Free Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? by Marion Meade

had married “a blonde and rounded person whose walk in life was upon the runway at the Winter Garden.” The smitten Dorothy assured Vanity Fair readers that she would never get over the loss of this sublime creature.
    In reality, the impeccably dressed god had not married a chorine at all. He was an eligible bachelor. Having only recently made his acquaintance and still feeling awed, she could not predict what he might do. She was merely sure of what he was not likely to do, and that was to marry her.
    During the summer of 1916, drawn as always to those ubiquitous hotel verandahs, she had spent her vacation in Branford, Connecticut. It was at a hotel there that she had met and fallen in love with the unobtainable—or so she assumed. Sexually, her basic taste ran to men who were exceptionally good-looking but who were, if not exactly dumbbells, at least her intellectual inferiors, the male equivalent of the beautiful show girl to whom she had married off her god in the pages of Vanity Fair . Tall, slender, and blond, he was as pretty as some picture-book prince. He dressed well, as princes are wont to do. Of course princes also are apt to be dullards, but this man had demonstrated a capacity for wicked behavior, and he also seemed clever and entertaining. While he did not appear indifferent toward her, there were other women pursuing him and he naturally was busy playing the field. Dorothy began to prepare herself for rejection.
     
     
    Edwin Pond Parker II was twenty-three and worked as a stockbroker at Paine Webber. He came from Hartford and had been in New York only long enough to establish himself in Wall Street, the beginning of a promising and substantial career.
    He was a descendant in the ninth generation of William Parker, who had arrived in Hartford from England in 1636. The ministry became the Parker family’s profession, although the Ponds also were clergymen. Ed Parker’s grandfather, the Reverend Edwin Pond Parker, had been pastor of the Second Church of Christ in Hartford for nearly sixty years. He was not only the state’s leading Protestant clergyman and one of Hartford’s most distinguished citizens, but also he was a magisterial and dominating presence in his own family. Ed’s father, Harris, had declined to enter the ministerial path, instead choosing the sporting goods business, but people in Hartford continued to associate the Parkers with Congregational clergy and to recognize the house on South Beacon Street as the old reverend’s residence. The weight of all this had shaped young Ed Parker into a galloping atheist and something of a rebel.
    At Branford, he was quick to poke fun at his pious Parker and Pond forebears, whom he derided as fanatics who most likely had burned their share of witches. Dorothy, sensing his scorn for religion and God, impulsively confessed that her family had been Jews, information that Ed Parker promptly dismissed as irrelevant. He could not imagine why it concerned her.
    Aside from his disdainful attitude toward the church, he had a wild streak that proved irresistible to Dorothy. In an autobiographical story, she would recall their courtship:
She liked him immediately.... She was enormously amused at his fast, slurred sentences, his interpretations of apt phrases from vaudeville acts and comic strips; she thrilled at the feel of his lean arm tucked firm beneath the sleeve of her coat; she wanted to touch the wet, flat surface of his hair. He was as promptly drawn to her.
     
    She began calling him Eddie; he called her Dear.
    In the city, they soon fell into the habit of spending their evenings together, and now her friends at the rooming house saw little of her. Eddie was fond of the theater, not the serious dramas she enjoyed but musicals that offered bevies of scantily dressed beauties. Since he had money, they inevitably wound up dining and drinking at expensive restaurants. She did most of the dining; he did all of the drinking. In fact, he drank hugely,