by Yehuda Koren
Ten years after the end of the Second World War, England, still immersed in austerity, was a visually dull place. During the war, colourful clothes were hardly to be seen; everything was drab, often copying navy and air-force blue and army khaki. But Assia wore reds and purples, hats with veils and, with her wonderful flair, could transform otherwise shabby or unfashionable outfits with a scarf or cheap jewellery, and end up looking chic and unique. By English standards she was definitely exotic, stunning without being theatrical, and had an eye for fashion, always knowing what would be dernier cri. Women turned to look at her and men were overwhelmed. ‘To be with Assia was like being admitted into the presence of Aphrodite. We were stopped in the streets – one man clutched at her sleeve, and stared and stared before apologising,’ recalls Pam Gems.
In the spring of 1954, the Lipseys moved into a basement flat in Bayswater, 72 Palace Court, a red-brick block showing the signs of years of wear and neglect. The five bedrooms all opened on to a large L-shaped central hall, for the use of the eight tenants, members of a commune, who shared expenses, chores, food and friends. Assia’s friends in the commune were irritated by her concept of sharing: she took the best and the most of what was offered or available. Jo (later Price) and Ken Reed suspected that in their absence, she browsed in their room, ‘borrowing’ things. When caught, she would look scared and try to elicit pity. Thirell Lipsey, who joined the commune, soon became wary of spending time with her sister-in-law. Assia was a heavy smoker and used to wheedle cigarettes all the time: ‘Or she would say, oh, can you pay this time, for lunch, or bus, or museum, and it was very often my turn, and seldom hers, to pay,’ Thirell remembers.
Architect Ken Reed recalls that Pam – as she was still calling herself – hardly participated in the workload: ‘She was rather slothful, and was content to lounge around. However, she entertained us all with her tall tales and fine performances, which included Near-Eastern dancing and singing.’ With an entire repertoire of body language to accompany her words, Assia would hold the floor, imitating people, putting on foreign accents, fabricating adventures from her flight from Germany and her travails on a kibbutz. ‘She was never boring, and above all, she was funny. Women were not funny then,’ remarks Pam Gems. From time to time Assia would take her diary, and read aloud scenes from her past. If the Lipsey door was ever open wide enough to permit a look inside, flatmate Don Michel recalls, a pile of dirty bedding blocked the view. But if going out for the evening was on the cards, Assia metamorphosed into a rare beauty, her face immaculate. Dressed and made up to kill and astound the world, she was a force to be reckoned with.
Her friend Pam Gems saw more to Assia than her outgoing persona: a crippling self-consciousness and shyness. Before entering a room full of people, Assia would panic at the door, unsure what impression she would make and what people would say about her. Then, suddenly the adrenalin would flood her, and she would burst in. However, when at times she dropped out of the conversation and withdrew into herself, it was unnerving for everybody. ‘When someone looks as sensational as Assia, and keeps silent, people become stressed, and then they blame her for being a snob,’ says Gems. Before returning to the United States, Jo and Ken Reed left their promising business of ceramic jewellery to Assia. She grabbed the opportunity, only to discover that the effort of moulding, baking and painting each item by hand, and then keeping up with orders, was just too much for her to handle. She backed out. Later, she planned to buy crocodile bags, modify and upgrade them to be sold for a higher price. Nothing came of that either. ‘We all did things for her often, not because she expected or demanded it, but because she messed up,’ recalls Pam Gems. ‘There was in her something fragile and brittle about her, in need of protection, though I used to accuse her of exploitation. She did not seem so much lost, as for ever in the wrong place, in the wrong country, with the wrong man.’
As hard up as they were, the Lipseys still scraped up enough money to go skiing at the fashionable Swiss resort of Zermatt at Christmas. While Dick enrolled in the beginners’ class, Assia, boasting of being a skilled skier, joined the advanced class. Her failure was too obvious and, four days later, she sneaked out, but was too proud to go down to the beginners’ class. She spent the rest of the holiday by the fireplace in the hotel lounge. ‘It was typical of her: first showing off; then, if encountering crisis, seeking a way out,’ Dick Lipsey comments. Despite Assia’s ineptitude on the slopes, she insisted on ski vacations abroad each Christmas. Magnificently dressed in her ski outfit, she posed radiantly for the camera, three of her photos making it into a Norwegian newspaper.
