Before she was the lodestar she later became, Dorothy Parker had to go to work at nineteen. That was not how things were supposed to go, not for someone like her. She was born well-enough-to-do in 1893 to a fur merchant. The family name was Rothschild—not those ones, as Parker reminded interviewers all her life. But still a respectable New York Jewish family, financially comfortable enough for Jersey Shore vacations and a large apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Then her father died in the winter of 1913, devastated by the deaths of two wives and a brother who sank with the Titanic. His children inherited almost nothing.
There was no impending marriage available to rescue then Dorothy Rothschild. She had no education to speak of either. She had not even graduated from high school, not that women of her background were generally educated to work. Secretarial schools, which would grant a host of middle-class women the power to make their own living by the midcentury, were only starting to open when she came of age. Parker had to turn instead to the only talent she had that could quickly prove remunerative: she could play the piano, and dancing schools were beginning to crop up all around Manhattan. Sometimes, Parker liked to say, she even taught the slightly scandalous new ragtime dances to the students: the Turkey Trot, the Grizzly Bear. She always made herself the punch line of the story. “All her men graduates, ever after, Lame-Ducked on the wrong foot,” a friend remembered her telling him.
It was a good story, granted that it was also almost certainly an exaggeration. In all the annals kept by her friends and contemporaries, no one mentions Parker so much as sitting near a piano, not to mention doing any kind of dancing. Maybe she just gave it up. Maybe, as would happen to her later with writing, having to make money with her musical talents turned the whole activity sour. But perhaps, too, she exaggerated in the service of humor, because from the beginning humor provided a good escape. Her jokes would eventually give Dorothy Rothschild a legendary status as “Mrs. Parker,” a kind of avatar of the good time. Mrs. Parker always had a cocktail in her hand and had just dropped a quip on the party like a grenade.
But just as the noise and glitter of a party often hide miseries and frustrations, the same was true of Parker’s life. The stories that enchanted other people were carvings of a kind, taken from horrible experiences and offered up as fun. Even this jovial image of a piano-playing Parker sitting at the center of a bunch of people whirling to a beat hid anger and suffering. Parker clearly didn’t mind telling people she had been left penniless, because there was a certain heroism in having built herself up from that. But she much more rarely talked about her mother, who had died by the time Parker was five, or the hated stepmother who had followed. She also tended not to mention that when she left school at fifteen, it was to stay home with her increasingly ill and disoriented father. It would be nearly five years before his death would spring her from that particular trap.
Later, in a short story she wrote about the last day of “The Wonderful Old Gentleman,” Parker described the state of the (fictional) man thus:
There was no need for them to gather at the Old Gentleman’s bedside. He would not have known any of them. In fact, he had not known them for almost a year, addressing them by wrong names and asking them grave, courteous questions about the health of husbands or wives or children who belonged to other branches of the family.
Parker liked to present her father’s death as a tragedy and could sometimes sound bitter about how she’d been left to fend for herself: “There was no money, you see.” But the need for a job turned out to be a boon, the first time Parker would turn a bad experience into a good story. This was her gift: to shave complex emotions down to a witticism that hints at bitterness without wearing it on the surface.
After that experience, Parker apparently decided that all good fortune was a kind of accident. The business of writing happened by chance, she usually said. She wrote for “need of money, dear.” That wasn’t really the whole truth. Parker had composed verse from the time she was a small child, though it’s unclear exactly when she got the idea. She wasn’t a record keeper, and very few papers of hers survive. One of her biographers managed to lay hands on a few childhood notes to her father, which already had a budding writer’s voice to them. “They say when your writing goes uphill, you have a hopeful disposition,” she wrote to him once, referring to the slant of her handwriting. Then she added the sort of deflating remark that was to become her signature maneuver: “Guess I have.”
Talent can be a kind of accident sometimes. It can choose people and set them up for lives they never would have dreamed of themselves. But that was really the only kind of accident that had any hand in making Dorothy Parker a writer.
The first person who gave Parker a professional chance was a man named Frank Crowninshield. He pulled her from a pile of unsolicited submissions sometime in 1914. He may have recognized something of himself in her, perhaps her oppositional spirit. Though already in his forties by then and born a Boston Brahmin, Crowninshield was not like everyone else in the New York high society. He never married—perhaps because he was gay, though there is no firm proof of it. To all interested parties, Crowninshield presented himself as merely devoted to a troubled brother who was addicted to narcotics. He was known about town chiefly for his pranks, and for his stewardship of the first iteration of Vanity Fair, a once staid and proper men’s fashion magazine he was hired by Condé Nast to reinvent.
It was then still the early days of American magazines. Harper’s and the Atlantic Monthly were kicking around. But no one had yet invented the New Yorker, much less dreamed of catering to an audience more cosmopolitan than “the old lady from Dubuque.” Edward Bernays, a nephew of Freud’s who is often credited with the invention of public relations, had only begun his career in the fall of 1913. Advertisers were only beginning to have some idea of their eventual power in America.
Having so few models to emulate, Crowninshield’s Vanity Fair turned out something like its editor’s personality: tart and impertinent, particularly in regard to the very rich. Something—perhaps the sufferings of his brother, perhaps the clear fact that Crowninshield’s family had always possessed more prestige than money—had made him a critic of the well-off. But he was not much for fire-and-brimstone social criticism. His method, instead, was ridicule. Even his editor’s note to the first issue of the revamped magazine was sardonic:
For women we intend to do something in a noble and missionary spirit, something which, so far as we can observe, has never before been done for them by an American magazine. We mean to make frequent appeals to their intellects. We dare to believe that they are, in their best moments, creatures of some cerebral activity; we even make bold to believe that it is they who are contributing what is more original, stimulating, and highly magnetized to the literature of our day, and we hereby announce ourselves as determined and bigoted feminists.
