S he entered a room like an apology. Tiny and startlingly delicate, she moved with steps that were short and brittle, and she appeared to be so fragile that you feared she would shatter if you touched her. The first image that comes to my mind is this: She sits in her accustomed place in the living room of the house in California she shared with her husband Alan Campbell. In her lap is the ever-present dog, a yapping brown poodle.
Beside her on the sofa are her reading glasses, and in front of her is a large ashtray filled with the remains of the cigarettes she smokes constantly. Cellophane from a discarded Chesterfield package catches fire and the flames go unnoticed while she complains of the dearth of talent to be found in the pile of books of every size and subject that crowd the top of the coffee table.
One of those days of everlasting and monotonous sunshine is drawing to a close, and Alan has made Scotches for the two of them while I sip No-Cal soda, feeling somehow guilty and unforgiven for being a teetotaler. This would be some time in Born nearly seventy years before to a fairly prosperous cloak-and-suiter her description named J. On this day she received from a publisher a request that she write an autobiography.
She was right. And, of course, if she could, she would have to call it Mongrel because that term comes about as near as anything to expressing how Dorothy Parker saw herself: as a mongrel that wanted to be a thoroughbred. Dottie had little impulse toward public self-analysis, at least not of the dispassionate and objective sort.
Not for Dottie the psychoanalytically-oriented confessional style of breast-baring that has been a common vogue of our times, and I, for one, say for this relief much thanks. It owed more, I think, to her early and late enthusiasm for Dickens than to the actual facts, if one assumes that facts must behave themselves and not vary too wildly from one recording session to the next.
