The wicked wit and enigma of Dorothy Parker – 50 years on
Fifty years after her death, this master of the one-liner has survived better than the rest of her New Yorker set, but everything you know about her is liable to be wrong
John Dugdale
Friday 16 June 2017 12.00 BST
A bestselling poet who moved on to fiction, Dorothy Parker, who died 50 years ago this month, single-handedly invented “the New Yorker short story”, the kind of debonair but melancholy tale later associated with JD Salinger and John Cheever. She was equally innovative as a critic, pioneering a first‑person style and busting the taboo on hatchet jobs by women when reviewing theatre – she was fired under pressure from Broadway managers after three plays that she had slated closed – and books (as “Constant Reader”, best remembered for her one-liner on AA Milne, “Tonstant Weader Fwowed Up”).
And, as the only woman in the core members of the 1920s Algonquin “vicious circle”, she was arguably the first female celebrity wit since the 17th century, outperforming her illustrious male peers as a gag maker (after terminating a pregnancy by the priapic playwright Charles MacArthur: “I put all my eggs in one bastard”; on being told that stolid, taciturn President Coolidge had died: “How could they tell?”). Parker has survived better than the rest of her New Yorker set – her poems and stories are picked for anthologies, her best zingers are frequently invoked, and she’s usually only outscored by Oscar Wilde (and easily the most-quoted woman, in terms of things said rather than written) in dictionaries of quotations.
Next year she’ll get a posthumous screenplay credit for Bradley Cooper’s updated remake of A Star Is Born (Parker co-wrote the 1937 film), starring Cooper and Lady Gaga. But actually finding her work is tricky, partly because (as Natalie Haynes has noted) it’s all “slight in scale” – stories, reviews, verse, witticisms – and lacks the single substantial book that would help to categorise and promote her. In a bookshop today, you’re unlikely to locate her in fiction or poetry, or even in humour. If Parker’s there at all, she’ll be slightly improbably shelved instead with literary giants: Penguin Classics’ The Collected Dorothy Parker is still in print, though – as it’s a 2001 repackaging of the 1944 Portable Dorothy Parker with a bizarrely uncelebratory 1973 introduction by Brendan Gill – a new Best Of selection is surely long overdue.
The very versatility that makes her hard to define and sell, however, is also a strength. Everything you think you know about Parker is liable to be wrong. She spent most of the 1920s exchanging screwball banter in the Algonquin? She later said she “wasn’t there very often – it cost too much”. She was a boozy flop in Hollywood, like her friend Scott Fitzgerald? She had two Oscar nominations for screenplays, including A Star Is Born, before being blacklisted. She was a shallow, cocktail-quaffing Jazz Age flapper who took nothing seriously? She was a political activist from as early as 1928, who left her estate to Martin Luther King. She hated Katharine Hepburn? In fact she believed there was no “finer actress” and only joked that Hepburn “ran the gamut of human emotions all the way from A to B” because “people expect you to say things”.
It may be this protean, unpigeonholable aspect of Parker that most looks forward to female authors today, as they shift between, say, fiction, memoir, poetry, journalism, screenwriting, live appearances and social media. We used to think, for example, that JK Rowling could only write rather old-fashioned children’s books, before she tried her hand at literary fiction, whodunits, plays, website curation and political activism – not to mention emerging as a Twitter wit whose best putdowns (to a troll: “The internet doesn’t just offer opportunities for misogynistic abuse, you know – penis enlargers can also be bought discreetly”) Parker might have been proud of.
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