This is the kind of irony that can easily fold back on itself and become confusing: Is this humor about feminism, then still a relatively new concept? Or is it humor in the service of feminism? Or is it empty ridicule, with no kind of political purpose? To me, it appears to be all three. One of the great pleasures of irony like this is being able to watch it refract in different directions. At least a few of those directions were paths women could walk down. When this first issue was published in 1914, women couldn’t even vote. But because Crowninshield liked to poke fun, he needed writers with oppositional viewpoints, people who didn’t quite fit into the recognized bounds of propriety.
A great many of that kind of writer also happened to be women. Anne O’Hagan, a suffragette, wrote about the alleged bohemianism of Greenwich Village. Clara Tice, an avant-garde illustrator who liked to claim she’d been the first woman ever to bob her hair, was an integral part of the magazine from the start. Marjorie Hillis, who by the 1930s had become an avatar of the single life for women everywhere, also published there in the early days of the magazine.
Parker would become the signature voice of the magazine, but it took a while to install her there. Crowninshield’s eye was caught by a bit of light verse she’d submitted. The poem is called “Any Porch,” and its nine stanzas present themselves as overheard remarks, the idea being they could be heard on “any porch” of the largely well-to-do and slightly well-informed. Stylized and relying on the moral prejudices of an early twentieth-century high society, it’s a bit of a clunker to modern ears. But it already bore the marks of Parker’s future preoccupations: her acid read of the confines of femininity and her impatience with those who spoke only in the clichés of received wisdom:
She’s un-moral, dear, not im- moral …
I think the poor girl’s on the shelf
She’s talking about her “career.”
Crowninshield saw something in this. He paid her five or ten or twelve dollars for the poem. (Her account, his, and those of others all differ on the amount.) This small success emboldened her to ask him for a job. At first he could not wrangle a job for her at Vanity Fair proper, so he found a place for her at Vogue.
It was not exactly an ideal fit. The Vogue of 1916 was a prim magazine for nice women with a lot of prim, nice writing in it. Parker wasn’t much interested in fashion, never had been. Yet at this magazine she found herself with a job that required her to hold passionate, almost religious views as to the merits of one fabric over another, as to the length of a hem. From her first days at the magazine she could not muster the energy. Late in life she’d try to present her memories politely. But she could not hide that she’d been as much a critic of her coworkers as she was of anything else. She told the Paris Review that the women at Vogue were “plain … not chic.” The compliments she had for them were never half so long as the insults:
They were decent, nice women—the nicest women I ever met—but they had no business on such a magazine. They wore funny little bonnets and in the pages of their magazine they virginized the models from tough babes into exquisite little loves.
Vogue was driven by the demands of the fledgling commercial clothing industry, a business that mostly pandered to and trivialized its customers. There was, even in this early period, a kind of marketing gloss to every article in the magazine, the copy always demanding the tone of a catalog. And with an admirable and wicked kind of prescience—it was still more than half a century before women would begin to revolt over the confines of dress—every move Parker made at Vogue undermined the idea that a beautiful outfit was the height of feminine sophistication.
To be fair to Vogue, the couple of years spent marinating in a subject she so plainly felt beneath her focused Parker’s wit. The writer of “Any Porch” wielded a pen like a hammer. The duress at Vogue made her sly and subtle. When, for example, she was assigned to write captions for the pen-and-ink fashion illustrations that took up most of the real estate in Vogue’s pages, she would thread a very fine needle. She might find the subject indescribably stupid, but her wit had to be wielded so subtly that the editor in chief wouldn’t catch any hint of Parker’s condescension to Vogue’s readers. This filigree work led to some truly brilliant captions—such as the famous one that affirmed that “brevity is the soul of lingerie.” Others poked even lighter fun at the elaborate undercarriage fashion required:
There is only one thing as thrilling as one’s first love affair; that is one’s first corset. They both give the same feeling of delightful importance. This one is planned to give something approaching a waistline to the straight sturdiness of the twelve-year-old.
Her editors noticed. Some of Parker’s captions were rewritten when her disdain cut too clearly through the text. And even though Parker’s manners were apparently impeccable, Edna Woolman Chase, the coolheaded editor in chief of Vogue, called Parker “treacle-sweet of tongue but vinegar-witted” in her own memoirs. It seems important that Chase also noticed the way Parker’s bite was hidden in subterfuge, delivered with honey. It echoes the picture a later friend, the drama critic Alexander Woollcott, would draw of the young Parker: “So odd a blend of Little Nell and Lady Macbeth.” Work simply poured out of Parker in those early years. She wrote almost as frequently for Vanity Fair as she did for Vogue, clearly angling for a job at the former. Vanity Fair just had more room for the kind of light, satirical, and more often than not forgettable verse that Parker seemed able to deliver by the gallon. She returned again and again to a form she called hate songs, light verse whose targets ran the gamut from women to dogs. Some of these could be quite funny, but mostly they took the form of raw complaint, and their harshness could grate. She did better when allowed to flesh out her talents at greater length in essays. Her vinegar wit did well when it was drawn out like that, a slow-acting acid eating away at the ridiculous subject. Her boredom, again, gave the pieces she was producing a finer edge.
In a November 1916 issue of Vanity Fair, Parker explained her singleness in a piece titled “Why I Haven’t Married.” It was send-up of the New York dating scene, apparently as hopeless in Parker’s era as it is in ours. She sketched the “types” a single woman found herself dining with in terms that still seem apt. Of Ralph, a nice man of unfailing solicitousness: “I saw myself surrounded by a horde of wraps and sofa pillows … I saw myself a member of the Society Opposed to Woman Suffrage.” Of Maximilian, a leftist bohemian: “He capitalized the A in art.” Of Jim, a rising businessman: “In his affections I was rather third—first and second, Haig and Haig; and then, third, me.”
