Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (47 page)

Several months later, after it was rumored that the League might be a Red organization, some stars dropped out and producers withdrew for fear they were contributing to Communism. By this time, Otto Katz was back on the other side of the Atlantic, his mission successful. Despite the early dropouts, the League continued to thrive and its membership eventually reached some four thousand.

Dorothy began moving away from people who failed to take the threat of fascism seriously, those who would not be convinced “until they see what has happened.” She turned to another group. The white house on Roxbury Drive soon became the scene of buffet suppers that appeared to be ordinary social functions. At some point in the evening, Dorothy introduced a Marxist lecturer or a trade unionist, sometimes a German refugee, and she urged the need for generous contributions. She gave a dinner to raise money for the defense of the Scottsboro boys. One weekend, she and Alan, along with Don Stewart and a delegation of film writers, were invited to San Francisco for a conference being sponsored by the League of American Writers. This was an openly left-wing affair, whose speakers included Harry Bridges, the Australian-born leader of the International Longshoremen’s Union, and Ella Winter, the widow of Lincoln Steffens. Welcoming the screenwriters, Winter said that the movement needed their spirit and humor. She flattered Dorothy and Don by describing them as people who “in one sentence can help us more than a thousand jargon-filled pamphlets.” Later, she met them at a nearby cocktail lounge and introduced them to Bridges, who promptly won them over with his humor and ability to put away respectable quantities of bourbon. Everyone relaxed and got drunk. The next day the visitors made a trip to San Quentin prison and spoke with Tom Mooney.

Dorothy had been arrested during the Sacco-Vanzetti demonstrations, but nine years later, with no attempt at concealment on her part, her leftist tendencies still baffled those who knew her well and those who believed they did. If her support on behalf of two anarchists was not taken seriously, neither did she receive respectful attention when she began to speak warningly about Franco and Hitler. To many observers (including some of her most intimate friends), the source of her radicalism was obvious: She was playing amateur revolutionary, just as she once had played amateur suicide. This was nothing but theatrics.

Even her appearance underwent an evolution. In the days when she had been broke, she had always managed to turn herself out in fine outfits from Valentino and Hattie Carnegie. Since moving to Hollywood, she had hundred-dollar underwear and nightgowns made at an exclusive Beverly Hills shop. Outwardly, however, she began to adopt the proletariat look—a ruffled peasant blouse, baggy dirndl skirt cinched in at the waist, flat-heeled shoes, a babushka wrapping her hair and tied under the chin, so that only the dark bangs stuck out. You didn’t see many women looking like that in Hollywood. There were days when she showed up at Paramount dressed like a Ukrainian farm woman getting ready to climb on a tractor. For that matter, she also bore more than a passing resemblance to those 1890-style sweatshop workers jogging along Hester Street with bundles of shirtwaists riding on their heads. J. Henry Rothschild would have swooned.

Dorothy declined to explain the reasons for this transformation. As she wrote in
New Masses
, “I cannot tell you on what day what did what to me,” a statement that shed little light on the subject. She did recount a childhood memory: She and her Aunt Lizzie Rothschild were watching men shovel snow outside the house on West Sixty-eighth Street when Lizzie said that it was nice there had been a blizzard—now the men had work. “And I knew then it was not so nice that men could work for their lives only in desperate weather, that there was no work for them when it was fair.” She also alluded to the Sacco-Vanzetti executions by noting that at certain times of her life, she had felt “wild” with the knowledge of injustice but had not known what to do. It amazed and amused her that she had to come to Hollywood, of all the improbable places, to discover ways of fighting values she had always hated.

With more generosity than accuracy, she gave credit for her radicalization to Don Stewart, though he corrected this error in his memoirs by observing that she “had ‘gone left’ before I had.” She felt intense rapport with Stewart, who was also losing friends and suffering for his new beliefs. Alan was, according to Budd Schulberg, “a genuine left liberal who had a little trouble stomaching the Party,” but he put aside his own beliefs when they conflicted with his wife’s enthusiasms. This was not true in Stewart’s marriage. Bea objected vigorously to his political activities. As Robert Benchley sympathetically commented, “Don pretty difficult in past two years, all wrapped up in his guilds and leagues and soviets.” In due course, Bea divorced him and married Count Ilya Andreyevich Tolstoy, a grandson of Leo Tolstoy, whom she met in Florida, where he was managing the Marine Aquarium without a dime to his illustrious name. In 1939, Don Stewart married Lincoln Steffens’s widow, Ella Winter. Throughout the thirties and forties he worked on a number of highly successful films, such as
The Philadelphia Story
, while continuing his political involvements. By 1951, he immigrated to England, blacklisted.

