One of the best things that ever happened to me during my curious stint as editor-in-chief of Quest in New York was having the opportunity to commission a piece on one of my favorite writers, Patrick Dennis, by author Eric Myers. The article, entitled Whatever Happened to Patrick Dennis?, generated a great deal of buzz and led soon after to a book deal for Eric. His biography, Uncle Mame, came out in November 2000 from St. Martin’s Press. Reading Eric’s scrupulously researched story, I found out that the life of a writer, even one as enormously successful and popular as Patrick Dennis, is not always as predictable as the clever blurbs on the dustjackets might indicate. Patrick Dennis was a phenomenon who churned out several incredibly funny and innovative works that went on to have additional lives in theatre and film, and influenced future generations of writers, artists and comedians. Charles Busch recently revived the play Auntie Mame in a hilarious drag performance.

But despite the pinnacles of fame that Patrick Dennis reached, his internal life was a mystery wrapped in an enigma — and his inner demons led him to transform himself into an eccentric character that like his most famous creation was decidedly larger than life.

Excerpt from
Whatever Happened to Patrick Dennis?
by Eric Myers

Edward Everett Tanner III — better known under his pseudonyms Patrick Dennis and Virginia Rowans (for Virginia Rounds, his favorite brand of cigarettes) — authored 16 novels, three of which achieved the unprecedented feat in 1956 of making The New York Times best-seller list simultaneously. Auntie Mame went on to become a hit play, a hit film, a hit Broadway musical and a big (if not exactly a hit) Hollywood musical.

With the success of his other novels, Genius and Little Me (which also went on to become a Broadway classic), Tanner became a modern American counterpart to such British wits as Noel Coward and Ronald Firbank.

Tanner was the first American writer to popularize camp. As Susan Sontag wrote in her 1964 essay Notes on Camp, “The whole point of camp is to dethrone the serious.” And nobody dethroned as stylishly as “Patrick” (as he preferred to be called), who had a keen way with a social scalpel, cutting through the dull hypocrisy of America in the Ozzie and Harriet era. As observant satirist, he was celebrated during the 1950s and early ’60s, but then virtually disappeared. Even though the plays and films based on his literary creations are still immensely popular, Tanner is all but forgotten today.

Playwright/novelist Paul Rudnick, a longtime fan, says Tanner “was, like Cole Porter, one of the first writers who had a camp sophistication that crossed over. He’s either dismissed or merely enjoyed, because his books are so purely entertaining; but they’re also major social history. You could really create a time line from Edith Wharton through Patrick Dennis to Tom Wolfe — excellent reporters fascinated by the social mores of their time…”

Tanner was born in 1921 in Chicago, the son of a stockbroker. Growing up on Lake Shore Drive, little Edward refused to answer to his given name; he insisted that he liked Patrick better, and Patrick it stayed for the rest of his life…Never much interested in academia, Patrick completed high school but steered clear of college. At the onset of World War II, he joined the American Field Service and became an ambulance driver on the front lines. Twice wounded, he would later be awarded a posthumous Purple Heart.

[After the war, he moved to New York] and married Louise Stickney, a striking Social Register beauty longing to escape her straitlaced environment…During this time, Patrick did a great deal of ghostwriting and also published his first two novels, Oh, What a Wonderful Wedding (1953) and House Party (1954). The latter story, of a wealthy family desperately trying to conceal its sudden impoverishment, became the basis for the Phyllis Diller sit-com The Pruitts of Southampton twelve years later. The books were penned under the name Virginia Rowans.

[While working at Foreign Affairs, the official magazine of the Council on Foreign Relations, Dennis wrote Auntie Mame…] A rapid-fire writer, Patrick turned out the novel in a mere 90 days. People assumed that he was basing the book on his own batty aunt Marion Tanner, the black sheep of the family, whose Bank Street town house became a revolving door for an assortment of Bohemian oddballs. “He was certainly inspired to write it because of her,” says Louise, “but she was just a point of departure.” Patrick was not even particularly fond of his aunt. She became a burden, and he was constantly bailing her out when her unsavory houseguests made off with her money and belongings.

“Auntie Mame was not scooped up in two seconds,” says [Patrick’s friend] Vivian Weaver. In fact, the book was rejected by 15 publishers before it was finally picked up by Vanguard Press in 1955…The book made Patrick a millionaire.

[But it is the bizarre odyssey that Patrick Dennis took after the success of Mame and Little Me that is the stuff of legends. To read more about Edward Tanner III, grab a copy of Eric Myers’ brilliant biography, Uncle Mame. You can find it at www.Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble.]