CONTENTS

About the Author

About the Book

Title Page

Copyright Page

Author’s Note

•

THE LAST DAYS OF DOROTHY PARKER

Prologue:

The Big Crack-Up

Chapter 1:

Times Square (1931–1933)

Chapter 2:

Beverly Hills (1934–1935)

Chapter 3:

Foreign Lands (1936–1950)

Chapter 4:

Norma Place (1951–1963)

Chapter 5:

Upper East Side (1964–1967)

Chapter 6:

Ferncliff (1967)

Chapter 7:

Wall Street (1968–1976)

Chapter 8:

Baltimore (1977–1988)

Epitaph:

Laughter and Hope and a Sock in the Eye

•

Appendix:

The Hunt for Dorothy Parker’s Worldly Goods

Source Notes

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE LAST DAYS OF DOROTHY PARKER

MARION MEADE is the author of Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? and Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties. She has also written biographies of Nathanael West, Woody Allen, Buster Keaton, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Victoria Woodhull, and Madame Blavatsky, as well as two novels about medieval France. For Penguin Classics, Meade has edited The Portable Dorothy Parker and has introduced Parker’s Complete Poems, The Ladies of the Corridor, and Alpine Giggle Week.

ABOUT THE BOOK

The Volney was a dignified residence hotel, favored by older women and their dogs, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Dorothy Parker died there, of a heart attack, on June 7, 1967. She was seventy-three and had been famous for almost half a century. As befitted a much-loved humorist, poet, and storywriter, the New York Times announced her exit in a front-page obituary. This was followed by a star-studded memorial service, also reported in the paper, which was attended by some 150 of her friends and admirers. More than twenty years later, on October 20, 1988, Parker was buried in Baltimore, in a memorial garden at the national headquarters of the NAACP. Why did it take more than two decades for Dorothy Parker to get a decent burial? What accounts for her macabre Edgar Allan Poe–style ending, arguably one of the most ghoulish in modern literary history? And just what happened to her during those twenty-one years?

Dorothy Parker biographer Marion Meade draws from new research to portray Parker in her last years and last days, with an emphasis on her posthumous existence. The story also features Parker’s enduring friendship of over thirty years with playwright and screenwriter Lillian Hellman, along with other notable figures in Parker’s circle, including Dashiell Hammett and John O’Hara. Always riotous and occasionally ghastly, The Last Days is utterly and completely Dorothy Parker.

THE LAST DAYS OF

DOROTHY PARKER

•

The Extraordinary Lives of

Dorothy Parker and Lillian Hellman

and How Death Can Be Hell on Friendship

•

Marion Meade

A PENGUIN SPECIAL

PENGUIN BOOKS

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First published in Penguin Books 2014

Copyright © 2014 by Marion Meade

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ISBN 978-1-101-62721-1

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AUTHOR’S NOTE

It is rare in the literary world to find close friendships between writers – Hawthorne and Melville readily come to mind as well as James and Wharton – but an intimate thirty-year bond between two renowned women is extraordinary. What is noteworthy about the relationship of Dorothy Parker and Lillian Hellman is not just its length but also the surprising sequel, a preposterous comic operetta that began with Parker’s death in 1967.

When I was winding up a biography of Parker in the winter of 1987, I believed my subject had been buried two decades earlier at a cemetery in Westchester County, New York. By pure happenstance, I discovered this to be untrue. She was not interred at Ferncliff and furthermore was not a resident of any graveyard. In a peculiar twist of fate, the place to which she had found her way was truly creative, a shade chilling but no doubt the sort of gallows humor that she herself might have considered amusing.

Why did it take so many years for Parker to get a proper burial? What accounts for her Edgar Allan Poe–style ending, arguably one of the spookiest in modern literary history? What happened to her during those twenty-one years?

This story is not about Parker alone but Parker side by side with Hellman. It traces the life and death of two fiercely headstrong women, how their closeness endured over decades as each of them struggled to find their place in the world, how paths that had flowed comfortably parallel for years on end gradually diverged until only threadbare memories remained.

During the good times, an endless parade of particularly interesting people swept into – and out of – their lives: Dashiell Hammett and Alan Campbell, of course, but also larger-than-life characters such as Ernest Hemingway, John O’Hara, S. J. Perelman, Mary McCarthy, Samuel Goldwyn, Gloria Vanderbilt and Wyatt Cooper, Zero Mostel, Nora Ephron, William Styron, among others. Indeed, was there anyone in the fast lane they did not meet or know or admire, sleep or quarrel with? In the view of some, the friends eventually resembled an old married couple together so long that the prospect of change would be unlikely. But this notion, alas, turned out to be fanciful.

Afterward none of it seemed to matter because – fantastic but true – death can be hell on friendship.

Prologue

THE BIG CRACK-UP

Everyone was fox-trotting to “I’ve Got the World on a String” when F. Scott Fitzgerald composed a eulogy for the 1920s, a joyful ten-year period that was obviously “as dead as were the Yellow Nineties in 1902.”[1] His essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” was both a farewell and a confession of his own failure and despair. “Somebody had blundered and the most expensive orgy in history was over.”

As he published those words, in Scribner’s Magazine, it was November, 1931, and he was broke, cracked up, a Gatsby in pieces. The spree that had “bore him up, flattered him, and gave him more money than he had dreamed of” had dissipated into a blur of memory:

Good-bye to the whoopee flappers and their hip-flask Romeos.

Good-bye to speakeasies that served Bushmills Irish Whiskey in thick white mugs.

Good-bye to knees, round and rosy, that had disappeared, again, as skirts dropped.

Good-bye to the Oak Park boy, at La Closerie des Lilas in Paris, using lead pencils to write clean sentences in blue notebooks.

Good-bye to the Black Bottom and “Basin Street Blues.”

Once the music died, bankers and brokers jumped from buildings in Times Square, and the homeless lined up below for bowls of lukewarm soup with a hunk of bread. The rest of the country was waiting for the cure. It was simply a matter of time before the market went up – wait until spring, folks insisted, wait and see – and then everything would be normal somehow.

But would it? The big money was gone, the expatriates limped home, hemlines plunged, even the end of Prohibition rolled into sight. About the only thing that had not changed were people trying to get as inebriated as possible, a condition that Fitzgerald in particular knew all too well.

That same month his epitaph for the Jazz Age appeared, two women showed up one evening at a cocktail party in Greenwich Village. One was an inch short of five feet, neatly made, and a somebody; the other stood half a head taller, shapely, and nobody of importance. Publishing parties that fall of 1931 were crowded with perfectly nice people in the midst of noisy breakdowns, spilling drinks, stubbing out butts in empty glasses, and laughing too heartily. And so when one of the women noticed a writer of the most incredible detective novels, when she turned to him and abruptly dropped to her knees and grabbed the man’s hand – actually, she kissed it – this set off whoops of laughter.

Standing nearby, the writer’s girlfriend had turned away. That night after the party, she began yelling at him that he made her feel sick. How could she live with a man who just stood and simpered when a famous woman kissed his hand in public? He had loved it, she remembered saying, admit it.

Don’t be crazy, he said. He’d hated it.

She was through with him, she cried.

Go ahead, he told her. Leave.

This particular evening remained stuck in her memory. It wasn’t the “wacky-tipsy fight”[2] because Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett were always getting drunk and fighting about one thing or another. It was the hand-kisser, who would become her lifelong friend, against all the odds.

Chapter 1

Times Square

(1931–1933)

There were times when she got tired of everything but if you talked like that, people usually wanted to know what was wrong. Didn’t she feel well? So she once put it into verse – “This living, this living, this living / Was never a project of mine” – and handed the poem to her friend Frank Adams at the World, who published it in his column.[3] Later, “Coda” would be collected in a volume of verse and made readers smile, she was told, so she supposed it was decent. Poetry hadn’t changed the feelings, though, except that she was better at pretending now.

For many years Dorothy Parker had lived in a Midtown Manhattan hotel, home of the legendary Algonquin Round Table, going out each night to shows or clubs or cocktail parties, ending up at her favorite speakeasy, Tony Soma’s, where she held court in a cloud of cigarette smoke and downed copious amounts of Scotch, toddling home bleary-eyed in the predawn hours and waking up with historic hangovers that belonged, she said, in the goddamn Smithsonian under glass.

By this time the Round Table where she had gathered with her great friends Alexander Woollcott and Robert Benchley was gone, their ten-year lunch fading into myth and memory. But to the general public, she continued to be America’s sweetheart, a poet and short-story writer with a finely tuned ear and a cheeky wit, loved for indelicate confessional verses, for tortuous romances and cynical wisecracks. Because she was one-of-a-kind, fan mail addressed to “Mrs. Dorothy Parker, New York City” could be sure of delivery. Who, besides the post office, did not know that she published in the New Yorker, just as she lived at the Algonquin Hotel in Times Square? Or that her love life was in chaos as usual, her beaux being legion in quantity, low in quality, as she continued to wait for Prince Charming.

Rather surprisingly, only a portion of her work demonstrated the signature humor for which she had become famous, but instead many verses showed how she had shaped her obsession with loss and death into deceptively plain commentary. “Observation,” published in Enough Rope, 1926, was a love poem to freedom that disregarded the boundary between recklessness and self-destruction:

If I don’t drive around the park,

I’m pretty sure to make my mark.

If I’m in bed each night by ten,

I may get back my looks again.

If I abstain from fun and such,

I’ll probably amount to much;

But I shall stay the way I am,

Because I do not give a damn.[4]

Of course she didn’t. Because she was being Dorothy Parker. At the age of 39, it was she (and Edna St. Vincent Millay) who personified the postwar woman: smart, glamorous, and sexually liberated, one of those tough cookies who did as she pleased. “And if you do not like me so, / To hell, my love, with you!” she wrote.[5] This militant ode to female independence had become one of her best loved verses.

Since she wrote autobiographically, readers liked to think they knew her.

They didn’t, because she was good at using confession to hide some parts of her life and humor to camouflage the rest. She once described herself as “just a little Jewish girl trying to be cute.”[6] She was adorable without trying, though, a pocket-size girl never growing any taller than four feet eleven, with a skinny body and dainty feet, dreamy dark eyes and a cotton-candy voice, seldom silent. Everything about her was sugared except a demonic tongue that willfully provoked the nuns at her convent school – she insisted that the Immaculate Conception was spontaneous combustion – and a great many people thereafter.

Late one night the bartender at Tony’s asked what she was having.

“Not much fun,” she told him.[7] She wished to God that she could quit writing light verse, but how? She was too famous. What would Susan B. Anthony do? What would Attila the Hun do?

Two years into the Depression the country had fallen on hard times. Yet Dottie’s difficulties had little to do with the wider world and its crazy pileups of lost jobs, bank closures, and breadlines. Most of her worries were personal – overdue rent, deadlines, memorable hangovers, missed periods, not necessarily in that order – and she would remember 1932 quite clearly as “this year of hell” when life was a ghastly mess.[8] Tragedies don’t kill you, she decided, “it’s the messes. I can’t stand messes. I’m not being a smart-cracker. You know I’m not when you meet me – don’t you, honey?”[9]

•

Not giving a damn meant sleeping with youngsters sometimes. John McClain was a good-looking, muscular fellow of the sort that stands out in a crowd, a reporter for the New York Sun who had been a football star at Brown. Dottie met him through one of her regular drinking companions, a writer she knew by the name of John O’Hara. Having taken a liking to young O’Hara, deciding he was a straight shooter (he wasn’t always), she figured that his friend must be similarly trustworthy. The main problem with this John McClain was his age: twenty-seven.[10]

For a while, everything was marvelous. John was bright, sweet, and treated her with reverence, obviously flattered to be seen with a successful writer, an eager escort on her regular nocturnal rambles. But gradually, even while swearing his love, he turned snippy and complained that she wanted too much. There were times when he disappeared, for no good reason, when she feared he was bored with her and seeing other women. Well-intended friends warned that lover boy was on the make and plainly using her to meet rich women. Dottie refused to listen. She believed that John was not a bad person, simply immature and starstruck by the literary crowd.

Finally, she had to stop defending the rascal. One weekend he hurried off to Long Island and the home of a rich socialite, as if to remind Dottie that he was a bachelor and could spend time with anybody he pleased. Pretending, she tried to make light of the rival. How could she compete? Let’s face it, she didn’t own a squash court. Not even a swimming pool. He would return “as soon as he licked all the gilt off her ass,” she laughed.[11]

Before the relationship collapsed, there were awful screaming matches. Just so everybody would know, she called him, publicly, a male whore because it was a fact. He, ungentlemanly, called her a rotten lay, which was an absolute lie.

In a perfect world, those who claim to love you do not go away without warning, forever. The sudden death of her mother, Eliza Marston Rothschild, the year Dottie was just five had left her permanently marked. Dark valleys of depression, she discovered, could be transformed into jokes, verses, stories. The grown Dottie found out about alcohol and learned how to anesthetize herself with industrial-strength Scotch. (She loved gin, brandy, and champagne, but loved Scotch more.) Although nobody called her an alcoholic to her face – she would have denied it – she was to some degree on her way to becoming one. With a couple of drinks under her belt, life seemed nicer; with a lot of drinks there seemed no need to think at all.

At the end of February 1932, sunk into a deep depression, she finally reached rock bottom. In a scribbled note, she gave her clothing, watch, and dachshund Robinson to her sister, Helen, and to cheating John McClain, who cared nothing for her, she left her book royalties. A heap of misery, she swallowed barbiturates and pulled the covers over her head at the Algonquin.

Not enough pills, it turned out, because the next day she found herself in Presbyterian Hospital getting her stomach pumped. It was to be her final effort to shoo herself out of this life, after previous ineffectual attempts with razor blades, pills, and shoe polish. She had never been able to get the hang of a foolproof suicide technique. In “Resume,” she wrote: “You might as well live,” which was to say the matter involved complicated decisions.[12]

After the parting from John McClain, which had turned out so badly, she steered clear of emotional involvements and concentrated on work. Between 1932 and 1933, she produced some of her sharpest stories, including “From the Diary of a New York Lady,” “Glory in the Daytime,” “Horsie,” and “Here We Are.” There were glimpses of the past in “Dusk Before Fireworks,” in which a controlling woman struggles to salvage her affair with a handsome scoundrel, where the made-up characters closely mirror the real-life ones. But mainly she tried not to look back.

Meantime, her association with the New Yorker, the magazine she had helped make a success, seemed to be deteriorating. Harper’s Bazaar, which paid much better, would publish six stories, and soon she would also quit her popular New Yorker book column.

Professionally, Dottie continued to win praise when critics commended her second collection of short stories, After Such Pleasures, in 1933. When she published another volume of verse – her last – three years later, reviews of Not So Deep As a Well were enthusiastic, and the Saturday Review cemented her status as poet and icon. She was, it said, “the wittiest woman of our time.”[13] Dottie could care less what people called her because she was acutely aware of what she lacked. Success as a writer had brought disappointment; so had her wartime marriage to a Wall Street broker ensnared by alcohol and, eventually, morphine. Wed in 1917, when she and Edwin Pond Parker II were twenty-three years old, they had separated after five years.[14] Her deepest longing was for real love, not the palaver of guys who scurried off to Long Island on Fridays. She had yet to meet a man who phoned when he promised to phone. Apparently, such a person did not exist. It was entirely possible she would spend the rest of her life alone.

Long I fought the driving lists,

Plume a-stream and armor clanging;

Link on link, between my wrists,

Now my heavy freedom’s hanging.[15]

Back on the Times Square social circuit, operating on automatic pilot, she was soon drinking too much and taking up with boring dispensable men. She had grown to hate the parties but disliked being alone even more, so luckily there was no shortage of invitations. In literary circles you did not throw a party without inviting Dorothy Parker; she might not show up, but she was always invited. The fall of 1932, S. J. Perelman happened to be at a cocktail party when Dottie made a theatrical entrance that he would never forget. As befitted one of Manhattan’s all-stars, she was tricked out in a soigné black Lanvin outfit, feathered toque, and opera-length gloves, and immediately made every woman in the place look like a frump. Her condition, as he charitably described it, was “visibly gassed.”[16]

Only a year earlier, during the holidays, she had showed up at a similarly elite gathering, at the home of William Rose Benet. A popular poet and editor, founder of the hugely influential Saturday Review of Literature, Bill Benet had been the husband of Dottie’s dear friend Elinor Wylie. A widow for three years, Bill was planning to remarry and the celebration brought out a crowd of prominent well-wishers. Dottie charged over to an author whose latest novel, The Glass Key, she had praised in her book column. Dashiell Hammett was “so hard-boiled you could roll him on the White House lawn,” she wrote. He was “as American as a sawed-off shotgun.”[17] Seldom did such extravagant compliments occur in her column, but she loved Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon and meeting the mystery writer in person made her sink to her knees in playful homage. It is more than likely that she was “visibly gassed,” but her foolery made Hammett laugh.

Dottie knew nothing at all about Hammett’s glowering girlfriend, perhaps did not even notice her. In that clubby crowd, any outsider would be counted of little consequence. Lillian Hellman – Lil Kober, as she was known – was the wife of Arthur Kober, a minor screenwriter, and seemed destined for obscurity. When the women next met the situation would be strikingly different, changed in ways that neither of them could have imagined.

•

Tony’s was her clubhouse, and almost every night, often in the company of Bob Benchley, she liked to stop by before heading back to the Algonquin. One evening in the spring of 1933, the two of them were ordering a nightcap when in walked an actor and would-be writer who occasionally published pieces about the theater in the New Yorker. The exchange was nothing special, merely a nod and a smile, because Bob knew the man just to say hello and Dottie paid no attention to him at all. But several months later she stumbled upon him again, at the home of lyricist Howard Dietz, and they hit it off right away.

Alan Campbell was a quick-witted young man of twenty-nine who was born in Richmond and majored in civil engineering at Virginia Military Institute. He had jaunty manners and the kind of blond clean-cut looks that are almost too pretty for a man, so he came across as gay to some folks. But Alan was partial to the opposite sex, and he immediately made a play for the diminutive Mrs. Parker. He actually preferred older women, in some cases considerably older, and had once lived with the English actress Estelle Winwood, two decades his senior.

Unlike some of her previous boyfriends, Alan felt privileged to be in Dottie’s company. He did not find her especially demanding or her celebrity intimidating but simply accepted that she was an A-lister and he wasn’t. A person of her stature should not have to worry about dragging around a vacuum cleaner or changing lightbulbs; in fact, not the smallest mundane task would he expect of her. A caretaker, a fussbudget with a talent for professional management, he set to work imposing order on her life. Initiating a self-improvement program of sorts, he supervised the purchase of a new wardrobe, rejuvenated her makeup, and talked her into a smart coiffure – and encouraged her to tone down the drinking. Here was a man, it was plain to see, who wished to mother her, and she was glad to be mothered.

She had a habit of joking that all she required in a man was good looks and stupidity, the type of fellow who might get lost in an elevator. Alan was no numbskull, but neither was he macho competitive. Eager to please, he was willing to stand behind the superstar and hold her coat.

Almost nobody took the romance seriously. It was whispered that Alan had planted himself in Dottie’s life and coddled her as if he were training a prizefighter; nastier comments deemed him a mediocre actor in search of a meal ticket. If the snide remarks bothered Dottie, she didn’t let on. Photos taken around that time show her looking girlishly young and terrifically happy. As she had once written, and half meant, overachievers drove her up the wall.

People Who Do Things exceed my endurance;

God, for a man who solicits insurance![18]

Alan was not cut out for a career in insurance. Regrettably, his future in the theater was beginning to look pretty wobbly too. There were small roles in a dozen Broadway shows, among them hits like Show Boat and Design for Living, but he himself was worried. He could not play juveniles forever. His final appearance on Broadway was in a Philip Barry comedy, The Joyous Season, which closed after sixteen performances. After that, except for a season of summer stock, he retired from acting. Alan was adaptable.

Nobody expected her to fall in love with Alan Campbell, least of all Dottie herself who did not believe in happy endings. And yet, it was really not so strange after all because they had similar tastes and prejudices, and he also had a self-deprecating sense of humor that made her laugh. Even their family backgrounds – both had Jewish-Gentile parents – were comparable. At a Bowery tattoo parlor, they had matching blue stars put on the insides of their upper arms.

What was plain to all, even those baffled by the unconventional pairing, was the pleasure they took in each other’s company. They were “absolutely right for each other,” recalled their friend Wyatt Cooper who added, in remembrance of their squabbling, “probably they were too right for each other.”[19]

Based on past experiences with younger men, Dottie could be fairly sure that Alan Campbell was going to disappoint her, no matter how right he appeared. There was an eleven-year difference in their ages. Eventually he would cozy up to a Kewpie doll, somebody his own age who needed looking after. So what is a smart, beautiful, liberated woman to do?

She married him.

Chapter 2

Beverly Hills

(1934–1935)

In the fall of 1934, Dottie and Alan arrived in Hollywood hoping to begin new careers as screenwriters. The reason was simple: big money. In the fifth year of the Depression, when the average American felt fortunate to take home perhaps thirty-five dollars a week, writers were flocking to the movie studios that paid hundreds and even thousands of dollars.

On the street one day, Dottie passed a Cadillac that seemed to stretch a block long. Reaching out the side window emerged “a wonderfully slinky mink and an arm,” she would remember, and when she looked carefully noticed “at the end of the arm a hand in a white suede glove wrinkled at the wrist, and in the hand was a bagel with a bite out of it.”[20] She couldn’t see the woman’s face inside the car, or come close enough to smell the slippery leather upholstery or her French perfume, but all that was not hard to imagine, not in that neighborhood. The scent of money hung in the air of Beverly Hills, an architectural theme park of pretend Italian villas and Swiss chalets, each with a manicured, sprinkler-watered lawn and rectangular pool painted turquoise.

Where ranchers used to raise lima beans and herd sheep now stood streets fringed by palms and eucalyptus, the avenues named Rodeo and El Camino, Roxbury and Linden. At 520 North Canon Drive, the Campbells rented a white, L-shaped American Colonial Revival with three bedrooms, four baths, and a lush backyard that had a pool as well as a guesthouse. Immediately Dottie began stocking the place with animals, adding to their pair of Bedlington terriers a dachshund puppy named Fraulein and some kind of Welsh terrier, perhaps half German shepherd, who answered to Scrambles. While dogs came first, because too many were never enough, she was thinking it might be nice to have a baby.

To Dottie, the movie capital seemed like a foreign country full of exotic sights, home to people with piles of money but no taste. Of course the whole place was frightfully silly, nowhere you wanted to be stuck forever, and she agreed with her friend Sid Perelman who mocked the studio chieftains as “beetle-brained wind-suckers.”[21] Then again, how could anyone dislike a city whose streets were paved with Rolls-Royces? “I love having a house,” she confessed to friends back East, “I love its being pretty wherever you look.”[22] Alan, adept at home decorating, was in his element. Dottie, never a worshipper of Mother Nature, discovered that she loved freshly cut grass and birdsong. Above all, she loved the paychecks because, for the first time in her life, she could spend freely. The problem was screenwriting, which she hated “like holy water.” On the other hand, she was filthy rich and owned four dogs.

•

The carved pillars of Paramount’s archway loomed over Bronson Avenue like a majestic relic from ancient Rome. Built in 1926, the gateway provided a reminder that the studio was the largest in Hollywood, its historic roots extending back to the first feature film, Cecil B. DeMille’s The Squaw Man. Through its wrought-iron gate had passed legends past and present: Valentino and Swanson, Mae West and Marlene Dietrich, and the Marx Brothers. Despite the glamour, Paramount in the midthirties was in reality a factory whose facilities included twenty soundstages for the manufacture of assembly-line entertainment. Along with the stars and contract actors, the studio employed mobs of bit players and extras, and an army of skilled technicians: cutters, cameramen, set designers, sound engineers, among dozens of other specialists behind the scenes. Ranked below all these came the “schmucks with Underwoods,” meaning the writers, as one studio chief liked to call them.[23] Some one hundred schmucks were working for Paramount at the time.

Marketing themselves as a team, the Campbells signed on for $1,250 a week ($1,000 for Dottie, $250 for Alan) and threw themselves into their first assignments: cooking up uncredited dialogue for a handful of stinkers followed by an adaptation of a Faith Baldwin novel, The Moon’s Our Home, on which they shared credit with three other writers. The pictures were formula romantic comedies, typical of the thirties, studded with clichéd characters that one day would become a staple of countless television sitcoms.

With hindsight, Dottie would recognize Hollywood money as not money at all. Like a snowball, it melted in your hand before you knew it. In the real world of 1934, a loaf of store-bought presliced white bread cost around ten cents. Their weekly salary could buy roughly 12,500 packages of Wonder Bread.

A visitor from New York was astonished to find her on easy street. Over the course of a few months, she and Alan had begun a fine-art collection that included a Utrillo, no less, and a Picasso gouache. They had, John O’Hara reported in disbelief to Scott Fitzgerald, a “brand-new Picasso, a Packard convertible phaeton, a couple of Negroes, and dinner at the very best Beverly Hills homes.”[24] Such grandiose surroundings, although not exempt from Dottie’s barbs, were a sharp departure from her cozy two-room suite at the Algonquin. In New York she had earned a comfortable if undependable living from her writings, enough to employ a part-time maid, but difficulty managing money sometimes left her in financial straits. Not anymore.

That the men running the movie factories were bags of hot air was to be expected. Yet, she informed Aleck Woollcott, “there are some nice people here.”[25] She was invited to lots of parties where she made friends with actors like Jimmy Cagney and Bing Crosby. There was no mention of Lillian Hellman.

As Hellman would tell the story, they met socially shortly after she arrived in Hollywood, in December of 1934, probably at one of those ritzy homes mentioned by John O’Hara. Remembering their earlier encounter, and how her lover had behaved like an ass, Lilly spent the evening glaring at Dottie before deciding that the hostility was silly. After all, Dottie’s flirtatious vamping had been harmless. That night, the two began talking, and Lilly found herself laughing and thinking she was funny and genuinely nice, which was unusual because Lilly put little value on female friends. The twelve-year difference in their ages – Dottie’s forty-one to Lilly’s twenty-nine – didn’t seem important either. “I liked her,” Lilly would write later, “and we saw each other the next day and for many, many other good days and years until she died in June of 1967.”[26] The “good days and years” would be very good indeed; the unmentioned bad days and years very bad. It was unclear which, in the end, would prove to be the most significant.

•

The week before Thanksgiving, new shows were opening on Broadway almost every night. At Maxine Elliott’s Theatre, typically home to the dramas of Shaw and Synge, was a debut work from an unknown playwright, which was rumored to be a shocker. It seemed peculiar that the author, surely a wunderkind, was a woman still in her twenties.

On the evening of November 20, 1934, Lilly was sick from drinking. A two-day binge had left her severely hungover, and to keep from going off the rails she needed to drink some more. The wardrobe mistress was dispatched for another bottle of brandy. In the course of the performance, when she was not dashing outside to vomit, she huddled at the back of the theater. Afterward, at opening night parties, she continued drinking until the early reviews began trickling in. Then she knew that something good had happened and her play was going to be a hit.

The Children’s Hour, which drew for inspiration on an 1810 court case that took place in Scotland, tells the story of a disaffected student at a girls’ boarding school who falsely accuses two teachers of being lesbians. As a consequence, the school closes and the teachers are deprived of their livelihood. This was strong meat for theater audiences at a time when any mention of homosexuality onstage was illegal in New York State, and several actresses had refused the roles.

