On May 3rd, 1982, Brenda Diana Duff Frazier died at Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Boston of inoperable bone cancer at the age of 60. Her body, when she was admitted in February, weighed 65 lb. She was, according to the Vanity Fair essay her biographer Gioia Diliberto published five years later, fed through a nasogastric tube in her final weeks, and even then she remained obsessed with her weight, yanking the tube from her nose whenever her fingers could close around her upper arm without resistance.
She had spent the previous 20 years as a recluse, dividing her life between a house in East Harwich, Massachusetts, and a quiet apartment on Beacon Hill, refusing photographs, refusing interviews, refusing the name the country had once known her by. She had been cremated, and her ashes were scattered at sea.
44 years earlier, on the night of December 27th, 1938, she had walked into the ballroom of the Ritz-Carlton in New York at 24 minutes past 11:00 in the evening, in a white satin gown trimmed with ostrich feathers, an orchid bouquet in her hand, the headline of every major American newspaper waiting outside, and the country in the middle of the Depression had stopped what it was doing to look at her.
The next morning, the San Francisco Chronicle ran four words across the front page. Brenda is finally out. Now we can all relax. She was 17 years old. In today’s episode of Old Money Allure, we trace how a Canadian banker’s granddaughter was assembled between the ages of 12 and 17 into the most photographed teenager in the United States, how the Depression-era press apparatus converted her image into a national consolation prize, how the title of Glamour Girl Number One became the only identity her mother and the newspapers would permit her. And how
the most famous debutante of the century spent the rest of her life trying, with 31 attempts on her own life, and a public confession in the same magazine that had crowned her, to refuse the role America had cast her in before she was old enough to consent to it. Brenda Diana Duff Frazier was born on June 9th, 1921 in Quebec, Canada, into a family whose money was not American, and whose social position was not, by the standards of the Knickerbocker enclaves that would later try to exclude her, established at all.
The stories behind figures like Brenda Frazier, the public lives they were sold into, and the private ruin those lives produced, receive extended treatment in our free Substack newsletter, where the personal and financial wreckage too complex for documentary format reveals what these extraordinary lives actually cost the women who lived them.
The Frazier saga belongs in that company. Her father, Frank Duff Frazier, came from a prosperous Boston family whose money had been made in the western grain trade, and who, by the time of Brenda’s birth, had largely drunk and squandered its way out of any influence the trade had once conferred. Her grandfather, Frank Pierce Frazier, was reported by Time magazine to have considered his own son the only bad investment he ever made in his life.
A verdict the son confirmed on the day of Brenda’s birth by disappearing into an alcoholic absence so prolonged that he did not see his daughter for months. The genuine wealth in the family ran through her mother’s line, and it ran out of Canada. Her maternal grandfather was Sir Frederick Williams Taylor, born in Moncton, New Brunswick on October 23rd, 1863, who rose through the Bank of Montreal to become its general manager and later a director.
And who was knighted by King George V in 1910 for his services to Canadian finance. His knighthood was a British Imperial honor, not a New York social credential, and his primary residence in his later years was not Manhattan, but Nassau in the Bahamas, where his wife, Lady Jane Farrar Henshaw Williams Taylor, functioned as Time observed in its 1938 coverage as the social matriarch of the colony.
The distinction is essential to everything that followed. Brenda Frazier was not old money American. And the established Astor and Vanderbilt families would later, with the precise cruelty available to old wealth confronting new, hold the Canadian banking origin against her. Her mother, Brenda Germaine Henshaw Williams Taylor, was the only daughter of Sir Frederick and Lady Jane, born in 1889, and would, across three marriages and one daughter, accumulate the name Brenda Germaine Henshaw Williams Taylor Frazier Watriss
Perry and the press shorthand Big Brenda. The parents had married in December of 1916, and the marriage was, by every account that survives, an alcoholic catastrophe in which both parties carried on multiple affairs and treated their only child as a strategic asset in their mutual destruction. Big Brenda divorced Frank Frazier in January of 1926 and married Frederick Watriss two months later.
The affair with Watriss having run through the final years of the first marriage. A custody battle followed that ran for nearly eight years that reached the Supreme Court of Florida as Frazier versus Frazier in 1933. And that the presiding judge concluded with a phrase that has outlived the litigants. Neither parent appears to have been in the past, nor appears to be now, any paragon of virtue in parenthood.
The little girl whose custody had been litigated for eight years was, throughout those eight years, largely ignored. The judge’s joint custody ruling came in 1933, and 1 month later, Frank Duff Frazier died of throat cancer, resolving the question of physical custody by the simpler method of removing one of its claimants.
