The fabulous role of Auntie Mame in the eponymous 1956 Broadway play, based on the previous year’s novel by Patrick Dennis, was first incarnated by Rosalind Russell. Unusually, the veteran film and stage star next got to reprise her part in the 1958 hit movie version. Onstage, she was succeeded by Greer Garson, Beatrice Lillie, and Constance Bennett (once Hollywood’s top-paid actress). Sylvia Sidney and Eve Arden did national tours of Auntie Mame.
The 1966 musical version, Mame, made a belated leading lady of Angela Lansbury, who did not get to do the (non-hit) 1974 film version that was Lucille Ball’s screen swansong. Lansbury was followed by a veritable parade of stage Mames, from Ann Miller and Celeste Holm to Janis Paige, Jayne Morgan, and, in Las Vegas, Susan Hayward—also, in a 1998 New York benefit performance, Charles Busch (with Peggy Cass returning to enact her unforgettable Agnes Gooch). Mame revivals have starred Ginger Rogers, Juliet Prowse, Patrice Munsel, Laugh-In’s Joanne Worley, Christine Baranski, and others.
Even before Auntie Mame became a smash stage hit, people were asking whom the madcap character was based on. She purportedly derived from Patrick Dennis’s own aunt. Supposedly the novel was barely veiled reality, but the bestseller was more than mere veiling—a closet was involved. To begin with, Patrick Dennis was really Edward Everett Tanner III (1921-1976), raised in affluence by his parents, not by an aunt. Tanner’s other pseudonym was Virginia Rowans, and in all he penned sixteen frothy, today mostly obscure and out-of-print novels. He enjoyed more bestsellers on the New York Times list at one time than anybody else for decades to come.
Did anyone really believe that Mame Dennis, despite the story’s obligatory matrimonial wedding, would have a heterosexual ward and nephew? Tanner, though madcap and flamboyant, was content to let the world imagine that he was “little Patrick” all grown up. In the conservative 1950s, “Pat” tried hard to hang on to and increase his hard-won super-success. His first two novels had made no impact. Then Auntie Mame was rejected by nineteen publishers before seeing the light of print and spending two years on the bestseller lists.
Several women claimed to be the model for Mame Dennis, but once, in non-media company, Pat was asked who Mame really was? He smiled knowingly and pointed at himself. In 1958, there was a book sequel, Around the World with Auntie Mame. Like its precursor, it was less a novel than a collection of stories featuring Mame. The chief difference between the stage version and the books was that Patrick Dennis, an admittedly light and superficial scribe, kept the relationship and growing bond between aunt and nephew—which is the heart of the play and the musical—in the background. (A gay-straight duo, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, transformed the book into a play, and another gay man, Jerry Herman, composed and wrote the lyrics for the sometimes philosophic songs in Mame.)
Another of Dennis’s books, Little Me, made it to Broadway as a 1962 musical with TV star Sid Caesar enacting eight roles (a ’90s revival starred the even more versatile Martin Short). Another novel, Guestward Ho!, became a CBS sitcom pilot starring Vivian Vance in her attempt to break out from Lucille Ball’s shadow and get her own TV series. To her lasting chagrin, the series—short-lived, as it turned out—instead starred the younger and slimmer Joanne Dru, forcing Vance to resume second-banana status opposite her redheaded costar and boss.
By the early 1970s, Patrick Dennis was all written out. His gossamer style had become outdated and his sales were ghostly. He’d long since become an alcoholic, attempted suicide (in 1962), and been confined for eight months to a mental institution (electroshock therapy and all). Finally aware that he could never escape his true sexual and affectional orientation, he left his wife and kids and moved to Mexico for several years. He himself had been abandoned by a male partner who left him for a rich woman and a seemingly hetero lifestyle in Morocco, where that pair wound up alcoholic recluses.