Scandalous subject aside, the production was significant for another reason: the sex of the precocious playwright. In those years of the early twentieth century, the American stage was dominated by Eugene O’Neill and Elmer Rice (along with Ibsen, Shaw, and Strindberg). The idea of a female playwright was far-fetched but not completely unknown. Deemed first-rate were Zoë Akins and Susan Glaspell (a Pulitzer Prize winner for Alison’s House); the most commercially successful was Edna Ferber who, with George S. Kaufman, wrote such light comedies as The Royal Family and Dinner at Eight. Nonetheless, Lilly was greeted as something of a novelty.

First-night jitters did not entirely account for her frantic consumption of alcohol though. Compounding her panic was rage. On the most important night of her life – the moment her real career began – the man she loved was as far from her as he could get. There was no phone call, let alone a congratulatory wire, and she was livid.

It was Dashiell Hammett who had first read about the school closed by a lesbian scandal and decided the case might make an interesting play. Initially he thought of dramatizing the material himself but eventually handed it over to Lilly. While she was getting the hang of stagecraft, he logged endless hours of writing and rewriting, assuming the role of critic, shaper, and editor through a half-dozen drafts. Because Lilly was a diligent student, the upshot of all this was a well-made drama. Three weeks before the premiere he set off for Hollywood, to work on a sequel to The Thin Man, a popular film based on his most recent novel, and there he embarked on a weeklong binge. On the night of November 20, when she desperately needed him to hold her hand, he was a continent away and apparently content to let her sink or swim.

By this time Lilly understood that Hammett was essentially undependable, a man who brought pain to anyone who loved him. Still, this was intolerable.

Four years before the Broadway opening, she had been Mrs. Arthur Kober living in Hollywood with her husband and looking to escape her life. Nothing much of importance had ever happened to her. Just twenty-five, she hungered to become a writer but had no confidence whatsoever, not knowing how to go about it or even a vague idea of what to write. Then she crossed paths with Hammett.

Their first meeting, in the fall of 1930, was unplanned. Certainly she knew of his novels and his personal reputation as “the hottest thing in Hollywood or New York,” but there was no conscious angling to seek him out.[27]

One evening at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, attending a Bing Crosby opening with her husband and a party of friends, she spotted a tall, slender, expensively dressed man striding toward the men’s room. With his shock of prematurely white hair, he cut a distinct figure.

“Who’s that man?” she asked.

Learning it was Dashiell Hammett, she bounded out of her seat and went careening after him, close on his heels. Before he reached the john, she grabbed his arm and fell into step, chattering as she attempted to engage him in conversation.

What Hammett saw was a reddish blonde–haired woman, bosomy, with thin lips and a large nose. A stylish wardrobe and a fast-talking manner did not obscure the fact that she was no goddess in the looks department.

When he emerged from the toilet she was still there, running her mouth. Her brash personality amused him. Instead of going back to their tables, they wound up in the hotel parking lot, where they sat in the back of his car and talked until daylight.

Hammett seemed under the weather. Unguarded, he confided that he was getting sober after a five-day drunk and felt lousy. Lilly later volunteered that they may have talked about T. S. Eliot. The rest she forgot or more likely wished to keep private. In the meantime, the Crosby floor show had ended, and Arthur Kober was left to return home without his wife.

Lilly didn’t know the first thing about men like Hammett but soon found out: her easy conquest happened to be meaningless because Dash was not exactly a choirboy. He was the son of a Maryland tobacco farmer by birth, a school dropout at thirteen, addicted to alcohol, prostitutes, and danger, and because of a particular recklessness in his temperament, drawn to the life of a cop. By twenty, he was working for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, a private police force with a long record of brutality, whose men were thoroughly detested by organized labor as strikebreaking terrorists and bloody-handed cutthroats operating in dark corners. A wayward husband and father, he was already involved with two women: fiction writer Nell Martin and an aspiring movie actress named Elise De Viane. Then, too, he didn’t object to paying for sex and was known as a regular customer at Lee Francis’s sporting house; his promiscuity led to repeated doses of gonorrhea.

If Dash put little stock in either fidelity or sobriety, there were other discoveries for Lilly: the former Pinkerton agent, like the tough-guy heroes of his fiction, turned out to have an ugly streak; he mistreated both men and women, but most of the time women. Soon after the night at the Hollywood Roosevelt, at a private party, he and Lilly got into an altercation, and he hauled off and slugged her. On several occasions there were black eyes. When he slapped around Elise De Viane during rough sex, she sued him for assault, but Dash, barely disguising his contempt, laughed about it. Why should he care? When the aggrieved Elise won $2,500 damages, he still didn’t care. Lilly, appalled at his behavior but besotted with the man, never thought of suing. She was not a crybaby. She remembered Dottie saying to her, “It can’t be news to you that Dash is a cruel man,” and she agreed but told herself it didn’t matter.[28]

Hammett, however, had another side that made him exceptionally attractive. In addition to being an idealistic social critic, a late-blooming crusader for the downtrodden, he had distinguished himself in the field of detective fiction. Almost thirty, he attempted writing for pulp magazines, and by forty, everything he touched had turned to gold. In quick succession came five novels – Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, and The Thin Man – galloping best sellers with such memorable characters as the Continental Op and Sam Spade. Known for his understated style, reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway’s, he was now on his way to becoming undisputed master of the genre.

•

Before meeting Lilly, Dash had spent almost two years with Nell Martin, to whom he had dedicated The Glass Key. Nell was a hardworking author of some two hundred stories and a half-dozen novels, inelegant lowbrow fare to be sure but nonetheless a woman not to be confused with a prostitute. Nevertheless, in Lilly’s mind, the rest of his women were bimbos and gum-cracking chippies.

The morning after the premiere of The Children’s Hour, waking with a head-splitting hangover, she nevertheless felt triumphant and phoned Dash at his rented beach house in Pacific Palisades. The woman who answered said that she was Dash’s secretary. Wasn’t it an unusual hour to be calling?

The whole conversation lasted about a minute but left Lilly seething. After hanging up she remembered that the time in California was 3 A.M. and so any woman who picked up Dash’s phone in the middle of the night must be sleeping there. Because she knew of no secretary (actually, he did have one), the mystery woman could only be one of his strumpets. She was familiar with Dash’s goatish sexual habits, involving both paid and unpaid partners – he once suggested a threesome, but she had the good sense to refuse.

When writing in her memoir Pentimento about Dash’s absence and the numbing phone call, she talked about her humiliation, how she had flown to Los Angeles, rattled up blazing drunk at Dash’s house, smashed a soda fountain to smithereens, then hightailed it back to the airport and caught a night flight home.

This tale of the pulverized soda fountain may or may not be true, but what is not in question is that barely three weeks after the premiere she surfaced in Hollywood, where she parked herself in Dash’s $2,000-a-month hotel suite at the Beverly Wilshire.

These were heady days for Lilly. In the opinion of some critics, The Children’s Hour was the season’s outstanding play. A few months later, when the Pulitzer Prize went instead to Zoë Akins, they organized the New York Drama Critics Circle and bestowed their first award on Lilly. Impressive earnings from the play, which ran almost two years, enabled her to go hog wild and purchase a mink coat.

•

Lillian Florence Hellman, born June 20, 1905, in New Orleans, came from a Jewish family where her mother’s relatives were wealthy bankers and merchants, and her father was a shoe salesman whose sisters operated a boardinghouse. The great sorrow of her life, and a source of lifelong insecurity, would be her face. Mischievous genes, or perhaps just bad luck, denied her heart’s desire: ravishing natural beauty. Through no fault of her own, she was a plain child who wound up a plain young woman forced to struggle for minimal prettiness. Growing up, she winced whenever people remarked on her lovely hair, which meant “they couldn’t think of anything nice to say about my face,” she recalled.[29] Although deeply identified as a Southerner, Lilly actually spent half of each year in New York City, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and attended a public high school for girls. As a pampered only child, she was not shy about promoting herself, sure that she was meant for stardom despite her ordinary looks. Since then, she had continued to demand, and often got, whatever she wanted.

On the basis of her theatrical success, producer Samuel Goldwyn approached her about a movie contract and wound up offering an astonishing $2,500 a week. Not only was screenwriting a boys’ club, but this kind of money in 1934 was restricted to a handful of elite writers. By point of comparison, Dottie, together with Alan, was raking in a grand total of $1,250. Lilly was not fooling herself. If she had to work on drek, her favorite word for trash, she damned well wanted to be paid handsomely.

Her first assignment was rewriting a tearjerker set during World War I, which in previous incarnations had been a Broadway play and before that a hokey silent film. To Lilly, The Dark Angel was “an old silly.”[30] What’s more, her relationship with Goldwyn got off on the wrong foot because after several weeks, impatient with endless script conferences, she stormed back to New York, a tip-off that she would not be easy to work with. Goldwyn, as big an egotist as Lilly, was not particular fond of female writers, especially prima donnas, but he recognized a go-getter who could deliver high-quality scripts. He wooed her back. When The Dark Angel was released in 1935, with a stellar cast led by Fredric March and Merle Oberon, reviews were enthusiastic. As debuts went, it could have been worse.

Her relationship with Goldwyn (a Polish-born glove salesman) would remain contentious, but nonetheless she ended up writing several more pictures for him, including adaptations of The Children’s Hour (released as These Three, 1936) and also the play that made her name, The Little Foxes (1941).

In the next few years, in addition to films, she tackled the class struggle in a play about a labor strike in small-town Ohio. Without the benefit of Hammett’s close supervision, she cranked out a dull melodrama peopled by cardboard characters. Days to Come, which opened in December 1936 and closed after just six performances, was pummeled by critics as “inept” and “muddled.”[31] For Lillian, Days to Come was not only “an absolute horror of a failure” but a huge embarrassment.[32] She rebounded quickly, but three years would pass before she returned to the stage with the play considered to be her biggest achievement, The Little Foxes. Priding herself on hard-won independence, she deliberately set about constructing a reputation as a woman who stood up for herself, a no-holds-barred gunslinger whose success rested on being good at what she did. She hungered for, and accepted nothing less than, the world’s admiration. In due course, she would get it.

Though success could not bring the physical beauty she craved, public recognition had its compensations, allowing her to live on a grand scale. Controlling every aspect of her life was especially important to Lilly, and yet she had no control over Dash who “always had to have things on his own terms.”[33] His most egregious betrayal was a brief fling with Laura Perelman, who with her husband Sid were close friends. For Lilly, that was particularly reprehensible. Still bitter decades later, she told a friend, “I wish he were alive, I could kill him for that.”[34]

Other shortcomings of his were equally worthy of mayhem. Divorced from Arthur Kober, she was free to marry, even have children. Needless to say, this scenario was the furthest thing from Dash’s mind, and so a pregnancy in 1937 ended in abortion. For that matter, with their physical relationship pretty much over by 1935, the affair was running out of gas.

While they continued to care for each other, it was a narrow definition of love that excluded marriage, family, passion, and fidelity. As always, he dictated the terms of their relationship. Refusing to put himself out on her account, he made no promises to stop drinking, divorce his wife, forgo prostitutes, or avoid gonorrhea. In self-defense, she had affairs with other men. Forced to let go, at least temporarily, she was adopting Dash’s cool hard-boiled style as she tried to remold herself into a she-Hammett, even if the original Hammett was not all that worthy of imitation.

In the end, however, she would get the last laugh.

Chapter 3

FOREIGN LANDS

(1936–1950)

Seven years before going to Hollywood, in the heat of a Boston summer, Dottie got arrested. It was an afternoon she would never forget. Wearing an embroidered sheath, strappy high heels, and white gloves, a Hattie Carnegie cloche framing her face, she looked less like a protester than a Fifth Avenue shopper on her way to Henri Bendel. When police yanked her arms on Beacon Street she refused to enter the paddy wagon, walking briskly instead to the station house. There she was relieved of her cigarettes and bundled off to a cell, and the next morning she pleaded guilty to loitering and sauntering and paid a five-dollar fine. All this happened in August 1927, and ever after, she thought of it as the proudest moment of her life.

Dottie would not get over the executions of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti,[35] which set in motion beliefs that lasted to the end of her life. Feelings that emerged during the trial and sentencing of the Italian-American anarchists sent her to the city where she worked for the defense committee at its headquarters on Hanover Street and took part in the demonstrations on Boston Common. In a newspaper picture, she can be seen trailing John Dos Passos and singing “The Internationale” with an expression of haughty indifference to the crowds chanting “Red scum” and “Bolsheviki.” Later, Dottie gained admission to Charlestown State Prison, where she was said to have spoken to the condemned immigrants.

The executions took about fifteen minutes. In the early morning of Tuesday, August 23, Sacco was marched to the electric chair at precisely 12:11 A.M. and pronounced dead at 12:19; Vanzetti entered the room a minute later and died at 12:26.

When Dottie got back to New York, her suite was waiting at the Algonquin, and her friends were all sitting downstairs at the Round Table cracking jokes and ordering creamed chicken and popovers, as if nothing had happened.

Nineteen twenty-seven was a good year to be an American. The most popular songs – “Let’s Misbehave” and “I Wanna Be Loved by You . . . Boo Boo Bee Doo” – reflected the nation’s emotions. Nearly everybody was pumped up as they watched the stock market pulse higher. Every Yankee Doodle Dandy believed in the American flag, everybody had confidence in the sanctity of Wall Street, and anybody who had a dollar invested it. Apart from money – making and flaunting it – the important thing was having fun. With all the giddy spending and cheating and carousing, the overdrafts and divorces and hangovers, nobody had time to think about trivialities and almost certainly not the deaths of Sacco and Vanzetti.

By the time fall came, Dottie soon resumed her normal life, writing a book column called “Constant Reader” for the New Yorker and wrapping up a second volume of verse, Sunset Gun. In short order, she began writing one of her best stories (“Big Blonde”) and finally ended her marriage to her first husband, Eddie Parker. There was an impassioned affair with an investment banker, the epitome of a right-wing reactionary, which may or may not have inspired a few lines in Cole Porter’s latest hit “Just One of Those Things.” (“As Dorothy Parker once said to her boyfriend . . .”) Calling herself a socialist, who refused to put a dime in the stock market, failed to impress her Round Table friends. To hold political views of any sort back then was unfashionable – Dottie had never voted – and besides, everybody was a capitalist.

Over the years, she never spoke of the incident in Boston again, never wrote a word of it. Poor at managing her emotions in general, she kept quiet about Sacco and Vanzetti. But in 1927, she silently had become an unregistered anarchist.

•

It was now 1935, and the unthinkable had happened. The country was unraveling, and the dream of a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage – Herbert Hoover’s presidential campaign slogan in 1928 – had grown battered and broken. If the twenties had been a permanent party, the thirties was an anarchist’s banquet – the unemployment rate reached a shocking peak of 24.9 percent as more and more families were forced into poverty. What seemed evident to some, among them Lilly and Dottie, was that capitalism must surely be doomed. The answer lay in profoundly different political solutions.

Speaking about herself and Dottie, Lilly liked to point out that they had absolutely nothing in common. “We were not the same generation, we were not the same kind of writer, we had led and were to continue to lead very different lives.”[36] But it’s no coincidence that both women were provocateurs, both understood the importance of organizing a screenwriters’ union, and both were obsessed with the larger issues of capitalism and Communism and the specter of Fascism in Europe. Only in the thirties – in a place like Hollywood, an incubator of American communism – would such a serendipitous occurrence be possible, perhaps even inevitable. At another time, another place, such a friendship might not have happened. The real key to their relationship lies not in their style of living but in a likeminded obsession with politics.

In the mid-1930s, Communism seemed a panacea to some screenwriters, not merely a cure-all but a powerful aphrodisiac as well. It was better than sex. It was true love. Among the most fervent believers were Dashiell Hammett, Donald Ogden Stewart, Dalton Trumbo, John Howard Lawson – and Dottie and Lilly. In Lilly’s case, political awareness was a direct result of her affair with Hammett, a malcontent turned evangelical Marxist who joined the Communist Party in 1937. She was a member from 1938 to 1940, notwithstanding later claims to the contrary, and a Stalin supporter for the remainder of her life. There is no reliable evidence for Dottie becoming a member, although a close friend and former party member contends she was for a short time but dropped out in 1939 after the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact. Whether her membership was formal or fiction seems irrelevant because she followed the party line as fiercely as any card-carrying member, and she would one day find herself blacklisted just like the rest. (The Communist Party did not interest Alan.)

Involvement tended to be personal, and business was conducted privately. Meetings, which took place in people’s homes, drew serious political organizers, but others showed up out of curiosity; and for some, the party represented a social organization, handy places to pick up dates. Screenwriter Nathanael West, who found Communism a big snooze, and its believers closet romantics, agreed to attend a Marxist study group simply to please his wife.

A decade earlier, the guilt or innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti had split public opinion, as John Dos Passos sorrowfully concluded in his trilogy USA, “all right we are two nations.”[37] In 1937, a civil war thousands of miles away – the battle for the Spanish republic against the Fascist forces of dictator Francisco Franco – rallied similar emotions. Some Americans who saw Spain as the first battle of a new world war signed up to fight with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, while others volunteered their services as doctors, nurses, and ambulance drivers.

With emotions running so high, dissension was to be expected, and people took sides. Certainly the unorthodox views of home-brewed Bolsheviks were regarded as controversial, if anything extreme, to most Americans. When Lilly claimed that she would trade her writing career in order to make a better world, the soapbox tone understandably got a rise out of James Thurber. That was, he told E. B. White, the most egotistical claptrap he’d ever heard. Dottie, another early anti-Fascist, was not quite as outspoken as Lilly. Nevertheless, she too earned a reputation as a knee-jerk radical and found puzzled friends turning against her. “She was a very, very grande dame, and contrariness was the wellspring of her Communism,” Beatrice Stewart told one of Parker’s biographers. “She was anti. She was anti the Establishment.”[38] Bea’s lack of sympathy was to be expected since her ex-husband Donald, an important screenwriter and a hotshot in the party, had left her to marry a Communist.

•

In mid-August of 1937, Dottie and Alan set sail for France with Lilly, anticipating a festive Parisian vacation. Checking into the five-star Hotel Le Meurice overlooking the Tuileries Garden, they found themselves in a crowded city partying hysterically as it simultaneously hosted the World Exhibition and trembled in the shadow of war. As Lilly quickly discovered, nobody had more street credibility among the expatriates than Dottie, and her affectionate friends jockeyed to shower her with love and a great many invitations. There was a sentimental reunion with old friends like Sara and Gerald Murphy, as well as nostalgic evenings in Les Deux Magots and La Closerie des Lilas, still the favored hangouts of Americans in Paris.

“Fine time” is the phrase Lilly used to describe those first days of rushing around to dinner parties and country luncheons.[39] Unfortunately, the fine time was short-lived. In the spotlight since her Broadway success, she had grown accustomed to people fussing over her, but here she found herself treated with indifference by this crowd of self-absorbed expatriates with money. Her days of going unnoticed were over, but these people brought it back. It was painful to realize that her own admirers were “second-class stuff” compared to Dottie’s fans.[40] Uncomfortable, truthfully more than a little jealous, she disliked playing second fiddle and compensated by pouting and drinking too much. Among those who got under her skin were the Murphys and their circle of prominent artists, musicians, and sleek sporty lesbians. But the one who annoyed her most was Alan Campbell, “a hard man for me to take,” she admitted.[41] He impressed her as snobbish, fussy, hopelessly overbearing, and presumably a gay closet case. By this time, she hated his guts.

Apologetic for snapping at him, she told Dottie that she simply couldn’t help it because he made her nervous.

Dottie shrugged. “Dear Lilly, you’d be a psychotic if he didn’t.”[42] She herself bickered with her husband, who was never at a want for words.

Alan vanished every afternoon. Where was he? Lilly asked.

“Takes a sleeping pill,” said Dottie. “He hates to toss and turn from four to six.”

Meantime, there was plenty besides Alan to worry about. All around them Europe was in turmoil. Nazi Germany, whose armies had marched into the Rhineland, was on the brink of annexing Austria. And the civil war in Spain, in its fourteenth month, seemed like a prelude to a second world war. Fierce fighting and air strikes around the beleaguered capital of Madrid had failed, and the Republican government was forced to Valencia. The last place Dottie had intended on visiting was a combat zone because, she frankly admitted, she was “scared stiff” of getting her head blown off.[43] What’s more, she worried about visiting a country where people were starving. How could she possibly eat their food? An American journalist just back from Madrid would not listen to her excuses because the obvious solution was to go bearing donations of food for the Spanish and eat the local diet. On September 20, the Campbells ditched Lilly and departed for Madrid, their bags loaded with canned hams and chicken and beef stew, Kraft Welsh rarebit, and Horlicks malted milk.

•

On a late Sunday afternoon in October 1937, darkness had begun falling. Dottie was drinking vermouth with a lump of gray ice, a luxury in wartime, and gazing around the congested café. After a few days in Madrid, she and Alan had come to Valencia, a place where air raids could occur at any moment. Unnerved by the bombs, she could barely manage to smile. “There are things that never have been funny,” she decided, “and never will be.”[44] It was a working-class café, clamorous with families, even babies, and soldiers in faded uniforms, on a brief respite from the carnage at the front.

Aided by a Swedish interpreter, she was able to exchange words with soldiers at a nearby table, men who had spent nearly a year living through circumstances beyond their control. She expected them to talk about the war. But as the restaurant around them buzzed with chatter, they spoke grievously of missing their homes and their families, not knowing if their wives and children were dead or alive. What they didn’t mention was the fighting. After they left, Dottie was shocked to discover that the soldiers had paid for her vermouth.

Five months later, when her beautifully told memory of this gloomy Sunday afternoon and the men she had met was published, the New Yorker labeled “Soldiers of the Republic” as fiction.

Midway through October, Lilly followed in the Campbells’ footsteps. Her stay of three weeks, recounted in a thirty-page travel diary, would eventually appear in print decades later. Disappointingly, there was less about air raids than the kind of gee-whiz details recorded by tourists, things that may have seemed exotic at the moment but sound trivial afterward. One night in Madrid she was invited to dinner by Ernest Hemingway and his girlfriend and future wife, the journalist Martha Gellhorn. The meal, she wrote, was notable for excellent wine and tough beef. The fiancé was dismissed as a pretty woman with good taste in clothing. When shelling began, Lilly couldn’t bring herself to watch. She shut her eyes in panic and stayed well away from the window.

If Lilly was catty about Martha Gellhorn, Gellhorn was inclined to believe the worst about Lilly and would question the authenticity of everything she wrote about her expedition to Spain. To Martha, she not only had swanned around like a crass tourist but was also a “dull” woman who did not tell the truth.

Lilly was lonely after the Campbells returned to their farm in Pennsylvania. Hanging around a war by herself was not the holiday she had envisioned, so she soon headed home. In New York she celebrated at “21” Club with ex-husband Arthur Kober because Dash was in Hollywood after finally getting a Mexican divorce. The trip, she decided, had made her cranky because “Paris was never my city,” no matter how beloved by Dottie and her friends.[45] It was the last time they traveled together. As for Dottie’s husband, she thought of him as a “fairy-shit” and tried to avoid his company.[46]

•

Before Dottie and Alan visited Spain, they had been employed by Samuel Goldwyn earning a weekly salary of $5,200, the equivalent of about $90,000 in today’s money. For this seductive paycheck, virtually unparalleled in 1937, they worked on ghastly scripts and attended untold numbers of story meetings, in which Dottie, bored the hell out of her mind, passed the time by knitting. Often she found herself at odds with Goldwyn, who thought little of her suggestions and once yelled at her in a room full of writers, “God damn it, Dottie! You and your God damn sophisticated jokes.” He was in the business of entertaining, he said. Too bad she knew nothing about audiences and what they wanted. People didn’t go to the movies for high-minded ideas. They didn’t pay money for jokes either. They simply wanted happy endings.

Arguing was useless. But Dottie, hackles up, roused herself. “I know this will come as a shock to you, Mr. Goldwyn, but in all history, which has held billions and billions of human beings, not a single one ever had a happy ending.” She walked out in utter disgust.

Goldwyn looked around, bewildered. “Does anybody in here know what the hell that woman was talking about?”[47] Everybody knew; nobody was going out of his way to explain. Actually, endings didn’t matter. What did matter was the money.

The gold-plated contract turned out to be short-lived, and when Goldwyn suddenly dropped their option in August of 1937, they retreated to their farm.

Lilly, meanwhile, continuing to make her home in New York, also worked for Sam Goldwyn. Unlike the Campbells, she had never felt comfortable putting down roots in Los Angeles, and neither was she satisfied seeing her name on drek. How could she make Goldwyn money on Broadway? There she had done her best only to produce a humiliating mess with Days to Come. She decided to try again.

•

“I hope you die!” Regina tells her husband. “I hope you die soon! I’ll be waiting for you to die!”[48]

In her parlor sits Regina Hubbard Giddens, watching as a sick man with a bad heart drops his medicine bottle. Horace asks her to go upstairs to his room for another bottle. Continuing to watch, Regina allows him to die.

The period drama, set in a small Southern town in 1900, charts the disintegration of the Hubbard clan, rapacious wolves who hate each other, and centers on the schemes of sister Regina, famously played by Tallulah Bankhead and later Bette Davis in the film, to snatch power from her brothers, even if it means ending up alone. Apparently, the Newhouses, Lilly’s rich blood relatives on her mother’s side, were the inspiration for The Little Foxes.[49]

Her best-known work, The Little Foxes ran 410 performances on Broadway and continues to be revived to the present day. Its success not only established Lilly’s position as an important playwright – she would be called America’s Ibsen – but also made her rich. She bought an estate on the outskirts of Pleasantville, New York, a property of 130 acres with an 1810 house, woods full of deer, and a lake with three islands. At Hardscrabble Farm, she planted a vegetable garden and took up raising chickens (and selling the eggs). Partly this blissful rural retreat thirty-five miles from the city was purchased with thoughts of Hammett, who enjoyed country life and would spend time there over the next dozen years, not as family, but as a remote semipermanent houseguest who had little to offer her.

By the late 1930s, quite a few Hollywood screenwriters were seeking healthy antidotes to the artifice of Beverly Hills by purchasing agricultural property. For a while, Dottie, who had come to loathe Hollywood, had been experiencing a nesting urge. Having not given up the hope of raising a family, still trying to get pregnant after a miscarriage, she wanted a permanent home. So often did she repeat the word “roots,” usually after several martinis, that her nagging began to irritate her husband. “We haven’t any roots, Alan. You can’t put down roots in Beverly Hills.”[50] In Bucks County, Pennsylvania, overlooking the Delaware River Valley, they found an 111-acre farm whose purchase price of a mere $4,500 was less than one week’s salary. Unlike Hardscrabble Farm, Fox House was totally uninhabitable and needed extensive renovation. Still, the expense was worth it because the result was an elaborate fourteen-room showplace. They hired a farmer to run the place, which was also worth it.

Clocking in at the studio was tricky when you lived thousands of miles away. Not for crack screenwriters, however, because by the late 1930s air travel had become more common and they could easily afford to fly. Whenever Dottie or Lilly had a writing job on the Coast, they shuttled back on a cross-country flight and simply settled down for months on end at a luxurious hotel. In 1940, the census taker would catch up with the Campbells comfortably ensconced at the Garden of Allah on Sunset Boulevard.

