INTRODUCTION

Dorothy Parker was beginning the new year cautiously jubilant. It was not only her escape from Hollywood after three months slaving for Cecil B. DeMille, but also the raves for “Big Blonde,” her just-published story that was to win the O. Henry prize for best short fiction of the year. When the thirty-five-year-old author sped home that January morning in 1929, she stepped off the 20th Century Limited at Grand Central Terminal and made straight for the Algonquin Hotel four blocks away. This redbrick and limestone building, on West Forty-fourth Street, was her home and her office; in fact, it was just about the center of her universe: two rooms for writing and having a few friends in for drinks. (“Please send up two bottles of White Rock and some ice.”)1 Robert Benchley, sometimes, talking poker and Heywood Broun bewailing IOUs, and randy John O’Hara looking to get lucky in Parker’s exclusive circle. Downstairs, parades of tourists hoping to lunch at the Round Table where the fast-talking, wisecracking literati once buzzed. Up the street, the Marx Brothers hyperventilating in a show called Animal Crackers. Around the corner, Ross driving poor Thurber mad at the New Yorker. Everywhere, illegal what-have-yous promising the real stuff. And in the midst of this hive fluttered Parker in her Hattie Carnegie cloches, the New Yorker thought to know everybody worth knowing, have everything worth having.

In the days that followed, the woman who had it all found herself being courted by a pair of wealthy young men offering the one thing she didn’t have: a published novel. Harold Guinzburg was twenty-nine, George Oppenheimer twenty-eight; both were charmers. Undeterred by limited experience in the book business, these privileged fledglings had founded the Viking Press with the lofty ambition of publishing works that would have “permanent importance rather than ephemeral popular interest.”2 Parker could see that the “kids” (as she liked to call them)3 were not merely engaging but exceptionally clever too. Already they had bought the illustrious B. W. Huebsch, consequently acquiring a backlist that numbered the early works of Joyce, Lawrence, and Anderson; next they launched a mail-order book club, the Literary Guild of America, to compete with the Book of the Month Club. Yet even so, after four years they remained a small house with an unremarkable track record, still shopping around or hustling for authors by practicing, whenever necessary, discreet poaching.

The intellectual of the team appeared to be Harold Guinzburg, bookish by nature, who was a family man and father of a little boy named Tommy. If Guinzburg’s tastes tended toward the highbrow, his partner’s interests were more attuned to the flash of show business. George Oppenheimer, known as “Georgie Opp,” swooped upon Parker in a rush of breathless “Dotty Darlings,” his effusive manner unusually close to the kinds of comic characters who sometimes appeared in her sketches.4 Although the dear boy could not have been sweeter, his maddening habit of tripping over himself to mention important people irritated her. One time, hearing a loud crash, she was overheard to say, “Pay no attention, it’s only George Oppenheimer dropping a name.”5

Around bowls of Fish House Punch at boozy publishing teas, at a Literary Guild party in the Viking office on Irving Place, the kids continued their pursuit. To entice a marquee author, who might well give them a best seller, they offered a contract with an advance against royalties to subsidize the writing. Bubbling with assurances, they confidently predicted that any novel coupling her literary gifts with her understanding of human complexities would command plenty of attention.

She naturally felt flattered as it was the age of the so-called Great American Novel (a story defining its era), and writing a GAN was the aspiration of practically every writer she knew. Anyway, short fiction was on its way out, she reported to readers of her New Yorker book column. People were likely to put down a volume of stories, sniffing “Oh, what’s this? Just a lot of those short things.”6 A case in point was Ernest Hemingway, whose In Our Time stories had attracted as much curiosity as an “incompleted dog fight on upper Riverside Drive.”7 His next works, however, The Torrents of Spring novella followed by The Sun Also Rises, rocketed him into the major leagues. Parker believed that any ambitious writer must graduate to long-form fiction.

