Dear Witty Dorothy

There's a reason you don't hear much about Dorothy Parker these days: she passed away in 1967, given a front page send-off in the NYT by Alden Whitman, a senior obituary writer who is described by Marilyn Johnson in her seminal book on obituaries, "The Dead Beat," as the bow-tied Harvard graduate who affected a French policeman's cape and cultivated the mystique of interviewing his prospective subjects while they were still alive (obviously), who Gay Talese called 'Mr. Bad News.'" (Mr. Whitman passed away in 1990.)

Dorothy's obit jumps from the front page, left below the fold, to page 38 where it stretches across the eight columns that were used by the paper at the time. That's a 21-gun sendoff for a deceased.

Most people might remember Dorothy best for her famous line: "Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses." "Passes" was the vernacular of the day for "hit on." Dorothy was born in 1893. Passes, or hit on, the male objective has always been the same. Sex.

I remember reading in a paperback volume of light verse a long time ago that underneath Dorothy's take on glasses, someone posted a rejoinder: "Now aren't men just asses who never make passes at girls who wear glasses?" Maybe.

Mr. Whitman in his NYT obit tells us that Dorothy was extremely nearsighted, but would seldom wear her horn rimmed glasses in public. And why would she? Eyewear of the era was not "designer," or chic. Glasses made women look especially nerdy, like librarians, maybe the girl to bring home to Mom, but not the girl to go dancing and drinking with. We all know that Professor Harold Hill in the Music Man was not interested in librarians, with or without glasses. He was rooting to meet a Hester, who he hoped would just earn one more A.

When I was in high school in 10th grade I found that unless I sat dead center in the room, equidistant from the front and back blackboards I had trouble seeing things sharply. I made my own appointment with an eye doctor and got a prescription for glasses to correct my nearsightedness. I got the glasses, probably at Sterling Optical, a pretty big chain of the era.

Even glasses for guys earned you derisive remarks of being "4-eyes." Luckily, my high school was full of nerds, so wearing glasses did not make you stand out.

I remember my father was not happy about my wearing glasses, but I didn't care. He himself had bad eyesight, telling me he couldn't see well out of one eye. Since he didn't drive his acuity deficit wasn't that impairing. I always wondered if his eyesight was so bad, how'd he get in the Army? It was WW II, and eventually 15 million people were in uniform in the U.S., so maybe you didn't need 20/20 vision. Close enough for government work might have been the criteria.

My father eventually had so many drug store reading glasses in a drawer he looked like Fred Sanford in the sitcom Sanford and Son, making a selection from a pile of non-prescription reading glasses. 

I remember Christopher Buckley repeating one of Dorothy's quips: "If all the girls at Bennington College were laid end-to-end, I wouldn't be at all surprised."

Because of that remark I assumed Dorothy went to Smith College, a rival to Bennington. But Dorothy didn't go to college. Alden Whitman tells us: "her father, J. Henry Rothschild, was a New Yorker of means; her mother, the former Eliza Marston, was of Scottish descent."

Interesting to note the convention of the obituary was not to reveal any occupation for either parent. Rothschild was rich, and Mom was likely Presbyterian. No wonder Dorothy established wit. It was in her genes. The humor came from being part Jewish, mixed in with the deadpan of U.K. humor.

She didn't have a literary background by any means. She was born in West End, New Jersey and attended Miss Dana's School in Morristown, NJ, and the Sacred Heart Convent of New York. Her first job in New York was writing captions to photos for Vogue magazine for $10 a week.

Imagine trying to live on $10 a week in Manhattan, even in the '20s. But of course her father was a man of "means" who likely help support his Bohemian daughter.

Dorothy eventually got a job at Vanity Fair magazine, whose offices were on West 44th Street, across the street from the Algonquin Hotel. West 44th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues is a storied block. There are several Ivy League university clubs there, my optician Meyrowitz and Dell, in business so long they supplied Theodore Roosevelt's glasses, and the Iroquois Hotel as well. The Iroquois is less well known since of course because they weren't the site for what became the famous Round Table.

The Algonquin was as famous for its Round Table reputation as it was once for its cabaret. My wife and I saw Karen Akers there once, but after renovations, the cabaret was eliminated. Another loss.

The story goes that the Round Table coterie came from the writers at Vanity Fair who dashed across the street for lunch at the hotel, no doubt adding alcohol to their meals, if they ate at all. Such New York literary lights such as Franklin P. Adams, Ogden Nash, Robert Benchley, Alexander Wollcott, Harold Ross, and others filled the table out with sometimes as many as 10 people. I have no doubt there is an Al Hirschfeld drawing of this bunch hanging in Sardi's theater district restaurant somewhere.

