Jennifer Wheat

Auntie Mame: The Power of the Fool

“Auntie Mame!–why are you writing on that piece of fluff?” A serious-minded friend asked when I told her about my topic. Apparently this view has been shared by reviewers from the time the play and film came out. Bosley Crowther’s review of the film in the New York Times ( 10 Dec. 1958) labels film and title character as “largely inflated with hot air–or a sort of intoxicating vapor, or theatrical laughing gas” (D 5, 39). He goes on to assert, “There is little or no substance to its heroine and her milieu of café society jokes, free-loaders, phonies and freaks.” Feminist film criticism seems to have completely ignored the film. Despite Auntie Mame’s status as the number one hit of 1959, Jeanine Basinger’s extensive treatment A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women 1930-1960 makes no mention of the film, although she does discuss other Rosalind Russell movies. The same is true of other feminist film critics including Molly Haskell, Tania Modleski, and Ann Kaplan. Peter Biskind’s valuable study of Fifties films, Seeing is Believing, also omits it. I can only conclude that these critics have overlooked the film, because they are of the same mind as Ed Sikov who states, “As its box-office receipts suggest, Auntie Mame’s comic escape from propriety is the late 1950’s at its most conventional”(128). To neglect the film for this reason smacks of literary elitism, and a disregard for the influence that it may have had on the general public. In addition, both film and play invite viewers to question accepted roles for women.

From the outset, Rosalind Russell sparkles in the role of a woman with an unusually large appetite for experience. We first see Mame’s apartment decorated with dragons, gongs and lacquered screens as a party is in progress. In the course of the film, both her apartment and her persona take on a number of new guises. Mame whirls through many identities, from Depression-era saleslady to Southern belle/huntress, to world traveler, to successful author. Underneath all these changes are two constants that keep her from being just a fickle dilettante: her dedication to her nephew Patrick, and her openness to diverse cultures and lifestyles. Politically correct viewers may deplore the campy stereotyping of Irish nurse Norah’s and Asian houseboy Ito’s mannerisms and speech, but Mame makes it clear that both are part of her family. She embraces people who are vigorous and stimulating, dismissing those who, like Patrick’s financial guardian Babcock, fuss over propriety so much that they drain life of pleasure and fun.

It is my contention that the character of Auntie Mame¹  offers a significant challenge to what Molly Haskell has characterized as the “creeping paralysis of adult womanhood as it was coming to be defined in the Fifties” (26). One way that Mame does this is to exercise the power of the Fool, a role that has been off-limits to women for centuries. The Fool’s power to criticize official policies may be one reason why women do not appear in this role. Strolling through folk history and literature, the Fool ruffles the established order by his bent for mischief and outrageous behavior. In canonical literature, the Fool is always identified as male; most fools in folklore are male as well. Occasionally, in western drama, one can detect a female character who exhibits some of the freedoms and powers of the Fool. Lori Landay’s excellent study (1998) on the female trickster in American culture discusses several, from Lorelei Lee to Lucille Ball, but she misses Auntie Mame (1957). Mame’s status as a free, independent woman who enjoys life tremendously is itself a challenge to patriarchal values. In addition, she breaks all the rules about feminine decorum and motherhood—she smokes, drinks, curses, forgets when nephew Patrick will arrive, starts to offer him a drink when he stumbles into her rowdy party, teaches him words that were taboo for children in the 1950s, teaches him how to mix drinks; in short, helps him make a bridge to the world of adults instead of confining him in the play world of children. One way of viewing Mame’s unorthodox behavior as surrogate mother is to see her as inhabiting the role of the Fool; like the king’s jester, she offers an earthy wisdom to deflate pretensions.

To grasp the full impact of Mame’s fooling, it is helpful to recall the conformist nature of Fifties culture that her character challenges. Elaine Tyler May’s study of American families in the Cold War era foregrounds the issue of containment, pointing out that the drive to contain communism included suppressing subversive individuals to prevent the spread of their “poisonous influences” throughout society (13-14). Television presentations of traditional functional families (Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best) promoted a norm to which few viable alternatives were offered. As Nina Leibman states, in her study of the Fifties family in the media:

Both the film and television texts are concerned with the delineation of power—implicitly in terms of narrative structure and visual and aural stylistics, and explicitly in narratives whose focus is on generational, gender and societal conflicts. A key difference between the two media, however, rests in the fact that on television programs, the powerstructures are correctly aligned, while in the films, the family needs to resubscribe to the patriarchal values inherent in the definition of the successful nuclear family.(117)

