However, she did not earn a lot from writing and that brand cost ‘$12 a quart at bootleg prices’. Parker’s favourite Scotch was Haig & Haig. But she was seldom completely sober either.’ It seemed almost miraculous how little sips, spaced regularly throughout the day, could act as an effective tranquilliser… The liquor made her feel cheerful and loose, clever remarks spun spontaneously from her lips, until everyone was falling down with laughter and she felt appreciated and loved. According to her biographer Marion Meade, ‘Scotch helped her to function better. She took it without water, because that was the quickest way to its effect.’Īt first, Parker thrived on her favourite tipple. After experiment, she found that Scotch whisky was best for her.
Gin, plain or in mixtures, made her promptly sick.
Whisky became her drink of choice – the reason being, one understands from her autobiographical short story, Big Blonde (1929), that: ‘…she hated the taste of liquor. She had never been a drinker, but her friends were a bibulous bunch and she felt obliged to join them.Īlgonquin Round Table: (left to right) Art Samuels, Charles MacArthur, Harpo Marx, Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott She was invited to many of the wild parties in Long Island mansions which inspired the most memorable and decadent scenes in F. Just a bunch of loudmouths showing off, saving their gags for days, waiting for a chance to spring them…’ At the time, however, her world revolved around the group.Īs was common in Prohibition-era New York, Parker socialised in speakeasies after nights at the theatre. In her later years, Parker was dismissive of the self-proclaimed ‘Vicious Circle’ at the Algonquin: ‘The Round Table was just a lot of people telling jokes and telling each other how good they were.
With fellow Vanity Fair staffers Robert Benchley and Robert E Sherwood, Parker founded an informal lunch ‘club’ at New York’s Algonquin Hotel, attracting some of the city’s most influential critics and social commentators. The Algonquin Round Table came to epitomise the flippancy, irreverence and hedonism of the Jazz Age. She developed a pithy, acerbic style which placed her firmly in the increasingly popular ‘elevated eyebrow’ school of American journalism. The young journalist Dorothy Rothschild married Edwin Parker in 1917, and soon afterwards replaced PG Wodehouse as Vanity Fair’s theatre critic. Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) was a poet, writer and critic, most famous today for her scathing wit and savage put-downs. As a founder member of the Algonquin Round Table, she spent the Prohibition era partying with some of the greatest American journalists and literary figures of the day, developing a taste for Scotch whisky in the process.
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