oday is the birthday of the extraordinary Dorothy Parker, born Dorothy Rothschild in Long Branch, New Jersey in 1893. Poet, satirist, reviewer, screenwriter, wit, and founding member of the Algonquin Round Table, she was ultimately placed on the Hollywood blacklist during the McCarthy era due to her left wing politics.
She went to a Catholic elementary school at the Convent of the Blessed Sacrament on West 79th Street, though her father was Jewish and her stepmother was Protestant. But she was asked to leave after she referred to the Immaculate Conception as “spontaneous combustion.”
Her formal education ended at age 14, and she played piano at a dancing school to earn a living while she wrote poetry. She sold her first poem to Vanity Fair in 1914, and she got offered a job as an editorial assistant for Vogue, which was owned by the same company.
Parker's career took off in 1918 while she was writing theater criticism for Vanity Fair, filling in for the vacationing P. G. Wodehouse. At the magazine, she met Robert Benchley, who became a close friend, and Robert E. Sherwood. The trio began lunching at the Algonquin Hotel on a near-daily basis and became founding members of what became known as the Algonquin Round Table. The Round Table numbered among its members the newspaper columnists Franklin Pierce Adams and Alexander Woollcott. Through their publication of Parker's lunchtime remarks and short verses, particularly in Adams' column "The Conning Tower", Dorothy began developing a national reputation as a wit. When the group was informed that famously taciturn former president Calvin Coolidge had died, Parker remarked, "How could they tell?"
Her witty and caustic reviews (which were often in the form of poems) made her very popular with readers. But in 1920 she was terminated because she offended powerful producers too often. In solidarity, Benchley resigned in protest.
When Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, Parker and Benchley were part of a board of editors established by Ross to allay concerns of his investors. Parker's first piece for the magazine was published in its second issue. She became famous for her short, viciously humorous poems, many highlighting ludicrous aspects of her many (largely unsuccessful) romantic affairs and others wistfully considering the appeal of suicide. The next 15 years were Parker's greatest period of productivity and success. In the 1920s alone she published some 300 poems and free verses.
Parker eventually separated from her husband, stockbroker Edwin Pond Parker II, divorcing in 1928. She had a number of affairs, her lovers including reporter-turned-playwright Charles MacArthur and the publisher Seward Collins. Her relationship with MacArthur resulted in a pregnancy. Parker is alleged to have said, "how like me, to put all my eggs into one bastard," She had an abortion, and fell into a depression that culminated in her first attempt at suicide. It was during this period she began to become politically aware, traveling to Boston to protest the pending executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, where she was arrested for “loitering and sauntering.”
I do so want to be convicted of “sauntering.”
In 1932, Parker met Alan Campbell, an actor with aspirations to become a screenwriter. They married two years later in Raton, New Mexico. She learned that he was bisexual and later proclaimed in public that he was "queer as a billy goat". The pair moved to Hollywood and signed ten-week contracts with Paramount Pictures. She and Campbell eventually worked on more than 15 films. With Campbell and Robert Carson, she wrote the script for the 1937 film A Star Is Born, for which they were nominated for an Academy Award. Together with Frank Cavett, she received another nomination for an Oscar for the screenplay of Smash-Up, the Story of a Woman (1947), starring Susan Hayward.
During the 1930s and 1940s, Parker became an increasingly vocal advocate of civil liberties and civil rights, and a frequent critic of authority figures. During the Great Depression, she was among numerous American intellectuals and artists who became involved in related social movements. She reported in 1937 on the Loyalist cause in Spain for the Communist magazine, 'The New Masses.' At the behest of Otto Katz, a covert Soviet Comintern agent and operative of German Communist Party agent Willi Münzenberg, Parker helped to found the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League in 1936, which the FBI suspected of being a Communist Party front. The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League's membership eventually grew to some 4,000 strong.
Parker also served as chair of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee's fundraising arm, "Spanish Refugee Appeal". She organized Project Rescue Ship to transport Loyalist veterans to Mexico, headed Spanish Children's Relief, and lent her name to many other left-wing causes and organizations. Her former Round Table friends saw less and less of her, and her relationship with Robert Benchley became particularly strained (although they would reconcile). Parker met S. J. Perelman at a party in 1932 and, despite a rocky start (Perelman called it "a scarifying ordeal"), they remained friends for the next 35 years. They became neighbors when the Perelmans helped Parker and Campbell buy a run-down farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, near New Hope, a popular summer destination among many writers and artists from New York.
Parker was listed as a Communist by the publication Red Channels in 1950. The FBI compiled a 1,000-page dossier on her because of her suspected involvement in Communism during the era when Senator Joseph McCarthy was raising alarms about communists in government and Hollywood. As a result, movie studio bosses placed her on the Hollywood blacklist. Her final screenplay was The Fan, a 1949 adaptation of Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan, directed by Otto Preminger.
Her marriage to Campbell was tempestuous, with tensions exacerbated by Parker's increasing alcohol consumption and Campbell's long-term affair with a married woman in Europe during World War II. They divorced in 1947, remarried in 1950, then separated in 1952 when Parker moved back to New York. Her writing became increasingly erratic due to her continued abuse of alcohol. She returned to Hollywood in 1961, reconciled with Campbell, and collaborated with him on a number of unproduced projects until Campbell died from a drug overdose in 1963.
Following Campbell's death, Parker returned to New York City and the Volney Residential hotel. In her later years, she denigrated the Algonquin Round Table, although it had brought her such early notoriety:
“These were no giants. Think who was writing in those days—Lardner, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway. Those were the real giants. The Round Table was just a lot of people telling jokes and telling each other how good they were. Just a bunch of loudmouths showing off, saving their gags for days, waiting for a chance to spring them... There was no truth in anything they said. It was the terrible day of the wisecrack, so there didn't have to be any truth...”
Parker died on June 7, 1967, of a heart attack[5] at the age of 73. In her will, she bequeathed her estate to Martin Luther King Jr. Her ashes remained unclaimed in various places, including her attorney Paul O'Dwyer's filing cabinet, for approximately 17 years. In 2014, some of her poems from the early 20th century were set to music by the composer Marcus Paus as the operatic song cycle Hate Songs for Mezzo-Soprano and Orchestra.
She said, “That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.”
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