Pretty Garrotte

Dorothy Parker​ dreaded repetition and found it everywhere. In 1919, when she was just 25 and only months into her stint as Vanity Fair’s theatre critic, she already claimed enough ‘bitter experience’ to know that ‘one successful play of a certain type’ would result in a ‘vast horde’ of copycats, ‘all built on exactly the same lines’. In quantity at least, this was Broadway’s golden age, just before radio and the movies ate up its audiences. At least five new shows opened each week and Parker sat through all the popular formulae: ‘crook plays’; Southern melodramas; bedroom farces; musical comedies; plays in which ‘everybody talks in similes’; and Westerns in which gold was ‘sure to be discovered at five minutes to eleven’.

Topical themes promised ‘novelty’ but that dwindled in the inevitable ‘follow-ups’. Parker noted a bevy of plays dealing with Prohibition, the ‘Irish question’ (‘what a rough day it will be for the drama when Ireland is freed’) and, worst of all, a ‘mighty army of war plays’ (‘I have been through so many … that I feel like a veteran’). Eventually the battlefield smoke cleared from the theatres, but the next slew of melodramas, about returning soldiers, was even more tedious. ‘Heaven knows the war was hard enough,’ she grumbled. ‘Now the playwrights are doing their best to ruin the peace for us.’

Once she had identified a formula, Parker didn’t devote much space to individual plays. Those she didn’t like could be summed up quickly – ‘The House Beautiful is the play lousy’ – while those she admired, such as Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, made her coy: ‘One is ashamed to place neat little bouquets of praise on this mighty conception.’ On the whole, she preferred ‘little, bitter twists of line and incident’ to ‘any amount of connected story’ and always had time for dog actors, swashbucklers and songs that rhymed ‘license’ with ‘five cents’. It was also easy to praise performances, whether on stage (Eddie Cantor, Jacob Ben-Ami and the ‘flawless’ Barrymore brothers were favourites) or in the stalls. Germs of short stories can be found in her descriptions of the couple who argue over Bernard Shaw’s symbols, the woman who ‘speculates, never in silence’ about what’s going to happen next, and the soldier who ‘condescendingly translated’ bits of French to his girl. ‘You heard that guy saying toujours? That means today.’

Parker was fired from Condé Nast in 1920, after some of Broadway’s biggest producers (all regular advertisers) complained about her constant savaging of their plays, and of Florenz Ziegfeld’s wife. She continued as a drama critic at Ainslee’s for another three years and then, in 1927, spent twelve months as ‘Constant Reader’, writing about books for the New Yorker and accruing what the magazine’s founding editor, Harold Ross, described as a ‘mountain of indebtedness’. ‘Her Constant Reader,’ he insisted, ‘did more than anything to put the magazine on its feet, or its ear, or wherever it is today.’

Parker approached books in the same way as she had plays. That is, she tended to dodge analysis of works she admired: ‘What more are you going to say of a great thing [in this case, Ring Lardner’s collected stories] than that it is great?’ Instead, she preferred what Sloane Crosley calls the ‘low-hanging fruit’ of Elinor Glyn, Emily Post and Winnie the Pooh, at whose insistent whimsy ‘Tonstant Weader Fwowed Up’. The main draw was always Parker herself. Never mind the book, what readers wanted to know was that she’d hurled it across the room or assessed it as ‘second only to rubber duck’ as a ‘bathtub companion’. ‘And if it slips down the drainpipe, all right, it slips down the drainpipe.’ And how could she be expected to finish Mussolini’s The Cardinal’s Mistress (‘the Lord knows I tried’) or Forty Thousand Sublime and Beautiful Thoughts (‘conscientious though I be, I am but flesh and blood’)? When Dwight Macdonald identified ‘amiability’ as the distinctive quality of New Yorker criticism, he wasn’t thinking of Parker.

It’s not all virtuoso demolition work. While she always insisted that she wasn’t a ‘real’ critic, Parker is more astute than most on matters of style, the literary quality for which repetition is both most necessary and most risky. Doing certain things over and over is what makes a style distinctive, but it also leaves a writer vulnerable to parody, or self-parody. Parker homes in on the mannerisms that characterise ‘mezzo-Hemingways’ and Woolf’s ‘weaker sisters’, while May Sinclair is chastised for turning out books ‘with one hand tied behind her and a buttered crumpet in the other’. The one genre in which Parker didn’t complain about duplication, on either the stage or the page, was crime. She confessed herself ‘a confirmed user of Whodunnits’.

