Dorothy Rothschild Parker was an American writer of short stories, poems, plays, screenplays and entertainment criticism, whose acerbic wit made her the doyenne of the sparkling (albeit alcohol-fueled) company at the Algonquin Round Table in New York in the roaring twenties. In her heyday, she wrote for Vogue, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker, among others, and was a formidable theatre critic (once describing Katharine Hepburn as running the gamut of emotions from A to B). She espoused liberal causes early on, including the Spanish Civil War, the Sacco and Vanzetti case, and civil liberties for African-Americans (in fact, leaving her entire estate to the N.A.A.C.P.). She was blacklisted in Hollywood during the 1950s, which she considered an honor. Ms. Parker was married once to stockbroker, Edwin Parker (being half Jewish in an era of anti-Semitism, she joked that she did it only to change her name), and twice to Alan Campbell, a screenwriter and sometimes actor. Probably the love of her life was the writer, Charles MacArthur, but their affair ended disastrously; he went on to marry Helen Hayes and she went on to her first suicide attempt. In her later years, Dorothy, who was childless, lived in a residential hotel in Manhattan with her pet dogs, and died alone of a heart attack. Her remains were unclaimed for 17 years; finally the N.A.A.C.P. put them to rest in a memorial garden in their Baltimore headquarters. She had her share of sorrow in her life, but she certainly contributed to laughter in ours. Our favorite Parkerism? Asked to use “horticulture†in a sentence, she replied, “You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.†Apocryphal? Maybe. Who cares – we believe it!