Brenda was 12 years old, and the surviving parent was the parent who had spent the previous decade preparing her for a single use. Big Brenda’s strategy was to remove her daughter from any environment that might produce an alternative identity, and place her instead inside the apparatus that produced debutantes.
She was enrolled at Miss Chapin’s School for Girls in Manhattan, the institution that trained the daughters of established New York for the ornamental existence their futures required. She was sent on to Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut, the boarding school whose alumni roster reads, across the century, like an index of American first ladies and old society wives.
And she was finally dispatched to a finishing school in Munich, where she studied French and German, attended classical concerts in the evenings, and discovered, in her own later words, that people went to the opera not to be seen, but because they genuinely loved the music. She was an excellent painter by the assessment of her teachers, and a capable pianist.
Her mother and grandmother treated both abilities as impediments to marriage. She herself, writing in 1963, summarized the curriculum behind the curriculum with a sentence that cuts in two directions. I was pretty good in my classes, but that was altogether unimportant. Indeed, it was possibly dangerous.
It might disqualify me for marriage to someone who was a brilliant catch, but unfortunately stupid. She added in the same essay, “You do not become a grand dame in high society by playing the piano or painting seriously.” She begged her mother to let her remain in Munich, to forget about the debut, to continue living and studying in Germany, and her mother answered with a single sentence whose confidence has not aged well.
“Brenda, you’ll deeply regret not having your debut. You’ll be much happier if you do.” The New York Times reviewing Dilberto’s biography in 1987 observed that Brenda had been encouraged to think of her body as a kind of triumphal chariot in which she traveled, a training in ornamental existence that replaced any conventional intellectual formation.
The chariot was being prepared while the girl inside it was still asking for piano lessons. By the autumn of 1938, she had been returned from Munich to New York, and the apparatus that had been assembled across her childhood was ready to receive her. She was 17. She was the only child of an absent dead father and a relentless ambitious mother, and the country she had been brought back to was about to convert her, with her mother’s complete participation, into a national consolation prize for the worst economic
decade in its history. The financial architecture of the Frazier household was a paradox the press would never report accurately, and Brenda herself would spend the rest of her life trying to correct. Time magazine, in its 1938 coverage of the debut, reported that a court accounting showed this, in the magazine’s phrase, “infant over 14” had several trust funds with assets of $4,051,000.
The corpus, as later traced Diliberto’s biography, had come primarily from the Frazier paternal estate, structured so that the principal was distributable only to her children upon her death, or in a provision whose literary irony has not improved with age, to Yale University if she died childless. What the trust documents did not convey, and what the tabloid summaries of her wealth concealed, was the structural truth of her cash position.
Brenda herself, writing in Life magazine in 1963, was emphatic on the point. “Everybody thought my mother and I were swimming in wealth at the time of my debut. Actually, we had only a little money, which the surrogate court gave us out of the trust fund income to live on.” She offered in the same essay a detail that captures the gap between image and ledger with brutal economy.
“One reason I went to the Stork Club so often was that Sherman Billingsley, to attract debutantes, served us lunch for just a dollar a piece. The most famous heiress in America was eating dollar lunches because the principal was locked up and the income was thin, and the woman who controlled the household, her mother, had her own reasons for keeping it that way.
” Big Brenda was a figure that Diliberto’s biography characterizes, in a phrase the New York Times review found unimprovable, as a driven, ugly duckling mother determined to become, through Brenda, the belle of the ball that she herself had never been, and blind to her daughter’s yearning for a non-public life.
She had refused, throughout Brenda’s childhood, to display physical affection. The child was required to curtsy to her, not embrace her, and to kiss her grandmother’s hand rather than her grandmother’s cheek. She traveled to Europe at Christmas and left Brenda to open presents alone with the butler. She put 12-year-old Brenda into furs and heavy makeup while criticizing her weight.
And historian Christian Richardson, [music] in her Norton history of the debutante, articulated the underlying mechanics with the analytical clarity the situation requires. There’s a bit of that stage mom energy with Brenda’s mom. She didn’t get to enjoy what Brenda had. Beauty, access to elite society, and she wanted it. She could leverage Brenda’s trust fund to achieve that.
The trust fund was the working capital of the project, and the project was the daughter. A psychiatrist who would later treat Brenda for the consequences of the project summarized the architecture in a single sentence preserved in the Dilberto biography with the precision of a verdict.
