[Dorothy Parker 03] - Mystic Mah Jong Read online

  Alexander Woollcott, theatre critic, gourmand, bon-vivant, and wit extraordinaire, entered with Woodrow Wilson in tow, having retrieved my pet from Jimmy upon entering the lobby.

  Aleck, after handing me his ivory-and-sterling-headed walking stick, removed his wide-brimmed black hat with a sweeping, dramatic gesture and placed it on my head; his flowing red scarf he tossed over my arm, and his topcoat, over my sagging shoulders. The hat fell forward to rest at the tip of my nose.

  Vision impaired, I could tell Frank Pierce Adams had arrived by a glimpse of fine, spotless spats and the breathtaking fumes of a Cuban cigar.

  Best known as “FPA,” he stood dwarfed next to the corpulent Woollcott, and side by side they created the number 10. Narrow and neat in his one-hundred-dollar black suit, the newspaper columnist, a self-proclaimed modern-day Samuel Pepys, recorded daily, for the citizens of New York, the activities of our circle of friends—most notably we writers, actors, and artists of the Algonquin Round Table. Chewing on the fetid stick, he removed his homburg, fingered through his greasy comb-over, and then freed me of Aleck’s huge chapeau.

  “Still playing dress-up with your little doll, Aleck?” said FPA, tossing the inflated disk through to the bedroom alcove.

  The original Smart Aleck grabbed the nape of the little man’s collar and responded: “Quick! Call the organ grinder: Gigo, the monkey, he is found!”

  The arrival of Groucho Marx sent another wave of cigar smoke to fill my tiny apartment, and me to throw open a window.

  Harpo walked in with Gertie Lawrence, star of Oh, Kay!, the musical written by our friend George Gershwin, and on their heels, Chico Marx, a renowned ladies’ man, waltzed in with two chorus girls on his sleeves.

  Tallulah snagged Jack Barrymore and his bottle of absinthe as the party spilled out into the hallway.

  Half-an-hour later, a dozen bottles spent, amid overflowing ashtrays, naked Chinese platters, and the ever-rising pitch of laughter, Mae West arrived, the star of Sex, the risqué Broadway comedy penned by its star.

  As Mae was just released from jail after having spent ten days as a guest of the New York City Police Department on charges of obscenity, everybody wanted to hear her first-hand account of life behind bars. Sex had opened last spring, and had been seen by three-hundred-twenty-five-thousand people. Among those in attendance for multiple performances were the chief of police, federal judges and their wives, and seven members of the district attorney’s office before the theatre was raided.

  “How does it feel to be set free, Mae?”

  “Like bustin’ out of my bustier.”

  By six, the riffraff had departed, and Mr. Benchley, Aleck, FPA, Edna, and I went down to the Algonquin’s Rose Room for dinner. We assumed our favored positions at our usual table, a round table set front-and-center off the hotel’s lobby.

  Back in ’19, when Alexander Woollcott had returned from Europe, after covering the War for Stars and Stripes, newspaper cronies had thrown him a welcome-home banquet in the hotel’s big dining room, the Oak Room. Heywood Broun, Harold Ross, Robert Benchley (my editor at Vanity Fair), and Robert E. Sherwood (recently hired by the rag, and thereafter known as “Sherry”) were among the invited guests. I was writing clever copy and reviewing Broadway’s offerings for Vanity. The two Roberts and I were les enfants terrible of the magazine’s editorial staff, and most days we lunched together.

  Not wanting to leave me behind, the boys insisted that I tag along to the Woollcott luncheon. I accepted the offer and found myself elbowed in by a dozen or so hardboiled newspapermen at a long banquet table.

  Whether or not the men noticed, I was the only female present. Sitting there primly in my neat little gray dress with lace collar and wearing a girlishly wide-brimmed hat, I uttered not a word during the first hour. When I did suddenly spurt-forth a remark, I suppose it was the incongruity of my diminutive appearance in contrast with the hulking retinue among which I found myself squeezed, along with my rather whispery voice uttering a perfectly timed and unanticipated response to the gruff (though good-natured), bellowed sparring of the past hour, that turned all attention to wide-eyed little me wedged between the big cats, right and left. What I said cannot be printed, as is true of many of my most inspired observations, but six little words delivered with a deadpan expression brought peals of laughter, a thunder of foot stomping, and me into the fold. Aleck had had so much fun, he suggested weekly luncheons.