For the two friends, the late 1930s and early 1940s would be the best of times, at least superficially. Lilly enjoyed another Broadway success, Watch on the Rhine, while Dottie (and Alan) received an Academy Award nomination for A Star Is Born. As two of the most famous women writers of their day, their personalities became as familiar to the public as movie stars. Thanks to immense incomes, they too had privileged existences whose essence was excess: high-end real estate, deluxe cars, sophisticated friends, lavish soirees. In published photographs the two of them sometimes appear together sporting similar outfits, big wide-brim hats and smashing ankle-length fur coats.

On Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Lilly purchased a six-story neo-Georgian townhouse and, later on, a house on Martha’s Vineyard. Her income continued to rise, and by the midforties she was earning, for example, almost two million dollars in today’s currency. In Bucks County, Alan Campbell bought his mother a home nearby; and he also imported a live-in servant from Richmond to drive the Packard. As the only black uniformed chauffeur the locals had ever seen, the man quickly became a novelty.

Indefatigable Communists, the friends continued to embrace blue-collar issues. Ordinary men and women appeared in Dottie’s fiction (“Clothe the Naked,” “The Standard of Living”) and in some of Lilly’s dramas (the ill-fated Days to Come), but the only working-class people in their real lives were the servants, black and white, whom they employed. Everyday Angelenos – the Hollywood flotsam and jetsam, the self-help cults, the health-food nuts who found their way into Nathanael West’s novel The Day of the Locust – never reached their radar.

•

“Constant use had not worn ragged the fabric of their friendship,” Dottie wrote.[51] She was referring, not to herself and Lilly, but to a pair of young women named Annabel and Midge who were “surely born to be comrades.”

Stenographers in the same office, Annabel and Midge are best friends, whose desks sit companionably side by side. Boyfriends come and go, but the pair remain inseparable. On Saturday afternoons they stroll along Fifth Avenue playing their favorite game, doing what young women do when they have no money and nothing better to do: pretending somebody has died and left them each a million dollars to spend on themselves. Spying a double rope of pearls in a jewelry store window, presumably Tiffany’s, they muster the courage to go inside, only to learn the price is a quarter-million dollars. Unlike Truman Capote’s good-time girl who zips off to Tiffany’s for breakfast,[52] Dottie’s heroines are working girls who have never visited the Stork Club or accepted money from men. They earn less than twenty dollars a week typing and taking dictation, and they live at home with their parents.

Midge and Annabel were comrades in “The Standard of Living,” a story of Dottie’s published by the New Yorker in 1941. By this time, she and Lilly had been comrades for seven years and, like the fictional secretaries, the fabric of their friendship remained unchanged; in fact, it was stronger than ever. What could be more natural than to dedicate her new volume of stories to Lilly, whom she held in high regard for both her political commitment and her talent as a playwright. (Here Lies, her seventh book, would be her last.) The following year, she composed an effusive foreword for a special edition of Lilly’s play, Watch on the Rhine, to benefit the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee (a group later designated to be a Communist front by the House Un-American Activities Committee or HUAC).

Most of all, they had fun together. There was plenty of teasing and laughing at each other’s jokes, no matter how lame. Their repartee amused not only each other but anybody within earshot. One time it was a ribald afternoon-long contest over which one had slept with the most awful men. Dottie proclaimed herself the winner; Lilly insisted she was bragging. Another time, after a party in honor of Helen Keller, which Dottie had declined to attend, Lilly came home disgusted by the pious chatter. What a waste of time, she complained. Without looking up from a book, Dottie said mildly, “It’s your own fault, dear. Didn’t I tell you she was a con woman and a dyke?”[53] Peter Feibleman, the writer who was Lilly’s protégé, called them “a perfectly matched pair, a kind of intellectual vaudeville team.”

Notwithstanding their perfect match, the bond between them depended on censoring anything disagreeable. In contrast to Lilly’s theatrical blowups with practically everybody she knew, she uncharacteristically muzzled herself around Dottie. Hurt feelings were not voiced, disappointments not confronted, and good manners unfailingly observed. Quenching anger and nursing grudges, they carefully avoided getting into fights. Lilly liked to insist that they never once exchanged “even a mild, unpleasant word,” but it would turn out that she was quietly keeping score.[54] When her father died, she made a list of those friends who had sent condolences. Dottie, she noted, did not.

It seemed clear to the playwright Ruth Goetz, a friend of both women, that Dottie admired Lilly, “but Lillian did not admire Dottie because she had no admiring mechanisms, and she wasn’t generous about anything.”[55] Actually, there were few women in Lilly’s life simply because she didn’t like her own sex and saw no reason to be kind. She viewed women with suspicion, sometimes treating them savagely, or as the screenwriter Frances Goodrich put it bluntly, she could “get rough.”[56]

The she-Hammett much preferred to be one of the boys, as if association with the female sex might brand her second-class goods. Dottie, too, was famous for hanging out with the guys at the Round Table, and her oldest best friend was a man, the humorist Robert Benchley. Significantly, one of her chief literary subjects was the male sex, but her fascination with men was seeded with comic but ruthless digs, undergirded by exasperation, if not outright animosity. She is likely to have agreed with Rebecca West’s quip that the opposite sex is primarily useful for lifting pianos. Despite half-joking remarks – “Dear God, please make me stop writing like a woman”[57] – she certainly was not a woman-hater, as her verses and stories attest. For one thing, she wholeheartedly enjoyed the company of women and formed numerous affectionate relationships, sometimes with quite ferocious card-carrying feminists. Also, despite her love-hungry panic around men, she wore her beliefs like a badge and made a point of joking that she’d been an ardent feminist since buffalo roamed in Central Park. Lilly, scorning sisterhood as passé, equated it with those quaint suffragettes of her mother’s generation, and when embraced by feminists in the 1970s, refused to acknowledge that the women’s movement had any importance whatsoever.

Lilly was right: she and Dottie were an odd couple and should not have been compatible. But they were.

In 1944, when Dottie’s work was collected into The Portable Dorothy Parker, she inscribed Lilly’s copy with a syrupy love letter:

“For Miss Hellman – The most beautiful, the most rich, the most chic, the most dashing, the most mysterious, the most fragrant, the most nobly-born, the most elegant, the most cryptic, the most startling, the most glorious, the most lovely – in short, for Miss Hellman (from Miss Parker).”[58]

To be sure, it was hearts and flowers fluff but seemed appropriate nonetheless. By 1945, after fifteen years of economic depression and a brutal war, everybody was starved for a bit of giddiness. Soon, Alan and Dash would be back safely from the service,[59] life would go on as before in peaceful Beverly Hills and pastoral Bucks County. With every reason to believe in the future, they envisioned stories, plays, and movies, love, money, and fun. Anything else, they didn’t want to know about.

But that was a mistake, because in the years following the war, they would have to grapple with epic burdens, the kind of messes that made no sense. One question, by then, was whether they were going to prison. The other question was for how long.

Chapter 4

NORMA PLACE

(1951–1963)

Lilly knew the subpoena was coming. When a man wearing a black preacher’s suit showed up at her house, he removed his hat before politely asking if she was Lillian Hellman. Then he handed over the envelope ordering her appearance before the committee investigating Communist influence in the motion picture industry. While he stood waiting, she read the subpoena, then slammed the door in his face.

She did not think that she could feel so calm. Without telling anyone about the subpoena, she spent the next hour reading her mail and finally lay down for a nap. But she awoke drenched in sweat.

In September 1951, a screenwriter named Martin Berkeley had told the House Un-American Activities Committee that he had been a member of the Communist Party for seven years, while working at MGM and Columbia. He testified under oath that scores of actors, directors, and fellow writers also belonged to the party and went on to identify, by name, 161 individuals. Among them were Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, Dashiell Hammett, and Alan Campbell. He placed the four of them, plus Donald Ogden Stewart, at his home on the day when, he said, the Hollywood section of the party was organized in June 1937. His place, he added, was chosen because he had a large living room and ample parking facilities. Nobody coughed up more names than Berkeley, who seems to have panicked and tossed in the names of innocent bystanders, like Alan, having no involvement with the party.

As Lilly soon learned, all her alternatives were unpleasant. The Fifth Amendment gave her a constitutional right to refuse to answer questions on the grounds of self-incrimination, but she did not wish to claim the privilege, which she considered a sleazy circumvention famously favored by drug dealers and Mafioso. Knowing that she was in great trouble, she took the subpoena to a Washington attorney specializing in civil liberties and emphatically stated her own agenda. “I’m not going to jail,” she told Joseph Rauh.[60] Neither would she name names or take the Fifth. In fact, she would only answer questions about her own life. But, he warned, if she replied to questions about herself, she could be forced to talk about other people or face contempt charges. It was pointless to attempt horse-trading with the committee. Once again, she said that her main purpose was to avoid jail.

Following Rauh’s instructions, she prepared an account of her political activities for the committee. Accordingly, she wrote about how she’d joined the party in 1938 without giving it much thought and remained a member until 1940. She would willingly tell the committee about her own activities but could not, in all good conscience, hurt innocent people to save her own skin. Leaning toward a strategy of moral outrage, she continued: “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group.” Rauh rewrote her statement but omitted the troublesome admission of party membership and dispatched it to the committee on May 19, 1952. Lilly, meanwhile, had her hair freshly colored and bought a lovely silk dress, a black-and-brown-checked Balmain.

Two days later, at 11 A.M., she presented herself at the Old House Office Building wearing the Balmain with a black hat and carrying a handkerchief. Her stomach in knots, but appearing cool, Rauh at her side, she was sworn in and cautiously began responding to the committee’s questions.

What studios had she worked for? What was she doing in 1937?

To these routine inquiries she kept her answers concise. Rauh had warned her not to make a spectacle of herself, no strutting and posturing, specifically, to refrain from jokes or express belligerence, like some previous witnesses had done, to their regret. Then the committee members got down to business: Had she ever met Martin Berkeley? She must refuse to answer, she said. Berkeley’s testimony was read aloud. At this point, Joseph Rauh distributed copies of her statement of conscience to the committee, to be read into the record, and also passed out copies to the press gallery. The committee continued to concentrate on Martin Berkeley. Did she attend the meeting at his house? She declined to answer.

There was more. Questions followed questions until, finally, came the sixty-four-dollar question: Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? Like so many others before her, she refused to incriminate herself and invoked the Fifth Amendment. After one hour and seven minutes, she was surprised when they suddenly excused her. Now what?

Tense, she sat waiting for the next question. It was a badly run operation. “Get up,” Rauh whispered in her ear. She must leave the building immediately, walking swiftly without running, and speaking to no one. Interviews or a press conference would make more trouble for herself.

That same afternoon on the plane back to New York, she broke down and vomited, she would remember. Regrettably, she had been forced to take the Fifth, but she had not named names, and that was a victory of sorts. An even bigger surprise was getting off without being prosecuted. Did her sex save her?

Although Martin Berkeley swore Dottie was present at the organization meeting of the Hollywood Communist Party, HUAC failed to subpoena her. Neither did they bother to call Alan Campbell, who was viewed by the government as nothing more than a bystander and thus not worth questioning. Several years earlier, Dottie had divorced Alan who remained in England after the war because of another woman. By the time he made his way home in 1946, tail between his legs, she rejected the possibility of reconciliation. Nothing remained of either their marriage or their professional collaboration, and Alan would not share her Oscar nomination for Smash-Up.

Living without Alan proved more difficult than expected, and so in 1950 she took an unusual step, one that horrified Lilly. “Her husband was a pip-squeak, but she saw fit to remarry him.”[61] The decision was, in some respects, predictable, a case of not being able to live together or apart. The ceremony took place in Hollywood, where Alan was trying to get work at the studios. Mainly, he scraped out a living from income as one of the original investors in the musical South Pacific, directed by his friend Joshua Logan. Lilly’s skepticism turned out to be realistic because the second marriage didn’t work either. Dottie quietly retreated to New York after just a few months and moved into the Volney, a residence hotel on East Seventy-fourth Street in which she would make her home off and on for the rest of her life and which served as the inspiration for her feminist play The Ladies of the Corridor.[62]

Four years after Berkeley’s testimony, Dottie was finally called as a witness, in February 1955, and then it was not by HUAC but a New York State committee investigating financial contributions to organizations considered to be Communist-run. In the thirties and forties, Dottie had lent her name and money to so many of these supposed “front” groups that she might have lost count. (The actual number was thirty-three.)

Worried that Dottie might panic, Lilly made a special point of offering to accompany her downtown to the court house.

“Why?” replied Dottie,[63] who chose to view the summons as a request, not as a command, and consequently saw no reason to make a big deal of it. Several weeks earlier, not for the first time either, FBI agents came by and commenced asking questions about her various affiliations. Did she belong to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade? The League of American Writers? The agents could barely make themselves heard above the yammering of her poodle. Dottie frowned and pretended to be mystified by their inquiries. “My influence?” she said, as if unfamiliar with the word. [64] Jesus Christ, she couldn’t even get her dog to shut up. Unbeknownst to her, the FBI had been keeping an eye on her activities since 1939, even though their surveillance files consisted largely of newspaper clippings and fund-raising letters.

Still, when she arrived at the New York County Courthouse, she had taken pains to look stylish. She was wearing a mink jacket and a spiffy Tyrolean hat, along with an expression of discreet contempt. The questions, predictable, centered on how much money had been raised and what happened to the funds. Dottie’s position was that she could do nothing for the Committee, unfortunately. How was she supposed to know what the Spanish Refugee Appeal did with its money? The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League? She had no idea it was controlled by Communists.

Was she a member of the Communist Party? Raising her voice for the first time, she promptly invoked the protection of the Fifth Amendment.

Shortly thereafter, the government concluded that she presented no danger to national security and finally closed its Parker files, which by this time ran to beyond nine hundred pages.

•

In time, Lilly would write about the financial consequences of the blacklist, the overwhelming hardships it created for the victims. Some writers did not work in their professions for ten years, some never again. Unfortunately for Hammett, the cost was even greater. His association with a left-wing group designated as a Communist front – and his refusal to name contributors to its bail fund – led to a conviction for contempt of court. Five months in prison left him sick and broken. In her own case, it meant both the loss of Hollywood assignments and her country home at Hardscrabble Farm. In 1953, she briefly took a movie-writing job in Rome and tried to save by living in a cheap hotel. Back home, pinching pennies, she gave up taxis and allotted herself five dollars a week to splurge on candy bars and dime-store lipsticks. To make ends meet, she would later claim to have worked as a part-time clerk, under an assumed name, in the grocery section of a department store.

But for all the painful losses, her plight was not quite the catastrophe she pictured. For the most part, her everyday life was little changed. In fact, she continued to soldier on as before in her Manhattan townhouse, with a housekeeper and dinner parties, and she still appeared in tasteful if less showy designer clothes. She was, to be sure, not so wealthy as she had been. Still, it seemed like a great comedown.

What was a setback – and sometimes nothing more than a nuisance – for Lilly was a calamity for Dottie. Almost sixty, she had been earning her living as a professional writer for more than thirty-seven years. Her last nonwriting employment was playing piano at a dance studio in 1913. Without question, she was a miserable businessperson, neglecting to cash checks promptly and relying on her husband to manage the checkbook, and she had made no plans for her older years.

For a while, the sale of the Bucks County farm provided a comfortable nest egg, but it didn’t take long to exhaust the money, and when debts stacked up she was forced to borrow from Lilly – indeed, Lilly claimed, “a good deal of money.”[65] True to form, they didn’t talk about repayment because good friends did not discuss such disagreeable subjects. Instead, Dottie insisted on giving her the Picasso watercolor and the Utrillo she had owned since the thirties. Afterward, during another emergency, she had to reclaim the Utrillo and sell it. The true extent of Lilly’s financial woes is suggested by the fact that Dottie felt comfortable asking for a loan, which would not have been the case otherwise. Besides, in Dottie’s eyes, Lilly may not have appeared exactly broke because she’d just purchased a summer home on Martha’s Vineyard.

On the face of it, their friendship continued unchanged during the fifties. When Lilly was working with Leonard Bernstein on a musical adaptation of Candide, she invited Dottie to contribute lyrics for the song “Gavotte.” Apart from such professional favors, Lilly was a hospitable hostess who regularly extended invitations to the Vineyard. For whatever reason, unclear to Dottie, she could never be in the house when Dash was around. After a ferry ride churning through seven miles of seas from Woods Hole, she sometimes would find herself relegated to a guesthouse down the road. Being a good sport, she never complained.

Once she was visiting when Lilly got a call to drop everything and leave the island. Before dashing off, she started flitting around chopping and stirring, spooning the mixtures into little pans. She slapped together three days of suppers, writing down instructions about how long to heat each casserole and even lighting the oven before leaving. Besides the hot meals, she left an assortment of fancy sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs.

Lilly got home to find the casseroles untouched, the eggs and sandwiches uneaten. It looked like Dottie had consumed nothing but a large chunk of cheese. If this wasn’t bad enough, the oven was still on. All that effort to be a good hostess, all those dried-up casseroles and soggy sandwiches. Needless to say, Lilly felt like throttling her. But there was no showdown, not so much as a mention of the uneaten meals.

One of Lilly’s obsessive concerns happened to be food, especially what she considered superior food. Anything less than the best was disdained as “drek,” or “goy drek.” Her culinary tastes were traditional, her gastronomic fetishes inherited from a previous generation of cooks. The dishes she prized were tripe, kippers, quail, chicken hash, calves liver, rabbit, venison, and boiled short ribs. She made soufflés and mousses and of course mayonnaise from scratch. A cook of high standards, she purchased ingredients at first-class stores and bought her meats and poultry at Schaller & Weber, an overpriced German butcher in Manhattan’s Yorkville.

To Dottie, who had never learned to cook, a fixation with food seemed completely daft. She didn’t know the first thing about kitchens and would eat raw bacon before turning on the stove. When Ruth Goetz had her over for dinner, she knew what to expect. Dottie would pick at her plate, sample a morsel or two, and whisper, “Oh that’s lovely.”[66] Like a well-behaved child, “she overthanked you when she arrived and overthanked you when she left,” Ruth said. Considering the length of Lilly’s friendship, twenty years by then, it’s rather odd that she remained unaware of Dottie’s indifference to food. Give her a meal in a glass and she would be happy.

•

One day in 1959 a woman came to the Volney to interview Dottie. It was for a Columbia University program that was collecting oral histories of illustrious public figures, described to her as one of those scholarly projects that had become something of a trend lately. As she was being hooked up to the recorder, already wanting to jump out the window, she adopted a grande dame strategy in preparation for taking liberties with the facts.

“I’m not very important,” she warned the interviewer Joan Franklin, who had showed up with her husband, Robert. Furthermore, nobody cared to hear what she had to say. “The Lord knows I don’t want to hear about myself.”

Basically, her poor-little-me routine was meant to generate a bit of sympathy or, at the very least, a laugh, but this time she misjudged because her exaggerations seemed to intimidate Franklin. Jittery, she proceeded to tiptoe through a list of bland, flat-footed questions, mainly about Hollywood, the blacklist, and other subjects that Dottie preferred not to think about. Had she not been drinking, she might have behaved herself. The alcohol, apparently, encouraged her to sweep aside practically every question with the hauteur of a queen.

- Her motion pictures? “Never saw them. Not in my contract, for God’s sake.”

- Screenwriting? “Why do you keep asking me about Hollywood?”

- The blacklist? “For heaven’s sweet sake. I don’t know about the blacklist thing.”

- Her fiction? “Not important. Listen, my dear, I do the best I can.”[67]

- Her friends? “Dead. I go staggering on with my graying hair.”

- The Spanish Civil War? “The Spanish are wonderful people.”

- A memoir? “I’ve considered it.”

In the end, she had two choices: shoot Franklin or quote Samuel Johnson. She quoted Dr. Johnson – “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money” – at which point Franklin shut off the recorder. Dottie had managed to yap her head off for an hour without saying a single thing of importance.

The transcript, archived at Columbia University’s Butler Library, reads on paper like an ordinary conversation, at least for much of the time. But on the tape, Dottie shows no sign of her soft feathery voice and sounds like what she was – gassed. Likewise, the forlorn interviewer also sounds like what she was – a nervous wreck.[68]

•

During the fifties, with Hollywood barred to her, Lilly returned to Broadway. She wrote adaptations for four shows, including the book for a Leonard Bernstein operetta based on Candide. Dottie wrote a play too, her first since 1924, in collaboration with one of her boyfriends, Arnaud d’Usseau. The Ladies of the Corridor depicted the lives of older women living on their own in a Manhattan hotel, and the inspiration was, of course, her own home at the Volney.

For both women, love was as hard to get in the 1950s as a screenwriting job. Casual sex was a different story. Although Lilly had never fallen out of love with Dash, she was obliged to seek affection elsewhere. She made do with a string of exemplary but uninspiring males: one a career diplomat, one a young thing twenty-five years her junior, two theatrical producers, others who were journalists, editors, publishers, lawyers; men who, for one reason or another, were stolen from their wives or otherwise unavailable. In the end, there were no deep ties (except to the boy writer who one day would inherit her estate) and no man as thrilling as Hammett.

The men that set Dottie’s heart aflutter seemed to reinforce her reputation for choosing unsuitable lovers. A perfectionist in her writing, she put up with the biggest jackasses in her bed. As usual, the dalliances came to nothing, and the men slunk back to their hopeless marriages. One time in Cuernavaca, the fellow with whom she was living dumped her for another woman. On top of that he stole her dog. She had to find her way, alone and without luggage, from Mexico City to the Plaza Hotel in New York. Another time, when she and d’Usseau were working on The Ladies of the Corridor, his wife Susan rationed her liquor and forced her to eat home-cooked dinners. From time to time she saw Alan Campbell, to whom she was still legally wed, but after two marriages there could be nothing more between them.

•

Norma Place covered a single block, from North Doheny to Hilldale, with a bank and post office at one end and small apartment buildings at the other. The street, located in West Hollywood and supposedly named after the silent-screen star Norma Talmadge, was known as Boys Town because its residents, men with muscular bodies and flawless tans, were primarily gay.

It was a leafy green neighborhood of 1920s vintage cottages set on small lots with neat front yards and narrow, unpaved driveways. Alan Campbell scraped together enough to purchase a tidy two-bedroom, one-bath home at number 8983, possibly lending some credibility to rumors of his bisexuality, but more likely because he was drawn to the vibrant atmosphere. In his late fifties, he was a sociable, physically attractive gentleman who, a neighbor recalled, did not appear to be a practicing homosexual, nor did he seem to be romantically coupled with women either.

In the spring of 1961, Dottie took up residence with Alan on Norma Place. Not that she changed her mind about marriage – it wasn’t any fresh start with him that tempted her back to Hollywood; it was, in fact, money.

In recent months, Alan’s fortunes had taken a turn for the better when he began getting movie work again. His last job on a feature was a low-budget Universal film (Woman on the Run) in 1950; throughout the fifties he had eked out a modest living from television (The Jack Benny Program, Lux Video Theatre). On the verge of getting a break – the possibility of employment at Fox – he urged Dottie to join him. The movie was an upcoming star vehicle for Marilyn Monroe, an adaptation of a French comedy called The Good Soup, but getting hired depended entirely on Dottie’s collaboration. To Alan’s optimistic thinking, a Monroe picture could not help but do well, and further assignments could be expected. It was not too late, he believed, to reestablish themselves as the successful comedy duo of the thirties, the team whose work on A Star Is Born yielded them an Oscar nomination. To a professional pessimist like Dottie, invariably prepared for the possibility of failure, the idea must have been hard to imagine. Yet, what mattered was that his starry-eyed strategy appeared halfway promising for the short term. Whether it would continue indefinitely remained to be seen.

Over the years Dottie had learned a lot about Hollywood, and what she knew was that she hated the place. Still, the Fox job meant good money and the satisfaction of lucrative paychecks for the foreseeable future, security that had been missing from her life. Obviously there were other factors to consider: much-needed dental work that she’d been postponing and Alan’s agreement that she could have a nice bedroom of her own. And, of course, the weather was glorious.

A fiscally prudent individual, Alan owned a handful of stocks, two insurance policies, some real estate in Virginia, and with his good credit had no problem obtaining a mortgage. Brimming with home improvement projects, he intended to add a second bathroom and convert the garage into a rental apartment. It was a far cry from the glory days of swimming pools and Picassos, but if living grandly was no longer possible, he still wished to live well, and what he fancied next was a Jaguar, preferably dark green.

The decision to return was terrifying, and yet Dottie had little to lose. At the time nothing was happening for her in New York. Her ideas, it seemed, were passé; her writing, she believed, had gone out of style. In the end, the deciding factor was not “20th Century Fucks,” as she called the studio, or The Good Soup, fluff that had flopped on Broadway, but its star. She was smitten with Marilyn Monroe – “I am crazy about her”[69] – and could not pass up the enticing opportunity to write a Monroe film. Of course, starting over with Alan was risky. It had been some years since they worked or lived together, and the brief second marriage had tested the limits of her patience.

In no time at all, she settled into the community, or, as she liked to call it, “Peyton Place West.” Along Norma Place she became a familiar figure being ferried around in the Jaguar by her husband or walking her poodle Cliché along with a new Sealyham puppy. Soon she was making new friends, chatting up her gay neighbors, holding court at their frequent cocktail parties. Perhaps most important, she made the acquaintance of a cheerful young man living down the street, another writer working at Fox. Of all the people she met, it was Wyatt Cooper who would be the bright spot in her life on Norma Place.

Raised on a farm in Quitman, Mississippi, one of nine children, Wyatt grew up in a family that might well have come out of a Faulkner novel. Dottie, accordingly, nicknamed him the Sharecropper. As a child he was emotionally scarred by a tyrannical, womanizing father who told him “You’re no damn good,” and whose typical advice was backwoods basic: “Take a leak as soon as you finish & always wash it off with soap and water.”[70]

From his harrowing early years, Wyatt had matured into a caring, uncommonly sensitive man, one of the kindest people Dottie knew. She delighted in his company because, happily, he understood what was funny, and like herself loved giggling and swapping gossipy shoptalk, the more outrageous the better. The farmer’s son with the boyish smile was thirty-four but appeared ten years younger. As if unaware of the three decades between them, he treated her like a contemporary. If Dottie had succeeded in having a baby, and if it were a son, she would have wanted a boy like Wyatt.

At the studio, Dottie and Alan and Wyatt fell into the habit of lunching together. Bypassing the commissary, they trawled around the area looking for amusing restaurants and stores. One day while browsing in a Santa Monica antique shop, Dottie caught sight of a set of hand-painted porcelain figurines, Napoleon and his marshals, the courageous men who led his battles. Endlessly fascinating to her were, not just the campaigns, but also Napoleon’s career, his family, and his exile to Elba. The generals were nine inches high, and she wanted all thirteen of them. To display the miniatures in style, Alan put up a shelf in the living room and installed a special overhead light.

Wyatt was struck by how much fun the pair had together, “as they must have done in earlier and younger days.”[71] Of course they bickered, but even so, their solidarity was obvious. At the studio, they had no trouble coming up with, as Dottie called it, “a darling, bawdy farce” for Marilyn.[72] In their little house, where they chose not to own a TV set, evenings were spent leisurely reading, chain-smoking, and sipping Scotch; as before, she did not involve herself in housekeeping or cooking. After Cliché had puppies there were five dogs on the premises (Alan had little patience with the messes). For the fourth year she continued to entertain Esquire readers with her witty book column (“This novel,” she said admiringly of Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, “brings back all my faith in terror and death.”[73]) For a person who never admitted knowing happiness, who had a lifelong love affair with negativity, she had found a surprising degree of contentment.