Her mother led her to it by the hand. By the spring of 1936, 2 and 1/2 years before the debut, the apparatus that would convert Brenda Frazier into a national figure had already started its work. The most important society columnist in the United States at this moment was Maury Henry Bidwell Paul, who wrote under the pseudonym Cholly Knickerbocker in William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and American, who was paid a reported $100,000 a year, who was syndicated to roughly 60 papers, and who had coined the phrase cafe society to describe the post-prohibition
collision of old wealth, new wealth, theatrical celebrity, and gossip that he himself chronicled. On June 14th, 1936, Paul previewed a lunch at the Ritz, where the 14-year-old Brenda had appeared with her mother. And his column closed with a sentence that functioned in retrospect as the founding document of her fame.
“It may seem a bit early,” he wrote, “but I here and now predict Brenda Frazier will be one of the belles, if not the belle of her season. The prediction was made 2 and 1/2 years before the season it named. The publication of the prediction itself became the event that would make the prediction true because once a girl of 14 had been singled out by Cholly Knickerbocker, every photographer, every restaurateur, every advertiser, and every rival hostess in New York had a reason to attend to her.
The New Yorker in E.J. Kahn’s June 1939 profile titled Just a Debutante traced the propagation of the fame after the prediction with the dry precision the magazine had already made its signature. Her initial public identification as the glamour girl of the year, Kahn reported, came when a Yale student casually used the phrase to a photographer named Chick Farmer at the Stork Club.
Farmer’s photograph appeared in the World Telegram, and no one officially crowned Brenda as the glamour girl. She merely found herself in that position, and neither she nor anyone else could pinpoint how it happened. The advertising trade magazine Tide dubbed her, in a phrase Kahn flagged with mild astonishment, a promotion natural.
The New Republic ran a piece about her on its cover. The tabloid editor Barclay Beekman of the Mirror confided to his readers with the bemused candor of a professional who had encountered a force he could not refuse, “I just can’t keep her name out.” The mechanism was almost entirely self-reinforcing. A girl whose photograph reliably sold newspapers received more photographs.
The photographs produced more demand. And by the middle of 1938, 6 months before her debut, the De Liberto biography records that 5,000 articles had been written about her. She had done nothing. She had attended school in three countries, sat for photographs her mother arranged, and turned 17. The Cholly Knickerbocker pseudonym itself was an institution of the Hearst press, whose continuity would carry forward through every phase of her life, surviving Maury Paul’s death in 1942, and passing 3 years later to Igor
Cassini, who would, in 1947, name Jacqueline Bouvier the new queen deb of the year by explicitly invoking in his column the predecessor who had selected Brenda Frazier as the queen of glamour. The sentence that ratified Bouvier into the public role she would, as Mrs. Kennedy, carry into the White House began with Brenda Frazier’s name, and the apparatus that had built Brenda in 1936, and named Jackie in 1947, was, structurally, a single continuous press operation that had been converting young women into public property since
before either of them was born. The country was in the seventh year of the depression. The editors of New York were looking for a face that could be sold to a readership that needed a reason to keep looking at front pages, and Cholly Knickerbocker’s 1936 prediction had given them a name they could attach to that face without having to ask the girl any questions.
The party that closed the campaign was held on December 27th, 1938, in the ballroom of the Ritz-Carlton on Madison Avenue, and it was staged by big Brenda and her social advisers with the operational precision of a small military deployment. 2,000 engraved invitations were sent. The hotel’s entire ballroom suite, including the Palm Court and the Oval Room, was rented, along with additional rooms for guests who would need to nap and repair their faces between the start of the party and its conclusion the next morning.
The florist, Constance Spry, transformed the ballroom suite into a moonlit garden. Emil Coleman’s orchestra opened the evening with Manhattan, then moved through a set of Cole Porter standards that included It’s De-Lovely, Mountain Greenery, and the song that Brenda had said was her favorite, Get Out of Town.
A second ensemble, Alexander Haas’s six-man gypsy band, played rhumbas in the Palm Court. Supper was served at 1:00 in the morning, black bean soup, breast of chicken with Madeira sauce, wild rice, pureed peas, chocolate and vanilla ice cream in individual molds, tiny cakes, and coffee. Breakfast was served at 4:00, ham and biscuits, hot fruit, chicken hash with bacon.
1,000 quarts of champagne were consumed across the night. Time magazine reported the entertainment cost the family some $50,000, a figure Brenda herself would later dispute as inflated, telling friends the true outlay had been between 16,000 and 20,000. And the gap between the reported cost and the family’s actual cash position was, like every other gap in the story, papered over by the press’s appetite for the larger figure.
