PATRICK DENNIS

The butler did it.

When I was a little boy, watching THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN, I cringed a bit, although I certainly wouldn’t have had the words to describe this feeling, at the over the top antics of Ben Welden and Herb Vigran, two frequent bad guys on this understandably favorite show of mine. Even as a kid, I understood personal embarrassment, and these performances were just silly.

I asked my mother, who was in the kitchen, brooding, as usual, why these grown men were behaving this way. With barely a beat away from her brooding, she responded, without turning her head, “Because it’s their job.”

I recalled this a few years later when I saw the fall preview for a new television series called THE HATHAWAYS, starring Peggy Cass.

As noted previously, I was familiar with her from her eccentric conversational appearances on the Jack Paar show. She reminded me of overheard conversations between my mother and her sisters, who seemed to me, although as ever the words weren’t there yet, to be digressive and committed to cul de sacs of non sequitur, to weirdly comic effect.

It wasn’t until years later that I learned about the rest of her career, mostly stage performances, some Broadway, but mostly a lot of touring company work. Seeing her on that chimp show, I understood precisely what my mother meant. Nowadays, it’s serious actors doing idiotic characters in some super crap, for real fuck you money.

Back then, it was a paycheck, and nothing more.

And then, in Peggy Cass’s case, there was Agnes Gooch, in AUNTIE MAME. She won a Tony for her performance in the Broadway version, and was nominated for an Academy Award for the movie. And this movie was among those I’ve indicated pointed at secrets, notions and ideas that had been invisible to me before; and the tumbling down that rabbit hole led me to consuming the entire oeuvre of the author of the novel on which it was based, Patrick Dennis.

Patrick Dennis was a massive deal in publishing from the mid 1950s to the late 1960s, one of those astonishing success stories with three books on the NEW YORK TIMES bestseller list at the same time. After AUNTIE MAME, I found and devoured everything he wrote, comic novels that frequently made me laugh out loud. To be clear, his work was not amusing. It was genuinely funny.

I knew nothing about him, his private and personal life, of course. The author photo depicted a bearded middle aged fellow who looked all too capable of mischief. It was all about the novels, and in at least one case, a television series based on one of those novels, which I never missed. There was another series, too, but it was unwatchable.

I have a very clear memory of the perfectly kind wife of the man who hired me for my first job as an artist, doing pasteups, dismissing Dennis’s books as unserious, and thus unworthy of my attention.

She meant well, of course, but in her classic midcentury midcult liberal pseudointellectual condescension, she provided me with my first understanding of those who mistake humorlessness for seriousness, gravity for enormity. As they say in the show business, “Dying is easy—comedy is hard!”

This may be true, but Patrick Dennis made it look easy.

After a raft of very funny narratively conventional comic novels, Dennis collaborated with Cris Alexander, a Greenwich Village based photographer, to create a fictional memoir, entitled LITTLE ME, with faked up photographs of the life of the memoirist, the great actress and star of stage and screen, Belle Poitrine. For those of you in the back rows, that translates in English as Beautiful Chest.

This wonderful book is a brilliant parody of the sort of ghost written tell alls, all self regard without an iota of self awareness, that were popular back then, and was adapted by Neil Simon into a terrific musical.

Dennis and Alexander followed this up with another similar, just as brilliantly funny, but less commercially successful parody memoir, FIRST LADY:MY THIRTY DAYS UPSTAIRS IN THE WHITE HOUSE, featuring Peggy Cass in the photographs of the memoirist.

See? Everything ties itself up if you stick around long enough.

As noted, Dennis was astonishingly popular and commercially successful, until, in a way oddly similar to the brilliant Preston Sturges, he simply wasn’t. His cachet simply vanished, and he slipped into the ether. Even the mediocre musical adaptation of AUNTIE MAME, cleverly titled MAME, had no impact on a resurrection of his work, his reputation. None whatsoever.

(I could be wrong about this—I haven’t checked a brick and mortar bookstore for quite some time. But indulge me.)

By the early 1970s, he had functionally vanished from the cultural landscape. To be honest, I assumed he’d died, and at any rate, my tastes were plastic in those times, always available to change. If I thought about Patrick Dennis at all, it was as nostalgia for a part of my boyhood.

In the late 1970s, I stumbled across copies of LITTLE ME and FIRST LADY in a thrift store, for a dollar apiece—that high price, I suspect, because both books were almost coffee table sized. I brought them home, and, beyond the nostalgic aspect of the find, I was struck by a pervasive element in both books which had completely escaped my adolescent eyes and understanding.

The tone of the narrative in both books, and even moreso the faked up and posed photographs, were deeply encoded with a barely and I do mean barely, repressed homosexual subtext; a subtext shoving its way through to context. Who knew? Not adolescent and teenage me, apparently.

In those pre internet, UnWikipedia’ed days, it was years before the details behind this came to light, and, believe you me, the facts were both unexpected and, in some senses, inevitable.

It developed that Patrick Dennis was a pseudonym for, at least to my mind, the far more authorial name Edward Everett Tanner III. He had indeed died in 1976 at what now seems a ridiculously young fifty five. And he had apparently spent his adult years living as archetypal a double life as any mid twentieth century closeted homosexual might have imagined.

Tanner married, and had children, while at the same time, he invested much of his romantic and I would presume sexual energy in the Greenwich Village Gay community. Not all that unusual, mind, certainly not in the New York City creative scene of the mid twentieth century.

Beards were everywhere, and not all were on men’s faces.

Rather, what is truly unusual, what sets Edward Everett Tanner apart from his contemporaries, is his choice, as his appeal as a writer waned and vanished, to pursue an entirely different and unrelated career.

In the case of Edward Everett Tanner, F. Scott Fitzgerald was way off base in his insistence that there were no second acts in American lives.

Tanner reinvented himself as, and to use a classic Jack Paarism, I kid you not, a butler.

When I first learned this, just as I had the first time I’d read Patrick Dennis’s prose, I laughed out loud. A life, it would seem, lived with the same comic energy, the same charming irony, as his prose.

Damn.

In sum, Patrick Dennis, born Edward Everett Tanner III, was a wildly popular midcentury American novelist, who worked in what turned out to be a dying art—breezy comic fiction—and vanished with that genre. In this Era of Miserable Nonsense, how I dearly miss this now lost art form.

Trust me on this.

As ever, I remain,

Howard Victor Chaykin…A Prince.