She found both men in the small bathroom. They were chatting quietly. Faulkner was curled in the tub, using it for a bed. He was covered in a wool blanket. Benchley leaned against the wall, sipping his martini.
He said, “I thought you had fallen asleep.”
She shook her head. “I’ve been up talking to myself. The good part is that I’m rarely interrupted. What are you pigeons cooing over?”
Faulkner said, “We were just discussing Mr. Benchley’s reviews.”
“You should be writing them, not talking about them,” she said. “Or just forget all about them. Your deadline was two hours ago.”
Benchley frowned. “I hate to leave Bud Battersby in the lurch. First, his star drama critic is murdered in broad daylight. Then, after he asked me nicely to fill in, I fail to deliver the goods.”
“Don’t forget that little incident of nearly being murdered,” she said. “I think there might be an escape clause for that. And did you forget this afternoon’s edition of the
Knickerbocker
? The articles that made all the members of our little lunch circle look like suspects in Mayflower’s murder?”
Benchley shrugged, unconvinced.
“It’s too late anyhow,” she said. “The morning edition goes out at six. That’s only four hours from now.”
“I could telephone the reviews in,” Benchley said. “If only I could write the damn things down. Mrs. Parker, that contraption is a monster.”
“Don’t be silly. First of all, it’s only a typewriter, Mr. Benchley. Mechanical devices are your enemy only because you make them so. Second, as you already know, I don’t own a telephone for you to call in your reviews. You’ll have to go down to the lobby to place a call.”
He didn’t answer. He merely fumed at the thought of the typewriter.
She sighed. “Okay, then. Let’s all have another drink. And, if you absolutely must do those reviews, we’ll get you through them together.”
This, at last, brought a slow, twinkling smile to Benchley’s face. They returned to the parlor. While Benchley joked and made them laugh, she poured each of them a glass of bootleg bourbon. Then they had another.
It was three o’clock before Benchley finally fell into the chair and tried again to type. Dorothy and Faulkner sat on the couch, the dog lying between them.
“For Pete’s sake!” Benchley cried. “Now the keys are malfunctioning. I typed a whole sentence. It came out gibberish.”
“Are your fingers on the right keys?” she said.
Very slowly, very deliberately, Benchley lowered his head to look at his fingers on the typewriter keys.
“Well, would you look at that?” he mumbled.
Then his arms fell to his sides and his head dropped to the typewriter with a dull thud. After the briefest interval, he began snoring softly.
She said, “Well, I guess the party’s over at last.” She turned her unsteady gaze to Faulkner. “It’s time for bed. You can sleep here on the couch. Looks like Mr. Benchley won’t be using it.”
Faulkner looked down at the stained, smelly, grubby couch. It was covered with a fine layer of vomit-colored dog hair.
“I think I’ll go back to the bathtub,” he said.
Chapter 13
The lobby of the Algonquin Hotel was crowded when Dorothy Parker went down for lunch the next day. People were everywhere. Every chair and every banquette in the lobby was occupied. A number of people meandered around aimlessly. They loitered at the entrance and the front desk as if waiting for something to happen.
On her way to the Rose Room, Dorothy encountered Robert Sherwood, who had pulled down his straw boater as if to hide his long face. Instinctively, she linked her arm through his. The bystanders gawked at them, and she sensed that this was not simply because she was very small and he was very tall.
“So, what fresh hell is this?” she muttered.
Sherwood leaned down and whispered, “They’re a bunch of scandalmongers—that’s what. They read all about the murder of Leland Mayflower, how he was found under our table and how any one of us might have stabbed him in cold blood. If you read it in the newspapers,
certainly
it must be true. Now they want to have a look for themselves.”
She shrugged in response. She had woken up just an hour before with a terrible hangover. She had done what she could to brighten her appearance, with a green dress and a bit of pancake makeup. But, having caught her reflection, she decided she looked like a thin, dried-out pickle topped with a smudge of flour.
Georges, the maitre d’, stood holding back a small crowd at the entrance to the dining room. He waved Dorothy and Sherwood through. The gaggle of wide-eyed onlookers watched them pass, some of them whispering conspiratorially to one another.