Dorothy, meanwhile, had begun to divide the world into two camps: those who smiled at her indulgently and the like-minded leftist friends whom she referred to as “my own people.” She preferred the company of her own people, including Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett. Her feelings were reflected in a tart remark she made about Walter Duranty, the
New York Times
Moscow correspondent and a journalist she disliked for his callous attitude toward the Russians: “When the train of history went around a sharp curve, he fell out of the dining car.” In her eyes, history had shoved a great many people out of the dining car. Out of affection and nostalgia, she continued to maintain ties with the Murphys, the Guinzburgs, and Aleck Woollcott, but she dropped people like Adele Lovett. She felt saddest of all about Benchley. At first, eager for his support, she had counted on his understanding because he believed that the new progressive movement was good for Hollywood. He paid twenty dollars to attend a fund-raising dinner on behalf of German-Jewish refugees. Afterward, he complained to Gertrude that such affairs were “all very laudable—but expensive.” As Dorothy kept inching further to the left, she soon realized he was not following, but appeared to be increasingly skeptical of her direction.

A serious break occurred the following year, when she and Benchley both happened to be visiting New York and met for drinks at “21.” Cannoning him with a fusillade of leftist ideology, she espoused her views with such militancy that Benchley was taken aback and greatly angered. He reacted to what probably struck him as political arrogance by launching an indirect counterattack and told her “not to make those ingenue eyes at me,” because she was no longer an ingenue. Writing to Sara and Gerald Murphy about it, he said, “Dottie didn’t mind my views on her labor activities but the ‘ingenue’ line (so I am told) cut her to the quick.” In fact, she objected violently to both. For several months, she refused to answer his phone calls or visit him at the Garden of Allah, until eventually the intercession of friends brought about a reconciliation.

Benchley’s reference to labor activities meant Dorothy’s fierce belief that screenwriters should be organized. She had been in Hollywood a very short time when she stopped marveling about the fairy-tale salaries studios paid to their writers. She was dismayed to learn that few writers had the credentials to command hundreds of dollars a week and that for every Parker or Loos or Hecht, someone was earning slave wages.

I saw some of the most stinkingest practices you’d ever want to see. People—honest, hard workers were thrown out of their jobs, without warning, without justice. People were hired on what is called “spec”—which meant that they wrote without pay, with the understanding that if their work was accepted they would be paid—and then their work would be used, but they would be fired—still without pay. The average wage of a screen writer was forty dollars a week. [Well, that] would have been perfectly corking except that there was a catch to it. The average term of employment was two weeks in a year.

In the summer of 1936, a drive got under way to recruit new members for the Screen Writers Guild, the union that had been formed four years earlier but had encountered violent opposition from the studios, who refused to accord it recognition or bargaining power. Many writers considered unions beneath the professional dignity of so-called artists. Needless to say, Dorothy was not among them, nor did she have sympathy for those who later affiliated themselves with a rival, studio-supported union known as the Screen Playwrights. Expecting studios to represent the rights of writers, she was said to have remarked, “was like trying to get laid in your mother’s house. Somebody was always in the parlor, watching.” At a meeting where a number of well-known writers spoke out against affiliation with the Guild, she was enraged to hear Richard Schayer, a writer who had been in the business for twenty years, insist that “screenwriting is a soft racket.” He saw no reason for writers to gum up the works. “Especially when the Mothership [MGM] objects,” Dorothy retorted. She was furious. For the
Screen Guilds’ Magazine
she wrote a toxic rebuttal to Schayer and saracastically titled it “To Richard—With Love.”

I do not feel that I am participating in a soft racket (and what the hell, by the way, is a
hard
racket?) when I am writing for the screen. Nor do I want to be part of any racket, hard or soft, or three-and-a-half minutes.... I have never in my life been paid so much, either—well, why am I here, and why are you, and why is Mr. Schayer? But I can look my God and my producer—whom I do not, as do many, confuse with each other—in the face, and say that I have earned every cent of it.

