Around the World With Auntie Mame

by Dennis, Patrick

  “Then Mr. Babcock,” Auntie Mame said, “all is forgiven. Forgiven . . . and . . . forgotten?”

  “Oh, y-yes,” Mr. Babcock said, his teeth chattering. “But just one thing . . .”

  “Yes, Mr. Babcock?” Auntie Mame said sweetly.

  “Wh-what shall I do with your lap robe when I get to the hospital?”

  “Take it off!” Auntie Mame shouted. With a roar the car raced up the silent street.

  Auntie Mame in Court Circles

  “SO AFTER ALL THOSE MUSEUMS AND GALLERIES and the French National Theatre what did the old maniac do with you?” Pegeen asked.

  “Well,” I said glibly, “Auntie Mame felt that Paris was getting too hot for her. I mean even in the early spring there are some real scorchers there. Not so much the heat, it’s the . . .”

  “Go on,” Pegeen said.

  “Well, so we went to London.”

  “What for?”

  “To visit the Queen. Quite literally. Only it was a King and Queen then.”

  “Cut the comedy.”

  “I mean it. What trouble could anyone possibly get into in a staid old town like London. Besides,” I added, “Auntie Mame has always moved in Court circles.”

  Unable to face the distraught mother, I went out to the pantry to step up my drink. The drink needed bolstering and so did I.

  LONDON was just getting over Mrs. Simpson and the Coronation when Mrs. Burnside and the entourage checked into a suite at Claridge’s. The entourage, by that time, consisted of Auntie Mame’s best friend, Vera Charles, First Lady of the American Theater, who had collected so much money from the Folies-Bergère for indignities suffered there that it was easier not to work at all that summer—and, of course, me.

  Auntie Mame had been to London many times before and knew quite a lot of people left over from the twenties. At that early age in history they had been called the Bright Young Things. But after a couple of Auntie Mame’s Little Afternoons and Big Evenings—and a stern rebuke from the management—she had to confess that her companions of the past had not kept pace with the times. They were just middle-aged delinquents.

  “Oh, my little love,” Auntie Mame moaned from beneath her ice cap the day after her third Big Evening, “I’m afraid that I’m in the Wrong Set. My old friends are neither bright nor young any longer.”

  “Well, they were certainly trying,” I said.

  “Trying? Darling, they were impossible! Too Evelyn Waugh for words. No, Patrick, I have reached an age when there should be beauty and dignity in my life. I am no longer Madcap Mame, but Mrs. Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside, a widow—still young and attractive, perhaps—with a certain amount of wealth and position. I also have the crushing responsibility of guiding a young nephew through life and . . .”

  “Don’t worry about me, Auntie Mame,” I said. “I’ll be in college this fall and then you can go right on doing . . .”

  “Don’t interrupt!” Auntie Mame snapped, setting her ice cap down with a clatter. “As I was saying, these elderly Bright Young Things are wrong for me now. Wrong, wrong, wrong! Oh, we were all mad and gay ten years ago, but today—in the grim cold light of 1937—all those immature, hard-drinking, pleasure-crazed playmates of yesteryear seem too shoddy for words. Look at the way they’ve left this lovely room! Cigarette burns! Glasses overturned! That chandelier hanging by a thread! No, Patrick, my little love, England means to me beauty, dignity, serenity, a sense of the past. . . .”

  Vera, who had been asleep on the sofa for some time, got up and lurched off toward her bedroom, last night’s evening dress trailing raggedly behind her. Vera said a short but unprintable word and slammed the door.

  “That,” Auntie Mame said, “is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about. It is not the sort of London society I wish to present to an impressionable young man such as you, darling. I wish you to know a more gracious England—a sovereign nation of rich tradition, of pomp and ceremony. And for that reason, my little love . . .” Auntie Mame paused dramatically and clapped the ice bag back on her head.

  “Yes, Auntie Mame?”

  “And for that reason, Patrick, I am going to be presented at Court.”

  WHENEVER AUNTIE MAME MADE UP HER MIND TO do something, she got it done in a hurry, and so she didn’t waste any time at getting into Court circles. The first thing she did was to cable New York to have her Rolls-Royce and Ito, her Japanese houseman, shipped over on the Queen Mary. It seemed sort of like carrying coals to Newcastle to have a Rolls sent from America to England, and Ito drove so badly that I was a little worried about him in London traffic. But Auntie Mame said that the Rolls and Ito were a Family Tradition and that since Ito had always driven on the left-hand side of the street anyhow, he might find London his Spiritual Home.

  The next thing Auntie Mame did was to get in touch with Lady Gravell-Pitt and then she really started moving.

