Stuff You Should Know - Who was Dorothy Parker, really?

Episode Date: December 20, 2022

She was known for her quick wit and sharp tongue. But she was also a poet, screenwriter and activist. Tune in today to learn what outside her "vicious circle."See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Munga Shatikler and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too.

Just a Skyline drive on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too and this is Stuff You Should Know, yeah. All right, what are you laughing at, Chuck? You made your first joke right out of the gate. What was it? You know, you just did it.

I'm not going to do it. Oh, the little jazz hands? Yeah, that's what I pictured. That was not a joke. I was dead serious. Oh, all right. Speaking of jazz, Chuck, how about that jazz age? Oh, look at you.

Dalthy paka. So you requested this one, Livia helped us out with it, what, what, why, what? I have no idea why Dorothy Parker popped into my brain. There wasn't anything, I'd seen the movie a long time ago. What, the Dorothy Parker story? Yeah, Dorothy Parker in the Vicious Circle was the name of the movie. Great Alan Rudolph film starring Jennifer Jason Lee, JJL as Dorothy Parker. Great cast rounded it out, Cable Scott, Matthew Broderick, others.

Wow, Cable Scott was this 93, 92? It was not quite that old, but it was, I think it was late nineties or early aughts. Although he was just in something I saw recently. Cable Scott was? Yeah, he's in like a Marvel movie or something, I think. Oh, okay. Is he a good guy or a bad guy? I think, well, I think he's a bad guy.

That's sad. I like Cable Scott, though. You know that's George C. Scott's son, right? I did not know that for real. Yeah. One of those, I think that somehow that's not the most common knowledge, despite having this name and profession. If I didn't know, it's not common knowledge.

He doesn't really look like him, so. Not at all. Yeah. I have no idea why Dorothy Parker popped into my head or really don't. So there it is. It's kind of understandable because I'm trying to figure out how to describe her. Dorothy Parker is one of those very rare people who was so witty, that that is what she's remembered for.

She worked prolifically through prohibition, basically through the 20s to the early 30s, and apparently basically in step with it. And then that was it, like her writing really fell off after that. She did some screenwriting, but her body of work is not super extensive. If you asked her, it wasn't that great. But she was so witty and so just sharp and funny that she just became a literary legend because of it. Yeah.

I think this quote from the New York Times kind of says it all. Most writers are known for the works they leave behind. Dorothy Parker is best known for having lunch. And I resist, I'm not going to compare her to people these days that are famous without really having done much because that's a different category. She was a writer and she was a very talented writer. She just wasn't extraordinarily prolific. I don't think she loved to write from what I've gathered.

Like I can't crawl into her head, but all the stuff I've read, it didn't seem like it was her favorite thing in the world, like she was a poet, but she wouldn't even call them poems. She called them verses. She didn't know it. Yeah. She was always kind of undercutting her own work, I think, in a self-deprecating way, which was maybe just sort of part of the shtick of being Dorothy Parker.

Well, I read an Esquire article from 1968 written by Wyatt Cooper, who's Anderson Cooper's dad. Oh, okay. Well, I think whatever you know about Dorothy Parker is wrong. Okay. Something along those lines. Yeah. Anyway, it's on the internet.

I'm so unsure of yourself. Really good. Yeah. There's like a bunch of ellipses in there. Yeah. In the title. But he kind of pegged it as she had that same kind of fear of inadequacy that any writer has.

Yeah. But hers just got worse and worse to the point where it paralyzed her and she just couldn't write any longer. Wow. Yeah. She also was quoted as saying she would write five words and then change seven. Yeah. Which in and of itself is a great line, which is what she's known for.

Yeah. Known for humdingers, zingers, one-liners. Humzingers. Yeah. And that whole quote about having lunch is a reference to her membership in the Algonquin Roundtable, which was basically a lunch bunch of these great literary minds all coming together in the Algonquin Hotel to have lunch. And it became really famous and really beloved.

