Biography

Born into a prosperous Jewish family in the 1920s.  Elaine Dundy grew up in New York on Park Avenue.  Her lineage includes a maternal grandfather whose revolutionary screws fastened together two of America's best loved landmarks:  Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis and the Statue of Liberty's crumbling drapes.  In many ways it was a privileged childhood.  But wealth, luxury and opportunity were counter-balanced by fear and repression.  She loved Lincoln School, the flagship progressive school she attended, but coming home every day was like "returning to prison with my father the sadistic warden and me and my sisters inmates.  He was a rageaholic given to violent fits of temper at the  dinner table which could land on anyone present."  A wealthy successful businessman, an active philanthropist, in his own home he was a tyrant; a frightening, damaging  and destructive father.  Throughout her teens Dundy nurtured fantasies of killing him.

 After working in war-time Washington Dundy, became an actress and moved to Paris where the chances of furthering  her career looked good and where she could escape from the family situation.

 Loving Paris as a moderately successful actress, she accepted an acting job in London.  There she met the man who was to change her life irrevocably--the enfant terrible of British theatre critics,  Kenneth Tynan.  On their first date, he said to her, "I am the illegitimate son of Sir Peter Peacock.  I have an annual income.  I am twenty-three years old and I will either die or kill myself when I reach thirty because by then I will have said everything I have to say.  Will you marry me?"  Caught in each other's spell, three months later they plunged into a marriage that was both comic and tragic.  It was also romantic.  As Tynan would say to her, "We gave each other a tremendous feeling of specialness,  uniqueness, even glamour.  We looked at each other with the absolute certainty  that nobody  quite like us had ever existed."  They spent years in undomesticated bliss, where Dundy's household chores consisted in cooking breakfast, Tynan's in setting traps for the mice.  But eventually they divorced after thirteen years of  battles over Ken's sado-masochistic tendencies, his suicide threats, blatant extra marital affairs, (and her more discreet ones) and increasing dependence on alcohol.

 Says Dundy "The 50s have so often been characterized as Dull Conformity that I wonder what planet these people were on.  Not mine.  It produced such bold original stars whose like we shall not see again but who still shine bright on the radar screen: In films it produced Marilyn, Elvis and Brando.  In music it produced the great Miles Davis.  It made stars of writers Jack Kerouac,  Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Philip Roth, and James Baldwin.  It made stars of playwrights John Osborne, Harold Pinter, Bertholt Brecht.  Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot got theatregoers happily chewing on its mysteries for months--or angrily spitting it out in minutes.  It produced The Civil Rights Movement led by Martin Luther King.  Dull Conformity?"

During her marriage Elaine Dundy was to become friends with  some of the most distinguished names in theatre, film and literature and Life Itself! is packed with fascinating anecdotes about legends both in their own time and beyond.  A chapter "Larry and Viv"  includes a dizzyingly varied weekend at Notley Abbey with the golden couple of the theatre, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh who described herself as a "Zen Buddhist Catholic."  There is a hilarious description of a dinner the Tynans held for Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe  to which the main guests failed to turn up due to Monroe's hysteria. Happy were the weekends be enjoyed with Gore Vidal at Edgewater where she saw aside of him not usually seen: affectionately playful and actively helpful to her writing (as, she discovered he was to so many others).  Weaving in an out of her narrative is Orson Welles who once fired everyone except her from a radio set.  Then there are pub lunches with Henry Green one of the most highly praised English novelists.

Based on her first hand experiences with Hemingway and Tennessee Williams is a chapter Hem and Tenn,the yang and yin of 20th century American letters, twin peaks so seemingly opposite as to appear foreordained but who in fact had much in common and who met for the first and only time in Havana in '59 when Dundy herself was there.                                                                             

In the midst of all this Dundy take a candid look at what life was like in the high Bohemian set Dundy mixed with, a post Syphilis and pre-Aids era when within that set, certain men and women had carnal knowledge of each other not for favors, or for second-hand fame "but for curiosity and attraction; for fun and for free." 

Dundy's life however was not all fun and games and neither bravery nor bravado gets her through the late 60s when her life comes crashing down on  her shoulders and she finds herself part of the Valley of the Dolls generation as she battled with her pill addiction and depression in her uphill attempts to get her life back on track.

"Deliver us from evil whose presence remains unexplained" is the way Dundy opens her chapter n the death of her of her sister Shirley Clarke, a leading Independent Filmmaker and a popular UCLA professor of film who pioneered the use of the Video Camera as a filmmaking tool ushering in the MTV generation, struck down in her prime by Alzheimer's disease.  Three years into this terrifying disease she did not even recognize her sister. 

Finally, Dundy describes her experience of writing Elvis and Gladys and the people in Tupelo who helped make it the groundbreaking  biography.  This became another important turning point in a life filled with godshots which she defines as "what happens when problems you are sure will take huge amounts of time, trouble, money and frustration unexpectedly come towards you solved." 

"I think it was a master stroke of Fate," she says, "that in researching the greatest celebrity of them all, I would at last be meeting real people, finding them more extraordinary than celebrities; fascinated by them all and

enjoying enduring friendships with some."  

Life Itself! was on the You Really Must Read, list in the London Sunday Times.  It was on several prominent writers' best liked books of the year Mail list and on Evening Standard best seller lists.

Foreword to The Old Man and Me to be published by Virago in their Modern Classics Series in August 2005.

The Moving Finger writes: and having writ,
Moves on! Not all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line.
Nor all your Tears was out a Word of it.

