A highly visual view of the life and art of the famous wit and writer Dorothy Parker

1. Dorothy Parker – a profile
Dave Shafer

2. Dorothy Parker – 1893-1967
Rare photo of
young Dorothy
smiling
Dorothy was born 2 months prematurely (this has been
hard to confirm – as well as her 4’ 11” adult height)

3. Dorothy’s parents were
a German Jewish father
and a Scottish mother.
Her father, Jacob Henry
Rothschild, had made a
small fortune in the
garment industry. It is
difficult to figure out
what his relationship
was to the extended
Rothschild clan.

4. When Dorothy was 5 her
mother Eliza died, an event that
devastated her. Soon after her
father remarried – a strict
Catholic woman who Dorothy
detested.
Dorothy’s uncle went down
with the Titanic and she
became a young adult with a
step-mother she hated, a
father she disliked, and no
close family ties.

5. As a young girl, Dorothy went to a Catholic school on 79th street in
Manhattan, which she despised. She later joked that they had thrown
her out when she compared
the Immaculate Conception
to Spontaneous Combustion.

6. Dorothy’s hated step-mother
died in 1903 and 9 year old
Dorothy was sent to a Finishing
School in New Jersey – Miss
Dana’s School for Young Ladies.
Dorothy’s father introduced her at the school as an
Episcopalian. Back then there was prejudice
against both Jews and Catholics so her father tried
to cover her background. But Dorothy always felt
that she was clearly an outsider.

7. The school taught the usual Bible,
reading, writing, history and math, but also
geometry, chemistry, astronomy, Latin and
even a form of philosophy. Graduates
were automatically accepted by Vassar.
There are conflicting accounts about
if Dorothy graduated from this school.
Her father died when she was 20 and
she then supported herself by playing
piano at a dance school (or being a
dance instructor). Her father’s
business had failed by that point.

8. There are very few photos of young Dorothy.
In 1917, when she was 24, she married stockbroker
Edwin Pond Parker II, and thereby got what she called
“a nice clean name” (i.e. not Jewish).

9. Wall Street 1917
Parker, later in life.
Soon after their marriage
Dorothy’s husband left for the war.

10. In England
there was a
battalion that
consisted
mainly of
stockbrokers.
1917 recruitment poster

11. The Parker marriage had a long alcohol
fueled decline and eventually fell apart
in 1928. Parker was also addicted to
morphine due to war injuries

12. In 1916 Dorothy
had a brief stint at
Vogue magazine.
Here are two of
the Vogue 1916
covers. There she
immediately drew
attention due to
her witty writing.

13. 1916
Vanity
Fair
covers

14. 1916 lingerie
ads when
Dorothy
Parker was
hired to write
ad copy, but
had not
started yet.

15. Dorothy wrote, as part of a
lingerie ad, a memorable line.
“Brevity is the soul of lingerie”
She started out just writing
copy for advertisements but
then quickly moved up to real
writing.

16. In 1917 when her husband left for war Dorothy became a staff writer for Vanity
Fair magazine. In 1918, at age 25, Dorothy became the theater critic for Vanity
Fair, replacing P.G. Wodehouse. This was an unprecedented position for a
woman of any age at that time. She became an immediate success, with her
notoriously vicious and funny reviews. Her one-liners were memorable.

17. Her review of one play – “if you don’t
knit, bring a book”
“This wasn’t just plain
terrible, this was
fancy terrible. This
was terrible with
raisins in it.”

18. It is hard to beat Parker’s short pearls of
wisdom. Groucho had a similar talent

19. Dorothy’s wit soon made her famous, plus her
constantly going to parties, where she had an
audience. One of her priorities was to spend as
little time as possible sober.

20. When asked to complete an assignment for
some deadline Dorothy memorably said

21. Dorothy was burning the candle at both
ends, with constant partying.
Eventually her acid
reviews so offended
the theater crowd
that in 1920 Vanity
Fair magazine fired
her.

22. Dorothy’s friend at the
magazine, the humorist
Robert Benchley, quit in
protest. It was, Parker
said, "the greatest act of
friendship I'd known."
(1919 photo of them)
Benchley was a
great wit. While
visiting Venice he
wired to a friend
this telegram.

23. Parker then supported
herself by free-lance
writing and continued to
make very quotable
remarks that kept her in
the public eye.

24. Dorothy was getting a lot of
exposure with her free-lance
writings but she was absolutely
miserable.
She had serious money problems, and had a succession of painfully
brief love affairs with men who cared little for her. All these troubles led
to two failed suicide attempts, in 1923 (following an abortion) and 1925.
Her marriage to the morphine (from the war) and alcohol-addicted
Edwin Parker finally ended in 1928. Through her worst years, Parker
maintained a tough-talking and hard-drinking public exterior, scoffing at
her own misery with blasé humor.

