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There was a time when it seemed that all things bright, clever, or malicious spoken in New York were ascribed to Dorothy Parker. That time was the 1920s, when wit was as plentiful as bathtub gin and, when dispensed by her, just as lethal. "You know," she was remembered as saying among friends about an accomplished contemporary with amorous proclivities, "that woman speaks 18 languages? And she can't say 'No' in any of them." When conversation turned to an actress who had fallen and broken a leg in London, Dorothy Parker became distraught: "Oh, how terrible! She must have done it sliding down a barrister." She could mock herself as well. "One more drink," goes her famous party line, "and I'd be under the host." Even in later years she could be heard delivering memorably witty lines with undiminished spontaneity. "I had an office so tiny," she recalled in an interview about the office she shared with Robert Benchley, "that an inch smaller and it would have been adultery." When Tuesday Weld and her mother moved onto her Hollywood street, she told visitors: "Have you met Tuesday Weld's mother, Wednesday, yet"" "Don't worry about Alan," she said after her divorce from second husband, Alan Campbell, "Alan will always land on somebody's feet." In An Unfinished Woman, Lillian Hellman said that she enjoyed Dorothy Parker more than any other woman: "for me, the wit was never as attractive as the comment, often startling, always sudden, as if a curtain had opened and you had a brief and brilliant glance into what you would never have found for yourself."
This exceptionally bright woman was born Dorothy Rothschild in West End, New Jersey, in 1893 to a Scottish Presbyterian mother who, she felt, deserted her by dying in her infancy and a wealthy Jewish father who regularly, among other cruelties she remembered, hammered her wrists at table for the slightest infraction.
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