Brenda made her entrance at exactly 24 [music] minutes past 11:00 in white satin trimmed with ostrich feathers, carrying a bouquet of orchids, accompanied by her mother. She was suffering from influenza. Her feet were swollen from the edema that would persist for the rest of her life, and she had begged Big Brenda to cancel the party.
Her mother had answered with two syllables, “It’s just a cold.” She drank milk mixed with Coca-Cola instead of champagne. At 6:30 the next morning, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. noticed she was shivering in the emptying ballroom and draped a white tablecloth over her shoulders. And Brenda, writing 25 years later, recalled the moment with one of the saddest sentences of her life.
Doug said I was shivering, that the hall must have grown cold, but the hall was not cold at all. I was shivering from exhaustion. The party appeared on the front pages of newspapers in New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco, St. Louis, Atlanta, Seattle, and Los Angeles. The New York Daily News announced the result in three syllables. Bowes a Wow.
The San Francisco Chronicle, exhaling from across the continent, ran the seven-word headline that became the unofficial epitaph of her social career before her social career had begun. Brenda is finally out. Now we can all relax. Cholly Knickerbocker himself, the man whose 1936 prediction had made the night possible, produced the most florid summary of his own prophecy fulfilled, writing in the Journal and American that diamonds had sparkled, champagne corks had popped, a small army of musicians had played, and Brenda DD Frazier, the
number one glamour girl of the 1938 to 1939 season, had slid down the debutantal ways into the New York social seas. She collapsed into bed at dawn, and when she woke, she could not remember what had happened all the following day. In November of 1938, several weeks before the Ritz-Carlton party, Brenda’s photograph had appeared on the cover of Life magazine, the picture weekly that Henry Luce had launched in 1936, and that by 1938 had become the single most influential image distribution platform in the United States.
The cover did not show a head of state or a war. It showed a 17-year-old girl who had not yet been formally introduced to society, and the appearance of her face on that cover, weeks before the social event the cover was nominally previewing, completed the inversion that the Cholly Knickerbocker prediction had begun.
The press had stopped reporting on debutantes and had started manufacturing them. And the most efficient manufacturer in America had selected Brenda Frazier as the prototype. In the following year, the gossip columnist Walter Winchell, whose syndicated column reached an estimated 50 million readers and listeners daily, coined for Brenda a portmanteau that did not exist before her.
Selebuntant, celebrity, and debutante fused into a single noun that named, with the casual brutality of pure invention, the new category she had been pushed into occupying. The word entered the language and never left. It would, 60 years later, be applied to Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian. And the historians who would make that connection would correctly identify Brenda Frazier as the original from whom the category descended.
The Depression-era function of her image was articulated with mordant precision by the New York Times review of the De Liberto biography. To the nation grappling with the burdens of the Depression in the winter of 1938, Brenda was a radiant symbol of hope. And then the review immediately delivered the question the radiant image had been designed to suppress.
Hope for what, exactly? To be gazed upon? To be photographed? To possess wealth unearned? The signature look that the cover and the columns disseminated was an iconography as deliberate as the costume of a stage character. The face was powdered lunar white. The mouth was painted the slashed crimson that the Vanity Fair essay would later call liver red.
The hair was black, sleek, and so meticulously arranged that, as Wikipedia notes, she developed neck problems from refusing to turn her head for fear of disturbing the coiffure. A perfume called Sarong was created in her honor. A drag ball circuit in New York was reportedly populated by Brenda Frazier impersonators in black wigs, strapless gowns, and white face powder.
Fan mail addressed only to Brenda, New York, New York, no street, no number, reliably reached her. A stranger once burst into her dressing room while she was changing and exclaimed with the disbelief of a religious encounter, “I’ve just got to look at you.” She was, in a phrase the fact in a compilation preserved, the best advertisement for just about everything.
The advertisement, she would later understand, had been booked before the 17-year-old inside it had been consulted. The transgression that ratified her status as a national figure and that simultaneously closed the doors of established New York society against her was the commercial endorsement contract. The norm in 1938 for a girl of her claimed social standing was unambiguous.
Old money did not advertise. A daughter of the Astor or Vanderbilt families did not pose for soap. A debutante from the Knickerbocker enclave did not sell automobiles. Brenda Frazier did both. And a perfume was created for her in the bargain. Time magazine in its 1938 coverage recorded that she had posed for Woodbury soap advertisements.
