SHE’S PROBABLY ONE of the most fascinating Hoosiers you’ve never heard of … Janet Flanner of Flanner Buchanan, one of the first funeral homes in Indianapolis. But this Flanner never lived quietly. Born in 1892 (28 years before women won the right to vote), she lived large and uncensored.
Flanner is the subject of the new one-woman play, They Call Me Genêt, which debuts at The District Theatre on July 16. Written by playwright D. Paul Thomas, it stars veteran Indianapolis actress Jen Johansen, who was “mortified” she’d never heard of Flanner, a fellow Park Tudor grad (though a century apart.)
“To learn about this woman, that she was here in Indianapolis … It’s kind of staggering she hasn’t been a household name,” Johansen says. “It’s past time to bring her story to the floor here.”
- Studied at the University of Chicago for two years
- Worked as a film critic for The Indianapolis Star (the first in the U.S.)
- Married and left for New York. Soon after, she divorced and headed to Paris with Solita Solana, a writer and eventually Flanner’s lifelong partner
- Landed a gig as the Paris correspondent for a new magazine called The New Yorker. Using the pseudonym “Genêt,” she penned more than 700 “Letters from Paris” over 50 years on politics, arts, and culture while hobnobbing with the likes of Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Kurt Vonnegut, and Gertrude Stein.
Flanner would also write a three-part expose on Hitler leading up to WWII and later cover the Nuremberg trials. Even so, she was never quite known or celebrated in her hometown.
Scott Keller and Bruce Buchanan hope that soon changes. They’re cousins of Flanner and among those financing the upcoming production.
“When people learn about her, it isn’t ‘Oh, she’s interesting,'” Buchanan says. “It’s ‘Wow. She was so accomplished.’ She networked with the top political, social, and artistic leaders of the day.”
Johansen describes the play as couched in the writing of her final letter from Paris—the memories of her time and the reckoning of coming to this closure of her career.
While Buchanan never met Flanner, Keller did twice. The first time with his mother in New York, when they stopped at The Algonquin Hotel, where the Round Table met.
“And there’s Janet and Noel Coward,” Keller recalls. “We had a two-and-a-half-hour smoke- and martini-filled lunch, and my mother said, ‘Don’t say a word!'”
Years later, Keller would spend three days with Flanner in Pasadena, California, where Janet’s mother founded the Pasadena Playhouse. He says she was “walking with a cane but as sharp and witty as can be.”
Flanner died in November 1978 at age 86. Her funeral in New York City drew a who’s who list of attendees, including Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Keller and Buchanan hope the upcoming production ultimately leads to a documentary or feature film on their cousin’s life.
“I think a lot of people will say this story needs to be enlarged and told on a national scale, and I think it will happen,” Keller says.
