WHATEVER YOU THINK DOROTHY PARKER WAS LIKE, SHE WASN'T
"I was," she said, "just a little Jewish girl trying to be cute."
By Wyatt Cooper
July 1968
Esquire
She entered a room like an apology. Tiny and startlingly delicate, she moved with steps that were short and brittle, and she appeared to be so fragile that you feared she would shatter if you touched her.
The first image that comes to my mind is this: She sits in her accustomed place in the living room of the house in California she shared with her husband Alan Campbell. In her lap is the ever-present dog, a yapping brown poodle. Beside her on the sofa are her reading glasses, and in front of her is a large ashtray filled with the remains of the cigarettes she smokes constantly. Cellophane from a discarded Chesterfield package catches fire and the flames go unnoticed while she complains of the dearth of talent to be found in the pile of books of every size and subject that crowd the top of the coffee table. One of those days of everlasting and monotonous sunshine is drawing to a close, and Alan has made Scotches for the two of them while I sip No-Cal soda, feeling somehow guilty and unforgiven for being a teetotaler.
This would be some time in 1961. Born nearly seventy years before to a fairly prosperous cloak-and-suiter (her description) named J. Henry Rothschild (“My God, no, dear! We’d never even heard of those Rothschilds!”) and his wife, a former schoolteacher of Scotch extraction (“. . . who promptly went and died on me,” she explained bitterly), Dottie had never become reconciled to her mixed parentage.
On this day she received from a publisher a request that she write an autobiography. She exhibits the crumpled letter and her eyes sweep the room in hopeless supplication of those invisible but omnipresent forces that so capriciously shape our destinies; the huge, pleading eyes seem never to stop searching for some sort of sympathetic understanding that they damned well know they aren’t going to find.
“I’d never be able to do it,” she says, “but I wish to God I could!” The ladylike voice progresses from resignation to a final note of triumph and defiance. “I’d like to write the damned thing, just so I could call it Mongrel!”
She was right. She couldn’t. And, of course, if she could, she would have to call it Mongrel because that term comes about as near as anything to expressing how Dorothy Parker saw herself: as a mongrel that wanted to be a thoroughbred. It’s not the whole story. Mongrel doesn’t even explain all that much, but it is a beginning. Dottie had little impulse toward public self-analysis, at least not of the dispassionate and objective sort. She had no trouble, God knows, finding harsh words with which to dismiss her life and work, from: “I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Edna St. Vincent Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers,” to the more brutal, “. . . just a little Jewish girl trying to be cute.” But these statements, though they had truth in them, are a way of evading a more revealing truth. Not for Dottie the psychoanalytically-oriented confessional style of breast-baring that has been a common vogue of our times, and I, for one, say for this relief much thanks. It’s too late for me to have to start thinking of her as a walking example of the Electra Complex, or to examine her writing for signs of Penis Envy or other popular psychological ills. She was what she was and she wrote what she wrote and none of the terms one might think of tell us anything that the work doesn’t. “She was part of nothing and nobody except herself; it was this independence of mind and spirit that was her true distinction,” her longtime friend, Lillian Hellman, said at her funeral. Miss Hellman also said that Dottie wanted her tombstone to tell the world, “If you can read this, you’ve come too close.”
When, in the last months of her life, and a few years after the remark quoted at the beginning of this piece, she seemed to want to get her story down (“It would give me something to live for,” she said), sitting for a few dozen hours talking into a tape recorder while I, who saw her not only as a thoroughbred but as best of breed and best in show as well, prodded her with apprehensive questions, she began by saying, “Let’s make it gay; if it’s not fun, there’s no point in telling it,” and then plunged into a narrative that was all one color and that color was black. It owed more, I think, to her early (and late) enthusiasm for Dickens than to the actual facts, if one assumes that facts must behave themselves and not vary too wildly from one recording session to the next. If the accuracy of her reporting fluctuated, the mood did not. She could (and did) stand one’s hair on end with a chronicle of the adversities of a waif with the unfortunate name of Dorothy, a chronic victim whose misadventures were enough to make a piker out of de Sade’s Justine. “I apologize for introducing nobody but dreadful characters,” Dottie would interject cheerfully as she waded on in a saga of a childhood filled with such obstacles as ignorant nuns (“Well, how do you expect them to treat a kid who saw fit to refer to the Immaculate Conception as ‘Spontaneous Combustion’? Boy, did I think I was smart! Still do”) and hostile children (“They weren’t exactly your starched-crinoline set, you know. Dowdyest little bunch you ever saw”) at the Blessed Sacrament Convent (“It was practically around the corner and you didn’t have to cross any avenues, whatever that means. Never mind you couldn’t learn anything”), while at home, a house on West Seventy-second Street (“It’s still standing, I believe. They sell trusses there now”), was a dearly loathed father (“On Sundays he’d take us on an outing. Some outing. We’d go to the cemetery to visit my mother’s grave. All of us, including the second wife. That was his idea of a treat. Whenever he’d hear a crunch of gravel that meant an audience approaching, out would come the biggest handkerchief you ever saw, and in a lachrymose voice that had remarkable carrying power, he’d start wailing, ‘We’re all here, Eliza! I’m here. Dottie’s here. Mrs. Rothschild is here—’”), two unsympathetic older brothers and a sister (“I remember my brother coming along the street once with a friend. The friend pointed at me. ‘That your sister?’ ‘No,’ my brother said. That helped. There was an enormous gap there, you see; you can’t bridge that, ever. Nine years between my sister and me. She was a real beauty, my sister: sweet, lovely, but silly”), a wretched stepmother (“She was crazy with religion. I’d come in from school, she’d greet me with ‘Did you love Jesus today?’ Now, how do you answer that? She was hurt because the older ones called her ‘Mrs. Rothschild.’ What else? That was her name. I didn’t call her anything. ‘Hey, you,’ was about the best I could do”), and malicious servants (“In those days they used to go down to Ellis Island and bring them, still bleeding, home to do the laundry. You know, that didn’t encourage them to behave well. Honest, it didn’t”). Exaggerations, of course, but creative exaggerations that throw a fascinating light on what the truth must have been.
Our sessions invariably turned into visits, and, as one of the things we had in common was a shameless lust for gossip, the resultant tapes, except for the times when I had the presence of mind (and the discretion) to shut the damned thing off, reveal much more happy (and inventive) speculation about the secret lives of some of the more beautiful of the “Beautiful People” than about Dottie’s days among the golden circle at the Algonquin Round Table, a circle, which, in any case, she maintained she’d never been a part of (“Mr. Benchley and I weren’t there for the simple reason that we couldn’t afford it. It cost money, and we weren’t just poor, we were penniless”). If it was hard for her to remember her own statistics, she had no such difficulty with those of the aforementioned beautiful folk, recalling with deadly accuracy just how much so-and-so inherited from which side of the family and who was once married to whom and for how long and (what’s more) why. She conscientiously followed the comings and goings of that group through the columns; her curiosity was insatiable and her memory infallible. She had her favorites and her prejudices, and, from the number of times she protested that she wouldn’t have gone to Truman Capote’s historic ball if he had asked her, adding with a bitter laugh, “which he didn’t!”, it was clear that she was hurt by being left out.
She was called “Mrs.” Parker because, as she put it, “there was once a Mr. Parker.” Somebody said of her that she only married her first husband in order to take his name. Mr. Benchley and Mr. Sherwood addressed her in that manner in the old days and it stuck. I’ve heard Alan introduce her as Miss Parker, and people who met her late in her life tended to call her “Miss” but I always liked the “Mrs.” There was something special and singular about it, something romantic and dignified that seemed right for her. It suggested another era to me, the nineteenth century, perhaps, or earlier, when actresses were known simply as “Mrs. Gilbert” or “Mrs. Bathwell” or “Mrs. Siddons.”