If reviews were more fun in the 1920s, that’s partly because mass culture was new and critics still believed they could cut through its excesses with sheer force of personality. There was lots of talk about the threat to literature of ‘standardisation’, ‘the machine age’ and ‘main street’, and critics had to work hard to avoid comparisons with advertising agents. But if, as Edmund Wilson complained, too many reviews suggested that ‘masterpieces are being manufactured as regularly as new models of motor cars,’ debunking could also become an assembly-line job. Given that Parker filed copy so regularly, it’s no wonder that she recycled her jokes and put-downs. (Or that she recycled them again in the late 1950s when, unable to make money elsewhere, she spent six years reviewing books for Esquire.)

Parker not only benefited from the early 20th-century Manhattan magazine boom, she reinvented herself in its image. Born in 1893, she was originally Dottie Rothschild, but not, she always pointed out, one of those Rothschilds. Her father, a partner in a successful clothing business, liked to go by his middle name, Henry, rather than the more Jewish Jacob. Her mother, Eliza, died when she was just four, followed, when she was nine, by an unloved stepmother (Henry’s ‘second Christian schoolteacher’, Parker’s biographer Marion Meade wryly notes). Dottie was a sickly child and, perhaps because of this, her formal education ended abruptly when she was just fourteen. When her father died six years later, there wasn’t much left of the family fortune. Parker’s self-presentation as a penniless orphan, in the style of her favourite literary heroine, Becky Sharp, was something of an exaggeration. But she certainly needed a job and all she could draw on was her childhood aptitude for writing humorous verses. The first that earned her a cheque – for $12 – was ‘Any Porch’, published by Vanity Fair in 1915, the same year that ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ appeared in Poetry. Eliot may have identified the category of society women who come and go talking of Michelangelo, but it was Parker who, in nine meticulously metered and rhymed stanzas, provided the whole conversation.

‘My husband says, often, “Elise,
You feel things too deeply you do –”’
‘Yes, forty a month, if you please,
Oh, servants impose on me, too.’

The poem landed her a job at Vogue but she found it hard not to push against the magazine’s over-developed sense of decorum. After one too many risqué captions and jokes at the expense of well-known interior decorators, she was moved to Vanity Fair, whose editorial office had more of a party atmosphere. The magazine claimed to celebrate ‘the assertion of the individual’, but the individual it had in mind was a type: something close to, but certainly not to be confused with, more common ‘species’ such as the goofy flapper, the golfing girl or the ‘trick vamp’.

Parker spent much of her time at Vanity Fair delineating these and other species in reviews, features and a popular series of ‘hate’ poems. Some of her targets have dated, but many are still recognisable: ‘domestic women’ whose ‘every moment is packed with Happiness’; ‘Serious Thinkers’ who talk about humanity ‘as if they had just invented it’; poets who demand to be told ‘honestly – is it too daring?’; and magazine editors who ‘never fail to find exceptional talents/In any feminine artist under 25’. Her first book publication followed in 1920, in the form of ‘prose precepts’ to accompany the drawings in High Society, a parodic etiquette guide by the cartoonist Fish. The book advises girls which kinds of men to avoid. Futurist artists, for example, ‘always have a past’.

For Parker, debunking social types meant debunking the forms that went with them, particularly where romance was concerned. As a reviewer, she joked about the possibility, ‘sometime, in the glorious future’, of a play in which ‘a penniless girl sets out to capture a millionaire – and doesn’t get him.’ As a poet, she adopted traditional verse forms (sonnet, ballad, triolet, roundel) to delineate love’s very modern discontents. Parker wasn’t the first to do this, as she readily admitted. All she had done was walk ‘in the exquisite footsteps’ of Edna St Vincent Millay, ‘unhappily in my own horrible sneakers’. But it’s sneakers you need if you want to get somewhere fast. Only Parker can reduce a ‘Two-Volume Novel’ to four lines:

The sun’s gone dim, and
The moon’s turned black;
For I loved him, and
He didn’t love back.

Parker’s problem, her friends all said, was that she fell in love with one ‘twerp’ after another, the common denominator being blond matinée idol looks. The prototype was Edwin Pond Parker II, a Connecticut stockbroker whom she married just before he enlisted in 1917 and whose pleasingly Wasp name she retained. They separated in 1922. Before long, she became pregnant (by another twerp), had an abortion and made the first of several suicide attempts. She also began to have regular lunches with other critics and theatre people at the Algonquin Hotel, where she became famous for well-timed barbs and ‘improvisions on the four-letter words’. Freelancing at the New Yorker, she did her best to shock Ross, who, according to James Thurber, had ‘an editorial phobia’ about ‘bathroom and bedroom’ stuff. ‘We damn near printed a newsbreak about a girl falling off the roof,’ Ross once confided to Thurber. ‘That’s feminine hygiene, somebody told me just in time.’ (On another occasion, however, Parker gleefully smuggled in the phrase ‘like shot through a goose’.)

