The Real Mrs Miniver

by Ysenda Maxtone Graham

  ‘Now, Miss Struther and gentlemen, Mrs Henry J. Shipment of Baltimore asks you this: Here are four famous American names translated into various foreign languages. Can you identify them? (a) Heinrich Langerkerl; (b) Alfredo Ferrero; (c) Benito Buonomo; (d) Giuseppe Sarto.’ ‘Benny Goodman!’ cried Joyce, shooting her hand up before the others had a chance. She felt much more at home among these New York brain-boxes than she had among the Los Angeles millionaires. At the Information, Please! anniversary party she talked and danced until four in the morning, and Wendell Willkie, the man who had recently failed to be elected President of the United States, made an unsuccessful pass at her.

  Jan on Information, Please!

  Christmas was coming, and Harcourt Brace were spending $5,000 on their Christmas advertising campaign for Mrs Miniver. Jan and the children sent parcels and loving messages to Tony, Jamie and Nannie. On 24 December Jan had Christmas dinner and present-giving with her secret ‘family’, Dolf and Pauly, and on Christmas Day with her official family at 1 Beekman Place.

  * * *

  ‘Liebes, Liebes, I have had such fun at Kalamazoo,’ Jan wrote to Dolf on 7 March 1941: she was in Michigan, and had just given her forty-first lecture. ‘A perfectly charming college, charming Faculty, charming boys and girls, and an ENORMOUS audience: about 800 people, including rows and rows standing up or sitting on the floor, and hundreds were turned away too. The sponsors took me on a fascinating 150-mile journey through apple orchards and vineyards … I think I am in love with the world; and the best of it is that it seems to last. The love, I mean. Just as – thank God – yours and mine does.’ But on the back of her Details of Engagement for 13 March (Place: Buffalo, N.Y. Sponsor: The Garret Club. Correspondent: Mrs J. M. Mitchell, 70 Oakland Place), she scribbled ‘Mrs J. McC. Mitchell. Yellow-faced old bitch.’

  Sponsors sent gushing letters to Clark Getts to thank the agency for sending them Jan Struther, who was ‘as cute as a bug’, and whose humour, light-heartedness, infectious laugh, charm, grace, radiance and joy had warmed hundreds of hearts. The income from the lectures, and from the MGM contract, made it possible for Jan to make donations of thousands of dollars to the British War Relief Fund.

  She helped to raise yet more money by editing and writing the Introduction to a book called Letters from Women of Britain, which Harcourt Brace published in 1941 on the understanding that all its profits would go to the Air Raid Victims Relief Fund. It was a collection of letters (some to Jan but mostly to her friends and acquaintances) from women living through the Blitz. It demonstrated how British women were beginning to get used to the absurdity of going down to the cellar or into an air-raid shelter each night: it was becoming as routine as brushing one’s teeth. ‘How gloriously adaptable we shall all be after the war!’ wrote one correspondent. ‘S. and I used to make an awful fuss at a hotel if we could only get a double-bedded room – and now we share a single mattress on the floor in the greatest luxury.’ ‘Last night I slept a whole night in my bed, which was a most delightful experience,’ wrote another. ‘Today,’ wrote a third, ‘as I was vacuuming the sitting-room carpet, it suddenly came over me how silly it was to be doing it, with a house blown to smithereens nearby – and yet one must and does. One even renews one’s kitchen utensils at Woolworth’s, and worries about the moth in the curtains. One must and one does.’

  Real names were changed to initials, so there were tedious sentences like ‘We have Z. living here now – she moved from the O— Street flat – but we don’t see a great deal of S.’ The book was put together quickly, and it showed. But it was a vivid document, full of such domestic detail as the way people planted rockeries with gnomes and rabbits on top of their garden air-raid shelters. Perhaps Jan felt a rush of reassurance when she chose to include the following, in which the anonymous writer advises her friend ‘C.’ to stay in America and not come back to Britain: ‘It is of the greatest importance to us all that some people should remain in full possession of a kind of pre-war sanity, not muddled and dérangé like us. Not, I mean, in order to regulate the world, but just so we can restore ourselves by getting back our old balance from them, serenity and so on.’ Yes, there was another good reason for staying in America.

