Auntie Mame

by Patrick Dennis

  “Yes, but only for the summer. Your Auntie Mame understands that you’re to be back in time for school—come hell or high water.”

  Auntie Mame took Mike by the hand and looked lovingly into his eyes. “Tell me, my little love, do you like the school you go to?”

  “No, I don’t,” Mike said.

  “There’s such an interesting man here from Madras. He has a whole new conception of education, Michael. It’s an interracial school for boys and girls of all nations and colors. It’s held in the out-of-doors, and instead of books …”

  “I said I wanted him back before Labor Day!” I sputtered.

  “This man is right here at the party now, my little love,” she said to Mike, “and I’m sure he’d like to meet you. Come along with me and we’ll find him. Enjoy yourselves, darlings,” she said over her shoulder.

  “My God,” Pegeen gasped, “she’s the Pied Piper.”

  Holding Mike’s hand, Auntie Mame drifted into the crowd, her sari floating out behind her.

  Patrick Dennis

  © Pictorial Parade/Getty Images

  Afterword

  AUNTIE MAME AND ‘CEDIE’

  by Matteo Codignola, translated by Anne Milano Appel

  To Bianca and Livia; they should know why

  ‘I always start writing with a clean paper and a dirty mind’

  Patrick Dennis

  The first edition of Auntie Mame carried a caveat for the reader, forewarning him that the true identity of the author was shrouded in deep mystery, and noting that neither the first nor last name appearing on the volume was authentic. Along with an acknowledgement of obvious lacunae in the author’s personal biography, the reader was advised that if he would like to try and guess who Patrick Dennis actually was, he should contact the publisher, who would be happy to hear him out. Provided, of course, that the reader was not expecting any sign of denial or confirmation from the said publisher.

  Albeit well beyond the time frame, what follows may be considered an entry, more or less, to the amusing game launched on the jacket flap of that first edition of Auntie Mame. Today’s reader, however, unlike his 1955 predecessor, who had to grope for clues in the dark, has some small assurance: the certainty that Patrick Dennis’ name was, in fact, Edward Everett Tanner III. It is almost more than the concerned party knew about himself, and is in any case enough to approach a story that fortunately can be reconstructed starting from any given moment in time. For example, a cold February morning in 1943, on the deck of the ship Atlantis.

  Having set sail from New York, the Atlantis was transporting a contingent of the American Field Service to North Africa: a not-very-select corps made up, voluntarily, of those who had been declared unfit for active duty. Even just to look at – seeing the uniforms of the Desert Rats modified by each individual according to his personal taste – the newly enlisted units must not have seemed, to the officers called upon to organize them, particularly taken with the role. And it was probably for this reason that, after a few days’ travel, the commander decided that, starting the following morning at the crack of dawn, the troops would have to perform a healthy half hour of physical drills outdoors.

  The decision itself was not a bad one; what left much to be desired was the assessment of the individuals. None of the recruits appeared to be too trainable, and the least compliant was the gayest one of all: that beanpole Tanner, who was already known for his impeccable imitation of some Carmen Miranda numbers and his encyclopedic knowledge of the Pal Joey script. Indeed it was quite obvious that insubordination was to be expected from the aspiring nurse who went around the ship cutting his fellow soldiers’ hair in tapering styles and wondering aloud why the military was intent at all costs on turning war into such an unpleasant experience. However, there had been no insubordination as infectious, or as choreographed, as that one morning when, in response to the order to run in place, Tanner began singing, and of course dancing, to Offenbach’s Cancan. This was followed instantly by all the troops, and shortly thereafter by the commander, who had no choice but to revise the training programme with a resigned ‘Oh all right, Cancan!’

  It has never been entirely clear exactly what Susan Sontag meant when she wrote that the whole point of camp was ‘to dethrone the serious’1, partly because it is not clear why a vast progeny of writers, from Lucian of Samosata to Tristan Tzara, could not then have slipped through the back-door in this Fifties variant of desecration. But if the limits of camp are arbitrary, nothing prevents us from finding an equally arbitrary birth date and circumstance for the phenomenon: for example, that morning in February 1943, on board the Atlantis.

