Background
She was born in Baltimore, Maryland, a daughter of Johns Hopkins clinician Doctor Louis Hamman.
She was born in Baltimore, Maryland, a daughter of Johns Hopkins clinician Doctor Louis Hamman.
She was an editor for Pictorial Review, Good Housekeeping, Mademoiselle, the modern living editor for LIFE, editor-in-chief for Bride & Home. Her move to Manhattan was during prohibition, which fueled many stories. She was one of a "trio of formidable and colorful women" the other two being Mary Letherbee, movie editors
And Sally Kirkland, fashion editors
Together they led the "back of the book" at LIFE and were given free rein by Editor Thompson as managing editor and later editor in chief When Thompson went on to found the Smithsonian Magazine Hamman would often write the humor page inside the back cover.
I"ve never laughed more than at some of Mary"s stories — they came out visually like comic strips. You could see her father"s Christmas turkey from a grateful patient, safely anaesthetized, plucked and put over-night in the ice-box — until it leaped out at the first early riser and ran naked and squawking through the startled house.
Mess loved her 1941 Buick — she kept it well into the 1960s.
One summer she and I bought a flock of antiques in New Hampshire — so many that we had to buy an old trailer to get them to Buckinghamshire county. On the road down we were stopped twice by troopers and at every toll booth. "Number trailers allowed, lady!" Each time she"d bat her eyes and smile, "But sir, this isn"t a trailer — it"s a furniture van."Either the rules didn"t mention furniture vans or her smile was irresistible, because we made it to the farm by 3:00 a.m.
Hamman liked nothing better than a good prank or joke, as did her father.
Years ago, I did a number of breast enhancement operations on go-go dancers (to help pay my daughter"s tuition bills, I explained).
Later, I received a letter from a Lydia Thomas of Philadelphia complaining that her breasts had continued to grow to their present monstrous size (photo enclosed, showing unbelievable mammaries) and that I had to do something to stop lieutenant I wrote back, telling her to come in for an antidote shot, warning her not to smoke pot because it reacts with the Silastic to form an unusual growth hormone.
The letter came back, "Number such address." The photo, I later discovered, was cleverly mounted to look like a Polaroid, but actually was a ckip from a skin magazine. Mess said later that she felt I"d eventually smell a rat but concocting the letter had been such fun.