Hartford Courant from Hartford, Connecticut • 130

fifth Symbol of an era ii -'f MS? Dorothy Parker at 70 She shatters her own legends. hf i by SAUL PETT Associated Press EDITOR'S NOTE: Dorothy Parker remains the symbol of an age, of the gaiety, the bite, the heartbreak of that time between the wars. Now 70 and still one of the fastest wits in the West, Miss Parker shoots down legends about herself and her fabulous past and finds new targets in today's literature, humor and youth. Wearing glasses, despite her couplet about girls who do, Dorothy Parker is shown in her Hollywood home where she is packing to return to New York. Her husband died last June after their 29 years of marriage.

ered noisily over and around the French period furniture. "Newport has its social season and Los Angles has its flea season," explained the mistress of establishment in behalf of the hell-raising dogs, Miss Parker admitted her age without visible struggle: "I should have started lying a long time ago. Now it's too late. I'm 70 and feel 90. If I had any decency I'd be dead.

Most of my friends are." More than 30 years ago, Dorothy Parker wrote a poem in which she projected to the time she'd be 77. It began: "I was seventy seven, come August, I shall shortly be losing my bloom: I've experienced zephyr and raw gust And (symbolical) flood and simoom. When you come to this time of abatement, To this passing from summer to fall, It is manners to issue a statement As to what you got out of it all. "So I'll say, though reflection unnerves me Ami pronouncements I dodge as I can, That I think if my memory serves me There was nothing more fun than a man." (From "The Portable Dorothy Parker," copyright, 1931, t5 by Dorothy Parker, The Viking Press.) AND NOW on a hot day cf smog in Los Angeles, Dorothy Parker, turned 70 this last August, agreed with the woman who wrote that 30 years ago, although she does not admire her poetry. "There was," she said evenly, "nothing more fun than a maa Alan and I had 29 great years together." Her eyes invited a change of subject, away from the fact that Alan Campbell, screen writer, col-.

laborator and husband of Dorothy Parker, had died last June. They had no children. The last movie script the Campbells did together was finished two years ago, an adaptation of a French play called "The Good Soup." 1 was written for Marilyn Monroe and has yet to be produced. This job helps explain Miss Parker's disdain for Hollywood and why, after 14 years her, she's impatient to return to New York once her husband's estate is settled. "We wrote," she said, Ha nice, little, innocent, bawdy French farce.

But in this town everybody's a writer and has ideas. So they (the studio) took our script and hoked it up with dope pushers, two murders and, straight out of Fanny Hurst, the harlot with the heart of goo." WRITHING, Miss Parker refilled her teaching experience this year at Los Angeles State College where, replacing Christopher Ish-erwood, she gave a course in the American novel. The school, she noted, hds 18,000 students and 15 parking places. The students unnerved her. "They're such stuffy, ignorant prigs," she said.

"They don't reac'. They're so serious and disagreeable. Even Theodore Dreiser shocked them. It stunned them that an unmarried women might be living with a man. I found myself defending adultery in literature.

"They didn't like Steinbeck and thought the "Grapes of Wrath" was a waste of time about a low type of people. But then Steinbeck got the Nobel Prize and they acted like they had given it to him. Now they liked him. Why? That's Hollywood, my dear. Steinbeck had become a star, don't you see." The memory of the students' humorlessness led Miss Parker to another therapeutic Scotch, another cigarette and a broad swipe at the level of American wit today.

"There just aren't any humorists today. I don't know why. I don't suppose there is much demand for humor although there ought to be. S. J.

Perelman is about the only one working at and he's rewriting himself. "Humor now is too carefully planned. There is nothing of the old madness Benchley and some of the others had in my time, do leaping of the minds." MISS PARKER said that her own reputation for being a lethal wit was greatly exaggerated, that in time plagued her socially and professionally that she never said all the things attributed to her. She never made that statistical allegation about the promiscuity of girls at the Yale Junior Prom, and doesn't know who did. She never actully hung a "Men" sign on her office door to conquer boredom but did several times think about doing it.

((A RE YOU married, my dear?" "Yes, I am." you won't mind zipping me up." Zipped up, Dorothy Parker turned to face her interviewer and the world. She wore a polka dot dress and pearls and, charac- telrically, her black-gray' hair iii: bangs, her mouth in a small-girl, smile, her big, round, brown eyes in a look of startled inno- -ctiife. jiZipped up and now sipping her Sketch neat, she confirmed an ugly rumor that seems to surprise both young and old: Dorothy Parker has turned 70. You mean she's still ask the irreverent young. 70 already!" exclaim the rest of us, who remember Dorothy Parker as a bittersweet voice of our youth short story writer, poet, critic, cynic, devastating wit.

