By Albert Williams
In his new biography Uncle Mame, journalist Eric Myers aims to brush aside such misconceptions and reclaim Dennis from the obscurity into which he sank after the failure of his last book, 3-D, published in 1972, four years before his death. Dennis–born Edward Everett Tanner III in 1921–merits recognition as one of 20th-century literature’s most talented and intriguing comic writers. This would be true even if Auntie Mame had been his only claim to fame; screwball socialite and bohemian butterfly Mame Dennis Burnside ranks as one of American fiction’s most memorable adventuresses, right up there with Scarlett O’Hara, Lorelei Lee, Holly Golightly, and Myra Breckinridge. But Dennis wrote 15 other novels; in 1958 he became the first author to have three books on the New York Times best-seller list simultaneously.
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The portrait Myers paints is of a troubled, deeply divided man–a suicidal, binge-drinking manic-depressive and guilt-ridden homosexual who struggled well into middle age with his sexual identity and his unresolved conflicts with his parents, especially the father after whom he was named (his mother nicknamed him Pat). The house where the Tanners lived, at 1574 Asbury Avenue, looks a perfect setting for a comfortable, happy suburban upbringing, with its fenced-in backyard and pleasant, leafy surroundings. It’s just a few minutes’ walk to Evanston High, which Dennis attended from 1934 to 1938 and where he gained popularity by participating in amateur theatricals in the school’s third-floor social hall (today known as the Upstairs Theatre). It’s also a short jaunt to the Davis el station, where the stagestruck Dennis would board the train for the Loop to see movies and stage shows at the Chicago and Oriental theaters.
Dennis had a special gift for barbed description and waspish repartee that came across as simultaneously frothy and cutting. Dennis’s best novels are written in the first person (his high school friends recall him improvising batty monologues) and have a breathless, gossipy feel, like a story told by a witty raconteur in a bar or a beauty parlor. (“I write fast or not at all,” Dennis said, which explains both the energy of his best work and the erratic quality of much of his output.) Myers cites Paul Rudnick and Camille Paglia as writers Dennis influenced; I would add to that list Armistead Maupin, David Sedaris, and the creators of the British TV series Absolutely Fabulous, whose leading characters are posthippie incarnations of Auntie Mame and her bosom buddy, actress Vera Charles.
While some believed the model for Mame was Dennis’s real-life aunt, a Greenwich Village eccentric named Marion Tanner, the character was primarily a projection of Dennis’s own self-image, for better and worse. Fans of the movie and musical know Mame as stylish, independent, irreverent, larger-than-life. But in Dennis’s book she’s also vain, frivolous, libidinous, and a bit of a bitch. (In one of the novel’s funniest, raciest episodes, Mame has a fling with one of Patrick’s college chums, a boy half her age; you won’t find anything like that in the movie or play.) Providing a counterweight to her outrageous behavior is the narrator Patrick, whose attitude toward his screwball relative is ironic, skeptical, and a little disapproving. This, too, is a side of Dennis’s personality–self-critical, and keenly aware that Mame’s behavior is largely an act. The core of the novel is Mame and Patrick’s deepening love and understanding–a projection of Dennis’s wish to accept and love himself.
Reading between the lines of Belle’s self-serving account, we see that she screwed her way to what meager success she attained despite her utter lack of talent or taste, marrying several times and enriching herself every time a husband died. Much of the novel’s comedy derives from Belle’s deluded sense of her own importance and blithe ignorance of everyone else’s total contempt for her. Describing the response to her starring role as Mother Cabrini in a film called Sainted Lady, she writes, “Only George Santayana seemed to understand and appreciate the film when he wrote: ‘Miss Poitrine has perpetrated the most eloquent argument for the Protestant faith yet unleashed by Hollywood.’ But it was small consolation.”
What Myers fails to note is the significance of the name Dennis chose for his butler persona: Edwards. Edward Tanner Jr. having died in 1969, Dennis could finally adopt the name bequeathed to him by the father for whom he had such conflicted feelings.
