"What Fresh Hell is This?"
Written by: Marion Meade
Published by: Penguin (Non-Classics); Reprint edition (March 3, 1989)
Reviewed by: Lys Anzia
ISBN-10: 0140116168
" ISBN-13: 978-0140116168
Genre: Biography
On the Tumbling Absurdities of Life:
Marion Meade Tracks the Days of Dorothy Parker
I have to admit I read the end first of Marion Meade's incredible book, Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?, by Villard Books, NY. Of course the end carved out the most delicate part of Dorothy Parker's life in old age up to her death and beyond.
As a national celebrity, who as Meade surprisingly described, "Left no correspondence, manuscripts, memorabilia or private papers of any kind," Parker was a woman of sharp contradictions. Without audience her ashes after death sat unclaimed for over twenty years in a stored box in her lawyer's office filing cabinet. A sad ending to a woman who dedicated a lifetime to making people laugh hard as they simultaneously watched and winced at the tumbling absurdities of life.
As Dorothy aptly said,
"But now I know the things I know.
And do the things I do;
And if you do not like me so,
To hell, my love, with you!"
Born Dorothy Rothschild in 1893, "Dottie" as she was lovingly called by her friends, grew up not even knowing who the famous, rich, Jewish-French Rothschild family was.
"My God, no, dear! We'd never even heard of those Rothschilds," she said. Staying close to her childhood home in Long Branch, New Jersey, Dorothy lived as a shy, aspiring writer in her twenties in the Big Apple during the roaring time of sleep-over parties and celebrations that would later be described in Scott Fitzgerald's famous book, The Great Gatsby. Surrounded during those years by flappers, eccentrics, and the literary celebrities of the Algonquin Round Table, Dorothy climbed the tall and sometimes tittering ladder of social acceptance.
The Algonquin celebs included the likes of writer Robert Benchley, Harold Ross—founder of The New Yorker magazine, comedian Harpo Marx, critic Alexander Woollcott and Edna Ferber—writer of the famous 1925 Pulitzer Prize winning book, So Big, that covered the grand highs and lows of a struggling Chicago family and their under-bellied gambling world.
At the beginning Dorothy was shy, often quietly watching the brilliant discussions before her.
On the young Dorothy Parker, Marion Meade writes, "She looked meek and fragile in every way, childlike, not quiet five feet tall with a mop of dark hair demurely tucked under the brim of her embroidered hat and huge dark eyes that seemed to plead for the world's protection. She wore glasses, but not in public. She had never smoked a cigarette or drunk more than a sip of a cocktail. The taste of liquor made her sick. She still lived in her childhood neighborhood on the Upper West Side and visited her married sister on Sundays."
But the mood of the times changed "Dottie." She soon became one of the gang of critics rising to the status of society leader and co-conspirator.
The Algonquin Round Table family stayed together for over a decade, meeting in squalid 24-hour rounds of too much drink and cigarettes. Edna Ferber called them the "poison squad" as they critiqued every living artist, playwright, and writer in New York City. Ripping up and tearing down the best of them. As they, too, sometimes would float great praise on others. To attempt to pass their inspection was considered a far too dangerous task for most.
"If you don't mind my saying so, I think you're full of skit," said Parker defiantly.
Eight years after the Round Table began, Dorothy's witticisms were becoming legend. "She had a positive genius for creating the impression that she was a one-of-a-kind flapper—sophisticated, urban, intellectual," Meade pointed out in What Fresh Hell is This? "The truth was that she [Dorothy] was obliged to invent herself as she went along," added Meade.
So how can a woman look as strong as a man in the 1920s? She would have to out-smoke, out-drink, out-think every man she knew, especially the smart ones. Parker broke every rule in the book as she out-did the true best-of-the-best, the smartest of the smartest.
"Three be the things I shall never attain: Envy, content, and sufficient champagne," said Parker.
In a life as triumphant as it was tragic, Dorothy did eventually fall. And the fall was hard. Over a period of years she tried three times to commit suicide. She went through a difficult abortion, fought her way through love lost and love gained, through the betrayal of friends and the death of enemies. Money too went through extreme ups and downs. It was either flood or famine. It was clearly true-what went up was bound to fall.
In spite of this, "Dorothy was incapable of asking anyone for money. Pride would not allow her to beg. What she would do instead was to look woebegone, wring her hands, and confess that she simply had no idea what she was going to do because she was broke and feeling scared about it. What usually happened was that the offer of a loan would be forthcoming, which she could then be prevailed upon to accept," said Marion Meade.