Meanwhile “Interior Desecration,” published in the July 1917 issue of Vogue, sent Parker out in the world describing a bewildering visit to a home decorated by one (possibly fictitious) Alistair St. Cloud. (This visit was itself possibly fictional.) One room, we are told, is decorated in purple satin and black carpet, and contains “infrequent chairs, which must have been relics of the Inquisition.”
There was no other thing in the room, save an ebony stand on which rested one lone book, bound in brilliant scarlet.
I glanced at its title; it was The Decameron.
“What room is this?” I asked.
“This is the library,” said Alistair, proudly.
She was getting better all the time, landing more punch lines, hitting her targets with greater precision. Her talent had been obvious from the start but her skill had needed the time to develop. It also needed, it seems, the stimulation of Crowninshield’s admiration and attention. In the first years of her career Parker was more productive than she’d ever be again. The discipline of earning her own way—which she did even after she married Edwin Pond Parker II in the spring of 1916—suited her.
The man who gave Mrs. Parker his name was a young, blond Paine Webber stockbroker of good Connecticut stock, but like hers, the name implied more money than its holder possessed. Eddie, as he was known, was a person destined to come to us more through the lens of other people’s impressions than his own telling. But we know that from the start he was a drinker, a bon vivant, far more than his future bride. When she met him, Dorothy was a near teetotaler. Over the course of their marriage Eddie would get her into gin.
“From beginning to end, the process of getting married is a sad one for the groom,” Parker quipped in an article she wrote after her 1916 marriage. “He is lost in a fog of oblivion which envelops him from the first strains of the Wedding March to the beginning of the honeymoon.” And though she seemed by all accounts to love Eddie, she mostly left him to the fog. When America entered World War I a few months after their wedding, Eddie enlisted in an army company and went away to training and eventually the front. There, he apparently picked up a morphine addiction to pair with his alcoholism.
Eddie Parker’s problems made him a spectral presence in his wife’s history, a ghost she dragged along to parties, someone she shoehorned into a story or two, without ever quite conveying what might have attracted her to him. Crowninshield was finally able to get Parker to Vanity Fair in 1918, and when he did it was her prose he wanted. P. G. Wodehouse had been the magazine’s drama critic from the time of its rebirth, but he’d quit. Crowninshield offered Parker his job. She had never written a word about the theater, yet the drama critic of Vanity Fair bore a considerable burden for the magazine. In the early half of the twentieth century, fashionable, important people cared about theater reviews. Moving pictures were not yet ascendant forms of popular entertainment; live theater still created and nurtured actual stars. There was a lot of money and status to be toyed with, influenced, and considered—not to mention insulted—on the drama critic’s beat.
Perhaps that explains why Parker’s first reviews for the magazine were so tentative. The sure feet of the humor pieces suddenly lost their rhythm. She chatted nervously for the first few columns. In many of them, she spent little time describing the plays and musicals she was seeing at all. The very first, published in April 1918, devotes itself to a lengthy complaint about an audience member who spent most of the performance of a musical searching for a glove. It ends, abruptly: “So there you are.”
Confidence came, but gradually. Long windups began to be more reliably punctuated by fastballs. Parker’s aim improved, too. By her fourth column she was complaining about the “dog’s life” of a theater critic who often found herself wanting to review shows that had closed by the time the magazine appeared on store shelves. By her fifth column she was casting aspersions on the theater’s love of the trappings of war: “How will they ever costume the show-girls if not in the flags of the Allies?” Her barbs gradually took on her old elegant touch: “I do wish that [Ibsen] had occasionally let the ladies take bichloride of mercury, or turn on the gas, or do something quiet and neat around the house,” she would complain of the inevitable gunshots in a production of Hedda Gabler.
One source of her growing confidence was that at Vanity Fair Parker found herself writing for friends. Crowninshield understood her, as did the other editors at the magazine. Humor depends on a measure of shared understanding. Even when a joke is outrageous or transgressive, it can be that way only if there is some kind of consensus between joker and audience for its teller to transgress. And for most of Parker’s professional life, there was ready encouragement and approval from a circle of close friends and confidants. Almost all of them were men. Two Vanity Fair colleagues were particularly important. One was Robert Benchley, a maladroit newspaperman hired on as Vanity Fair’s managing editor shortly after Parker arrived from Vogue. The other was Robert Sherwood, a slimmer and quieter man whose reserve hid an equally devastating sense of humor. These three were an inseparable troublemaking trio at Vanity Fair.
They wrote their own legend, in every sense of the phrase. “I must say,” Parker admitted much later with an obvious note of proud wickedness, “we behaved extremely badly.” They liked pranks, especially ones that needled their bosses. A favored anecdote saw Parker subscribe to a mortuary magazine. She and Benchley loved morbid humor. They also loved how much Crowninshield flinched when he passed Parker’s desk and saw the embalming diagram she’d ripped from one of the issues and pinned up. They took long lunches, were late and refused to make excuses for it, and when Crowninshield left for Europe on a business trip with Condé Nast they got worse. They were not dedicated employees.
Their lazy ethos naturally extended to the Algonquin Round Table, that storied clique of writers and other assorted glamorous hangers-on who briefly gathered at the Algonquin Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. The Round Table formally began in self-indulgence, when Alexander Woollcott, then the drama critic for the New York Times, held a lunch to welcome himself back from war in 1919. Attendees enjoyed the occasion so much it was agreed they would continue. The group’s reputation long outlasted its actual existence, which was brief and ephemeral. The first references to the Round Table in gossip columns appear in 1922; by 1923 trouble is reported in the ranks, owing to anti-Semitic remarks by the hotel’s proprietor; and by 1925 the phenomenon was declared over.
