Dorothy Parker

Dorothy Parker (née Rothschild; August 22, 1893 – June 7, 1967) was an American poet, writer, critic, and satirist based in New York; she was best known for her wit, wisecracks, and eye for 20th-century urban foibles.

Parents: Jacob Henry Rothschild and Eliza Annie Marston.

Married:

1. in 1917 to Edwin Pond Parker ll (1893-1933)
2. in 1934 to Alan Campbell (died 1963) divorced in 1947; remarried in 1950 and remained married (although they lived apart from 1952–1961) until his death in 1963 in West Hollywood. [51]

She had been cremated and her ashes interred in a memorial garden at the NAACP headquarters in Baltimore, Maryland. But on August 22 2020, she was re interred in a family plot at the Woodlawn Cemetery in Bronx, New York. Her tombstone was unveiled a year later (54 Years Late, Dorothy Parker Finally Gets a Tombstone, New York Times).

Notes

From Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940

See also: https://lithub.com/dorothy-parker-political-activist-melancholic-bo...

In a way, Dorothy Parker epitomized the transition between the Twenties and the Thirties, between romanticism and reality, between boom and bust. Her best work incorporates the sentimentality of the Twenties and the rude awakening in the Thirties, a decade when the world was willing to forego the beau geste for tangible assets.

Dorothy Parker was born to J. Henry and Elizabeth Rothschild on Aug. 22, 1893, at their summer home in West End, New Jersey. The family cottage was on Ocean Avenue; it burned down before World War I. Dorothy's mother died in West End when she was four years old.

Growing up on Manhattan's Upper West Side, her childhood was an unhappy one. Both her mother and step-mother died when she was young; her uncle, Martin Rothschild, went down on the Titanic in 1912; and her father died the following year. Young Dorothy attended a Catholic grammar school, then a finishing school in Morristown, NJ. Her formal education abruptly ended when she was 14.

In 1914, Dorothy sold her first poem to Vanity Fair. At age 22, she took an editorial job at Vogue. She continued to write poems for newspapers and magazines, and in 1917 she joined Vanity Fair, taking over for P.G. Wodehouse as drama critic. At the time she was the first female critic on Broadway. That same year she married a stockbroker, Edwin P. Parker. But the marriage was tempestuous, and the couple divorced in 1928.

In 1919, Parker became a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table, an informal gathering of writers who lunched at the Algonquin Hotel. The "Vicious Circle" included Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley, Harpo Marx, George S Kaufman, and Edna Ferber, and was known for its scathing wit and intellectual commentary. In 1922, Parker published her first short story, "Such a Pretty Little Picture," for Smart Set.

When The New Yorker debuted in 1925, Parker was listed on the editorial board. Over the years, she contributed poetry, fiction and book reviews as the "Constant Reader." Parker's first collection of poetry, Enough Rope, was published in 1926, and was a bestseller. Her two subsequent collections were Sunset Gun in 1928 and Death and Taxes in 1931. Her collected fiction came out in 1930 as Laments for the Living.

During the 1920s, Parker traveled to Europe several times. She befriended Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, socialites Gerald and Sara Murphy, and contributed articles to The New Yorker and Life. While her work was successful and she was well-regarded for her wit and conversational abilities, she suffered from depression and alcoholism and attempted suicide.

In 1929, she won the O. Henry Award for her autobiographical short story "Big Blonde." She produced short fiction in the early 1930s, and also began writing drama reviews for the New Yorker. In 1934, Parker married actor-writer Alan Campbell in New Mexico; the couple relocated to Los Angeles and became a highly paid screenwriting team. They labored for MGM and Paramount on mostly forgettable features, the highlight being an Academy Award nomination for A Star Is Born in 1937. They divorced in 1947, and remarried in 1950.

Parker was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1959 and was a visiting professor at California State College in Los Angeles in 1963. That same year, her husband died of an overdose. On June 6, 1967, Parker was found dead of a heart attack in a New York City hotel at age 73. A firm believer in civil rights, she bequeathed her literary estate to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Upon his assassination some months later, the estate was turned over to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Dorothy Parker remains were cremated and her ashes interred in a memorial garden at the NAACP headquarters in Baltimore, Maryland.

Copyright 2005 Kevin C. Fitzpatrick.

Burial

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Parker

Following her cremation, Parker's ashes were unclaimed for several years. Finally, in 1973, the crematorium sent them to her lawyer's office; by then he had retired, and the ashes remained in the custody of his colleague Paul O'Dwyer's filing cabinet, for approximately 17 years.[66][65] In 1988, O'Dwyer brought this situation to public attention, with the aid of celebrity columnist Liz Smith; after some discussion, the NAACP claimed Parker's remains and designed a memorial garden for them outside its Baltimore headquarters.[67] The plaque read,

Here lie the ashes of Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) humorist, writer, critic. Defender of human and civil rights. For her epitaph she suggested, 'Excuse my dust'. This memorial garden is dedicated to her noble spirit which celebrated the oneness of humankind and to the bonds of everlasting friendship between black and Jewish people. Dedicated by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. October 28, 1988.[68]

Plaque at Parker's birthplace

In early 2020, the NAACP moved its headquarters to downtown Baltimore and the question about what would happen to Parker's ashes became the topic of much speculation, especially after the NAACP formally announced it would later move to Washington, DC.[69]

The NAACP restated that Parker's ashes will ultimately be where her family wishes her to be.[70] "It’s important to us that we do this right,” said the NAACP.[71]

Relatives called for the ashes to be moved back to the family's plot in Woodlawn Cemetery, in the Bronx, where a place had been reserved for Parker by her father. On August 18, 2020, Parker's urn was exhumed.[72] "Two executives from the N.A.A.C.P. spoke, and a rabbi who had attended her initial burial said Kaddish." On August 22, 2020, Parker was re-buried privately in Woodlawn, with the possibility of a more public ceremony later.[65] "Her legacy means a lot," added representatives from the NAACP.[71]

Quotes

• I'm never going to be famous. I don't do anything, not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don't even do that any more.

• I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true.

• Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.

• I know that there are things that never have been funny, and never will be. And I know that ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon.

• I might repeat to myself slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound -- if I can remember any of the damn things.

• I require only three things of a man. He must be handsome, ruthless and stupid.

• Take care of luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves.

• The two most beautiful words in the English language are 'cheque enclosed.'

• If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.

• The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.

• Now, look, baby, 'Union' is spelled with 5 letters. It is not a four-letter word.

• It serves me right for keeping all my eggs in one bastard.

• Heterosexuality is not normal, it's just common.

• Scratch a lover, and find a foe.

• That woman speaks eighteen languages, and can't say No in any of them.

• People are more fun than anybody.

• She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.

When asked what she would like written on her tombstone, she replied "Pardon My Dust".

Audio Visual

• http://www.dorothyparker.com/dotaudio.htm
• Mrs. Parker And The Vicious Circle trailer

Links

• The Algonquin Round Table: An Online History of the Vicious Circle
• by or about Dorothy Parker in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Dorothy Parker's New York
• Dorothy Parker Quotes
• Random Poems of Dorothy Parker
• Dorothy Parker
• https://dorothyparker.com/2020/09/homecoming.html
• “54 Years Late, Dorothy Parker Finally Gets a Tombstone” New York Times, August 22, 2021. “Dorothy Parker was born during a hurricane. ... So the poet, known for her mordant wit, might have gotten a dark chuckle that Hurricane Henri derailed plans for the long-in-coming unveiling of her headstone at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx last Sunday.”
• “ Jazz Age icon Dorothy Parker FINALLY receives headstone 50 years after her death”

Citations

• [51] Silverstein 58