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

lunch hours at Child’s, and went home early. Whenever it was necessary for Sherwood to leave the office, even though the midgets had left town, he would say, “Walk down the street with me,” and all three would nip out for some air. Dorothy remembered that “Mr. Benchley and I would leave our jobs and guide him down the street. I can’t tell you, we had more fun.”
    Condé Nast was far from entertained. He instructed the business manager to enforce the company’s tardy rule with a memo warning that latecomers would be required to fill out a slip explaining why they were late. Benchley was the first to receive one. His reply, hundreds of words in tiny handwriting covering a slip of paper the size of a playing card, unfolded a sorrowful tale of how he had arrived early, heard that the Hippodrome’s elephants had got loose, offered to round them up, chased them up to Seventy-second Street and down West End Avenue to the Hudson River docks where they were trying to board the boats of the Fall River Line, and finally herded them back to the Hippodrome, thereby averting a major marine disaster but unfortunately causing him to be eleven minutes late for work.
    This was his first and last tardy slip, but the battle lines had been silently drawn up, with the whelps on one side, Condé Nast on the other, and a nervous Crowninshield in the middle.
    At the end of June, Nast and Crowninshield departed for a two-month trip abroad and left Benchley in charge of publishing two issues of the magazine with the assistance of Dorothy and Sherwood. What made Nast imagine this would be a sensible plan is hard to fathom. On the day of sailing the editors appeared at the Aquitania with a floral horseshoe, the tackiest one they had been able to buy, and offered exuberant bon voyage wishes to their bosses. Liberated, they trooped back to the office and immediately began to go haywire. Naturally they kept hours that suited them. They also took steps to upgrade Sherwood’s position and salary. Unable to authorize a raise, Benchley did the next best thing and assigned him several articles to write. The first piece he turned in was a piece of juvenalia better suited to a college humor magazine than the country’s most sophisticated monthly, but Benchley purchased it for seventy-five dollars, a higher price than some well-known contributors were getting. When the editor of the men’s fashion department went on vacation leaving a half-finished column, Sherwood completed it with predictions that best-dressed men would soon be wearing waistcoats trimmed with cut jade and peg-topped trousers. This cracked Benchley up, and he and Dorothy sent it off to the printer. Nobody, they assured each other, ever read the stupid column anyway.

     
    In June, Dorothy received an invitation to attend a luncheon at the Algonquin Hotel, a party hosted by two theatrical press agents to welcome Alexander Woollcott, The New York Times ’s drama critic, back from the war.
    Woollcott was a fat, bespectacled man of thirty-two whose smallish features tended to sink like raisins into a pudding of jowls and double chins. A master of the insult, he already had acquired a considerable reputation for bitchiness. It was said that entering into conversation with him was like petting an overfed Persian cat who had just sharpened its claws. Those who found his personality uncomfortable dismissed him as a one-man freak show, but to his intimate friends—and in time they would be a cult numbering in the hundreds and ranging from Eleanor Roosevelt to the Marx brothers—he was an acquired taste. They would vie with each other to find the right words to describe his personality: “Old Vitriol and Violets,” James Thurber dubbed him; Louisa M. Woollcott, said Howard Dietz; a New Jersey Nero in a pinafore, according to Edna Ferber. George Jean Nathan called him “the Seidlitz powder of Times Square” but the only epithet to capture the whole man was George Kaufman’s one-word