True Grit

Although Elaine Dundy divides her life story into four parts, “Waiting to Be Discovered,” “Being Discovered,” “Discovering Myself” and “Discovering Elsewhere,” it really contains only three: life before, with and after Kenneth Tynan, the flamboyantly gifted and costumed British theater critic.

Part One is the story of a bright, attractive, ambitious girl from a well-to-do Jewish family in Brooklyn who becomes a small-part actress, then goes to Paris in 1949 after hearing that American actors are much in demand there. Parts Three and Four describe the post-Tynan-alcoholic-sleeping-pill-addiction route to AA, from which she emerges relatively intact. All this is familiar terrain with only a few compelling features, but in the long central section of “Life Itself!,” the account of her marriage is riveting.

By the time Dundy and Tynan discover each other in London, it’s clear that she’s become a fame junkie. And her autobiography, like Tynan’s posthumously published diaries, makes it clear that he shared her addiction. Celebrity fixes, in fact, were a powerful component of the glue that kept them together from 1951 to 1964.

In Part Two of “Life Itself!,” Dundy throws famous names around like confetti: Richard Burton, Peter Finch, Graham Greene, Alec Guinness, Gene Kelly. When she bears Tynan a daughter, Cecil Beaton and Katharine Hepburn agree to become godparents. Not coincidentally, when Tynan in his diaries recalls the “happy times” with Dundy, he selects the happiest as a birthday party that Richard Avedon organized for Mike Nichols. Flown from London to New York, then--at the time of the party--nailed inside large crates and opened as human gifts, the couple joined a galaxy of guests including Lauren Bacall, Leonard and Felicia Bernstein, Truman Capote and Stephen Sondheim.

Dundy mentions too many celebrities like items in a gossip column (“Judy Garland was fat in a caftan, but talked easily and wittily”), but sometimes she records an illuminating anecdote. “I am for normalcy and against homosexuality,” Ernest Hemingway announces to her, “because there are infinite variations for the normal person but none for the homosexual one.” How little he knew, and how ironic that Tynan’s obsessive heterosexual desires proved traumatic for his wife.

In Kingsley Amis’ words, Tynan was “an old-fashioned British flogger.” Caning was his foreplay of choice, but Dundy, after reluctantly consenting, felt only pain and anger at first. But from time to time she continued to submit, partly because she loved him (and the world he introduced her to); partly because he threatened suicide when she threatened to leave him; and partly because the sadist brought the masochist out of the closet, and Dundy felt “... the thrill of an accomplice collaborating at her own ruin.”

As Tynan alternates between fascinating and humiliating her, Dundy’s reaction seesaws between “Now I can love him and now I must hate him.” When they begin to have affairs on the side, Tynan expects Dundy to accept and even welcome his infidelities but doesn’t play fair. He recalls in his diaries that during a trip to Spain, when she confessed to an affair with Amis, “I caned her, one stroke for each letter of his name.” Meanwhile, Kathleen Halton, his second wife-to-be, was waiting in the south of France on “a half-promise that I would leave Elaine and join her there.”

Later, when “everyone” gossips about Dundy’s affair with a Scottish laird, Tynan is so incensed that he beats her up and leaves her “unconscious on the bathroom floor with two black eyes and a broken nose.” It’s a relief to the reader, and surely to the writer, when Orson Welles takes one look at Dundy’s face, says, “Now will you divorce him?” and she agrees.

Dundy describes 14 years of a marriage that turned from heaven to hell in vivid, horrible and absurd detail. Sometimes the couple become as savage as August Strindberg’s in “Dance of Death,” and sometimes as blackly comic as Edward Albee’s central characters in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” As well as threatening suicide when he’s on the brink of losing her, Tynan blames Dundy for making him feel ashamed of his sexual preferences, but he never seems to understand how they humiliate her. And yet, between canings, confrontations and reconciliations, party-going and visits to psychiatrists, travels to France, Spain, Italy, New York and Hollywood, Tynan somehow manages to write the best of his theater criticism (for the Observer in Britain, then for the New Yorker), and Dundy completes two slight, entertaining novels.

Unlike the Strindberg and Albee wives, Dundy had a romantic streak. It encouraged two fatally mistaken and contradictory beliefs: that her love would be powerful enough to “cure” her husband and that a true love would come along to “take Ken off my back.” It says much for her basically amiable and generous nature that Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams, whom she got to know as Elaine Tynan, remained her friends after she became Elaine Dundy again. It’s also proof of her talent for self-discovery that she could look back on her marriage to Tynan, decide that she’s “more indebted to him than debited,” yet find it “absurd that the lesser debt of gratitude, I pay, but the greater one, of forgiveness, I defer.”

For Tynan, life after Dundy was less rewarding. In 1967, four years after he kept her waiting in the south of France, he married Halton. Hoping to become more than “just” a critic, he tried but failed to raise money for a film (about sado-masochism) he’d written and wanted to direct. He signed contracts to write several books that he never completed, and only his piece on Louise Brooks for the New Yorker reflected the brilliance of his best writing, nearly always about actors. Until he died of emphysema in 1980, at age 53, his diaries reeked with the despair of a burnout case.

Meanwhile Dundy discovered “Elsewhere” as well as herself, and wrote her two most substantial books. “Elvis and Gladys,” a study of Elvis Presley’s relationship with his mother, is inevitably overshadowed today by Peter Guralnick’s two-part biography, but it contains many original insights, notably concerning Presley’s boyhood obsession with Captain Marvel Jr., the comic book hero with a dual identity. She followed this with a biography of the Southern small town Ferriday, La., intrigued by its claim “to have produced more famous people per square mile than any other town in USA.” (That fatal attraction again.) In fact the Ferriday celebrity list, headed by rock star Jerry Lee Lewis, TV anchorman Howard K. Smith, evangelist Jimmy Swaggart and Gen. Claire Lee Chennault (who organized the Flying Tigers), is less intriguing than Dundy’s exploration of the way Southern towns so often produce “downright theatrical people.”

Vidal once told Tynan that “Elaine wants something you can never give her. She wants herself.” The long central episode of her autobiography and various incidental passages (notably her comparison of Hemingway heroes and Williams heroines) make me wish that she’d been quicker to give herself what she wanted and become a writer freed from the desire to write primarily to gain her husband’s approval and regain her self-esteem.

But “Life Itself!” ends with 80-year-old Dundy watching a sunset from her Los Angeles penthouse. “I share in its exhilaration, and am content,” she writes, so maybe she got enough of what she wanted after all.

*

From ‘Life Itself!’

Throughout our American Experience, the combat between Ken and me had continued. Looking back it is often where our fighting took place that I remember rather than what those rows were about. One particular altercation, at East 89th Street in the winter of 1959, began in the living room and rapidly accelerated to the stage where we were looking for things to throw. When we saw that the maid was trying to get in to clean the room, without missing a beat we moved into the bedroom she had just finished putting in order.

Had we a penchant for theatrics? What did you expect?