The Last Days of Dorothy Parker by Marion Meade Read Free Book Online Page A

York. Her ideas, it seemed, were passé; her writing, she believed, had gone out of style. In the end, the deciding factor was not “20th Century Fucks,” as she called the studio, or The Good Soup , fluff that had flopped on Broadway, but its star. She was smitten with Marilyn Monroe – “I am crazy about her” 69 – and could not pass up the enticing opportunity to write a Monroe film. Of course, starting over with Alan was risky. It had been some years since they worked or lived together, and the brief second marriage had tested the limits of her patience.
    In no time at all, she settled into the community, or, as she liked to call it, “Peyton Place West.” Along Norma Place she became a familiar figure being ferried around in the Jaguar by her husband or walking her poodle Cliché along with a new Sealyham puppy. Soon she was making new friends, chatting up her gay neighbors, holding court at their frequent cocktail parties. Perhaps most important, she made the acquaintance of a cheerful young man living down the street, another writer working at Fox. Of all the people she met, it was Wyatt Cooper who would be the bright spot in her life on Norma Place.
    Raised on a farm in Quitman, Mississippi, one of nine children, Wyatt grew up in a family that might well have come out of a Faulkner novel. Dottie, accordingly, nicknamed him the Sharecropper. As a child he was emotionally scarred by a tyrannical, womanizing father who told him “You’re no damn good,” and whose typical advice was backwoods basic: “Take a leak as soon as you finish & always wash it off with soap and water.” 70
    From his harrowing early years, Wyatt had matured into a caring, uncommonly sensitive man, one of the kindest people Dottie knew. She delighted in his company because, happily, he understood what was funny, and like herself loved giggling and swapping gossipy shoptalk, the more outrageous the better. The farmer’s son with the boyish smile was thirty-four but appeared ten years younger. As if unaware of the three decades between them, he treated her like a contemporary. If Dottie had succeeded in having a baby, and if it were a son, she would have wanted a boy like Wyatt.
    At the studio, Dottie and Alan and Wyatt fell into the habit of lunching together. Bypassing the commissary, they trawled around the area looking for amusing restaurants and stores. One day while browsing in a Santa Monica antique shop, Dottie caught sight of a set of hand-painted porcelain figurines, Napoleon and his marshals, the courageous men who led his battles. Endlessly fascinating to her were, not just the campaigns, but also Napoleon’s career, his family, and his exile to Elba. The generals were nine inches high, and she wanted all thirteen of them. To display the miniatures in style, Alan put up a shelf in the living room and installed a special overhead light.
    Wyatt was struck by how much fun the pair had together, “as they must have done in earlier and younger days.” 71 Of course they bickered, but even so, their solidarity was obvious. At the studio, they had no trouble coming up with, as Dottie called it, “a darling, bawdy farce” for Marilyn. 72 In their little house, where they chose not to own a TV set, evenings were spent leisurely reading, chain-smoking, and sipping Scotch; as before, she did not involve herself in housekeeping or cooking. After Cliché had puppies there were five dogs on the premises (Alan had little patience with the messes). For the fourth year she continued to entertain Esquire readers with her witty book column (“This novel,” she said admiringly of Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle , “brings back all my faith in terror and death.” 73 ) For a person who never admitted knowing happiness, who had a lifelong love affair with negativity, she had found a surprising degree of contentment.
    During this period,