Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (9 page)

Having cemented a cool smile to her lips, Dorothy struggled to keep from strangling on her indignation. At last, Eddie’s eighty-one-year-old grandfather appeared to inspect her. After arriving at his son’s house on Evergreen Avenue on the arm of his second wife, Laura, he called the family into the parlor for prayers. Dorothy’s head was bowed when she heard him intone, “Oh Lord, grant to the unbeliever in our midst the light to see the error of her ways....” In the next breath he referred to her as “a stranger within our gates.” Stupefied at his mean spirit, she was harshly reminded of the chasm separating New England Congregational pulpits and the Lower East Side sweatshops. If she had felt no harmony with the Jews, it was now clear that she had even less in common with these Hartford Brahmins, “toadying, in sing-song, to a crabbed god.”

In the following weeks, she hid her rage by making fun of the Parkers and by clinging ever more tightly to Eddie. Her questions became relentless: Did he love her? Did he understand how truly she loved him? how sadly she would miss him? His responses seldom satisfied her. Since he was planning to marry her, he failed to understand what further proof of his love she wanted.

On the last day of June 1917, they were married in Yonkers, New York, a small city in suburban Westchester County. On the marriage license application, Eddie listed his occupation as stockbroker and Dorothy gave hers as “none.” In view of their antagonism toward religion, it is interesting that they observed the usual sacraments. A Reverend J. M. Ericsson performed the ceremony before three witnesses, obliging strangers whom the minister had hastily rounded up. After her humiliating treatment by the Parkers, she refused to have them at her wedding. No Rothschild was present either, nor did she and Eddie invite any of their friends. Soon afterward he joined the 33rd Ambulance Corps, 4th Division, and departed for Summit, New Jersey. One can imagine how disoriented Dorothy must have felt: She had been a bride “for about five minutes” before her husband had gone off and she found herself alone again.

Even before Eddie left, Dorothy had begun developing herself as a writer. Her earliest journalism, while written in the first person, was rooted almost entirely in what she, or her editors, hoped would sell rather than in her own experiences or memories. With her gift for making clever observations, she was able to tell a kind of truth but it was not uniquely hers. Vanity Fair had asked for several more free-verse hate songs—she attacked relatives, actresses, and men—and Edna Chase had agreed to try her as a special-features writer. One of her articles dealt with fashionable breeds of dogs, other pieces covered home decoration, hair and beauty care, knitting, and weddings, themes that have always been the staple fare of fashion magazines. Dorothy’s treatment of these subjects was unusual because she played with them and invariably wound up mocking them. When she wrote about interior decoration, recklessly titling the piece “Interior Desecration,” she made people furious. Chase never forgot that “more than one decorator swallowed hard and counted ten before expressing his feelings about it.” The flak resulted less from Dorothy’s cynical observations about furnishings than from her offensive portrait of an hysterical and unmistakably homosexual decorator. Mrs. Chase, who apparently had not thought to question the article prior to publication, was not amused.

Whenever
Vogue
needed a guinea pig, Dorothy volunteered. She tested beauty preparations, diets, and exercise regimens, and she agreed to submit her head to a permanent wave at a time when such procedures were still hazardous. Chase had to admit that getting the permanent had taken “rare courage,” but it was also clear that Dorothy was developing into a problem writer.

At
Vanity Fair
, Frank Crowninshield could not help noticing Dorothy’s work, and he also must have realized that she was training herself to write the Frank Crowninshield genre. This called for, above all, a good sense of what was clever and entertaining. The formula, subsequently summed up by Robert Benchley as the Elevated Eyebrow School of Journalism, was by no means simple to master. You could write about practically any subject you wished, no matter how outrageous, so long as you said it in evening clothes. Crownie had no objection to serious topics and would publish, for example, a report on the Russian Revolution, but it had to be showered with references to debutante dinners, Grolier bindings, and French literature, then adorned with drawings by his favorite illustrator, Fish. Finally, it would be sandwiched between a survey of the polo season and “How to Be Idle Though Rich,” but at least it would be published.

In some ways the Frank Crowninshield genre was more china-painting than writing. It took Dorothy only a few months to get the hang of Crownie’s style. Then she spent the next decade trying to unlearn it.

Unlike
Vogue, Vanity Fair
seemed more like a playpen than an editorial office. Visitors had been known to whistle, throw paper darts, and play charades. Crowninshield proudly likened his private office to “a combined club, vocal studio, crap game, dance-hall, sleeping lounge, and snack bar,” and it was apparent that the magazine flourished on chaos. Vanity Fair, barely four years old, had already become publishing’s most fabulous success story, a financial winner that carried more advertising than any other monthly with page after glossy page of Rolls-Royces, diamond necklaces, and other gewgaws for the conspicuously wealthy. Crownie, however, could not have cared less about advertisers. His dedication was to the theater—and to painting, literature, dance, poetry, music, and satire—and he was as obsessive about exploration as Henry the Navigator was, fervently cruising the capitals of Europe and the drawing rooms of Southampton to seek out the most heretical work being done. When he had unearthed a work he feared too esoteric, he would tell his staff, “Remember, there’s an old lady sitting in Dubuque, and she has to be able to understand everything we print,” but he was the first to ignore this old publishing cliché. To the American public he would introduce a long line of innovators, from Picasso and Matisee and Beaton to Colette, Huxley, and Millay. Dorothy was determined to enter this exciting, elite club.

