Sybille Bedford

by Selina Hastings

  Eventually Eda and Sybille decided they could endure it no longer, and although their landlady refused to refund any money, they left Asolo at the beginning of July, driving to France to spend a recuperative few months with Allanah. Arriving at Les Bastides Sybille immediately felt happy. “Allanah is being so very very sweet, and really seems to like to stuff her house with a selfish old creature like myself. Then the climate, the air that is like an element, the few clothes one wears, the sense of outdoor life and freedom. Being in the open air is bliss to me.” Allanah, too, seemed very contented: divorced from her husband, Robert, she had also surrendered her maternal role, giving up her rights to the little boy she and Fay Blacket Gill had originally adopted together. Despite their occasionally embattled friendship, Allanah and Sybille remained close; Allanah confessed to Evelyn that when Sybille was in England she missed her “terribly. I love her more than anyone and would do anything for her.”

  Over the next couple of years, Allanah was to make some significant alterations to her property, her aim to provide Sybille, in return for a modest rent, with the space, privacy and quiet she needed to write. Close to the main house were a couple of small farm buildings, one of which was now converted into a separate two-storey dwelling, with jasmine and honeysuckle climbing the walls, and a vine-covered terrace overlooking the garden and beyond it the sea. The interior was whitewashed, the rooms lined with bookshelves, the air kept cool by “shutters closed from dawn to sinking sun.” There was even a small wine cellar in an area dug out between wall and rock, “a true cave,” as Sybille described it, “pitch-dark, very low…I had to squeeze in on all fours…extracting bottles one by one, pocket torch held in the other hand, then back out again.” Here in their adjoining studios Sybille and Eda were able to spend the mornings peacefully at work; in the afternoons they drove down to the beach to swim, before joining Allanah in the evening for dinner. “This place is bliss,” Sybille reported, “bare, clean and spacious; sun-drenched, large French windows opening south onto olives and wild country…No noise except cicadas. We dine out of doors every night. And there is a soothing stillness from morning (when Allanah goes off in her boat) till five in the afternoon when the femme de ménage clatters in.”

  This idyllic period was to be interrupted only once, when in mid-July Sybille returned to London for a couple of weeks, commissioned by Esquire to report on the trial of Stephen Ward. Ward was an originally peripheral figure in what had recently become notorious as the Profumo scandal. In March 1963, John Profumo, a distinguished member of Harold Macmillan’s government, had been forced to resign after denying the truth about his relationship with Christine Keeler, a beautiful young “model” suspected of connections to a Russian naval attaché. It was Stephen Ward, described in the press as a “society osteopath,” who had introduced Keeler to Profumo, and when further investigation revealed his close connection to a number of other young women of dubious reputation Ward was charged under the Sexual Offences Act of living off immoral earnings.

  The trial began on 22 July at the Old Bailey, and from the beginning Sybille found herself both fascinated and appalled as the increasingly disquieting story unfolded over the following few days. Among the many witnesses called to testify, by far the most striking were Christine Keeler herself and Mandy Rice-Davies, both close friends of Dr. Ward. Keeler, a dark-haired beauty, was described by Sybille as “devastatingly sexually attractive,” but whose absence of emotion gave a curiously chilling impression. “Not only the mean little voice is a giveaway, the look on the face is avid, stubborn, closed…At times there might have been a puppet in that box.” Rice-Davies, by contrast, “festively decked out,” was blonde, pert, giggly. “After Christine Keeler’s wan automatism,” Sybille observed, “we were back to flesh and blood. Miss Rice-Davies was at ease in the box like a cheerful predatory cat who knows she’s got a good many mice under her paw.”

  Not until the fourth day did Dr. Ward enter the witness box. “His presence came as a shock, the shock of fresh air…Within two minutes one knew that he had two qualities which had not been associated with him publicly before, intelligence and dignity.” Ward was interrogated for nearly six hours, responding with unfailing courtesy and calm, repeatedly making clear that although he enjoyed the company of pretty girls, he had plenty of money of his own and had never procured women for financial gain. Towards the end of the trial, the judge, Sir Archie Marshall, began a summing-up widely regarded as highly prejudiced against Ward. When at 4:30 the court closed for the day, “a kind of flat gloom set in. It must have sprung from a growing conviction among many of us that if Dr. Ward were not acquitted, justice would not have been felt to have been done.”

