Dorothy Parker: O what a lady!
Khalid Hasan
Dorothy Parker wrote more memorable lines than any of her contemporaries and nearly forty years after her death, she continues to delight her large circle of admirers. She was born in 1893 and died of too much living and all that goes with it, including drink, in 1967. Four things, she wrote, she would have been better off without: love, curiosity, freckles and doubt. As for curiosity, she said, the cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
And what did she think of spring, about which more poetry has been written than any season under the sun? “Every year, back comes spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants.”
Robert Sherwood, her contemporary, said of cowboy hero Tom Mix, “They say he rides as if he’s part of the horse, but they don’t say which part.”
Dorothy Parker’s one-liner is funnier. “That woman,” she said, “speaks eighteen languages and can’t say ‘no’ in any of them.”
Another of Parker’s contemporaries, George S. Kaufman, when asked by a press agent how he could get the name of his leading lady into his newspaper replied, “Shoot her.”
During the 1920s, Dorothy Parker and a dozen or so of her friends met regularly, in fact every day – and this went on for a decade – at New York’s Algonquin Hotel on 44th Street (the hotel still exists) and came to be known as the Algonquin Round Table. They included men like humourist Robert Benchley, Harold Ross, the founder and editor of The New Yorker, columnists Franklin Pierce Adams and Heywood Broun, and Broun’s wife Ruth Hale; critic Alexander Woollcott; comedian Harpo Marx; and playwrights George S. Kaufman, Marc Connelly, novelist Edna Ferber, and, of course, Robert Sherwood. Occasional visitors would be admitted: persons such as the actress Tallulah Bankhead and the British playwright Noel Coward. Parker was engaged as book reviewer and Benchley as drama critic by Ross for the New Yorker. She was later associated with Vanity Fair for long years. The Round Table broke up when the Depression hit America and members moved away, some of them to Hollywood, including Parker.
I should think apart from Dorothy Parker, the only other figure in literature to whom more “quotable quotes” are attributed is Oscar Wilde. But Parker was funnier and more acerbic than Wilde. Her light verse continues to delight. But first some Parker quotes:
‘Brevity is the soul of lingerie.’ ‘He and I had an office so tiny that an inch smaller and it would have been adultery.’ ‘Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses’ (this was before contact lenses). ‘It’s not the tragedies that kill us, it’s the messes.’ ‘Summer makes me drowsy. Autumn makes me sing. Winter’s pretty lousy, but I hate Spring.’ ‘Men don’t like nobility in woman. Not any men. I suppose it is because the men like to have the copyrights on nobility – if there is going to be anything like that in a relationship.’ ‘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.’ ‘I require only three things of a man. He must be handsome, ruthless and stupid.’
‘Sorrow is tranquility remembered in emotion.’ ‘His voice was intimate as the rustle of sheets.’
‘The only ‘ism’ Hollywood believes in is plagiarism.’ ‘Take care of luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves.’ ‘You can’t teach an old dogma new tricks.’ ‘The two most beautiful words in the English language are “cheque enclosed.” ‘I don’t care what is written about me as long as it isn’t true.’ ‘This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.’ ‘Money cannot buy health, but I’d settle for a diamond-studded wheelchair.’ ‘If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.’ ‘Ducking for apples – change one letter and it’s the story of my life.’ ‘Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays. Clutch it, and it darts away.’ ‘Salary is no object: I want only enough to keep body and soul apart.’ ‘Miss (Katherine) Hepburn runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.’
‘He is beyond question a writer of power; and his power lies in his ability to make sex so thoroughly, graphically and aggressively unattractive that one is fairly shaken to ponder how little one has been missing.’ ‘All I need is room enough to lay a hat and a few friends.’ ‘I don’t do anything. Not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don’t even do that any more.’ ‘It serves me right for keeping all my eggs in one bastard.’ ‘The transatlantic crossing was so rough the only thing that I could keep on my stomach was the first mate.’
Dorothy Parker was a marvelous poet. Here are a few of her poems: I wish I could drink like a lady/I can take one or two at the most/Three and I’m under the table/Four and I’m under the host.
Parker and Clare Booth Luce did not get along. Someone told her once that Luce was always kind to her inferiors. “Where does she find them?” asked Parker. On another occasion, the two arrived at the door at the same time. Luce said, “Age before beauty” indicating that Parker should enter first.
As she walked through the door, Parker, not one to be upstaged, said, “And pearls before swine.”
Parker was on her honeymoon but her editor would not stop pestering her about work she was supposed to have sent in. Finally, she sent him a telegram that ran, “Too f…g busy, and vice versa.”
If there is one Dorothy Parker poem people know it is Resume: Razors pain you/ Rivers are damp/ Acids stain you/ And drugs cause cramp/ Guns aren’t lawful/ Nooses give/ Gas smells awful/ You might as well live.
Another one she called Frustration. Here is how it goes: If I had a shiny gun/I could have a world of fun/Speeding bullets through the brains/Of the folk who give me pains/Or had I some poison gas/I could make the moments pass/Bumping off a number of/People whom I do not love./But I have no lethal weapon/Thus does Fate our pleasure step on/So they still are quick and well/Who should be, by rights, in hell. And of men, she wrote: Some men break your heart in two/Some men fawn and flatter/ Some men never look at you/And that clears up the matter.
Dorothy Parker left her estate to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and, upon his death, to the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP). Although she had never met King, and had no heirs, she wanted both the civil rights leader and the expanding civil rights movement to be a beneficiary of the income from her writings. Within a year of her death, King was shot, and the Parker estate went to the NAACP. Since 1968, the NAACP has received royalty benefits from Parker’s publications and productions. The epitaph on her grave in Baltimore where her ashes – which lay unclaimed for 21 years – are buried reads, “This memorial garden is dedicated to her noble spirit which celebrated the oneness of humankind and to the bonds of everlasting friendship between black and Jewish people.”