Her anger at writers who “wouldn’t join because they were individuals, they were artists, because it wasn’t genteel, because they were ladies, they were gentlemen” did not abate either. Two years later, when a writer she was trying to persuade to join the Guild said he didn’t believe that creative writers belonged in unions, she saw red. “That sonofabitch telling me that he’s a creative writer! If he’s a creative writer, I’m Marie of Rumania.”

To those who feared the word union, she wanted to say: “Now, look, baby, ‘union’ is spelled with five letters. It is not a four-letter word.”

After settling in Hollywood, Dorothy frequently saw Sid and Laura Perelman, who were working as a writing team at Paramount. Disenchanted with the film business, the Perelmans would instantly decamp once they had completed a picture. Dorothy paid careful attention when they began extolling the virtues of the farm they had purchased in Pennsylvania. Judging from their poetic description, Bucks County was an unspoiled stretch of country north of Philadelphia along the Delaware River, a place where the eye beheld vistas on every side that refreshed the soul, a pastoral retreat of covered bridges and stone barns, gently rolling hills, and unpretentious hamlets that might have graced the Cotswolds before the advent of the Industrial Revolution. In other words, it sounded everything that Beverly Hills was not. The Perelmans reported that even though the area had been invaded by artists and writers, property was still relatively inexpensive. There were bargains to be found if one made the effort.

These delirious references to Bucks County began to intrigue Dorothy. She found herself growing receptive to the idea of trees and grass, vegetation synonymous in her mind with suburban living. Suddenly she was struck by a gloomy thought.

“We haven’t any roots, Alan,” she said. “You can’t put down roots in Beverly Hills. But look at Laura and Sid—they’ve got roots, a place to come home to. Roots, roots.”

Alan’s eyes were already misty. As he too warmed to the prospect of becoming a country squire, the interior decorator lurking within came bubbling to the surface. Nothing like their home on North Roxbury Drive would do, nothing that came equipped with washing machines and stainless-steel kitchens. Instead, he visualized a place they could refurbish to suit their tastes, the kind of old house that had character.

They visited New York in July. It was a slow, sultry journey in a baking-hot compartment. When they reached Kansas, Dorothy wired Sara and Gerald, cheerfully swearing that the next time she crossed the continent by railroad it would be in a coffin covered with an American flag. Once they had checked into the Surrey Hotel, they lost no time in heading to Bucks County to inspect the Perelmans’ rustic paradise for themselves. Sid and Laura introduced them to Jack Boyle, Tinicum township’s resident anarchist and former professional fur thief. He was usually planted on the steps of the post office spinning yarns, but he also peddled real estate in his spare time. Dorothy hit it off with the Irishman at once.

For the next few days, the Perelmans accompanied the Campbells on a tour of local farms for sale. The second property Boyle showed them turned out to be an extremely handsome Pennsylvania Dutch house in Pipersville. Set back from the main road, reached by a long, scenic lane that guaranteed complete privacy, the fieldstone house sat on 111 acres of land that boasted a panoramic view of the Delaware River valley. Boyle called the place Fox House, named he said for a family who had owned it since the Revolutionary War. Three maples shaded the fourteen-room house on the north side, an apple orchard luxuriated on the south, and about fifty yards away stood an immense stone barn. When Boyle announced an asking price of only forty-five hundred dollars, it seemed past belief and everybody’s eyes widened. Sid Perelman declared that if the Campbells hesitated, he and Laura would certainly scoop up the house themselves.

Boyle raised a warning hand. They should see the inside of the house first, he told them, because it needed a little work.

It did indeed. Poultry feathers and cobwebs blanketed the interior. The ceilings dripped plaster stalactites, and the woodwork crumbled beneath their touch. There was no cellar, and what remained of the rotting floors was carpeted with dead chickens—“not still corpses, not yet skeletons,” Dorothy recalled. Most incredible of all, people were actually living there, an elderly Lithuanian couple who had established a rent-free colony a number of years ago and had been eking out a living cultivating a few fields and raising chickens. They did not welcome the appearance of potential buyers.