During this period, Dottie saw nothing of Lilly. There was her aversion to Alan but also the fact that Dottie made no trips back to New York, and so their contacts were necessarily limited to phone calls or letters. A sort of liaison between them was Peter Feibleman, Lilly’s youthful protégé, who coincidentally lived a few houses down the street and sometimes would stop for a drink. From Peter, Dottie learned that Lilly was teaching at Harvard and that she was elected vice president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, an impressive honor. Likewise, information traveled the opposite direction because Lilly kept tabs on Dottie, asking for news and generally ending with the question of money. Did she have enough? She was living on “a shoestring,” Feibleman reported.[74]

The Campbells may have appeared pinched to Peter and Lilly, but they were hardly living hand to mouth; indeed, they were no worse off than any working-class couple. They were doing their best, given the circumstances. The shoestring continued to hold nicely.

Until it snapped. As happened all the time in Hollywood, the studio followed standard procedure and turned over their script to additional writers. Dottie, however, could not pretend to take it in stride and told friends that she felt “sickened.” As she described it, ‘hired swine burned the pot” and turned The Good Soup into “a kind of gaudy gazpacho.” Turned out, it didn’t matter. The Campbells found themselves off the Fox payroll but so was Marilyn, fired from her current film Something’s Got to Give and slapped with a half-million-dollar lawsuit. She was supposed to be ill. Disgusted but philosophical, Dottie allowed that Monroe might have been a problem. “Of course, Marilyn can’t help her behavior. She is always in terror.” A few months later, Monroe was dead and The Good Soup shelved forever.[75] Who, in her right mind, could have predicted such an improbable outcome?

The reconciliation that had begun with so much promise in 1961 quickly dribbled away, only to be replaced eighteen months later by perpetual friction. Living together as housemates had become far more perilous than either of them expected. Wyatt Cooper, accustomed to their genial crabbiness, was distressed to find them sometimes at each other’s throats.

Once the movie money disappeared, the ground shifted beneath them and the days became purposeless, with too much time on their hands and too much dependence on alcohol. No assignments were forthcoming. Alan may have tried and failed, but then he stopped trying. For a brief period Dottie taught a class at California State University, but eventually they were living on unemployment insurance, her royalties, and checks from Esquire, which had raised her rate from $600 to $750 a month and generously paid whether or not she submitted a column. Frequently she was late, or sent nothing, even though she claimed to be working. Sometimes, distrustful, Alan played crafty games. At one point, he placed a hair on her typewriter, assuring Wyatt that “when I get back it’ll still be there.”[76] Other times, he loaded stacks of unread review copies into his Jaguar and made the rounds of local bookshops. He can be excused for feeling nervous because the end of unemployment benefits was looming.

By the spring of 1963 the cracks in their relationship were getting hard to hide. Alan, increasingly grouchy, made no effort to look for work and typically started off the day drinking. Dottie retaliated by jabbing him with old insults, telling him harshly that he was hopeless, a horse’s ass, a writer of dubious achievements still clinging to her coattail. Her browbeating made him tear up.

“He used to be able to drink and still have fun,” she told Wyatt, ignoring her own overindulgence in Scotch. But Alan, who had shut down, was not much of a party guy anymore.

When the actress Cathleen Nesbitt was invited to supper, Alan got mumbly drunk. Hustling back and forth to the kitchen, he finally dished up a ruinous meal of burned roast and salad garnished with – what the hell was that? – speckles of aluminum foil.

•

On June 14, Dottie had been at the hairdresser. When she returned home in the late afternoon, Alan lay sleeping, curled in a fetal ball, knees folded up. A plastic dry-cleaners bag was wrapped around his neck. Then she saw that he was dead. There were Seconals spilled on the rug next to the bed, and when she shook him he was already stiff.

To those who came swooping into the house that night in June 1963, the procession of neighbors, the police, and the ambulance crew – and to those she phoned, such as Lilly in New York and Wyatt somewhere or other in Alabama – Dottie denied that Alan had killed himself. Before dozing off for his nap, which he had done untold hundreds of times, he must have lost track of the Seconals he’d taken. Another thing: he left no suicide note.

That Friday morning he’d been drinking Bloody Marys. He was plastered, recalled their maid Clara Lester, who described him as “drunk as a skunk.”[77] In the expert opinion of the State of California Department of Health, Alan’s death was caused by “acute barbiturate poisoning due to an ingestion of an overdose.” Its conclusion (which Dottie would always dispute): “probable suicide.”

That evening she talked mindlessly, having no patience with those who tried to comfort her. What appeared to be understandable shock and bereavement was blended with an even more powerful emotion: outrage. After twenty-nine years he had left her, once again. Without saying boo, not so much as a fare-thee-well, he’d simply toddled away.

Everybody was eager to help, but Dottie had nothing to suggest.

“What can I do?” a neighbor purred.

Dottie turned to her and said, “Get me a new husband.”[78]

The woman was shocked.

“Then run down to the corner and get me a ham and cheese on rye. And tell them to hold the mayo.”

An ambulance came to take Alan away. Still, people continued to stand around elbow to elbow, fixing themselves drinks and giving her hugs.

She had always told herself that the worst to befall people were not the tragedies of life but the messes. Make no mistake: what happened to Alan may have been the result of a time bomb that had been ticking for months, but it also was the cruelest, most unforgiveable kind of sloppiness. He had fled, leaving her to clean up the mess.

Chapter 5

UPPER EAST SIDE

(1964–1967)

It was chilly when Dottie straggled home, her plane landing at an airport called Idlewild when she’d left but rechristened John F. Kennedy International in her absence. In the heart of town, bare trees stretched across a dirty gray sky, and the March temperatures barely topped thirty degrees. Her last months in Hollywood had passed in a blur of sticky heat, a painful broken shoulder, and the obligation to tidy up Alan’s mess. Finally, his things had been shipped to his mother in Virginia, the dogs given away, the bank accounts closed, the house, car, and furnishings disposed of, the clutter cleared. “A clean sweep,” she called her attempt to purge herself of the things associated with Alan.[79] Free again, her suitcases bulging with the total of her earthly possessions (including the cherished Napoleon generals), the seventy-year-old exile rented a furnished one-bedroom apartment in the Volney.

Located on the fashionable Upper East Side, the Volney was the kind of place where white-gloved widows and refined divorcées lived with cherished pets. (Dottie’s poodle Cliché had died, but she still had one of her puppies, Troisième “Troy”). Apartment 8E had the minimalist look of a dentist’s waiting room, and some of Dottie’s visitors were to remember bare walls, a scarcity of knickknacks, hardly a few framed photos and books. Common to the elderly, she had pared down her surroundings, perhaps unconsciously, although fripperies of any kind had never much interested her. It was Alan, a lover of objects, who had adored decorating. Her apartment was unpretentious with a kitchenette and a dining table wedged into the corner of the living room. Did she long for the vanished house and pool on North Canon Drive, her comfortable fieldstone farmhouse in Pennsylvania with its apple orchards? Probably not.

The first months were difficult. Weighing eighty pounds and suffering from malnutrition, she resembled some survivor of the Bataan Death March. Her arm was in a sling, her eyes were failing. It took two or three packs of Chesterfields to get through the day. “I should be dead,” she would say, not entirely in jest, after a few Scotches, and sometimes before.[80]

As if the broken shoulder wasn’t enough, other debilitating ailments arose: bursitis, pneumonia, and poor balance leading to falls and fractures that sent her to the hospital more than once and weakened her self-confidence. Everything seemed to go haywire. Unable to dress, bathe, or feed herself, she needed the care of a practical nurse. For many months she found herself cooped up in 8E with a middle-aged woman in a uniform and organdy apron, who bossed her around, talked endlessly, and covered the dining table in plastic. Before long, the enforced intimacy was driving her nuts. In despair, she bought a television set and kept it on all day to escape the nurse’s chatter. Whiling away the hours, she soon became a regular viewer of soap operas, particularly As the World Turns.

Among her most serious worries was money. After settling Alan’s estate, she had felt optimistic. In addition to the proceeds from the house and car, there was a life insurance policy and sale of stock certificates. Armed with $41,500 from the estate, combined with her own income from royalties and options, she understood that her nest egg was not a fortune – far from it, in fact – but hopefully enough to get by if she was frugal. Missing was a reserve for emergencies, and because she was ill and faced with hospital and nursing bills, she sometimes required help from friends. (Medicare would not begin for another two years.)

In the meantime, trying to get well, she found no energy for work. “I can’t use my typewriter,” she told a visitor, because she might as well have tried to climb Mount Everest.[81] Although lifting her arms took immense effort, she found it possible to write with a pencil. One of her final pieces, published in Esquire, was a lengthy caption to accompany paintings of John Koch. In a poignant reverie titled “New York at 6:30 P.M.,” she returned to a departed time when she was growing up, replaying in her head the sweet moments when dusk fell across the city, when hostesses who had stepped from the pages of Edith Wharton were presiding over traditional drawing rooms, whose curtains had not yet been drawn and whose fires were being lit in real fireplaces. “There is no such hour on the present clock as 6:30 New York time,” she wrote. “Yet, as only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you’ll live through the night.”[82]

Struggling herself to get through the twilight, she was surprised to realize how much she had aged. She had expected her demise, even tried to hasten its arrival when she was thirty, and thirty-three, and thirty-nine, not counting one halfhearted attempt to kill herself with shoe polish at thirty-six. But what she had not imagined was decay, discovering herself an old woman in a cotton housedress and flapping slippers, dependent on strangers to wipe her behind. This is the part of her life that biographers would skip over.

•

In early February 1965, Dottie invited Oscar Bernstien to the Volney because she decided it was time to make provisions for her estate. By coincidence, the law firm of O’Dwyer & Bernstien represented Lillian Hellman, but this played no part in her choice. Her friendship with Oscar and his wife, Rebecca, went back five decades. Of greater importance, she knew his office to be a champion of civil rights.

There was no discussion about her last will and testament because she knew exactly what she wanted to do. There were no charitable donations, no financial bequests or sentimental gifts of trinkets to relatives and friends. In fact, just a single individual was mentioned, and he was a total stranger.

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a thirty-six-year-old clergyman, pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Ten years earlier, Dr. King had led the Montgomery bus boycott – the nation’s first black nonviolent demonstration – which led to the U.S. Supreme Court decision declaring laws that required segregated buses to be unconstitutional. During the yearlong boycott, King was jailed, his phone wiretapped, and his home bombed, but his cause triumphed and he was awarded the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, the youngest recipient ever. At the present time, it was King who personified the struggle for civil rights, and his “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, would be considered the defining moment of the movement.

Dottie and Dr. King had never met. Neither had she written about him, marched with him, talked about him to others, or praised his work publicly. There were no mutual friends, seemingly no personal connection whatsoever between the two. What she wished to offer him, and everything he represented, was a heartfelt version of herself, the Dorothy Parker who in her thirties had got arrested for demonstrating in Boston on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti. At the Volney, her mind clear forty years later but too old to march, she contributed what she could.

The civil rights movement had stirred her impassioned feelings of outrage over oppression, and so she had followed news of the Ku Klux Klan murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi with anguish. Two weeks after signing her will, Malcolm X would be assassinated, and that was followed in March by what would come to be known as the Bloody Sunday march to Montgomery. History came in a rush that year.

Dottie’s assets consisted mainly of two accounts at the Chemical Bank and some fifty or sixty shares of New Yorker common stock; she owned no property or insurance policies. But in addition to the immediate bequest, she left Dr. King a gift of far greater significance: her copyrights and royalties. This meant that he would receive all profits from her work during his lifetime, and then these rights would be transferred someday, decades in the future, to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Her decision came as no surprise to Oscar Bernstien. To be sure, a white writer leaving her estate to a black civil rights leader was highly unusual; in fact, nothing comparable sprung to mind. But under the circumstances – a widow without immediate survivors – it made sense. Knowing Dottie, it made perfect sense. As Rebecca recalled, “He understood completely what she had in mind.”[83] For that matter, any friend of Dottie’s knew exactly where she stood on racism. Some forty years earlier, she had published “Arrangement in Black and White,” a story shocking at the time, in which an African American singer (thought to be Paul Robeson) is subtly humiliated at an all-white cocktail party.

Throughout her life, Dottie had mismanaged her finances more often than not. But in organizing her death, the four-page will was a model of simplicity. Lillian Hellman was appointed executor of the estate (but did not share in the monetary award). Alternate executor was Seymour Bricker, the Los Angeles entertainment lawyer who had put Alan’s affairs in order. She had a soft spot for young Bricker who was responsible for her return to New York with money in her pocket (more than $300,000 in current dollars).

Following the main order of business came instructions for funeral arrangements, in which she directed that “my body be cremated and that there be no funeral services, formal or informal.” Otherwise, in keeping with her lack of religious beliefs or affiliation, there were no further mandates, for example, no guidance concerning disposal of the ashes – buried, scattered – but that was not unusual.

Having finally drawn up the will, she was in an unusually cheerful mood. Yukking up her forthcoming demise, she joked to friends that the least she could do was kick the bucket. Not to a soul did she reveal the actual contents of the will, and for that matter she did not bother to inform Lilly that she had finally put her affairs in order.

Interestingly, when the contents did become public, it was not the choice of King that would startle her friends; it was appointing Lilly as executor. It seemed inappropriate, Ruth Goetz said, “because she had not really been a friend to Dottie” in recent years.[84]

Why did she do it? “I can tell you why,” one of Hellman’s biographers declared. “Because Hellman was a shrewd businesswoman.”[85]

To Dottie, the decision was merely practical. Lilly was a hard-nosed manager of her own affairs, and she also controlled Hammett’s estate after appropriating both the book revenues and the copyrights from his daughters. In her view, this was nothing but fair because she had tended him in his last years and considered herself the rightful owner, not two young women who lacked administrative skills.

•

By the winter of 1965 – almost a year after returning to the city – Dottie’s health had improved; the maddening nurse was finally gone. After those dark days, she was tickled to be out and about in the neighborhood, eager for some semblance of a normal life. At Zitomer Pharmacy she bought toothpaste and ordered her medicines; she clumped past the galleries and consulates on Madison Avenue, past the corner where the new Whitney Museum was rising like a dour gray UFO above the townhouses. Some days she wandered up to the Carlyle, the hotel where Marilyn Monroe snuck in to see the president, and there Dottie occasionally allowed herself a forbidden cocktail at Bemelmans Bar. Surrounded by streamlined young women trotting by in miniskirts and boots, she looked like a sack of potatoes in her dark silk dresses and sensible walking shoes. It was an outfit she once wouldn’t have been caught dead wearing, but she had to watch her pennies. She feared running out of money and decided to move to a smaller, cheaper apartment on the sixth floor.

In the evenings she enjoyed going out but complained of receiving few quality invitations. Once there was a swanky concert and the promise of an introduction to Jacqueline Kennedy, whom she adored, but Jackie failed to show up. Another time, she found herself excluded from Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball, a slight that caused her to stew for weeks even though she understood that such snubs had become inevitable.

Again and again, doctors had warned her to give up alcohol, a cruel punishment in her view, but she made sporadic efforts at sobriety. To celebrate her seventy-second birthday, Sid and Laura Perelman threw a party that brought out many old friends. Clinking glasses with Heywood Hale Broun, she said, “Do you know what this is? Ginger ale.”[86] It was pathetic. Back in the day her old self could happily party all night long on bathtub gin, cheap rotgut whiskey, homemade absinthe, cough syrup, indeed, when the spirit moved her, practically any liquid in a bottle.

•

A Victorian chair from The Little Foxes graced Lilly’s cool green and yellow living room on East Eighty-second Street while other rooms showcased furniture from The Children’s Hour and The Autumn Garden. This collection of antique-shop memorabilia, which included a quaint Sheraton-Hepplewhite birdcage, was a daily reminder of how high she had risen since the days when she was Lil Kober and first met the legendary wittiest woman in America.

Except that, in real life, age and illness will eventually upend a talent for bon mots, something that Lilly was reluctant to acknowledge. A high adrenaline woman, she found Dottie’s physical deterioration terrifying.

Although the Volney catered to all ages, its predominance of seniors – and the ticking-clock atmosphere – sometimes gave the impression of an old folks’ home. Apartment 6F, a claustrophobic nest where even a short visit could be uncomfortable, alarmed Lilly. In Dottie’s living room, cluttered with unread issues of the New York Times and an assortment of dog toys, the poodle constantly barked and jumped on guests. Newspapers carpeted the bathroom floor.[87] Peter Feibleman tells a story about how he was puzzled seeing, on several occasions, the September 9, 1965, issue flattened to an obituary of the actress Dorothy Dandridge. He finally figured out the reason: the poodle, he said, “peed in the living room and shit behind the sofa.” Squeamish callers learned to pick their way around.

Lilly could not begin to fathom why anybody would live this way. But of course it was much more than messy conditions; it was Dottie herself who had become a person she didn’t know. “Poor Dottie,” she told people, so that they assumed Mrs. Parker must be out of it. One of Dottie’s worshipful admirers, Nora Ephron, confessed that “all I wanted in this world was to come to New York and be Dorothy Parker.” But Lilly managed to convince her that her heroine was actually “a sad lady who misspent her life and her talent.”[88]

Despite Lilly’s residence a few blocks north, she had kept her distance after Dottie’s return from the Coast. Phone calls were sporadic, visits occasional and brief. Her appointment books were clogged with professional activities and a hectic social schedule. She was a memorable hostess and party-giver, and guests were eager to dine on her cooking, a main course like leg of venison served with sweet-and-sour cabbage and “some very good red wine,” followed by a mixture of lemon and pineapple sherbets with “a nice piece of cake that isn’t too heavy.”[89] She loved entertaining almost as much as she loved grumbling about the effort she had lavished on preparations, but nonetheless visitors to her immaculate townhouse could see how much attention she paid to the small details of life. On the menu at her gatherings was not only superior food – her default preoccupation – but the company of exceptional personalities brimming with witty repartee and dishing up the latest dirt. People down on their luck, momentarily or otherwise, were not likely to be invited.

Dottie, in her heyday the darling of Manhattan hostesses, no longer fit in, of course. Neither was she invited to Vineyard Haven, which was realistic because she was too frail to do much traveling and unable to keep up. Spending time with her was no fun anymore.

More distressing than Dottie’s apartment was her drinking, which Peter Feibleman called “hard-core. Lilly couldn’t take it.”[90] Sober, Dottie was angelic. Under the influence, she could not resist the temptation to tell people what she thought of them. These outbursts made visitors uncomfortable, and Lilly was not the only one to shrink. As Ruth Goetz remembered it, an hour at the Volney could be “heavy-going.”[91] Well-intentioned guests felt obliged to rescue Dottie from herself by emptying Scotch bottles behind her back. Sometimes those who phoned found that the Volney switchboard had instructions to block incoming calls. If a person did manage to get through, Dottie could be needlessly defensive, leaving one gentleman gasping when she, a woman known for elegant manners, suddenly called him a Fascist son of a bitch.

Whenever Lilly turned up, Dottie seemed pleased to see her. “Oh, Lilly, come in quick. I want to laugh again.”[92] Every time it was the same sweet smile, which naturally made Lilly feel a little guilty. In Dottie’s place, she would have been far less gracious and said, “Where have you been?”

For Dottie, too, these indifferent reunions had become awkward because she knew full well that Lilly had dropped her. Unlike the old days, there was little to talk about, and so one of Lilly’s duty visits required a certain amount of ladylike playacting.

There was no denying Lilly had a mean streak, and Dottie had witnessed countless blowups that caused people to cringe and run for cover. Once at Lilly’s farm the two of them were inspecting the turtle cages when their conversation turned sour over some triviality. Spoiling for a fight, Lilly insisted that Dottie was lying to her.

Not so, Dottie answered, but clearly hoping to let it pass. At that moment a turtle’s penis suddenly snapped to attention. Without missing a beat, Dottie said, “It must be pleasant to have sex appeal for turtles. Shall I leave you alone together?”[93]

“She had paid me back,” Lilly was to recall, “and all was well.” Or so she liked to think. Friends who loved her dearly tended to make allowances, and Dottie also forgave her thoughtless behavior.

Lilly, increasingly judgmental, looked down on Dottie for roads taken – or not taken – choices that usually involved money. As a self-made woman, she had considerable disdain for people whose irresponsible management of their finances left them muddling through without sufficient income but who nevertheless insisted upon living above their means. She decided Dottie was paying too much for her apartment, even the smaller one on the sixth floor. Cheaper quarters in a less expensive neighborhood would do just as well and cut down on her expenses. While she herself could be “foolishly extravagant” in some things, she knew how to economize and always bought secondhand typewriters.[94] Instead of a desk, she worked at the dining room table. Dottie’s problem, on the other hand, was that she still wanted to live like a queen.

But more significant to their friendship than money was the passage of time. The age gap, irrelevant for so many years, was no longer possible to bridge. Dottie was a slow-moving seventy-two-year-old, whereas Lilly was a trim, fit sixty-year-old still eager for trips to Russia, flirting with younger men and hoping for sex, and swimming naked as a jaybird at Gay Head beach and not caring who saw her.

Needy people made Lilly feel resentful. She had done her best to look out for Dash, whose physical health, weakened from alcoholism, tuberculosis, gonorrhea, lung cancer, depression, and imprisonment, made full-time care necessary. But he was not at all grateful and stoutly resisted her efforts until his death in 1961, which made her even more angry. Dottie, too, seemed like a burden, even though she asked for nothing. In the meantime, Lilly was flailing both personally and professionally. There was a terrific year in 1960 with Toys in the Attic, a meaty semiautobiographical work depicting her father’s family. The companion piece to The Little Foxes received laudatory reviews and ran more than a year. However, her next venture bombed. My Mother, My Father and Me, an adaptation of a satiric novel, opened during a newspaper strike in 1963 and closed after seventeen performances. Despite her formidable gifts as a playwright, strike or no strike, it was not very good. What she called a comedy failed to entertain the critics, with the New York Times suggesting it was a mirthless “hymn of hate.”[95]

Another recent project, a Marlon Brando vehicle, had ended in personal mortification. The Chase, her first Hollywood assignment since being blacklisted, was an adaptation of a Horton Foote novel about brutality in a small Texas town. The job came at a painful time when she found herself consumed by the worst depression of her life, she recalled, a gush of bad feelings that had traveled with her since childhood. Director Arthur Penn, faced with a dysfunctional writer, ordered her script to be rewritten by Foote. An outstanding cast did not prevent mostly negative reviews labeling the film “in bad taste,” a jumble of violence, sensation, and clichés.[96]

Of all her disappointments, the most painful was falling in love with a man she believed a possible successor to Hammett. Blair Clark was a journalist, television producer (CBS News), and political activist twelve years younger than herself. A Harvard graduate, he was a handsome, wealthy patrician whose well-born friends numbered politicians (John F. Kennedy) and poets (Robert Lowell). There is no question he was uncommonly affectionate, with their relationship so close that they were viewed as a couple; in fact, some mistook them for lovers. A romantic Valentine’s Day poem, in 1965, was titled “Lilly Pie, Baby” and began, “I love my Lillian.”[97] Still, Clark was a divorced man who played the field and dated glamorous young women such as the newly widowed Jacqueline Kennedy. He felt no sexual attraction for Lilly.

The more he pushed her away, the greater her obsession; she wanted, not just sex, but matrimony. Clinging to her infatuation, Lilly deducted two years from her age, grieved over his rejection, and wrote heartachingly in her diary: “Blair – broken bad.”[98]

•

That winter of 1967, Wyatt Cooper brought over a tape recorder so that Dottie could reminisce about her life. For the love of God, she had the most horrible things happen in her childhood. It wasn’t exactly Little House on the Prairie. The Rothschilds weren’t normal – just a bunch of loudmouthed lunatics; and on her mother’s side, the Marstons were Yankee terrorists who manufactured firearms. The last thing she wanted was to go on about her life, but she didn’t want to disappoint Wyatt since she knew he was hoping to get a book contract out of it.

A mere four years before, the Sharecropper was living down the street from her in Norma Place, in somebody or other’s garage apartment, aimlessly collecting unemployment. But the kid’s life contained more plot twists than a Saturday-morning cartoon: he moved to New York and promptly married glamour girl Gloria Vanderbilt; as a result, he was currently dwelling in baronial splendor among the fat cats. He and the Heiress – whom Dottie privately called Gloria the Vth – were living in a townhouse on East Sixty-seventh Street with their two-year-old son, and another child was due in June.

Insisting that she was seventy-three and practically in her grave, she reluctantly agreed to the tapings because, looking on the bright side, his visits would perk up her day and maybe even “give me something to live for.” Sitting on her sofa, oblivious to the nervous yapping of her poodle, she lit up a Chesterfield as she waited for Wyatt to stop fiddling with the machine. “Let’s make it gay,” she told him. “If it’s not fun, there’s no point in telling it.” Then she got started: the Jersey Shore, Woodlawn in the Bronx, Long Island, her homes on the Upper West Side where she had lived her first twenty-seven years, not forgetting the Titanic and her family’s greatest tragedy.

It was stuff she had not spoken about, or even thought of, for more than half a century. Mother died and Papa was not right in the head afterward. On Sundays he dragged the entire family to Woodlawn so that they could talk to Eliza. Papa decided to marry a crazy bitch from the neighborhood who conversed with Jesus. None of the children were nice to Eleanor so that she had a stroke one morning and died. Soon after came Rags and Nogi, and for a while, stupidly victorious, they had the dogs to make life worth living. There was the spring all those years ago when Papa’s brother, poor Martin, died on the Titanic. Papa was wall to wall batty after that. And then he died. Naturally, it wrecked her but then she got the job playing piano at the dance studio.

The craziest things came floating back, such as the day when her brother passed her on the street and pretended not to know her. Even though both her brothers and her sister had died, nothing much had changed since 1907. She still saw herself as “just a little Jewish girl trying to be cute.”

After a couple of weeks she had to stop the sessions, disappointing Wyatt. She had tried very hard to continue, but it was no use; because, quite frankly, despite her best efforts she was straining for self-deprecating things to say. What she had most enjoyed about the tapings were the hours spent with her friend.[99]

Wyatt was Gloria Vanderbilt’s fourth husband (her third, Leopold Stokowski, was fifty-eight years her senior), and everybody, Dottie included, found the new marriage baffling. Truman Capote considered her choice of Wyatt “a mystery. He certainly wasn’t like anybody’s father.”[100] Wyatt let slip to Truman that during sex the Heiress “would scream over and over, Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” (which Capote leaked to his biographer), an enticing detail that would have lent itself, had Dottie known about it, to extensive clinical analysis.

Because the tapings had to be put aside, the Coopers decided to host a dinner party in her honor and made sure a great deal of care went into the guest list. By and by, acceptances arrived from an impressive roster of notable New Yorkers, among them several power couples – the Bennett Cerfs, the Bill Paleys, and the Martin Gabels (Dorothy Kilgallen). Dottie, excited, was also secretly irritated to learn that none of her friends would be there. The Coopers claimed that wasn’t the point – the purpose was to invite interesting people she didn’t know, ones she’d like to meet. Still, the way she saw it, her friends were not sufficiently chichi. Manufacturing an excuse to call the whole damn thing off, she said that she couldn’t come because she had nothing to wear, which was actually the case. This posed no problem to the Heiress who sent her a yellow brocade dress trimmed with seed pearls, which was size 3 but still much too large and almost reached the floor. The gift necessitated a trip to Saks to purchase sparkly slippers and handbag, whose cost made a serious dent in her budget.

