Around the World With Auntie Mame (6 page)

“That's
blackmail
!”

“I prefer to call it
quid pro quo
—a Latin term meaning that I did a big favor for you and now you're coming around to the lockup with me, Vera.
Or else!
”

HOUSED IN A SETTING NOT UNLIKE THE DUNGEON portrayed in the Folies-Bergère, Mr. Babcock was a piteous sight. He had been badly beaten up, his clothes all but torn off his back. He hurried eagerly to the wicket, but he recoiled when he found that his visitor was Auntie Mame, demure in black organdy without any pizazz whatever.

“Oh, it's you, you Jezebel,” Mr. Babcock moaned.

“Jezebel indeed, Mr. Babcock,” Auntie Mame said. “I have come on a mission of mercy after prevailing upon my dear friend Vera Charles to forgive you for your shocking lapse of this evening. And speaking of Miss Charles, Mr. Babcock,” she added cattily, “I'd always understood that it was
Mrs.
Babcock who had the great crush on Vera. Not you.”

“You know damned well that it was you up there on that stage tonight cavorting around without enough on to . . . You and that delinquent orphan brat of yours.” He seemed a bit uncertain. Woozy, you might say.

“He's drunk,” Vera snapped, “obviously drunk. Just who else do you think could replace
me
, you dirty old man?”

“Ohhhh,” Mr. Babcock groaned. “If I was . . . if I was not myself this evening, it's because
you
, Mame Dennis Burnside, put something in my grape juice.”

“Nonsense,” Vera said harshly. “He was stinking. I smelled his breath myself when he dragged me off . . .”

“Drugged,” Mr. Babcock said weakly, any conviction he may ever have had deserting him.

“La, Mr. Babcock,” Auntie Mame said, waggling a coquettish finger through the wicket, “the days of the Borgias are long since dead. But, alas, the days of rapine, lust, and bestiality, I fear, are still with us—and in some very surprising circles. Can you think that I, a poor, lone widow, would have taken an innocent youth to a carnal display such as the one you attended—and all too conspicuously—this evening?”

“Gee, Mr. Babcock,” I piped up, “Auntie Mame and I were even thinking of driving out to Neuilly for some real home-style peanut butter and those keen lantern slides.”

“Indeed we were,” Auntie Mame added, “and I have been heartsick at the prospect of having to tell poor Eunice of the disgrace brought upon her and her son—yes, and that peach of a couple, the Gilbreaths—by your conduct . . .”

Mr. Babcock's hysterical gibbering drowned out the rest of her message. Auntie Mame waited sadistically for his sobs to be stilled before she went on.

“But if you are not grateful, Mr. Babcock, for my willingness to stand staunchly behind your poor, deluded wife, you should at least thank me for begging Miss Charles to forgive you. And also,
not to press charges
.”

“B-but . . .” Mr. Babcock stammered.

“Happily,” Auntie Mame charged on, “Vera Charles is a true trouper with a heart of pure gold. What other woman would forgive you for mauling her, for disgracing her in public and for doing
this
”—dramatically Auntie Mame ripped the veil from Vera's hat and pointed to her swollen, discolored jaw. Mr. Babcock choked. “For doing
this
, Mr. Babcock, to a face that has been dear to drama lovers for the last half-century.”

Vera bridled, but there wasn't much she could do.

“I—I left you at the American Express this afternoon,” he said brokenly, “and I had this—this odd feeling. I stopped off in a—in some low saloon and ordered a drink of liquor and then—then . . . Well, everything went black. I . . .”

“That is indeed a sad story, Mr. Babcock,” Auntie Mame said, holding up a pious hand, “but a squalid tale and one which I should not like you to relate before my innocent young ward. It is bad enough that a man of your Jekyll and Hyde character completely controls this poor orphan's inheritance, probably squandering his pitiable income on voices too vile to contemplate. So I will thank you to bear in mind that Patrick's
spiritual
welfare remains in
my
hands and I should not like his young mind polluted by any accounting of your disgusting fall from . . .”

“Please, please,” Mr. Babcock said, a broken man. “I'll do anything you say.”

“Ah, but there you are wrong, Mr. Babcock,” Auntie Mame said. “It is not
you
who are here to help
me
, but
I
who have come to this sinkhole of drunks and criminals to help
you
. Now tell me,” she said with honeyed venom, “wouldn't you like me to telephone Mrs. Babcock? Eunice must be wondering what can have hap . . .”

“Oh, no!
Please
no!”

“Very well then,” Auntie Mame said. “Vera is not only willing to forgive you, but also to pay your fine.
Aren't
you, Vera?”

Vera looked as though she'd been struck by lightning at the very suggestion of parting with so much as a centime, but she said, “Yais,” with icy grandeur.