  Between lecture engagements, as she looked out of her train window at ‘moonlit and flat grain fields with their drifts of snow lying about the edges, and lonely farmhouses sunk in isolationist slumber’, she wondered whether anything could wake America up to the danger of the world’s situation. Roosevelt, thank goodness, had been re-elected, and had managed to get the Lend Lease bill through Congress: America had now agreed to be, at least, ‘the arsenal of democracy’, giving ‘all aid to Great Britain short of war’. FDR’s analogy of a man lending a hose to a neighbour whose house was on fire had helped to get the idea across to millions of Americans clinging fearfully to their isolationism. But in the air there was still an almost tangible hatred of Roosevelt and everything he stood for. Jan bore the brunt of this loathing more and more in 1941. In her lectures she was beginning to introduce rallying words which did not go down well with isolationists. She quoted Sydney Smith, the nineteenth-century canon of St Paul’s Cathedral, whose essay on the subject of possible Napoleonic invasion seemed amazingly apposite to the United States in 1941:

  Be not deceived, there is no wall of adamant, no triple flaming sword, to drive off those lawless assassins who have murdered and pillaged in every other land. Heaven has made with us no covenant that there should be joy and peace here, and wailing and lamentation in the world besides. I would counsel you to put on a mind of patient suffering and noble acting; whatever energies there are in the human mind you will want them all; every man will be tested to the very spring of his heart, and those times are at hand which will show us as we really are, with the genuine stamp and value, be it much or little, which nature has impressed upon every living soul.

  The children had noticed a growing anti-British element among the teachers at Trinity School: Jan decided to take them away. Robert would board at the Harvey School in Westchester County, New York and Janet would go to the George School in Pennsylvania, an enlightened Quaker boarding-school.

  ‘What a different 1st of June this is from last year’s one,’ Jan wrote to Dolf. She was spending the weekend with Lord and Lady Halifax, the British ambassador and his wife, at their residence in Washington. ‘You had just sailed away and I was wandering about feeling disembowelled … I’m having a lovely time here – just a small dinner party last night, and I sat next to the Greek Minister.’ Lord Halifax had taken a liking to Jan from the moment she told him, in a direct-but-kind way, that he mustn’t go about fox-hunting with the smart set in Virginia because it would give Americans a damaging impression of what the British were like. She described the Halifaxes’ drawing-room to Dolf: ‘On the table where visitors can’t fail to see it, there is a solemn thick book about India, inscribed “Their Excellencies” by someone there, and sticking out of it, instead of a bookmarker, a piece of unmistakable BUMF! (loo paper). In no other country’s embassy could this occur. Don’t worry, we’ll win the war, because we know how to improvise.’

  As her lectures began to merge into one another in her memory, she took more care to ‘catch’ each one by writing notes on the back of her Details of Engagement.

  Mrs Harriet Collins [she scribbled, after ‘The Truth About Mrs Miniver’ at the Matrix Club of Columbus, Ohio]: husband died a year ago – very fat, fair, jolly – insomnia. I recommended rum milk punch at night. Knows Thurber.

  Mrs Harriet Allen – husband in jewellery store.

  Mrs Florence Horchow: née Smith. Married a Jew – Austrian insurance broker. Delicate girl, 9, Hester, brain tumours. I did orange-peel teeth. Mrs H. very nice, ugly, efficient, became Jewish by religion on marriage.

  Mrs Bricker: wife of State Governor. V. nice, distinguished-uglyish.

  Mrs Bevis: wife of Univ. Pres. Oldish. ?Jewish.

  ‘Jewish’ was one of the most frequent words in these scribbles.
She was still more interested in Jews than in anyone else, and gushed to Dolf in her letters about the delightful ones she had met. Dolf wished she wouldn’t, sometimes: anti-Semitism was despicable, but indiscriminate pro-Semitism was not healthy either.

  Where should they spend the summer? Summer loomed in America, more than it ever had in England. There, a gentle breeze blew, and she could rely on Nannie, Kensington Gardens and the cottage at Rye to get her through July, before the ready-made holiday at Cultoquhey which soaked up August. But here it was sweltering from mid June onwards, there was no Nannie, and the summer school vacation was three months long. She yearned to go on a real holiday with Dolf, away from everyone: she envisaged them riding horses together through the Wild West. What she didn’t want was to go with him on a local villagey holiday: ‘I feel I’d rather have a hellish hot six days’ drive than potter around New England all summer.’

  July and August would present no problem, because Robert would be staying with the Townsends in Rhode Island, and Janet would be at summer camp. But there was still June. Jan decided to be brave and motherly and take Janet and Robert camping on her own.

