By August, Brickhill had tired of chilly New Zealand, and was missing big city life. An early return to London was ruled out by the taxation issue. Across the Pacific, US sales of Reach for the Sky were below expectations, so Brickhill decided that later in the year he would sail to America and spend six months in New York City promoting the book. Margot insisted that, before she and Timothy joined him in New York, he send her back to Sydney to show off the newborn to family, then fly the pair to Hong Kong to spend a month over Christmas with Margot’s sister Jeanette there. Brickhill agreed, adding that in March or April they would go somewhere warm for the rest of the year – he gave Margot the option of either Italy or the Bahamas. She chose Italy.
Jeanette had initially gone to Hong Kong to visit big sister Beth, whose husband had been transferred to the colony by the British Army. Finding employment in Hong Kong as secretary to a British barrister, Jeanette had married a local diamond trader, and Brickhill would send Margot to Honkers with money to buy jewellery wholesale from Jeanette’s husband. As Margot told Billy Collins in an August letter, she was excited about seeing her sister, and about visiting Hong Kong and New York. She also revealed that she was looking forward to returning to England and settling permanently there, and declared that both Brickhill and she were besotted with baby Timothy.270
Come September, Brickhill was so displeased with Collins for his persistent requests for royalty reductions, and his support of Bader in the royalty split matter, he told the chairman he was seriously considering terminating his relationship with the publisher. Quickly backing off, Collins offered to fly to New York in January to meet Brickhill and iron out their differences. In the end, Brickhill would stand firm and refuse to alter his contract. He did concede that, with Collins still pushing him to write the Battle of Britain novel, he was prepared to accept lower royalty rates on future books.
Another storm now broke over the author. By the second week of September, the Sydney Morning Herald was reporting from its London office that The Dam Busters movie had been wrapped up and was in the can, ready for release.271 That release was scheduled for November. In October, out of the blue, came a phone call to Brickhill from London. The film’s release was on hold, perhaps permanently, and producer Robert Clark was blaming Brickhill. Guy Gibson’s young widow, Eve, was threatening to sue Associated British Picture Corporation for using material taken from her late husband’s book, Enemy Coast Ahead, without permission.
As Brickhill explained to Clark, he had obtained written permission from the publisher of Enemy Coast Ahead, Michael Joseph, to use selected extracts from the book in The Dam Busters. Clark wasn’t satisfied with this. He wanted Brickhill to settle the matter with the widow, fast. When Brickhill said he couldn’t possibly return to London, and was shortly setting off for New York, Clark told him to sort it out from America; but sort it out he must. If Associated British was prevented from releasing the film, they would sue Brickhill for every penny he possessed.
Brickhill crashed back into depression. He was so low when Margot and Timothy flew back to Sydney as planned, he couldn’t get out of bed to see them off. Finally pulling himself together, Brickhill told Clark that if Gibson’s widow appointed agents in New York, he would enter into discussions there. Make it quick, Clark responded. This was Associated British’s biggest movie ever, and the only one wholly funded by the company. This crisis threatened to bankrupt them. To save time, and overcoming his prejudice against air travel, Brickhill booked airline tickets to New York, via Suva, Honolulu and San Francisco.
Gibson’s widow, meanwhile, arrived in London from South Africa. Besieged by the press wanting to know about the dispute over the film, she declared, ‘I am not concerned with the financial aspect – I am just deeply hurt that they did not consult me.’272 As Brickhill was to discover, it would prove to be all about the financial aspect.
As he nervously flew across the Pacific from Auckland, Brickhill wondered how Gibson’s widow knew exactly what was in the film. No one outside Associated British had yet seen it. Then he remembered that, before filming began, Clark had sent the screenplay out to him, and everyone who’d been connected with 617 Squadron in 1943, for comment.
Australian former 617 Squadron member Jack Leggo had told the press he’d received his copy via his father, after the RAF informed Associated British he was dead. Harry Humphries, difficult former 617 Squadron adjutant, had added a few comments to his copy and returned it, considering it ‘a fair reflection of the events’.273 Gibson’s father had seen and approved the script. So, Gibson’s widow must have been sent the script by Clark – she’d been introduced to star Richard Todd prior to filming. Why wait until the film was ready for release before speaking out? Clearly, she must have had legal advice to hold off, to maximise her leverage.
