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Dorothy Parker, who took over P G Wodehouse's job at Vanity Fair,
hated work. So she made worry a life-time occupation. In doing so she
became world renowned as a poet, a playwright and a critic --but mostly
as a wit. Even though being universally accepted as 'A Wit' may be the
ultimate human achievement, one has to ask, is it worth the effort?
The answer lies in Dorothy Parker's own life.
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Dorothy Parker was 43 when this picture was taken for her second book published in 1933.
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She turned worry into an
art form, and occasionally it drove her into an asylum. Worrying about
Death - its mystery, its certainty, its delay - was her only light
relief. It was what made Dorothy Parker the life-and-soul of the Roaring '20s; the scourge of the '30s; and helped her to be a tiny voice of conscience in the '40s. Her wit grew out of her corrosive awareness which lived with her during a life that lasted, far beyond public acclaim, until 1967. Her pre-war contemporary, playwright Eugene O'Neill, had the same grave outlook.
There is something to be said
For being dead, wrote O'Neill for his own epitaph.
Dorothy Parker suggested that her's should read: Here lies Dorothy Parker. Excuse my dust.
Later she changed the wording for her grave-stone to read:This one's on me.
RING LARDNER
"The girl who wore glasses" Dorothy Parker herself, had many lovers, among them Ring Lardner who was also in love with death. Despite his infinitely sad spirit and deep capacity for worrying, Lardner too is remembered for his quips.
After telling a joke to President Coolidge, Lardner said the President "laughed until you could hear a pin drop."
Lardner once sent a telegram to a friend: "When are you coming back? And
why?"
He liked to tell the true story of a mournful ex-coroner who wrote an ode
to his mother about death, including a line which read
And if perchance the inevitable should come. . ." (I love that one)
He loved funerals and was once asked to read aloud some poetry written by
the man being buried. After making the dubious funereal tribute, Lardner
asked: "Did your brother write this before or after he died?"
ROBERT BENCHLEY
Parker loved funerals even more than her lover did, and she took death much more seriously. Twice she tried to commit suicide. Her colleague Robert Benchley had to warn her: "Go easy on this suicide stuff, Dottie. First thing you know it will ruin your health."
On another occasion Benchley said, "Snap out of it, Dottie. You might as well live." Perhaps it was this which inspired her to write:
Razors may 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.
SCOTT FITZGERALD
While wooing death, she grabbed at life. F Scott Fitzgerald said of her to New Yorker editor Harold Ross: "Dottie is the lightning in the storm. She illuminates the tawdry for what it is, and her personal thunderbolt crashes on and on... She is desperately unhappy all the time. . . Time is the only thing she really has. And she doesn't want it."
Parker was a founder member of that wild and wildly amusing group which gathered at the Algonquin Hotel off Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, and called itself the Thanatopsis Chowder and Marching Society (or Inside Straight) Club. The members changed the name at whim, but the one word in the title which never varied was Thanatopsis (contemplation of death). . .the Algonquin set became famous and was dubbed the Round Table, and later the Vicious Circle.
(The relatively brief presence of that small group of humorous writers made the Algonquin famous across the literary world. Many first-time visitors to New York made a point of visiting the bar . . . but usually left disappointed at the absence of ambience and nostalgia. Perhaps, since I last visited the pub 25 years ago, things have changed. Perhaps there are now photos, cartoons and other memorabilia about. As pub's go, its not a bad shrine to those semi-demi paper gods who practised so superbly the intricate art of wit)
.Dorothy parker's career took off when she succeeded P G Wodehouse as a theatre reviewer for Vanity Fair, where her wit became legend. Wodehouse was not one to worry about vanity or competition, but he had one weakness: his compulsion to work. It led to him to utter one of the two unqualifiedly silly remarks made in his wise old life. The first was his notorious, bland remark about Hitler and the advantages of facism. The second was: "Those three-hour lunches at the Algonquin! When did any of those slackers ever get any work done?"
He should have known that people who worry about working too hard do all their best work during and after lunches that last longer than two hours (but not longer than six). The workers at Algonquin lunches gradually embraced people like Booth Tarkington, Douglas Fairbanks, Alexander Woolcott, Ben Hecht, Henry Miller, and attracted visitors such as the Alfred Lunts, Lynn Fontaine, Harpo Marx, Noel Coward, George S Kaufman, Edna Ferber, and no doubt PG Wodehouse.
In fact the literary watering hole at the Algonquin, a 12-storey hostlery on West Forty-Fourth Street, had existed for some time. It started as the Puritan Hotel with the intention of being a temperance establishment. It failed in this over-ambitious project - even in the Prohibition era when all hotels - and the entire nation - were supposed to be free of demon spirits. The rot set in when the hotel restaurant attracted writers such as Alfred Noyes, Mark Twain, William Makepeace Thackery and Edgar Allen Poe. Later came far-from-puritannical actors such as the Douglas Fairbanks and the Barrymores.
