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

Dottie saw nothing of Lilly. There was her aversion to Alan but also the fact that Dottie made no trips back to New York, and so their contacts were necessarily limited to phone calls or letters. A sort of liaison between them was Peter Feibleman, Lilly’s youthful protégé, who coincidentally lived a few houses down the street and sometimes would stop for a drink. From Peter, Dottie learned that Lilly was teaching at Harvard and that she was elected vice president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, an impressive honor. Likewise, information traveled the opposite direction because Lilly kept tabs on Dottie, asking for news and generally ending with the question of money. Did she have enough? She was living on “a shoestring,” Feibleman reported. 74
    The Campbells may have appeared pinched to Peter and Lilly, but they were hardly living hand to mouth; indeed, they were no worse off than any working-class couple. They were doing their best, given the circumstances. The shoestring continued to hold nicely.
    Until it snapped. As happened all the time in Hollywood, the studio followed standard procedure and turned over their script to additional writers. Dottie, however, could not pretend to take it in stride and told friends that she felt “sickened.” As she described it, ‘hired swine burned the pot” and turned The Good Soup into “a kind of gaudy gazpacho.” Turned out, it didn’t matter. The Campbells found themselves off the Fox payroll but so was Marilyn, fired from her current film Something’s Got to Give and slapped with a half-million-dollar lawsuit. She was supposed to be ill. Disgusted but philosophical, Dottie allowed that Monroe might have been a problem. “Of course, Marilyn can’t help her behavior. She is always in terror.” A few months later, Monroe was dead and The Good Soup shelved forever. 75 Who, in her right mind, could have predicted such an improbable outcome?
    The reconciliation that had begun with so much promise in 1961 quickly dribbled away, only to be replaced eighteen months later by perpetual friction. Living together as housemates had become far more perilous than either of them expected. Wyatt Cooper, accustomed to their genial crabbiness, was distressed to find them sometimes at each other’s throats.
    Once the movie money disappeared, the ground shifted beneath them and the days became purposeless, with too much time on their hands and too much dependence on alcohol. No assignments were forthcoming. Alan may have tried and failed, but then he stopped trying. For a brief period Dottie taught a class at California State University, but eventually they were living on unemployment insurance, her royalties, and checks from Esquire , which had raised her rate from $600 to $750 a month and generously paid whether or not she submitted a column. Frequently she was late, or sent nothing, even though she claimed to be working. Sometimes, distrustful, Alan played crafty games. At one point, he placed a hair on her typewriter, assuring Wyatt that “when I get back it’ll still be there.” 76 Other times, he loaded stacks of unread review copies into his Jaguar and made the rounds of local bookshops. He can be excused for feeling nervous because the end of unemployment benefits was looming.
    By the spring of 1963 the cracks in their relationship were getting hard to hide. Alan, increasingly grouchy, made no effort to look for work and typically started off the day drinking. Dottie retaliated by jabbing him with old insults, telling him harshly that he was hopeless, a horse’s ass, a writer of dubious achievements still clinging to her coattail. Her browbeating made him tear up.
    â€œHe used to be able to drink and still have fun,” she told Wyatt, ignoring her own overindulgence in Scotch. But Alan, who had shut down, was not much of a party guy anymore.
    When the actress Cathleen Nesbitt was invited to