Free The Last Days of Dorothy Parker by Marion Meade

personal mortification. The Chase , her first Hollywood assignment since being blacklisted, was an adaptation of a Horton Foote novel about brutality in a small Texas town. The job came at a painful time when she found herself consumed by the worst depression of her life, she recalled, a gush of bad feelings that had traveled with her since childhood. Director Arthur Penn, faced with a dysfunctional writer, ordered her script to be rewritten by Foote. An outstanding cast did not prevent mostly negative reviews labeling the film “in bad taste,” a jumble of violence, sensation, and clichés. 96
    Of all her disappointments, the most painful was falling in love with a man she believed a possible successor to Hammett. Blair Clark was a journalist, television producer (CBS News), and political activist twelve years younger than herself. A Harvard graduate, he was a handsome, wealthy patrician whose well-born friends numbered politicians (John F. Kennedy) and poets (Robert Lowell). There is no question he was uncommonly affectionate, with their relationship so close that they were viewed as a couple; in fact, some mistook them for lovers. A romantic Valentine’s Day poem, in 1965, was titled “Lilly Pie, Baby” and began, “I love my Lillian.” 97 Still, Clark was a divorced man who played the field and dated glamorous young women such as the newly widowed Jacqueline Kennedy. He felt no sexual attraction for Lilly.
    The more he pushed her away, the greater her obsession; she wanted, not just sex, but matrimony. Clinging to her infatuation, Lilly deducted two years from her age, grieved over his rejection, and wrote heartachingly in her diary: “Blair – broken bad.” 98
    â€¢
    That winter of 1967, Wyatt Cooper brought over a tape recorder so that Dottie could reminisce about her life. For the love of God, she had the most horrible things happen in her childhood. It wasn’t exactly Little House on the Prairie . The Rothschilds weren’t normal – just a bunch of loudmouthed lunatics; and on her mother’s side, the Marstons were Yankee terrorists who manufactured firearms. The last thing she wanted was to go on about her life, but she didn’t want to disappoint Wyatt since she knew he was hoping to get a book contract out of it.
    A mere four years before, the Sharecropper was living down the street from her in Norma Place, in somebody or other’s garage apartment, aimlessly collecting unemployment. But the kid’s life contained more plot twists than a Saturday-morning cartoon: he moved to New York and promptly married glamour girl Gloria Vanderbilt; as a result, he was currently dwelling in baronial splendor among the fat cats. He and the Heiress – whom Dottie privately called Gloria the Vth – were living in a townhouse on East Sixty-seventh Street with their two-year-old son, and another child was due in June.
    Insisting that she was seventy-three and practically in her grave, she reluctantly agreed to the tapings because, looking on the bright side, his visits would perk up her day and maybe even “give me something to live for.” Sitting on her sofa, oblivious to the nervous yapping of her poodle, she lit up a Chesterfield as she waited for Wyatt to stop fiddling with the machine. “Let’s make it gay,” she told him. “If it’s not fun, there’s no point in telling it.” Then she got started: the Jersey Shore, Woodlawn in the Bronx, Long Island, her homes on the Upper West Side where she had lived her first twenty-seven years, not forgetting the Titanic and her family’s greatest tragedy.
    It was stuff she had not spoken about, or even thought of, for more than half a century. Mother died and Papa was not right in the head afterward. On Sundays he dragged the entire family to Woodlawn so that they could talk to Eliza. Papa decided to marry a crazy bitch from the neighborhood who conversed with Jesus. None of