At first, Clark publicly declared that Associated British was prepared to pay her compensation if she had been wronged, and remake the movie from scratch if necessary. But knowing his company didn’t have the money for a reshoot, he quickly changed his tune. ‘This film will never be shown until this matter has been cleared up,’ he angrily told the press as Brickhill flew east. ‘As far as we are concerned, it is a matter between Mr Brickhill and Mrs Hyman’s agents.’274
Gibson’s wife quickly attracted public sympathy. For she was twice a widow. After the war, she’d married a second time, to Jack Hyman, a former captain with the South African Army, and moved with him to Johannesburg. Hyman had within a few years also been killed, in a car accident. Now using the name Mrs Eve Hyman, the double widow would before long revert to the name of Mrs Gibson.
Brickhill knew that Eve had been chorus girl Evelyn Moore when Gibson began courting her. While the 1940 evacuation of Dunkirk’s beaches was underway, and Brickhill was still a subeditor at Sydney’s Sunday Sun, Gibson had been on leave in Brighton, haunting a theatre’s stage door to see the petite dancer. They had married shortly after. The fact that Eve’s marriage to Gibson had been on the rocks at the time of his death didn’t come out until much later. Only in 2010 would Margaret Masters, a nurse with the Women’s Royal Auxiliary during the war, come forward to say that she and Gibson had an affair in 1943–44, and claiming he’d intended leaving his wife.
Once Brickhill landed in New York, he took an apartment in the Beaux Arts building on East 44th Street, and, with the help of Mike Watkins, began a long, drawn-out conversation with the widow’s US agents. Planning to commence researching a novel while in New York, Brickhill told Billy Collins it would be on a subject he knew well and would be a perfect transition from war nonfiction. As December arrived, Brickhill reckoned it would take him a year to produce the novel, although he soon found this city which never slept a far from ideal place to be creative – as Collins had earlier warned him. But first, Brickhill had to sort out the Eve Hyman affair: ‘The most bare-faced attempt at unjustified extortion I have ever encountered,’ he told Collins. ‘Their claims are quite untenable and we are, of course, calling their bluff.’275
Brickhill reckoned he’d taken quite a beating in 1954. The battering wasn’t yet over. The Dam Busters battle would continue into the new year.
21.
A Slap in the Face
ACROSS THE TABLE from him in Manhattan’s swanky Hawaiian Room night club sat Margot, looking trim and healthy. On 11 January, she and baby Tim had arrived from Hong Kong. To please his wife, Brickhill had moved out of the Beaux Arts building and taken a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, hiring a fulltime nurse to look after their eight-month-old. This night out was Brickhill’s way of welcoming Margot back. With Timothy under the watchful eye of his nurse at the Waldorf, they’d taken in the Hawaiian Room’s hula show, with Margot telling Brickhill how much she’d enjoyed seeing family and how fascinating she’d found Hong Kong.
As a waiter refilled their champagne glasses and withdrew, Margot reached into her handbag, took out a cigarette, and put it in her mouth.
‘I thought you’d given up smoking,’ said Brickhill wi
th a scowl.
As far as he knew, she hadn’t smoked since falling pregnant. Although a heavy smoker himself, he’d never liked to see Margot smoke. As she fished in her handbag for a lighter, Brickhill reached across the table, took the cigarette from her mouth, broke it in half, and laid it on the table in front of her. After looking at him in surprise for a moment, Margot calmly took up the halved cigarette, and stuffed the pieces into his champagne. The confrontation ignited into a row, which continued as Brickhill paid the bill, and flowed out onto the Lexington Avenue pavement. It was not the reunion that Brickhill had been hoping for.276
Their stay at the Waldorf-Astoria lasted fifty-five days, as Brickhill and Watkins continued the battle with Eve Hyman’s agents. Finally, by March, an agreement was reached that would allow The Dam Busters to be released. With the marathon negotiations terminated, Brickhill tore an advertisement from a New York newspaper which promoted an imminent sailing to Naples of the liner Roma. Giving it to Margot, he asked her to book their passage. His return to Naples would be in considerably more style than he’d left it in 1943.