  ‘I am going to have fun with the children but you know I hate leaving you,’ she wrote to Dolf, giving him some addresses in upstate New York and Vermont. ‘Please type envelope, mark Personal, and enclose your letter in an inner envelope. With these provisos, you can write freely.’

  It was lovely, on the surface. They stopped by the sides of lakes and cooked ‘Wieners’ on Jan’s Sterno stove. They went to movies in obscure New England towns in the afternoon and ate strawberry cheesecake afterwards. They slept in a log cabin in a wood on the edge of Lake Placid, with a bathing beach, a canoe and no electric light. ‘Don’t be a “Mutti” about traffic accidents, my sweet!’ Jan wrote to Dolf. ‘Really and truly I drive very carefully when I’m with the children. I never go more than 60 mph, mostly about 40, and we are wandering along doing about 150 miles a day.’

  But she was beginning to notice a new pattern of aliveness and deadness in herself. When she was with Dolf, she felt physically and mentally alive – able to respond fully to the sensations around her: the beauty of trees, the deliciousness of food, the soothingness of water, the sparkle of conversation. When she was away from him for any length of time, there seemed to be a smothering of these feelings: life lost its savour. She expressed this later in a poem, using the Cinderella analogy.

  While you are here, Beloved, while you are here,

  Happiness clothes me round like a golden gown.

  The young men smile, and turn their heads, and stare,

  As I step light-footed through the enchanted town.

  But when you are gone, Beloved, when you are gone,

  The slippers of glass will vanish, and the golden gown;

  And no one will look at the rags that I have on

  As I walk with feet of lead through the desolate town.

  ‘I am as sterile as hell,’ she wrote to Dolf from Hillsborough in upstate New York. ‘I eat, and swim, and write letters, and sleep, and dream, and then wake suddenly. I am getting very sunburnt.’

  Their star was still watching over them. At a literary luncheon at the New York Public Library a few weeks before, Jan had sat next to the eminent librarian Jenny Flexner (of Jewish descent), and had mentioned that she knew a young Viennese immigrant who would make a brilliant library student. Strings were pulled; and in the log cabin by Lake Placid Jan filled in a reference form about Dolf: ‘Ability of candidate: more than average, considerably. A real scholar and book lover.’ Dolf got a scholarship to library school at Columbia, and the course was to begin in September. He could give up the envelope-addressing job – and the dream of a secret holiday in the West could come true.

  It was, Dolf later said, ‘among the most magic things we ever did. It was our last chance.’ They set off in Jan’s second-hand Plymouth and drove across the United States. For the whole month of July they could ignore the screeching of time’s winged chariot, and could live together day and night, away from the world’s gaze. At hotels, they registered as Don and Judy Eisler (Don – joke-typical American name; Judy – Mrs Miniver’s daughter; Eisler – Dolf’s stepfather’s surname). They stopped for the night at Cleveland, Ohio, at La Porte, Indiana and at State Center, Iowa, where they bought local papers to catch up on the world’s news. (The German Fourth Panzer Division was encircling Smolensk.) They pulled off the road for snacks at ‘Joe’s’, or ‘Nick’s Eats’, or ‘Ma Schmitt’s Place’. In the washroom at O’Neill, Nebraska, Jan had a narrow escape. She was chatting to the woman at the next-door basin when the woman stopped in mid-hand-wash and said, ‘Wait a minute – I recognize your voice. Now, where have I heard that voice before?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ said Jan. ‘My name’s Judy Eisler. I’m a housewife.’

  ‘No – come on, it’s so familiar. Let me guess. Haven’t I heard you on the radio?’

  Jan shook her head, smiled, dried her hands as calmly as possible, left the washroom, and left O’Neill, Nebraska ten minutes later.

  Dolf and Jan headed for the Black Hills of South Dakota. There, at last, they were out of earshot of the Information, Please! audience. They stayed at a dude ranch and rode horses side by side all day, getting lost on purpose. Jan’s ability to appreciate beauty had come flooding back: every sunset, every picnic, every view, every siesta, every conversation was memorable. They felt they were literally discovering the New World together.

  They crossed the Rocky Mountains at Kremmling, Colorado, where Jan spotted gentian, wild columbine, larkspur, monkshood and Alpine rue. They swept down into scorching Arizona and rode horses with Western saddles in the Canyon de Chelly. They bought tough Western shoes at a J. C. Penney store. Their car got stuck in the mud between Ganado and Chambers, Arizona, and was pulled out by the sheriff of the Apache country. Every adversity merely enhanced the sense of adventure.

