It's Wednesday, March 1, 2023, the first day of Women's History Month. As faithful readers of this newsletter know, we celebrate March at RCP by amplifying women's voices -- pointing to the contributions female speakers have made in America's civic and political discourse.
This morning, I'm highlighting a woman whose communication skills ranged from evocative poetry about love and Hollywood screenplays to the risqué and martini-fueled bon mots delivered extemporaneously over the famous Round Table at New York's Algonquin Hotel. I'm talking, of course, about the incomparable Dorothy Parker.
It was on this date in 1935 that nationally syndicated columnist Walter Winchell gave his vast audience a tip of the cap to Dorothy Parker in a cryptic 14-word item:
"Dorothy Parker can make up a sentence containing the word ‘horticulture,' but hardly here."
I don't know how Winchell figured that his readers would decipher that line. But what his last three words ("but hardly here") meant was that family newspapers in the Thirties shied away from repeating verbatim the one-liners Parker was known for -- mainly because they often related to sex. As best I can tell, it wasn't until the early 1960s that any publication bothered to report what Parker had actually said. The story is simple -- and as best anyone can tell, true -- but first, some background:
I'm not sure how the tradition started, but in New York's heyday as a publishing mecca, authors would celebrate their first book with a pilgrimage to The Algonquin. Perhaps this is because such luminaries as William Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, James Thurber, and Gertrude Stein frequented the bar there. In time, a group of literary friends (Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Edna Ferber, Robert Sherwood, George S. Kaufman, and Alexander Woollcott) would meet there for lunch regularly at the Round Table beside the fireplace.
They would talk and drink and exchange ideas for books and articles -- and play word games. One of them was called "make a sentence with a word." This self-explanatory diversion easily lends itself to puckish humor, the more racy the better. And few could match Dorothy Parker's salacious wit. One day the word, as Walter Winchell noted, was "horticulture." Parker's sentence? "You can lead a whore to culture, but you can't make her think." Say it aloud, if you don't get it right away. (For young readers, Parker was drawing on an old aphorism, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.")
Dorothy Parker was born in 1893 and came of age in the Roaring Twenties. She belongs to a category of early 20th-century wordsmiths revered by their devotees, but largely forgotten in popular culture. Gene Fowler, who I've written about previously, is another. Fame in the world of arts and letters can be fleeting.
But those of us who love a well-turned phrase are reluctant to let these literary lights pass unremembered into that good night. Fred Shapiro, the editor of the essential "Yale Book of Quotations," has 49 entries from Dorothy Parker. This is almost as many as Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan combined, which suggests that it's obviously too many. But if you love the written word, you'll cherish them. (My only complaint with Fred is that he has none for Fowler).
Anyway, here are a few of my favorite Dorothy Parker-isms:
--"Salary is no object," she wrote in 1928. "I want only enough to keep body and soul apart."
--"Take me or leave me; or, as is the usual order of things, both."
Those lines were published in The New Yorker, a magazine she helped get off the ground. So were these two brief passages, the first published in a review of evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson's memoir, the second in a profile Parker wrote of Ernest Hemingway:
--"It may be that this autobiography is set down in sincerity, frankness, and simple effort. It may be, too, that the Statue of Liberty is situated in Lake Ontario."
--"He has a capacity for enjoyment so vast that he gives away great chunks to those about him, and never even misses them. He can take you to a bicycle race and make it raise your hair."
Her humor could be both self-deprecating and dark. On being warned by her physician that if she didn't stop drinking she'd be dead within a month, she said, "Promises, promises!"
She was quoted late in life in the Paris Review, as saying this: "There's a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words."
Parker did both, often simultaneously. As early as 1916 she wrote a simple caption for Vogue magazine, "Brevity is the soul of lingerie."
At the same time, she was a lifelong opponent of racial injustice and a public advocate of free speech. She raised money for the Scottsboro Boys (nine black men falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama), railed against blackface in the theater as early as 1920, and expressed solicitude for Communism, all of which put her in the crosshairs of the FBI and anti-communist crusaders in Hollywood. When she died without close family or heirs, she left her estate to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., a man she'd never met. The will also said that in the event of King's death, her estate should go to the NAACP. Parker didn't have much money, but the royalties from her books and poems produce revenue for the NAACP to this day.
On June 7, 1967, Rev. King was chairing a meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta when he was informed of Parker's will. King, who had never heard of her, told his executive assistant that the bequest "verifies what I have always said, that the Lord will provide."
I don't know what Dorothy Parker would have thought of such faith, especially considering that Martin Luther King had only 10 more months to live. But I do know what she thought when two FBI agents came calling in 1951 to ask whether various friends of hers were Communists and the like. Parker was living alone except for her dog, who barked when the feds rang the doorbell and who kept yapping during the entire interview. When asked directly if she'd conspired against the United States, she told the agents, "Listen, I can't even get my dog to stay down. Do I look to you like someone who could overthrow the government?"
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