This kind of thing was particularly enjoyable when issued in the soft ‘finishing-school’ drawl of a woman not five foot tall and, Hemingway complained, apt to weep ‘at the mention of an injustice to some small defenceless animal’. If the editor of Vogue already had her pegged in 1915 as ‘treacle-sweet of tongue but vinegar witted’, it was Alexander Woollcott who created the brand, describing ‘Our Mrs Parker’ in a 1933 Cosmopolitan profile as ‘a blend of Little Nell and Lady Macbeth’. Other friends and frenemies riffed on the theme. Corey Ford opted for animal imagery: Parker was ‘a demure little lady with the tongue of an adder’, a kitten whose ‘sheathed claws were lightning-fast’. Ben Hecht preferred military metaphors, writing in one memoir of ‘the pretty garrotte of phrases in Parker’s reticule’, and, in another, upgrading her armoury to ‘a machine-gun nest capable of mowing down a town’. In less hyperbolic terms, Parker’s friend Lillian Hellman tried to explain ‘the game of embrace-denounce’ as a self-destructive response to her own neediness.

But​ Parker’s 1920s weren’t all cocktails and corrosion. She wrote regularly for several magazines, contributed a chapter to a group novel called Bobbed Hair and a song about flappers to the musical No Sirree! She collaborated with F.P. Adams on a book about the men and women they wouldn’t marry (‘no species rare’), and with Elmer Rice on a play, Close Harmony, which had a short run in 1924. She also published two collections of verse. Unusually for poetry, Enough Rope (1926) and Sunset Gun (1928), which have been reprinted in a new Everyman edition, were bestsellers. They were also reviewed in serious-minded places such as Poetry, which praised Parker’s ‘frank American humour’, and the New Republic, where Edmund Wilson compared her to Alexander Pope in her ‘flatly brutal’ ability to grasp ‘contemporary reality’ and to offer a ‘criticism of life’.

Life in these books, however, is largely romantic. And the reality is not that it goes wrong but that it goes wrong again and again and again. Parker relies on traditional cyclical imagery, of the seasons and the ‘renovated skies’ of dawns and dusks, to evoke ‘Recurrence’ (as one ballad styles it). ‘Into love and out again/Thus I went and thus I go,’ a poem entitled ‘Theory’ begins. The speaker of another, ‘De Profundis’, asks whether she’ll ever meet a man ‘Who’ll not relate, in accents suave,/The tales of girls he used to have?’ Knowing ‘all the songs were ever sung,/All the words were ever said’ is one thing; living those songs on repeat is another. But what is particularly painful is the sense of gradual diminishment, the recognition that ‘every love’s the love before/In a duller dress’:

Oh, gallant was the first love, and glittering, and fine;
The second love was water, in a clear white cup;
The third love was his, and the fourth was mine;
And after that, I always get them all mixed up.

What Parker’s poems declare, her stories dramatise. Consider ‘Big Blonde’. The protagonist, unusually for Parker, has a name, Hazel Morse. But she’s also a specimen of the genus ‘good sport’, ‘the type that incites some men … to click their tongues and wag their heads roguishly’. Parker describes speakeasies filled with women who look ‘remarkably alike’ (‘abundantly breasted’) and ‘always the newcomers resembled those whom they replaced.’ It’s easy to mix up the men too. Now middle-aged, Hazel struggles to reconstruct the ‘blurred and flickering sequence’ of Herbie, Ed, Charley, Sydney, ‘then there was Billy. No – after Sydney came Ferd, then Billy.’ But what did it matter? ‘There were no surprises.’

For Hazel, and often it seemed for Parker, the dreariness of life is matched only by the tedium of trying to end it. ‘You might as well live,’ ‘Résumé’, one of her most famous poems, concludes. But how, or rather in what mood? There is always more than one way, hence Parker’s fondness for a double voice: in poems which deflate their own lyricism with cynical parenthetical asides or deflationary last lines, and in stories which stage debates between characters or, more often, within a single character’s consciousness. The monologue ‘Sentiment’, for example, begins with a woman in a taxi contemplating a former lover and wondering ‘why people are so contemptuous of feeling’. We’re on her side until the taxi seems to be approaching ‘our house’, ‘the place of our love and our laughter’. She is sure her heart will ‘burst’, that she will ‘die’. Then she looks up and realises that they’re on 65th Street, not, as she’d thought, on 63rd. The car drives on and what her ex called her ‘fool sentimentalising’ dissipates. For now. A tonal back and forth is also central to ‘The Waltz’, narrated by a woman ‘locked’ in a ‘noxious embrace’ on the dancefloor. Her partner kicks her shin and she daydreams about murder, while reassuring him that ‘it didn’t hurt the least little bit. And anyway, it was my fault.’ And although she feels the minutes drag on interminably, as soon as the music stops she turns to her partner to ask if he might slip the band $2o to repeat the waltz.

