Ideas - Known for her sharp wit, Dorothy Parker was also an activist

Episode Date: September 23, 2026

She’s famous for her caustic quips and her love of cocktails, but there was a lot more to Dorothy Parker than her time at the famed Algonquin Round Table. The icon of New York in the 1920s spent decades in Hollywood as a screenwriter, won awards for her short stories and was a committed social activist, who ended up being blacklisted because of her ties to communist causes. She was also a war correspondent.Guests in this episode:Kevin Fitzpatrick is the founder and president of the Dorothy Parker Society.Michelle Dean is a screenwriter, critic and author of Sharp! The Women who made an Art of Having an Opinion.Nina Miller is a former English professor at Iowa State University, and the author of Making Love Modern: The Intimate Public Worlds of New York's Literary Women.Ellen Meister is a novelist and the author of Dorothy Parker Drank Here and Farewell, Dorothy Parker.Gail Crowther is a researcher, writer and the author of Dorothy Parker in Hollywood.

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So the thing to remember about the location of the Algonquin is how short a distance it is from the hotel to the theaters. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. So this is not even 10 minutes to get there. And welcome to 59 West 44th Street in Midtown Manhattan, the literary landmark, better known as the Algonquin Hotel. At one time, they were using a Native American chief as their mascot. You don't do that any longer.

The Algonquin opened in 1902 and soon established a reputation as a place to see and be seen. Frank Case, who was the general manager, really cultivated that. So a lot of actors were coming here. Mary Pickford lived here. And he capitalized on that and advertised on it and advertise on it. You know, stay at the hotel where so-and-so is. That's so-and-so, included a rowdy group of wretched. writers, critics, and actors who made the hotel their unofficial home.

Every weekday for about a decade, they showed up for a cheap lunch and dined out on the witty bars they served up to each other and to the public. The thing that helped them grow the mystique and the legend is a lot of the men at the table were columnists. If you have to turn in a column six days a week, on Tuesday, Dorothy Parker said this to rubber benchly. Then the wire service is pick it up. And so within 24 or 48 hours, it's coast to coast. The Algonquin Roundtable was where Broadway shows were birthed, plots of Hollywood screenplays imagined,

and the venerable New Yorker magazine dreamed up. Yet the person whose legacy is most tied to the roundtable and its towering figures stood barely five feet tall in heels and hat, Dorothy Parker. Parker stands apart as someone who is known for great writing, her wit and her charm, but also is very closely associated with the good life and having a cocktail and cracking wise. Most days, she was the only woman at that famous table. But she held her own with the men, once quipping that,

the first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue. Lines like that meant she was already well known when her first book was published in 1926. Enough Rope was a surprising bestseller. Men, they hail you as their morning star because you are the way you are. If you return the sentiment, they'll try to make you different. A book of poetry filled with heartbreak, loss, and the struggles of a modern woman in New York, themes that still resonate decades later. They cannot let you go your gate.

They influence and educate. They'd alter all that they admired. They make me sick. They make me tired. She's more popular now than when she was dead. All of her work is back in print. I think with the rise of Instagram and Facebook, it just keeps on growing.

So when I see an influencer quoting Dorothy Parker, God love them. It's great. And I'm glad they chose her. It's likely that no one would be more. surprise by her enduring appeal than Dorothy Parker herself. My work is not important. I do the best I can. I wish to the Lord in heaven it were better. Fans and scholars respectfully disagree with her. She's massively important to the tradition of

humor, which is probably our grandest, biggest art form in America. Dorothy Parker, they say, deserves even more recognition for her criticism, her short stories, her plays and Hollywood scripts and her activism. She wasn't given credit or taken seriously for her political activism. And all the media wanted from her was for her to be funny and witty and to come out with some pithy one-liners. She did deal with social issues, prejudice, poverty. She cuts through.

Again, the misogyny and stuff that surrounds women, particularly women who are writing and taking shots of power. For all of her vicious tone, she had an amazing. amazingly compassionate view on life and people. I kept just coming back to this paradoxical, oh my God, who was she? Indeed, who was Dorothy Parker? To help answer that question, Ideas producer Donna Dingwall brings us her documentary,

Dorothy Parker, Excuse My Dust. When you walk through the front door of the famed Algonquin Hotel, and they ask you where you'd like to sit? The library? We can sit here. The answer is not the library. I mean, I accept the sick book. You want to sit at the round table and just wing it.

I mean, if the music can come down? I can make that happen. Okay, let's do that. Let's do that. You sit at the round table at the back of this room. The perfect spot. It's smaller than the original round table. The original round table, you can have about 16 around comfortably.

Even if it's not the round table, it's close enough. And if you look up, Donna, you see that circle in the ceiling. See you right there? That's where the chandelier used to hang from. So that was the center of the round table right there. So you're almost in the same spot as Parker would have sat in. It's very cool. It is cool, but full disclosure, I'm a Parker fan, so it's not my first visit.

