Almost 50 years ago Young Etiquetteer was introduced to “America’s favorite relative,” Auntie Mame, the creation of Patrick Dennis, based on his actual relative, Marion Tanner. Etiquetteer’s life might have been less colorful if Cousin Jeannette hadn’t sent a copy to Dear Mother as a 1955 wedding gift.
Auntie Mame has some wonderful life lessons for us all. But that whole “Live! Live! Live!” thing got started with the stage and film interpretation by the great Rosalind Russell*. Nothing against Roz, but Etiquetteer wants to concentrate on the novel itself, the Pure Milk of the Word.
Use your words, and know them. “A rich vocabulary is the true hallmark of every intellectual person,” Auntie Mame tells Patrick when she gives him his first vocabulary pad. Etiquetteer thinks it would be wonderful if we all stopped talking like some unctuous graduate school, move beyond words like trope, performative***, etc. and incorporate less cardboard-sounding words. The list Patrick compiled at a Bastille Day party gives some dazzling examples: “Hotsy-Totsy Club, gang war, Id, daiquiri, relativity, free love, Oedipus complex, mobile, stinko, narcissistic, Biarritz, psychoneurotic, Shonberg . . .” You can really sink your teeth into those!
That said,
Maybe don’t say the first thing that pops into your head. Mame had a sparkling bad habit of saying exactly what she thought, “an unfortunate candor that delighted many but offended just as many others.” And it cost her her job at Jesse Franklin Turner, too. Heaven knows That Mr. Dimmick Who Thinks He Knows So Much has fit his foot into his mouth often enough to know better! Putting yourself on a five-second delay could save you a lot of trouble.
But,
Courteously call out the bull@#$&. Mame’s brisk, businesslike takedown of the anti-Semitic Upsons could not have been more effective. How did she do it? She knew her facts, she wasn’t afraid to speak the truth — even as a guest having to criticize her hosts — and she didn’t lose her temper. And after her victory, she left the field immediately.
Meet the challenge! Auntie Mame didn’t exactly have a winning strategy against her husband Beau’s old flame Sally Cato MacDougall — she told Patrick after her terrifying hunt experience that “I got my thigh stuck so tight in that sidesaddle thing I thought I never would fall off” — but unprepared as she was, she still entered the arena. Nobody gets anywhere on the sidelines. Happily, she emerged victorious.
At the edge of the abyss of failure, Auntie Mame never stopped trying.
Fail faster. When the stock market crash swept away her money, Auntie Mame kept moving through careers as her trials exposed her errors. Rosalind Russell memorably gives us her disastrous turn as a telephone operator, but she was also a copywriter, interior decorator, gallery owner, vendeuse, fashion model, nightclub hostess, personal shopper, door-to-door saleswoman, and playwright before destroying her friend Vera’s play as an actress and then selling roller skates at Macy’s. Patrick noted that “she had a lot of confidence in herself,” and she never stopped trying.
Whoop it up with someone younger . . . but don’t try to cover it up, either. The movie versions all deprive of us Auntie Mame dating one of Patrick’s college friends, Alex, and going to the Junior Prom with him when she thinks Patrick won’t be there. Patrick’s confrontation of his aunt grips Etiquetteer every time, the best part of the entire book: “And since the year you graduated from college happens to coincide with the year Alex was born, you thought it would give you a common bond . . . “ Finally she admits “Maybe I was having a silly little flirtation with him. He amused me.” And that’s fine, but she might’ve saved a lot of trouble admitting it in the first place.
But, don’t make it more important than it is. Poor Auntie Mame really lost her heart to Brian O’Bannion, even though he was “a cheap phony with the morals of a goat and the worst case of hot pants in New York.” But then Love is blind, isn’t it, readers? Give your heart, sure, but not your vision.
Use your wardrobe to advantage, but dress for the occasion. Mame naturally gravitated to exotic couture — her initial idea of what to wear for her first meeting with Mr. Babcock was “that little gray kimono outfit with the scarlet embroidery and perhaps a blood-red camellia over each ear.” Vera wisely talked her out of that — “Mame dear, I wasn’t speaking of a Japanese costume for this, this ordeal” — steering her to something “sorrowful, but not strictly mourning, and very conservative. It gives a trustee confidence.” Her later failures, particularly her “disguise” as a Balkan spy in rural Massachusetts, only highlight her many successes: as a Macy’s salesgirl, and then a widow, in black; as mother of the groom “in shades of toast, a flattering but forthright hat, and a magnificent pearl necklace” to meet the Upsons; and even in a gold sari at the final cocktail party.
Last and most important, be the life of your own party. Auntie Mame begins and ends with that marvelous 1920s invention, the large cocktail party. And as hostess, Mame puts herself at the center of the action, distinctively dressed and enjoying herself as much as she wants everyone else to enjoy themselves. That, readers, is what makes Perfect Propriety — putting your guests at ease.
Etiquetteer hopes you will rush right out and read the novel for yourselves. Then perhaps you’ll share the life lessons you picked up there.
*Patrick Dennis admired her performance so that he dedicated subsequent Mame novels to her, and she appeared in his devastating parody celebrity memoir Little Me.
**At the end of the book she says “a large and flexible vocabulary is the hallmark of every truly cultivated person.”
***In the 1980s, database was the equivalent fashionable but boring word.