Dorothy Parker

Dorothy Parker who was born Dorothy Rothschild was born on August 22, 1893 in Long Branch, New Jersey were her parents Jacob and Eliza Rothschild owned a summer cottage. She grow up in Manhattan, New York, were her parents wanted her to be considered a New Yorker. Her mother Eliza died July of 1898 just before Dorothy turned five. Her father Jacob remarried in 1900 to a woman named Eleanor Francis Lewis. Dottie as she was also known as claimed her father was being physically abusive to her because she refused to call her stepmother by “mother” or “stepmother” and referred to her instead as “the housekeeper”. In 1903 Eleanor died when Dorothy was nine. Her father then sent her to attend Miss Dana’s School in Morristown, New Jersey which she graduated from in 1911 at the age of eighteen. Her father passed away two years later in 1913. Dottie went on to play piano at a dance school to make money. She sold her first poem to Vanity Fair and a few months later was hired as an editorial assistant for Vogue magazine. After two years at Vogue she left for a job as a staff writer for Vanity Fair. In 1917 she went on to marry Edwin Pond Parker II a Wall Street stock broker, but they were soon separated by his army services during World War I.

Dorothy’s career took off in 1918 while she was writing theatre criticism for Vanity Fair as a stand in, but by 1920 she was terminated after her criticism began to offend powerful producers. In 1924 she collaborated with play writer Elmer Rice and created “Close Harmony” which ran on Broadway in December of 1924, but it was short lived and only preformed twenty-four performances before being closed down. It only went on to be successful during a touring production under the title “The Lady Next Door”....

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...o movie bosses and the FBI had compiled a thousand page dossiers on her because of her suspected involvement in Communism during the McCarthy era. In 1952 she moved back to New York and then back to Hollywood in 1961 to reconcile with Alan. For the next two years they worked together on a number of unproduced projects, but in 1963 Alan committed suicide by a drug overdose. Following his death Dorothy moved back to New York City.

Dorothy Parker died of a heart attack on June 7, 1967 at the age of seventy-three. She left her estate to the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. foundation. Following his death her estate was passed on to The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a civil rights organization for ethnic minorities in the United States. Her ashes remain unclaimed in various locations including her attorney Paul O’ Dwyer’s filing cabinet.