Estate of Mind

At a Manhattan cocktail party in 1931, Dorothy Parker was delighted to meet a writer whose latest novel she had showered with praise. Dashiell Hammett, she said in her New Yorker review of The Glass Key, was as all-American 'as a sawed-off shotgun,' a guy 'so hard-boiled you could roll him on the White House lawn.' Such rapturous compliments seldom appeared in her book column, but she had admired Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon, and suddenly encountering 'my hero' in person made her drop impulsively to her knees in homage. Hammett took theatrics in the intended spirit-he laughed. Dash's
girlfriend, pouting nearby, was not amused. Afterward she screamed at him for permitting a literary critic to kneel in such a disgusting manner, as if he could have stopped Mrs. Parker, who ordinarily knelt to nobody.
It is unlikely that Parker noticed Hammett's friend, Lil Kober. Most recently a manuscript reader for MGM, she was married to Arthur Kober, screenwriter and one-time press agent. An ambitious twenty-five-year-old of no particular accomplishment, she tended to dwell in the shadows of men, which may be why she failed to make an impression on Parker, a woman accustomed to standing in the spotlight on her own two feet.
Despite that inauspicious beginning at William Rose Benet's party, Parker and Lillian Hellman were destined to become
best friends, their relationship like few others because events took place beyond the grave that even the looniest screenwriter might have rejected.

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