In a just world, Princess Tulip Murphy would have a place in America’s honorary royalty alongside Emperor Norton, King Kong, and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. In the course of the fifteen years or so when her updates, as faithfully reported by Virginia Faulkner, appeared regularly in Town & Country magazine, Princess Murphy was America’s leading royal. She boasted genuine red-white-and-blue blood: her grandmother was “the first white woman to be called ‘Madam’ west of Rock Island, Illinois” and her husband, “Brick-a-minute” Murphy, reveals in the heat of a barroom brawl that he is descended from a long line of Irish kings. In true American do-it-yourself fashion, Princess Tulip assembles these ingredients into an invitation into the finest circles of international society.
At first, she does resort to a little blackmail ease her way in. A month or two working as a chambermaid in an exclusive Riviera hotel and some spying into the diaries and doings of the various millionaires and noblemen and -women staying there, a few suggestions about the potential damage of a tip or two to the gossip sheets, and soon she has a string of invitations to the finest watering holes in Europe. “Before the afternoon was over, they understood that my friendship was indispensable and my social position was assured.”
From here, we travel along through My Hey-Day on Princess Tulip’s seemingly neverending round-the-world tour: from Scandanavia to India via Russia; from Egypt to Hollywood; from the 1939 World’s Fair to the supposed site of the Garden of Eden in Iraq. All along the way, we meet a hodge-podge of personalities:
… an unfrocked monk from Athos; a Rumanian gun-runner; a stranded Anazc ventriloquist; a Macedonian pimp; a honey-bee salesman from Hymettis; Raymond Duncan; a two-headed brown-and-white goat; and twenty-seven Levantine streetwalkers — to say nothing of a wandering band of Russian wolf-boys….
We also meet such nobility as Lady Crystal Scum, the Bedad of Nawab, Lord Beastie of Kelp, Grand Duke Slavko (the Nero of the Neva and author of What to Do Till the Dictator Comes), and the ex-King of Jugo-ourway.
If the changing scenery and cast are not enough, we can also enjoy Princess Tulip’s ever-evolving wardrobe:
I was wearing a taffeta middy bloud with a halter of passementerie; an accordion-pleated backless sarong; stout, hand-twisted fondant-colored ski shoes (ideal for dry weather); and a jaunty parka made of the skins of dozens and dozens of elves from the Irish Free State.
In circles where quick-wittedness was considered a prime virtue, Virginia Faulkner had one of the fastest tongues in the business. Gossip columnists like Walter Winchell and Sidney Skolsky often reported one of her sarcastic quips. On an over-exposed actress: “She had established herself in the public eye, ear and hair.” On a particularly ghastly Hollywood actress’s palace: “The decoration was not so much period as exclamation point.” She delighted in the public’s appetite for dished dirt and was not averse to inventing some of her own to keep things lively. Of a scandal involving an actress on Broadway, she remarked: “There have been conflicting stories — all mine.”
Faulkner was often in demand to supply rapid-fire comic dialogue for Broadway shows, radio, and the movies, but at times her tastes went beyond the conventional limits. It’s unlikely that Winchell or anyone else would have quoted Princess Tulip’s report from Russia:
I want to go on record that no matter what you hear about Russia their beauty parlors are most economical. You can get a shampoo, wave, massage, facial, manicure, and abortion all for about seven rubles ha’penny.
In his 1962 book, The Image, the historian Daniel Boorstin defined a celebrity as “a person who is known for his well-knownness.” In My Hey-Day, however, Faulkner/Tulip portray a world in which everyone sought to make their knownness ever more splendid in its isolation. “If you don’t already know who someone is, why on earth would you want to meet him?” Princess Tulip asks. “I have never been introduced to most of my intimate friends.” She admires the standards of Baroness Burper, who never consented to set foot in an establishment which did not boast at least one heated moat.
Even Princess Tulip could not be unaware of the great events unfolding outside the heated moats of high society. She acknowledges at several points what she refers to as “the unpleasantness” which was making travel in Europe ever more difficult. In keeping with the American pioneer spirit, however, she devised ways to accommodate the new circumstances — wearing, for example, a specially-designed frock which, “with a little manipulation can be converted into an air-raid shelt, with room for one other, or a good book and three square meals, if you are the cool, practical type.” War and the rumors of war were driving the International Set to taken extreme measures: “Many of my oldest friends can now count their yachts on the fingers of one hand.” Others are closing their apartments as … gasp! … “moving into their homes!”
My Hey-Day was published in 1940 and you might think the fall of France would have brought Princess Tulip’s adventures to an end. There remain, however, uncollected and out of print, a further half-dozen or so of the princess’s stories that Faulkner published in Town & Country over the course of the war and after. This material is crying out to be assembled with My Hey-Day into the complete memoirs of Princess Tulip. It would be a work that deserves a place on the shelf next to Augustus Carp, Esq., The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace, and Lord Bellinger: An Autobiography.