by Yehuda Koren
She enrolled at the University of British Columbia, her studies a pretext for spending most of her time away on the campus, stretched out on the lawn in front of the library with friends. She studied art and took an active role in campus life, participating in drama groups and literary clubs. Fellow-student John Bosher, later a distinguished professor of history, got the impression that Assia was neither academically inclined nor had any clear or steady notion of what she wanted to do. Like many undergraduates, she was carried away with intellectual excitement. ‘We all thought that ordinary life was contemptible, and the poets we read – Eliot, Auden – influenced us all.’
In the university records, Assia was registered as Pamela A. E. Steele; the ‘A. E.’ stood for ‘Assia Esther’, but it was after her divorce that she started calling herself Pamela, like her husband’s younger sister. It infuriated the Steele family, since the little Pamela had died tragically in infancy and they accused Assia of wilfully and callously stealing the dead baby’s persona. Assia was driven to changing her name following the ribbing she got at university, when the derogatory term ‘ass’ was applied to her broad buttocks. Her singular exotic Russian name becoming a hindrance, she found refuge in a nondescript English one, erasing her foreign identity. ‘With anti-Semitism in Vancouver, she wouldn’t go back to her maiden name Gutmann either,’ says her sister Celia. ‘Refusing to feel Jewish, she wanted nothing to set her apart from becoming a true Canadian.’
Her jaw, heavy in her teens, now became more refined, her cheekbones high and her mouth well shaped. She had a big bosom, a flat bottom and thick ankles, and turned the heads of students and instructors alike, radiating magnificence rather than sex appeal. She looked self-conscious, always aware of herself, but was very touchy when people referred to her looks. Her wardrobe was too scanty for her vast social needs and she helped herself to her sister’s clothes – much to Celia’s dismay. On other occasions she did not hesitate to forge her sister’s signature and charge her shopping account; she also shoplifted small items like nylon stockings or cosmetics. With her haughtily cultivated English voice, John Bosher thought that Assia came from an upper-class British boarding school; still, she was not a snob, and made friends on every side: ‘She made an immediate impression by her beauty, exotic intensity and lively conversation, but was an anxious and troubled young woman in search of a way out of her circumstances. She was frightened of becoming a steady, sensible, hard-working adult with ordinary limited horizons, and was ready for any wild adventure, eager to have a busy social and intellectual life.’ Richard Lipsey was Bosher’s best friend and a fourth-year undergraduate student of economics at the university, when he first met her: ‘She and John Bosher had a passionate affair. She was everything that we were not; we were naïve undergraduates who had never been outside Vancouver and here she was, an exotic creature who experienced the world.’
Only in the summer vacations did Assia do her share of supporting herself. It was her beauty, no doubt, that got her the much-desired job of chambermaid at the fashionable Harrison Hot-Springs Resort and Spa Hotel. That summer of 1950, actress Joan Fontaine went on a fishing trip in British Columbia, paying a surprise visit to her father, Walter de Havilland, who had retired to live in Canada. Assia was thrilled to hear that the Hollywood star was staying at the hotel and could not take her eyes off her. She coaxed one of the other chambermaids to sneak with her into the actress’s suite in her absence. Opening the wardrobe, they took out Joan Fontaine’s dresses and Assia tried them on one by one, slipping easily into the alluring evening gowns of the 33-year-old star of Rebecca and Jane Eyre. Suddenly the door burst open; the flabbergasted Fontaine could not contain her rage. Assia’s charming excuses and pleas tipped the scales and saved her job. She turned her mischief into a gag and for years made her friends roar with laughter as she mimicked the star’s hysteria and acted out the hotel scene.
Her next summer jobs, however, were much less glamorous; in August 1952 John Steele and his new wife were sailing from Vancouver to their teaching posts at Prince Rupert, on Kaien Island. The boat called at Namu, a small island and the site of a fish cannery. Steele used the stopover to stretch his legs and stroll around by himself. As he glanced idly through the cannery window, a bunch of women were gutting salmon; there, in an apron and head covering, brandishing a long knife, he saw Assia. ‘Our eyes met, we smiled. We couldn’t converse, and my ship was about to sail. I turned away. I never saw, nor heard from her again.’ Assia bit her lips and battled on in the cannery, urging her sister to send her a pair of rubber gloves, a copy of Vogue magazine and a bottle of perfume. This experience as well was added to her repertoire of tales and she enjoyed shocking future audiences with vivid descriptions of blood and guts. Ted Hughes incorporated it into his poem ‘Descent’, as he described ‘the cannery, with its erotic motif/Of porcupine quills, that pierced you.’