Biographies will be written about her, then more will be written after that, and people will say they’re marvelous and maybe they will be, but I’m willing to start taking bets that they won’t get anywhere near the truth of her. How can they? The truth of her was that complex, and complex truths resist examination. They play tricks on you. It’s the problem anybody has who sets out to describe any unique personality. You talk and talk and talk and the listener gets an impression and it may even be an interesting one, but it is only remotely like the original. Try to describe W.C. Fields to somebody who has never seen him, if you want to get an idea of the difficulty. Dottie was an original. She was unique. None of the words fit. (Cooper’s Law: If you didn’t know Dorothy Parker, whatever you think she was like, she wasn’t. Even if you did know her, whatever you thought she was like, she probably wasn’t.)
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If I sound as if I am about to reveal to you exactly what she was like, would someone in the front row please get up and kick me where it hurts. The decent thing to do is admit that I can’t, and then get on with it. What one does in the end is fall back on retelling the stories about her and repeating the things she’s alleged to have said (most of which she disclaimed), and the result is something that could go to Hollywood and be played by Miss Eve Arden, but it’s not the Dorothy Parker I knew. May I offer one slight attempt to describe her by saying that a tiny part of the truth of her is that she could never, never, under any circumstances, be played by Eve Arden? Or by anybody else for that matter, notwithstanding the fact that many have tried. She was the model for so many plays that Alexander Woollcott once wrote her that he’d just gone to a play and neither he nor she was a character in it! Come to think of it, I believe I remember that Miss Arden (as well as Tallulah Bankhead, et al) did a turn one summer as a character patterned after Dottie in George Oppenheimer’s Here Today, in a part originated on Broadway by Ruth Gordon, who then went on to write and appear in a play or two of her own with roles that bore more than a casual resemblance to Mrs. Parker. (Miss Gordon’s Over 21, a charming account of a famous writer joining her husband at an Army base in the South, as Dottie did when Alan Campbell enlisted in the Second World War, was also made into a movie with Irene Dunne in the part that was not Dottie and Alexander Knox in the part that was not Alan.) Dottie once said that she’d like to write a play about herself but was afraid that Ruth Gordon would sue her for plagiarism.
Probably the best-known description of her is that of Alexander Woollcott, “. . . so odd a blend of Little Nell and Lady Macbeth.” It is very funny and very clever, but it is also misleading. She did not affect the sweetness for any ulterior purpose; rather it sprang from her desperate wish to be what the manner suggested. If it had been bogus it wouldn’t have been as effective as it was. If she said, “Doesn’t she have the loveliest voice?” of a poor soul who had been talking for some time in a particularly rasping one, it was in large part because she really wished it were true. To an actor with a most unfortunate nose and no chin to speak of, who told her of his hopes in Hollywood, she said, “Oh, they’ve been searching for a new Cary Grant,” and he was able to accept the flattery because there really was something quite genuine about it, or at least in the intention behind it. (Let’s face it, he was able to accept the compliment because he was a damned fool, but that doesn’t alter my point.) Dottie’s sad eyes were infinitely regretful that the world is filled with unpleasant voices and Pinocchio noses, and she made her little effort to improve upon God’s slipshod handiwork by giving voice to things as they should be. The inside of her head must have been a battleground. Her desire to be a lady (and she was a lady and a great one), soft-spoken, gracious, delicate, charitable, and well-mannered (and may I be struck dead if she wasn’t those things), was constantly at war with her incredible mind, a critical mind, brilliant, precise, and to the point. It was her misfortune (and her fortune) that she saw the absurdity of everybody, including herself; not just piecemeal, either; she saw it whole, entire, all at one time, and sometimes, when one was with her, one would look at people and see them with her X-ray vision (an experience not recommended for casual social intercourse) and would find oneself as dismayed by the phenomena as she must have been. Out of this dismay came those little purrs of sympathy and murmurs of encouragement and the outrageous compliments that misled many an innocent to run on and on, pouring out his heart to her. Her mind, I don’t have to tell you, won out in the end, as it must, and asserted itself by the devastating remark, the aptness of which usually passed over the head of the victim, so spellbound was he by her kindly radiance. Moss Hart used to enjoy telling how she charmed his wife, Kitty Carlisle, at their first meeting. The two women sat together on the sofa. Dottie said, “Tell me all about yourself,” and Kitty did. At length. She ran through all the high points of her career up to that point. “And there I was,” she was saying, “at the Capitol Theatre at ten-thirty in the morning, walking out on a stage for the first time in my life to face thirty-six hundred people . . .” while Dottie was clicking her tongue and exclaiming softly, “How could they do that to you!”
Unhappy aspects of life genuinely pained her, but the pain never stopped her from staring disaster square in the face. Once, in Hollywood, soon after she and Alan had reconciled for the last time (they were married off and on from 1933 until his death in 1963), we were having one of our periodic forest fires, and thousands of acres and hundreds of houses were being destroyed. I dropped by Alan and Dottie’s, as was my neighborly custom, and found her listening to an account of the fire on the radio. I took Alan aside and asked if he thought she would like to see it. He said that she was dying to, but would have to be persuaded. I broached the subject, mentioning offhandedly that the holocaust was visible from a nearby hilltop, and that I had been thinking of driving up for a quick look. “Oh, I couldn’t bear it! What a terrible sight it must be!” she was saying as she pulled on a sweater and headed for the door. We got to the hilltop and couldn’t see anything. We went further, and still couldn’t. Should we keep going? Might as well. We traveled, finally, some ten or fifteen miles, with Dottie protesting all the way, until suddenly there it was, the entire horizon aflame. Miles of fire. Dottie’s face was hidden in her hands, but she was peeking out between her fingers. “It’s like Dante’s Inferno, isn’t it? The end of the world!” she was saying in genuine distress. “Think how frightened all the little animals are: the little squirrels, the little rabbits, all the little birds,” then, without a change of voice, “Do you think we could get any closer?”
She didn’t hit anybody who wasn’t as big as she was, and she never picked unworthy targets. Her barbs were aimed at sham, pomposity, and pretension. Let us consider her celebrated encounter with Mrs. Clare Boothe Luce. The details are doubtless familiar: the two women arrived simultaneously at the door of a restaurant. Mrs. Luce gestured for Dottie to go first, saying, “Age before beauty.” Now, Mrs. Luce, we all know, passed some pretty funny remarks in her early days, before she switched careers (she passed some pretty funny ones afterward, too, but never mind that), but “Age before beauty” will not go down in history as among her best. It will win no prizes for originality. Why, we were saying that in high school down in Quitman, Mississippi, around that time, and we didn’t even know there was such a thing as wit. It seems a safe assumption that the phrase contained more hostility than humor. It just wasn’t Mrs. Luce’s night. Certainly it is clear from all accounts that she spoke first, threw down the gauntlet, so to speak, and as she is not a lady totally incapable of taking care of herself, one suspects that her most ardent supporters would have to concede that Mrs. Parker was justified in striking back. Under these circumstances, it is nice that our Dottie was able to rise to the occasion. And rise she did. “And pearls before swine,” she said as she glided past, doubtless to the applause of the angels.
