by Marion Meade
In Atlanta, Martin Luther King, Jr., was in Beaumon’s Restaurant, where his Southern Christian Leadership Conference was meeting in an executive session, when he was called to the telephone. A few minutes later he made his way back to the table and announced that Dorothy Parker had bequeathed her estate to him, “which verifies what I have always said, that the Lord will provide.” He was surprised because he had never met her. Afterward, he issued a formal statement saying that although she needed no monument to her memory, “this fine deed” could only add to her reputation. After deduction of expenses, the Parker estate amounted to $20,448.39.
On Thursday evening, at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel in New York, Kate Mostel kept vigil with the body, which was laid out in the beaded caftan Dorothy had worn to the Vanderbilt-Cooper party. Mostel, raised a Catholic, thought it was awful to leave a person’s body alone in a funeral parlor. The only other person present was George Oppenheimer. They sat in silence.
Lillian Hellman took charge of the funeral arrangements with her usual efficiency. On Friday morning, a day of brilliant sunshine, there was a memorial service at Frank Campbell’s. In her will, Dorothy had requested no service of any kind, but Hellman believed in observing the amenities. In any case, it was going to be a very brief service. Among the one hundred and fifty friends who showed up to pay their respects were a number who expressed astonishment over the size of the obituary that had appeared in The New York Times. The story had begun on the front page and continued inside for almost an entire page. The paper also carried a sampling of quotes to demonstrate her “saucy wit,” some of which witticisms she had written or spoken and some of which she had not.
After a violinist played Bach’s “Air on a G String,” Lillian Hellman and Zero Mostel came forward to deliver eulogies. Kate Mostel recalled that Hellman told Zero, “ ‘You take five minutes and I’ll take five.’ So Zero took five minutes and she took twenty.” Zero Mostel tactfully pointed out that the last thing Dorothy would have wanted was this formal ceremony. “If she had her way,” he said, “I suspect she would not be here at all.” After the mourners had filed out, Sid Perelman remarked, “I’m sure Dorothy’s foot was tapping even through as short an exercise as that because she had a very short fuse.”
Many times she had rehearsed her death, imagining even the kind of weather she wanted:Oh, let it be a night of lyric rain
And singing breezes, when my bell is tolled.
I have so loved the rain that I would hold
Last in my ears its friendly, dim refrain.
When she had written those lines she had been thirty and thinking of her mother’s death, that terrifying journey across the harbor with the coffin and standing around the muddy mound at Woodlawn. On the afternoon her own life closed it was fair and warm, with temperatures in the mid-eighties. She had never been able to get what she wanted.
In Rochester, Bill Droste and Lel Iveson read of their aunt’s death in the newspaper. Even though they had not heard from her in many years—not, in fact, since their mother died—they wished to acknowledge her passing, out of respect.
On June 9, 1967, Dorothy was cremated at Ferncliff Crematory in Harts-dale, New York. During the following weeks, her ashes remained unclaimed. Lillian Hellman, who made the arrangements, had left no instructions about their disposition. On July 16, 1973, Ferncliff finally received word to mail the cremated remains to the legal firm of O’Dwyer and Bernstien, 99 Wall Street, New York City.
Oscar Bernstien and Paul O‘Dwyer frankly did not know what to do with Dorothy’s ashes. Pending further instructions from Lillian Hellman, Paul O’Dwyer stored the box in the drawer of a filing cabinet in his office. In 1988, the NAACP claimed the ashes, which were transferred to a specially designed memorial garden on the grounds of its Baltimore headquarters.
Upon Dorothy’s death, the disposition of her business affairs and her personal effects fell to her executor. Since the only business deal in progress during the last months of Dorothy’s life was Marcella Cisney’s A Dorothy Parker Portfolio, Leah Salisbury wasted no time in writing to Lillan Hellman about it. To her surprise, Hellman was unwilling to extend the necessary approval. Despite appeals from both Salisbury and Cisney asking her to reconsider, Hellman steadfastly opposed the project until Cisney was obliged to drop the matter in 1970. Hellman’s attitude toward her guardian-ship of Dorothy’s and Dashiell Hammett’s estates was essentially negative. As one of her biographers later noted, she did not encourage those “who would like to keep books on Hammett and Parker, whose literary papers she keeps safely out of sight.” She refused to cooperate with anyone who wished to write about Dorothy.
