Life Itself!: An Autobiography

by Elaine Dundy

Author of the celebrated and hilarious THE DUD AVOCADO, the classic novel about a young American ingenue in Paris, Elaine Dundy was born in New York in the 1930s. Her first years were spent in an apartment on Park Avenue until the stock market crash wiped out most of the family's money. She went to university in the south where, among other studies, she worked hard at losing her virginity. Deciding the stage was her true home, Elaine Dundy headed first to Paris and then to London, where she met and married the famous theatre critic Kenneth Tynan. Though their union was intoxicating, it was far from easy and the successful publication in 1958 of her novel finished off the marriage. But it was the opening of a new world of writers for Elaine Dundy, including friendships with Tennessee Williams, Hemingway and Gore Vidal. Extremely funny and extraordinarily honest this wonderfully remembered story of growing up in America is as much a tonic as life itself.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Biography

395 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Elaine Dundy (1921–2008) grew up in New York City and Long Island. After graduating from Sweet Briar College in 1943 she worked as an actress in Paris and, later, London, where she met her future husband, the theater critic Kenneth Tynan. Dundy wrote three novels, The Dud Avocado (1958), The Old Man and Me (1964), and The Injured Party (1974); a play, My Place (produced in 1962); biographies of Elvis Presley and the actor Peter Finch; a study of Ferriday, Louisiana; and a memoir, Life Itself!

Reviews

[Laurel · Rating 5 out of 5]

The era between The Pill and HIV/AIDS was wild.

[Julie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decided to read this memoir as extra credit, after reading The Dud Avocado for my book group. In the afterward to the novel, Dundy writes about all the people who asked her how much Sally Jay was based on herself. The answer? "All the impulsive, outrageous things my heroine does, I did. All the sensible things she did, I made up." So how could I not read her memoir after that haha.

Dundy lives up to the description of being impulsive and outrageous. She had a penchant for stripping off all her clothes when she was drunk, and she was drunk A LOT. Her drinking was prodigious, though you could describe a lot of people's drinking that way back in the 1950s. She was constantly on the go, traveling and attending parties throughout her twenties and thirties and early forties. Talk about stamina! Of course, the pills and the nicotine helped too.

I was not surprised at all when her life started to go off the rails. No one can keep up that level of partying except maybe Hunter S Thompson. Her mid forties, when she got divorced(finally!) and hit menopause(zero mention of that but I think it was a factor in her issues), her drinking and pill popping and general craziness became unpleasant rather than amusing. What is cute when you are 21 is pathetic at 50.

Her memoir, which I had been highly enjoying, started to go off the rails at that point as well. Her fascinating youth as a wealthy girl in NYC in the 1920s, her jaunts around NYC as a fun loving teen in the 1930s, a young adult in DC during the war and Paris post war sowing her wild oats and her membership in the jetset in the 1950s and 1960s were all great fun to read about. Once the 1970s hit, along with no money and health issues and addiction, the bad times commenced for both Dundy and the reader.

The last third of the book is so odd. It's basically chapters profiling various famous figures, almost like you are reading one of the magazine profile pieces she wrote over the years. I did find them fun and easy to read, but they were totally irrelevant to her personal memoir. It was like, without the partying and famous people to discuss, there was no "there" there. Elaine Dundy when it came right down to it was an empty shell. She had nothing to discuss, no interior life. She presented as a huge gaping void.

I wondered at first if it was a front, that she didn't want to reveal her true nature to the reader. Sadly, my take on her as a narcissistic empty shell is the reality of the situation. I started to feel so terribly sad for her. What an meaningless life, bereft of deep relationships with others and with herself. What happened to cause this? I can read between the lines and guess, but at the end of the day she is a cipher.

I saw on Google that her only child, Tracy Tynan, wrote a memoir so you better believe I immediately started Tracy's memoir after finishing her mother's memoir. While reading Dundy's memoir I kept thinking to myself, wait, where is her child? What's going on? It was nuts. I kept forgetting she even had a child, Tracy was mentioned so infrequently. Dundy tells a "funny" story of Tracy at 6 years old telling Elaine that they aren't a real family because they have never eaten together. When she goes to her friends homes, they eat together as a family. What a tragic, heartbreaking comment! That Dundy found it humorous is so telling, so tone deaf.

As someone who has read so much about the eras and the people Dundy writes of, I did enjoy this book. It would be a wonderful primary source for someone writing a biography or non fiction piece about that time period. She knew everyone and was everywhere for about twenty years. I was wondering while reading if she had non famous friends and was just choosing to omit writing about them but after reading Tracy's excellent memoir, I know that no, Elaine Dundy did not have non famous friends as an adult. She actively sought out famous people. Even when planning her funeral, in her notes she ranks her friends that she wants invited! Not ranked in terms of love or of closeness to her, but societal rank. Wow.

