v Primary Sources v

Dorothy Rothschild, the daughter of Jacob Rothschild, a clothes salesman, was born in Long Branch, New Jersey on 22nd August, 1893. Her mother died in July 1898. Two years later her father remarried. Parker had an unhappy childhood and later accused her father of being physically abusive.

Parker's formal education ended at 13. She found work playing the piano at a dancing school. In 1908 she sold her first poems to the editor of Vogue magazine. This was followed by other work being published and eventually she became a staff writer at Vanity Fair.

In 1917 she married Edwin Pond Parker, who worked as a stockbroker in Wall Street. Soon afterwards he joined the US Army and served in Europe during the First World War. The marriage was not successful and Parker had a series of love affairs.

In 1918 she replaced P.G. Woodhouse as theatre critic of Vanity Fair. During this period she began having lunch with two other colleagues on the magazine, Robert Benchley and Robert E. Sherwood, at the Algonquin Hotel. Other members of what became known as the Algonquin Round Table were Heywood Broun, Harold Ross, Ruth Hale, Franklin Pierce Adams and Alexander Woollcott. Parker developed a reputation for making harsh comments in her reviews and in 1920 she was fired by the editor of the magazine.

Parker remained in demand and worked for the New Yorker, The Nation, The New Republic, Cosmopolitan and American Mercury, became well-known for her acerbic criticism. Parker once commented that Katharine Hepburn in a Broadway play: "She ran the whole gamut of the emotions from A to B." Parker also had a reputation for spontaneous wit. When told of the death of President Calvin Coolidge, she replied: "How could they tell?"

Her first collection of poems, Enough Rope (1926), was a best-seller. In 1927 Parker joined with other artists such as John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ben Shahn, Floyd Dell in the campaign against the proposed execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. The day before the execution Parker was arrested at a demonstration in Boston for "sauntering and loitering".

Parker also published two collections of short stories: Laments for the Living (1930) and After Such Pleasure (1931). In 1932 met the actor and writer, Alan Campbell. They married in 1934 in Raton, New Mexico, and moved to Hollywood. They signed ten-week contracts with Paramount Pictures, with Campbell earning $250 per week and Parker earning $1,000 per week. This would later be increased to over $2,000 a week.

Parker later recalled: "Through the sweat and the tears I shed over my first script, I saw a great truth - one of those eternal, universal truths that serve to make you feel much worse than you did when you started. And that is that no writer, whether he writes from love or from money, can condescend to what he writes. What makes it harder in screenwriting is the money he gets. You see, it brings out the uncomfortable little thing called conscience. You aren't writing for the love of it or the art of it or whatever; you are doing a chore assigned to you by your employer and whether or not he might fire you if you did it slackly makes no matter. You've got yourself to face, and you have to live with yourself."

Over the next five years the couple worked on fifteen movie scripts including Hands Across the Table (1935), The Moon's Our Home (1936), Suzy (1936), Three Married Men (1936), Lady Be Careful (1936), A Star is Born (1937), Trade Winds (1938), The Cowboy and the Lady (1938) and Sweethearts (1938).

Parker and Campbell held left-wing political views and with Donald Ogden Stewart formed the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. She was also a strong supporter of the Popular Front government in Spain and during then Spanish Civil War was a member of the Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee and the Motion Picture Artists Committee to Aid Republican Spain. In October 1937 Parker visited Spain and made a broadcast from Madrid Radio. She also sent back reports on the war for the the New Masses magazine.

Left-wing writers such as Parker was attacked by Martin Dies, the chairman of the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Parker responded by arguing: "The people want democracy - real democracy, Mr. Dies, and they look toward Hollywood to give it to them because they don't get it any more in their newspapers. And that's why you're out here, Mr. Dies - that's why you want to destroy the Hollywood progressive organizations - because you've got to control this medium if you want to bring fascism to this country."

