Literary Rogues (16 page)

When Hemingway deboarded the ship in Normandy, he shouted up to Parker that he didn't have a typewriter with him—so she tossed hers overboard to him. Of course, this now meant that she didn't have one. “Good god,” she said, realizing this. “
I have just thrown away my only means
of livelihood!”

Thankfully, she purchased a new typewriter in France in order to finish her poetry collection. The resulting book,
Enough Rope
, was published in December 1926. At a time when a modest-selling book was likely to sell no more than five thousand copies, Parker's book of poetry sold a remarkable forty-seven thousand copies in its first year. The critical response was more ... measured. The
New York Times
dismissed
Enough Rope
as frivolous “
flapper verse
,” and Hemingway satirized her in an unpublished poem of his own dedicated to “a Tragic Poetess—
Nothing in her life became her
like her almost leaving of it.”

Parker's success built upon that of Pulitzer Prize winner
Edna St. Vincent Millay
(1892–1950), who had also raised eyebrows by flaunting her promiscuous sex life and airing her dirty laundry in verse. “
I was following in the exquisite footsteps
of Edna St. Vincent Millay,” Parker once said, “unhappily in my own horrible sneakers.”

“
In America it has always been
extremely difficult to cause a sensation by publishing a poem,” Millay biographer Daniel Mark Epstein wrote. But Poe did it with “The Raven” in 1845, and Millay did it in 1912 with a 214-line poem called “Renascence.” The poem, published in a literary anthology, thrust the twenty-year-old Millay into the spotlight.

Shortly thereafter, Millay left Maine to take preparatory classes for passing her entrance exams at Vassar College. On the basis of “Renascence,” Millay was readily accepted into the upper echelons of New York literary society. Unfortunately, the experience overwhelmed her: in the middle of a lecture by publisher S. S. McClure, Millay fainted and fell out of her chair.

At Vassar, the timid Millay came out—in more ways than one. She was four years older than the other freshmen in her class, and, as a published poet, more famous than anyone else on campus (including her professors). Millay drank alcohol, smoked cigarettes, and seduced her fellow students with her crimson hair, fair skin, and naturally red lips. “Honestly, Vincent,
you have a
gorgeous
red mouth
,” one of her classmates (and lovers) told her. Before she graduated in June 1917, she had written most of the poems for her first book,
Renascence and Other Poems
.
Aria da Capo
, a play written by Millay, opened in December, the same month her poetry collection was published. Both were critical and commercial hits. The
New York Times
drama critic called
Aria da Capo
“
the most beautiful and interesting play
in the English language now to be seen in New York.”

Millay and Parker never crossed paths: by the time Parker was raising hell with the Round Table, Millay had already married a Dutch businessman and moved out of New York City.

Parker shuttled between Europe and the United States for several years before finally divorcing her estranged husband in 1928; Edwin died five years later of an accidental overdose of sleeping powder. Then, sometime after the stock market crashed in 1929, the Algonquin Round Table broke up. No one is quite sure when they officially disbanded, but one story has Edna Ferber walking into the Algonquin in 1932 and finding a family from Newton, Kansas, dining at their old table, the Vicious Circle nowhere to be found.

Parker believed their accomplishments paled in comparison to Fitzgerald's and Hemingway's. “
Those were the real giants
. The Round Table was just a lot of people telling jokes and telling each other how good they were,” she said years later. Parker is the only member of the Round Table whose literary celebrity has stood the test of time.

To shore up her finances, Parker moved to Los Angeles to write for MGM studios. MGM sent out a press release that welcomed “
the internationally known author
of
Too Much Rope
, the popular novel” to Hollywood. In other circumstances, she might have just laughed off the mistakes in the press release. However, the line about her being a novelist cut deep. She had been contracted by Viking Press to write a novel for release in the fall of 1930. Despite working on it in Switzerland, when the time came to turn in a draft to the publisher she had nothing. (Perhaps she shouldn't have chosen to write in the European country with the highest per capita consumption of alcohol?) Viking settled for a short story collection instead of a novel.

Following a brief stint writing for the movies, she returned to New York City. She had a short affair with F. Scott Fitzgerald while Zelda was hospitalized. When Parker first met Fitzgerald years earlier, he told her he was going to marry the most beautiful girl in Alabama and Georgia. Parker, however, “never found [Zelda] very beautiful.
She was very blond
with a candy-box face and a little bow mouth, very much on a small scale, and there was something petulant about her. If she didn't like something, she sulked; I didn't find that an attractive trait.” According to gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, Parker and Fitzgerald's affair was an act of compassion on Parker's part—and one of desperation on Fitzgerald's.

Parker married actor and screenwriter Alan Campbell in 1934. They moved to Los Angeles, where they were hailed as a Hollywood power couple. While Parker was undeniably the draw for studios hiring them—she initially commanded $1,000 a week, while her husband drew $250—Campbell was no slouch: he would eventually publish nineteen of his own short stories in
The New Yorker
. They were a good team. Parker, who hadn't lasted more than a few months during her previous stint on the West Coast, grudgingly settled in and made California her home.

Parker and Campbell went to a dinner party at author Nathanael West's home on December 13, 1940. West and his bride of eight months were christening their new house in North Hollywood. The mood was upbeat. They reminisced about the long-gone Jazz Age and sang “The Last Time I Saw Paris.”

Fitzgerald died of a heart attack eight days later on December 21; the day after his death, the Wests were killed in a car crash.

Campbell was superstitious and worried that he and Parker would be next. Bad things happen in threes, he told Parker, and holding the dinner party on Friday the thirteenth was an omen of ill fortune. His fears were unsubstantiated; the other shoe did not drop for a very long time.

