This week the former magazine queen Tina Brown started a Substack called Fresh Hell, after an expression oft-attributed to Dorothy Parker. Of course I subscribed immediately, considering Brown’s book “The Vanity Fair Diaries” one of her crowning achievements. Chattiness is her idiom. But also because of the Parkerly promise.
This archetype of archness, whose death in 1967 at 73 was front-page news, persists into the 21st century partly because of her pith, eerily well suited to the slicing and dicing of contemporary online culture. Long before X she was dishing out quotes of 280 characters or fewer: “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses” and other tablespoons of hot honey diluted into shampoo commercials and beyond.
Less known is her work for the movie industry, Gail Crowther’s focus in DOROTHY PARKER IN HOLLYWOOD (Gallery Books, 291 pp., $29.99). Parker’s copious if frequently forgotten credits include Oscar nominations a decade apart for the original “A Star Is Born” (1937) and “Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman” (1947), both with alcoholic protagonists.
She was writing what she knew. Booze pickled her career and second and third marriages, both to the actor and screenwriter Alan Campbell, who died swathed in a dry-cleaning bag and surrounded by Seconal capsules. In a late, sad photograph enlisted as caution by at least one recovery organization, alcohol almost seems to be dissolving her, as water did the Wicked Witch of the West.
Parker wasn’t wicked but she could be very, very cruel, Crowther reminds readers (there have been several previous, fuller biographies, from which she draws, along with archival material). To the 11-years-younger Campbell, whom she called “pansy,” “fairy” and worse; to acquaintances she’d butter up in person, then roast at scorching temperature the minute they left the room; and to a literary community that kept coming back for more abuse. Esquire kept the older Parker on retainer as a book reviewer for years, though her copy rarely materialized. (Click forthwith on Wyatt Cooper’s unpaywalled homage to her there, “Whatever You Think Dorothy Parker Was Like, She Wasn’t.”) She agreed to judge a University of Michigan poetry competition, but “upon receiving the shortlisted poems,” Crowther writes, “she replied that none were worthy of any award or indeed of any consideration whatsoever.”
Parker herself had made her reputation in part by writing a series of Hate Verses, which targeted among other things women, men and movies (her first collection, with the dark title “Enough Rope,” was hugely popular). She would come to hate screenwriting, too, but stayed in Hollywood for the better part of 30 years, chiefly for the money, though her lavish spending habits melted that away, she lamented, “like small ice in your hand. It all vanishes.”
Her specific contributions to scripts are just as ephemeral. Crowther does her best to detect “Parkeresque quips” in “A Star Is Born” — of Norman Maine: “His work is beginning to interfere with his drinking” — but with the system of apportioning credit entirely different “out there,” as Parker referred to the West Coast, “as though it were in the alien beyond,” no one can say for sure.
Forget about the Algonquin Round Table, the “vicious circle” of writers and critics regularly lunching at a Midtown hotel where Parker is usually situated in popular memory, for she came to loathe its mythos as well. Far less examined are her years at “the infamous, the outrageous, the preposterous Garden of Allah,” on Sunset Boulevard, where afternoon tea was dry martinis poured from a glass pot, skinny-dipping was high on the agenda and the gossip columnist Sheilah Graham had her affair with F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Parker’s commitment to left-wing causes and broader social justice — she helped form the Screen Writers Guild and Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, and left her estate to Martin Luther King Jr. and the N.A.A.C.P. — also gets a close-up. “Well, now I know,” she wrote in a piece for New Masses in 1937, after visiting Madrid and Valencia during the Spanish Civil War. “I know that there are things that never have been funny, and never will be. And I know that ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon.”
Bronx cheers for Hollywood go back to at least the dawn of the talkies. But a particular Parkerly spirit persists in Bruce Eric Kaplan, a New Yorker cartoonist and television writer. At a moment when streaming has thrown a wrench into the gears of the dream factory, he has a new book called THEY WENT ANOTHER WAY: A Hollywood Memoir (Henry Holt, 272 pp., $28.99). It’s the kind of mordant show-business diary you wish Parker had been together enough to keep; her personal papers, as Crowther discovered, are thin and scattered.
In some ways these writers couldn’t be more different. Parker let her poodle, Cliché, run rampant, soiling other people’s yards; Kaplan frets about constipated birds in his. Her marriages buckled most horribly; his, to a writer-producer he met on the funeral-parlor dramedy “Six Feet Under,” seems like a solid bedrock. Parker drank constantly and hated domestic chores; though Kaplan thinks he’s become Finchley in that “Twilight Zone” episode where the owner’s appliances seek to oust him, he deals with stress by folding laundry with mindfulness and cooking elaborate vegan meals — even including a few recipes.
But he too is beautifully brutal about the absurdities of his industry (name “approval”; stalled drafts; exclamation points in correspondence) and the ways the world in general disappoints him. Both fret about lost youth (“Oh, God help me … help me …,” Parker wrote in “The Middle or Blue Period”); both are prone to gazing into the abyss. “I think this book is actually turning into my suicide note,” Kaplan writes on Page 246. Like Parker’s poem “Résumé,” though, “They Went Another Way” takes a hopeful turn. (And: Variety reports Kaplan has just joined Netflix’s hit comedy “Nobody Wants This” as a showrunner.)
Unusually in a timid town, it names names. Much of the book is about the process of trying to put together a series about a woman (Glenn Close) who falls in love with a man almost half a century younger (Pete Davidson), and the texts and meetings trying to arrange this obviously doomed project — during Covid! — are a “Dangerous Liaisons” for the Zoom era. On the back burner is a remake of “Gilligan’s Island” that, like its inhabitants, can’t quite get off the ground.
Kaplan’s cartoons are not unlike hate verses — the people in them, even the children, angular and armored-looking. This book expounds on his delicious dislikes: most amusement parks (“Disneyland sickens me”); going to the hardware store (“It always feels so MAGA in there”); genealogy; Bruce Springsteen; sports; the sun.
But (more hope than rope) he loves passionately too: his two children; a particular vegetable peeler; the work of his fellow cartoonist Liana Finck; the sculpture garden at U.C.L.A.; the Alfred Hitchcock movie “Saboteur.”
Few remember that the writers of that movie include one Dorothy Parker. Her brief, she told a journalist, was “giving the girl more to do.”
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