The dining room was packed and noisy. Every seat at every table—except at the Round Table in the center—was filled. The ruckus quieted momentarily as Dorothy and Sherwood entered and all eyes turned toward them. Then the loud chatter resumed with renewed gusto as the diners conferred about the new arrivals.
At the Round Table, Alexander Woollcott sat looking pleased with himself. He had a fresh lily in the lapel of his snugly fitted, black worsted wool jacket. He smiled broadly as Dorothy and Sherwood approached. His beetle eyes glittered behind his owllike glasses. Also seated at the table as usual were Franklin Adams, George Kaufman, Marc Connelly, Harold Ross and Heywood Broun.
“Mrs. Parker,” Woollcott trilled in his high, nasal voice. “How perfectly delightful to see you. You look like you’ve been hit by a trolley car. And you, Mr. Sherwood, you look as elongated as always.”
She wasn’t usually bothered by this typical greeting from Woollcott. On any other day she would have ignored it or made a nonchalant but witty response. But this day Woollcott was preening for the onlookers, basking in their sidelong glances. She couldn’t help herself from sniping in return.
“And what makes you so happy and gay today?” she snapped. “Another one of your competitors turn up dead?”
George Kaufman, a perpetually nervous and sensitive person, winced at this remark.
“Tut-tut, Dottie,” Woollcott said, raising a cup of tea, disappointed in her rudimentary riposte. “If I am shining like a sunbeam today, it is due in no small part to Mr. Benchley’s reviews in this morning’s
Knickerbocker
. The old cutup had me chuckling all morning. Now, tell us, where is that rogue writer? That man of letters? I must confer my accolades.”
These weren’t words of praise, she knew. This was Woollcott sharpening his claws.
“Once again, Aleck, you have it wrong,” she said. “Mr. Benchley didn’t submit his reviews. He didn’t even write them. He fell asleep before he finished the first paragraph.”
Now Franklin Adams spoke up, removing the cigar from his anteater face. “And you—
ahem
—have an intimate knowledge of his sleeping habits?”
Some of the others at the table chuckled wryly, though Adams and Sherwood kept stony expressions.
“No,” she said. “I have an intimate knowledge of his
working
habits.”
She felt cooler now. She wanted to divulge the dangerous events of the night before, how they had been held at gunpoint and nearly killed. It would knock their damned socks off. But, on the elevator ride down, she’d decided to let Benchley tell this tale. He’d get a great deal of enjoyment in telling it, and he would make it funnier, more absurd, than she could. (His talent was in making the ridiculous sublime, she knew, while hers was in making the bitter taste sweet and the sweet taste bitter.)
Woollcott said, “If these reviews are what Benchley considers work, then I’d suggest he retire forthwith. In any case, where is the jovial jackanapes?”
Reviews?
Benchley had slept with his head on her typewriter all night. How could he have submitted his reviews? She didn’t let her face betray her puzzlement.
“He went up to Doug Fairbanks’ penthouse to borrow a change of clothes,” she said. “Well, here’s the proud peacock now.”
Robert Benchley, beaming widely, strode into the dining room. He wore a well-tailored expensive-looking blue suit, a crisp white shirt, a florid pink tie and a matching pocket handkerchief. He wore it with a casual, care-free confidence, even though it was at least a full size too small. The pants displayed his stockinged ankles; his jacket sleeves ended midway between his elbows and wrists. As he crossed the room, he acted unaware of both the shortcomings of his borrowed suit and the stares focused on him by the room’s scandal-hungry spectators.
“Good day to you all,” he chimed, seating himself next to Dorothy. “No dead writers joining us today, I trust? No skewered critics on the bill of fare, I hope?”
Gasps emanated from a nearby table. Seated there were two dowdy, middle-aged, eavesdropping women. No one at the Round Table paid them any mind.
Woollcott grinned mirthlessly. “The only critic that should be skewered is you, old chum.”
Benchley’s eyes twinkled as he tugged at his cuffs. “In that case, waiter, give me a skewdriver. I’m parched. Come now, why are you all looking at me like that? Something amiss?”
Benchley expected to be taken to task for wearing the undersized suit. He had clearly intended it. Dorothy could almost see a clever response waiting at the corner of his upturned mouth. But Benchley didn’t know that Woollcott had something else in mind, and she didn’t know how to alert him to this.
“Something amiss? ”Woollcott purred. “Nothing much. Only your writing. It’s more than amiss. It’s a mess.”
