Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin

Chapter One

1920



CHAPTER ONE



It couldn't be worse.

Twenty-six, and she was losing her job. Vanity Fair's editor in chief broke the news in the grandeur of the Tea Court at the Plaza Hotel, beneath the Tiffany glass dome, amid the Caen stone and Breche violet marble, the Baccarat crystal and gold-encrusted china, the handwoven Savonnerie rugs. He had to fire her, Frank Crowninshield said, because his former theater critic was planning to return to the magazine and of course he needed his old job back. She said she didn't know that. He hoped she would work at home and do little pieces in her spare time. She said she really couldn't. She had no idea how to change a typewriter ribbon.

Vanity Fair had no cause to fire her, thought Dorothy Parker. And so what if every producer on Broadway hated her. It was Sunday afternoon on Central Park South, the carriage horses dozed standing up at the curbs, the leafless trees across the street were dark against the dusky sky. When Dottie emerged from the hotel, she went straight home, round Columbus Circle, up Broadway, back to the Upper West Side, where she grew up. From an early age she ... read full excerpt from: Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin ebook