Parker later became ambivalent about the Round Table, the way she tended to become about virtually everything she’d done that had been a success. She was not, as is sometimes said, the only woman at the table; journalists like Ruth Hale and Jane Grant and novelists like Edna Ferber were often there sharing drinks with the rest. But Parker was undoubtedly the person whose manner and voice were most closely associated with it. Her reputation dwarfed those of most of the men who were there, most of whose names are forgotten now. And because her wit was so pithy, she was the one most frequently quoted by the gossip columnists.
Uncomfortable with all of it, Parker would sometimes snap at interviewers who brought up the Round Table. “I wasn’t there very often,” she would say. “It cost too much.” Or she’d put the whole thing down: “Just a bunch of loudmouths showing off, saving their gags for days, waiting for a chance to spring them.” She was undoubtedly affected by the contemporary press, which was skeptical about, even critical of, the Round Table’s claims to literary might. “Not one [member] had given an impressive tone to literature nor had one fashioned a poem of consequence,” sniffed one gossip columnist in 1924. “Yet theirs was an attitude of superiority over conventional minds.”
Parker was perhaps protesting too much, selling her friends a little short. Their laughter at the hotel lunches and dinners was obviously a light prize, carrying little consequence. But it was a kind of fuel for other, greater things. The sort of willing audience Benchley, Sherwood, and the rest of the group provided was energizing for her. Never again would she write as much as she did during the Vanity Fair and Algonquin years.
Parker’s congenital inability to accept people’s self-images—as serious writers, as glamorous stars—haunted her as a critic. She was not a theatergoer who was easily satisfied; she was, in short, not a fan. Producers grew angry about the wounding remarks that appeared in Parker’s columns. The offense caused was always disproportionate to the insult, but that rarely mattered. The producers were advertisers as well as critical subjects. They could wield a club.
Sometimes Parker managed to anger them without even trying. The column that broke Condé Nast’s back was sadly not even one of Parker’s best. The show under review was a now-forgotten Somerset Maugham comedy called Caesar’s Wife. Its star was one Billie Burke, of whom Parker remarked:
Miss Burke, in the role of the young wife, looking charmingly youthful. She is at her best in her more serious moments; in her desire to convey the girlishness of the character, she plays her lighter scenes rather as if she were giving an impersonation of Eva Tanguay.
This was a subtler cut than usual. Yet it sent Flo Ziegfeld, the legendary Broadway producer and Burke’s husband, flying to his telephone with complaints. Eva Tanguay, for one thing, was an “exotic dancer,” or the 1920 equivalent. Billie Burke, meanwhile, had a squeaky-clean image. She is probably now best known for her role as Glinda the Good Witch in the 1939 MGM version of The Wizard of Oz. But the squalid implications may not have been what most offended Burke. She had just turned thirty-five when this review was published, and more than likely resented Parker’s jabs at her age much more than any implication of stripperhood.
In any event, Ziegfeld was only the latest to complain about Parker’s critical liberties, so Condé Nast insisted on a change. Crowninshield took Parker to tea at the Plaza and told her he wanted to take her off the theater beat. There is some quarrel over whether she resigned or was fired from the magazine entirely, the pendulum swinging back and forth depending on who you’re reading. She said she ordered the most expensive dessert on the menu, stormed out, and called Benchley. He immediately resolved to quit as well.
Benchley had become the most important person, bar none, in Parker’s life. It was his approval she wanted and his voice she emulated. Their friends wondered if they were having an affair but there seems to be no evidence of that. She was plainly just as important to him as he was to her, since he gave up that job while he had children to support. “It was the greatest act of friendship I’d known,” Parker said.
They were less angry about leaving the magazine than their dramatic exit suggested. They chose their own successors. Parker had pulled a very young critic named Edmund Wilson from the slush pile not too long before she left. When Crowninshield tapped Wilson to take over managing editor duties as Benchley’s replacement, she may have even been pleased. Her work would be back in Vanity Fair’s pages within a year of her being fired.
The handoff was smooth, punctuated with drinks at the Algonquin for the young and uninitiated Wilson, who was years from becoming the revered and “serious” critic of Axel’s Castle and To the Finland Station. Though invited to Round Table gatherings, “I did not find them particularly interesting,” Wilson wrote in his diaries. But he did find Parker intriguing, because of “the conflicts in her nature.” He distinguished her from the other Algonquinites because she could talk to serious people “on an equal basis.” Her “well-aimed and deadly malice” made her less provincial than the rest of the group. All this suited Wilson, who’d keep up their friendship for the rest of Parker’s life, even when she was washed-up and penniless. Wilson, unlike many men of his background and circumstances, really liked the company of sharp women. He couldn’t seem to resist the company of the truly clever.
Parker didn’t need to hold a grudge against Condé Nast, anyway. Forging out on her own, she never lacked for work now that she had a reputation. A magazine called Ainslee’s quickly hired her as its theater critic. Her light verse appeared almost weekly in newspapers and magazines all over town, the theater reviews monthly, and she was doing prose pieces besides. Throughout the 1920s she worked constantly. And though she’d say her verse never made her enough money to live on, she was managing to survive on her earnings and some form of contribution from Eddie; they were living apart by 1922, though they would not formally divorce until 1928.
So her work was certainly popular. But was it good? The poetry has suffered badly in that regard. The American appetite for light verse diminished, then disappeared by the 1930s, and admittedly its appeal is hard to see now. It seems clichéd, overwrought. Her usual subject was romance, too, which got her accused of sentimentality. Parker internalized the criticism and came to feel her poetry was worthless. But read carefully, and you can see flashes of brilliance in the verses that took on the world around her. Even her throwaway poems still pack punches, as in 1922’s “The Flapper”:
Her girlish ways may make a stir,
Her manners cause a scene,
But there is no more harm in her
Than in a submarine.
