The Peculiar Truth about Dorothy Parker’s Remains

• October 1988: Representatives of the NAACP arrived at the Manhattan law office of O’Dwyer and Bernstein. They had come to collect the cremated remains of famed author Dorothy Parker.

• Paul O’Dwyer, Ms. Parker’s attorney, had kept the little box of her ashes in his office for years, mostly in his filing cabinet. He handed over the box to the NAACP, and they took them to Baltimore.

• Dorothy Parker was a white woman, not black. Neither was she from Baltimore.

• Yet the National Association for The Advancement of Colored People legally claimed her ashes. Despite the fact that she had died 21 years earlier in 1967.

• Dorothy Parker was one of the early 20th Century’s most famous female writers. She grew up in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Her family name was Rothschild.

• 1914: At age 21, Parker got a poem published in Vanity Fair magazine. Then she was published in Vogue, The Saturday Evening Post, and a host of other publications.

• 1917: She married her first husband, Edwin Parker II. They stayed together for eleven years.

• She was a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table, a select group of New York City luminaries who met daily for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel throughout the 1920s. The members grew to included journalists, literary authors, Broadway insiders, and entertainers like Harpo Marx and Tallulah Bankhead.

• 1925: Harold Ross, a recurring member of the Algonquin Round Table, founded The New Yorker magazine. Dorothy Parker came aboard, and her caustic poems made her famous. Her own up-and-down love life was a recurring topic.

• Parker acquired a national reputation for her clever wit. Some of her best-known quips include:

• "You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think."

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

• "Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses."

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

• "This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force."

• 1932: Parker attempted suicide following the end of her relationship with a boyfriend. She took sleeping pills but survived. She made three more unsuccessful attempts throughout her remaining years.

• In 1934, Parker married her Hollywood screenwriting partner Alan Campbell - for the first time. They moved to Los Angeles.

• In 1938, she and Campbell won an Academy Award for Best Story for A Star is Born. The duo wrote 11 other movies throughout the 1930s.

• During that period, Dorothy Parker began developing left-leaning antiauthoritarian politics. She favored civil liberties. She joined the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, which some believed to be a Communist-led group. That affiliation among others marked her as a Communist sympathizer and would damage her career.

• In the post-war years, Parker slipped into alcoholism. Her volcanic marriage to Campbell erupted and they divorced in 1947. Then they were married again until his drug-related death in 1963.

• Parker moved back to New York City where she lived another four years before suffering a fatal heart attack at age 71.

• She never had any children.

• Her friend and fellow author Lillian Hellman was the executor of her will. Parker was a champion of civil rights, so she signed over her estate to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. - even though she never met the man.

• Hellman was stunned. Parker left her nothing. Even so, she arranged for her dead friend’s cremation as per Dorothy’s instructions.

• Lillian Hellman forgot to pick up the ashes, however.

• When Dr. King died less than a year after Dorothy Parker, everything she’d left him in her will was turned over to the NAACP.

• Hellman eventually litigated the organization. She felt entitled to something from her friend Dorothy. Hellman lost the legal challenge.

• Six years after Parker’s death, the crematorium finally found the address of her lawyer, Paul O’Dwyer, and sent her ashes to his office where they remained for years.

• When the NAACP claimed Ms. Parker’s ashes in 1988, they took them to their headquarters in Baltimore and created a memorial for her. A plaque in her honor still exists at NAACP’s office property. It includes the words she wanted on her gravestone: Pardon My Dust.

• To this day, the NAACP receives all of Dorothy Parker’s royalties.