BESTSELLERS & BEST FRIENDS
My book publishing blog, with murder mysteries woven through it.
If this is your first visit, be sure to start with “1. Let’s do it!”
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Witty and creative and funny as Parker was, life wasn’t kind to her. Even her afterlife.
Parker died in 1967 leaving her estate and all future royalties to Martin Luther King Jr, who she had never met. Which was sorta weird.
But even weirder, she left no instructions as what to do with her remains (ashes).
When King was assassinated the next year (1968), Parker’s estate then transferred to the NAACP. Her estate included her ashes. Those were shoved into an attorney’s file cabinet. (I like to think Parker would find that funny.)
Finally, 20 years later, in 1988, the NAACP grabbed her remains from the file cabinet and laid them to rest outside its Baltimore headquarters.
Jump ahead another 35 years or so to when the NAACP plans to leave Baltimore to move its headquarters to Washington, DC. Oops!—what about Parker’s remains buried at the Baltimore headquarters? Eventually, the NAACP allowed Parker’s relatives to move her ashes to New York. And at last, in August 2021, Dorothy was buried in her family’s plot at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. Parker’s relatives and others attended a memorial ceremony where those gathered read from Parker’s work. And gin, her beverage of choice, was poured on the grave.
It was time for me to visit Dorothy. I drove up to the Bronx and parked at Woodlawn. After a bit of a walk, I found her.
The headstone is carved with a poem of Parker’s written in 1925 that reads:
“Leave for her a red young rose;
Go your way, and save your pity;
She is happy, for she knows
that her dust is very pretty.”
Somebody had recently left her a rose. I choked up a bit. Yet reading her gravestone I marveled at how Parker could make me laugh more than 50 years after leaving us.
I wandered a bit as I returned to my parked car. And that’s when I spotted a headstone in the shape of a book.
It read:
Lajos Antal
1959 – 2019
Vége
That’s all. A name. Years of birth and death. And Allan Jatos’ signature sign-off, “Vége” (“the end”), on a tombstone shaped like a book.
Weird! Was this Lajos guy (I assumed Lajos was a male name, I’m not sure why) the biggest Allan Jatos fan ever? Or maybe he’s just some Hungarian who loved to read and thought it witty to have “the end” (in his native language), on his gravestone?
Whatever. I’m tired. Driving to the Bronx and back can be an exhausting pain.
Tomorrow: What can I learn about this Lajos Antal guy?
PS: I have a friend who now lives in this home in West Hollywood, where Dorothy Parker once lived. Which is sort of fun because on every gift-giving occasion, I give my friend another Dorothy Parker book for her growing library of Parker titles. It seems so right.