by Yehuda Koren
In June 1961, Notley’s published an ad to promote the agency with a charity ball programme. The slogan ‘We really live our work at Notley’s’ ran with a photograph of two sophisticated-looking couples in a dinghy on the Serpentine. Trevor Cox – later known as novelist William Trevor – was seen hammering away at a portable typewriter resting on his knee, and copywriter Sean Gallagher, wearing a bow tie, was holding a bottle of champagne. It was a sunny day, and a chic-looking Assia was elegantly holding a glass of champagne in her left hand, sucking a pencil, half-listening to her colleague Marisa Martelli. The text read, ‘No, we don’t have a champagne account at Notley’s; we just happen to like product testing. We came out here because things were “not conducive to creative thought” back at the office. And you can bet your elastic-sided boots that something will come out of this session.’ Though a novice at the agency and not yet an accomplished copywriter, Assia was a perfect publicity choice, wearing a white straw hat, a sleeveless top and a three-piece summer ensemble, with her jacket off.
Assia doted on shopping sprees and was always quick to offer unsolicited advice to her friends, derived from her own experience in fashion and make-up. ‘Her figure was rather dumpy, heavy legs and thick ankles, and being a perfectionist, she was very conscious of these defects,’ remembers Edward Lucie-Smith. ‘Curiously she was unaware of the beauty which made one overlook these flaws. If you paid her a compliment on her beauty, she was rather put out. I remember that once Marisa and I reduced her to tears by telling her the whole morning how beautiful she was.’ Once installed in advertising, Assia found it easier to move on, and found a job at Colman, Prentice and Varley in Grosvenor Street, doubling her salary. CPV held the long-time record for being the advertising agency for the War Office. In the 1959 elections, when Labour looked almost certain to topple the Conservative government, Harold Macmillan resorted, for the first time, to the services of an advertising agency. CPV conducted the campaign under the slogan, ‘Life’s better with the Conservatives – don’t let Labour ruin it,’ winning a victory of 107 seats and gaining the party account. Assia was working at CPV when they earned their place in the history of advertising with their campaign for Yardley, entitled ‘A Woman’s Ammunition’: influenced by the James Bond films, the ad showed a delicate, feminine bandolier with lipsticks for bullets.
The copywriters were a closed shop, with their own pubs and restaurants: ‘and seldom met anyone who wasn’t in the trade, who might look at us askance and mock our enthusiasm,’ recalled Fay Weldon, who often lunched with Assia. ‘Advertising was still an innocent toddler, as was television: they had not yet created the consumer society.’ The copywriters got together again in the evenings, this time wearing their literary hats. Drifting along with no agenda, the mere thought of career and ambition was loathsome; the main thought was to get through the day and wait for the great literary breakthrough. Once Peter Redgrove complained that he was broke, and someone suggested an easy way to make money. ‘“Oh,” said Peter in a tone of absolute outrage, “but that would be ‘work’!” “Work” in that sense was the enemy of poetry and the poetic state,’ recalls Edward Lucie-Smith.
Handling the publicity accounts of Assia’s favourite department stores – Fortnum & Mason and Dickins & Jones – CPV matched her aspirations and coveted lifestyle. Art director Julia Matcham remembers Assia’s strong, slightly swarthy face graced by an amused, rather ironic and wondering smile. Matcham admired Assia’s chic, a scarf thrown with splendid artistry over her shoulder, her glossy hair held back with a round tortoiseshell clasp. ‘She was a pirate on the sea of life, and life could not possibly ignore this rather beautiful and rather animal woman. She was charming, but she did not exploit her power. Like a satisfied lioness, she waited,’ Matcham recalls. Assia was bursting with ideas; she would entertain her colleagues by outlining a complicated plot for a novel, indifferent to the fact that somebody might pick it up and turn it into a book. ‘What she related never sounded quite like fiction, more a sleight of hand involving real people and the real world,’ was William Trevor’s observation. She electrified them with her plan to purchase an old bread van, install a refrigerator, drive it to Hampstead Heath on warm Saturday afternoons and, dressed in white, sell homemade ice cream, prepared from an Italian recipe book. Although she was sure that they would make a fortune, it was not the money she was after: but ‘being loved for herself alone was what she hoped for when she tried to sell ice cream,’ recalled William Trevor. The scheme never went beyond passionate pub talk.