Other screenplays by the couple include Weekend for Three (1941), The Little Foxes (1941), Tales of Manhattan (1942) and Forever and a Day (1943). During the Second World War Campbell served in Europe as an officer in Army Intelligence. He attained the rank of captain and after leaving the army he joined Parker to write Woman on the Run (1950).

In the late 1940s the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), chaired by J. Parnell Thomas, began an investigation into the Hollywood Motion Picture Industry. The HUAC interviewed 41 people who were working in Hollywood. These people attended voluntarily and became known as "friendly witnesses". During their interviews they named nineteen people who they accused of holding left-wing views.

One of those named, Bertolt Brecht, an emigrant playwright, gave evidence and then left for East Germany. Ten others: Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Albert Maltz, Adrian Scott, Samuel Ornitz, Dalton Trumbo, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson and Alvah Bessie refused to answer any questions. Known as the Hollywood Ten, they claimed that the 1st Amendment of the United States Constitution gave them the right to do this. The House of Un-American Activities Committee and the courts during appeals disagreed and all were found guilty of contempt of congress and each was sentenced to between six and twelve months in prison.

Leo Townsend, Isobel Lennart, Roy Huggins, Richard Collins, Lee J. Cobb, Budd Schulberg and Elia Kazan, afraid they would go to prison, were willing to name people who had been members of left-wing groups. If these people refused to name names, they were added to a blacklist that had been drawn up by the Hollywood film studios.

In June, 1950, three former FBI agents and a right-wing television producer, Vincent Harnett, published Red Channels, a pamphlet listing the names of 151 writers, directors and performers who they claimed had been members of subversive organisations before the Second World War but had not so far been blacklisted. The names had been compiled from FBI files and a detailed analysis of the Daily Worker, a newspaper published by the American Communist Party.

A free copy of Red Channels was sent to those involved in employing people in the entertainment industry. All those people named in the pamphlet were blacklisted until they appeared in front of the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and convinced its members they had completely renounced their radical past. As a result both Parker and Alan Campbell were blacklisted.

The couple left Hollywood and moved back to New York City. Parker joined forces with Arnaud d'Usseau, to write the play Ladies of the Corridor. The play opened in October 1953 to poor reviews and closed after six weeks. After this she concentrated on writing reviews for Esquire Magazine.

In 1960 Dalton Trumbo became the first blacklisted writer to use his own name when he wrote the screenplay for the film Spartacus. Based on the novel by another left-wing blacklisted writer, Howard Fast, is a film that examines the spirit of revolt. Trumbo refers back to his experiences of the House of Un-American Activities Committee. At the end, when the Romans finally defeat the rebellion, the captured slaves refuse to identify Spartacus.

Parker and Campbell decided to return to Hollywood. They worked together on a number of unproduced projects. Campbell committed suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills in Los Angeles on 14th June, 1963. Parker's health was also poor because of her heavy drinking.

Dorothy Parker died of a heart-attack, in New Jersey on 22nd August, 1967. In her will, she bequeathed her estate to Martin Luther King. Following King's death, her estate was passed on to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

^ Main Article ^

(1) Dorothy Parker, broadcast, Madrid Radio (October 1937)

I came to Spain without my axe to grind. I didn't bring messages from anybody, nor greetings to anybody. I am not a member of any political party. The only group I have ever been affiliated with is that not especially brave little band that hid its nakedness of heart and mind under the out of date garment of a sense of humour. I heard someone say, and so I said it too, that ridicule is the most effective weapon. I don't suppose I ever really believed it, but it was easy and comforting, and so I said it. Well, now I know that there are things that have never really been funny, and never will be. And I know that ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon.

In spite of all the evacuation, there are still nearly a million people here in Madrid. Some of them - you may be like that yourself - won't leave their homes and their possessions, all the things they have gathered together through the years. They are not at all dramatic about it. It is simply that anything else than the life they have made for themselves is inconceivable to them. Yesterday I saw a woman who lives in the poorest quarter of Madrid. It has been bombarded twice by the fascists; her house is one of the few left standing. She has seven children. It has been suggested to her that she and the children leave Madrid for a safer place. She dismisses such ideas easily and firmly.

