Auntie Mame

by Patrick Dennis

  Moreover, strictly by word of mouth, Auntie Mame was rapidly elected into that pantheon that more than any other guarantees a character long-lasting survival, that of gay icons. In the Fifties homosexual culture did not have the visibility it has today, on the contrary it was struggling to come out. It therefore had a desperate need for authoritative spokespersons, and for obvious reasons, no candidate for the role appeared more suitable than Mame and/or the actresses (and later the actors) who played her on stage.

  Incredibly enough, Pat did not seem to be bothered by all this. He obviously found no fault with the book’s success, but the strange thing is that he found nothing to object to in the adaptations that the book was undergoing. The plural is to be taken literally, too, since the first writer assigned to write a script, Sumner Locke Elliott, had a merciless hatred for the book, which was evident in the final work. Horrified, Fryer and Russell asked Pat to fix it. He agreed, and after a few weeks was thrilled to communicate that he had almost finished the first five hundred pages, namely, the first act. A speedy transition was arranged, and the work was passed on to two first-class professionals, Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee, with Pat serving as consultant. A consultant with an extraordinarily good disposition, however, who, despite an enormous simplification of the plot (largely demanded by Roz), and a decided turn toward the melodramatic, kept saying only that everything seemed perfect to him – and it’s even likely that he thought so too. And so it came to be that on 31 October 1956, just a little more than a year after the book had come out, the show appeared on stage. It would be the most expensive non-musical ever produced on Broadway, but also one of the ten biggest box-office hits of all time.

  Meanwhile, Pat had moved on to something new, specifically writing a tourist guide of sorts for a ranch in New Mexico that a friend of his had bought, painstakingly restored and intended to turn into a kind of dude-ranch resort. Anyone who has ever heard just one person he knows regale his listeners with the preliminaries and aftermath of a real estate deal cannot help but shudder with horror at the thought of such a theme, and yet Guestward Ho!, published in 1956, rapidly climbed the charts as well, even threatening Auntie Mame’s standing. At this point, success for Pat seemed a bit too much like a sentence, however, and, as one would expect, it set off a reaction that even his friends, in their rare intervals of sobriety, found excessive. Teeth and hair for Pat had long been a torment, but surely these were things a man who was now affluent should have been able to resolve without replacing the latter with a theatrical wig and the former with low-cost dentures, easily removable, and continuously removed, for example.

  The only one who showed him some understanding throughout all this was Cris Alexander. An actor (including Auntie Mame), photographer, dancer and other things besides, Cris was a flamboyant gay man of boundless vitality, specializing in the charter movement of camp culture: transvestitism, and at first Pat went along with whatever Cris suggested – they were harmless games. At a party at the Tanners, as part of one of these games, Cris managed to pass himself off to everyone as a maid hired for the evening. At least, that is, until he got within earshot of Roz and – in the same number he performed to perfection on stage – came out with a jolting, unmistakable belch. Not long afterwards the mask of innocence dropped.

  During the course of this movable feast, however, Pat skipped a turn, and sent out his other creation, Virginia Rowans. She published a new novel, The Loving Couple, also in 1956, and the public discovered that, until now, it had greatly underestimated her. Starting from an idea that did not stand out for its originality – a day in the life of a young suburban couple – Virginia constructed a sensational comedy of manners that was based on a unity of time (it all takes place in the twenty-four hours following a trivial argument) though not that of space, or at least not the space of an average book. The Loving Couple is in fact divided in two: it has two points of view, two sections (‘His Story’, ‘Her Story’), two covers, two title pages – identical but upside down. Consequently, there are two ways of reading it. It looks like a book, but is more of a puzzle. You start reading what John thinks, but after a couple of pages you turn the volume upside down to hear Mary’s voice, then it’s back to John. And even if you force yourself to follow first one and then the other, as the minutes and pages go by you inevitably wonder what is happening on the other side, and the brainteaser starts anew. By the end you may be lost, but not before experiencing a kind of narrative tension previously unknown: while it is often said that a certain under lying thread – a certain theme, a certain style – runs throughout a book, it is hardly ever that they run through it side by side, as they do here.