And she's probably the most famous of that whole group. Right. And that is the vicious circle of the movie title. It was also called the Vicious Circle. Yeah. The Algonquin Roundtable was, right? Yeah. And it was named because they were all having lunch one day and I'm sure someone nearby

said, look at them. That is a vicious circle. That was great. So write that down. Hopefully we'll be able to get across kind of what we're trying to say here because this is going to be one of the most challenging episodes ever because we have to get across why she was so, why she's worth doing an episode on. You know, it's more like other people can be like, oh, well, they figured out the double

helix of DNA or, you know, they invented the race car or something like that. She was kind of a short lived writer who had a really great wit and like we have to flesh it out more than that. All right. You seem doubtful. You're not saying what did she ever do that was so great, right? No. I'm questioning our ability to get across why she was so great.

That's my trepidation. Okay. Well, I mean, she would like if she was alive today, she would be the person that was most well known for like Twitter. Oh, yeah. She would be good at that. She'd be really good at that. All right.

So let's jump back in her life. She was born in down the shore in New Jersey to she was born Dorothy Rothchild. This makes me immediately sidetracked quickly. Her nickname was Dot or Dottie. And I cannot hear the name Dottie without thinking of one of my favorite comedy bits of all time standup bits, which is Gary Goldman's bit on abbreviating the States. Have you ever seen that? No.

I don't know who Gary Goldman is. Goldman, G-U-L-M-A-N. He's really tall. He's like six, six. He's a comedian. Okay. But just everyone should, but you especially because you like stand up, just go after this and find Gary Goldman's state abbreviations bit because it is fantastic.

And there's a character in the bit named Dottie. So always think of that. But she was born in 1893 to a father who was Jewish. He was in the garment district. He worked in the garment district, Henry Rothchild, and her mother was Scottish American. Her name was Eliza. And like I said, she was born down the shore of New Jersey, but mainly grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Right. And she had a lot of tragedy surrounding her. Yeah. But her misanthropy was chalked up to this early just bout of tragedy. Misanthropy, huh? Yeah. Okay. What would you say?

Misanthropy? No. All right. So she just kind of adopted this persona, which is, you would call it kind of emo today a little bit, but like a really funny, sharp emo person, maybe a little bit, especially when she was young, she described herself as a plain disagreeable child with stringy hair and a yender right poetry. And that tragedy began when she was four years old when her mom died.

Yeah. Apparently that was just, that just shaped her immediately, which something like that will. She also said their father was terrible to her, possibly physically abusive, although some of the biographers of hers aren't sure if that's true. And Livia points out that that's a long running ongoing thing about whether stuff she said about herself was true or not. And then the converse of that, she frequently denied saying some of the quips that were

attributed to her. Yeah. It's pretty interesting. Like she seemed like the kind of person that would, she loved to spin a yarn. And if the facts were fudged because it made for a better story, then that's fine. Right. That makes it difficult to parse out the person from the persona. And that was certainly the case.

Like you said, some people aren't so sure about the dad. She apparently also had a pretty evil stepmother situation. She referred to her stepmother as the housekeeper, which I think is pretty funny. I also saw she would call her, hey you. Hey you. Stepmom died in 1903. So Dorothy was still just nine years old and also had an uncle that was apparently pretty close to the family that died on the Titanic.

Her dad died shortly thereafter. And if I do the math right, I think she was like 19 or 20 when she was basically kind of, seems like left alone in the world for the most part. Although she did have a sister, but I didn't see much about how close they were. I didn't even see that she had a sister. Yeah. There was a sister in there somewhere. So when her dad died, her dad was very prosperous as a garment in the garment industry.

There was her uncle, but apparently he did not invest wisely. And so when he died, he didn't leave much for her. So that was the first time that she had to go get a job. And her first job was playing piano in a dance school, which is kind of a cool first job. But apparently she hated it because it was like actual work. Right. Yeah. That's the one thing that may be a through line here is that I don't think she loved

to work super hard. She did not. She said she doesn't like rich people, but she thought she'd be a darling at it. Right. Exactly. Things changed for her in 1914. She sold her first poem to Vanity Fair Magazine. It was called Any Porch.

And this sort of began her career as kind of a high society satirist. Paid 12 bucks for that poem, which is about 300 bucks today, which was a lot of money for a poem. Even today. She'd get $300 for a poem. And then a gentleman came into her life named, a very formative figure named Frank Crowninshield. And he said, hey, I like the cut of your jib. Pretty talented writer.