Assia frequently quarrelled with her parents, who criticised her idle existence and urged her to settle down with a husband and children. Lisa Gutmann looked at John Bosher with blazing anger. ‘I was only a boy, two years younger than her daughter, and hardly a decisive figure in the situation,’ he says. ‘Assia was not willing to pursue fixed objectives, or to be what people might call “sensible” or faithful. She wanted to open as many doors as she could for intellectual experiments and excitements.’ Assia was grander and worldlier than anyone he had ever met, filled with the prospects befitting a person with such qualities, a wild, romantic woman, ‘who might also be seen in the context of poems by Byron or Shelley, and tragic, too, in that sense’. And yet she always surprised him by her willingness to spend time with him in his ‘simple life’. On one occasion, having spent his summer working as a lumberjack and forest surveyor’s assistant, he took her for a walk in the thick woods beyond the university. ‘We lit a fire, and spent the night eating food toasted at my fire, and talking, talking, talking.’
Bosher was aware that Assia was not exclusively his; she had a series of men friends whom, he thought, she became involved with out of unhappiness and a search for some kind of relief or shelter: ‘But when anyone offered support and affection, she continued looking for the next step in some undefined direction.’ In a diary note from Saturday, 20 January 1951, John Bosher made the following entry: ‘Pam Steele phoned this afternoon, and wanted me to go to see her. She’s not well. I went, of course, to see her at her parents’ place on Cambie Street, opposite the City Hall, and found her as attractive as ever, but in trouble as ever. It seems she conceived a child by a man she was in love with (until last night) and had an abortion.’ Her parents knew nothing of this, but she divulged all to her younger sister Celia, who, then and on another occasion, helped her find a clandestine abortion clinic. In those pre-pill days, abortion was the prevailing, though illegal and aggressive, method of birth control. In later years Assia never hid her past abortions and Ted Hughes gave her the derogatory title of ‘Lilith of abortions’.
Her relationship with John Bosher was plagued by his lack of time and money, as well as by his immaturity. She continued to look for a stronger, much older, more mature, man with a creative spark. She found it in Professor Earle Birney, the energetic, charismatic ‘crucible of Canadian literature’, as he was described by his biographer, Elspeth Cameron. Birney, an avid mountaineer, was a giant of a man, but thin and built like a whiplash; red-haired, blue-eyed and with a sandy-grey beard. He established the first department of creative writing in a Canadian university, which Assia attended. His wife, Esther Bull, a fellow Marxist and the mother of his son, was aware that her macho husband was an insatiable womaniser and that ‘he needed women to feel significant and worthwhile’. He pursued women of all ages and marital status and did not stop at his own students. In her photo album, Assia glued a newspaper cutting from a class at the university; she was photographed sitting in the front row, glaring at her 48-year-old professor, who ensnared the students with accounts of his arrest in Germany for failing to salute a Nazi parade. Some yea
rs later, Birney confided in poet and art critic Edward Lucie-Smith, telling him about his relationship with Assia. ‘He just wanted a fling, and when he discovered that Assia wanted his identity as a poet, he withdrew from the affair.’
Six
A Second Husband
Toronto, 1952–London, 1956
In his childhood, the distinguished economist Richard (Dick) Lipsey had resolved to become a cosmologist. ‘I often regret that I got seduced by this crazy subject, economics, that purported to have universal laws about the behaviour of people rather than stars.’ A native of Victoria on Vancouver Island, Lipsey graduated from the University of British Columbia with first class honours in economics. He was doing his MA at Toronto University, and in the summer vacation of 1952 returned to Vancouver to work at the Bureau of Economics and Statistics in the provincial government of British Columbia.
