He was married for twenty-seven years altogether to Dorothy Parker, who was eleven years his senior. Theirs was an extremely tempestuous relationship - they divorced in 1947 and remarried three years later - and Parker often accused him (sometimes in public) of being a homosexual. He was disliked by most of her New York friends, and seen as a sponger or hanger-on who was able to have a successful Hollywood screenwriting career as a result of being married to a famous woman. He enjoyed Hollywood; she detested it, although she admitted it paid a lot of bills.