Who was Dorothy Parker, really?

how about that jazz age? Oh, look at you don't anti paca. So you requested this when Livia helped us out with it? What? What? What? Why? What? I have no idea why. Dorothy Parker popped into my brain. There wasn't anything. I had seen the movie a long time ago with the arth Dorothy Parker story. Yeah, Dorothy Parker in the Vicious Circle was the name of the movie. Great Alan Rudolph film starring Jennifer Jason Lee, j J. L as Uh, Dorothy Parker. Great cast rounded it out,

Cambell Scott, Matthew Broderick, others. Campbell Scott was this. It was not quite that old, but it was. I think it was late nineties or early odds, although he was just in something I saw recently. Yeah, he's in like a Marvel movie or something. I think. Okay, is he a good guy or a bad guy? I don't think he's a bad guy. Um, I like Campbell Scott though you know that's Georgeie Scott's son, right, I did not

know that for real. Yeah, he's one of those I think that somehow that's not the most common knowledge despite having the name in profession. If I didn't know, it's not common knowledge. He doesn't really look like him, so not at all. Uh. Yeah, I have no idea why Dorothy Parker popped into my head. I really don't. So it's kind of it's kind of understandable because I'm trying to figure out how to describe her. Dorothy Parker is one of those very rare people who was so witty

that that is what she's remembered for. She worked prolifically through the through Prohibition, basically through the twenties to the early thirties, um, and apparently like basically in step with it, and then that was it. Like her, her her writing really fell off after that. She did some screenwriting but her body of work is not super extensive. If you asked her, it wasn't that great. But she was so witty and so she's sharp and funny. Um that that

she's still she just became a literary legend because of it. Yeah, I think this quote from the New York Times kind of says it all. Uh. Most writers are known for the works they lead on. Dorothy Parker is best known for having lunch and this was I resist. I'm not going to say that. I'm not going to compare her to people these days that are famous without really having done much, because that's a different category. She was a writer, and she was a very talented writer. She just wasn't

extraordinarily prolific. Um. I don't think she loved to write from what I've gathered, Like I can't crawl into her head, but all the stuff I've read, it didn't seem like it was like her favorite thing in the world. Like she you know, she was a poet, but she wouldn't even call them poems. She called them versus. She didn't know it. Yeah, she was always she's always kind of undercutting her own work, and I think in a self deprecating way, which was maybe just sort of part of

the stick of being Dorothy Parker. Well, I said, I read a Esquire article from written by Wyatt Cooper, who's Anderson Cooper's dad. Oh okay, called, um, I think whatever you know about Dorothy Parker is wrong. Something along those

lines anyways on the internet. Really good. Yeah, there's like a bunch of ellipses in there, uh in the title um but he he kind of pegged it as she had that same kind of um uh fear of inadequacy that any writer has, but hers just got worse and worse to the point where it paralyzed her and she

just couldn't write any longer. Yeah. She also was quoted as saying she, um, she would write five words and then change seven, which in and of itself is a great line, which is what she's known for, Yeah, known

for hum Dinger's zingers one liners. Um. Yeah. And that whole quote about having lunch is a reference to her membership in the Algonquin Roundtable, which was basically basically a lunch bunch of these great literary minds all coming together in the Algonquin Hotel that have lunch, and it became really famous and really beloved, and she's probably the most famous of that whole group. Right, And that is the vicious circle of the movie title. It was also called

the Vicious Circle, Yeah, the Algonquin roundtable was right. Yeah. And it was named because they were all having lunch one day and I'm sure someone nearby said, look at them, that is a vicious circle. That was great. Hopefully we'll be able to get across kind of what we're trying to stay here, because this is going to be one of the most challenging episodes ever because we have to get across why she was so why she's worth doing

an episode on. You know, It's it's more like other people could be like, oh, well they figured out the double helix of DNA, or you know, they they invented the race car something like that. She was as kind of a short lived writer who had a really great way in like, we have to flesh it out more than that. All Right, you seem doubtful. You're not saying, what does she ever do that was so great? Right? No, I'm I'm questioning our ability to get across why she

was so great. That's my that's that's my trepidation. Okay, Well, I mean, she would like if she was alive today, she would be the person that was most well known for like Twitter. Oh yeah, she would be good at that. She'd be really good at that. All right, So let's jump back in her life. Um her. She was born in down the Shore in New Jersey too. She was born Dorothy Rothschild. Uh. This makes me immediately sidetrack quickly.

