Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (46 page)

While married to writer Arthur Kober and living in Hollywood, Hellman had first met Hammett five years earlier. Despite his wife and daughters, despite his chronic womanizing, they had fallen in love and been together ever since. Lillian was a scrapper, a woman of spirit and independence and some ruthlessness who knew where she wanted to go and did what was necessary to realize her ambitions. She had reddish hair, stylish clothes, and a tough, funny way of expressing herself, but she was not a handsome woman. She had heavy features; her mouth was thin, her chin receded, and her nose was large and protrusive.

Dorothy and Lillian became good friends. In her memoirs, Hellman decided that their friendship had been remarkable because they were so dissimilar. That was true. Apart from a difference of eleven years in their ages, they led entirely different lives, were not the same kind of writer, and often disagreed on people and books. Certainly their tastes in men were different. Alan was, Hellman admitted, “a hard man for me to take;” in fact, she despised him. Although Dorothy was too polite to say so, she did not get on well with Hammett as a person. To complicate matters further, Hammett couldn’t stand Dorothy. In later years, he would leave the house whenever she came to visit. Her habit of flattering people to their faces and then declaring, “Did you ever meet such a shit?” once they had left was especially perturbing to him. Hellman stood up for Dorothy by saying that it was nothing more serious than a defense sometimes adopted by frightened people. Subsequently, she decided that the explanation was too simple. She grew to believe that Dorothy’s hunger for love and admiration, a craving that led to intense self-loathing, could only be released by the most violent behind-the-back denunciations.

Throughout the years of their friendship, Dorothy took pleasure in Lillian’s company, but the reverse was not always so. As time passed, it became less and less true. “Dottie admired Lillian,” said Ruth Goetz.

She admired her political stance and respected her success in the theater. She was never jealous or mean spirited about somebody else’s good fortune or talent. But Lillian did not admire Dottie because she had no admiring mechanism, and she wasn’t generous about anything. Either she was jealous of those who were doing well or she flattered them as colleagues. She enjoyed Dottie’s company because Dottie was so delicious to be around. They got on well at parties and over the dinner table, even though Lillian had no time for women. She was so frantic for male company, male adulation that I don’t think she was ever a good friend to a woman. I was very surprised when I heard that Lillian was to be her executor. It seemed inappropriate because she had not really been a friend to Dottie. To put it bluntly, in later years she had found Dottie wearisome.

As new friendships developed, several old ones began to fade as a result of distance, Alan, or death. Soon after Dorothy’s arrival in Hollywood, she was stunned to learn of Ruth Hale’s death. It was hard for her to believe, let alone accept. She greatly respected Ruth, whose stand on many subjects paralleled her own. An important exception was Ruth’s adamant belief that married women should retain their unmarried names. With Jane Grant, she cofounded the Lucy Stone League to encourage women not to change their names. Dorothy, who regarded keeping the name Rothschild with as much distaste as Ruth would have viewed the idea of taking Heywood Broun’s surname, could never personally endorse Ruth’s crusade. To indicate the emotions behind her rejection, she once sent Ruth a telegram that began TO RUTH BROUN FROM DOROTHY ROTHSCHILD.... Despite her opposing viewpoint she could not help feeling angered at the irony of Ruth’s obituary in the
Los Angeles Examiner
a five-word record that struck her as the total failure of a feminist’s life: EX-WIFE OF HEYWOOD BROUN PASSES.

All through the year she was gripped by a sense of dislocation. Waves of homesickness for New York came and went and later sent her rocketing from coast to coast. She reminded herself that nice people lived in Hollywood—she thought Bing Crosby was “swell” and James Cagney “the best person”—but nobody made up for the loss of old, dear friends. Each week she made a point of tuning in to Aleck Woollcott’s radio show, The Town Crier. When she heard his voice, she felt “pulled apart by nostalgia” and began to cry. She also missed the Murphys, whose older son, Baoth, suddenly died of spinal meningitis at the age of sixteen.

The person she missed most was Robert Benchley, which was ironic, since he was living half of each year in Hollywood. She could have seen as much of him as she had in New York. With a successful second career as a film actor, he came to the Coast in April and lived at the Garden of Allah until September or October, when he rushed back home to cover the theater season for
The New Yorker.
If not for Gertrude and the boys, he might have spent even less time in the East.

A coolness had developed between Dorothy and Benchley. To a great extent, Alan had usurped Benchley’s role of confidant, comrade, and advisor, but her withdrawal from Benchley predated her marriage. In 1933, Edmund Wilson visited one Sunday afternoon and found her entertaining Bea Stewart and Benchley’s ex-mistress Betty Starbuck. Drinking gin and ginger ale and lounging around in a dowdy dressing gown, she openly ridiculed Benchley for selling out to Hollywood. She also was disgusted by an advertisement for his
New York Mirror
column that showed a little girl saying, “Oh, goody! here comes the funny man.” Wilson wrote, “They were vomiting and puking over his stuff in the
Mirror
.”

In Hollywood, her contacts with Benchley were increasingly limited to social occasions.

Their plans to return East after clearing her debts seemed to have been postponed and perhaps temporarily forgotten. Indeed, they were settling more firmly in California. In 1935 they moved to 914 North Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills, a colonial mansion with tall white columns and rolling lawn graced by magnolia and pine trees. Despite Harold Guinzburg’s warnings about the folly of writers who remained in Hollywood year-round, they continued to sign contract renewals and hurtle from film to film:
The Case Against Mrs. Ames, Hands Across the Table, and Mary Burns, Fugitive
, as well as others Dorothy wished she could assign to oblivion. For three months in the autumn, Paramount loaned them to MGM, where they worked on Suzy, a gold-digger comedy about an American showgirl in London that was to showcase Jean Harlow and Cary Grant.