However much Dottie appreciated the Coopers’ thoughtfulness, however great her affection for the Sharecropper, she nonetheless felt out of place among all those starchy, piss-elegant rich people. In the Cooper townhouse, a long dining table had been gaily set with a red tablecloth and vases filled with elaborate flower arrangements. No detail was overlooked by Dottie, who afterward described the party to her uninvited friends. Cutting straight to the heart of the matter, she offered an expert appraisal of the expensive wine goblets. Leave it to the Heiress to do things right, she said, because there wasn’t a paper cup in sight.

•

For all her yelping about the exclusion of her people from the Coopers’ guest list, it was not really important. As a person whose roots in the city went back to another century, she had a sizable social circle and routinely saw Sid and Laura Perelman, Kate and Zero Mostel, Jack and Madeline Gilford, Heywood Hale “Woodie” Broun, actresses like June Walker, writers like Quentin Reynolds, and playwright Ruth Goetz, whose father had staged Dottie’s first play, Close Harmony, in 1924. Living in Dottie’s building with a nurse-companion was her dear friend Sara Murphy, a Volney resident since her husband, Gerald, had died two years earlier.

The person she rarely saw was Lilly. What was to be their last visit took place in March 1967, right before Lilly trooped off to the Soviet Union. There was a postcard, mailed during a stopover in Paris, in which she nostalgically referred to their long-ago visit (that would be 1937) to the city and promised to phone when she got back. In Peter Feibleman’s memoir of Hellman, he writes that the two never saw each other again after Dottie returned to New York, but the details of the Paris postcard prove otherwise. It is one of two such pieces of correspondence in Hellman’s papers; the other is an undated telegram from Lilly in Vineyard Haven to Dottie in Hollywood, wishing her a happy birthday.

Dottie’s most devoted friend was Beatrice Stewart, a onetime Santa Barbara debutante who used to be married to Dottie’s writer pal Donald Ogden Stewart in the twenties, back when Dottie was still married to Eddie Parker. They knew each other well enough, after forty years, to put up with pretty much everything. Bea had two sons with Stewart before their divorce (in 1937), then became the third wife of Leo Tolstoy’s grandson, a U.S. citizen who had built Marineland in Florida. The marriage did not last.

In The Ladies of the Corridor and the short story “I Live on Your Visits” appear pathologically needy mothers who smother their sons, thinly disguised portraits of Bea (embellished with a pinch of Alan’s exasperating mother, Hortense). Bea, however, had refused to connect the dots, either unable to recognize herself or perhaps had simply decided to forgive Dottie. Those works were written a dozen years ago. Now it was 1967 and both of them were alone, husbands dead or alive or lost to Karl Marx, living with their poodles, doing their best.

Every few days or so, Dottie trudged the eight blocks to Bea’s apartment on East Eightieth Street, where they would have dinner together. Pecking at the food and smoking, she could spend an entire evening expounding on the endless indignities of her life. When it was time to leave, she would open her purse and say, “What am I going to do about taxis?”[101] A person like herself did not accept handouts, so when Bea offered a dollar or two, Dottie always said she really shouldn’t take it. Then she always did.

She had been raised to never speak of money, but her situation by this time had grown worrisome. Royalties and permissions were steady but modest, and options for dramatizations occasional and unprofitable. There was no money for luxuries like party gowns and cabs, despite rigorous scrimping. For that matter, after buying staples – mostly, Scotch and Chesterfields – she had little left over.

Unfortunately, taxis had become a necessity. Unsteady on her feet after several bad spills, she took special care about walking on the street in the dark. Nobody knew that her eyesight had gotten much worse. She continued to have the Times delivered, but reading it was a struggle.

Bea scolded her. “What the devil have you done with your glasses?”

Useless, she told her. “I can’t see anyway.”

•

Late Wednesday afternoon, June 7, 1967, a Volney desk clerk phoned Bea Stewart. “She’s gone,” he announced.

Gone? Bea had dinner with Dottie just the other day, but there was no mention of going anywhere.

No, no, said the clerk. A chambermaid found Mrs. Parker in her bedroom. She was dead.

This kind of news, not normal but not all that rare in a hotel with numerous elderly occupants, was presumably broken in a professional manner. Bea, composed, replied that something had to be done about Dottie’s poodle. A dog owner herself, she told the clerk to remove Troy from the apartment. She would hurry right over to pick him up.

When Bea got to the Volney, 6F was an apartment in transition, perfectly calm just hours earlier and suddenly a hive of activity. Lying in the bedroom was Dottie, who, as accurately described by the desk clerk, had gone. In the living room, police officers and firefighters busied themselves filling out forms and asking questions about next of kin. Hotel employees pushed in and out while curious neighbors gathered in the corridor.

For a while Bea lingered. Nobody was guarding the door. In the apartment were books and knickknacks, a closet of clothing, Dottie’s desk and typewriter, everything that remained of the house in Norma Place. What was to prevent vandals from pilfering whatever they fancied? Not that valuables were in view, but there was no accounting for souvenir hunters. They were not the sort of people likely to show much respect.

Finally, there was nothing to wait for, and so Bea took the dog and slipped into the hum of evening traffic on Madison Avenue.[102]

Chapter 6

FERNCLIFF

(1967)

For her half a century as a writer, Dottie was rewarded with the equivalent of a gold watch: a front-page obituary in the New York Times.

DOROTHY PARKER, 73, LITERARY WIT, DIES

The New York Times, Thursday, June 8, 1967, Page 1

By Alden Whitman

Dorothy Parker, the sardonic humorist who purveyed her wit in conversation, short stories, verse and criticism, died of a heart attack yesterday afternoon in her suite at the Volney Hotel, 23 East 74th Street. She was 73 years old and had been in frail health in recent years.

The prominence of the obituary startled some. There were those who found it remarkable because they had thought she was already dead, while others, including a few of her dearest friends, were secretly jealous. Did she really deserve such an honor? After all, she owed her reputation to work first written in the twenties. Had she not been resting pretty much on her laurels lately?

But after the backbiting and the whispers died down, everyone donned their sympathy faces and turned up at Frank E. Campbell’s funeral home. In her will, Dottie had stipulated no funeral service, formal or informal. Reading between the lines allowed for no prayers, blessings, or eulogies, no jibber jabber of any kind. Her scenario, simple as it was efficient, amounted to a suitable farewell for a devout atheist.

Within hours of her passing, however, Lilly lost no time arranging a funeral, small but nice, including the selection of the Gloria Vanderbilt Cooper party outfit as a shroud. Of course there were other friends who might have volunteered – Bea Stewart for one – but once Lilly had accepted responsibility and began issuing orders, the rest backed away. Obviously, as the presumed executor, it was her right, if not her responsibility.

Dashiell Hammett, who had looked upon rituals of any kind with horror, insisted that he did not want a funeral, traditional or otherwise. When he died six years earlier, Lilly dressed him in a tuxedo, delivered a heartfelt eulogy, and buried him in Arlington National Cemetery. Dash just didn’t know he wanted a funeral. Likewise, Dottie’s wishes were of no consequence either. The decisions fell to Lilly who began making phone calls, notified Campbell’s, and saw that the ceremony would be covered by local papers. Decisive as usual, she handled the funeral without emotion.

•

In the days when Dottie first lived at the Volney, in the early fifties, the sight of what seemed like five hundred old ladies under one roof had moved her to a grim thought. What if she died in this Madame Tussauds? The passenger elevator was too narrow to accommodate a gurney, and the service elevator was used to collect trash. The hotel, she told Quentin Reynolds, a journalist also living there, really ought to construct a chute between one of its upper floors and Campbell’s, several blocks away. It was the ideal solution. “We’d arrive in good condition and the trip would take a minute.”[103] Prophetically, she did indeed die at the Volney, and her body did indeed go to Campbell’s. Not by chute of course.

On a very hot Friday, Dottie’s friends gathered one last time. Anticipating a modest turnout, Lilly had bypassed the main chapel and scheduled the service for a small private room that seated around eighty. The event brought out an impressive showing of literary and theater lions – Arnold Gingrich of Esquire, Dorothy Schiff of the Post, Thomas Guinzburg and George Oppenheimer of Viking, writers Arthur Kober and Charles Jackson, S. J. Perelman, actors Zero Mostel, Maureen Stapleton, and Jack Gilford – joined by dozens of fans and gawkers. While Wyatt Cooper showed up, Gloria was preoccupied with the arrival of their second son, Anderson Hays, born the previous weekend. The small flower-filled chapel was soon jammed, and half the nearly 150 mourners had to stand in the hall and crane their necks.

Initially, a violinist played Bach’s “Air on a G String,” and then Lilly stood up and read a twenty-minute remembrance praising her friend as “a great lady.” In a solemn voice, she said that “she was part of nothing and nobody but herself. It was this independence of mind and spirit that was her true distinction.” Twice referring to Dottie’s final years, she mentioned her being “brave in deprivation, in the chivying she took during the McCarthy days, to the isolation of the last, bad, sick years.” She tried relating a joke, saying that Dottie had wanted this epitaph on her tombstone: “If you can read this, you’ve come too close.”

Next, Zero Mostel stepped forward. The barrel-chested comic actor, blacklisted in the fifties, recipient of a Tony Award for Fiddler on the Roof in the sixties, was not going to pretend when the service was a farce. “It was Dorothy’s express wish that there be no formal ceremonies at all,” he said. Having summed up the situation economically, he repeated the remark she had made to him after signing her will, that all she had to do then was kick the bucket. “If she had had her way, I suspect she would not be here at all.”

Zero sat down. Another rendition of “Air on a G String” closed the service, which had clocked in at thirty-five minutes.

On the sidewalk, the mourners seemed in no rush to leave. Without any particular evidence of moistened eyes, they treated the funeral as a social occasion, clustered around wisecracking as they conducted a postmortem in the heat. Almost as if Dottie were leaning down from a cloud, they riffed about whether she would have liked it. Nobody thought so.

To Sid Perelman, the program went on far too long. He was sure Dottie’s foot would have been tapping because “she had a very short fuse.” Naturally, Lil’s attempt to reproduce her wit fell flat. Her best lines, he said, could not be repeated in any eulogy because they were obscene.

There was no shortage of hilarity over Lilly’s chutzpah, how she capped her disgraceful neglect of recent years with a soiree Dottie didn’t want. Worse, her stage-managing of the funeral, a paint-by-the-numbers affair, was especially inappropriate. Bea Stewart thought that Dottie would have “HOWLED at the way Lillian Hellman decided to run the show.” She would’ve died on the spot had she been forced to watch. It was goofy sidewalk shtick that would not have amused Lilly.

Eventually, everybody went home.[104]

On their way back to their farm in Bucks County, Sid and Laura Perelman were not likely thinking about Dottie’s remains; neither was this a concern of the new father Wyatt Cooper or any other mourner. Everybody assumed that Lilly would take care of the remaining details.

•

Ferncliff Cemetery is situated along a silent country road in the village of Hartsdale, New York, a twenty-five-mile drive north of Manhattan. Established in the early days of the twentieth century, Ferncliff is not a traditional burial place. There are no upright headstones in its seventy-acre park, only markers flush with the ground. Equally distinctive is its mausoleum, a climate-controlled, museumlike palace of gorgeous stained-glass windows and Oriental rugs, whose marble corridors resonate with the sounds of soothing nondenominational hymns; here are entombed the likes of Judy Garland, Joan Crawford, Paul Robeson, and Moss Hart. That weekend of June 10, the cardboard container with Dottie’s body arrived at Ferncliff.

In 1967, it was a popular destination for deceased New Yorkers desiring cremation because it was – and still is – the only crematory in Westchester County. One luminary who would be cremated there, thirteen years later, was John Lennon, whose ashes were claimed by Yoko Ono. For the lesser-known, next of kin could remove their loved one’s ashes or arrange interment in the Ferncliff mausoleum or its special cremation garden.

Dottie’s cremation expenses were to be paid out of her cash on hand along with other unpaid bills. Since no provision had been made for purchase of an urn, the ashes were sealed in a container resembling a coffee can. Also unknown were her wishes about a burial site for the cremated remains, information that is sometimes noted in a will, but sometimes not. In her case, this would prove a serious omission.

•

Despite the cracks from Dottie’s gang of borscht-belt wiseguys, Lilly, out of the goodness of her heart, had made sure she got a funeral she deserved. Her eulogy had characterized Dottie as a person who “never spoke of old glories, never repeated old defeats, never rested on times long gone.” To remember her was to step back in time and think of the two of them together, the late nights when Dottie would be sipping watered Scotch and then peel off her ladylike manners and let loose with jokes that made Lilly shriek with laughter.

Suffice it to say, the spoilsports at Campbell’s had allowed her to assume the burden of Dottie’s exit without bothering to lift a finger. Unknown to those clowns, she had been walking around in a daze ever since reading the will. Nothing had prepared her for the contents.

For a very long time, she had expected to be named literary executor, and she also assumed she would be Dottie’s sole heir, the person who would receive the copyrights, royalties, and contract rights, all the cash and negotiable securities, plus the proceeds of a trust fund. To her astonishment, she learned that even though the executorship remained hers, the estate would go to Martin Luther King Jr. and someday to the NAACP.

Trying to put on a good face, she took pains to tell the Times that she was “very impressed.”[105] As far as she knew, Mrs. Parker was “the first white person who ever did this,” explaining that the gift was surely extraordinary but also completely in character. “She had very strong feelings about civil liberty and Negro rights.” Unfortunately, any deeper insights into the decision would be conjecture because “she never spoke of her will.” Left unspoken were her private feelings about the legatee.

In the summer of 1963, she had been in Washington covering the civil rights march for the Ladies’ Home Journal. Her piece, “Sophronia’s Grandson Goes to Washington,” took an offbeat angle on the historic demonstration, however. Instead of a straightforward report, she penned a personal account that incorporated her Southern background and the family of her childhood nurse. The daylong program on the National Mall – long-winded speeches, music, rah-rah hoopla – eventually grew tiresome, and she began to wilt. It was, she decided, like a VIP funeral that goes on too long.

Martin Luther King, kind man that he must be, nevertheless reminded her of grandiloquent Southern preachers from her youth. By the time he rose to begin his “I Have a Dream” speech, she felt thoroughly bored, she later admitted, and soon wandered away to find something to eat. She had heard it all before.

If Dr. King in one of his finest moments failed to bowl her over, his position as new owner of Dottie’s estate impressed her less.

To be sure, she and Dottie usually had quite different views on men. Alan had maddened her, obviously, and even though the relations between Dash and Dottie appeared cordial, Lilly claimed that he did not like her one bit. Once again, something similar was happening. The man to whom Dottie foolishly entrusted her future earnings – her legacy perhaps – was a person who failed to interest Lilly. This of course was Dottie’s decision, and there was nothing to be done about it. Still, she felt hurt and betrayed.

Among her friends Lilly bristled with rage. To Howard Teichmann, in a thundering diatribe that the playwright later repeated to a biographer, she cursed her as “that goddamn bitch.”[106] It was unbelievable because “I paid her hotel bill at the Volney for years, kept her in booze, paid for her suicide attempts – all on the promise that when she died she would leave me the rights to her writing. But what did she do? She left them directly to the NAACP. Damn her!”

Lilly had paid for none of these things, of course, and Dottie certainly did not make the NAACP her heir.

In her view, Dottie had made a promise and broken it. Maybe so. But what, exactly, was the agreement? True to her word, Dottie did in fact appoint Lilly as her executor. But it is one thing to be executor and another to inherit the estate. Whether she had additionally assured her of pocketing the rights as well is based entirely on Lilly’s say-so. In any case, Lilly did not take advantage of the provision allowing her to decline the position of executor in favor of Dottie’s alternate choice, the Los Angeles attorney Seymour Brick.

Lilly’s wrath seemed directed less at the civil rights hero personally than at his organization, which she found timorous, ineffectual, and behind the times. Some years afterward, in a calmer mood, she was to say, “It’s one thing to have real feeling for black people, but to have the kind of blind sentimentality about the NAACP, a group so conservative that even many blacks now don’t have any respect for, is something else.” The only explanation, she liked to say, was that “Dottie must have been drunk when she did it.”[107]

In the meantime, at his headquarters in Atlanta, Dr. King expressed surprise and gratitude. Of course he had never met Parker, and in all likelihood had never heard of her before, but he rose to the occasion. What impressed him, he said, was that “one of America’s most respected and warmly loved women of letters felt so committed to the civil rights movement that whatever she had she offered to it.”[108]

•

Along with control of Dottie’s work, Lilly would be obliged to deal with less appealing tasks that demanded immediate decisions. The Times had to be canceled, cartons of books taken away, payments issued to the Volney ($385.17) and Zitomer Pharmacy ($23.92), and on top of everything, the hotel wanted 6F vacated by the end of July. And who was supposed to remove Dottie’s personal belongings? Was that the concern of an executor?

In this case it was.

Opening drawers, she discovered several uncashed checks dating back to 1960, confirming her suspicions of Dottie’s financial ineptitude. In the bedroom closet hung all the clothing she owned, poor soul, none of it first-rate. The furniture belonged to the hotel; there were scarcely any kitchen utensils, not surprising given her disinterest in food. (Room service delivered her meals.) Lilly always knew that she had few possessions, but she was shocked to see how few. “Nobody ever left fewer accumulations,” she thought.[109] She could not help thinking it pitiful. A classic pack rat herself, she needed multiple homes, both a city townhouse and a country residence, to store her copious things. But if she was a hoarder, she was also a sensible hoarder who believed in recycling. She routinely weeded out unused items for donation to the Irvington House Thrift Shop on Second Avenue.

Finally, Lilly decided to send her secretary and cleaning man to the Volney. Together they cleared out 6F, dumping junk into the trash and bagging the rest, carting the plastic garbage bags back to Eighty-second Street. There were tons of papers, about God knows what, but it didn’t matter anymore. It made no sense to keep drek.

The one thing she did salvage, however, was Dottie’s set of Napoleon’s generals, which wound up on a shelf in the living room.

•

Twelve years later, I would attempt to trace the contents of Apartment 6F. Contacting the NAACP lawyer who was handling the copyrights at that time, I began by inquiring about Mrs. Parker’s papers.

Immediately Andrew Weinberger shook his head. “There are none,” he replied.

This was unusual because writers normally leave correspondence.

“No letters.”

What about the material from her estate? All her belongings? First drafts, her typewriter, her books?

“You won’t find a thing,” he cautioned. “Not a stick of furniture, not a chair or a stool, not a scrap of paper.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Nothing.” [110]

I did not believe him. Was there any way on earth for a person to leave nothing? Besides, he did not understand my job, which was to dig and dig until, as often happened, something of importance turned up. Surely Andrew Weinberger had it wrong.

Ten years passed. By the time my biography was published in 1988, quite a lot of interesting Parker material had come to light: poems written at age eleven for her father, photos of her twelfth birthday party, her nine-hundred-page FBI file, a Cartier watch handed down to her niece Lel, not to mention scores of her letters. I could say that I’d inspected Dottie’s Volney apartment, tramped through her Pennsylvania farmhouse, even spent a night in Alan Campbell’s childhood bed in Richmond. What I could not say was that I had located a single table or stool. Not one item that had been in Dottie’s possession at the time of her death, let alone anything that might be called a treasured doodad. Everything was gone.

The scraps of their past that people leave behind at death – the birth certificates, Social Security cards, passports, wedding rings, address books, divorce decrees, bank books, the little trinkets squirreled away – all these artifacts had disappeared.

Many years later, after Lilly’s death, her papers that had been deposited at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, became open to use without restrictions. I hoped that, perhaps finally, some Parker materials might surface. Research librarians tasked with cataloging the voluminous collection were able to find three manuscripts and a folder containing a few legal documents. Otherwise, there were “no caches of letters or other personal effects.” Hellman, in the words of one nonromantic archivist, “was a great one for donating to thrift shops” – the receipts saved for tax write-offs were among her papers – and so his educated guess was that Parker’s personal belongings went to a charity shop.[111]

•

The month after Dottie’s death, Lilly was at her house in Vineyard Haven, still trying to sort out Dottie’s things and looking to Oscar Bernstien for guidance. There were letters from Ferncliff about the remains, she told him; only she had “absolutely no knowledge” of what to do.[112] Doubtless he responded, but his instructions were not followed, and so Dottie’s ashes waited in a limbo of sorts.

Actually, no problem existed: Dottie owned her family’s plot at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx and therefore had every right to be buried there. In 1888, her father, J. Henry Rothschild, purchased Lot 6039 East, Myrtle Plot, designed to accommodate six grave spaces.[113] Between 1888 and 1913, there would be four interments: himself, his wife Eliza, and her parents. Two spaces remained, but since Dottie’s three deceased siblings had chosen to be buried elsewhere, ownership went to Dottie by default. Several months earlier, while taping her childhood memories for Wyatt Cooper, she referred to Woodlawn Cemetery and went into macabre but comic detail about the Rothschild children visiting their mother’s grave. Her father, she explained, liked to present the trips as weekend excursions.

Over the years the exact status of the plot, and her legal ownership, may have slipped her mind. And despite her attempts to amuse Wyatt, the subject was nothing to lose sleep over. Even so, a minimum of research, a single phone call to Woodlawn, by either her friends or the Campbell funeral home or Ferncliff, would have clarified the situation immediately.

•

Freeloaders got Lilly riled up, so when a Volney neighbor claimed she had been promised Dottie’s fur coat, Lilly swatted her aside with disdain. But Dottie’s niece and nephew in Brockport, New York, wondering if they might share the estate with Dr. King, provoked outrage. What “absolutely unmitigated gall,” she erupted to Bernstien. Not once had she heard Dottie mention these people. Besides, if they were that close to their aunt, they would know that she “owned almost nothing.”[114] Rebuffed, the relatives requested an autographed book or a photo as personal mementos, but got no response. Neither did Lilly bother replying to queries about where their aunt was buried.

In other cases, however, such as the piles of condolence notes from Dottie’s important friends, duty required personal replies. To one of these longtime friends, Lilly wrote of feeling guilty about her neglect of recent years because Dottie’s “disintegration” was too painful to witness.[115] Parker was hardly reclusive, but Lilly blandly insisted that she shunned people out of embarrassment over “the way she looked.”

In her capacity as literary executor, she could barely keep up with a swarm of business requests. Awaiting approval were two shows based on Parker material, now in various stages of development. A production featuring the music of Cole Porter and starring Julie Harris was scheduled for a Michigan tryout that fall prior to a Broadway opening. Equally exciting, Sandy Wilson was developing a proposal called “As Dorothy Parker Once Said.” Wilson was best known for his hit musical comedy The Boyfriend, which had introduced Julie Andrews in her first starring role, and months before Dottie’s death her enthusiastic Viking editor, Marshall Best, had talked up the project as potentially “quite big.”[116] On a mundane level, Zero Mostel’s accountant brother Milton was busy calculating her assets. Early estimates put the value of the estate at roughly $10,000, not unreasonable for an elderly person living in reduced circumstances. But this figure turned out to be low. After deduction of debts and expenses, the amount would add up to $25,000, which is something close to $200,000 in today’s currency. At the same time, a search of her copyrights was under way, which ultimately would prove far more significant than the cash.

Into Lilly’s lap fell every sort of question. Esquire, for example, wondered about an assignment Dottie had been working on, “The Middle-Aged Generation,” critical comments on contemporary novelists such as Norman Mailer, William Styron, and Gore Vidal. Had any drafts turned up in her apartment? The Library of Congress and Syracuse University were looking for Dottie’s papers. Would the estate be willing to donate them? (No, said Lilly.) But the greatest interest of all seemed to focus on her life. Not one but four publishers wished to commission a biography, and the suggested writers included Wyatt Cooper, William Zinsser, former Viking publisher George Oppenheimer, and Hellman herself.

Lilly’s standard response was that Dottie had never wished to write her autobiography and never wished to be the subject of a biography. As executor, a “moral obligation” compelled her to state Dottie’s feelings on the matter.[117] At the same time, she left herself a loophole, saying that she knew, as well as anyone, that she could not forbid such a book, and if the right person ever came along, she might even help. The operative word was “might.” To Lilly there was no right biographer: she despised all of them and had no intention of offering assistance. Biographers were skilled in snooping out the things people would just as soon keep to themselves. Worse, far worse, was the issue of control. Biographers took control of a subject’s life, something that horrified her.

For a valid reason, Lilly rightly described Dottie as a reluctant memoirist: often enough she had been overheard saying that rather than write her story she would cut her throat with a dull knife. This had not prevented her, in times of need, from accepting advances with no plans to deliver a book, a practice that Random House cofounder Bennett Cerf found disgusting and unprincipled. But as she told one publisher when returning a portion of her advance, she had tried, “but it doesn’t come.”[118] One reason it didn’t come was her speed. For a slow-paced writer who joked that she put down five words and erased seven, the completion of a full-length book on any subject was virtually impossible.

For sure, Dottie’s unwillingness to do a tell-all book was not news. But privacy was not the reason. Just the opposite. As a confessional-style writer who had hemorrhaged intimate details of her life for fifty years, there was hardly a dark secret left to tell readers. What’s more, happy in the spotlight, she seldom refused an interview and even took pleasure in cooperating with Paris Review in a self-portrait for its “Writers at Work” series. (She didn’t hold back either, cheerfully drawing and quartering novelists like Edna Ferber.) Most recently, she had begun recording her youthful memories for the sake of a young man for whom she felt affection. It was no coincidence that, within weeks of her death, Wyatt Cooper pitched a mini-bio to Esquire, which would quote from the interview tapes but mainly recall his friendship with her and Alan when they lived on Norma Place. “Whatever You Think Dorothy Parker Was Like, She Wasn’t” was a heartwarming portrayal of Dottie in her declining years, first as half of a screenwriting couple trying to make a Hollywood comeback, then as a widow living with her poodle in a residence hotel, ironically a character out of her own play.

There was nothing Lilly could object to, and besides, Wyatt was a Mississippi charmer. Even though his first-person reminiscences did not require her approval, his letters to Lilly were marked with the kind of gushy compliments that suggest a writer worried about keeping on the executor’s good side.

In the midst of all that, Lilly was shocked to discover that Viking Press, Dottie’s publisher since 1930, had commissioned a biography behind her back. Instead of consulting her, Marshall Best “didn’t even tell me about it,” she fumed, in this instance legitimately upset because it was a slap in the face. When she chastised Best for “very bad manners,” the wily editor offered a flimsy excuse and argued that it was not an authorized book. She said that had nothing to do with it. He should have asked her opinion.[119]

To make matters worse, the writer to whom Best had entrusted Dottie’s life story was downright preposterous, she believed. John Keats was a forty-seven-year-old journalist and author of works on social issues (Detroit automakers, suburbia, education, the food industry), along with a biography of Howard Hughes. His books, often best sellers, were known for zealous research and sharp wit.

Lilly opposed Keats because he seemed ill-equipped to undertake the life of a clever woman like Parker, but he failed to win her approval in other aspects as well. As a person whose work was not endorsed by influential arbiters of literature, the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, he was not a member of the club. In contrast to her select coterie of blueblood writers, the Mailers and Styrons and such, he was simply déclassé.

Determined to stop him cold, she unleashed an all-out campaign employing rough-and-tumble tactics commonly used to thwart biographers. She rushed off notes to those Keats might be likely to approach – not only Dottie’s friends and professional colleagues but places she had lived and dined, such as managers of the Algonquin and Volney – and forbade them to talk. Dottie was against the book, so Lilly was not cooperating either. Mum was the word. Weirdly enough, her warning succeeded in silencing a great many people.

