A SOCIALITE EVER AFTER: Pat Montandon pens her own Cinderella story. |
It’s unclear what Patsy Lou Montandon wanted to be when she grew up — but safe to say the preacher’s daughter didn’t divine her catholic future. The mother of Sean Wilsey — who penned Oh the Glory of It All, a New York Times bestseller, and an oddly heartwarming poor-little-rich-boy yarn — has written her own memoir, titled accordingly Oh the Hell of It All. Pat Montandon’s life story is the “sprawling kitchen sink of a memoir” that the New York Times described her son Wilsey’s to be — but, surprisingly, it’s less her side of the Wilsey family saga, and more the scripted inner-workings of an old-school socialite. Summer of ’63 with Sinatra, three-times a divorcee, and a gold cape cut from the curtains of the old San Francisco opera house — Montandon’s memoir reads like an American-pop fairy tale . . . except that, ever after, the gold cape does not a Paris Hilton make. Montandon auctions the cape, along with her Rodin, to survive her public break-up with butter tycoon Al Wilsey. Through Jungian visualization techniques and meditations, Monatandon realizes she’d rather save the world — from famine, nuclear war, the Russian mafia, and her former self, in no particular order — than keep the stuff contemporary socialites dream about.
Montandon’s memoir confirms that which her son’s is all about: Al Wilsey left Montandon for her best friend and fellow socialite/philanthropist Dede Wilsey (Diana Dow Buchanan Triana Wilsey). After the divorce, Montandon details her depression, and attempts at suicide — during which she asks her son Wilsey, then ten years-old, if he wants to die, too. It’s no wonder her son’s version of the split renders his mother certifiable — a vision of a teepee in Dr. Sheila Krystal’s Berkley office does eventually save her, though.
Prior to her being saved (from herself), Montandon penned Confessions-of-an-Heiress-like fodder, such as How to Be a Party Girl, and Celebrities and Their Angels. Her only novel, The Intruders, (out of print) deals with the paranormal — a pulp fiction ghost story she wrote to cope with her friend’s mysterious death in an apartment fire. It’s the sort of stuff soap operas (and Montandon’s real life) are made of. But unlike her son, Monatandon isn’t a very funny, nor good writer. It’s often downright hard to take the author-ess seriously. Especially when she explains herself like this: “See A Teepee was the home that could never be taken from me, the home that would always be mine.”
Where Wilsey’s articles appear in the New Yorker, Montandon’s appear in the San Francisco Examiner. Where Oh the Glory of It All’s cover is black and white with flora print, Montandon’s is a technicolor burst of balloons and confetti. Book covers aside, Wilsey’s honest (to the point of rendering his stepmother’s panty drawer) memoir is better than his mother’s “inside peek.” Montandon does not have a way with voice, or words — often summing up an important detail in a sentence or two. “I, too, was refurbished,” Montandon writes to hint that, yes, she had a facelift. “What was I made of? I did not know. What did I want to be made of? Love.” But where she’s shallow, where she’s got nothing on her son’s spot-on wit, she makes up with what could be only be called paperback reality T.V. Pat is something like American Idol, and her detailed successes in Oh the Hell of it All are just as unbelievable.
Montandon’s vision of an Indian teepee — following her vision of an inferno — launches the socialite’s life-long campaign for peace, both within herself, and on earth. She really does give up San Francisco society — the Danielle Steels, Alex Haleys, and Gettys — to head-up what was originally known as Children as Teachers of Peace, CATP (See A TeePee). (Reader, welcome to the bizarro). Now, her group is on the Web as Children as the Peacemakers Foundation. (//www.peace-kids.org/)
With children and white prayer candles in tow, Pat’s campaign for peace flourishes. The group meets with over 28 heads of state, and is blessed by both Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa. As her world turns, what Pat sees in the psychiatrist’s office, Pat gets — which may be reason enough to read this babbling book.
However intrigued the reader is by Montandon’s early fashion, it’s the passage on Ethiopian death tents and the imaginary clowns she sees there, that verges on deep. Outside the “dying hut,” she writes that “humming a show tune, I tried to distance myself from the viscous web of despair.” If only Simple Life stars had such stories to tell.
Don’t expect Oh the Hell of It All to be a sane, or a particularly great read. But do expect to keep reading — stuff this bad, but this awe-inspiring, is hard to put down.