  By and by, journalists would drop in at the Algonquin’s smaller restaurant, the Rose Room, where Aleck and FPA often met for lunch several days a week, sharing news, gossip, and laughs. Aleck, the nation’s highest paid columnist and drama critic, could well afford his extravagant dinners and suppers at what was to become his favorite restaurant. Located at 44th Street off Sixth Avenue near the el train, The Gonk is a convenient distance from Broadway and the Times pressroom. Most of us couldn’t afford the buck-fifty luncheon fare. We’d munch on celery sticks from the pickle platter or a popover roll from the breadbasket that graced the table, compliments of the management, or would simply pull up a chair to shoot the breeze with Aleck and FPA while the two ate sumptuously. FPA would occasionally drop a line or two into his widely read, celebrity-driven column about this one or that one who’d stopped by at lunch with news of this or that. I’d say something droll, and the next day, five million people would know how clever I’d been the day before. I smile when I think of a story that a press agent told me: Early on, when most of us were not yet famous, theatrical agent Herman Mankiewicz, watching us congregate outside the Gonk after lunch one day, turned to his companion, pointed at us, and said, “There they go, the greatest collection of unsalable wit in America.”

  We proved him wrong.

  Within a few months, Frank Case, the hotel manager, facing a crowd-control problem at our arrival every day at one o’clock, moved a large, round table into the Rose Room, affording us more space than the little tables we’d push together and cram into. He assigned us our own waiter, Luigi, and instructed that there be placed on the table complimentary pickle platters and popovers for the raggedy friends of Woollcott and Adams. Rambunctious laughter, thunderous verbal assaults, and adolescent high-jinx were the order of the day. Our friends brought more friends—actors, novelists, musicians—and if the newcomers proved sharp-witted, they were invited to return. We were tolerated at first, and then later welcomed by Case because our publicized association was bringing tourists into the hotel. Frank Case knew there was no greater public attraction than a room full of celebrities, our at-times quarrelsome, high-spirited jocularity notwithstanding. And to give best advantage for celebrity-peepers, our table was placed so that it could be seen from anywhere in the lobby.

  So, as we gathered again on the October evening in question for supper after the cocktail hour in my rooms, most of us having temporarily parted company at lunch, I tried to steer the conversation away from the World Series games that had been the October obsession of the men at the table, especially Heywood Broun, sports reporter, drama critic, and jazz maniac. If I could find an opening, I hoped to plead my case. There was a remote chance, I speculated, that somebody might jump at the prospect of attending the séance tonight with Jane. I thought, I must carefully sell that prospect as an opportunity, not a favor.

  As Aleck tore into yet another dinner roll, a useful sponge for the short ribs gravy, I endured Heywood’s play-by-play narrative of games one and two at Yankee Stadium while nursing my tomato bisque. If he’d only pause for breath, I sighed, noticing the striking resemblance between his facial features and the as-yet-untouched baked sweet potato resting on his plate. Both man and spud wore a rather puckered expression. Broun’s fork broke through the potato skin and I turned away with a wince.

  Aleck was eagerly attending to the application of a tub of sour cream upon his baked potato as Heywood droned on about rookie Lou Gehrig driving in the winning run for game one’s six-to-three Yankee victory at Yankee Stadium. Still at home for game two, the Yankee
s took a beating from Grover Alexander despite the efforts of three pitchers—Urban Shocker, Bob Shawkey, and Sam Jones—in the Cards’ six-to-two victory.

  Aleck was well into his second piece of pecan pie and third cup of coffee, and I was dragging the last bit of chicken fricassee around the plate with a fork, as the men debated the strategies of game three: how the Bambino was off his game, and how St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Jesse Haines pitched all nine innings to sweep in a four–nothing shutout for the underdogs.

  Marc Connolly, slump shouldered, bowling-ball-bald Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and Mama’s Boy (in his late thirties, he still lives with dear old Mom), turned to address his sometime-collaborator, George S. Kaufman, newsman, playwright extraordinaire, and possessor of a substantial black pompadour topping his six-foot-plus meticulously tailored frame: “I’m going to games six and seven, George, so forget about getting any work done on those days.”

