37. See, for example, Rodney Garland’s novel about homosexual life in London, The Heart in Exile. London: W. H. Allen, 1953, p. 104.
38. See note 36; and also ‘Rattigan Talks to John Simon,’ Theatre Arts. 46 (April 1962), p. 24.
39. Terence Rattigan and Anthony Maurice. Follow My Leader. Typescript. Lord Chamberlain Play Collection: 1940/2. Box 2506. [British Library].
40. Quoted in Darlow and Hodson, op. cit., p. 15.
41. B. A. Young, op. cit., p. 162.
42. Quoted in Darlow and Hodson, op. cit., p. 56.
43. Quoted in Sheridan Morley, op. cit.
44. Darlow and Hodson, op. cit., p. 308.
45. Guardian. (2 December 1977).
Cause Célèbre
Late Sunday evening, on 24 March 1935, the local family GP, Dr William O’Donnell, was surprised to receive an emergency call to visit the Villa Madeira, on Manor Road, Bournemouth. He had often been to the house to attend to Alma Rattenbury, who had been treated for a tubercular condition three years before, and also to visit her rather older husband, the respected architect Francis Rattenbury.1
When he arrived at the house shortly after 11.00 p.m., he discovered Francis slumped unconscious in a chair, his hair matted with blood, a bloodstained towel wrapped around his head. A surgeon, Dr Rooke, was called and confirmed that Francis had suffered three heavy blows to the side of the head. Alma meanwhile was distracted, confused, a large glass of whisky in her hand. Her attempts to help the surgeon were clumsy; ‘If you want to kill your husband,’ he told her, ‘you’re going the best way about it.’
At around 2.00 a.m., a PC Bagwell arrived to examine what was now clearly a crime scene. He found Alma very drunk, playing gramophone records loudly, dancing and offering first to kiss him, then to bribe him. And then she stopped, blurting out a confession: ‘I did it, with a mallet.’
Francis Rattenbury – known to his friends as ‘Ratz’ – was already in his late fifties when he met and married Alma Pakenham, a gifted pianist in her twenties. Francis and Alma were both married when they met, Alma on her second husband, but neither their respective spouses nor the difference in their ages were barriers to what was at first a relationship of mutual love, support and respect. Francis had spent most of his working life in Canada where he met Alma, but they both shared a desire to settle down together in England, eventually deciding to rent the Villa Madeira in Bournemouth. With Francis’s support, Alma forged a small-scale career as a songwriter under the name ‘Lozanne’.
Their relationship cooled fairly quickly in Bournemouth. Francis was increasingly given to depressive episodes in which he would talk of suicide. He still worked, but without enthusiasm. In 1934, he decided that he no longer wanted to drive, and they agreed to advertise for a driver and odd-job man. The young man they hired was eighteen-year-old George Stoner.
Just as the difference in ages had not stopped Alma falling for Francis, it did not stop George falling for his new employer, and soon Alma and George had embarked on an affair. She and Francis were no longer having sex and it may have been that he was aware of the relationship and tacitly accepted it. In March 1935, she asked Francis for £250, on a spurious pretext, so she could visit London with George. They stayed at The Royal Palace Hotel, visited theatres and cinemas, and went on a spending spree in Harrods, where George was kitted out with silk pyjamas, a suit, shirts and shoes; he chose a ring for Alma. By now, George was living in at the Villa Madeira.
But George was a jealous and fearful lover. More than once Alma made to break off their relationship, but George threatened to kill her or himself. He claimed that he was a cocaine user, that he carried around a blade. Alma seemed thrilled by her bad boy and the relationship continued.
On 24 March 1935, Francis was in a very deep gloom. To cheer him up, Alma had tea with him in his bedroom and suggested that they go and stay with a friend of theirs and made the arrangements herself, which seemed briefly to lift his spirits. This all seems to have enraged George, who cornered her, demanding that she never again go in Ratz’s bedroom with the door closed and that they must not visit their friend. He was furious at the thought that Alma and her husband might share a bed while he, the driver, would sleep alone and separately. That evening he went to his parents’ home and borrowed a mallet.