An embrace and a taxi are typical of the confined spaces in which Parker sets many of her stories, as is the sense of moving but going nowhere. But if her characters often seem trapped, Parker was determined that she wouldn’t imprison herself in the familiar formulas of the magazine story. In her review of The Best Short Stories of 1927, she lampoons the ‘same old’ plots, characters and even phrases that magazine readers encounter ‘over and over, month after month’. But the debunking work of parody was merely the first line of attack in the effort to modernise the short story. While Parker felt a great affinity with Ring Lardner, because he viewed his characters with ‘strange, bitter pity’, it was Hemingway whom she described as the ‘greatest living writer of short stories’. All three tended to reduce narrative to a key scene, and character to a voice defined by repetition and evasion. Several of Parker’s stories make particularly effective use of the new medium of the telephone to dramatise romantic disconnection: he takes calls from other women; he pretends the line’s faulty; he hangs up; he doesn’t ring though he said he would and she prays to God to ‘keep me away from that telephone … Let me still have just a little bit of pride.’ In other stories, speakers are characterised by their reliance on a particular turn of phrase. ‘Here we are,’ a nervous bridegroom intones; ‘you were perfectly fine,’ a woman reassures a ‘pale young man’ who can’t remember the drunken night before, and especially not his proposal of marriage. ‘I live on your visits,’ a mother kvetches to her son. ‘Ah, mom,’ is his only, repeated, response.

When ‘Big Blonde’ won the O. Henry award for the best short story of 1929, Scott Fitzgerald wrote to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, urging him to sign up Parker for a novel because ‘just now she’s at a high point as a producer.’ But, despite some torturous attempts, Parker soon gave up on that idea. In any case, her particular skills – rapid-fire dialogue and just-held-back sentiment – were better suited to the newest game in town: talking pictures. Parker had spent most of the 1920s pronouncing her aversion to the movies (‘any motion-picture theatre is as an enlarged and magnificently decorated lethal chamber to me’), but like Fitzgerald, and so many of her New York friends, she was lured west by the prospect of ‘streets paved with Goldwyn’. Newly married again, to the writer and actor Alan Campbell, she moved to Hollywood in 1934 and worked there, on and off, for almost thirty years. While she endlessly complained about the way writers were treated on the ‘Isle of Do-What’s-Done-Before’, she took her work seriously. ‘No matter what the result, and no matter how caustically comic you are about it afterwards,’ she told one journalist, ‘what you did was your best. And to do your best is always hard going.’

Campbell and Parker were an effective team. She pitched ideas; he attended to contractual details. He kept the story on track; she made the conversations snap and crackle. They were often hired to fix up other people’s scripts or, as in the case of It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), to do a ‘dialogue polish’. Since these were rarely credited, it’s hard to identify all their contributions.

In Dorothy Parker in Hollywood, Gail Crowther makes some brave guesses at ‘Parkeresque-sounding’ lines. Her real subject, however, is Parker’s complicated relationship with Campbell, and the films that interest her most are those in which she might be ‘writing about her own life’. The Parker and Campbell story is a pure melodrama of heavy drinking, loud fighting and fabulous houses. They divorced in 1947, remarried in 1950, separated in 1952, but were living and working together again when he killed himself in 1963. It’s tempting to find ‘parallels’ for their lives in the two tricky-marriage films for which Parker received Oscar nominations: A Star Is Born (1937), whose screenplay she wrote with Campbell, and Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman (1947), the original treatment for which she wrote with Frank Cavett. But Parker and Campbell also worked on a more upbeat version of marital collaboration. Sweethearts (1938) is a Nelson Eddy-Jeanette MacDonald comedy about Broadway performers forced to sing the same numbers night after night after night. The title refers both to an operetta, which, like the couple, has been going for six years, and to its seeming replacement: MGM’s first Technicolor movie. On the one hand, royal Ruritanian duets; on the other, a modern, working marriage. As ever, Parker seemed to want it both ways.

