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

Sara Murphy, a Volney resident since her husband, Gerald, had died two years earlier.
    The person she rarely saw was Lilly. What was to be their last visit took place in March 1967, right before Lilly trooped off to the Soviet Union. There was a postcard, mailed during a stopover in Paris, in which she nostalgically referred to their long-ago visit (that would be 1937) to the city and promised to phone when she got back. In Peter Feibleman’s memoir of Hellman, he writes that the two never saw each other again after Dottie returned to New York, but the details of the Paris postcard prove otherwise. It is one of two such pieces of correspondence in Hellman’s papers; the other is an undated telegram from Lilly in Vineyard Haven to Dottie in Hollywood, wishing her a happy birthday.
    Dottie’s most devoted friend was Beatrice Stewart, a onetime Santa Barbara debutante who used to be married to Dottie’s writer pal Donald Ogden Stewart in the twenties, back when Dottie was still married to Eddie Parker. They knew each other well enough, after forty years, to put up with pretty much everything. Bea had two sons with Stewart before their divorce (in 1937), then became the third wife of Leo Tolstoy’s grandson, a U.S. citizen who had built Marineland in Florida. The marriage did not last.
    In The Ladies of the Corridor and the short story “I Live on Your Visits” appear pathologically needy mothers who smother their sons, thinly disguised portraits of Bea (embellished with a pinch of Alan’s exasperating mother, Hortense). Bea, however, had refused to connect the dots, either unable to recognize herself or perhaps had simply decided to forgive Dottie. Those works were written a dozen years ago. Now it was 1967 and both of them were alone, husbands dead or alive or lost to Karl Marx, living with their poodles, doing their best.
    Every few days or so, Dottie trudged the eight blocks to Bea’s apartment on East Eightieth Street, where they would have dinner together. Pecking at the food and smoking, she could spend an entire evening expounding on the endless indignities of her life. When it was time to leave, she would open her purse and say, “What am I going to do about taxis?” 101 A person like herself did not accept handouts, so when Bea offered a dollar or two, Dottie always said she really shouldn’t take it. Then she always did.
    She had been raised to never speak of money, but her situation by this time had grown worrisome. Royalties and permissions were steady but modest, and options for dramatizations occasional and unprofitable. There was no money for luxuries like party gowns and cabs, despite rigorous scrimping. For that matter, after buying staples – mostly, Scotch and Chesterfields – she had little left over.
    Unfortunately, taxis had become a necessity. Unsteady on her feet after several bad spills, she took special care about walking on the street in the dark. Nobody knew that her eyesight had gotten much worse. She continued to have the Times delivered, but reading it was a struggle.
    Bea scolded her. “What the devil have you done with your glasses?”
    Useless, she told her. “I can’t see anyway.”
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    Late Wednesday afternoon, June 7, 1967, a Volney desk clerk phoned Bea Stewart. “She’s gone,” he announced.
    Gone? Bea had dinner with Dottie just the other day, but there was no mention of going anywhere.
    No, no, said the clerk. A chambermaid found Mrs. Parker in her bedroom. She was dead.
    This kind of news, not normal but not all that rare in a hotel with numerous elderly occupants, was presumably broken in a professional manner. Bea, composed, replied that something had to be done about Dottie’s poodle. A dog owner herself, she told the clerk to remove Troy from the apartment. She would hurry right over to pick him up.
    When Bea got to the Volney, 6F was an apartment in transition, perfectly calm just hours