And the other occasions involved gin. Kevin needs a glass of water. This time, it's water. You want a glass of water? Sure. Two glasses of water. Because my guide today is on the clock. My name is Kevin Fitzpatrick.

I'm the author of 10 books, all tied to New York City, and I'm also a licensed to our guide in New York City. And tell me about your relationship with Dorothy Parker. Dorothy Parker, the other woman in my life. To call Kevin Fitzpatrick a Parker fan doesn't go far enough. Marian Meade said I was Parker's representative of Planet Earth, but she was certainly going to punch me in the nose someday. So.

Marion Mead, who died in 2002, wrote the definitive biography of Parker, which came out in 1987. What Fresh Hell is this? I devoured it, and I figured out two things. One is we lived on the same street, West Seventy Second Street, and two, I had a lot in common with Parker in my life at that time. I was a writer. I had bad jobs, bad apartments, bad relationships. I have this new thing called a digital camera. I go all around to places in New York where she lived and worked.

and had fun, and I'll make a website out of that. That led to the Dorothy Parker Society. As president and founder of the Dorothy Parker Society, Kevin oversees a vast online repository of all things Parker, photos, stories, archives, merchandise, there's even a section for Parker tattoos. The society has about 13,000 online members. All the people I come in contact with all have a love for her or want to celebrate her, and it doesn't matter if it's a, a high, school girl who wrote to me and says, I'm doing a Dorothy Parker presentation at my school. Do you have any tips? And I said, yeah, bring a dog. You know, the kid got an A and was the hit of the day. That kind of fun thing is what gives me, you know, joy out of doing this kind of volunteering for this dead writer.

And Parker, he points out, is the writer whose work has stood the test of time, unlike many of her bold-faced peers from the 1920s. People like Frank Adams and Haywood Bruin, They were very highly paid columnists. And so they're very influential and very red. But the ironic thing is today they're all completely forgotten. But Parker, there's always a one-woman show about Parker someplace. And the witty words of a beloved writer are getting the spotlight and finding Dorothy Parker. Considering how long ago the material was written, they're not even going to notice because

it's so immediate and so current and so funny. That show had a run in early 2026. Kevin's homage to Parker guided tours of their shared neighborhood. has been running for more than two decades. The reason we're here on 72nd Broadway is this is Parker's neighborhood. So the first 25 years of her life were spent within a short walk of right where we are. Parker's childhood is well documented. The family was well off.

Her father, J. Henry Rothschild, was a successful garment manufacturer, though he was not one of those Rothschilds, as Parker was quick to point out. He was Jewish, while her mother, who died before Parker was full. was Scottish. Her father remarried a deeply religious woman. Dorothy and her three older siblings referred to her as the housekeeper or Mrs. Rothschild, but never mother. Despite her Jewish Protestant household, Parker's early schooling came courtesy of the Catholic Church. So this was Blessed Sacrament, which was a girls' convent school. In the 19th century, families that wanted their daughters to get a good elementary school education,

turned to the nuns. Parker claimed she got kicked out of her Catholic school for referring to the Immaculate Conception as spontaneous combustion and was then shipped off to a New Jersey boarding school. She returned home a year later at around age 15. So where we're going now, it's kind of sad because it's the last place

that Dorothy lived with her father. By then, Parker's stepmother had died. It was up to Dorothy to care for her ill father, and he took a turn for the worst after his brother died aboard the Titanic in 1912. Henry passed away a year later. A small sign marks the building where they lived. So this is the plaque I wrote, and we dedicated it, and it's become a local landmark, and now Parker gets junk mail here.

His death was a turning point for Dorothy. Her dad died after ruining the family business. She had no money, and so she had to figure out how to work, and she played the piano for dancing schools by her own account. My name is Michelle Dean, and I'm a journalist and a screenwriter, and I wrote a book called Sharp, The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion. Actually, the first woman in the book is Dorothy Parker. At the same time, she's doing this.

She is writing poems, although she would describe them as verse, I think, and is sending them in. Frank Crown and Shield at Vanity Fair was the first to buy her poem. What's your sense of why her? her words at that time may have caught his eye. It's this quality of sharpness where you write something that's like piercing enough. That's what reached out and grabbed people. I mean, it's still impossible once you hear a Parker poem to get it out of your head. My husband says, often Elise, you feel things too deeply you do.

The poem Annie Porch was a send-up of socialites and their idle upper-crust chit-chat. He has 40 a month, if you please. Oh, servants impose on me too. Parker was known to eavesdrop in bathroom stalls, pen and paper in hand. To think that you saw it, how funny. Why, he must be 60 or more. I told you she'd marry for money. She got a $12 check for that poem and a boost of confidence.