Pat’s final transition was his most unusual, like something out of a novel. Always a big spender, though no longer on the bottle—for the most part—he was in need of a job. Auntie Mame had made him rich, but the contract he’d signed for subsidiary rights included nothing about a musical comedy adaptation, and so he drew very little income from the huge success of Mame, which ran five years on Broadway. To settle the matter, arbitration was sought, but the situation wasn’t resolved until after the author’s death. He had declined to attend Mame’s opening and didn’t see it until summer 1967, while visiting New York City.
He wrote his sister: “I found it a crashing bore. Angela Lansbury was just too common for words, which is the one thing Mame cannot be. Celeste Holm should at least be a bit classier.” But the supporting actress from All About Eve and Gentlemen’s Agreement (for which she won an Oscar) proved far less popular and acclaimed than Lansbury.
And so, in what he couldn’t know would be the last few years of his life, Edward Everett Tanner III became a butler. One of the references given by Edwards Tanner—his new alias—to his first millionaire employer was from Patrick Dennis. “Who is Patrick Dennis?” asked the former ambassador and ex-owner of Brentano’s. Pat wrote his son, “Considering that Auntie Mame kept that defunct art-supply establishment in the black during both 1955 and ’56, I was a little miffed when he [asked].”
The once-famous writer sold most of his belongings and threw himself into his new lifestyle, glorying in a generous salary, privacy, and anonymity, authority over a household staff, and the fact that in between decorating, delegating, etc., he hardly had to spend a cent. He explained, “I am beautifully housed … and given anything I want to eat and drink. My laundry is done for me and even the dry cleaner gives a 50 percent discount just because so much work is thrown their way.”
As to his new role, “I simply love it. A ham at heart. And when I switch out to serve dinner every evening I feel half actor and half prop man. It’s fun. And it’s also terribly profitable.” Guests would often offer him tips. “Tipping doesn’t embarrass me at all, unless it’s lower than $50—and it never has been. I simply bow lower, say, ‘Modom is too generous,’ and tuck it into my jockstrap.”
He concluded, “I shall probably [keep doing this] until I drop, as I could never reaccustom myself to paying out money for such fripperies as food, rent, utilities, and telephone bills.”
His next employer was an elderly millionairess, for whom he headed up a staff of ten. Finally, he worked for Ray and Joan Kroc, the owners of McDonald’s. They were his favorite employers (his least: the Republican dowager). But then came the bad news: like his father and grandfather before him, Tanner contracted pancreatic cancer, a disease often associated with abuse of alcohol and tobacco. He retired of necessity, reunited with his wife and children, and died not long after at age fifty-five.
Although his name, like most of his books, is now all but forgotten, Patrick Dennis was instrumental in the mainstreaming of “camp,” or at least a mostly heterosexual version of it. Only in his last novel, 3-D, published in 1972, did he venture partly out of the closet. His legacy to pop culture is Mame—whether as an aunt, musical, or otherwise, a brilliant and enduring creation and self-reflection.
THOUGH MAME WAS A CHEERFUL, giving, and open-minded spirit, not all of her thespic incarnations were too. The diva temperament sometimes got in the way. Case in point: Ann Miller of MGM and terpsichorean fame, also renowned for her big, black shellacked hairdo. She wasn’t the last actress to actively object to a younger, attention-getting actress playing the supposedly shapeless and sexless Agnes Gooch—the amanuensis whose other function is to make Mame Dennis seem younger, thinner, and more graceful by comparison.
In 1969, Ann Miller was the final Broadway Mame. Jerry Herman enthused, “She was very warm and funny and we added a special tap routine for her in ‘That’s How Young I Feel’ that stopped the show. Annie is a good sport and we became quite friendly. We always catch up when we run into each other at opening nights.” Miller may have been warm and friendly toward her composer and musical mentor, but not toward one supporting female player.
Laurie Franks had been playing Gooch when Miller arrived in 1969. (Screen rights had sold to Warner Bros. the previous year for $3 million, but no film version could be released before 1971, so as not to compete with the Broadway and national touring productions.) Mame was the first Broadway starring role for “Annie,” but upon meeting Ms. Franks she blurted, “She can’t play Gooch. Her complexion’s too good.” Miller determined to get a new Gooch, which didn’t happen overnight because Laurie was part of a tightly knit company and had her professional superiors’ backing—up to a point.