Going from forty dollars a week income, freelance writing for magazines, to a twelve hundred and fifty dollar a week income in Hollywood writing movie scripts with her second husband, Alan Campbell, Parker was definitely up for the ride. She worked in league with Alfred Hitchcock on the movie Saboteur writing the script, starring in a whimsical cameo role designed by Hitchcock. She wrote script parts for eighteen movies including the movie, A Star is Born.
"Hollywood money isn't money," said Dorothy. It's "congealed snow" that "melts in your hand," she continued.
"Dorothy was never dull," said Meade in her brilliant Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell is This?
Before Parker's life was over she had written for a staggering number of publications. From Esquire magazine to Vanity Fair, The Saturday Evening Post, Life Magazine and of course The New Yorker magazine, Dorothy had tried her hand at playwriting and filmscript writing too. But what is most remembered today are her unforgettable hilarious and caustic poems.
"They say of me and so they should,
It's doubtful if I come to good."
Dorothy was never good at apologizing for anything. At the age of thirty-three she said,
"Time doth flit. Oh shit."
At the age of thirty-eight, Parker unapologetically described a lonely ten-day trip to Spain as a love-sick lost maiden, "The crossing was so rough that the only thing I could keep on my stomach was the First Mate."
In time Dorothy's socialist leanings would bring her trouble. As J. Edgar Hoover's associate and friend, radio star Walter Winchell, wrote:
Dear Mr. Hoover:
Mr. Winchell wondered if you knew about Dorothy Parker,
the poet and wit, who lead many pro-Russian groups. She
and the boss were once good friends, but she became a
mad fanatic of the Commy party line.
In 1943 from work "for the Spanish Refugee Appeal, now part of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee.... She made speeches on behalf of causes as diverse as Yugoslav relief, the rescue of European Jews, and children's book week. When she volunteered to sell war bonds, the Treasury Department teamed her up with Ogden Nash and a young New Yorker editor just returned from New Guinea and sent them on a tour of Pennsylvania to visit schools," wrote Marion Meade.
Dorothy was a constant champion of the forgotten and the downtrodden. On the days just before her death in 1967 she signed her entire estate over to Dr. Martin Luther King, only a year before his death, after she watched the years of negro protest and the tumult of the black civil rights movement. At that time Parker's estate had grown from ten dollars to what she didn't know at the time was millions.
Thirty-six years after she crossed the Atlantic Ocean to Spain, at the age of 73, Dorothy Rothschild Parker died alone of a heart attack at the Volney residential hotel in New York. She had outlived most of her contemporaries of the Algonquin Round Table. Many, like Robert Benchley, had died years earlier in their mid-fifties of a weak body and an overly excessive mind. "Many times she rehearsed her death," said Marion Meade, adding "imagining even the kind of weather she wanted."
"Oh let it be a night of lyric rain
And singing breezes, when my bell is tolled.
I have so loved the rain that I would hold
Last in my ears its friendly, dim refrain."
"When she had written those lines," wrote Meade, "she had been thirty and thinking of her mother's death, that terrifying journey across the harbor with the coffin and standing around the muddy mound at Woodlawn. On the afternoon her own life closed it was fair and warm with temperatures in the mid-eighties." Dorothy had lost her mother at the tender and crucial age of five. Fourteen years later, in 1912, she would also lose her brother as he disappeared in dark waters on the sinking of the Titanic.
It seemed loss and its counterpart made up the hide and parcel of her life.
Dorothy Parker was never good at predicting the weather or the future. Somehow the climate of the world always threw her one endless surprise after another. Finally in old age, as America's favorite and sometimes most-hated darling, she stridently came home to roost.
It was clear even with all her wit, intelligence, and yearning added Marion Meade, "she had never been able to get what she wanted."
Lys Anzia is assistant book reviews editor for Moondance magazine. As a 2006 Pushcart Prize nominee she currently writes international news through Women News Network for UN agencies and affiliates in addition to writing for NewWest magazine, ProgressNow, SquareState, and ColoradoPols. Currently Lys is also producing news radio for international syndicate WINGS-Women's International News Gathering Service. In 2003, she was chosen as creative affiliate in poetry by UNESCO for her contributions to OtherVoices International, (Sam Hamill's) Poets Against War, BluePrintReview, Muse Apprentice Guild, MiniMag, and Ah-Ha poetry among others.