As the Brickhills sailed for Italy on 19 March, it was left to Robert Clark to implement the changes agreed with Hyman’s agents. Details of the settlement were never made public. The production company’s records are lost, and neither surviving film crew nor film historians have been able to shed light on precisely what was done to placate Gibson’s widow. Brickhill clearly stuck to his guns and didn’t part with any money.
He and Clark did agree to give Guy Gibson a screen credit. As the opening credits unfold, we see, following the film’s title, ‘Based on the book by Paul Brickhill’, and, beneath that, ‘and Wing Commander Gibson’s own account “Enemy Coast Ahead”’. The term ‘own account’, rather than ‘book’, seems to draw a fine line to obviate the need to pay a rights fee.
Almost certainly, Brickhill also convinced Clark to shoot two short, additional cockpit scenes in the spring of 1955. Freddie Goode, assistant director on the film’s second unit, would recall that filming of aerial scenes for The Dam Busters, supposed to last only ten weeks, ultimately extended over five months.277 And Walter Mycroft is known to have written several additional scenes for the film. All this extra shooting contributed to a blowout in the film’s budget from £200,000 to at least £250,000. By one account, it grew to £260,000.278
These two new cockpit scenes involved supporting actors, not Richard Todd, who had moved on to other projects. The two, virtually identical scenes, were superfluous. In the final film, as the first wave of three Lancaster bombers flying Operation Chastise flit low over the North Sea, heading for occupied Europe, the scene changes to the cockpit of Gibson’s aircraft. Guy Gibson’s navigator informs the rest of the crew that the Dutch coast is just ahead.
‘Stand by, front gunner,’ Richard Todd, as Gibson, then says, ‘we’re going over.’
The scene changes to the operations room, where Barnes Wallis, Bomber Harris and senior RAF Bomber Command officers tensely wait. An officer says that the second wave of Lancasters should now be coming up to the Dutch coast. The scene switches to the cockpit of the lead aircraft of the second wave, where the navigator says, ‘Enemy coast ahead.’ After seeing the second trio of bombers cross the Dutch coast and head inland, we cut to the cockpit of the lead aircraft of the third wave. Before he fastens his oxygen mask and these three planes also cross the coast, the pilot says, ‘Enemy coast ahead.’
Neither Gibson nor Brickhill used the phrase ‘Enemy coast ahead’ in their books. Gibson only used it as his title. He wrote that his own bomb aimer, Australian Spam Spafford, actually said, ‘There’s the coast.’ But Gibson made no mention of what was said in other aircraft. In negotiations, Brickhill would have pointed out that additional scenes using the dialogue ‘Enemy coast ahead’ would promote Gibson’s book and generate more sales of it, and more royalties, which continued to flow to Gibson’s widow, Eve. And this compromise seems to have been the centrepiece of the undisclosed settlement.
Finally, with Hyman seen off via the secret deal, and with two additional short scenes edited in and credits amended, Robert Clark had his film in the can. He announced that the movie would launch with a charity premiere in London attended by Princess Margaret, on 16 May, which would coincide with the twelfth anniversary of the night that 617 Squadron took off on the dams raid. Demand for tickets proved so high, Clark scheduled a second charity premiere for the following evening, with the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester officiating.
Rain teemed down in London on the evening of Monday, 16 May 1955, but that didn’t deter hundreds of people from lining the streets outside Leicester Square’s Empire Theatre. They’d come to catch a glimpse of film stars and royalty arriving for The Dam Busters charity premiere. Richard Todd and Princess Margaret garnered the greatest cheers. Among the special guests were mothers of men of 617 Squadron who’d died in Operation Chastise, and fourteen 617 survivors including five who’d been flown in from Canada.
Producer Robert Clark had pulled out all stops to make this a success. He had to. In 1954, Associated British had released ten pictures. This year, as a result of the Hyman dispute, it released just four. The futures of the company and Clark were riding on The Dam Busters. Two nights earlier, Clark had staged a special 617 Squadron reception at Regent Street’s Criterion Restaurant. The centrepiece had been a giant model of the Moehne Dam, and Guy Gibson’s seventy-eight-year-old father, Alexander, had told guests his son had deeply regretted the large number of farm animals drowned after he’d ruptured the dam.
