Genius

by Patrick Dennis

  It was Christmas Eve. Chicago was caught in the grip of a blizzard. The Super-Chief had been 19 hours late and the Century wasn’t even planning to budge. The “L” could barely make it out to Evanston. Starr arrived in a white polo coat and a white heat of fury. It was a white Christmas, all right, and every hotel Starr had ever heard of—as well as quite a lot he hadn’t—had marooned guests sleeping on cots in the corridors.

  “I’m ever so sorry, Mr. Starr,” his valet said after three hours in a pay telephone booth at the station, “but there’s no place. Not even the Y.M.C.A. can take you.”

  “To think that I, a man who has maneuvered Carole Lombard, Jean Harlow, Gertie Lawrence—every goddess of stage and screen—to greatness, can be so victimized by fate and the elements, a castaway in this squalid station. Very well, get my things and we shall make do with a humble railway bench. Please ask those people to move.”

  As Starr had planned to spend nearly two weeks in New York, his “things” consisted of two trunks, a shoe trunk, six alligator hat boxes, golf clubs, tennis and squash racquets, five suitcases in graduated sizes, a portable radio, book case, desk, bar, the traveling pharmacopoeia (he was something of a hypochondriac), and the picnic hamper. It made quite a display and he suddenly was out of small change for tipping the redcaps.

  Starr’s valet, risking heart and muscle, walloped the “things” into a semi-circle around the bench, making a sort of private apartment. Martinis were mixed from the portable bar, champagne appeared—none too cool—and the hamper offered up an adequate repast of smoked trout, celery knobs, tinned squabs (boned), a Westphalian ham, hearts of palm, and some babas au rhum.

  “When I think,” Starr fumed, “that I could be having a decent meal at 21!” But, fortified with three martinis, he was able to dig in with something of his old gusto when he became conscious of a face on either side of his own.

  “Hello, Mr. Man,” a small voice said.

  “Go away,” Starr growled.

  “We’re hungry,” the other face said. There were two small children, obviously brother and sister, somewhere between 6 and 10. Starr was as bad about other people’s ages as he was about his own.

  “There’s an appalling restaurant over there. Ask your mother to buy you something.”

  “Our mommy isn’t here. Sister Mary Alexander from the school left us here to wait for her but the train’s real late and . . .”

  “Here, take this ham and some rum cake and go.”

  “And we’re thirsty, too.”

  “You can have some of this champagne, if you’ll just leave me alone. Not properly chilled, but a good year. Now shut up.”

  “I guess we’re not gonna see Sanny Claus,” one of the children whimpered.

  “Of course you’re not, child. Now do be quiet and stop panting down my neck.”

  Starr sent his valet to the newsstand for copies of Vanity Fair, Judge, Ballyhoo, and Theatre Arts and began to read ostentatiously. Drugged by the champagne and the stale heat of the waiting room, the children stretched out on their bench and dozed off. But the station, once stifling, became cool, then chilly, then downright icy. The children shivered and stirred restlessly.

  “I can’t endure this for another minute,” Starr snapped at his valet. “Put a coat over them.”

  “Your white polo coat, sir?”

  “Certainly not. Look at those galoshes! Use the cashmere with the sable lining. Here, I’ll do it.”

  As Starr covered the children, the girl opened her eyes. “Sanny Claus? Oh.” She began to sob quietly.

  “Go back to sleep, child. He’ll be here in due course. Miserable little beggars,” Starr said to his valet. “Not much of a Christmas for them—not to mention poor me. Tell me, did you pack that red silk smoking jacket?”

  “Oh yes indeed, Mr. Starr.”

  “And my black riding boots? And is there cotton among my med’cines? Now get out a pair of socks—good long ones.”

  “Your silk stockings, Mr. Starr?”

  “Do you think I’d wear rayon? Certainly the silk ones. And now just fetch me my boîte de bijoux. There must be some old watches and tie pins and other baubles in it. And then buy a couple of oranges and chocolate bars or whatever poison brats stuff themselves with.”

  “Really, Mr. Starr?”

  “Do as I tell you. Now, give me those clothes. I’ll be changing in the gents’ room. When I come out, start jingling the luggage keys like a thing bewitched.”

  Five minutes later he reappeared, as skittish a Father Christmas as ever was turned out by Pearl’s or Sulka’s.

  “Ho ho ho!” he boomed. The drowsing waiting room came to life with a jolt. “O, ho, ho, ho. Merry Christmas to all and whatever it is!”

  The children, thoroughly awake now, sat up wide-eyed as Starr capered across the waiting room toward their bench.

  “Sanny Claus!” they said in unison. “Right here in this ole train station!”

  The next morning things began moving in a confused, sluggish way. A special train to New York had been assembled from old bits and pieces of rolling stock in the car yard. Starr, having insisted on a drawing room or at least a compartment, settled for an upper berth. He sat furiously dipping the last of the rum cakes into a cardboard container of coffee while he dispatched his valet and the children to the station restaurant.

  “Anything to get them out of my sight,” he said.

  The children, each swinging a Patek Philippe watch by its thin platinum chain, went off happily enough to bacon, eggs, pancakes, waffles, and crullers. One by one, Starr’s “things” were carted off to the cold, waiting train.

  A harried woman in a worn cloth coat hurried in. “Pardon me, sir, but have you seen two kids—a boy and a girl—wearing . . .”

  “I have seen nothing else, madam, more’s the pity. They are at breakfast.”

  “Who with?”

  “Why, with my valet, who else?”