Other characters in Auntie Mame remind us of the numerous ways in which women give away their power: there is Vera Charles, the vain, drunken actress, performing the same tired society dramas year after year. Then comes Agnes Gooch, Mame’s amanuensis with the emotional development of a ten year- old. Norah, Patrick’s Irish nanny, is the soul of kindness and practicality, but is easily shocked because of her own conventional pieties. Sally Cato McDougall is a vindictive bitch, who would literally kill to get her man. Mrs. Burnside, Mame’s belching mother-in-law, is sour, tyrannical and bigoted. Gloria Upson, Patrick’s bimbo fiancée, is vapid, brittle and shallow— truly the well-bred robot that the script designates her. The list concludes with Mrs. Upson, Gloria’s banal, bourgeois, mother. These are among the stereotypes that women face again and again in film and literature, from Restoration drama to Gone with the Wind. Even many so-called women’s plays, like Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart, represent women trapped in destructive patterns, which often revolve around uncooperative men. However, the male characters in this play are also narrow and unimaginative. Dwight Babcock, the manager of Patrick’s inheritance, exemplifies the conservative agenda that Mame refuses to endorse, and sometimes criticizes openly. Detached from pompous, suburban social values, Mame is determined to help Patrick get more out of life than a job in a stuffy brokerage firm. Her indifference to establishment values is one attribute of the Trickster-Fool.

Other qualities of the Fool, listed by anthropologist Mahadev Apte, include “ a lack of common sense and social propriety, love of imitation, at least outward manifestation of stupidity, a chaotic or disorderly nature, and an incongruous juxtaposition of traits generally assumed to be contradictory” ( 233). Mame fits this cluster of traits. First, she is a Fool because she is hopelessly inept at day-to-day routine. She is chaotic and disorderly in the roller-skate department at Macy’s; unable to write up a cash-sale, she sends everything COD. In the film version, her sales book sports long streamers of tissue and carbon-paper, similar to the ribbons that festooned the traditional Fool’s costume and staff. Bells are another part of the Fool’s traditional costume, and in one scene, Mame has these in abundance. Striving heroically to enlarge her small role in a play, she creates havoc when her jingling bells drown out the Vera’s lines. Even worse, Mame tangles up her bells in the star’s cape so that Vera is forced to share her curtain call. In the film version, Mame drapes Vera’s cape around her clumsily so that part of it flaps in her face; when she finally straightens it out, a royal ermine border appears over the red cloak. As the two unwillingly joined together take their bow, they create a tableau of the Fool’s power to mock majesty, to injure the dignity of royalty. The bells signal merriment—a warning not to take life and self too seriously. Although Mame’s light-hearted attitude provides a good corrective to Vera’s pompous self-dramatization, she gets fired for bungling the performance. She is consoled by Patrick who points out that everyone was bored by the play until she came on—she has livened up what was dead and stuffy.

Mame proves equally incapable at her next job, as switchboard operator at the firm of Widdicombe, Applewhite, Gutterman, Bibberman and Black. Because she cannot keep up with the pace of calls, she dissolves in gibberish. But, by garbling the partners’ names into Bibbibib and Gutterwipe, she makes us laugh at them. Her ineptitude is satirized, but so is the partners’ pomposity. This ability of the Fool to deflect criticism from self by turning the tables on the powerful is crucial to his role as Joker— the one who reminds the King of his frailties and blind spots.

By speaking bluntly to powerful figures, as Mame does to Dwight Babcock on several occasions, the Fool shakes up a society that has become too complacent about its customs and values. Certainly the Fifties, with its smug assurance that consumer capitalism would solve everything fits the picture of such a society. In her study of Fools and Folly, Barbara Swain notes the relationship of the Fool to a society that has drifted away from its intentions : “When actual life in a society or portion of a society becomes too different from a still cherished ideal of life, those who live in the ideal rather than the real appear to be . . . a fool. Although they always exist, they are more visible in times of crisis” ( 5). One Fifties conflict that revealed America falling short of its cherished ideal was, of course, McCarthyism. Freethinkers were hounded by official suspicion in what Arthur Miller terms a “poisoned cloud of paranoid fantasy”(163). This vicious atmosphere was masked by the media’s promotion of packaged smiles as people in commercials whirled past, waltzing with their vacuum cleaners in a daze of domestic bliss. Mame offers a real alternative to phony glamor and enforced conformity, with her circle of avant-garde artists and eccentrics. She is the kind of borderline figure who, in the words of another theorist, William Willeford, “ holds open the social world to values which transcend it” (137). Much of the Fool’s power to effect transformation resides in an awareness of more than one level of reality, a way of sliding from one world to another, untroubled by boundaries that others fear to cross. In this regard, Anton Zijderveld’s comments on the Fool are illuminating:

Fools rejected the established patterns of thought and emotion, the norms, values and meanings of daily routine, the roles and habits of everyday life. . . . During their foolish acts, these nitwits would live beyond good and evil, like Nietzschean immoralists. They would exert a reign of anarchy in the structureless no-man’s land between the regions of meaning which have been given names like “human” and “animal,” “male” and “female,” “sane” and “insane,” old and new etc. They were strangers in the most original sense of the word—in this world, but not of this world. Traditional fools played erratic games with the primary foundations of human existence, with the essential criteria by which human beings manage to experience meaning at all. Turning reality upside down, they rendered it to chaos, to the forces of unstructured primeval energy. ( 2)

In the role of the Fool, Mame turns reality upside down for a number of people, from Agnes Gooch, who changes from dutiful scribe to sexy wild woman (and expectant mother), to Patrick himself, whose outlook is broadened by Mame’s disregard of the prim and tidy notions promoted by his WASP guardian. Mame lives beyond good and evil on many levels, from her insistence on Patrick’s education in the nude at an alternative school, to her tendency to lie and blur the truth.

Mame fulfills another of Zijderveld’s criteria; she is a stranger in many of the worlds she enters. Like the Fool, Mame uses costumes to cross from one world to another—for example, when she dresses up as an equestrienne in the Southern sequence of the story, her unsuitability for the role is highlighted by the tiny boots that she wears— they are several sizes too small, thereby also parodying women’s supposed stubbornness in wearing constrictive clothing in order to appear dainty and beautiful. Disproportion is also a characteristic of the Fool, and many fools deviated from physical norms. Mame’s ludicrous appearance marks her separation from the fictions of Southern gentility. Although she appears a grotesque among the sleekly groomed Southerners, tottering in tiny boots and a riding habit that doesn’t fit her, she is magically able to succeed in their milieu, staying on a dangerous horse simply because she got stuck in the sidesaddle—something only a Fool would ride on a hunt. By attributing her choice of the sidesaddle to modesty, she again calls attention to the ridiculous restrictions fashion imposes on women. Mame, in her innocence, evades the murderous intentions of Sally Cato, thus embodying another quality of the Fool—magical protection from danger.

It is the Fool’s simple innocence, or what was termed naturalness, that shields him from the malice of others, enabling the fool to expose what others are trying their best to hide. Being dense or simple-minded, Fools speak bluntly. “In this life, but not of it,” they unmask the hypocrisy and falsehood that in Mikhail Bakhtin’s words “saturate all human relationships” (162). Mame explodes hypocrisy and unmasks her nephew’s homophobia when he sneers at her “airy-fairy” friends from Fire Island, slamming Patrick for having become “one of the most beastly, bourgeois, babbitty little snobs on the Eastern seaboard” (II.6). In similar fashion, she slashes through Babcock’s veneer of respectability when she lambastes him for trying to shut Patrick up in a “safe-deposit box” and turn him into “an Aryan from Darien” (II.10).

Despite her forthrightness on these occasions, Mame’s relationship to language is complex and ambivalent. For one thing, she lies a lot, and not just about her shoe size and riding ability. Most of the time, her equivocations serve to lull the suspicions of the establishment, especially Babcock, who is bent on making Patrick into a proper, emotionless WASP. Linguistically, Mame walks the Fool’s road between innocence and duplicity in a number of ways, with “slips” of the tongue revealing sly and dangerous connections. For example, when she addresses the portentous Mr.Babcock as “Babbitt,” she causes the audience to recognize his kinship with Sinclair Lewis’s complacent snob of that name. This faux pas has the added effect of making Babcock correct her by emphasizing the “cock” in his name—an obscene pun. Mame flouts conventional notions of propriety in women’s speech by cursing roundly, calling her dead brother “a bastard,” emphatically spelling out the word for Patrick and defining it as “your late father,” so he can add it to his vocabulary list. She subverts 1950s educational norms by making sure that he gets definitions of “taboo” words which caused most grown-ups to hush an inquisitive child.

