Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble (18 page)

I have spent a great deal of my life discovering that my ambitions and fantasies—which I once thought of as totally unique—turn out to be clichés, so it was not a surprise to me to find that there were other young women writers who came to New York with as bad a Dorothy Parker problem as I had. I wonder, though, whether any of that still goes on. Whatever illusions I managed to maintain about the Parker myth were given a good sharp smack several years ago, when John Keats published a biography of her called
You Might As Well Live
(Simon & Schuster). By that time, I had come to grips with the fact that I was not, nor would I ever be, Dorothy Parker; but I had managed to keep myself from what anyone who has read a line about or by her should have known, which was simply that Dorothy Parker had not been terribly good at being Dorothy Parker either. In Keats’s book, even the wonderful lines, the salty remarks, the softly murmured throwaways seem like dreadful little episodes in Leonard Lyons’s column. There were the stories of the suicide attempts, squalid hotel rooms, long incoherent drunks, unhappy love affairs, marriage to a homosexual. All the early, sharp self-awareness turned to chilling self-hate. “Boy, did I think I was smart,” she said once. “I was just a little Jewish girl trying to be cute.”

A year or so after the Keats book, I read Lillian Hellman’s marvelous memoir,
An Unfinished Woman
(Little, Brown). In it is a far more affectionate and moving portrait of Parker, one that manages to convey how special it was to be with her when she was at her best. “The wit,” writes Hellman, “was never as attractive as the comment, often startling, always sudden, as if a curtain had opened and you had a brief and brilliant glance into what you would never have found for yourself.” Still, the
Hellman portrait is of a sad lady who misspent her life and her talent.

In one of several unbelievably stupid remarks that do so much to make the Keats biography as unsatisfying as it is, he calls Parker a “tiny, big-eyed feminine woman with the mind of a man.” There are only a few things that remain clear to me about Dorothy Parker, and one of them is that the last thing she had was the mind of a man.
The Portable Dorothy Parker
(Viking) contains most of her writing; there are first-rate stories in it—“Big Blonde,” of course—and first-rate light verse. But the worst work in it is characterized by an almost unbearably girlish sensibility. The masochist. The victim. The sentimental woman whose moods are totally ruled by the whims of men. This last verse, for example, from “To a Much Too Unfortunate Lady”:

What seems all wrong about these lines now is not their emotion—the emotion, sad to say, is dead on—but that they seem so embarrassing. Many of the women poets writing today about love and men write with as much wit as Parker, but with a great deal of healthy
anger besides. Like Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poetry, which Parker was often accused of imitating, Dorothy Parker’s poetry seems dated not so much because it is or isn’t but because politics have made the sentiments so unfashionable in literature. The last thing I mean to write here is one of those articles about the woman artist as some sort of victim of a sexist society; it is, however, in Parker’s case an easy argument to make.

And so there is the legend, and there is not much of it left. One no longer wants to be the only woman at the table. One does not want to spend nights with a group of people who believe that the smartly chosen rejoinder is what anything is about. One does not even want to be published in
The New Yorker
. But before one looked too hard at it, it was a lovely myth, and I have trouble giving it up. Most of all, I’m sorry it wasn’t true. As Dorothy Parker once said, in a line she suggested for her gravestone: “If you can read this, you’ve come too close.”

October, 1973

A few months ago, I got a phone call from a man at CBS named Sandy Socolow. I have known Sandy Socolow ever since college, when I was a copy girl at CBS for a summer and he was working for Walter Cronkite. A few years later, he and his wife, Nan, and their children and I all lived in the same New York apartment house, One University Place. As a matter of fact, the night of the 1965 blackout Nan Socolow and I spent a rather ragged evening together. I had groped my way down to her apartment, having nowhere better to go, having no idea that I ought to be doing something memorable that night to tell my children about, and Nan suggested we play canasta. I had forgotten how, but she taught me. She won the first game. I wiped her out in the second. After it, Nan looked up and said, “It’s too bad you have to leave.” Anyway, I have a fondness for Sandy Socolow in spite of the fact that his wife is a sore loser, and I was glad to hear from him.