I'm going to give you a full time staff job here at Vogue Magazine and I'm going to pay you 10 bucks a week, which is not bad pay at the time, even though apparently Parker said she spent most of that on her housing, like eight of 10, right to her room and board. Yeah. So Crowninshield, he was the editor of Vanity Fair, but Vogue was like a sister magazine to Vanity Fair, I believe. Yeah. They were all conning-assed publications.

So he was, or she was Crowninshield's protege from what I understand. And she went to work for a woman named Edna Woodman, or woman, yeah, woman, Chase. She was a female editor in chief, which was very rare at the time. And Dorothy Parker got her first job writing captions and she would get bored easily because captions were supposed to be pretty normal and boring. Is prosaic the correct word? I don't know. Okay.

Let's just go with prosaic because it seems like it's the right word. So she very quickly started to try to slip in, you remember when we used to write for How Stuff Works and we tried to slip in hilarious things into, like, cut lines, the captions under photos. Oh dude, I thought of us a lot during this because we did that all the time to try and make things a little more interesting, and I think both of us had editors that were constantly saying like, what are you doing? You can't do that.

So she was doing basically the same thing. So she became kind of a thorn in Edna Chase's side, but not enough that she was fired at this point. She actually was, she was promoted basically after PG Woodhouse, the humorists stopped being the drama critic for Vanity Fair, they turned to Dorothy Parker to become that, to fill that role, to review plays, and she was only 24 at the time. And by that time, she'd been married a year to a guy named Edwin Pond Parker, the second stockbroker.

Yeah. He was, he enlisted in the army as a lot of guys did back then, Wilton Fault in World War One. And like you said, when she was 24, she was this play or theater reviewer and was known sort of for doing the same thing in the reviews of making sort of biting cutting remarks about high society. One kind of funny one, she was writing about a play and she said, not even the presence in the first night, audience of Mr. William Randolph Hearst could spoil my evening.

So a lot of great punchlines. She was pretty good at like setting someone up to think they may be getting a compliment and then cutting their legs up from under them. That was actually her whole thing. Like she was supposedly fairly soft spoken, kind of quiet. You might even call her shy at first, but also really complimentary, like really kind. And then she would kind of build you up until you weren't even paying attention anymore because you were just so drunk on the praise she was giving you.

And then bam, she cut your legs out. You probably didn't even notice, but everyone else in the conversation listening in is having a good laugh. That was her whole jam. And it's really important to say her purpose wasn't to be mean. There was a real purpose to her, her like biting criticism. And it was usually a bullying, self gratification, acceptance of praise, worship from the lower classes.

Like that's why she didn't like high society types. She also didn't like feigned graciousness, like high society types who were so nice that they gave their housekeeper an extra hour to go home early one week and now they feel really great about themselves. Those kind of things, like just all the stuff that just kind of makes somebody gross that she was surrounded by in her life. That is what really kind of drove her the craziest and that is what she would attack. And it didn't matter who you were, didn't matter what your station in life.

So I don't believe she punched down very often. You were subject to that criticism if you kind of allowed yourself to behave that way. Yeah. She probably would have been a standup comedian today now that I think about it. There's a little bit of Ms. Maisel in this, but that wasn't really a job that women had back then. It wasn't a job period. I don't think at the time.

There was one other criticism I want to point out that she wrote in, I don't remember where she wrote it, but she was criticizing I think an actress in a play and she said that as a source of entertainment, she ranks somewhere between a sprig of parsley and a single ice skate. That's just good stuff. That's not even, it's just smart, you know, like who would think of a single ice skate as conveying like just how not fun something is. Like it was just brilliant stuff and she was full of that.

Yeah, she pushed too far though as people like that often do, lost her job in 1920. I think it was sort of a you insulted the wrong person kind of thing. There was a column where she was reviewing a play. She accused the playwright basically of plagiarizing himself and then what the real deal was though, the real sort of last straw was there was an actor, an actress named Billy Burke in there who was criticized and sort of likened to this risque vaudeville star, which was not like a good, you know, comparison to make at the time. But that actress was the wife of Florence Ziegfield, who put a lot of money into advertisements

with Vanity Fair and a good friend of Nast of Condé Nast, and that was kind of it. So apparently she got the news at the Plaza Hotel and as legend has it, she ordered the most expensive dessert on the menu then left and took it with her. So I don't even think she took it with her. I think she left before it came just long enough to waste it. Oh, I saw that she took it with her. Oh, did she? Awesome.

