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

and tea-rooms, even in cafeterias, people were tangoing and Castle-walking. At home they rolled back the rugs and turkey-trotted to phonograph records. For those eager to learn the syncopated dances, newspapers published diagrams of the latest steps, and schools began to spring up all around the city. It was at one of these dance schools that Dorothy Rothschild found employment with the only moneymaking skill she possessed—playing the piano. She purchased quantities of sheet music and practiced “The Floradora Glide” and “Everybody’s Doin’ It (Doin’ What, Turkey Trot).” She also had to master the various steps because the school expected her to help out with student instruction. Working at a dance school scarcely seemed like a respectable occupation for a gentlewoman—that year the Yale prom forbade the tango—but she didn’t care whether people approved or not.
    “After my father died, there wasn’t any money. I had to work, you see....” This was Dorothy in her favorite role: orphan vulnerable to the indignities of an unjust world. Then, as later, she enjoyed thinking of herself as poor. It seems probable that much of Henry’s fortune had melted through speculations, but it was unlikely he had left her penniless. What he did leave is a mystery because the New York Surrogate Court has no record of either will or intestate proceedings.
    Abruptly the old life vanished. The apartment she had shared with her father was given up, its contents sold or dispersed to Bert and Helen. There were some lovely crystal glasses that Helen wished to keep. She considered it important to save family photographs and letters and the verses written by her father and sister. Dorothy had no interest in artifacts from her first twenty years.
    The first months after her father’s death she must have lived with her brother—or else Helen and George took her in. Neither situation would have been to her liking, because Bert and Tiny had a particularly lively six-year-old son and an obnoxious parrot who flew free about the apartment. Though Helen had no parrot, she did have a five-year-old boy and a husband whom Dorothy considered to be “the most horrible, disgusting, outrageous German, the worst kind of German.” Any extended stay with her relatives would have been intolerable.
    She spent the summer of 1914 at the dance school, not unhappily, for the job was fun and she met plenty of new people. At the same time that she was memorizing song hits, she was also trying to write the light verses that were immensely popular before the war. When she subsequently admitted that she had “fallen” into writing, it was strictly the truth. There was a good reason she never planned to become a writer, but rather blundered into it. She regarded poetry and fiction as literature, a serious business requiring special gifts. Her self-view had always been constricted and her concept of her abilities even more limited, although her fantasies would always be grandiose. She invented herself as a writer as she went along. At this age, she had a keen interest in the theater. She said she had been stagestruck and had entertained vague theatrical ambitions, but what shape these might have taken she never made plain, perhaps had not imagined herself. As for verses, they did not qualify as genuine writing. If her father could do them, couldn’t anybody?
    Beyond the fact that her rhymes had been a means of pleasing him, she now wrote because it was fun and because everybody seemed to be doing “very nice light verse.” She was careful about rhyming the first and third lines of quatrains and fussed over masculine and feminine endings. Such work “didn’t do any harm, and it was work that didn’t roughen our hands or your mind; just as you can say of knitting,” which she also enjoyed. All the New York papers (and in 1914 there were more than a dozen) published light verse, but the Mount Everest of verse publishers was the New York Tribune , where