Dorothy Parker
Dorothy Parker (née Rothschild; August 22, 1893 – June 7, 1967) was an American poet, writer, critic, wit, and satirist based in New York; she was known for her caustic wisecracks, and eye for 20th-century urban foibles.
Not to be confused with Dorothee Parker.
Dorothy Parker
Dorothy Rothschild
August 22, 1893
Long Branch, New Jersey, U.S.
June 7, 1967 (aged 73)
New York City, U.S.
- Author
- poet
- critic
- screenwriter
Poetry, satire, short stories, criticism, essays
Enough Rope, Sunset Gun, A Star Is Born
O. Henry Award
1929
From a conflicted and unhappy childhood, Parker rose to acclaim, both for her literary works published in magazines, such as The New Yorker, and as a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. Following the breakup of the circle, Parker traveled to Hollywood to pursue screenwriting. Her successes there, including two Academy Award nominations, were curtailed when her involvement in left-wing politics resulted in her being placed on the Hollywood blacklist.
Dismissive of her own talents, she deplored her reputation as a "wisecracker". Nevertheless, both her literary output and reputation for sharp wit have endured. Some of her works have been set to music.
Hollywood[edit]
In 1932, Parker met Alan Campbell,[36] an actor hoping to become a screenwriter. They married two years later in Raton, New Mexico. Campbell's mixed parentage was the reverse of Parker's: he had a German-Jewish mother and a Scottish father. She learned that he was bisexual and later proclaimed in public that he was "queer as a billy goat".[37] The pair moved to Hollywood and signed ten-week contracts with Paramount Pictures, with Campbell (also expected to act) earning $250 per week and Parker earning $1,000 per week. They would eventually earn $2,000 and sometimes more than $5,000 per week as freelancers for various studios.[38] She and Campbell "[received] writing credit for over 15 films between 1934 and 1941".[39]
In 1933, when informed that famously taciturn former president Calvin Coolidge had died, Parker remarked, "How could they tell?"[40]
In 1935, Parker contributed lyrics for the song "I Wished on the Moon", with music by Ralph Rainger. The song was introduced in The Big Broadcast of 1936 by Bing Crosby.[41]
With Campbell and Robert Carson, she wrote the script for the 1937 film A Star Is Born, for which they were nominated for an Academy Award for Best Writing—Screenplay. She wrote additional dialogue for The Little Foxes in 1941. Together with Frank Cavett, she received a "Writing (Motion Picture Story)" Oscar nomination for Smash-Up, the Story of a Woman (1947),[42] starring Susan Hayward.
After the United States entered the Second World War, Parker and Alexander Woollcott collaborated to produce an anthology of her work as part of a series published by Viking Press for servicemen stationed overseas. With an introduction by W. Somerset Maugham,[43] the volume compiled over two dozen of Parker's short stories, along with selected poems from Enough Rope, Sunset Gun, and Death and Taxes. It was published in the United States in 1944 as The Portable Dorothy Parker. Hers is one of three volumes in the Portable series, including volumes devoted to William Shakespeare and the Bible, that had remained in continuous print as of 1976.[44]
During the 1930s and 1940s, Parker became an increasingly vocal advocate of civil liberties and civil rights and a frequent critic of authority figures. During the Great Depression, she was among numerous American intellectuals and artists who became involved in related social movements. She reported in 1937 on the Loyalist cause in Spain for the Communist magazine New Masses.[45] At the behest of Otto Katz, a covert Soviet Comintern agent and operative of German Communist Party agent Willi Münzenberg, Parker helped to found the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League in 1936, which the FBI suspected of being a Communist Party front.[46] The League's membership eventually grew to around 4,000. According to David Caute, its often wealthy members were "able to contribute as much to [Communist] Party funds as the whole American working class", although they may not have been intending to support the Party cause.[47]
Parker also chaired the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee's fundraising arm, "Spanish Refugee Appeal". She organized Project Rescue Ship to transport Loyalist veterans to Mexico, headed Spanish Children's Relief, and lent her name to many other left-wing causes and organizations.[48] Her former Round Table friends saw less and less of her, and her relationship with Robert Benchley became particularly strained (although they would reconcile).[49] Parker met S. J. Perelman at a party in 1932 and, despite a rocky start (Perelman called it "a scarifying ordeal"),[50] they remained friends for the next 35 years. They became neighbors when the Perelmans helped Parker and Campbell buy a run-down farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, near New Hope, a popular summer destination among many writers and artists from New York.