This was no random attack. Parker was taking quiet aim at her contemporaries. Her star had risen alongside that of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the chief mythologizer of flappers and flapperdom. His This Side of Paradise, a campus novel about a young student in love with a flapper, was published to huge sales and critical fanfare in 1919. It made him a star; it also made him, briefly, into a kind of oracle for his age. Parker knew Fitzgerald personally before he published the book, when he was still struggling. Still, after his success, the sort of figure he cut in the media irked her. In March 1922, Parker published a hate song called “The Younger Set”:
The ones who are going to put belles lettres on their feet.
Every night before they go to sleep
They kneel down and ask H. L. Mencken
To bless them and make them good boys.
They are always carrying volumes with home-cut pages,
And saying that after all, there is only one Remy de Gourmont;
Which doesn’t get any dissension out of me.
They shrink from publicity
As you or I would
From the gift of a million dollars.
At the drop of a hat
They will give readings from their works —
In department stores,
Or grain elevators,
Or ladies’ dressing-rooms.
Rémy de Gourmont, now mostly forgotten, was an enormously popular French symbolist poet and critic of the day. But here he is clearly a cipher for Fitzgerald, who was the true patron saint of Boy Authors. When This Side of Paradise was published, Fitzgerald was only twenty-four. And his contemporaries couldn’t help noticing him, and envying him. “It makes us feel very old,” complained another member of the Round Table who read the novel.
Did Parker envy him? She never admitted to it—always called Fitzgerald a friend and said she loved his work. But there are other hints she felt competitive. In 1921, she had published a parody under the title “Once More Mother Hubbard,” the idea being that this was the classic fairy tale “as told to F. Scott Fitzgerald,” in the pages of Life.
Rosalind rested her nineteen-year-old elbows on her nineteen-year-old knees. All that you could see of her, above the polished sides of the nineteen-year-old bathtub, was her bobbed, curly hair and her disturbing gray eyes. A cigarette drooped lazily from the spoiled curves of her nineteen-year-old mouth.
Amory leaned against the door, softly whistling “Coming Back to Nassau Hall” through his teeth. Her young perfection kindled a curious fire in him.
“Tell me about you,” he said, carelessly.
This parody, like all good ones, was the product of close attention to its target’s work. If there was jealousy here, there was also some pretty trenchant criticism. Fitzgerald did fetishize high-class “carelessness.” He was indeed sentimental about the Ivy League (“Coming Back to Nassau Hall” was a Princeton fight song). He was also fond of putting certain kinds of beautiful but not altogether together young girls in his heroes’ sights, most of them simulacra of his wife, Zelda Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald did not leave behind any response to the piece, but if he read it, he surely saw that some of its slings and arrows were well aimed.
That Fitzgerald’s treatment of women caught Parker’s eye was no accident either. Like a lot of Fitzgerald’s friends, Parker wasn’t particularly fond of Zelda. “If she didn’t like something she sulked,” Parker told Zelda’s biographer. “I didn’t find that an attractive trait.” Perhaps there was a feeling of competition: there are rumors of a sexual affair between Scott and Parker, though no proof of that survived. It was also something about image, about the way Zelda so often appeared to embrace a role Parker often resisted, so willing to be the press’s ultimate flapper. In the publicity wave that hit Scott after the publication of This Side of Paradise, Zelda was usually part of the package. She’d say in interviews that she loved Rosalind, the character based on herself. “I like girls like that,” she’d say. “I like their courage, their recklessness and spendthriftiness.” Parker, by contrast, thought the whole thing a sham, couldn’t give quotes like that, couldn’t relate.
Nonetheless, Parker and Scott Fitzgerald remained friends most of their lives. They were just too much alike, rarely solvent alcoholics who suffered from writer’s block. Eventually, too, he would come to agree with her both about the weakness of his earlier work and about the emptiness of Jazz Age excess. By the time Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby in 1925, he wouldn’t fetishize carelessness anymore. The flappers and scions of fortune were by then the cankers in their respective roses. But people were drawn still more to the shimmering mirage of places like Gatsby’s West Egg than they were to the reality that all the glitter was counterfeit. Gatsby was a commercial flop. People weren’t ready to hear that message from Fitzgerald in his lifetime. It wouldn’t become popular until it was revived by an armed services edition distributed free to troops during World War II.
Unlike Parker, Fitzgerald died young, only forty-four when the alcoholism conspired with a bout of tuberculosis to kill him in 1940. Parker lived almost thirty years longer than he did. When she went to see him in his casket she quoted a line from Gatsby at him: “That poor son-of-a-bitch.” No one caught the reference. By the late 1920s, Parker could not escape her own persona. She was in every newspaper, every magazine, everyone wanting to publish a poem, or a quip. In 1927, she released a collection of poetry called Enough Rope. To her surprise, and everyone else’s, it promptly became a bestseller. Her poems became so popular that their lines and rhythms morphed into commonplaces, things people would say to each other at parties to seem witty and impressive. “Almost anyone you know can quote, re-quote, and mis-quote at least a dozen of her verses,” complained a dour reviewer in Poetry in 1928. “She seems to have replaced Mah Jong, the crossword puzzle, and Ask Me Another.”
Her popularity was even more surprising because Parker’s poetry was not exactly relaxing to read. People simply loved the way she shocked them. There was something about her technique that, although repetitive, managed to deliver every time. Edmund Wilson, who had by then left Vanity Fair to become an editor at the New Republic, reviewed Enough Rope—it was not strange until relatively recently for literary friends to review each other—and gave an excellent summation of how a typical Parker poem worked:
A kind of burlesque sentimental lyric which gave the effect, till you came to the end, of a typical magazine filler, perhaps a little more authentically felt and a little better written than the average: the last line, however, punctured the rest with incredible ferocity.
