This Is Dorothy Parker!

1929

This Is Dorothy!

Milwaukee Journal: When we saw Dorothy Parker at her East Sixty-third street apartment She had just returned from Hollywood, where she had gone to write a series of conversations for the talkies. She was passionate in the expression of her antipathy toward Hollywood and movie folk. She vows that she will never go there again. The Dorothy Parker of her two volumes of verse, "Enough Hope" and "Sunset Gun," is not the Dorothy Parker of real life. It is apparently her idea that life has pulled some sort of dirty trick her and she contemplates establishing a colony for "frustrates" somewhere along the coast of France. "But it all comes around to the fact that I don't like work," she confesses. "And — well, people must live."

Dorothy Parker claims that she is one of those rare creatures in New York — a born New Yorker. "Or I would have been," she amends her statement, "if my parents hadn't gone to New Jersey for the summer." She is short, dark and slender, and not nearly so full of Dorothy Parkerisms as one might be led to suspect from her verse.

She is at work on a play which has been contracted for by a Broadway producer. "But I don't know anything about the technique of writing plays," she says. "For instance, I don't know how to get an actor gracefully off or on the stage. The most obvious thing to me for an actor to do is to enter casually and say, 'Well, there seems to be a second act going on here.'" And she is soon to write a book in collaboration with Donald Ogden Stewart — "just as soon as Stewart gets through with the part he is playing in Philip Barry's comedy, 'Holiday.'" The book will be made up of a series of love letters and ought to create a riot — if we know anything about the origins of riots.

--(reprinted 3-25-1929, Evening Tribune, Albert Lea, MN, p 2.)