  On leaving the Old Bailey, Sybille found herself sharing a taxi with Ward. He was clearly in a desperate state, and she held his hand while trying to comfort and encourage him—to no avail, as it turned out: that night, 30 July, Ward took an overdose of barbiturates, and when discovered lying unconscious was rushed to hospital. After the court reconvened the following morning, the jury in his absence found him guilty of living immorally off the earnings of both Keeler and Rice-Davies, the judge suspending sentence until the accused was well enough to return. But Ward never did return, dying three days later, so “what that sentence would have been we shall never know.”

  Sybille had been shocked by the whole experience, “a case of judicial murder,” as she later described it. “A very, very ugly page of English history.” Writing to Evelyn the day after the trial ended, she told her how the “strange, doomed business” had left her with “a heavy feeling of tragedy, muddle & waste…a blatant and distressing manipulation of justice, and very frightening for us all.” Her long article on the trial, entitled “The Worst We Can Do,” was completed within weeks, but shortly before publication it was withdrawn, judged to be in contempt of court.*

  With the case completed, Sybille returned to France, where she was to stay till the beginning of the following year. By now her journalistic career was well established, and she was receiving frequent requests for articles; her willingness to accept these often trivial commissions resulted in an admonitory letter from her agent in New York. “Tortiss Tortiss Tortiss,” Evelyn began, “Pull up short—WHOA. I feel as if my T[urtle] has turned into a runaway horsie with bit-in-teeth. Darling you must STOP this galloping off in all directions on every nonsense piece of journalism that offers…It’s not good for you when you simply take job after job as it’s offered, so you’re a perpetual journalism factory with no time for serious work for months on end.” Only days after this letter was written, however, an offer arrived on Evelyn’s desk which she realised would be out of the question for Sybille to refuse: to report for Life magazine on the trial in Dallas of Jack Ruby, accused of the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President Kennedy.

  “Darling listen,” Evelyn wrote excitedly, “you surely must know that this will be one of the tremendous trials of our time…Bob says it’s the greatest thing for your career that ever was.” The offer from Life included all expenses paid, “plus, of course, the highest money in the US for every single piece…If this trial lasts 3 weeks—you can make a minimum of 15,000 dollars, repeat minimum. Bob says, this is a different class of money—beyond anybody’s sanity.”

  Sybille did not hesitate to accept, and at the end of January 1964, she and Eda sailed for New York; Eda then left for California to stay with her old schoolfriend, the now well-known writer M. F. K. Fisher. Sybille meanwhile spent a week at the luxurious Weston Hotel in Manhattan, where she found herself “rushed off feet. The LIFE business is so tough I don’t see how I can survive it.” At a luncheon given by “the Top Brass on LIFE/TIME,” the company, to Sybille’s disgust, spent an entire two hours drinking cocktails before the first morsel of food appeared. Among her fellow guests was Ruby’s counsel, Melvin Belli, a large, handsome man with thick white hair, pompous and vain, “a monster who’d be debarred in England.” After
arriving in Dallas, “the most hideous town I have ever seen,” she was given a suite at the Sheraton Hotel, “2 TV sets & 4 telephones. No natural air; all food iced…Last night at dinner I sat next to the Prosecuting Attorney who chewed a cold cigar while he spoke.” Later, looking back, she wrote, “I had five mortal weeks at Dallas and hated nearly every minute of it.”

  The trial of Jack Ruby, who had shot Oswald only two days after Oswald had murdered the President, was the focus of attention all over the world. As the shooting had been caught on camera, there was no question that Ruby was the killer; the case to be proven was not whether he were guilty of the act, but whether he had been in his right mind while committing it. Well aware of the gravity of the forthcoming trial and of its overwhelming national importance, Sybille was shocked to find how casually the proceedings were conducted in court, how undisciplined the behaviour of the legal teams. In a tone of barely concealed contempt, she describes the district attorney, Henry Wade, “lying back in his chair, chomping on his unlit cigar,” while the judge, Joe. B. Brown, “bumbles about the scene…calls for water, swallows a pill or stands still to be photographed, or does his go-out-and-get-a-cup-of-coffee stuff.” Meanwhile the accused, Jack Ruby, watches the proceedings “with a kind of dead-chicken stare. He looked…like a wretched, scraggly, half-plucked broiler, blinking or staring under a strong hypnotic light.”

