The real life of Patrick
Dennis was just as bizarre as the madcap adventures of his most famous
invention, Auntie Mame. Profiled in Life magazine
as one of the world’s most successful authors at age forty, he tried to commit
suicide a week later and was committed to a mental institution for eight
months. A multi-millionaire,
thanks to his best-selling novel Auntie
Mame and fifteen others, he was penniless at age fifty and went to work as
a butler for Ray Kroc, the McDonald’s hamburger mogul, who had no idea who he
was. A devoted husband to Louise
Stickney and father of their two children, he fell in love with a man and
abandoned his family.
Dennis was born Edward
Everett Tanner III on May 18, 1921, in Chicago. Nicknamed “Pat” before he was
born, in honor of the Irish boxer Pat Sweeney, known as a “dirty fighter,” he
attended Evanston Township High School.
He joined the American Field Service and drove an ambulance in Northern
Africa and the Middle East during World War II.
After the war, using the
pen name Patrick Dennis, he wrote the novel Auntie
Mame, about a character based on his father’s sister. Writing in the first
person, he inserted himself into the fictional narrative as the orphaned
youngster who is raised by a zany aunt. It sold two million copies and was on
the best-seller list for more than two years. Adapted into a play, a movie, a
musical, and a movie musical, it was a vehicle for Rosalind Russell, Beatrice
Lillie, Angela Lansbury, and, unfortunately, Lucille Ball. Dennis wrote fifteen
other books, some as Virginia Rowans, and several became best-sellers. He was
also the author of Little Me, a
parody memoir which became a hit Broadway musical starring Sid Caesar playing
seven roles.
Having squandered a
fortune, Dennis took a job during the 1970s as a butler, work which he said he
greatly enjoyed. He also became
well known as an outré denizen of the Greenwich Village gay scene.
In 1976 Dennis was
diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and by the autumn of that year was gravely
ill. He asked his physician, Dr.
William G. Cahan, for enough sleeping pills to end it all. “I can’t use a gun,” said Dennis,
“because I can’t shoot straight, and I can’t jump out of a window because I’m
afraid of heights.” Dr. Cahan naturally declined to offer a suicidal dose, but
did prescribe a modest supply of morphine-based pain-killers, which Dennis
squirreled away.
Dennis maintained his dry
wit to the very end. On his last
day, November 6, 1976, his friend and former housekeeper, Corry Salley,
administered some medicine to him and asked, “Is there anything else I can do?” Dennis replied, “Yes, for God’s sake,
will you put in your dentures.”
His estranged wife, Louise, was at his bedside, and his last words were
to her: “Louise, there’s a spot on your dress.” At fifty-five, “Uncle Mame,” as
one biographer called him, the man who led a life as improbable as a character
in one of his books, was dead. Whether death was hastened by ingesting some of the pills he had stowed
remains unknown.
In his will, Dennis
specified that there be no funeral or memorial service. “My body is to be
cremated and disposed of in the quickest, cheapest manner possible (flushed
down the toilet, scattered to the winds, sunk into an unmarked hole in the
ground, etc.).” Louise kept the
urn containing his ashes and was buried with it cradled in her arms 24 years
later.
