Debutante: The Story of Brenda Frazier

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. First edition. First edition [stated]. Presumed first printing. Hardcover. Very good in very good dust jacket. DJ has slight wear and soiling.. xi, [1], 331, [7] p. Illustrations. Notes. Selected Bibliography. Index. From an on-line posting: "Gioia Diliberto is the author of five books two historical novels and three non-fiction. She specializes in writing about women s lives and has been a contributor to many publications, including The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian, Town & Country, and Vanity Fair." From Wikipedia: "Brenda Diana Duff Frazier (June 9, 1921 May 3, 1982) was an American debutante popular during the Depression era. Her December 1938 coming-out party was so heavily publicized worldwide she eventually appeared on the cover of Life magazine for that reason alone. She was known and dubbed as 'Poor Little Rich Girl' by the media, together with socialites and other famous debutantes Barbara Hutton, Gloria Vanderbilt and Doris Duke....Brenda's father, Frank Duff Frazier, came from a prosperous Boston family. Her mother, the former Brenda Germaine Henshaw Williams-Taylor, was the only daughter of Sir Frederick Williams-Taylor (a general manager of the Bank of Montreal who was knighted in 1910 and combined his middle name and birth surname into a new hyphenated surname) and his wife, the former Jane Fayrer Henshaw. Lady Frederick Williams-Taylor was painted in 1917 by the Swiss-born American society artist Adolfo Muller-Ury in Nassau in the Bahamas, after which he attended Brenda Germaine's wedding to Frank Frazier in Montreal in December of that year. Both parents drank heavily, caroused separately and eventually divorced, causing Brenda to spend much time with her maternal grandmother. Her parents divorced when Brenda was 11, and both remarried. Her mother's second and third husbands were Frederick N. Watriss and Henry Pierrepont Perry. Frazier completed her education at Miss Chapin's School for Girls and Miss Porter's School. Sent to almost every social obligation she was invited to, she made great inroads in securing her picture everywhere. She had invented the famous white-face look. Powdered skin made a startling contrast to her very red painted lips combined with dark, dark hair, perfectly coiffed (Frazier's hair has often been described as "blue-black"; in fact, it was naturally a very dark brown; under low nightclub lighting and in black-and-white press photographs it appeared much darker). Brenda often developed a stiff neck, as she feared moving her head lest a hair fall out of place. She sported strapless gowns and made a sensation with that trend as well. During the year of her debut Brenda was at the beck and call of press agents worldwide. She was most often written about by columnist Walter Winchell. Occasionally, she did stop to think about where all this was coming from. In Debutante: The Story of Brenda Frazier by Gioia Diliberto, Frazier's daughter, Victoria Kelly, remembered her saying, I m not a celebrity, she said, I don t deserve all this. I haven t done anything at all. I m just a debutante. Her family was equally dumbfounded. "I fear Brenda's being spoiled, " said a great-aunt at the time of her great-niece's debut. "I bemoan all this spectacular notoriety." The press, both awestruck and vindictive, constantly wrote of Poor Little Rich Girls such as Frazier, Gloria Vanderbilt, Doris Duke, and Barbara Hutton. As so many in Society lost their fortunes during the Depression, lineage was no longer the sole common denominator. Publi-ciety a combination of money, social standing and news coverage also entered the Winchell lexicon. And then there were the Glamour Girls. In 1938 Brenda Frazier was dubbed Glamour Girl #1. In 1939 the word celebutante was coined to describe her. Leading the pack, she had become a cottage industry. She posed in ads for Woodbury soap and Studebaker cars (even though she could not drive) among others. In November she achieved the apex of fame her face on the cover of Life magazine. The article inside gave hardly a mention of Frazier but from it she secured international wattage. The morning of her debut her face was puffy with fever and she.