Pretty, petite Dorothy Parker, a drama critic for Vanity Fair, did not look poisonous. But at the Round Table, she was the acknowledged master of the put-down. "Age before beauty," Clare Boothe Luce once remarked as she invited Parker to proceed her; "pearls before swine," the latter supposedly retorted as she swept through the doorway. Alexander Woollcott called her an odd "combination of Little Nell and Lady Macbeth."