Keats of course had a contractual obligation to Viking Press. Clearly worried about his hands being tied, he made an effort to resolve the problems by phoning Lilly and trying to win her trust. But it didn’t work; in fact, his audacity in placing the call simply fanned her anger, and before long the conversation grew intense. Losing his temper, he called her “a scorned women who puts her personal feelings ahead of her friend’s interests,” as she reported later to Marshall Best.[120] Insulted, she felt further stung when he began analyzing her motives. Didn’t her hostility really indicate fear that he would start looking at her life, and perhaps Hammett’s as well, flushing out secrets that might cast doubt on their patriotism? The conversation turned hugely ugly when he brought up politics and specifically HUAC. He mentioned the Hollywood blacklist, and she, furious, exclaimed that the blacklist had never intimidated her. Although he stopped short of bringing up Communist Party membership and her support of Stalin, the line had already been crossed. His chances of getting her cooperation, let alone an interview, had gone to hell in a hand basket.

Their conversation, Lillian told Best, made her feel sick at her stomach.

Afterward, Keats crafted a two-page, single-spaced letter of apology, in which he confessed to being “heartily sick of you, me, Viking, my agent, Dorothy Parker, and writing books for a living.”[121] There was nothing more to say. Nevertheless, she continued to fight him with insults (“hack,” “upstart,” “bastard”) and poked fun at his name – John Keats – as if sharing a name with a dead poet automatically made him a fraud.[122]

•

Lilly appeared intent on withholding approval of everything that could keep Parker’s name alive: A testy no was her answer to irksome queries from theatrical organizations, libraries, and professional societies like the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Gradually scripts were shelved, book ideas dropped, institutions disregarded, requests politely denied. When the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) needed to update its files on Dottie, she pleaded ignorance about the proper way to fill out a questionnaire. And when Bea Stewart presented a friend of hers with a Ladies of the Corridor script, Lilly demanded its return and then spread the word that Bea was a drunk.[123] All of this proved detrimental, and soon a fog seemed to settle over Dottie’s very existence.

The notable exception was John Keats’s biography, You Might As Well Live: The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker, whose publication she was unable to prevent. Viking, it turned out, decided to reject the manuscript on the basis of quality. (There were whispers that it contained an unacceptable number of errors.) After revisions, it was released by Simon & Schuster in 1970, but problems remained. The book, which showed signs of being inadequately researched and hastily written, was marred by the biographer’s patronizing view of his subject and also appeared curiously tone-deaf about women in general. No doubt out of frustration (or desperation), Keats was not above quoting from interviews with people who did not truly know Dottie, but offered steamy stories of drunkenness and sexual exhibitionism. Perhaps all this was predictable given Lilly’s relentless and effective campaign to muzzle witnesses. Only a few (Wyatt Cooper, Beatrice Stewart and her former husband Donald) dared to identify themselves. A chilling sentence in the author’s note that understated the vendetta said that Lillian Hellman chose “not to be involved with this biography in any way.”[124] The book, to Lilly, would forever remain “that awful biography of Dottie.”[125] Another biography of Dottie would not appear for eighteen years.

•

For all the aggravation connected with Dottie’s estate, the fall of 1967 would be a particularly happy period for Lilly. At Lincoln Center, rehearsals were under way for the first New York revival of The Little Foxes since 1939, featuring an all-star cast (Anne Bancroft, George C. Scott, and Margaret Leighton) under the direction of Mike Nichols. A close friend – one of her inner circle that included John Hersey, Jules Feiffer, William Styron, and Hannah Weinstein – and also her neighbor on the Vineyard, Nichols was now a heavyweight director in both New York and Hollywood, whose latest film, The Graduate, had proved a sensation. The Little Foxes represented his return to Broadway.

Unsurprisingly, the revival brought forth a batch of breathless reviews, the best of Lilly’s career, and comments such as “magnificent” and “thrilling,” even critics who found it “better than the original.” [126] It didn’t get much better than that.

Savoring her biggest splash of publicity in years, she welcomed a New York Times reporter to her home where she sat in her elegant parlor talking about clothes. “I buy Balenciaga when I can afford him. I like very cheap or very good clothes. Middle clothes are such junk, don’t you think?” She bought coats locally because “I’m in love with Ohrbach’s coat department.”[127] On a tour of the house, the reporter noticed at her bedside two phones, a radio, and books by Nathanael West and Bertolt Brecht. The headline “Furniture Collection That Charts Lillian Hellman’s Career” might just as well have read “Lives of Rich and Famous Playwrights.”

Among the rapturous reviews, however, was one savage attack that seemed to come out of nowhere. The reviewer was the formidable Elizabeth Hardwick who, in the New York Review of Books, deliberately went after the play – and its author – with a machete. A Southerner herself, she hated Lilly’s portrayals of blacks and whacked the play as sentimental Southern goo that she felt was clichéd, awkward, and dated.

A few weeks later, the most distinguished literary critic of the time bounded to Lilly’s defense. The Little Foxes, Edmund Wilson declared sympathetically, was neither old-fashioned nor melodramatic. Indeed, it was Hardwick who was misreading Hellman’s work. In addition to Wilson’s, the New York Review published letters from Penelope Gilliatt, Richard Poirier, and Felicia Bernstein weighing in their objections to the review. Refusing to back down, Hardwick responded with additional insults and went on to call the play’s lead male character a boring puppet. Clearly, she had it in for Lilly.

Although Lilly pretended indifference, Hardwick’s suggestion that she was a bad writer jangled her. Her eight original plays and four adaptations spanned thirty-three years in the theater. By this time she was a veteran, recognized as one of the most gifted playwrights of her generation, certainly in a class by herself as the best woman dramatist. Battling the good old boys club of Broadway theater, she had made them pay attention by delivering the goods.

Perhaps, she thought, Hardwick was disgruntled over Lilly’s cozy relationship with her poet husband, Robert Lowell (who was soon to leave her for Lady Caroline Blackwood). Normally, when somebody punched Lilly, she hit back, but she let it go this time because she was in a cheerful mood. Nothing could take away her pleasure in a lovely revival of Little Foxes, but now she was looking for different things to do.

Chapter 7

WALL STREET

(1968–1976)

Martin Luther King was killed by an assassin’s bullet nine months after Dottie’s death. On April 4, 1968, visiting Memphis to support striking sanitation workers, he was staying at the Lorraine Motel. It was almost 6 P.M., and he was standing on the motel’s second-floor balcony, speaking with Jesse Jackson in the parking lot below.

“Jesse, I want you to come to dinner with me,” he called down.[128] There was talk of wearing neckties for dinner, and somebody else said to bring coats for the chilly night. Suddenly a single bullet ripped into Dr. King’s cheek and caused him to fall backward onto the concrete, unconscious. He died an hour later at St. Joseph’s Hospital.

Two months passed before a fugitive from Missouri State Penitentiary, a petty thief by the name of James Earl Ray, was charged with the crime.[129]

After Dr. King’s death, the Parker estate automatically became the property of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Henceforward, her work would rest in the hands of a civil rights organization that had no experience in managing literary properties. The NAACP had a powerful legal division but no department for dealing with poetry and fiction.[130] Additionally, no precedent existed for this kind of situation.

Dating back to a time when African Americans were called “colored people,” the fifty-nine-year-old organization had initially devoted its energy to fighting lynchings and Jim Crow laws. By the late 1960s, it had scored important victories by means of litigation, among these the Supreme Court decision ending desegregation in elementary schools (Brown v. Board of Education). Yet, as times changed, the NAACP had to face increasingly fierce competition from controversial new activist groups such as the Student National Coordinating Committee working on voter registration in Alabama. The important issues to these groups tended to be polarizing – the emergence of the black power movement, the Vietnam War – and figures like Stokely Carmichael were considered cutting-edge.

“Radical chic” became the popular term for so-called extremist political causes supported by celebrities. At their Park Avenue penthouse, Leonard and Felicia Bernstein feted the Black Panthers, a militant group formed by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, at a party where guests wearing Afros nibbled Roquefort cheese balls rolled in crushed nuts. In a dig at the NAACP, the journalist Tom Wolfe wrote of the occasion, “There are no civil rights Negroes wearing gray suits three sizes too big – these are real men.”[131]

Hellman’s stewardship of Dottie’s literary affairs ended on the day King died because the estate laws giving the NAACP absolute ownership made an executor unnecessary. Regardless, she chose to thumb her nose at them and continued to administer the estate, bristling at those who tried to interfere. Although it was Viking that granted permission to reprint Parker’s fiction and verse, everything else had to obtain the executor’s approval. To all appearances the gatekeeper appeared to be Lilly, not the NAACP. Treating every request with frosty condescension, she almost always denied.

In an attempt to have things both ways, she displayed total indifference to Dottie in one breath; in the next, she held on for dear life. One minute she was disregarding Ferncliff’s entreaties to remove the ashes; the next, going to court against the NAACP to retain her position. Over her loud complaints, a ruling terminated her fiduciary capacity and gave total control to the NAACP in 1972.

This was not the end, however, because she continued to revile them every chance she got. Using the New York Times Book Review as a pulpit, she made certain to bring up the subject of Dottie’s estate. In the course of an interview with Nora Ephron, a personal friend, she called it “a bad story. I was executor, as you know. When King died, it turned out I was no longer executor – everything passed to the NAACP, of course.” To which she added, “I was so stupid that I assumed I would be executor of the estate until I died.”

Predictably, she went on, bad things happened. “Poor Dottie. Now the NAACP has sold the rights to all her work for a Broadway musical.”[132] (That was an outright lie.)

•

In seven years Lilly had not made peace with Dottie’s departure. The ashes had not been called for and the storage bill was left unpaid, until finally Ferncliff Cemetery lost patience and insisted on removal of the remains. Only after losing the executorship and her lawsuit did Lilly accept reality: Dottie’s estate was no longer her responsibility. When pressured by Ferncliff, she told them to mail the ashes to the office of Dottie’s attorneys, Bernstien and O’Dwyer, LLP,[133] in the financial district at 63 Wall Street.

Delivery of the package in July 1973 presented a dilemma because nobody had the vaguest notion of what to do. Since the firm didn’t wish to offend Hellman, a valued client, the issue was never presented to Dottie’s rightful executor, as it should have been. Instead, Paul O’Dwyer quietly stashed the box in his private office, in the bottom drawer of a file cabinet, a few feet behind his desk. As he would later explain, they planned to wait for instructions from Lillian. Months passed: Oscar Bernstien died and O’Dwyer, who had begun as a clerk and worked his way up, became the heart of the firm. Around the same time, he had been pursuing a political career and was serving as City Council president. Gradually, interest in Parker’s ashes faded. “I didn’t hear any kind of outcry,” O’Dwyer recalled. “Most people didn’t even know where the hell they were.”[134]

In a busy office the years slip by, and a package at the bottom of a file cabinet can easily go unnoticed. O’Dwyer, however, had not forgotten and sometimes mentioned the ashes to various friends. On one occasion, he showed the box to the writer Malachy McCourt, who remembered meeting Dottie years earlier. As a young man at a Hollywood party, he began bantering with an amusing woman who said she wrote “little things” but didn’t give her name.[135] When McCourt proclaimed her unbelievably sexy and playfully propositioned her, Dottie, who was in her late sixties then, called him a bigger than average jerk.

Probably the only person to pay his respects to Dottie during her file cabinet period was McCourt.

Anticapitalist, pro-Communist, ultra-anarchist, Dottie had always intensely disliked Wall Street and all it stood for. Life had taught her, she lamented in her story “The Garter,” to “never trust a round garter or a Wall Street man.”[136] Spending eternity in the financial district, in a drawer, was the biggest joke of her life. Regrettably, she could not be there to appreciate it.

•

Shortly after Dottie died, Lilly changed occupations. Having spent the better part of three decades as a dramatist, from her triumphant debut with The Children’s Hour to the embarrassingly short-lived My Mother, My Father and Me, she was bored by the theater and decided to close this chapter of her life. For celebrated writers like herself, the next step was often autobiography – a successful model was the posthumous Hemingway memoir A Moveable Feast – but she disliked the genre almost as much as she hated biography. On the plus side, memoir combined literary talent with the ancient practice of revenge.

How to piece together a personal account without writing a conventional memoir posed a challenge, as did telling her story without revealing confidential information about friends and family. No account of hers could exclude Hammett or Parker, the two of them sticklers for the absolute truth. Dash alive had been capable of the most vicious attacks on her honesty; Dottie alive had extraordinary sensitivity to pretense and hypocrisy. But this was no longer a concern. Scores were waiting to be settled.

•

At her house in Vineyard Haven, she was entertaining Nora Ephron, who had been assigned by the Times Book Review to conduct a Q & A interview. For two days Ephron followed her around with a notebook as Lilly cooked, coughed (from a bronchial infection), and talked nonstop. Asked to explain how she came to write An Unfinished Woman, she said that the book was “faute de mieux,” something to do.[137] Sick of writing plays, she found herself at loose ends and looked for a way to pass the time. Her original idea was to punch up old magazine pieces, a matter of developing the ideas, adding extra padding to give them dramatic effect, turning her experiences into theatrical events.

Wasn’t it interesting, Ephron observed, that all her main characters were dead. Lilly said she hadn’t realized it at the outset; in fact, she didn’t even notice until after publication. Without offering details about the reason for this belated epiphany, she did admit feeling liberated when she wrote about dead people. Besides, the way she figured it, she was the protagonist, telling the stories in her voice and expressing her feelings.

Her first public announcement of the autobiography had appeared four months after Dottie’s death, in another interview with the Times. Among her comments about furniture and her favorite coat store was a significant sentence: “I’m working on a collection of memory pieces.”[138] No further explanations were forthcoming at the time.

These “memory pieces,” as she labeled them, turned out to be odds and ends of personal history, a collection of snapshots, flashbacks, and snippets, which described her life experiences and dispensed information, apparently both factual and imagined. This structure permitted her to dart in and out, offering a glimpse of an experience, not necessarily in any cradle to grave sequence. An Unfinished Woman opened with her upbringing in New Orleans, then quickly led readers through her first publishing job in New York; the dull marriage to Arthur Kober (dispatched in one sentence), which led to Hollywood and a thankless job as manuscript reader for MGM, vacations in France and Spain during the 1930s, intertwined with diary excerpts from several trips to Moscow. The centerpiece featured a trio of portraits involving three people who had meant a great deal to her: her housekeeper Helen Richardson, Dashiell Hammett, and Dottie.

The sketch of Dottie starts generously by extolling her unforgettable wit, “so wonderful that neither age nor illness ever dried up the spring from which it came fresh each day.”[139] But in practically the same paragraph she begins cutting her down to size, claiming that Dottie, like herself, was a “difficult” woman and serving up handpicked memories that focus mostly on the superficial: liquor, rich people, uncashed checks. Tucked between the anecdotes are pent-up feelings of condescension and contempt.

References to Dottie’s abysmal taste in men allows her to pounce on Alan Campbell, whom she always denounced, behind Dottie’s back, as a “fairy-shit” and “pip-squeak.”[140] In reality funny and good-natured, Alan is introduced as unlikable and hard to stomach before being dismissed as a dope whom Dottie herself mocks but continues to depend on. The dead Alan rates a clever but mean-spirited reference to mayonnaise, courtesy of the Campbells’ neighbor Peter Feibleman, with Lilly casting doubt on the cause of death and implying that pills were to blame. No charge of suicide was brought, she said, which was untrue since Alan’s death certificate lists him as a “probable suicide.”

But perhaps the ultimate in disrespect was failing to give Dottie any significant place in American literature. Apart from a fleeting compliment for “Big Blonde,” there is practically nothing about her defining work, the 330-odd poems and free verses, the scores of short stories, screenplays, and song lyrics, the mountain of articles, essays, and reviews, and the three plays staged in New York and Dallas. By implication, she is not in the same league as a serious artist like Lilly. Glossing over the literary accomplishments devalues her to a wisecracking personality destined to be remembered for cute epigrams (“Men seldom make passes / At girls who wear glasses.”[141]).

Toward the end of the portrait, affection abruptly falls by the wayside when Lilly suddenly confesses to having grown sick and tired of Dottie, no longer an entertaining companion but a forgetful old woman and a sloppy drunk who neglects to deposit checks in a timely manner. Only here could Lilly acknowledge her tremendous anger about Dottie’s drinking, illnesses, and embrace of a dingy life (which forced Lilly to feel pity) and especially rage that she had reneged on a promise and made a stranger her sole heir.

Finally, she circles back to quote from a letter of Dottie’s, presumably written shortly before her death but never mailed, in which she refers to her poodle as C’est Tout. There was no way on earth this letter was written by Dottie, whose dog was named Troy. Small slips like this one inevitably raise suspicion about the accuracy of other “memories.”

Throughout the book, Hellman seemed to use a simple formula for anecdotes, larding her own memories with hearsay, facts taken out of context, quotes from the defenseless dead, and news stories. As a result, the details of scenes sound right, but the conclusions subtly distort reality, or worse. In the composite about Dottie’s relationship in the 1920s (prior to meeting Lilly) with an archconservative banker, the man is described as a “very dirty cad” who beat her.[142] It is correct that John Garrett was handsome, correct that he later killed himself, to be sure his infidelities made Dottie extremely unhappy, but certainly nothing hinted at physical violence. The woman with the black eyes and bruises, the one who chose the company of an abusive man for thirty years, was Lilly herself.

In his popular novel The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett created a beguiling fictional couple, Nick and Nora Charles, a pair of witty sophisticates who owned an adorable schnauzer Asta.[143] In his own life, Hammett was a sadistic husband who fled his marriage and never achieved a successful relationship with any woman, in or out of wedlock. The characters of Nick and Nora, as played by William Powell and Myrna Loy, became America’s favorite movie couple, practically role models for an ideal marriage in the 1930s. The greatest irony, though, is that Hammett’s relations with the opposite sex involve textbook incidents of physical violence. And the abuse extended to his older daughter, Mary, with whom he tried, but failed, to have sex.

As everyone who had known the ex-Pinkerton detective could affirm, he was not a happy person. During his lifetime, fearing and despising women, he forced them to play by his rules. When he was no longer around to call the shots, Lilly deftly reassembled him into a charismatic marionette, as deliberately as Geppetto had fashioned the wooden boy Pinocchio.

Lilly had suffered terribly from his cruelty, more than anybody realized, not only the promiscuity, drunkenness, and battering, both verbal and physical, but also the rejection of her sexually, his refusal to marry her, and the pregnancy she felt obliged to terminate. Washed up by the age of forty, Hammett never published another book after The Thin Man, never had sexual relations with Lilly after 1939 (and probably earlier). In the last years of life, he relied on Lilly to support him.

Lilly’s revenge was to restyle a selfish bastard into a saintly scamp with a few garden-variety tics who was trying to make the world a better place. In her makeover, the real Dash was replaced by a sensitive fictional Dash, “my closest, my most beloved friend,” the love of her life, the Nick to her Nora, the Rhett to her Scarlett, the Dick to her Liz.[144] Even his most devout beliefs got retooled when she claimed not to know for sure if he’d ever been a member of the Communist Party.

The writing of An Unfinished Woman began mid-1967, the manuscript was delivered in the fall of 1968, and the book subsequently released in the spring of 1969, altogether a period of around twenty months. It was not a coincidence that Lilly spent these very months simultaneously sparring with John Keats and fending off assorted publishers with clumsy excuses about her “moral obligation” to stop all Parker biographies. Just as Keats had requested a formal sit-down interview, so would other writers, but cooperation was not in her interest when she could use her Dottie memories in a book of her own. Never to the day she died would she speak about Dottie with any biographer.[145]

The disarmingly winsome style of An Unfinished Woman, just the right blend of self-deprecating candor and confession, enchanted readers and earned accolades from critics. Better than that, it earned money and won a National Book Award. Her first endeavor as a memoirist proved so successful that she decided to embark on a sequel.

•

Norman Mailer, a friend of Lilly’s, diagnosed that she “didn’t know the boundary between fact and fiction.”[146] Presumably, she did know but chose to ignore it. As she put it in The Little Foxes, “God helps those who invent what they need,” a showbiz-type adage akin to “there’s a sucker born every minute.”

Playwrights make stuff up: invention was her business, imagination her bread and butter, and strict accuracy not an issue. Having worked hard to perfect her craft, Lilly had become a specialist at massaging a tale for maximum impact. Rather than tell a story straight, she was accustomed to perking up a yarn by use of hyperbole. By her standards, taking liberties was not fibbing.

Nevertheless, some of her stories did more than fudge the facts; they peel off into fantasies masquerading as truth. If the exaggerations in An Unfinished Woman were not conspicuous, the second volume of memoirs, Pentimento: A Book of Portraits, shows her sliding toward calamity.

The literal meaning of the unusual title is repentance and refers to an original image painted over by the artist, in its way, almost what a writer might think of as a second draft. Drifting through Lilly’s revised images are family members in New Orleans, colorful figures like an eccentric attorney and the actress Tallulah Bankhead, and encores from several by-now stock characters: Dash, Dottie, and Alan. At the heart of the book was a fifty-page chapter, “Julia,” a spy thriller recalling the summer of 1937 when she accompanied the Campbells to Europe, during the brief period when they went off to Spain and left her behind in Paris. The character who figures centrally in this segment is a childhood friend, Julia (no last name given), an heiress studying medicine in Vienna and an activist in the anti-Fascist resistance. And here, where Lilly enters the scenario, is the moment when her undoing began.

Writing a role for herself as a brainy Bond girl, she agrees to become a courier and deliver $50,000 to the Austrian resistance, to be used for bribing Nazi guards into freeing prisoners. It is a dark, mysterious train journey of a fearless Jewish woman risking her life by smuggling refugee aid money concealed in the lining of a gray fox hat, making her way through perilous border crossings and past Nazi customs officials in Berlin, forced to fend for herself in foreign lands on the brink of war. The danger of this adventurous mission is confirmed by the fate of Julia, who is subsequently killed by the Germans.

Skeptics found it curious that a strong storyteller like Hellman produced a narrative marbled with ambiguities and a bundle of contradictions. For example, the fuzzy chronology placed her in several countries at once. Attempts to fact-check the story were inevitable.

The most thorough investigation, “‘Julia’ and Other Fictions by Lillian Hellman” (1984), was made by Samuel McCracken, assistant to the president of Boston University. In an exhaustive effort to challenge Hellman’s accuracy, McCracken and his researchers poured over the 1938 London phone book but found no listing for the funeral home where Julia ended up; examination of old train schedules show no Paris–Moscow trains stopping in Berlin; the boat on which Hellman brought back Julia’s corpse sailed from Le Havre without stopping in England. And so forth. No specifics could be verified, they reported.

Publication of Pentimento in 1973 raised questions for a New Jersey psychoanalyst, who was unpleasantly shocked to recognize herself and her own life in Austria during the thirties. Her name was not Julia; it was Muriel Gardiner, and at no time, she said, had she ever met Lillian Hellman. At the outbreak of war, she returned to America with her husband, Austrian socialist Joseph Buttinger, and their daughter. The two women knew one person in common, a mutual friend who possibly had mentioned Muriel’s exploits to Lilly. For ten years Gardiner and her family had shared a house with Wolfgang Schwabacher in Pennington, New Jersey.

Taking the high road, Lilly remained lock-jawed and resisted the temptation to engage with Gardiner. It was not worth wasting time on fussy allegations that would blow over.

As the final indignity for Muriel Gardiner, the purloined tale of “Julia” would end up as a Hollywood film, with Jane Fonda playing Lilly and Vanessa Redgrave winning an Oscar for her portrayal of Julia/Muriel.[147]

•

Some who knew Lilly could not help snickering about Lilly the Memoirist. Some who knew her exceedingly well held even stronger opinions. In the latter group was Sid Perelman, a friend for close to forty years, who valued An Unfinished Woman for its portrait of Dottie but found it otherwise unremarkable. His opinion of the melodramatic life-and-death Julia story in Pentimento went unmentioned, but her third volume of memoirs made him roar with laughter. Seriously, had Lil taken leave of her senses? Evidently, she was viewing herself as a “historical character” – George Sand for the Age of Aquarius.[148] He feared “lest those men in the white jackets armed with butterfly nets suddenly appear and entice her into their wagon.”

But Lilly hardly cared what people said, whether they were friends or foes. Her books, spectacularly popular, had sharpened her image, and for the first time she was known to a national audience that had probably never seen one of her plays.

What tickled Sid Perelman was Lilly’s humorless testimonial to herself in her political memoir Scoundrel Time, in which she blithely rewrote history. The 150-page book, set primarily during the McCarthy era, is a period piece taking the form of a duel between good and evil, almost entirely given over to her battle with the U.S. government, and her differences with various liberals, by this time boring ancient history to most Americans. Detailing her appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952, she reprinted the full text of her letter to the committee in which she declared that “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.” The climax came during her testimony when she refused to give the names of party members or answer other incriminating questions and instead pleaded the Fifth Amendment.[149]

In reality, previous witnesses had used exactly the same strategy (and a few refused to answer all questions), but Lilly’s emotional account left the impression that she alone had done something extraordinary. Some of her recollections had the hallmarks of a Charlton Heston biblical epic, as when a disembodied voice called out from the press gallery, “Thank God somebody finally had the guts to do it,”[150] a hurrah apparently heard by Lilly alone. At another point in Scoundrel Time, she interrupts the narrative and devotes four pages to an evening in New York, shortly after the hearing, when she took part in a concert program at the 92nd Street Y. Her appearance onstage, she said, was greeted with thunderous applause.

Unquestionably, her story was dramatic. But it led her down a slippery slope that ended in embarrassing questions, among them had she ever been a member of the Communist Party?

In Scoundrel Time, she continued to pass herself off as a nonmember, conceding only that she had tagged along to several meetings with Hammett, but “I did not join the Party,” she wrote.[151]

This simply was not true. She was a member from 1938 to 1940, as her biographer Carl Rollyson would discover at the Library of Congress while sorting through the papers of her attorney, Joseph Rauh.

Little, Brown released the book in the spring of 1976 with a flowery introduction by the conservative Catholic historian Garry Wills and a twelve-page photo insert billed “Lillian Hellman. An American Heroine.” Despite this song-and-dance number, hilarious to some readers other than Sid Perelman, the book attracted admiring reviews. The Times, as usual, went overboard; one critic paid homage to her “clear-eyed, pithily-written account,”[152] while it reminded another of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. Lilly had come to expect no less from the paper, which routinely endorsed her self-mythologizing and printed fawning articles by her close friends and loyal cheerleaders Nora Ephron and Christopher Lehmann-Haupt.

Contrariwise, a handful of detractors voiced reservations or pointed to her naïveté. As one unfriendly review put it, “What she cannot understand yet is that politics is politics and full of tough cookies, and that writers who meddle in it solicit destruction by it.”[153] An exceptionally harsh opinion came from the critic Hilton Kramer, who wrote on Lillian’s death that Scoundrel Time was “one of the most poisonous and dishonest testaments ever written by an American author.”[154] Leftist politics was not an interest of Perelman’s, so he could laugh. Those not amused remembered that Lilly had supported the verdicts of the Moscow purge trials in the 1930s, when “enemies of the people” were executed or marched off to labor camps, and that she also had defended the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression treaty of 1939 – and, furthermore, had never renounced her belief that Stalin’s Russia was a democratic country. So the fact that, after five decades, she remained an unregenerate Stalin apologist was not harmless drivel. It seemed repugnant.

