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Group talks ‘Dorothy Parker and Algonquin Round Table’

Gail Crowe, whose paper on Dorothy Parker was featured at the Oct. 15 meeting of the Fredonia Shakespeare Club, is pictured.

The second meeting of the 2020-21 Fredonia Shakespeare Club was held virtually on Oct. 15.

President Mary Croxton welcomed 13 members.

After a short business meeting, Gail Crowe read her paper on “Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table,” exemplifying this year’s theme of “Humor and Humorists”:

“Razors pain you,

Rivers are damp,

Acids stain you,

And drugs cause cramp.

Guns aren’t lawful,

Nooses give,

Gas smells awful.

You might as well live.”

Parker’s grim humor catapulted her into fame. Her poetry came to express the cynical spirit of the 1920s, its insistence on having fun and its pretense that there was nothing left to believe in.

Dorothy’s education had ended at the age of 14. Only once did she publicly allude to the fact that she never finished high school, when she remarked to a newspaper reporter that “Because of circumstances, I didn’t finish high school. But, by God, I read.”

After the death of her father, Dorothy Rothschild found employment at a dance school, through the only moneymaking skill she possessed – playing the piano. She was also trying to write the light verses that were immensely popular before the war.

There is no way of knowing how many verses Dorothy submitted to all the likely markets, and how many rejections she received. She had nothing to lose by sending verse to the new magazine, Vanity Fair.

In the fall of 1917, she was hired at Vanity Fair. She debuted in the April 1918 issue as New York’s only woman drama critic, filling in for P.G. Wodehouse who was on vacation.

Her first year as chief dramatic critic put her right in the thick of the influenza pandemic. She was living alone while her husband was waiting to return home from the Great War. She was 25 years old when New York started to close down due to the pandemic.

If Dorothy’s reputation as a wit can be pinpointed, it would be at this time, in her mid-20s, when she began to attract a broader, more sophisticated audience. She became the perfect fantasy of the literary life, the very embodiment of New York sophistication. As someone who did not express herself in the polite manner expected of women, Parker embodied the shift in attitudes about female behavior that began in the 1920s.

In June 1919 Dorothy had received an invitation to attend a luncheon at the Algonquin Hotel, a party hosted by two theatrical press agents to welcome Alexander Woolcott, the New York Times’s drama critic, back from the war. After the first party, Woollcott continued to lunch at “the Gonk” and invited friends to join him. It became an exclusive luncheon club.

The group was made up of people with a shared admiration for each other’s work. Outspoken and outrageous, they would quote each other freely.

The verbal dexterity around the table was enough to electrify all of Manhattan. Dorothy Parker was the undisputed “Guinevere of the Round Table.”

Dorothy’s forte was oral agility. Wicked put-downs seemed to flow effortlessly when she was there. When informed that Calvin Coolidge had died, she remarked: “How can they tell?” When asked to use the word horticulture in a sentence, Dorothy sang out “You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.” She famously said, “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.”

When the Depression had stilled the champagne corks and the clouds of war gathered again, Parker and her brand of humor were no longer in step. Eventually, she needed to earn some real money, and was lured to Hollywood, where she’d been offered a deal writing screen plays for films.

She became a Socialist and co-founded the first union for screenwriters. Through the 1930s she supported anti-Fascist causes and wrote with courage and candor about the persistent bigotry and ignorance bedeviling America.

Parker helped found the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League in 1936, which the FBI suspected of being a Communist Party front. The FBI compiled a 1,000-page dossier on her during the height of McCarthyism. Before being blacklisted, she co-wrote the script for the 1937 film A Star is Born, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Writing – Screenplay, and another Oscar nomination as well.

She died on June 7, 1967, at the age of 73, alone except for her dog. In her will, she bequeathed the bulk of her estate to Martin Luther King Jr.

Dorothy’s ashes remained unclaimed in various places, including her attorney’s filing cabinet, for 17 years. Finally, in 1988 her ashes were interred in Baltimore, at the headquarters of the NAACP.

Dorothy’s ashes were moved again just months ago, in August 2020. At the reburial in New York, passages were read from an essay that she wrote in 1928, called “My Hometown”: “London is satisfied, Paris is resigned, but New York is always hopeful. Always it believes that something particularly good is about to come off, and it must hurry to meet it.”

The pine box was lowered into the grave and covered over with dirt. Dorothy’s chosen epitaph was “Excuse My Dust.”

The Fredonia Shakespeare Club was established in 1885.

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