Please Don’t Eat the Daisies by Jean Kerr ~ 1957. This edition: Doubleday, 1957. Illustrations by Carl Rose. Hardcover. 192 pages.
My rating: 8/10.
I’ve had this book kicking around for years, as you can see from the sad state of its dust jacket pictured over there on the left (now covered with crinkly, shiny Brodart Just-a-Fold, one of my happier recent personal library improvement initiatives), and I re-read it with pleasure every so often. The only thing keeping it from a 10/10 rating is that it is too darned short; we never really get to settle down into it; it’s over and done with much too soon.
Jean Kerr lightly channels Shirley Jackson (the domestically-focussed SJ of Life Among the Savages versus the darker fictions, I hasten to add) and shines a cheerful and mildly sarcastic light on her own marriage and the goings-on of her four young sons.
Jean was always interested in the theatrical arts, and upon graduation from college, married one of her drama professors, Walter Kerr, who later became a prominent stage and film critic. The Kerrs dabbled in playwriting, producing a series of not terribly successful efforts, but having much more success with writing material for revues.
Jean Kerr did eventually have a hit, with the 1961 Broadway comedy Mary, Mary. She also wrote humorous essays which were published in various periodicals, such as the Ladies’ Home Journal and The Saturday Evening Post. Please Don’t Eat the Daisies is a compilation of these essays, and was followed some years later by other collections: 1960’s The Snake Has All the Lines, 1970’s Penny Candy, and 1978’s How I Got to Be Perfect.
Somewhere in the middle of Daisies, the Kerrs buy a house. Not just any house, but an eccentrically designed and decorated Larchdale, New York mansion formerly owned by a compatriot of Henry Ford, one retired inventor, world traveller and stuff collector, Charles B. King. King incorporated such features into his “fairy tale home” such as carved ceiling beams and a dining room floor made of planks from a retired paddlewheel steam ship, the door of ST. Gabriel’s Church, a clock tower, and a thirty-two bell courtyard carillon (connected to a clock in said clock tower) which played the duet from Carmen every day at noon.
The Kerrs found the house bizarrely irresistible, and persisted in their efforts to buy it from the trustees of the King estate, who could not agree on a reasonable asking price, until a fire destroyed one of the wings, and the price dropped to a level the Kerrs could manage.
For anyone interested in taking a peek at the house of the book, here is a link to an article and a slide show of a tour of the building prepared when Jean Kerr’s sons put the building up for sale in 2003, after it had been in the family for 58 years:
http://larchmontgazette.com/2003/features/20030318kerrhouse.html
Please Don’t Eat the Daisies caught the spotlight in 1960 as it was used as the basis of a romantic-comedy movie by the same name starring David Niven and Doris Day, and then a 1965-67 television sit-com based very loosely on the Kerr ménage and their unique home.
While I enjoy Jean Kerr’s on-page persona as a harassed mother of many (she eventually had six children, including one set of twins) I think my favourite essays in Please Don’t Eat the Daisies are the parodies of literary works. Stephen Vincent Benét’s sombre poem John Brown’s Body is presented as a readers’ theatre piece entitled Don Brown’s Body (starring Mike Hammer and set amongst the gangsters), while Francoise Sagan’s A Certain Smile inspires Jean Kerr’s brutally funny mockery, Toujours tristesse. These two essays make the book for me; the Kerrs’ revues, if they were anything like these, must have been an absolute joy to attend.
A very clever lady, behind that “I’m just a harried mom who happens to write on the side” literary disguise.
Leaves & Pages 
Oh how I love Brodarting my hardbacks. It makes me so happy to take a tatty dust jacket and protect it forever.
Have you read How I Got to Be Perfect? I have this vague, vague memory of a book of essays, one of which was about a girl taking elocution lessons or something in which she had to bellow out “HUN-GAH!” in a play. And the name Jean Kerr sounds awfully familiar…
I didn’t realize until just recently that one could actually purchase Brodart by the roll – I had previously purchased a few three-packs at a local stationery store for an exorbitant price for those few extra-special books, but I’m now on my third 300-foot roll of the stuff, and my books look FABULOUS. So many of them have disintegrating dust jackets, and it was a perpetual worry that they were getting increasingly damaged with every reading. No more!