  When after nearly three weeks the trial reaches its final stage, the courthouse is “overflowing with humanity and litter, with counsel, staff and newsmen in an indescribable state of grubbiness, nervous exhaustion, fatigue.” By the time Melvin Belli begins his “wildly theatrical” closing speech, it is after midnight and everyone is exhausted. Belli speaks in a style reminiscent of “the long-discarded forensic art of the Victorians, the courtroom style of blood and thunder and tears…Dickens would have been at home here.” When at 1 a.m. the case is finally referred to the jury, the judge instructs them to leave for a night’s sleep before reconvening the following day. Next morning a consensus is quickly reached: Ruby is declared guilty of murder and sentenced to death.

  After the trial finished, Sybille immediately returned to New York, the pressure of meeting her deadline intense. “I did sixteen thousand words…between one Saturday afternoon and the next Wednesday morning,” she told Allanah. “I got up at 3.30 every morning and worked till 9 or 10 in the evening.” In her report, her distaste for what she regarded as the “clownishly conducted” procedure in court and her shock over Ruby’s sentencing are modified only up to a point. Perhaps unsurprisingly, her article attracted some negative criticism. “The summary of the testimony Miss Bedford presents seems reasonably objective,” stated an editorial in the Salt Lake Telegram. “But by using one of the oldest, most transparent and discredited reportorial tricks of the business—the use of highly subjective adjectives to describe participants—she sets about discrediting judge, prosecution attorneys, and state witnesses.” Miss Bedford was entitled to her opinion, but it was shameful “for a supposedly responsible national publication to spread this sort of womanly emotionalism on its news pages.”

  Once the article was written, Sybille, “feted everywhere” and living in luxury at the magazine’s expense, was able to enjoy herself. Eda had returned from California, “has put on some weight, thank God,” and the two of them now embarked on a round of cocktail parties, luncheons and dinners. One of the most memorable evenings was spent with Bob Gottlieb, Bob excited finally to meet the author whose work he so much admired. As Bob was indifferent to food and cared nothing about wine—“I only know there’s red wine and white wine and that disgusting thing called rosé”—he had left the preparations for dinner to his wife, Muriel. Fortunately, “with the help of Manhattan’s finest butcher she came through and produced a filet de boeuf that passed muster.” The evening was clearly a success; Bob was fascinated by Sybille, impressed by her intellect and knowledge, while at the same time aware of a slight air of condescension in her manner towards him. “We had a good time together,” he recalled, “but she was formidable…[Sybille] was arrogant, not a cosy person…She thought publishers and editors were tradesmen, didn’t see them as equals.”

  Inevitably, the most emotionally charged element of Sybille’s time in New York was her reunion with Evelyn. For the past fifteen years, Evelyn had provided the cornerstone of Sybille’s professional and emotional life, while for Evelyn Sybille remained her dearest love, her closest confidante and friend. After Sybille’s departure at the end of April, Evelyn wrote to her, “I miss you so much you can’t imagine…And also feel consoled because I miss you: it’s such a proof of the realness of the loving tie…And no I didn’t see you sail. Stood on shore…and munched a hot dog off a hot-dog stand. Just stood and stared and stared and ate the hot dog then went and took the cross-town to office. OH and missed you so much.”

  Sybille and Eda left New York on the Queen Elizabeth, disembarking at Cherbourg rather than Southampton, as they were to return immediately to the south of France. And here over the next few years the two of them were to make their base, although several expeditions were also undertaken to other countries, to Italy, Germany, Yugoslavia, and to England. As ever, England and France were the two countries Sybille loved the most, despite their numerous faults and failings. “I’m deeply, intrinsically attached to France and to the French way of living,” she said once in an interview, while “my ties with England are language, profession, institutions—and friends.”