Temptation aside, she nevertheless hesitated because it would mean leaving her current publisher, the imaginative showman Horace Liveright. Known as the house of Dreiser and Anderson, Boni & Liveright had released two collections of her verse, and both had become best sellers, always an impressive achievement for poetry. Besides, she was at the top of her game, and if she were to switch, a wiser choice might be Scribner’s, which was publishing some of her friends. F. Scott Fitzgerald urged his editor Maxwell Perkins to sign Parker while she was riding a hot streak: “I wouldn’t lose any time about this.”8

As it happened, Viking’s proposition had stirred up some old ambitions; above all else, her heart’s desire was to write a novel. In 1925, the year Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby, she had attempted one that drew on her early years as the daughter of a New York cloak and suit manufacturer, but discovered it was trickier than she thought. Subsequently, the material was revised and appeared as magazine stories. The kids’ enthusiasm, however, began to eat at her self-doubts. Could she really pass up this opportunity to reshape her career and to make critics take her seriously?

And so, inspired, she succumbed. In short order, Viking drew up a contract for a book with the tantalizing title Sonnets in Suicide, or the Life of John Knox (a sixteenth-century firebrand of a cleric who overthrew the Roman Catholic church in Scotland). Of greatest significance is not the curious title but a clause expecting delivery of the manuscript in under a year. Such a timetable, if unusual, was not totally unknown because John O’Hara several years later would write Appointment in Samarra in just four months. Parker, however, who was known to slap together one of her New Yorker columns over a weekend, wrote fiction at glacial speed. In her restrained, cut-to-the-bone style, she was a particularly fastidious writer whose method, she famously joked, was to set down five words and erase seven.

Which isn’t to say she was kidding. She had completed a draft of “Big Blonde” in a month, while housebound after an appendectomy, but then tinkered with it for another six months. The notion of her producing a full-blown book in a year was laughable, but this apparently did not occur to Harold and George.

Armed thus with the advance, soon Parker was on her way to France, which in 1929 continued to be the mecca for expatriate writers.9 Living abroad was not only a lot cheaper but would allow her to leave behind the hustle and bustle of Manhattan, those aimless parties and toxic love affairs that became so distracting. After a ruinous affair with an investment banker, whose dirty tricks had inspired some of her sharpest verses, she resolved to spend the rest of the year free from diversions. It was not too late for reform.

In the company of friends, the painter Allen Saalburg and his fashion designer wife Muriel King, she made a brief stopover in London where she couldn’t resist buying a fourteen-month-old Dandie Dinmont terrier named Timothy. In Paris, however, work on Sonnets had to be postponed due to illness, her ailment diagnosed as an enlarged liver (hepatomegaly) probably brought on by alcohol use. Just about all of June, “rotten sick,” she could hardly move from her hotel room.10 All she could do was see Ernest and Pauline Hemingway and mosey out to shop for chemises and panties every once in a while. To cheer herself up, she bought the most useless delight imaginable, a summer fur coat made of creamy unborn lamb, having “all the warmth and durability of a sheet of toilet paper.”11

Toward the end of June, though, her steadfast pal Robert Benchley showed up with his wife and sons. Bound for the French Riviera, the family planned to spend the summer with Sara and Gerald Murphy, a well-to-do American couple in their early forties who owned a villa in Cap d’Antibes, and Parker, knowing the Murphys slightly, needed no urging to join them.

Tucked away in the garden of Villa America was a guesthouse that became her home for the summer. The bastide, a tiny Provençal cottage with electricity and plumbing, was a sort of writer’s tree house, and it was in this sweet-scented retreat, within shouting distance of a busy household, that she discovered the perfect conditions for work. Typically an Olympian fussbudget, she could find nothing to complain about at Villa America, except the ripe purple fruit outside her window. She hated figs in any form.

Sara and Gerald Murphy were an enormously attractive couple full of panache and positive attitudes completely unlike Parker’s own cynical views. In their villa above the sea, set amid the Aleppo pines and shrubby eucalyptus, life was full of sugar. According to their philosophy, each day ought to be celebrated as special, each detail deserving of attention; it was the artistic, made-up part of life, and the imagination to live well, that truly had meaning, as Gerald later said. Inside their lollipop kingdom, whose simplicity was naturally built on a foundation of leisure and money, they appeared to be living very well indeed.