She marched down to Vanity Fair and asked for a job. The editor hired her, but put her to work. down the hall at the women's fashion Bible, Vogue. I mean, she was just writing captions mostly and sometimes little pieces, but what she was doing was quietly undermining Vogue while she was writing for it. And she didn't really want to be writing for a women's magazine. I have one here, like, there's only one thing as thrilling as one's first love affair, that is one's first corset. They both give the same feeling of delightful importance.

This one is planned to give something approaching a waistline to the straight, sturdiness of the 12-year-old. And you can hear kind of like that, why is a 12-year-old wearing a corset? And the more famous one, probably seen as a Parker quote around, as brevity is the soul of lingerie. Parker did move on to Vanity Fair first as a staff writer and then in 1917 as drama critic. As Kevin Fitzpatrick points out on our tour, it was a really high-profile gig at the time. When Parker was working as a drama critic, there was 80 Broadway theaters. She went to two shows a night.

She was writing like 3,000 words a month, and it was really good stuff. It really holds up. Among the more memorable, her take on Catherine Hepburn's turn on stage, Ms. Hepburn, she wrote, ran the gamut from A to B. But at 3,000 sharp words a month, she was bound to cut someone the wrong way. And I always love this fact.

An actress named Billy Burke, who is best known to pretty much everybody as Linda the Goodwitch, in The Wizard of Oz. She basically likened her to sex worker and got herself fired from Vanity Fair for having done that because Billy Burke was with Zigfield. Florence Ziegfeld's follies helped define the era's musical theater. He was powerful, a big advertiser,

an actress Billy Burke's husband. So it's not surprising Parker's pot shot did her in, even if she had a point. She was taking aim at the pieties of the business. That's why she would always turn her eye to something else, because sometimes the play didn't supply the thing that she was really interested in writing about. But also, you know, then it would hurt her professionally. Like sometimes I think she should be the patron saint of self-sabotage.

Parker did manage to overcome the job loss, though, with the help of her roundtable friends. Yes, Bob, you rang. Her best friend, Robert Benchley, Vanity Fair's managing editor, resigned in protest. Well, because my job, if you could call it that, as managing editor, is no longer attractive without the extraordinary talents of Mrs. Parker.

She called that the greatest act of friendship she'd ever seen. Are you quite sure about this? That was captured in the 1994 film, Mrs. Parker, and the vicious circle. You can't buy the kind of advertising they'll be giving us. We'll be freelance. Oh, my God. We'll write only what we'd like. Not slave over a hot desk for people like Kande, The two rented an office together, and Parker joked if it had been any smaller, it would have

been adultery. She was, in fact, married to a stockbroker named Edwin Pond Parker the second. They wed in 1917 over his waspy family's objections. When they split up, some accounts quoted Parker saying she kept his name because it was, quote, clean, as in not Jewish. She was also famous as Dorothy Parker by then. in 1925 when round-tablers Harold Ross and his wife, Jane Grant, launched a magazine they'd been talking about. Parker was a name they wanted on the masthead. During its first two decades,

the New Yorker became the successful humor and literary magazine that its founding editor Harold Ross had dreamed of. From its dingy offices on 43rd Street, he published essays that were fizzy in Rye. cartoons that were risque and winking. She joined as a founding editor and took over the column constant reader, applying the same bite to book reviews as she had to theater. She was prepared to make fun of them in a way that a more serious book critic might have been like,

well, philosophical themes don't hang together. And like she was looking to make rhetoric out of her criticism, almost pure rhetoric. So it made the column kind of a can't miss. You can imagine the response when Parker insisted. on poking not just any bear, but a gentle, beloved teddy bear. Whose only crime was humming too sweetly for Parker's bitter taste. In her review of The House at Poo Corner, she wrote, And it is that word humming, my darlings, that marks the first place at which constant weeda flowed up.

It's funny, we talk about this. the internet and certainly the internet has accelerated negativity and cruelty. And there is a reason why we are attracted to negativity and like laugh. In some cases, I don't even really think that people realize that they're writing in that tradition. But a lot of female humorists are, right? Like the Lindy West's and Scotchy Cooles of the world, it's there. What I want is for people to be aware that Parker, that we're all still sort of living in her shadow. One memorable piece of criticism, took aim at a friend who happened to be one of the most celebrated male writers of the day. You mentioned F. Scott Fitzgerald. Yeah, I mean, she wrote a really great parody of this side of

Paradise, Fitzgerald's first novel, and it's not the one that has stood the test of time in quite the way that Gatsby did, because it was ridiculous. First line of the parody is something like Rosalind rested her 19-year-old elbows on her 19-year-old knees. It's not quite 70s musicians dating 14-year-olds openly, but what she's making fun of there, is focus on nubile young women in early Fitzgerald. And she seemed in that to kind of find the side door through humor to make her point. Which is often the best way to do it. As long as you're funny, people will let you get away with saying quite a lot about themselves.

