The fresh hell of Dorothy Parker’s Hollywood

Hollywood didn’t kill Dorothy Parker, but booze probably did. In fact, if Hollywood hadn’t paid her so well to spend so much time at home, she couldn’t have afforded the booze – as well as maintain a lifelong ability to insult almost everyone she loved while still earning their (sometimes reluctant) affection.

Gail Crowther’s latest book (she has written entertainingly on other notably cocktail-absorbed writers such as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton) is a focused, fun and almost recreationally enjoyable brief biography not of a writer but of a well-framed aspect of a writer’s life – in this case, Parker’s critically neglected years as a well-paid and genuinely gifted screenwriter.

Born in 1893, near Long Beach, New Jersey, to middle-class Jewish parents, Parker suffered the loss of her mother when she was only five; and when her father later married a Jesus-obsessed Catholic, it taught Parker a rule she seemed to follow for the rest of her life: if you love someone too hard, don’t do it too openly or life might take what you love away.

So while she seemed to feel deeply for others, she was careful to act as though she didn’t. Meanwhile, she wrote some of the lightest, funniest, most cynical verse in American literature. Her first sales, to the popular magazine Vanity Fair in 1916, with titles such as ‘Women: A Hate Song’ and ‘Why I Haven’t Married’, managed to carve up both the males and the females of her species as if they were fish. One can only imagine that if Parker had lived long enough she would have similarly eviscerated just about any of our age’s multifarious sexual identities with the same caustic wit.

Hired as Vanity Fair’s fact-checker and writer of advertising captions, she moved to Manhattan at the first opportunity, lived in rooming houses, befriended the likes of Thorne Smith and Robert Benchley, and took a temporary job in editorial when her bosses went on holiday.