Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner

On this day 114 years ago, a New York couple named Rothschild, who had a summer cottage in the little New Jersey beach town of Long Branch, became parents of a baby they named Dorothy.  (A brief momentary aside: on this same date, 79 years ago, a German couple named Stockhausen living near Cologne became parents of a baby boy they named Karlheinz – but let’s stick with Dorothy; I may or may not eventually come back to Stockhausen [anyone interested?], whose path and mine have crossed on fairly numerous occasions starting during his teeth-cutting electronic days at Cologne’s Westdeutscher Rundfunk about half a century or so ago, when Time had me fly there from Berlin to provide its first story about him.)

But as long as I seem in a veering mood, let’s veer back for just a moment to that name Rothschild.  Virtually all the world connects it with the unique European banking family (some of my fellow codgers may recall George Arliss decades ago in a Hollywood epic called “The House of Rothschild”), which by clever distribution of progeny established a unique international web of banks, and Anglophone eyes tend to divide that surname wrong - approximately Roth’s Child – whereas the original (meanwhile archaic) German spelling, pronounced Roat-Shild, means simply Red Schield – get it?  (I’ll exert myself not to veer yet once more and pause to tell you about finding myself on the same BEA plane from Salzburg to London with a latter-day descendent who’d become Lord Rothschild - with me at that point accompanying the great (Soviet) Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter on a dream assignment the German magazine stern laid on me to spend two or three weeks travelling with Richter and Nina Dorliac, the Russian soprano everyone at that point took for his wife, to three of Europe’s most important annual music festivals: Salzburg, Edinburgh, and Lucerne.  [I'll really have to exert myself to keep from veering off yet again about Richter's introductory meeting with Marlene Dietrich in Edinburgh's George Hotel, with me on hand . . . but that'll have to wait until I finally get around to taking that Memory Lane stroll here through the Marlene Dietrich neighborhood I recently discovered has long since become my home here in Berlin.])

Now then – getting back to that newborn New Jersey child Dorothy Rothschild.  When she grew up, she married a gentleman named Parker, and since American anti-Semitism made his surname professionally preferable for a budding writer, she became, forevermore, Dorothy Parker.  I first heard her name at a very early age during my El Paso childhood, from the brother of my Texan sister’s New Mexico rancher fiancé, whose literarily inclined younger brother Jim described her work as “caustic”, a word also new to me, which he kindly defined for me.  I thus had a pre-conceived notion that jibed, I believe, with the vast majority of people’s opinion of the slim volume of literary treasures Dorothy Parker left us when she died.

One night in New York during the mid-1940s my telephone rang and I heard the voice of Hallie Faulk, whose approaching second marriage had recently brought her up from Texas, where for part of the summer of 1942 I’d roomed with her and her brilliant first husband John Henry Faulk (about whom I could also write a short book – but more of him later, too) in their house out on the bank of the Colorado River as an 18-year-old senior at the University of Texas in Austin.  (During her later years Hallie enjoyed a modest folk-singer success as Hallie Wood, recording at least one LP.)  Halfway through the evening in question she telephoned me in my dark, tiny apartment down in the unfashionable part of Greenwich Village from a party up on lower Park Avenue, where they had a piano that needed someone to play it, so how about my coming up? 

I reacted to news that with an equanimity bordering on coma until she started going down the list of people present.  During those pre-McCarthy days, when the dividing line between anti-fascist and pro-Communist frequently became blurred, almost everyone I knew in that era’s New York classified as left-wing, and Hallie had telephoned me from a fund-raising party for an organization I’d never before even heard of: U.N.A.V.A, which stood for United Negro-American Veterans’ Association or something similar.  The choreographer Jerome Robbins (later pilloried by the McCarthy mob as a one-time member of the Communist Party of the United States of America) had made available for it the furnished apartment down in the un-chic lower part of Park Avenue he’d temporarily sublet from the photographer George Platt Lynes.  I knew Jerry slightly, through mutual friends including Leonard Bernstein (with whom he’d made a simultaneous introductory splash with their ballet “Fancy Free”) but not until Hallie mentioned Dorothy Parker as one of the guests did I really snap to attention.  Needless to say, I hightailed it up to that party as fast as Manhattan’s subway system (which in those days cost a nickel) could get me there.  (Taxis?  Me, at that stage in my life?  Don’t make me laugh – not even the sooner to get to meet my adored Dorothy Parker.)

I found her the way S. J. Perelman had also found her at their introductory encounter: visibly gassed.  Literary gossip about her already legendary self had it that she’d tried Alcoholic Anonymous – but without lasting success.  Lynes had one of those modest waist-high pianos I believe the manufacturers (inaccurately) called spinets, and almost as soon as I sat down I had Dorothy’s face directly in front of me, elbows on top of the little piano, chin cradled in her hands, gazing directly into my utterly enchanted eyes from only a few feet away, with a dreamy smile on her face I could without exaggeration call almost adoring - catapulting me of course directly into seventh heaven.  She quite clearly took an immediate shine to me – I hardly need go into my own reaction to that totally unanticipated development – and primarily for her I proceeded to trot out virtually my entire repertoire, and to hell with the fact that only a small circle close around us really listened to the musical pearls I so lavishly cast before them.

I guess I could fairly say that I moved from seventh up to eighth heaven when the party broke up, during the no longer very wee hours of that morning, and with genuine cordiality she casually extended to me one of the most appreciated invitations of my entire life.  At that time, between her two marriages to her considerably younger writing collaborator Alan Campbell, she had moved into a two-room suite at the largely residential semi-bohemian New Weston Hotel, on Madison Avenue in the upper forties.  Almost off-handedly, unaware of the accolade her invitation automatically amounted to, she said that any time I happened to find myself in the New Weston’s neighborhood around cocktail time, I should feel free to drop in for a drink.

. . . Now I hate to frustrate those of you I know I have drooling to read absolutely everything I can tell you about my fairly numerous visits to her in that apartment, but it grows late here in Berlin and I did want to write this little tribute on her birthday.  Tomorrow looms uniquely large in my life – 4 a.m. E.D.T. will find me at one of Berlin’s regional City Halls collecting the certificate that will proclaim me a brand-new citizen of the Federal Republic of Germany (after living here for almost all the past 56 years), and tomorrow afternoon will find me making my debut – albeit merely as a modest Anglophone voice - at Berlin’s pinnacle Deutsches Theater, where Max Reinhardt worked his theatrical wonders until the brownshirt goons who took over in 1933 threw him out for his suddenly criminal Jewish origin.  Please don’t go away mad, though – I assure you that I myself want to wrap up my memories of Dorothy Parker every bit as eagerly as you do, okay?