On the night of December 27th, 1938, a seventeen-year-old girl walked into the ballroom of the Ritz-Carlton in New York at twenty-four minutes past eleven, wearing a white satin gown trimmed with ostrich feathers and carrying a bouquet of orchids. Her name was Brenda Diana Duff Frazier, and the country, still in the grip of the Great Depression, stopped what it was doing to look at her. The next morning, the San Francisco Chronicle ran four words across its front page. Brenda is finally out.
Now we can all relax. Forty-four years later, Brenda Frazier died at Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Boston of inoperable bone cancer. She was sixty years old. When she had been admitted in February of 1982, her body weighed sixty-five pounds.
In her final weeks, fed through a nasogastric tube, she remained obsessed with her weight, yanking the tube from her nose whenever her fingers could close around her upper arm without resistance. She had spent the previous two decades as a recluse, dividing her time between a house in East Harwich, Massachusetts, and a quiet apartment on Beacon Hill, refusing photographs, refusing interviews, refusing the name the country had once known her by. She was cremated, and her ashes were scattered at sea. Brenda Frazier was born on June 9th, 1921, in Quebec, Canada.
The money in her family ran through her mother’s line, and it ran out of Canada. Her maternal grandfather, Sir Frederick Williams Taylor, had risen through the Bank of Montreal to become its general manager and had been knighted by King George V in 1910. But his knighthood was a British Imperial honor, not a New York social credential. Brenda Frazier was not old money American, and the established Astor and Vanderbilt families would later hold the Canadian banking origin against her with the precise cruelty available to old wealth confronting new.
Her parents’ marriage had been an alcoholic catastrophe in which both parties carried on multiple affairs and treated their only child as a strategic asset in their mutual destruction. Her mother, Big Brenda, divorced Frank Frazier in January of 1926 and married Frederick Watriss two months later. A custody battle followed that ran for nearly eight years and reached the Supreme Court of Florida, where the presiding judge concluded with a phrase that has outlived the litigants. Neither parent appears to have been in the past, nor appears to be now, any paragon of virtue in parenthood.
One month after the joint custody ruling in 1933, Frank Frazier died of throat cancer. Brenda was twelve years old, and the surviving parent was the parent who had spent the previous decade preparing her for a single use. Big Brenda’s strategy was to remove her daughter from any environment that might produce an alternative identity and place her inside the apparatus that produced debutantes. She was enrolled at Miss Chapin’s School for Girls in Manhattan, sent to Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut, and finally dispatched to a finishing school in Munich, where she studied French and German and discovered, in her own later words, that people went to the opera not to be seen, but because they genuinely loved the music.
She was an excellent painter and a capable pianist. Her mother and grandmother treated both abilities as impediments to marriage. She begged her mother to let her remain in Munich, to forget about the debut. Her mother answered, Brenda, you’ll deeply regret not having your debut.
You’ll be much happier if you do. By the spring of 1936, two and a half years before the debut, the apparatus that would convert Brenda Frazier into a national figure had already started its work. The most important society columnist in the United States was Maury Henry Bidwell Paul, who wrote under the pseudonym Cholly Knickerbocker in William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and American. On June 14th, 1936, after spotting the fourteen-year-old Brenda at a lunch at the Ritz, Paul closed his column with a prediction.
It may seem a bit early, he wrote, but I here and now predict Brenda Frazier will be one of the belles, if not the belle of her season. The publication of the prediction itself became the event that would make it true. Once a girl of fourteen had been singled out by Cholly Knickerbocker, every photographer, every restaurateur, every advertiser, and every rival hostess in New York had a reason to attend to her. By the middle of 1938, six months before her debut, five thousand articles had been written about her.
She had done nothing. She had attended school in three countries, sat for photographs her mother arranged, and turned seventeen. The party that closed the campaign was staged by Big Brenda with the operational precision of a small military deployment. Two thousand engraved invitations were sent.
The hotel’s entire ballroom suite was rented, along with additional rooms for guests who would need to nap between the start of the party and its conclusion the next morning. The florist transformed the ballroom suite into a moonlit garden. Emil Coleman’s orchestra opened the evening with Manhattan. Supper was served at one in the morning.