So that's even better. There's one other thing I want to point out about her criticism or two other things, Chuck. First of all, after she was fired from Vanity Fair, she that was not the end of her credit career, like she went on to be a book reviewer for the New Yorker. But her criticism, her columns, she had no training whatsoever. She didn't take any kind of classes or education on criticism, like technique and theory and all that stuff. All of her reviews were just totally subjective, but she was so funny and so entertaining and

so insightful that she became like an instant sensation. And then the other thing I want to say about it from what I can tell is that her criticism was not always negative, that if you actually produced like a really good book or something like that, she could use that same wit for praise as well. And I read that there was some book that she reviewed. She was saying, to say of it here as a magnificent novel is rather like gazing into the Grand Canyon and saying, well, well, well, quite a slice. Yeah.

She's a legitimate critique or she, she put forth legitimate critique. Right. And if it was praise, it was praise. If it was negative, which I think it more often was, it was negative. She didn't like crud. Well, I don't even think it more often was negative even. I think that's the stuff that gets pulled because she's Dorothy Parker. I see.

That's a really good point, Chuck. I think you might be right. I don't think they were like, hey, this is supposed to be a real cherd. Let's put Parker on it. She'll just rip him a new one and it'll be great. I hate that word so much. Cherd. Yes.

It's terrible. It's terrible. It's even worse because it's spelled with a U. It looks bad on paper in print. Yeah. And it even evokes the color brown somehow. Somehow. Yeah. I think we should take a break.

We should revisit that word. No. Okay. All right. We'll be right back. I'm Mangesh Chitikula and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking.

You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down.

It doesn't look good, there is a risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Mr. Turd. So when she got fired from Vanity Fair, there were two employees, Robert Benchley and Robert E. Sherwood, who were such friends with her that they actually quit and protest.

Because apparently she wasn't wrong with her criticism that got her fired. And she was just fired because she insulted a very high-ranking friend of the publisher. So they actually quit and protest. I mean, that is to inspire a couple of people to quit because you were fired is really saying something. It's almost like a trope, you know? But if you stop and think about it in reality, somebody being like, so long paycheck, so long study work, this person should not have been fired and I'm taking my talents away

from you because you don't deserve them because you fired this person. That's a really big deal. If someone fired you, I would quit. Thank you. Same to you. All right. Deal. Okay.

You hear that, everybody? You hear that, bosses? Yeah. Hopefully we don't get tested, but yeah. We would have been fired by this point if we were going to at all. You would think so, right? But hey, there's always the future. So now we get to the point where we can talk about the vicious circle again, which was

the roundtable generally lunches, although they had lunched for many hours at the Algonquin Hotel, which I believe is still there in New York, right? I think so, yeah. And still the Algonquin. Yeah. I want to stay there some time. I'm going to check that. But it's now the Algonquin by Hyatt.

Right. Oh, that's funny and probably true. So this was a period of time over about a decade or so that first started in June of 1919 when they all got together for lunch to welcome home their friend, Alexander Wolcott from his World War I correspondence job. They roasted them. They got drunk. They had a good time and they said, hey, let's come back tomorrow.

And we don't have to have a special occasion to get together and drink scotch at lunch. And it kind of became sort of a Studio 54 booth scene where you see Mick Jagger with Andy Warhol and Mickey Dolens from the Monkees and a painter. It was people from all different walks of life, like Harpo Marx might be there. Yeah. There might be a fiction writer like Edna Ferber or a sports writer like Haywood Brown or columnist or screenwriters or playwrights. And it was just like it kind of became the cool, like a certain kind of cool crowd was

hanging out at this round table. Yeah. Especially it was especially considered cool among the intelligentsia. Yeah. Right? Smart literary types, generally. So it became like a worshipful gathering and people knew about it because a lot of these people were columnists in like, you know, the New York Times and later on the New Yorker

and like these big publications and they would write about like a quip that Dorothy Parker said. Apparently like she would say something at lunch one day and it'd be in the New York Times the next day. I think Wyatt Cooper was the one that said she was probably the most quoted woman of the 1920s because she was so funny, but also because she was in a position to be so exposed. But the Algonquin round table, the fact that it became the stuff of legend, the more legendary it came, I think the more kind of disgruntled by the whole idea Dorothy Parker became.

