To be a screenwriter on a movie about Dorothy Parker is to be caught up in a kind of echo experience. It’s impossible to forget that at one point in Parker’s legendary life-hardly the most illustrious point, either-she was a screenwriter, too. In “Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle,” Dorothy Parker’s first line comes in response to hearing that she and her second husband, Alan Campbell, probably will be nominated for the 1937 best-screenplay Oscar.
“Oh, (expletive),” she says. “Now I’ll have to see the picture.”
To my best knowledge, Parker never actually said such a thing. What’s certain is that once she had been in Hollywood long enough to appreciate the gulf between what she wrote and the fragments of her sensibility that could be detected on screen, her hefty paycheck became the thing that mattered most.
I could never be so cynical about “Mrs. Parker,” a movie so much a labor of love that no one knew for sure where half its slender $7 million budget would come from until several weeks into production. While Parker’s collection of verse, short stories and reviews in “The Portable Dorothy Parker” has never gone out of print in 50 years, selling Parker as a film subject wasn’t easy. Even those who have never read Parker, however, are familiar with her most-quoted lines-such as “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses,” her assessment in The New Yorker of a Katharine Hepburn performance as running “the gamut of emotions from A to B,” and her own suggested epitaph, “Excuse my dust.”
Not surprisingly, the very elements that made financing a movie about her life difficult were the most intriguing to me when I started working on the script with Alan Rudolph four years ago-the emotional evolution of a woman famous for being witty during the ’20s, an isolated cultural moment when it was possible for Dorothy Parker and her gang of wordsmiths at the Algonquin Hotel’s Round Table (a k a “The Vicious Circle”) to have the same popular currency in their era that far more mindless media sensations have in ours.
Equally unsurprising to me was that two cinematic gamblers like Rudolph and our producer, Robert Altman, both accustomed to risking everything but creative integrity to get their films made, would somehow carry “Mrs. Parker,” which opens Friday, to the finish.
What did surprise me was the frequency with which I wondered how Dorothy Parker would feel about all this. Despite ample evidence to the contrary-Parker assiduously avoided autobiography and left behind no diaries-I hoped she might be pleased. As much, that is, as a woman so finicky as Parker could be pleased. There certainly weren’t any strange occurrences on the set that might be wishfully interpreted as portents from the spirit world.
It was toward the end of production, a quieter time with Jennifer Jason Leigh and Campbell Scott doing some of their most intimate work as Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley, the humorist who was her loving best friend, that the echoes really got loud for me.
One night in the whorehouse was especially resonant. The whorehouse was a re-creation of Polly Adler’s tony Manhattan brothel, circa 1928, where Parker liked to drink champagne with Benchley, a regular client. Polly’s had seemed a perfect backdrop for addressing how the pair shed their respective Victorian upbringings and tumble into bed with other people, yet never (according to all their different biographers) physically consummate their love for each other. Just as significantly, the headlong, wisecracking lifestyle of which Polly’s became emblematic hardly nurtured the literary accomplishments that Parker and Benchley had dreamed of as fledgling journalists at Vanity Fair.
The private home in Montreal being filmed as the brothel was available only for a single warm July day. Under lights, the set turned sweltering well before noon. At midnight, union rules turned all the ancillary actors and extras playing johns and prostitutes into pumpkins who had to be sent home. All, that is, except Leslie, an assistant director doubling as a hooker in a blond wig and a flapper frock.
At this late hour, Leslie was the only woman prepared to be a distant figure in the background while Benchley put a drunken Mrs. Parker down to rest in one of Polly’s unoccupied bedrooms. When I was asked to join Leslie in the shot, it seemed selfish to refuse.
A little later, as I reappeared in period ensemble, the crew responded to my film debut as a lady of the evening with predictable razzing. Although Dorothy Parker had the sense to stay hidden behind her knitting when she was on a movie set, I could imagine how she would respond if she were in my position: “They warned me this would happen if I wrote for the movies.”
I don’t mean to glorify the appearance of my left shoulder in a segment that ended up being cut out of the movie anyway. The point is that, for Parker, a slow writer who sweated just as much over fluff as she did her finest short stories, Hollywood represented a creative Sahara. As a writer, it’s easy for me to wonder how different things might have been for Parker if she had ever managed to finish the autobiographical novel she abandoned, not once but twice, before signing up for a long haul with the studios.
Parker didn’t exactly waste her time in Hollywood. She collaborated on “A Star Is Born,” “The Big Broadcast of 1936” and others, and she put a lot of energy into leftist causes and the Screen Writer’s Guild. Still, she felt guilty enough over ditching fiction to complain to F. Scott Fitzgerald about the impossibility of serving two masters.