  Even with its eccentricity, though, The Loving Couple was very well received, and followed close behind Pat’s previous two titles in the bestseller list – three out of ten may not be a record, but it’s not far off. ‘Patrick’ and ‘Virginia’ continued to coexist undisturbed for another couple of years, until an unfortunate article in Life disclosed the ruse, and Pat, quite put out, was forced to give up the privilege, or the illusion, of having both a more reflective soul (Rowans) and a more whimsical one (Dennis).

  Moreover, someone who exceeds the sale of a million copies soon loses interest in playing games – and if he doesn’t, his customers do. Pat knew he could not show up empty handed at his new (and eminent) publisher, Harcourt Brace, and so, as soon as he arrived, he signed a contract for a sequel to Auntie Mame. This meant that he got an advance for committing to deliver a manuscript within a certain period of time, though only its title, Around the World with Auntie Mame, existed at that point; and also that from that moment on the infernal machine – designed to make booksellers pre-order, and possibly make readers buy, the greatest possible number of copies – was set in motion, and nothing could stop it. Nothing, except, of course, failure to deliver the manuscript.

  A few days before the deadline, Julian Muller, who had also moved to Harcourt, called his author, who he knew was about to leave for Europe, to ask if there was any news. He was told to drop by the Tanner home that evening, where, in addition to the usual seventy or so guests in various stages of stultification, he would find a nice surprise. And a surprise is undoubtedly what Muller found: the elegant gift package resting on the lawn contained a manuscript, but also an accompanying note in which Pat informed him that he had not had time to finish the work, and asked him to please see to it personally. Having already written the ending to The Loving Couple (a happy ending, though somewhat flat), Muller was less startled than one might expect, and once it came out, the book sold 130,000 copies. It is clear, however, that Pat had something else up his sleeve. Maybe he didn’t yet know what, but he soon discovered it one afternoon in 1961, upon entering the office of Cris Alexander, now the headquarters of the newly created Lancelot Leopard.

  What was Lancelot Leopard? Well, indeed, it’s best to explain it properly, since it was the prototype for a company destined to be one of a kind. It was a literary production house, essentially, which faithfully re produced the structure of the cinematic houses but which, instead of films, would deliver books to the intermediary, namely the publisher, considered the natural equivalent of the film distributor. Put this way it might seem like yet another caper on the part of Pat and his bunch, but it wasn’t: as an employee of the company, Pat was able to pay the revenue authorities a lesser amount of taxes than that required of freelance writers. Consequently, both men took the Lancelot meetings (Cris also took part ) very seriously. And it was, in actual fact, during a break in a discussion among the members, so it is said, that Pat went into the bathroom and found the walls covered with photographs taken during the filming of a super 8 in which Cris and his buddies impersonated nurses in an unknown sanatorium.

  It was a vision worthy of a gothic Mike Hammer, but, for posterity, it took credit for suggesting instantly to Pat the idea for his next work: the illustrated autobiography of a diva – first of burlesque, then silent films, then
Broadway, then Hollywood – by the name of Belle Poitrine. The outline and, in particular, the tone of the book represented a form of libel that in other times would have been legally actionable, but that in the twentieth century (especially in the early part) was considered the best possible crowning success of a star’s career, an unauthorised ‘tell-all’: the difference being that while the works ridiculed by Pat were based on a layer of reality – albeit exceedingly thin – everything here was strictly invented (although, as usual, it was presented as true).

