Read more about Elaine Dundy

Read Elaine's essay on 'Jilly Cooper and the Art of Fiction'

Elaine Dundy was the author of a novel, The Dud Avocado, whose great success in 1958 could only further sour her marriage to Kenneth Tynan, the theatre critic, for he wished that he himself had the ability to do more than supply its spirited title.

This perfectly encapsulates a story of an American girl footloose and fancy-free in Fifties Paris. It has enduring charm, its heroine’s off-the-cuff insights and gaucheries are in the same league as those uttered by Holly Golightly in Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which appeared that same year.

Capote was indeed but one of hundreds of the famous who popped up throughout her life, which was one of monied ease but with so strong an undertow of insecurity that, traumatised by marriage to a man as stylish and psychologically wounded as Tynan, she almost died in the late 1970s — and found unlikely salvation in a study of Elvis Presley.

One of three sisters, Elaine Brimberg was born in 1921, in Manhattan, where her father, Samuel, had arrived some years earlier from Warsaw and set up profitably in the garment industry. Style and prosperity were qualities with which she was imbued.

Her school days were erratic. She was never to be one of nature’s students in any rigorous fashion, and she was unabashed in the enthusiasm with which she greeted the prospect of sex (“I had discovered the power of mind over matter”). At 15 she discovered New York’s nightclubs and termed herself one of “my age group’s ever-growing company of hot virgins”.

She thought nothing of travelling, topless, with her head through the roof of a taxi at dawn, and she soon found herself in the company of the exiled painter Piet Mondrian. He wanted to learn to jitterbug. She did so “while chewing gum — another American custom of which he was enamoured”.

Dundy had been to Mills College in Oakland, California, and was of the opinion that “in choosing frivolity I was simply following my family’s basic tradition of self-invention”.

So saying, she joined the Army Signals Corps in Washington and “put frankly, my guts were saying: what a place to lose your virginity! To which my mind responded: and what a time to do it!” She found that the willing man had other fish to fry, which only spurred her to make free with another, and, when challenged over this, she declared, to her own surprise, “I feel rather worldly.”

There was a foray into acting. If she never made a great mark upon the stage, she was always to find herself in good company; in particular, at a workshop run by Erwin Piscator, she was among such tyros as Tony Curtis and Rod Steiger. But spurred by the prospect of shaking off her father’s bile (he insisted that she live at home when in New York), she calculated that his monthly allowance would fund a Paris sojourn.

This was a city of jazz, cabaret, Fulbright scholars and poets — as well as auditions, radio and, most lucratively, dubbing work. “My brilliant career was anything but brilliant, but curiously I didn’t see it that way,” she said. And that might have been that; a lark which would duly have to fly back to Manhattan. But a trip across to London brought a chance meeting with Kenneth Tynan, then recently down from the Oxford at which he had cut a postwar dash and was now the stylishly dressed author of an elegantly no-holds-barred view of contemporary theatre, He that Plays the King.