Parker managed to fit in with the boys not only by meeting them quip for quip, but drink for drink. Although her drinking career only began after her writing career began to take off. contrary to popular belief, the Algonquin couldn't serve alcohol. It was prohibition. But New York was home to well over 50,000 speak-easies at the time. It's funny because her wit was born in the context of drinking alcohol, chicken and egg, right? Like it both loosened her up and allowed her to do things that I think she would have been scared to do without it. Later on, the over-medication became too much. It was self-medicating about her relationships with people, too, as much as her professional ambition. Parker's personal life was complicated, as anyone who's read her short stories or poetry can attest. In fact, her most famous poem, Resume, is about suicide. Raisers pain you, rivers are damp, acid stain you, and drugs cause cramp.

Parker tried to take her own life more than once. The first time in 1923 came after a breakup that had resulted in an event. abortion. Even in her misery, she managed to deliver a searing punchline. Gas smells awful. You might as well live. Her poems are highly, highly crafted. They are real little gems. Most people are writing ephemeral stuff. Hers is witty, but not ephemeral. I'm Nina Miller, the author of Making Love Modern, The Intimate Public Worlds of New York's Literary women, which devotes about a third of its space to Dorothy Parker. Nina Miller is a former English professor at Iowa State University and an expert on Parker's

poetry, her place in the literary landscape, and a relationship to the public. She really just flies off the page as modern and sharp in a way that is so intentionally engaging for a reader, partly through the forum, but so. crystalline and partly through the deflating moves, the irony. What I see as a strong, implicit call to her audience to kind of be in on it with her, with real strategic benefits to her. Parker also benefited from being a part of the round table. They were, in a sense, the influencers of their day, cultural trendsetters leading seemingly fabulous lives. And Parker's followers both aspired to her aura of sophisticated modern.

and appreciated being invited inside her world, says Miller. I think she trusted her public with intelligence. She really let them feel that they were her confidant. Bottom line, here was this somewhat terrifying, fabulous person. Everybody's afraid of her around her, but I'm not, because she lets me in on the joke. One perfect rose. A single flower he sent me, since we met, all tenderly his messenger he chose, deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet. For all of the kind of sardonic tongue lashings people credit her for and the ways that she can kind of just skewer a lover in a poem and was famous for kind of doing that at parties.

There's a broader audience to that. The lover goes down in flames, but her broader audience. is really invited in to be empowered by it. Why is it no one ever sent me yet? One perfect limousine, do you suppose? I know. It's always just my luck to get one perfect rose. It's so funny when I hear you giving that description. I feel like you could be talking about Taylor Swift.

It's so funny. You know, skewering a lover. and them going down in flames, that sounds like a lyric she might. You're absolutely right. I hadn't thought about Taylor Swift. I was thinking about comedians now. It's really part of her legacy that you are as a woman in public going to be seen in this way as a female body. And when someone like Nikki Glazer, I don't know if you're familiar with her, she's very dirty, very famous, very pretty.

It's okay. 28th, which I just found out is the age where, as a. a woman, your body starts to tell you to have a baby. It's, uh, my hormones are like, have a baby. My bank account is like, don't you even, I think about it. She sort of beats them to the punch and embodies herself in ways that are entirely deflating of sex and of anybody's fetishizing of her. And I think Parker does that. I think Parker has started that. Parker's other talent was to make it all seem effortless. It's imperative. It's imperative. for her sophistication to not claim that it was a lot of work. Life is silly. If you take

yourself too seriously, you're not sophisticated. That as her account of herself makes sense in the time. And I think over time, I think she just has less and less respect for herself. And does that lend to diminishment of her work? Does that end up impacting her legacy? Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think she is kind of, everything going against her. She's a woman. First of all, novels over poetry, so the genre. And secondly, if it's poetry, it's got to be Whitman and it's got to be one of the great men as repound. That's built in in so many ways. But her longevity, I think the portable Dorothy Parker has never been out of print. I think she's held her place.

The fact that Dorothy Parker's work continues to be printed, sold, and read is evidence that her place is with us. that we still feel as if we're in on the joke. It's also proof that the relationship she cultivated with her readers remains fertile, more than 100 years after she put pen to paper. In some cases, it's moved them to do the same. Way before I was a novelist, before I wrote a Dorothy Parker book, certainly many years before I had a Dorothy Parker page on Facebook, I was inspired by her poem resume to write my own version,

of it called Resumé Redone with Apologies to Dorothy Parker. And I sent it to the New York Times Metropolitan Diary, and it was published there. So that was very exciting to have my first official publication and now looking back to have a tie to Dorothy Parker, who later became so important in my life. It goes like this. TV boards you. The web is a fright. Your spouse ignores you and hobbies are trite.