That night, Alma’s companion-help Irene Riggs arrived home late. She heard stertorous breathing but could not tell where it was coming from. Going to her room, she found George on the upstairs landing looking over the banister. Ten minutes after she’d retired to bed, she heard Alma screaming, ‘Someone has hurt Ratz!’
After Alma was arrested for Ratz’s murder, George seems to have been troubled by guilt. He drank heavily and apparently confessed to Irene that he had borrowed the mallet to put Francis out of the way. He took a train to London in an unsuccessful attempt to find Alma and give himself up. Meanwhile, Irene had confessed what she knew to Dr O’Donnell, who immediately called the police and they intercepted George when he arrived back in Bournemouth that evening.
When the trial opened in late May 1935, the newspaper coverage had ensured a huge and hungry crowd, determined to see Alma hanged. As the contemporary writer F. Tennyson Jesse remarked:
There was probably no one in England, and no one in court when the trial opened, save Mrs Rattenbury, her solicitor and counsel, Stoner and his solicitor and counsel, and Irene Riggs, who did not think Mrs Rattenbury was guilty of the crime of murder. In everyone’s mind, including that of this Editor, there was this picture of Mrs Rattenbury as a coarse, brawling, drunken and callous woman. But life is not as simple as that.2
And so it proved. Both defendants maintained their guilt, but it was Alma that broke first, testifying in the witness box that George had come to her room that evening and confessed to murdering her husband. Alma’s poise and calm in the witness box impressed many in the court. George’s defence, that he had murdered Francis under the influence of cocaine, fell apart when it became clear that George couldn’t even identify the colour of cocaine.
After confounding evidence by doctors and policemen, relatives and friends of the accused, the jury delivered their verdict: George Stoner was guilty of Ratz’s murder and Alma was to be freed. Though the jury asked for clemency, the Judge had no option but to sentence George to death. Alma, in a state of shock, was smuggled out of the court buildings to avoid a large and angry crowd. She was pursued across London by press and public, taking refuge in a Bayswater nursing home. Two days later, she took a train from Waterloo to Bournemouth but got off at Christchurch. There, on a bank by the River Avon, she wrote a series of fragmentary notes, then took a knife and stabbed herself with a series of frenzied blows. The coroner recorded that ‘the left lung had been punctured in four places, and there were three wounds in the heart, one where the instrument had passed more than once’.3
The next day, back in London, a young man of twenty-four was on a bus on Park Lane and saw the headline: ‘Mrs Rattenbury Kills Herself’.
I thought then… as a budding playwright… My God, what a revenge on her detractors, of whom God knows I was one. I was with everybody else in thinking she was the bitch of all time… I couldn’t use it then, but I thought one day I could have a shot at it.4
The playwright was Terence Rattigan, still over a year away from his breakthrough success, French Without Tears. Indeed, it would be forty years until he returned to this story and the result would be his last play, and one of his finest.
In the late fifties and through the sixties, Rattigan had fallen steeply from fashion, but the seventies saw a return to form and favour, with a string of successful revivals (see pp. xviii–xix), and the first good reviews for a new play in over a decade for In Praise of Love (1973). This latter play was an elegant restatement, but with new intensity, of Rattigan’s belief in the virtues of emotional restraint, the theatrical and personal power of indirection and the unspoken. His next play would be, in some ways, the opposite: a defiant defence of sexual de
sire, emotional honesty, and a ferocious attack on the moral pieties of middle-class, middle-brow Middle England.
Cause Célèbre began its life on the radio. Rattigan had been writing a television play for the BBC on the subject of the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, and the bisexual triangle between him, Sergei Diaghilev, and Romola de Pulszky, who eventually married the young man. Romola, who was still alive, objected to the portrait and Rattigan, unwilling to take the case to court, backed down; the script was never made.5 Deeply disappointed by the collapse of a cherished project, he gladly accepted the commission to write a radio play, and for his subject he turned to the trial that had obsessed him forty years before. The play had several titles – Crime Passionelle, Come to Judgement, and A Woman of Principle – before he chose Cause Célèbre.6
Much of the radio play – and the stage play that it would later become – is drawn directly from the real events of 1935. Some parts of the play may be regarded fairly as a kind of documentary theatre; the flashbacks to the night of the murder are taken directly from witness testimony; key exchanges in the trial scenes reflect the court transcript; and Alma’s final speech of the play is only lightly edited from her own final letters.
