Ursula Parrott

Ursula Parrott (March 26, 1899 – September 1957), was a prolific modern novelist, screenwriter, and short story writer whose sensational first novel, Ex-Wife (1929), was a Jazz Age best seller. Adapted for film as The Divorcee, it starred Norma Shearer. Exploring divorce, abortion, infidelity, changing ideas about marriage, and the disastrous effects of the new morality on women, Ex-Wife created a scandal because of its frank depiction of young working women in a New York City drenched in cocktails and Scotch. From 1930 to 1936, Parrott sold the rights to eight novels and stories that were made into films.

During her lifetime, her works fell into obscurity, only to be revived when Ex-Wife was republished in 1988 and 2023 (paperback), garnering considerable attention in the New York Times, The New Yorker, the Paris Review and other prestigious publications. Amy Helmes and Kim Askew of the “Lost Ladies of Lit Podcast” linked the book favorably to Mary McCarthy’s “The Group,” Rona Jaffe’s “The Best of Everything” and even F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterworks “The Great Gatsby” and Tender Is The Night.

The title of author Lyz Lenz's 2003 nonfiction divorce memoir, "This American Ex-Wife: How I Left My Marriage and Started My Life," is an homage to Ex-Wife. Her podcast "Remembering the Original-Ex-Wife" honors Parrott for chronicling the devastating consequences of divorce for women.

“Ursula Parrott’s cult Jazz Age novel Ex-Wife is more resonant than ever," says critic Alissa Bennett,. She recommends it to admirers of Edith Wharton and Jean Rhys. "Told with a polished Jazz Age dandyism, Ex-Wife resonates at a subtle but unmissable emotional frequency, which is what makes it feel so contemporary."

Ursula Parrott was born Katherine Ursula Towle in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Her father was Dr. Henry Towle and her mother was Towle's second wife, Mary Catherine Flusk. Towle's first wife, Elizabeth Mooney, had died shortly after giving birth to a daughter, Margaret. Parrott's older half-sister would later adopt the name Madge Tyrone. Dr. Towle's second wife, Mary, gave birth to Ursula and her older sister, Lucy Inez Towle. Mary's daughters adored her, but she was of frail health and died when both were still in their teens.

Parrott graduated from Radcliffe College, a small women's liberal arts college in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After graduation she moved to Greenwich Village, where she met Lindesay Marc Parrott in 1920.

In 1922, Ursula married Parrott, then a reporter for The New York Times. They had a son named Lindesay Marc Parrott Jr. two years later. However, Parrott, Sr. didn't want a child and, in one commonly told story, the baby's existence was kept a secret. According to the tale, it wasn't until 1924 that Parrott, Sr. found out that he was a father. He then denied the existence of the child.

A different if still confusing story emerges in the 21st century biography, “Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life and Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrot.” Ursula did conceal her pregnancy at first, most likely to prevent her husband from pressuring her to terminate it. She chose to have the baby in her hometown of Boston where she had the support of the Irish domestic who had raised her. After the birth, she left her baby (called Marc) in the care of her father and sister Lucy in Boston. She and Lindsey attempted to patch up their marriage. But it ended after less than six years, with infidelities on both sides, paralleling the plot of Ursula's forthcoming novel, Ex-Wife.

After Lindesay left her, Ursula found herself a single mother and the family breadwinner, although Lindsey did pay child support. Even the success of Ex-Wife in 1929 must have seemed a mixed blessing since her beloved father died in 1930, only a year after publication. Still, she made an astonishing amount of money, churning out advertising copy, short stories, novels and screenplays. She saw her son often, paid his boarding school expenses, bought him a horse and many other gifts, traveled with him, and put him through Harvard.

Ursula married three other men, Charles T. Greenwood, a prominent New York banker, in 1934; John Wildberg, an attorney, in 1937; and Air Force Major Coster Schermerhorn (grandson of Charles Coster) in 1945. She ran in high literary circles and was even rumored to have had an affair with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Her biography makes no such claim. It does note that Fitzgerald was happy to work on the screenplay of "Infidelity," based on one of Ursula's short stories.

In December 1942, Parrott made headlines when she was brought up on federal charges of attempting to help jazz guitarist Michael Neely Bryan escape from the Miami Beach Army stockade,. She was found innocent at trial.[10] There was another arrest over $1,000 worth of silverware taken from a house where she was a guest. That, too, blew over. "Although she’d published twenty-two books and over fifty stories, the New York Times still reminded its audience of her identity by saying she was the author of Ex-Wife," notes Paris Review critic Michael LePointe.

Famous for reckless spending, especially on fashionable clothes, and plagued by the heavy drinking and smoking typical of the Jazz Age, Parrott died of cancer in the charity ward of a New York hospital in 1957 at the age of 58.[11]

Lindesay Parrott outlived his ex-wife and son—apparently without ever getting to know the latter. A well-known foreign correspondent, he earned a small obit in the New York Times.

in 1988, Marc Parrott, a retired schoolteacher and librarian, died in Honolulu at the age of 64. He left behind his wife, Janice S.M. Parrott; sons, John M. of Philadelphia and Richard K. of California; and a grandchild. His rueful, affectionate afterword to the republication of Ex-Wife (which astonished him, since it had been so long forgotten) vividly describes his mother's workaholic lifestyle.

Parrott's Ex-Wife, her first novel, was published anonymously in 1929.[12]

An overnight success, it sold more than 100,000 copies in nine editions.[13] MGM paid $20,000 for the film rights as well. The New York Mirror’s serialization of the “book everybody is talking about” coincided with the stock market crash and the start of the Great Depression. Ex-Wife was adapted for film as The Divorcee (1930) starring Norma Shearer, who also starred in an adaptation of Strangers May Kiss, published in 1930. Her novel Next Time We Live was adapted for film as Next Time We Love in 1936.[14]

Financially, Parrott was most successful between 1929 and 1940, during which she became a sought-after Hollywood screenwriter, wrote more novels, and many short stories. Her son estimated that she earned around $700,000 ($15.2 million in 2023 dollars) during that period of time.

Like Fitzgerald, Parrott’s popularity peaked in the Jazz Age, fell into decline, and then enjoyed a great second act. "Her biography salvages and reconstructs Parrott’s many remains, rescuing an important American voice and cultural figure from near oblivion," wrote Alan Sobsey in the Los Angeles Review of Books.