Films are offensive. Gardens, Weed. Shopping's expensive. You might as well read. Brilliant. Thank you. Thank you. That's novelist Ellen Meister's take on Dorothy Parker's poem, resume. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. Almost 3,000 people were killed in the 9-11 terrorist attacks.

How did some of their remains end up in the world's largest landfill? They treated my son like garbage. So while the people who killed my son, I have certainly an animosity for them. I have a huge animosity for the people who were running New York. On the latest episode of Revisionist History, the story of a battle over what some see as a pile of dust and others see as the remains of the dead. Listen to Revisionous History wherever you get your podcasts. From the time that I first discovered Parker when I was a teenager,

and I read her poems about love and heartbreak, and it all resonated so deeply with me, and it all felt so interesting and fresh and sometimes very funny and sometimes very tender, but it was always very relatable, and I felt like she understood me in a very special way. And she was kind of the snarky voice I carried around with me, you know, sort of sat on my shoulder making the remarks that I didn't dare say because I was wanted everybody to like me, I wanted to be a nice girl. Years later, that snarky voice jumped to. off Ellen Meister's shoulder onto the page when she resurrected Parker as a ghost in two of her novels.

I thought it would be really interesting to have her take on the modern world, but I also wanted to juxtapose her with a contemporary woman who was struggling to find her own voice because Dorothy Parker had such a strong voice. And the strength of Parker's voice holds wide appeal. You know, I thought how wonderful it would be to be someone who always got off the right. line, you know, the number of times one has gone to bed and thought, what should I have said? What really should I have said at that moment? And she never had those moments. Journalist and filmmaker Nora Ephron, who's best known for whipsmart, romantic comedies like when Harry met Sally, spoke early in her career about her affection for Parker.

And to find out that she had no conception of her own worth and of her own gifts is a very sad thing. Amy Sherman Palladino, the creator of TV hits like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, named her production company Dorothy Parker drank here. So what are you reading? The portable Dorothy Parker. She even dropped a portable Dorothy Parker into a Gilmore Girls episode. There's little in taking or giving. There's little in water or wine.

This living, this living, this living was never a project of mine. Cheery. Funny, though. Hollywood's fascination with Parker might be seen as ironic. After moving there to write film scripts, she described Los Angeles as, quote, 72 suburbs in search of a city. While she'd hate to admit it,

Hollywood changed her for better and worse. And as ideas producer Donna Dingwall found out, Dorothy Parker also changed Hollywood. She claims that she hated it. She claims that she hated the climate. She claims she hated the palm trees. She didn't like the work that she was doing. She didn't feel valued there.

But, on the other hand, she was earning vast amounts of money. My name's Dr. Gail Crowther, and I'm a researcher and writer. And I'm the author of Dorothy Parker in Hollywood. One of the many things Gail Crowther learned while researching her book was that Dorothy Parker is an unreliable narrator, especially of her own life. She was having quite a good time. A lot of her friends were there. They were all living in a place called the Garden of Allah,

so they had all of these bungalows around a swimming pool, wild parties, up till dawn. So Dorothy Parker's descriptions of Hollywood are very mixed. She seemed to dislike the actual geography. She seemed to dislike some of the attitudes out there. She felt people were used, abused, and then thrown aside. But nevertheless, it allowed her a very nice life. style. Hollywood's interest in Parker coincided with the advent of talkies because if movie stars

were going to speak, someone had to tell them what to say. And who better than a bunch of witty, erudite New York writers to serve up snappy dialogue. Parker and many of her friends got the call. For her, the move was financial. She joked that her two favorite words were check and closed, maybe because her debts were serious. And, MGM was offering her $300 a week, the equivalent of $6,000 US today. What they didn't offer her was respect. When she arrived in Hollywood, nobody knew who she was. And then the actual people who had employed her at the studio got the name of her book wrong.

She suddenly realized she wasn't going to be valued or viewed in the same way. On top of that, L.A. was to her East Coast eyes, a wasteland. The upper end of Sunset Boulevard, for example, was still a dirt road at that time. She was suddenly shocked to be in a place which she referred to as out there, really alien and really out of her experience. Parker had been awarded the prestigious O. Henry Prize for her short story, The Big Blonde in 1929, the same year she moved to Hollywood. But she couldn't find her way into the credits of a single script during her time there. Different groups of writers would not know that they were all working on the same film. And then suddenly one group would just be cast aside and any work that they had produced would just not be used.

And so Dorothy Parker was quite shocked by this because suddenly she had gone from being a writer who was very valued to somebody whose work suddenly became disposable. Parker did get credit for writing the lyrics to a song. How Am I to Know was featured in a 1929 Cecil B. DeMille film, Dynamite, and was later recorded by Billy Holliday. How am I to know a love that's found its way. That credit wasn't enough to convince her to stay at Metro Golden Mayor. Once she got home, she dubbed the studio Metro Golden Maire. But life in New York was not. married-free either. She had a contract to write a novel but couldn't make any progress.

