Bestseller Revisited

AUNTIE MAME (280 pp.) -- Patrick Dennis -- Vanguard ($3.50).

"We stood in a vestibule which was painted pitch black. The only light came from the yellow eyes of a weird pagan god with two heads and eight arms sitting on a teakwood stand . . . A regular Japanese doll of a woman strolled into the foyer . . . Her feet were thrust into tiny gold slippers twinkling with jewels, and jade and ivory bracelets clattered on her arms. She had the longest fingernails I'd ever seen, each lacquered a delicate green. An almost endless bamboo cigarette holder hung languidly from her bright red mouth . . . There was a moment's silence. 'But darling,' she said dramatically, 'I'm your Auntie Mame!' She put her arms around me and kissed me, and I knew I was safe."

Two thousand new readers a week are putting their armchairs around Auntie Mame and finding her neither safe nor sane, merely sidesplitting. Auntie Mame is a screwball who has to be seen or read to be disbelieved. She is a coupon-clipping Pearl White hanging on the dizzy cliff edge of her every enthusiasm. She is a roaring Life Drive without a muffler, and the most commanding prose female since Philip Wylie dreamed up "Mom." Around her and her nephew Pat Author Dennis has fashioned a frothy drawing-room comedy spiked with smoking-room raffishness and powder-room chitchat. The little old lady from Dubuque will find Auntie Mame some gal, but no lady.

On Roller Skates. As her Beekman Place decor suggests, Auntie Mame goes through phases like revolving 'doors. In 1929, when orphaned ten-year-old Pat is put in her flamboyant care, Auntie is in her Japanese phase. Child-rearing brings out her progressive education phase. Little Pat is enrolled in a "divine new school that a friend of mine is starting. Coeducational and completely revolutionary. All classes are held in the nude under ultra violet ray. Not a repression left after the first semester." Pat is just working up his first good tan when the shocked male trustee of his estate puts an end to repression-shedding and the divine new school: "Over delicately retouched photographs of . . . the student body were [newspaper] headlines such as SEX SCHOOL SEIZED, with articles by civic leaders and an outraged clergy that all seemed to begin: 'Mother, What Is Your Child Being Taught?' "

The hard school of the Depression brings out the spunky strain in Auntie Mame. With her income down to $200 a month, she opens an artsy-craftsy shop, the Maison Moderne, only to see it burn to the ground without insurance. On her first day as a switchboard operator, "she nearly electrocuted herself and was home in time for lunch." But a job selling roller skates at Macy's pays off. She meets and marries Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside, "the richest man under 40 south of Washington, D.C." She visits her husband's ancestral plantation, Peckerwood, meets his evil-tempered old mother, and trails a fox hunt in her hus band's Duesenberg. "I just hope I won't be sick when they kill that poor little fox," she confides to nephew Pat. Poor Auntie Mame has "never fully mastered the automobile." As the hounds come yelping down the road, the Duesenberg lurches forward, and Auntie Mame is in at the kill: "The fox lay dead under the car."

Back up North, hubby Beauregard comes to an equally sad end. He is "kicked in the head by a horse in Central Park." Chin up, Auntie Mame goes indefatigably on, whether dictating to a secretary ("Agnes . . . shave under your arms. You look like King Kong") or matchmaking for Pat ("A perfect peach of a girl and born for motherhood--look at that pelvis!") or helping the war effort ("I sold more bonds than any woman who's ever worked El Morocco").

On the Horizon. Only once does Auntie Mame lose her aplomb. Pat catches her in a flagrant infatuation with one of his Ivy League classmates and bawls her out: "You just happened to end up at the Junior Prom with a boy who could very easily be your son." Shamefaced for an instant, Auntie Mame cracks back: "That's not true, unless you're referring to some unhappy prank of nature like that little girl down in Peru." At novel's end, Auntie Mame is old enough to be a grandmother, but still spirited enough to go barreling off to India in native dress, "her sari floating out behind her."

Patrick Dennis is a nom de plume for Edward Everett Tanner III, 34, promotion manager of Foreign Affairs magazine. Socialite Tanner refuses to get excited about his book's climb up the bestseller list ("The damn thing will probably sink next week") and regards his writing as an after-hours prank. But Auntie Mame looks as watertight and unsinkable as anything on the horizon. The producers of Wonderful Town hope to star Rosalind Russell as Mame in a Broadway stage adaptation. And major Hollywood studios are bidding warmly for the screen rights.

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