Parker detested Hollywood from the very start – despising Tinseltown and its studio system. But she was confronted by the Faustian choice that faces all freelance writers and journalists – she did it for the money but did her best not to sell her soul.

She certainly enjoyed the cash as it rolled in, splashing out with crazy extravagance on ludicrously expensive hats and spending $100,000 dollars to renovate her $4,500 dollar home. She and her screenwriter husband Alan Campbell were snapped up by studios in desperate need of dialogue now that the talkies had arrived to take over from silent movies.

Much of Parker’s work was never credited in the studio factory system but she worked on a number of notable films and, along with Campbell, received an Oscar nomination for A Star is Born.

Parker was greatly moved by cases of injustice in the United States, of which there were many in the twenties and thirties. She was arrested in 1927 at a protest against the death sentences on Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants who were fitted up for murder and subsequently electrocuted. After meeting the mother of framed Irish labour organiser Tom Mooney while on board a liner to Europe, she took up his case too. While in Hollywood she also organised fundraisers for the legal defence of the Scottsboro Boys, nine African Americans accused of rape and facing legal lynching by all-white juries in Alabama.

The Communist Party of the USA played a leading role in all of these campaigns but Parker was not a communist. Nonetheless, as communists were the most relentless and effective anti-fascists in the thirties Parker did not shy away from them and in 1936 she became a founder of the Anti-Nazi League set up by communists and their allies to mobilise broad support for the Spanish Republic threatened by Franco’s illegal rebellion.

The scene was set for Parker to be denounced as a “premature-antifascist” 20 years later when America was convulsed by McCarthyite hysteria. She and Campbell were blacklisted for her political sympathies and hard times forced the once glamorous, now sidelined, couple to apply for social security benefits.

Campbell descended into total alcoholism and died of drink and drugs in 1963. Three years later Parker died of a heart attack at the age of 73. She bequeathed her estate to the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People. And it was the NAACP which finally buried Parker’s ashes after they had spent 17 years languishing in a solicitor’s filing cabinet.

It was a chaotic ending to a chaotic life. Parker endured widowhood twice, fractious relationships, suicide attempts, alcohol dependency and political persecution. She looked back on her days holding court at the Algonquin Hotel in the twenties with contempt and couldn’t stand speaking about Hollywood.

Rather ominously, author Gail Crowther laments a lack of original sources at the beginning of this book and at the end apologises for its limitations by explaining that the book was conceived and written during lockdown which hampered her research. Nonetheless she shines an illuminating light on a tragic talent.

Dorothy Parker in Hollywood by Gail Crowther. Published by Gallery Books, 304pp, £20.