I think if Dorothy Parker heard that, she would say, name one other woman who was even quoted in the 1920s, dear. Oh man. And I go, they became so sort of popular and famous just for these lunches in this round table that the manager of the hotel, Mr. Frank Case, started seating them in a very sort of public area in the rose room. So people could just kind of come by and watch them have lunch and talk smack to each other. Yes.

So they, like you said, like these lunches would also go, by the way, I'm going to say Greta Garbo. How about that? Oh, great. Sure. Okay. These lunches would turn into dinner and in very short order after their initial meeting in June of 1919, prohibition started so that scotch, they were sipping turned into bootleg

scotch that they had to kind of surreptitiously drink, but they were all super drunk from lunch onward and they would go to people's houses and have cocktails afterward. They would vacation together. They became like really good friends. It sounds fantastic. It does sound fun for sure. But even more important, I would say, is that a lot of them came to collaborate. It was like a really productive group and so not only did some like get together and

write like screenplays together or plays, they would actually use one another as characters in their books or their plays like Alexander Walcott. He was like the stock, a cervic course character who was kind of the center of the man who came to dinner. It was based on him. There are plenty of characters in different plays that you never heard of that were based on Dorothy Parker. They just used each other as inspiration in addition to collaborating with one another

directly. And as you would think, Dorothy Parker also sort of undercut the importance of the whole Algonquin vicious circle. She was quoted as saying that round table thing was greatly overrated, full of businessmen and publicity people and hangers on and a lot of second rate writers saying, did you hear what I said the other day? So I get the impression that it's a little bit of both. It may have been a little overplayed, but I think she also sort of vastly underplayed

what was going on in that sort of self deprecating way again. Well, I also saw that she said it was just a bunch of loudmouth showing off, saving their gags for days waiting for a chance to spring them. So I think that kind of ties into that idea of like, you know, just being grossed out by people heaping praise onto other people and then those people accepting all that praise and basking in it. And then the more that that happened, the more she was like, forget this. So yeah, I'm sure it's like you said, it was both, but I feel like that was the reason

she kind of distanced herself from it through criticism. Yeah. I get the impression and this is, I may just be reading too much into this, that she, she didn't love the spotlight and she was sort of in it because she was just so smart and funny. I think she definitely hated phonies and that sort of, you know, ties into the upper crest thing. She probably would have loved Catcher in the Rye.

When was that written? The fifties, she's, I'm sure she was alive while it was published. She died in 1968, spoiler alert for 67. She also, it wasn't just the round table. I think Libya took great pains to sort of talk about other people and non-literary people that she hung out with as well as other writers that just didn't, you know, like she was a friend of Ernest Hemingway, but I don't think Ernest Hemingway was one to like sit around a round table and like crack jokes and stuff like that.

He had like elephants to shoot. So Hemingway was a buddy. I think he supposedly, Scott Fitzgerald ended up basing a lot of the great Gatsby parties after what happened in the social circle at the Algonquin. So, you know, I think she had an influence on other writers as well, you know? For sure. Yeah. And she was very quoted and also misquoted and I think she inspired a lot of people for

sure. Let's talk, should we talk about some of the great quotes? Sure. All right. Well, one of them was someone said apparently like use the word horticulture in a sentence and she said, you can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think. And I think that's off the dome. Like she was known for just being that quick, you know?

Right. Yeah. That's a big part of it. And that's why she was saying like people would be saving their gags for days just waiting for a chance to spring them. She did not do that. Right. It just came into her head.

Like she was just that sharp. My favorite is this. You ready? So Calvin Coolidge, the president, apparently he was very famously quiet and she was told about the death of Calvin Coolidge and she whispered, how do they know? Yeah. She actually took me a second to figure that one out. And then once I got it, it was, that's a really good one.

Yeah. I like that one too. But she was also, like you said, misquoted or not only misquoted, but I think other quotes were attributed to her. Right. That she said that she never said a very famous one from Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Supposedly she said, it is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force, which is a great quote, but she said that she never

said that, nor did she say, the first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue. Yeah. That's a little too, like she's joining in the celebration of her. Too cutie. Yeah. And she wouldn't do that. I could, I could have spotted that a mile away and been like, nay.

Yeah. And it seems like she got very annoyed at being, having things attributed to her because that's part of the phoniness. Yeah. Which is why I think she would just deny saying stuff a lot of times too. Well, even if she did. Yes. Yeah.