Not previously known for advocacy of childbearing or domesticity, Parker was nonetheless drawn into this odd, unconventional family in which caring parents put everything into bringing up their offspring. At La Garoupe beach, Sara (a string of pearls dribbling down her back) worked on her household accounts under a roof of umbrellas and Gerald calmly raked the sand of dead seaweed as their three sunny-haired, Botticelli-faced children played in the water. Interestingly, Parker seemed to draw a great deal of pleasure from the various activities of the youngsters who owned a menagerie of dogs, rabbits, turtles, and pigeons and demonstrated an unexpected sense of humor by naming a chicken after her.

So far she had written hardly a thing, but sanctuary in the bastide filled her with energy and she quickly made up for lost time. In July and August, her daily regimen included a dip in the freezing Mediterranean, keeping tabs on local crime news, and occasionally a jaunt to Antibes’s crowded watering holes, but mostly it was sitting at the typewriter and reminding herself that the important thing was to keep going. After a few weeks, continuing to pick up speed, she had a stack of finished pages and was sputtering comical prayers: “Dear God, please make me stop writing like a woman.”12 When Harold and his wife, Alice, turned up on vacation in Paris, she took a break to see them and to ask Viking for more cash. Soon afterward she returned to interview Hemingway, whose A Farewell to Arms had just been published, for a New Yorker profile.13 Otherwise there were no interruptions, and she celebrated her thirty-sixth birthday believing herself on the road to a reformed life of self-discipline.

Next door someone died during the night.

A short while ago, she had been rattling along on Sonnets, snug in the bastide amongst the fig trees, when the Murphys’ youngest boy was diagnosed with tuberculosis, the dread disease for which there was no cure in those days. Suddenly, they were shuttering Villa America and moving their household to Montana-Vermala, a health resort in Switzerland, for eight-year-old Patrick’s treatment.

She was packing for the journey home when, much to her surprise, Sara implored her to come along with them. At first, Parker could think of nothing to say. Aside from her unfinished book, she was not fond of mountains, which always made her feel “a little yippy.”14 Seeking advice, she wired Benchley who had been her confidant for a dozen years, but the “big shit” didn’t answer.15 Evidently, he wasn’t going to get involved.

Before she knew it, she was somehow living on top of an Alp, in a crowded, freezing sanatorium, listening to people die. For anyone rattled by death, Montana-Vermala was an eerie place. It was, she supposed, slightly better than the year before, the three months of 1928 when she had been stranded in Hollywood, but not much. Lacking entertainment of any kind, the former party girl had to settle for sensible shoes, sobriety, and a nine o’clock bedtime huddled together with Timothy for warmth.

If meeting Harold and George marked a watershed moment, even more pivotal was her decision to join the Murphy family as an unpaid companion because it would have consequences for the rest of her life. Had she gone home as planned, she would have forced herself to honor the Viking contract, perhaps not with a blockbuster, not even with a book that satisfied her, but at the very least with a work reflecting effort and boosting her self-respect as a writer.

Death-infested Montana-Vermala plunged her into depression, a paralysis so severe that she could not write and even reading was a struggle. “Write novels, write novels, write novels – that’s all they can say,” she wrote to Benchley, then added, “Oh, I do get so sick and tired, sometimes.”16 To her sister Helen, she admitted hating Switzerland but offered no regrets about her loyalty to “my best friends in bad trouble.”17 More than anything she wanted to finish “that Goddamn book,” but it was “terribly hard.”

Words refused to come; meanwhile, what she had done over the summer suddenly looked horrible, and before long she began tearing up pages. Despite her desperation, none of it shared with Viking, she lied to Harold and said that she was hard at work. His reply simply reinforced her guilt. Mail the manuscript special delivery, he told her, and remember to include a bio for the dust jacket. He persisted in calling the book a best seller.

