She Hopes Parker’s Words Will Strike Some Chords

BALTIMORE — Imagine if Dorothy Parker had been a folk singer instead of a woman of letters. Nearly a quarter-century after Parker’s death, the fabled wit is taking the stage in Baltimore through Niki Lee, a singer-songwriter determined to introduce the writer’s work to a new generation and to remind an older one why it remains important.

Parker, pen fatale of the Roaring ‘20s, roaring back to life as a 21st century pop star!

“She’s taken over my life,” said Lee, who will unveil her one-woman show this Friday. “A year ago I didn’t know who Dorothy Parker was.” Didn’t know that Parker was a major player in the man’s world of American letters between the world wars; didn’t know that Parker’s long-forgotten ashes had made an improbable journey to Baltimore for final interment.

And surely did not anticipate selling her 15-year-old Toyota pickup truck to license the writer’s work for her show.

What Lee, a 41-year-old ex-bartender turned lounge singer turned editor for an online investment newsletter, did know one bad night last May was that another relationship had ended and heartache had come to call again.

“I was so depressed, I went out to rent a movie that was just as depressing as I was,” said Lee, who taught herself to play guitar after her second marriage ended five years ago. “I wanted to see a movie about a woman with a worse romantic life than mine.”

Lee found it in “Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle,” a 1994 film directed by Alan Rudolph and starring Jennifer Jason Leigh in the lead role.

“The cover of the movie shows Dorothy sitting in bed smoking a cigarette with a guy lying next to her,” said Lee. “You can tell it’s not a good situation.” As Parker’s private life flickered before her--depression, alcoholism, attempted suicides, sex with men who didn’t love her and love with men who wouldn’t sleep with her--Lee shouted at the TV: “I am that woman!”

Even though she was still unsure who that woman was.

After watching the movie a second time, Lee bought a book of Parker’s poetry. When the verse jumped out at her as song lyrics, she picked up a pen and a guitar and didn’t put them down for a week. “I sat in my pajamas writing in a trance. I forgot what time it was, forgot to eat,” said Lee. “That had never happened to me before. It was coming from somewhere.”

When the binge ended, Lee had relief from her heartache and 13 new songs culled from the work of Dorothy Parker: complete poems set to music, composites of other poems and pieces of prose, such as “Advice to the Little Peyton Girl,” fitted to the pop form.

Seeking permission to perform the work in public, Lee was led to NAACP headquarters in northwest Baltimore, where Parker’s ashes have been interred since 1988. After the writer’s fatal heart attack on June 7, 1967, her modest assets and voluminous papers were left to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., whom Parker admired but did not know.

With King’s murder the following year in Memphis, the Parker estate became the property of the NAACP, and her ashes languished in the filing cabinet of a Wall Street attorney. They were forwarded to Baltimore when the civil rights group moved its headquarters there from New York in the 1980s.

Ned Himmelrich, an attorney with the Gordon, Feinblatt law firm assigned to the Parker estate by the NAACP, said he “gets a couple of requests every week” from people who want to use the words of Dorothy Parker.

Requests range from off-Broadway producers to high school drama clubs to people who think they can make a buck by putting Parker’s quips on napkin rings.

The NAACP charges accordingly, Himmelrich said, with the producers of the movie “Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle” paying significantly more than the price quoted community theater groups.

Lee wanted permission to perform selected works for small audiences. She raised the $400 she was charged by selling her ailing pickup truck to a man who said he was going to use it to haul wood.

Transforming Writings Into Song Lyrics

What of the leap Lee takes with Parker’s words, the leap to lyrics?

At the Algonquin Hotel in New York City, where the Round Table wits gathered, a portrait of the group hangs on the wall. In it, Parker is holding a menu on which is written: “Drink and dance and laugh and lie . . . love the reeling midnight through for tomorrow we shall die, but alas we never do . . .”

These could be the lyrics of hard-living musicians like Janis Joplin and Billie Holiday.

Yet, even among admirers, folks knocked out by lines like “brevity is the soul of lingerie,” Parker’s verse does not strike everyone as especially passionate. “Dorothy’s no soul singer,” said Michelle Madigan Somerville, a fellow Gotham writer and author of “Wise Gal,” an epic poem published this month by Ten Pell Books of New York.