But a third way was also developing. It was in Hollywood that Parker began to devote large amounts of time and energy to what Crowther calls her ‘bold and brave’ activism. She first became interested in politics in 1927, when she marched against the imminent executions of Sacco and Vanzetti. But it was as a dirndl-wearing member of the Hollywood Popular Front that Parker became serious about organising. Her main work was for the Screen Writers Guild and the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, of which she was a founding member. She also helped to finance Joris Ivens’s film The Spanish Earth and visited Spain herself in 1937. Her most enduring concern, however, was with civil rights. As a reviewer in the 1920s, Parker had drawn attention to the lack of opportunities for Black actors and praised Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem as a welcome antidote to the fashionable white fetishism that her story ‘Arrangement in Black and White’ satirised. Later, she raised funds for the defence of the Scottsboro boys, and when she died, in 1967, her estate went to Martin Luther King and, after his death, to the NAACP.

Crowther admires the fact that, in the midst of all this, Parker repeatedly ‘dissected her own privilege’. ‘Soldiers of the Republic’, for example, begins with the narrator welling up at the sight of a Spanish baby with a blue ribbon in its hair, only to cut herself short: ‘Oh, for God’s sake, stop that!’ And that’s only the first of the mea culpas. She has hardly finished handing out cigarettes to soldiers before she starts to chastise herself as ‘Little Lady Bountiful. The prize sow.’ Self-deprecation had always been part of the slick magazine’s understanding of sophistication. In her early poems, for example, Parker describes herself as the author of ‘little trills and chirpings’, ‘little things that no one needs’, compared to the ‘Big Boys’ of modernism. But this is light-hearted and playful – nothing like the self-disgust one finds in the late 1930s pieces.

Parker wasn’t, of course, the only writer at the time who felt the need to distance herself from an earlier frivolity. Having made careers talking ‘largely about small matters and smally about great affairs’, Thurber explained, his contemporaries all found it difficult to recalibrate. But no one else turned on themselves quite so wholeheartedly. Writing in New Masses, Parker denounced the ‘little, selfish, timid things’ she had once written, and dismissed a sense of humour as an ‘out-of-date garment’.

But little and funny was what Parker was best at. Her attempts at ‘I-have-seen’ reportage or symbolic social realism – such as ‘Clothe the Naked’, about the humiliation of a Black laundress and her grandson – fall flat. Speechifying, rather than speech, is a feature of her contribution to Hitchcock’s anti-fascist film Saboteur (1942). In one of its most celebrated scenes, written by Parker, the man-on-the-run finds sanctuary with a group of circus freaks, one of whom points out the ‘parallel to the present world predicament’. But that’s already more than apparent, right down to the Hitler moustache on a malignant midget called the ‘Major’. Hitchcock somehow thought this all ‘too subtle’, so viewers are then subjected to a series of speeches reassuring them that democracy will survive because ‘people that get a kick out of helping each other fight the bad guys.’ But a much better, since not remotely allegorical, version of the same point had already been made about thirty minutes earlier in another Parker-polished scene. Here the fugitive hitches a ride with a truck driver who riffs about the monotony of his job and his wife’s love of hats and movies: ‘Buys a hat so she can put it on and goes to the picture show so she can take it off.’ This is an America worth saving.

During the 1950s, as various institutions (Yaddo, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Paris Review) lined up to honour her work, Parker graciously dismissed the lot. There had been plenty of other wags – at the Algonquin, in the offices of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, and on the MGM lot – doing ‘calisthenics with words’. Her five plays ‘just weren’t good enough’; she hadn’t written poetry at all, just ‘verses’, and they were now ‘terribly dated’; comparing her stories to Lardner’s was ‘much too high praise’. Yes, A Star is Born had been nominated for an Oscar, but she could hardly remember the movie. When one interviewer, Studs Terkel, tried to bypass all this, describing her as ‘a writer of profound compassion and tenderness and understanding’, Parker asked if he was ‘talking about somebody else’. ‘I think, Mrs Parker, you are low rating yourself,’ he retorted. ‘I’m afraid you’re wrong,’ were her last words on the subject.

A hundred years after Parker’s pomp, the zingers that she muttered to friends over a Scotch, or tossed off to meet a magazine deadline, continue to circulate; one can even subscribe to a daily feed. She also remains the touchstone for any attempt to characterise sardonic humour, whether it comes from Fran Lebowitz, Andrew Sean Greer or David Sedaris. Nora Ephron worked hard to overcome her ‘Dorothy Parker problem’, but others embrace it. Amy Sherman-Palladino, the creator of Gilmore Girls and The Marvellous Mrs Maisel, called her production company Dorothy Parker Drank Here. Parker would be mystified by the continuing attention. But with no end in sight of faithless men and sentimental fools, of ‘do-what’s-been-done-before’ movies and whimsical essays about ‘what the author feels when riding in the subway’, it’s too soon to give her up.