These unsavory passages from her earlier life were nowhere to be found in the pages of Scoundrel Time, which was essentially a paid message selling Lillian Hellman, the writerly equivalent of an infomercial for the purpose of marketing a brand. The book was calculated to inflate her status and provide a seductive blueprint to the way Lilly wished to be remembered. And although her story cast a spell on many readers, not all the attention was favorable. For that matter, suspicions that had surfaced with her story of Julia in Pentimento were about to take a direction she could not have predicted.

Chapter 8

BALTIMORE

(1977–1988)

On March 28, 1977, Lilly appeared on the stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to present the Academy Awards for best documentaries. With the majestic air of Glinda the Good Witch, she stepped out of her 1930s bubble, you might say, as the Hollywood Munchkins stood and cheered. This fanfare, having nothing whatsoever to do with the documentaries, signified recognition for Lilly herself, the courageous author of the greatly anticipated Julia, which was scheduled for release that fall. The following year, nominated for eleven Oscars, Julia would win awards for Jason Robards, Alvin Sargent, and Vanessa Redgrave, but it lost Best Picture to Annie Hall. Redgrave turned her acceptance speech into an awkward political oration saluting blacklisted Hellman – though not by name – and all the people who had stood up to the McCarthy witch hunt “against those who tried to express in their lives and their work the truth they believe in.”[155]

Throughout the 1970s – possibly her best years ever – she was an electric personality on the American literary scene and more, she was a name. Blackglama furs invited her to model a mink coat for its national ad campaign, “What Becomes a Legend Most?” featuring divas such as Elizabeth Taylor, Beverly Sills, and Marlene Dietrich. Unlike Judy Garland, who had clopped through her photo session in a vodka fog, Lilly posed in a $7,000-dollar coat holding a cigarette and barely suppressing a smile of cool triumph. She was seventy-one and frankly thrilled. Still in fairly decent health despite four packs of cigarettes a day, almost beautiful, definitely glamorous, she seemed to be leading an enviable life, the very embodiment of fabulous.

Now, whenever Lilly made a trip abroad, she liked to fly the Concorde, another emblem of her quest for class. Still hungry for experience, she made holiday jaunts to London and Venice, Martinique and Barbados, streamed down the Nile, shared a vacation house in Florida with friends like Sid Perelman. Summers on the Vineyard brought a procession of blueblood houseguests; in the city she was sought after by journalists clamoring for interviews. In 1976, after the release of Scoundrel Time, it seemed everybody wanted a piece of her. There may be no second acts in American lives, as Scott Fitzgerald had written romantically, but Lilly proved that adage incorrect. Weren’t all her dreams of success coming true, again?

At her Park Avenue apartment came calling a young reporter, sweetly costumed in a dainty white blouse and a single strand of pearls, who seemed awestruck in her presence. Afterward, evidently, the reverence must have worn off because her published piece wounded Lilly’s vanity. It described Hellman’s “wonderful stone face” as looking like “it had fallen off Mount Rushmore.”[156] For years Tallulah Bankhead, the original star of The Little Foxes, an actress who despised her, had been comparing her face to George Washington’s. And now this? She should have known better than to trust anybody in a single strand of pearls. “The bitch,” she growled, and vowed never to give another interview to a stranger.

More potentially troubling than the reporter with the pearls was a growing pack of fact-checking sharks, still in the distance but growing more visible, the Muriel Gardiners and the assorted nitpickers with their insinuations of dishonesty. No matter, though, because Lilly never ran from a fight. When Little, Brown collected her trio of memoirs into a single volume, Three (1979), and asked her to add commentaries, she reread the books and decided that “on the whole, they please me.” That reassurance was for her admirers, to let them know she would not back down.

And to prove discretion was not her forte, she threw out a handful of condescending remarks about veracity for the fact-checkers. With Icarus-like bravado, she declared, “I tried in these books to tell the truth. I did not fool with facts.” Readers, she added, should judge for themselves.

And readers did, sending her books to the best-seller lists and reinforcing her image as a fearless truth teller. In her favor was an ingratiating style of writing that made people want to like her, to believe her incapable of fooling with facts. It was hard to imagine that such an uncompromising person had stolen another’s achievements. Especially admired by her own sex, she became a figure of inspiration to the women’s movement, which enthusiastically identified her as a feminist role model. Even so, their social revolution left her cold. She had personally liberated herself long before these banner-waving, consciousness-raising sisters were born.

•

Late at night Lilly liked to watch television in her bedroom. Never a great fan before, she had taken up the habit after dismaying physical ailments – emphysema and heart problems – began to slow down her social life. On evenings when there was nothing to do besides watch television and smoke, she turned on the news or various talk shows. One of her regulars was the popular Dick Cavett Show on Channel Thirteen (PBS).

A former standup comic, Cavett was a small man with an engaging personality on-screen, irascible offscreen, whose success relied on persuading celebrities to engage in conversation on serious issues of the day. Unlike the late-night hosts on the networks, Cavett didn’t do jokes, magic tricks, or chitchat with plastic starlets. He went for intellectual guests – he loved writers – who would have something provocative to say, which to certain viewers like Hellman was the best kind of entertainment.

On the evening of January 25, 1980, Lilly was listening to Cavett interview Mary McCarthy, a writer Lilly had always disliked for her anti-Stalinist sentiments. Who, Cavett asked, were the most overrated contemporary writers? It was a variation on one of his stock questions, posed countless times to professionals in other fields, which made his program so much fun to watch.

McCarthy didn’t hesitate. Pearl Buck and John Steinbeck, she replied quickly, and in addition to those deceased writers she would add Lillian Hellman who, still alive, was unmistakably a has-been. To which she added that Hellman was “tremendously overrated, a bad writer, a dishonest writer, but she really belongs to the past.”[157] All that Joan of Arc preening before HUAC was ludicrous. As for Scoundrel Time, a self-congratulatory book that mangled history, it was nothing but warmed-over Stalinism and therefore more Hellmanology.

Lilly promptly pricked up her ears.

Cavett, who delighted in goading his guests, followed through with the obvious question immediately: What was dishonest about Lillian Hellman?

In a flash, McCarthy took a swing. “Everything,” she breezily declared. “I once said in an interview that every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’” The woman was a virtuoso of deceit.

Cavett’s question was not as impromptu as it seemed because, apparently, McCarthy had known in advance that it would be asked.

In her bedroom, Lilly laughed out loud. The next morning, she called her attorney and told him to sue Mary McCarthy and the Dick Cavett Show.

Their decades-old acrimony involved two issues: professional rivalry and politics (because McCarthy had supported Leon Trotsky). Certainly Lilly had never made a secret of her scorn for McCarthy, aiming slurs at her whenever offered the opportunity. And sometimes she lobbed a sizable insult, as when, in an interview with the Paris Review, she called her “often brilliant” but unfortunately her fiction revealed her as an amateur, only “a lady writer, a lady magazine writer.”[158] In fact, McCarthy was hardly a dabbler. Her novel about a set of Vassar graduates, The Group, spent two years on the best-seller list.

Practically everybody advised Lilly that suing McCarthy was a bad idea. Most likely she was seeking attention for her latest novel, Cannibals and Missionaries. But to Lilly, defiant as ever, it was outrageous that such ignominy could find its way into her bedroom through the television screen. McCarthy was a disgusting woman whose “poisonous nonsense” should not go unchallenged.[159] Why shouldn’t she hold her feet to the fire?

Let it go, Peter Feibleman urged sternly. Move on with your life.

“What life?” she replied.[160] She declined Cavett’s offer to rebut McCarthy. Did he really expect a response? What was she supposed to say – that she was not a liar? On February 15, Lilly filed a lawsuit for libel claiming $2.25 million in damages against McCarthy, Cavett, and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).

Initially, Mary McCarthy’s reaction was to treat the lawsuit as a joke. It was a shame that Hellman couldn’t recognize hyperbole, she said. All she had done was to offer an opinion – after all, she was a literary critic. Once before, she had made the same comment in almost the same words, all but saying that when it came to dishonesty, Hellman was a career criminal. A year earlier, she had told the biweekly paper Paris Metro that she couldn’t stand Hellman. Her every word was false including “and” and “but.”

Whatever the case, McCarthy pointed out, Lillian Hellman had no grounds for her suit because she was a public figure.

For the rest of her life, Lilly continued to obsess over the case as it escalated into a tabloid catfight. Annoying Mary McCarthy became “faute de mieux” and a kind of enjoyable therapy rolled into one. Hopefully, the legal fees would ruin her. For her own counsel, Lilly chose Ephraim London, a prominent civil liberties lawyer and close friend who had taken the case gratis.

•

As the critic Diana Trilling had found out the hard way, you could risk losing your publisher if a book offended Lillian Hellman. Several years earlier, Little, Brown (also Lilly’s publisher) requested removal from her essay collection of several passages that Lilly found objectionable; when she refused, they canceled the contract, whereupon she took We Must March My Darlings to Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in a brouhaha that reached the pages of the Times.

Hellman’s warlike swagger could be extremely intimidating. But not to everyone. For the Paris Review Martha Gellhorn drafted a sulfurous piece about lying and denounced Lilly as an “apocryphiar,” a word she coined to mean someone who fabricates a tale with herself as the heroine.[161] The editor, George Plimpton, changed “Close Encounters of the Apocryphal Kind” to “Guerre de Plume,” but it didn’t matter what he titled it. Lots of people had come to fear Lilly, but Martha had been waiting years for a chance to scorch “that witch.”[162] The result was a blistering article that made Mary McCarthy’s name-calling look like schoolyard hair-pulling.

The two of them had met for the first time in 1937, during the summer and fall when Martha and Hemingway, Dottie and Alan, and Lilly were in Paris and Spain, and also the very same weeks in which Lilly had set her “Julia” escapade. Gellhorn decided that almost every word in Lilly’s self-glorifying account of her visit to Madrid was a lie. On the offensive, she mauled Lilly for draping herself in the Spanish war like it was some Blackglama mink coat. No doubt, too, it must have grated her to find herself in An Unfinished Woman frivolously described as wearing “good boots,” a less-than-friendly barb similar to Lilly’s characterization of Mary McCarthy as a lady magazine writer.[163]

Gellhorn was quick to recognize Dottie’s importance in discrediting the story of “Julia.” Sensing that Hellman had already chucked any incriminating documents that pertained to the 1937 trip, she wrote that “Mrs. Parker might as well have left her papers to Fort Knox. Until Miss H. releases Mrs. Parker’s papers, there is no way to prove how long Miss H. stayed in Spain.” Likewise, there was no way to prove or disprove her train trip to Berlin with the currency in her hat. And for that matter, none of Lilly’s three memoirs would have been possible had Dottie – or Dash – been around.[164]

Martha Gellhorn’s venom provided a green light to critics who had once feared Lilly’s reprisals. The next writer to go after her was a former confidante, the journalist-novelist Renata Adler. In the early 1970s, Lilly had mentored the opinionated young woman whom she considered brilliant and hoped would be a friend for life. During her career at the Times and New Yorker, Adler simultaneously turned to fiction and in 1983 published her second autobiographical novel, Pitch Dark, based on her relationship with the civil rights lawyer Burke Marshall. In a memorable walk-on, drizzled with malice, Lilly appears as Viola Teagarden, described as a disagreeable woman who paraded around her anger as if it were some prizewinning thoroughbred bull, “to be used at stud,” and who brought a juicy lawsuit that had utterly no merit.[165]

Instead of confronting Adler, Lilly expressed her disdain to Marshall, telling him that Renata needn’t worry about a lawsuit from her. She regarded her hostility as inconsequential.

In fact, she faced more pressing matters because another ugly crisis had erupted. Only weeks earlier, Muriel Gardiner, who had done nothing about Pentimento for ten years, decided to publish a book about her life. In Code Name “Mary,” the psychoanalyst, eighty-two and soon to die of cancer, recounted how she had joined the anti-Fascist resistance while studying medicine and psychoanalysis at the University of Vienna, and how she had used the name Mary to smuggle passports and money. Unlike Julia, Muriel had not lost a leg or been killed by the Nazis, but otherwise her resemblance to Lilly’s heroine was remarkable. As Gardiner pointed out, she and Lillian Hellman had never met, but there was a connection because they had shared a friend at one time.[166]

Caught in the cross-fire of Mary and Muriel, badgered for details about Julia and her wealthy family – by close friends like Blair Clark – Lilly had a hard time focusing and doled out conflicting tidbits that convinced nobody. Again, she brushed aside Gardiner’s story as foolishness, blustering that it was news to her because she had never heard of the woman until a few days earlier. “She may have been the model for somebody else’s Julia, but she was certainly not the model for my Julia.’’[167] Don’t bother her; she was tired of the subject.

•

As her health problems worsened, Lilly lived in a state of volcanic rage: she barked orders at domestic help and cursed her devoted secretary Rita Wade as “a dirty Catholic son of a bitch.”[168] As she departed Massachusetts General Hospital in 1983, where she had slapped nurses and thrown trays of food, the staff she had tyrannized for four months was heard to shout cheers of joy. Her hair-trigger outbursts, increasingly repulsive, alienated even the most sympathetic of friends. She was, reported William Styron, “utterly insane and loathsome to everyone, but is mercifully immobilized by her cigarette, her blindness, feebleness and venom and so can really bite no one seriously.”[169] Her wild, bold side, so admired by friends and feared by others, had turned grotesque.

The final year of her life consisted largely of trying to deny her real circumstances: blindness, strokes, hallucinations, paralysis, and attacks of uncontrollable rage. For a distraction, she began collaborating on a cookbook with Peter Feibleman. Eating Together had to be dictated since she could no longer read or write. Many of the recipes are too old-fashioned for broad appeal, but she did a roast chicken and scrambled eggs to perfection. Strangely, some of the recipes brought back memories of Dottie, one of her few friends who had no interest in cooking. She recalled them driving to the Vineyard on a St. Patrick’s Day and Dottie fulminating against the Irish with insults that were “amazing in variety and sometimes in length.”[170] The more Lilly laughed, “the more remarkable grew her anger with the Irish. By the time we got to the traffic on Major Deegan Parkway, they were even responsible for Hitler’s Holocaust.” After the six-hour drive, she cooked “a very good meal” of crispy roast duck and warm green beans vinaigrette.

Lilly died on June 30, 1984, ten days after her seventy-ninth birthday. Several months earlier, Peter Feibleman had visited her in New York. A nurse who stopped him to announce the approaching end warned that Hellman could no longer eat, sleep, or walk, and her memory was failing. Making his way into Lilly’s room, he asked how she felt.

Wretched, she answered in irritation. “This is the worst case of writer’s block I ever had in my life.”[171]

Up on Martha’s Vineyard, following a bon voyage luncheon hosted by Rose Styron, Lilly was buried in Chilmark Cemetery. After eulogies by old friends like Patricia Neal and Jules Feiffer, after references to her as “a finished woman” by John Hersey, after Bill Styron told the mourners that he was the last person to take her out to dinner, people went back to her house in Vineyard Haven for another good-bye and more food.[172] Eating together seemed appropriate.

All the while, down in Wall Street, the can containing Dottie’s ashes was still stranded in Paul O’Dwyer’s makeshift mausoleum. By this time, it was forgotten by everyone but O’Dwyer.

•

Three years after Hellman’s death, I was preparing to deliver my biography of Dorothy Parker. Chatting on the phone one afternoon with Paul O’Dwyer, who was at his desk in his Wall Street office, I mentioned my plans to visit Parker’s grave. Whenever possible, I made a point of checking out the whereabouts of a deceased subject, if for no other reason than to pay respects. After eight years, one final task remained: a trip to Ferncliff Cemetery.

“Oh, she’s not there,” O’Dwyer said.

“Of course she is.” If there was one thing I knew for sure, it was where Dottie was buried.

“No, no. I’m looking right at her.” He had her in his office, he said, and then proceeded to explain how the unclaimed ashes had ended up in his care.

“Excuse me? Never buried?”

The truth was, he said, Mrs. Parker had been occupying his file cabinet for almost fourteen years.[173]

In his cabinet? Among the file folders? Good grief, hadn’t he thought of a more suitable spot, say a shelf? I put down the phone and immediately began looking for a solution. My initial thought was to wonder if I might claim the ashes and arrange for a proper burial. Very likely a biographer taking possession of a subject’s remains was unconventional, but these were unusual circumstances.

In any case, O’Dwyer had other ideas. Once the cat was out of the bag, he understood that something needed to be done. After New York Daily News columnist Liz Smith wrote about the ashes, suggestions flowed in from all over the country. Ideas ranged from the traditional to the creepy: sprinkling the ashes from an airplane, commission of an oil painting, enshrinement in one of the Algonquin’s bars.

Throughout that year, O’Dwyer began discussions with the NAACP, and soon the matter was quietly resolved. It was a thoughtful decision, which, unlike some of the proposals that leaned heavily on her reputation as a drinker, would finally give her remains the respect they deserved.

On the evening of March 16, 1988, the lobby of the Algonquin was the scene of a boisterous party and press conference, swarming with Parker aficionados, newspaper reporters and TV cameras, curious hotel guests, and a sprinkling of gate-crashers hoping to cadge free wine. After all, ashes parties did not happen every day. Among the revelers was Liz Smith, who was asked to imagine what Mrs. Parker might say about the gathering. “She would have thought it was absolutely ridiculous, and, even if she loved it, she would have made fun of it.”[174] Finally, the white haired, eighty-year-old O’Dwyer made his big announcement: coming to Mrs. Parker’s rescue, he said, was her executor, the NAACP, who wished to give the ashes a home at its national headquarters. No planes or hotel bars for Dottie. She was going to Baltimore.

The assembled guests stared blankly. Their Mrs. Parker in Baltimore? She would rather stick a pencil in her eye.

Quickly O’Dwyer went on to introduce a graying, heavyset man, Dr. Benjamin Hooks, executive director of the NAACP, who had come up from Baltimore for the occasion. Sensible as the plan sounded, some of those present looked disappointed while others began whispering unhappily. Hooks hurried to say that he understood some might object to the NAACP getting the ashes, “not because we’re not worthy but because we’re not in New York.”[175] This was true. Somehow the idea of Parker, a chauvinistic New Yorker, hustled off to eternity in Baltimore seemed strange.

But then came a second surprise: his organization was not content to claim Parker’s ashes, but instead they planned to put up a memorial on its grounds. To many of the sophisticates milling around the Algonquin lobby, Dorothy Parker’s connection to the NAACP had come as a complete surprise.

That very evening, Hooks personally bore the can to Baltimore. As he would observe afterward, “The idea of a white woman leaving her entire estate to the black cause was unparalleled. I can imagine the gesture was greeted with a raised eyebrow by many whites.”[176]

Although Dottie the nonbeliever wanted no funeral, she would get two of them, unusual for a nonpracticing half-Jew, half Episcopalian. Seven months later, on a gusty day in late October, Benjamin Hooks and the mayor of Baltimore, Kurt Schmoke, would bury Dottie at the NAACP national headquarters on Mount Hope Drive. As befitted a major literary figure, the ceremony dedicating the Dorothy Parker Memorial Garden was a solemn affair with speeches emphasizing her commitment to civil rights and to the traditional ties of friendship between blacks and Jews.

The vice president of the Baltimore Board of Rabbis was on hand to toss in a symbolic handful of dirt, followed by tributes to her work by a local university professor, a remembrance by Paul O’Dwyer, and three musical interludes. Missing were references to the bad old days, her dedication to the Communist Party and other unpopular activities that had led to the necessity of claiming a Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

None of her friends were able to attend because nearly all of them were gone: Lillian Hellman, Sid and Laura Perelman, Beatrice Stewart, Sara Murphy, Zero Mostel. Even young Wyatt Cooper had died of a heart ailment at age fifty.

No expense had been spared in constructing the $10,000 memorial, a brick circle in a grove of nine towering white pines, designed by the dean of the Howard University School of Architecture. The inscription on the forty-pound bronze urn read:

Here lie the ashes of Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) Humorist, writer, critic, defender of human and civil rights. For her epitaph she suggested “Excuse My Dust”. This memorial garden is dedicated to her noble spirit which celebrated the oneness of humankind, and to the bonds of everlasting friendship between black and Jewish people. October 20, 1988.

At long last, Dottie was laid to rest twenty-one years, seven months, and thirteen days after her death.

Epitaph

LAUGHTER AND HOPE AND A SOCK IN THE EYE[177]

One thing about life, the road can go awry so easily. For a start, Dorothy Parker got cheated out of being a New Yorker. She was supposed to be one, but somebody goofed and she wound up arriving the wrong month (August), in the wrong place (by the sea some sixty miles south of New York). The family trekked back to the city immediately after Labor Day, but somehow it didn’t count.

Before she knew it, she had become an adult with a ridiculous life, not kind of ridiculous but ridiculous with nuts and raisins. Chained to a desk with pencil and pad was “the worst life I’ve ever heard of,” she wrote in a woeful moment. Typewriters were just as terrible because she always had a problem changing the ribbon. “This living, this living, this living / Was never a project of mine.” And yet, people went on saying, “Oh, so you’re a writer. Oh, that must be terribly interesting.”

“Yeah, it’s a great life.”[178]

And to make matters worse, so very short. For her thirty-fourth birthday she registered a brief complaint:

Time doth flit.

Oh, shit![179]

As life flew by, she often wished that “I was anybody but me.”[180]

It’s hard to see around corners, however, and the name of Dorothy Parker, born Dorothy Rothschild in the last years of the Victorian era, burns bright in the twenty-first century.

Parker’s writings, which have never been out of print, are available in bookstores and online, and her witticisms continue to be quoted, even those she did not originate because amateur and professional wisecrackers insist on ghosting bon mots on her behalf. Ordinarily, written humor comes with a shelf life. In contrast to beloved humorists of her generation – Robert Benchley and S. J. Perelman – whose work prompts few chuckles anymore, her wit has held up amazingly well.

No question, Parker is a charismatic literary figure – she is not like anybody else – and yet the true reason for her survival is neither wit nor wisecracks; it’s the work. The prose that seems so effortless is an example of the English language boiled down to essentials, divested of cliché and sentimentality. In these unadorned human stories, and in light verse, essays, and dramas, she beamed a light on her world. At the same time, however, she illuminates ours, which is why her work is still so readable a hundred years afterward.

The earliest writers to document Parker’s life were Wyatt Cooper (1968) and Lillian Hellman (1969) as well as John Keats with his full-length biography, You Might As Well Live: The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker (1970). Notwithstanding Hellman’s opposition, Keats managed to interview a few key people shortly after Parker’s death and deserves credit for a stouthearted basic attempt.

In 1987, building on Keats’s work but lacking additional research, The Late Mrs. Dorothy Parker was published by British biographer Leslie Frewin, whose previous subject had been Marlene Dietrich. The next year brought my biography, Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (1988), which included scattered archival material, scores of interviews, and cooperation of the Rothschild family. Along with Edna St. Vincent Millay, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Edna Ferber, Parker is one of four women writers whose lives are described in Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties (Marion Meade, 2004). Kevin C. Fitzpatrick published a richly illustrated guidebook to the locations where Parker lived, many of the buildings still standing, in A Journey into Dorothy Parker’s New York (2005).

The best picture of Parker’s life and writings remains her collected work, The Portable Dorothy Parker. A pocket-size book when first compiled by Viking Press in 1944, the collection has grown to a hefty 626 pages in its third edition, revised in 2006, with the addition of letters (1905–1962) and a self-portrait, published as an interview with the Paris Review (1956).

In fiction, a shelf of mystery novels introduce a Dorothy Parker character as the sleuth: The Dorothy Parker Murder Case, George Baxt (1989); The Broadway Murders, first in a series of five Dorothy Parker Mysteries, Agata Stanford (2011–2012); and Murder Your Darlings, first in a series of three Algonquin Round Table Mysteries, J. J. Murphy (2011–2012). Unlike the mysteries, which all take place in the twenties, the most recent attempt to fictionalize Parker is set in the unlikely surroundings of present-day suburban Long Island. In Ellen Meister’s Farewell, Dorothy Parker (2013), the heroine is a movie critic who, after inadvertently channeling Parker, becomes dependent on her as an unpaid therapist.

On the screen, Parker is the star of a feature film, Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994), and The Ten-Year Lunch: The Wit and Legend of the Algonquin Round Table (1987), which won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. There has been no shortage of tributes, well-deserved and wacky: the U.S. Postal Service honored her with a 29-cent commemorative stamp; the Algonquin Hotel decorated a Dorothy Parker Suite; and memorabilia marketers stocked a dozen items including bumper stickers and trucker hats adorned with her quotes.

In the end, her mismanaged arrival in the wrong state turned out rather well because New Jersey would designate her birthplace a National Literary Landmark. A bronze plaque stands at 732 Ocean Avenue, in the West End section of Long Branch, once the site of the Rothschild seaside cottage and now an apartment building.

•

Lillian Hellman is remembered as one of the most successful dramatists of the twentieth century. A giantess in the history of American theater, she wrote plays during the depths of the Great Depression that are regularly revived eighty years later. Both her jewel in the crown, The Little Foxes, and The Children’s Hour have become staples of regional and community theaters.

But if Hellman’s position in the theater seems honorably ensured, the same cannot be said about her controversial personal life. She left behind a reputation that continues to be the subject of debate. Since her death in 1984, six major biographies have been published, altogether some one and a half million words put to paper trying to explain who Hellman was and why she behaved as she did. Despite severe censure, she still matters.

While the operatic Hellman reveled in the spotlight, she recoiled from close examination of her private life by strangers and never fully came to terms with the fact that she was a public figure. Determined to thwart snoopers, she lamented in a 1973 interview that “in the end you can’t stop biographers.”[181] This realization did not stop her from trying.

One way to discourage busybodies is to leave behind as little as possible. Hellman could not bring herself to destroy much, as it turned out, because archivists at the University of Texas would toil over the processing of her papers (including a ton of banal ephemera) for years on end.

Another method of controlling information is to appoint an official biographer, a literary watchdog, who will protect an image and, not incidentally, obstruct predators seeking to root through dark secrets. As her anointed biographer, she turned to her Little, Brown editor, William Abrahams, whom she considered a friend and would make one of her three literary executors. Although he is known to have interviewed Lilly’s attorney, Joseph Rauh, several times, his actual work is unclear because he died in 1998 before publishing the book. It seems possible that Abrahams never got around to writing a word.

Stationing Abrahams as gatekeeper was pointless because writers brandishing book contracts scampered right past him. The first Hellman biographers, William Wright and Hilary Mills, had begun their investigations before Hellman’s death, which allowed her to embark on a letter-writing campaign asking friends to circle the wagons (and they hastened to obey). Wright, however, was a veteran who had published the lives of Luciano Pavarotti and Marjorie Merriweather Post, among other nonfiction works. Undeterred, he scrambled to round up some of his subject’s deadliest enemies: Diana Trilling and Mary McCarthy, along with Hellman’s former lover John Melby and attorney Joseph Rauh.

Mills, too, conducted a number of important personal interviews, for example with another of Hellman’s lovers, Ralph Ingersoll, before deciding to quit. Choosing motherhood over biography, she subsequently sold some of her files (for $300) to another Hellman biographer, Carl Rollyson, who would eventually sell them (for $300) to a third biographer, Joan Mellen.