From these examples, one can see that language becomes a contested issue because of Mame. Patrick himself attempts to censor Mame when he fears that she will say something outrageous to his prospective in-laws. After she hoists her skirts to show him “the damnedest thing I ever bought” (a pair of slacks), he hints that she might restrain her language: “Uh—Auntie Mame, I don’t suppose it’s really necessary to say this— but with Gloria’s folks, I hope you won’t let your language get too well— vivid” (II.10). The gesture of hoisting her skirts reminds us of the Fool, with, as Bakhtin puts it, his propensity for betraying “to the public a private life down to the most prurient little secrets” (163). The Fool’s association with fertility and unruly sexuality goes back to earliest times. A woman who hoists her skirts teases with the possibility that one will get a glimpse of more than slacks. With this gesture, Mame further ruffles Patrick’s sense of propriety, even as she plays at allaying his anxieties, with the promise not to let out “even one teensy-weensy son-of-a-bitch.”

Literally, she keeps her word, but manages to disrupt the engagement party anyway. Barred from saying what she thinks, she resorts to outlandish staging to create a memorable evening for the Upsons. By seating her guests on furniture that she can move up and down, she metaphorically conveys the fact that in her home, they are no longer on solid ground. Her home is a theatrical space in which anything may happen. In addition she has playfully literalized the Upsons’ cutsy name for their country place— “Upson Downs”—by jerking them up and down. We are reminded of Zijderveld’s comment that the Fool plays erratic games with the primary foundations of human existence, as Mame deftly subverts all conventions of hospitality even as she professes the utmost solicitude for the comfort of her guests. As they are jiggled through the air, the Upsons are unsettled in other ways. Mame serves flaming cocktails which they cannot drink without getting scorched. Denied their accustomed means of relaxing, they become even edgier, as the elegant canapes turn out to be pickled rattlesnake. Fetus-shaped ashtrays and a view of Agnes in her very pregnant, unwed state titillate them with little shocks, but the real “meltdown” occurs when Mame announces that the proceeds of her new book will fund a home for Jewish refugees to be built next door to the Upsons’ house in an exclusive suburban neighborhood. It is ironic that the Upsons’ town is called “Mountebank,” an indication that they are impostors whom Mame has exposed.

By allowing the Upsons to make fools of themselves with their petty snobberies and attachment to exclusivity, Mame helps Patrick recover from his infatuation with Gloria. Mame has trained him to relish a broader life than the one that the Park Avenue set has to offer. When he sees how the Upsons react to Mame’s humanitarian plan, Patrick comes to understand the other side of “restricted communities”—that those who live there are themselves restricted from experiencing the richness and pleasures of life. When we recall that Gloria resembles the media ideal for Fifties women—bland, attractive and small-minded—we can better appreciate what Mame has done in educating her nephew to reject such a diminished woman. Mame has also succeeded in winning other significant victories. One is over the sappy poet O’Bannion, sent to help her polish her memoirs. When O’Bannion was palmed off on her by Lindsay and Vera, Mame resisted, exclaiming, “You don’t trust me to write my own life!” He turns out to be a conniving cad, sponging off Mame, even as he distorts her account with a load of Irish incongruities. Although she appears to play along, flirting with him and his Irish fantasies, when the book finally comes out, it is unadulterated by peat bogs and Celtic mumbo-jumbo, as her publisher Lindsey’s remark emphasizes: “And the most important thing, Vera, is that she did it all by herself. There isn’t an Alana or a Coccamaura in the whole book” (II.10). Resistance to male control of literary standards has eluded women for a very long time. I am therefore surprised that feminist readers have overlooked this significant moment. For, as everyone stands around marveling at Mame’s interpretation of their lives, we realize that Mame has scored another victory—control of narrative. Moving from not being trusted to write her own life, she has written the record for all

