The fresh hell of Dorothy Parker’s Hollywood

Hollywood didn’t kill Dorothy Parker, but booze probably did. In fact, if Hollywood hadn’t paid her so well to spend so much time at home, she couldn’t have afforded the booze – as well as maintain a lifelong ability to insult almost everyone she loved while still earning their (sometimes reluctant) affection.

It’s hard to believe that Parker didn’t take her film work seriously, since she kept producing such good work

Gail Crowther’s latest book (she has written entertainingly on other notably cocktail-absorbed writers such as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton) is a focused, fun and almost recreationally enjoyable brief biography not of a writer but of a well-framed aspect of a writer’s life – in this case, Parker’s critically neglected years as a well-paid and genuinely gifted screenwriter.

Born in 1893, near Long Beach, New Jersey, to middle-class Jewish parents, Parker suffered the loss of her mother when she was only five; and when her father later married a Jesus-obsessed Catholic, it taught Parker a rule she seemed to follow for the rest of her life: if you love someone too hard, don’t do it too openly or life might take what you love away.