Auntie Mame

by Patrick Dennis

  Auntie Mame had forsaken her expensive duplex and installed herself in a neat little carriage house on Murray Hill. She had furnished the place throughout, had bought a lot of new, longer clothes, and had given a couple of parties to warm the house and rally what was left of her Old Set. Then she began to realize that living cost money—even in 1930, when things were cheap. But money in general was scarce, and Auntie Mame’s money, in particular, was even scarcer.

  Now it had been made crystal clear that after her violent flirtation with the stock market and her Babylonian expenditures, she had exactly four thousand dollars in cash and the snug little annuity of two hundred dollars a month.

  “Oh, to think that I should bear the yoke of poverty after scrimping and saving for all these years.”

  “That’s a shame, Auntie Mame,” I said, and snickered because it rhymed.

  She cast me a cold glance. “Oh, it’s all very well for you to laugh—a mere boy of eleven with a big inheritance tied up so that nobody can get at it—when your poor Auntie Mame is practically ready for the Peabody Home, but how are we to live on a lousy two hundred bucks a month?”

  In 1930 two hundred dollars seemed a fortune to literally millions of people. Actually, with a few simple economies she could have gotten along fine.

  “Well,” she said with a dolorous sigh, “I suppose you know what this means. It means I shall have to go to work simply to keep you in that wretched St. Boniface school.” I knew that the Trust Company paid my tuition, but it seemed wiser not to say so. “But then,” she continued, “God knows I’ve worked and slaved all my life, so I should be used to it.”

  This was not strictly true, either. For a period of nearly six weeks my Auntie Mame had danced in the chorus of a road company of Chu Chin Chow until my father heard about it and family pressure was brought to bear. Since then she’d never turned a hand at more than mixing her famous homemade gin.

  “Yes, that’s the answer. Your poor Auntie Mame will have to go back to work—try to find a job with millions unemployed already—in order to keep clothes on our backs and the wolf from the door. But don’t fret, my little love, Auntie Mame will find a way, even if she has to scrub floors.” She retired early with the classified advertising section of the New York Times.

  The next day Auntie Mame had her usual one o’clock Little Morning Chat. She was surrounded by pads of yellow paper with lists of names written on them. “Giving a party?” I asked.

  “Certainly not!” Auntie Mame snapped. “Oh, well, maybe after I get established in business I’ll have a little celebration, but these people are all valuable contacts—friends of mine who are well placed.” She rattled the New York Times contemptuously. “All these jobs here in the want ads, they’re nothing I’d be interested in; waitresses, salesgirls, factory hands, stenographers—nothing I could really sink my teeth into. No, darling, it isn’t what you know that gets you places in this town, it’s who you know. And God knows, I have connections. Why,” she said, “there are probably any number of organizations in New York that would be delighted to have me once they knew I was on the market. So I’ve just made up a list of influential friends and I’m going to make them aware of my interest.”

  Auntie Mame made a lot of long and vivacious telephone calls that day. The first was to her old broker, Florian McDermott. She told him the whole story of her financial downfall, although it seemed unnecessary to be so explicit with the man who was largely responsible for it. She asked Florian if his brokerage house would be interested in a businesswoman accustomed to handling large sums of money. But he said hastily that they were Cutting Down, and managed to sell her a couple of hundred shares of a stock that was Absolutely Foolproof. Two months later Florian was sharing a cell with an illustrious broker whom he never could have hoped to know socially before.

  All of her other financial friends were retrenching, too, so Auntie Mame decided that her future lay in the Arts.

  The following day she had lunch with Frank Crowninshield and came home jubilant over a job as a copywriter on Vanity Fair. The salary was forty dollars a week—exactly what she paid Norah and Ito—but she knew she’d Forge Ahead. She ordered a lot of smart little businesslike suits and some new hats to wear around the magazine office. I was packed off for St. Boniface Academy and Auntie Mame commenced her business career.

  During the fall of 1930, I had only Auntie Mame’s letters to give me a dramatic—if somewhat prejudiced—picture of her various professional endeavors. The job at Vanity Fair lasted a month. Then Mr. Crowninshield and Mr. Nast took her to lunch again and said that her writing was too inaccurate, albeit spirited, and they were reducing the staff anyway. As a consolation prize they ran a full-page photograph of her in a three-hundred-dollar Jeanne Lanvin evening dress, which she bought with her severance pay and some money she’d won on a race horse. Mr. Crowninshield said that she was too attractive a woman to be running around loose and she really ought to marry and settle down.