  Dethroning the serious, for Tanner, had shown itself to be a precocious compulsion. It had been his (very serious) father for example, who had encouraged him not take his name seriously: even before his birth his father had decided he would call the baby Pat, in honour of the most improbable of patron saints, Pat Sweeney, an Irish heavyweight popular at the time. In the years to come Pat would not take his father’s vices seriously either – after yet another of the man’s collapses upon returning from a wild night of drinking, Pat would simply take off his socks, paint his toenails with red polish, and put the socks back on – letting the reprobate wonder, upon awakening, what the hell he had done in those previous hours. In short, if a psychological trait must at all costs be attributed to Edward, Patrick, Pat – though this, as we will see, is our fixation rather than his – the prime candidate is an instinctive rejection of the most predictable reactions. At the front, to give another example – and not just any front, in the hellhole of Montecassino – Pat showed a surprising disregard for danger, fearlessly driving his ambulance under enemy fire, but when he was wounded in the leg, and a fellow nurse attempted to cut off his Bermuda shorts in order to dress the wound, he suffered a panic attack. The colleague stopped and tried to calm the patient, asking him to explain, only to be told that the shorts came from the most exclusive uniform shop in Cairo, and that, in a nutshell, there was no way to procure another pair.

  Pat must in any case have been very attached to those Bermuda shorts – which survived the scissors – since for all of 1945 he wore practically nothing else. Discharged from the army following a sudden, serious depression, Pat decided to leave Chicago for good and look for work in New York. Despite the Bermuda shorts, he was hired by a major literary agency, McIntosh & Otis, for whom he wrote reader reports. Shortly afterwards – thanks no doubt to the Bermudas, the long flowing beard he grew and his shaved head – he was noticed by Franklin Spier, inventor and owner of an agency that provided editorial products and turnkey books to prime industry clients, such as Doubleday. Pat’s new employer had a high tolerance for eccentricity (after all, he walked up and down the office’s parquet floors tapping his wooden leg and was covered with tattoos), which he tended to view as a symptom of possible talent. So, shortly after hiring him, Spier assigned his new arrival the job of writing There’s a Fly in This Room!, a collection of semi-amusing anecdotes which appeared in 1946 with the byline of a rather well-known journalist, Ralf Kircher.

  After a two-year apprenticeship, Pat left Spier for a small, recently opened publishing house, the Creative Age Press. The name seemed promising, and to show he was equal to it, Pat pursued two courses of action: in terms of behaviour, he introduced a new form of postprandial exercise to the office, which consisted of spending the first two hours of the afternoon upside down, no matter who you had with you; and on a professional level, he proved he was able to discuss in detail topics about which he had no direct knowledge – such as a young couple’s first year of marriage, the central theme of The Doctor Has a Baby, a blithe little novel written in 1949 by a certain ‘Evelyn Barkins’.

  The writing of this book could be considered auspicious, since the following year Pat, despite various further indications of eccentricity, married a very beautiful, aristocratic girl, Louise Stickney, who would bear him two children and
who, in one way or another, would spend the rest of her life at his side. During the same period, Pat was sought out by an unexpectedly austere magazine, Foreign Affairs. It was an approach that was impossible to refuse, and Pat not only accepted it, but attempted to immerse himself in the culture, even deciding to shave off his beard. Unfortunately for him, however, clean-shaven and dressed as a frequent habitué of Savile Row, Pat seemed like the ideal candidate for a job that went beyond that of political journalism, and he was soon asked to be an ‘auditor’ (something between an interpreter and a stenographer) for the Council, an arm of the magazine which organized conferences and seminars for diplomats, political scientists and statesmen. Due to a seemingly physical inability to pronounce the word ‘no’, Pat agreed, though after a couple of sessions he did the only sensible thing – he let his beard grow back, something incompat ible with any type of official position in those times.

  From that point on, his role at the Council would become marginal – though it so happens that the margins may have been, or were about to become, Pat’s favourite vantage point. This was confirmed in 1952, when Thomas Crowell published a book that, according to the flyleaf, shed ‘new light on Communist tactics’ and above all ‘could have been written by nobody else’ other than its putative author, former Hungarian diplomat Nicholas Nyaradi. As most people know, it is always a good idea to mistrust assertions that are too emphatic or tautological, and in fact the book (as well as the flyleaf) was written entirely by Pat, who in addition to a respectable commission earned the praise of the Herald Tribune: ‘It is astounding that Mr. Nyaradi can write about his grisly ordeals with the Kremlin with so much poise, humor, and charm’.