“Let’s have lunch,” he said. “I want to talk to you about your future in television and mine.”

“I hate television,” I said.

“Let’s have lunch anyway,” he said.

A few weeks passed between the phone call and the lunch, and during that time I read that CBS was revamping its morning news show and was looking for an anchorwoman and anchorman. I became more interested in the lunch. I really do hate television—last year I did a pilot for a talk show for women, and when it was through, and, as far as I was concerned, perfect, the head of the company that produced the show saw it and said I had a quality on screen not unlike Howard Cosell. The show was cut to pieces, I was fired, and an entire other person was dubbed in my place. All in all, it was not a happy story, and it left me almost certain I never wanted anything serious to do with the medium again. I say
almost
certain, because the only desire I was left with, the only ambition the experience did not manage to kill, was for Barbara Walters’s job. I have always wanted Barbara Walters’s job. The CBS thing seemed about as close to it as I was ever going to get.

So Sandy Socolow and I had lunch. I told him I had read about the job in the papers. “That’s what I was calling you about,” he said. It was a nice lunch. Soft-shell crabs. Rice pudding with a lot of raisins in it. I had some ideas. He had some ideas. He said he’d call me after he looked at an old tape of me on
The Dick Cavett Show
. He also said that his wife would be delighted to hear I was separated from my husband, because she had a lot of extra men.

The next day Nan Socolow called.

“Are you free for dinner Tuesday night?” she said.

“Sure,” I said.

“Good,” she said. “We’re having dinner with a man who’s a writer, and we’d like you to come, but it’s not a fix-up.”

“Fine,” I said.

“I really want to make that clear,” she said. “It’s not a fix-up.”

“What are you trying to tell me?” I asked. “Is he gay?”

“No,” said Nan. “It’s not that. It’s just that we have to have dinner with him, and we have to have dinner with you, and I thought we’d kill two birds with one stone.”

I passed on the dinner.

A few days later—June now—Sandy Socolow’s secretary called quite frantically to set up a lunch. He had apparently seen my Cavett tape and was still interested. I went to the lunch to find Sandy and Lee Townsend, the producer of the show, Gordon Manning, one of the heads of CBS News, and Hughes Rudd, who had just been given the job of anchorman on the new morning show. Part of the purpose of the lunch was to see whether Hughes and I had chemistry. We had chemistry. I have always liked Hughes—he is funny and dry. I like Sandy. I liked Lee Townsend. As for Gordon Manning—when I first came to New York, I ran copy at
Newsweek
, where he was executive editor, and I was forever bearing memos from him that he had written “nifty” across the top of. I am constitutionally incapable of truly relating to anyone whose favorite adjective is nifty. Still, it was a pretty good lunch. Lamb chops. Crème caramel. It was also a seductive lunch, and I left it wanting the job. I also left it knowing that if I got it, it would probably be the worst thing that ever happened to me, the worst hours, the end of my privacy, my private life, my writing. “If you take the job,” the man who used to be my husband said to me, “the only person in New York you’ll be able to have an affair with is Hughes Rudd.” I thought about that, and about the other drawbacks, and I knew that I
would never have the courage or good sense to turn it down. It made me crazy.

“What do you want to do?” asked my psychoanalyst in the middle of it all.

“I want them not to offer it to me so I won’t have to make a decision,” I said.

“That’s ridiculous,” said my psychoanalyst.

“I’m not sure it is,” I said.

It got to be the middle of June. The
Esquire
issue on women, which I had worked on, was on the stands. CBS booked me onto the
Morning News
show, ostensibly to give the magazine a plug but actually to audition me. I got up at 6 a.m., tried not to think about what life would be like if I had to be awake at that hour five days a week, put on my most grown-up dress, and went over to be interviewed by John Hart.

“You did fine,” he said after it was over. “I hope you win.”