Assia’s free spirit and ability to imply elegance even in the most ordinary ads impressed Angela Landels, who was Assia’s group head. ‘She was very innovative, everything she wrote had charm, and she brought a touch of poetry to mundane subjects like bread.’ But Assia was also difficult to work with, brazenly lying to excuse her regular lateness or complete absences. Landels found her unpredictable, untrustworthy, manipulative, devious, argumentative and petty, but still was charmed by her unconventional, often wild and stimulating ideas, a priceless advantage in the profession. To her fellow workers, Assia’s bubbling vitality seemed feverish; her radiant glare was at times menacing, slightly insane: ‘all that beauty could turn ugly in an instant.’ Assia seemed self-assured and above criticism and Angela Landels did not dare risk her wild temper. She often had to defend Assia against the management: ‘and it always puzzled me why she was in advertising, when she could have been a diva; our world was too limited for her.’
Assia continued to feel that the score with her ex-husband remained unsettled: she blamed him for deliberately holding up their divorce in order to jeopardise her relationship with David. One day she phoned and demanded to see Dick at once; they met at the entrance to the South Kensington underground station and had a stormy row. ‘She suddenly pulled a long Burmese ceremonial dagger and tried to stab me. I grabbed her arm and we fell in the gutter. The bystanders – how typical of the English – walked by while we struggled, no one trying to separate us,’ he says. After a tussle in the gutter, Lipsey managed to overpower Assia, and wrenched the dagger away from her. ‘Be careful, I have a gun,’ she screamed at his receding back.
Did Assia attempt to harm her ex-husband? Lipsey was not scared enough to go to the police station which was just around the corner. Instead, he travelled to another part of town, laying the dagger on his solicitor’s table. ‘The world was Machiavellian to Assia, and she saw everything in terms of pacts. If something had gone wrong with the divorce, she couldn’t accept that it was simple bureaucratic negligence, but rather, evil intention, meaning that I must have been at fault,’ says Lipsey. But still maintaining his role of the protective father, he persuaded himself that Assia was incapable of doing any serious damage and did not press charges.
But Assia would not let go. Dick and Diana’s sleep was disturbed constantly by late-night phone calls, the mysterious caller hanging up as soon as they picked up the phone. It became such a nuisance that they had to have their phone number changed. They never found out the intruder’s identity but were quite sure that it was Assia. One evening, when the Lipseys were out, there was a knock on the door. The au pair, watching over Diana’s child and the newly born Matthew, opened the door to Assia, who introduced herself as a friend of Dick’s and asked to see the children. ‘Christine caved in at Assia’s persistence, and followed her warily into the nursery. Assia just stood there and stared at my son with a frightening look, and then turned and left,’ Lipsey recalls. He was distraught at the incursion – he remembered that Assia claimed to have a gun – but still, did not turn her in, nor did he reproach her.
Assia’s possessiveness and vanity would not let her get over her husband’s quick recovery from their divorce. ‘How dare he! He’s mine!’ she exclaimed to Edward Lucie-Smith. In her wounded pride she initiated more acts of revenge, canny and sophisticated. ‘Assia had an original entertaining mind, with crazy ideas highly coloured by an exaggerated romanticism,’ thought her colleague Julia Matcham. ‘I
n its rather tenuous relationship to reality, it allowed her free reign to be quite ruthless in the pursuit of anything that she wanted, without the burden of a bad conscience.’ Matcham was lost for words when Assia told her and Angela Landels of her little revenge en passant. No sooner said than done, Assia went out at lunchtime with colleague William Trevor, and led him to top florist Moyses Stevens near their office in Berkeley Square. She went as far as introducing herself ‘as somebody’s secretary – which she was not – and ordering flowers in his name’.