In 1972, over Hellman’s fierce protests, the executorship of Dorothy’s estate passed to the NAACP. Ownership of the Parker literary property belonged to Martin Luther King during his lifetime. After his death in 1968, it was the NAACP’s position that their absolute ownership made an executor unnecessary. A court ruling in their favor terminated Hellman’s fiduciary capacity, which she had assumed was for life. She was not pleased. “It’s one thing to have real feeling for black people,” she said, “but to have the kind of blind sentimentality about the NAACP, a group so conservative that even many blacks now don’t have any respect for, is something else. She must have been drunk when she did it.”
To playwright Howard Teichmann, Hellman angrily called Dorothy “that goddamn bitch.” Hellman claimed that she had “paid her hotel bill at the Volney for years, kept her in booze, paid for her suicide attempts—all on the promise that when she died, she would leave me the rights to her writing. At my death, they would pass to the NAACP. But what did she do? She left them directly to the NAACP. Damn her!”
Hellman arranged for her secretary to be paid fifty dollars from the estate to clean Dorothy’s apartment. According to Hellman’s memoirs, “Among the small amount of papers she left were odds and ends of paid or unpaid laundry bills, a certificate of the aristocratic origins of a beloved poodle, a letter dated ten years before from an admirer of her poems, and the letter from me sent from Russia about six weeks before she died. [In fact, the only unpaid bills were from the Volney, Dorothy’s doctor, the Zitomer Pharmacy, and a newspaper delivery service, debts amounting to less than five hundred dollars.] Around the envelope of my letter was folded a piece of paper that was the beginning, obviously, of a letter Dottie never finished. It said, ‘Come home soon, Lilly, and bring Natasha on a leash. She’d be such a nice companion for C’Est Tout [Troy]. I—’ ”
The few personal papers, documents, or mementos that she left behind were to vanish, destroyed either when the apartment was cleaned or at some later date. As Martha Gellhorn wrote in 1981, Dorothy “might as well have left her papers to Fort Knox. Until Miss H. releases Mrs. Parker’s papers, there is no way to prove how long Miss H. stayed in Spain [during 1937].”
Nothing was released. After Lillian Hellman’s death in 1984, no material relating to Dorothy was found among her possessions.
Dorothy outlived nearly all the Round Tablers except Marc Connelly and Frank Sullivan. A few days after her death, Sullivan wrote to a friend,I could write you so much about Dotty that I don’t dare get started. Jim Cagney telephoned today from Milbrook in a mild state of shock about her death. He said he just wanted to make sure I was here, as a link with former and happier days. Well, it threw me into a pensive shock too. Her departure is as much the end of an era for me ... as the departure of the bulk of the NY papers. She was a strong person, Honey. And you said it, when you wrote: she was at war with herself all her life. Maybe most of us are and some negotiate cease fires occasionally, which seldom last. All the digs she took at people, friend and foe alike, were really digs at herself....
If there is any meaning to anything, she is now having the good time she seldom had while here, and I hope she is having it with Mr. Benchley (her name for him always).
AFTERWORD TO THE TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
Nobody seems to have noticed that Dorothy Park
er died in 1967. Maybe this is because every time you turn around she is either being quoted or misquoted, when someone is not setting her verse to music or adapting one of her stories for a one-act show. In the twenty-first century, she has become a brand name with her own literary society and one of the most impressive Web sites of any major writer.
Over just the past two decades, in death as in life, she’s experienced her share of successes. The United States Postal Service honored her with a commemorative stamp in 1992. Madame Tussauds wax museum in New York exhibited a life-size statue, and Hollywood, a place where she once worked and thereafter deeply loathed, decided to film her life (Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, 1994), at least the juicy parts. And, when a new edition of her collected work, The Portable Dorothy Parker, was published last year in a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, a crowd of well-wishers threw a book-launch party at the Algonquin Hotel, exactly the fabulous event that lots of living writers would envy. Clearly, just because she has been gone forty years doesn’t mean she isn’t having fun, for a person in her condition.
These days, about the only things she no longer does are television appearances. However, as befits a veteran celebrity, she continues to make news. Signatures are being collected to honor her with a street sign, DOROTHY PARKER WAY, on the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 44th Street. In her hometown, visitors who want to view her favorite Times Square haunts have a chance to take walking tours or consult a lavishly illustrated travel guide devoted to Dorothy Parker’s New York. On West 44th Street, where the Algonquin still pays tribute to its patron saint, they can book the Parker suite (typically $499 a night). The hotel dining room allows guests to sit at a facsimile “Round Table” and order the “Dorothy Parker Burger,” even wash it down with a “Dorothy Parker” cocktail (Smirnoff vodka, Chambord liqueur, and fresh lemon juice).
