Elaine Dundy, 86; author wrote about life with Kenneth Tynan
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.
Dundy was the author of several books, the best known of which are "The Dud Avocado" (1958), a novel about a young woman much like herself, who comes of age in the 1950s through a series of misadventures in decadent Paris; and "Elvis and Gladys" (1985), a well-received 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 brilliant 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."
Dundy was born Elaine Brimberg in 1921 into a prosperous New York City family. Her father was a successful businessman and philanthropist but was so abusive that she left home as soon 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 the flamboyant Tynan, an Oxford graduate who would soon terrorize the theater world with his brilliant and lacerating reviews for the London Observer. Soon after, as 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.
Dundy worked as an actress but found only moderate success. Tynan encouraged her to try writing a novel and promised he would not read it until she was done.