From their first meeting, Crowninshield had been immensely taken with Dorothy and his admiration had continued to grow. He would describe her as wearing

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. She had a fondness for
Chypre
, as a perfume, and for flat-heeled shoes, sometimes for black patent leather pumps 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.

More important, seldom had he encountered anyone, man or woman, with so sharp a tongue and so keen a sense of mockery. Even though she could be difficult, this was to be expected in such an excessively opinionated person. He concluded that “her peceptions were so sure, her judgment so unerring, that she always seemed to hit the centre of the mark.”

In the fall of 1917, after she had been slaving in Edna Chase’s kingdom for two and a half years, Crowninshield arranged for Dorothy’s transfer to
Vanity Fair,
noting that Chase had “turned her over to my tender care” as if she was a sickly moppet. He forgot to add that Edna Chase was by no means unhappy to be rid of someone who showed signs of developing into a genuine enfant terrible.

The next few months, having no idea what to do with Dorothy, Crowninshield gave her routine editorial tasks and also published several more of her hate songs. At the end of the year, he had a daring idea. P. G. “Plum” Wodehouse, the magazine’s drama critic, had coauthored a hit musical comedy and wished to take an indefinite leave of absence. Crowninshield decided to name Dorothy as Wodehouse’s successor. Not only did this reflect his faith in her, but also it happened to be a brilliant promotional gimmick for
Vanity Fair
.

Dorothy could not have been more amazed. She had spun out her line in hope of reeling in a modest-sized fish and instead had hauled up a whale.

From the beginning, she set out to make herself noticed. In her first column, New York’s only woman drama critic described herself as “a tired business woman” who was “seeking innocent diversion”—which was the reason she had chosen to review a batch of five musical comedies. With the exception of Wodehouse’s
Oh, Lady
,
Lady!,
where she deemed it politic to lay praise on thick, she proceeded to slice up the rest with a poison stiletto. Since it is always more fun to revile than extol and because abuse was practically reflexive with her, she made it her modus operandi. One show, for example, got her recommendation as an excellent place to do knitting and “if you don’t knit, bring a book.” With another, she refused to print the names of author or cast, declaring that she was “not going to tell on them.” There was a show she ignored entirely, instead reviewing the performance of a woman seated next to her who had been searching for a lost glove. Certain chorus lines were damned for consisting of “kind, motherly-looking women,” the locations of her seats criticized, and certain prominent producers chastized for low taste.

Altogether her debut in the April 1918 issue was a bravura performance that assured maximum pleasure to
Vanity Fair
readers and maximum annoyance to Broadway entrepreneurs.

If the beginning of Dorothy’s reputation as a wit can be pinpointed, it would be that spring, for it was then, when she was twenty-four, that she began to attract the attention of an audience broader and more sophisticated than the readership of a fashion magazine. What makes that particular column so interesting is its rejection of the prevailing standards for female writing and thinking. She had chosen to present herself not so much as a bad girl but as a bad boy, a firecracker who was aggressively proud of being tough, quirky, feisty, a variation on the basic Becky Sharp model, and she managed to carry it off with terrific style and humor. She was putting on an act, but it was an act that seemed as if it might sell. Now she began to see what shape her future might take.

Life as a married woman was turning out to be dull as mud. Dorothy left the boardinghouse and moved to an apartment in a handsome building on West Seventy-first Street, the block directly behind the brownstone that Henry Rothschild had owned when Eliza was alive. Dorothy’s new, non-Jewish name may have completed the superficial obliteration of Dorothy Rothschild, but choosing to live a few hundred yards from the Rothschild house, the place where she had spent her most secure years, might be construed as an indication of her ambivalence toward this disloyalty. She made no effort to turn the flat into a home because once Eddie returned they would be moving anyway. Her suits hanging next to his civilian clothes in the closet, the kitchen bare of food and drink, she took her meals in restaurants and continued to live in much the same transient fashion as she had at the rooming house.

Although she would not admit it, she had an acute aversion toward homemaking. Granted, she had not been brought up to concern herself with such matters, but most women in 1918, even those raised with servants, were nonetheless able to care for themselves in an emergency. Dorothy was not. So phobic was her reaction to domesticity that she would have starved before boiling herself an egg. Throughout her life, she would eat bacon raw claiming she had no idea how to cook it. The mechanics of laundry would be equally mysterious—when she removed her underwear, she threw the soiled lingerie back into the drawer with the clean and let a maid, if there was one, figure it out.

These days, hungry for company, she took to dropping in on her sister, who recently had given birth to a second child, a daughter also named Helen, nicknamed Lel. Helen Droste’s marriage show signs of erosion. Dorothy had never been crazy about her brother-in-law, but now it seemed clear that Helen was far from contented with the party-loving George. Dorothy, playing with her niece, would talk of having a baby when the war ended, when her husband returned.

Eddie’s company remained in the States. It moved from New Jersey to Pennsylvania, then south to North Carolina before shifting to Jersey again. Dorothy wrote him nearly every day, but she never felt satisfied with her letters. Had she been able to express herself fully she would have poured out her loneliness, but she knew that Eddie, with his low tolerance for teary confidences, would not appreciate gloomy mail. To cheer him up, she related amusing incidents that had taken place at the office and sometimes enclosed copies of her verses, which had begun appearing regularly in the magazine. She yearned to receive love letters but had to content herself with his postcards, usually addressed to “Mrs. Edwin P. Parker, 2nd,” in care of
Vanity Fair
. His messages were marvels of brevity that began “Dear” and ended abruptly “Ed,” while sandwiched in between were one or two lines that might have been written to anyone.