Parker was listed as a Communist by the publication Red Channels in 1950.[51] The FBI compiled a 1,000-page dossier on her because of her suspected involvement in Communism during the era when Senator Joseph McCarthy was raising alarms about communists in government and Hollywood.[52] As a result, movie studio bosses placed her on the Hollywood blacklist. Her final screenplay was The Fan, a 1949 adaptation of Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan, directed by Otto Preminger.[53]
Her marriage to Campbell was tempestuous, with tensions exacerbated by Parker's increasing alcohol consumption and Campbell's long-term affair with a married woman in Europe during World War II.[54] They divorced in 1947,[55] remarried in 1950,[56] then separated in 1952 when Parker moved back to New York.[57] From 1957 to 1962, she wrote book reviews for Esquire.[58] Her writing became increasingly erratic owing to her continued abuse of alcohol. She returned to Hollywood in 1961, reconciled with Campbell, and collaborated with him on a number of unproduced projects until Campbell died from a drug overdose in 1963.[59]
Honors[edit]
On August 22, 1992, the 99th anniversary of Parker's birth, the United States Postal Service issued a 29¢ U.S. commemorative postage stamp in the Literary Arts series. The Algonquin Round Table, as well as the number of other literary and theatrical greats who lodged at the hotel, contributed to the Algonquin Hotel's being designated in 1987 as a New York City Historic Landmark.[71] In 1996, the hotel was designated as a National Literary Landmark by the Friends of Libraries USA, based on the contributions of Parker and other members of the Round Table. The organization's bronze plaque is attached to the front of the hotel.[72] Parker's birthplace at the Jersey Shore was also designated a National Literary Landmark by Friends of Libraries USA in 2005[73] and a bronze plaque marks the former site of her family house.[74]
In 2014, Parker was elected to the New Jersey Hall of Fame.
In popular culture[edit]
Parker inspired a number of fictional characters in several plays of her day. These included "Lily Malone" in Philip Barry's Hotel Universe (1932), "Mary Hilliard" (played by Ruth Gordon) in George Oppenheimer's Here Today (1932), "Paula Wharton" in Gordon's 1944 play Over Twenty-one (directed by George S. Kaufman), and "Julia Glenn" in the Kaufman–Moss Hart collaboration Merrily We Roll Along (1934). Kaufman's representation of her in Merrily We Roll Along led Parker, once his Round Table compatriot, to despise him.[75] She also was portrayed as "Daisy Lester" in Charles Brackett's 1934 novel Entirely Surrounded.[76] She is mentioned in the original introductory lyrics in Cole Porter's song "Just One of Those Things" from the 1935 Broadway musical Jubilee, which have been retained in the standard interpretation of the song as part of the Great American Songbook.
Parker is a character in the novel The Dorothy Parker Murder Case by George Baxt (1984), in a series of Algonquin Round Table Mysteries by J. J. Murphy (2011– ), and in Ellen Meister's novel Farewell, Dorothy Parker (2013).[77] She is the main character in "Love For Miss Dottie", a short story by Larry N Mayer, which was selected by writer Mary Gaitskill for the collection Best New American Voices 2009 (Harcourt).
She has been portrayed on film and television by Dolores Sutton in F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood (1976), Rosemary Murphy in Julia (1977),[78] Bebe Neuwirth in Dash and Lilly (1999), and Jennifer Jason Leigh in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994). Neuwirth was nominated for an Emmy Award for her performance, and Leigh received a number of awards and nominations, including a Golden Globe nomination.
Television creator Amy Sherman-Palladino named her production company 'Dorothy Parker Drank Here Productions' in tribute to Parker.[79]
Tucson actress Lesley Abrams wrote and performed the one-woman show Dorothy Parker's Last Call in 2009 in Tucson, Arizona, presented by the Winding Road Theater Ensemble.[80] She reprised the role at the Live Theatre Workshop in Tucson in 2014.[81] The play was selected to be part of the Capital Fringe Festival in DC in 2010.[82]
In 2018, American drag queen Miz Cracker played Parker in the celebrity-impersonation game show episode of the Season 10 of Rupaul's Drag Race.[83]
In the 2018 film Can You Ever Forgive Me? (based on the 2008 memoir of the same name), Melissa McCarthy plays Lee Israel, an author who for a time forged original letters in Dorothy Parker's name.
Adaptations[edit]
In the 2010s some of her poems from the early 20th century have been set to music by the composer Marcus Paus as the operatic song cycle Hate Songs for Mezzo-Soprano and Orchestra (2014);[84][85] Paus's Hate Songs was described by musicologist Ralph P. Locke as "one of the most engaging works" in recent years; "the cycle expresses Parker's favorite theme: how awful human beings are, especially the male of the species".[86][87]
With the authorization of the NAACP,[88] lyrics taken from her book of poetry Not So Deep as a Well were used in 2014 by Canadian singer Myriam Gendron to create a folk album of the same title.[89] Also in 2014, Chicago jazz bassist/singer/composer Katie Ernst issued her album Little Words, consisting of her authorized settings of seven of Parker's poems.[90][91]
In 2021 her book Men I'm Not Married To was adapted as an opera of the same name by composer Lisa DeSpain and librettist Rachel J. Peters. It premiered virtually as part of Operas in Place and Virtual Festival of New Operas commissioned by Baldwin Wallace Conservatory Voice Performance, Cleveland Opera Theater, and On Site Opera on February 18, 2021.[92]