Gibson made no mention of the 1294 civilians, many of them foreign forced labourers, who’d also drowned. That death toll was similar to the highest number of civilian deaths in London on the worst night of the Blitz of 1940–41. In 1943, Germany’s propaganda ministry had labelled the dams raid a war crime. Now, in 1955, the German press was expressing deep regret at the release of this film, which they saw as a ‘glorification of a gruesome act’.279
Moustachioed, paunchy producer Clark could be seen in the Empire Theatre’s foyer at the world premiere, anxiously rubbing his chin. Hovering behind Princess Margaret, he whispered to her occasionally as she stood at the head of the official receiving line. One after the other, VIPs filed past the princess, bowing and curtseying. A slight, bird-faced blonde seemed in an inordinate hurry as she curtseyed nervously and went to move on. But Margaret held fast to her hand and spoke with her. Clark, it seems, asked Her Royal Highness to make a fuss of this young woman – Eve Hyman. He wanted no more problems from Guy Gibson’s widow.
Brickhill had meanwhile arrived in Italy with his wife and son. After two weeks at Florence’s Anglo-American Hotel, they settled into the Villa Tortoli at Tavarnuzze, outside Florence. During the fashion season, Margot secured work modelling for Victor Stiebel in Florence, leaving Timothy in the care of a nurse at the villa while she drove into the city in their Alfa Romeo, which had been shipped to Italy from storage in London.
Although the Hyman affair had been settled, Brickhill was just as worried as Robert Clark about the success of the Dam Busters movie. His concerns were exacerbated when Air Marshal Sir Robert Saundby, a former senior Bomber Command officer who’d attended one of the gala premieres, wrote to the New Statesman spluttering that the film and Brickhill’s book were fundamentally wrong in making Barnes Wallis the hero of Operation Chastise. The RAF had been planning a dams raid for years before Wallis came along, he said. Saundby also claimed that much of Brickhill’s dialogue was incorrect.
The letter was passed on to Brickhill in Italy, from where he sent a prickly response to the New Statesman. In his and Wallis’ defence, he wrote that he had only used dialogue conveyed to him by multiple sources. And, as for destroying the dams, ‘Who cares who first thought there might be a way?’ he countered. ‘Dr Wallis was the man who “hatched” the only idea that did, in fact, work.’280
Brickhill’s blood pressure was going through the roof by this time, and he went to see a Florence
medico, Dr Guiliani. The doctor prescribed Reserpine, a new ‘wonder drug’ first used the previous year. Today, the drug is banned in the UK and other parts of the world after its use was connected with suicide by users. For several months in Italy, Brickhill, gravely assured that his life depended on it, attended the doctor’s surgery twice weekly for injections of Reserpine.
Now began what Brickhill called ‘the horrors’, for which he would later blame the drug. He’d been made aware of side effects such as congested nose, weight gain, vomiting and diarrhoea, but wasn’t ready for others which included sexual dysfunction, depression, nightmares, inability to concentrate, inexplicable fears, and the return of his claustrophobia. With Brickhill totally unable to get himself organised, his typewriter gathered dust.
By October, the frustrated Brickhill and his bored wife were again arguing. Violently, this time. As Margot yelled at him, Brickhill pushed her back against a wall of their Italian villa. Three days later, when Margot became hysterical during an argument, Brickhill slapped her on the cheek with an open hand. Suddenly silenced by the blow, she took a step back.
‘I suppose you enjoyed that,’ she said after composing herself.
‘Well, as a matter of fact, I did,’ he responded, a little dazed.
‘The only way you can handle a woman is by hitting her,’ she spat, pushing by him.
‘It might have come to that,’ he retorted, ‘if you made it impossible to deal otherwise with you.’ Following her into the kitchen, he defended himself by saying that if she became hysterical again he would be forced to end her fit by again slapping her.
That night, neither of them could sleep. Overcome with remorse at striking his wife, Brickhill sat on the edge of their bed, head in hands, muttering to himself. On the recommendation of his doctor, both he and Margot sought psychiatric treatment from Italian specialists. Within weeks, Brickhill had another nervous collapse and was admitted to hospital.281
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