She set her mind on four dozen roses but, glancing over the vast array of flowers, she scaled it down to a dozen and a half long-stemmed red roses, to be dispatched immediately to her so-called employer’s wife. She told William Trevor that the flowers were for a pregnant woman, whose husband was a cold fish, incapable of such romantic gestures: ‘in error, I married him once,’ she added. The grand bouquet arrived at the Lipsey residence with no note attached and Dick and Diana could not fathom the sender’s identity. A month later they were aghast to get a bill, close to a week’s salary. The indignant Lipsey phoned the shop to complain and was told that his secretary had ordered the flowers. ‘I couldn’t think of anyone but Assia whose mind would work in such a convoluted way,’ he recounts. ‘But if she wanted to make me insanely jealous over my wife’s unknown lover, which is what I guess she would have wanted, she failed.’ Once again, Lipsey decided not to confront Assia, but, gnashing his teeth, paid the bill.
The Wevills renewed their ties with the Group, spending many Friday evenings at Edward Lucie-Smith’s in Chelsea. In the summer of 1961 they took a holiday in Italy and upon their return decided to move, since the flat in Holland Park was a bit expensive. They searched the property section of the London Evening Standard for flats in Hampstead or its vicinity.
It was at this time that Ted Hughes and his wife, Sylvia Plath, having also returned from holiday, decided to sublet their flat at 3 Chalcot Square, at the foot of Primrose Hill. They had taken the unfurnished flat on the top floor in January 1960 on a three-year lease that allowed them to sublet it for the remaining period. Now, with baby Frieda and another baby due, it became too cramped. A move to their own house in the village of North Tawton sounded a great improvement: less expensive, healthier for the children, the marriage and the creative careers of two poets.
When Assia dialled PRI 9132 to inquire about the flat, the name Hughes sounded familiar, though she did not ask whether the prospective landlords were the two poets. ‘I think we realised it was them, putting two and two together, and since I liked Ted’s and Sylvia’s poetry, it seemed serendipitous,’ says David Wevill. Getting the address, Assia was quick to draw a map on the back of ‘One-eyed Monster’, a poem by Peter Redgrove that they had discussed in one of the recent Group meetings. She marked in arrows the shortest way to the flat from the 74 bus stop, opposite the Zoo gate at Regent’s Park. This page has survived all the turbulent decades that followed.
Assia knew the area well, since she had lived around the corner when she arrived at England in 1946. She and David were thrilled to reside close to the place where they first lived together as illicit lovers in 1957. Chalcot Square was in a run-down neighbourhood but Hughes and Plath raised the rent to cover the expenses incurred by painting and decorating, and putting in shelves and linoleum on the kitchen floor. The flat was tiny – one living room and a bedroom that could hold only a double bed – but the Wevills fell for it instantly. They seemed to Plath ‘too slow and polite to speak up’, and as they were looking around, another customer, a ‘chill, busybody man’ arrived. He was so eager to have the flat that he immediately sat down to write a cheque and stormed out. His brashness put Sylvia and Ted off, especially since they took a liking to the couple, ‘the boy, a young Canadian poet, the girl, a German-Russian, whom we identified with’, as Plath wrote to her mother. Sylvia was 29, ‘the boy’ David was 26, and ‘the girl’ Assia, 34. Apparently, Plath regarded the Wevills as a recent couple, although they had been a couple for nearly five years, only slightly less than she and Hughes. But there was something fresh and intimate in the well-dressed childless pair, which may have reminded Sylvia of her own early conjugality with Ted. She found an excuse to cancel the busybody’s transaction and by her affirmative action the Wevills got the flat.
‘We got on with them like a house on fire,’ recalls Wevill. He and Assia were invited to Chalcot Square for supper and a few days later Ted and Sylvia went with baby Frieda for dinner at the Wevills’. In the next three weeks they met about half a dozen times. Once – as Hughes told Professor Judith Kroll – Assia gave Sylvia a painted wooden handcrafted snake, from the collection of artefacts that she had brought back with her from Burma. It is tempting to interpret the gift symbolically but ‘Assia was indifferent to the occult, and for her, it was just a decorative object, with no subtle reasons behind it,’ David Wevill believes. Plath, on the other hand, must have been aware of the totemic significance of the seducing snake but, although she tended to be jealous of any woman who came near her husband, she did not regard Assia as a threat or a rival in her own Garden of Eden. She had only compliments for Assia, finding her ‘very attractive, intelligent’. Did Assia’s charm numb Sylvia’s suspiciousness, or was Sylvia so excited about her prospective new life in Devon that she could think of nothing else?
