Dorothy Parker

From April 7, 2016, article in The New York Review of Books
 
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/04/07/brilliant-troubled-dorothy-parker/


Edith Wharton: 1862 - 1937
Coco Chanel: 1883 - 1971
Dorothy Parker: 1893 -  1967
Ernest Hemingway: 1899 - 1961
Ayn Rand: 1905 - 1982

The Algonquin Hotel threesome: Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Robert Sherwood.

Algonquin Round Table
Volney Hotel, in later years


Dorothy Parker:

1915, age 22 — Vogue; $10/week; proofreading, captions, fact-checking

Shortly thereafter: Vanity Fair; her first poem appeared there; three years as scribe-of-all-work

About age 26: chosen to replace the departing P. G. Wodehouse as the magazine’s drama critic; not only the youngest by far of New York’s theater critics, but was the only female drama critic.


At the magazine she met Robert Benchley, the closest friend of her life.

Also met Robert Sherwood, long before his four Pulitzer Prizes.

A threesome; lunched at Algonquin Hotel.

Another threesome drifted in, graduates of Stars and Stripes:

• Alexander Woollcott
• Harold Ross
• Franklin Pierce Adams (as “F.P.A.” the most influential newspaper columnist of the day)

FPA made Dorothy Parker a celebrity quoting her bon mots.

Very pretty, very sex, somewhat checkered personal life.

Born a Rothschild, but not of the Rothschilds. She married Edwin Parker; he went in army in 1917; but ended soon after he returned from overseas.

Many amours later, all ending disastrously.

A frightening abortion which probably resulted in many miscarriages later; never able to have a child that she dearly wanted.

The father was Charles MacArthur (The Front Page).

1920: Vanity Fair fired her at the insistence of Broadway producers. Benchley resigned in solidarity; Sherwood had already been fired.

A turning point in her life, for liberal causes, 1927 — to Boston to protest the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti.

Other writers in solidarity with her on that: John Dos Passos, Edna St Vincent Millay, Katherine Anne Porter.

Second husband, probably gay, Alan Campbell, while in Hollywood — never worked out.

In addition, too many young deaths:


• Ring Lardner, her idol, 48 (1885 - 1933)
• Robert Benchley, her soulmate, 56 (1889 - 1945) -- too many wars
• F Scott Fitzgerald, 44 (1896 - 1940) — WWI, Jazz Age, but not WWII

Who was left? Edmund Wilson was still around. They had almost had a fling back in 1919. Now he paid her painful visits to the Volney, where she was an alcoholic, dying.

Still devoted to the Golden Couple, Gerald and Sara Murphy. From wiki:

Gerald Clery Murphy and Sara Sherman Wiborg were wealthy, expatriate Americans who moved to the French Riviera in the early 20th century and who, with their generous hospitality and flair for parties, created a vibrant social circle, particularly in the 1920s, that included a great number of artists and writers of the Lost Generation. Gerald had a brief but significant career as a painter.

By the mid-1950’s, finished with fiction, she went back to her first field — criticism.