At Christmas, feeling practically catatonic after two months in Montana-Vermala, she was able to escape her misery for a few days. Making their way to the mountain came some of the old gang: Ernest and Pauline Hemingway and Pauline’s sister, Jinny Pfeiffer; John Dos Passos and his new wife, Katy. This was 1929, the year when Wall Street fell apart and who knew what that was going to mean, perhaps merely a footnote of history, perhaps not. As in better days, there was laughter again as everybody gathered around singing carols and drinking the local Riesling, their holiday supper complete with a plum pudding and a handsome goose shot by Ernest. But not long afterward an agitated wire from Viking warned Parker that the spring catalog was closing. Where was the manuscript?

The honorable resolution to this ugly situation, she decided, would be to make a fast trip home and confess to the kids that her life had temporarily come apart and she needed more time to meet her obligations. February 1930 found her at the New Weston hotel in New York, being interviewed by a herd of reporters fishing for colorful observations on the state of the union. Over martinis in her suite, she plopped on a sofa and insisted that she was a writer, not a comedian. Her stay would be brief in that she was rushing back to Switzerland to finish a novel.

Did Mrs. Parker care to reveal the subject?

She did not. Honestly, she hated writing “more than anything else in the world.”18 Brushing off the dumb questions people were always asking her, she hastily turned into a prima donna. Raising a glass, she burst out “put a little more gin in mine,” before losing patience and shooing everyone out the door.

Numbed by shame, she never did manage to level with the kids. They had been kind to her, but she had let them down in the most disgraceful way – she had no illusions about that – and all she could do now was shrink away from the unbearable truth. Lacking proper equipment for cutting a vein or two, with no access to arsenic either, she instead turned to a commodity close to hand and tried to poison herself by drinking a bottle of shoe polish (at the time containing the highly toxic chemical nitrobenzene). Ingestion of polish could be, and often was, fatal, but Parker, while going too far, did not go far enough. Extremely ill during the winter of 1930, she was hospitalized and recovered, though the story went around that what she really drank was silver polish, as if that would have made a difference.

Shocked, facing an unheard-of predicament, an author who had tried to self-destruct over a late manuscript, George and Harold came up with a plan to postpone Sonnets and substitute for its spring 1930 list a collection of her published short stories and sketches. Laments for the Living tied together some of her most gripping work: daring tales like “Arrangement in Black and White” that presaged the convictions of a person who one day would bequeath her estate to a civil rights organization; two stories (“Little Curtis” and “The Wonderful Old Gentleman”) salvaged from her abandoned 1925 novel; and the beautifully wrought “Big Blonde.”

In the winter of 1930, Viking Press had no reason to doubt that it would ultimately publish her novel. (She must have known better.) Certainly, she was not ready to begin writing again anytime soon. Out of some wildly misguided notion that the Murphys could not get along without her, magnified by her own reluctance to address her difficulties, both personal and professional, she made plans for returning to Montana-Vermala. The family, meanwhile, had left the sanitarium once their son’s condition improved and were living in a chalet; Dottie would find lodging in a nearby pension.

The subject of Sonnets in Suicide? There’s no way of knowing, but it would seem to be the messy lives of single women who drink too much and seek love from jerks, with the main character recognizable as Parker herself, the most autobiographical of writers. Presumably, it would revisit themes of importance to her, the bigger picture of female independence and the routine tension between the sexes. As the title implies, the narrative probably detailed the complex inner life of a misfit poet who had not yet come to terms with existence, whose fantasies of suicide lay curled inside each lyric, her head throbbing with the fury of a modern-day John Knox. Certainly, Sonnets would have reflected the world as Parker knew it, reckless, money-mad New York in the 1920s, whose excesses Fitzgerald had examined in The Great Gatsby but here viewed from the unique viewpoint of a Dorothy Parker character instead of a sexually uncertain bond salesman. Parker’s big blonde, Hazel Morse, could easily have been a convincing character in Gatsby.19

