The outcry generated by the event remains the most lasting trace of Pat’s presence in the city, in part because other vestiges (his first, monumental residence, and the villa that he spent two years having built, selling it hastily before it was completed) no longer exist. And nor did ‘Patrick Dennis’, after six years in Mexico, exist any longer either.
Upon returning to the United States, Pat told anyone he met that Patrick Dennis was dead. Everyone thought it was a macabre joke, which in actual fact is exactly what Pat had in store. Without a remaining cent (the money that was left after the disastrous architectural venture had disappeared, down to the last penny, into the pockets of his Mexican houseboy), Pat was forced to seek work for the first time in thirty years. The first job he found, as a partner and manager of an art gallery, might even have lasted, had it not entailed both relations with the public (which Pat was no longer capable of maintaining, since he repeatedly put his foot in it) and moving to a city which, for reasons that can easily be imagined, afforded him no chance of survival: Kansas City. He quit after a few months, and at this point he was really ready. He sold what little he had left, shaved off his beard for the last time, acquired a new wardrobe, bought a convertible and set out for Palm Beach. As soon as he arrived, he circulated a resumé in which a certain Tanner Edwards, claiming twenty-eight years of experience in the field, and a list of references as long as your arm (among them Patrick Dennis), offered himself as a butler to anyone who might require one.
The first to come forward was a former top-level diplomat, Stanton Griffis, who was immediately enthusiastic about Edwards. He had good reason to be: Edwards was so incomparable, so perfect for the part, that one evening, waiting table, he served a friend of his from back in New York without being recognized. And Pat was particularly proud of Edwards: if his current appearance didn’t thrill him (‘Now I look like a cross between John Gielgud and a very old deep sea turtle’), the life he was leading, and which he had recounted many times in his novels, suited him to perfection. Besides bringing him an unexpected serenity, it offered him one last moment of glory, very likely more gratifying than many others that had come before. When the Chicago Tribune decided to publish a long article about a line of work woefully close to extinction, the old-school British butler, one of ten interviewees was none other than Edwards, who had meanwhile gone into the employ of Ray Kroc – a name that today means little to most people, but which belonged to the creator and owner of a commercial enterprise that even then was rather successful: McDonald’s.
Edwards revealed various tricks of the trade to the Tribune, and was far more forthcoming than his colleagues, both about his own idiosyncrasies (never a tuxedo, a tuxedo is for waiters and bartenders) and about some philosophical realizations that he claimed to have reached after a life spent in high society: ‘“After thirty years of listening to fatuous conversations”, says a butler of his employers and their guests, “I’d rather wait on them than talk to them”.’ More than that Edwards could not say without compromising himself. Or perhaps he could have: he might have listed the only three earthly possessions he had brought with him from his previous life, in whose company he spent almost all of his free time in his unpredictably (or perhaps not so unpredictably) cloistered rooms: a crossword puzzle dictionary, Emily Post’s Etiquette and a first edition, very worn, of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.
1 Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on Camp’, Partisan Review, 1964.
2 The expression ‘four quarterings’ refers to noble heritage from all four grandparents; a concept of nobility that derives from blood. Tr.n.
NB: Disgracefully, Patrick Dennis is still an author for whom, as the Spanish saying goes, no hay bibliografìa: the only two major books available are his biography, Uncle Mame: The Life of Patrick Dennis, by Eric Myers (De Capo Press, 2001) – a very precious and very brilliant source of information; and But darling, I’m your Auntie Mame!: the amazing history of the world’s favorite madcap aunt, by Richard Tyler Jordan (Kensington Books, 2004), an entertaining reconstruction of how Dennis’s book has become, over the last six decades, two movies, one play, one broadway show, a tv series, and so on. So, in one way or another, much of the information presented here comes from one of these two sources, while every misunderstanding or error is, of course, mine.
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