By now their joint salary had climbed to fifteen hundred dollars a week. Dorothy may not have taken pride in her work, but she refused to belittle her labors. “Garbage though they turn out, Hollywood writers aren’t writing down. This is their best.” Unfortunately, she was unable to develop the pragmatic attitude held by friends like William Faulkner and Nathanael West, who viewed film writing as a means of underwriting their other work. After a five-and-a-half-day week at the studio, Dorothy found she had little energy left. This was not true of Alan. He wrote three stories for The New Yorker in 1935, but Dorothy produced no fiction or verse, only a five-page introduction to Arthur Kober’s book,
Thunder over the Bronx.

As the months passed, her estrangement from New York continued to deepen. She mourned the unwilling severance of old ties, developed hurt feelings over what she interpreted as neglect by eastern friends, and told herself that New Yorkers had peculiar attitudes about friendship—if you left town for any length of time, they simply figured you were dead. She did not intend to be forgotten and sometimes felt sufficiently provoked to issue a reminder of her existence:

Dear Harold [she wrote to Guinzburg],

This is small business troubles. Look, it seems that Miss Miriam Hopkins ... did some broadcasting while in your New York, and used for her vehicle, the bitch, my “Telephone Call.” I didn’t hear it, because what would I be doing with a radio, but it turns out, from the testimony of kindly friends, that she did it on two occasions. I never knew anything about it—no one ever asked me about using it, let alone any matter of royalties....

It is doubtful whether she realized that she had referred to her native city as “your New York.” The truth was that the city felt less and less like hers. Two years earlier, in Manhattan, she was quoted as saying that she favored taxes because “rich people should be taxed for being alive.” What she could not yet bring herself to acknowledge was that she was, by any standards, well on her way to becoming one of those despised people.

Chapter 13

GOOD FIGHTS

1936-1937

All through the middle and late thirties, Dorothy was engaged in feverish warfare, but some observers found it hard to say what side she was on. In the spring of 1936, John O’Hara paid a visit to Hollywood and stayed briefly as a houseguest with Dorothy and Alan, who were living grandly on their fifteen hundred dollars a week. His eyeballs rolled up. “They have,” he recounted peevishly to Scott Fitzgerald,

a large white house, Southern style, and live in luxury, including a brand new Picasso, a Packard convertible phaeton, a couple of Negroes, and dinner at the very best Beverly Hills homes. Dottie occasionally voices a great discontent, but I think her aversion to movie-writing is as much lazy as intellectual. She likes the life. She and Alan are with Paramount, writing a courtroom picture for Claudette Colbert. Don Stewart, who is full of shit, has converted himself to radical thought, and goes to all the parties for the Scottsboro boys. His wife, who is more honest and whom I don’t like either, stays home from them.... He is certainly scared about something, and it isn’t only the Revolution. But he is such a horse’s ass that it doesn’t matter much....

There is no mention of Dorothy’s political activities, most likely because O’Hara was unable or unready to decode the signals he was receiving from his one-time mentor. When Robert Benchley wrote to his wife at the end of April, he too mentioned the new political awareness that was sweeping Hollywood. The Scottsboro case had become a cause célèbre among liberals and Communists. Everybody was eager to organize a screenwriters’ union or join a committee to free the eight black Alabama youths convicted of raping two white girls. “Dottie and Alan,” Benchley added, “are on all committees at once, and seem to be very happy about it.”

What drew her attention most powerfully was news of the Third Reich’s persecution of Jews. Her ambivalence over her own Jewishness was so great that she would think of herself as a “mongrel” because of her mixed origins to the end of her life. At the same time, she found anti-Semitism terrifying and had begun to take a passionate, emotional interest in what was happening politically in Germany. At a hundred-dollar-a-plate banquet that she co-hosted with Don Stewart and others, she heard a firsthand account of the situation. The dinner speaker was a professional Communist propagandist, although it is unlikely that Dorothy knew anything about Otto Katz’s politics that evening. A native of Prague and a former Berlin journalist, Katz was a suave and extremely persuasive man who spoke five languages and could talk about Kafka as easily as he could about Karl Marx. In 1936, he was acting as chief of staff for the legendary Willi Münzenberg, the German Communist who had escaped the Nazis and established a new headquarters for Comintern propaganda in Paris. Münzenberg is credited with being the first to recognize the advantages to be gained by quietly recruiting the support of eminent intellectuals, cultivating the friendship of these distinguished fellow travelers by subtle means, rarely quite aboveboard. He wooed foreign sympathizers such as Clarence Darrow and André Gide to the Soviet cause. Otto Katz had figured importantly in this work. He also had helped to compile Münzenberg’s
Brown Book
, an indictment of Hitler that had been translated into twenty-three languages.

During his visit to Hollywood, Katz avoided expressing himself in Communist terminology, nor did he go out of his way to publicize his association with Münzenberg, whose name probably would have meant nothing to his audience anyway. Although Katz spoke eloquently about the importance of maintaining ties of friendship with the Soviet Union, he presented his primary allegiance as the cause of combatting fascism. Don Stewart recalled that when Katz began to describe the Nazi terror, “the details of which he had been able to collect only through repeatedly risking his own life, I was proud to be sitting beside him, proud to be on his side in the fight.”

When Otto Katz called for the cooperation of the film colony in fighting Hitler and preventing a second world war, Dorothy saw an opportunity to make herself useful. Together with Stewart, Fredric March, and Oscar Hammerstein II, she helped found the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League to propagandize actively against Hitler. Offices were rented, a weekly newspaper was published, and public meetings were sponsored. Stars, writers, and directors contributed donations, and the studio heads offered enthusiastic support. Don Stewart became the League’s chairman, Alan its secretary, and Dorothy a member of the executive board.