So, what the, and also like you said too, I think she was kind of creating this fiction that was more entertaining than reality in some cases. Yeah. Like a character. Like I still think there's probably a lot of people who don't really understand who the, or maybe every, no one knows who the real Dorothy Parker was. Even Dorothy Parker might not have known, but she probably did. Although I'll tell you who really did know again is Wyatt Cooper, Anderson Cooper of

60 Minutes in CNN and New Year's fame. His dad wrote that Esquire article I mentioned, I'm finally prepared to share the title. It's whatever you think Dorothy Cooper was like, she wasn't. Dorothy Parker. And it is, what did I say, Cooper? Yeah. My God. Still got it wrong.

Okay. And I even have it written down as Cooper, that's why I got it wrong. So that title I just said, but replace Cooper with Parker. And it's one of the most insightful articles I've ever read about anybody. So even if Dorothy Parker didn't understand herself, Wyatt Cooper understood her. Like it's a really good, interesting article that doesn't necessarily follow any timeline. It's just like, Wyatt Cooper is kind of like, oh yeah, and one other thing about her was this.

And then he back it up with like three different stories that are also hilarious or maybe a little sad or something like that. Yeah. It's a really, really good article. I would recommend anybody go read it, even if you couldn't care less about Dorothy Parker. Well, hopefully they will after the end of this. After she went away from Vanity Fair by getting fired, it's a nice way to say it. She never worked like a regular staff job again.

She became a very successful freelancer. She wrote for all kinds of magazines that were popular at the time, Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal. When the New Yorker was founded by her friend Harold Ross in 1925, I think you mentioned earlier, she became a regular columnist doing reviews, short stories, her poems, again what she called verses. Between 26 and 33, she did publish books of poetry. She published three books of poetry and two short story collections, and one of which

was a bestseller, Enough Rope was a poetry collection, which was a bestseller and sold really well. Yeah. And I'm trying to find where it was. She won a couple of big prizes too, didn't she? She won the O. Henry Story Prize in 1929 for one, oh, I can't remember what it's called Big Blonde. Big Blonde, yeah.

It's about what a character I saw described as a serial mistress in decline, and she attempts suicide. And apparently that was a pretty prestigious prize. She wrote very frequently about love, especially modern love in the sense of in the 20s, they were just starting to deal with this idea of like, wait a minute, men and women are just working in the same places, and we're kind of interacting more now, and are you my equal? No, that doesn't seem right, but how does that translate into dating?

Everybody kind of moved from the farm to the city, and they were trying to figure it out. And so that was one of Dorothy Parker's favorite topics of writing, both verse and short stories as well. Yeah, she eventually would get, I think kind of just leave poetry behind. She stopped because she said that she didn't think she was getting any better. Which is, man, that is admirable. Yeah, yeah, to not just like run something in the ground like we're doing. I think we're still getting better here there in 15 starts.

Yeah, man, I think this has been a great year actually. Okay. You didn't take out a series. In 56, she talked about, just again, sort of her reputation being overblown. She said, it got so bad that audiences began to laugh before I opened my mouth. So her reputation preceded her in a way that she wasn't comfortable with. And I think she didn't feel like it was earned. I have a suspicion that she might have been deeply, oh geez, I'm blanking.

What's the word when you don't feel good about yourself? Insecure. Sure. A lot of these things that happen with her and the way she portrayed herself kind of makes me think she might have been insecure in her writing and with sort of getting attention as somebody who was doing good things. No one minds me going back to the same well of Wyatt Cooper. He basically said she seemed to prefer misery.

That's why I compared her to like an emo person earlier. He gave a great example where you'd be hanging out at her house and she'd get a phone call from a friend and she'd tell them I'm not home. And then later on in that same visit, she complained about how that exact same friend never called anymore. Interesting. So like it was a self-imposed kind of thing. She seemed to just feel more comfortable, isolated, but tried to make it so that it wasn't her

own choice. Yeah. I don't understand why. I don't know if it was to get sympathy. It doesn't seem to have been. It's just kind of bizarre in that way. All right. Should we take a second break?

Yes. Yes, we should. All right. So we'll take that break and we'll be back to talk about from this point forward in Dorothy Parker's life. I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking.

