Brenda Frazier, Debutante of the Century: The Dark Side of America’s Most Famous Socialite
Brenda Frazier sitting in a balldown at her debutante." width="970" height="769" data-caption='Brenda Frazier Kelly Chatfield-Taylor, whose name was once synonymous with glittering debutante balls and the social whirl, in 1938 when she made her debut, a social event of the season that attracted 1,000 people. <span class="media-credit">Bettmann Archive</span>'>
There is a memorable line in Anita Loos’ 1927 novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Towards the end, the main character declares that “a man being rich is like a girl being pretty.” The problem with equating those attributes is that a man can always make more money. If a girl’s value lies entirely in being pretty, that is akin to being very rich at age 21 and getting a tiny bit poorer every day for the rest of your life. No one worried about that decline more keenly than Debutante of the Century Brenda Frazier.
Brenda Frazier was born in 1921. She came into the world with a trust from her grandfather for 4 million dollars, the modern equivalent of $72 million. This was not nearly as important, at least in the eyes of her family, as the fact that she was pretty. She had a famously icy mother who refused to hug her—she was made to curtsey, formally, instead—and an alcoholic father who, when Brenda was four years old, went to a Harvard-Yale football game and never came back. He died of throat cancer when Brenda was age 12. Her mother was often absent, travelling to Europe for Christmas, leaving Brenda to open presents alone with the butler. As for schooling, Brenda would later recall, “I was pretty good in my classes, but that was altogether unimportant. Indeed, it was possibly dangerous; it might disqualify me for marriage to someone who was a brilliant catch, but unfortunately stupid.” She was, however, said to be an excellent painter by her teachers, and she enjoyed playing piano. But again, Brenda noted, “You do not become a grande dame in high society by playing the piano or painting seriously.” The joke in the newspapers was that “She went to Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut, and graduated to the Stork Club and El Morocco.”
As she came of age, her mother, known as “Big Brenda’ seemed to take an interest in her once more. Big Brenda’s efforts were channeled with a single-minded passion into enhancing her daughter’s beauty and fame. This was explicitly done so she could secure the best marriage. The fact that this might not have been strictly necessary—that little Brenda could simply take her trust fund, buy a chateau in the South of France and spend the rest of her days painting in the sun under a large straw-brimmed hat—was never suggested. Such was the downside of an era in which female ambition was largely channeled in only one direction.
Brenda Frazier would later recall, “The only way I could gain love or acceptance was to submerge my desires in my mother’s—to be a passive tool of her whims.”
By the time she was age 13, Brenda visited clubs wearing jewels, strapless dresses and a full face of pale white make-up where she could be seen smoking cigarettes and dancing to dawn. Her mother pushed her to be nice to the men in the club, who were much older, and she was said to have had sex with at least one by the time she was age 14, where, according to her psychiatrist, “her mother led her to it by the hand.”
It’s probably easy and appropriate to blame Big Brenda for her daughter’s later emotional troubles, but society at large gobbled these escapades up. No one questioned why a thirteen-year-old girl was drinking martinis with thirty-year-old men pawing at her instead of getting ready for class. It’s perhaps a very small (tiny) testament to the progress we’ve made as a society that people generally do not hear about the girls on Epstein’s island and think what was happening was fine, and, in fact, glamorous.
By 1936, one writing under the name of the society column Cholly Knickerbocker declared, “It may seem a bit early, but I—here and now—predict Brenda Frazier will be one of the belles—if not THE belle—of her season.” She was. Brenda Frazier was declared Debutante of the Year in 1938 and was soon called “debutante of the century.” A photo from her debut ball in 1938 was on the cover of Life Magazine.
There was some work to be done prior. Brenda’s feet were swollen due to edema, which meant that she could not wear high heels. Her mother insisted upon a tendon lengthening operation, though doctors felt it wasn’t necessary. She spent the following six months in steel braces. But she danced at that debutante ball, even if her feet were swollen the entire time (it never did fully get rid of the edema).
The New York Times noted that “she was encouraged to think of her body as a kind of triumphal chariot in which she traveled.” That would imply that she, at least, thought of her body as something which belonged to her, not the public. This did not seem to be the case. Brenda regarded her own body, first and foremost, not as a source of pleasure for herself, but as a source of pleasure for others. There may not be a woman in the world who does not feel this way to some extent. Countless women spend countless hours and dollars waxing, shaving, injecting, highlighting, polishing and engaging in a hundred other treatments to meet some imagined ideal of womanhood—upheld as much by the judgment of other women as by the lust of men. Usually, our distance from that ideal offers a certain perspective. No one is really paying that much attention to us. But to Brenda Frazier, they were.
By October 1939, The Times Leader declared, “Brenda is news . . . she rates space just as do J.P. Morgan, Mahatma Gandhi, Hedy Lamaar and Mussolini . . . if a reporter called [an] editor and said ‘Brenda Frazier just hurled a salad bowl at Victor Moore in La Conga’ that editor would galvanize into action and scream ‘replace the front page!’ Just the way they do in the movies.” Mail addressed only to “Brenda” in New York found its way to her. Drag balls were packed with Brenda Frazier impersonators modeling pale white make-up, black wigs and strapless gowns. A woman once burst into a dressing room where Frazier was changing, exclaiming, “I’ve just got to look at you!”
It certainly did not help that her “friends” debated whether she was all that attractive. One acquaintance told the press that she was plump and, “If you put your finger in the flesh of her arm, it would sink like the Poppin’ Fresh dough boy.” Her stepbrother from her mother’s second marriage claimed, “Brenda wasn’t really beautiful. She just was done up to look beautiful.”