  Little Me was a type of book of which very few prior examples are known (perhaps only one, though illustrious: My Royal Past, by Cecil Beaton, the hypothetical memoir of a younger son of the house of Windsor). Today the presence of illustrations in a text in itself attests to the project’s innovative nature and the author’s four quarterings of nobility2, but, in the early days of graphic design, the text of a story might well be conceived along with illustrations from the very beginning, and therefore would make no sense without them. Belle Poitrine, one might say, can be considered the more inept, though on the other hand more likeable and clever, sister to Ed Wood, and everything she amuses us with is in blatant, striking contrast to the facts. The reader realizes it thanks to countless evident incongruences – for example, he knows why Belle’s husband, a producer, always and only comments on the daily screenings in his native tongue – Yiddish – just as he can well imagine the contents of the letters with which Joyce and Gertrude Stein reply to Belle, when she asks them to collaborate on the script for The Scarlet Letter, transposed into the world of football. And he knows, or imagines, this irrespective of the fact that Belle, in this regard, ensures that her consort experiences a burst of excitement each night that cannot be expressed in English, or remarks that two figures incapable of writing an intelligible letter would be hard pressed to set their hand to a script. Yet, without Cris’s photo-montages (made by following Pat’s instructions to the letter and carried out through long, often exhausting sessions, involving all or nearly all of the two men’s acquaintances), without that B-film visual creation complete (and hilarious) in its entirety, the project would have only half succeeded.

  Here, as elsewhere, Pat proved himself to be a virtuoso of ambiguity, and his feverish back-and-forth between reality and performance deliberately sowed uncertainty even in the most alert reader. The actress who played Belle, for example, was very close, almost too close, to her character. Her real name, Gladys Tinfawichee, seemed invented, and under her stage name, Jeri Archer, she was known for her appearances in calendars – which in those bygone days were not open to amateurs, but instead were the prerogative of serious professionals – rather than for her repeated appearances in minor films. About six feet tall, a height that the photos did not attempt to conceal, with a confidence born of early plastic surgery, Gladys appeared in every shot in the book, linking the story with her imposing figure. About one third of the way through, though, a shy, lanky gentleman makes his way into Belle’s dressing room, convinced that he is entering the men’s room, and certain that the building itself, the Audubon, is the headquarters of the famous ornithological confraternity of the same name. The intruder is a British aristocrat suffering from pathological shyness: apart from bird watching, his only pursuit is Elizabethan poetry and he has no interest of any kind in the opposite sex (though he is equally uninterested in any possible alternatives) and he has a name – Cedric Roulstoune-Farjeon, which seems like one of Edward Gorey’s famous pseudonyms. Nevertheless, from the few words that the two exchange, Belle realizes that, in addition to rank, ‘Cedie’ possesses boundless wealth and so, clearly against his will, she marries him.

  The British interlude is one of the most hilarious parts of the story, not so much for the predictable havoc that Belle’s presence wreaks in Westminster’s environs, but for the trials and tribulations inflicted on poor Cedie, with whom the reader ends up sympathizing, not necessarily knowing that the Bertie Wooster-like character with the dangling wrists and terrorized look is, in fact, Pat himself, rendered almost unrecognizable thanks to a simple contrivance – his dentures, worn the wrong way round. Nowadays, an entire hermeneutics has justifiably bloomed around the pose and features with which artists from Vermeer to Hitchcock carved a niche in their own compositions, but to find a self-portrait so cruel and pitiless, whose farcical tone only makes it crueller, is quite rare. If one wished to dwell on the ultimate meaning of this book – which is many things, among them a vehement caricature of Auntie Mame – and on the complex relationship that Pat had with his creations, one would probably end up getting quite far off the track: what matters, however, is that this self-inflicted jeer be taken very seriously, as we will shortly see.

  Regardless of what it portended, the publication of Little Me confirmed, in any case, Pat’s extraordinary talent for self-promotion. As it happened, the book was to be presented for the first time at a booksellers’ convention planned at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, and for some reason a national radio network had decided to broadcast it. For the occasion, Pat and Cris staged and starred in a mini-musical inspired by Little Me and it was so successful that the following day the incredible occurred: that is, one of the national television networks invited the two to repeat the performance live, in prime time. It was an unheard of occurrence, but not as unheard of as Pat’s refusal, which left everyone dumbfounded, and whose explanation, given some time later in an interview in Saturday Review, rendered it more wistful, without completely explaining it: ‘… there are writing authors, and there are talking authors. I’d rather be a writing author’.