If you are a parent and want to feel like the best parent ever then read this book and give yourself a pat on the back for not acting like Elaine Dundy and Kenneth Tynan.

Quotes to reference at my book club:

I decided I would write a wonderful novel and that he(Kenneth Tynan) would be proud of me...To begin with there was that persistent feeling of never coming across a part that was right for me. Or for any of my female friends, or any young female I had struck up an acquaintance with next to me in a café or at a hairdresser's. Ken's praise of American playwrights in writing roles for the unique girl, who exists in her own right, independently and eccentrically alive, was bullseye, but I felt that even American playwrights and novelists didn't go far enough. They didn't get into all those complications and contradictions going on inside the contemporary girl as I knew her. They never showed that, in spite of her wit, intelligence, education and ever-present self-awareness, these complications and contradictions could lead her into many comic situations as well as life-threatening ones. I would tell it all in the first person, in the voice I'd been polishing up on Henry. In short, I would write a great part for myself

Events from when I was single in Paris were mixed in with events in Spain when married, and characters popped up from all periods of my life. Sally Jay's beloved uncle had characteristics of Maxwell Anderson plus his telescope. I kept my friend Judy's first name and most of her history, but I gave her a Spanish father. With enormous round eyes and a slender stem of a neck, she looked like the adorable young Anna Massey, who had made a sensational debut that May in The Reluctant Debutante in the West End. Left Bank ex-GIs got mixed up with actors from the Dramatic Workshop. A bullfighter and his entourage that I'd spent some time with in Seville surfaced. A photographer suddenly made an important appearance. He looked like Ken and I gave him some of his background, but his ethos and life experience were based on the great war photographer Robert Capa, and the house he inhabited in Greenwich Village, with the tree growing through it, belonged to Dick Avedon

Writing instead of acting gave me more time for Tracy.We would have people to drinks several times a week, and Tracy aged four or five, fresh from her bath in a blue wool bathrobe with a white bunny embroidered on it, would come rushing in, her shining dark brown hair cut short with bangs clinging to her beautifully shaped head like a helmet.She would shake hands with everyone, dropping a quick curtsy at the same time, as she was taught in dancing school, then she would sit quietly listening to our guests. And when I'd say it was time for bed, she'd rise and kiss everyone goodnight and bound out of the room. I'd think how unlike either of us she was in every way, happy, sensible, reasonable. How relieved I was, thinking she'd not inherited our quick tempers or impatience. I prayed for her to be as little like me as possible. OH! This is fascinating. Tracy mentions the curtsying! No, she didn't learn it at dancing school. Elaine told her to do it so Tracy did until she had a friend over, who was actual British gentry, and saw Tracy curtsy to a writer and give Tracy never-ending shit for doing so because that was a social faux pas. Tracy was humiliated and stopped. Also, note how the "more time" with Tracy was Tracy wandering around an adult cocktail party.

From the outside at 120 Mount St you would have said our life there could not be improved upon. We were in the heart of Mayfair, one of London's most luxurious districts. The antique shop and auctioneers Christie's, with its opulent windows, had its shop on the ground floor next door to us, and several steps further toward Park Lane was Farm Street, with its miniature jewel of an emerald green square presided over by the centuries-old Farm Street Catholic church, headquarters of the Jesuits, and of Father D'Arcy, converter to the faith of such famed brains as Alec Guinness and Evelyn Waugh. The butcher shop on the corner and the stationer's across the street were both By Royal Appointment.
We were no distance from Curzon Street, which boasted of the art cinema, the great restaurant the Mirabelle, and the superb Heywood Hill Bookshop, all so close together as to seem to be jostling one another. And we were always dropping by the cocktail lounge at the Connaught Hotel, across from us, to join friends staying Note it's all about the fabulousness of the area, not how comfy or practical the home was.

Leyland Heyward, superagent to the stars turned producer, stopped by our table to say hello and have a drink. He was full of trim Ivy League charm, from the top of his brush-cut Ivy League pepper and salt hair to the soles of his well-shod Ivy League feet. When he left, Ken said to me, almost as a rebuke, 'He's the sort of American I thought your parents would be like.' 'What a snob you are,' I snapped. 'Would they have been as generous to you if they were like Leyland?' "They can't buy me,' he replied, his standard Marxist answer whenever a rich person expressed an interest in him. 'I thought you liked my mother.' 'She's all right, but she's a bit of a bore, he replied. I said nothing. I stopped eating but went on drinking, and when we got home I told him what I thought of his mother, also questioning what she had done to make him so screwed up sexually. We read a book about Brooke Heyward for this book club, Leland was her father.