Robert Benchley once welcomed his colleagues to the Round Table by saying "Let's get out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini."
The Pergola room of the would-be temple to temperance soon became a fulltime drinking place. It was unconsciously emulating a thousand press clubs or theatre bars around the world - although their wit was exceedingly better.
But it wasn't original.
Oscar Wilde had been minting similar jokes at the famous Cafe Royal in London years before, at a watering hole later frequented by writers such as D H Lawrence and T S Elliott. This literary drinking circle had also been imitated in places like the Romansche Cafe in Berlin, which hosted writers ranging from Christopher Isherwood and Billy Wilder to Stefan Zweig and Albert Einstein. Then there was the Bell Epoque group at Fourget's restaurant in Paris, frequented by people like Diaghilev, Debussy, Dali and Picasso.
The watering holes of writers and actors usually form spontaneoously, and attract them naturally. These non-warriors and non-worriers around the world herd together to talk, to drink, to show off, and to avoid work. The Algonquin was a Manhattan venue for this frantic activity. What made it special was the way its patrons, seeking self-assurance, tore each other to pieces. The Pergola Room (they later moved to the Rose Room) formed the lists for daily, sometimes bloody, skirmishes of wit. Even spectators, invited to the joust, sometimes savaged each other. Noel Coward was a guest when he spotted another, Edna Ferber, and could not resist remarking,
"Why, Edna, you look almost like a man."
"So do you," retorted Miss Ferber.
It was the sort of clash which pleased the Round Table and soon converted its members into the Vicious Circle. It was a growing circle, which spread to the Cote d'Azur, where its Manhattan membership mingled with the likes of Somerset Maugham, George Bernard Shaw, Cole Porter, Charlie Chaplin, Edmund Wilson, Cornelia Otis Skinner, John O'Hara, Ernest Hemingway, the Scott Fitzgeralds. . . James Thurber remarked (inconsequentially as usual)
"Only Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas are missing - isn't that good?"
And when the Algonquin set's founding members, Parker and Benchley, moved
to Hollywood their company included James Cagney, Helen Hayes and Bing
Crosby (for whom she wrote a song!), Errol Flynn, Frederic March, Norma Shearer, David Niven, Merle Oberon and almost any other famous filmstar whom the cognoscenti and collectors will remember from the first half of the
twentieth century.
Dorothy Parker didn't care about this, or any other form of name-collecting. When a socialite looked round a party of lesser known names and told her, "I simply can't bear fools," she flashed back: "How odd. Your mother obviously could."
Her publisher, George Oppenheimer, once lived in an apartment above her and
had a reputation for "collecting" people. During one of his gatherings of notables there was a crash that shook the ceiling of Dorothy Parker's room.
"Dear, dear," Dottie told her friends. "there's George dropping another
name."
Before her marriage to Parker, Dorothy (Rothschild) had left her parents'
home at a tender age in order to seek fame as a writer. Possibly by osmosis. She found herself sharing accommodation, often a bed, with Thorne Smith, later to become one of America's popular humourous authors.
Dorothy didn't believe absolutely in Free Love. She thought it too 'staged'. However, in an era when even the bohemians were often afraid to live out of wedlock or be seen to be 'promiscuous', she gave love freely. But
it never seemed to be returned in sufficient or sustainable quantities.
She lived life largely, though in very small apartments. "All I need is a room big enough to lay my hat and a few friends," she once said. And when freelancing as a writer between jobs with Vanity Fair and the New Yorker she shared an "office" with Robert Benchley which he described as so small that, "one cubic foot of space less it would have constituted adultery."
Their telegraphic address was "Parkbench", but they were too busy avoiding work to receive much mail. Dorothy did send some messages which shocked even the "fast set" of the 1920s. She was responding to a telegram which reached her during the honeymoon of her second marriage. "Please despatch the article you promised," she was asked. She wired back: "Too fucking busy, and vice versa."That marriage ended in sadness, as did almost all her love affairs. Once, after an abortion, she told Benchley: "Serves me right for putting all my eggs in one bastard." Years later, when Dorothy saw a notice at a fairground reading: "Ducking for Apples", she opined: "But for a single literal misprint, that is the story of my life."
