Poetry Editor, Ira Maine, presented this with the title “Boa Tree Sandy”. I think he has too much time on his hands.
Rothschild was Dorothy’s name before she was Parker and a long time before Parker she was born in 1893 in West End, New Jersey to Henry and Eliza Rothschild in some comfort. Mum died early, Dad married again and Dorothy was very unhappy with the new arrangement. She and the stepmother did not hit it off and she had a very unhappy childhood. She married at 24 and acquired Parker as a husband for ten years and Parker as a surname forever. At the age of 22 she was recommended for an editorial position on Vogue magazine. Two years later she was on the staff of Vanity Fair where she would one day become it’s theatre critic. In 1925 she would begin writing for the New Yorker, but it was the Vanity Fair period that the Algonquin Round Table meetings began and would continue for ten years.
The Algonquin Hotel, on West Forty-fourth Street, New York used to have a Rose Room Restaurant. The room is not there now but when it was, a group of writers, actors and humourists used to meet there regularly enough and funnily enough to be remembered to this day. Their numbers included George Kaufman, Harpo Marx, Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley, Harold Ross and Irving Berlin. There were many others. This was a smartarse, wise cracking clever and witty group of people. It was not the cream of American literary life, this honour belonged to Hemingway and Faulkner and others, but it was nevertheless, a group you’d give your left tit to be allowed call them your friends.
And just like any tale you might read on the Café Royal, one that includes some of Oscar’s bon mots, the people round the Algonquin table were no slouchs in this department either:
Famously Robert Benchley spoke of ‘getting out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini’.
When Calvin Coolidge died, Parker was heard to ask; ‘How could they tell?’ Which, I suppose quite summed up Coolidge’s famed inaction.
On Scott Fitzgerald’s remarking that drinking was a slow way to kill yourself, Benchley is reported to have replied; ‘So, whose in a hurry?’.
And a couple from Ms Parker to round it all off. The first is Parker as theatre critic, reviewing a performance by Katherine Hepburn;
‘…Miss Hepburn runs the gamut of emotions, from A to B…’
A perfect, perfect example of how to ‘damn with faint praise’ don’t you think?
And a hilarious slap in the face for the unfortunate author of a book on science;
“…written without fear and without research…’.
It would be remiss of me, considering this piece to be of a poetic inclination, to shuffle off this immoral pile without an adverse verse or so from this extraordinarily down to earth and unpretentious Ms Dorothy Parker. To say she was cynical would be to too easily sum the woman up. She lost her mother at the age of four, her stepmother a few years later. To decide from this that cynicism is the best defence, that nothing lasts, that nothing is to be trusted and that all you have to rely on is yourself, is an entirely forgiveable decision in the circumstances. Here are a couple of unclouded observations;
UNFORTUNATE COINCIDENCE.
By the time you swear you’re his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying —-
Lady, make a note of this;
One of you is lying.
ooooooooooooooooooo
And then gloriously, to finish;
COMMENT.
Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Roumania.