Breakfast at four. One thousand quarts of champagne were consumed across the night. Time magazine reported the entertainment cost some fifty thousand dollars, a figure Brenda herself would dispute as inflated. Brenda made her entrance with her mother.
She was suffering from influenza. Her feet were swollen from the edema that would persist for the rest of her life, and she had begged Big Brenda to cancel the party. Her mother answered, It’s just a cold. Brenda drank milk mixed with Coca-Cola instead of champagne.
At six-thirty in the morning, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. noticed she was shivering in the emptying ballroom and draped a white tablecloth over her shoulders. Brenda, writing twenty-five years later, recalled the moment. Doug said I was shivering, that the hall must have grown cold, but the hall was not cold at all.
I was shivering from exhaustion. She collapsed into bed at dawn, and when she woke, she could not remember what had happened all the following day. In November of 1938, several weeks before the Ritz-Carlton party, Brenda’s photograph had appeared on the cover of Life magazine. The cover did not show a head of state or a war.
It showed a seventeen-year-old girl who had not yet been formally introduced to society. The press had stopped reporting on debutantes and had started manufacturing them, and the most efficient manufacturer in America had selected Brenda Frazier as the prototype. The following year, the gossip columnist Walter Winchell coined for her a portmanteau that did not exist before her. Selebuntant, celebrity and debutante fused into a single noun.
The word entered the language and never left. Her signature look was as deliberate as the costume of a stage character. The face was powdered lunar white. The mouth was painted a slashed crimson.
The hair was black, sleek, and so meticulously arranged that she developed neck problems from refusing to turn her head for fear of disturbing the coiffure. A perfume called Sarong was created in her honor. Fan mail addressed only to Brenda, New York, New York, no street, no number, reliably reached her. The transgression that ratified her status as a national figure and simultaneously closed the doors of established New York society against her was the commercial endorsement contract.
Old money did not advertise. A daughter of the Astor or Vanderbilt families did not pose for soap. Brenda Frazier posed for Woodbury soap advertisements and a separate campaign for Studebaker automobiles, made faintly absurd by the documented detail that she did not know how to drive. The genuine old families watched from a distance and registered with the precision of an inventory that the Frasers had advertised soap.
The Knickerbocker families did not on the whole attend the Ritz-Carlton party. The two thousand guests were drawn predominantly from cafe society, the Hearst press, the theatrical world, and the publicity-adjacent corners of New York. Parents didn’t want their children associating with her. Brenda herself understood with complete clarity what she had become and what she had not become.
Booed at a Broadway nightclub when she was introduced from her table alongside the comedian Ben Blue and the figure skater Sonja Henie, both of whom had earned their place by accomplishment, she later told friends, I’m not a celebrity. I don’t deserve all this. I haven’t done anything at all. I’m just a debutante.
Her first marriage was contracted into the same cafe society that the endorsements had cemented. John Sims Kelly, called Shipwreck, was a former professional football player who had run the hundred-yard dash in 9. 8 seconds and was a fixture at the Stork Club. They were married on June 30th, 1941, at her mother’s apartment in the Ritz-Carlton, the same hotel where she had made her debut three and a half years earlier.
She was twenty. A reporter asked her, on the record, on her wedding day, whether she was happy. She told him the truth. No, can’t you see?
I’m utterly miserable. The papers reported instead that Brenda Frazier, glamour girl number one, was now Mrs. John S. Kelly, housewife.
Within the first year of the marriage, she gave birth to a stillborn child whose parts had to be surgically removed from her, an experience she remembered with horror as one that almost killed her. Their surviving daughter, Brenda Victoria Kelly, was born in 1945, and the papers dubbed the infant the town’s littlest glamour girl. The marriage unraveled across the late 1940s and ended in divorce in 1956. The clinical record of Brenda Frazier’s decline had begun earlier than the divorce papers.
She had developed by her mid-teens a pattern of binge eating followed by self-induced vomiting that intensified across her twenties and thirties into an endless cycle. She rationalized the pattern with a sentence whose psychological architecture is its own diagnosis. It was the only thing I had control over. The eating disorder ran alongside an escalating dependency on alcohol and prescription drugs.