Interestingly, Hilary Mills was married to a prominent Random House editor, Robert Loomis, who had edited all but one of the books of Hellman’s close friend William Styron. In addition, Hellman was particularly chummy with the subject of Mills’s earlier biography of Norman Mailer and had granted an interview for the book. Apparently, these behind-the-scenes connections failed to reassure Hellman, whose guard was up.[182]

Within two years of Hellman’s death, the first unauthorized books started to appear:

- Lillian Hellman: The Image, the Woman (1986) by William Wright is an ambitious attempt to sort out the truth and lies of a volatile life recently ended. Given the obstacles in his path, the result is critical but fair.

- Lillian Hellman: Her Legend and Her Legacy (1988) by Carl Rollyson is the best all-round portrait based on evenhanded analysis and scrupulous research. It was Rollyson who found the smoking gun of Hellman’s Communist Party membership in the archives of her attorney. No excuses are made for Hellman’s actions.

Wright and Rollyson were followed by four women biographers:

- Hellman and Hammett: The Legendary Passion of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett (1996) by Joan Mellen is a dual biography, basically more sympathetic to Hammett than to Hellman, which the author has described as “a critique of the Stalinist politics of Hellman and Hammett and their broader historical implications.”[183] The only biographer personally acquainted with Hellman, she recalls in her introduction how she twice cooked for her (roast goose, crawfish bisque, fig cake). The highboy that Hellman left Blair Clark in her will now belongs to Mellen.

- Lillian Hellman: A Life with Foxes and Scoundrels (2005) by Deborah Martinson is a well-meaning effort to excuse Hellman’s bad behavior. Fan-girl reverence leads the biographer to paper over transparent fabrications, especially to rationalize the memoirs as innocent fictionalizations and to suggest that the story of Julia may be real.

- A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman (2012) by Alice Kessler-Harris is an admiring historian’s attempt to rehabilitate a less-than-admirable subject in an unconventional biography that takes a different approach and observes her against the circumstances of her times. However, redemption via a series of essays on aspects of Hellman’s life sometimes means overlooking the lies, as well as appearing to give her an undeserved pass on charges of Stalinism.

- Lillian Hellman: An Imperious Life (Jewish Lives Series, 2014) by Dorothy Gallagher is unmistakably skeptical – at times, harsh – despite a genuine attempt at balance. Hellman impresses the author as remarkable but nonetheless “a piece of work,” with everything the term implies.[184]

In some ways the most convincing – and most frightening – picture of Hellman is Lilly: Reminiscences of Lillian Hellman (1988), a memoir by her principal heir and literary executor, Peter Feibleman.

A novelization, Lillian & Dash by Sam Toperoff (2013), presumably aimed at readers unfamiliar with the real-life people, tries hard to transform them into lovable characters.

Hellman’s life has been dramatized in film, television, and stage productions. In a one-woman show, Lillian (1986), she was played by Zoe Caldwell, and she is also the central character in Peter Feibleman’s play Cakewalk (1993), adapted from his memoir. Nick & Nora (1991), a Broadway musical based on The Thin Man, survived just nine performances. In addition to the film Julia, there was a sympathetic television film, Dash and Lilly (1999), directed by Kathy Bates and starring Sam Shepard and Judy Davis. Nora Ephron’s Imaginary Friends (2002), the story of Hellman’s feud with Mary McCarthy, shows the women reunited in hell and still slugging it out.

With Hellman’s death, the McCarthy lawsuit came to an end. To this day, the dust has not settled, however. The name of Lillian Hellman is associated with the statement that “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions,” even though its significance is probably no longer readily identifiable by the younger generation. [185] But it is as likely as not that her name is synonymous with pathological lying and the now-famous Mary McCarthy remark that her every written word was a falsehood.

To the general public, she may be the only major literary figure within memory whose posthumous reputation is defined as much by accusations of dishonesty as by her body of work. One of her biographers, Carl Rollyson, thinks that she “might be unique in the kind of damage she did to herself.”[186] Working her way back into public esteem has been hampered by several complications. For one thing, Hellman never confessed wrongdoing and of course made no apologies. Then, too, her selling image was one of moral superiority, which made the misconduct all the more unforgivable. Surely the woman who flaunted her integrity, writing that “truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels,” could not be capable of deceiving her readers.[187] Or could she? To many she is perceived as untrustworthy. And yet, tarnished reputations can be turned around, and the passage of years may ultimately blur her image as a fabulist. Or at least render it irrelevant. Time will tell.

•

Collectively, everybody who had a stake in protecting Parker’s reputation – an extended family of publishers, executors, relatives, and lawyers, as well as a host of devoted friends and admirers (some wondrously wealthy) – failed her. Whether out of carelessness, misunderstandings, spite, or whatever, nobody assumed responsibility for providing one of the essential rites of existence: a grave of one’s own.

There is a temptation to judge Lillian Hellman a plainly bad friend or worse. Her obstructive behavior was no accident: she always acted in her own best interest, not Parker’s and not Hammett’s either. A controlling person, she expected to profit from Parker’s royalties though she had plenty of money of her own – and when her scheming was foiled, she punished Dottie. Looking back, the insensitive disposal of her friend’s personal belongings seems callous. But, more important, her refusal to cooperate with biographers succeeded in damping – even if only temporarily – critical attention to Parker’s work.

But while some of Hellman’s actions appear to be indefensible, there may be a simple reason for them: after losing her influence over Parker’s estate, with her obligations at an end, she simply washed her hands of any further involvement and moved on. Who can really blame her? The dead, with perhaps the exception of immediate family, are more easily screened out than we like to imagine.

The saga of Dottie and Lilly may be sad, but it’s almost comical too. Surely the first to smile about it would be Parker herself. She always imagined the hereafter as paradise, a sort of luxury hotel with hot and cold running dogs. Little did she guess that settling permanently would require a Homeric journey of twenty-one years. More galling, her real-life coda – afterlife in a tin can – doomed her to spend fifteen of those years hanging around Wall Street, the symbol of everything she hated, followed by eternal rest in Baltimore, another place not to her taste, a short distance from a parking lot (she didn’t drive). One of her oh-let’s-kill-ourselves verses (the aptly titled “Coda”) concludes with a courteous request: “Kindly direct me to hell.”[188]

She should have been a lot more careful about what she asked for.[189]

Appendix

THE HUNT FOR DOROTHY PARKER’S WORLDLY GOODS

Can the accumulations of a lifetime vanish? Over the years, I continued to keep an eye out in case anything should turn up. As it happened, two research collections that opened for use have made contributions to what is known about Dorothy Parker.

At the University of Michigan, new material regarding Parker’s life in the 1930s and 1940s, during her marriage to Alan Campbell, became available in 1999. More than thirty years after Campbell’s death, his cousin Ann Gregory donated his papers in 1991 to the university’s Special Collections. This archive (1.25 linear feet) contains a batch of unpublished letters, one-sided and truncated, which Campbell wrote to Parker while he was stationed overseas during World War II, describing his wartime experiences. There are no replies to any of these letters. Neither does the archive include exchanges that might indicate problems in their marriage, which is disappointing because Campbell fell in love with an English woman. When the relationship did not work out, he returned to America in November 1946; Parker divorced him in 1947. Presumably, the files were weeded at some point and correspondence relating to the split removed.

The bulk of the archive is professional, mainly a dozen or so film scripts coauthored by the Campbells in the 1930s, especially notes and incomplete scripts for A Star Is Born, aka It Happened in Hollywood. The most interesting work by Parker without Campbell is the play script of The Coast of Illyria, written with Ross Evans, about the lives of Charles and Mary Lamb, which was staged in 1949 by the Margo Jones Theatre in Dallas. Included too are fragments of several stories (“Clothe the Naked,” “Cousin Larry,” “Glory in the Daytime”), most of them written during the years she knew Campbell. Financial documents include canceled checks and bank statements.

The Michigan collection is valuable for its description of the couple’s professional lives as a Hollywood screenwriting team in the 1930s, along with details of Alan Campbell’s military service. In contrast to the Campbell papers, intentionally saved by his family, the University of Texas material consists primarily of sweepings, you could say, that had wound up on the cutting-room floor. Still, these odds and ends also add a minuscule amount of information to the last years of Parker’s life.

At the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, archivists spent a decade cataloging Lillian Hellman’s papers, a hulking collection filling some 157 boxes (68 linear feet), which officially opened for use in 2005. Could some of Parker’s things be mixed in by accident? As it turned out, yes, because librarians processing the collection found various business and legal correspondence involving the settlement of Alan Campbell’s estate in 1963, along with a few royalty statements and permission requests. A single item relating to Parker’s work is the handwritten manuscript of “New York at 6:30 P.M.,” her description of John Koch’s paintings that was published in 1964. Apparently not in Parker’s possession at the time of her death, it was sent to Hellman by former Esquire editor Harold Hayes a decade later.

In addition, the Hellman archive includes scripts submitted prior to and during the period when she was Parker’s literary executor. Three writers were hoping to adapt Parker’s work for the stage: John B. Tarver (“The Sexes,” 1964); Gail Bell (“One Perfect Rose, An Evening with Dorothy Parker,” 1966); and Sandy Wilson (“As Dorothy Parker Once Said,” 1969).

But the things that interested me most – the unpublished short stories written during the 1950s, a draft of her unfinished novel, Sonnets in Suicide, caches of letters, personal effects, keepsakes – were not found.

Hellman could be unusually generous to her friends, with numerous instances of financial help to her credit, but she could also be extremely stingy. An Olympic-class donor to charity shops – Irvington House Thrift Shop was her favorite – she painstakingly distributed everything of no further use in exchange for a tax deduction. Off to Irvington House went Dashiell Hammett’s suits, cast-off toasters, her own worn apparel, including intimate items like girdles.

The likelihood that Parker’s clothing and books might also find their way to thrift stores seems reasonable because Hellman would hesitate to destroy anything that qualified for a tax credit. All the same, how was it possible to dispose of personal memorabilia like a Social Security card or a birth certificate? What about everyday things like her reading glasses, jewelry, address book, her typewriter? In An Unfinished Woman, Hellman wrote that Parker left no family heirlooms, and she inventoried her worldly goods as “odds and ends,” in other words, laundry bills paid and unpaid, a favorite poodle’s registration certificate, and the letter she claimed to have sent Parker from the Soviet Union a few weeks before her death. In the Ransom archive, there is not a trace of the dog’s papers or the Russian letter.

As a last resort, I decided to seek out a few Hellman sources on my own. Recalling that court papers listing Parker’s debts had mentioned a payment of $50 to Hellman’s secretary for cleaning the apartment, I tried to reach Rita Wade in the hope that she might recollect something. For weeks I left messages on an answering machine before she finally returned my calls, and then her responses to my questions were brief.

RITA WADE: I’m very busy with two jobs. There’s really no time I can spare.

MARION MEADE: You are one of the few people who remember when Mrs. Parker died. I wonder if you could help me out.

RW: It’s been so long. When did she die? 1965?

MM: 1967. At the Volney.

RW: I went down there with Miss Hellman’s cleaning man, and either disposed of things or brought things up to her house.

MM: I’ve been curious about what happened to Parker’s personal belongings.

RW: Oh, there was really nothing left. Or it got thrown out. She was living in a furnished hotel room.

MM: Was her dog there? I’ve heard that Beatrice Stewart rescued it.

RW: Not when I went there.

MM: You’re sure nothing was saved?

RW: It was all disposed of. She didn’t need anything.[190]

It seemed unlikely that Parker would have parted with her set of Napoleon generals and, in fact, they can be seen in the background of a photograph taken at the Volney, probably in 1965. As soon as I mentioned the figurines to Hellman’s executor, Peter Feibleman, he reported remembering them well. “Lillian left them to me,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I gave them to her secretary when she came to work for me after Lillian’s death.” He assured me that Rita Wade could explain everything.[191]

In a second conversation with Rita Wade, I asked her explicitly about the bric-a-brac. This time she recalled seeing five or six of the generals (originally thirteen) on a bookshelf in Hellman’s living room. Peter Feibleman did indeed pass them on to her, she said to me. Unfortunately, they became badly damaged in the mail, with hands broken and a sword missing. Beyond repair, they had to be discarded.[192]

It is theoretically possible, even likely, that other material about Parker will surface, perhaps in library archives where collections have not yet been processed, or among family papers remaining in private hands. In literary history, there have been many incidents when precious documents – biographers’ treasure – have been found in mismarked boxes, somehow lost in attics or barns for decades. Miracles do happen.

SOURCE NOTES

The following abbreviations are used for frequently cited sources:

DP

Dorothy Parker

LH

Lillian Hellman

WC

Wyatt Cooper

MM

Marion Meade

Portable

The Portable Dorothy Parker (Penguin, 2006)

Three

Three: An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento, Scoundrel Time (Little, Brown, 1979)

Lilly

Lilly: Reminiscences of Lillian Hellman (William Morrow, 1988)

Prologue: The Big Crack-Up

1. F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” in The Crack-Up (New Directions, 1945), 13–21. The piece, first published in Scribner’s Magazine, November 1931, was written while Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were living in Switzerland – Scott in Lausanne and his wife a patient at Les Rives de Prangins in Nyon. They returned to the United States in September 1931.

2. LH, Three, 232.

Chapter 1: Times Square (1931–1933)

3. DP, Portable, 240.

4. Ibid., 112.

5. Ibid., 107.

6. WC, Esquire, July 1968.

7. Quoted in John Keats, You Might As Well Live (Simon & Schuster, 1970), 85.

8. DP introduction, James Thurber, The Seal in the Bedroom and Other Predicaments (Harper Brothers, 1932), 10.

9. DP, Portable, 582.

10. At the time, McClain was greatly disliked by some of Parker’s friends who disparaged his physical appearance as a brawny bohunk and a male version of a beefy Rubens nude. He would go on to become a powerful New York drama critic at the Journal-American in the 1950s.

11. Orville Prescott, Cue, July 10, 1937.

12. DP, Portable, 99.

13. William Rose Benet, Saturday Review of Literature, December 12, 1936.

14. Dottie’s marriage to Eddie Parker was a typical wartime romance. After living apart for most of the 1920s, they divorced in 1928.

15. DP, Portable, 316.

16. S. J. Perelman, The Last Laugh (Simon & Schuster, 1981), 171.

17. DP, Portable, 519.

18. Ibid., 223.

19. WC, “Whatever You Think Dorothy Parker Was Like, She Wasn’t,” Esquire, July 1968.

Chapter 2: Beverly Hills (1934–1935)

20. DP, Portable, 581.

21. S. J. Perelman to Betty White Johnston, October 17, 1931.

22. DP to Alexander Woollcott, January 1935.

23. James Silke, Here’s Looking at You, Kid: 50 Years of Fighting, Working, and Dreaming at Warner Bros. (Little, Brown, 1976), 62.

24. John O’Hara to F. Scott Fitzgerald, April 1936.

25. DP to Alexander Woollcott, January 1935.

26. LH, Three, 233.

27. Ibid., 278.

28. Peter Feibleman, Lilly, 25.

29. Ibid.

30. LH, Three, 466.

31. Reviews from New York Mirror and New York Post.

32. Paris Review, Winter-Spring 1965.

33. LH, Three, 297.

34. Feibleman, Lilly, 167.

Chapter 3: Foreign Lands (1936–1950)

35. In recent years, historians disagree about their guilt or innocence.

36. LH, Three, 233.

37. John Dos Passos, The Big Money (Houghton Mifflin, 1936), 469.

38. Beatrice Stewart interview with John Keats, You Might as Well Live, 193.

39. LH, Three, 403.

40. Ibid., 403.

41. Ibid., 233.

42. Ibid., 409.

43. DP, Portable, 464.

44. DP, “The Siege of Madrid,” New Masses, November 23, 1937.

45. LH, Three, 130.

46. LH to John Melby, May 1946.

47. Garson Kanin, Hollywood (Viking Press, 1974), 284.

48. LH, Four Plays by Lillian Hellman (Modern Library, 1942), 219.

49. Source for the title, Little Foxes, is the Bible, chapter 2 in the Song of Solomon: “Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes.” The title was suggested by Parker.

50. Perelman, The Last Laugh, 173.

51. DP, Portable, 30.

52. To know Holly Golightly, Parker wrote in an Esquire review, “would be to find her a truly awful pest.”

53. Feibleman, Lilly, 102.

54. LH, Three, 233.

55. Ruth Goetz interview with MM.

56. Frances Goodrich interview with Carl Rollyson, Lillian Hellman: Her Legend and Her Legacy (St. Martin’s, 1988), 55.

57. DP to Helen Droste, September 1929.

58. Mike Nichols e-mail to MM, November 20, 2005.

59. After enlisting in 1942, Alan Campbell attended Officer Candidate School and was shipped overseas in November 1943. Lt. Campbell served with Air Force Intelligence in London and Paris. Dashiell Hammett, a disabled veteran of World War I, enlisted and served in the Aleutian Islands where he edited an Army newspaper.

Chapter 4: Norma Place (1951–1963)

60. Joseph Rauh interview with Carl Rollyson, Lillian Hellman, 318.

61. LH to Oscar Bernstien, February 18, 1964.

62. Six women marooned without partners, all residents of an Upper East Side hotel, struggle to make meaningful lives for themselves when no longer young. Because the play is set during the Eisenhower years, when a woman’s role was deemed wife and mother, they are forced to depend on themselves for the first time. The Broadway production ran forty-five performances after it opened in 1953 to mixed reviews. Parker’s collaboration with Arnaud d’Usseau was filmed for television in 1975 but won renewed critical attention when revived off-Broadway in 2005 by the Peccadillo Theater Company.

63. LH, Three, 238.

64. DP quoted in Leonard Lyons column, New York Post, January 1955.

65. LH to Oscar Bernstien, February 18, 1964.

66. Ruth Goetz interview with MM.

67. In the 1950s, the New Yorker published three stories, “I Live on Your Visits,” “Lolita,” and “The Banquet of Crow.” According to editor William Maxwell, other submissions were rejected because “her style had become heavily mannered.” (William Maxwell interview with MM.) Her last published story, “The Bolt Behind the Blue,” appeared in a 1958 issue of Esquire.

68. Columbia University, “Reminiscences of Dorothy Rothschild Parker” oral history, 1959.

69. DP to John Patrick, February 1962.

70. WC, Families: A Memoir and a Celebration (Harper & Row, 1975), 38, 43.

71. WC, Esquire, 1968.

72. DP to John Patrick, February 1962.

73. DP, Portable, 1973 ed., 575.

74. Feibleman, Lilly, 103.

75. For the script, see DP, Portable, 613.

76. WC, Esquire, July 1968.

77. Clara Lester interview with MM.

78. LH, Three, 248.

Chapter 5: Upper East Side (1964–1967)

79. New York Herald Tribune, April 8, 1965.

80. WC, Esquire, 1968.

81. New York Herald Tribune, April 4, 1963.

82. DP, Esquire, November 1964.

83. Rebecca Bernstien interview with MM.

84. Ruth Goetz interview with MM.

85. Carl Rollyson interview with MM.

86. Heywood Hale Broun interview with MM.

87. Peter Feibleman e-mail to MM, November 20, 2005

88. Nora Ephron, “Women,” Esquire, October 1973.

89. LH and Peter Feibleman, Eating Together: Recollections and Recipes (Little, Brown 1984), 21.

90. Peter Feibleman e-mail to MM, November 20, 2005.

91. Ruth Goetz interview with MM.

92. LH, Three, 244.

93. Ibid., 240.

94. New York Times, November 14, 1967.

95. New York Times, March 25, 1963.

96. New York Times, February 19, 1966.

97. Quoted in Joan Mellen, Hellman and Hammett: The Legendary Passion of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett (HarperCollins, 1996), 370.

98. Ibid., 366.

99. DP interviews with WC, Esquire, 1968.

100. Gerald Clarke, Capote: A Biography (Ballantine, 1988), 337.

101. Beatrice Stewart interview with John Keats, You Might As Well Live, 295.

102. Fred Lawrence Guiles, Hanging On in Paradise (McGraw-Hill, 1975), 285.

Chapter 6: Ferncliff (1967)

103. Quentin Reynolds, By Quentin Reynolds (McGraw-Hill, 1963), 6.

104. Descriptions of the funeral derive from Kate Mostel interview with MM; Washington Post and New York Times, June 10, 1967; Donald Stewart e-mail to MM, September 5, 2005.

105. New York Times, June 27, 1967.

106. Howard Teichmann interview with William Wright, Lillian Hellman: the Image, the Woman (Simon & Schuster, 1986), 311.

107. LH interview with Nora Ephron, New York Times Book Review, September 23, 1973.

108. New York Times, June 27, 1967.

109. LH, Three, 244.

110. Andrew Weinberger interview with MM.

111. Richard Workman and Bob Taylor correspondence with MM, April 19, 2005.

112. LH to Oscar Bernstien, July 10, 1967.

113. Cemetery correspondence with Kevin C. Fitzpatrick.

114. LH to Oscar Bernstien, July 10 and 13, 1967.

115. LH to Adele Lovett, June 18, 1967.

116. Marshall Best to DP, April 21, 1967.

117. LH to Leonard Lyons. April 15, 1968.

118. DP to Bernard Geis, ca. 1960.

119. LH to Oscar Bernstien, March 28, 1968; LH to Leonard Lyons, April 16, 1968.

120. LH to Marshall Best, April 3, 1968.

121. John Keats to LH, April 12, 1968.

122. New York Times, October 12, 1970; LH correspondence with Wyatt Cooper, Archibald MacLeish, Arthur Kober, Adele Lovett, and others.

123. LH to Paul O’Dwyer, August 17, 1967.

124. Keats, You Might As Well Live, 8.

125. New York Times, September 1973.

126. New York Times, New York Morning Telegraph, and New York Daily News, respectively.

127. New York Times, November 14, 1967.

Chapter 7: Wall Street (1968–1976)

128. Taylor Branch, The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement (Simon & Schuster, 2013), 183.

129. Years after the assassination, the King family concluded that Ray was falsely charged with King’s murder, which they believe resulted from a government conspiracy.

130. Today the NAACP Image Awards honor outstanding work by African Americans in the fields of film, TV, music, and literature.

131. Tom Wolfe, Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (Bantam, 1970), 5.

132. LH interview, New York Times, September 23, 1973.

133. Characters in The Big Crowd (2014) by Kevin Baker are patterned after O’Dwyer and his brother William, mayor of New York City (1946–1950).

134. Rockland County Journal News, January 23. 1989.

135. Malachy McCourt interview with MM; Malachy McCourt, A Monk Swimming, (Hyperion, 1998), 165.

136. DP, Portable, 558.

137. LH interview, New York Times, September 23, 1973.

138. New York Times, November 14, 1967.

139. LH, Three, 234.

140. LH to John Melby, May 1946; LH to Oscar Bernstien, February 18, 1964.

141. DP, Portable, 109

142. LH, Three, 237.

143. Hammett’s 1934 novel was adapted for six films as well as a radio series, television series, TV play, and Broadway musical. Hellman was the model for the Nora character, as well as two subsidiary female characters.

144. LH, Three, 276.

145. In the early 1980s, while researching my biography of Dorothy Parker, I requested an interview of Hellman. When there was no response, my editor suggested trying to influence her by sending my previous biographies. She was not impressed. Still, I succeeded in getting her attention because she began warning certain of Parker’s friends (former blacklisted writers) not to talk to me. Those obeying her wishes included Parker’s collaborator on The Ladies of the Corridor, Arnaud d’Usseau, and also screenwriters Ring Lardner Jr. and Ian McLellan Hunter. Initially, Hunter agreed to see me, but after learning that I had failed to clear our interview with Hellman – and that I had conversed with a writer who had “named names” to HUAC, Budd Schulberg – he physically bundled me out of his apartment and down the hall to the elevator. Left behind was my untouched glass of ice tea.

146. Norman Mailer interview with Carol Brightman, Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World (Clarkson Potter, 1992), 617.

147. Asked in 2013 about roles she regretted turning down, Barbra Streisand named the Hellman character (portrayed by Jane Fonda) in Julia.

148. S. J. Perelman to Pat Kavanagh, October 18, 1976.

149. LH, Three, 659.

150. Ibid., 675

151. Ibid., 609.

152. New York Times, July 30, 1976.

153. Spectator, November 13, 1976.

154. Hilton Kramer, “The Life and Death of Lillian Hellman,” New Criterion, October 1984.

Chapter 8: Baltimore (1977–1988)

155. www.ontheredcarpet.com, Redgrave’s political speech, which included references to “Zionist hoodlums,” was considered inappropriate for the occasion and provoked boos and hissing.

156. Feibleman, Lilly, 225.

157. McCarthy quoted in Carol Brightman, Writing Dangerous, 600.

158. LH, Paris Review, Winter-Spring 1965.

159. Feibleman, Lilly, 283.

160. Ibid., 284.

161. Martha Gellhorn, Paris Review, Spring 1981.

162. Martha Gellhorn to Hortense Flexner, May 14, 1960, in Caroline Moorehead, Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn (Holt, 2007), 277.

163. LH, Three, 111.

164. Martha Gellhorn, Paris Review, Spring 1981.

165. Renata Adler, Pitch Dark (Knopf, 1983), 5.

166. The accepted explanation for Hellman’s knowledge of Muriel Gardiner’s underground activities involves Wolfgang S. Schwabacher, a prominent attorney and a director of the Viking Press who died in 1951. His wife, Ethel, an abstract expressionist painter, died in 1984, but apparently did not involve herself in the controversy. For ten years the Schwabachers shared a two-family house in Pennington, New Jersey, with Gardiner and her family.

167. New York Times, April 29, 1983.

168. Feibleman, Lilly, 308. A memoir by a summer helper, Rosemary Mahoney, confirmed that employment by Hellman was never for the faint of heart. (A Likely Story: One Summer with Lillian Hellman, Doubleday, 1998.)

169. William Styron, Selected Letters of William Styron, edited by Rose Styron, with R. Blakeslee Gilpin (Random House, 2012), 556.

170. LH, Eating Together, 76.

171. Feibleman, Lilly, 332.

172. Ibid., 362.

173. Paul O’Dwyer conversation with MM, February 1987.

174. Schenectady Gazette, March 21, 1988.

175. Ibid. The NAACP had moved its headquarters from New York to Baltimore in 1986.

176. Rockland County Journal News, January 23, 1989.

Epitaph: Laughter and Hope and a Sock in the Eye

177. DP, “Inventory,” Portable, 96.

178. DP, Portable, 552.

179. DP, “Untitled Lament, Circa 1927,” Portable, 555.

180. DP, Portable, 552.

181. Nora Ephron, “Lillian Hellman Walking, Cooking, Writing, Talking,” New York Times, September 23, 1973.

182. Hilary Mills e-mail to MM, March 7, 2013.

183. New York Times, June 21, 2012.

184. Dorothy Gallagher, Lillian Hellman: An Imperious Life (Jewish Lives Series, Yale University Press, 2014), 4.

185. LH, Three, 659.

186. Carl Rollyson e-mail to MM.

187. LH, Three, 651.

188. DP, Portable, 240.

189. The concluding paragraphs were previously published in “Estate of Mind,” MM, Bookforum, April/May 2006, 8.

Appendix: The Hunt for Dorothy Parker’s Worldly Goods

190. Rita Wade phone conversation with MM, April 5, 2005.

191. Peter Feibleman e-mail to MM, November 19, 2005.

192. Rita Wade phone conversation with MM, November 22, 2005.