The strategy had its drawbacks. Leading up to the zinger, the poems often use what look like clichés, purple language, the tools of what Wilson called “ordinary humorous verse” and “ordinary feminine poetry.” Reviewers often complained about Parker’s rote images, and often called her derivative for that reason. But they were missing something. When Parker used clichés, it was generally with a sense of their insufficiency; their emptiness was usually the joke. Nonetheless, she absorbed that criticism of her work, and often repeated it herself. “Let’s face it, honey,” she told her Paris Review interviewer, “my verse is terribly dated—as anything once fashionable is dreadful now.”
It bears mentioning this was not how Wilson, among others, saw her work at the time. In his review of Enough Rope he wrote that he noticed certain infelicities in the poems, but he also thought they had “the appearance of proceeding, not merely from the competent exercise of an attractive literary gift, but from a genuine necessity to write.” He saw the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay’s style in Parker’s work, but he found little similarity in their philosophies. The “edged and acrid style” Parker employed was something entirely her own, he insisted, and he felt it justified a lot of the weaknesses in her poems. He was certain it was a voice worth listening to.
Parker’s voice was self-hating, masochistic, but the abuse had a target beyond herself. You could call that target the confines of femininity, or the falseness of the myths of romantic love, or even, in poems like the world-famous “Résumé,” the melodrama of suicide itself:
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.
Though most of her readers didn’t know it, this poem was a bit of self-satire. Parker had first attempted suicide in 1922. She had chosen razors for the first outing. She had been despondent over a breakup with Charles MacArthur, a newspaperman who’d go on to write The Front Page, the template for the 1940s hit film His Girl Friday. At the bitter end of their affair, Parker had had an abortion. She did not pluckily pick herself up and recover afterward. Instead she seems to have told the story, again and again, sometimes not to the most sympathetic of audiences. A case in point: one of the people she chose to tell was a very young, very green writer named Ernest Hemingway.
Like Parker, Hemingway is now so famous it seems his genius must have been greeted with instant recognition, his reputation established the moment he published his first line. But when Parker first met him in February 1926, he was the author of a single collection of short stories, In Our Time, published by a tiny press called Boni and Liveright. The book did not make great waves in New York. Parker would later describe its reception as about as stirring as “an incompleted dogfight on upper Riverside Drive.” It was Fitzgerald who would suggest Hemingway to his own publisher, the richer and more prestigious Scribner’s. It was the negotiations over that first truly major book deal that brought Hemingway to New York in the spring of 1926, a deal that would eventually see Scribner’s publish Hemingway’s first truly successful book, the novel The Sun Also Rises.
So Parker and Hemingway did not meet as professional equals. By any measure of public acclaim, she was better known than he. This seems to have bothered him. It no doubt also bothered him that, having heard all his tales of the delightfully cheap life of the expatriate writer in France, Parker decided to prolong their acquaintance and sail back to Europe on the same boat as Hemingway. Over the next few months, she ran into Hemingway more than once on the Continent, in France as well as in Hemingway’s beloved Spain. And she clearly began to grate on Hemingway’s nerves.
Exactly what happened on that ship, and later in Spain and France as Parker and Hemingway met and talked, is lost. One of Parker’s biographers said she somehow insulted Hemingway by questioning the honor and suffering of the Spanish people, in that she had made fun of a funeral procession. Certainly, though, she also talked of MacArthur, and of her abortion. We know Hemingway resented these confessions, because he was so bothered by them he decided to memorialize his irritation in a poem he called “To a Tragic Poetess”:
To celebrate in borrowed cadence
your former gnaw and itch for Charley
who went away and left you not so flat behind him
And it performed so late those little hands
those well formed little hands
And were there little feet and had
the testicles descended?
The poem ends on what Hemingway plainly considered a devastating note: “Thus tragic poetesses are made / by observation.”
Parker may never have heard “To A Tragic Poetess.” She left behind no hint that she knew it existed. But her friends did. Hemingway read it aloud at a dinner party at Archibald MacLeish’s apartment in Paris, which was attended by the Round Tabler Donald Ogden Stewart and his wife. All present were reportedly appalled. Stewart himself had been in love with Parker at one point. He was made so angry by the poem that he promptly severed his friendship with Hemingway. Still, Hemingway clearly didn’t regret having written it. He kept a typescript of the poem among his papers.
Parker registered Hemingway’s disdain for her, even if she never heard the poem. And she could not simply brush it off. While not yet famous, Hemingway had the approval of a literary set whose approval she wanted too. Her ambitions were not as small as other people thought. Hemingway became a flash point for her. She apparently had a habit of asking their friends if they thought he liked her. Then she wrote two articles about him, a book review and a profile, both published in the then still fledgling New Yorker—both admiring, but written with palpable anxiety.
“His is, as any reader knows, a generous influence,” she wrote in the review. “The simple thing he does looks so easy to do. But look at the boys who try to do it.” She wasn’t normally that good with straight compliments. The profile, too, was filled with awkward and perhaps unintentional barbs. Parker kept remarking on Hemingway’s seductive effect on women, blaming his author photograph. She said he was overly sensitive to criticism, but that it was justified because “his work has begot some specimens that should be preserved in alcohol.” In the end she said he had surpassing bravery and courage, and praised him for calling that “guts,” instead. The whole thing reads like an apology that has gone on too long, making its recipient uncomfortable instead of forgiving.
