Posted Aug. 6, 2000

By Lauren Mechling
National Post

Click here for 2000 Photo Gallery

(This article appeared (Page 3 Arts and Life section) in the National Post, published in Toronto and sold all across Canada. Pictures accompanied. Website is www.nationalpost.com)

NEW YORK — Last Friday night, bartenders at Flute, a posh New York nightspot, served highballs to new faces — a crowd of people sporting art deco cigarette holders, stringy flapper dresses and beaded necklaces that dangled down to their belly buttons. It was clear these revellers were not to be clumped together with the club's regular influx of European tourists and residents of the nearby Trump Tower.

PARKERFEST 2000 Images from the Y2K 'fest: Speakeasy Night at Flute (top); champagne cocktails at Flute (middle); Round Table lunch at the Gonk (bottom). See photo gallery

Back in the 1920s, Flute was called Club Intime, a speakeasy frequented by renowned writer Dorothy Parker. On Friday night, the anachronistically attired people were in town for Parker Fest 2000, the second annual New York convention of Dorothy Parker fans.

Neither scholars nor nuts, all of the more than 40 participants of the two-day festival had the same thing to say about the inimitable Parker: They like her for her wit.

Most of them discovered her in college, although some middle-aged Parker fans have only recently fallen in love with her.

That they cited her fang-sharp wit as their reason for admiring her is not all that surprising. Apart from having been played by Jennifer Jason Leigh in a mid-'90s Miramax period piece, Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, it is the author's oft-quoted witticisms for which she is best known.

(Dear readers, a mini-refresher course: "Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses," as well as "By the time you swear you're his / Shivering and sighing, / And he swears his passion is / Infinite, undying / Lady, make a note of this: / One of you is lying" and, of course, "You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think.")

Born Dorothy Rothschild in New Jersey in 1893, by the age of 23 she had blossomed into a 4-foot-11, heavily perfumed drama critic for Vanity Fair. For the next 50 years she continued to dabble in everything from writing (she managed to crank out short stories for The New Yorker, as well as catty criticism and clever verse despite her writer's block) to men (even before her first marriage, to Eddie Parker, dissolved, her proclivity for doomed love affairs bordered on pathological) to alcohol (although she barely touched a drink in her early years, it did not take her long to become a full-fledged alcoholic).

Most remarkable of all is the fact that, although she dropped out of school at age 14, little Dorothy Parker went on to become one of the cleverest writers of the modern age, a female (though not exactly ladylike) Oscar Wilde for the 20th century.

Kevin Fitzpatrick, a lupine man in his thirties, organized Parker Fest 2000. Dressed in a three-piece grey wool zoot suit, the antsy organizer held on to his martini and said, "I identify with Dorothy. She was a champion cocktailer. She had bad apartments, bad relationships, bad jobs. And she liked New York."

That people (this author included) find themselves becoming obsessed with Parker stands to reason. She is a mysterious and curious case. She wore her heart on her sleeve, revealing little, couching her sadness and desperation in jaunty verse and silly satirical stories.

She feared giving pieces of herself away, yet she was uncensored and forthcoming in a manner that would make the writers of Sex in the City look like the creators of prudish drivel. In Big Blonde, one of her most famous and autobiographical stories, after devoting several pages to the dissolution of Hazel and Herbie's marriage, Parker has Hazel take up with a succession of men, the last of whom (at this point in the story) is Sydney. "Then Sydney married a rich and watchful bride, and then there was Billy. No — after Sydney came Fred, then Billy." Bam. A spate of wretched love affairs crammed into one afterthought of a sentence. That's how Parker works.

Since it would be disgraceful (and outright impossible) to imitate Parker in any way other than sartorially, the mostly female crowd passed the night pretending to be characters in a Parker story, gulping highballs at Club Intime and talking about nothing.

The following day, the Parker fans convened in the famous, though windowless, Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel (Parker and her friends called it "The Gonk") for fancy chicken salad sandwiches and crab cakes. Parker and her literary companions, among them Alexander Woollcott, Harpo Marx, Noël Coward, Edmund Wilson and Harold Ross, the founder of The New Yorker, gathered there regularly for lunch year after year. Eventually, Parker moved into a room in the Algonquin, requiring no more than a room to, as she said, "lay a hat and a few friends."

At the lunch for the Parker fans, a number of round tables covered in white linen were set up. The original table around which Parker and her friends sat no longer exists. Guests ate calmly, happy to be in the same room in which Parker had spent so much time. When asked what they like about her, many of the guests gave me a chilly stare, as if I had just asked them if they had considered trimming their nose hairs. They weren't a wild bunch.

After the meal, people helped themselves to coffee and ricotta cheesecake and braced themselves for the post-prandial variety show.

Clarke Madden, a Pittsburgh, Penn., resident with a curious and volatile European accent, had dressed for the luncheon as writer Robert Benchley, who had been Parker's best friend and colleague at Vanity Fair. Madden put down his second glass of red wine, stood up and, with one hand behind his back, delivered a monologue that Benchley had performed onstage night after night to the dismay of his wife, Gertrude.

Several zaftig women in black cocktail dresses then took turns singing Parker's poems and some songs she wrote for Hollywood in the 1930s.

Finally, Michele Stayner, a Dorothy Parker impersonator from Australia, performed a bit of her routine for the room. Dressed in a two-piece, cream-coloured suit, Stayner put on her best high-society New York accent and recited bits and pieces from Parker's work: from a Vanity Fair theatre review, "The cast was so abominable I will not tell on them"; from a Vogue caption, "Brevity is the soul of lingerie"; and from her oft-quoted poem Resumé, "Guns aren't lawful; / Nooses give; / Gas smells awful; / Might as well live."

(Note: For all of Parker's talk of killing herself and repeated attempts, she died of natural causes in 1967.)

Next, the group repaired to the library in the Algonquin to look at old photographs of the writer and, later, sailed out to view the Upper West Side buildings Parker once lived in.

Along the way, Stayner elaborated on her love of Parker. "She had so much trouble, you know," she said, speaking in her Aussie accent. "Botched love affairs, abortions. And we all can relate to that."

Complimented on her post-lunch recitation, Stayner said, "I had never written anything before. But when I finished writing the piece, I had a dream that Benchley came to me and said, 'I love you, Dotty.' And then I knew I was done."

Click here for the 2000 Parkerfest photo gallery.