Meanwhile, Parker is booming in cyberspace: memorabilia enthusiasts log onto www.dorothyparker.com and shop for a variety of merchandise, including T-shirts and coffee mugs, a phenomenon that no doubt would dumbfound Mrs. Parker, a lifelong collector of nothing.
Another subject that fascinates people is the whereabouts of her ashes, which were stowed in a Wall Street filing cabinet for fifteen years. Her executors (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) interred the ashes in a memorial garden at their Baltimore headquarters in 1988, but her remains are due to move again.
Not only do readers continue to enjoy her work, they also snap up practically anything having to do with her life. There is obviously no shortage of possibilities. But why do people still care about a five-foot depressed, alcoholic, wisecracking nineteenth-century New Yorker who took wicked pleasure in making fun of just about everything? Presumably it’s because discretion was never her forte. A virtuoso of satire, she has been ranked with Mark Twain and Benjamin Franklin as an astute observer of life, love, and the glorious stupidities of her fellow citizens. As such, she may never go out of style.
Despite her reputation as a brilliant wit who fired off memorable one-liners, her reality was far more complex: a lifetime of hard labor turning out verse, short stories, literary and dramatic criticism, essays, war reporting, song lyrics, dramas, and screenplays. Her output was vast, her subjects wide-ranging—from suicidal blondes and perfect roses, to union organizing, fascism, and the Spanish civil war. She has the distinction of being the only American writer to have bequeathed her estate—and the whole of future royalty earnings—to a civil rights group, the NAACP. There was nothing witty about that.
If Dorothy Parker’s life was cluttered with “laughter and hope and a sock in the eye,” as she once wrote, her afterlife has been crowded with plenty of action-packed adventures. How she would have hated missing it all.
—Marion Meade October 2006
Notes
Introduction: The Algonquin Hotel
xvi THEY SAY OF ME: Parker, “Neither Bloody nor Bowed,” The Portable Dorothy Parker, The Viking Press, 1973, p. 117.
xvii I AM CHEAP: Edmund Wilson, The Twenties, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975, p. 345.
xvii BUT NOW I KNOW: Parker, “Indian Summer,” The Portable Dorothy Parker, p. 107.
xvii TIME DOTH FLIT: Author’s interview with Allen Saalburg.
xvii SHE DISDAINED: Parker, The Portable Dorothy Parker, p. 491.
xvii AT TWILIGHT: Author’s interview with Allen Saalburg.
xviii THREE HIGHBALLS: Parker, “Just a Little One,” The Portable Dorothy Parker, p. 242.
xviii I DON’T CARE: Parker, “Morning,” Life, July 7, 1927, p. 9.
xviii IT WAS INEVITABLE: Parker, The Portable Dorothy Parker, p. 483.
xviii AT LUNCH: Parker, The Portable Dorothy Parker, p. 510.
xix OH, HARD IS THE STRUGGLE: Parker, “Coda,” The Portable Dorothy Parker, p. 240.
xix JUST A LITTLE JEWISH GIRL: Wyatt Cooper, “Whatever You Think Dorothy Parker Was Like, She Wasn’t,” Esquire, July 1968, p. 57.