“[Miller] wasn’t really interested in her acting,” Franks recalled, “but in getting to the song-and-dance numbers. And she was terrific in those, and they put a tap number in for her, and they were giving her oxygen offstage.” Decades earlier, Miller had been clocked as the fastest-tapping dancer alive.
Mame was a challenge for Miller, trying to prove herself in a new medium. However, rather than fall in with the company, she kept aloof and did things her way. Laurie Franks: “We weren’t really too pleased with her. In the scene when they were talking about getting me dressed, she would sometimes ‘tap dance’ with her fingers on the back of my neck.” Whether or not Ann was thinking with her fingers, the habit greatly disconcerted Laurie.
Behind the scenes, Miller was trying to banish Franks, which contrasted with Annie’s image as a southern-fried, friendly gal who’s a lady but can kick off her shoes with the low-down-dest of ’em. In the book Sing Out, Louise! (not to be confused with this author’s Sing Out!), Franks admitted that Miller tried to have her fired when the show moved to the Broadway Theatre. The star declared she would sign her contract if Laurie Franks were dismissed. The producers stated they couldn’t do that. Miller responded, “Well, then, I’ll go back to LA.” So the producers agreed to demote Laurie to playing Cousin Fan, which was fine with la Miller.
“I gave my notice, but I had to stay for two months so they could replace me. It was breaking my heart to be out there onstage playing Cousin Fan. It was really rotten.”
MADELINE KAHN GOT A BETTER DEAL than Laurie Franks when she came up against diva Lucille Ball for the 1974 movie of Mame. Coral Browne, British costar of the film Auntie Mame, recalled, “I heard that Miss Ball was leery of both her female supports,” including Bea Arthur, who had already won a Tony for her role of Vera Charles. (Bette Davis had campaigned for the screen role of Mame’s best friend, an acclaimed theatrical lush.) Browne, the 1958 Vera, added, “Miss Ball preferred to be the only funny lady in the cast.” Yet when The Hollywood Reporter intimated that Ball was trying to oust Arthur, Lucy threatened legal action.
“Lucy had no worries about playing Mame,” offered producer Robert Fryer. “Most star actresses, by that age, think they are Mame.… Lucy did worry somewhat about being upstaged.” Mame would have been Madeline Kahn’s second movie. Several critics had written that she almost stole her first one, What’s Up, Doc?, from Barbra Streisand. Lucille Ball wasn’t about to let the talented comedienne, thirty-one years her junior, steal her picture.
The star later professed that Kahn couldn’t cut it, that she’d waited five weeks for Kahn to create a characterization. “She got them [the producers] for fifty grand,” huffed Lucy, “and she knew that all she had to do was play it cool—she would get paid off and go to work immediately on Blazing Saddles. She had no intention of giving me Gooch.”
Mame director Gene Saks said that Lucy turned on Madeline the first day of rehearsal, criticizing her voice and walk. Kahn stood her ground, which infuriated Ball, who had casting approval and complained to her director and wept in front of her producers. A devastated Kahn was eventually fired, but thanks to her contract, was fully paid. (Blazing Saddles was a hit and earned her an Academy Award nomination.)
Stage Gooch Jane Connell, circa fifty but completely lacking in sex appeal and slimness, was hired instead. Said Saks, “She was really too old for the part,” especially as Agnes Gooch gets pregnant. But Lucy liked her.
Despite Ball’s public disclaimers, she and Bea Arthur didn’t get along. Part of the friction was due to Arthur’s having become a TV star herself, via Maude, which ranked number four in the ratings compared to the long-running Here’s Lucy at number fifteen. In later years, Arthur remembered Mame as one of the worst experiences of her life, while Lucy disparaged Arthur’s second hit series, The Golden Girls, as being vulgar and near obscene.