The same Mrs. Luce was the object of another of Dottie’s oft-quoted remarks, and it is a particular favorite of mine. On being told that Mrs. Luce made a habit of being kind to her inferiors, Dottie asked, “And where does she find them?” With that line she managed to slay not only the unslayable Mrs. Luce, but the whole notion of condescending graciousness. Because she had quite a splendid contempt for the wisecrack and the wisecracker, she was inclined to put down the over-inflated reputation of the Algonquin wits as a fiction. “It was no Mermaid Tavern, I can tell you. Just a bunch of loudmouths showing off, saving their gags for days, waiting for a chance to spring them. ‘Did you hear about my remark?' ‘Did I tell you what I said?’ And everybody hanging around, asking, ‘What’d he say? What’d he say?’ The whole thing was made up by people who’d never been there. And may I say they’re still making it up? Woollcott was ridiculous. He had a good heart, for whatever that was worth, and it wasn’t much. Mencken was impossible. George Kaufman was a mess. I see nothing in that talent at all. . . . Oh, I suppose I do, but you know what I mean. It’s just that there was so much praise. . . . Nathan is missed. None of the others are.” (Nathan, reviewing a musical, once said, “All the show girls looked like David O. Selznick.” You know, we could use that today.) Her relations with most of the regulars (though not with Robert Benchley and Robert Sherwood, her colleagues at Vanity Fair, both of whom she adored) were pretty much an on-and-off thing. She and Mr. Kaufman went through periods of not speaking, in spite of the fact that a grudging affection remained on both sides. Once, at the Round Table, responding to a humorously anti-Semitic insult from one of the habitués, Mr. Kaufman jokingly threatened to leave, adding, “And I’ll expect Mrs. Parker to accompany me halfway.” During one of their prolonged estrangements, Mrs. Kaufman, the brilliant Beatrice, decided to stage a reconciliation. Dottie was accordingly invited to the Kaufman establishment in Bucks County for the weekend. All went cozily on Saturday. Drinks were drunk, wits sparkled, and affection flowed. On Sunday morning, however, disaster struck. Dottie happened to be the first one down for breakfast, and, there, in a special box on the front page of the drama section of The New York Times, was a reprint of an article she had written for the Chicago Tribune (“Who expects anybody in New York to see something you wrote for Chicago?”) in which she referred to “that singularly nasty little play by Mr. Kaufman and Mr. Hart, The Man Who Came to Dinner.” Obviously, this would never do. Mr. Kaufman was very fond of his newspaper, and liked to spend a leisurely breakfast over it. She had to work fast. She tucked it under her arm, scurried up the stairs, and locked it in her suitcase. George came down for breakfast. No newspaper. The staff was called in and questioned sternly. Mr. Kaufman was a gentle and sweet-natured man when all was going well, but could be quite wintry when faced with negligent servants, and this occasion was no exception. During the inquisition Dottie hovered around, innocently wondering aloud whatever could have happened to it! Breakfast was got through, with Beatrice being charming, Dottie chatty, and George disgruntled. For lunch, the party journeyed over to Moss Hart’s nearby place to consolidate the reunion. His paper had not been stolen. He drew George aside; the mystery of the disappearing newspaper was solved; a frosty afternoon was had by all, and the negotiations were off.
She felt sorry for anybody who had no humor. Of Fitzgerald, whom, as a person, she liked best of the serious writers, she said, “He was attractive and sweet and he wanted to be nice— Ernest never wanted to be nice; he just wanted to be worshiped. He was a bore then, and he remained so—but the damnedest thing about Scott, he didn’t know what was funny. He could be funny in his books, but not in life. I remember once in Antibes we were coming out of a restaurant, and there was a little man selling nuts. He had them beautifully arranged on a tray, and Scott tipped the tray over. Intentionally. He couldn’t understand why that wasn’t funny. ‘Wasn’t that funny? Wasn’t that funny? But I gave him a hundred francs!’ He couldn't understand that that made no difference.” Of Zelda: “She was living in the day of the shock technique. That wears off very quickly, don’t you think? Sitting at a dinner where nothing in particular was being said, she would turn to a neighbor”—here Dottie assumed an outlandish Southern accent—“‘Ah do think Al Jolson’s a greater man than Jesus Christ, don't yew?’ She wanted to be thought of as ‘fast’—A speed.” When Alan, Dottie and I were working at Fox Studios, they had a secretary who had absolutely no humor. This fascinated Dottie and she and Alan used to promise each other sleds for Christmas if they could get her to smile. Dottie swore that everything about the girl was artificial, and I believe it was true. Breasts, eyelashes, hair, fingernails, teeth, all seemed false. Dottie used to try to surprise her in the rest room, hoping to catch her with all or some of the beauty aids removed. She kept wondering if there was anything at all there. Every day at lunch, they would report to me the secretary’s personal phone calls, which were the major events of their day. Once, when the secretary had two tickets to a movie premiere, she spent the morning calling various fellows, trying without success to find a date. She was, needless to say, unaware that the pair were eavesdropping, and, when Dottie guilelessly inquired who was taking her to the movie, she replied airily, “Oh, I’d rather just go with a nice girl than with some man I don’t like.” It was our favorite saying for a while and we used to say it to each other rather a lot, and then roll about with laughter. We took long lunch hours, going off the lot and driving down toward Santa Monica to find a place to eat. Getting away always took a long time because Dottie would go to the rest room, which was filled with secretaries talking, and get into a booth to listen. Each day she would stay longer, and Alan would get impatient, as we were waiting in the car, but when she appeared she had many goodies to report, and she remembered every word; if she didn’t, it was no matter, for she had made up something better.
She was intolerant of affectation. One of our more narcissistic neighbors, describing a minor automobile accident in which she’d received a small scratch on her face, said archly, “I did hope there wouldn’t be a scar.” Dottie muttered, “As opposed to all those women who like looking as if they went to school at Heidelberg.”
I don’t suppose anybody ever thought of her as old. She wasn’t. Even as I write the word I’m struck by the inappropriateness of it. Her fragility had nothing to do with age; the deep lines across her cheeks came not from the piling up of the years, but from staring wide-eyed at the human comedy. The mind remained quick and severe and young, with the anger and daring and hope of youth. I was never aware of the difference between her age and Alan’s (he was some ten years younger) or, for that matter, the difference between her age and mine.
Probably everybody has somebody with whom he is never completely himself. The reasons for this may be varied—awe of a hero, respect for a talent, or just plain fear. In all the years I knew Dottie, and however often I saw her (and for a long time it was several times a day, for we lived a few doors apart and worked at the same studio), I was never totally at ease with her . . . well, hardly ever. Not for long at a time, anyway. I could not escape seeing myself as I imagined I looked to her; an Ichabod Crane, all awkwardness and absurdity, the nervous laugh always at the ready just in case, grinning and simpering with an embarrassing eagerness to please. I never stopped feeling, somehow, like an adolescent covered with runny pimples. Alan assured me from time to time that if evening approached and they had not heard from the Sharecropper (for Sharecropper I was called, in recognition of my Mississippi origin, a background Dottie accused me of making up in an attempt to be interesting; later, when I bought a house, the Campbells’ maid was solemnly instructed that henceforth she must announce that the Landowner was calling, erasing my former title), Dottie would start wondering why not, and she has been known to go to the telephone and dial my number herself, and there are few who can make that claim. Nevertheless, I was never sufficiently reassured, and advisedly so. Another friend of hers, who used to see her at the Volney Hotel after she moved back to New York, swore to me that she had never said unpleasant things about me in his presence, but after all I could not forget that I’d sworn the same thing to him with equal fervor, and I had had to cross every one of my fingers behind my back as I did so. When I told Lillian Hellman that she was the one friend of whom Dottie consistently spoke with respect, affection and admiration, Miss Hellman said, “People have told me that through the years and I always found it hard to believe, but so many have said it I’ve finally come to accept it.”