By June, Parker was back in Switzerland observing the fate of Laments for the Living from a distance. Although the book became an immediate success and went through four editions the first month, sales failed to interest Parker whose expectations had risen to unrealistic heights. She needed praise. Reviews were generally positive, but a few panned the stories as slight. “Sharply keen in so far as it goes,” the New York Times reported, adding that its range of subjects was limited, which seems a peculiar put-down for a collection that includes “Big Blonde” and “Arrangement in Black and White.”20

Parker told herself that the notices were “beyond words awful.”21 On the heels of her failure to complete Sonnets in Suicide, any nasty comments added to her pain. “You think you’re not going to care, but you do, somehow.”22 When she wrote George Oppenheimer that she felt sickened (actually, enraged), he refused to sympathize. For shame, he scolded, because readers were “drinking magnums of champagne in your honor.”23 After that she retreated into silence and sent no further personal letters until one day during the first week of September 1930, when she rolled a sheet of paper into her new German typewriter and typed, “Kids, I have started one thousand (1,000) letters to you” and tore them up because her life was so dull.24 But in honor of what she cheerfully called “Alpine Giggle Week,” she was going to give it another try.

Her rambling saga of that summer is addressed to George and Harold along with several mutual friends (Muriel King, Allen Saalburg, and Marc Connelly) and is a rare example of her unbuttoned humor. The longest letter she ever wrote, probably the funniest, and surely the bitchiest, it is vintage Parker that demonstrates what her friend S. J. Perelman meant when he said she was hard to quote because so much of her humor, while irresistible, was almost religiously offensive. Parker would forever cherish the Murphys, but damn near everyone else in Alpine Giggle Week is not so fortunate.

During her first visit to Montana-Vermala, the TB patients had aroused every iota of her natural sympathy. Nine months later, however, her pity for “the sicks” had hopelessly curdled, and she makes fun of their posturing and sense of entitlement simply because they happen to be dying. Repeating one of their corny puns – “T.b., or not t.b., that is the question” – she loosens up and blasts a blitzkrieg of stink bombs against “the lung-ers.” Their names are freely offered, of course. (The baroness who shares her bed with men, women, dogs, or ducks, “with equal good-humor,” is a real person.)25

Projected against this morbid setting is not solely Parker’s own self-portrait but unsanitized sketches of her famous friends. There is Hemingway who has sent her a “lovely, lovely” letter about how much he likes Laments for the Living, which means a great deal to her coming from a writer whom she regards hugely in spite of his blood-and-guts machismo. There is Fitzgerald, who pops in after depositing his wife in a Swiss sanitarium and who evokes nostalgic memories of the couple at the time of their marriage along with sorrow over their recent circumstances (“Ah, hell,” she erupted. “If I were a God, I’d be a God.”).26 She writes about Sara and Gerald Murphy, intimate observations revealing the impossible burdens their son’s illness has placed on their lives, and there are glimpses of the healthy son, eleven-year-old Baoth, who has managed to annoy Parker to the point where she feels like shoving him off an Alp. “Oh kids, kids, have I got a bellyful of Baoth!”27 She shows no remorse about unmasking him, only partly in jest, as “a thief, a liar, a bully.” Neither can she resist a cheeky aside that the curriculum of a certain Lausanne boarding school, where it turns out Baoth won’t be going after all, is said to include sodomy.

The summer’s high point is the arrival of Robert Benchley. His first night in Montana-Vermala the two of them get drunk (on champagne with shots of cognac) and stroll through the streets shouting Harvard fight songs. With Sara and Gerald, they spend a grand week in Venice before continuing on to Munich, where she buys the typewriter and another dog, this one an aristocratic dachshund puppy she names Robinson.

Alpine Giggle Week ends on a pleading note: please write, she says, because “any news is big news here.”