Once, in Malaga, sitting at the Miramar with Orson and some others, Ken started in with his current favorite quiz game: 'Where would you rather be right now?' When it was my turn I looked at Orson and said, 'Right here. Orson laughed, 'Oh no, you'd rather be with Tennessee or Truman Capote? No!' I said, T'd rather be with you but somewhere else? This sort of thing always made for a congenial atmosphere

In Barcelona in '56, we ran into Tennessee at the Hotel Colon. He showed us something we'd never seen before - the town's thriving gay side. Twice he took us to see a South American ballet company, which danced Swan Lake and other classics. The members of the ballet corps were all young, with beautiful hard, compact bodies. Suddenly I realized they were all men. Tennessee took us to a party that the company was giving at an apartment house the architect Gaudi had built - the one paved with cobblestones on all the hallways. We entered a strangely shaped apartment lit by candlelight and filled with the beautiful young men and women dancers who were all men. Tennessee went out on the balcony and dimly I saw his pudgy silhouette, so different from the others...He also took us to a gay beach called San Sebastian. Later, in 1958, I saw a preview of the film of his play Suddenly Last Summer, where the character driving the plot is a homosexual called Sebastian who is eaten by starving boys on a Spanish beach.

One Sunday in October we found ourselves about to give a dinner for Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller. Marilyn had finished filming The Prince and the Showgirl with Laurence Olivier and the Millers had remained in London during October for the production of the playwright's View From the Bridge. Paula Strasberg, Lee's wife and Marilyn's acting coach, was leaving London but urged me to invite Marilyn and Arthur Miller to dinner; she was sure we'd like each other. She gave me their phone number, and Ken spoke to Arthur and together they fixed a date for a dinner party. For the other guests we invited John Osborne and Mary Ure, who were, or were about to be, married. We also asked Peter Hall and his then very pregnant wife, Leslie Caron, and Maria Britneva, now Maria St Just (who had recently married Lord Peter St Just), and Cyril Connolly. It would be an intimate dinner for ten.

I spoke freely of my marriage problems. 'Of course Englishmen love flagellation, he said. "It's the only time they ever get touched as children"

Along with the dress came Ken's announcement that he was going to Valencia for the feria with an American actress, Carol Grace, who had been married to William Saroyan (she subsequently married the late Walter Matthau). Ken said he'd met her when we were in Los Angeles that first time and he had been increasingly drawn to her over the years. They were, he emphasized, sexually compatible, and now he simply must go with her to Spain. It was the only way to get her out of his system. Oooh, this made me think of a book of my mom's that I read in the 1980s. I had to search for it -Trio: Oona Chaplin, Carol Matthau, Gloria Vanderbilt: Portrait of an Intimate Friendship” by Aram Saroyan. I bet anything Elaine is in that book.

This is not a quote from her memoir but courtesy of a Google search of her address in London (when reading a book that gives a real address I always search online to see the current cost of the place as well as any other interesting facts.)
120 Mount Street in Mayfair, London, was the home of influential theatre critic and writer Kenneth Tynan before it became the renowned art gallery of Robert Fraser in 1962. This location served as a significant hub for cultural capital in 1960s London, bridging the literary world of Tynan with the pop art scene of Fraser........Fraser took another apartment down the road at 120 Mount Street. A larger apartment, it had lots of light, silk hangings and a four poster bed, where Keith Richards wrote You Got The Silver in the company of Anita Pallenberg, Fraser and Marianne Faithful. The lounge room was used by Keith in a similar fashion to write Gimme Shelter as he looked out the windows on to a storm outside, whilst he, Fraser, Faithful and Pallenberg got ever deeper into a heroin quagmire. Fun fact! Both The Dud Avocado and the song Gimme Shelter were written in the same apartment.

Shirley had married young and in those first years I saw her trying hard to be the model young wife. Her husband adored her and with his help her involvement in films could be total. Along with their loyal housekeeper he performed every function needed to keep the family going, including bringing up their daughter Wendy, whom Shirley loved passionately but was too deep in her art to attend to WOW. What happened to them both growing up, that both sisters were such deeply awful mothers?