She resisted friendship with all her might. God forbid she should let anybody get the idea she was popular. Neglect was infinitely preferable. The phone would ring in her room. She would exclaim, “Ah, here's fresh help!” and answer in an apprehensive voice. Upon hearing the name of the caller, she would curtly say, “Not in,” then turn to me: “I don’t want to speak to Mr. X now or ever, do you?” Later, in the same visit, she would complain that she never hears from the same Mr. X anymore. Once, when I went to pick her up to bring her to a dinner at our house, she paused outside the hotel entrance to drink in the wonder of the city at night. “It’s the first time I've been out after dark since I got back to New York,” she said, forgetting that she'd just been telling me about some monster of a play somebody had dragged her to a few evenings before. It’s easier for a neglected girl to know who she is. It was not by accident that she wrote those poems in which the romantic girl’s passion is rewarded by a sock in the eye.
This affinity for distress extended to money matters. When royalty checks came in, they were hastily put away in the backs of bureau drawers, to remain there, unopened, for years, while she went on worrying about how she could pay the rent.
And God help anybody who tried to come to her aid. Alexander Woollcott’s description of Mrs. Patrick Campbell in her declining days, as “a sinking battleship firing on her rescuers,” can be applied here with no fear of exaggeration. There was something quite fierce and splendid about it. Not long after Alan’s death, we were sitting in the living room of the California house. The heat was stifling, for the windows, which went all the way to the floor, could not be opened lest the dogs get out. There arrived on the scene a very altruistic lady, a former movie star as a matter of fact, as gracious as she was charitable, who had gone to the trouble earlier of measuring the windows and then having screens cut to fit. With the cheerfully bustling air of the well-intended, she lugged the screens in while Dottie went on effusively about her inability ever to repay “such kindness, such sweetness, such compassion, such beneficence. . . .” While Dottie continued in this vein, the lady asked me to find a hammer and nails, whereupon Dottie abruptly stopped her recitation of praise, turned to me, freezing me with a gaze of exaggerated (and unwelcome) sympathy, and said, “If there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s a bossy woman!”
During this time, helpful people brought her food, for otherwise she did not eat. Alan once told me that before she’d cook anything, she’d go into the kitchen and eat raw bacon. One saw quite a turnover in new faces, as none of the good Samaritans lasted long. They all started out with much enthusiasm, but retired, after a while, looking somewhat subdued. One neighbor, who happened to be the least bit effete, brought a couple to look at the house, which Dorothy wanted to sell in preparation for the move back to New York. While the prospective homeowners gingerly picked their way among the little piles of doggie waste (it had a way of accumulating after Alan was gone), the neighbor perched tentatively on a chair facing Dottie. “It’s so kind of you to do this,” Dorothy was saying, “but, then, that’s just the way you are, warmhearted, tender, compassionate, obliging. . . .” The fellow gushed a bit, quite pleased with himself, all out of proportion really, as he did expect to make a commission on the deal. He then allowed as how he’d better see how the clients were doing. He was barely out of his chair, certainly not out of earshot, before she said, “There he goes, tossing his little Shirley Temple curls.”
I doubt that this is a distinction that would hold up in court, but I really don’t think it was the person who had rallied around to help for whom she meant the back of her hand. Not the person, but the self-congratulating pleasure that the do-gooder takes in his deed—that’s what aroused her ire. Being grateful for an extended period produces a hell of a strain, and, as Virtue was obviously rewarding itself, she couldn’t resist a little annihilation.
The incident of the Shirley Temple curls reminds me of a story Alan told me (it is irrelevant here, probably, but we needn’t let that stop us), of the night he and Dottie got tattooed with matching tattoos, a star on the inside of their upper arms. It had seemed a good idea at the time, though she was later to complain that it had condemned her to long sleeves for the rest of her life. All Alan remembered of the night was that they were in a bar or something in Greenwich Village, and a rather delicate sort of fellow recognized Dottie and asked her, for some reason, if she liked fairy stories. “My dear,” she said, “let us not talk shop.”
During the Twenties and Thirties she must have been the most quoted woman in America. At the time I knew her, she denied almost everything attributed to her. She sometimes denied things on general principle, I think, as she genuinely resented having her witticisms repeated to her, but more often than not the quotations were neither hers nor truly funny. I have seen her in a rage when a misguided person told her he adored a tacky little poem that had been widely circulated and falsely credited to her. It concerned Miss Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst, and Dottie had nothing whatever to do with its composition. “Apart from the general squalor of it,” she pointed out, “it rhymed ‘honor’ with ‘madonna!’” Young (and old) girls often said to her, “I’ve always loved your lines, ‘Men never make passes at girls who wear glasses.’” If Alan were present, he would break in and correct them sharply: “‘Seldom,’ not ‘never.’ Men seldom make passes. . . .” Dottie was quite capable of purring the while, “Unfortunately, my dear, I never said it,” a reaction that came almost automatically to her. That line, which is a poem actually, called News Item, is her best-known saying; people know it who do not know her name.
Which reminds me of an incident at the unemployment office. When Alan and Dottie finished their work at Fox (on a script of The Good Soup, rumored to be for Marilyn Monroe), I persuaded them to file for unemployment compensation, which I was already drawing. It is a perfectly honorable procedure, and a rewarding one. You got quite a lot, considering that it was tax-free; it seems to me that it was about $75 a week, and for the two of them it amounted to a worthwhile sum by the end of the month. All you had to do was go in once a week and sign a card saying that you were available for work. It was a pleasant and even a rather chic thing to do; you not only caught sight of such stars as Marlon Brando from time to time, but you also ran into old chums you hadn’t encountered for ages, whom you were happy to see as long as you didn’t have to spend a lot of time with them. The parking lot always had a Rolls or two along with an abundance of sporty Cadillacs and we once decided that you saw just as many celebrities there as you would lunching at Romanoff’s; furthermore, as Dottie was quick to comment, “It’s a much nicer set.” The first time you go, however, there is a certain amount of bother. Papers must be filled out, and you are sent from desk to desk and asked such questions as, “Have you been looking for employment?”, “Are you enrolled in any school?”, and “What other skills or experience have you that might be of use in other fields?” They never bat an eye at the large sums you have been paid for your studio services; they’ve heard it all before. On the way down, I coached Alan and Dorothy carefully. The coaching was necessary because both were behaving as if they were about to perjure themselves into prison. We kept assuring each other heartily that, after all, we paid enormous taxes and were entitled to our rights like anybody else. Alan and I collaborated on filling out their preliminary forms, as it was an undertaking for which neither of us had any talent, and for which Dottie was hopeless. We could not, however, accompany her for the necessary interviews. We stood watching as she was shuttled from clerk to clerk, looking like a lamb on its way to slaughter. “Ah, she’ll be all right now,” Alan said as she approached one desk, “that one has glasses on.” Sure enough, the lady with the glasses started to read Dottie’s record, looked up, asked a question, grinned broadly, took off her spectacles, shook hands, and called several other girls over to touch the author of the familiar line. We were too far away to hear what was being said, but we could see several pairs of lips moving as they recited the poem to her, and Dottie’s expression on this occasion was one of deep gratitude. Everyone was most cooperative after that and it was even arranged that the Campbells’ reporting time would coincide with mine so that we could make a weekly jaunt of it.
