Babbit - and she condemned it in no uncertain terms. She called it "Babbitry," after Sinclair Lewis's conformist philistine George F. Mame Dennis had become an unlikely touchstone in postwar America by not knuckling under to cultural small-mindedness. #AUNTIE MAME TUNES MOVIE#It turned out to be a good investment: Auntie Mame spent two years on The New York Times bestseller list, sold millions of copies, and inspired both a Broadway play and a hit movie starring Rosalind Russell. In the button-down world of 1955, the McCarthy hearings were making things foreign and nonconformist sound positively Un-American, so it was by no means a given that Mame's liberal ideas would be embraced by the public.Įdward Everett Tanner III, who wrote under the pseudonym Patrick Dennis (which made many people think the story was autobiographical), had his manuscript turned down by 19 publishers before Vanguard Press decided to take a chance on it. Mame, informed that the neighborhood is "restricted," mutters just loud enough for Patrick to hear: "I'll get a blood test."Ī Broad-Minded Heroine For A Buttoned-Down Era Those were prejudices embodied in Auntie Mame by a bland society girl that the grown-up Patrick decides to marry and follow to her little bastion of privilege in Connecticut. Writing about her in the Eisenhower era, he made her a commonsensical "auntidote" to widely held '50s prejudices about race, anti-Semitism and all things foreign. Mame believes in trying things, thumbing your nose at convention, taking roads less traveled because they're bound to be more interesting - and even if that were all she stood for, she'd probably still be everyone's favorite aunt.īut novelist Patrick Dennis gave her a spine to go with that worldview. "Life is a banquet," goes Mame's watch cry, and when she's around, every moment of that banquet holds a surprise. Her Beekman Place apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side is filled with partygoers sipping bathtub gin, nibbling caviar, chatting up Broadway stars and Indian mystics. In Auntie Mame, published in 1955, her sheltered, just-orphaned 10-year-old nephew, Patrick, comes to live with her on the eve of the Great Depression - and is somewhat startled at what he finds. Mame Dennis - irrepressible, adoring, easily distracted, utterly down-to-earth - is the guardian any sensible child would love to have. Mame endures: Meeting her narrow-minded potential in-laws (Lee Patrick, left, and Willard Waterman) in their segregated suburb, Miss Dennis plots her singular brand of mischief.
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