DOROTHY PARKER IN HOLLYWOOD

By Gail Crowther

Gallery Books. 291 pages. £20. ISBN 978-1-9821-85794-4

Reviewed by Jim Burns

On the bookshelf facing me as I write this review is a copy of The Collected Dorothy Parker, published in 1974. It contains poems, stories, reviews and articles, and probably represents the work that most people now associate with her name. What it doesn’t cover is what she produced during her time in Hollywood. She was there, on and off, for around thirty-five years, and was involved not only with a number of films for which she received credit, but also several others that she worked on uncredited. She additionally gave her attention to the politics of the place and the period.

She was born in 1893 to well-to-do parents. Her mother “was of Scottish descent, while her father had a European Jewish heritage”. According to Gail Crowther, little is known about her early years “because Parker rarely spoke about them, and any paper trail is sparse and incomplete”. Jumping ahead, she first began to make a name for herself as a writer when she arrived in New York in 1914, at the age of twenty-one, and was published in Vanity Fair, Vogue and, in the 1920s, the New Yorker. She became known as “a girl about town” and famous for her “quips, her asides, her cutting reviews. Nobody was safe from her tongue-lashing”.

Parker was part of the group to be found “wisecracking in the Rose Room each lunchtime at the Algonquin Hotel, hanging around with fellow writers Robert Benchley and Robert Sherwood”. There is a kind of mythology surrounding those get-togethers at the Algonquin, but Parker was inclined to dismiss them when questioned in later life: “Just a bunch of loudmouths showing off, saving their gags for days…..Did I tell you what I said? And everybody hanging around, asking ‘What’d he say? What’d he’d say?’ The whole thing was made up by people who’d never been there. And may I say they’re still making it up?”.

It was, perhaps, inevitable that Parker would be invited to move to Hollywood, which she did in 1929. She was offered a three-month contract at three hundred dollars a week, and happily accepted despite not having a high opinion of either the place or its products. Her reason for going was simple “I was broke. I wanted to make money there”. She was to learn that writing screenplays was not as easy as it seemed, and that working in Hollywood could be a difficult endeavour. Writers were not looked on as all that essential to the creative process, and even those with reputations in the literary world had to accept that their work could be re-written by other writers, and that a host of different people – director, producers, actors – felt that they had the right to alter anything they didn’t like. Writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner were hired by Hollywood because their names gave the studios a surface appearance of culture, but they were often treated shabbily once they got there.

It's worth mentioning at this point that Parker, like so many writers and intellectuals, had taken part in the protests about the death sentences given to two Italian anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who had, in the opinion of many, been unjustly found guilty of killing a guard and a paymaster in a payroll robbery. There were doubts about some of the evidence given against them and the attitude of the judge during the trial. Parker was arrested and fined during the protests. It pointed to the fact that she had a social conscience that was overlooked when people read her caustic (some would say cynical) poems and her sharp short stories. It became more evident as the 1930s progressed. And it led to difficulties later. 

“A week after arriving in Hollywood, Dorothy Parker realised that she hated the place”, says Crowther, and she adds, “she found herself transplanted from a city where everybody knew her to a town where even the most important people who hired her had no idea who she was”. It could be that being in that situation encouraged her to drink more than she normally did. And she was already noted as a heavy drinker. Crowther refers to one of Parker’s best-known stories, “Big Blonde”, built around “an animal-loving, divorced, big-drinking suicide survivor, and comments, “The autobiographical aspects are unmistakable”. Parker attempted suicide more than once.

However, despite her feelings about Hollywood and many of its inhabitants, she did get down to work when required to do so. There doesn’t seem to be a lot that survived from her first visit to Hollywood other than the lyrics she wrote for the song, “How am I to Know”, which became a well-known standard and was recorded by Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra. The wistfulness of its opening lines, “Oh, how am I to know/If it’s really love/That’s found its way here?”, might well have expressed how she saw her own situation, given that she had a history of getting involved with unsatisfactory men. Billie Holiday also recorded another song, “I Wished on the Moon”, with lyrics by Parker. It was originally sung by Bing Crosby in the musical, Big Broadcast of 1936.

It was a sign of Parker’s progressive views that she was involved in the founding of the Screen Writers Guild as writers fought to improve their working conditions. This was in the mid-1930s when she had returned to Hollywood with her second husband, Alan Campbell, an actor and aspiring screenwriter. They worked together on a number of films, the most significant being the 1937, A Star is Born, for which the writers (Parker, Campbell, and Robert Carson) received an Oscar nomination for Best Writing (Screenplay) in 1938. It may have touched her in more ways than one as it focused on an ageing, alcoholic actor whose status is fading as his younger wife rises up the star system. It showed how easy it was to be abandoned by the studio bosses once someone was considered of no use.   Another film Parker and Campbell were involved with was The Moon’s Our Home, and Crowther says that Graham Greene, then the film critic for the Spectator, “singled out her written contribution and comedic talent”.

With the political situation developing in Europe, Parker and fellow- screenwriter, Donald Ogden Stewart, helped form the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, something she was proud of. She also decided that she needed to go to Spain to see for herself what was happening there. It’s easy now to dismiss the politics of well-paid Hollywood writers with jibes about the “swimming pool Soviet”, but she had seen at first-hand how “financial security breeds indifference, a callous condescension. It was a position that Parker never wanted to inhabit, however rich she became”. So, it seemed necessary to give support to the Republicans in Spain. Her experiences there were recorded in an article, “The Siege of Madrid”, published significantly in New Masses, a Communist Party publication, and in her short-story, “Soldiers of the Republic”, which appeared in the New Yorker. Crowther says that “Care must be taken not to read the story as straight autobiography, though the description of the main protagonist sounds an awful lot like Parker – a well-dressed, hat-wearing American”.