  Just where Auntie Mame ever found Hermione Gravell-Pitt I don’t know—don’t even like to contemplate. All I can tell you is that the day after Auntie Mame’s great declaration I came back from a tour of the Abbey to find Auntie Mame and Lady Gravell-Pitt being arch and ladylike over tea, and I knew that Auntie Mame had entered a New Phase.

  “Jewels,” Auntie Mame was saying, “will be no problem, Lady Gravell-Pitt.” She flashed her large uncut emerald ring and there was a discreet twinkle of rather good diamonds at her ears.

  “Of cawss,” Lady Gravell-Pitt said, her beady eyes taking in the considerable glory of Auntie Mame’s rocks. Then she smiled broadly, and I was stunned by the saffron splendor of her teeth. There must have been sixty of them. Very long, very false, they were the color of old ivory set into gleaming titian gums, and for some time I could think only of the double keyboard of an antique harpsichord. “And since we’re going to be such grand chums, my dear, you must call me Hermione—or even Hermie.”

  “Why, certainly, Hermione,” Auntie Mame said, “and you must call me Mame.”

  “Of cawss, Mame,” Hermione said with another ocher smile. “But have you a tiara?”

  “Two,” Auntie Mame said.

  “A pity,” Hermione said with a wistful little smile. “I have such a lovely one. Heirloom, of cawss, but I’d have let you have it for a song. Howsomever,” she continued, touching her brassy gold-dyed long bob, “we must do something about your living quarters. I mean, as your social sponsor, I really couldn’t permit you to live in an hotel.” She gazed around Auntie Mame’s suite at Claridge’s as though it were the county workhouse. “Luckly, I do know a little jewel of a house right here in Mayfair which we can lease for the season and . . .”

  “We?” Auntie Mame asked.

  “Yais,” Hermione said with a lackluster flash of dentures. “You, Miss Charles, your neview and I—all of us. Now, Lady Styllbourne is a chum of mine and so I think I could coax her to let you have it for a thousand guineas the mouth. Plus, of cawss, the servants’ wages.”

  I tiptoed quietly off to my room as I heard Lady Gravell-Pitt saying, “Now if you will simply give me your check”—or cheque.

  GRAND, I BELIEVE, IS THE TERM FOR THE LITTLE jewel of a house Auntie Mame had rented through Lady Gravell-Pitt. It was a vast marble mansion in Grosvenor Square, close enough to the American Embassy so that Auntie Mame could annoy her countrymen whenever she felt it necessary, yet far enough across the square so that they couldn’t keep too careful an eye on her. Auntie Mame pronounced the house “divine” and the location “ideal.”

  Lady Gravell-Pitt, very much the chatelaine, met us at the door surrounded by a platoon of footmen. “Welcome, welcome, dear Mame! Patrick, dear! Miss Charles.” Lady Gravell-Pitt did not care for Vera. “Now let me show you through our lovely, lovely new home. Your, um, setting as it were.” She smiled her horrible crockery smile and said, “The perfect setting for a lovely Ameddican jewel.”

  Vera gagged.

  Hermione led us between the ranks of flunkies and then guided us through a series of marble halls hung with Water
-ford chandeliers and dusty French tapestries and portraits of dead people. It was quite a place. Adam rooms opened into Chippendale rooms and Chippendale rooms opened into Heppelwhite rooms and Grinling Gibbons rooms and Regency rooms and Louis Quinze rooms and so on.

  It wasn’t very cozy, or even very clean, but Auntie Mame loved it. Eventually Hermione wound up her conducted tour in what she called “the sheerest Directoire conceit of a garden room” for tea. It was the cheeriest room in the house, which doesn’t say much for it, and it did look out over a sooty little patch of greenery, in the center of which a marble Apollo displayed with undue pride a pitiful array of amputated parts.

  “Now, Mame dear,” Lady Gravell-Pitt said finally, with a vivacious clatter of dentures, “about your presentation of cawss, anyone with my connections could have you presented immeejitly. . . .”

  “Then why don’t you?” Vera said.

  “But”—Lady Gravell-Pitt held up an imperious hand—“the best way is the gradual approach. First a little series of cocktail parties, luncheons, dinners. That way you can become intimate with the cream of Court circles. Then I shall arrange to have you invited to a Royal Garden Party. And lastly, a full presentation at St. James’s.”

  “How long do you think it will be?” Auntie Mame asked.

  “And how much?” Vera said.