  Her next job was also literary, but it didn’t last quite so long. She became a reader for Horace Liveright’s publishing company. Mr. Liveright was an old acquaintance, and although he and Auntie Mame had had their little differences, they respected one another’s intellects. However, Auntie Mame went out for a gay evening carrying with her the only copy of a thrilling manuscript that reeked of whale blubber and was written by a Danish explorer. Somewhere between Jack Delaney’s and the Cotton Club the manuscript was lost. There were a lawsuit and harsh words between Auntie Mame and Mr. Liveright. A year later an up-and-coming little firm published the rewritten book and it sold more than a hundred thousand copies and was turned into a solemnly successful documentary film. After that Auntie Mame always said she could smell a bestseller.

  Still undaunted, Auntie Mame moved into another branch of the Arts—interior decoration. Nobody could deny that she had taste, though sometimes a little bizarre. However, Auntie Mame possessed certain qualities that are important in commercial decorating: she was charming, she had flair and originality, and she knew a lot of influential people. So it was only logical that Auntie Mame would drift into the rococo atelier of Elsie de Wolfe and her jolly helpers.

  With what she called her Following and a lot of glib talk about the Regency and the Directoire, she landed a job that paid not only a good salary, but a generous commission as well. But conversant as she was with the decorative arts of France, Auntie Mame’s heart was more with the Bauhaus of Munich than with the rocaille and coquaille of Versailles.

  For a time, however, she was able to fight down her progressive impulses and string along with the staff at Elsie de Wolfe’s, chirping prettily over dim ormolu wall sconces and inaccurate cupid clocks. Under the watchful eye of a supervisor, Auntie Mame did over an entrance foyer on Fifth Avenue, a dining room in Oyster Bay, and a boudoir in Gracie Square, all in the style of Louis XV. Then, as a solo flight, she decorated her friend Vera’s suite in the Algonquin in the manner of Prud’hon with a lot of old Empire junk she’d unearthed on Avenue A. The rooms and their tenant were duly photographed by Home Beautiful, Miss de Wolfe wrote Auntie Mame a glowing letter, and her Empire rooms were in wild demand among bootleggers, who were the only people who could afford any expensive old furniture. At first she seemed a little stunned by her heady triumphs, but after pulling off three or four Napoleonic apartments on Central Park West, Auntie Mame grew bored with caryatids and columns and got that old modern itch again. Aesthetically it showed progress, but financially it was disaster.

  Auntie Mame’s big chance arrived in the autumn, when she came to the attention of a Mrs. Riemenschneider of Milwaukee, whose late husband had worked wonders in the near-beer business. Too big, at last, for Milwaukee, Mrs. Riemenschneider had set her heart on New York and on a social position that only a lot of money and the things that go with it over three or four generations can obtain. But Mrs. Riemenschneider wasn’t willing to wait for three or four generations. It was a buyer’s ma
rket in 1930 and she had plenty of cash to pay her own way. She hadn’t been in New York for more than a few hours before she’d bought an elegant little town house in the East Sixties and handed Auntie Mame a crisp check for one hundred thousand dollars to decorate it “like Fountain-blow.” Then she was off to Paris for clothes, having extracted from Auntie Mame the promise that her house would be finished by Christmas.

  The house was finished by Christmas and so was Auntie Mame. The pull of Munich modern had been too strong—almost as strong as Mrs. Riemenschneider’s language when she returned to find that her prim mansion had had its marble façade removed, most of its walls knocked down, and was filled with the most advanced stainless steel furniture, wire sculpture, and cubist art that money or imagination could create. Just before her return to Milwaukee, Mrs. Riemenschneider got out an injunction against the decorating firm not only for her hundred thousand dollars but also for restoration of the house.

  The papers got hold of the story and had a big time with it. Alliterations like “atheist art” and “Bolshevik barbarism” and “maniac modern” were bandied about the yellow press for days. Auntie Mame was christened “Madcap Mame” by an inspired headline writer, and two columnists wrote articles that began “What can Picasso paint that my boy in the fourth grade can’t paint better?” Auntie Mame was purged from Elsie de Wolfe’s.

