A splash of gin for Dorothy Parker in final resting place

The poet, humourist and civil rights campaigner has finally been laid to rest 54 years after her death.

Dorothy Parker is laid to rest on Monday in the Bronx’s Woodlawn Cemetery. Picture: Isabel Vincent / New York Post

Dorothy Parker, poet, humourist and civil rights campaigner, once mused that her headstone should read: “Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment”.

Now, 54 years after her death, she has finally been laid to rest in her home city of New York.

An idiosyncratic ceremony to unveil her headstone at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx this week concluded a decades-long effort to give Parker a fitting final resting place. “This is finally her homecoming to her beloved New York City,” Kevin Fitzpatrick, president of the Dorothy Parker Society, told the New York Post.

Parker was born during a hurricane in 1893 in New York and her send-off, which featured a jazz band and readings of her work, was delayed by a day as Storm Henri barrelled into the city.

Dorothy Parker in Los Angeles in 1936.

Mourners attended in fancy dress, and poured gin, a favourite of hers, on her grave.

It was revealed after Parker died of a heart attack in 1967 that she had left her entire estate, including all future royalties, to Martin Luther King Jr, the civil rights leader, whom she had never met. When he was assassinated, her ­estate was transferred to the NAACP. However, her will offered no pointer when it came to her ­remains. As a result, Parker’s ashes bounced from place to place, spending six years at a Westchester crematorium and 15 years in the Manhattan office of her lawyer.

The NAACP created a memorial to Parker outside its Baltimore headquarters in 1988. When the organisation announced plans to move to Washington DC last year, Parker’s family demanded her ashes return to New York.

Parker wrote poems, short stories and theatre and literary reviews for Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and other magazines, and was famous for one-liners such as: “The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.”

Her ashes were buried last year at the family’s plot at Woodlawn, with Monday’s ceremony revealing her headstone. It features hand-carved roses and takes its inscription from one of Parker’s poems, published in the New York World in 1925. “Leave for her a red young rose,” reads the inscription. “Go your way, and save your pity; She is happy, for she knows that her dust is very pretty.”

The New York Distilling Company in Williamsburg issued a commemorative gin to pay for the headstone. Along with the gin, mourners left red roses near Parker’s grave, which lies next to those of her parents and grandparents.

The family plot is in a section of the cemetery that includes the graves of writers such as Herman Melville and E.L. Doctorow.

The Times