Gloria Steinem 1965 Interview with Dorothy Parker Found.
'Journalist Gloria Steinem was 30 and Parker was 71 when they met in the winter of 1964-65 for a long chat that ended up as a 2,300 word article in the New York edition of The Ladies Home Journal. At the time Steinem was a rising star in New York, and Parker had just returned to life in Manhattan after 30 years in Hollywood. This is the first of the “Mad Men Era” interviews Parker gave upon her homecoming.
Dorothy Parker Comes Home
The Ladies Home Journal (New York edition)
March 1965
By Gloria Steinem
In moments of family stress my mother often would quote a line or two by Dorothy Parker (“…better a heart a-bloom with sins/Than hearts gone yellow and dry,” for instance, or “I wonder what it’s like in Spain”), and I absorbed them along with A. A. Milne and Mother Goose. Later, in high school, I read her short stories (Big Blonde I remember especially as the height of worldly wisdom), and discovered her part in that institution so dear to the hearts of writers too young to remember, the Algonquin Round Table. By the time I got to college, though, Mrs. Parker had become a figure of mild, literary fun–we were much too erudite to suppose that writing so simple could be any good–but she remained a kind of secret woman friend whose experience of everything from unrequited love to Negro segregation was remarkably like our own.
Finally, when some kindly English teacher had made us understand that “light verse” was a sort of poetry, not a term of derision, I turned to her works again. And there she was, clear-eyed, unphony and astringent as ever: a writer with the voice of her generation, but enough insight and style to make much of her work–as Edmund Wilson and Somerset Maugham predicted 20 years ago–last beyond it.
So it was with some trepidation that I thought about asking her for an interview: meeting long-distance friends, especially writers, is often a mistake. Besides, at the age of 71, in poor health, and newly returned to New York after the death of her husband in California two years ago, it seemed she deserves some privacy. In the end I phoned–hesitantly–the East Side apartment-hotel where she was staying, and made some kind of explanation about the interview; what it was like to be back in New York, how the city now compared with the city in the ’20’s and ’30’s. She waited politely until I trailed off.
“All right, dear,” she said briskly, “we can talk. But not about that damned Algonquin; I’m fed to the teeth with Algonquin.”
The hotel suite looked comfortable, but pure hotel: the only personal touches in sight were two books on the coffee table (The Rector of Justin by Louis Auchincloss and P. S. Wilkinson by C. D. B. Bryan), a white plastic-lace cloth over a card table, and a very friendly small poodle named Troy. (“Really Troisième,” explained Mrs. Parker, “because I had her mother, and this puppy arrived Number Three. I love dogs, wouldn’t live without one, would you?”) A middle-aged practical nurse offered me a drink, made me a cup of coffee, repeated to Mrs. Parker the whereabouts of her dinner, and left for the day.
Mrs. Parker, looking frail but gay in a red plaid skirt and red embroidered Mexican blouse, walked slowly to the couch and settled herself next to Troy. “I really don’t need a nurse now,” she explained, “only someone to help me dress and lift things. I broke one shoulder, and then–nature abhors imbalance, I think–I got bursitis in the other.” She lit a filtered cigarette, the simple mechanics of it costing her something, and gestured toward the door. “Nurses,” she said. “They have a language all their own–‘It’s time we took our bath now, dearie,’ that sort of thing–and it drives me mad.”
The only recent photograph of her–a super-realistic close-up taken by Richard Avedon for his book, Nothing Personal–seems cruel and old compared with her liveliness in person: all the signs of age are there, of course, but the dark, soft hair falling over her forehead in bangs (and cropped close at the neck in the ’20’s style she has always worn) and her quicksilver mobility of expression make her seem younger.
“Just look at that plastic tablecloth,” she said, and grimaced. “Isn’t it horrible? The nurse bought it; she thinks it’s very pretty. I try to think of it as pop art, but I can’t–oilcloth, yes; imitation lace, no–it’s too middle class.”
Was she glad to be back in New York? “Oh my God yes,” she said. “I looked forward to it every single day. California is nothing but money and what picture did you do, and Hollywood is a desert, a ghost town. Alan and I (her second husband, actor and playwright Alan Campbell) stayed there because of work–actually, I’ve lived there quite a lot and I hate it more each time. I stayed on after he died in order to close the house and take care of things.” She sighed, and Troy crawled into her lap as if in sympathy. “New York is home, and I love everything about it, including the dirt. It does seem to me that people are a little more unfriendly and cross than I remember–they walk fast, but seem listless: strange–but perhaps I just anticipated too much and was bound to be disappointed. Still, New York is the only place to be in the whole country.”'>>>
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