Wikipedia, drawing on De Liberto, confirms a separate campaign for Studebaker automobiles. An endorsement made faintly absurd by the documented detail that she did not herself know how to drive. It was a Studebaker advertisement that, according to the New York Post’s later reconstruction, first attracted the attention of Howard Hughes, who would propose to her in due course and be declined.
The advertising trade magazine Tide named her a promotion natural. The historian Kristen Richardson, interviewed by the post, articulated the commercial logic without sentimentality. She was a proto-influencer, famous for simply being famous, which eventually snowballed into something more. The social cost of the snowball was paid inside the drawing rooms that Big Brenda had spent her daughter’s childhood trying to enter.
Brenda was not an Astor, Richardson observed. She wasn’t from old New York. And many deemed her excessively ostentatious. Parents didn’t want their children associating with her. The Knickerbocker families did not on the whole attend the Ritz-Carlton party. The 2,000 guests were drawn predominantly from cafe society, the Hearst press, the theatrical world, and the publicity-adjacent corners of New York whose participation could be purchased or attracted by mention.
The genuine old families watched from a distance and registered with the precision of an inventory that the Frasers had advertised soap. Brenda herself, who was sharper about the dynamic than any [music] commentator who would write about it later, understood with complete clarity what she had become and what she had not become.
She was booed at a Broadway nightclub when she was introduced from her table alongside the comedian Ben Blue and the figure skater Sonja Henie, both of whom had earned their place in the lineup by accomplishment. She later told friends, in the formulation Victoria Kelly preserved for the De Liberto biography, “I’m not a celebrity. I don’t deserve all this.
I haven’t done anything at all. I’m just a debutante.” The line is the clearest single sentence she ever produced about her own position. It diagnosed at 20 what would take the country 60 years and the careers of three subsequent generations of famous-for-being-famous successors to confirm. The first marriage, when it came, was contracted into the same café society that the endorsements had cemented and to a man whose celebrity was as manufactured as her own.
John Sims Kelly, called Shipwreck after the 1920s flagpole sitter Alvin Kelly, was born in Kentucky on July 8th, 1910. Was dubbed at the University of Kentucky the fastest man in the South, ran the 100-yard dash in 9.8 seconds, and played professional football for the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers in the early 1930s.
By the time he met Brenda, he had been a player-coach and a partial owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers football club, had retired from the field, and was, in Dilberto’s borrowed Fitzgerald phrase, a national figure in a way. One of those men who reached such an acute limited excellence at 21 that everything afterward savors of anticlimax.
He was 29, working as an insurance broker, and a fixture at the Stork Club, 21, and El Morocco. They were married on June 30th, 1941, at her mother’s apartment in the Ritz-Carlton, the same hotel where she had made her debut 3 and 1/2 years earlier, by a clergyman in the presence of 200 guests. She was 20. A reporter asked her, on the record, on her wedding day, whether she was happy.
She told him the truth. “No, can’t you see? I’m utterly miserable.” The best man went afterward to the journalists and persuaded them to destroy the recording. And the papers, which had built her in the first place, reported instead that Brenda Frazier, glamour girl number one, was now Mrs. John S. Kelly, housewife.
She honeymooned in Hawaii. She moved with Kelly to a Long Island farmhouse where the Stork Club and the Ritz, the only landscape she had been trained to inhabit, vanished from her daily life. She was miserable in her own later confession. Within the first year of the marriage, according to the Observer’s reconstruction drawing on De Liberto, she gave birth to a stillborn child whose parts had to be surgically removed from her, an experience she remembered with horror as one that almost killed her.
Their surviving daughter, Brenda Victoria Kelly, was born in 1945 and the papers, with the unfailing instinct of an industry that had built its readership on the mother, dubbed the infant the town’s littlest glamour girl. A headline Brenda received with the dread of a woman who recognized the casting call she had been hearing all her life.
The marriage unraveled across the late 1940s. Kelly kept an office at Rockefeller Center for an insurance business and spent most of his time on the golf course. In 1950, he was hospitalized for a series of operations and during the hospitalization, Brenda began going out at night again. And when he recovered, she asked for a separation and the couple never lived together afterward, although the divorce was not formalized until 1956.
Her own attorney, Jerome Doyle, told De Liberto, with the discomfort of a lawyer breaking the professional reserve of his trade, “You could see when they were together that they were in love and I think she loved him until the day she died.” The marriage that had been entered into miserably had been left, 15 years later, with a love that neither party had been equipped to use.
