Dorothy Parker did not like movies. She did not like Hollywood. And she really did not like the people who ran it.
The native New Yorker — whose witty, urbane writing helped define the Roaring Twenties — couldn’t even deign to utter the words Los Angeles; she called it “out there.”
Yet in 1929, at the age of 36, Parker went “out there.”
In fact, she would spend the next 35 years, on and off, in Tinseltown, sprucing up scripts and churning out sparkling 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 town that captured her for decades and repeatedly drew her in.”
In fact, Parker spent many more years in Hollywood than at the famed Algonquin Round Table, where the young gimlet-eyed observer sharpened her poison pen trading barbs with the rest of Manhattan’s Jazz Age literati.
And while Parker dismissed her movie scripts as “fluff,” Crowther treats them not as commercial drek but as radical, empathetic and artful — a mirror into Parker’s views of society, fame, class, race and more.
Parker had one reason, and one reason only, for going to Hollywood: money.
She was broke.
The movies came calling with a three-month contract and the promise of $300 a week (or around $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 bestselling books under her belt, but no full-time job and a mountain of debt — not to mention an alcohol problem.
Hollywood, meanwhile, 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 smart writers who could create snappy dialogue for them.
They had already lured F. Scott Fitzgerald, P.G. Wodehouse and Anita Loos (one of Parker’s nemeses) out West, with the promise of easy money and a house with a pool.
But when Parker arrived in Hollywood, she was unimpressed. “It all feels as if it had been invented by a Sixth Avenue peep-show man,” she sniffed.
Most of all, Parker hated the work, which mostly consisted of waiting for directions from her bosses at MGM about a script that needed extra pizzazz.
She realized that while the studios wanted prestige writers, they didn’t necessarily value their ideas, micromanaging them, throwing out their drafts, and failing to give credit to their contributions.
The second her contract ended, she hightailed it 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 who would nurse her hangovers and look after her finances.
She remained, as ever, broke.
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 a whopping $1,000 a week to create dialogue.
Campbell would come up with the action and story, and Parker would shout zippy one-liners for him to sprinkle into the dialogue.
Their early efforts were uncredited, but displayed their touch.
“Mary Burns: Fugitive,” from 1935, had a complex female protagonist and a nuanced portrayal of gangsters, while the class-conscious Depression era screwball “Hands Across a Table,” featured a fast-talking Carole Lombard as a gold-digger who falls in love with an impoverished playboy, sizzled with Parker’s signature wit.
They got their first Oscar nomination in 1937, for “A Star Is Born,” still considered 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 complained about work, she partied with the Fitzgeralds, drank, burned through money (houses, a farm in Pennsylvania, booze, fancy lingerie), suffered two miscarriages, and threw herself into progressive causes.
She helped launch the Screen Writers Guild as well as the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League.
Yet her political activism got her in trouble.
In 1951, Parker was called upon by the House of Un-American Activities Committee and asked if she was a communist. She wasn’t, but she was blacklisted anyway. She would never — though she would try — work in that town again.
Parker lost her paychecks, the farmhouse and Campbell too (they divorced, remarried, broke up again and reconciled before he died in 1963 from an apparent suicide).
She moved back to Manhattan in March 1964, and died of a heart attack three years later. She was 73.
Parker did not walk to talk about Hollywood. “It was a horror to me when I was there and it’s a horror to look back on now,” she said late in life.
Yet Crowler argues that by looking at her time “out there,” a more expansive portrait of Parker emerges. Instead of the OG literary it girl, we see someone who was “subversive, political,” Crowler writes: “a fearless activist and a writer with an unresolved legacy.”
