Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (40 page)

“What do
you
think of
Pousse-Café,
Mr. Perelman?” she asked.

Perelman, with enthusiasm that was clearly feigned, pronounced her title “great” but wondered if it really carried enough punch. When Dorothy countered with
Aces Up
, he called her suggestion “marvellous” but continued to look doubtful.

“I just wonder, though,” he said, “if we can’t find something a
tiny
bit sharper, less static ...”

“Well, goodness me,” she said, spraying him with a smile. “What ever shall we do? Our wrist has been slapped by the house genius there, who feels that we’re a bit dull-witted. Of course, he’s in a position to know, isn’t he, leaning down from Parnassus—”

By this time, some of the guests had begun drifting uneasily toward the door, and a nervous Burr was trying to switch Dorothy off, decharge the atmosphere, and get his party moving again, to no avail. She was just warming up. Perelman made his escape, vowing that if he ever again ran into Dorothy Parker, legend or no legend, “I’d skewer her with one of her own hatpins.”

The next day, sober and remorseful, Dorothy was stricken to recall dimly that she had been rude to Perelman. She lost no time in sending him a dozen of the most expensive roses she could buy with a note of abject apology. Courtney Burr’s untitled show was eventually christened, by someone other than Dorothy,
Walk a Little Faster
, and it ran 119 performances. The friendship between Dorothy and Sid Perelman survived for thirty-five years.

Chapter 12

YOU MIGHT AS WELL LIVE

1933-1935

It looked as if her sex life had died. Since she and John McClain had parted, she had “put sex carefully away on the highest cupboard-shelf, in a box marked ‘Winter Hats—1916.’ ” Not that there weren’t plenty of ravishing men around, most of them willowy young actors who were thrilled to escort her wherever she wished to go and to see that she got back to the Lowell and tucked safely into bed if she passed out. If they had no interest in sleeping with women it made no difference because, as she often said, she needed good fairies to protect her. One night, she was invited to a costume ball where all the divine young men were dressed up to look like divine young women. Lubricated by several highballs, Dorothy observed the dancers from a balcony, but every so often she leaned over the railing and looked down at the dance floor, muttering in despair. Water, water everywhere and not a single drop to drink. When she could contain herself no longer, she shouted, “Come on up, anybody. I’m a man!”

That August she turned forty. On the night of her birthday she walked into Tony’s with her head defiantly armored in a football helmet, a gift from Adele Lovett’s husband. In the distance loomed all the birthdays to come, the unfolding of solitary years, until she felt like a prisoner trapped in a cage of her own construction.

Long I fought the driving lists,
Plume a-stream and armor clanging;
Link on link, between my wrists,
Now my heavy freedom’s hanging.

During the spring, she met Alan Campbell at Tony’s one night. Benchley introduced them, although Alan was not a friend of his. Alan Campbell was a personable young actor, who had published a few stories in
The New Yorker
and whom Benchley knew only well enough to say hello and how are you. A few months later, Dorothy ran into him again at Howard Dietz’s house, and she was surprised to learn they had other mutual friends. She was immediately impressed by Alan’s golden good looks, the fine bone structure, the fair hair and dazzling smile that made it seem as if he had just stepped indoors on a June day. He resembled Scott Fitzgerald when Scott had been young and healthy, before he began drinking heavily, and some people thought him far better looking. Alan, like Scott, had a face that was a touch too pretty for a man, the kind of features that caused people to remark he would have made a splendid woman. He was typecast by producers as a classic juvenile. His looks projected the image of a stunning man clad in a blazer, carrying a racquet, bursting through the doors of a stage drawing room, asking, “Tennis, anyone?” That cliché could have been written for Alan. His only physical flaw was a habit of chewing his nails.

He was twenty-nine, eleven years Dorothy’s junior. While he never actually lied about his background, some people got the idea that his father had been a wealthy Virginia tobacco man, and he could not bring himself to correct the mistake. His real background was similar to Dorothy’s, a mixture of Jewish and Gentile. In Alan’s case, his father was of Scottish descent. His mother’s family, the Eichels, were Jewish emigrés from the Alsace region of France who fought in the Civil War and afterward settled in Richmond, Virginia, where Alan’s grandfather was known to be the finest butcher in the city.