In September melancholy hung over Montana-Vermala. No more visitors appeared and everybody’s health began to unravel, with a frazzled Sara developing jaundice and rheumatism, and Parker shattering a kneecap and dislocating a thumb. Gerald, sliding into one of his hopeless moods, departed abruptly on a trip to the States, and when he got back he consulted a Jungian analyst. Two months went by. Feeling more miserable each day, Parker finally sent a telegram to Benchley: she was sailing from Cannes on November 15, “and will I be glad to see you dearest Fred.”28

Immediately upon her return, Viking Press threw a home-coming party that brought out practically everybody she had ever known. To get her back they’d had to wire $2,000 for her bills and passage, but it was worth every penny because six months later they were to release her third best-selling volume of verse, Death and Taxes. In January 1931, when her New Yorker column appeared for the first time in twenty months, she sprayed readers with a volley of jokes. “Maybe you think I was just out in the ladies’ room all this time.”29 God help her if it sounded chauvinistic, but after immaculate Switzerland, where nobody was under the age of seventy-five, swarming, polluted New York seemed heavenly. “Oh, this is a lovely city you have here!”

Lovely perhaps, but once that initial euphoria wore off, it was a struggle to rebound, and she backslid to the sort of madcap life she used to lead. She never got over her failure to complete Sonnets, indeed the fiasco permanently eroded her self-confidence as a serious writer. The most chaotic year was 1932, when the Great Depression was enveloping the wider world, and a foolish romance led to another suicide attempt. But soon came a dramatic turn that set her life whirling in a different direction altogether: she fell in love with a handsome actor eleven years her junior. After their marriage, Parker and Alan Campbell decamped to Hollywood where they became a fabulously paid, Oscar-nominated screenwriting team. Thanks to a brand-new career, she could own a Picasso and a farm in Pennsylvania while also engaging in work on behalf of the Communist Party. Never again would she attempt to end her life, despite a future that held as many thorns as roses. Even if her ambition to do a novel ended in failure, she succeeded as a writer of pretty near everything else: screenplays, short fiction, verse, song lyrics, criticism, stage plays – all told an impressive résumé.

For the Murphy family, who felt safe leaving Montana-Vermala but never returned to their fairy-tale life at Villa America, the 1930s brought additional suffering. In the real America, they settled in Saranac Lake, New York, and Gerald took charge of his family’s leather goods business, but they were fated to bear the crushing blows that Hemingway would describe as “the very worst end that all bad lucks could go.”30 In 1936, Baoth died suddenly of meningitis, and his brother finally succumbed to tuberculosis a year later.

The young go-getters at Viking, meanwhile, had turned thirty. As their firm continued to thrive, Guinzburg and Oppenheimer remained hopeful, in spite of everything, that Mrs. Parker would complete Sonnets in Suicide.

Viking Press over the years went on to become a distinguished house that remained true to its original creed (fiction of “permanent importance”) and whose history would subsequently include five Nobel Prizes for Literature, numerous Pulitzers and National Book Awards, and the publication of major writers such as John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, and J. M. Coetzee. For the last eighty-four years, Viking has continued to publish the work of Dorothy Parker.

George Oppenheimer, dissatisfied with book publishing, left the company in 1933 for a screenwriting career. But before his departure he wrote a Broadway comedy featuring a character whose mannerisms, quite obviously, suggested Parker’s. Her friend Bennett Cerf, who escorted Parker to the opening of Here Today, was expecting fireworks. Backstage, he recalled, she hugged Georgie Opp: what a wonderful show; how cleverly the dear boy had captured her foibles. Moments earlier, however, she had been ready to skin him alive.

Regrettably, everything connected with Parker’s ambition to write a Great American Novel has evaporated. Not so much as a paragraph of the mysterious manuscript survived. In the 1970s, Harold Guinzburg’s son and successor, Thomas, reported that Sonnets in Suicide remained the longest unfulfilled contract in the company’s history. By 2013, a search by Viking’s contracts department was unable to locate the agreement, so deep had it sunk into the Sargasso Sea of publishing.

—Marion Meade