“You will be released almost immediately, with no police record to blight your holiday among your friends the French. I have arranged for a limousine to take you out to the American Hospital at Neuilly. In an hour's time I shall call poor Eunice and tell her that you met with a motor accident while borrowing my car and that you can be found in the hospital. That will account for your deplorable physical appearance. Patrick and I are leaving Paris tomorrow and no one need ever be the wiser.”

“I—I can never th-thank you,” Mr. Babcock blubbered. I snickered. The sight of that self-righteous old bantam cock groveling before Auntie Mame was too much for me.

“Please don't be too affected by this simple show of loving kindness, Patrick,” Auntie Mame said, patting my shoulder and giving me a sharp jab in the nape of the neck. “Life teaches us many lessons.
Many!
Ah, here comes the turnkey now to give you back your ill-earned freedom. Come, Mr. Babcock!”

THE CROWD AT THE FOLIES-BERGÈRE HAD BEEN A good deal rougher on Mr. Babcock than I had suspected. His shoes and socks and a bit of underwear remained to him, but not much else. He made a ludicrous spectacle out on the street. The night had turned cool and he shivered helplessly.

“You may see me to my car, Mr. Babcock,” Auntie Mame said grandly. “Remember, this is the automobile you allegedly cracked up. A silver Panhard sedan. That's how the car was traced to me and how I was the first to be notified. Get in, Vera, Patrick. And would you just hand me that lap robe, my little love? Thank you.”

She turned to Mr. Babcock and hung the robe around him. “Here, Mr. Babcock,” she said, “this will help you cover your, um,
shame
. Your hired limousine is just behind.” She got into the car and started the motor. Mr. Babcock looked like a very small Sitting Bull draped as he was in Auntie Mame's motor rug. I snickered again.

“Then Mr. Babcock,” Auntie Mame said, “all is forgiven. Forgiven . . . and . . .
forgotten
?”

“Oh, y-yes,” Mr. Babcock said, his teeth chattering. “But just one thing . . .”

“Yes, Mr. Babcock?” Auntie Mame said sweetly.

“Wh-what shall I do with your lap robe when I get to the hospital?”

“
Take it off!
” Auntie Mame shouted. With a roar the car raced up the silent street.

Auntie Mame in Court Circles

“SO AFTER ALL THOSE MUSEUMS AND GALLERIES and the French National Theatre what did the old maniac do with you?” Pegeen asked.

“Well,” I said glibly, “Auntie Mame felt that Paris was getting too hot for her. I mean even in the early spring there are some real scorchers there. Not so much the heat, it's the . . .”

“Go on,” Pegeen said.

“Well, so we went to London.”

“What for?”

“To visit the Queen. Quite literally. Only it was a King and Queen then.”

“Cut the comedy.”

“I mean it. What trouble could anyone possibly get into in a staid old town like London. Besides,” I added, “Auntie Mame has always moved in Court circles.”

Unable to face the distraught mother, I went out to the pantry to step up my drink. The drink needed bolstering and so did I.

LONDON was just getting over Mrs. Simpson and the Coronation when Mrs. Burnside and the entourage checked into a suite at Claridge's. The entourage, by that time, consisted of Auntie Mame's best friend, Vera Charles, First Lady of the American Theater, who had collected so much money from the Folies-Bergère for indignities suffered there that it was easier not to work at all that summer—and, of course, me.

Auntie Mame had been to London many times before and knew quite a lot of people left over from the twenties. At that early age in history they had been called the Bright Young Things. But after a couple of Auntie Mame's Little Afternoons and Big Evenings—and a stern rebuke from the management—she had to confess that her companions of the past had not kept pace with the times. They were just middle-aged delinquents.

“Oh, my little love,” Auntie Mame moaned from beneath her ice cap the day after her third Big Evening, “I'm afraid that I'm in the Wrong Set. My old friends are neither bright nor young any longer.”

“Well, they were certainly trying,” I said.

“
Trying?
Darling, they were
impossible
! Too Evelyn Waugh for words. No, Patrick, I have reached an age when there should be beauty and dignity in my life. I am no longer Madcap Mame, but Mrs. Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside, a widow—still young and attractive, perhaps—with a certain amount of wealth and position. I also have the crushing responsibility of guiding a young nephew through life and . . .”

“Don't worry about me, Auntie Mame,” I said. “I'll be in college this fall and then you can go right on doing . . .”

“Don't interrupt!” Auntie Mame snapped, setting her ice cap down with a clatter. “As I was saying, these elderly Bright Young Things are wrong for me now. Wrong, wrong, wrong! Oh, we were all mad and gay ten years ago, but today—in the grim cold light of 1937—all those immature, hard-drinking, pleasure-crazed playmates of yesteryear seem too shoddy for words. Look at the way they've left this lovely room! Cigarette burns! Glasses overturned! That chandelier hanging by a thread! No, Patrick, my little love, England means to me beauty, dignity, serenity, a sense of the past. . . .”

