In this scene from my one-person musical play, You Might as Well Live, Dorothy Parker has just married her second husband, Alan Campbell. Alan, who is 10 years younger than Dorothy, has talked her into going to Hollywood, a place she loathes, to write screenplays together:
I loved the money—swimming pools, Valentino gowns, hundred-dollar bras—but I hated the movies. And Hollywood! All those palm trees—the ugliest vegetable God created. Even my pets didn’t feel at home there. Once I took my toy poodle, Cliché, with me to the Beverly Hills Hotel. I was walking her across the lobby when this officious manager rushes up to me and says, “Miss Parker, Miss Parker! Look what your dog did.” I made myself as tall as possible and gave him a look that shriveled his—ego and said,”I did that.”
Oh. And those script meetings. Priceless. We were working on a picture called You Can Be Beautiful at Metro-Goldwyn-Merde. It was about a Helena Rubinstein-type. Sam Goldwyn asked me for a new plot twist. “What about making her into a plain sort—a completely contented ugly duckling who’s transformed into a tragically unhappy beauty?’”
“Got tem it, Dottie! You and your Got tem zopheesticated chokes. You’re a great writer. You’re a great vit. You’re a great vooman, but you haven’t got a great ohdience and you know vy?” I simply held my breath. “Becausse you don’t vant to geef people vat dey vant, dat’s vy.”
“But Mr. Goldwyn, people don’t know what they want until you give it to them.”
“You see dot? You chust deet it again. Vicecrecks. I tell you there’s no money in vicecrecks. People vant a happy endingk.”
“I know this will come as a shock to you, Mr. Goldwyn, but in all history, which has held billions and billions of human beings, not a single one ever had a happy ending,” and as I was making my exit, I heard him say, “Duss anybody in here know vat da hell dot vooman vas tokink about?”
Why, he didn’t have enough sense to bore assholes in wooden hobby horses. What the hell was I doing out there with those people? The country was in a depression. “People vant a happy endingk.” People couldn’t afford a happy ending! And there we were agonizing over mascara. In my younger days that would have been my cue to change at Jamaica and get the hell out. But it was the ’30s, and a few of us thought we were going to make the world a better place. And what better place to start than with Hollywood.
