Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?

"Since Dorothy Parker herself left no correspondence, manuscripts, memorabilia, or private papers of any kind, I have had to reconstruct her life by talking to those who knew her and by retrieving material from various institutions, attics, trunks, and the personal files of people who considered her letters worth preserving. ...This biography was written with the cooperation of Lel Droste Iveson, Dorothy Parker's niece, who generously shared with me memories of her aunt an details of the family's history, as well as Parker's childhood letters, verse, and a scrapbook-photo album compiled over the course of many years.

(7% into the ebook) "..."There was a little girl who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead. When she was good she was very very good, and when she was bad she wore this divine nightdress of rose-colored mousseline de soie, trimmed with frothy Valenciennes lace." To presume that Vogue readers might be having sex was surely an idea to set Palm Beach and Newport reeling. ...Only at the last moment, in proofs, did someone catch and exterminate the subversive caption.

(8% in) "...After skewering half a dozen men with the collective appeal of a dish of boiled turnips, she went on to present a final portrait, one of special interest because he was the only man to merit her praise. ...He was utterly confectionery, "an English-tailored Greek God, just masterful enough to be entertaining, just wicked enough to be exciting, just clever enough to be a good audience."

(8% in) "...The formula, subsequently summed up by Robert Benchley as the Elevated Eyebrow School of Journalism, was by no means simple to master. You could write about practically any subject you wished, no matter how outrageous, so long as you said it in evening clothes.
...It took Dorothy only a few months to get the hang of Crownie's [Frank Crowninshield] style. Then she spent the next decade trying to unlearn it."

"...In her verse as in her fiction, she always wrote about herself or else drew portraits of people she knew, describing them so vividly that everyone in her circle knew exactly to whom she was referring. She was almost incapable of doing purely imagined characters or situations

"Writing fiction was a torturous process for her. When she insisted that it took her six months to complete a story, it was often the case. Instead of making a first draft, she thought out each paragraph beforehand and then laboriously wrote it down in longhand sentence by sentence. She may have been careless about many aspects living, but she was obsessively careful, a perfectionist, in her writing. Nothing pleased her and she couldn't "write five words but that I change seven." She named her characters from the obituary columns or the telephone book..."

"...Those who later claimed that Alan [Campbell] rode on Dorothy's coattails in Hollywood could not have been more mistaken... ...In Hollywood from the start he showed himself to be a dogged worker determined to master a new craft. His strength turned out to be construction. He would first block out a scene, then labor to pull it together on paper so that Dorothy could follow along and inject amusing dialog. Without her, Alan's scenes would have fallen flat, but without him there would have been no scene. As a team they were a perfect complement."

"...As with so many of Lillian Hellman's memories, this simply was not true. Dorothy was not among those who received a pink slip in 1947, nor was she summoned as a witness in the HUAC hearings during the early fifties, because the government must have known that it had a weak case. Dorothy herself made two rather emphatic statements on the subject. ...Fourteen years later, she denied having ever been a party member, although it is easy to understand that the circumstances under which she made the statement might have warranted the stretching of the truth."

"Accusations such as [Martin] Berkeley's destroyed Dorothy's career during the fifties. Unable to find work as a screenwriter, she paid dearly for her transgressions, real or invented, but she never called attention to her plight, never singled herself out as exception or in any way worthy of admiration."

"...One day, she looked out the window and told Alan they would have to move immediately because there was "a suicide light" rippling on the hill behind the house.

They hastened back to the Garden of Allah, where the light did not make her think that it might be refreshing to be dead."

"...Marc Connelly, after years of frustration over his unrequited love for Margalo Gillmore, finally married a Mack Sennet bathing beauty, Madeline Hurlock, only to watch her fall in love with one of his best friends Robert Sherwood, who himself had been trapped in a turbulent sadomasochistic marriage with Mary Brandon."

"...she told him that her estate, plus any copyrights and royalties from her writings were to go to the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and in the event of his death, to the National Association of Colored People. ...As his [Oscar Bernstien,the lawyer drawing up the will] widow, Rebecca, said, "He understood completely what she had in mind. It seemed natural because she had no heirs, and racial injustice had always affected her very deeply." "

"...And you said it, when you wrote: she was at war with herself all her life. Maybe most of us are and some negotiate cease fires occasionally, which seldom last. All the digs she took at people, friend and foe alike, were really digs at herself..."