Vera, who had been asleep on the sofa for some time, got up and lurched off toward her bedroom, last night's evening dress trailing raggedly behind her. Vera said a short but unprintable word and slammed the door.

“That,” Auntie Mame said, “is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. It is not the sort of London society I wish to present to an impressionable young man such as you, darling. I wish
you
to know a more gracious England—a sovereign nation of rich tradition, of pomp and ceremony. And for that reason, my little love . . .” Auntie Mame paused dramatically and clapped the ice bag back on her head.

“Yes, Auntie Mame?”

“And for that reason, Patrick,
I
am going to be presented at Court.”

WHENEVER AUNTIE MAME MADE UP HER MIND TO do something, she got it done in a hurry, and so she didn't waste any time at getting into Court circles. The first thing she did was to cable New York to have her Rolls-Royce and Ito, her Japanese houseman, shipped over on the
Queen Mary
. It seemed sort of like carrying coals to Newcastle to have a Rolls sent from America to England, and Ito drove so badly that I was a little worried about him in London traffic. But Auntie Mame said that the Rolls and Ito were a Family Tradition and that since Ito had always driven on the left-hand side of the street anyhow, he might find London his Spiritual Home.

The next thing Auntie Mame did was to get in touch with Lady Gravell-Pitt and then she
really
started moving.

Just where Auntie Mame ever found Hermione Gravell-Pitt I don't know—don't even like to contemplate. All I can tell you is that the day after Auntie Mame's great declaration I came back from a tour of the Abbey to find Auntie Mame and Lady Gravell-Pitt being arch and ladylike over tea, and I knew that Auntie Mame had entered a New Phase.

“Jewels,” Auntie Mame was saying, “will be no problem, Lady Gravell-Pitt.” She flashed her large uncut emerald ring and there was a discreet twinkle of rather good diamonds at her ears.

“Of cawss,” Lady Gravell-Pitt said, her beady eyes taking in the considerable glory of Auntie Mame's rocks. Then she smiled broadly, and I was stunned by the saffron splendor of her teeth. There must have been sixty of them. Very long, very false, they were the color of old ivory set into gleaming titian gums, and for some time I could think only of the double keyboard of an antique harpsichord. “And since we're going to be such grand chums, my dear, you must call me Hermione—or even Hermie.”

“Why, certainly, Hermione,” Auntie Mame said, “and
you
must call
me
Mame.”

“Of cawss, Mame,” Hermione said with another ocher smile. “But have you a tiara?”

“Two,” Auntie Mame said.

“A pity,” Hermione said with a wistful little smile. “I have such a lovely one. Heirloom, of cawss, but I'd have let
you
have it for a song. Howsomever,” she continued, touching her brassy gold-dyed long bob, “we must do something about your living quarters. I mean, as your social sponsor, I really couldn't permit you to live in an hotel.” She gazed around Auntie Mame's suite at Claridge's as though it were the county workhouse. “Luckly, I
do
know a little jewel of a house right here in Mayfair which we can lease for the season and . . .”

“We?”
Auntie Mame asked.

“Yais,” Hermione said with a lackluster flash of dentures. “You, Miss Charles, your neview and
I
—all of us. Now, Lady Styllbourne is a chum of mine and so I
think
I could coax her to let you have it for a thousand guineas the mouth. Plus, of
cawss
, the servants' wages.”

I tiptoed quietly off to my room as I heard Lady Gravell-Pitt saying, “Now if you will simply give me your check”—or cheque.

GRAND, I BELIEVE, IS THE TERM FOR THE LITTLE jewel of a house Auntie Mame had rented through Lady Gravell-Pitt. It was a vast marble mansion in Grosvenor Square, close enough to the American Embassy so that Auntie Mame could annoy her countrymen whenever she felt it necessary, yet far enough across the square so that they couldn't keep too careful an eye on her. Auntie Mame pronounced the house “divine” and the location “ideal.”

Lady Gravell-Pitt, very much the chatelaine, met us at the door surrounded by a platoon of footmen. “Welcome, welcome, dear Mame! Patrick, dear!
Miss
Charles.” Lady Gravell-Pitt did not care for Vera. “Now let me show you through our lovely, lovely new home. Your, um,
setting
as it were.” She smiled her horrible crockery smile and said, “The perfect setting for a lovely Ameddican jewel.”

Vera gagged.