In the summer of 1954, Assia was both nervous and excited when she visited Germany after twenty years’ absence. The Gutmann family had not been spared; the Nazis murdered Vanya, Lonya’s brother, together with his wife and small daughter. Lisa had severed her connections with her sister, whose two sons had been soldiers in the Wehrmacht and they had become prisoners of war. The sense of belonging that Assia experienced in the first few hours of her visit was soon laced with fear; she sensed that it was still dangerous to be a Jew in Germany. The perfect Prussian accent that accompanied her act made things more complicated, since she was constantly asked why she, a German citizen, had left the homeland.
She and Dick travelled to Dachau concentration camp, but Assia only reached the gate and could not make herself go in. It was a hitchhiking trip; with Assia’s striking looks, cars always stopped for her waving hand. Dick would squeeze in the back seat, while she sat in the front and stretched her body, impressing the drivers with her bubbling chat and upper-crust language. Wishing to prolong the encounter, the mesmerised drivers would treat the young couple to free meals. Once they were mortified when a driver proudly declared that he had been a senior SS officer and insisted that they have coffee and kuchen at his home. Once there, he rushed in to the next room, returning with a large framed photograph of Hitler decorating him with the Iron Cross. In obsessive and fervent Hitler-style staccato, the ex-SS officer praised the wonderful and great leader, as Assia and Dick shrunk back on the sofa. As they were about to leave, the host took out a flat object from a drawer, slid it into Assia’s palm and dramatically closed her fingers into a fist. He drove them to the train station and, before bidding farewell, he hugged Assia, saying, ‘Thank you for a most wonderful day.’ Only when the train pulled out of the station and they had lost sight of the man, did Assia dare open her hand. Her face drained of its colour; it was the Iron Cross on a red velvet background. ‘The monster became enamoured of this gorgeous creature and gave his dearest possession to a Jewish Madonna,’ Lipsey interprets. As if bitten by an adder, Assia sprung up and opened the carriage window, hurling the medal out with all her might. The trip, which Assia hoped would help her find her roots, only intensified her sense of dispossession. Unable to bond with Germany and turning her back on Israel and Canada, she threw herself on Britain. It was doomed from the start – Lipsey thinks – because only by birth could one find a place within the British class system. Assia aspired to something she could never get.
Dick and Assia moved from one grim flat to another, one of which was a fourth-floor garret in Goodge Street that they rented for next to nothing from the Gems. It was one room with the lavatory three floors below, which they shared with the employees of the ground-floor shops. They had no refrigerator, and could afford meat only once a week, their main staples being potatoes, cabbage, tomatoes and sausages. ‘My diet this week has again consisted of sardines and unbuttered bread for lunch, tomatoes and home-fried potatoes for dinner. Oranges are a mere window decoration in greengrocer’s shops,’ Assia complained in a letter to her sister Celia.
A frequent visitor was Jacques Parizeau, Dick’s fellow Ph.D. student at LSE, who subsequently acquired fame as the Prime Minister of Quebec. ‘Jacques was quietly in love with Assia, but it never came to anything,’ remembers Lipsey. They always welcomed Parizeau’s visits, enjoying his company and the bottles of beer that he invariably brought. They wo
uld return the empty bottles to the pub for the deposit and spend it on potatoes and small scraps of bacon left after all possible slices had been taken off the bone. ‘We loved hiding away from reality and the tough world outside, pretending to be children, calling each other pet names, a romance I’ve never played with any other woman before or since,’ Lipsey recalls.
Assia quenched her champagne taste by embarking on shopping sprees in the most expensive shops, masquerading as a rich woman. She would open charge accounts, spend hours bossing the shop assistants around and almost tearing the shop apart and, at the last moment, find an excuse to leave the shop empty-handed. In bookshops, she would ask – and get – two for the price of one. She would finish one book overnight and the following day return it to the shop, saying she had received the same book as a present, and swap it for another. She and Pam Gems shared the frustration of being married to men with little concern for arts, while they read avidly and adored the theatre, opera and ballet. ‘The trouble was money, paying for admittance. People often thought she was an actress, and she would wangle tickets,’ says Pam Gems. ‘Assia was very critical and got straight to the heart of the matter. She made a very good critic, summing up in one word everything that was wrong with the play, and spoiling the whole experience for me.’