She combined, in her time, tear drops, rose petals and cyanide pallets in a talent that was alternately poignant or deadly. "A blend of little Nell and Lady MacBeth," said Alexander Wool-leolt, himself a flamboyant contemporary. was wrong," said Miss Parker the other tiay.r "I was neither as appealing as the one nor as smart as the other." It was tha first of several pic-turesshe was to crack during the interview pictures of herself and her time, of Woollcott, Robert Benchley, Heywood Broun, Deems Taylor, Edna Ferber, Harold Ross, Franklin P. Adams, Robert Sherwood and others of the Twenties and Thirties. Legend has placed then in a geyser of intellectual fireworks and soaring wit which erupted daily at the Round Table of the Hotel Algonquin in New York, PARKER recieved us in the living room of her small white bulgalow, much like the other bungalows along the stretch.

The room reflected the disarray of recent transition, from long marriage to widowhood, from Hollywood slavery to impending liberation in her beloved New Y'ork. Books were stacked in confusion on the coffee table. The floors were rugless. Two black French poodles one named "Cliche" because the "streets are carpeted with black French poodles" and the other named "Troy" for re-sons the interviewer lost scamp 8 The As a drama critic, Miss Parker did once clubber Katherine Hepburn with the single line, "She runs the gamut of emotions from A to As the book reviewer for the New Yorker magazine who signed herself "Canstant Reader" Miss Parker pulverized one. of A.

Milne's sugary works with the remark, "At this point Ton- stant Weader fwowed up." She did write the couplet: "Men seldom make passes At girls who wear And, said Miss Parker, she has always regretted writing it. "Here's why," she explained, raising a pair of reading glasses from a stack of books. "This reputation for homicidal humor," she said, "used to make me feel like a fool. At parties, fresh young gents would come up defiantly and demand I say something funny and nasty. I was prepared to do it with selected groups but with others, I'd slink away." At one party a man followed her around all night waiting for her to unsheath the dagger of her wit.

She never did. The man finally apologized "You're not at all the way I'd thought you'd be. I'm "That's all right," said Miss Parker. "But do me one favor. When you get home, throw your mother a bone." While she admired some of its members individually, Miss Parker did not think much of the Round Table collectively as a fountain of intellect and wit.

"People romanticize it," she said. "This was no Mermaid Tavern. These were no giants. Think of who was writing in those days Lardner, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway. Those were the real giants.

The Round Table was just a lot of people telling jokes and telling each other how good they were. "At first I was in awe of them because they were being published. Eut then I came to realize I wasn't hearing anything very stimulating. I remember hearing Woollcott say that reading Proust is like lying in someone else's dirty bath water. And then he'd go into ecstacy about something called "Vaiiar-t is.

the Word for and I knew I'd had enough of the Round Table." Heywood Broun, the columnist, she said, was the only member of real stature because he knew and cared about the world beyond the Algonquin. Benchley was "very funny and wonderful." Franklin P. Adams, the cohunn-nist, was a "lovely man, disagreeable, rude, but lovely." Harold Ross, founder and editor of the New Yorker, was "almost illiterate, wild and rough, never read anything, didn't know anything but he had a great gift as an editor and was awfully nice to the people who worked for him." Miss Parker sighed in her reverie. "I don't read the New Yorker much these days. It always seems to be the same old story about somebody's childhood in Pakistan." MISS PARKER wrote her last peom :) years ago, quit beause she found she wasn't improving and now visibly cringes when reminded of her old verses, especially serious ones.

She calls them her "whines." "That was the style of the day," she said. ''We were all imitative. We all wandered in after Miss Millay. We vere all being dashing and gallant, declaring we weren't virgins, whether we were or not "Beautiful as she was, Miss Millay did a great deal of harm with her double-burning candles. She' made poetry sceem so easy that We could all do it.

But, of course, we couldn't." Among the writers Miss Parker admires today are James Baldwin, Edward Albee, Faulkner, John Osborne and Alan Silitoe. She plans to return to New York, write a book review column for Esquire magazine and hopes soon to come out with another collection of short stories. "I want," she said, "to be taken seriously as a short story writer and, by God, I hope to make it." At point the French poodles were barking loudly. "Oh, children please! Children, please!" cr.c childless Dorothy Parker, the vulnerable cynic. Courent Magazine, Oct.

13, 1963.