Pills to go to sleep and pills to wake up. Pills for digestion and pills to go to the bathroom. And pills to be happy and pills to be sad. And pills to be.
She carried the inventory in a red leather case from Mark Cross with a dozen plastic vials inside. On March 16th, 1961, she made the first of what her psychiatrist would eventually count as approximately thirty-one attempts on her own life across the following two decades. Her daughter Victoria, asked to characterize what the attempts had meant in the household where she had grown up, produced a sentence the biographer chose to preserve verbatim. Suicide was taken almost casually.
My mother tried it so many times. The psychiatrist produced a figure that has its own awful precision. I’d say she wanted to die 49% and wanted to live 51%. He added, perhaps unconsciously, that she always did something to ensure that she was saved.
A second marriage, to Robert Chatfield Taylor in 1957, was an attempt to climb out of cafe society and into a quieter life. It did not last. They divorced in 1962. She kept the name.
For the remaining twenty years of her life, she was Mrs. Chatfield Taylor, recognized as Brenda Frazier when she appeared in public, though those moments became year by year vanishingly rare. On December 6th, 1963, Life magazine published a confessional essay by Brenda Frazier under the headline My debut, a horror. Twenty-five years after her face had appeared on the cover of the same magazine, she delivered the verdict that has appeared on every retrospective ever published about her.
Being the number one glamour deb is the worst thing that can happen to you. She wrote, I hated every minute of my debut. She described her role inside her mother’s project with analytic detachment. 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.
And she explained what she had spent the previous decade trying to give her daughter. I am at last becoming a real mother to my daughter. I am free now to give her both love and the guidance that teenagers require and desperately want. Our first step was to agree that she would not have a coming out party.
The essay greatly boosted her self-confidence, and she appeared on talk shows including the David Susskind show to argue her case. Three years later, in 1966, the photographer Diane Arbus came to her Boston apartment on assignment from Esquire and took the photograph that would enter the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The image showed a gaunt woman of forty-five, heavily made up in white face powder and red lipstick, propped up in bed with a cigarette in her hand, looking warily at the camera. The hair was still black, still arranged.
The lips were still painted the shade she had worn since seventeen. The observer looking at the photograph decades later described it as more a vision of the evil queen than Sleeping Beauty, and the description captured the precise fact about the image that has kept it on museum walls. The seventeen-year-old in the white satin gown and the forty-five-year-old in the dressing gown were the same girl, maintaining the same face in two different decades of the same long performance. The diagnosis of inoperable bone cancer came in February of 1982 after a body scan at Newton-Wellesley Hospital outside Boston.
She was sixty years old, one month short of sixty-one, weighed sixty-five pounds, and was fed through a nasogastric tube she repeatedly removed. On the morning of May 3rd, 1982, at four in the morning, with the hand of a friend in hers, she stopped breathing. She had begged in her final weeks, with the directness that ran through everything she said when the press apparatus was not listening. Don’t leave me.
The Vanity Fair essay that her biographer Gioia Diliberto published five years later recorded the moment of her death. Brenda’s luminous brown eyes opened wide and then froze in death’s stare a month before her 61st birthday. She was cremated. Her ashes were scattered at sea.
The cultural afterlife she had not asked for had begun while she was still alive and continued without her. The comic strip Brenda Starr, Reporter, created by Dale Messick in 1940, was named after her and ran for seventy years. Stephen Sondheim, in I’m Still Here from the 1971 musical Follies, name-dropped her among the catalog of vanished celebrities. Gioia Diliberto’s biography, Debutante: The Story of Brenda Frazier, published in 1987, gave the verdict that has since been quoted in every retrospective written about her.
She didn’t stand a chance. There was no way she was going to be happy. Her life was basically over before it began. In the end, the country gave her the cover of Life, the front pages of eight cities, the patronage of the most widely read gossip columnists in the United States, and a portmanteau word coined for her by Walter Winchell that has outlived every figure who used it.
It took the piano lessons in Munich, the painting she had been good at, the body she would not stop punishing, the marriages she could not make work, and the thirty-one mornings on which she had tried to settle the account on her own terms. She was the most famous girl in the world for a single winter. She paid for it for the next forty-three years.
And the sea took the rest.