Free The Last Days of Dorothy Parker by Marion Meade Page A

the children were nice to Eleanor so that she had a stroke one morning and died. Soon after came Rags and Nogi, and for a while, stupidly victorious, they had the dogs to make life worth living. There was the spring all those years ago when Papa’s brother, poor Martin, died on the Titanic. Papa was wall to wall batty after that. And then he died. Naturally, it wrecked her but then she got the job playing piano at the dance studio.
    The craziest things came floating back, such as the day when her brother passed her on the street and pretended not to know her. Even though both her brothers and her sister had died, nothing much had changed since 1907. She still saw herself as “just a little Jewish girl trying to be cute.”
    After a couple of weeks she had to stop the sessions, disappointing Wyatt. She had tried very hard to continue, but it was no use; because, quite frankly, despite her best efforts she was straining for self-deprecating things to say. What she had most enjoyed about the tapings were the hours spent with her friend. 99
    Wyatt was Gloria Vanderbilt’s fourth husband (her third, Leopold Stokowski, was fifty-eight years her senior), and everybody, Dottie included, found the new marriage baffling. Truman Capote considered her choice of Wyatt “a mystery. He certainly wasn’t like anybody’s father.” 100 Wyatt let slip to Truman that during sex the Heiress “would scream over and over, Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” (which Capote leaked to his biographer), an enticing detail that would have lent itself, had Dottie known about it, to extensive clinical analysis.
    Because the tapings had to be put aside, the Coopers decided to host a dinner party in her honor and made sure a great deal of care went into the guest list. By and by, acceptances arrived from an impressive roster of notable New Yorkers, among them several power couples – the Bennett Cerfs, the Bill Paleys, and the Martin Gabels (Dorothy Kilgallen). Dottie, excited, was also secretly irritated to learn that none of her friends would be there. The Coopers claimed that wasn’t the point – the purpose was to invite interesting people she didn’t know, ones she’d like to meet. Still, the way she saw it, her friends were not sufficiently chichi. Manufacturing an excuse to call the whole damn thing off, she said that she couldn’t come because she had nothing to wear, which was actually the case. This posed no problem to the Heiress who sent her a yellow brocade dress trimmed with seed pearls, which was size 3 but still much too large and almost reached the floor. The gift necessitated a trip to Saks to purchase sparkly slippers and handbag, whose cost made a serious dent in her budget.
    However much Dottie appreciated the Coopers’ thoughtfulness, however great her affection for the Sharecropper, she nonetheless felt out of place among all those starchy, piss-elegant rich people. In the Cooper townhouse, a long dining table had been gaily set with a red tablecloth and vases filled with elaborate flower arrangements. No detail was overlooked by Dottie, who afterward described the party to her uninvited friends. Cutting straight to the heart of the matter, she offered an expert appraisal of the expensive wine goblets. Leave it to the Heiress to do things right, she said, because there wasn’t a paper cup in sight.
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    For all her yelping about the exclusion of her people from the Coopers’ guest list, it was not really important. As a person whose roots in the city went back to another century, she had a sizable social circle and routinely saw Sid and Laura Perelman, Kate and Zero Mostel, Jack and Madeline Gilford, Heywood Hale “Woodie” Broun, actresses like June Walker, writers like Quentin Reynolds, and playwright Ruth Goetz, whose father had staged Dottie’s first play, Close Harmony , in 1924. Living in Dottie’s building with a nurse-companion was her dear friend