She was, by any objective, commonly accepted metric, beautiful. She looked like Snow White, a movie that came out in 1937, and that Brenda herself frequently mentioned to reporters as an apt comparison.
But Brenda came to be terrified of doing anything to shatter the illusion of her beauty. She was scared to turn her head for fear of disrupting her hair and began to suffer from chronic neck problems as a result. The girl who was described in 1938 as “a national institution, like a doughnut” began to suffer in earnest from eating disorders. She would eat nothing for days, and then, understandably starving, devour a huge meal, after which she’d feel guilty and vomit it up. “It was the only thing I had control over.”
The fact that Brenda seemed increasingly psychologically shattered didn’t impact her romantic prospects. She was seen to be dating the movie star Douglas Fairbanks Jr., though he confessed, “She was trapped . . . 17 going on 27. One felt sorry for her.” She moved on to date filmmaker and aviator Howard Hughes, who presented her with a ring box containing two aspirins for a hangover. She did not find the joke funny.
And, as happens to virtually every woman elevated for her beauty, society turned on her. Bob Hope introduced a comedy sketch in 1940 on the Pepsodent Show featuring “Brenda and Cobina” (inspired by the glamour girl Cobina Wright Jr.) as “two shrill-voiced, man-hungry society girls . . . the first incarnation of a favorite Hope comedy foil: the homely, sex-starved spinster, obsessed with landing a man.” When Brenda’s name was read off a list of celebrities at a nightclub, people booed at her mention.
Fortunately, by this time, she had met the football star John “Shipwreck” Kelly at one of those nightclubs. Brenda was age 21, and Kelly was age 30. The two quickly became a pair in 1941. For Brenda, who claimed “romantic matrimony was her main ambition,” this should have been a happy ending, although her mother did wish that she’d marry Howard Hughes instead. Still, they married by the end of June with a reception for 200 at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. The couple honeymooned in Hawaii, and the papers happily reported that, “Brenda Frazier, glamour girl No. 1 is now Mrs. John. S. Kelly, housewife.”
The problem with having many years of her life’s identity geared toward the singular goal of getting married was that, now that Brenda was married, she was left without any particular purpose. Brenda had one goal; she achieved it, and she still had probably fifty more years left on earth to figure out what to do. Still, perhaps it could have been a respite from public scrutiny that would have allowed Brenda to regain her health.
Except that, within a year, she gave birth to a stillborn child, whose parts had to be surgically removed from her. She remembered the experience with horror, as one which almost killed her. She responded to the tragedy by withdrawing—the society photographer Slim Keith would claim she was “an old baby” who began spending most of the day in bed and throwing tantrums when she didn’t get her way. This doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable for a woman who had been denied a childhood and gone through a traumatic ordeal. Unfortunately, she also began drinking straight vodka all day, and the eating disorders that had long plagued her only intensified. Despite that, she went on to have a daughter named Brenda Victoria in 1945, who the papers dubbed “the town’s littlest glamor girl” much to her mother’s chagrin.
“Being the number one glamour deb is the worst thing that can happen to you,” Brenda remarked in 1956. Keep in mind, she said that as a woman whose infant had to be removed from her body “in pieces.” Being a glamour girl must have been an epically unhappy fate to eclipse that tragedy.
Yet, Brenda could not stop trying to retain the face and figure that had captivated the public in those last days of the 1930s. Doing so was near impossible. She had little support. Her first marriage ended in 1951, and her second, to sales executive Robert Chatfield-Taylor in 1957, was no happier than her first. It was likely not aided by the fact that, following a fight, Brenda served him a soup of a vaginal douche solution.
Meanwhile, her abusive lover, Italian Count Pietro Mele, when not threatening to throw her out a window (or showering her with emeralds) was known to scream, “See how ugly you are!?”
Brenda thought that if she could only be thin and “perfect” as she had been in the 1930s, it might solve all her problems. She sent her butler out on quests for long extinct cosmetics she’d once worn, like Raven Red lipstick. This was perhaps a tragic detail, but there were far more grotesque habits. In addition to the diet pills, Brenda began carrying about a plastic container to dinner parties. She could throw up into it directly if she was not near a toilet, which she did at one dinner party in front of a table of assembled guests at the Boston Ritz.
Her breakdowns, now brought on perhaps by the physical toll coupled with mental anguish, were nearly constant. She was estimated to have attempted suicide 31 times through the 1950s and 1960s. Her daughter recalled, “Suicide was taken almost casually, my mother tried it so many times.” Once, she asked to be taken to the hospital in a fire engine, for a bit of variety from an ambulance.
When she was age 45, Diane Arbus took a photograph of her propped up in bed, smoking a cigarette, just as she’d been doing since she was age 13. Looking skeletal and haggard, but still with perfectly kept hair and an elegant robe, she was more a vision of the evil queen than Sleeping Beauty. The effect terrified people from debut balls, with one man claiming they’d continue only so long as “daughters don’t take a look at Frazier and suddenly think, ‘There I am in thirty-five years,’ and begin to run as fast as they can.”
When Brenda died at age 60 from bone cancer, rather miraculously not from suicide, she was dismissed as having the “classic life of the poor little rich girl.” Brenda spent her life tormenting her body in the service of some imagined ideal in a way that might have been the envy of a medieval saint. She avoided practically anything that might have given her pleasure so that people could continue to see a glamorous object when they looked at her. Her tragedy isn’t one of a woman with money, though she really would have been better served by decamping to France with a paintbrush. Instead, it’s the tragedy of any woman who believes that her body belongs to the public.