Books: “Dorothy Parker in Hollywood” by Gail Crowther

Every writer has a favorite Dorothy Parker quip. Ever heard the expression “What fresh hell is this?” That was Dorothy Parker’s. How about “Men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses?” That too.

But behind being everybody’s funny lady lay an individual with a sad personal life. Her mom died when she was five and her stepmom never called her by name, preferring the, ahem, warm and fuzzy “hey you!”

Despite these early speed bumps, Parker went on to become New York’s first female drama critic and eventually exchanged bon-mots with Alexander Woollcott and Donald Ogden Stewart at the Algonquin Hotel. Parker continually played down that part of her life: “I wasn’t there very often; it cost too much.”

Having gotten the boot from Vanity Fair, and quickly running out of money, Parker joined other writers such as Herman Mankiewicz in search of the easy money Samuel Goldwyn promised in the movie industry. It is this part of her life that is covered in Gail Crowther’s wonderful “Dorothy Parker in Hollywood.”

“A week after arriving in Hollywood,” Crowther writes, “Dorothy Parker realized she hated the place.” She especially loathed the Hollywood writing process: the same script would get passed around to several writers so there was never any pride of authorship. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Parker soon discovered that writing scripts required different skills than writing poems and novels.

Parker got nibbles of work throughout the early 1930s but it was not until she met Alan Campbell, a handsome fellow writer whom she eventually married, that she got the industry attention she deserved. The couple wrote the original script for the 1937 version of “A Star is Born,” starring Frederic March and Janet Gaynor. It would go on to win an Oscar then get remade three times.

Through her life in Hollywood life—35 years in total—Parker contributed huge sums of money to leftist causes starting with Sacco and Vanzetti right up to the Spanish Republicans. To prove her commitment, she traveled to Spain in the late 1930s and wrote non-fiction essays about what she saw. People complained her writing wasn’t humorous. “Well, I know now that there are things that never have been funny and never will be,” she replied.

Parker was a mass of contradictions. Despite her cherubic appearance, she was consumed with insecurity and self-hatred, often causing her to lash out at the people closest to her, once calling Campbell “my homo husband.” (Unsubstantiated.) Her last ten years reflected that of Hazel Morse, the protagonist of her O. Henry short-story award winner “Big Blonde”—a descent into a lonely alcoholic existence in a New York flat with only her dogs and her cigarettes. Parker died at the age of 73 in 1967, leaving whatever she had left to Martin Luther King Jr and the NAACP.

“Hollywood” is a readable, expertly researched book that holds the life of one of our literary legends up to the light. Candy is dandy as Parker once quipped, but as far as kicks go, reading this book may top them all.