The papers reported the divorce. The girl who had been glamour girl number one was now 35, the mother of a daughter she had promised to spare the life she had been given. And the apparatus that had built her was no longer interested in covering her movements. The clinical record of Brenda Frazier’s decline began earlier than the divorce papers and ran deeper than anyone diagnosis can name.
She had developed by her mid-teens a pattern of binge eating followed by self-induced vomiting that Wikipedia, drawing on Diliberto, describes as an emergency measure she used only occasionally as a teenager, but that intensified across her 20s and 30s into an endless cycle of binge eating followed by self-induced vomiting and extended periods of starving herself.
She would later refer to her own condition with the gallows precision that ran through everything she said about herself. I invented anorexia. The diagnostic label did not exist as a household term in the 1930s. The behavior did. She would eat enormous lunches at restaurants and disappear into the ladies’ room.
She began carrying a plastic container in her handbag to dinner parties so she could purge directly if she was not near a toilet, a function she once performed at a dinner table at the Boston Ritz in front of the assembled guests. She rationalized the pattern to the Observer’s interviewer, drawing on Diliberto, with a sentence whose psychological architecture is its own diagnosis.
It was the only thing I had control over. The eating disorder ran alongside an escalating dependency on alcohol and prescription drugs that by the late 1950s had become its own medical problem. A friend’s enumeration of the pharmaceutical inventory preserved in the Diliberto biography and quoted in everything written about her since has the cadence of a litany.
Pills to go to sleep and pills to wake up. Pills for digestion and pills to go to the bathroom. And pills to be happy and pills to be sad. And pills to be. She carried the inventory in a red leather case from Mark Cross with a dozen plastic vials inside. She drank a split of champagne or vodka and water at breakfast, kept champagne in a small ice box in her room, carried a flask in the shape of a radio containing a mixture of Cointreau and vodka she called fuzzies.
On March 16th, 1961, while she was still married to her second husband, Brenda made the first of what her psychiatrist would eventually count as approximately 31 attempts on her own life across the following two decades. The first was a sleeping pill overdose and she was found and survived. Her daughter Victoria, asked by Diliberto to characterize what the attempts had meant in the household where she had grown up, produced a sentence the biographer chose to preserve verbatim.
Suicide was taken almost casually. My mother tried it so many times. The psychiatrist, asked by Diliberto for his clinical assessment, produced a figure that has its own awful precision. I’d say she wanted to die 49% and wanted to live 51%. She always did something. He added, perhaps unconsciously, to ensure that she was saved.
One signal Brenda used repeatedly was to lock her bedroom door. The arms that had been photographed in white satin in the Ritz-Carlton Ballroom bore, by the late 1960s, the railroad track scars the Diliberto biography records. The Depression-era press apparatus that had assembled her had by then dispersed. The woman it had assembled remained in a quiet house on Cape Cod doing the work of pulling herself apart with the only tools the assembly had left her.
Between the separation from Shipwreck Kelly and the formal divorce, Brenda passed through a sequence of relationships whose unifying feature was their inability to repair anything. Howard Hughes proposed to her and she declined. She had an affair with the New Yorker cartoonist Peter Arno, who had attended the 1938 debut.
She had a longer and reportedly violent relationship with an Italian count named Pietro Franceso Melé, who, according to the Observer’s account drawing on the Di Liberto biography, would oscillate between showering her with emeralds and screaming with the cruelty of a man trained to use beauty as a weapon, “See how ugly you are.
” She was hospitalized at Doctors Hospital in New York for what newspapers of the period called a severe nervous breakdown after Melé. The second marriage was, by every available account, an attempt to climb out of cafe society and into a quieter life that the trajectory of her decline did not permit her to inhabit.
On March 3rd, 1957, 14 months after the Kelly divorce, Brenda married Robert Chatfield Taylor, a sales executive of sufficient unobtrusiveness that the contemporary press cannot agree, across the available sources, on the nature of his profession. She had moved with her 12-year-old daughter to a small town near Cape Cod before the wedding, and the marriage was, at its outset, the closest she had come to the domestic privacy she had been asking for since Munich.
It did not last. She confessed to friends, the fact in eight compilation records, that almost as soon as she walked down the aisle she had regretted it. Shortly after the wedding, according to the Di Liberto Vanity Fair essay, she was rushed to Cape Cod Hospital where she remained for approximately a month. The first attempt on her life in March of 1961 came while she was still legally his wife. They divorced in 1962.