Her nickname was dot or Dottie. Uh. And I cannot hear the name Dotty without thinking of one of my favorite comedy bits of all time, stand up bits, which is Gary Goldman's bit on abbreviating the states. Have you ever seen that? No, I don't know who carry Goldman is Goldman g L M A N. He he's really tall, he's like six six. He's a comedian. But just everyone should, but you, especially because you like stand up, just go go after this and and find Gary Goldman's state abbreviations

bit because it was fan fantastic. And there's a character in the bit named Dotties. I always think of that. But she was born in to a father who was Jewish. He was in the garment district. He worked in the garment district. Henry rothschild and her mother was Scottish American. Her name was Eliza, And like I said, she was born down the shore of New Jersey, but mainly I grew up on the upper West side of Manhattan, right. Um.

And she had a lot of tragedy surrounding her. Yeah, I saw, I saw her missing thropy was chalked up to this early just about of tragedy. Yeah, okay, what would you say, missanthropy? No, alright, so, um, she she is kind of adopted this persona which is you would call it kind of emo today a little bit, but like a really funny, sharp emo person maybe a little bit, especially when she was young. She described herself as um,

a plain, disagreeable child with stringy hair and agenda write poetry. Um. And that tragedy began when she was four years old when her mom died. Apparently that was just that just

shaped her immediately, which something like that will. She also said that her father was terrible to her, possibly physically abusive, although some of the biographers of her aren't sure if that's true, and Olivia points out that that's an uh long running ongoing thing about whether stuff she said about herself was true or not, and then the converse of that, she frequently denied saying some of the quips that were

attributed to her. Yeah, it's pretty interesting, like uh. She seemed like the kind of person that would she loved to spin a yarn and if the facts were fudged because it made for a better story, then that's fine. But it kind of makes it difficult to parse out the person from the persona and that was certainly the case. Like you said, some people aren't so sure about the dad. Uh.

She apparently also had a pretty evil stepmother situation. She referred to her stepmother as the housekeeper, which I think it's pretty funny. I also saw she would call her hey you, hey you. Uh. Stepmom died in nineteen o three, so Dorothy was still just nine years old, and also had an uncle um that was apparently pretty close to

the family that died on the Titanic. Her dad died shortly thereafter, and if I do the math right, I think she was like nineteen or twenty when she was basically kind of she seems like left alone in the world for the most part, although she did have a sister, but I didn't I didn't see much about how close they were. I didn't even see that she had a sister. Yeah, that was a sister in there somewhere. So when her dad died, her dad was very prosperous um as a

garment in the garment industry. So it was her uncle. Apparently, Um, he did not invest wisely and so when he died, he didn't leave much for her. So that was the first time that she had to go get a job. And her first job was um playing piano in a dance school, which is kind of a cool first job, but apparently she hated it because it was like actual work. Yeah. That's the one thing that maybe a through line here is that I don't think she loved to work super hard.

She did not. She said she doesn't like rich people, but she she thought she'd be a darling at it right exactly, Um, things changed for her. Nineteen fourteen, she sold her first poem to Vanity Fair magazine. It was called any Porch, and this sort of began her career as kind of a high society satirist. UH paid twelve bucks for that poem, which is about three hundred bucks today, which was a lot of money for a poem even today.

I mean good luck at three for a poem. Uh. And then a gentleman came into her life name a very formative figure named Frank Crown and Shield, and he said, Hey, I like to cut of your jib, pretty talented writer. I'm gonna give you a full time staff job here at Vogue Magazine, and I'm gonna pay ten bucks a week, which is not bad pay at the time, even though apparently Parker said she spent most of that on her housing, like eight of ten right to her room and board. Yeah.

