This wonderfully entertaining, manic-depressive confession is not really Elaine Dundy's first autobiography. That was colourfully disguised as her first novel, The Dud Avocado, a slightly less complicated depiction of the frenzied European period of her young womanhood, when she seemed set to live happily ever after with Mr Right.
I very much enjoyed the novel when it was published in London in 1958 and became an international bestseller. I have just reread it - it's still available - and enjoyed it even more, although comparing it with the actualities of Life Itself! puts the fun into a context of a certain poignancy.
Dundy was born Brimberg, "part of the Jewish new rich," as she describes her family, of New York's Central Park West and then Park Avenue. A grandfather, a Latvian immigrant, invented a mechanically superior screw, which was used to repair the drapery of the Statue of Liberty and otherwise industrially on a vast scale, and made a fortune. In her youth, on both sides of the Atlantic, as she reveals, like Edith Piaf, without regret, Elaine devoted much of her energy to a quest for a superior screw of her own.
Her autobiography, in fiction and non-fiction, depicts her anarchic pursuit of pleasure with unflinching candour. The fiction is mostly exuberantly carefree; the non-fiction is a cautionary tale. The reader may thus choose to see her as the sexually playful heroine of a sort of feminine Catcher in the Rye, with touches of Archy and Mehitabel or as a confused victim of the new freedom of the 1950s and 1960s, a hedonist who succumbed for a while to up-and-down pills and electro-convulsive therapy, a character who might have been portrayed most sympathetically by her friend Tennessee Williams.
She spent a long time trying to escape from what has been called reality. "For years," she writes in Life Itself!, acting did everything I wanted it to do for me, including, thank God, ultimately giving me up. It was my vocation, my psychoanalysis, my group therapy, my circle of friends, my makeover, my goal, my place to exchange my old, injured, irrational self for new ones that worked better. It was my solace and my excitement."
An English drama teacher in Washington persuaded her to shed her family identity and to call herself Elaine Dundy. - I read all sorts of adjectives into it. The important thing was that it seemed to reflect the person I saw in the mirror." She spelled it with a y to distinguish it from Dundee marmalade. She found that her "new relatives . . . were an Italian family of boxers, wrestlers, trainers and managers of the same name. The most famous was Angelo Dundy, who was to manage Muhammad Ali." But these were not the sort of men that most intimately appealed to her.
In The Dud Avocado, she was immediately smitten and eventually taken away by a dandy photographer modelled in part on Avedon, with what the author must have thought, at the time, was the most glamorous possible name, Maximilian Ramage. When the dream-world Dundy met this paragon of elegance, "a tall, dark, graceful, erect young man," with an English voice, he was wearing "a pale grey suit, a pale pale yellow shirt, pale grey suede shoes and his tie (was) peacock-blue". Furthermore, "he had long graceful hands and a warm impulsive smile".
That was Dundy's love-dazed portrait of Kenneth Tynan, then the most fashionably intellectual theatre critic in London, the exquisite star of The Observer when it was London's best-written newspaper. In Life Itself!, Dundy relates how her temporary role of Mrs Ken Tynan enabled her to live "a life of undomesticated bliss" in a Mayfair flat across the street from the Connaught, and to meet everyone who was anyone in the arts Dundy now lives in real life in California. Her living room windows cover a whole wall. "On autumn evenings," she writes, "I watch a burning sunset," evidently feeling triumphantly not at all dud.
Patrick Skene Catling is an author and critic