You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down.

Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Chuck, one of the things that she did very sensibly after she kind of abandoned poetry and short story writing was to go to Hollywood and become a screenwriter.

And she did that through kind of marrying a guy named Alan Campbell, an actor, back in 1934. He was 10 years younger than she was. And they ended up being screenwriting partners together after he moved her out to Hollywood. Yeah. So her, just to tie up her first husband's situation, he came back from the war, apparently was an alcoholic and drug addict. And they were separated.

She had an abortion and they got divorced. So he died of a drug overdose at the age of 39. And that's when she met the new guy and the new guy, Alan Campbell. And like you said, went to Hollywood to write movies. She became pregnant at the, and it's still sort of old to get pregnant now, but it certainly at the time being pregnant at 42 years old in the 1930s was a tough situation. And she did have a miscarriage that devastated her. But she was, she sort of had a on again, off again relationship with this guy.

They were the kind that would get divorced and then reconcile, then remarry and then split up again, then move back together again. But they had a pretty prolific partnership where, and he would, and a lot of writing partners still kind of have this arrangement. Someone might be really good at nailing dialogue. And the other partner might be really good at structure and character development, stuff like that. So he would develop the structure of a script and sort of sketch out scenes and she would

come in with her, you know, rapier's wit and come up with all that clever dialogue and got a lot of money and attention and awards, or at least nominations. She was the co-writer on A Star is Born, the first one from 1937. Yeah. And they were making over a hundred thousand dollars a week. A week. That's so much money. It was just screenwriting and they were having a blast doing it.

They get drunk every day. That's today's money, by the way. They were friends with everybody in their neighborhood and it was just, it sounds like a really grand time. And then unfortunately, Alan Campbell died. They think it might be a suicide, although she apparently decided that that was not the case. So she got it listed as an accident on his death certificate.

And right after that, she's like, I'm going back to New York. She said, New York is the only place to be in the whole country. I'm guessing California was a little too painful after the death of Alan Campbell, but I also think like she just preferred living in New York anyway. Yeah, I think you're right. There was another thing that happened to her that probably prompted her to move to New York and that was her activism, like she's known for her quips and her sharp wit. You kind of have to dig in a little further before you realize like she was actually like

a legit died in the wool lefty activist who really cared about things like racism and civil rights long before this was on the radar of most people. Yeah, 100%. She was one of the founders of the screenwriters guild, very pro-union, as you probably shouldn't be surprised by this point, very anti-Nazi early on. This is like long before the Americans were involved in World War II. She had a half-Jewish father and I think it seems like sort of struggled over the years with her Jewish heritage, but came out hard against Lenny Reifenstahl when she visited

Hollywood and this was in I think 1938 and basically said like, no, you shouldn't take meetings with her. You shouldn't take meetings with any Nazis and like all these agents need to just close their doors to them basically. And I thought I couldn't admire her anymore. That's right. She founded an anti-Nazi league, I mean, hats off to her, right? So she also helped raise money to defend the Scottsboro boys who were nine black teenagers

in Alabama who were unjustly convicted and sentenced in the rape of two white women. And there was a really big push by the American Communist Party to basically rescue these boys from this unjust system. And she was at the very least communist adjacent, if not an outright sympathizer. I think a lot of her interests and viewpoints really kind of dovetailed with the Communist Party in America at the time. And she was also virulently anti-fascist. And for all of this combined, her anti-fascism, her work for civil rights, her kind of sympathy

for the Communist Party, got her essentially first informally blacklisted and then pretty much officially blacklisted in Hollywood starting in the 40s. Yeah. So before the blacklist, there was something called the Red Channels, which was a pamphlet that kind of said, hey, you may not want to hire these people if you're in broadcasting. Yeah, it was put out real quick, Chuck, by a right-wing publication that was called Counter Attack, I believe. And it was made by three former FBI agents who just basically created dossiers on everybody

in Hollywood to root out who were the communists. And a lot of them were accused just for contributing to civil rights causes or things like that. I was just about to point that out. That is, again, pre-blacklist. It should not surprise you that she eventually was officially blacklisted for a short time. She was also on the FBI watch list, they had a file on her. They called her a concealed communist. And just go back and listen to our McCarthyism episode if you want to learn anything else

about the House of Un-American Activities Committee. She did go before them in 55 and took the fifth. And the FBI eventually would clear her of being a security threat, but I think I don't think any of those people were ever completely off the list, if you know what I mean. No, for sure. And if you got on that list, if you were in that pamphlet, it doesn't matter how big of a star you were, you just could not find work all of a sudden. You get fired from your current job, it was crazy.