So Crown and Shield he was the editor of Vanity Fair, but Vogue was like a sister magazine to Vanity Fair, I believe. Yeah, they were all Conde Nast publications, so he was or she was Crowning Shields protege from what I understand. And she went to work for a woman named Edna W. Woodman or woman. Uh yeah, woman Chase. She was a female editor in chief, which was very

rare at the time. Um and uh, Dorothy Parker got her first job writing captions, and she would get bored easily because captions are supposed to be pretty normal and boring is prosaic the correct word. Uh, I don't know Okay, let's just go with prosaic because it seems like it's the right word. But um, so she very quickly started to trust try to slip in Remember when we used to write for house stuff work, so we try to slip in hilarious things into into um, like cut lines,

the captions under photos. Dude. I thought of us a lot during this because that's all. We did that all the time, to try and make things a little more interesting. And I think both of us had editors that were constantly saying, like, what are you doing? You can't do that? So so she would she was doing basically the same thing. So she became kind of a a thorn and Edna Chase's side. Um, but not enough that she was fired

at this point. She actually was um. Uh. She was promoted basically after P. G. Woodhouse Um, the humorists stopped being the drama critic for Vanity Fair. They turned to Dorothy Parker to become that to fill that role to review plays. And she was only twenty four at the time. Uh. And by that time she'd been married a year to a guy named ed Edwin Pond Parker, the second stockbroker. Yeah, he was. He enlisted in the army, as a lot of guys did back then. What fault in World War One? Um?

And like you said, when she was twenty four, she was this play uh or theater reviewer and was was known sort of for doing the same thing in the reviews of making sort of biting, cutting remarks about high society. Uh one kind of funny one she was writing about a play and she said, not even the presence in the first night audience of Mr William Randolph Hurst could spoil my evening. So a lot of great punch lines.

She she was pretty good at, like setting someone up to think they may be getting a compliment and then cutting their legs up from under them. That was actually her whole thing. Like she was supposedly fairly soft spoken, kind of quiet, you might even callers shy at first, but also really complimentary, like really kind, and then she would kind of build you up until you weren't even paying attention to anymore because you were just so drunk on the praise she was giving you, and then bam,

she cut your legs out. You probably didn't even notice, but everyone else in the conversation and listening in is having a good laugh. That was her her whole jam. And it's really important to say her purpose wasn't to be mean. There was a real purpose to her um her like biting criticism, and it was usually um a bullying self gratification, acceptance of praise, um worshiped from the lower classes. Like that's why she didn't like high society types.

She also didn't like feign graciousness, like high society types who were so nice that they they gave their housekeeper an extra hour, u to go home early one one week and now they feel really great about the selves. Those kind of things, like just all the stuff that just kind of makes somebody gross that she was surrounded by in her life. That is what really kind of drove her the craziest. And that is what she would attack. And it didn't matter who you were, didn't matter what

your station in life. Although I don't believe she punched down very often. Um, you were, you were subject to that criticism if you kind of allowed yourself to behave that way. Yeah, she probably would have been a stand up comedian today now that I think about it, Like there's a little bit of mis maasl in this, you know, But that wasn't really a job that women had back then.

It wasn't a job period, I don't think at the time. No. And there was one other criticism I want to point out that she wrote in I don't remember where she wrote it, but she was criticizing I think an actress in a play and she said that um, as a source of entertainment, she ranks somewhere between a sprig of parsley and a single ice skate. That's just good stuff, that's not even it's is smart, you know, like who would think of a single ice skate is conveying like

just how not fun something is? Like, it's just brilliant stuff. And she was full of that. Yeah, she pushed too far though, as people like that often do, lost her job in nineteen twenty. I think it was sort of a you insulted the wrong person kind of thing. There was a column where she was reviewing a play. She

accused the playwright basically of plagiarizing himself. And then what the real deal was though, the real sort of last straw was that was an actor, an actress named Billy Burke in there, who was criticized and sort of likened to this risque vaudeville star, which was not like a good you know, comparison to make at the time. But that actress was the wife of Florence Zigfield, who put a lot of money into advertisements with Vanity Fair, and a good friend of Nast of Conde Nast, and that

was kind of it. So apparently she got the new news at the Plaza hotel, and a legend has it she ordered the most expensive dessert on the menu, then left and took it with her. Right. So, oh, I don't even think she took it with her. I think she left before it came, just long enough to to waste it. Oh I saw that she took it with her. Oh did she awesome? Um? So uh, let's even even better. Um. There's one other thing I want to point out about

her criticism, or two other things, chuck. First of all, after she was fired from Vanity Fair, she that was not the end of her critic critic career, like she went onto to be a book reviewer for The New Yorker. Um, but her her criticism, her columns, she had no training whatsoever. She didn't she didn't like take any kind of classes or education on criticism like technique in theory and all that stuff. All of her reviews were just totally subjective.