  The two men were collaborating on a new play. In spite of his successes, Marc had the reputation of being a chronic procrastinator—unlike George, who led a disciplined life on a strict schedule.

  “No skin off my head,” said George, palming over his shiny mane, a deliberate taunt at his bald collaborator. “Edna and I will work on Royal Family.”

  “Not on your life,” said Edna. “I’ve every intention of playing hooky, too! I’m not missing those games!”

  “So this is what becomes of literary successes!” said George, referring to the spectacular sales of Edna’s novel, Showboat, which had hit the stands during the summer. “I defer to Murderer’s Row,” he added, referring to the moniker of the Yankees’ lineup.

  Heywood fished out a sheaf of tickets from his breast pocket, slapped the white rectangles across his palm for effect, and then, fanning them out like a hand of playing cards, waved the buck-and-a-quarter tickets through the air.

  “I’ve got press-box seats for game six, and if necessary, game seven, and I didn’t forget about my friends,” he said, a smile crumpling his sweet-potato features to match his sorry togs.

  “Whoopee,” I said, flatly.

  “Don’t you want to go, Dottie?” asked Edna.

  “What, to watch that fat man try to make it around the bases?” I replied, and then, catching Aleck’s bovine glare as he came up for air from his immersion in baked Alaska with Morello cherries, I added, “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  That’s when I found the opening I’d been waiting for: “And you know, friends of mine, I’d like to give any and all of you the really swell opportunity to spend this evening in a very special, most enjoyable and entertaining way—”

  “No!”

  “Forget it!”

  “. . . Plans . . . .”

  “. . . Rather chew glass . . .”

  I looked around the table—all eyes down at their plates.

  “Aleck?” I pleaded.

  “Play to review,” he spat out before re-immersing himself in the pool of cream.

  “Et tu, Brute?” I whined at Mr. Benchley.

  He’d made the mistake of glancing up at me from over the rim of his raised coffee cup.

  “Oh, not those big, pleading, brown peepers; not that doe-eyed, waif-lost-in-the-woods look!” said Mr. Benchley, with demonstrative effect.

  “Pul-leeeaaase?”

  “Bob can’t be bothered, either, Dottie. I know all about the spiritual quest you are embarking on with our Jane,” said Aleck, before smugly slurping down the melted remains of his dessert. “Bob’s got the play to review.”

  “No, I don’t,” said Mr. Benchley. “I agree with Mrs. Parker, with what she said last week about these tiresome plays,” he prefaced. “Got me thinking.”

  Ahhh, I thought, Mr. Benchley is referring to my distaste for a trend in Theatre that has become a preoccupation of our society: forbidden fruit!

  Stirred by the stern echo of the past, vestiges from the staid Victorian morality of the previous century, is a new trend in melodrama, in which all sex, except wedded union, is verboten!

  These tedious displays are pathetic morality plays. What the people who put on these shows know, but are loath to admit, is that they have created a venue that exploits “dirty” sex for the rapt, sex-starved, voyeuristic public who flood to these ditties at a buck-fifty a head!

  A decade ago we suffered through plays depicting feminine vulnerability. A maiden of seventeen, usually called “Meg” or “Peg,” has guarded her virginity for the man she hopes to someday meet and marry. Virginity in jeopardy, her nubile charms a bargaining chip to save her mother and siblings from homelessness and/or starvation, she must marry the landlord; or perhaps it’s the blackmailer threatening defamation of the family name, or worse, the ruination of the young fellow she loves. Virginity is the prize taken from her by the Big Bad Wolf!

  Once in a long while, that Virgin-at-Risk is really a promiscuous little slut who sets out to be the nemesis of any vulnerable man who crosses her path. I’d speculated that those shoddy pieces, written by men of course, were simply frustrated statements in direct response to Women’s Suffrage: Women are only as strong and as good as their hold on chastity.

  But these days we’re drowning in nightly adultery.

  Nothing new about adultery—it’s the old story starring Bathsheba, Hester Prynne, and Emma Bovary, and now adopted by Broadway.

