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

Forty-fourth Street with them—not with them actually but between them—for he was in need of protection. “In those days,” Dorothy recalled, “the Hippodrome, a block from the office, had engaged a troupe of midgets and Mr. Sherwood ... wouldn’t go down the street unless Mr. Benchley walked on one side of him and I on the other, because, with his six feet 7 inches, he was afraid the midgets might tease him if he were alone.” Looking like an ambulatory pipe organ, the editors set off down the street, but the midgets ran squeaking alongside yelling “Hey, Legs!,” warning him to duck when he crossed under the Sixth Avenue El, and demanded to know how the weather was up there. At Sixth Avenue, having outrun “the nasty little things,” Dorothy and Benchley felt obliged to invite Sherwood to join them for lunch, and the ice was finally broken.
    Back at the office, Dorothy whispered to Benchley that she was having second thoughts. Sherwood was “nice.” Benchley agreed that he was “one of the nicest guys I ever saw.” After that things began to change.
    Upon closer acquaintance, Dorothy discovered that Sherry was “pretty fast.” He wore his straw hat at a rakish angle, tried to make dates with the receptionist, and admitted to lifting a few in Broadway cabarets. One day when he acknowledged having a hangover, Benchley expressed alarm and disapproval. Dorothy sprang to Sherwood’s defense, declaring that she had once attended a cocktail party.
    Benchley was doubly shocked. “Mark my words,” he warned her, “alcohol will coarsen you.”
    Dorothy could see nothing wrong with drinking an occasional cocktail.

     
    Colored photographs of corpses appeared on the walls at Vanity Fair . While the atmosphere at the magazine had always been lively, now it was becoming downright rowdy. At first Crowninshield was pleased to note that his three editors had taken “an enormous shine to one another.” What he failed to understand was how much clowning was actually taking place. After Benchley told Dorothy about his enjoyment of two undertaking magazines, The Casket and Sunnyside, she decided to become a subscriber. Whenever a new issue arrived in the mail, the two of them stopped working to admire the pictures of cadavers, then they read aloud the humor column, “From Grave to Gay,” and howled with laughter.
    Dorothy found the magazines hilarious. “I cut out a picture out of one of them, in color, of how and where to inject the embalming fluid, and had it hung over my desk.” But in Crowninshield’s memory, there was not one but an entire row of brightly colored anatomical plates above her desk, and he asked her to remove them. “I dared suggest that they might prove a little startling to our occasional visitors, and that, perhaps, something by Marie Laurencin might do as well.” Dorothy responded to his suggestion with “the most palpable contempt.”
    Already Crownie’s la-dee-dah mannerisms were beginning to grate on Benchley’s New England nerves, but Dorothy said that she felt sorry for Crownie. He was “a lovely man, but puzzled,” and she had to admit that “we behaved extremely badly.”
    After several weeks of this, Crowninshield privately began to think of the magazine as a lions’ den with himself in the uncomfortable position of tamer. No doubt his editors were still cubs, “amazing whelps” he called them, whose teeth were not yet sharp and whose claws had not grown long, but they seemed to be animals nonetheless. Later on he described their antics more benignly: “Indeed I believe that in no period of their lives did the three find more enjoyment, make more friends, or work as hard, or as easily.” In the early summer of 1919, the problem was that the cubs weren’t working particularly hard and sometimes they weren’t working at all. They were expected in the office at eight-thirty but often showed up late, then spent the mornings in enthusiastic personal conversations, took long