The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘They tried to be Scott and Zelda’
Growing up in the libidinous circles of Kenneth Tynan and Elaine Dundy was hell for their daughter. By Gaby Wood
Mommie Dearest, by Joan Crawford’s daughter, is the first such revenge tragedy that springs to mind – but the rise of the misery memoir has made the risk more or less universal. Philip Larkin knew that all our mums and dads were to blame for filling us with faults: “They may not mean to,” as he put it, “but they do.”
The theatre critic Kenneth Tynan and the novelist Elaine Dundy fall somewhere between celebrated screw-ups and hoi polloi: well-known enough to have published diaries or memoirs themselves, their proximity to power was also a hobby. “They relentlessly and unabashedly pursued famous people,” their daughter Tracy writes in her welldressed memoir, Wear and Tear. “Their celebrity seeking,” she suggests, was not only “like an addiction”; it was “a contact sport. They thought that if they were around famous people, they, too, would become famous”.
It was perhaps with this in mind that they fought so violently; once, when Tynan broke Dundy’s nose, she fell into the arms of Orson Welles. On another occasion he threw a plate of spaghetti at her because they’d disagreed about a play. Often, they seemed to be acting out a melodrama, but it’s reported by their offspring as if it were a Harold Lloyd caper: here is Tynan, dangling from a window ledge, threatening to kill himself; there is Dundy, swaying naked in a doorway while Tracy watches a Marx Brothers movie with the au pair.
Ken and Elaine, their daughter notes, tried “their best to be the Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald of the Fifties”. It’s possible for the reader ofWear and Tear to wonder two opposed things at the same time: why the Tynans had a child at all, and why they didn’t have more. One answer to the first question is: so they could have an audience. It seems a pity then, from their point of view, that it was to be an audience of only one. “What did you think of that?” Dundy asked her daughter after a crashing marital row, in which ashtrays and books had been hurled across the room. “You’ve had that one before,” Tracy replied. She had the genes of a theatre critic, after all.
Kenneth Tynan is now known for his sado-masochistic sexual tastes as much as for the criticism and New Yorker profiles that won him fame. For Tracy, life was mainly mortification. As the daughter of the first man to say f--on television, and as a teenager whose parents were, in her own description, “notoriously libidinous”, she was assumed to be at the forefront of the sexual revolution.
Understandably, her background had the opposite effect. When her stepmother Kathleen sent her to a sex therapist, the doctor diagnosed Tracy with vaginismus, an involuntary tightening. Perhaps it was just a very intimate form of the cringing embarrassment she felt among her father’s friends, with whom, for instance, as her 21st birthday present, she was made to watch Sammy Davis Jr’s personal copy of the banned porn film Deep Throat. She eventually lost her virginity to a man who said afterwards: “I just presumed, with your dad and all…”
The fact that her emphysemastricken father’s “sexual escapades were more extreme the sicker he got” appears in this telling to be no more than a form of mild embarrassment. Prostitutes, coprophilia, golden showers, caning, or leaving her own mother unconscious on a bathroom floor with two black eyes – all previously documented in Kathleen Tynan’s biography: these are just “rather sordid and sad” to Tracy. When Ken takes her aside and tells her he would like to bequeath to her what he believes to be his best work – a diary of his sado-masochistic affair with a mistress – Tracy is “stunned and secretly pleased by this sign that my father loved me”.
Eventually, Tracy Tynan would go on to become a Hollywood costume designer. The seeds of her interest in fashion are clear from the start, and Wear and Tear is arranged in chapters built around items of clothing. As mnemonic devices, they work well – a Pucci
For Tracy Tynan’s 21st birthday, her father screened the film ‘Deep Throat’