Hermione led us between the ranks of flunkies and then guided us through a series of marble halls hung with Water-ford chandeliers and dusty French tapestries and portraits of dead people. It was quite a place. Adam rooms opened into Chippendale rooms and Chippendale rooms opened into Heppelwhite rooms and Grinling Gibbons rooms and Regency rooms and Louis Quinze rooms and so on.

It wasn't very cozy, or even very clean, but Auntie Mame loved it. Eventually Hermione wound up her conducted tour in what she called “the sheerest Directoire conceit of a garden room” for tea. It was the cheeriest room in the house, which doesn't say much for it, and it did look out over a sooty little patch of greenery, in the center of which a marble Apollo displayed with undue pride a pitiful array of amputated parts.

“Now, Mame dear,” Lady Gravell-Pitt said finally, with a vivacious clatter of dentures, “about your presentation of cawss, anyone with
my
connections could have you presented immeejitly. . . .”

“Then why don't you?” Vera said.

“But”
—Lady Gravell-Pitt held up an imperious hand—“the best way is the gradual approach. First a little series of cocktail parties, luncheons, dinners. That way you can become intimate with the cream of Court circles. Then I shall arrange to have you invited to a Royal Garden Party. And lastly, a full presentation at St. James's.”

“How long do you think it will be?” Auntie Mame asked.

“And how
much
?” Vera said.

AUNTIE MAME'S SEASON BEGAN AT LUNCH THE NEXT day when a gaggle of dowdy gentry showed up at twelve sharp, descended on the table like a flock of cormorants, and departed sharply at three. An hour and a half later, six more showed up to devour three large cakes, five platters of sandwiches, and I don't know how much tea. At eight o'clock a dozen more appeared in slightly soiled dinner clothes and tucked into an enormous dinner as though they hadn't seen food since the Diamond Jubilee. The rest of the week followed just about the same pattern, except that twice Auntie Mame was permitted to take Hermione's friends out to the theater, with dancing afterward at a supper club in which, I later discovered, Hermione had a slight financial interest.

I must say that none of Auntie Mame's myriad guests struck me as very attractive. They were mostly provincial English or superannuated White Russians with, as I now know, either minor or dubious titles. None of them was a minute under sixty and they were all related to Lady Gravell-Pitt. The women were given to whiskers and the men to rheumatism. They all dressed like something out of a rummage sale, and if
they
were the cream of Court circles, I felt awfully sorry for King George and Queen Elizabeth—“Bertie and Bessie,” as Lady Gravell-Pitt called them in Auntie Mame's presence.

Nor did it seem to me that any of them was in much of a hurry to repay Auntie Mame's lavish hospitality with so much as a cup of tea. Vera noticed it, too. But Auntie Mame was so busy being the gracious hostess, while Hermione hovered around her, teeth clattering like castanets, that I guess she didn't have time to think about it. During the mornings, Hermione kept Auntie Mame occupied with learning the Court curtsy, which she demonstrated with a fearful wobbling and a crackling of joints that reminded me of someone eating peanut brittle. After the first lesson Auntie Mame could curtsy like a prima ballerina, so there wasn't much else for Lady Gravell-Pitt to do but invite her relatives to feed on out-of-season delicacies at Auntie Mame's table and to try to sell things to Auntie Mame. These included an elderly Daimler; a rather dented Queen Anne tea service; almost new liveries for the footmen; a crisp old ermine cloak, which she said—and there was no reason to doubt her—once belonged to Queen Charlotte; a dinner service for thirty-six in chipped Limoges; an emerald stomacher, size forty-two; a sorrel riding horse; a ruined abbey in Wales; and a Saint Bernard puppy.

After a week of living under the same roof with Lady Gravell-Pitt Vera began to crack, almost visibly. “Come in here,” she said in pure Pittsburghese and with none of the unintelligible Mayfair accent she used on the stage.

I went into her bedroom and she closed the door.

It hadn't taken any crystal ball to see that Lady Gravell-Pitt rather looked down on Vera, although Vera was a Great Star and, even in London, more or less in a league with Gertrude Lawrence. “Theatah people, of cawss,” Hermione always said, dismissing Vera with a brisk click of her uppers, as though Vera had been sentenced for importuning in Park Lane. And she displayed her scorn in such little ways as excluding Vera entirely from conversation, neglecting to introduce her to the cream of Court circles, seating her far below the salt, and placing her in the smallest, dingiest bedroom in the house while far nicer ones remained unoccupied.

“Well?” Vera asked pregnantly, helping herself to one of my cigarettes.

“Well, what, Vera?” I said.

“You know what, Patrick. This auction gallery she's living in. The toothless wonder. All those tatty old frauds who show up at mealtimes.”

“Oh, you know Auntie Mame and her phases, Vera,” I said. “She'll get over it in time. She just wants to be presented at Court. After that she'll be sick of all this and move on to something else.”