The Dodgy Origins of Dorothy Parkers Famous Martini Quote

” I like to have a Martini,

Two at the very most.

After three I’m under the table,

After four I’m under my host .”

-Dorothy Parker

Without dispute, this is among of the most widely recurred sayings about booze ever uttered. And with good reason–it speaks to universal experience, it’s visual, it offers the promise of drunken sexuality, and is admirably compact–it gives an entire short story in a mere 130 characters( including both attribution and correct line breaks .) It’s a Twitter-length epic, written when only songbirds knew how to tweet.

When Allen Katz was casting about for a epithet for the gin made by his New York Distilling Co ., he settled on Dorothy Parker Gin, because, well, duh. He’d read and admired her writes when in college, knew that she was a notable New Yorker( although not a” native New Yorker ,” as she always rued–she was born in New Jersey, after all ), and that she used fond of drink.” It pays homage to a woman who’s a great novelist, and a damn good drinker ,” Katz said.

On the back of his gin bottle is, naturally, Parker’s ” Martini ” quote. If you don’t have his gin at hand to consult, you can certainly find the quote elsewhere. Her quatrain has also appeared on cocktail napkins at the Algonquin Hotel, where Parker was a member of the famously witty Round table. It was trotted out regularly in the 1980 s by cabaret vocalists Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme. It’s on tee-shirts and posters and gets tweeted several hour a few weeks( thank you, 130 characters !). On GoodReads, her quote earns well over 1,000 “likes” — or ten times more than Parker’s next most popular quote, which is an anodyne and forgettable commentary about books.

So enduring is her drinking quote that it constructs me feel more than a little churlish to point out a simple fact: No evidence exists that Dorothy Parker ever said it or wrote it.

To paraphrase Shakespeare, I come not to bury Dorothy Parker. I come to praise her. In fact, that the matter is quote is so widely attributed to her merely burnishes her legend to an even brighter splendor. It makes me respect her all the more.

I’m not the first to try to run down this quote with the hope that I would end up at Dorothy Parker’s doorstep. Troy Patterson dug into this for Slate several years ago. He managed to track down two commentaries that likely served as precursors, then somehow morphed together and affixed itself to Parker, like a remora.

The first was from Bennett Cerf, a founder of Random House and a television personality. In his bestselling 1944 book, Try and Stop Me , he referred the time someone asked Dorothy Parker how she’d enjoyed a cocktail party. Her reaction:” Enjoyed it? One more liquor and I’d have been under the host .”

The rest of the quatrain apparently first surfaced in 1959, in an undergraduate humor magazine at the University of Virginia TAGEND

” I wish I could booze like a dame. Two or three at the most. But two, and I’m under the table–And three, I’m under the host .”

Through some sort of celebrity alchemy, the two remarks fused, with a fourth booze added, perhaps as a nod to Parker’s well-documented capacity for liquor. It was no doubt attributed to her in the 1960 s and’ 70 s, although I couldn’t find any concrete evidence of this. But by 2006, via means uncertain, it had become are set forth in the updated edition of The Portable Dorothy Parker , which had been in publish in various publications since 1931.

From here, Parker’s quote made the leap into internet immortality.

The quote’s opaque descents, of course, builds it even more fascinating. You have to wonder: how did Dorothy Parker attract such great quotes without having to actually say them? In modern words, it’s as if she somehow managed to get 100 K likes for retweeting somebody else’s line.

Parker was a curiosity, famous in literary circles but not necessarily for her literature. While a respected writer of light poem and heavy short narratives, and a critic of theater( and her fellow New Yorkers ), her corpus was admittedly emaciated.” Dorothy Parker is only one of the most fascinating phenomenon on the American scene ,” wrote Cleveland Plain Dealer theater critic William F. McDermott in 1934.” She has achieved renown with less evidence of labor than any other prof of belles lettres I can think of. A few small-scale volumes of little stories, a few very thin volumes of verse–these are the total bricks in the great masonry of her literary notoriety .”