Although several Mames had not been inherently musical, the beloved Lucy was in a category by herself. When she began recording “If He Walked into My Life,” the ballad that Eydie Gorme had a hit record with, composer Jerry Herman, in the recording booth, tore his earphones off in horror. For her part, Ball dismissed criticism of her voice, saying it was right for the character. “Auntie Mame drank and stayed up all night. Was she supposed to sound like Julie Andrews? Come on!”
Though reviewers carped at Lucy’s warbling in Mame, she’d have sounded worse if not for Jerry’s help. He revealed, “One day, she was trying to sing the line ‘Open a new window, open a new door,’ but she just couldn’t hear that half-tone on door. I managed to teach her every other note, but she just couldn’t get that half-tone. The poor woman was in agony. So was I.”
He finally solved the problem by having her sing the line minus the final word. She was baffled but cooperative. The next day, he played a note on the piano and had Lucy sing only the word ‘door,’ which she did correctly, with the half-tone. Jerry said thank you, then clipped the note into the track. “I clipped the entire soundtrack together that way.” When the film’s record album was released, the cover featured only Lucille Ball—no mention of Jerry Herman, who was her vocal coach, the movie’s musical supervisor, and the composer-lyricist of every song in Mame. Herman threatened lawsuit, and a label was hastily tacked on to every single album. Of course once the movie flopped—more so critically than financially—the album flopped bigger, for it contained Lucy’s singing but none of the comedy or classy visuals.
Ironically, Ball had wanted the film to be as close to the Broadway musical as possible (ergo her early insistence that Bea Arthur reprise her stage role). But as Jerry Herman told Warner Bros. after they cast Lucy, “Mame Dennis is not a clown. She is an elegant woman, and when she slides down the banister it’s funny because she’s an elegant woman. It won’t be funny when Lucille Ball slides down the banister because she is always doing much more outrageous things than that.”
He summarized, “Lucille Ball can’t sing and she can’t dance. So will you please tell me why you have cast her in my show?” The studio’s first choice had been non-singing, non-dancing Elizabeth Taylor, who did star in the film of the Broadway musical A Little Night Music, which, no surprise, was a bigger, if lower-profile, flop than Mame.
THE CLASSIC AGNES GOOCH was Peggy Cass, whose career highpoint was the movie Auntie Mame. In 1984, she looked back, “The story and its message of tolerance was what made Auntie Mame so great.… The musical has great music, but all the songs kinda detract from the incidents and relationships. The sad thing is that since the musical came along, there went the straight play. It would be revived today, it could still be a big hit—maybe more than evah—but all they ever revive is the effing musical.
“Today it seems incredible they let Roz Russell do Mame for the movie. It was such a habit to choose somebody else—usually younger—than the person who originated the part on Broadway.… For my money, Roz was the best Mame; you liked her at the same time you looked up to her.”
Cass acknowledged, “I did hear about that rumpus with Ann Miller. That didn’t shock me, ‘cause every Mame wants a homely Gooch. They’re willing to have Vera be rather grand and nice-looking, but poor Agnes has to be a plain Jane.… She’s there as sort of a test of Auntie Mame’s tolerance, but she also isn’t a threat to anyone. Let me tell you, you have to be pretty secure to play someone so insecure, and God forbid you should step on the star’s toes!”
When Coral Browne worked with Rosalind Russell she discerned “attitude behind the very professional smile. I’ve no idea if Miss Russell was at all intimidated by my more extensive stage training, but she soon saw I have as much backbone as she did, and we reached an understanding. In England, actors are all equals, and we have only one Her Majesty.
“Besides, what could I take away from her? No one in the States knew me then, and if you think about it, Vera Charles is a foil to Mame Dennis, more of a parody than a character. A man could play Vera beautifully; in fact, one famous critic said that’s what Miss Arthur did, in [Mame, the movie].… People in the 1950s and up until Betty Ford were quite dismayed when a character, a famous theatre actress, was depicted as alcoholic. That enhances Mame Dennis, of course. It also made everyone ask each other who Vera really was, and the consensus was Tallulah Bankhead, who herself would have made a marvelous non-singing Mame.”