There were yet more ill-fated love affairs and saddest of all to more attempts to take her own life. The Roundtable was also not what it used to be. Some members had moved on professionally, others had personal family obligations. Parker had gotten more political. One of her complaints about the Algonquin round circle was that she felt they weren't political enough. And she said that they just don't care about anything. They just won't do anything about anything. Dorothy Parker's political awakening is often tied back to the case of Nicholas Sacco and Bartolomio Vincetti. The Italian immigrants and anarchists were convicted of murder in what was seen as a miscarriage of justice fueled by racism and xenophobia. Parker was arrested in Boston for protesting their pending execution in 1927. She happily paid the $5

fine and called it the greatest day of her life. When she made a reluctant return to Hollywood in the early 1930s, she at least found some like-minded comrades. She was surrounded by people who shared her wish to be actually doing something. And that's when we see Parker, the social activists and the political activists, really starting to kick in. I want to touch on a few of those things, but beginning, with the Screenwriters Guild, she downplayed her role not as she often did with many things,

but how important was she in building that union? She was really important and it wasn't just a case of signing a petition or something. So she was working within studio laws. She was working with union laws trying to establish because she was one of the highest paid writers in Hollywood. Parker was earning $2,000 and a half thousand dollars per week. and she could see how obscene that was. And she was also concerned with Hollywood writers

just been maybe used for three weeks and then thrown aside and never employed again and just having no security whatsoever. Parker and her new husband, an actor and writer named Alan Campbell, funneled a lot of their money into dozens of causes. And thanks largely to Campbell, the work kept coming. He almost acted like a manager to her.

He kept her working. He advised her on her. hairstyles and her clothes and really kept it together for her. Alan Campbell was more than a decade younger than Parker and rumored to be gay or bisexual. Either way, he seemed to be good for her. He cooked for her, he looked after her because she was certainly not domestically minded at all. In fact, Parker was so undomesticated. She was known to eat raw bacon rather than turn on a stove.

They had a really grip. partnership for many, many years. They shared credits on at least 15 movies together and worked with big-name directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Otto Preminger. Their partnership worked well enough to afford them a bi-coastal life. When the New York Times got wind, they bought a farm in Pennsylvania. The skeptical headline simply read, Dorothy Parker, Farmer. They had spent about $100,000 renovating, and it was beautiful, had beautiful views.

By the end of that year, Parker broke even bigger news. She was going to be a mother. She felt pregnant and seemed to be, for the first time in her life, so happy and so settled. There were snide comments about her age. She was 43. People were laughing at the idea of Dorothy Parker knitting booties. Someone joked she'd find she had nothing in common with children because they didn't drink. But it was clearly something that she was committed to and really looking forward to.

And it's that point where you think, oh, Dorothy, Dorothy's going to get a happy ending. But of course, she didn't and she miscarried. And the fact that we will never know Dorothy Parker as a mother is a real tragedy. In the aftermath of that devastating loss, Dorothy Parker, had one of the biggest wins of her career. Hollywood. You'd better be getting yourself a good husband and stop moaning about Hollywood.

She and Alan were nominated for an Academy Award for their work on the 1937 movie, A Star Is Born. What would you do if you did go to Hollywood? I'd be an actress. I would, I tell you, I've always known I could. Which has since become one of Hollywood's favorite movies to remake.

A Star is Born was the perfect vehicle for Dorothy Parker. she was able to almost have a cathartic outpouring of her feelings about and towards Hollywood. So here we have a story which is about the wonderful aspects of being famous in Hollywood. But then we also have a cautionary tale about what happens when it goes wrong and how brutal it can be and how you can just be suddenly cast aside when you're no use. to anybody. I think that Dorothy had observed all of those things happening around her in Hollywood and then poured this into the screenplay for the film. It was during this time that her activism

in political causes also picked up. The scope of her activism was really impressive. It was very much left-wing causes. She was one of the founder members of the Screenwriters Guild. She was also responsible for setting up the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. She also became involved in supporting causes for the Spanish Civil War, and she even traveled to Spain herself. To be fair, Parker was a reluctant war correspondent. And rightly, she was terrified, and she didn't really want to do it. And she was making up excuses about why she couldn't go to Spain.

And she was saying, but if I go, I'll just be using up resources. Food is scarce, and I'd just be another mouth to feed. And so it was pointed out to, well, you could take your own food with you. She eventually ran out of excuses. What a brave thing for her to do. And we have two really powerful pieces that she wrote for New Massis magazine, observing how people were living, bombs going off, bearing witness and reporting back for people in America

because she felt one of the most difficult things to do was to get people in America to care enough. If there was ever any doubt, Parker had left the roundtable years behind her for more serious matters, the opening of that 1937 piece in New Masses made it clear. I want to say first that I came to Spain without my axed grind. I am not a member of any political party. The only group I have ever been affiliated with is that not especially brave little band that hit its nakedness of heart and mind under the out-of-date garment of a sense of humor.