Hughes collected a round dining table belonging to the Wevills to take to North Tawton and, on Thursday, 31 August his own last remaining items – the double bed, the cot and the cooker – were loaded on the small van.
In the following months the couples corresponded and exchanged a few phone calls. When a Mr Price Turner from the Yorkshire Post wrote to Plath and Hughes and inquired whether they had any poems to publish, they apologised that they were too busy settling at their small farm, and recommended David Wevill, who took over their London flat, and had already published some very good poems.
Despite Hughes’s occasional visits to the BBC in London, he did not visit the Wevills. Apparently, he was not yet overwhelmed by what he later described, as Assia’s ‘many blooded beauty’, ‘With tiger painted nails’ and ‘erotic mystery’. The seed of lust was not yet sown. For several months there were opportunities but apparently no interest in adultery on either side.
Nine
A Fateful Meeting
Devon, May 1962
London in the swinging sixties: the pill, the Beatles, acid trips, the sense that the times were changing and ‘anything goes’ – but none of it was blowing Assia’s mind. She had neither the figure nor the taste for a miniskirt; she easily resisted beehived hair. The psychedelic revolution in no way altered her classic elegance, and Harrod’s, not Carnaby Street, was her Mecca.
Indifferent to popular culture, Assia did not swap Antonioni, Bergman and Fellini for fourteen hours of Technicolor Dream at Alexandra Palace, and Beethoven remained her favourite composer. Permissiveness did not change her bed manners; she was as reserved as ever about casual sex, marriage being her preferred lifestyle. Many of her friends were in analysis but not Assia. For all the rebellion against propriety in speech and language, Assia clung to her upper-class accent and Standard English. Her pre-war European cultural roots as well as her maturity vitiated any enticement of the druggie-hippie culture. LSD was definitely not her poison; in fact, Assia abstained even from alcohol. Not that Assia was unfamiliar with the latest trends; she worked, after all, in advertising and, as her husband David Wevill observed, ‘she was tolerant of the superficial, as long as she wasn’t asked to take it seriously.’ Demonstrations against the war in Vietnam were regularly held near Assia’s office, in front of the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square; if she acknowledged them, she also passed them by.
Youth had become the new Moloch, and mature women were the ravenous god’s burnt offerings. To this trend, the 34-year-old Assia was not immune. Terrified of ageing, she would talk about having a facelift in virtually the same breath as she did about dying. She told her boss, Angela Landels, that she
wanted to die young, ‘because growing old, with one’s skin wrinkled and hanging down, losing one’s feminine potency, was ghastly’. Since she looked absolutely ravishing, Landels did not interpret Assia’s sentiments as a death wish but rather as another instance of her dramatic posturing.
Assia had never wanted for dramatic flair and she and David together made a striking pair. Their colleague and friend Fay Weldon, in her autobiography, Auto da Fay, savours David’s grandeur and Assia’s brooding, sultry beauty: ‘a glorious poetic pair that for a time rivalled the Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath conjunction. When either pair entered rooms, heads turned and a kind of glow came in with them.’ William Trevor found Assia’s features to be ‘reminiscent of Sophia Lauren in a tranquil moment’. Together they were like ‘Scott Fitzgerald people, sixties-style, their innocence brushed over with sophistication, their devotion to one another taken for granted’. Some of the Wevills’ friends felt that Assia was overly protective of David, in a proud, big-sisterly way.
Philip Hobsbaum recalls an incident he witnessed at a party celebrating the publication of Peter Redgrove’s first book, The Collector. Among the guests at Redgrove’s house in Chiswick was the critic G S Fraser, who, Assia complained to the hostess, was making passes at her husband. ‘I didn’t know David was queer,’ Barbara Redgrove replied coolly. ‘But he’s not!’ Assia protested, and Mrs Redgrove said sweetly, ‘Well, I don’t see why you are worried then.’