‘Dorothy Parker in Hollywood’
By Gail Crowther
Gallery Books, 304 pages

Time spent laboring for Hollywood studios is usually of less importance in biographies of important writers than their work in fiction, drama, or poetry. Writers themselves have devalued their screenplays, and until recently their contributions to cinema have been difficult to determine because of the collaborative nature of many projects. 

Dorothy Parker is no exception. She disparaged or ignored some of her best work on films such as “A Star is Born” (1937) and “Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman,” even though the latter film, as Gail Crowther points out, paralleled Parker’s struggle with alcoholism.

Parker said she hated Hollywood, and for the usual reasons: superficiality and commercialism, as well as studio moguls who tried to crush the unions Parker supported. Yet she spent more than three decades in film land, enjoying the high salaries that allowed her to live well.

Parker came to Hollywood as one of the wits of the famous Algonquin Round Table, which she also disparaged due to its frivolity. Parker could be cutting about virtually everyone, including herself. She wrote and spoke with such accomplished, spontaneous, and comic acerbity that even her closest friends seemed not to take her seriously.

Ms. Crowther is aggrieved on Parker’s part, and deftly shows that her subject’s political principles were deep-rooted and not the result of flighty and fashionable sentiments. That Parker left her estate to Martin Luther King Jr. and after his death to the NAACP is not a whim, but expressive of a lifetime commitment that has resulted in her royalties still contributing to civil rights causes.

Parker suffered, and she tried to commit suicide several times, and that, too, was dismissed by confidants as attention-seeking and self-dramatizing. Parker’s self-criticism, even self-loathing, ran very deep. Why that is so is never made quite explicit in Ms. Crowther’s fast-paced narrative that complements Parker’s own agile style. 

My own research suggests that Parker may have been so down on herself because she had such high standards. She measured herself against Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner, and found herself wanting. Parker could never complete the novel she was contracted to write. She allowed screenwriting to deter her too often from her metier: the short story and light verse.

Near the end of Ms. Crowther’s biography, in a bravura summary of Parker’s likes and dislikes; her ricocheting between Hollywood, New York, Europe, and Bucks County, Pennsylvania; her troubled affairs with men and a fruitful and fraught marriage to screenwriting partner Alan Campbell, Ms. Crowther concludes: She was “kind and cruel and glorious.”

I would add that Parker liked to approach the end of a rollicking verse with a bomb-like denouement, plopping the reader in the human predicament. “All the songs were ever sung, / All the words were ever said; / Could it be, when I was young, / Someone dropped me on my head?”

Dorothy Parker has had her share of biographers, and Ms. Crowther gives them due credit, especially the incomparable Marion Meade. What Ms. Crowther adds is a close inspection of those movie scripts, honestly admitting that exactly what Parker contributed to them cannot be ascertained incontrovertibly. Yet remove Parker’s name from the equation of those films, and it is apparent that something is missing: the Dorothy Parker whom Ms. Crowther depicts.

Parker left a small paper trail, her biographer observes while carefully pinpointing the gaps. This is not a biography that presumes too much.

Parker could praise you to your face, Lillian Hellman and other friends reported, and then demolish you after you had left the scene. Parker’s kindness, I discovered, often went unreported — like the day she took Estelle Faulkner shopping in Manhattan, hoping to cheer her up just a little after the devastating death of her infant.

Years later, Parker would suffer two miscarriages. She remained silent about them, unable to articulate her pain as she redecorated her house to obliterate the signs of everything that had been made to order to welcome her child’s entrance into the world.

When Parker turned serious, when the world went to hell during war, people kept telling her to be funny. What an overwhelming weight she had to bear as she was commanded to be comical. Her plight is powerfully rendered in Ms. Crowther’s sensitive prose.

Dorothy Parker appears in Mr. Rollyson’s biographies of Lillian Hellman, Martha Gellhorn, Norman Mailer, and William Faulkner.