Yet Parker was one of those upper-class famed more for what she said than what she wrote. (” A mix of Little Nell and Lady MacBeth ,” wrote fellow Round Tabler, Alexander Wollcott .) She wasn’t as regular as the other regulars at the Round Table, but when she was present her bon mots were captured and echoed endlessly by her fellows, securing her fame as the wielder of a verbal rapier. (” A girl’s best friend is her grumbling ,” she once said .) She was the George Takei of her generation, someone whose offhanded witticism eclipsed her other accomplishments.

Being famous for being droll had its burdens. People expected more than a bland, casual statement about canapes. They craved it filleted and shredded.” Why, it get so bad ,” Parker told the Paris Review in 1956,” that they began to laugh before I opened my mouth .”

The anticipations of her fans developed so raised that they bestowed upon her almost any clever went on to say that seemed to fit, whether she uttered it or not. She was noted for saying things, and thus notable sayings gravitated to her and stuck, like burrs to socks.” One of the penalties of having induced bright remarks ,” noted another novelist, commenting about Parker in 1939, is that” a thousand other inventions, clever, indecent and wholly apocryphal, are always being ascribed to the same helpless author .”

” Did you hear what Dorothy Parker said is the commonest form of introducing a funny story in many widely scattered parlors ,” the critic McDermott of the Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote.” Tale and jests attach themselves to people whom they are supposed to fit .” And the columnist, playwright and administrator George S. Kaufman once lamented,” everything I’ve ever said will be credited to Dorothy Parker .”

Parker wasn’t the only quote magnet of her era. Others included Parker’s friend and fellow Round table regular Robert Benchley, the author who putatively uttered another justifiably famous boozing line:” Why don’t you get out of that wet coating and into a dry Martini ?”

Benchley actually did say this in a movie–to Ginger Rogers in” The Major and The Minor” in 1942. Director Billy Wilder often said that the line wasn’t in the script, but ad-libbed by Benchley. In turn, Benchley ever credited his pal, the actor Charles Butterworth, who said it in a Mae West-written movie several years earlier. Never mind. Benchley was the quote magnet , not Butterworth, and so he’s always credited with the line.

Parker invested her later years deflating stories of her humor and denying having said this or that.” She Didn’t Say Them ,” was the headline of a 1941 newspaper profile, when she was 48 years old. She told her interviewer that fewer than one percent of the wisecracks attributed to her had actually originated in her mind.

As she developed older and more reclusive, Parker–twice marriage , now divorced , no children–lived alone in a New York hotel. She refused to learn how to cook, said her literary executor Lillian Hellman, who also reported that she’d developed” an amazing those who are interested in mortuary magazines” and became” a great authority on embalming fluids .”

She died in 1967, alone in her inn room.” Dorothy Parker, 73, Dies; Noted for Sardonic Wit ,” was the headline of one obituary. This same obit went on to note that she” lived to overhear recitals of Dorothy Parker anecdotes while she herself was forgotten .”

Kevin Fitzpatrick, a chronicler of Dorothy Parker’s times in New York, wrote,” of all the Round Table members, she has become the most successful in fatality .” Indeed, her magnetism for quotes remains undiminished. She’s often cited as the source for the line,” The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue .” Yet it’s well established that this was said by comedian and pianist Oscar Levant, who had long been credited with it. But sometime in the early 2000 s, through some dimly understood posthumous magnetism, the saying migrated to Parker and muckled on to her, and now regularly surfaces as an oft-tweeted and much-Instagrammed meme.

Allen Katz, the manufacturer of Dorothy Parker Gin, admits that the Martini poem is certainly spurious. He recognise this, sort of, by ensuring the lines on his gin label shows without the definitive quotation marks.

” I would call it an attribution ,” he says.” It can’t be firmly or factually linked to her with full confidence .”

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