  Although angry and humiliated by what she called the ignorance of the masses, Auntie Mame still wasn’t ready to give up her crusade for the ultramodern. She’d picked up a few allies during the fray, one of them a brooding young sculptor named Orville who had his own potter’s wheel and did “the most exciting ceramics.” So Auntie Mame decided to take her capital and go into partnership with him. They were going to open a gift shop “devoted to the Brave, the Experimental, the Exciting, the New, the Modern,” her letter said.

  “Oh, Patrick, darling,” she wrote, “it’s going to be unlike any shop in New York. Just you wait and see. We’ll set New York on fire!”

  Maison Moderne, as the establishment was called, was unlike any shop in New York—or at least any I’d ever seen. It was located in a row of elderly brownstones on East Fifty-fourth Street. It had a big amoeba-shaped show window and a circular chartreuse door. Its walls were an uncompromising red-violet lighted with a tortured tangle of neon tubing, and it was filled with some of the queerest looking ash trays, plates, ceramic pins, and things Auntie Mame called objets d’art.

  Maison Moderne opened on the day I came home for Christmas vacation and it attracted throngs of people. But most of them, after the initial shock, said they were just looking. Auntie Mame was in her element, bustling around in a gay smock with a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth. The first day they did almost fourteen dollars’ worth of business, and got a lot of coverage from the press.

  But Auntie Mame didn’t seem to mind any of the mean things they wrote. “That’s the value of publicity, my little love. I couldn’t have bought all that newspaper space for fifty thousand dollars. Did you see how gorgeously Orville’s foetus sandwich platter photographed in the American? It’s all free advertising, darling. The time to worry isn’t when they’re talking about you. It’s when they’re not talking about you.”

  Maybe she was right, for the next day the crowds were still thicker. Auntie Mame raced among customers twittering like a debauched canary, and she sent me out twice for coffee and three times for Melachrino cigarettes. Around one o’clock the crowds got so heavy and the sales so brisk that she had to send for Norah to tend the cash register, while I stood in the back room, up to my waist in excelsior, wrapping up Auntie Mame’s outrageous ceramics. Whatever you said about Maison Moderne, it did attract public notice.

  It was after six when Auntie Mame finally shooed the last customer out and collapsed into the pile of excelsior in the back room. “Oh! Success, success, success!” she caroled. “Give me a cigarette, darling, Auntie’s simply exhausted!” She stretched luxuriously and exhaled a cloud of smoke. “How much do you suppose we took in today, Norah, a hundred?”

  “Oh, more than that,” Norah said beaming. “Five, six, seven hundred, I’d say.”

  “But how divine!” Auntie Mame cried. She took another ecstatic puff of her cigarette and then sat bolt upright. “My God, I promised Neysa McMein I’d have cocktails with her and I’m already hours late! Gracious, she’s promised to do some designs for us and I’ve forgotten all about it. Here, child, fetch my coat and whistle for a taxi. I must dash!”

  “What’ll I do with all this money?” Norah asked.

  “Just leave it in the cash register. I’ll lock up. Goodness, get a taxi, Patrick, I’ll drop you both at the house.” She locked the door, and we all raced away.

  That night what the tabloids described as “a holocaust of unknown origin” destroyed nearly half the block on East Fifty-fourth Street. It took three fire companies to extinguish the blaze and there wasn’t enough left of Maison Moderne to put in one of its Exciting ash trays.

  “Oh, Patrick, what has Fate done to me,” Auntie Mame sniffled. “My whole brave, new endeavor gone up in a puff of smoke. Well, thank God I mailed the premium for the fire insurance last week.” She blew her nose daintily. “Damn it,” she snapped, reaching into an empty crystal box, “there isn’t a cigarette in this house. Reach me my bag, will you, there’s a pet.”

  Still chattering animatedly, she burrowed through her lizard purse. Suddenly she was still; her face went white. “Oh, no!” she whispered. Then from her bag Auntie Mame withdrew a long white envelope addressed to The World Fire and Marine Insurance Company of Hartford, Connecticut.