Every six weeks, she says, her husband has 48 hours leave from the front. Naturally he wants to come home to see her and the children. She, and each one of the seven, are calm and strong and smiling. It is a typical Madrid family.

Six years ago, when the Royal romp, Alfonso, left his racing cars and his racing stables and also left, by popular request, his country, there remained 28 million people. Of them, 12 million were completely illiterate. It is said that Alfonso himself had been taught to read and write, but he had not bothered to bend the accomplishments to the reading of statistics nor the signing of appropriations for schools.

Six years ago, almost half the population of this country was illiterate. The first thing that the Republican government did was to recognise this hunger, the starvation of the people for education. Now there are schools even in the tiniest, poorest, villages; more schools in a year than ever were in all the years of the reigning kings. And still more are established every day. I have seen a city bombed by night, and the next morning the people rose and went on with the completion of their schools. Here in Madrid, as well as in Valencia, a workers' institute is open. It is a college, but not a college where rich young men go to make friends with other rich young men who may be valuable to them in business with them later. It is a college where workers, forced to start as children in fields and factories, may study to be teachers or doctors or lawyers or scientists, according to their gifts. Their intensive university course takes two years. And while they are studying, the government pays their families the money they would have been earning.

In the schools for young children, there is none of the dread thing you have heard so much about - depersonalisation. Each child has, at the government's expense, an education as modern and personal as a privileged American school child has at an accredited progressive school. What the Spanish government has done for education would be a magnificent achievement, even in days of peace, when money is easy and supplies are endless. But these people are doing it under fire.

(2) Dorothy Parker, The Heart of Spain (1952)

I stayed in Valencia and in Madrid, places I had not been since that fool of a king lounged on the throne, and in those two cities and in the country around and between them, I met the best people anyone ever knew. I had never seen such people before. But I shall see their like again. And so shall all of us. If I did not believe that, I think I should stand up in front of my mirror and take a long, deep, swinging slash at my throat.

For what they stood for, what they have given others to take and hold and carry along - that does not vanish from the earth. This is not a matter of wishing or feeling; it is knowing. It is knowing that nothing devised by fat, rich, frightened men can ever stamp out truth and courage, and determination for a decent life.

It is impossible not to feel sad for what happened to the Loyalists in Spain; heaven grant we will never not be sad at stupidity and greed. To be sorry for those people - no. It is a shameful, strutting impudence to be sorry for the noble. But there is no shame to honorable anger, the anger that comes and stays against those who saw and would not aid, those who looked and shrugged and turned away.

(3) Dorothy Parker on working as a screenwriter in Hollywood.

When I dwelt in the East I had my opinion of writing for the screen. I regarded it with a sort of benevolent contempt, as one looks at the raggedy printing of a backward six-year-old. I thought it had just that much relationship to literature.

Well, I found out, and I found out hard, and found out forever. Through the sweat and the tears I shed over my first script, I saw a great truth - one of those eternal, universal truths that serve to make you feel much worse than you did when you started. And that is that no writer, whether he writes from love or from money, can condescend to what he writes. What makes it harder in screenwriting is the money he gets.

You see, it brings out the uncomfortable little thing called conscience. You aren't writing for the love of it or the art of it or whatever; you are doing a chore assigned to you by your employer and whether or not he might fire you if you did it slackly makes no matter. you've got yourself to face, and you have to live with yourself.

(4) Dorothy Parker made an attack on Martin Dies and his Un-American Activities Committee in the magazine Directions (April, 1940)

The people want democracy - real democracy, Mr. Dies, and they look toward Hollywood to give it to them because they don't get it any more in their newspapers. And that's why you're out here, Mr. Dies - that's why you want to destroy the Hollywood progressive organizations - because you've got to control this medium if you want to bring fascism to this country.