Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? by Marion Meade Page A

so sharp a tongue and so keen a sense of mockery. Even though she could be difficult, this was to be expected in such an excessively opinionated person. He concluded that “her peceptions were so sure, her judgment so unerring, that she always seemed to hit the centre of the mark.”
    In the fall of 1917, after she had been slaving in Edna Chase’s kingdom for two and a half years, Crowninshield arranged for Dorothy’s transfer to Vanity Fair, noting that Chase had “turned her over to my tender care” as if she was a sickly moppet. He forgot to add that Edna Chase was by no means unhappy to be rid of someone who showed signs of developing into a genuine enfant terrible.
    The next few months, having no idea what to do with Dorothy, Crowninshield gave her routine editorial tasks and also published several more of her hate songs. At the end of the year, he had a daring idea. P. G. “Plum” Wodehouse, the magazine’s drama critic, had coauthored a hit musical comedy and wished to take an indefinite leave of absence. Crowninshield decided to name Dorothy as Wodehouse’s successor. Not only did this reflect his faith in her, but also it happened to be a brilliant promotional gimmick for Vanity Fair .
    Dorothy could not have been more amazed. She had spun out her line in hope of reeling in a modest-sized fish and instead had hauled up a whale.
    From the beginning, she set out to make herself noticed. In her first column, New York’s only woman drama critic described herself as “a tired business woman” who was “seeking innocent diversion”—which was the reason she had chosen to review a batch of five musical comedies. With the exception of Wodehouse’s Oh, Lady , Lady!, where she deemed it politic to lay praise on thick, she proceeded to slice up the rest with a poison stiletto. Since it is always more fun to revile than extol and because abuse was practically reflexive with her, she made it her modus operandi. One show, for example, got her recommendation as an excellent place to do knitting and “if you don’t knit, bring a book.” With another, she refused to print the names of author or cast, declaring that she was “not going to tell on them.” There was a show she ignored entirely, instead reviewing the performance of a woman seated next to her who had been searching for a lost glove. Certain chorus lines were damned for consisting of “kind, motherly-looking women,” the locations of her seats criticized, and certain prominent producers chastized for low taste.
    Altogether her debut in the April 1918 issue was a bravura performance that assured maximum pleasure to Vanity Fair readers and maximum annoyance to Broadway entrepreneurs.
     
     
    If the beginning of Dorothy’s reputation as a wit can be pinpointed, it would be that spring, for it was then, when she was twenty-four, that she began to attract the attention of an audience broader and more sophisticated than the readership of a fashion magazine. What makes that particular column so interesting is its rejection of the prevailing standards for female writing and thinking. She had chosen to present herself not so much as a bad girl but as a bad boy, a firecracker who was aggressively proud of being tough, quirky, feisty, a variation on the basic Becky Sharp model, and she managed to carry it off with terrific style and humor. She was putting on an act, but it was an act that seemed as if it might sell. Now she began to see what shape her future might take.

     
    Life as a married woman was turning out to be dull as mud. Dorothy left the boardinghouse and moved to an apartment in a handsome building on West Seventy-first Street, the block directly behind the brownstone that Henry Rothschild had owned when Eliza was alive. Dorothy’s new, non-Jewish name may have completed the superficial obliteration of Dorothy Rothschild, but choosing to live a few hundred yards from the Rothschild house, the place where she had spent her most secure years,