Parker was cremated at Ferncliff Crematory, in Westchester County. No one ever came to collect the ashes, and they sat on a shelf for years. Storage fees were never paid, and so, in 1973, after many unreturned phone calls, a frustrated clerk at Ferncliff sent the urn to the address listed on Parker’s paperwork, which had once belonged to the office of Parker’s lawyer, Oscar Bernstien. By this time, Bernstien had retired, and his partner, Paul O’Dwyer, had taken over the practice. O’Dwyer had barely interacted with Parker and didn’t know what to do with the delivery. He stuffed the urn into a filing cabinet attached to his desk, where it was soon forgotten.
In the early nineteen-eighties, the author and actor Malachy McCourt visited O’Dwyer’s office and began telling a story about meeting Parker at a Hollywood party in 1961, without recognizing her. “She was brightly dressed, her hair not white, blondish, warm and friendly and somewhat amused by my attention,” McCourt told me. “And I said, ‘You’re sure now that you don’t want to spend the night with me?’ And she said, ‘Young man, you might think you are flattering me, but you’re mistaken.’ ” O’Dwyer asked McCourt if he wanted to see Parker again. “I said, ‘Yeah, but I think she’s dead.’ He gave me a look and went to his desk and pulled out an urn from a metal filing cabinet in his bottom drawer. It was not large, maybe the size of a small flower vase; it was only about ten inches, I think. Very small. And he said, ‘So here she is again!’ And I said, ‘Oh my God! How are you, Dorothy?’ ”
In 1988, O’Dwyer, then eighty-one, decided to do something about Parker’s ashes while he still could. He called Liz Smith, a gossip columnist for the Daily News who had been a friend of Parker’s, and asked for advice. Smith mentioned Parker’s plight in her column, and soon received more than seventy letters in response. O’Dwyer then held a cocktail party of thirty Parker devotees at the Algonquin Hotel. He explained to the guests that the instructions in Parker’s will were unclear about where her remains should go, and he asked them for suggestions.