But this is not pure documentary. As he wrote in the introductory notes to the producer of the radio script, ‘it was not a documentary that you required, but a play’.7 To that end, he made a series of crucial changes to the historical record to create his play. Most notably, he introduces an entirely fictional parallel plot, concerning a Mrs Davenport who is called for jury service and, despite a deep moral prejudice against Mrs Rattenbury, finally votes ‘not guilty’, the truth overwhelming hatred at the last. Furthermore, Rattigan is keen to ensure that a focus on the drama of the trial’s defendants is balanced with a broader social perspective that shows the reporting of the case and the ugliness of public reaction to the events.
This is not, however, a facsimile recreation of a legal curiosity; it is in fact one of Rattigan’s most personal, indeed autobiographical, plays. Mrs Davenport lives in a small hotel in West Kensington, the exact location that he had given for Aunt Edna, his most notorious and misunderstood creation, a force for conservatism with whom the playwright must do battle.8 But the connection may be even more personal. In the radio play, Mrs Davenport’s address is given as The Cornwall Gardens Hotel. Cornwall Gardens is the West Kensington street where Rattigan was born, the home of his mother, Vera Rattigan, of whom Edith Davenport – count the syllables – may be a coded portrait. Like Vera, Edith comes from a family of lawyers, and her marriage is in tatters after a string of her husband’s affairs, a situation that recalls Frank Rattigan’s philandering. Vera had died four years earlier in 1971. Terry had always been a devoted son, but in the last years their relationship had deteriorated, perhaps because he had ceased to conceal his homosexuality in her presence. Vera had become, in some ways, a figure of judgemental moralism and so was her avatar in this play.
Rattigan admitted that during the trial he had joined in the general condemnation, but on the discovery of her suicide had begun a slow journey – like Mrs Davenport – towards sympathy and identification. Rattigan would be fifty-six years old by the time homosexual acts were decriminalised and lived for most of his adult life in an atmosphere of suspicion and fear of exposure. Alma was, as F. Tennyson Jesse remarked, a victim of ‘that worst of all Anglo-Saxon attitudes, a contemptuous condemnation of the man and woman, but more particularly the woman, unfortunate enough to be found out in sexual delinquency’.9 The homophony between the names ‘Rattenbury’ and ‘Rattigan’ betokens a deeper connection between their two experiences. The people who persecuted Alma Rattenbury were the very people who would persecute Rattigan and his fellow homosexuals.
The autobiographical connections do not end there. Mrs Davenport has a son, Tony. In the radio play, it is suggested quite clearly that he is having some kind of romantic relationship with another boy at the school, a Vietnamese Prince Phen Lon. In a misguided attempt to gain heterosexual experience, he pays for a prostitute. In the stage version, he contracts a sexually transmitted disease. Rattigan claimed this, too, was autobiographical, though at least one of his biographers doubts this.10 Perhaps the radio script is closer to the truth: here, the boy goes back to a room with the woman, but fails to achieve an erection.
The play arraigns the forces of repression against Alma’s singular sexuality. Mrs Davenport’s puritan condemnation is amplified by the appearance in the play of the hostile mob: at one point, greeting Alma’s arrival at court, Rattigan gives the chilling direction ‘a frenzied scream of collective rage’.11 It is also made clear what has stoked this hatred: the play offers a vivid picture of the press’s salacious interest and persistent misreporting of the trial. For example, when we hear George and Alma enter their pleas, George sounds confident and Alma hesitant, though reporters phone in stories of her brazenness and his timidity. Rattigan’s radio script is rather long and some of the press scenes had been deleted by the time the play was broadcast. The language of the courtroom, with its casual misogynistic contempt and its sheer lack of the concern for the real woman, completes a picture of patriarchal judgement that Rattigan implies is in part responsible for her decision to kill herself.
Against this is Alma herself, played on the radio by Diana Dors, a sex symbol of the 1950s with a rather torrid personal life. Dors brings both a tremendous sexuality to the role but also captures Alma’s innocence. One of the key features of Cause Célèbre that marks it out from many of Rattigan’s plays is that it has a protagonist who learns how to tell the truth about herself. Finally, when she testifies in the witness box, it is her utter lack of evasiveness on matters sexual that compels us, her plain comfort with her sexuality that acts as a convincing counter to the forces of piety and prurience.