  After the expensive demise of Maison Moderne, Auntie Mame decided that it was better to work for other people, after all. In those days her passion for exotic fabrics led her to buy most of her clothes at Jessie Franklin Turner’s. It was a shop of medium-sized proportions devoted to a clientele of large-sized income. “So pleasant and intime,” Auntie Mame said in one of her letters, “almost as though the customers were old friends and guests—which, of course, they are.” Owing to Auntie Mame’s bill, Mrs. Turner took her on as a saleswoman—“really a vendeuse, darling,” she wrote.

  Auntie Mame loved working among the beautiful, costly clothes and came home nearly every evening with some new Jessie Franklin Turner creation. Business was terrible in the winter of 1931, but Auntie Mame had a lot of confidence in herself.

  However, my aunt possessed an unfortunate candor that delighted many but offended just as many others. Auntie Mame’s winning honesty played her false when Mrs. Turner overheard her saying to a volatile matron of formidable proportions, “But, my dear, we haven’t a thing we could get onto you. All of our clothes are wrong for you—much too svelte. Now, take my advice and run down to the Stylish Stout section at Lane Bryant’s.” There were heated words and the customer stalked out, never to return. Fifteen minutes later Auntie Mame did, too, after an interchange with Mrs. Turner, who warned her that she’d better find a rich husband—fast—to pay the bill she’d run up.

  Auntie Mame’s last stop in the garment industry was at Henri Bendel’s, where, thanks to a beautiful figure and a long friendship with Mr. Bendel, she modeled tea gowns for just over a week. But on the day her elegant posterior was pinched by a dirty old man of untotaled buying power, there was an ugly contretemps and her services were dispensed with. Mr. Bendel wrote Auntie Mame a touching letter, saying that he felt terrible about the whole thing, but that she was, after all, a Lady and too fine a woman to be a mere clotheshorse. He also added that the best career for Auntie Mame would be marriage.

  Still Auntie Mame was eager to prove that she could hold her own in a man’s world. One night at Twenty-one she met an eager young man from a fine old Baltimore family who had capital to invest in a small but select speak-easy. Since he knew almost nobody in New York, and since Auntie Mame knew everyone, he persuaded her to become the social hostess of his new venture. Auntie Mame wa
s a little dubious at first, but she needed money badly, and after all, as she wrote, the place would be “not just some sordid little ginmill, but really an exclusive club with a carefully chosen membership, where ladies and gentlemen may drink like civilized people, dine graciously, and perhaps play a rubber or two of bridge. A service, really.”

  Together they found an old mansion in the Forties that was already equipped for just their sort of venture. Within the last two years it had been called Tony’s, Belle’s Bar Sinister, The Ole Plantation, Tony’s, Alt Wien, Paris Soir—or Sewer—Victor’s Vesuvius, Chez Cocotte, York House, Gay Madrid, and Tony’s. However, Auntie Mame and the young man had the place repainted, christened it the Club Continentale, and were ready for business.

  Everyone who got a chance to visit the place said that Auntie Mame and the young Baltimore gentleman had done things ever so nicely. They sent out engraved invitations and membership cards to the best people in the Social Register and the Arts. They hired one of New York’s most popular bartenders, a French chef, a Hungarian orchestra, an Irish doorman, an Italian headwaiter, and a Spanish dancer named something like Euthanasia Gomez. For further entertainment, Auntie Mame was perfectly willing, if called upon, to tinkle away at the white piano and sing some light French airs. But she never got a chance. In their eagerness to do everything Right, Auntie Mame and the young man had overlooked paying out protection money to the cops. On the night of the Grand Opening things were just reaching their pitch of brilliant gentility when the Club Continentale was raided, the bottles and decorations smashed with axes, and Auntie Mame and her carefully chosen membership were taken off in the paddy wagon.

  Next, through the kindness of Frank Case, Auntie Mame started a personal shopping service as a convenience to guests at the Algonquin. But the Algonquin wasn’t having many guests in 1931, and those it did have found Auntie Mame’s taste a little too extreme and a lot too expensive. So she passed most of that spring chatting with old friends in the lounge. She had to sell her pearls and a star sapphire ring to keep out of debt, and when I got home for summer vacation Auntie Mame had grown too restive to sit among the potted palms of the Algonquin any longer.