  Among those friends Martha Gellhorn was one on whom Sybille continued to rely, grateful for her continuing financial help and for her open invitation to stay in Chester Square. On a personal level, however, she was beginning to find Martha increasingly difficult, resenting her bossiness and bad moods. “I admired her so,” she told Evelyn, “and it animated my life at times. Now I do not admire her…[she] bores me. That is the worst…[her] reactions to me are so déjà vu and brash and empty…She is unhappy now, footloose, in despair…but all so self-made.” The cause of Martha’s current unhappiness was the sudden collapse of her marriage to Tom Matthews, recently discovered to have been conducting a secret affair for some time. The role of wife had never been easy for Martha, who had always hated the “absolute, pure, nameless, indescribable loathsome hell” of domesticity; “the plain fact is I should never have married…marriage is murder for me,” she had confessed to Sybille only months after her wedding. Now, enraged by Tom’s betrayal, Martha had decided to leave him, impatient to escape a relationship in which almost from the beginning she had felt trapped. Despite Sybille’s misgivings about Martha, she was sympathetic to her situation. “One was very sad for M,” Sybille told Evelyn, “who felt the human disappointment in Tom most and her wasted years and found it hard to see another side.”

  Two old friends with whom Sybille remained in affectionate contact were Jimmy and Tania Stern, now settled in England at Hatch Manor, a handsome sixteenth-century house with a large garden in Wiltshire. Here Sybille and Eda were often invited to stay, both enjoying the intellectual talk, the good food, the spacious book-lined sitting room with its open fire and comfortable chairs and sofas. The Sterns had been married for nearly thirty years, Jimmy as tall and handsome as ever, with his fine features and thick grey hair, Tania pale and delicate; both were always elegantly dressed, Jimmy in finely tailored tweeds, Tania with a metropolitan chic reminiscent of pre-war Paris and Berlin. Jimmy was very much the dominant partner, clever and amusing, insatiably demanding, quickly irritable, his main target Tania, whom he condescendingly referred to as “the LW,” the little wife—“Bist du da?” (“Are you there?”), he would call to her throughout the day. Both Sterns were avid talkers, and with friends at dinner Jimmy before long would grew resentful of the audience at Tania’s end of the table; rising from his chair, often half drunk, he would summon a chosen guest to go with him to his study, leaving Tania to entertain the rest of the company, the second rank, in the sitting room.

&nb
sp; From the first, Sybille treasured her visits to Hatch. She relished Tania’s excellent cooking, was fascinated by Jimmy’s conversation, impressed by his profound knowledge of European literature, and she loved the fact that as guests neither she nor Eda ever had to lift a finger. “The bliss of no housework…talk talk talk, sheer joy and never without a full glass of champagne to hand. How I love that.” Sybille was grateful, too, for Jimmy’s generosity, for the large cheques that arrived every year on her birthday and at Christmas, and she enjoyed the glamorous parties hosted by the Sterns on their visits to London. In November 1960 Sybille and Eda had been invited to a fiftieth-birthday dinner for Tania at the Etoile, along with the Robson-Scotts, John Lehmann, William Plomer and Nigel Dennis, Sybille, to everyone’s surprise, arriving dressed in a chic black evening dress and pearls.

  An added attraction of staying at Hatch was the company of near neighbours, Billy and Jenny Hughes. Sybille had first known Billy Hughes over a decade earlier in Rome, where Billy had been chief of staff to the general commanding the Allied forces. Now a distinguished judge, tall, stout and very handsome, Billy was a man of enormous warmth and charm, witty, exceptionally well read and a talented raconteur. For Sybille he possessed almost every quality she admired. “I love Billy Hughes,” she told Evelyn. “He is gay and kind and full of life, bursting with intelligence.” His much younger wife, Jenny, was amused to see how taken Sybille was with her husband. “Sybille was obsessed with legal process, and if she found a lawyer who was also obsessed with poetry it was irresistible.” Jenny for her part was intrigued by Sybille, although she often found her behaviour arrogant, particularly her bossiness and egotism, her habit of briskly brushing aside any intervention she considered irrelevant. In some respects, said Jenny, “she was a very difficult person to be fond of…with friends, she was quite secretive and it all had to be on her own terms, all of it.”