She cut herself often with her sharp tongue. Her private recipe for humour contained the following ingredients: "criticism, courage, irreverence; a
disciplined eye, a wild mind and a magnificent disregard of your reader." She was posing of course. The hard-living lady was shy, unhappy, constantly worried. One biographer, Leslie Frewin, sums up the walking, talking enigma thus: Introverted, moody, with a longing for laughter to shroud her omnipresent death wish. She perplexed, charmed, reviled and mystified most of those who met her. She loved most those who never loved her. Ernest Hemingway was the sort of person she could have transfixed in prose or rhyme at any time. He was a larger-than-life target of pretentiousness. He disliked her, and her honest cynicism. Yet, instead of piercing him with an epigram, she adored him from afar.
Her enemies - and they made up a large if wounded legion - described her as a flippant show-off who abused her talents. Others assessed her as a latter-day ragtime Ophelia in a black skirt, sweater and pearls, quietly given to crying into her gin.
They forget her courage in the McCarthy era of American fascist politics.
They forget her caring about injustice and racial discrimination. She is remembered as the Wit who punctured all inflated egos for three decades.
She is forgotten as the woman who gave everything left in her life to the cause of Martin Luther King. She was a brave, hugely vulnerable personality who refused protection, especially from her own mordant humour.
It is said that wit, the humour of the indifferent, was her armour. But she wasn't indifferent. She worried. She cared. She suffered inexpressible pain. She hid it by deriding everybody and everything, even her constant friend, Death.
"I like to think of my shining tombstone. It gives me, as you might say, something to live for."
But her darkness was riddled with delightful shafts of acute lightness.
Men seldom make passes
At girls who wear glasses
was the observation everyone recalls. Her other view of feminine allure is more accurate, if less memorable:
She whose body's young and cool
Has no need of a dancing school
Lightness was one gift. Sharpness a more scintillating one. You may remember some of these still-shining jewels;It was Parker who explained the word horticulture as:"You can lead a
horticulture, but you can't make her think."
It was she who, when colliding with Clare Booth Luce in the Time\Life building, and being told, "Age before beauty," invented the riposte: "Pearls before
swine," and took the gap.
At a party, when a friend said of their formidable and garrilous host,
"She's so outspoken", Dorothy asked, "By whom?"
Looking at a worn-out toothbrush in their hostess's bathroom, a fellow guest asked, "Whatever do you think she does with that?" Parker instantly hazarded; "I think she rides it on Halloween."
Countless are the witticisms of her criticisms. An example: Attending the dress rehearsal of her play Close Harmony, Dorothy Parker was discouraged by the performance. However she was distracted by the producer, who pointed to the leading lady and whispered, "Look at the size of those breasts! Don't you think she should wear a bra in this scene?'
"Heavens, no," said Dorothy, "You've got to have something in the show that moves."
Though Parker was a living pioneer for the equality of women, she had a feminine disdain of females. Of one, she said in feigned admiration; "You know, she speaks 18 languages, and she can't say 'No' in any of them."
Told that a certain London actress had broken her leg, Dorothy said, "How
terrible. She must have done it sliding down a barrister."
She reported on a Yale prom at which the number and the beauty of the debutantes failed to impress her. "If all those sweet young things were layed end to end," she wrote, "I wouldn't be surprised."
It was unwise to engage in verbal jousts with Parker, but to cross her, if you were pompous or hypercritcal, was plain stupid. William Randolph Hearst learned this to his cost. Though living with his movie-star mistress Marion Davies, the press baron informed guests to his spectacular Californian castle that one of the rules of the house was: no love-making between unmarried couples. Dorothy Parker broke the rule and was asked to leave. She wrote these lines in the tycoon's visitors book:
Upon my honour
I saw a Madonna
Standing in a niche,
Above the door Of the famous whore
Of a prominent son of a bitch.
When friends visited Dorothy Parker in hospital once, she pressed the bell marked 'Nurse', and told them: "That should assure us of at least 45minutes of undisturbed privacy."
Told of a woman who was seen to be arrogant, but in fact was "very kind to
her inferiors", Dorothy Parker inquired, "Wherever does she find them?"
Would-be wits around the world have quoted, misquoted or appropriated Dorothy Parker's quips to the point where many of the arrows have become blunt and her epigrams trite. People were appropriating her words almost as she uttered them. At least two plays and numbers of books about her have repeated her witticisms - to the point where she grumbled, "I daren't write my autobiography for fear of being sued for plagiarism"
Despite her unhappiness and despite her unnecessarily frantic chase after life, Parker was right in believing one needs a nice big worry, like Death. In her later years, her doctor warned her that her chase after life could kill her. Unless she came off the fast track; unless she stopped drinking, she would be dead within months, he solemnly warned her.
"Promises, promises" said Dottie with a sigh.Taken
*(Taken from my review of The Late Mrs Dorothy Parker" by Leslie Frewin (Sidgewick & Jackson, London 1987) |