  It was at this point that Pat realized that, if he had managed to pass himself off as a Magyar official, nothing prevented him from impersonating – and no longer on behalf of third parties – an entertainment writer. And so, appearing out of the blue (or out of Virginia Rounds, Pat’s favourite cigarette), came Virginia Rowans, author of Oh, What a Wonderful Wedding!, another story with a matrimonial theme, in which most of the press noted, together with its comic gloss, an unmistakable and very heightened ‘fine feminine realism’. Rowans seemed headed for a bright, and above all prolific, career. Twelve months after this debut, a second novel was published, House Party, whose setting and tone were similar to the previous one. This time, however, as often happens with second works, the reception was tepid. Miss Rowans, the critics maintained, was unquestionably able to write scenes that were quite amusing: what was doubtful was whether she could create a character capable of transforming a series of chapters into a novel, and finding a place in the reader’s memory.

  Oh, yes? Really?

  ‘Darling, my unscrupulous nephew Patrick Dennis has written a scurrilous book about me. It’s full of lies. It says I was caught nude in the dormitories of Princeton. It’s not so! It was Yale!’ Her predecessors may indeed have been too discreet, but Pat’s new character, Mame Dennis, actually took up her pen and wrote – on letterhead stationery printed with the same colours (pink, white and black) and the same characters as the book jacket – a letter to booksellers. And from the close of that letter one senses that Mame would not be so easy to get rid of, assuming one wanted to: ‘I’m going to sue Patrick, I’m going to sue Vanguard Press, and if you sell a single copy, I’m going to sue you! Love, love, love, Mame.’

  It was not immediately clear to the booksellers, and later the readers, whether Dennis was real or invented, and this doubt would remain for some time. It was a deliberate ambiguity on Pat’s part, and one which would contribute significantly to the book’s legend. The author and narrator of the novel is called Patrick Dennis, a name picked out of the phone book – but no matter how many warnings the reader was given before he started reading, the sensation of having a true story in his hands was not easily shaken. Some time after publication, tired of the many personal questions he was being asked, Pat tried to get out of the predicament by declaring to Life magazine: ‘The public assumes that what seems fictional is fact; so the way for me to be inventive is to seem factual but be fictional.’ But by that time it was too late: readers continued to hope that Mame and the other characters really did exist somewhere.

  With enough time and opportunity, it can also be shown that those expectations were not completely unfounded. In the novel, Patrick’s athletic father didn’t end up with his toenails polished, but, to make up for it, he died on page two; though Pat then reincarnated him in the most bigoted and irritating character in the book, Mr. Upson instead. Agnes Gooch, meanwhile, Auntie Mame’s unpresentable secretary, who, when needed, could transform herself into a seductive vamp, was a double of Pat’s secretary at Creative Age, and so on, up to what a lawyer would call the case in question: the inspiration for Mame Dennis.

  Marion Tanner, Pat’s aunt on his father’s side, was born in Buffalo, like Mame, and like Mame had later moved to New York, where early on, in order to support herself, she taught ice hockey, though we are not told where she learned it. Subsequently, Marion worked as a clerk and then tried her luck in films, with modest success. In the meantime – thanks to two husbands discarded in succession – she acquired the necessary wherewithall to furnish and maintain a home where, in addition to practicing every oriental discipline then known in the West, she welcomed more or less anyone: artists genuine or alleged, self-proclaimed members of the intelligentsia, socialites of varying ranks, and to an ever greater extent, vagrants as well, especially street urchins. The latter slept wherever they could, ate whatever there was, and according to witnesses showed a supreme and incorrigible contempt for sanitary facilities. The hostess, though as despotic as Mame, if not even more so, did not care that much about all this: in her eyes adults were an indistinct blur, while the youngsters could at least boast the privilege of a name, even if it was the same name for everyone: Patrick.

