Author and wife of critic Tynan

Lived, chronicled coming-of-age for Americans abroad

By Elaine Woo | Tribune Newspapers

May 10, 2008

LOS ANGELES — Elaine Dundy, a novelist, biographer, journalist and memoirist who wrote about her turbulent marriage to legendary critic Kenneth Tynan and their life among the rich and famous, died May 1 at her Los Angeles home. She was 86.

The cause was a heart attack, according to her daughter, Tracy Tynan.

Ms. Dundy was the author of several books, the best known of which are "The Dud Avocado" (1958), a novel about a young woman who comes of age through a series of misadventures in decadent Paris; and "Elvis and Gladys" (1985), a biography of Elvis Presley that homes in on his relationship with his mother.

She also wrote "Life Itself!" (2001), a memoir that focuses on her 13-year marriage to Tynan, the theater critic and New Yorker writer who finally drove her away with his demands for sadomasochistic sex. In between the beatings and arguments was a charmed life amid the literati and Hollywood and theatrical elite, including Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Laurence Olivier, Gore Vidal and Orson Welles.

"She was a great wit," Vidal, who knew her for 50 years, said Monday. "There was no one else quite like her. She introduced a whole style, the freed American girl landing on old Europe, starting in Paris and moving on to London. She collected a lot of very interesting friends. ... She had a lot of reality that was far more interesting than fiction."

Ms. Dundy was born Elaine Brimberg in 1921 into a prosperous New York family. Her father was a successful businessman and philanthropist but was so abusive that she left home as soon as she could.

After graduating from Sweet Briar College in Virginia, where she studied acting, she moved to Europe, living first in Paris and later in London. In 1950, she met Tynan, an Oxford graduate who would soon terrorize the theater world with his brilliant and lacerating reviews for the London Observer. Soon after, as Ms. Dundy wrote in her memoir, he proposed to her with these words: "I am the illegitimate son of the late Sir Peter Peacock. I have an annual income. I'm 23 and I will either die or kill myself when I reach 30 because by then I will have said everything I have to say. Will you marry me?"

They were married in 1951 and divorced in 1964.

Ms. Dundy worked as an actress but found only moderate success. Tynan encouraged her to try writing a novel.

The result was the semiautobiographical "Dud Avocado," the title of which was meant to suggest the naivete of the American woman abroad, who was tough on the outside but green on the inside. The book opens on a late morning in Paris with a young American actress "drifting down the boulevard St. Michel, thoughts rising in my head like little puffs of smoke," still wearing her evening gown from the previous night's soiree.

"That was Elaine to a T," said actress Rosemary Harris, who knew Ms. Dundy for more than half a century. "She was madcap. She lived life to the fullest."

Ms. Dundy wrote two other novels, a couple of plays and, in 1980, a biography of actor Peter Finch.

Her next subject, to the horror of her sophisticated friends, was Presley, whom she did not discover until after his death in 1977.

Los Angeles Times