Word: mame
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Tanner bottles his bestselling fizz under polypseudonymous labels. As Patrick Dennis he created the madwoman of Beekman Place, Auntie Mame. As Virginia Rowans he examined The Loving Couple and its five-year itch. Again as Dennis, he wrote (with Barbara Hooton) Guestward Ho!, the saddle-slipping saga of a Manhattan couple turned dude-ranch managers. On the assumption that the public is now hopelessly Tanner-Dennis-Rowans-addicted, his publishers are currently offering two seasonal pick-me-ups, one a reissue entitled House Party (originally published in 1954) and the other a collaboration with Dorothy (The Crystal Boat) Erskine called...
...record by having three of his books on the bestseller lists at the same time. Since January 1955 the wackiest aunt since Charley's has been Tanner's fairy godmother. With sales of more than 1,000,000 copies in hard and soft covers, Auntie Mame's book, play and screen loot has grossed 36-year-old Tanner most of his first half-million ("After taxes, I have an incrumb of 15? on the dollar...
...Auntie Mame (adapted from Patrick Dennis'-novel by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee) will likely be the favorite popular comedy of the season. It matters little that, far from being a sound play, Auntie Mame is really no play at all. For it will go fast and far on the inherent appeal of its chief character and the tremendous vivacity and skill of the gal who plays her. Everybody enjoys a lovable lunatic, and Rosalind Russell is a delight as the kindhearted madwoman of Beekman Place, bringing up her small nephew in a world of sidecars for breakfast...
...kind of scene-a-minute technique. Their slapdash method, though highly uncreative, is not entirely illadvised. Thanks to Morton DaCosta's lively staging, it makes speed a kind of substitute for wit, and puts pedestrian writing on horseback. Its quick-changes also consort well with Auntie Mame's scatterbrained nature, besides providing a fine succession of new costumes, new hairdos, new wall treatments, new gaffes, new predicaments...
...twining of farceuse and comedienne: she can give a drawing-room inflection to a loony-bin situation, or turn daffy or profane in the midst of playing a grande dame. To wonderful good nature she adds a few drops of acidity-juice from a sun-kissed lemon. Though Auntie Mame is really a one-woman show, Peggy Cass deserves mention as an unmarried expectant mother, and Polly Rowles as a stage star who has always started sleeping it off when the party has scarcely begun...