When Alan’s mother, Hortense, was eighteen, she eloped with Harry Lee Campbell, a six-foot-tall Baptist who worked for a company that sold leaf tobacco. He was reputedly a drinking man. For much of their fifteen-year marriage, they alternated living with their families. When Alan was born in 1904, they were staying at the spacious Eichel house on East Clay Street. It was an unhappy marriage. Clara Lester, who cooked for the Eichel family, remembered Horte’s restlessness. “She’d pick up and go off, and nobody knew where. Anybody goin’ anywhere would say to Horte, ‘You goin’ my way?’ and off she’d go. Her husband was jealous and he drank.” After the Campbells divorced, Horte and Alan continued to live with Horte’s family.

Alan’s mother, who worked as a clerk at the Internal Revenue Service, never remarried. Content to raise her beautiful son, Horte made him the center of her existence and devoted herself to obtaining the very best for him: dancing classes, scholarships to a prep school, summer camps patronized by Richmond’s elite families, and an education at Virginia Military Institute, where he became one of the most popular boys in his class. Although Alan majored in civil engineering, he also revealed a definite talent for the artistic. His writings and drawings appeared regularly in campus publications and he played the leading feminine parts in dramatic club productions. J. Clifford Miller, Jr., who was three years behind Alan at VMI, recalled that in one play he “was dressed in an evening gown and was so well made-up that in spite of his very obvious arm and leg muscles, he got a lot of whistles from the cadets when he appeared as a very pretty young lady.” For two years after graduation, he lived at home and worked for the state highway department. Roy Eichel remembered his nephew’s unhappiness:

All at once, one night, without saying a word to anybody, he disappeared. Later we figured out that when nobody was looking he had packed a suitcase, which he lowered out of his bedroom window on a rope during the night. Then he walked down the stairs to the backyard, picked up the suitcase, and went off to the station where he caught a train for New York. Of course Miz Campbell carried on like a lunatic.

A few weeks later, finally learning of his whereabouts, Horte dispatched Roy to New York on a special mission to bring her son home. Alan, determined to become an actor, refused.

His first theater job was in the Schubert costume department, but he soon got small parts with Eva Le Gallienne’s repertory company. In 1928, he played Laurette Taylor’s son in
The Furies
. By the time he met Dorothy he had appeared in a dozen Broadway shows, including the hit musical
Show Boat
and Noel Coward’s
Design for Living
with the Lunts. Alan also began to write and sell fiction, mostly about the theater, which was the subject of many of his
New Yorker
stories.

From the start, Dorothy and Alan were extremely taken with each other. He said years later that she was “the only woman I ever knew whose mind was completely attuned to mine.” They were very much alike, not only in their Jewish-Gentile backgrounds, but in their likes and dislikes, their fears, and their critical judgments. “No one in the world has made me laugh as much as Dottie,” he said. He could never predict when or where she would open her mouth and quietly utter five or six priceless words. One evening at the home of Dorothy and Richard Rodgers, dinner guests were happily and lengthily denigrating Clare Boothe. Her sole defender at the table was Uka Chase, who protested that Clare was always loyal to friends. Moreover, added Chase, Clare was always kind to her inferiors.

“And where does she find them?” asked Dorothy, without looking up from her plate or missing a bite.

