Kitty Kelley Book Club: ‘Dorothy Parker in Hollywood’
By • January 15, 2025 0 97
Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) 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 introduces her subject as “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.” One wonders why a British writer like Crowther, with limited familiarity with Hollywood, decided to tackle a subject so well documented previously by Marion Meade’s “Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?,” “Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties” and “The Last Days of Dorothy Parker: The Extraordinary Lives of Dorothy Parker and Lillian Hellman and How Death Can Be Hell on Friendship.”
Meade also edited the 2006 revised edition of “The Portable Dorothy Parker,” still in print after 60 years. “Even Marilyn Monroe had a copy on her shelves,” Crowther reports.
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. 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; she dedicates this book to her own dog: “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 Boothe Luce made a habit of being kind to her inferiors, Parker asked, “Where does she find them?”
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.”
Parker 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). She loved the money but hated Hollywood — “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. Arrested and fined for picketing the death sentences of Sacco and Vanzetti in the 1920s, she was later put on the FBI watchlist and, in 1950, blacklisted as a communist. She never worked on another film, but lived comfortably on royalties from four volumes of short stories, eight poetry collections and three plays for the stage.
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.” Phrases such as “It is difficult to know what Parker was up to” and “The lack of surviving Parker material is lamentable” indicate a biographer thrashing in the deep end without a life preserver, swept into waters over her head.
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 Upper East Side residence 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, pearl-encrusted caftan she had received from Gloria Vanderbilt, recalling the last stanza of Parker’s poem “The Satin Dress”: “Satin glows in candle-light —/Satin’s for the proud!/They will say who watch at night,/‘What a fine shroud!’”
