Rebel in Evening Clothes  Immortalized for her cocktail-swilling
Algonquin reign, Vanity Fair writer Dorothy Parker also used her
wit to skewer prejudice in pre-civil-rights America. And despite
the original objections of Lillian Hellman, her onetime literary
executor, Parker's final legacy—to Martin Luther King and the
N.A.A.C.P.—is still being affirmed.  In the fall of 1914, as
Europe was marching over the precipice, Miss Dorothy Rothschild
of New York wrote a poem entitled "Any Porch," and sent it off
to Vanity Fair editor Frank Crowninshield. It was a nine-stanza
lampoon, satirizing the hotel-porch babble of spoiled upper-
crust ladies in Connecticut, and its acceptance, for an
emolument of $12, marked the first time that the future Dorothy
Parker got anything into print:  Dorothy Parker. From Culver
Pictures.  "My husband says, often, 'Elise, You feel things too
deeply, you do—'" "Yes, forty a month, if you please, Oh,
servants impose on me, too." "I don't want the vote for myself,
But women with property