As always, Parker excelled at internalizing the criticism of others. No one could hate Dorothy Parker more than she hated herself. That was something Hemingway did not understand. The New Yorker was then helmed by Harold Ross, another Round Tabler, who’d founded the publication in 1925. The magazine was meant to be a statement of sophisticated, metropolitan tastes, seeking an audience beyond that “old lady from Dubuque.” But Ross was never a particularly refined character. Though the staff of the New Yorker would eventually become devoted to him, he was rough around the edges. He couldn’t decide what he thought of women. On the one hand, he married a woman named Jane Grant, an avowed feminist whose beliefs likely explained why, in the early years of the New Yorker, men and women were published in roughly equivalent numbers. On the other hand, James Thurber, who would join the magazine in 1927, records Ross as continually blaming the incapacities of men on the “goddam women schoolteachers.” Parker enjoyed Ross’s complete confidence, but then she had already established a reputation before she began writing for him. In fact, she was far more instrumental in making the magazine’s reputation than it was in making hers.
For the first troubled years of the New Yorker’s existence she simply contributed the occasional short story or poem. It was only when Robert Benchley needed to bow out as a book reviewer for the magazine for a while, and Parker filled in, that she made the magazine a famous outlet. She wrote under Benchley’s chosen sobriquet: Constant Reader.
As a book reviewer, Parker was the queen of memorable one-liners. Her jab at the treacle of A. A. Milne, “Tonstant Weader fwowed up,” is still famous. But many of the targets of Parker’s most memorable insults—”the affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature”—are now forgotten by the larger public and thus often seen as beneath her notice. On that point Joan Acocella compared her unfavorably with Edmund Wilson, who was covering less popular but ultimately more important writers. “The Constant Reader columns are not really book reviews,” she wrote. “They are standup comedy routines.” This is slightly unfair owing to the aims of the different magazines, for the New Yorker never aspired to be the home of serious intellectual criticism; it aspired only to good writing. And good writing would always be easier to do in the context of a negative review, where it was possible to power through on jokes.
The comedy had smarter, more self-aware barbs than it’s typically given credit for. My favorite of Parker’s Constant Reader pieces isn’t really a book review at all. It’s a column, dated February 1928, about what Parker calls “literary Rotarians.” The objects of her ire are a class of people who hang around the literary scene in New York attending parties and speaking knowledgeably of publishers, and who may even be writers of a sort themselves. She identifies them as writing columns with names like “Helling Around with the Booksy Folk” or “Turns with a Bookworm.” In other words, they are posers, people who want to wear the trappings of literature without exercising any judgment: “The literary Rotarians have helped us and themselves along to the stage where it doesn’t matter a damn what you write; where all writers are equal.”
That someone with as cutting a mind as Parker’s might take offense at a literary Rotarian attitude can’t surprise anyone. But she was doing something more complicated and less abstract than simply defending the use of judgment in evaluating literature. After all, what Parker is writing here will be published under the rubric of a column called Constant Reader. She herself is known as a girl about town, albeit one who is producing poetry of a well-known sort. She could still be describing several members of the Round Table here, many of whom wrote under cuter-than-cute column names. Most of all she is describing what she seemed later to come to fear was true about herself: that she and most of her friends were simply working at trifles.
“I wanted to be cute,” she told the Paris Review in 1957. “That’s the terrible thing. I should have had more sense.” This feeling dogged Parker more and more as she became more successful. The knife had traveled inward, and instead of urging her to do increasingly better work, it shredded her will to do it at all. Parker was hardly alone in hating the “sophisticated” aesthetic of the 1920s by then. An article in the October 1930 Harper’s, for example, bade “Farewell to Sophistication,” and sideswiped Parker as a leading proponent of empty, useless “sophisticated talk.”
The disillusionment began to play out in earnest in 1929. Paradoxically, that year began with a career triumph: Parker published a short story that would win her the O. Henry Award, and prove her talent could be directed at fiction. But it plays like a parable of Parker’s disappointment with herself. The story is called “Big Blonde,” and the heroine, Hazel Morse, has hair a color Parker describes as “assisted gold.” Indeed, nearly everything about Hazel seems artificial, an act. We meet Hazel in middle age, after a successful youth spent entertaining men as a “good sport.” “Men like a good sport,” the narrator tells us, ominously. But Hazel tires of her own act—”she had become more conscientious than spontaneous about it”—and, growing older and less able to command the attentions of rich men, or to keep up the “good sport” appearance, secures a number of veronal tablets (a barbiturate, the 1920s version of Ambien) and botches a suicide attempt.
“Big Blonde” has obvious autobiographical elements. Parker had also tried (and failed) to commit suicide the same way, and she and Eddie had parted in the same mood of ambivalence that characterized the breakdown of Hazel’s marriage. The depth of Parker’s anguish, though, wasn’t entirely about Eddie Parker, or about men in general.
Neither Parker nor Hazel was man obsessed in the traditional sense. If anything, both the writer and her character were on the fence about men. They had an idea of what fulfillment would look like, and they thought men would be part of that. But in practice, men were disappointments. They offered only surface engagement and were looking only for “good sports” instead of whole human beings with desires and aspirations and needs of their own. The autobiographical resonance of the story isn’t in the details, then, in the number of tablets of veronal taken, in Hazel’s devotion to whiskey as succor, in the elements of the divorce that may have been drawn from Parker’s abandonment of Eddie. It’s in the overwhelming feeling of disappointment: in men, sure, but also in the world, and in herself.
That year Parker also received the first of several offers to go to Hollywood and fine-tune the dialogue in screenplays. As a noted wit, she was offered more than the going rate. She took an offer for three hundred dollars a week for three months. She needed the money, of course, but she was also longing for escape. And while she mostly hated Hollywood, found it as stupid as all her contemporaries did, she was reasonably successful there. She cowrote many successful pictures and even received a credit on the original 1934 version of A Star Is Born starring Janet Gaynor. For that she won an Oscar and made a lot of money. It bought a lot of gin and a lot of dogs—one of which was a poodle she called Cliché. Parker clearly took great comfort and enjoyment in the things this money bought, while they lasted.
