The story of Mame Dennis, a well-to-do woman who lives in New York at the peak of the 1920s. She become the guardian of her nephew, Patrick. The ten-year-old needs his aunt, and this is something new for Mame -- to be needed. It changes her life and brings her into sharp conflict with her best friend, Vera Charles, a multi-martini, grande dame of the legitimate theatre, who can't stand children.
Eye to eye, toe to toe, Mame battles Babcock, the Babbitt-ish banker who wants to make young Patrick the prisoner of the Establishment and put the chains of conformity around him. When the Depression hits, it looks as if Babcock is going to have his way. Mame loses all her money and jobs as quickly as she finds them.
In a brief adventure as a manicurist, she meets Beau -- a wealthy scion of the South. He takes Mame to his plantation for the begrudging approval of his family. Beau proposes in the bouncing title song which sings the praises of Mame. There's only one problem as the curtain falls on the first act -- young Patrick is afraid he has lost his Best Girl.
Act Two rushes headlong into the 1930s. Mame returns to Beekman Place after Beau's sudden death. Patrick, now in college, and Mame's former suitor, Lindsay Woolsey, prompt her into writing her memoirs. Patrick's former nanny, Gooch, has been primed in secretarial school to type up Mame's pearls of wisdom -- but an experiment in a liberated life has a transforming influence on her.
The maturing Patrick seems to be slipping away from Mame's ideals of freedom. When he declares his engagement to a fatuous blonde "with the IQ of a dead flashlight battery," Mame is in despair. Just as young Patrick rescued her from the shallow trap of the 1920s, she helps the boy to save himself from a life of drabness and snobbery.
Ingeniously, she foils the Establishment and life goes on, not with Auntie Mame but with Grand Auntie Mame rescuing another youngster from the toils of conformity.
