Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (25 page)

Dorothy and Benchley thought that Polly’s house could use a touch of culture, and they were pleased to offer their assistance. They drew up a shopping list of classical and contemporary books for her bookshelves. In due course, Polly’s patrons had at their disposal a nice selection of literary works.

At the age of thirty-four, Benchley was busy sowing his wild oats. Since he and Charlie MacArthur had been rooming together, they had become inseparable. There were times when Dorothy found herself excluded from their escapades as they bounced around the city like teenagers. They once chased the aristocratic Charles Evans Hughes down Madison Avenue, spraying him with cries of “Yah, yah, Secretary of State.” Dorothy could not enter into this sort of adolescent, alcoholic male bonding, probably luckily for her.

In September, Philip Goodman discovered that life as a Broadway producer was not all roses. His new musical,
Dear Sir
, was practically laughed off the stage on opening night when a horse in the cast defecated on stage, distracting performers and audience alike. Although the show had music and lyrics by Jerome Kern and Howard Dietz, the critics decided that the production was indeed manure, and it folded after fifteen performances. Goodman, unnerved, ordered production temporarily suspended on
Soft Music
and indicated he would probably abandon it altogether.

Shortly after the failure of
Dear Sir
, Goodman suffered a second blow when his next offering,
The Mongrel,
directed by Dorothy’s friend Winnie Lenihan, also proved mediocre and had to be withdrawn. By now, Goodman was devastated and decided that he wouldn’t proceed with Dorothy’s play unless he was able to find someone willing to coproduce and stage it. To her relief, he finally persuaded Arthur Hopkins to be his partner. Hopkins, an Ohioan by birth, taciturn by temperament, was a veteran producer with many successes to his credit, among them such quality dramas as
Hedda
Gabler and
Anna Christie
. At first, the addition of Hopkins did not displease Dorothy. Nor did she object when Goodman and Hopkins changed the name of the drama from
Soft Music
to
Close Harmony
, even though the latter seemed to her no great improvement over the former. But once rehearsals began, she became increasingly worried about Hopkins’s directorial technique, because he seemed to have none.

Each day at noon, after the cast had been put through their paces by the stage manager, Hopkins drifted in and leaned against the proscenium arch. He looked on almost indifferently, rarely if ever interrupting, and occasionally took an actress or actor aside for a few moments of whispering. After a while—a very short while—he departed for the day. It had been explained to Dorothy that Hopkins believed performers should work out their own readings and stage business, but watching him in action was far from reassuring. She caustically dubbed his directorial style “the Arthur Hopkins honor system of direction.”

While Dorothy worried, Hopkins leased one of New York’s most expensive theaters, the Gaiety, for the sum of four thousand dollars a week and announced to the papers that
Close Harmony
would open on December 1. This further alarmed Dorothy, who knew from her experience as a drama critic that attendance is always poor before Christmas. When she voiced her doubts to Hopkins, he brushed them away.

“Whenever you open this play,” he assured her, “it will run for a year. ”

Close Harmony
had its out-of-town preview in Wilmington, Delaware. Dorothy and Elmer Rice accompanied the cast, who were traveling in a reserved parlor car. A private compartment had been set aside at one end of the car for the writers and producers, but at the last minute they were joined by several of the actresses, including Georgie Drew Mendum, who had been cast as the Gertrude Benchley character. Dorothy disliked Mendum almost as much as she did Mrs. Benchley. A garrulous descendent of two theatrical royal families, the Barrymores and the Drews, she was in the habit of regaling people with stories about dear Jack and dear Ethel, as well as other members of the clan. On the train she talked nonstop. Elmer Rice remembered that since the train did not have a dining car, there was no escape from her. He and Dorothy and the two producers fidgeted and stared out the window at the New Jersey farmland. “We were trapped, elbow to elbow, knee to knee,” Rice said.

When the train pulled into Wilmington, everyone disembarked and began straggling down the platform toward the taxi stand. Dorothy, watching them leave, remained near the train door with Goodman and Rice.

