"Life's a banquet and most poor sons of bitches are STARVING to death!" is Auntie Mame's most famous quote and her credo. Auntie Mame (one of my all time favorite films) is based on a bestselling book by Patrick Dennis, pseudonym Edward Everett "Pat" Tanner III. I just finished reading his biography, a very good one, UNCLE MAME.
Tanner was fun-loving and vastly entertaining (both in person and in print) married to a wonderful companion, Louise, and had two children. He essentially sheperded camp humor to the mainstream and was the first author to have 3 books on the bestseller list - at the same time.
Yet with the advent of 60s counterculture, what he did best - incisively skewer the snobbery of high society - quite suddenly was quaint and fell out of fashion. He attempted to become an arts dealer, and then - as he was a snob in his own right - found a final career as a butler. He excelled in this role, and ultimately butlered for Ray Kroc, owner of McDonalds, who never knew his clever and reliable servant was actually the famous former millionaire author of Auntie Mame.
