THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, February 18, 1995 TAG: 9502170097
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: INTERVIEW
SOURCE: BY MAL VINCENT, ENTERTAINMENT WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 109 lines
SHE LOOKS AS TINY and as fragile as a child who has just been asked to give a school report on the meaning of life.
Jennifer Jason Leigh, 32, is thinking back to the role of Dorothy Parker, the writer and wit who was a prominent part of the famous Algonquin Round Table in the New York City of the 1920s.
With her head almost completely shaven, she looks like Joan of Arc. She wavers. She whines. She gropes for just the right words. Searching for Dorothy Parker was a magnificent, exquisite torture. Acting, to Jennifer Jason Leigh, is a total commitment.
That commitment can be seen in ``Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle,'' a movie that traces four decades in the lives of the caustic, witty crowd that once made up New York's literary set.
It was a different world. New York City had 17 newspapers. Everyone read these people. For lunch, they met at the Algonquin Hotel on 44th Street and dished the dirt. Phonies were skewered with more heat than the soup du jour.
For Leigh, Dorothy Parker was more than a challenge. It was a threat. ``I liked the weaknesses in her,'' she said. ``I've never liked Hollywood biographies about heroes and heroines who were so perfect. That, to me, is not identifiable. I'm very, very concerned about whether or not I did justice to Dorothy, but I'm not concerned with picturing her as such a heroine. You see, I'm playing her, not a cult figure, not a successful writer.''
Born Dorothy Rothschild, she married Eddie Parker (played by Andrew McCarthy) in 1917. The two split up a few years later, but Parker kept her married name because she liked it better.
Dorothy Parker was fired as a reviewer at Vanity Fair. Robert Benchley (played by Campbell Scott, the son of George C. Scott) was her managing editor and resigned to protest her dismissal. The film pictures their relationship as a lifelong, platonic romance. In 1925, she helped Harold Ross found The New Yorker and became its critic.
She wrote the Broadway play ``Close Harmony'' with Elmer Rice and went to Hollywood to write the original screenplay for ``A Star is Born'' (starring Janet Gaynor) in 1937.
She married and divorced Alan Campbell (played by Peter Gallagher), with whom she shared writing credits for 16 movies. The two remarried and she stayed with him until his death in 1963. She died in 1967 at the age of 73, years after the demise of the famed Algonquin Round Table.
Many thought she had been dead for years, but Parker had become one of the most quoted writers in American literature. ``The Portable Dorothy Parker,'' first published in 1944, is one of only three original Viking Portables to remain in print for five decades. The others are ``Shakespeare'' and ``The World Bible.'' The New York Times' critic Alexander Woollcott called her ``a mixture of Little Nell and Lady Macbeth.''
The film, however, depicts a sad, tragic being who was drunk most of the time - and was a bad drunk at that. Leigh gives her a lockjawed New England accent with a slur that makes most of what she says indiscernible.
It is one of the more flamboyant, daring and brave performances of the year. Yet it is also one of the most controversial.
After an expensive and highly visible campaign to get Jennifer Jason Leigh her first Oscar nomination, the Oscar list came out Leighless earlier this week. Leigh is the daughter of screenwriter Barbara Turner and the late actor Vic Morrow. Her parents divorced when she was 2. Her father died tragically when a helicopter crashed on the set of ``Twilight Zone: The Movie.''
Making her professional stage debut at age 14, she broke through in the 1992 TV film ``The Best Little Girl in the World'' and later with the hit movie ``Fast Times at Ridgemont High.'' Her other films include ``Single White Female,'' ``Last Exit to Brooklyn,'' ``Backdraft'' and Robert Altman's ``Short Cuts,'' in which she played a mother and wife who dispenses telephone sex. Her specialty has been misunderstood lowlifes, with a touch of vulnerability.
For Dorothy Parker, her controversial diction is purely intentional. ``There are three recordings of Dorothy's speech patterns. I listened to them night and day. I was determined to get the rhythm, the cadence, everything. She did speak in that slur. Some people say they can't understand her, but I can't understand that. She was an educated woman. She had been taught diction. This is the way she spoke.''
Leigh denies the rumors that she was called back on the set to re-record some of the dialogue after audiences claimed they could not understand. ``Untrue. Completely fabricated,'' she said. ``Nothing was re-recorded.''
Asked if she could do a little of her Dorothy Parker, she blanched. ``It would be impossible,'' she said. ``At the time I was doing the film, I got totally into that, but I couldn't get into it again - not without a lot of emotion tearing. It takes a long time to get into it - and once you get into it, you stay there a while.'' ILLUSTRATION: Dorothy Parker
Jennifer Jason Leigh depicts Dorothy Parker as a sad, tragic being
who was drunk most of the time.
THE WIT OF DOROTHY PARKER
From the acid tongue of Dorothy Parker, the critic, poet, and
short story writer who has been called ``a mixture of Little Nell
and Lady Macbeth'' as well as ``America's first modern woman'':
On viewing a group of prom girls at a Yale party: ``If all those
sweet young things were laid end to end, I wouldn't be surprised.''
Describing a party guest: ``That woman speaks 18 languages and
can't say `NO' in any of them.''
On her problems with writing: ``I may die before a train of
thought leaves the station.''
Whenever she was exasperated: ``Kindly direct me to hell.''
Her poem, written when she was considering suicide: ``Guns aren't
lawful/ Nooses give/ Gas smells awful/ You might as well live.''
by CNB