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Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) - original surname Rothschild | |
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American short story writer, poet, and critic, a legendary figure in the New York literary scene. Dorothy Parker wrote sketches and short stories, many of them published in The New Yorker. Her column, 'Constant Reader', was highly popular. Parker was especially famous for her instant wit and cruel humour. COMMENT Dorothy Parker was born in West End, New Jersey, as the fourth and last child of Jacob (Henry) Rothschild, a garment manufacturer, and Annie Eliza (Marston) Rothschild, the daughter of a machinist at Phoenix Armour. Her paternal grandparents came from Russia. Parker's mother died in 1898. Jacob married in 1900 Eleanor Frances Lewis, a Roman Catholic; Parker never liked her stepmother. Eleanor Frances died of a heart attack three years after the wedding. Parker's father died when she was twenty. Parker was educated at a Catholic school. "But as for helping me in the outside world, the convent taught me only that if you spit on a pencil eraser it will erase in," Parker said later in an interview. She moved to New York City, whe she wrote during the day and earned money at night playing the piano in a dancing school. In 1916 Parker sold some of her poetry to the editor of Vogue, and was given an editorial position on the magazine. In 1917 she married Edwin Pond Parker II, a stockbroker, whom she divorced in 1919. Edwin was wounded in World War I, he was an alcoholic, and during the war he became addicted to morphine. From 1917 to 1920 Parker worked for Vanity Fair. Frank Crowinshield, the managing editor of the magazine, recalled that she had "the quickest tongue imaginable, and I need not to say the keenest sense of mockery." With two other writers Robert Benchley and Robert Sherwood, Parker formed the nucleus of the Algonquin Round Table, an informal luncheon club held at New York City's Algonquin Hotel on Forty-Fourth Street. Other members included Ring Lardner and James Thurber. Parker was usually the only woman in the group. Alan Rudolph's film Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994), starring Jennifer Jason Leigh, Campbell Scott, Matthew Broderick, depicted the life of the author and her friends around the famous table. Between the years 1927 and 1933 Parker wrote book reviews for The New Yorker. Her texts continued appear in the magazine at irregular intervals until 1955. Her first collection of poems, Enough Rope, was published in 1926. It contained the often-quoted 'Résumé' on suicide, and 'News Item'. Résumé Razors pain you; Enough Rope was a bestseller and was followed by Sunset Guns (1928) and Death and Taxes (1931), which were collected in Collected Poems: Not So Deep As a Well (1936). Parker's poems were sardonic, usually dry, elegant commentaries on love, or shallowness of modern life: "Why is it no one sent me yet / One perfect limousine, do you suppose? / Ah no, it's always just my luck to get / One perfect rose." (1926) Parker's short story collections, After Such Pleasures (1932) and Here Lies (1939), proved sharp understanding of human nature. Like Hemingway, whose work she admired, Parker relied rather on dialogue than on description. Among her best-known pieces are 'A Big Blonde', which won her O. Henry Memorial Award, and the soliloquies 'A Telephone Call' and 'The Waltz'. During the 1920s Parker had extra-marital affairs, she drank heavily and attempted suicide three times, but maintained the high quality of her literary output. Her brief affair with F. Scott Fitzgerald while he was married to the unstable Zelda was motivated, according to the gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, by compassion on her part and despair on his. In Enough Rope Parker wrote: "Four be the things I am wiser to know: / Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe." In the 1930s, Parker moved with her second husband, Alan Campbell, who was twelve years her junior, to Hollywood. She worked there as a screenwriter, including on the film A Star Is Born (1937), directed by William Wellman and starring Janet Gaynor, Fredric March, and Adolphe Menjou. The film received an Oscar for Best Original Story. In Alfred Hitchcock's film Saboteur (1940) Parker collaborated with Peter Vierter and Joan Harrison. Her contribution is mainly visible in some of the bizarre details of the circus milieu where the hero (Robert Cummings) takes refuge in, with its squabbling Siamese twins, its bearded lady in curlers and a malevolent dwarf who acts and dresses a bit like Hitler. Parker and Hitchcock appeared in the film together in a cameo bit. Otherwise the film bored her. With Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett, Parker helped found the Screen Writers' Guild. She also reported on the Spanish Civil War, and collaborated on several plays. Temptations of Hollywood did not make Parker any softer, which a number of film stars had to face. When Joan Crawford was married to Franchot Tone, she became obsessed with self-improvement. Parker said: "You can lead a whore to culture, but you can't make her think." Parker had taken an early stand against Fascism and Nazism and she declared herself a Communist, for which she was blacklisted during the McCarthy era. However, she was never a member of the Communist Party. Her last major film project was The Fan (1949), directed by Otto Preminger. It was based on Oscar Wilde's play Lady Windermere's Fan, but Wilde's witty comments on society and Parker's updating did not amuse the audience. Later Preminger admitted that "it was one of the few pictures I disliked while I was working on it." Alan Campbell died in 1963, "of acute barbiturate poisoning due to an ingestion of overdose" according to the coroner's report. Parker died alone on June 7, 1967 in the New York hotel that had chosen as her final home. A chambermaid discovered the body. Parker left her estate to civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1972 the executorship of Parker's estate passed to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Parker's ashes were transferred in 1998 to a memorial garden of NAACP's Baltimore headquartrs. For further reading: Dorothy Parker, Revised by Arthur F. Kinney (1998); The Rhetoric of Rage by Sondra Melzer (1997); Dorothy Parker by Randall Calhoun (1992); Women of the Twenties by George H. Douglas (1989); Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell is This? by Marion Meade (1987); The Late Mrs. Dorothy Parker by Leslie Frewin (1986); Dorothy Parker: A Bio-Bibliography by Randall Calhoun (1992); Dorothy Parker, Revised by Arthur F. Kinley (1998); A Gender Collision: Sentimentalism and Modernism in Dorothy Parker's Poetry and Fiction by Rhonda S. Pettit (2009) - Writers in Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s: James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, John Fante, Daniel Fuchs, Horace McCoy, Clifford Odets, Maxwell Anderson, Dorothy Parker, John Don Passos, Theodore Dreiser, Dashiell Hammett, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Selected works:
Films (as screenwriter in collaboration or uncredited):
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