25. One of Dorothy’s failed loves was with reporter,
writer, and screenplay author Charles MacArthur. In
many ways he shared her love of the one-liner. Once,
when writing as a reporter about a dentist accused of
sexually molesting his female patients, Charlie chose
the headline "Dentist Fills Wrong Cavity” Later he
married Helen Hayes and collaborated on many plays
and movies. He and Ben Hecht wrote the 1928
Broadway play "The Front Page“, which was a
phenomenal success.
The failure of this affair led Dorothy to an abortion
and a suicide attempt. She had a string of unhappy
loves.

26. At the suggestion of a friend, she
collected a volume of her poetry in 1926
to pay for an overseas trip, although she
herself felt her verse was not good
enough for a book. To her great surprise,
Enough Rope became an instant best-
seller, rare for a book of poems.
Most of the poems are about failed love,
heartache, depression and death – but
some are short, light and funny. Here,
next, is a sampling.

27. Men seldom make passes
At girls who wear glasses.Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.
Oh, life is a glorious
cycle of song,
A medley of
extemporanea;
And love is a thing that
can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of
Roumania.

28. One Perfect Rose
A single flow'r he sent me, since we met.
All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet
One perfect rose.
I knew the language of the floweret;
'My fragile leaves,' it said, 'his heart enclose.'
Love long has taken for his amulet
One perfect rose.
Why is it no one ever sent me yet
One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah no, it's always just my luck to get
One perfect rose.
Her mind lives in a quiet room,
A narrow room, and tall,
With pretty lamps to quench the gloom
And mottoes on the wall.
There all the things are waxen neat
And set in decorous lines;
And there are posies, round and sweet,
And little, straightened vines.
Her mind lives tidily, apart
From cold and noise and pain,
And bolts the door against her heart,
Out wailing in the rain
Her most acclaimed short story, "Big Blond," won the O. Henry
Prize in 1929. It depicts the drunken loneliness, male dependence,
and increasing desperation of an aging "kept woman."
Humor
Pain

29. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTmKi48kUHQ
Watch this

30. Dorothy surprised her friends when she was arrested in 1927 as part of
a New York rally about the Sacco and Vanzetti affair. She became quite a
social activist and later went to Spain to work against Franco in the
Spanish Civil War, which she later called “the proudest thing I ever did”

31. During this time the
famous Algonquin Round
Table was formed and
lasted from 1919 to 1929.

32. A group of great wits, artists, writers, actors, etc. would regularly
meet for lunch and exchange scintillating conversation. Dorothy
Parker was a key member and often the only woman.

33. President Calvin Coolidge was a
man of few words and was knick-
named “Silent Cal”. When told in
1933 that he had died, Dorothy said
“How could they tell?”
In a game where you had to make up
a sentence using a given word,
Dorothy said, for “horticulture”, “you
can lead a whore to culture but you
can’t make her think”

34. Many great wits were
there, like Robert Benchley,
Parker, P.G. Wodehouse
(above) and others.

35. Benchley wrote
several books of
funny essays
and made some
humorous short
instructional
films.

36. Regular member
Alexander Woolcott
was the inspiration for
the play and movie
“The Man Who Came
to Dinner”. It’s witty
lines exposed the
Algonquin Table’s style
to the general public.

37. Much has been written about
this famous collection of wits

38. Harpo Marx was an occasional drop in.

39. Back then

40. Now

41. When the Great Depression came many
writers, artists, and other creative types left
New York and moved to Hollywood to work in
the film industry. Films were offering to the
public fantasies of escape from the ravages of
the Depression.

42. In 1934, at age forty, Parker married the writer Alan Campbell, who was
eleven years her junior. The couple became a Hollywood screenwriting
team whose credits included the original A Star Is Born (1937). Like
Dorothy, he was half Jewish and half Scottish. He adored her but was
often overshadowed by her powerful talent and personality.

43. Parker claimed in public that he was “queer
as a billy goat". The pair moved to Hollywood
and signed ten-week contracts with
Paramount Pictures, with Campbell (who was
also expected to act) earning $250 per week
and Parker earning $1,000 per week. They
would eventually earn $2,000 and in some
instances upwards of $5,000 per week as
freelancers for various studios. She and
Campbell worked on more than 15 films.
Back then this was an enormous amount of
money.

44. Considering the vast amount of money
that Dorothy made in Hollywood it is a
mystery where it all went.

45. Their relationship was complicated by economic woes as well as
their ongoing alcoholism and his homosexuality. The couple divorced
in 1947, remarried in 1950, separated in 1953, and reconciled again in
1956, staying together until Campbell's death (suicide) in 1963.
1950 They wrote the original 1937
screenplay for “A Star is Born”
1937

46. Parker was not proud of her work in Hollywood and felt (as she did about reviewing)
that screenwriting kept her from serious literary engagement. She was able to produce
stories and poems only sporadically in the 1930s and later years, and never reached the
level of productivity to which she aspired nor wrote the novel she had always dreamed of
writing. During her adult life she attempted suicide 3 times and was basically a deeply
unhappy person. This well of emotion fueled her writing.
She never
had children

47. These are just a few of the many books about Parker or collections of
her writings. She would be surprised at her enduring life in print.

