Free Beautiful People: My Family and Other Glamorous Varmints by Simon Doonan

Lassie.
    Betty adored the insane diversity of this experience. She talked ceaselessly and hilariously of the trials and tribulations of working for “Ivan and Yvonne the Terrible.” She did a brilliant impersonation of the theatrical princess, duplicating atone of voice which quivered and shook with tortured regret: “I remember vashink my hairs wiz tventy-four eggs effry mornink while ze peasants outside ze palace were starfink.”
    Phyllis’s situation was far more complex. She was lodging full-time with the deposed nobles. Out of the blue, she developed a schoolgirl crush on the handsome prince. She became lovesick and wan. Her doctor—eager to write prescriptions for the latest antidepressants—prescribed purple hearts and more purple hearts. By the time Betty arrived, Phyllis was already knocking them back à la Neely O’Hara. 2
    One day the princess smelled a rat and gave Phyllis her marching orders. Distraught, Phyllis threw herself on Betty’s mercy. Before you could sing “Come On-a My House,” Betty had offered her beleaguered pal a room chez nous.
    Aunt Phyllis was installed in the one remaining space in our rambling, leaky red-brick Edwardian house. Her room was a windowless garret with a sloping ceiling on the top floor. It was freezing in the winter and boiling hot in the summer. Features included a nonopening skylight, a nonfunctioning fireplace, and an appropriately rock-bottom rent.
    Despite her grim accommodations, Phyllis flourished. Under Betty’s supervision, she put on weight, kicked the purple hearts, and learned to laugh again. A vigorous and not unattractive brunette rose from the ashes. It was a symbiotic arrangement: Betty now enjoyed the benefits of a live-in best friend and coconspirator.
    The 1960s arrived, and Phyllis and Betty embraced theconcept of health food. They became ardent followers of the world’s first granola guru, a Swiss bloke named Gayelord Hauser. Henceforth, every phrase uttered by Betty and Phyllis invariably contained the words Gayelord Hauser.
    “Well, according to Gayelord Hauser, white sugar is white death.”
    “Some chocolate cake? Just a thin slice. Don’t tell Gayelord Hauser!”
    On Saturdays, Phyllis and Betty would set out for the local health food store—improbably named The High—and stock up on wheat germ, molasses, brewer’s yeast, and anything else Gayelord Hauser was endorsing that particular week in his syndicated column.
    An employee at The High convinced Betty that the key to health was growing your own greenery. In no time we had large plastic trays of sprouting bean shoots covering the sideboard in our dining room. Betty often tended them while enjoying a cigarette.
    Thanks to Betty and Gayelord, the crumpled, depressed Phyllis morphed into a healthy, vibrant, singular being. She turned out to be more like a naughty big sister than an aunt.
    The new Phyllis was an eccentric, courageous woman who made a mockery of her congenital handicap. Phyllis laughed when she walked into doorframes or stepped in Lassie’s poo. Blindness was a total gas! She loved to tell us about the time she exited a train on the wrong side, falling onto the tracks in a heap, avec chien.
    The new Phyllis was also wildly unconventional. Her handicap afforded her a marginalized status, of which she nowtook full advantage. One day she came home in fits of laughter: she had, she explained, just returned from a very conventional tea party. One of the ladies present had an unruly dog. Exasperated, Phyllis had grabbed the dog and bitten it on the snout. With one nip she had subdued the dog and scared the hell out of the refined attendees.
    Betty loved the new Phyllis. She was in heaven. She now had a chum with whom to cackle, someone to offset the psychotic ravings of our other lodgers.
    The relationship between Betty and Phyllis was far more than that of landlady and lodger: they were two wildly opinionated broads who loved nothing more than an emotionally charged debate.