But she was so funny and so entertaining and so insightful that she became like an instant sensation. And then the other thing I want to say about it, from what I can tell, is that her criticism was not always negative. That if you actually produced like a really good or a really good book or something like that, she could use that same wit too for praise as well. And I read that there was there's some book that

she reviewed. Um, she was saying, to say of it here as a magnificent novel is rather like gazing into the Grand Canyon and saying, well, well, well, quite a slice. Yeah. I mean she was a legitimate uh critique or she put she put forth legitimate critique, right, And if it was praise, it was praise. If it was negative, which I think it more often was, it was negative. She didn't like crud. Well, I don't even think it more often was negative even. I think that's the stuff that

gets pulled because she's Dorothy Parker. I see that's a really good point, Chuck. I think you might be right. I don't think they were like, hey, this is supposed to be a real turd. Let's put Parker on it, because like she'll just she'll prop a new and it'll be great. I hate that word so much. Yes, it's terrible. It's terrible. It's even worse because it's spelled with to you. It looks bad on paper print and it even evokes the color brown somehow, somehow. Uh yeah, I think we

should take a break. We should revisit that word. M hm, no, okay, all right, we'll be right back. Learn it's stuff with Joshua, alright, Mr turd. So when when she got fired from Vanity Fair, there were two employees, Robert Benchley and Robert E. Sherwood, who were such friends with her that they actually quit and protest because apparently she wasn't wrong with her with her um her criticism that got her fired and she was just fired because she insulted a very high ranking

friend of the publisher. So um, they actually quit and protesting. I mean that is to inspire a couple of people to quit because you were fired, is really saying something like it's almost like a trope, you know, but if you stop and think about it in reality, somebody being like so long paycheck, so long, steady works. I'm I like, this person should not have been fired, and I'm I'm taking my talents away from you because you don't deserve

them because you fired this person. That's a really big deal. If someone fired you, I would quit. Thank you, same to you. Okay, you hear that, everybody you hear that bosses? Yeah, hopefully that we don't. We don't get tested, but yeah, we have been fired by this point. If we were going to at all, you would think so. But hey, there's always the future. Uh So, now we get to the point where we can talk about the vicious circle again,

which was the round table. Generally lunches, although they lunched for many hours at the Algonquin Hotel, which is I believe it's still there in New York, right, and still the Algonquin. Yeah, I want to stay there sometime. I gotta check out. But it's it's now the Algonquin by Hyatt.

That's funny and probably true. Uh So, this was a period of time over about a decade or so that first started in June of nineteen nineteen, when they all got together for lunch to welcome home their friend Alexander Woolcott from his World War One correspondence job. They roasted him, they got drunk. Uh, they had a good time, and they said, hey, let's come back tomorrow and we don't have to have a special occasion to get together and

drink scotch at lunch. And it kind of became like sort of a a Studio fifty four uh booth scene where you know, where you see Mick Jagger with uh Andy Warhol and like Mickey Dolan's from the Monkeys and like a painter, you know. It was people from all different walks of life, like Harpo Marx might be there.

There might be a fiction writer like Edna Ferber, or a sportswriter like Heywood Brown, or columnists or screenwriters or playwrights, and it was just like it kind of became the cool, like a certain kind of cool crowd was hanging out at this round table. Yeah. Especially it was especially considered cool among the intelligentsia, right, smart and literary types generally,

So it became like a worshipful gathering um. And people knew about it because a lot of these people were columnists and like you know, the New York Times and later on the New York Parker and like these big publications, and they would write about like equip that that Dorothy Parker said apparently like um, she would say something at lunch one day and to be in the New York Times the next day. I think why Cooper was the one that said she was probably the most quoted woman

of the nineteen twenties. Um because she was so funny, but also because she was in a position to be so exposed. Um. But that the Algonquin roundtable, the fact that it became the stuff of legend, the more legendary came, the I think the more um kind of disgruntled by the whole idea Dorothy Parker became. I think if Dorothy Parker heard that, she would say, name one other woman who was even quoted in the nineteen twenties, dear oh man,

and I go uh her uh uh. They became so sort of popular and famous just for these lunches in this round table that the manager of the hotel, Mr Frank Case started seating them in a very sort of public area in the rose room, so people could just kind of come by and watch them have lunch and talk smack to each other. Yes, so, um, they like you said, like, these lunches would also go by the way,

