Table Of ContentTable of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Auntie Mame and Posterity
Auntie Mame and the City of Light
Auntie Mame in Court Circles
Auntie Mame and the Fortune Hunter
Auntie Mame and a Family Affair
Auntie Mame in Her Mountain Retreat
Auntie Mame and Mother Russia
Auntie Mame and the Middle Eastern Powder Keg
Auntie Mame and the Long Voyage Home
Auntie Mame and Home-coming
About the Author
ALSO BY PATRICK DENNIS
Copyright Page
To the one and only
ROSALIND RUSSELL
Auntie Mame and Posterity
CHRISTMAS IS NEARLY HERE AND I LOOK FORWARD to it more and
more with loathing. All the shops that didn’t have their holiday decorations up
by Michaelmas made up for it with sheer ostentation by Halloween. Canned
carols bleat from every corner. The clerks at Saks are surlier, the ones at Lord &
Taylor lordlier, the ones at Bergdorf’s bitchier than at any other season.
All about me I see children being led by the hand to wheedle toy department
Santa Clauses out of the most ruinous remembrances. On the commuters’ train
each night I see fathers, burdened with bulky packages, discussing not taxes, not
politics, not the market, but the complexities of assembling electric trains and
English bicycles.
I hate to go to my office each day because all that awaits me is nothing—a
message from that pompous young ass in the State Department saying that no
reliable information has been uncovered as yet, but every effort is being made; a
cable from the Countess of Upshot (the former Vera Charles) saying that she just
missed making contact at the Aga Khan’s funeral in July, but thought she saw
them at the Copenhagen airport in September; a rambling letter from my London
operative, Percy (“Peek-a-boo”) Pankhurst, announcing that his detective agency
is still hot on the trail and asking for yet another hundred pounds.
Even more, I hate to go home at night. Home is a Georgian-type house in
Verdant Greens, a community of two hundred houses in four styles just over an
hour from New York, if the train is on time. My wife and I hate the house. We
also hate Verdant Greens. We only moved there when our son was born so that
he could have grass beneath his feet, fresh air, and rather mediocre schooling
under the collective gimlet eye of a meddlesome group of Verdant Greens
mothers who have a smattering of psychiatric jargon. And now my wife and I
have even come to hate each other. Our overpriced, ill-built little house—seven
rooms, two-and-a-half baths, expansion attic—has become an empty echoing
shell, the prison of two lonely, silent, frustrated people. The son, for whose well-
being the house was bought, is no longer here. He was kidnapped in 1954.
When I say kidnapped I don’t mean to imply anything like ransom notes and a
ladder against the wall. He went away just after his seventh birthday with our
kisses and our blessings. We even waved him off at Idlewild as the big Pan-
American plane carried him off to India. But we have never seen him— and
rarely heard of him—since. That was June of 1954. He was supposed to be back
by Labor Day in time for school. Two and a half years have passed, and now we
face another melancholy Christmas without Michael in the house. And all
because Auntie Mame fancied the child and wanted to take him off on a little
outing!
MY AUNTIE MAME IS A MOST UNUSUAL WOMAN. SHE raised me from
the time I was orphaned at ten. Not because anyone wanted her to—far from it—
or because she herself had any desire to take on a lonely only child during her
heyday in 1929. It was simply that she was my only living relative. We were
stuck with each other and we had to make the best of it.
But raise me she did in her own helter-skelter fashion, to the horror of my
trustee, Mr. Dwight Babcock of the Knickerbocker Trust Company, to the horror
of the masters at St. Boniface Academy in Apathy, Massachusetts (where Mr.
Babcock finally put me after Auntie Mame’s forays into progressive education),
and sometimes even to the horror of me.
We lived in many places together, Auntie Mame and I. We lived in a duplex
in Beekman Place during the twenties when Auntie Mame was still Miss Dennis,
still rich, and still in her Japanese phase. We lived in a carriage house in Murray
Hill during the Depression before Auntie Mame found love and marriage and
even more riches as Mrs. Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside. For a while we
lived on a plantation in Georgia with Uncle Beau. Then, when Auntie Mame
became the ninth-richest widow in New York, we lived in a big town house in
Washington Square. We also lived in various other places around the world until
I grew up and got married. After that, Auntie Mame’s address—whenever she
stayed still long enough to have one—was the St. Regis Hotel. Today I don’t
know where Auntie Mame is living. I wish I did, because that’s where my son
Michael is living, too. Assuming, of course, that the boy is still alive.
