Milestones

DIED. Marion Tanner, ninetyish, quirky, colorful, real-life model for the heroine of the Broadway musical Mame, which was based on the 1955 novel Auntie Mame, written by her nephew Edward Everett Tanner III under the pen name Patrick Dennis; of pneumonia precipitated by a stroke; in a New York City nursing home. For more than three decades she ran a salon for struggling artists, writers, self-styled radicals and, later, drifters. In 1964, unable to meet mortgage payments, she was evicted from her house, prompting a deputy sheriff on the case to remark, "She is an amazing woman . . . In an earlier time, she might have been a saint."