  Very reluctantly, after three weeks of this existence, they turned eastwards again and were drawn back towards New York. The routes across America – just like the Great North Road in Britain – were now lined with ‘memory flags’ for Jan, to be noticed and hugged to herself in private reverie each time she passed nearby, on future, solitary journeys.

  * * *

  ‘Greer Garson probably starring,’ Jan had cabled Nannie at the end of 1940: and it took many months of Hollywood meetings for that probability to become a certainty.

  First, the whole Mrs Miniver project had to be passed by the sceptical Louis B. Mayer. The producer Sidney Franklin had taken on the project with zeal, and had set up a team of five scriptwriters (James Hilton, Arthur Wimperis, George Froeschel, R. C. Sherriff and Claudine West) who had worked for six months to adapt (which is to say, completely rewrite) the book for the screen. They handed the screenplay to Mayer at the end of August 1941, and he didn’t like it. Too many anti-German films seemed to be filtering out of the Writers’ Building, he said, and MGM could do without them while it was clinging to a declining, war-torn international market. Mayer became even more worried in September, when Senator Burton Wheeler, a prominent member of the America First Committee, accused Hollywood of ‘conspiring with the Roosevelt administration to conduct a violent propaganda campaign intending to incite the American people to the point where they will become involved in this war.’

  Greer Garson was not happy about accepting the role of Mrs Miniver. How could she – a beautiful, thirty-three-year-old actress with what journalists called ‘a nimbus of red-gold hair’ – possibly play the mother of a man aged twenty-one? It was absurd. Surely, if she accepted the part, she should be ‘aged’, with wrinkles, greying hair, horn-rimmed spectacles and padded hips? William Wyler, the director, disagreed. He said she looked just the right age as she was. ‘That hit a nerve,’ wrote Michael Troyan in his biography of Greer Garson, A Rose for Mrs Miniver. (Actually, Garson was not thirty-three but thirty-seven: she always subtracted four years from her true age, and it was only after her dea
th that her year of birth was found to be 1904, not 1908.)

  William Wyler had the reputation of being an impossibly demanding director to work with. Both Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon had to be begged by Sidney Franklin to say ‘yes’, but at least there was no need for begging when it came to casting the twenty-three-year-old (and already-divorced) Richard Ney as Mrs Miniver’s son Vin: ‘I picked him out of a bunch of silly kids,’ said William Wyler, ‘because he seemed the silliest.’ Ney, who had merely stopped by at MGM to visit a friend and decided on a whim to do a quick screen test, could not believe his luck when he was offered the part. Culver City seemed to him like the Garden of Eden: ‘I was in paradise, eating apples everywhere.’

  Was it love at first sight? The scene, in Sidney Franklin’s office, was imaginatively described in an article by Beth Emerson entitled ‘Secret Romance’: ‘Greer looked up, prepared to see the usual young actor. Instead, she observed a tall, slender fellow with a sensitive, studious face. Richard Ney looked down … His startled blue eyes flashed to her slender ankles, even as Greer’s startled green eyes took heed of the width of his shoulders; and then their delighted glances met again, met and locked and held.’

  The burgeoning clandestine love-affair between screen-mother and screen-son was a new sub-plot in the Mrs Miniver story. Jan was unaware of it as she set off from Pennsylvania Station on 4 October for her longest lecture tour so far.

  * * *

  She perused her time-table.

  Schedule for Miss Struthers [the Clerk Getts secretaries often spelt her surname wrong]:

  Saturday, Oct. 4th: Lv Pennsylvania Station, train 31, 6.05 EST. Lower Berth 12 in Car 318.

  Sunday Oct. 5th. Arrive Terre Haute, 11.13 am CST. Change trains. Lv Terre Haute, Chicago & Eastern Illinois R.R. 1.45 pm CST. Ar. Evansville 5.05 pm CST. Reservation at McCurdy Hotel …

  This went on for three pages. She would be travelling on The American, The Spirit of St Louis, The Blue Bonnet, The 20th Century, The Morning Zephyr, The Black Hawk and The Rocket. (What would Tony give to ride on these famous trains! She must write to him during the journey.) She was to give twenty-three lectures in six weeks, and local newspapers from Michigan to Texas were growing excited. ‘In a full week of activities ahead,’ said the Evansville, Indiana paper, ‘probably the one most talked about is the appearance of Jan Struther, the English woman whose much-read Mrs Miniver has made her to the public “Mrs Miniver” herself.’ She mustn’t disappoint her public.