Dorothy Parker’s ashes need a new home

Dorothy Parkes ashes are in the move again. And many of her fans believe she should return home to New York.

Dorothy Parker as a Hollywood screenwriter in 1936.

When Dorothy Parker died in 1967 she left the world poems, fiction, biting literary criticism and a treasure trove of wisecracks that would go on to grace T-shirts and cocktail plates.

All of her money she left to Martin Luther King Jr, although he could not recall ever having met her.

When King was assassinated 10 months later the estate passed, as Parker had instructed, to the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People.

The writer had no children and gave no instructions about what should become of her ashes but, after years in a lawyer’s filing cabinet, they were interred in a garden at the NAACP’s headquarters in Baltimore.

Now another debate has begun about where to put Dorothy Parker. The civil rights organisation is moving its headquarters to Washington DC and is wondering whether to bring Parker’s ashes along too. “Her legacy means a lot,” Aba Blankson, a spokeswoman, said. “It’s important to us that we do this right.”

Some argue that Parker is too much of a New Yorker to be kept anywhere else for long.

She complained of having to go to Hollywood as a screenwriter; sometimes she seemed reluctant to go outside at all. “If the doorbell rang in her apartment, she would say, ‘What fresh hell can this be?’” a friend told her biographer, John Keats.

Ellen Meister, a writer who runs a Parker fan page, said: “People are kind of disappointed that she didn’t end up in New York. New York was her home, and her first and last love.”

Others are keen that her resting place remains tied to the civil rights movement.

Parker wrote that her commitment to it was fostered by her aunt, who displayed total indifference to the plight of the working class.

When she died, King pronounced himself “deeply touched and gratified” at the bequest.

He said: “What impresses and inspires me is that one of America’s most respected and warmly loved women of letters felt so committed to the civil rights movement that whatever she had she offered to it.”

Francine Gordon, a Parker aficionado, said she hoped that the NAACP did not leave her in Baltimore. “She’s always had abandonment issues,” Ms Gordon told The New York Times. “It’s happening again!”

The poet herself had once suggested that the words “Excuse my dust” be her epigraph: it was duly written on a plaque in Baltimore.

Ms Gordon felt that if Parker was not wanted in Washington her remains ought to be transferred to the lobby of New York’s Algonquin Hotel, where she once presided as the in-house wit at a round table of writers and critics.

“Knowing her, which obviously I did not, she probably would prefer to be thrown in someone’s face,” said Stuart Y. Silverstein, a literary detective who found lost poems by Parker. “There is no shortage of candidates.”

The Times