“Well, she is” replied my mother. How perfect, I only realized fully when my mother had a crippling stroke in her seventies, which immobilized her and all but deprived her of speech. Some friends sent flowers, some made a token visit, most of them gave up after that. But Fanny came to the hospital and later to my mother’s house weekly and she brought containers of her own cucumber or carrot soup or lobster salad made with that mayonnaise, all of them labeled in her beautiful handwriting, to tempt mother’s appetite and to supplement the dreadful hospital food. And that was when Aunt Fanny morphed definitively into Fanny for me and became my adored friend as much as she was my mothers. It wasn’t an easy time for any of us I know, I could never have got through it without Fanny.
Nor could I have written my biography of Sara and Gerald Murphy, “Everybody Was So Young” without her help and that of her closest childhood friend, Honoria Donnelly – Honoria Murphy Donnelly. Fanny not only lent me the letters and appointment books of her father, Richard Myers, which chronicled dinners and cocktails and lunches and weekends with the Myers’ friends the Murphys. She went through volumes of photographic scrapbooks with me, telling me who was who and what was what and giving me invaluable context. Most important, sharing her razor-sharp perceptions of the people and events involved.
She told me who to talk to; she told me how to find them. So many of the best stories in my book, like the one about Sara Murphy and Picasso ignoring each other the Brasserie Lipp, came from Fanny. I would pick up the telephone and hear that inimitable voice “Amanda, it’s Fanny” or she’d be on my answering machine saying “Just give me a bell.” She’d ask me to tea accompanied by those tomato sandwiches or her buttery shortbread. We would sit in front of the fire and she would quiz me gently about where my research was taking me and with exquisite tact, she would redirect my steps if I seemed to be heading in a wrong direction or at least not in the right one. Sometimes the process felt like inhabiting one of her exquisite, surreal paintings whose surface and compositional elegance almost obscures their sometimes unsettling wit and truthfulness. But that, of course, is what Fanny was all about. Her style, which was an organic thing, had nothing to do with superficial chi-chi.
Let me leave you and her with a particularly vivid memory of an afternoon when the two of us has been to lunch at my mother’s apartment. We left and we went down the street together, Fanny in one of her glamorous woolen wraps over a ladies-who-lunch suit, her Seaman Shepps earrings, her dark glasses and a pair of those amazing kid gloves. Instead of hailing a taxi on Park Avenue, she took leave of me at the steps to the Ninety-Sixth street subway station.

Fanny Brennan, Falling Ribbon, hand-crafted lithograph on Arches Cover. Image size: 3.75 x 1.625 inches. Paper size: 6 x 7 inches. Signed and numbered in pencil.