The Rise and Notorious Downfall of Aunt Kay

It's true. My reaction to many of my discoveries of my recently-found-mother's-side-of-the- family has been something like, "What? What?!? WHAT?!?!" I've shared a few stories with a handful of people. Other revelations have remained in the family until we have time to process the information. My cousin and I have become a detective team, opening cold case files others never knew about. Or never spoke about. Understandably, I have to be careful about what I write when it could affect other members of the family. But, it's been agreed that I could safely write about Aunt Kay Brunell. After all, that was never her real name in the first place.

Technically, Aunt Kay is my great aunt, only sibling of my grandmother. The younger of the two by a couple years, Aunt Kay was born Kate B**** to Lithuanian-Jewish immigrants. In her teens, Kate moved from Minneapolis to Chicago, writing obituaries for The Chicago Herald.

Suddenly, Kate B**** disappeared. In the 1930 U.S. Census, she reappeared under the identity she would claim for the rest of her life: Kay Brunell, "author of books", daughter of an Anglo-sounding couple from Pennsylvania. In the next paper trail we've found, she was living alone in New York City in a Park Avenue apartment. A fashion editor for film and fashion magazines, there are newspaper articles about her attending rooftop parties at the Pierre Hotel and suing another hotel for refusing to allow her Beddlington terrier to stay there with her.

When she was very young, my cousin visited Aunt Kay in her spectacular apartment. She remembers Kay smoking a cigarette in a long holder while my cousin felt the soft fur coats that filled a whole closet. Aunt Kay, in her deep, raspy voice, commented, "Maybe someday you'll have a closet full of fur coats, too."

But, soon after that, things began getting shaky. The tide of good fortune that had carried Kay along for decades was shifting. Instead of working for fashion and film magazines, she became a fashion editor for True Romance, a pulp fiction publication. She soon left that position to become a stockbroker. The house of cards she'd built was about to collapse.

In the 1961, Kay registered with the SEC to become the sole proprietor of Kay Brunell Securities Company, 277 Park Avenue, New York. And, her registration was denied by the SEC due to the small fact that she'd been using fraudulent claims to sell shares in a shady Florida racetrack. As my cousin and I frantically did more research, we discovered that soon after the SEC rejection, Aunt Kay's long-term boyfriend was involved in a headline-making stock market scandal. The trial lasted 11 months, the longest federal case on record at the time. There were indictments and plea bargains. And it was just about then that Kay contacted Christie's auction house to sell an original Sir Joshua Reynolds oil painting that had hung in her lavish apartment.

It's difficult to track the next seven years of Aunt Kay's life. Without children and having lived an invented life, there are no photos of her since childhood--aside from a few, grainy, unflattering newspaper pictures. We know she died in 1971, alone, penniless, and in pain, in a shoddy nursing home in Miami. She'd been put there, then ignored, by her sister. My grandmother.

To be honest, my grandmother's story is more exciting and dangerous than Aunt Kay's. But, it's so complex and there are so many privacy factors to consider that I always feel thwarted when I try to write about it. It may be easiest to fictionalize parts of it. In fact, it may be best if I used a pen name for it. The alias K. Brunell comes to mind as being perfectly appropriate.