‘The things here are absolutely exquisite, there are no more elegant children’s clothing in the world, than those in the children’s department of Fortnum and Mason,’ Assia exclaimed in a letter to her sister in Canada. She aired her dilemma as to whether to buy Ronnie, Celia’s firstborn, a white tailored doeskin coat with a hat to match, or a navy-blue coat with gold buttons, a white linen collar and beautiful tiny white gloves. Both unbought presents were equally impractical for Celia’s son and, in any case, way beyond Assia’s means. But playing rich only increased her distress. Wealth had always eluded Assia, and ending up living in near-poverty, the kind that she and her parents had tried to escape, exasperated her. She felt cheated, thinking she was entitled to a better life. So deep was her despair, that she tried to kill herself twice – in her husband’s presence – by swallowing a handful of aspirins. Lipsey perceived his wife’s act as ‘a clear cry for help, and not a deliberate attempt to end her life’.
It was the beginning of his career and, being assiduous and self-motivated, Lipsey spent days on end in the library or with his colleagues, staying at work till midnight. ‘My work took up most of my sexual and other energies,’ he admits. Assia felt locked out. Bored in the company of Dick’s economist friends, she poisoned his relationship with some of them, causing break-ups. He was aware that men were falling in love with his wife and that she savoured their attention. His sister Thirell felt: ‘Assia was compelled to try and conquer every man in the room, and she was usually successful, but I think she never followed it up with physical seduction. I felt humiliated for the poor silly man who allowed himself to become intoxicated by her intense manner and apparent complete absorption in him. My woman friends recognised Assia’s exotic and sexy appearance (none of us could compete) and seemed to enjoy Assia even though she might make a fool of their boyfriends.’ A herd of besotted admirers was much more thrilling to Assia than a relationship with a specific man. Lipsey was flattered that it was his woman that everyone was after. ‘She was not driven by sex, and was not looking to have affairs. With her fatal attraction, men met her and melted. I got pleasure from her beauty as well, sensing other men’s envy that Assia was mine.’ Once, when Lipsey was away for the weekend to attend the Oxford–Cambridge–London Joint Economics Seminar, Assia flew to Berlin with a wealthy businessman who dealt in ball-bearings. Lipsey never had any inkling of the escapade.
Beauty, rather than sensuality, was her calling card, but she felt resentful and misunderstood when people found it unnecessary to look further and undervalued her intelligence. ‘She drew rather well, occasionally wrote poetry, but lacked self-discipline and focus, and never pursued either with the dedication that is needed to excel,’ thinks Pam Gems, who later became a playwright. The letters that Assia left behind bear traces of her observant, critical eye and flowing pen:
The English are inequipped [sic] to deal with heat – they are gorgeously stupefied by the sun they are used to see [sic] in the cinema and on travel posters … what other culture devotes so much of its lyric poetry to heat, sun and Summer as do the English? Even love finds an inaccessible competitor in Summer – ‘… shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day?’ Go, catch me a Parisian poet saying that.
She confided in Pam that she wished to marry a blond, tousle-haired English poet: Rupert Brooke would have answered her requirements. But not content with the role of a poet’s wife, she wanted to be part of a milieu of poets. ‘In the past, someone like Assia – with an artistic temperament but no specific talent to express it – could become a muse as a way of self-fulfilment. I used to tell her she was born in the wrong century. She would have managed better in the nineteenth century, with Shelley and Browning and Keats. But now, women have to be existential like men.’
In August 1955, the 27-year-old Dick Lipsey was appointed assistant lecturer at LSE and was also teaching statistics in an American army camp near London. ‘The very worst of times are over,’ Assia broke the good news to her sister, ‘which brings his salary up to a point where it will no longer be necessary for me to work.’ They planned to stay in London for two more years, and then Lipsey would have the prospect of ‘returning to North America, calling his own tune, or rather his own salary, and a professorship at the age of 29.’