One night in August, after a long day’s work at City Hall, he was on his way home. In the rear of the bus he spotted the young woman he knew as Pam Steele. It was two years since they had seen each other on campus and the last he had heard was that she was the mistress of a married friend of his. ‘Before I knew it, we were on a romantic whirl.’ She pulled him off the bus, to cruise the nightclubs. She led him to the dance floor, and he was completely won over when she sang to him hits from the musical Oklahoma! After a week of intense courtship, Lipsey invited her to come to Victoria, and paid for her hotel room. ‘I’m your kept woman,’ she teased him. He recalls that the idea seemed romantic to her, ‘and probably to me too, that I was the keeper of a kept woman. It was really just a post-adolescent game.’
After this dizzy escapade lasting all of one week, Dick proposed to her. It was an act of revolt – he had never rebelled during his adolescence – and now, by getting involved with a wild, exotic woman, he was protesting against the middle-class morality he had grown up with. ‘I was rather impressed with the romanticism of marrying a Russian-Jewish divorcée, and a woman of the world, while I was still inexperienced in worldly matters. But I wasn’t so rebellious as to forgo the notion I grew up with, that if you want to sleep with a woman, you must marry her.’
Assia agreed instantly. At 25, living with her parents, her future bleak, a sudden marriage proposal fitted her romantic fantasies. She clearly enjoyed the company of the 24-year-old Lipsey, who came from a well-to-do family and may have hoped that his parents would support the young couple in a grand style. ‘She liked to do things impetuously, and I think she married me for a lark – much as I did her, though I was deeply in love with her.’ They did not disclose their plans to their parents and, at the end of the summer, Dick returned to Toronto for the second year of his MA. Assia found an excuse to travel there a few weeks later and booked into the YWCA. One night she spirited Dick into her room and they slept together for the first time. He crept out at dawn. ‘I’m very law-abiding, and it worried me all the time I was there. But it was the sort of mildly anti-authoritarian thing that she liked.’
Assia was once again dreaming of a white wedding but they could not find a minister who would agree to perform the ceremony when the bride was a divorcee. They had to settle for a rude man smoking a cigar in Toronto’s register office. On 21 October 1952, they signed the papers and went to celebrate in a friend’s house. Assia compensated with a glorious white evening gown, one shoulder totally bare and with a deep cleavage, a white garland embracing the nape of her neck. Neither pair of parents attended the wedding – they lived on the other side of Canada and were told only at the last moment – and were surprised and dazed by the hasty nuptials. That same week John Bosher, Assia’s former lover and Dick’s best friend, got married as well, and the four of them spent much of their time together.
With a taste for intrigue, Assia charmed Dick into keeping the marriage a secret. In the Canada of the early 1950s, cohabitation seemed improper, and the young Lipseys boasted of their supposedly illicit relationship and glowed under the halo of being an unconventional, daring couple. (Just four years later, Sylvia Plath would talk Ted Hughes into concealing their marriage, but for a different reason: so as not to jeopardise the rest of her Fulbright scholarship at Cambridge.)
Dick and Assia rented a basement bedsitter in Toronto, the telephone an extension from the main line in the landlord’s flat upstairs; in less than a month they were ordered to leave, because Assia slammed down the phone if the call was not for her, and the landlord lost many important business calls. They moved to a larger bedsitter with a cupboard-sized kitchen and a bath shared with other tenants on the same floor. The nosy landlady inspected their room whenever they were absent; soon she was expressing worries that they would pollute the entire house with bugs if they continued to keep their room so filthy. It was Dick who had to add housekeeping chores to his overloaded schedule of studies for the final year of his master’s degree.
With an incomplete university degree and no marketable skills, Assia once again had to settle for monotonous, mundane, subservient jobs. She was a copy typist in an advertising agency and, in the pre-computer, even pre-Xerox days, spent hours typing and retyping the same memos and letters. Dick Lipsey sympathised with her distress. ‘It was demeaning, but she had only herself to blame for it.’ Already only six months into the marriage, he realised that he had made a terrible mistake: ‘In today’s terms, when I met her I would have said, come live with me, and we would have had six months of a crazy, intense wonderful affair, and then we would have split up. Assia was a wonderful person to have an affair with, but we just weren’t compatible as husband and wife. Our tastes were different, our values contradictory.’