She kept the name. For the remaining 20 years of her life, the New York Times obituary would record she was Mrs. Chatfield Taylor, recognized as Brenda Frazier when she appeared in public, though those moments became year by year vanishingly rare. She divided her time between East Harwich, Massachusetts and Beacon Hill in Boston.
She had ceased by the early 1960s to be a public person in any sense the Cholly Knickerbocker apparatus had originally manufactured. She had not, however, ceased to be the figure that apparatus had named. And she had begun in the early 1960s to consider whether she might be able to say so in her own words in the same magazine that had made her face the face of the year in 1938.
A Time magazine people item from June 14th, 1963, 6 months before the essay would appear, captured the position she had arrived at, photographing Brenda and Shipwreck Kelly together at the Stork Club. The two of them now ex-spouses on cordial terms discussing the future of their 17-year-old daughter, Victoria.
The Kellys had agreed, the item reported, that there would be none of that coming out foolishness for Victoria. And Brenda was quoted with the calm of a woman who had finally been permitted to use a complete sentence about her own experience. “Too many people see the debut as a goal, but perspective is more important.
I want my daughter to have a full life.” The sentence was, in its quiet way, the single most subversive piece of writing Brenda Frazier ever produced about the institution that had built her. A full life was the thing the apparatus had not been organized to deliver. The answer she would produce in December of 1963 was the closest thing to a final statement she ever made about her own life.
On December 6th, 1963, Life magazine published a confessional essay by Brenda Frazier under the headline My debut, a horror, and the subhead, The Most Famous Deb of All, Denounces the Life She Lived. The publication coincided with an irony the magazine did not pretend was incidental, with the issue whose cover was devoted to the state funeral of President John F.
Kennedy, who had been assassinated two weeks earlier in Dallas, and who had, in his own cafe society years, danced with Brenda at the Stork Club. She had been 25 years earlier on the cover of Life. She was now in the same magazine the byline on an internal account of what the cover had done to her. The essay was, by Dilberto’s later description, a ghost-written account that began with an account of one of Brenda’s attempts on her own life, and flashed back through her childhood, the misery behind her glittering celebrity, her two failed marriages, and
her redemption through psychoanalysis. It omitted, whether by editorial pressure or by Brenda’s choice, any direct reference to her alcoholism, her drug dependency, or her anorexia, the specific clinical mechanisms that had been doing the daily work of her destruction. What it contained instead was a set of sentences that did the moral work the omissions could not.
“I hated every [music] minute of my debut,” she wrote. “I fell into bed afterward in such a state of collapse that I still cannot remember what happened all the next day.” She had looked back, the essay reported, at photographs of the event after years of therapy, and she had noted, in the phrase that has stuck to her story ever since, “The mockery of fake smiles and how many people there are in the world who were doomed like me by unfortunate childhoods to adult lives plagued by fears and inner emptiness.
” She described her own role inside her mother’s project with the analytic detachment of someone reading her own court record. “The only way I could gain love or acceptance was to submerge my desires in my mother’s, to be a passive tool of her whims.” She forgave her family with a sentence whose generosity is also a diagnosis.
“Their wrongdoings,” she wrote, “were the inevitable result of their own upbringing.” She delivered on the question of the debut as institution, the verdict that has appeared on every retrospective ever published about her. “Being the number one glamour deb is the worst thing that can happen to you.” And she explained what she had spent the previous decade trying to give her daughter in a sentence the Vanity Fair essay quoted in full, “I am at last becoming a real mother to my daughter.
I am free now to give her both love and the guidance that teenagers require and desperately want. Our first step was to agree that she would not have a coming out party, a decision in which she takes great pride. She has not been pushed into the first irrevocable circle of a meaningless social whirl, and is free to choose her own kind of future.
” The essay greatly boosted Brenda’s self-confidence, the De Liberto biography records, and she appeared on talk shows including the David Susskind show to argue her case. Three years later, in 1966, the photographer Diane Arbus came to her Boston apartment on assignment from Esquire and took the photograph that would in due course enter the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art under the title Brenda Duff Frazier, 1938, [music] debutante of the year at home, Boston, Massachusetts, 1966.
The image showed a gaunt woman of 45, heavily made up in [music] white face powder and red lipstick, propped up in bed with a cigarette in her hand, looking warily at the camera. The hair was still black, still arranged. The lips were still painted the shade she had worn since 17. The body inside the dressing gown was the body of someone who had been eating very little for very many years.