“She works more like a sociologist, a documentarian,” said Somerville, who taught Parker’s poetry a decade ago to freshman at Brooklyn College. “The work is so well-executed that it’s irresistible, yet the precision lacks heat. Big on brain, short on heart.”

Perhaps. There is enough substance in Parker’s work and life--from co-writing the original screenplay of “A Star Is Born” to filing dispatches from the Spanish Civil War--for an academy’s worth of dissertations.

The Viking Portable edition of her oeuvre has been in print continuously since 1944; at least five biographies have appeared, among them 1987’s “What Fresh Hell Is This?” by Marion Meade; and a Dorothy Parker Society (https://dorothyparkernyc.com) thrives in New York.

But Parker’s literary standing is of no matter to Lee, for the writer has irrevocably changed her life and changed her luck for the better.

Before finding Parker, Lee said she was “begging for gigs,” and has since landed a job opening for Lloyd Cole, of Commotions fame, in Annapolis, Md. Lee worked a few Parker poems-turned-songs into the opening act--”Triolets” was one--but didn’t tell the audience their source. “I was afraid they would elbow each other and say: ‘Who the [expletive] is Dorothy Parker?’ ”

That question will be answered Friday when Lee’s show--”Here Lies Dorothy Parker”--debuts at the Creative Alliance, an arts cooperative with performance space in east Baltimore. The show includes 14 songs and two monologues and runs for an hour and a half.

By then, Lee will have recorded a demo tape of songs from the show and will begin looking for larger venues to share Parker’s wicked wit and tender torment.

In this search, she could learn a thing or two from Culver City resident Laurel Ollstein. Ollstein took Dorothy Parker on the road from 1989 through 1992 in her own one-woman show--”Laughter, Hope and a Sock in the Eye”--that played Baltimore, Minneapolis and her native Los Angeles.

A playwright, actor and teacher, Ollstein named the show for one of Parker’s most quoted lines: “Three be the things until I die: Laughter, hope, and a sock in the eye . . .”

“It was a wonderful experience to play the wittiest woman in the world,” said Ollstein, whose advice to Lee is, “Teach the ignorant, please the fan and keep ‘em laughing.

“Some people are attracted to Dorothy’s sadness and loneliness. I was drawn to her wit and ability to laugh at her misfortunes. I don’t think anyone could have stood Dorothy Parker if she wasn’t funny.”

Confronting Fears, With Parker’s Help

Offstage, said Lee, coming to know Dorothy Parker allowed her to “open up parts of myself that I’ve been afraid of, that I never wanted anyone to see, like my Jewishness.”

Parker was born Dorothy Rothschild in New Jersey in 1893 and made little of the fact that her father--who employed Jewish immigrants in Manhattan garment-district sweatshops--was a Jew. “She hated the name Rothschild and said the best thing about marrying Eddie Parker was getting his name. It sounded so clean,” said Lee.

Parker’s early education took place in a convent and among her childhood friends she encouraged the fiction, suggested by her father, that the family was Episcopalian.

Lee was born Niki Lee Albert in 1959, grew up in suburban Washington, D.C., and, until recently, hid her Jewish heritage. It frightened her, she said, nearly to death: “My fear, and it was true fear, came at an early age.” It came on a weekend outing with her father and two brothers. Niki was 10.

“One Saturday, my father was taking us to the amusement park but said we had to stop to buy some bonds for Israel,” she remembered. “We started whining: ‘We wanna go to Playland. We wanna go to Playland!’ ” Niki’s father stopped the car to deliver an angry lecture. Buying bonds for Israel, he said, would help ensure a safe haven for Jews. “He said: ‘Do you know what the Nazis did to little children like you?’ ”

Hebrew school, with its emphasis on the Holocaust, only made it worse. “I became so fearful that someone might come and steal me out of my bed that I began trying not to seem Jewish in any way,” said Lee, who is often taken for Greek and does not correct the assumption, she says.

Learning that Parker struggled with the same issue, however differently, has led Lee to an exploration of her Jewishness and what the faith may have to offer her.

“The Dorothy show is one project I’ve done for love and nothing else,” she said. “By acting out Dorothy’s life, I’m no longer ashamed of being sensitive to painful situations. . . . She’s taught me that you don’t hold back if you believe in something.”