Quite apart from his uncritical appreciation of her wit, it was obvious to him that she needed someone to look after her. The disorderly way she lived was deplorable, but Alan took it for granted that a writer of her stature should be ignorant of cooking, shopping, and keeping her bank account in order, indeed coping with any mundane matter. He was quick to notice every detail of her appearance and to make tactful suggestions for improvement. Even though she had excellent taste in clothing, her grooming was occasionally less than impeccable. Alan felt strongly that a woman in her position should look elegant, and he was going to make sure she did. Not only did he supervise dieting and shopping for a new wardrobe, he redid her makeup and also designed an exceptionally becoming hairstyle—long soft bangs with the rest of her hair sleekly pulled back into a twist. She liked the style so much that she kept it for the rest of her life. Alan was, said Ruth Goodman Goetz, “your instantaneous, quick-witted interior decorator. Alan bought her clothes, fussed with her hairstyle and her perfume. I don’t know if he actually set her hair or not, but he may have. Dottie was delighted to have this handsome creature around.”

Meanwhile, she was suffering from serious problems that seemed incapable of solution by anything as simple as a new coiffure. Sunk deep in one of the moods that she called “a Scotch mist,” she drank heavily and sometimes had blackouts. Writer Joseph Bryan III, a childhood friend of Alan’s from Richmond, remembered running into him at a dance.

“Come along at once,” Alan said. “Dottie Parker is here and she’s dying to meet you.”

Bryan followed him to the edge of the dance floor, where Dorothy was holding court on a gilt chair. To his amazement and delight, she seemed thrilled to see him, complimented him extravagantly on a recent
New Yorker
profile, and insisted he take a seat next to her. After a time, she wondered whether he might be interested in collaborating on a play with her—he said he would be—and wanted to know how soon he could start. When they agreed to meet the next morning, Bryan left the dance floating on a pink cloud. Next day, on the stroke of eleven, he appeared at her hotel and asked the doorman to ring her.

She was a long time answering, but finally he said, “Mr. Bryan, madam ... Mr.
Bryan....
He turned to me: “Will you spell it, sir?” I spelled it, and he repeated, “B, R, Y, A, N, madam.... Yes, madam.” He turned to me again: “Mrs. Parker asks what you wish to see her about.” I don’t know how I made myself heard over the noise of my heart cracking, but I must have succeeded, because presently I found myself in the elevator, even though I was already achingly aware that she’d have no recollection of our glittering plans from the evening before. It proved to be worse than that: she had no recollection even of our having
met
.

I saw Dottie many, many times afterwards... but never once was that first evening ever mentioned. For all that she retained of it, it had never happened.

A few weeks later, another embarrassing incident occurred. Dorothy had agreed to support Fiorello La Guardia’s candidacy for mayor of New York City. At a press conference arranged by Beatrice Kaufman, a horde of reporters arrived at Dorothy’s apartment and began to interrogate her about politics. One of the better political jokes of the year had been hers: When Benchley brought her the news that Calvin Coolidge was dead, she responded, “How can they tell?”

Firsthand witnesses claimed that Benchley shot back, “He had an erection.” But the punch line was generally omitted in deference to Benchley’s image as a one-hundred-percent clean-cut family man.

On the afternoon of the La Guardia press conference, crouched in a chair, Dorothy was either drunk or hung over. She refused to talk about La Guardia, or any other subject, and declared that “I’m having a filthy time.” Reluctant to acknowledge that she had never voted, she said that maybe she once had voted for a surrogate judge but could no longer remember. When asked about the election, she replied, “Maybe we’d better have another round of drinks. I’ll tell Ivy,” and added angrily, “This is not going so well, I feel miserable.”

The Viking Press was preparing to issue her second volume of collected fiction. The original title,
The Infernal Grove,
had been discarded and donated to John O’Hara, who also finally vetoed it in favor of
Appointment in Samarra
for his first novel. Dorothy’s book finally appeared as After Such Pleasures from John Donne’s “Farewell to Love.” Viking reprinted several of her best stories (“Horsie,” “Dusk Before Fireworks”), some of her earliest work (“Too Bad,” written in 1923) and popular soliloquies such as “The Waltz.” An excited Edmund Wilson recommended the book to Louise Bogan: “You should read it, if you haven’t—I’ll send you my borrowed copy, if you promise to send it back.” Wilson’s praise was typical of the critical reaction, which should have delighted Dorothy, but the pleasures of success were overcast by the debilitation that always accompanied a “Scotch mist.”