The observer looking at the photograph decades later described it as more a vision of the evil queen than Sleeping Beauty, >> [music] >> and the description captured the precise fact about the image that has kept it on museum walls. The 17-year-old in the white satin gown and the 45-year-old in the dressing gown were the same girl, maintaining the same face in two different decades of the same long performance. She had told her story.
The Cholly Knickerbocker apparatus by 1966 was no longer interested in hearing it. The diagnosis of inoperable bone cancer came in February of 1982 after a body scan at Newton-Wellesley Hospital outside Boston. She was 60 years old, 1 month short of 61, weighed 65 lb, and was fed through a nasogastric tube she repeatedly removed.
On the morning of May 3rd, 1982, at 4:00 in the morning, with the hand of a friend in hers, she stopped breathing. She had begged in her final weeks, with the directness that ran through everything she said when the press apparatus was not listening. Don’t leave me. The Vanity Fair essay Gioia Diliberto would publish 5 years later recorded the moment of her death with the clinical exactness the biographer had carried through the entire reconstruction.
Brenda’s luminous brown eyes opened wide and then froze in death’s stare a month before her 61st birthday. She was cremated. Her ashes were scattered at sea. The New York Times obituary published on May 6th and written by Paul L. Montgomery ran under the headline “Brenda Frazier, who caught eye of public as debutante dies at 60” and identified her in its opening line as Brenda Frazier Kelly Chatfield Taylor.
It noted that she had in her heyday danced with Howard Hughes, John F. Kennedy, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and had been ranged in the press of her time alongside Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, the Duke of Windsor, and Edwina Mountbatten as a symbol of glamour. It noted that she had for the previous two decades chosen a more subdued lifestyle.
The society columnist Suzy, the inheritor of the Cholly Knickerbocker franchise that Maury Paul had built and Igor Cassini had extended, produced what may stand as the most honest single sentence ever written about her. Quoted in Diliberto’s Vanity Fair essay, “Brenda Diana Duff Frazier Kelly Chatfield Taylor had everything, beauty, breeding, money, brains, a kindness and sweetness about her.
On second thought, she really didn’t have everything. Health and happiness eluded her.” The cultural afterlife she had not asked for had begun while she was still alive and it continued without her. The comic strip Brenda Starr, Reporter, created by Dale Messick on June 30th, 1940, named after her by the Chicago Tribune’s editorial assistant, Molly Slott, ran for 70 years, reached 250 newspapers, and was the first comic strip run exclusively by women.
Rodgers and Hart’s Disgustingly Rich in their 1940 show Higher and Higher had set her name to a nursery rhyme melody whose lyric the Dilberto biography preserves. Brenda Frazier sat on a wall, Brenda Frazier had a big fall, Brenda Frazier’s falling down, falling down, falling down. Stephen Sondheim, in I’m Still Here from the 1971 musical Follies, name-dropped her among the catalog of vanished celebrities the song’s forgotten showgirl had outlived.
Gioia Dilberto’s biography, Debutante: The Story of Brenda Frazier, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1987, 5 years after her death, gave the verdict that has, in the four decades since, been quoted in every retrospective written about her. She didn’t stand a chance. There was no way she was going to be happy.
Her life was basically over before it began. The Dilberto verdict, like every honest verdict that has been delivered on her since, raises the question of what, in the final accounting, the country took from her and what it gave her in exchange. It gave her the cover of Life, the front pages of eight cities, the patronage of the most widely read gossip columnists in the United States, and a portmanteau word coined for her by Walter Winchell that has outlived every figure who used it.
It took the piano lessons in Munich, the painting she had been good at, the body she would not stop punishing, the marriages she could not make work, and the 31 mornings on which she had tried to settle the account on her own terms. The relevant comparison in any final score is not between Brenda Frazier and the Astors and Vanderbilts whose doors she could not enter because those doors had been irrelevant to what was actually being done to her.
The relevant comparison is between the 17-year-old in the white satin gown and the 45-year-old in the Diane Arbus photograph and the gap between them measured in years and in pounds and in attempts is the price the country paid for the consolation prize it cost her as in the seventh year of the depression. She had told her story in life in 1963.
She had told it again through her psychiatrist and her daughter and the inventory of pill bottles in the red leather case to Di Liberto in the years after her death. The country had built her, used her and then when the apparatus that had built her lost interest, left her to spend the last 20 years of her life on Cape Cod trying to take back the consent she had not been old enough to give.
In the end, she was the most famous girl in the world for a single winter. She paid for it for the next 43 years and the sea took the rest.