48. There was nothing separate about her days. Like drops on the window-
pane, they ran together and trickled away.”
She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B. (about Katherine Hepburn)
Her big heart did not, as is so sadly often the case, inhabit a big bosom.”
Yes, I once was the toast of two continents! (...Greenland & Australia).
You can’t take it with you, and even if you did, it would probably melt
Parker
quips

49. Parker produced books of poetry and
short stories and a lot of reviews of books
and plays. She had literary criticism
published over many decades in the New
Yorker (under the title "Constant Reader")
and, from 1958 to 1963, in Esquire. These
reviews were often penned with the
same unblinking brutality as her earlier
drama reviews (of A.A. Milne's The House
at Pooh Corner, she said, "Tonstant
Weader Fwowed Up"), although as often
they were generously sensitive and
enthusiastic.

50. During her whole career Dorothy was involved, on
the side, in social activism. Here is one memory.
”I think I knew first what side I was on when I was about five
years old. It was in a brownstone house in New York, and
there was a blizzard, and my rich aunt—a horrible woman
then and now—had come to visit. I remember going to the
window and seeing the street with the men shoveling snow;
their hands were purple on their shovels, and their feet were
wrapped with burlap. And my aunt, looking over my shoulder,
said, "Now isn't it nice there's this blizzard. All those men have
work." And I knew then that it was not nice that men could
work for their lives only in desperate weather, that there was
no work for them when it was fair.” (notice her double
meaning of “fair”).

51. She helped raise money for Loyalist Spain, China, and the Scottsboro defendants,
and lent her name to more than thirty fund-raising activities. She traveled to Spain
during its civil war. Later she helped Ernest Hemingway and Lillian Hellman
finance the film The Spanish Earth, and was on the board of Equality, a magazine
in support of democratic rights and racial equality. Her pro-communist sympathies
were noted by the F.B.I.; the agency kept a file on her. She wanted to be a World
War II correspondent but was denied a passport.
Dorothy supported
the Actor's Equity
Strike in 1919.
Ethel Barrymore is
in the left photo.

52. Dorothy organized Hollywood screenwriters, and was blacklisted in the
1950s for her pro-Left views. Parker helped to found the Hollywood Anti-
Nazi League in 1936 (which was suspected by the FBI of being a
Communist Party. The FBI compiled a 1,000-page dossier on her because
of her suspected involvement in Communism during the McCarthy era.

54. In her later years, she would come to denigrate
the group that had brought her such early
notoriety, the Algonquin Round Table:
“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.”

55. Before her lonely death (heart attack) at age 74 in New York on June
7, 1967, Parker disparaged the life that she and other Round Tablers had
lived. She also judged her own writing harshly as derivative and not
living up to her promise. "I was following in the exquisite footsteps of
Miss Edna St. Vincent Millay," she once claimed, "unhappily in my
own horrible sneakers”

56. Dorothy’s will left her small estate ($21,000 in 1967) to
Martin Luther King, or to the NAACP if he were dead. She
was always very supportive of the civil rights movement.

57. Lillian Hellman, Dorothy’s
executor, was furious that
the money had not been
left to her and bitterly but
unsuccessfully contested
this disposition. Hellman
despised the NAACP,
which she thought was too
conservative.
Hellman was a very
vindictive person and she
was an acquired taste, if
you like poison.

58. To this day the literary rights to reprinting
Parker’s work are held by the NAACP.
There are many books in print of her
poems, plays, short stories, and collected
witticisms. Two of her best known short
pieces are “A Telephone Call” and “The
Waltz”, both available on the internet. Both
are poignant – the former very moving and
the latter mixed with humor.
A recent movie about her and her circle
is on Netflix and Amazon streaming sites.

59. In 1988, the NAACP claimed Parker's remains
and designed a memorial garden for them outside
their Baltimore headquarters. The plaque reads,
Here lie the ashes of Dorothy Parker (1893–
1967) humorist, writer, critic. Defender of human
and civil rights. For her epitaph she suggested,
'Excuse my dust'. This memorial garden is
dedicated to her noble spirit which celebrated the
oneness of humankind and to the bonds of
everlasting friendship between black and Jewish
people. Dedicated by the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People. October
28, 1988.

60. In order to end here on a more upbeat
note, we will now do a play reading of
her very short humorous piece “Here We
Are” . It is on the internet at
https://thelifelonglearningacademy.com
/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Week-4-
Here-We-Are.pdf
and there are also some performances
of it on Youtube