Ah, Dorothy Parker. Who had more wit, was more acerbic, produced more delightful light verse than Mrs Parker? The Algonquin, the Round Table, the Vicious Circle, the New Yorker, the men, the alcohol, the suicide attempts. She was a most unhappy woman and brought a lot of her trouble on herself. But she managed to convert her troubles into at least one deathless short story, Big Blonde, and innumerable poems that told her story with a wry smile.
Marion Meade, in her 1987 biography, Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?, tells it all: the sparkling wit of her youth, the famous friends, the charm, the success. She also tells us about her gradual decline, the intentional alienation from most of her friends, her poor health, the deaths of so many of the people she loved most, her depression and alcoholism, the inability to save her money and the impecunious result.
Robert Benchley, her best friend all their lives, described her early style as "The Raised Eyebrow School
of Journalism. "You could write about practically any subject you wished, no matter how outrageous, so long as you said it in evening clothes." She was a tiny woman, very slender, sometimes even emaciated. She dressed very stylishly and seldom was seen without her hair and her makeup done perfectly. Her editor at Vanity Fair, Frank Crowninshield, described her thus:
[She wore] horn-rimmed eyeglasses, which she removed quickly if anyone spoke to her suddenly. She had too -- perhaps the result of nervousness -- a habit of blinking and fluttering her eyelids. The had a fondness for Chypre, as a perfume, and for flat-heeled shoes with black bows. She walked, whatever her shoes might be, with short, quick steps. Her suits, in the winter, at any rate, were tailor-made. Her hats were large and turned up at the brim. Green, as a colour seemed to appeal to her greatly, whether in a dress, hat, or scarf.
I learned some things about her that I had not known. She was a devoted leftist, flirting with the Communist Party, and never compromising although she worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood during the days when such a background was grounds for dismissal and blackballing. She alienated friends with the virulence of her political activities.
She and Lillian Hellman were life-long friends with a love/hate relationship. She made Hellman her literary executor, but Hellman refused to allow publication of nearly all her unpublished work. After Hellman's death it was discovered she had destroyed all of Dorothy Parker's papers.
She was married three times and had numerous lovers. She preferred men younger than herself. Her first husband was Eddie Parker, whose name she took (her maiden name was Rothchild, no relation), but during his service in World War I he fell into drug use that destroyed his life when he returned to the civilian world. After her divorce from Parker she married Alan Campbell, divorced him, and remarried him. She wanted a child, but after a few miscarriages she had to have a hysterectomy, something that she regretted the rest of her life.
She lived mostly in hotels with room service and as far as is known never cooked anything in her life. She and Campbell owned a house in the country in New York and spent a lot of time there. I have never thought of her a country girl. She had many dogs over the years to whom she was dedicated, but she refused (or was unable) to house train them and wouldn't pick up after them and so lived in relative squalor for most of her days.
The title of the book comes from something Mrs Parker used to say in the last years of her life when the doorbell or the phone rang, "What fresh hell is this?" It seems clear that she was clinically depressed all her life or perhaps bipolar. I recommend the book highly, but be prepared for a minimum of jolly wit and a lot of misery and sadness.