Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner

It should surprise no one familiar with her writings that as soon as decently possible after her so casual, offhand invitation to stop in for a drink the next time I found myself in her Manhattan neighborhood around that time of the afternoon, I did just happen to find myself around Madison Avenue and the upper ’40s.  When I gave my name to the deskman at the New Weston Hotel, for him to ask whether he should let me go up, it would not at all have surprised me for him to turn me away - but by golly he didn’t!  I can’t recall who else had already dropped in on Dorothy that afternoon, but I soon discovered that she had obviously extended that casual invitation to a  fairly wide circle, for I never appeared there without finding at least one visitor already on hand.

Informed Parker fans may have wondered why, in my dropping the resounding name of Dorothy Parker, I haven’t gone all the way and called her Dottie - as did virtually everyone else who knew her at all - so let’s get that cleared up right now.  At first it would have seemed to me something close to lèse-majesté for me to have presumed to call her that, and I hadn’t known her long before a chance occurrence one afternoon answered my unasked question.  A woman friend of Dorothy’s and I formed that afternoon’s group; I’ve forgotten that visitor’s identity but she also had a sort of nickname problem, and it transpired that I’d unknowingly ingratiated myself with her by not using it.  The conversational byplay prompted by that included Dorothy’s saying: “Paul calls us by our right names”, adding that she’d always hated the nickname she got stuck with during her periods of Hollywood servitude.  Naturally I never once, during the time we remained in contact (until a Hollywood gig she felt forced to accept took her back there around Christmastime 1948), called her anything except Dorothy.

If anyone asked me to name the saddest woman I ever knew, I wouldn’t even have to reflect before naming Dorothy.  Research shows that she even attempted suicide on three occasions.  She’d lost her Jewish mother a few months before her fifth birthday, and her Jewish father had then married a shiksa - about whom Dorothy told me a psychologically important tidbit I’ve never seen anywhere in print:

“She brought me up to look down on my father the same way she did, because I was only half-Jewish and he was all-Jewish.”  She immediately added: “Of course in later life that made me two hundred percent Jewish.” 

She grew up on Manhattan’s upper west side, and attended Roman Catholic elementary school at the Convent of the Blessed Sacrament, no doubt at the decision of her stepmother - who, in turn, died before Dorothy turned ten.  She also attended Miss Dana’s School, a stylish finishing school in upper-class Morristown, New Jersey.  Her formal education ended completely not long after her thirteenth birthday.  When “The Paris Review” interviewed Dorothy many years later, she said she’d learned nothing during her school years except that a pencil eraser will erase ink “if you spit on it.”

In all those 1948 afternoons we drank together - and she always had plenty of drink of various kinds on hand, with endless reinforcements only a room-service telephone call away - I don’t recall having ever seen her actually drunk . . . but a moment’s reflection reminds me that I myself probably got too sozzled to have even noticed her own state. 

I’ve read somewhere that her closest friend Lillian Hellman’s long-time lover Dashiell Hammett couldn’t stand Dorothy, because of what he regarded as her duplicity, her two-faced behavior, but I myself caught only one brief glimpse of that.  At one point during those years three young Manhattan débutantes turned up fairly frequently in the gossip columns as stars of what someone during that period dubbed Café Society.  I recall one of their names as Brenda Frasier, but one of the other two, whose name I’ve forgotten, also dropped into the New Weston one afternoon and the deskman called up for Dorothy’s instructions.  She did tell him to send her up, but during the few minutes it took her to arrive at Dorothy’s apartment door, Dorothy absolutely demolished her, mercilessly ridiculing everything conceivable about her.  Then the doorbell rang, and Dorothy’s manner instantaneously underwent a total transformation; to revert to a Texas expression, you could have poured her on a waffle.  Two-faced?  Hypocritical?  To trot out another Texas locution, those terms hardly covered it.

(During that period I also rejoiced in occasional meetings with another well-known writer, Dawn Powell, a Greenwich Village neighbor of mine the literary pope Edmund Wilson highly esteemed and in a “New Yorker” essay praised to the skies.  One afternoon at Dawn’s - also, inevitably, over drinks - Dorothy’s name came up, and I told her how distasteful I’d found the episode with that débutante.  Dawn said she understood what I meant, but she had a personal theory about Dorothy that I can at least reliably paraphrase: “She fires those demolition jets of vitriol in swift little volleys, and that takes care of it, right then and there.  I think the rest of us do more or less the same thing, only we spread it out over a lot more time.”)

My most memorable single experience of Dorothy took place one night after whoever else had come that afternoon had left, leaving Dorothy and me alone.  I’d noticed earlier that evening that she seemed unusually depressed, and for that reason I’d not left, for I didn’t want to leave her all alone in that desolate mood.

With her sitting in one corner of her not terribly spacious hotel living room and me diametrically across the room from her, we exchanged respective miseries, undoubtedly doing the exact opposite of bucking each other up.  Some time prior to that I had gone into psychoanalysis - beginning one of the most traumatic experiences of my life, not because of psychoanalysis per se, but because the coincidence of outrageous fortune had landed me on the couch of an analyst my worst enemy might have selected for me - so that evening I had an abundant reservoir of raw material to hold up my own end of our ever more and more lugubrious colloquy.  Three epithets at the end of one of Dorothy’s sentences branded themselves forever into my memory; speaking of herself at that time of her life, after her divorce from Alan Campbell, she summed up her autobiographical summary at 55 with these whip-lash words: “elderly, ugly, and alone.”