  AUNTIE MAME’S SEASON BEGAN AT LUNCH THE NEXT day when a gaggle of dowdy gentry showed up at twelve sharp, descended on the table like a flock of cormorants, and departed sharply at three. An hour and a half later, six more showed up to devour three large cakes, five platters of sandwiches, and I don’t know how much tea. At eight o’clock a dozen more appeared in slightly soiled dinner clothes and tucked into an enormous dinner as though they hadn’t seen food since the Diamond Jubilee. The rest of the week followed just about the same pattern, except that twice Auntie Mame was permitted to take Hermione’s friends out to the theater, with dancing afterward at a supper club in which, I later discovered, Hermione had a slight financial interest.

  I must say that none of Auntie Mame’s myriad guests struck me as very attractive. They were mostly provincial English or superannuated White Russians with, as I now know, either minor or dubious titles. None of them was a minute under sixty and they were all related to Lady Gravell-Pitt. The women were given to whiskers and the men to rheumatism. They all dressed like something out of a rummage sale, and if they were the cream of Court circles, I felt awfully sorry for King George and Queen Elizabeth—“Bertie and Bessie,” as Lady Gravell-Pitt called them in Auntie Mame’s presence.

  Nor did it seem to me that any of them was in much of a hurry to repay Auntie Mame’s lavish hospitality with so much as a cup of tea. Vera noticed it, too. But Auntie Mame was so busy being the gracious hostess, while Hermione hovered around her, teeth clattering like castanets, that I guess she didn’t have time to think about it. During the mornings, Hermione kept Auntie Mame occupied with learning the Court curtsy, which she demonstrated with a fearful wobbling and a crackling of joints that reminded me of someone eating peanut brittle. After the first lesson Auntie Mame could curtsy like a prima ballerina, so there wasn’t much else for Lady Gravell-Pitt to do but invite her relatives to feed on out-of-season delicacies at Auntie Mame’s table and to try to sell things to Auntie Mame. These included an elderly Daimler; a rather dented Queen Anne tea service; almost new liveries for the footmen; a crisp old ermine cloak, which she said—and there was no reason to doubt her—once belonged to Queen Charlotte; a dinner service for thirty-six in chipped Limoges; an emerald stomacher, size forty-two; a sorrel riding horse; a ruined abbey in Wales; and a Saint Bernard puppy.

  After a week of living under the same roof with Lady Gravell-Pitt Vera began to crack, almost visibly. “Come in here,” she said in pure Pittsburghese and with none of the unintelligible Mayfair accent she used on the stage.

  I went into her bedroom and she closed the door.

  It hadn’t taken any crystal ball to see that Lady Gravell-Pitt rather looked down on Vera, although Vera was a Great Star and, even in London, more or less in a league with Gertrude Lawrence. “Theatah people, of cawss,” Hermione always said, dismissing Vera with a brisk click of her uppers, as though Vera had been sentenced for importuning in Park Lane. And she displayed her scorn in such little ways as excluding Vera entirely from conversation, neglecting to introduce her to the cream of Court circles, seating her far below the salt, and placing her in the smallest, dingiest bedroom in the house while far nicer ones remained unoccupied.

  “Well?” Vera asked pregnantly, helping herself to one of my cigarettes.

  “Well, what, Vera?” I said.

  “You know what, Patrick. This auction gallery she’s living in. The toothless wonder. All those tatty old frauds who show up at mealtimes.”

  “Oh, you know Auntie Mame and her phases, Vera,” I said. “She’ll get over it in time. She just wants to be presented at Court. After that she’ll be sick of all this and move on to something else.”

  “Well, for Christ’s sake,” Vera said, “if she only wants to stick three feathers in her scalp and do a full curtsy, she could manage it easier than this. After all, Mame’s a damned attractive woman, and a prominent one; and a rich one. The American ambassador’s wife could have her presented in a minute.” Vera fixed me with a cold green gaze. “I suppose you think that Lady Hormone doesn’t know that Mame’s the ninth-richest widow in New York. Why, she’s taking poor Mame for such a ride that . . .”

  “Oh, Auntie Mame’s enjoying herself,” I said. “She’d be going in for yoga or the Oxford Movement or the modern dance if she weren’t so hipped on getting into Court circles.”

  “Court circles, my ass!” Vera said eloquently. “I’ve been playing royalty on the stage for the last fifteen years and if those old frumps are anything but down-and-out deadbeats, I’m Queen Mother Mary. Anyway, it isn’t the principle of the thing, Patrick, it’s the money. That bitch is going to bleed poor Mame for every penny she can get and then some. Why, Mame could rent Windsor Castle for what she’s paying for this mausoleum, not to mention all those servants and all the free groceries she’s passing out to Gravell-Pitt’s poor relations.”

  “She’s very generous,” I said. “Extravagant, too.”