1 arrived in Klosters the day before New Year's Eve, checked into my hotel and went to meet the Shaws for drinks at Chesa Greshuna's cocktail lounge, where everyone gathered. Among the people who dropped by our table that evening were: (I am copying down their names from my journal) Alan Lerner, whose musicals included My Fair Lady and Camelot, and his French wife, Michele, a lawyer; Dorian Leigh, supermodel and older sister of super-supermodel Suzy Parker; Winston Churchill II, grandson of the renowned elder statesman; Peter Viertel, screenwriter on The African Queen, and his wife, Deborah Kerr;Peter's mother, Salka Viertel, who collaborated on the screenplays Queen Christina and Anna Karenina for Garbo and remained her close friend; Swifty Lazar, demon Hollywood agent, and his wife Mary; Gene Kelly and his new wife, Jean; Elsa Gogo Schiaperelli, Anatole Litvak, the director of The Snake Pit and Anastasia, and his wife; Don Stewart Jr, a reporter on the New Yorker and son of Donald Ogden Stewart; Ella Winter, Mrs Donald Ogden Stewart; Lex Barker, ex-film Tarzan and ex-husband of Lana Turner; Terry and Joanna Kilmartin; a French ambassador, Monsieur Hervé, and his wife. I am fascinated by her admission that this list is from her journal. Not writing about her feelings and thoughts but a list of famous people she was around.

Jimmy(James Baldwin) lying on someone's sofa, read to a group of us his long essay on the Black Muslims until seven in the morning. Under the title The Fire Next Time it created a sensation when it ran in the New Yorker and again in book form.

I found the sixties unsympathetic. I had come to life in the fifties, in the decade with cultural icons whom I knew and assumed would last forever, only to be greeted by the swinging sixties hot shots Tom wrote about, like Baby Jane Holzer, Phil Spector, Ken Kesey and Junior Johnson, the stock car racer. As a habituée of nightclubs with fabulous entertainers and wonderful jazz bands, hot and cool, I hated the discos, with their screaming music, steaming with people bumping into each other all night long on packed dance floors. I wonder if her discomfort stemmed from the fact that her daughter was now a young woman and a hippie and this was her daughter's scene, not hers.

[Margaret · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I have a biography of Kenneth Tynan somewhere which now I one hundred percent have no interest in reading, after reading this.

[Nora R · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm fascinated by elaine dundy's life and mind. she maintained a single degree of separation from celebrity for most of her life - close friends with tennessee williams ("tenn"), ernest hemingway ("hem"), vivien leigh ("vivien leigh") - and she observes the 20th century's rich and famous with such intimacy and insight. deeply integrated into the theater/acting/literary community in london, new york, los angeles. courageous, sexually shameless, brilliant, funny, selfish, an absolute delight to read. i was locked into this book for three-quarters of it, then decided to look up her daughter and learned of the neglect & rage that characterized her childhood. this very quickly killed my idolization of dundy's glamorous life. in the last quarter, she starts to talk a lot about elvis anyway and i was uninterested as well as disillusioned. i will be reading all of her books.

[Creolecat]

Sister of filmmaker Shirley Clarke.

[Jess · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s wild to me that Elaine Dundy was obviously at the centre of the cultural life of the 20th century - she’s met and been friends with, or at least partied with, an astonishing number of famous writers and actors - but she’s so little known.

[Samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had to special order this from the UK as it is no longer printed in the US! After reading "The Dud Avocado" and "The Old Man and Me", I knew I had to read whatever else she had written, and to my dismay, there was only one other book of hers to read, her very own life story. I just adore her and found myself instantly recognizing some of myself in her and love her spirit for adventure and all things good.

Favorite Quotes:
- "Time after time it was only through their breathing presence in the room that I discovered what I was trying to say."
- "In the beginning, my life seemed to be divided equally between the things I got right and the things I got wrong."
- "I took exception to the grimness of this path laid out before me, and I was determined to stop the whole process by simply not growing up, not marrying, and not having children. Then I would not die. I was confident I could accomplish this"
- "I ate breakfast at a local coffee shop, lunch at the canteen on the base, and in the evening I was always out on dates in Washington - dining, dancing, drinking in jam-packed cocktail lounges"
- "Like the break that divides Act I from Act II in the theatre, crossing the ocean was the break that divided Part I of my life from Part II."
- "They were just giddy at being alive."
- "Summers of sun, sea, and swimming pools had been potent pleasures in my childhood and I welcomed them back in my life with something like ecstasy in the Spanish coastal towns"
- "One night he said to me coldly, 'if you ever write another book, I'll divorce you.' That did it. Early next morning, I sat down and started my new novel."
- "In autumn I was saved by a happy confluence of events that grew, one out the other, with miraculous speed, good fortune attracting good fortune as money is said to attract money."
- "says Sherlock Holmes, 'we must go to life itself which is far more daring than any act of the imagination."

[Ellen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Didn't work for me after a while. Some bits were entertaining but others bits were tedious.