Debutante

In the six months before her debut in 1938, Brenda Diana Duff Fraizer  – a quiet, pretty girl from a New York society family – became the  world’s “Glamour Girl No. 1,” with five thousand articles written about  her, her face everywhere recognized, movie stars from Errol Flynn to  Johan Crawford maneuvering to be photographed at her side, fan letters  arriving with only her photograph on the envelope to guide the post  office.

Her look – lunar skin, ruby lips, and jet black hair – became  the look of the day. The entire photographic corps followed her wherever  she went – to the Stork Club, to El Morocco, to her hairdresser, to the  races at Belmont, to sailing on the Acquitania, to tea at the Plaza.

At seventeen, Brenda Frazier was the most envied girl alive –  yet her life was already on a tragic and irreversible slide toward a string of unhappy marriages and love affairs, toward alcoholism and suicide attempts, toward the reclusive final years when she scarcely left her bed.

Drawing on scores of interviews and family documents, Gioia  Diliberto takes us into the Café Society world Brenda Frazier epitomized  – the world of exclusive nightclubs, charity balls, and openings, the  world of gossip columns and of elaborate and expensive juvenile pranks  played out in post-party hours of the morning. Then into Brenda’s  private world – from childhood, at once neglected and manipulated by her  driven, ugly-duckling mother, who was determined to become through  Brenda the belle of the ball that she herself had never been and who was  blind to her daughter’s yearning for a non-public life…And to the  London of the turn of the twentieth century, where Brenda’s mother,  crushed by the weight of her mother’s imposing presence, made her own  debut… And to the rigidly established social world of Brenda’s  grandmother in Montreal, London, and Nassau in the 1890s – where we  recognize the seeds of Brenda’s story.

Gossip and tragedy, social history and psychodrama mingle in  this richly resonant book about celebrity at an early age, about a girl  who lived her mother’s fantasy, and about the strange customs of the  fashionable world reflected in three generations of high society.