My idea of
Holiday Cheer
I like my coffee
at rocket fuel strength
Books for Christmas?
Excellent!
Christmas with the frat boys:
"We need a little Christmas"...
Auntie Mame
The Incomparable Patrick Dennis
Edward Everett Tanner III was born in 1921 in Illinois into a
prominent family of staunch Republicans. Edward, nicknamed "Pat", was a
popular high school student who excelled in writing and theater. In
1942, at the age of 21 he joined the American Field Service, working as
an ambulance driver in North Africa and the Middle East. After WW II he
married Louise Stickney, with whom he had two children, even though he
had struggled with homosexual leanings his entire adult life.
Under
an assumed name at the age of 36 he wrote a best-selling novel, which
remained on the NYT Bestseller list for more than two years, selling
more than 2 million copies in the first edition. A year later he became
the first writer to have three books on the NYT Bestseller list at the
same time. His books were mostly biting social satires which almost
single-handedly introduced "camp" into mainstream American culture. He
also wrote several books under the female pseudonym, Virginia Rowans.
Tanner
made millions from his 16 books and became the toast of New York
society. His novels were made into wildly popular films, plays,
television series and musicals, but by the 1970s his writing style had
fallen out of fashion. A week after he was profiled in Life
magazine, he attempted suicide and was committed to a mental hospital
for eight months. After years of leading a double life as a gay man, he
had fallen in love with another man and decided he had to abandon his
family. He had always been a profligate spender, and by the time he left
his wealthy wife, he was broke and had to go to work as a butler, a job
he actually enjoyed. Giving full vent to his homosexual orientation, he
became a fixture in the Greenwich Village gay scene in New York.
His
employers at the time, Mr. and Mrs. Ray Croc (founder of McDonalds),
had no idea that their butler, Edward Tanner, was in fact the writer Patrick Dennis, author of Auntie Mame, which in stage, movie and musical forms would provide Rosalind Russell and Angela Lansbury with major theatrical roles.
Mr.
Dennis died from pancreatic cancer in 1976, at the age of 55, his days
as a dilettante long behind him. In the year 2000 his ashes were
interred with the body of his wife Louise in St. James’s Cemetery in
Stony Brook, Long Island.
Note: I can especially recommend an obscure book by Mr. Dennis: Tony
(1966). The narrator, whose name is never disclosed, meets Tony, a
name-dropping scoundrel, when they become college roommates. Tony is a
complete fraud and a pathological liar, yet the narrator chronicles
their decades long love-hate friendship in hilarious style. Tony morphs
into whatever form will get him ahead. An inveterate social climber,
even Tony’s sexuality is “fluid” when a wealthy homosexual man falls in
love with him (the man’s mother writes a very large check to have Tony
fly the coop). Many aspects of Tony’s character are autobiographical
(the author had three real life identities as Edward Tanner, Patrick
Dennis and Virginia Rowans, not to mention the bisexuality), and the
reader can easily lose track of the number of times Tony reinvents
himself . This is perfect holiday reading, and used copies are readily
available from Amazon and Alibris.
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