I'm gonna say, Greta Garbo, how about that? Okay, Um, these lunches would turn into dinner and in very short order after Um there the initial meeting in June Prohibition started so that scotch they were sipping turned into bootleg scotch that they had to kind of surreptitiously drink. But they were all super drunk from lunch onward, and they would go to people's houses and have cocktails. Afterward, they would vacation together. They became like really good friends. It

sounds fantastic. It does sound fun, for sure, Um. But even more um important I would say, is that a lot of them came to collaborate. It was like a really productive group. And so not only did some like get together and write like screenplays together or plays, they would actually use one another characters in their books or their plays. Like Um, Alexander Walcott. He was like the stock acerbic, um course, um character who was kind of the center of the man who came to dinner. It

was based on him. There are plenty of characters in different plays that you never heard of that were based on Dorothy Parker, Um, they just used each other as inspiration in addition to collaborating with one another directly. And as you would think, Dorothy Parker also sort of undercut

the importance of the whole algonquin vicious circle. She was quoted as saying that round table thing was greatly overrated, full of businessmen and publicity people and hangers on and a lot of second rate writers, saying did you hear what I said the other day? So I get the impression that it's a little bit of both. It may have been a little over played, but I think she also sort of vastly underplayed what was going on in

that sort of self deprecating way. Again, well, I I also saw that she said it was just a bunch of loudmouth showing off save being their gags for days, waiting for a chance to spring them. So um, I that, and I think it kind of ties into that idea of like, you know, just being grossed out by people heaping praise onto other people and then those people accepting all that praise and basking in it. And then the more that that happened, the more she was like forget this.

So um, yeah, I'm sure it's like you said, it was both, but I feel like that was the reason she kind of distanced herself from it through criticism. Yeah, I get the impression, and this is I may just be reading too much into this that she she didn't love the Spotlight, uh, and she was sort of in it because she was just so smart and funny. I think she definitely hated phonies, yes, and that sort of you know, ties into the upper crust thing. Um. She

probably would have loved Catcher in the Rye. When was that written the fifties. She's I'm sure she was alive while it was published. She died in nineteen sixty eight. Spoiler alert, yeah, sixty seven. She also it wasn't just the round table. I think Livia took great pains to sort of talk about other people in nonliterary people that she hung out with, um, as well as other writers that just didn't you know, like she was a friend

of Ernest Hemingway. But I don't think Ernest Hemingway was one to like sit around a round table and like crack jokes and stuff like that. He had like elephants to shoot, So Hemingway was a buddy. Um. I think he supposedly, uh at Scott Fitzgerald ended up basing a lot of the Great Gatsby parties after what happened in the social circle at the Algonquin. So you know, I think she had an influence on other writers as well, you know, for sure, um yeah. And she was very

quoted and also misquoted. Uh, And I think she inspired a lot of people, for sure. Let's talk should we talk about some of the great quotes? Sure? Al right, Well one of them was someone said a aparently like used the word horticulture in a sentence, and she said, you can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think. And I think that's off the dome. Like she was known for just being that quick, you know, right, Yeah,

that's a big part of it. And that's why she was saying, like people would be saving their gags for days, just waiting for a chance to spring him. She did not do that. It just came into her head, like she was just that sharp. Um my favorite is this? You're ready? So Calvin Coolidge, the president, apparently he was very famously quiet and um she uh, she was told about the death of Calvin Coolidge, and she whispered, how

do they know. Yeah, it actually took me a second to figure that one out, and then once I got it, it was that's a really good one. Yeah, I like that one too. But she was also, like you said, misquoted or not only misquoted, but I think other quotes were attributed to her that she said that she never said. Um, a very famous one, uh from iron Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Supposedly she said it is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force,

which is a great quote. But she said that she never said that. Nor did she say the first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpened my tongue. Yeah, that's a little too, like she's joining in the celebration of yeah. And she wouldn't do that. I could. I could have spotted that a mile away and been like nay, yeah. And and it seems like she got very annoyed at being having things attributed to her,

because that's part of the phoniness. Yeah, which is why I think she would just deny saying stuff a lot of times too, even if she did, Yes, so, um, what the other And also, like you said, too, I think she was kind of creating this um fiction that was more entertaining than reality in some cases, like a character like I still think there's probably a lot of people who don't really understand who or maybe every no