Four years into their marriage, with their financial future so promising and Assia’s biological clock ticking 29, they could think of raising a family. But the very idea repulsed her. Her married women friends sometimes had fun recounting their childbirth experiences, laying it on thick as soon as they saw Assia’s obvious horror. She was not in the least interested in other people’s babies, never cuddled or attended to them. It was never clear whether it was the pregnancy, labour, delivery or motherhood that Assia abhorred so much. Despite Lipsey’s craving for children, he went along with his wife’s fears and the subject was not brought up.
In the summer of 1956, Lipsey got a teaching job at the summer school of the University of British Columbia. They stayed with the Gutmanns in central Vancouver and sailed at weekends to the Lipsey family mansion on the island. Assia did not use the opportunity to try to complete her university degree and, instead, lay about, occasionally painting, reluctant to show her work. ‘She had a charming self-deprecating way of showing us her various artistic fragments, as though afraid of our reaction,’ remembers her sister-in-law Thirell. When one of Lipsey’s professors asked Assia about her future plans, she said that she wanted to be a satirist. When he asked what she wished to satirise, she had no answer.
In September, Dick and Assia joined Thirell and her boyfriend and the four of them drove together to Montreal. To cut expenses, they slept under the stars in sleeping bags, washing in restaurant toilets. They lived off cakes and biscuits that Mrs Gutmann had lavishly provided, passing the time singing and telling stories. Dick remembered it as ‘one of the most wonderful and romantic times’ of his life and he thought it was similar for Assia.
Seven
Falling in Love
London, 1956–59
The head waiter led Dick and Assia to their seats in the dining room, telling them that he had found the most perfect table, with ‘some other middle aged persons’. At the sound of these words, Assia threw a fit: are there no young people aboard? She demanded an immediate replacement and it took the bewildered head waiter some minutes to examine the floor plan before leading them to another table. ‘Fate took a hand, and we were seated with David Wevill,’ Dick Lipsey comments. Tall, willowy, pensive, with a sculptured face and a shock of blond hair falling over his forehead, Wevill had the ‘look of the young Gary Cooper and sounding like him too, a whispering Canadian drawl,’ as the writer William Trevor later described him.
A few
hours earlier, the 21-year-old Wevill had been sitting by the purser’s office, waiting to present his passport. He was using the time to write a letter to his French-Canadian girlfriend, apologising for terminating their relationship. Wevill lifted his eyes and was stunned by the profile and posture of a dark-haired woman who was standing in the queue. Occasionally, he stole a look, but no word was spoken. Wevill was returning from a summer holiday with his parents in Ottawa for his final year at Caius College, Cambridge, where he was reading History and English. A budding poet, Wevill played the accordion and never went anywhere without his sketchbook, tenderly drawing faces and landscapes on his travels.
At dinner, David and Assia were thunderstruck by each other’s presence. She was instantly and totally drawn into a tête-à-tête, which left her husband trailing behind. After almost giving up on her lifelong fantasy of rubbing shoulders with men of letters, she was captivated when Wevill spoke with passion about Wordsworth; it was then that she fell in love with him. David was intrigued by Assia’s personality: ‘I have not met anyone like her. She was a good conversationalist, an engaging person, witty and animated, who also possessed depth and silence.’ He found her grey-green hazel eyes and very dark brown hair strikingly beautiful, ‘but she was no houri, no nymph of paradise. She had a deep beauty, not a woman of glamour in a stage or screen sense.’ He was touched by her tales of a grievous past, with her family of landless, tragic refugees, and admired her struggle to reconstruct herself almost from scratch. ‘We felt an immediate kinship, since both of us were first-born children, nomads, who came naked to Canada,’ Wevill remembers. He had been born in 1935 in Yokohama, Japan, moved to Canada as a child, then moved constantly, until his parents finally settled down in Ottawa. ‘I find I have a certain restlessness, an inability to stay very long in one place,’ he said in a radio interview.