“Let’s go to Baltimore,” she said.

Without a word, they grabbed their suitcases and climbed back on the train just as it was pulling out. Only then did her bewildered companions begin to object. What could she be thinking of, because there was plenty to do that evening in Wilmington.

“I’m terribly sorry,” she said, “but I just couldn’t look at them anymore.”

It was after eight when they arrived in Baltimore, starving. Goodman telephoned Henry Mencken, who invited them to his hotel for drinks and dinner. Not only did Dorothy respect Mencken as an innovative publisher, but also she had a personal reason for feeling warm toward him: he had published every short story she had written thus far. On this particular evening, she was disappointed to find him coarse and insensitive. Even allowing for the immense quantities of alcohol they were consuming, Mencken acted badly. When he began to tell jokes about blacks, Dorothy bristled and decided to leave. She refused to spend the night in Baltimore and made Rice take her to Wilmington, even though it meant riding a milk train that got them there at three in the morning.

The next day, exhausted and hung over, she sat in the darkened theater with Arthur Hopkins during dress rehearsal and decided that the play was insipid. Hopkins appeared to be studying the bouncing breasts of Wanda Lyon, the actress playing Belle Sheridan.

“Dorothy,” he said, “don’t you think she ought to wear a brassiere in this scene?”

“God, no,” she replied. “You’ve got to have something in the show that moves.”

On opening night, the first laugh of the evening was hers, in response to a wry telegram she received from Benchley. THAT OLD FILLING HAS JUST COME OUT, it read. After that, the laughs came from the audience who chortled straight through until the curtain fell. The next day, when she saw that the local critics had hailed the show a winner, she began to hope again. During her years as a drama critic, she had complained incessantly about tedious opening nights, but watching people on stage speaking words she had written was another matter entirely. It was “the most exciting thing in the world.” When
Close Harmony
opened in New York the following week, she was still feeling euphoric and confident enough of success to throw an opening-night party at the Algonquin.

Despite excellent reviews and hosannas for “Miss Dorothy Parker, who is known as New York’s brightest girl,” customers were slow to buy tickets. The third week, after a matinee when the house was practically empty, Dorothy sent a telegram to Benchley that read, CLOSE HARMONY DID A COOL NINETY DOLLARS AT THE MATINEE. ASK THE BOYS IN THE BACK ROOM WHAT THEY WILL HAVE. By guaranteeing the Gaiety Theater four thousand dollars a week, Hopkins could not afford to carry the play. A week later, he posted the closing notice. The play had run twenty-four performances and grossed less than ten thousand dollars. Hopkins subsequently assigned touring rights to another producer, who changed the play’s name to
The Lady Next Door
and opened it in Chicago the following summer. There it played fifteen weeks, followed by another ten weeks in smaller Midwestern cities, to fine reviews and substantial houses. As Elmer Rice later wrote, “These things are inexplicable.” Ring Lardner was also puzzled. Writing to Scott Fitzgerald in Rome, he reported that
Close Harmony
was a good play that had gotten great notices and still it failed. To Dorothy the failure seemed nothing short of astonishing, an enormously bad joke that she could not comprehend and would be unable to talk about. In years to come, when asked about it, she supposed that “it was dull,” and yet “how do you know about your own.”

Philip Goodman, who had enough of the theater, went to Paris for the winter. He and Hopkins may have been relying on the enthusiastic support of the Round Table to ensure success and a long run. Perhaps they also had counted on its being a spicy open secret that the play concerned Robert Benchley, but audiences were not privy to this titillating bit of rialto gossip. Benchley had the unenviable task of reviewing a work based on his own messy domestic life, but with which he could not admit any connection. He found the play deeply moving, especially the scene in which James Spottswood and Wanda Lyon play a mandolin and piano duet to the tune of “The Sunshine of Your Smile,” and decided it was “just about as heartbreaking a thing as we have ever seen on the stage.” On the evening that he attended
Close Harmony
the audience apparently began to laugh during this scene and he took it badly. In his
Life
review he inferred that they must have severe personality disorders and singled them out “for special and painful extermination next Monday morning, rain or shine.” If he saw anyone so much as daring to grin during the scene “you will receive, on leaving the lobby, one special souvenir crash on the skull which will make it awfully difficult for you to laugh at anything again. That’s final.”
Close Harmony
was, in his opinion, closer to “magnificent tragedy” than to comedy.

