Dorothy Parker

From Alfred Hitchcock Wiki

  • born: 22/Aug/1893 (Long Branch, New Jersey, USA)
  • died: 07/Jun/1967 (New York, USA) - heart attack

[edit] Biography

Dorothy Parker was an American writer and poet best known for her caustic wit, wisecracks, and sharp eye for 20th century Urban foibles. Also known as Dot or Dottie, Parker was born Dorothy Rothschild in the West End district of Long Branch, New Jersey.

She grew up on the Upper West Side, and attended the Blessed Sacrament Convent School -- despite having a Jewish father and Protestant step-mother. Young Dorothy later went to Miss Dana's School, a finishing school in Morristown, New Jersey. Her formal education ended when she was 13.

She earned money by playing piano at a dancing school, among other things. She first sold a poem to Vanity Fair magazine in 1914, and, some months later, she was hired as an editorial assistant for another Condé Nast magazine, Vogue.

In 1917 she met and married a Wall Street broker, Edwin Pond Parker II, but they were separated by his army service in World War I. She moved to Vanity Fair as drama critic and staff writer following two years at Vogue.

In 1919 her career took off while writing theatre criticism for Vanity Fair, initially as a stand-in for the vacationing P.G. Wodehouse. At the magazine she met Robert Benchley, who became a close friend, and Robert E Sherwood. They began lunching at the Algonquin Hotel, among the founding members of the Algonquin Round Table. They were soon joined by Franklin Pierce Adams and Alexander Woollcott, both newspaper columnists who helped publicize Parker's witticisms, Harold Ross, and many others.

She was fired from Vanity Fair in 1920 — Benchley and Sherwood resigned in protest — and began earning a living as a freelance writer. She separated from her husband, and had affairs with reporter-turned-playwright Charles MacArthur and with the publisher Seward Collins.

She married Alan Campbell, an actor with hopes to be a screenwriter, in 1934. He was reputed to be bisexual — indeed, Parker did some of the reputing by claiming in public that he was "queer as a billy goat" — but there is no substantial evidence for this. She and Campbell moved to Hollywood and worked on more than 15 films (on a salary of $5200 a week, an enormous sum during the Depression, more than $70,000 in 2005 equivalent dollars).

With Robert Carson and Campbell, she wrote the script for the 1937 film "A Star is Born", which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Writing - Screenplay. Her marriage with Campbell was tempestuous; they divorced in 1947, remarried in 1950, and remained together on and off until his death in 1963 in West Hollywood.

During the 1930s she became involved in left-wing politics, helping to found the Anti-Nazi League in Hollywood, and drifted away from some of her Round Table friends. She was named as a Communist by the Red Channels publication in 1950, and was investigated by the FBI for her suspected involvement in Communism during the McCarthy era. As a result, she was placed on the Hollywood blacklist by the movie studio bosses.

From 1957 to 1962 she wrote book reviews for Esquire magazine, though these were increasingly erratic due to her problems with alcohol. She died of a heart attack at the age of 73 in 1967 at the Volney Apartments in New York City.

(Wikipedia)

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