The Last Days of Dorothy Parker Read Online Free PDF Page A

wealthy bankers and merchants, and her father was a shoe salesman whose sisters operated a boardinghouse. The great sorrow of her life, and a source of lifelong insecurity, would be her face. Mischievous genes, or perhaps just bad luck, denied her heart’s desire: ravishing natural beauty. Through no fault of her own, she was a plain child who wound up a plain young woman forced to struggle for minimal prettiness. Growing up, she winced whenever people remarked on her lovely hair, which meant “they couldn’t think of anything nice to say about my face,” she recalled. 29 Although deeply identified as a Southerner, Lilly actually spent half of each year in New York City, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and attended a public high school for girls. As a pampered only child, she was not shy about promoting herself, sure that she was meant for stardom despite her ordinary looks. Since then, she had continued to demand, and often got, whatever she wanted.
    On the basis of her theatrical success, producer Samuel Goldwyn approached her about a movie contract and wound up offering an astonishing $2,500 a week. Not only was screenwriting a boys’ club, but this kind of money in 1934 was restricted to a handful of elite writers. By point of comparison, Dottie, together with Alan, was raking in a grand total of $1,250. Lilly was not fooling herself. If she had to work on drek, her favorite word for trash, she damned well wanted to be paid handsomely.
    Her first assignment was rewriting a tearjerker set during World War I, which in previous incarnations had been a Broadway play and before that a hokey silent film. To Lilly, The Dark Angel was “an old silly.” 30 What’s more, her relationship with Goldwyn got off on the wrong foot because after several weeks, impatient with endless script conferences, she stormed back to New York, a tip-off that she would not be easy to work with. Goldwyn, as big an egotist as Lilly, was not particular fond of female writers, especially prima donnas, but he recognized a go-getter who could deliver high-quality scripts. He wooed her back. When The Dark Angel was released in 1935, with a stellar cast led by Fredric March and Merle Oberon, reviews were enthusiastic. As debuts went, it could have been worse.
    Her relationship with Goldwyn (a Polish-born glove salesman) would remain contentious, but nonetheless she ended up writing several more pictures for him, including adaptations of The Children’s Hour (released as These Three , 1936) and also the play that made her name, The Little Foxes (1941).
    In the next few years, in addition to films, she tackled the class struggle in a play about a labor strike in small-town Ohio. Without the benefit of Hammett’s close supervision, she cranked out a dull melodrama peopled by cardboard characters. Days to Come , which opened in December 1936 and closed after just six performances, was pummeled by critics as “inept” and “muddled.” 31 For Lillian, Days to Come was not only “an absolute horror of a failure” but a huge embarrassment. 32 She rebounded quickly, but three years would pass before she returned to the stage with the play considered to be her biggest achievement, The Little Foxes . Priding herself on hard-won independence, she deliberately set about constructing a reputation as a woman who stood up for herself, a no-holds-barred gunslinger whose success rested on being good at what she did. She hungered for, and accepted nothing less than, the world’s admiration. In due course, she would get it.
    Though success could not bring the physical beauty she craved, public recognition had its compensations, allowing her to live on a grand scale. Controlling every aspect of her life was especially important to Lilly, and yet she had no control over Dash who “always had to have things on his own terms.” 33 His most egregious betrayal was a brief fling with Laura Perelman, who