Benchley’s smile didn’t falter, but he stopped adjusting his cuffs. “My writing, you say? Or my wardrobe?”
“Today,” Woollcott said, driving the point home, “you come up short on both.”
With delicate, disdainful fingers, Woollcott slid the morning edition of the
Knickerbocker News
across the table. He had folded it so that the drama page faced up. Benchley didn’t pick it up at first. Then, suddenly, as if spotting his own obituary, he seized it and inspected it closely.
Dorothy leaned over his arm to look. He read aloud. “A DARK DAY FOR BROADWAY, BY ROBERT BENCHLEY, SPECIAL TO THE DRAMA PAGE.” He looked up. “But I never submitted this piece. I never even finished it. Barely got it started.”
Woollcott smirked. “Please continue.”
Benchley read the article aloud:
There are many new shows on Broadway, and I can say with confidence that
Twenty-three Skidoo!
, produced by Florenz Ziegfeld, is certainly one of them.
Marc Connelly nodded. “Sounds like your writing.”
“Yes, I did write that,” Benchley muttered, as if to himself. “And that’s all I wrote. I had an argument with Mrs. Parker’s typewriter, and the typewriter won. So I stopped there. But the review continues—” He read on.
Leland Mayflower, rest his soul, isn’t the only deadweight on Broadway—
“Oh, dear.” Benchley frowned.
Twenty-three Skidoo!
is the familiar kind of musical revue we’ve seen time and again, featuring yet another spanking new ingenue, plucked fresh from the chorus line, with more looks than talent. The evening’s entertainment ends when the opening curtain rises; it’s all downhill from there, with a supply of musical numbers gathered from the refuse of Tin Pan Alley.
This is the same dead horse that Mr. Ziegfeld has been flogging for years. And this dead horse stinks. I had to brush the flies aside to get a good look at Dulcea McCrae, the show’s ingenue. When I finally did see her, and heard her, I stopped swatting. The flies made a more pleasant noise—
“But I didn’t write this,” Benchley said. “How did Bud Battersby print this?”
Woollcott said nothing; he merely scooped a spoonful of butterscotch pudding into his widely grinning mouth.
Franklin Adams narrowed his eyes. “Maybe Battersby wrote it himself. When you didn’t hand in the reviews as promised, maybe he went ahead without you.”
Benchley looked perplexed. “But ...”
Woollcott said, “Please, Robert, continue to indulge us.”
Benchley scanned the article, jumping to the second review.
Meanwhile, down the street at the Sheldrake Theater, Bibi Bibelot and Carl Worthy starred in the debut of Cornell Clyde’s
The Winter of Our Marriage
. I won’t quip that this
Marriage
should be annulled. It’s not significant enough for that. It’s not significant for much of anything, really. This lifeless bedroom drama is the apex of mediocrity, if mediocrity indeed has a high point. And if it does, then mediocrity must have a low point also. Interestingly enough—and this is the only interesting thing about this play—
The Winter of Our Marriage
manages to be the rock bottom of mediocrity as well.
Benchley stopped reading.
Connelly said, “That review sounds like you, too.”
“It sounds like what Benchley might s
ay
,” Sherwood remarked. “Not what he would
write
. Not what he’d put into
print
.”
Woollcott said shrewdly, “Are those indeed your words?”
“Well, yes.” Benchley allowed himself a sly smile. “But I never actually wrote them.”
“Then how, pray tell, did they appear in the
Knickerbocker News
?” Woollcott said. “Not that it matters now. What’s done is done.”
“Aha!” Benchley grinned. “I think
you
wrote them. You were at both plays, too. I think you’re putting one over on me.”
“Would that I had such talent!” Woollcott replied drily. “No, my boy, I could not possibly write my two excellent reviews for the
New York Times
and also write your ridiculous reviews for the
Knickerbocker
. I’m flattered that you think I’m capable of such.”
Adams spoke, this time not removing his cigar. “Maybe that’s not all you’re capable of.”
Woollcott drew his marshmallow body as erect as he could. “What are you implying?”
“You know what,” Adams said, leaning forward. “You’ve got a mean streak as wide and as dirty as the Hudson River. You had it in for Mayflower. Now you have it in for Benchley. Watch your back, Robert.”