Norma Place, where they lived in West Hollywood, was only one block long. At some point in prehistory Norma Talmadge had had a studio on the spot and it was for her that it was named. Dottie called it Peyton Place, West. The frame building that had been Miss Talmadge’s dressing room still dominated the little street. It was the largest house on the block and had been cut up into several apartments, in one of which lived Estelle Winwood. Her front room was quite near the sidewalk and one could pass by at almost any time and see her, somewhat on display, like a mannequin in a shop window, perpetually pouring tea, always carefully groomed and wearing a hat. The neighboring houses had once been the nondescript homes of railroad workers, fairly uniform in lack of design, but in recent years they had been taken over by people connected “with the Industry,” as they say out there, and the facades done over in a sort of Regency style (for want of a better term) that has evolved in that area, and nowhere else. Nina Foch, Carleton Carpenter, John Dall, and Alan were among the longest-term residents, the pioneers, so to speak, but other moderately well-known personages came and went. I remember Dottie’s delight when Tuesday Weld’s mother moved in, and Dottie would ask the neighbors, “Have you met Tuesday Weld’s mother, Wednesday, yet?” Everybody knew everybody else, there was much dropping in on each other, few secrets were possible, and nothing that went on was beneath Dottie’s notice. The bank, the post office, the laundromat, and the supermarket were clustered around the corner and down the hill, and if you had an errand in any of those places you were likely to encounter Troy Donahue or the like, and find out who was working today on what film, who had gone to the beach, and who was having drinks with whom. There was also a bar called the Four Star, where one might glimpse Patsy Kelly shooting a mean game of pool, or a former wife of Louis Hayward passing the time with a couple of pals and a few assorted dogs. Dottie’s arrival in the area had caused a momentary sensation, of course, and she became an instant landmark. She was pointed out politely as she took the dogs for walks, and she returned from those outings a mine of information. Once, at night, she saw Estelle Winwood (who, she said, used to be around the Algonquin in the old days, “and she was creaking, even then”), driving along in the dark, blissfully unaware that she had forgotten to turn on the headlights, but with the interior lights burning brightly. (Later, when I mentioned that Miss Winwood was acting in Camelot, Dottie commented, “Playing a battlement, no doubt.”) Now and then we had a little extra excitement, like when a character lady’s canary got out and all the fellows joined (unsuccessfully) in trying to recapture it, while the tearful owner jogged along, calling out to the fugitive bird, and Dottie tried to keep up, offering comfort as best she could. Or maybe somebody got drunk and fell off a porch and broke a toe—that kind of thing happened from time to time. Rumors were forever spreading—that Judy Garland was visiting one of the residents, or that Dorothy Dandridge had looked at a house that was for sale, or that a certain couple was breaking up; we took a lively interest in such things. Once everybody was invited for the unveiling of a portrait of one of the most popular Norma Placers. His living room was small and the portrait was big. In it, our host was life-size and stark naked, seated, facing front, with carefully drawn genitals that seemed to tumble out at you. Dottie was most genteel and admiring, murmuring things like, “It’s so real, you almost feel he could speak to you, don’t you?”
But the biggest sensation of all was Bathsheba Glyn’s rape. (That is not her real name, of course.) Miss Glyn, an authoress with a number of plays and scenarios to her credit, had a habit of lying nude in her bedroom watching television, and her window shade did not seem to reach all the way to the bottom of the window. Now, to be fair, it should be pointed out that this window was not readily visible from the street; you were not likely to see it unless you happened to be hanging around in her neighbor’s driveway, but we did a lot of hanging around in each other’s driveways in those days, and, if you had any excuse whatever for being in that particular driveway, Miss Glyn’s charms were there to be seen, and so near that, as Alan said, “If you couldn’t actually reach out and touch them, they were certainly within spitting distance.” Not half bad charms, either, all things considered. As a sort of running gag, Alan and I were always inviting each other to stroll down and take a look before turning in, and once or twice Dottie, who never entirely believed it, was about to go with us and see for herself, but would lose her courage before we got there. Imagine then, her fascination when news spread that poor Bathsheba had been raped at five o’clock of a morning. Dottie expressed horror like everybody else, but only when company was present. She relished every last detail, and details were not sparing. Since Bathsheba had called in a few neighbors, as well as the police, as soon as her surprise guest had departed, it didn’t take long for word to get around. Apparently, she had fallen asleep watching The Late Show, leaving the light on. It seems safe to assume that some casual passerby was overcome by the sight and lost control of himself, but, according to Bathsheba, the intruder told her (in a postcoital conversation over drinks) that he had seen her in the supermarket, become obsessed by a passion for her, and, knowing that he could never possess her any other way (“I don’t know why people jump to such conclusions!” said Dottie), he had taken this tack. He was eighteen years old, or so he told her, and he was blond—this Bathsheba could tell by the texture of his skin, as she was not allowed to see his face, which was covered by a shirt. We spent some time trying to figure out how he maneuvered his drink with that shirt over his head, but reluctantly concluded that in desperate situations such things can be managed. She had promised to cooperate on condition he would afterward discuss his reasons for such outrageous behavior, an arrangement to which he agreed with alacrity. I am omitting some of the more explicit details as hardly suitable for a man’s magazine, but would feel remiss if I did not report Dottie’s reaction to the disclosure that a certain jar of vaseline had figured in the act, since the lad found some difficulty effecting entry, “. . . because he was so large, or she was so small—in either case a fantasy,” said Dottie. She refused to believe any of it, even after police found footprints and the kitchen knife with which he had threatened his victim. Dottie further claimed to have heard a rumor that Bathsheba was to be arrested for contributing to the delinquency of a minor by giving him the alcoholic beverage. It was with reluctance that we departed for the studio on those days, so fearful were we of missing new developments. Little writing got done in any case, as we were in constant touch by telephone, working out new theories and speculations.
It is often said of married couples, “They couldn’t be happy together and they couldn’t be happy apart,” and this certainly applied to Dottie and Alan. They were two of the most engaging people in the world, and absolutely right for each other. Probably they were too right for each other. Their relationship was an extraordinary one, incredibly close, each strongly identifying with the other, but also mutually antagonistic and somehow fearful and bitter toward the other. When I first saw them together—it must have been 1955 or ’56—they had been separated for quite a while, and the experience was so disturbing to me that the intervening years have almost succeeded in putting it out of my mind, and remembering it even now is oddly discomforting. I had known Alan only casually; I had seen him here and there and, though he was one of the most charming, witty, and sociable gentlemen alive, he also had a surprising defensiveness, an off-putting chip on the shoulder, that made me wary of him. I was surprised then, when, in the elevator after a gathering at George Kaufman’s, he suddenly asked, like a man desperate not to be alone, “I have to go see Dottie. Will you go with me?” As my previous encounters with Mrs. Parker had not been pleasant ones—this was an unhappy period in her life—I must have hesitated, though it is doubtful that I hesitated long, my curiosity being what it was. She lived then (as she did later) at the Volney, and my memory is of a stark, bare, colorless, and impersonal room, with a large bone on the floor, dog toys on the gravy-colored sofa, a dog of course, and an agonized Alan facing a stricken-looking Dottie, who was, as incredible as it seems now, actually fat. My impression was of a sad, bewildered young girl, angrily trapped inside an inappropriate and almost grotesque body. Of the desolate conversation, I remember only that she apologized repeatedly: for the disorder of the room, for her own appearance, for the behavior of the dog, and for the absence of anything to drink. There was a sense of unreality about it: the darkened room, the sad and lost lady, the man ill-at-ease and poised for flight, and the stranger to them both, with no reason whatever for being present. It was painful to witness the estrangement of two people who were forever to be deeply involved with each other. Loneliness and guilt were almost like physical presences in the space between them, and they spoke in short, stilted, and polite sentences with terrible silences in between, and yet there was a tenderness in the exchange, a grief for old hurts, and a shared reluctance to turn loose.
