This weekend, its the premier event of Parkerfest in New York, the yearly homage to New York’s most wittily sarcastic historical figure, Dorothy Parker. This year, its a jazz-age lawn party on Governor’s Island. In Los Angeles, there’s a guided tour. Dorothy Parker’s Hollywood, which begins at the Washington Mutual/McDonald’s center at 8152 Sunset in West Hollywood.

Mrs. Parker was a fan of neither banks nor fast food, but the site has a rather rich history, because Mrs. Parker and Robert Benchley lived there for a while (as did Orson Welles and a host of other notables,) when it was the Garden of Allah which then was made famous again to a new generation by Joni Mitchell who sang “they paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” The parking lot was soon followed by a two-story savings and loan which today is a multi-story LA-style office building.

The Algonquin Hotel of Roundtable fame

Mrs. Parker was one of the early larger-than-life characters that shone through modern media. To those who saw her in glimpses and short texts she was brilliance personified, but in too hefty a dose, she was tart and bitter, and it may be why she never had a hit play or novel; her forte was the review, the poem and the short story.

She was one of the early celebrities who gained and kept fame by feeding free content to the daily press. Franklin Pierce Adams’ New York Times column “The Conning Tower,” made use of quips from the witty and famous, often gathered at a “roundtable” held at New York’s Algonquin hotel. One wag said FPA (Franklin Pierce Adams was an early adopter of initials-as-name) raised Parker from a couplet.

But like many talented people whose intensity makes a few words shine, a full dose overwhelms, and today she’s remembered mostly for her oneliners. Asked to use horticulture in a sentence, she quipped, “You can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think.” Deferred to at a doorway with the phrase, “Age before beauty,” she walked through and retorted: “No, pearls before swine.”

But like so many rapscallions, she was quickly forgotten in death. Her friend Lillian Hellman didn’t pick her ashes up from the crematorium for 10 years. They languished another 15 in her lawyer’s office, where her intellectual property was more important than her physical remains. She finally found a home at the NAACP headquarters in Baltimore (she gave the MLK foundation her estate at her death).

Dorothy Parker is perfect for the days of the 30 second soundbyte and the Internet sigline, so when the Dorothy Parker Society brought her to the web in the late 90s, she might actually have liked it (though she never would let on.) She was adamant that she not be lionized in death. But then she was adamant about a lot of things. That was her curse and her salvation.

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