The problem was that the work proved so lucrative it took up most of her time. She more or less stopped writing poetry altogether. Once in funds, she’d put out a short story. At first this worked well; she’d manage to publish a story every few months in 1931, 1932, 1933. Then it tapered off. Soon there were entire years between stories. She was given an advance for a novel at least once, but never finished it and had to return the money. She became the sort of writer whose communications with publishers consisted primarily of apologies. She could concoct the most charming “dog ate my homework” notes, as in this telegram from 1945 regarding some now-forgotten project she had going with Pascal Covici, an editor at the Viking Press:
This is instead of telephoning because I can’t look you in the voice. I simply cannot get that thing done yet never have done such hard night and day work never have so wanted anything to be good and all I have is a pile of paper covered with wrong words. Can only keep at it and hope to heaven to get it done. Don’t know why it is so terribly difficult or I so terribly incompetent.
There were a few soothing balms for her disappointments. First, there was her second husband, a man named Alan Campbell, tall and slim and actorly handsome, whom she married in 1934. He appointed himself the caretaker in their relationship, controlling her diet. He took such a strong interest in her outfits that others speculated about his sexuality. (Be that as it may, friends and observers always said that when the relationship was on, there was obvious physical attraction between them.) The course of the relationship did not always run smooth: the Parker-Campbells would divorce, then remarry, then divorce again, and ultimately Campbell would commit suicide in the small West Hollywood house they shared even in separation and divorce. But when it was good, it was very good.
Parker also found herself in politics—though many of her admirers would have said she was lost there, too. The spark was the late 1920s protests against the execution of the Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Known to the Boston police for their anarchist political activities, Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested on charges of murder and armed robbery—charges of which many American literary and political elites insisted they were wholly innocent. Along with the likes of the novelist John Dos Passos and the Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, Parker was a fervent advocate for Sacco and Vanzetti’s release. Ultimately the appeals of writers and politicians were ignored, and the men executed. But not before Parker was arrested at a march in 1927 and made numerous headlines before being released a few hours later. She pleaded guilty to “loitering and sauntering” and paid the five-dollar fine. When asked by the press if she felt guilty, she said, “Well, I did saunter.”
This first taste of protest gave her an appetite for more. In subsequent years Parker would attach herself to innumerable political and social causes. She began to have real sympathies with the un-unionized, participating in a protest of the plight of service workers at the Waldorf-Astoria. She was constantly appearing on the masthead of some new Hollywood political organization: the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, the Motion Picture Artists Committee to Aid Republican Spain, and eventually, too, the Screen Writers Guild.
Some found it hard not to question these newfound egalitarian convictions, given her frequent association with the glamorous and the rich. But whatever her present situation, Parker knew what it was like to have material comforts suddenly disappear. She could well have been drawing on her own occasional panics over finances in sympathizing with the plight of others. And no matter how much time she spent in the company of the rich, her eye for the ridiculous, honed all those years back by Frank Crowninshield, kept her from fully sympathizing with them.
Besides, her political ventures provided new avenues for self-criticism. Parker often used the seriousness of the social and political causes she now involved herself with to club her prior activities. She did so, for example, in an article she wrote for the New Masses, the journal of the American Communist Party, in 1937:
I am not a member of any political party. The only group I have ever been affiliated with is that not especially brave little band that hid its nakedness of heart and mind under the out-of-date garment of a sense of humor. I heard someone say, and so I said it too, that ridicule is the most effective weapon. I don’t suppose I ever really believed it, but it was easy and comforting, and so I said it. Well, now I know. I know that there are things that never have been funny, and never will be. And I know that ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon.
As the Depression waned and the country moved toward World War II, her self-flagellation intensified. In 1939, Parker gave a speech to the American Writers Congress, an openly Communist group, in which she elaborated on her disillusionment:
I don’t think any word in the language has a horrider connotation than sophisticate, which ranks about along with “socialite.” The real dictionary meaning is none too attractive. The verb means: to mislead, to deprive of simplicity, make artificial, to tamper with, for purpose of argument, to adulterate. You’d think that was enough, as far as it goes, but it has gone farther. Now it appears to mean: to be an intellectual and emotional isolationist; to sneer at those who do their best for their fellows and for their world; to look always down and never around; to laugh only at those things that are not funny.
There was some truth in this. “Sophistication” had its foibles, an obsession with surfaces, a casual quality. And yet the things Parker said and wrote turned out to be anything but ephemeral. People still send each other “Résumé.” They quote Parker’s criticisms of A. A. Milne and Katharine Hepburn. They remember that she said, in 1957, long after she thought she’d been wrung out as a writer: “As for me, I’d like to have money. And I’d like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that’s too adorable, I’d rather have money.”
But after Hollywood, after politics, nearly everyone who knew Parker well seems to have counted her a failure. The movies she worked on were thought to be beneath her. Her embrace of political sloganeering seemed devastatingly earnest in someone whose special skill was making fun of everything. Her ambitions to be a good short story writer were thought to wane because she never managed to repeat the success of “Big Blonde.” Perhaps worst of all was how these criticisms leaked into her assessment of herself: she was a successful writer by any standard, even a “good” writer, but it never sank in. By the mid-1930s, Parker seemed to believe herself as washed-up as anyone else. Her stories became halfhearted; she quit writing poetry altogether.
Others, without Parker’s punishing self-monologue, were easier with their praise. Reviewing a new and apparently surpassingly ridiculous book about the Russian mystic Rasputin in 1928, a writer by the name of Rebecca West said it had to be written by an American humorist. She identified in it “traces of the unique genius of Dorothy Parker,” whom she considered a “sublime artist.” West had particularly liked “Just a Little One,” a short story Parker published in the New Yorker some months before, a story about a woman who becomes so drunk in a bar she dreams of bringing a cab horse back to her apartment to live with her. West knew something of despair over men, and how to write about it.