  “Some people’s idea of what’s funny!” the woman snapped and hurried off.

  “We’re all ready to go now, Mr. Starr,” his valet said. “I’m to ride with the baggage.”

  The great white polo coat flung about him like an ermine mantle, Starr made his stately way across the station.

  “. . . and Mommy,” the children were shouting, “Sanny Claus came. He reely did. Right here in a station.”

  “Will you shut up!” Starr snapped.

  “G’by, Mr. Meeeeee-an!”

  “Children,” their mother said, “how many times have I told you not to talk to strangers! You never know what they might be up to.”

  Afterword

  * * *

  Michael Tanner, MD

  Genius, my father Patrick Tanner’s tenth novel, is a comedy of manners satirizing the affectations of a social class, in this case Anglo-American expatriates in Mexico City in the early 1960s. The book follows the formula of the classic Patrick Dennis novel: a basically decent, reasonable observer finds himself unwillingly thrust into a bizarre situation involving a larger-than-life character. I refer you to his 1955 masterpiece Auntie Mame.

  My favorite character in the book is “my wife,” who is never mentioned by name but is my mother, Louise Tanner, a very funny writer who published five books of her own. In my first-edition hardcover copy of Genius, Pat inscribed the frontispiece to her: “All of my love to the dearest old alley cat in town.”

  My but they’re drinking a lot! Alcohol is the book’s gasoline. In retrospect, all the booze was a harbinger of bad things to come. When Dad finished Genius in Mexico City on Good Friday 1962, his life and my parents’ marriage were both about to fall off a cliff. How could this happen to two such perfectly suited people? Their lighthearted banter in Genius is exactly what they sounded like in real life. And they really did use to type it out one room away from each other, Pat’s big gray Royal running slightly ahead of Louise’s little blue Olivetti.

  By Christmas, my father was an inpatient at a psychiatric hospital following a bathtub
suicide attempt in the setting of an affair with a man. Dad only told me the whole true story six years later when I was fourteen and he thought I could handle it. I’m sixty-four now and I still can’t handle it! Dad’s bisexuality spelled the end of the “noisy duets on our typewriters,” the memory of which is still the most beautiful sound on earth to me, along with the sound of the two of them laughing together as they read each other the day’s work.

  The attempt to end his life at the zenith of his career happened on December 4, 1962. Everything seemed to be going so well! Auntie Mame was a household word. Little Me, the musical comedy adapted from Dad’s movie-star-memoir parody, had just opened on Broadway at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater. The next day, Genius entered the New York Times bestseller list at number 12. It had climbed to number 9 by December 2, and there’s no telling how high it might have risen had not the 114-day New York City newspaper strike intervened on December 8. Then suddenly we were all reading the Philadelphia Inquirer and Dad was in the loony bin. Genius was his sixth and last bestseller.

  I believe that the success of the book had a lot to do with my father’s decision to move from New York to Mexico City in 1965—a decision that my little sister Betsy and I very much lamented. At the age of nine I remember being appalled to hear him say that he wanted to live “with a footman behind every chair.” Such a way of life was financially much more feasible in Mexico City than at his apartment at 930 Fifth Avenue overlooking Central Park. Dad thought he could milk Mexico for a few more novels and live in the servant-laden style to which he wanted to become accustomed.

  Visiting Dad in Mexico City for two months in the summer of 1966 was very trying for Betsy and me. All we had was each other. We found ourselves in the middle of a Patrick Dennis novel. We—two basically decent, sensible kids—were unwillingly thrust into a bizarre situation with a larger-than-life character. The bizarre situation was Dad’s 100 percent adult, Mexico City expatriate world. There was no Leander Starr, but I do recall a middle-aged director dropping by with a fabulously beautiful fifteen-year-old “protégée.” The larger-than-life character was Patrick Dennis himself, whom we feared and adored. It seemed we were always spending the weekend as guests in some eccentric gringo’s dilapidated hacienda where the electricity had just gone off. Nice as it may sound, Cuernavaca by candlelight was something that Betsy and I came to dread.

  We were expected always to behave as adults. But we could not have cared less about the answer to the big question: whether Dolores del Río was older than or younger than seventy. We would have been much happier playing prisoner ball and running bases on East Ninety-First Street until after the streetlights came on at night. We just wanted Dad to come back home to New York and live with us again, and possibly drink a little bit less. One hot morning at a riding school in San Miguel de Allende, we counted eleven consecutive Planter’s Punches. And of course we missed “my wife” terribly.

  He went on to write six more novels—two set in Mexico—before declaring himself out of fashion and retiring from writing: “I’ve said everything I had to say. Twice.”

  To everyone’s amazement, he then became a servant himself. In 1970 the Mexican experiment came to an end. He moved back to the United States and reinvented himself as Edwards, butler to the very wealthy in Palm Beach and Chicago, having forged his own letters of reference. He loved being a butler and was very good at it. He once said, “I would rather serve these people than have to talk to them.” After three jobs below stairs, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and came home to spend his last few months with us. He died in my mother’s bed on November 6, 1976. She took him in. There was never any question. “My wife” and he adored one another until his dying day.

  Genius holds up so well because of Pat’s wonderful style and its memorable characters. It is my favorite of his novels, partly because of the fondness I still feel for the final year of my parents’ marriage, the golden days of early 1962, my family’s Camelot period: literary stardom, domestic bliss (they never exchanged a harsh word), and John F. Kennedy in the White House.

  It’s so nice to see it back in print after all these years. I very much hope you enjoyed it.