Both Dorothy and Benchley felt murderous but as usual they veiled their anger with humor. Dorothy wished she could be a pirate so that she might cut out the hearts of everyone she hated. After the play closed she wrote a revealing poem for
Life
and called it “Song of Perfect Propriety”:

Oh, I should like to ride the seas,
A roaring buccaneer;
A cutlass banging at my knees,
A dirk behind my ear.
And when my captives’ chains would clank
I’d howl with glee and drink,
And then fling out the quivering plank
And watch the beggars sink.
I’d like to straddle gory decks,
And dig in laden sands,
And know the feel of throbbing necks
Between my knotted hands.
Oh, I should like to strut and curse
Among my blackguard crew....

Given the chance, she would do all that and more. Certainly she felt capable of destroying those who had injured her.

But I am writing little verse,
As little ladies do.

Chapter 8

“YESSIR, THE WHADDYECALL’EM BLUES”

1925

During that winter of 1925 there seemed to be no end to the number of men passing through her life and her hotel suite. Their names were “ever written on the pages of my heart—and, by the way, my dear, what was your name?” Chiefly, these visitors were in transit. It was the period that Marc Connelly was thinking of when he likened her apartment to a mailbox. Connelly’s description of one of those lovers could serve as a portrait of all:

She fell in love with some of the goddamnedest terrible people. John What-the-hell-was-his-name—society boy with the famous brother, you’d know the name if I could remember it. He and his brother were very, very, very East Hampton. Handsome guy, pretty good tennis player. He was a wealthy mucker and quite a bastard. We were all delighted when she shook him off—he was dandruff. Have you got a list of her beaux? Not a full list? Well, I wouldn’t think so.

After months of hard work she was pleased to be idle. She wanted to have fun, which meant dating sizable numbers of rich, good-looking men. No doubt she felt genuinely enthusiastic about some of them, but these affairs were certainly nothing more serious than crushes. The string of men offered the illusion of accomplishment and helped to obscure the fact that Eddie Parker had dropped out of the picture by now. She insisted on being called Mrs. Parker, wearing the title as grandly as if it had been inherited. Whenever impertinent people inquired why she continued to call herself Mrs., she answered defensively that there had been a Mr. Parker once. Although she thought of Eddie in the past tense, neither of them had decided to obtain a divorce, and he remained her legal husband until 1928. Among those who remembered his existence was Gertrude Benchley, who professed from her outpost in Scarsdale to find the banishment of Parkie and his replacement by a bunch of Long Island playboys incomprehensible. “She dedicated one of her books ‘to John,’ but by the time the book came out it was quite another John! Lucky it was a common name like that.”

Dorothy learned that there were special benefits to be derived from her celebrity as a playwright, even from being a failed playwright. An attractive, successful woman who had passed the age of thirty, who no longer expected men to respect her so-called purity, was able to wield a type of power over males, not genuine power, of course, but a counterfeit that seemed real. Suddenly swarms of men seemed eager for her company, for no other reason than that she was Mrs. Dorothy Parker. She had her pick of polo players, low-brow moguls who had never heard of James Joyce, gentleman stockbrokers, and all the assorted frog-princes who congregated in Great Neck. Even those who found clever women terrifying, which included most of them, could not suppress the urge to pay court. Since sex seemed to be her only immediate reward for the failure of
Close Harmony
, she had every intention of milking that painful experience for its current worth. She wondered if it was worth anything, and suspected not.