I am glad that I came to know and love them later in better times, when they had great fun together, as they must have done in earlier and younger days. In Hollywood in 1960 their spirits were gay; they delighted in each other’s humor and found pleasure in each other’s company. They had the kind of unspoken communication of those who know all there is to know about each other.
They were very alike, much more alike than most people realized. Not only their humor—Alan wrote the funniest letters I’ve ever read—but their likes, their dislikes, their prejudices, their fears, and their critical judgments were almost interchangeable. Even their backgrounds had certain parallels. Alan’s father was of Scotch extraction and his mother was Jewish. Coming from Richmond, Virginia, and from a social class that concerned itself with such things, he had a feeling of not belonging that matched Dottie’s own. Also, they were similarly embarrassed by private emotions. Dottie was incapable of admitting to any degree of happiness; shortly after she came to Norma Place, I heard someone at a party ask where she was staying, and, with the shamefaced mien of an adolescent caught in an indiscretion, she replied, “At Alan’s, isn’t that disgraceful?” Many years before, someone had said to her,
“Dottie, what are you complaining about? You’re married to a charming, handsome man who adores you. What more do you want?” Dottie shot back, “Presents!”
When they awoke on the morning of their second wedding day (in 1950; they had been divorced three years earlier), Dottie coyly pulled the sheet over her face, and said, “Mustn’t see the bride before the wedding.” At the reception, someone remarked that many were present who had not spoken to each other for years, and Dottie rejoined, “Including the bride and groom.”
She was incurably jealous, and accused him of infidelities that, according to him, did not exist. He had a happy capacity for friendships, many of them with cultivated and interesting women. Of one, who was perhaps a little more formal and unbending than most, Dottie said in anger, “I know you aren’t laying her. If you were, you’d have splinters in your prow.”
As time went on, they complained more and more about each other. They took turns, actually. One day she would say, “I don’t know why Alan behaves as he does when he’s drinking. He used to be able to drink and still be fun.” The next day Alan would say the same thing of her. If he said, “I didn’t know the paper had come,” she would say, “I didn’t try to hide it, or the lines could as easily be reversed. He used to come over to my house and announce grumpily, “I’m supposed to get out of the way so Dottie can do her Esquire piece. It’s already five days late and she’s not going to do it. I put a hair on the typewriter, and, when I get back, it’ll still be there, wait and see, and she’s going to claim she’s finished it and sent it in.” And he would be right. Her book reviews appeared less and less frequently. The magazine would call to ask when it could be expected and she would declare in all innocence, “I can’t imagine why it hasn’t arrived. I sent it days ago,” when she hadn’t written a line of it. She went on reading the books, she talked about them brilliantly, and she wanted to write, but the fears of inadequacy, from which she’d always suffered, in common with so many other first-rate writers, became more and more paralyzing.
Their feelings about each other were a blend of pride and exasperation. Alan was constantly starting home-improvement projects, adding a bathroom, or making the garage into a guest cottage to be rented out, and they were rarely completed. Dottie would announce with the air of a true martyr, “I don’t know where Alan is; he just pulled two boards up out of the floor and went off to the post office!” Or if he took a chair to be covered in a pretty fabric—he had a strong nest-building instinct—Dottie would share his enthusiasm for the result, taking loving pride in his taste, but, shortly afterward, when the dogs had done their inevitable destruction to it, she was almost gleeful in pointing out the damage.
Sometimes they seemed determined to behave symbolically; when Dottie arrived with her poodle Cliché, Alan, who up to then had seemed content without a dog, went out and bought a bad-tempered Sealyham puppy, and the two animals were never at peace. From their first meeting, they engaged in a running contest to see which could wreak the greater havoc.
At the same time, Alan and Dottie could be fiercely protective of each other. When she suffered through quite a bit of repair work on her teeth, Alan was visibly distressed by her pain.
Once we were driving along in my car and Alan was describing some untalented screenwriter, saying, “He would write a line like, You’re mashing hell out of my finger!” Dottie was busily reacting, saying, “Imagine writing a line like that!” and I, ever eager to learn, was trying to figure out what was wrong with the line if the character’s fingers were actually being mashed, not connecting it with the fact that I was also, at that moment, pressing a button, the function of which was to raise the window on Alan’s side of the car. I had no way of knowing that he’d stuck his fingers down into the space where the window was rising, and it took some time and quite a lot of yelling on Alan’s part to make the connection for me. Dottie laughed heartily at his predicament, reversing her former position by saying, “It seemed like a perfectly good line to me,” until she saw that there was actually blood on his fingernail, and then she was all concern for him and mad as the devil at my idiocy.
Whatever their anger at each other, they presented a united front when guests were present, each elaborately ignoring any misadventures on the part of the other. One night Miss Cathleen Nesbitt and I were invited for dinner, and, when we arrived, I recognized the glassy, unfocused look in Alan’s eyes as a signal that we were headed for trouble. Drinks stretched on and on, with Alan making unsteady trips to the kitchen from time to time check the progress of a roast. Dottie was fine—his bad behavior brought out her best—she was entertaining and amusing, as was Miss Nesbitt, who is surely one of the most attractive people in the western hemisphere. She spoke charmingly of her affection for Dottie’s poem, One Perfect Rose, and told us about seeing Noel Coward’s new musical, Sail Away, describing it in quite gracious terms, while Alan interrupted unpleasantly and frequently, snarling, Let’s face it, what you’re trying to say is, it stunk!” That was not what she was trying to say, but she never lost her aplomb, nor did Dottie, as stomachs began to rumble and dinner failed to appear. Alan’s trips to the kitchen took longer and longer and he angrily refused any offers of help. It was well after ten o’clock before food was forthcoming, and we were so busy not noticing his lurching walk which was, by now, that of a sailor on deck in the worst sort of storm, that it was not until I had a fork loaded with salad and on the way to my mouth that I noticed the presence in it of long strips of gaily-colored aluminum wrap. God knows what Alan had thought he was doing as he shredded it so carefully, but there it was disappearing down Miss Nesbitt’s elegant throat, while Dottie complimented her husband on the excellence of his cooking.
Alan despaired of ever totally pleasing her. He said that no matter what he did, she felt victimized. When World War II began, she went about muttering that any man worth his salt would be in there fighting. Then, when he enlisted, she bitterly accused him of deserting her in perilous times.
She was filled with sympathy for all of society’s victims. She and Mr. Benchley were, as is well-known, fined $5 for marching in a protest against the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. This sympathy extended to anyone accused of a crime; so long as they were found guilty, she was convinced of their innocence. It was clear to her, at the time he was in jail, that Dr. Sam Sheppard had been railroaded. On the other hand, Lizzie Borden, having been acquitted, would be forever guilty in Dottie’s eyes, and she took it personally when a book written a few years back asserted her innocence. “I can sympathize with almost any wrongdoing,” she once told me. “People are horrified by child molesting, but it seems perfectly understandable to me. The only criminal activity with which I don’t completely identify is arson.”
