Who was Dorothy Parker? Voice of the Roaring Twenties from NYC, author of ‘A Star is Born’ and more

Dorothy Parker didn’t like movies. She didn’t like Hollywood. And her Real didn’t like the people who ran it.

The native New Yorker – whose witty, urbane writing style helped define the Roaring Twenties – couldn’t even deign to say the words Los Angeles; she called it “out there.”

But in 1929, at the age of 36, Parker “went there.”

In fact, she would spend the next 35 years on and off in Tinseltown, revamping scripts and producing sparkling dialogue for the screen.

As Gail Crowther puts it in her revealing new book “Dorothy Parker In Hollywood” (Gallery Books, out now): “It was a city that held her captive for decades and repeatedly drew her in.”

In fact, Parker spent many more years in Hollywood than at the famed Algonquin Round Table, where the sharp-eyed young observer sharpened her poison pen and traded with the rest of Manhattan’s Jazz Age literature.

And while Parker dismissed her film scripts as “fluff,” Crowther treats them not as commercial dregs, but as radical, empathetic, and artistic—a mirror for Parker’s views on society, fame, class, race, and more.

Parker had one reason, and one reason only, for going to Hollywood: money.

She was broke.

The films came with a three-month contract and the promise of $300 a week (or about $4,700 today). It was an offer she couldn’t refuse.

By 1929, Parker had already survived a divorce, several disastrous love affairs, an abortion and two suicide attempts.

She had two best-selling books to her name, but no full-time job and a mountain of debt – not to mention an alcohol problem.

Hollywood, meanwhile, was desperate for literary talent.

The industry’s first sound film, “The Jazz Singer,” caused a sensation when it debuted in 1927, and producers tried to greenlight more “talking pictures.”

They needed smart writers who could create snappy dialogue for them.

They had already lured F. Scott Fitzgerald, PG Wodehouse and Anita Loos (one of Parker’s enemies) west with the promise of easy money and a house with a swimming pool.

But when Parker arrived in Hollywood, she was unimpressed. “It all feels like it was invented by a peep show guy from Sixth Avenue,” she snorted.

Most of all, Parker hated the work, which mostly consisted of waiting for directions from her bosses at MGM on a script that needed extra spice.

She realized that while the studios wanted prestigious writers, they did not necessarily value their ideas, micromanaged them, discarded their concepts and did not recognize their contributions.

As soon as her contract expired, she returned to New York.

She would return five years later.

In 1932, Parker met Alan Campbell, an actor and writer eleven years her junior who became her second husband.

Campbell noticed that Parker needed someone to nurse her hangovers and take care of her finances.

She remained, as always, broke.

So he went to Paramount in 1934 and negotiated a ten-week contract as a husband-and-wife team: he would write and act for $250 a week, while Parker would be paid as much as $1,000 a week to produce dialogue to achieve.

Campbell came up with the action and story, and Parker shouted out snappy one-liners to sprinkle into the dialogue.

Their early efforts were not mentioned but showed their touch.

1935’s “Mary Burns: Fugitive” had a complex female protagonist and a nuanced portrayal of gangsters, while the Depression-era class-conscious “Hands Across a Table” featured a fast-talking Carole Lombard as a gold digger. falls in love with an impoverished playboy, brimming with Parker’s signature humor.

They received their first Oscar nomination in 1937, for “A Star Is Born,” still considered one of the most fearless portrayals of showbiz ever put to screen. (It has been remade three times, most recently in 2018 with Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga.)

While Parker complained about her job, she partied with the Fitzgeralds, drank, burned money (houses, a farm in Pennsylvania, booze, nice lingerie), had two miscarriages and threw herself into progressive causes.

She helped launch the Screen Writers Guild and the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League.

Yet her political activism got her into trouble.

In 1951, Parker was summoned by the House Un-American Activities Committee and asked if she was a communist. That wasn’t the case, but she was still blacklisted. She would never – even if she tried – work in that city again.

Parker lost her salary, the farm and so did Campbell (they divorced, remarried, separated again and reconciled before he died of an apparent suicide in 1963).

She moved back to Manhattan in March 1964 and died of a heart attack three years later. She was 73.

Parker didn’t run to talk about Hollywood. “It was a horror to me when I was there and it’s a horror to look back on now,” she said later in life.

Yet Crowler argues that looking at her time “out there” reveals a more comprehensive portrait of Parker. Instead of the OG literary IT girl, we see someone who was “subversive and political,” Crowler writes: “a fearless activist and a writer with an unresolved legacy.”