In truth, when writing the radio play, Rattigan was perhaps still on the journey towards full sympathy for his character. Alma can sometimes seem less straightforward than other-worldly. In the script, Rattigan has moments of mockery for the historical Alma, as in his note about her music:
Whether any of ‘Lozanne’s’ songs still exist, or whether they have all be[en] consigned to the oblivation [sic] which expert musical opinion has claimed they deserve is unknown to the author at the present time. He would anyway suggest that invention would probably be better advised than strict authenticity, and is even heroically prepared to have a shot at a ‘Lozanne’ lyric (of which all that is known is that they were of a vulgarity, cheapness and sentimentality unsurpassed even in the pop-musical annals) provided a composer will come up with a ‘Lozanne’ melody […] The title, used above [He has suggested a song called ‘My Life is Like a Spring Flower’] is anyway invented, and we can surely proceed from there and invent the few bars and lines necessary without much danger of producing an unexpected ‘top of the pops for 1975’.
He goes on satirically to suggest a song about a ‘shower […] which drove the lovers from the bower to the tower, where they spent a lovely hour’.12 In the event, the BBC opted to use two of ‘Lozanne’s’ actual songs and they strike the modern listener as simple and uncluttered melodies and lyrics, not quite the idiocies that Rattigan assumes.
Cause Célèbre uses the possibilities of radio with great effect. There are dozens of locations and the fifty or more scenes flow restlessly into one another, following characters on journeys, the proceedings taking on, at times, a hallucinatory character as the language of the law joins forces with moral piety to denounce Alma.
The play was recorded between 22 and 26 September at Broadcasting House, London, directed by veteran BBC radio producer, Norman Wright. Robin Browne played George, an exquisitely frosty Gwen Watford was Mrs Davenport and Gareth Johnson her priggish son. Noel Johnson – the first Dick Barton – played O’Connor, her defence barrister. One last-minute change is that George Stoner became George Wood. It seems likely that Rattigan had assumed that Stoner was dead and, realising he was still living and not wanting another conf
rontation like that with Romola Nijinska, changed the name. (Indeed, Stoner’s death sentence was commuted to a term of imprisonment, from which he was released after seven years. He died in 2000 in a hospital less than half a mile from the riverbank on which Alma killed herself.) The play was broadcast on BBC Radio 4, on 27 October 1975.
One listener to the play was John Gale, an ex-actor and theatrical producer, who liked it very much and contacted Rattigan, asking if he’d consider adapting his play for the stage. Gale had a director, Robert Chetwyn, interested in the piece and thought that Dorothy Tutin might make an excellent Alma. Rattigan wanted very much to see another play of his performed on a West End stage and admired Tutin, but could not work out a way of transferring the elegant fluidity of Cause Célèbre to the theatre. He wondered if the parallels and differences between the two central women might be emphasised by having them played by the same actor, but discarded this notion realising that it would mean turning a challenging play into an impossible one.
The path that led Cause Célèbre from radio to stage is long and twisting and not easy to follow. It does not help that the archive, usually so carefully arranged, is, for this last play, somewhat disordered. Shortly before Christmas 1975, Rattigan was told that the cancer with which he had been diagnosed three years before had spread to his bones and was now irreversible. Over the next two years Rattigan was increasingly weakened by both his illness and the attempts at treatment. He seems to have taken less care of his papers in that time, and the story of Cause Célèbre is less easy to trace.
However, Rattigan tried twice to write a stage version of the play. Neither of these was fully successful. In one version, he moved decisively away from the documentary elements, trying to fit the play into the mid-century theatrical conventions with which he was so familiar. Although there are some touching moments, much of what is poignant in the radio play becomes merely sentimental and weighed down by cumbersome dramaturgical devices. For example, trying to solve the problem of how to show Alma’s death on the riverbank – so easy to evoke on radio, less easy to do on stage – he has the dreadful idea of returning her to the Villa Madeira, where she enacts the following implausible sequence of actions:
Cause Célèbre Page 3