Dorothy Parker -- book

Morialekafa is "getting out of Dodge" for two or three days and will not be blogging until he returns.

I love Dorothy Parker. Of course if I had known her when she was still alive I almost certainly would not have. I just finished a book called Dorothy Parker, in Her Own Words (Taylor Trade Publishing, 2004), edited by Barry Day (who seems to have developed this technique on P.G. Wodehouse and Sherlock Holmes). Day has selected passages from Parker’s very substantial writings, her poems, lyrics, movie scripts, short stories, articles, reviews, and correspondence, and used them to illustrate her opinions on sex, marriage, Hollywood, actresses, dogs, writers, and suicide, among other things. As she lived to be 74 and was just as cynical and acerbic at the end as at the beginning, it is quite a tour.

She was, of course, best known for her wit and her acid tongue, and she did not suffer fools gladly. As a reviewer of books and plays she was more often than not rather devastating. Reviewing a performance of Katherine Hepburn in a play she once said, “Her emotions run the gamut from A to B.” Hepburn later allowed that she had been right. She compared a performance by Billie Burke (who was married to Ziegfield) to an imitation of Eva Tanguay (who was a burlesque performer and not considered a serious actress), a review that got her fired when Ziegfield was not amused. On seeing Tolstoy’s play, Redemption, she wrote: “It isn’t what you would call sunny. I went into the Plymouth Theatre a comparatively young woman, and I staggered out of it three hours later, twenty years older, haggard and broken with suffering…”

When it came to book reviews she could be equally devastating. For a time she reviewed books for the New Yorker as “The Constant Reader.” Confronted with A.A.Milne’s, the House at Pooh Corner, when Piglet asked Pooh “why he has added the phrase ‘Tiddely-pom’ to a song, Pooh answers “To make it more hummy.” She wrote, “And it is that word ‘hummy,’ my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corners at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up.” On another occasion, reviewing a novel, she wrote: “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”

She was one of the founding members of the famous Algonquin Round Table, along with Robert Benchley and Robert Sherwood. They met there for lunch almost every day and the group soon included Alexander Woolcott, Franklin P. Adams, Edna Ferber, Tallulah Bankhead, Harpo Marx, Harold Ross, George S. Kaufman, Heywood Broun, Ring Lardner, and others. There is no doubt it was a witty group and the conversation was remarkable, but it was also kind of incestuous in that the members tended to publish and promote each other and were not quite as successful as they appeared to be. They played, among other things, a game in which you were given a word and tried to turn it into a pun. Parker was superb with things like: Horticulture: “You can lead a horticulture but you can’t make her think.” She also did Penis: “The penis mightier than the sword.” The Round Table came to an end with the 1929 crash.

Parker quickly became known for her wit and it was expected of her. She seldom let anyone down at the parties and events she attended, and she left so many skewered she was not always appreciated. There are endless examples of this in this book, which covers her years in Hollywood as well as her marriages and love affairs. For me, I think her greatest put-down came when she worked for the New Yorker. Harold Ross, the editor, wanted his writers to come to the office to work, but most of them did not. Once when Parker arrived to deliver a story he demanded to know why she had not been there to work. She replied simply: “Someone was using the pencil.” Her accounts of exchanges with Samuel Goldwyn and other Hollywood biggies are absolute treasures of understatement, as are many of her comments on Hollywood in general. The following anecdote I think gives some idea of what she encountered:

When she contracted to work with Cecil B. DeMille on a film called Dynamite, she was asked to write a theme song for it. She did, but it was rejected. She decided it would be sensible to try to find out what the film was supposed to be about.

“Getting to see DeMille was ‘like riding a camel through the eye of a needle,’ but finally she managed it. DeMille took her through a convoluted plot, which involved the wrongly accused hero sitting in his prison cell with only his guitar for company, which is where Dorothy’s contribution was to come in. At a comparative loss for words, she could only mutter how the details were ‘just staggering.’ ‘Ah, yes,’ DeMille replied, ‘zebras in the King of Kings,’ as if that explained everything. It was only later when she had the temerity to ask him where the zebras came in. He explained that they were pulling the chariots of Mary Magdalene. Unfortunately, when they kicked, their legs were inclined to break. “Of course,’ said the sympathetic Mrs. Parker, ‘I should have known that.’”

Her heyday, and the heyday of the Algonquin Round Table was in the 1920’s when it was fashionable to be cynical and wild. Dorothy Parker, an early feminist, did her best to live up to the times. She promoted human rights with respect to both blacks and gays when it was not at all fashionable to do so. Although she was never a communist, she was blacklisted for being a sympathizer. She drank at times much more than was good for her and on quite a few occasions attempted suicide (although how serious she was is open to question). She accepted the good and the bad with a kind of cynical resignation and left her mark on the permanent literature. I believe she was a much better writer than she believed and that she is given credit for.

Dorothy Parker: two marriages, one abortion, one miscarriage, no children, many lovers, alcohol and drugs, nominated twice for screenwriting. She loved dogs. A nasty neurotic bitch, an innocent brown-eyed doe, caught in the headlights of an era and a society that gave no quarter. She was all of that and more. If you are interested in this period of time, and/or in Dorothy Parker, or even in finely honed wit, you should enjoy this book.