But that's what happened, and it was part of that McCarthy era. So she moved back to New York, and I saw that she basically lived out the last act of her life in a very surprising manner as a little old lady, basically. Yeah. She died at age 73, and I think she left all her money to Reverend Martin Luther King. And then once he died, that went to the NAACP, there's a New Yorker article that kind of indicates like no one knows exactly how much money that ended up being for the NAACP, but I think it was a lot.

And this is sort of a not so fun way to end this, but one of her good friends, Lillian Hellman, was a playwright, someone she knew for a long, long time was designated as her executor for her will and estate, but was mad because she wasn't left any money. And so she basically threw all her stuff away, the way all her papers, all of the manuscripts that she had been working on in her life, and Dorothy Parker did not want to have a big deal made about her death, wanted a quiet cremation, and she against her wishes organized a big public memorial, it seems like just in defiance of her wishes because she was mad about being, I guess, left out of her will.

Lillian Hellman's defense, she largely supported Dorothy Parker during their old age years from 1963 to 67, so I think she expected to kind of be repaid, but still, it's definitely not worth going against somebody's wishes. So Dorothy Parker's ashes had a really interesting afterlife. She had no heirs, no family, so they were left at the crematorium from 1967 to 1973, when the crematorium finally got fed up of storing it and just mailed them to the address of her former lawyer. But her lawyer had retired, but his partner was still in business, and her partner didn't

know anything about this, didn't know what to do with the ashes, didn't know who to contact, so he just put her in his desk drawer. And from 1973 to 1988, Dorothy Parker spent in a desk drawer in her former lawyer's office. She'd probably think that's funny. I think so, but if she were in there, she would have been really bored too. Yeah, they would eventually move though, if you go to New York now, you can go up to the Bronx to Woodlawn Cemetery, where a tour guide and big fan of hers eventually put her ashes, was given her ashes, he didn't steal them, and there's a little small plaque with

a phrase that she apparently proposed for her epitaph, which is, excuse my dust. Just beautiful. It beats Shakespeare's epitaph, right? What was Shakespeare's? It was some clumsy, ham-fisted curse that people are like, Shakespeare wouldn't have written that. Gas, grass, or what was it, was that it? No one rides for free.

Oh man, Chuck, since Chuck said that hilarious quip, that means this is the end of the Dorothy Parker up. So if you want to know more about her, go read her stuff. It's really good and fun. And since I said it's really good and fun, that means it's time for a listener mail. I'm going to call this a counterpoint to another listener mail. We got the email from the teacher that talked about PBIS, Positive Behavioral Interventions and Support, and apparently there's a lot of controversy surrounding that, because Jennifer

here says this, hey guys, been listening for years, learned so many cool things. After the casino bombing episode, however, you read a letter from a gentleman who wrote about using PBIS in his classroom. I taught school for 30 years and finally left, as did hundreds of my colleagues, because PBIS has destroyed public education. Teachers can be kind to students without a PBS program in place. My co-teacher was permanently disabled by a student. It's my feeling that once you're an adult in society, society will hand you consequences,

and students may not be taught how to be prepared for that with PBIS schools. Thanks for stating that it may or may not work in your own home, Chuck. I was required to take two college classes on this, so it's not that I don't understand it. I keep giving us great knowledge on millions of topics, and that is from Jennifer. Awesome. Thank you, Jennifer, for the counterpoint. There may be a good episode in there now that I see this.

Yeah, I think you might be right, Chuck. Anytime there's controversy like that, we're on it. Let's do it. Every time I hear a point or counterpoint, I'm reminded of that part from airplane, where they're debating the whole thing. I think it's airplane two, maybe, where the guy goes, let them crash. I don't remember that line. That's good.

That's pretty. Yeah, it's way funnier in the movie than what I just did. If you want to get in touch with us like Jennifer did and offer a counterpoint, you can send it to StuffPodcasts at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts on my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I'm Munga Shatikler, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want

to believe. We find in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me, and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes, because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.