At sixteen, The Rubaiyat ruled my life. Now at eighty two I see it makes good poetry but bad sense. Re reading The Old Man and Me forty years after its first publication, my Moving Finger has re-writ, or rather, edited my novel with I hope, all my Piety and Wit. From today's prospect, I was able to cancel a word or half a line throughout, understanding what I didn't then that in this novel, speech read is preferable to speech spoken. The latter is full of 'um', 'oh', and 'ah' - dead foliage that smother the text. I eliminated most but not all of them. Some were too stubbornly embedded in the text. Words such as the all purpose 'just' that runs around this book as in 'you just want to', 'just a moment', 'just in time', 'just the wrong way.' I cut some of the beginnings of sentences that use such weakening qualifications as "well" and "I'm afraid" followed by I, you, he, she, it. I cut 'perfectly', and 'definitely'.' These being eliminated I felt released the core of the text to glow. I wanted the two protagonists to express themselves through exchanges that are brisk, crisp, direct and unadorned, sometimes to the point, often around it, even at times, soul to soul.

My first-person narrator, a young American girl, speaks a jumble of jargon du jour, collegespeak, popular Madison Avenue mocking metaphors and basic black musiciantalk. Jazz great, Miles Davis, who I had loosely based a character on, after he read the book, had only one comment. "Watch out for slang," he said. "It dates fast." I had occasion to recall that in the '70's when a frined said the narrator's slang was dated. Again in the '80's, when another reader thought is was "period" (i.e. quaint). Now in the new millennium, it is historic. The way we talked way back when we dug things, made the scene, went to Happenings and all that jazz. When cigarettes were not props but had a life of their own, like those of Bette Davis, indicators of mood, gestures denoting anything from seduction to boredom. Smoking round the clock was universally acceptable. In the novel, one Bright Young Thing with a long cigarette-holder smokes during the meal and no body leaves the dining room. Cigarettes and slang stay, I decided, dead weight vegetation goes.

Indicentally, the other protagonist, Englishman C. D. McKee, the narrator's worthy opponent, described as "too distinguished to do anything," speaks a brand of standard educated English which never went through the dated or period cycle but was and is historic.

My specific aim in writing this novel was to present an anti-heroine in response to all the anti-heroines so popular of the day, beginning with Kingsley Amis' Jim Dixon in Lucky Jim, John Osborne's Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger and all the anti-heroes who followed in their wake. Loosely bound together as Angry Young Men, they hit out at everything phony, pompous priggish, prudish and pretentious. Their anger was exhilarating. To their delight, and to his later embarrassment, Somerset Maygham called them "scum." Creating the female counterpart I knew would be tricky as in those days when relationships between men and women were at an all time low, females were depicted as passive and put upon. (Then came the '70's - Gloria Steinem and her MS magazine, Germaine Greer and her Female Eunuch, Carmen Callil and her all-female publishing house Virago. And nothing was ever the same again.) Back in the '60's I was aware that my anti-heroine might scare people off. But I did it anyway. And it was fun. After all, Cyril Connelly had advised me about my private life, "Make up your mind, you can either be a monster. or a doormat, I opted for the former.

My Angry Young Woman hates everything English - Soho, Mayfair, the West End and countryhouses. She is a girl with a plan, with lots of opinions, operating on a short fuse. Almost everything about English people annoys her, her irritation at tiems boiling up to fury even as her adversary's irony slides down into sarcasm.

But what I hope I had going for me is that Bad Girls are more interesting than Good ones. The Bible has an infatuation with them - Delilah, Bathsheba, Jezebel, Salmoe and then some. It does them proud. The 19th century Bad Girls - Hedda Gabler, Becky Sharp and Scarlett O'Hara live on in iconic glory. My narrator who plans to kill the Englishman because he has the money, is throughly bad.

The time frame is 1962, with England not-yet-but-on-the-verge-of Swinging London was not the Mecca for tourists it has become. It was however regrouping itself from '51 on for its cultural explosion, its fashions of Carnaby Street, its playwrights' invasion of Broadway, to say nothing of the Liverpool sound of The Beatles and the Glaswegian sound of James Bond.

But in the '60's, all good Americians skipped bombed-out London and rushed to Paris. I myself went straight from New York to Paris where I stayed happily for a while surrounded by neew Americian friends. I didn't have any in London and it occurs to me now that this feeling of isolation rubbed off onto the novel. Then too, America at the end of WW II was the richest country in the world. However much of its money wnet to rebuilding Germany and Japan, the defeated enemy and none to brave England. Which, as ny novel also reflects didn't make Americians very popular with the English.

Short digression - It didn't work the other way around! The English coming to America were unequivocally ecstatic about everything in the New World and Americians quick to return the compliment, rolled out the red carpet.

Another point: in the '60's, publishers were giving writers the freedom to be explicit about sex, its cravings, its orgasms, its masturbations. I took advantage of this. Sexual matters combined with self-interest activate my tow leading characters who while they think they are guided by reason, in reality only use their logic to justify their passion.

Perhaps, not surprisingly, I have also written a romance. At least according ot Brewer's Dictionary of Phrases & Fable, which decrees, "The modern application of the word 'romance' pertains to a story containing incidents more or less removed from the ordinary evenets of life." That seems to describe my story too as the contenders fight, flee, reconniter, re-engage and fight on with fresh energy to the end - to justify their out of control passions.

Elaine posed for photographer Richard Avedon for the cover of the original publication of The Old Man & Me.