You Might As Well Die (36 page)

He looked at her knowingly and smiled. “We would have done the same thing we’ll do with the spare five hundred you have, Mrs. Parker. We’ll take it to Tony Soma’s.”

Dorothy raised her cup of plain old tea. “I’ll drink to that, Mr. Benchley.”

 

T
his fictional story is full of improbable and sometimes impossible incidents. History, too, is full of improbable and often unbelievable people and events. The following explanation attempts to distinguish the two.

First of all, the members of the Algonquin Round Table were real people, although this story takes some liberties with timelines and events. Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and Robert Sherwood (along with their editor, Frank Crowninshield) worked together at
Vanity Fair
magazine. Ernie MacGuffin, however, is fictional.

This story makes reference to Dorothy Parker’s attempts at suicide. Like her attempts at writing a novel, she failed each time she tried. Her friends doubted her seriousness about suicide. They joked with her about it when they came to visit her in the hospital after one attempt. She joked right along with them. It was easier to do that than to try to explain the pain she felt.

Also, it bears repeating that in reality Dorothy and Benchley were not romantically involved, although they were the best of friends.

Alexander Woollcott, as improbable as he seemed, was real, and he had a real passion for croquet, as well as many other games. He hated to lose. “Their croquet was a kind of ferocious golf, with the wrong tools, and no limits. Once, when Woollcott drove Harpo Marx’s ball into the woods for the third time, Bea Kaufman found Harpo sobbing his heart out against a tree,” wrote Margaret Case Harriman (daughter of Algonquin Hotel owner Frank Case) in her book
The Vicious Circle: The Story of the Algonquin Round Table
. Despite this one-upmanship, Woollcott and Harpo Marx were close friends. They once rented a house together for the summer in the south of France. (But that’s an entirely different story.)

There was indeed a speakeasy called Tony Soma’s and a man by the same name. (In real life, the speakeasy was in the basement, not on the first floor as in this story.) Carlos, described as a “dull-witted Basque . . . uninspired in his work with the shaker and bottle,” was the bartender. Tony reportedly would stand on his head and sing opera to entertain the speakeasy’s drinkers. Interestingly, Tony’s daughter, Enrica Soma, was a ballerina and fashion model who married John Huston, the director of
The Maltese Falcon
,
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
,
The African Queen
, and
Prizzi’s Honor
. Their daughter is actress Angelica Huston.

Here are some other real people (who were also real characters):

 

 

Harold Ross and his wife, Jane Grant, founded
The New Yorker
magazine after a few financial fits and starts. Half of the start-up money came from Raoul Fleischmann, who joined in the Round Tablers’ Saturday night poker games. Fleischmann was an heir to the General Baking Company and a relation to the owners of the Fleischmann Yeast Company. The original
New Yorker
office was not in the fictional “Fleischmann Building” but in a nondescript office building on Forty-fifth Street.

In the beginning, Ross used the names of several Round Tablers as advisory editors. But Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley contributed very little, and some of the others didn’t contribute at all. Ross paid only peanuts in those early lean years, and sometimes handed out stock instead, which was worth almost nothing at the time. (Ross once bumped into Dorothy Parker unexpectedly. “I thought you were coming into the office to write a piece last week. What happened?” he asked. “Somebody was using the pencil,” she answered.) But soon the magazine took off. Ten or more years later, even during the Depression, stock in
The New Yorker
was worth quite a pretty penny.

The name for
The New Yorker
is credited to John Peter Toohey, a Broadway writer and publicist and a founding member of the Round Table.

 

 

Bestselling author Edna Ferber, an occasional Algonquin Round Table member, grew up in Houdini’s hometown, Appleton, Wisconsin. At age nineteen, when she was a cub reporter (and the first female reporter) for the Appleton newspaper, Ferber interviewed Houdini. She described him as “a medium sized, unassuming, pleasant faced, young fellow, with blue eyes that are very much inclined to twinkle.” Other than this incident, Houdini had little connection to the members of the Algonquin Round Table. He never befriended Dorothy Parker as portrayed in this story.

But that’s not to say that they never met. In the mid-1920s, Houdini did have a six-week run at the New York Hippodrome, which was located across the street from the Algonquin Hotel. So it’s very possible they crossed paths at some point.

Houdini achieved fame and success not only as a magician and escape artist, but also as a skeptic and debunker of fraudulent spiritualists. (In 1924, Houdini was a member of a committee organized by
Scientific American
magazine. The magazine offered a cash prize for a medium who could produce, under test conditions, an “objective psychic manifestation of physical character.”) Houdini incorporated this into his stage act by demonstrating how phony mediums pulled their tricks during séances. His longtime friendship with Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and a fervent spiritualist, went to pieces because of their opposing views on the matter.

Although Houdini did not appear as the halftime entertainment, the first professional football game in New York was indeed held at the New York Polo Grounds between the New York Football Giants and the Frankford (Philadelphia) Yellow Jackets. (The actual game was played on a Sunday, not a Tuesday afternoon as depicted in this story. And, unfortunately, the home team lost.)

Houdini died on Halloween 1926. As he had instructed, he was buried in his coffin with a packet of his mother’s letters for a pillow.

 

 

Dr. Norris brought forensic medicine in New York City out of the dark ages. Before his appointment in 1918 as New York’s first chief medical examiner, the city got by with a motley assortment of ill-equipped and often wrongheaded coroners, none of whom had the medical training required for forensic science. Because the coroners were paid on commission for every body they examined, some corpses wound up being autopsied several times over while the coroners lined their pockets. It was a “system which fosters ignorance, prejudice and graft,” Dr. Norris wrote.