one knows who the real Dorothy Parker was. Even Dorothy Parker might not have known, but she probably did, although I'll tell you who really did know? Again? Is um Whyatt Cooper Anderson Cooper of sixty Minutes in CNN and New Year's Fame. Um His dad wrote that Esquire article I mentioned, I'm finally prepared to share the title. It's whatever you think Dorothy Cooper was, like she wasn't, and it is what did I say? Cooper? Oh my god, I got it wrong? Okay, and I even have it

written down as Cooper. That's why I got it wrong. So that title I just said, but replaced Cooper with Parker. And it's one of the most insightful articles I've ever read about anybody. So even if Dorothy Parker didn't understand herself, why A Cooper understood her? Like It's a really good,

interesting article that doesn't necessarily follow any timeline. It's just like why Cooper is kind of like oh yeah, and one other thing about her was this, and then he back it up with like three different stories that are also hilarious or maybe a little sad or something like that. Um. Yeah, it's a really really good article. I would recommend anybody go read it, even if you couldn't care less about

Dorothy Parker. Well, hopefully they will after the end of this. Uh. She after she went away from Vanity Fair by getting fired, it's a nice way to say it. She never worked like a regular staff job again. She became a very successful freelancer. She wrote for all kinds of magazines that were popular at the time, Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal.

When The New Yorker was founded by her friend Harold ross In think you mentioned earlier, she became a regular columnist, doing reviews, short stories, her poems again what she called versus. Between twenty six and thirty three she did publish books of poetry. She published three books of poetry and two short story collections, and one of which was the best seller. Enough was a poetry collection which was a best seller and sold really well. And uh, where I'm trying to

find where it was. She won a couple of big prizes to didn't she She won the Oh Henry Story Prize in nine for one. UM. Oh, I can't remember what it's called big Blonde about what a character I saw described as a serial mistress? Uh in decline and um she attempts suicide. Um. And apparently there was a like one, a pretty prestigious prize. UM. She wrote very

frequently about uh. Love, especially modern love in the sense of in the twenties, they were just starting to deal with this idea of like, wait a minute, men and women are like working in the same places, and you know, we're kind of interacting more now and are you might equal? No, that doesn't seem right, But how does that translate into dating? You know, everybody kind of moved from the farm to the city and they were trying to figure it out. And so that was one of Dorothy Parker's favorite um

topics of of writing both verse and short stories as well. Yeah, she eventually would get I think, kind of just leave poetry behind. She stopped because she said that she didn't think she was getting any better, which is man. That is admirable. Yeah. Yeah, to not just like run something into the ground like we're doing. I think we're still getting better here and starts yeah, man, I think I think this has been a great year. Actually, okay. Uh. In fifty six she talked about just again, sort of

her reputation being overblown. She said it got so bad that audiences began to laugh before I opened my mouth. So her reputation preceded her in a way that she wasn't comfortable with, and I think she didn't feel like it was earned. Um. I have a suspicion that she might have been deeply uh, she's some blanking what's the word when you don't feel good about yourself? Um? Insecure? Sure.

A lot of these things that happened with her in the way she betrayed herself kind of makes me think she might have been insecure in her in her writing and with sort of getting attention as somebody who was doing good things. If I can't if if no one minds me. Going back to the same well of whyatt Cooper, he basically said, she seemed to prefer misery. That's why I compared to like an emo person earlier, like um.

He gave a great example where um, you'd be hanging out of her house and she'd get a phone call from a friend and she'd tell the the help like, tell tell them I'm not home. And then later on in that same visit, she complained about how that exact same friend never called anymore interesting, So like it was a self imposed kind of thing, Like she seemed to just feel more comfortable isolated, but tried to make it so that it wasn't her own choice. Yeah, I don't

understand why. I don't know if it was to get sympathy, it doesn't seem to have been. It's she was just kind of bizarre in that way. All right, should we take a second break, Yes, yes we should. All right, so we'll take that break and we'll be back to talk about from this point forward. In Dorothy Parker's life learnt with Joshua John So Chuck, one of the things that she did very sensibly after she kind of abandoned poetry and short story writing was to go to Hollywood

