was the culmination of 14 years of discussion, according to Kevin C. Fitzpatrick, head of the Dorothy Parker Society, a fan group.
“She’s back in her hometown,” Mr. Fitzpatrick, a professional tour guide and author, said in an interview on Saturday.
Parker, who was known for her writing published in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Vogue, as well as for her wry humor, left the bulk of her estate and royalties from her writings to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and in the event of his death, to the N.A.A.C.P.
She had not, however, left instructions about what should become of her remains by the time she died in 1967 at 73 in her suite at the Volney Hotel on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and no one knew what to do with her ashes. For years, they sat at a Westchester County crematory until they were shipped to the Wall Street office of Paul O’Dwyer, a lawyer for the playwright Lillian Hellman, who was the executor of Parker’s estate. The ashes were left in an office filing cabinet there. . .
When Benjamin L. Hooks, then the executive director of the N.A.A.C.P., learned that Parker’s ashes did not have a proper resting place, he suggested they be brought to the group’s headquarters, in Baltimore. . .
But the N.A.A.C.P.’s announcement that it planned to move its headquarters to Washington in the coming years ignited a debate over where Parker’s remains should go.
The Woodlawn Cemetery, in a plot with her parents and grandparents, was “really the only place for Dorothy Parker to go,” Mr. Fitzpatrick said. . .
Mr. Fitzpatrick transported Parker’s ashes on an Amtrak train from Baltimore to New York, and then in an Uber from Penn Station to the Upper West Side. During the train journey, he said, he made a cocktail with Dorothy Parker gin.
“I just wanted to celebrate getting her on her journey home,” he said. . .
The ceremony at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx took place on Aug. 22, Parker’s birthday, when she would have turned 127 years old.
Susan Cotton, Parker’s 73-year-old grandniece, and other family members could not attend the burial ceremony because of the coronavirus pandemic. But Ms. Cotton said she had drunk a martini in her great-aunt’s honor while the ceremony was happening. . .
At the burial ceremony, Mr. Fitzpatrick read passages from Parker’s essay “My Hometown,” an ode to New York, in which she wrote that she had been cheated out of the distinction of being a native New Yorker because she was born while her family was spending the summer in New Jersey.
New York, Parker wrote, “is always a little more than you had hoped for. Each day, there, is so definitely a new day.”'
Brief Poems by Dorothy Parker
Alexandre Dumas and his Son
Although I work, and seldom cease,
At Dumas pere and Dumas fils,
Alas, I cannot make me care
For Dumas fils and Dumas pere.
***
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Should Heaven send me any son,
I hope he’s not like Tennyson.I’d rather have him play a fiddle
Than rise and bow and speak an idyll.
***
Anecdote
So silent I when Love was by
He yawned, and turned away;
But Sorrow clings to my apron-strings,
I have so much to say.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I could go ON and ON! Thanks, 'jeeves.'
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