I heard someone say, and so I said it too, that ridicule is the most effective weapon. I don't suppose I ever really believed it, but it was very easy and comforting. And so I said it. Well, now I know. I know that there are things that never have been funny and never will be. And I know that ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon. At the same time, though, she had difficulty. getting editors, even colleagues, to take all of this seriously.

When Dorothy Parker came back from Spain, she was greeted with irritation and anger. And even one newspaper editor said to her, for goodness sake, Dorothy, when are you going to be funny again? People seem to not like serious Dorothy Parker. They wanted Dorothy. Parker to make them laugh. Despite Parker's intelligence and commitment, they always seemed to think she was just being sentimental or there was something that was just not convincing for them about her activism. And I think in some ways that was some good old fashion, sexism and misogyny. Clearly all of the evidence suggests from everything that she did. She was a deeply political committed woman. People may have been surprised by Parker's turn to left-wing activism, but in some

ways, she'd been telling them who she was for years right on the page, novelist Alan Meister. Her stories were really very interesting. She dealt with issues. She dealt with social issues. She dealt with prejudice. You know, she dealt with poverty. I was talking about her, you know, addressing things like racial prejudice. So there's a story she wrote Cold Arrangement and Black and White. That story is about a rich white woman hosting a black musician at a dinner party. It was published in 1927, and in it Parker Slyly reveals the host's hypocrisy, laying bare her white privilege, a term that wouldn't be coined for decades. Another story called The Standard of Living takes aim at materialism and consumer culture,

as does her very pointed and brief missive epitaph for a very rich man. He'd have the best, and that was none too good. No barrier could hold before his terms. He lies below, correct in Cyprus wood, and entertains the more exclusive worms. Parker wrote another Oscar-nominated screenplay. Smash up, the story of a woman is a window into Parker's forward-thinking compassion. When I used to sing in nightclubs, I was so blamed, scared I had to have two drinks before I'd even go on.

What were you scared of, Mrs Conley? People, I guess. It was one of the first films in Hollywood that dealt with women and alcoholism. It was a very subversive film, and I think it was a very trailblazing film, very ahead of its time in the way that it dealt with issues of addiction. So it definitely saw addiction as a disease and not as a moral failing. And Parker's dialogue in that is, particularly moving and particularly powerful.

Does that make me a lush or something? There are a lot of people who drink to excess. They are not... They are just sick. He had no right to tell you. Parker knew the terrain well, given her own issues with alcohol,

and the fact that her marriage to Alan Campbell was eroding because of it. Despite the Oscar nod, Parker's name appears on only one more movie after smash-up, because while the media and her peers failed to take her activism seriously, the FBI did. They seemed convinced that everything Dorothy Parker was involved in was a front for communism.

So she was a member. I think it was the Hollywood Ladies' Shopping Club, and they were convinced that this must be a front for some communist activity. The FBI had been watching Parker since the 1930s, and by the time the second Red Scare was at its height, They'd linked her to as many as 33 organizations, they said, had communist ties. She was unofficially blacklisted in Hollywood. The impact on her work in Hollywood was quite drastic, really. I mean, the last film that she wrote that was actually filmed and went to production was in 1949. She and Campbell both lost work, and maybe in their misery, they needed company because they remarried.

each other in 1950, but the relationship remained off and on and volatile with both of them underemployed, sometimes collecting unemployment and drinking heavily. And they lived together in this quite small bungalow, which seemed to be a bit of a disaster zone. Alan Campbell was always starting renovations, never finishing them. It seemed at that time that Alan Campbell too had become addicted to alcohol and possible. possibly other substances as well. Those years, they were really sad. In 1963, Alan Campbell died of an overdose,

and it was ruled a suicide. That really was the end of Dragher Parker's time in Hollywood. She sold the house the following year and moved back to New York. Parker, now in her 70s, eventually settled into a small room in an Upper East Side Hotel. Her health was poor and her social circle was small. Gloria Vanderbilt and Wyatt Cooper were steadfast friends. Lillian Hellman dropped by when it suited her.

Robert Benchley had died nearly 20 years before, and she saw little of the round table. But every few years, a journalist showed up, among them Gloria Steinem, a writer for the Paris Review and radio legend Studs Terkel. Hollywood, that's a trigger word, isn't it? Would you mind if I leave the room when you speak that was? Those interviews took much the same shape.

They often note her sparse, shabby surroundings, the newspapers on the floor to accommodate her poodle. Parker declares she's tired of talking about Hollywood in the roundtable and then rails on about how awful both were. Did she really say all those things that people are quoted her to saying? Oh, I would like to answer that. No, no. And it was a curse on me. It was simply awful the things that were attributed to me.

