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Mame, Jerry Herman’s 1966 musical version of Auntie Mame, opens 10/16 at Drury Lane Oakbrook Terrace , with veteran actress Barbara Robertson as the socialite who takes her orphaned nephew under her wing. Wacky, wonderful Mame Dennis Burnside may inhabit Depression-era Manhattan, but her roots are right here in Chicago. She first saw life as the heroine of a 1955 novel by Chicago-born, North Shore-bred Edward Everett Tanner III, a 1938 graduate of Evanston Township High School. The following year his bestseller became a Broadway hit starring Rosalind Russell, whose performance was immortalized in a 1958 movie adaptation.
But Tanner–who married and fathered two children–was so deeply conflicted about his homosexuality that he suffered a nervous breakdown and attempted suicide in 1962. His literary career ran out of steam, and he separated from (but never divorced) his wife. In the early 1970s he quit writing and left New York, winding up back in Chicago, where he worked as–of all things–a butler in the Lake Shore Drive apartment of McDonald’s magnate Ray Kroc and his philanthropist wife Joan. When Tanner developed pancreatic cancer, he returned to his wife, who nursed him till his death in 1976 at the age of 55.