One: The Events Leading Up to the Tragedy
3 WILD IN MY BREAST: Parker, “Temps Perdu,” The Portable Dorothy Parker, p. 317.
3 MY GOD: Cooper, p. 57.
5 FOLK OF MUD: Parker, “The Dark Girl’s Rhyme,” The Portable Dorothy Parker, p. 78.
8 WHAT STREET: Parker, McCall’s, January 1928, p. 4.
9 GO DOWN TO ELLIS ISLAND: Cooper, p. 57.
9 THE GREATEST SALESMAN: Crerand’s Cloak Journal, February 1899, p. 146.
10 SILLY STOCK: Parker, “The Dark Girl’s Rhyme,” The Portable Dorothy Parker, p. 78.
11 LOVELY SPEECH: Author’s interview with Ruth Goetz.
12 DIARRHEA WITH COLIC: State of New Jersey Report of Death, Eliza Rothschild, July 20, 1898.
12 PROMPTLY WENT AND DIED: Cooper, p. 57.
13 I DIDN’T CALL: Ibid.
14 WHENEVER HE’D HEAR: Ibid.
14 WOULD LAUGH: Parker, “Condolence,” The Portable Dorothy Parker, p. 93.
14 DO NOT WELCOME ME: Parker, “The White Lady,” The Portable Dorothy Parker, p. 90.
15 SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION: Cooper, p. 57.
15 THEY WEREN’T EXACTLY: Ibid.
15 EIGHTY YEARS LATER: Laura McLaughlin letter to author, February 25, 1980.
15 DID YOU LOVE: Cooper, p. 57.
16 THAT YOUR SISTER?: Ibid.
16 A FOUNTAIN PEN: Parker, Ainslee’s, October 1921, p. 156.
16 THERE’S LITTLE: Parker, “Coda,” The Portable Dorothy Parker, p. 240.
17 SUCH ARTICLES OF JEWELRY: Eleanor Rothschild will.
Two: Palimpsest
19 SHE WAS A REAL BEAUTY: Cooper, p. 57.
20 ONE OF THOSE AWFUL CHILDREN: “Dorothy Parker,” in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Edited by Malcolm Cowley, The Viking Press, 1957, 1958, p. 76.
20 WONDERFUL TO SAY: Helen Rothschild letter to Henry Rothschild, July 25, 1905.
20 THIS MORNING RAGS: Henry Rothschild untitled verse, 1905.
21 DO NOT FAIL: Ibid.
22 FOR COMFORT: Writers at Work, p. 78.
22 LYING ON HIS FACE: William Thackeray, Vanity Fair, p. 347.
22 THEY SAY WHEN YOUR: Dorothy Rothschild letter to Henry Rothschild, August 6, 1906.
22 A SOCK IN THE EYE: Parker, “Inventory,” The Portable Dorothy Parker, p. 96.
23 THE KID IS FINE: Helen Rothschild letter to Henry Rothschild, ca. July, 1905.
23 DEAR PAPA: Dorothy Rothschild letters to Henry Rothschild, Summer 1905.
24 SAY, MISS DOROTHY: Henry Rothschild untitled verse, Summer 1905.
25 ONE CAME IN HANDY: Dorothy Rothschild letter to Henry Rothschild, August 22, 1905.
25 IT’S TERRIBLY HOT: Ibid., June 23, 1906.
26 DEAR PAPA: Ibid., June 26, 1906.
27 THE TYPICAL DANA CIRL: Parker, “The Education of Gloria,” Ladies, Home Journal, October 1920, p. 37; “The Middle or Blue Period,” The Portable Dorothy Parker, p. 595.
28 CARRIED THE DAISY CHAIN: “Theatre,” The New Yorker, February 28, 1931, p. 22.
/> 28 BECAUSE OF CIRCUMSTANCES: Los Angeles Times, April 28, 1963.
28 THE BLACK SHEEP: “Nobody knew what happened to him,” Lel Droste Iveson said of her uncle, Harry Rothschild. In “The Wonderful Old Gentleman,” Parker drew the character of a scapegrace who had disappointed his father, despite everything he had done for the boy. The Old Gentleman “used to try and help Matt get along. He’d go down, like it was to Mr. Fuller, that time Matt was working at the bank, and he’d explain to him, ‘Now, Mr. Fuller,’ he’d say, ‘I don’t know whether you know it, but this son of mine has always been what you might call the black sheep of the family. He’s been kind of a drinker,’ he’d say, ‘and he’s got himself into trouble a couple of times, and if you’d just keep an eye on him, so’s to see he keeps straight, it’d be a favor to me.’ ” Matt’s wild behavior, Parker wrote, “had a good deal to do with hastening father’s death.” The Portable Dorothy Parker, p. 61.
29 MARTIN, SHE SAID: Surrogate Court, County of New York, “In the Matter of Proving the Last Will and Testament of Martin Rothschild, Deceased,” May 17, 1912.
29 THREE NIGHTS LATER: Henry Rothschild’s death certificate lists the cause of death as “chronic endocarditis—chronic myocarditis—genera arteriosclerosis.”
30 AFTER MY FATHER DIED : Writers at Work, p. 72.
31 THE MOST HORRIBLE: Fred Lawrence Guiles, Hanging On in Paradise, McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1975, p. 87.
31 VERY NICE LIGHT VERSE: Parker, “Sophisticated Verse” speech, American Writers Congress, June 1939.
31 THERE IS NO WAY OF KNOWING: If F.P.A. published any of Dorothy’s early verse in The Conning Tower, there is no way to distinguish her work from that of other contributors.