Dorothy Parker didn’t like movies. it he didn’t like Hollywood. And she really they didn’t like the people who ran it.
The native New Yorker—whose sharp, urban writing helped define the Roaring Twenties—couldn’t even deign to utter the words Los Angeles; she called it “out there.”
However, in 1929, at the age of 36, Parker went “out there”.
In fact, she would spend the next 35 years, off and on, in Tinseltown, writing scripts and creating brilliant dialogue for the silver screen.
As Gail Crowther puts it in her revealing new book Dorothy Parker In Hollywood (Gallery Books, out now): “It was a city that captivated her for decades and drew her back again and again.”
In fact, Parker spent many more years in Hollywood than at the famed Algonquin Round Table, where the doe-eyed young observer sharpened her poison-pen trading barbs with the rest of Manhattan’s Jazz Age literature.
And while Parker dismissed her screenplays as “cheesy,” Crowther treats them not as commercial, but as radical, empathetic, and artistic—an insight into Parker’s views on society, fame, class, race, and more.
Parker had one reason, and one reason only, for going to Hollywood: money.
She was broken.
The movies came with a three-month contract and the promise of $300 a week (or about $4,700 today). It was an offer she couldn’t refuse.
By 1929, Parker had already survived a divorce, several disastrous love affairs, an abortion and two suicide attempts.
She had two best-selling books under her belt, but no full-time job and a mountain of debt—not to mention a drinking problem.
Meanwhile, Hollywood was desperate for literary talent.
The industry’s first sound film, The Jazz Singer, caused a sensation when it debuted in 1927, and producers were scrambling to greenlight more “talking pictures.”
They needed clever writers who could create fast dialogue for them.
They had already lured F. Scott Fitzgerald, PG Wodehouse and Anita Loos (one of Parker’s enemies) out West with the promise of easy money and a pool house.
But when Parker arrived in Hollywood, she wasn’t impressed. “It all looks like it was invented by someone from the Sixth Avenue movie show,” she sniffed.
Most of all, Parker hated the job, which mostly consisted of waiting for instructions from her bosses at MGM about a script that needed extra pizzazz.
She realized that while studios wanted prestigious writers, they didn’t necessarily value their ideas, micromanaging them, discarding their drafts, and not giving credit for their contributions.
When her second contract ran out, she moved him back to New York.
Five years later, she would return.
In 1932, Parker met Alan Campbell, an actor and writer 11 years her junior, who became her second husband.
Campbell noticed that Parker needed someone to nurse her worries and take care of her finances.
She remained, as always, broken.
So in 1934, he went to Paramount and negotiated a 10-week contract as a husband-and-wife team: he would write and act for $250 a week, while Parker would get $1,000 a week to create dialogue. .
Campbell would come up with the action and the story, and Parker would yell out a zip line for him to sprinkle in the dialogue.
Their early efforts were uncredited but showed their touch.
1935’s “Mary Burns: Fugitive” had a complex female protagonist and a nuanced portrayal of gangsters, while the Depression-era conscious “Hands Across a Table” featured a fast-talking Carole Lombard as a gold digger who falls in love with a poor playboy, swept away by Parker’s well-known wit.
They received their first Oscar nomination in 1937, for A Star Is Born, still regarded as one of the most unflinching portrayals of show biz ever put on screen. (It has been remade three times, most recently in 2018 with Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga.)
While Parker grumbled about work, she partied with the Fitzgeralds, drank, burned money (the house, a farm in Pennsylvania, booze, fancy underwear), suffered two miscarriages, and threw herself into progressive causes.
She helped found the Screenwriters Guild, as well as the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League.
However, her political activism got her into trouble.
In 1951, Parker was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee and asked if she was a Communist. She wasn’t, but she was blacklisted anyway. She would never work again – even if she tried – in that city.
Parker lost her wages, the farmhouse, and so did Campbell (they divorced, remarried, separated again, and reconciled before she died in 1963 of an apparent suicide).
She returned to Manhattan in March 1964 and died of a heart attack three years later. She was 73.
Parker didn’t walk the talk of Hollywood. I think it should be: Parker didn’t want to talk about Hollywood.
However, Crowler argues that looking back at her time “there,” a broader portrait of Parker emerges. Instead of the OG literary girl, we see someone who was “subversive, political,” Crowler writes: “a fearless activist and a writer with an unresolved legacy.”
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