But as unorthodox and eccentric—her detractors have even used such
adjectives as depraved and lunatic—as Auntie Mame’s methods of child care
may have been, I don’t think that any of the unusual things she did ever hurt me.
This, however, is not the opinion of my wife, Pegeen. When I got home to
Verdant Greens last night, Pegeen was waiting at the door.
“Chilly out, dear,” I said, kissing her. “Anything in the mail? I mean like
especially terrible Christmas cards.”
Pegeen knew perfectly well what I meant and went on to say so. “I know
perfectly well what you mean. You mean is there some word from our child or
from that madwoman who carried him off. And the answer is No. Just as it’s
been every day for the last four months. No! No! No! My God, Patrick, I can’t
eat, I can’t sleep, I can’t even think, worrying about my baby in the hands of that
old maniac. For all we know, poor little Michael may be dead and buried.”
“Oh, I scarcely think so. We’d have heard, surely.”
“Heard? What have we heard? Six cables, a few miserable scribbled post
cards—the Taj Mahal, a bathhouse in Tokyo, a lamasery in Tibet, an apartment
house in Tel Aviv that looked like a dresser with all the drawers open, the
Istanbul Hilton, the Mozart Festival, Animation sur la Plage from Cap
d’Antibes; those and about a dozen more and not one more word about our child
in two and a half years!”
“That’s not quite true, Pegeen. Both Michael and Auntie Mame have been
very good about remembering our birthdays, our anniversary, Christmas—and
very handsomely, too. I still wear that mandarin . . .”
“Christmas. How can you say the word? This will be our third Christmas
without a child in the house. Don’t you think everyone in Verdant Greens is
talking?”
“I’m certain they’re talking but it’s rarely interesting enough to . . .”
“That boy’s almost ten years old. I haven’t seen him since he was seven. He’ll
never be a cub scout and I’ll never be a den mother.”
“Not if I have anything to say about it you won’t.”
“Well, I grant that it sounds dismal. But think of the other things our baby is
missing. Proper schooling. The companionship of children his own age. Sports.
Sunday school. Christmas.”
“Nonsense,” I said, trying to be as bland and offhand as possible because I
was just as worried about Auntie Mame and Michael as Pegeen, only I didn’t
want her to know it. “As Auntie Mame always said, I could learn more in ten
minutes in her drawing room than I could in ten years at school. She was right,
too. I saw more of children my own age than I wanted to. As for Christmas, she
gave me some damned nice things.”
“Such as what?”
All I could remember, offhand, was a list of items that would hardly have
comforted a worried mother—a live alligator, a samurai sword, a chimpanzee
that promptly died, and a lifetime course at Arthur Murray’s. “Oh, nothing. Just
some very nice things.”
“But don’t you realize that she’s simply stolen our child away from us? If he
were to march into this room right now he wouldn’t recognize his own parents.
Oh, I know her game. I’m a woman, too. She plans to take over our child
entirely, to twist him around her finger, to teach him life on her terms— life as
Mame Dennis Burnside sees it—so that he’ll end up just as scatterbrained and
eccentric as she is.”
“If you please,” I said. “She raised me from the time I was ten until I escaped
—that is, until I met you. Do you find me so odd? Don’t I manage to shower
every day, hold down a decent job with a reputable firm? Do I keep a collection
of boots and whips in the cellar? Don’t I pay my taxes and come home every
night on the six-oh-three? Sometimes I even wish I were a little more colorful—
a little less dull.”
“So do I. But that’s beside the point. The point is that your aunt took our child
away two and a half years ago. She promised that he’d be home by Labor Day,
and here it is 1957 and . . .”
“Do be fair, Pegeen. Auntie Mame didn’t say which Labor Day.”
“Don’t interrupt! Bit by bit she’s taken over. First a cable begging to let him
stay until Christmas. I never should have consented, but I did. Then a long letter
