Elaine Dundy drops names like confetti .... Ernest Hemingway, Orson Welles, Gore Vidal, John Osborne, Ava Gardiner, Miles Davis, Groucho Marx ... Had she blinked, she'd have missed someone. She lived, loved, hardly slept. A product of upper-class New York society - her grandfather invented a screw which held the Statue of Liberty together - this slightly manic, rich young thing hit London in the early 1950s and married Kenneth Tynan, drama critic, towering theatrical figure, and sado-masochist. "Have married an Englishman," she cabled home. "Letter follows." That was part one. Dundy went on to write The Dud Avocado, a coming-of-age novel that mentioned sex in a way young women didn't. It made her new name - she had been born a Brimberg and took Dundy as a pseudynom - but helped to end her marriage. She wrote other novels, biographies, plays and short stories. Now, cruising towards 80, she lives alone in an LA high-rise apartment overlooking the Hollywood hills. Are these good times? She shrugs. "I'm content. One of the things about being a senior citizen is acceptance. It's the only way it can be bearable. I say thank goodness I haven't got cancer or Parkinson's or something ..."
Dundy is in Dublin to promote her autobiography, Life Itself! Written in a snappy, clever style, it zips, almost sings, along. Despite endless, often tiresome, tangents about the great and infamous, it is in many ways a simple story about a woman who has lived life in reverse and is only now learning how to be ordinary.
What is quite remarkable about Dundy is her youthful appearance. Her skin is soft, gently radiant and, peer as I do, I can't find evidence of tucks, nips, the ravages of a facelift. She wears a loose, blue shift-dress more becoming of a woman half her age, seems slightly weary as well as wary and asks for strong Columbian coffee. "None of the other stuff will do." Coffee has replaced alcohol as her favoured tipple.
The best, she then concedes, has already happened. The good times rolled by in the 1950s, she says. Having flirted with Paris, she made London her base. "The war was over. We were alive. There was a post-war cultural explosion not unlike the 1920s. I was lucky to be in England. It is portrayed as being in the grip of dull conformity but it provided stable circumstances where you could take risks ... all the people, like Osborne and Beckett, were extraordinary. It was a mistake to believe it would go on forever."
She thinks the 1960s were overdone. "The lunatic fringe moved to the lunatic centre then. We had suicides ... Hemingway and Marilyn Monroe and then those assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King. The 1960s wasn't a literary decade like the 1950s ... more a musical one, but I suppose there was a tremendous sweetness going on at the same time as the violence."
Outwardly, Dundy seemed to be having a ball - fΩted, feasted, flying all over the place. But in fact she was in freefall by the 1960s. "I was skidding downwards so fast I ended up back in New York in a high-rise where I was always giving house-warming parties to warm the place up but it never happened. I was very, very crazy. I had to crash." And so she did. She ended up depressed and popping pills.
Breaking up with Tynan was hard to do. Marriage was intoxicating. He was impulsive. He had proposed on their first date, after all, and she never knew . And so, having left him, she went back a number of times. "He wouldn't let go. I am deeply, deeply indebted to him but I don't entirely forgive him."
With marriage to Tynan in 1951, she ditched plans for a stage career. But there were compensations, not least a daughter. As she puts it: "We looked on each other with absolute certainty that nobody quite like us had ever existed." And she learned from Tynan: "Being married to him meant I never had to look up a dictionary". She was also inspired to write. "We were always reading and writing, it couldn't help but rub off a bit." But the downsides were the affairs, black eyes and a broken nose, his physical cruelties, the sado-masochism. "Everyone wanted to know Ken so I got to meet them too. That was the part people knew. The other side was grim." And indeed, most of those people were empty vessels, friends of the moment. Dundy accepts they were as instant as bad coffee is now. "I am probably a much better friend now. I am more interested in my friends. I need them now not in the way I thought I did when I was all over the place and they kept disappearing."
And there was sex - the other men, the Laird who got away. "It was post-syphillis and pre-AIDS," she says. "It was the way things were at the time. People knew everyone carnally. Everything was for fun and for free. We decided history began when we were born."
She didn't marry again after Tynan. "I realised I didn't need to be married. I had never taken his name and I had always kept my own opinions. But, as we became separated, I started to move towards knowing other writers. And in the States, Ken wasn't all that well-known anyway and it was certainly good to put an ocean between us." She wrote a biography of Peter Finch and then had quite a successs with one about Elvis Presley and his mother, Elvis and Gladys. "A Depression baby with a spirit that never dies," she says.
"Agatha Christie taught me to write," she says, sitting slightly forward, hand on cup, "P.G. Wodehouse how to write in the first person and Elvis taught me how to unlock my feelings and throw away the key." Researching the Elvis book and the Deep South made an impact on her, so much so that she went on to write a book about Ferriday, Louisiana.
"There's real depth there. People from the South say what they mean, they write what is important to them." She has been to Ireland once before but the details evade her. "I think it was the Horse Show but I seem to remember a steeplechase...oh, it was something to do with horses anyway." She doesn't give parties anymore. "But I go to them. I think it's time I did." Her depression is under wraps, she travels a lot less and the genes are good. "I've been through a lot," she says. "And you can use being old. You can get people to sit up and listen sometimes and get through airports faster. My mother lived to be 99. She needed round-the-clock nursing care. I wouldn't want that..."
Dundy has come to the simplicity of life relatatively late. "It's true that at one point everyone I knew was a celebrity. I didn't know that other people could be extraordinary. It was just such a strange life with Ken and having all those people around." She lives near her daughter - who is married to the film director, Jim McBride - and her two grandchildren. She likes to play cards and attend cutting-edge theatre on the fringe. She spent eight years writing her autobiography in four-hour-a-day stints. "I had to leave a lot out, so I'm starting work on something else which I'm going to call My Italics." Los Angeles is home, she likes the weather. "Even on a day after an earthquake tremor you still wake up and see the sun and think it's not too bad." Maybe the good times are sweeping in ... finally.
Life Itself! is published by Virago, at £17.99 in UK