  Attached to these plays, like a flea on a dog, is a social statement that everyone ignores while relishing the dirty sex. Then, damn! A bite! A paw raises to scratch an ear, an alert to the audience of the immorality of our times! A tail points accusatorially toward too much booze, too much money, and too much easy virtue. The moral is little more than an annoying itch, but the consequences of scratching are deadly. As the conflicted cur chases her tail in circles, the self-righteous matron and stiff-collared banker in the audience tsk-tsk away, relishing the exhilarating chaos of forbidden romance. They know the spouse that strays is easily tempted by too much jazz, too much booze, and too little clothing. Three acts later, fully infested, then dipped, and duly shorn, the adulterer(ess) always sees the error of his or her way!

  Sex, sex, sex! God help us all . . . .

  During the late teens of this new twentieth century, when mothers, wives, and sisters worked in industry while their men fought the Great War in Europe, new attitudes of independence arose along with the victory of long-fought-for freedoms. With the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment came more liberties: the raising of hems, the uninhibited jazz of Harlem, the free-footed Charleston, bobbed hair, flung-off corsets, and bathtub gin. Women are exploring new interests and careers (for which until just a few years ago only men need apply), and rethinking their roles in our modern society. We’ve upset the apple cart, as they say. Women can shape their own destinies, now, and are no longer subject to the petty whims of fathers and husbands. Why, my friend Jane Grant is the most modern of my generation. When she married the irascible Harold Ross, she kept her maiden name, relinquished domestic husbandry, retained her job as columnist at the New York Times, and cut her hair as short as Mr. Benchley’s. Ruth Hale, a champion of women’s rights, does not appreciate being referred to as “Mrs. Heywood Broun.” And although both Jane and Ruth love their husbands dearly, the war to obtain an equal footing with their men, both at home and in public, is an ongoing one.

  And so, many male playwrights, observing the new freedoms, take issue and feel threatened with the powerful metamorphosis of the modern woman. Why else would they write such tripe, pointing out the error of our ways, depicting us as immoral, and trying to re-suppress us?

  I had recently voiced my low opinion of these stage offerings to Mr. Benchley. Cleaned up and printable, substituting “spread” and “fungi” for more sexually explicate terms, “I repudiate all those loathsome melodramas that have spread their fungi all over the Great White Way!”

  “But you’ve a play to review tonight, Bob,” objected Aleck, brows meeting, dark eyes glinting, beady and sharply critical and magnified by
the thick lenses of his cheaters.

  “I’d rather not review that play, Aleck.”

  Mr. Benchley solemnly rose from his chair, and with his fork, struck bell-like tones upon his water glass, a call for attention.

  “I am now definitely ready to announce that sex, as a theatrical property, is as tiresome as the Old Mortgage, and that I don’t ever want to hear it mentioned again.I’m sick of Victorian parents, and I don’t care if all the little girls in all sections of the United States get ruined or want to get ruined or keep from getting ruined.” He ranted on: “All I ask is: Don’t write plays about it and expect me to sit through them!”

  “Hear, hear!” yelled Heywood, standing to applaud.

  “Where? Where?” bellowed a voice from across the room.

  Groucho Marx entered from the lobby, followed by Harpo and Chico. They hovered over our plates like a swarm of locusts.

  “What? What?” demanded Chico, breaking a crust off of Heywood’s apple pie.

  “Mr. Benchley has sworn off virtue, chastity, and ruined maidens,” I said, slapping Harpo’s hand as he tried to grab a cherry from off my cherries jubilee.

  “I swore off the first two,” said Groucho, “but I’m all for the last ones!”

  “Oh, yeah? Well I swore off the last ones, and now I’m stuck with the first two,” said Chico.

  “Oh, yeah?” said Harpo, “Well, I don’t swear, period!”

  “Where’s Zeppo?” asked Aleck.

  “Not here!” said Chico.

  “Stepping out with a maiden, name of ‘Rosie,’” said Groucho. “Whether she’s ruined or not—?”

  “We don’t know!” chimed in everybody, with a round of hearty laughter.

  “You mean you’ll go to the séance with Jane?” I asked Mr. Benchley, stroking the fine wool of his suit coat.

  He removed my hand, one finger at a time, and examined tips and nails. “You’ve been in the honey pot, Miss Stickyfingers!”

  “Oh, sorry, Fred,” I said, calling him by the pet name I’d adopted for him. He was right; my fingers were sticky. I stuck a corner of my cloth napkin into my water glass and proceeded to wipe away the remnants of honey cake I’d picked off of his plate when he wasn’t looking.