From that point on Parker’s output dwindled, but she remained an icon for young women who dreamed of breaking into journalism and dazzling all the men around them. Several years after John Keats’ less-than-empathetic biography of Parker appeared in 1970, though, one such woman, Nora Ephron, wrote a column in Esquire renouncing Parker as a role model, promoting the comforts of sisterhood over the dubious distinction of being the only woman at the table. As much as I agreed with Ephron then, this now seems an easy shot to take at someone who rose to prominence in an entirely different era.
In Parker’s heyday, few starkly personal literary novels were being written by her “sisters.” One of these was Zelda Fitzgerald, and we all know what happened to her. In fact, Parker’s most self-defeating thought as she wrote her novel was probably, “Dear God, please make me stop writing like a woman.” Had this request been granted, of course, we would not be talking about her still.
“Big Blonde,” Parker’s best-known and most highly praised short story, describes the despairing days and drunken nights of Hazel Morse, a woman so like Parker that she attempts suicide precisely the way Parker did, in one of several efforts, with an overdose of carefully hoarded Veronal tablets. In a piece last year coinciding with the centennial of Parker’s birth, The New Yorker said that what makes “Big Blonde” so wonderful is Parker’s objectivity. Well, if I had been her best friend, I’d have encouraged her to write more out of her subjective experience, not less. I’d have encouraged her to finish that novel.
Maybe Parker really was a sprinter by nature, not a marathon runner. Maybe completing a novel would have only deepened her depression instead of her talent. As it was, she ended her career the same way she began it, writing entertainingly scathing reviews. It’s tempting to think that being a critic was part of what held her back as an artist: It was always too easy for her to see what wasn’t.
Such were the thoughts running through my head that night in Montreal as I stood in the whorehouse hallway. And so it seemed particularly appropriate when I heard Leigh, hot and tired between shots, calling out softly to no one, “I want to go home,” sounding as much like that other famous Dorothy as Mrs. Parker.
Crouched beside the camera, Rudolph murmured sympathetically, “So do we.” But when shooting ended at 2 a.m., everybody went to watch dailies instead.
Soon, Leigh would complete her protrayal of Parker by playing her toward the end of life, a woman in her 60s. In contrast to the color footage of most of the film, these flash-forward sequences would be shot in black and white. One compelling reason for attending dailies tonight was that they would include Leigh’s black-and-white makeup test.
The test ran first, and it turned out to be a magical piece of film. Not only was Leigh eerily adroit as the elderly Parker, but a genuine Montreal storm raged in the background, punctuating her speech with thunder. To appreciate the significance of this you must know that Parker, whose mother died during just such a torrential downpour, took so much comfort from the rain that she, too, hoped to die as it fell.
During the test, Leigh didn’t speak scripted dialogue. Instead, on camera, she asked in Parker’s distinctly accented, cultured voice if it was all right for her to just “rattle on.” Then, lighting a cigarette, she proceeded with a monologue she had pieced together from listening to a recording of an interview Parker gave a few years before her 1967 death.
“Writing is the toughest way you can possibly take,” she said. “It’s the loneliest way there is. There you are, you and your paper-that’s all. And nobody puts on their paper what they really meant to be there. You can’t do it, you can’t do it. Is it too much to ask that you’re someday able to put something on your paper you won’t be ashamed of? I haven’t done it yet, but I hope to.”
Hearing this, I burst into tears. And to cadge a line from the ever-relevant lady herself, it’s impossible to enjoy a thing more than that.
Earlier that day, a visiting journalist had asked how audiences were supposed to feel about Dorothy Parker by the end of the movie. Sniffling in the dark while watching that test, I let myself wish at least some people might end up feeling a little like I did then, taken by the complex longings of Parker’s life.
At that moment, almost as if in response, a bolt of lightning struck and knocked out the lamps that had been illuminating Leigh’s face onscreen, leaving her in the dark too.
We all wanted to take this as a sign, of course, but there was some confusion as to whether Mrs. Parker would have hurled electricity in our direction because she was pleased or annoyed. All I can add to clarify is that later, back home in Seattle, I stumbled upon a description of Parker by Fitzgerald that had previously escaped my notice. “Dottie,” he wrote, “is the lightning in the storm.”
After filing this away, I cleared my desk of all the books that had helped me through the facts of Mrs. Parker’s life, nowhere near so intriguing as imagining the private moments behind them. Then, hoping to put an end to the echoes, I sat down to my own novel-which Dorothy Parker, in more ways than one, helped buy me the time to finally finish.
