Dorothy Parker in Hollywood

by Kitty Kelley

Dorothy Parker is probably best known for her bon mots: “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses” and “Brevity is the soul of lingerie.” During a party game called Give Me a Sentence, she drew the word “horticulture” and seconds later quipped, “You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.”

Such sparkling wit from the only woman to sit at the Algonquin Round Table suggests a gleeful romp through Gail Crowther’s new book, Dorothy Parker in Hollywood. But buyer beware. Before the first chapter, the author issues a stark warning about her subject: “irreverent, witty, mocking, uncontrollable, derisive, drunk, world-weary, deadpan, and wry.” Parker attempted suicide four times and wrote wistfully about ending her life in a book of poems she entitled Enough Rope. After one overdose, she wrote the poem “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.

Dorothy Parker in Hollywood is not Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. In fact, one wonders why a British writer like Crowther with limited familiarity with Hollywood decided to tackle a subject so previously well documented by Marion Meade (1934-2022), who wrote Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (1988), followed, in 2004, by Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties. Two years later, Meade edited Parker’s collected works, The Portable Dorothy Parker, still in print after 60 years. (“Even Marilyn Monroe had a copy on her shelves,” Crowther reports.) And, in 2014, Meade published her final book, The Last Days of Dorothy Parker: The Extraordinary Lives of Dorothy Parker and Lillian Hellman and How Death Can Be Hell on Friendship.

Crowther’s earlier book Three-Martini Afternoons at the Ritz: The Rebellion of Sylvia Plath & Anne Sexton suggests she knows the territory of self-destructive female poets, so perhaps she felt equipped to address the sad screenwriting years of Parker, who claimed to “hate Hollywood like holy water.” Parker died in 1967 in a Manhattan hotel with only her brown poodle, Troy, at her side. Crowther seems to identify somewhat, as she dedicates this book to her own dog, which died in 2022: “In memory of my best boy, my life and writing companion. My George.”

Curiously, Crowther begins Dorothy Parker in Hollywood by citing “the unpleasant side of Parker, her meanness…cruelty…malice…brutality.” Yes, she celebrates her subject for being clever, but add an “a” to clever, and you get cleaver, which illustrates the effect of Parker’s humor. She once critiqued an actress as someone “who looked like a two-dollar whore who once commanded five.” When told that Clare Booth Luce made a habit of being kind to her inferiors, Parker asked, “Where does she find them?” And in her “Constant Reader” column for the New Yorker, she said of A.A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner, “Tonstant Weader fwowed up.”

Understandably, most of Parker’s contemporaries wanted to be the last to leave the room. Meeting her sounds like encountering a boa constrictor: You can freeze in place or you can bolt. Either way, you’re still a goner. She seemed to fit Murray Kempton’s definition of a critic as “someone who enters the battlefield after the war is over and shoots the wounded.”

With “a string of spectacularly unsuitable younger lovers,” writes Crowther, Parker’s private life was a bit of a mess. Her first husband, who divorced her, was an alcoholic, and her second husband, whom she married, divorced, and years later remarried, was bisexual, although she dismissed him in public as “queer as a billy goat.”

Hollywood was extraordinarily lucrative for Parker, but she claimed her screenwriting years were not happy, despite her 1934 salary of $1,000 a week (the equivalent of $20,000 a week in 2024). “It took over half the screenwriters in Hollywood one year to earn what Dorothy Parker was being paid for one week,” writes Crowther.

Parker loved the money but hated the place, which she described as “dull a domain as dots the globe.” Yet she cherished her left-wing political circle of friends, including Ernest Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett, Lillian Hellman, Donald Ogden Stewart, Orson Welles, and Fredric March. She was arrested and fined for picketing the death sentences of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, and was put on the FBI watchlist during the McCarthy era, when she was blacklisted as a communist in 1950. She never worked on another film but lived comfortably on royalties from four volumes of short stories, eight poetry collections, and three theatrical plays.

Still, Crowther is stymied by a lack of information. “Between 1951 and 1961 it is hard to imagine what life was like for Dorothy Parker,” she writes, forced to acknowledge that “little is known about these years.” This is a biographer thrashing in the deep end without a life preserver, swept into waters over her head:

“Sadly, we do not have Parker’s response to this unfortunate accident…”

“It is difficult to know what Parker was up to…”

“With no surviving screenplay that specifically shows Parker’s contributions it is impossible to know for certain…”

“The lack of surviving Parker material is lamentable…”

Parker’s alcoholism soaks every chapter of this book, along with the trauma of her abortions, depression, and suicide attempts. Yet by fictionalizing herself in the 1929 short story “Big Blonde” as a drunken divorcée who survives suicide, she earned the O. Henry Award that catapulted her to fame. But there was no happily-ever-after to her life.

Leaving Hollywood in 1964, Parker, widowed at 70, lived her last three years at the Volney, a dignified residence in Manhattan for little old ladies and their dogs. “Still drinking, still hopeless with money and still unable to write,” according to Crowther, “she spent her days smoking, reading gossip magazines and watching soap operas.”

The New York Times, which once dismissed her poetry as “flapper verse,” ran Parker’s obituary on the front page, followed, days later, by coverage of her star-studded memorial service, which attracted 150 friends and admirers. Eulogized by Hellman, she was buried in the gold and pearl-encrusted caftan she’d received from Gloria Vanderbilt, which recalled Parker’s poem “The Satin Dress,” which celebrated just such an event:

Satin glows in candle-light —
Satin’s for the proud!
They will say who watch at night,
“What a fine shroud!”

Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books