  “And yet,” Vera said, “a couple of days ago when I, Vera Charles, her oldest and dearest friend, asked her if she wouldn’t like to invest a few thousand pounds in this new play I’m considering for Cochran—and a beautiful, beautiful play, Patrick, you should see the clothes—Mame said she didn’t think she could a ford it. Fancy that, if you will. Never lost a nickel on one of my shows in her life and now she . . .”

  “She must have been joking.”

  “She was not. Hermione’s got the screws into her good and proper. Here I can work my ass off doing eight performances a week while that slob Hermione—a total stranger, if you please—wallows around in Mame’s Rolls, orders the servants around, invites her dreary chums here, shuts me up in this maid’s room. I tell you, Patrick, that woman is sinister.”

  I was so accustomed to Vera’s outbursts against other women that, at first, I put her dislike of Lady Gravell-Pitt down to jealousy and didn’t think much about it. But only a day or so later I began to see at firsthand that when it came to a quick deal, Hermione was next to none.

  It all arose over the state of my clothes, which I had always considered neat if not flashy. “Of cawss, Mame dear,” Hermione said, gazing at me as though I were a ragpicker, “I don’t see how you expect Patrick to attend the bigger dinner parties and balls inadequately clad as he is.”

  I looked down to see if anything was undone, but my clothing was intact.

  “Whatever do you mean, Hermie?” Auntie Mame asked absently.

  “Ektualleh, Mame, a dinner coat is one thing, but for the really gala functions a tail coat, white tie, silk hat, opera cloak are de rigueur.”

  “An opera cloak?” Auntie Mame laughed. “That’s too silly, my dear; Patri
ck’s only seventeen.”

  “And, of cawss, for the Royal Garden Party, gray striped trousers, a cutaway, a gray topper . . .”

  “Mmmmm. That is true,” Auntie Mame said.

  “Well, I suppose that if I really get invited to any of these things,” I said, “ I can just rent the outfits from Moss Brothers. What would I ever need with a gray . . .” The words died on my lips. If I’d suggested going naked, Lady Gravell-Pitt couldn’t have looked more horrified.

  “Moss Brothers!” she spat, “Really, Mame, it’s quite difficult enough for me to bring Ameddicans out in the best London society. But even to consider hired clothing . . .”

  “Oh, all right,” Auntie Mame said reasonably. “He can always wear the evening clothes at college dances, and as for that Garden Party drag, I suppose he’ll be an usher at someone’s wedding someday. You might just run down to Dover Street, darling. I know a lot of beautifully turned-out men who have their clothes made at Kilgour, French and . . .”

  “However,” Lady Gravell-Pitt said, eying me, “I know a young duke—my cousin ektualleh—who is just Patrick’s size. His suits would fit perfectly and I think I could get him to part with the lot for, um, for a hundred guineas.” That seemed to take care of that.

  Lady Gravell-Pitt was the sort of woman you dislike at first, but after you get to know her a little better you detest her. I got to know Hermione like a book, although I never overcame a sense of wonderment at her long, rawboned frame, the synthetic glory of her yellow hair and teeth. Somewhere between fifty and death, Hermie seemed to have been unduly influenced both by photographs of Lady Sylvia Ashley and some self-help article urging readers simply to emphasize their worst points. The final effect was pure Douglas Byng.

  I could have forgiven Lady Gravell-Pitt her hideous physical appearance if only there had been somewhere in her makeup one kindly or generous instinct. But there was none. Hermione was one of those horrible women who make a true profession out of being a Lady. If she did not stoop to posing for face powders and cleansing creams it was because no cosmetic firm was insane enough to ask her. But I never once saw Hermione when she wasn’t up to her eyeballs in a dozen little deals vaguely connected with being titled. For a fee she would get rich Canadian or Australian or American women presented at Court. At a slight consideration she could find you a dear little service flat in the West End or a duck of a house by the sea or a castle in Scotland. Hermie dealt in secondhand jewelry and silver, in used furs, in hastily cleaned ball gowns, in antiques and decorations, in household servants and social secretaries, in world cruises and sight-seeing tours of stately homes. She was delighted to lend—or rent—her name to new night clubs and restaurants, dress shops and art galleries; to anyone or anything willing to pay for the temporary use of her title. I don’t think that she trafficked in narcotics or white slaves, but I’ll bet that if I’d asked for a sniff of cocaine and a half-caste concubine, Hermione would have been on the telephone in a trice. Service was Hermie’s byword, and, in her slightly soiled silks and satins, her frumpy furs and dirty diamonds, she looked as though she’d seen a great deal of it.