I haven’t read How I Got to Be Perfect (yet), but I do recognize the “HUN-GAH!” reference. It’s from My Sister Eileen, by Ruth McKenney, which is also an utter joy to read and extremely funny. I have it right here opened to chapter two: HUN-GAH – Eileen Learns to Play the Piano and I Take Elocution Lessons. Another glorious vintage treasure. 🙂
OH MY GOD THANK YOU. This has been bothering me for YEARS and I haven’t been able to google it successfully. You are a helpful genius.
We aim to please! 😉 Seriously though, that was just a fluke, because I read My Sister Eileen this winter, and then gave it to my mom to read, and had just received it back so it was nice and handy. I think there’s a similar episode in one of the Betty MacDonald books, too, where the girls take elocution lessons. Must have been a common “enrichment skill”, kind of like tap dancing lessons… 🙂
Sounds fun!
It is! 🙂
I was very fond of this book and Shirley Jackson’s domestic novels as a girl, but somehow never took in that the Kerrs’ house was – that! Thank you immensely for sharing the Larchmont article with its vast slideshow. My goodness, those people lived large, didn’t they, and the place looks like it ought to be a museum now, or a visitable writers’ historic house! Fascinating, great stuff.
I was so thrilled to find that article – it’s a wonderful glimpse into the backstory of this too-short collection of articles.
I don’t know if you’ve ever come across Marie Killilea’s books about her daughter Karen, who was born with cerebral palsy. They were neighbors of the Kerrs in Larchmont, and both play supporting roles in the second book – an interesting view of them!
Oh, yes, I remember those books. Karen and With Love From Karen. I read those in elementary school. I had no idea that the Kerrs and the Killileas were neighbours. How very interesting.
I must see if I can find the Karen books – I know they were still at my mom’s house before she downsized, but I don’t recall seeing them when I packed up her books after her second move to the nursing home this past year, so possibly they were put in the giveaway boxes.
Oh, I read the Karen books a million years ago. Very upbeat, I recall. I don’t remember references to the Kerrs, though I also read Please Don’t Eat the Daisies.
Like Jenny, I’ve covered many of my books with Brodart milar covers. It brings even the scruffiest jacket to life, and makes the books look so loved. As they are.
I too read the Karen books way back when. And the one about the skier who was paralyzed – The Other Side (Far Side?) of the Mountain – do you remember that one? Very “inspirational”, as I recall.
There are no references to Karen and family in Daisies, but I’ll be watching for them in subsequent books. I think I will be hunting down the other Jean Kerr compilations; I took a quick look on ABE and they are all available in abundance, for nicely reasonable prices.
Brodart is wonderful; I’m a complete convert. I wish I’d discovered it years ago, before some of these lovely old dust jackets got so beat up. Well, the worst ones came to me already in tatters; I must say that we are pretty careful with them as a rule, temporarily removing them before reading and so on. But time is not kind to paper…
I enjoyed you article. A couple of notes for you. My Dad was a professor at Catholic University in Washington, DC, and convinced my mother to go there to get her MA…and later, after teaching her in one of his classes, convinced her to marry him.
My parents bought the house in Larchmont, New York in 1954, and there is a great illustration of my parents looking at the house in wonder in Please Don’t Eat The Daisies.
Dear Gil – it is so wonderful to hear from you! I am so glad you enjoyed the article. Your parents sound like they were wonderful people. I hugely enjoy your mother’s writing, as I said in the review. I will add your notes to the review – thank you for sending those.
Wonderful to read that, Gil. I’ll look up that picture in the book, with wonder! Thanks.
Gil, I remember your family and your babysitter Karen, a good friend of my sister’s. I named my child after her. Your twin brothers were in my class or one above or below at SAS. Larchmont was a wonder in those days, wasn’t it? Good and plenty!
Wow. Small world. Karen and her sister who also taught at St. Augustine’s (and was probably my favorite teacher at the time) both used to baby sit for us. I believe Colin and John graduated from St. Augustine’s in 1963. Thanks for reaching out…