The Curmudgeon Files #4

Lest we think that Curmudgeonry is strictly a male affliction, consider Dorothy Parker. She was a gifted author, poet, and screenwriter who wreaked havoc on the literary world for more than fifty years. “The first thing I do in the morning,” she once commented, “is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.” Alexander Woollcott described her as “a combination of Little Nell and Lady Macbeth.”

As a literary and theatrical critic for such publications as Vanity Fair, Esquire, and Cosmopolitan, she liberally dispensed vitriol on many prominent actors and budding authors. Her review of a book by a later-day best-selling author included: “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force. This isn’t just plain terrible. This is fancy terrible. This is terrible with raisins in it.” The disgruntled author later characterized her as “something that would eat its young.”

During an intermission of a stage performance by Katherine Hepburn, Parker asked a companion, “Shall we go home or go back in and watch her run the gamut of emotions from A to B?”

Despite her running rough-shod over New York society, no fashionable cocktail party was without her. She was a heavy drinker, and admitted that “three drinks and I’m under the table; four drinks and I’m under the host.”

Her married life and myriad affairs were legendary. “I require three things in a man,” she once said. “He must be handsome, ruthless, and stupid.”

Upon hearing of the death of President Calvin Coolidge, she asked “How do they know?”

Two Dorothy Parkerisms are still used by stand-up comics to this day: “Men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses” and “Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clear to the bone.”

She died June 7, 1967, in New York.

Ray Cassidy