  Shortly after the publication of Little Me, which, besides pleasing his long-time readers, also raised his status in the gay community from a fellow traveller to a pagan idol, he published a novel as traditional as it was irresistible. It was called Genius and was an ingenious caricature of a director who extorts money from everyone he meets in order to allocate it to making a film that is unbearably arty and doomed, by decree, to failure. In addition to Orson Welles, the obvious inspiration for the protagonist, the satire assailed and corroded the whole idea of cinema and was so effective that Otto Preminger immediately bought the rights to the book, calling upon Pat to collaborate on the script of a film that threatened to strip Sunset Boulevard of the title of most abrasive film of all time about Hollywood. Unfortunately, the film was shelved. In contrast, the show adapted from Little Me, like Auntie Mame and the comedy based on The Loving Couple, premiered on Broadway, so things could hardly have been better. Yet, shortly after the publication of Genius, Pat attempted suicide, and was urgently admitted to a psychiatric hospital.

  Of course, it is highly likely that non-professional causes contributed to Pat’s emotional instability. For example, the first conscious manifestation of his long-suppressed homosexuality, which when it exploded took the sadly familiar form of a devastating passion for the wrong person – in this case Guy Kent, a costume designer not much caught up in Pat’s excitement, and only interested in taking the obvious advantages. The breakdown was long and intense, however, and the Pat who came out of the clinic, and out of electroshock therapy, was a markedly different person.

  As soon as he was released, Pat – Psychopatrick, as he himself now preferred to be called – left his family, in the most civil way possible, and went to live alone. During this period, he presented his publisher with a book that he had started writing at the clinic, a kind of sequel to Little Me. It was called First Lady, and this time Cris’s photos depicted the rise and fall of a woman very close to an American president. Miracles, however, don’t tend to happen twice, and the work was a limp repetition of his previous efforts; though, with hindsight, the final part, set entirely in an insane asylum with Pat as an inmate, adds a poignant note to the masochistic self-portrait depicted in Little Me.

  What is most striking about Pat’s last ten years, however, is the meticulous care with which he prepared his own stage exit, one scene after anoth
er – without those around him showing any sign of realizing what was happening or why, and without the usual suspects (alcohol, or sex) providing any conclusive evidence. Basically, Pat spent a staggering amount of money, became a laughing stock (generally by stripping off in public) in a stunning number of situations, and on several occasions uttered remarks that were less articulate than those to which he had accustomed his readers: that life is ‘an effing mess’, for example. Then, without any forewarning, as always, he shut down his house in New York and moved to Mexico City.

  The reason for the move is unclear, although, in 1965, Mexico City was home to a thriving and lively colony of expats – artists, adventurers and those, American and European, fleeing from lives that had gone wrong, or were just so-so. Pat must have been attracted by the prospect of constant and inexpensive carousing, since he found nothing to write home about the place (when his two sons, then teenagers, declared themselves sick and tired of the indigenous culture and begged him to take them to see some ruins, Pat agreed, but once there he asked a female friend whom he had brought along to look after them and spent the two hours of the tour sitting in the car). In the midst of partying he continued working, producing three novels in five years, the last of which had a title that sounds like a long-meditated retaliation against the critics who had always accused him of creating two-dimensionional characters. 3-D, which came out in 1972, was panned more or less unanimously and would be Patrick Dennis’ last novel. But his true leave-taking – in grand style – from the creative world actually took place four years earlier, in 1968 to be precise, when the Anglo-Mexican Cultural Institute imprudently asked Pat to undertake the staging of the sacred Christmas production, an innocuous representation of the Nativity, which from time immemorial had been reproduced on greeting cards intended mainly for England. It is not known whether the cards were actually produced that year (one would hope so), but it is certain that the show, for which Pat wrote the text and music, designed the sets and costumes, and which he of course directed, was called Turkish Delight, was set between London and Constantinople in 1222, and narrated the exploits (it’s not clear how it related to the current idea of nativity scenes) of a certain Queen Sadistica, the cruel mistress and torturer of a handful of slaves – one of whom was … well, there’s no need to say it.