Marion Meade Dorothy Parker biographer dies at 88

With her 1988 biography, Marion Meade helped revive interest in Dorothy Parker, the famous author and sardonic wit of the Algonquin Round Table. Marion Meade died on December 29 at her home in Manhattan. She turned 88.

Ashley Sprague, a grandchild, confirmed her death. She claimed Ms Meade had recently had COVID-19 but the exact cause was unknown. From Mrs. Meade “Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?” chronicles the lively, if difficult, life of an important figure in the literary scene of the 1920s and 1930s.

In addition to coming up with slogans such as “You can manage a horticulture, but you can’t make it think” and “Men rarely match girls who wear glasses”, Ms. Parker joined Vanity Fair magazine as a drama critic at the age of 24. She was also a founding member of the Round Table at the Algonquin Hotel in Midtown Manhattan.

She, author Robert Benchley, critic Alexander Woollcott and others were involved in the witty commentary. She overindulged in alcohol, battled depression, and married playwright Alan Campbell twice (and divorced once) after a failed marriage to Edwin Parker II. She made two suicide attempts.

According to Mrs. Meade, Mrs. Parker “panicked and swallowed a bottle of shoe polish” in 1930 after she couldn’t finish a novel she promised to her editor at Viking and sent her to the hospital. Mrs Parker gave her epitaph, “Excuse my dust,” before he passed away in 1967.

When Mrs. Meade decided to focus on another figure, she had previously published a biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine, who reigned as Queen of England and France in the 12th century. Initially focusing on the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, she soon discovered that another author was compiling a biography of the woman.

She turned her attention to Mrs. Parker, whom she called “one of the funniest women of the 20th century, whose humor and common sense always amuse me,in an essay many years later for Contemporary Authors.

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“From time to time readers will say to me, ‘Oh, she had such a sad life'” she added. But, she said, she disagreed: While alcoholism and depression sometimes derailed her, she wrote, she “Didn’t prevent her from being hugely successful, the versatile author of verses, stories, plays, film scripts and criticism.”

Reviews of the book were mixed. In The Pittsburgh Press, Roy McHugh called it one “Admirably simple biography” Which “explains more than is possible and makes no excuses.” But in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani wrote: “Parker’s cynical wit, of course, may not have made it easy for friends or biographers to penetrate her defensive armor, but instead of trying to straighten out her emotional life, Mrs. Meade simply settles for sloganeering, attributing her troubles to to insecurity or self-loathing.”

The book increased Mrs. Parker’s popularity enough, according to Kevin Fitzpatrick, president of the Dorothy Parker Society, that Penguin Classics decided to republish collections of her short stories and poetry in the 1990s. And he said Mrs. Meade thought the screenplay for the 1994 Alan Rudolph movie “Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle,” which was written by Mr. Rudolph and Randy Sue Coburn and starred Jennifer Jason Leigh in the title character, was based in part on her life.

“She has spoken to a lawyer, but she has not filed a lawsuit” said Mr. Fitzpatrick in a telephone interview. “It was a low point for her.”

Marion Lolita Sidhu was born on January 7, 1934 in Pittsburgh. Her father, Indian immigrant Surain Sidhu, was a physicist who oversaw the X-ray facility at the University of Pittsburgh and later participated in top-secret research at Argonne National Laboratory. Mary (Homoney) Sidhu, her mother, was a housewife.

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When Marion was young, she had the ambition to become a writer. She received a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University in 1955. Later that year, when she arrived in Manhattan to enroll in Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, she hurried to the Algonquin, sat on a sofa in the lobby’s cocktail bar, lit a cigarette, ordered a Tom Collins and took in the scene Mrs. Parker must have seen many times.

She spent a year interviewing famous people and fact-checking for syndicated gossip columnist Earl Wilson after receiving her master’s degree in 1956. Ms. Meade spent the next two decades freelancing for magazines such as McCall’s, Cosmopolitan, and The Village Voice .

She also joined the New York Radical Feminists, a group that occupied the offices of Ladies’ Home Journal for eleven hours in 1970 in exchange for a – fulfilled – promise to publish a special issue. “women’s liberation” addition in a subsequent issue. She also worked for a long time as an editor for Aviation Week.

Her debut book, “Keven,” released in 1973, was based on conversations with women about what it was like to be a woman and how they felt about men. Then, in 1976, she published a biography of Victoria Woodhull, a pioneer of women’s suffrage.

From Mrs. Meade “Eleanor of Aquitaine” (1977) was praised by The Los Angeles Times critic Robert Kirsch for her “almost uncanny empathy for her subject,” which he said it looked like “she can see the world through Eleanor’s eyes.”

The Parker book took seven years to study and write. She went on to publish biographies of Woody Allen in 2000 and silent film comedian Buster Keaton in 1995. With “Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: writers who ran wild in the 1920s,‘, a collaborative portrait of Mrs. Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Zelda Fitzgerald and Edna Ferber, she returned to Dorothy Parker in 2004.

Dorothy Parker biographer Marion Meade has passed away #COVID-19 complications, 88 years. #CovidIsNotOver pic.twitter.com/ImDUa2Hgob

— Alexandra Halaby🏳️‍⚧️ (@iskandrah) January 20, 2023

In addition to Mrs. Sprague, she is survived by a great-granddaughter, Alison Linkhorn, her daughter, and another granddaughter, Katharine Sprague. Her unions with Milton Viorst, a writer who passed away last month, Forbes Linkhorn and Charles Meade ended in divorce.

Mrs. Meade revisited her most famous theme a few times. The introduction of a new edition of “The Portable Dorothy Parker” was edited and written by her (2006). In a Kindle book titled “The Last Days of Dorothy Parker” published in 2014, she expanded on a 2006 Bookforum essay on Ms. Parker.

She told the story of how Mrs. Parker’s urn was eventually hidden in Manhattan in a filing cabinet owned by veteran politician Paul O’Dwyer, who served as legal counsel to author Lillian Hellman, the literary executor of the Parker estate. (After a winding journey, the urn was buried in 2020 at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.)

Mrs. Meade called Mr. O’Dwyer in 1987 to inform him that she was on her way to the cemetery in Westchester, where she thought the urn would be buried. Mrs. Meade wanted to pay her respects now that Mrs. Hellman had died and her biography of Mrs. Parker was finished.

“Oh, she’s not here, “ Mr O’Dwyer told her.

“Of course she is,” said Mrs. Meade.

“No no,” Mr O’Dwyer said: “I look straight at her.”