Another area in which Mame as Fool transcends negative female stereotypes is that of motherhood—surrogate in her case. These stereotypes continue to haunt us, starting with Philip Wylie’s near hysterical condemnation of mothers in Generation of Vipers (1942), resurfacing with Hans Sebald’s more clinical assessment in Momism, with its sinister subtitle The Silent Disease of America (1976). A quotation Wylie should suffice to show some of the stereotypes mothers are up against. He has a number of vivid phrases with which he caricatures Mom, including “brass-breasted Baal” and “the thin and enfeebled martyr whose very urine, nevertheless, will etch glass” (187) , but an even harsher assessment follows:

She is a middle-aged puffin with an eye like a hawk that has just seen a rabbit twitch far below. She is about twenty pounds overweight, with no sprint, but sharp heels and a hard backhand which she does not regard as a foul, but as a womanly defense. In a thousand of her, there is not sex appeal enough to budge a hermit ten paces off a rock ledge. She none the less spends several hundred dollars a year on permanents and transformations, pomades, cleansers, rouges, lipsticks and the like—and fools nobody except herself. (189)

Rosalind Russell, as Auntie Mame, is the antithesis of this crabbed portrait. Filled with radiant energy, but at first very tentative about how to connect with a small boy, she concentrates on opening doors in people’s lives so that they can leap as joyfully through them as she does throughout the movie. This story offers a woman who nurtures imaginatively while soaring above the dismal patterns described by Wylie. Mame has combined the various freedoms of the Fool that Bakhtin cites: “to confuse, parody, hyperbolize, to act life as a comedy, to rip off masks” ( 163) with the concern of a mother. She has prevented her surrogate son from becoming one of those “sons-of-bitches” who are starving even though the banquet of life awaits. Contrary to the fate of many female characters in the films of the Fifties who, as Molly Haskell notes, “contract spiritually and disappear into the miasma of male fantasies” (26), Mame takes the road to further adventures. Since the Fool is often represented as a traveler, with stick and pouch,² I find it significant that the end of this play finds Mame traveling also, on the road to India, in the company of Patrick’s little boy— a sign that she connects with an energy that is pure and unspoiled in men, and that she will continue to feast and enjoy life always, a future that very few canonical texts ever allow women .

Jennifer Wheat

Humanities

University of Hawaii at Hilo

Hilo, Hawaii 96720-4091

Notes

¹ As Comden and Green’s filmfollows Lawrence and Lee’s script closely, I do not distinguish between the two in this article, except when referring to specific performance choices in the film.

²  In the film there is a still moment in which Russell wields an ice-pick resembling a Fool’s bauble and wears an odd mottled jacket and cap similar to that of a medieval Fool. This occurs as she poses on the edge of an abyss, waiting for her husband to snap her photo. While I cannot ascribe directorial intention to the tableau, I could not help being struck by the archetypal iconography.

Works Cited

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Bakhtin, M.M.. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. CarolEmerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.

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Biskind, Peter. Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood Taught us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties. New York: Pantheon, 1983.

Crowther, Bosley. “Auntie Mame.” New York Times 10 December 1958, sec. D 5:39.

DaCosta, Morton, dir. Auntie Mame. Perf. Rosalind Russell, Forrest Tucker, Coral Browne. Warner Bros., 1958.

Gray, Frances. Women and Laughter. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1994.

Haskell, Molly. Holding My Own in No Man’s Land: Women and Men and Film and Feminists. New York: Oxford U P. 1997.

Landay, Lori. Madcaps, Screwballs, Con Women: the Female Trickster in American Culture. Philadelphia, U of Pennsylvania P, 1998.

Lawrence, Jerome, and Robert E. Lee. Auntie Mame. New York: Vanguard, 1957.

Leibman, Nina C. Living Room Lectures: The Fifties Family in Film and Television. Austin: U of Texas P, 1995.

May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New York: Basic Books, 1988. 

Miller, Arthur. “Why I Wrote the Crucible.” The New Yorker 22 Jul. 1996: 158+.

Sebald, Hans. Momism: the Silent Disease of America. Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1976.

Sikov. Ed. Laughing Hysterically: American Screen Comedy of the 1950’s. New York: Columbia U P, 1994.

Swain, Barbara. Fools and Folly during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. New York: Columbia UP, 1932.

Willeford, William. The Fool and his Sceptre: A Study in Clowns and Jesters and their Audience. Evanston: Northwestern U P, 1969.

Wylie, Philip. Generation of Vipers. New York: Rinehart, 1942.

Zijderveld, Anton C. Reality in a Looking Glass. Rationality through an Analysis of Traditional Folly. London: Routledge, 1982.