Dorothy Parker’s Ashes: a short story

A short story. Status: finished, edited, ready for a good journal.

“That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: ‘Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.’ ”―Dorothy Parker

There can’t be many true stories about literary figures that are more bizarre or sadder than that of the after-life of Dorothy Parker.

Many of you might already know her story:

Parker was one of the great literary wits and great celebrity writers of the 20th century, whose fame and success peaked from the 1920s through the ‘40s. Besides writing newspaper columns, magazine essays, books, short stories, poetry, and screenplays, she gave us so many immortal lines, from “What fresh hell is this?” to “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.” to “She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.”

Dorothy Parker created and perfected the “I’m-the-bitch-you-don’t-fuck-with” persona.

But she got blacklisted in the 1950s, and she never recovered professionally. Her famous tongue and her infamous drinking eventually drove away nearly all her friends, and she never recovered socially. Her husband’s death left her sullen and resigned, and she  never recovered emotionally. When she died in 1967 she was heirless, friendless, and more or less destitute.

That’s not the sad and bizarre part yet. I’m getting to that next.

Parker was cremated. No one came. No one claimed her ashes. Her probate lawyer put her ashes in a cabinet in his office, along with a few other unclaimed items of his less-beloved dearly departed clients. They remained there for decades.

There was a move or two from there, but essentially Parker’s ashes remained disrespected, unmemorialized, and forgotten for 53 years after her death. Finally, in 2020 some Dorothy Parker fans tracked them down, acquired them, and had them properly interred in a Bronx cemetery, with a nice memorial and everything.

That’s the bizarre and sad true story.

Or is it?

In my new short story “Dorothy Parker’s Ashes” I imagine a different fate.

My story involves theft, conspiracy, blackmail, forgery, fraud, extortion, a dirty law intern, dirty scholars, a dirty archivist, dirty cops, a saltines tin, and an ending that, while nothing could ever be considered happy considering that Dorothy Parker was, by this time, dead, at least improved over her real after-life situation.

As Dorothy Parker herself once said: “I don’t care what is written about me so long as it isn’t true.”