and become a screw writer. And she did that, um through kind of marrying a guy named Alan Campbell, an actor back in he was ten years younger than she was, and um, they ended up being screenwriting partners together after he moved her out to Hollywood. Yeah, so her just to tie up her first husband's situation. Uh. He came back from the war apparently was an alcoholic and drug addict, and they were separated. She had an abortion, uh, and they got divorced. So he died of a drug overdose

at the age of thirty nine. Uh. And that's when she met the new guy. And the new guy Alan Campbell, and uh, like he said, went to Hollywood to write movies. Um. She was became pregnant at the uh. And it's still, you know, sort of old to get pregnant now, but it's certainly at the time. Being pregnant at forty two years old in the nineteen thirties was a tough situation, and she did have a miscarriage that devastated her. UM. But she was she sort had an on again, off

again relationship with this guy. They were the kind that would get divorced and then reconcile and then remarry and then split up again, then move back together again. But they had a pretty prolific partnership wherein he would and a lot of writing partners still kind of have this arrangement. Someone might be really good at nailing dialogue and the other partner might be really good at structure and character

development stuff like that. So he would develop the structure of a script and sort of sketch out scenes, and she would come in with her you know, rapiers wit and come up with all that clever dialogue and got a lot of money and attention and awards or at least nominations. She was a co writer on A Star Is Born, the first one from and they were making a hundred over a hundred thousand dollars a week a week. That's so much money. It's just just screenwriting. And they

were having a blast doing it. They get drunk every day, they were everybody. Yeah. Yeah, they were friends with everybody in their neighborhood and it was just it sounds like a really grand time. Um. And then unfortunately, Alan Campbell died. Um. They think it might be a suicide, although she apparently decided that that was not the case, so she got it listed as an accident on his death certificate. And right after that, she's like, I'm I'm going back to

New York. She said, New York is the only place to be in the whole country. Um, I'm guessing California was a little too painful. After the death of Alan Campbell. But I also think like she just preferred living in New York. Anyway, there was another thing that happened to her that probably prompted her to move to New York,

and that was her activism. Like she's known for her quips and her sharp wit um and you kind of have to dig in a little further before you realize like she was actually like a legit died in the wool, lefty activists who really cared about things like racism and civil rights long before this was on the radar of most people. Yeah, she was one of the founders of the Screenwriters Guild. Very pro union, as you probably shouldn't be surprised by this point. Uh, very anti Nazi early on.

This is like, you know, before the long before the Americans were involved in World War Two. Uh. She you know, she had a half Jewish father, and I think it seems like sort of struggle over the years with her Jewish heritage, but came out hard against Uh Lenni Riefenstall when she visited Hollywood and was sort of and this was in I think, uh and basically said like, no,

you shouldn't take meetings with her. You shouldn't take meetings with any Nazis, and like all these agents need to just close their doors to them, basically, and I thought I couldn't admire her anymore. She founded an anti Nazi league, I mean, hats off to her right. So she also helped raise money to defend the Scottsboro Boys, were nine black teenagers in Alabama who were unjustly convicted and sentenced

in the rape of two white women. UM and there was a really big um push by the American Communist Party to to basically rescue these boys from this unjust system. And she was at the very least Communist adjacent, if not an outright sympathizer. I think a lot of her interests in viewpoints really kind of dovetailed with the Communist Party in America at the time. UM. And she was

also virulently anti fascist. And for all of this, combined her anti fascism, her UM work for civil rights, her kind of sympathy for UM, the Communist Party UM got her essentially first informally blacklisted and then pretty much officially blacklisted in Hollywood starting in the forties. Yeah, so before the blacklist, there was something called the Red Channels, which was a pamphlet that kind of said, hey, you know, you may not want to hire these people if you're

in broadcasting. Yeah, it was put out real quick, chuck by a right wing um publication that was um called counter Attack, I believe, and it was made by three former FBI agents who just basically created dossiers on everybody in Hollywood to root out who were the communists. And a lot of them were accused just for contributing to like, you know, civil rights causes or things like that. I was just about to point that out. That is again pre blacklist. It should not surprise you that she eventually

was officially blacklisted for a short time. She was also on the FBI watch list Edifile honor. Uh. They called her a concealed communist and you know, just go back and listen to our McCarthy asm episode, uh if you want to learn anything else about the House of Unamerican Activities Committee. She did go before them in fifty five and took the fifth and the FBI eventually would clear her, uh being a security threat. But I think, you know, I don't think any of those people were ever completely