Parker wrote and appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's
Saboteur
in 1940 and adapted Oscar Wilde's play
Lady Windermere's Fan
as
The Fan
in 1949. Her Hollywood success, however, was overshadowed by her political associations, which leaned toward communism and other controversial stances.

She was aggressive in soliciting support for causes she believed in, and alienated many friends over the years, including her old Round Table colleagues. Editors frequently rejected her stories or requested she rewrite them because she was putting in blatant propaganda. “God damn it,” an editor told her. “
Why can't you be funny again
?”

Though she was never an official member of the Communist Party, she wound up on the Hollywood blacklist in the 1950s. The FBI compiled a thousand-page file on her alleged communist activities, but they never called her before Congress and ultimately dismissed her as “
not dangerous enough
.”

Parker and Campbell never had any children together. Privately, people questioned if it was possible for Parker to have anything in common with children or anyone else who didn't drink. Campbell engaged in an affair with a married woman in Europe while serving in World War II and divorced Parker in 1947. Three years later, Campbell and Parker reconciled—and were remarried. “
What are you going to do when
you love the son of a bitch?” Parker allegedly said.

In some ways, Parker was still following in Edna St. Vincent Millay's footsteps. Millay's marriage to Eugen Jan Boissevain was plagued by infidelities on both sides (though historians have likened their arrangement to an open marriage). Millay's political views also bled into her poetry, leading many to dismiss her work as propaganda. And, like Parker, Millay had a drinking problem.

After leaving New York City for the country, Millay continued to write and publish; she even worked on an English translation of Charles Baudelaire's
Les fleurs du mal
, published in 1936. In her preface to that book, Millay wrote that Baudelaire's habits “unfortunately
stand between the poem and the reader
.” Little did she know that she, too, would soon fall victim to a habit similar to Baudelaire's laudanum addiction.

In 1940, doctors prescribed Millay morphine to relieve pain stemming from a car accident four years earlier. Millay was powerless against the opium derivative. She was so hopelessly addicted at one point that she had to set an alarm to wake her every hour, on the hour, for an injection. In addition to morphine, Millay used a host of prescription and nonprescription barbiturates such as Nembutal, Seconal, and Demerol. While she struggled with substance abuse, she wrote very little besides patriotic poems in support of the war effort.

Millay entered rehab in 1944; she exited sober but depressed. One of her lovers, Arthur Ficke, was dying. She couldn't write a line to save her life, and worried that drugs had stolen her muse. In September 1945, her depression bottomed out. “I'm through,” she wrote. “
I'm not going to live just in order to be one day older tomorrow
.” Ficke passed away in November, devastating Millay further and sending her back into the clutches of drugs and alcohol.

She reentered rehab in February 1946, and was discharged after treatment to a psychiatric hospital, where she spent two months—followed by yet another relapse. In 1947 she finally managed to get six months of sobriety under her belt, which allowed her to resume writing. “I am clean of drugs now and clean of alcohol,” she wrote to a friend. She let it slip that she was still chain-smoking. “
A person who has been as wicked as I have been
, would feel a bit too naked perhaps, without at least one little vice to cover her,” she wrote.

The years had taken their toll, however, and she lost much of the vibrancy that had been her trademark in the Roaring Twenties. As her former lover Edmund Wilson recalled after seeing her in 1948, “
She had so changed
in the nineteen years that, if I had met her unexpectedly somewhere, I am sure I should not have known her. She had become somewhat heavy and dumpy, and her cheeks were a little florid. She was terribly nervous; her hands shook; there was a look of fright in her bright green eyes.”

Millay's husband died suddenly of lung cancer the following year, and she was subsequently hospitalized after a nervous breakdown. Her doctors were worried she might harm herself, but she swore that she was fine. Things went downhill quickly upon her release. She snapped her sober streak and drowned her sorrows with wine, gin, and Seconal. On October 19, 1950, her housekeeper found her body at the bottom of the stairs. Millay had either fallen or thrown herself down the stairs while she was drunk, breaking her neck. She was fifty-eight.

Parker's husband, Alan Campbell, also left a question mark when he passed away. Despite remarrying, Parker and Campbell had mostly lived apart until 1963, when Campbell fatally overdosed on barbiturates. Those closest to him suspected suicide, but no note was found. Campbell was fifty-nine; his estranged wife, seventy-one.

At the funeral, one of Parker's neighbors asked the widow if there was anything she could do for her. “
Get me a new husband
,” Parker said dryly.

“I think that is the most callous and disgusting remark I ever heard in my life,” the shocked neighbor said.

“So sorry,” Parker said. “Then run down to the corner and get me ham and cheese on rye and tell them to hold the mayo.”

While Parker, like Flaubert, was a notoriously slow writer, her drinking slowed her down even more. “
I'm betraying my talent
,” she told a friend. “I'm drinking. I'm not working. I have the most horrendous guilt.” Parker supplemented her scotch with sedatives like Veronal, which she took in a bowl with cream and sugar. Parker spent years working on
Sonnets in Suicide, or the Life of John Knox
, her novel-in-progress, with nothing to show for the effort.

Still, she brushed off any attempt at intervention. When a doctor warned her that if she didn't stop drinking, she was headed to an early grave, she said, “
Promises, promises
!” Robert Benchley, her old colleague from the Round Table, once urged her to seek help via Alcoholics Anonymous. She went to a meeting and found it “
perfectly wonderful
.”

“So are you going to join?” Benchley asked.

“Certainly not,” she said. “They wanted me to stop drinking.”

Parker died of heart failure on June 7, 1967, in New York; she never finished
Sonnets in Suicide
.