“Who else is up for it?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, “the front runner is Sally Quinn.”

There is no way, particularly at this point, particularly since the outcome of this contest is no secret, for me to convey the exact pain I felt at that moment. It had something to do with my stomach and something to do with dizziness. For one thing, I knew it was all over, that I would never get the job. For another—and I’ll go into this in a minute—it seemed hopelessly ironic.

“Gordon Manning is really hot for her,” said John Hart.

“That doesn’t surprise me,” I said.

There has been altogether too much written about Sally Quinn, here and elsewhere, in recent months; I am sorry
to add to it, but a story’s a story. Sally Quinn and I were friends. She came to my house a couple of times. I went to her house a couple of times. She helped me out on a story I wrote about Henry Kissinger. I had known Sally two or three years, had seen her over a dozen times, but until the A. J. Liebling Counter-Convention last May, I had never heard her discuss her philosophy of reporting. I never even knew she had one.

As it turned out, she did. She appeared on a panel at the convention, leaned into the microphone, and went on huskily and at some length about being a woman reporter. She said that the essence of reporting was manipulation—through flirtation, the insinuation of availability, a few too many drinks for the interview subject, whatever means were necessary. “Being blond,” she said very very slowly, “doesn’t hurt.” I found all of it incredibly offensive, and said as much to one of Sally’s rivals on the
Washington Post
, who quoted me to that effect. Then I spent a few weeks trying to figure out why I had been so upset. At first, it seemed to me it was because I thought what she was saying was demeaning to the profession and to women in it. Then I realized that that wasn’t really true, that the profession would somehow survive her remarks. My second thought, and this came during a period of what I like to think of as mental health, was that I had been upset because I thought that Sally’s remarks were demeaning to herself. I saw her at a party in June and said as much.

“You don’t really work that way,” I said, “and when you say that you do, you’re just putting yourself down.”

“I do work that way,” Sally said. “And so do you. We all do.”

As it happens, I don’t work that way. I have never
worked that way. I am uncomfortable flirting, it requires a great deal of energy and ego, and I manage to do it only a couple of times a year, and not with interview subjects.

But the conversation at the party went on, and we got around to the line about being blond. “If what you meant to say by that,” I said, “is one of life’s cruel truths, which is that it is better to look good than bad in this world, you picked the one way of saying it that was the most self-aggrandizing and least likely to make anyone hear what your point was.”

Sally conceded that there might be some truth to that, that she had chosen her words badly, and I went off thinking I had at least made a small point. Later on, I realized I was wrong. I was reading Pauline Kael’s review of Norman Mailer’s
Marilyn
, and it suddenly hit me that what Sally Quinn had meant to say when she said, “Being blond doesn’t hurt,” was simply this: being blond doesn’t hurt. I also realized later, much much later, what it was that had bothered me so much about her performance that day. When John Hart told me that she was the front runner for the job, I realized that what had gotten to me was that Sally Quinn was right. Her way worked. Mine didn’t. Lillian Hellman said it all a good deal better than I could have, in an interview I had with her this summer. We had gotten to talking about women. “Dashiell Hammett used to say I had the meanest jealousy of all,” Miss Hellman said. “I had no jealousy of work, no jealousy of money. I was just jealous of women who took advantage of men, because I didn’t know how to do it.”

Well, you know how it all ended. Sally Quinn got the job.
New York
magazine wrote an article about her. Sally Quinn said the only reason the magazine had published
the article, which was not entirely complimentary, was that Clay Felker, the editor, had offered her a job and she had turned it down. “You were going to be a star,” Sally said Felker said to her, “and you should have let me make you one.” Clay Felker says he never said that to Sally Quinn, but that’s not the point. The point is he is capable of saying it. I know, because a few nights after I read in the
New York Times
that Sally had gotten the job—CBS never bothered to tell me—Clay came to my new apartment and looked around. “Oh, Nora,” he said. “You shouldn’t have to live like this.” And he made me an offer.