Brittle Nell THE LATE MRS. DOROTHY PARKER

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

When Dorothy Parker remarried her ex-husband Alan Campbell in 1950, she looked around during the reception and said, "People who haven't talked to each other in years are on speaking terms again today, including the bride and groom." A corrosive reviewer, Parker once slated a hapless author as a "writer for the ages. For the ages of four to eight." She could be equally cruel to her nearest and dearest. When Alexander Woollcott, a fellow jouster at the Algonquin Round Table, recalled an afternoon of book signing with the smug rhetorical question "What is so rare as a Woollcott first - edition?", Parker replied deadpan, "A second edition." Presumably it was the memory of such moments that prompted Woollcott to term her "so odd a combination of Little Nell and Lady Macbeth."

Parker, the first famous American woman humorist, probably inspired more awe -- and more imitative bad manners -- than any other female of her day. She remains one of the best-known brand names in literature, although nowadays hardly anyone reads her short stories, her flop plays, her mostly slight and bitchy journalism or more than a handful of her poems, most of which depend on the confectionery trick of concealing a goo of sentimental self-pity beneath a brittle crust.

Like most subjects of biographies, Parker would be considerably less interesting if she had led a happier life. The woman who had everything -- appeal, style, brains, celebrity and that deadly wit -- also drank to excess for decades, repeatedly attempted suicide, spent her declining years in the noisome atmosphere generated by adamantly unhousebroken dogs, and was cremated in a party dress Gloria Vanderbilt had given her as an act of charity. Leslie Frewin's The Late Mrs. Dorothy Parker revisits this pith and pathos more grandiloquently but less methodically than John Keats' 1970 volume You Might As Well Live, on which Frewin substantially relies. Just how much is hard to tell, for the new book has neither footnotes nor a chapter-by-chapter list of sources, and its sense of chronology is, to put it politely, approximate. What Frewin adds is a culling of choice Parkeriana, a well- considered if clumsily executed effort to evoke the pop-culture context of her times and a brief, provocative assessment of her talents. Parker was, after all, the one person George Bernard Shaw asked to meet at a 1926 Riviera party full of glitterati. On being introduced to the pert, poised lady, Shaw cut to her tragic core as he turned and said wonderingly to Woollcott, "I'd always thought of her as an old maid."