Even among the many outrageous and outsized personalities of the Roaring Twenties, Charles Norris stood out. He came from a wealthy family, was educated in Europe, and had the genteel manners and aristocratic nature of his station. He wore fashionable suits and cut a dashing figure going into and out of expensive restaurants. But for all his sophisticated elegance, he had the grit and tenacity of a bare-knuckle prizefighter when it came to his job. He pestered city officials for better equipment and personnel—but he paid for most of the lab instruments from his own deep pockets.

In this story, his infatuation with Dorothy Parker is pure fiction. But as with Houdini, there’s a sporting chance they might have met at some ritzy speakeasy or celebrity’s party. Incidentally, the Mansion nightclub was real, and its membership was very exclusive—just the kind of place Dr. Norris might frequent. Members showed a unique wooden calling card to gain entrance.

I owe considerable thanks and recognition to:

Dorothy Parker—although she had some sad times in her life, she continued to utter every cynical remark with a bright, sparkling joke. Every bookshelf should contain
The Portable Dorothy Parker
.

Robert Benchley and the rest of the Algonquin Round Table, whose happy and easygoing attitude toward work and desperate pursuit of fun should not be entirely rejected these days.

Harry Houdini for his charmingly skeptical account of the paranormal,
Magician Among the Spirits
.

Kenneth Silverman for his colorful and detailed biography,
Houdini!!! The Career of Ehrich Weiss
.

Colin Evans for his authoritative book,
Blood on the Table: The Greatest Cases of New York City’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

Deborah Blum for her funny and frightening
Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York.

Al Hirschfeld for his wonderfully illustrated and humorously written field guide of Prohibition-era watering holes,
The Speakeasies of 1932
.

James Thurber for his fantastical chronicle of the early years of
The New Yorker
magazine and its founder Harold Ross,
My Years with Ross
.

Brian Kreydatus, chair of the Art and Art History Department at the College of William and Mary, for his insight inside the art world.

Kaitlyn Kennedy for helping to spread the word and listening to some cockamamie ideas.

Editor Sandra Harding for her lightheartedness and her light use of the red pen.

Michael Gibbons and the members of the Between Books Critique Group (a division of the Delaware Valley Sisters in Crime) for their editorial assistance with the first draft.

Karin, as always, for her positive attitude and continued support.

J. J. Murphy grew up as the child of circus performers. But life under the big top was monotonous and dreary for an inquisitive youth. So one night, J.J. ran away from the dull and dismal circus to join the thrilling, razzmatazz world of business-to-business trade publishing. After a highly lucrative and award-winning career in corporate journalism, J.J. sought a totally new challenge: writing the sayings in fortune cookies. Soon, by piecing together thousands of these random sayings, J.J. realized that this collection was actually a (somewhat) coherent novel—the first Algonquin Round Table Mystery—and had serendipitously embarked on a new career!

 

“M
rs. Parker,” said Alexander Woollcott, “how about a friendly little game of murder?”

Dorothy Parker pretended she didn’t hear him. Woollcott was a fellow member of the Algonquin Round Table and the drama critic for the
New York Times
. But he was also a pompous, paunchy pain in the neck sometimes.

Dorothy was preoccupied anyway. She and Woollcott stood at one end of the crowded lobby of the Algonquin Hotel. Her eyes turned again to the massive grandfather clock to check the time. Normally the lobby wasn’t quite so busy and boisterous at eight o’clock on a Saturday night—but this wasn’t an ordinary Saturday night. The crowd was elbow to elbow. The tinkling laughter of elegant ladies in glittering gowns mingled with the low chuckles of dapper men in their crisp white shirts, black ties and tails. The air was rich with the heady scents of cigarette smoke and expensive perfume. Most of them were here for the big party.

Now, where is that hound Robert Benchley?
Dorothy wondered for the umpteenth time.

“Please, Mrs. Parker, I beseech you,” Woollcott said, like a fly buzzing in her ear. “Murder would simply be no fun without you.”

A tall, stocky man standing just a few feet from Dorothy turned toward them, mildly alarmed at this. Dorothy returned his glance to reassure him all was fine. He was an older gentleman, in his sixties, with a bushy walrus mustache and sagging, gentle eyes. He looked vaguely familiar to Dorothy, but she knew she had never met him.

“Mrs. Parker, please!” Woollcott commanded. “One little murder is all I’m asking—”

“Fine,” she said, cocking her fingers at him like a pistol. “Bang—you’re dead. Game over. Have a nice night.”

Woollcott sighed, exasperated. “It’s not just any old night, dear Dottie,” he said. “It’s New Year’s Eve. Where is your sense of fun?”

“It was beaten to death by my sense of taste. And I find your detective game to be distasteful. I’d rather play something else. Russian roulette comes to mind at the moment.”

Through his round owl-like spectacles, Woollcott’s dark, beady eyes examined her. “What’s got your knickers in a pinch?”

She glanced at the grandfather clock again. It was now just after eight.
Benchley should have arrived half an hour ago. He’d better not stand me up
.

“Well?” Woollcott said, and repeated his question about her knickers.

“My knickers are perfectly fine, thank you. It’s you and everyone else who’s in a twist,” she said, as much to herself as to him. “Why is it that everyone insists on making such a big deal out of New Year’s Eve? Everyone’s in such a lather to have so much fun that the evening ceases to be enjoyable and starts to become one long, tedious chore.”

Irked, Woollcott turned on his heel and stormed away, nearly colliding with the familiar-looking gent with the walrus mustache.

Dorothy checked the clock again, but the minute hand hadn’t moved.
Will Benchley stay at home in the suburbs with his wife and family? Or will he come into the city, as he said he would, for the party?
Dorothy had bought a new dress, even though she didn’t have the money to pay for it. Its forest green velvet complemented her deep brown eyes. She toyed with the long strand of faux pearls around her neck.

What is the point?
she wondered morosely. Even if Benchley did show up, he wouldn’t notice.