Dorothy Parker was an elusive character. When her friend Wyatt Cooper wrote an essay in the July 1968 issue of Esquire called “Whatever You Think Dorothy Parker Was Like, She Wasn’t,” his headline perfectly captured Parker’s ability to slip out of reach just when you think you’ve got her. This was one feature of writing my latest book, Dorothy Parker in Hollywood, that I found particularly surprising yet enjoyable. I spent three years chasing a ghost who would seemingly disappear into thin air whenever I got too close.
Although she is best known for wisecracking her way through extended boozy lunches at the Algonquin Hotel, in Manhattan, when I began researching Parker, an entirely different character emerged. She was a serious and dedicated political activist. She was a Hollywood screenwriter for almost 30 years, working on a number of major films, including the original A Star Is Born (1937) and Hitchcock’s Saboteur (1942). She was nominated for two Academy Awards. She lived in huge houses in Beverly Hills and partied with the stars. She loved knitting. She yearned to be a mother but never became one. She owned a farm in Pennsylvania. There were even rumors that she had a tattoo. In fact, there were many rumors, and this often added to her air of elusiveness.
There were always leads—exciting leads—that suggested I was about to discover something that Parker had produced. In January 1959, she appeared on Open End, a TV show hosted by David Susskind, with fellow guests Truman Capote and Norman Mailer (the latter not inaccurately described by Parker as “that awful man who stabbed his wife”). The promise of viewing this footage was an exciting one—a chance to examine her mannerisms, her interactions with others, how she responded to questions, her clothes, and so forth.
Yet weeks of searching, with the help of film historians, finally revealed that all of the Open End episodes from 1958 to 1966 had been erased. From those years, only 10 episodes survived. Parker’s interview is not one of them. No known copy exists.
At one point in his Esquire article, Wyatt Cooper reveals that he recorded 12 hours of interviews with Parker on reel-to-reel tapes for an autobiography that never happened. So I decided to try to track down the tapes. After all, 12 hours is a lot of audio.
When Cooper died, in 1978, his estate passed into the hands of his wife, Gloria Vanderbilt. And when Vanderbilt died, in 2019, her estate passed into the hands of her son Anderson Cooper. An e-mail exchange with Anderson revealed that he had looked for the tapes to no avail.
So where are they? Were they destroyed? Will they enter the realm of literature’s greatest mysteries, like Sylvia Plath’s missing journals and Walter Benjamin’s suitcase?
This is not all. The Special Collections Research Center at the University of Michigan holds a large number of letters in the papers of Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell, her husband. A mid-coronavirus-lockdown scanning session by the wonderful archivists there revealed that all the letters were written by Campbell. Parker’s side of the correspondence is missing in its entirety.
From time to time she appears, phantom-like, as Campbell quotes something she wrote to him or answers a question she has asked. But once again she is silent. We do not know where her letters are, or even if they still exist.
If this sounds frustrating, it isn’t. As a biographer, silences can be revealing. And there are ways to circumnavigate these silences, too. Secondary archives are a rich source of information, where, for example, neighbors describe in minute detail Parker’s day-to-day life, from what time she woke up to what she ate for breakfast.
Memoirs recall the role Parker played in other people’s lives, notably her film-studio adventures with fellow writer Sid Perelman and her partying with director and playwright Joshua Logan (of South Pacific). Newspaper reports mention what events she attended, almost always for left-wing causes such as raising funds during the Spanish Civil War. Gossip columns obsessed over her salary and noted which Hollywood friends she invited round for dinner. (It was usually those who shared her political beliefs, such as Fredric March and James Cagney, and those who simply went wild, like Errol Flynn.)
Even Parker’s extensive F.B.I. file, which was compiled when her left-wing sympathies came to light, places her in certain historical and cultural moments, informing us where she was living and when, and with whom she was meeting. One interview carried out by an F.B.I. agent describes Parker’s physical demeanor, how she was small, dark-haired, and appeared to be very nervous when questioned.
So, despite Parker’s elusiveness, through all these sources, she flares to life, momentarily appearing from her shroud of silence. These are the moments that I relished, when Parker flickered into view and I was able to hear her, loud and clear.
Gail Crowther is the author of Three-Martini Afternoons at the Ritz: The Rebellion of Sylvia Plath & Anne Sexton and The Haunted Reader and Sylvia Plath