I wouldn't have minded if I'd been good. I was, in effect, the shaggy dog of my time. I'm glad that's over. She's asked to weigh in on writers of the day. She trashes many and is delighted by few. What's your feeling about Ringlearner? I think he's great. I think lastingly great.

Well, suppose someone said that you were. I'd be embarrassed and frightened, I think. And without fail, she dismisses the work that she does take credit for. I think, Mrs. Parker, you are low-rating yourself, I may say this. It's my feeling. as a reader, you have your right. I'm afraid you're wrong. No one asks her much about the matters closer to her heart,

the social activism, her work in Spain during the Civil War. When Parker died in 1967, the New York Times obituary devoted two paragraphs to her activism at the tail end of a 2,500 word text. When she died, people were amiss that she was even still alive. They thought that she'd died years. ago. But Dorothy Parker, always a master of the unexpected ending, did not disappoint. Her family was deceased. She had no children. But who was in the newspaper every single day?

MLK. Dorothy Parker's society president, Kevin Fitzpatrick. King was dominating the news all the time, and she really admired the civil rights movement that he was leading. So when it came time for her to her will, she left her estate to him. She left her estate and royalties to Martin Luther King, with the caveat that upon his death, would roll over to the NWCP. No one may have been more surprised than her executor, the writer Lillian Hellman, who apparently believed Parker was leaving the estate to her, according to Marion Mead. That might explain, but not excuse what Helmand did or rather didn't do after Parker died. What Helman did is ignored Parker's wishes. And she also failed to dispense with her remains.

The urn just sat in a box up in Westchester County for many years. In 1972, the ashes were dispatched to an attorney who'd represented Helman. Mary and Meade told NPR's weekend edition she called the lawyer for a chat right before she finished her biography of Parker. And I said to him, just conversationally, well, I have one thing left to do before I turn in the manuscript. I'm going to go up to Ardsley, and I'm going to pay my respects to. Mrs. Parker, and he said, basically, never mind, I'm looking at her. And he was in his office in Wall Street, and he had her ashes in a drawer right behind his desk. Helman gave no indication of what she wanted done with him, and then she died. Meade also contends that Helmand hurt Parker's

legacy by going out of her way to block anyone who tried to develop her work, possibly out of spite or to preserve her own legacy. But when the story of the ashes broke, a debate in sued, where should Dorothy Parker be laid to rest? Some suggested an urn be put on display at the Algonquin, but the NAACP intervened and built a memorial garden for Parker's ashes. There was just one problem. Of course, a lot of her New York friends said, oh my, but she's in Baltimore. I know. Everyone made jokes about that was a fate worse than death. But listen, after you've been hanging around on the shelf when you've been dead for that long, what difference does really make. That question turns out to be more than rhetorical, Kevin Fitzpatrick.

There was a period when Barack Obama became president that NWCP hinted they're going to move closer to Washington, D.C. And they didn't move. But I spoke up and I said, hey, what about Dorothy Parker? And the organization wrote to me and said, don't worry, we're not going to forget about Dorothy Parker. Unconvinced and unsatisfied, Fitzpatrick contacted Parker's remaining family and campaigned successfully to have her ashes brought back to New York to be buried in a family plot in the Bronx. Which was an incredible experience to go down there and see the urn come out of the earth and put in a box that I built in our basement. I mean, imagine then getting on an Amtrak and having a gin and tonic with her and bring her back to New York on a train. It was wild.

And then on her birthday in 2020, she was buried. It was a small pandemic-sized affair on August 22nd, involving about 10 people. But Kevin Fitzpatrick made up for that later. So the next year, when we unveiled the gravestone, it was more of a celebration. We had a jazz band and sang songs. And now she's got a wonderful gravestone. And it's one of the most visited in Woodlawn up there with Celia Cruz, you know, a few other famous folks. So it's fun.

It's hard to say what Parker would have made of that scene. A couple of the epitaphs she suggested for her tombstone might provide a clue. One was, if you can read this, you've come too close. The other had been used at her Baltimore grave. Excuse my dust. It was classic Parker to offer up a pithy line seemingly at her own expense. But neither ended up on what we assume is her final resting place. The granite marker is engraved with four lines from a poem she wrote in the 1920s called epitaph for a darling lady.

Leave for her a red young rose. Go your way and save your pity. She is happy for she knows that her dust is very pretty. One can only hope that Dorothy Parker in the end did know how pretty remarkable her life and her work was. This program was produced by Donna Dingwall. Technical production by Danielle Duval and Johnny Casamatta. Readings by Magin Cardi. Thanks to the Studs Terkel Radio Archive and to the NAACP. Lisa Ayuso is Ideas web producer. Nicola Luxchich is the senior producer. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas and I'm Nala Ayyed. go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.