To my dying day I’ll regret not yielding to my spontaneous impulse to rush across the room and enfold her in my arms . . . but I didn’t.  Why not?  Well, for one thing her identity as the Dorothy Parker still overawed me.  Another factor also inhibited me: Dorothy had a reputation for losing her heart to sensitive young men a great deal younger than she, a category in which I definitely belonged, and I did not want to get involved in that kind of predicament.  (Talk about unlucky in love: Dorothy married homosexual Alan Campbell not once but twice; they divorced in 1947, remarried three years later, and remained together on and off until his death in 1963 in West Hollywood - the largely gay section of Los Angeles.  I recall reading somewhere that in her cups her fundamental hostility towards him did not stop short of homophobic twitting, even in the company of others.)

That evening she and I did somehow manage to yank our spirits up at least a bit higher than rock-bottom, but before I finally left she pointedly quizzed me about my own personal situation at that stage of my life.  Not long before that I’d lost the script-writing job at RKO-Pathé (which an unorthodox, graphology-influenced, possibly almost clairvoyant employment agent had sent me into, thus officially enabling me finally to call myself a writer), and I faced a bleakly uncertain future with virtually no money in the bank.  When Dorothy demanded details, I gave them to her.  Without another word she went to another area of that two-room apartment and came back with one of those big out-sized check ledgers you see mostly in places of business.  She sat down and wrote out one check, then folded it to conceal the amount and handed it to me with this envoi: “I’ve had some unexpected royalties recently, so here’s a month.  Have a month on me.”

The fact that she’d even done such a thing struck me almost totally dumb, but as soon as I even began trying to put into words the grateful fullness I felt in my heart, she wanted none of that.  I couldn’t see the amount she’d written, but I did catch a glimpse of the top-level private bank where she had her account: Brown Brothers Harriman - as I recall, Averell Harriman, one of the richest Democrats in the country, had at least a hand in running it.  (Reflection subsequently led to my conclusion that Dorothy had not exactly thrown away the bounteous reimbursement she’d received from those Hollywood chores for which she had such contempt.  She and Alan Campbell co-wrote more than fifteen films, at salaries as high as $5,200 a week, an all the more enormous sum during those post-1929 depression years.)

Before I even got into the elevator, naturally I unfolded the check and damned near fainted when I saw the amount: $500.  At RKO-Pathé they’d paid me $50 a week; for my dark little warren down on West Tenth Street I paid exactly $31 a month.  For me at that time, $500 would go a long, long, long way farther than the month she’d mentioned.  In context, I believe that topped, for sheer generosity, any other benefaction that’s come my way ever since.

A standard reference work summarizes Dorothy Parker as “best known for her caustic wit, wisecracks, and sharp eye for 20th-century urban foibles.”  Well, yes, I suppose so . . . but also someone much, very much more than that.  She took a passionate interest in social issues; any kind of social injustice outraged her.  Her outrage never drove her quite into actually joining the Communist Party, but she made no secret, especially in Hollywood, of her left-wing sympathies.  The infamous vigilante outfit called “Red Channels” came right out and called her a Communist.  With Mussolini’s fascist Italy and Hitler’s Nazi Germany destroying Spain’s elected Republican government while the leading democratic world powers merely looked on, she actually went to Spain herself, and wrote about what she experienced there for the not officially Communist but definitely Party-lining intellectual weekly “New Masses”, which also published two little-known poems of hers, “Not Enough” and “Sophisticated Poetry - and the Hell With It”.

In 1967, at the comparatively early age of 73, Dorothy died of a heart attack in her suite at the high-class Volney residential hotel in New York City, in a reasonable facsimile of which she set one of her last literary efforts, a collaboration entitled “The Ladies of the Corridor”.  Her will bequeathed her entire estate to the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Foundation; following King’s death, it passed on to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.  For whatever reason, her best friend and executrix, the equally left-wing playwright Lillian Hellman, bitterly but unsuccessfully contested that disposition.  Dorothy’s ashes remained unclaimed, in various places including the filing cabinet of her attorney Paul O’Dwyer, for about seventeen years.  The N.A.A.C.P. eventually claimed them and designed a memorial garden for them outside its Baltimore headquarters.  The plaque there reads:

“Here lie the ashes of Dorothy Parker (1893 - 1967), humorist, writer, critic.  Defender of human and civil rights.  For her epitaph she suggested, ‘Excuse My Dust’.  This memorial garden is dedicated to her noble spirit which celebrated the oneness of humankind and to the bonds of everlasting friendship between black and Jewish people. Dedicated by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.  October 28, 1988.”  Dorothy’s image appeared on a 29¢ commemorative postage stamp in the Literary Arts series, issued on August 22, 1992, Dorothy’s 99th birthday.

One might say Dorothy summed up her fundamental Weltanschauung in the eight lines of the little poem she laconically entitled “Résumé“:

Razors pain you;

Rivers are damp;

Acids stain you;

And drugs cause cramp.

Guns aren’t lawful;

Nooses give;

Gas smells awful;

You might as well live.

I could, and easily, write a lot more about my indelible personal experiences involving Dorothy, but I hope this unfairly brief mini-memoir will at least suffice to present another aspect of her intricate personality, at such variance with the predominant reputation that’s survived her.