The FBI was, by this time, carefully noting Parker’s activities, aided by informers within the studios. She was restless, moving back and forth between Hollywood, New York, and the farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania that she and Campbell had bought. She was also still drinking heavily, and the couple were constantly falling out. Campbell enlisted in the armed forces when America entered the war, and was eventually posted to England. As for Parker, Crowther notes that little information is available about what she did in 1943 and 1944. She had earlier worked on the 1941 film version of Lillian Hellman’s play, The Little Foxes, and with Alfred Hitchcock on the 1942 Saboteur, but after that there was nothing until 1945, by which time she and Campbell had drifted apart. She collaborated with Frank Cavett for the story (not the screenplay) of the 1947 Smash Up: The Story of a Woman, for which they received an Oscar Nomination for Best Writing (Original Story). Susan Hayward gave a powerful performance as a woman sinking into alcoholism, but Marsha Hunt, who was in the film and was later blacklisted because of her political affiliations, was dismissive of it: “It’s the story of a weak, self-pitying woman who acquires a serious drinking problem because her husband isn’t paying any attention to her…..I don’t understand why it is so popular”.

There may be a story behind Parker being seemingly not involved in the screenplay. Gerald Horne in his The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten (University of California Press, 2006) suggests that Parker “by August 1945 was at work, but by January 1946 she was ‘off’ the script, her ‘employment’ was ‘terminated’, and Lawson was hired in her stead”.  Had her drinking interfered with her work on the screenplay and made her unreliable? It’s of relevance to note that Lawson was a leading Hollywood communist, and would almost certainly have been known by Parker.

Parker made one final appearance as a screenwriter when she was credited, along with Walter Reisch and Ross Evans, for the screenplay of The Fan, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan, starring Jeanne Crain and George Sanders, and directed by Otto Preminger. Evans was a younger man she had linked up with and, like others, was to prove unreliable. She went to  Mexico with him, but couldn’t settle there. And she had been named by Louis Budenz as a “concealed communist” when he testified before HUAC. He had never met her, but claimed he had been told that she was a Party member. Having been named and listed in the notorious anti-communist publication, Red Channels, her Hollywood career was at an end. No-one was likely to come to her defence for fear of being named themselves or tainted by association.

Parker was eventually summoned to appear at a HUAC hearing in 1955, where according to Crowther, “in an exquisitely polite manner she answered all questions, until she was directly asked if she had been a member of the Communist Party. On this, she invoked the Fifth Amendment”, designed to protect against self-incrimination.  For many people opposed to communism, this was the equivalent of an admission of membership.

There isn’t a lot to say about the remaining twenty-five or so years of Parker’s life, at least not in terms of her writing. She reviewed books for Esquire, produced three short stories, the last one published in 1958, wrote a play with Armand d’Usseau, another blacklisted writer, which had only a six-week run, and tried to ease back into Hollywood again by working with Alan Campbell (they had re-married) on the screenplay for a film to be called Love is for Other People. It was never produced.

There was also a brief period when, thanks to admirers of her poems and stories, she was hired to teach two courses (one on twentieth-century American literature, the other on English literature) at California State College. The salary was good and she would have the title of “Distinguished visiting professor of English”. As Crowther says, “It was of course something of a disaster…….she ran out of things to say after ten minutes. Sometimes she wouldn’t turn up at all”. No doubt her drinking affected her ability to be organised and reliable. It was, in addition, a fact that she simply wasn’t suitable, either by training or temperament, for any sort of structured teaching. She couldn’t understand the attitude of many of the students, who. “were not well-read enough and…were too compliant with society….She appeared to feel sad that education was not for education’s sake but for career purposes or financial gain”.

Alan Campbell died in 1963, a possible suicide. Like Parker he was a heavy drinker, and their time together had been marked by endless bickering and worse. Parker moved back to New York and an apartment at the Volney Hotel where, “Her health declined sharply, as did her mobility, and she began to lose her vision. Still drinking, still hopeless with money, and still unable to write, she spent her days smoking, reading gossip magazines, and watching soap operas”. She died in 1967.

Bearing in mind the title of Crowther’s book it’s reasonable to ask if Parker’s work in Hollywood produced anything of literary value. She went there for the money, as did many other writers, and had to adapt, however unwillingly, to the production line conditions that applied to the making of films. So, it’s not always possible to know precisely which words were written by which writer. Another question that arises from the presence of writers in Hollywood is the one about whether or not working there destroyed their talents for other forms of writing. I doubt that was the case for Parker. Her drinking, the unreliability it brought, and her tendency to bite the hands that fed her, probably had greater effects. Her politics were the final nail in the coffin of her career in the film capital and probably beyond it. Had she been prepared to adjust to a more modest manner of living she may have been able to survive on the income from her poems, stories, book reviewing and general literary journalism. But that wouldn’t have been Dorothy Parker.  It’s the poems and the stories from her early days before Hollywood that she’ll be read and remembered for.

Dorothy Parker in Hollywood will interest those who enjoy her work, though they may be disconcerted by some of the details that Gail Crowther reveals about aspects of Parker’s life, especially in her final years. The book has a filmography, a bibliography, notes, and relevant photographs.