Dorothy Parker profile in Hearst's International-Cosmopolitan (1933 August)

[Garson O'Toole]

The earliest instances of several Dorothy Parker quotations have been
traced by researchers to a chapter of Alexander Woollcott's 1934 book
"While Rome Burns". In August of the previous year, Woollcott
published a profile of Parker in a periodical called Hearst's
International-Cosmopolitan. The title of the article, "Our Mrs.
Parker", is the same as the book chapter title, and several quotes are
antedated within its pages. Yet, the content is not identical to the
chapter and some quotations that appear in "While Rome Burns" are
absent in the magazine article.

Cite: 1933 August, Hearst's International-Cosmopolitan, [Hearst's
International combined with Cosmopolitan], "Our Mrs. Parker" by
Alexander Woollcott, Page varies, New York : International Magazine
Co., New York. (Verified with photocopies)

For example, the following quotes antedate entries in The Yale Book of
Quotations, The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and/or The Oxford
Dictionary of American Quotations:

Page 88, Column 2:
Then she got a job writing captions on a fashion magazine. She would
write "Brevity is the Soul of Lingerie" and things like that for ten
dollars a week.

Page 90, Column 3: Message to a woman who had recently given birth:
At last it came, and the telegrams of relief and congratulations
poured in from every direction, "Good work, Mary," our Mrs. Parker
wired collect. "We all knew you had it in you."

Page 90, Column 1:
And adds, when this dear chum is out of hearing, "That woman speaks
eighteen languages, and can’t say No in any of them."

See the Quote Investigator blog for an earlier variant of this quote
about a polyglot:
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/10/28/speaks-many-languages/

The following quotes may not appear in the 1933 Hearst article. I have
not found them via OCR at this time:

If all the girls attending it were laid end to end, Mrs. Parker said,
she wouldn’t be at all surprised.

Miss Hepburn, it seems, had run the whole gamut from A to B.
(A variant of the Hepburn quote appears in Time magazine on Feb. 19,
1934 and in Life and Letters on December 1934.)

Garson

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