They returned to British Columbia in the late spring of 1953, settling into the splendid Lipsey family home on Vancouver Island. Dick put enormous pressure on Assia to take the summer course at the university but she stuck it for just a few weeks and then dropped out. A social animal to her core, she hobnobbed in the intellectual celebrity circles with the architect Arthur Erikson and his like. Dick studiously avoided Assia’s friends, and took no part in her social life. His parents could not comprehend their daughter-in-law: she was so far beyond anything they had experienced, they did not understand her frame of mind and she made them feel uncomfortable. His mother complained that Assia was not looking after her son’s clothes and even neglected her own. Assia’s messiness was so monumental, chronic and ugly, that Mrs Lipsey urged her son to tidy up their ‘pigsty’ before allowing the maid to clean their room. ‘I believe that Assia’s mother took care of the many petty details of her daughter’s life, whereas, in our family, each child was responsible for their own laundry, tidying their room and making their own breakfast,’ observed Dick’s younger sister Thirell Lipsey, now Weiss.
Assia annoyed the Lipseys by frequently sleeping late, then storming into the kitchen to make some tasty dishes just for herself. She performed household tasks only when asked and even then grudgingly and with the air of someone put upon. Nevertheless, Thirell Lipsey was delighted with her sister-in-law and found her gorgeous, sophisticated and stylish. Assia drew Thirell into the drama of her life, always with a captivating tale about the effect of some event or person on her psyche: ‘She would listen to my own “stories” quite attentively, but the subject always miraculously returned to her life and trials. I loved her as the person she could have been, and I tried to accept and understand her strict devotion to her own needs, and no one else’s. She seemed aware only of her own desires and pursued them with single minded diligence.’ While Assia found it difficult to fit into the Lipsey ambience, Dick was enchanted by her father: ‘A solid, impressive, and sentimental man, a Hollywood type of Russian’. Dick admired Dr Gutmann’s ability to spout Chekhov at length, and they spent many hours over the chessboard. When losing to his son-in-law, Lonya did not hide his irritation and did not let go until he eventually won.
Lipsey was undecided whether he should do his Ph.D. in Chicago or at the London School of Economics. The advantage of the latter was that French was no lon
ger a requirement. More than that, it was Assia’s preference to go back to England and she talked him into it. The most momentous decision of Lipsey’s career, then, was taken ‘for the wrong reasons, though in retrospect it turned out to be the right decision’, he recalled. In September 1953, they travelled to Montreal and boarded an Empress Liner to Liverpool.
Assia was so happy to return to London after five years of absence that she hurried to Primrose Hill, her favourite part of town. She showed Dick around and proudly led him to her local pub. She was disappointed that no one recognised her. Looking up the ex-servicemen that she had known from Tel Aviv, she was glad to renew her friendship with Keith Gems and his wife. Gems, who was the best friend of her first husband, now became a lifelong friend of Dick Lipsey. Assia was still using the name ‘Pam’, sometimes signing ‘P. A. E. Lipsey’: Pamela Assia Esther. Only after meeting the Gems did Dick learn that Pamela was not his wife’s given name. It took him six more months to switch to Assia.
The Lipseys rented a basement room in Mayfair, near Hyde Park Corner – a shabby dwelling, which Assia picked on account of its posh address. All they had to live on was Dick’s small and inadequate student’s grant of £500 a year and his savings from summer jobs, with no financial support from either pair of parents; the Gutmanns were struggling to earn a living, and the Lipseys, believing in the character-building nature of being self-supporting, left their children to fend for themselves. Assia enrolled at an employment agency as a temporary copy typist. She counted herself lucky when assigned to work, in different offices all over town, filling in for sickness or holidays. Since her pay depended upon typing speed and hers was only twenty words per minute, she was always at the bottom of the ladder, getting the minimum wage of about five pounds a week. In between the odd secretarial jobs, she worked as a stewardess at a car show at Earl’s Court and was a door-to-door market researcher for soap products. She blossomed in street interviews, introducing products to passers-by, turning them into street performances.