I once heard Alan contemptuously say of a certain irresponsible couple, “They simply aren’t citizens!” Conversely, Alan and Dottie both were citizens. They were concerned, and they cared deeply about such things as justice, civil rights, and equal opportunities. They were civilized persons. When Dottie taught in a Los Angeles college for a while, she hated the students, feeling that they were too quick to settle for too little, the range of their vision was too short—and she claimed that they hated her; when she heard that Christopher Isherwood said the students were mad about her and fought to get in her course, she laughed and said, “You know how much sense Christopher makes!” Her feeling about the students didn’t extend to the Negroes. She believed in their future, and she left her estate to Martin Luther King Jr., whom she had never met, because she respected what he had done. She adored the memory of President Roosevelt (“He was God; you didn’t exactly feel you were slumming with him”), and she thought Mrs. Roosevelt was a heroine (“What a woman! So decent, so fairminded, and, it’s hard to believe, but when you met her, she was the most beautiful woman you ever saw”). Of the Thirties, she said, “They were progressive days. We thought we were going to make the world better —I forget why we thought it, but we did.” And, of course, like most literate persons, she was passionate about Adlai Stevenson. She never ceased to have great hopes for the young, her dislike of those students notwithstanding, and she never stopped feeling passionately involved in the issues of the day.
In June of 1963 I was in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where Governor George Wallace was making his brief stand in the door of the university to bar the enrollment of two Negro students—for a couple of hours until the National Guard could be mobilized to overwhelm him. The National Guard consisted of university students who did weekend military training and, with the eyes of the entire world focused on the historic event, one was startled to move among the assembled militia and hear them asking each other questions like, “Are you taking English Lit again this term?” I had nothing whatever to do with any of it, needless to say; I was simply a fascinated observer, only allowed to be there because I was a self-invited guest of the president of the university, a relative of mine. I wrote Alan and Dottie long daily accounts of the human side of the events leading up to the encounter in the doorway (and those events were very human, indeed, and surprisingly humorous as well) and it was there that I received word of Alan’s sudden death. Shaken and emotional, I called Dottie, not really expecting her to be in any condition to come to the phone. She did, however, and there ensued a most disconcerting conversation. While I was still making blubbery and incoherent noises of sympathy, she cut me off by saying, as calmly as if continuing a conversation interrupted only five minutes earlier, “The whole world thanks you for what you’re doing.” I couldn’t think what she was referring to, unless it was the act of calling her. “I could hardly not—” I began, but she went on, “And let’s face it, dear, it’s not for yourself you’re doing it; it’s for all mankind—” By now I was hopelessly at sea. “I think we can say Alan died with your letters clutched in his hand.” Then I had a vague idea of what she was trying to do. She was removing herself from her grief by talking of something else, something untrue, and she was outrageously giving me credit for accomplishing the integration of the university. (She sometimes paid one a compliment so unreasonable that it was presumptuous even to deny it. One’s only recourse was silence and pretending not to have heard it.) I asked her who was with her, and she replied that no one was, although I could hear voices and had recognized that, of their close friend, Bill Templeton, when he had answered the phone. I ran through a list of their friends and she said flatly that she had heard from none of them, which was, of course, not true. She was in a state of suspended emotion, moving automatically, and she seemed to want to talk. She gave me an account of her discovery of his body, speaking as one might to a newspaper reporter, getting the facts straight. She said that he’d asked to be awakened at a certain time, and that when she touched him “rigor mortis had already set in.” This last she said with some coldness as if that condition were somehow his fault. A final affront.
In the four years she lived after that, she was to describe the same thing to me many times, omitting only the reference to rigor mortis. It was a moment she returned to again and again. Just as she was to mention over and over that Alan’s mother, who still lives in Virginia, had insisted on having the funeral in Richmond. The doctor had advised Dottie not to go (“I didn’t know what ‘in shock’ meant, but I was it”) and I am sure that it was just as well, her relations with her mother-in-law; being what they were.
Of course the idea of Dottie having a mother-in-law of any sort was unsettling at best, and Dottie lodged many a complaint against the senior Mrs. Campbell. “The way she gushed over me when we got married, calling me ‘my little daughter’ (I wasn’t her little daughter; I wasn’t her little anything!), while she went around telling everybody I had ‘snatched that boy out of the cradle,’ just because I happened to be a year and a half older than Alan. You would have thought she was the only mother that ever lived.” She had not been happy with Mr. Parker’s family either. “His grandfather had been chaplain of the Senate, and he used to call us together for family prayers. Oh Lord, grant to the unbeliever in our midst, the light to see the error of her ways. . . .’ The unbeliever, in case you don’t recognize her, was me! ‘Stranger within our gates’ was another term he tossed around.” Of Edwin Pond Parker II, her husband, whom she met at a summer hotel at Branford, Connecticut, she said, “He was beautiful, but not very smart. He was supposed to be in Wall Street, but that didn’t mean anything. We were married [in 1917] for about five minutes, then he went off to war. He didn’t want to kill anybody, so he drove an ambulance. Unfortunately, they had dope in the ambulance. Morphine. You know, that’s not good for you. Not healthy. Well, it was one sanatorium after another, so finally I ran off to the Riviera with a Trotskyite.” She divorced Mr. Parker in 1928, “in Connecticut, where you can get it for roller skating.” When I mentioned this recently to Beatrice Ames, who was once Mrs. Donald Ogden Stewart, she roared with laughter. “Little Charlie Parker a drug addict? Impossible! He was the most harmless little man you ever saw. That Dottie! She’s awful! Isn’t it marvelous?”
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“I should be dead,” Dottie said several times that last year, “everybody I ever cared about is.” Death was much on her mind. She had been talking of moving, and one day one of the reasons came out. “Do you know what they do when you die in this hotel? They used to take them down on the big elevator in the back, but it’s not running and they take them down that front elevator, and you know how small it is. They have to stand you up.”
Her rooms, again, were bare and impersonal, though more cheerful than the one I remembered from years before. Except for a Christmas card with a picture of my son on it on the bureau in her bedroom, there were no photographs, no attempts at decoration, and no clues to the identity of its resident, apart from the inevitable pile of books on the coffee table. Even those she did not keep. Publishers continued to send books to her and, as soon as she’d read them, they were pressed on the next visitor. There were only two visible mementos of her life. One was an old edition of her poems or stories, only recently sent to her by a stranger, who had, through the years, cut pictures of her out of the papers and glued them in. When I said that the photographs were beautiful, she said, “My dear, those are pictures. They could fix those up.” When I said that it was a fascinating thing to have, she said gruffly, “Want it?” and I put the book down. The other souvenir, and the only thing so far as I could see that she had salvaged from the California house, was a set of Napoleon’s generals, thirteen porcelain figures, that we had come across in a junky sort of antique store in Santa Monica during one of our lunch hours. They were installed in the Campbell living room and Alan even put a special light over them. Here at the hotel Dottie had gotten somebody to put a shelf in the middle of a wall, and Napoleon, backed by his stalwart generals, brooded down on her as she went about her daily occupations. When I took Carter Cooper, an extremely self-possessed and brilliant child who was then just past his second birthday, up to see her, he strolled in, shook hands, and, indicating the figures with a tilt of his beautiful head, said, “You like Napoleon?” She was convinced that I’d coached him to say it before we entered the room, until they sat down and had a conversation about Mr. Napoleon putting the crown on Mrs. Napoleon’s head, about Baby Napoleon as King of Rome, and Napoleon setting fire to Russia. It happens that our child (who came into this world with a college education) preferred The Life of Napoleon in Pictures to Winnie the Pooh, a literary judgment with which Dottie found herself in complete agreement. She was fascinated by children, and seemed to want to like them, but a certain degree of mistrust was apparent in her manner, as if waiting for the little tykes to betray themselves and confirm her darkest suspicions.
