dorothy parker fired from her vanity fair job
One hundred years ago today, Dorothy Parker got canned as theater critic/editor at Conde Nast’s Vanity Fair, a job she had held, and relished, since 1918.
Dorothy Parker on a train ca. 1920. Courtesy the Dorothy Parker Society.
On a snowy, blustery Sunday afternoon, Vanity Fair editor Crowninshield, Nast’s right-hand man since 1912 (and great-uncle of Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee, legendary Washington Post editor of more recent vintage) asked Parker to the Plaza Hotel tearoom. The Plaza had first opened in 1890 at Manhattan’s Grand Army Plaza–the surprisingly little-known name for the southeast corner of Central Park–and starting in 1905 underwent two years of renovations, overseen by architect Henry Janeway Hardenbergh, that made it synonymous with luxury, excess and pretension. Re-opened in 1907, it has since been owned by, among others, Conrad Hilton and Donald Trump, these personalities reflecting and reinforcing the character of the place. So Crowninshield’s gesture was grandiose.
The Plaza Hotel in 1912. Courtesy the Bowery Boys.
But Parker may have suspected a trap, and she would have had good reason to, as she had been increasingly unruly at the magazine. For several months she had been openly if gently provoking management with a series of pranks, such as clipping out macabre illustrations from a funeral industry journal and using them to decorate the walls of the office. At the Vanity Fair headquarters, three weeks before the tea at the Plaza, Crowninshield had sat her down and voiced a series of disappointments about the magazine and her role in it; just a few days later he fired the writer Robert Sherwood, Parker’s friend and a fellow Algonquin Round Table regular.
To top it all off, what may have been the straw that broke the camel’s etc.: Parker had lampooned actress Billie Burke’s performance in Somerset Maugham’s new play Caesar’s Wife. In her monthly column for VF, Parker wrote that Burke (later to become famous as Glenda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz) played her part, "as if she were giving an impression of Eva Tanguay." Tanguay was a vaudeville star known for a tawdry erotiocism. Caesar’s Wife producer Florenz Ziegfeld, who happened to be married to–wait for it–Billie Burke–was displeased, and complained to Nast.
Dorothy Parker’s January, 1920 theater column for Vanity Fair. Courtesy Vanity Fair.
Sure enough, as the story goes: after ordering roses for the table, Crowninshield told Parker he was dismissing her, offering the rationale that her predecessor, P.G. Wodehouse, wished to return to the role. He went on to compliment Parker’s writing and invite her to publish occasional pieces for the magazine. The Plaza Hotel setting, the roses, the consolation prize offer, all were attempts to sugarcoat the firing, and either the fact that the magazine had chosen safety and conformity over iconoclastic critique or Crowninshield’s guilt about delivering the blow, or all of the above.
As the story goes: Parker refused the offer, ordered the most expensive dessert on the Plaza menu, and marched out.