In Jerry Herman’s opinion, the ideal (musical) Mame was Angela Lansbury. She was neither too funny, too madcap, too good a singer, too beautiful, nor too overwhelmingly glamorous. “Miss [Ginger] Rogers tried to swamp her character in rhinestone dazzle and boas,” wrote one critic of the actress who in some interviews objected to Mame Dennis’s “clearly very liberal politics.” When Susan Hayward briefly played Mame, it was said she over-dramatized the role and was too distractingly beautiful.
Herman recalled that when the Oscar-winning redhead “came to my house so I could teach her the score, she took my breath away. With that sweetheart face of hers, she was movie-star gorgeous. You could tell she knew how to wear clothes just by the way she had this cashmere sweater draped casually over her shoulders. I have met many handsome and stylish women in my day; but Susan Hayward and Lana Turner were the most beautiful women I ever saw in my life.”
Celeste Holm, by contrast, was a pared-down Mame whose performance lacked much of the warmth she’d exhibited in earlier Broadway shows like Bloomer Girl and Oklahoma! When Susan Hayward had to leave Mame (she would die prematurely from a brain tumor), she warned her replacement, Holm, that if she didn’t treat the young cast right, Hayward would hear about it and return to “kick [your] ass.” Stage star Holm had long since left the theater for Hollywood with hopes of screen stardom. Leading lady Joan Fontaine was quoted, “I once told Celeste Holm, ‘You’re so lucky not to be a big Hollywood star, not bound to a contract.’ Celeste is cool to me to this day.”
IN HIS MEMOIRS, JERRY HERMAN declared that his dream Mame would have been Judy Garland. He’d hoped to pay tribute to her by offering her the role of Mame Dennis following Angela Lansbury’s departure from the hit show after about a year and a half. But in offering the fast-fading icon the role, he inadvertently caused her pain during a downward spiral that would, in 1969, turn fatal.
When Herman heard via the William Morris agency that Judy Garland was interested in taking over the role, “I just about lost my mind.… I was the craziest, the most ardent Judy Garland fan of all time. I still am. I worshipped that woman. It was a passion that went beyond reason.… She sang, and it was a religious experience for me.”
He admired Judy’s underrated acting talent, also her dancing ability, and believed she would be a perfect Mame, making the role her own and the show a bigger hit than ever while staging a definitive and prestigious comeback.
Several meetings took place with Garland, who was charming and “trying very hard to be ‘good,’ in a professional sense. She believed in her heart that she would be there every night, faithfully.” But her private life was chaotic and she was rumored to be drinking. Even Jerry had to admit, “Miss Garland had a reputation for not being reliable.” At roughly the same time, after a screen test, costume fittings, and a public announcement that she’d gotten the role, Judy was fired from the movie The Valley of the Dolls, replaced by Susan Hayward as Broadway bitch-diva Helen Lawson, based on novelist Jacqueline Susann’s ex friend Ethel Merman.
Although Jerry Herman persuaded several Mame backers that Garland would be a breathtaking Mame—particularly singing his songs—the final decision was no. “We are very sorry, Jerry,” he was informed by the producers, “but we cannot do it. We cannot entrust this show to Miss Garland. We have the backers to consider, and we cannot risk a show that is at its peak and has many more years to go. If it all falls apart because she doesn’t show up on opening night, we will have destroyed everything that we all worked so hard to create.”
Later, Herman said he replied rashly: “I don’t care! Even a bad performance from Judy Garland would be an event. Just to have Judy Garland in this show for one night would be magical—historical.” He’d spoken with his heart, not his business head. Word got back to Jerry that Judy “was destroyed” when she found out she didn’t get the role. She told daughter Liza Minnelli that “her heart was broken, because she knew how right she was for it.
“That is something I have had to carry in my own heart through the years,” Herman has noted. “This was a woman I truly idolized. I still can’t bear to think of how hurt she was because of something I wrote [Mame]. It was a very sad experience for me and I have always felt bad about it, because I never wanted to cause that woman pain.” The man who brought Mame to musical life felt, then as now, “Judy Garland stood for show business, in all its emotional, theatrical glory. I still hear that sound when I write.”