One of her passions was Mrs. John F. Kennedy; she was full of admiration for the quiet grace with which that lady conducted her life under incredible pressure and, when I told her of meeting Mrs. Kennedy, she wanted to hear everything about her; what she wore, how she spoke, what we talked about, and could she possibly be as enchanting as Dottie fancied her to be? We promised Dottie that if she would come with us—she had recently been in the hospital and almost never went out—to a recital at the U.N. by Libby Holman, we would invite Mrs. Kennedy. Unfortunately, Mrs. Kennedy was unable to join us, though she expressed regret at not being able to meet Mrs. Parker, and delight at hearing that she was alive and around. I, accordingly, conveyed this disappointment to Dottie, who agreed to come anyway. The evening went well; she was enthusiastic and energetic, making a luncheon date with Mr. Main Bocher, chatting as happily as a schoolgirl with Miss Eugenia Sheppard, whose column she followed conscientiously, and, at the concert, enjoying a reunion with Miss Holman. After such an excursion, her spirits were high for days, and she delighted in describing it to her friends, though something in her made it necessary that she balance her diversion with some show of vexation, and her pleasure in this particular evening did not keep her from complaining that we had got her out under false pretenses by promising her Mrs. Kennedy. Another evening, when she was to come to our house for dinner, the city was hit by the worst snowstorm of the season. Cars could not move and the sidewalks were piled so deep with snow and ice that only the most hardy could navigate. She insisted that she could make it, however, and when Harvey Breit went to pick her up, she happily invited him up to her room to zip her dress. “After thirty years of marriage,” she explained, “you miss such things.” They set out on foot determinedly, but she had to give up before they’d gone a block. Her disappointment was so keen that my wife suggested we give a party for her and ask people she’d like to see—some she knew, some she’d like to meet, some she’d enjoy looking at, and some she’d enjoy talking to.
Mr. and Mrs. Gardner Cowles, Mr. and Mrs. William S. Paley, Mr. and Mrs. Bennett Cerf, Mr. and Mrs. Samuel P. Peabody, Mr. and Mrs. Martin Gabel, Mr. and Mrs. John Barry Ryan II, Mr. and Mrs. Louis Auchincloss, Mrs. Arthur Bunker, Miss Gloria Steinem, Miss Jean Parr, Duke Fulco diVerdura, Mr. Herb Sargent, Mr. Richard Adler, and Mr. Oliver Smith accepted, and Dottie followed all developments with joyful anticipation, but about a week before she suddenly said, “You know I can’t go there with Mrs. Paley and all those people. What in God’s name would I wear?” It is true she had no clothes. Alan used to take her to buy her dresses, and I don’t imagine she had ventured into a store since. But we were prepared for this. My wife was, of course, fascinated by Dottie, and somewhat worshipful, an attitude that was mutual; after their first meeting, Dottie had a dream in which she, Dottie, was the size of a pigmy, and Gloria was tall, towering toward the sky. The dream—Dottie circled around and around, looking up at the tall beauty. She could even describe the dress my wife wore in the dream—it had gold leaves on it, small ones at the top, growing larger toward the bottom. Gloria never heard her breathe an unkind word about anybody. Dottie was always at her most genteel in my wife’s presence, with malice toward none and charity for all. Gloria had always wanted to see Dottie in some kind of Chinese robe, delicately embroidered and elegant, and, when, a few months before this, Gloria started wearing kaftans as maternity dresses, she often expressed the desire to have one made for Dottie. Having no measurements to go by, it was made in size three, of yellow brocade with gold trim encrusted with little pearls. I took it over to Dottie, and she sat looking at it and touching it in the manner of an orphan with a Christmas present she can’t quite believe is meant for her. She went into the bedroom to try it on, and emerged after a long time to say that she didn’t know how to get into it. I put it on the floor, and, as one would in dressing a child, I lifted her feet to place them inside the dress, pulled it up, and fastened it around her. The stand-up collar, the soft color, and the rich material emphasized the essential femininity of her face. She stood looking at herself in the mirror and she was transformed. It was as if for a long time she had been unaware of her beauty, and suddenly she could see what she had forgotten. The dress was too long by at least six inches. I offered to have someone come in to shorten it. “No,” she said immediately, “I want it long. Then I have to lift it, like this. . . .” She pulled herself tall, and with one hand raised her skirt like an Edwardian lady about to step into her carriage. “I want to have that haughty look,” she said, which she had. She minced about the room, head held high, body erect and proud, steps ladylike and sure, while her eyes followed her progress in the mirror.
Gloria Steinem and Herb Sargent brought her to the party, and she entered the room trembling but looking magnificent, like the last dowager empress of China, a creature frail and exquisite but a power not to be tampered with, a lady of grace and modesty but well aware of her own value. She was not unlike a great actress who may have been away for a while, but who knows her audience is still waiting for this appearance, and she’s going to make it a triumphant one.
I saw Mrs. Paley catch her husband’s arm. “Bill,” she said quietly, but with some awe in her voice, “do you know who that is?” and Mr. Paley went over to sit beside Dottie and talk of previous meetings. Others came to her, and she was unfailingly gracious and charming and impressive. The evening had a certain amount of glitter; everybody looked just right, and Dottie’s eyes took in every detail of the women’s clothes, jewelry, and hairdos; each item was tucked away in her mind to be produced at will later on.
I had a moment with her and whispered that her slippers and bag were perfect. She put on her sorely-tried-but-ever-patient face and said with mock dignity, pronouncing each syllable with elaborate care, “Mr. Cooper, promise me that you will never, never go to Saks to buy gold slippers and a gold handbag with Sara Murphy and that nurse!” Sara Murphy is the legendary Mrs. Gerald Murphy, who, along with her late husband, were objects of idolatry to Scott Fitzgerald and were the models for the glamorous couple in Tender Is The Night. “And promise me further,” Dottie went on, “if you do go to Saks to buy gold slippers and gold handbag with Sara Murphy and that nurse, you won’t go to Schrafft’s for tea afterward!”
She was seated on my right, of course, and, as we took our places at table, she spoke glowingly of the beauty of the room with the red tablecloths, the gleaming silver, the glowing candles, the flowers arranged with such artful casualness (my wife does these things with tolerable style), but when someone remarked that the wine glasses were beautiful, adding, “I always think that wine tastes so much better in lovely glasses, don’t you?”, Dottie, quick as a flash, said, “Oh, yes, paper cups aren’t right,” and I was seized by a fit of nervous coughing.
She got on well with Mr. Auchincloss on her other side; she admired his work; he admired hers; it was their first meeting, so that was fine. When it was time for her to turn back to me, we exchanged a few formal remarks and then realized that, after all the years of talking, of letting our hair down and shooting straight, man-to-man as it were, we had, under the present elegant circumstances, nothing whatever to say to each other, and we began to laugh.
Three months later she was dead. I know that night meant something to her. There was something splendid and touching and defiant in her brave vanity, and I like to remember her in that golden dress, which she was not to have on again until she was buried in it. Many years ago she wrote a poem.
Needle, needle, dip and dart,
Thrusting up and down,
Where’s the man could ease a heart,
Like a satin gown?
See the stitches curve and crawl
Round the cunning seams—
Patterns thin and sweet and small
As a lady’s dreams.
Wantons go in bright brocades;
Brides in organdie;
Gingham’s for the plighted maid;
Satin’s for the free!
Wool’s to line a miser’s chest;
Crepe’s to calm the old;
Velvet hides an empty breast;
Satin’s for the bold!
Lawn is for a bishop’s yoke;
Linen’s for a nun
Satin is for wiser folk—
Would the dress were done!
Satin glows in candlelight—
Satin’s for the proud!
They will say who watch at night,
“What a fine shroud!”