off the list, if you know what I mean. No, for sure. And if you got on that list, if you were in that pamphlet, it doesn't matter how big of a starre you were, you just could not find work. All of us are you get fired from your current job? It was crazy, Um, but that's what happened, and it was part of that McCarthy era. So she moved back to New York and um, she I saw that. She basically lived out the last act of her life in

a very surprising manner as a little old lady. Basically, Yeah, she died at a seventy three and uh, I think she left all her her money to Reverend Martin Luther King and then once he died, that went to the Inn Double a c p. Uh. There's a New Yorker article that um kind of indicates like, no one knows exactly how much money that ended up being for the Double a CP, but I think it was a lot. And um, this is sort of a not so fun

way to end this. But one of her good friends, Lilian Hellman, was a playwright some when she knew for a long long time was designated as her executor for her will in a state but was mad because she wasn't left any money and so she basically threw all her stuff away the way, all her papers, all of the you know, manuscripts that she had been working on

in her life. And uh, Dorothy Parker did not want to have a big deal made about her death, wanted a quiet cremation, and she, against her wishes, organized a big public memorial. It's it seems like just in defiance of her wishes because she was mad about being h I guess left out of her will slightly. In Hellman's defense, she largely supported Dorothy Parker during her old age years from nineteen to sixty seven, so I think she expected to kind of be repaid. But still, it's definitely not

worth going against somebody's wishes, you know. So Dorothy Parker's ashes had a really interesting afterlife. She had no heirs, no family, so um, they were left at the crematorium from nineteen sixty seven to nineteen seventy three, when the crematorium finally got fed up of storing it and just mailed them to the address of her former lawyer. But her lawyer had retired, but his partner was still in business.

Her partner didn't know anything about this, didn't know what to do with the ashes, didn't know who to contact, so he just put her in his desk drawer, and from nineteen seventy three to Dorothy Parker spent uh in a desk drawer in her former lawyer's office. She'd probably think that's funny. I think so, But if she were in there, she would have been really bored too. Yeah. Uh.

They would eventually move though. If you go to New York now you can go up to the Bronx to Woodlawn Cemetery, where a tour guide and big fan of hers eventually put her ashes. Was given her ashes. He didn't steal them. And there's a little small plaque with a phrase that she apparently proposed for her epitat, which is, excuse my dust, it's just beautiful. It beat Shakespeare's epitaph, right, what was Shakespeare's? It was some clumsy, ham fisted curse

that people are like. Shakespeare wouldn't have written that gas grass? Or what was it that no one rides for free? Oh man, Chuck. Since Chuck said that hilarious quip, that means this is the end of the Dorothy Parker ep So if you want to know more about her, go reader stuff. It's really good and uh fun. And since I said it's really good and fun, that means it's time for a listener mail. I'm gonna call this a

counterpoint to another listener mail. We got the email from the teacher that talked about p b i S positive behavioral Interventions in support. Oh yeah, and uh apparently there's a lot of controversy surrounding that, because Jennifer here says this, Hey, guys have been listening for years. I learned so many cool things after the Casino bombing episode. However, you read a letter from a gentleman who wrote about using p

b i S and classroom. I taught school for thirty years and finally left, as did hundreds of my colleagues because p b i S has destroyed public education. Teachers can be kind of students without a PBS program in place. My co teacher was permanently disabled by a student. It's my feeling that once you're an adult in society, uh, society while hand you consequences, and students may not be taught how to be prepared for that with p b

i S schools. Thanks for stating that it may or may not work in your own home, Chuck, I was required to take two college classes on this, so it's not that I don't understand it. Keep giving us great knowledge of millions of topics, and that is from Jennifer. Awesome. Thank you Jennifer for the counterpoint. There may be a good episode in there, now that I see this, Yeah, I think you might be right, Chuck. Anytime it was controversy like that, we're on let's do it. Every time

I hear point or counterpoint, I'm reminded of that that. Um, apart from Airplane where there they're debating the whole thing where the I think it's airplane too maybe where the guy goes let them crash, I don't remember that line. That's good. Um, Yeah, it's way funnier in the movie than what I just did. If you want to get in touch with this, like Jennifer didn't offer a counterpoint, you can send it to Stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of

I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.