I once read that the table wasn't even round. But I guess it sounded historic, like King Arthur's Knights at the Round Table. Tipsy lips can come out with some zingers, and Dorothy liked what I'll bet were her martinis. Her conversational tidbits became fodder for Adams's column, and Dorothy quickly became the "It" literary girl in New York.

Mr. Whitman describes Dorothy as: "a little woman with a dollish face and basset-hound eyes in whose mouth butter wouldn't melt." Alexander Woollcott weighed in, saying she was "an odd blend of Little Nell and Lady Macbeth." At least no one said you needed a rabies shot to sit next to her.

What propels remembering Dorothy Parker at this point in time is the passing of Marion Meade, at 88, who through her biographies helped renew interest in Dorothy's work.

As soon as Marion Meade started at the Columbia School of Journalism  in 1955 she made a beeline to the Algonquin and ordered a drink, hoping to soak up the literary atmosphere.

In Ms. Meade's obit the passes/glasses remark if of course remembered. But the  obit writer, Richard Sandomir, writes another one that Ms. Meade liked to repeat: "You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think."

That one I think tops the one about the student body at Bennington.

I'd love to know the context of when she said that. One Google offering was that Franklin Adams asked her to create a sentence using the word "horticulture." Could be. But I've got a better one, one that I'd like to think is the real thought behind the sentence.

Dorothy was a critic of theater plays and movies, and I'd love to believe she was thinking of the Elizabeth Taylor character in BUtterfield 8, a 1960 movie based on the then steamy novel by John O'Hara's bestseller, BUtterfield 8, about a Manhattan call girl based on the life of a 1930s gal about town, socialite and flapper Starr Faithfull.

The main character in the movie is played by Elizabeth Taylor and is named Gloria Wondrous. I have no idea how many husbands Ms. Taylor had by 1960, but she was well casted as the call girl Gloria. The movie's poster featured Elizabeth in a slip (something women then wore) and was as racy an ad as you'd get in 1960. Sex always sells.

The BUtterfield 8 referred to a somewhat lower East Side telephone exchange s. In that era, and up until the 1970s, telephone numbers were composed of the first two letters corresponding to numbers on the dial. BU would have been 28 in the finger holes of a rotary phone. Today's phones are not rotary, but there are still alpha characters associated with the push button numbers. Quick, what two letters of the alphabet were not used on rotary phone finger holes? The family flower shop was GRamercy 3-4248.at 18th Street and Third Avenue. Gramercy since we were near Gramercy Park on 20th Street. 

One Google explanation for O'Hara's choice of the telephone exchange was that BUtterfield numbers were centered on the somewhat lower portion of the smart Upper East side, and was where prostitutes lived. I can tell you, I never encountered a prostitute at 18th Street and never knew anyone who had a BUtterfield number. But the phone exchange did exist, although I cannot find anything that reliably tells me where the word Butterfield comes from. Telephone exchanges were rooted in geographic parts of New York City. I never heard anyone say they lived in Butterfield, but it did exist as an exchange.

Dorothy, like many writers of the era did run afoul of being accused of being a Communist. She was liberal, advocated for women and was once fined $5 for protesting the executions of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. That got you on a list of the era. Ancient history.

In 1951 she was cited by the House Un-American Activities Committee for participating in what they designated a "Communist-front" organization. There was one witness who claimed she was a member of the Communist Party. She always denied it.

Ms. Meade wrote many biographies of historical and literary women. She wrote about Dorothy a few times. In 1987 she finished a book about Dorothy and wanted to visit her grave site where she expected her epitaph would be, the one Dorothy penned herself: Excuse my Dust.

Mr Whitman's obit tells us Dorothy was waked at the pre-eminent waking place in Manhattan, Frank E. Campbell's Funeral Home on 81st Street and Madison Avenue. The famously dead of Manhattan flow through there, and still do. I delivered many a funeral piece to that place. Dorothy was married a few times, but left no survivors. Zero Mostel and Lillian Hellman gave eulogies.

In 1987 when Ms. Meade was finishing another book on Dorothy, she wanted to pay her respects to where she thought she was buried, in a Westchester cemetery. Ms. Meade contacted the lawyer of Lillian Hellman, who was an executor of Dorothy's estate, Paul O'Dwyer. O'Dwyer was a durable NYC politician whose older brother had once been mayor. O'Dwyer himself had been on the City Council and was president of it once. I remember his name.

O'Dwyer listened nicely and told Marion Dorothy wasn't in Westchester. He was looking at her. Huh? Her urn was sitting in a filing cabinet in Paul's office, and he was looking at the filing cabinet during the phone call.

Eventually, after many twists and turns, Dorothy's ashes were interred in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, with a marker with her self-penned Epitaph, Excuse My Dust.

If only she knew how true that had been.

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