Who was Dorothy Parker? Defining voice of NYCs Roaring Twenties, A Star is Born scribe and more

Dorothy Parker did not like movies.She did not like Hollywood.

And she really did not like the people who ran it.The native New Yorker — whose witty, urbane writing helped define the Roaring Twenties — couldn’t even deign to utter the words Los Angeles; she called it “out there.” Yet in 1929, at the age of 36, Parker went “out there.” In fact, she would spend the next 35 years, on and off, in Tinseltown, sprucing up scripts and churning out sparkling dialogue for the silver screen. As Gail Crowther puts it in her revealing new book “Dorothy Parker In Hollywood” (Gallery Books, out now): “It was a town that captured her 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 young gimlet-eyed observer sharpened her poison pen trading barbs with the rest of Manhattan’s Jazz Age literati. And while Parker dismissed her movie scripts as “fluff,” Crowther treats them not as commercial drek but as radical, empathetic and artful — a mirror into Parker’s views of society, fame, class, race and more.Parker had one reason, and one reason only, for going to Hollywood: money.She was broke.The movies came calling with a three-month contract and the promise of $300 a week (or around $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 bestselling books under her belt, 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 were scrambling to greenlight more “talking pictures.” They needed smart writers who could create snappy dialogue for them. They had already lured F.Scott Fitzgerald, P.G.

Wodehouse and Anita Loos (one of P...