  Over the years, Marion had caused a number of headaches for her nephew, who was repeatedly obliged to plug up the holes that such an irresponsible way of living created. And in fact it was her unending financial instability which, at the end of the Fifties, gave her the idea of appearing on the television quiz show of the moment, The Big Surprise, in the guise of the ‘real Auntie Mame’, to answer questions about her own, alleged or real, biography – a subject that Marion proved to know quite well in every instance, and so it earned her a sum that was anything but paltry: $20,000. Besides earning her Pat’s irritation, of course. Convinced that the only public face of his creation should be that of the actress who played her officially on stage and later in the movies, ‘the one and only Rosalind Russell’, Pat did not take kindly to the ‘coming out’ of his relative, who had neither Russell’s spirit nor flair, much less her figure. And yet, the rather unusual scenario of a fictional character who appeared in prime time, on her own two legs, maybe should have led him to reflect on the nature and continuing effects of his work. Which, as the following flashback shows, no one would have bet on just two or three years earlier.

  In 1955, the manuscript of Auntie Mame was rejected by nineteen publishers, who with the instinct and far-sightedness typical of the industry, had considered it unmarketable. ‘Un market able’, for those who might not know, is a judgment that in publishing is applied to many different types of works, notable among them, by rank, several titles that will soon be printed in millions of copies, almost all illustrated books, and all collections of short stories, without distinction. Unfortunately for Pat, Auntie Mame was originally just that, a collection of short stories, which explains both the rejections and the decision made by Vanguard Press, namely to acquire the book and turn it into something that could, no matter how artfully, be presented as a ‘novel’. Fortunately for Pat, a brilliant young editor, Julian Muller, undertook the assignment and in a week created – by picking through the pages to find marvels of creativity in articulo mortis – the winning ploy. Pat realized in a flash that Muller’s idea of using a Reader’s Digest-
style Most Unforgettable Characters device to link the vignettes would work, put his two typists to the task (Vivian Weaver and Elaine Adam, to whom the book is dedicated), and in fifteen days delivered the version of Auntie Mame we know today. From an editorial standpoint, the operation was complete. From all other angles, it was just beginning.

  Mame’s letter, quoted earlier, had some effect, as it was the letter that led the manager of Doubleday bookstores, George Hecht, to read the book in one evening and to immediately contact James Murphy, Vanguard’s business director, to urge a release worthy of the name. On a wave of enthusiasm, Hecht then announced that he was prepared to print, at his own expense, a playbill in which bookstores would promise customers dissatisfied with Auntie Mame a refund of two books per every one returned, but Murphy was lukewarm. He thought so little of the novel’s possibilities that he scheduled its release for the deadest time of the year, mid-January. And the greatest creative effort he came up with was a box of matches identical to the book’s cover, with the words ‘Have you read Auntie Mame?’

  The problem – for Murphy, obviously – was that the book moved right away. And as soon as the first reviews appeared, all of them enthusiastic, Muller and Pat personally took up Hecht’s idea, as well as offering booksellers a free copy for every ten copies sold, in exchange for stocking a reasonable supply. Their efforts were unnecessary, though, since only a short time after the book’s release it made its appearance on the New York Times top ten bestsellers list, where it would remain for 112 weeks. In case you read those figures cursorily, that’s more than two years.

  From there on out, the story of Auntie Mame was bigger than just publishing. Twenty-four hours after the appearance of the eagerly awaited New York Times review, for example, Robert Fryer, perhaps the most important producer on Broadway, bought the theatrical rights for the book – after the inevitable wheedling of Pat’s agent, Annie Laurie Williams, who told Fryer that ‘the dramatization rights were indeed available, but added that a number of other people were interested and, in fact, were already placing bids’. Privately, Fryer had also already chosen the leading actress, who, he felt, could be none other than the most elegant, witty and chatty among the (almost) former Hollywood stars: Rosalind (Roz) Russell. He immediately sent her the novel, which from that very day and for the rest of her life Russell would consider hers and no one else’s, in spite of the countless aspirants for succession, from Greer Garson to Angela Lansbury to Lucille Ball. For this reason the making of Auntie Mame would be so animated as to be in itself the material for a novel. Anyone who wants to personally verify this need only read Roz’s memoirs, which, in addition to their title (Life Is a Banquet!, Miss Dennis’ motto), take all the rest from Mame, starting with the unreliability – and charm – of the narrator’s voice, so that it seems like a remake of the novel, this time told directly by the protagonist.