by Jane Dunn
Once out of the clutches of the mercenary doctor, Daphne began to regain her health, but moped around Cannon Hall being moody and difficult. Her room-mate Jeanne still continued with her fantasy of being schoolboy David Dampier, but Daphne could not conjure much enthusiasm for their old games. She only felt free and almost happy riding her horse on Hampstead Heath; the confines of home reduced her to ‘a silent frenzy, and a mist of hate comes over me for it all’.22 She dreamt of being a collie rounding up sheep on the moor. Learning to drive Muriel’s car and getting herself a dog of her own, Jock, her second West Highland Terrier, provided some consolation. Driving a car in those days could often be quite literally a rather hit or miss affair: there were no formal lessons, no test, just jump in and off you go. Not surprisingly, there were accidents, but Daphne revelled in the freedom and was unfazed by skidding on the London streets into a passing car. She would borrow her mother’s Calcott, a distinctive little car manufactured by a small British firm of bicycle makers which had just been taken over by the American company Singer. Jeanne too was involved in a road accident, but at the receiving end, when she was knocked down in the street, but was not badly hurt.
That spring a trip with Jeanne, Muriel and Jock to the Lake District awakened a new kind of ecstasy, for wild country, water, mountains, sky. When their mother had to return to London to care for Gerald, who was rehearsing a new play, Ferdy joined Daphne and Jeanne for the last week. This visit had been much anticipated by Daphne. Parisian allure, however, did not survive so well the mud, gorse and hills of Cumbria, for Daphne no longer felt quite so besotted. It rained a lot and Mlle Ferdy was not very keen on the inhospitable outdoors; accompanying Daphne as she scrambled up chilly becks, and struggled through the rain to the top of a windswept hill, was more in terrier Jock’s line.
Daphne’s vague disenchantment with her French mistress continued when Ferdy found, on returning to London, that she had been summarily sacked and suggested to an appalled Daphne that perhaps she could start an acting career, with some help from her pupil’s distinguished actor-manager father. Had the down-to-earth proprietor, Miss Wicksteed, finally had enough of the divisive favouritism practised by her head teacher towards her pupils? Or did she in fact suspect something more scandalous? Perhaps even Gerald and Muriel had a hand in the matter – certainly Gerald would prove himself capable at the end of the year of threatening to ruin the career of an actress who seemed to be getting too close to his wayward, favoured daughter. For whatever reason, Ferdy suddenly was out of a job and Daphne had the awful dawning thought that her teacher’s relationship with her had been nurtured by some hard-headed self-interest. Her father was influential and famous and perhaps Ferdy had always thought that one day she might need his help. Nevertheless, Daphne never lost her affection for Mlle Yvon and, wishing to help in her plans to start another finishing school, offered her the interest due on her war bond that amounted to £95. This Ferdy declined.
While Daphne, Jeanne and Jock scampered over the hills of Derwentwater, Angela had taken up with alacrity the Towles’ kind invitation of a month in a luxury hotel on the French Riviera. There, in the Belle Epoque splendour of the Bristol Hotel in Beaulieu-sur-Mer nestling exquisitely on the coast between Nice and Monaco, she restored some of her hurt pride after the failure of her embryonic acting career. Between playing tennis and lotus eating, her heart unfurled in the spring sunshine. She turned twenty-two while in the hospitable embrace of the Towle family and, as if on cue, her prince arrived, or at least a prince’s courtier.
This was a grand passion to rival Daphne’s. The young man was a member of the immensely impressive and still highly formal entourage of Prince Chichibu of the Japanese Chrysanthemum throne. Many Japanese still considered their royal family to be divine beings and anyone in the prince’s entourage had a certain theatrical glamour that Angela found hard to resist. Embellished with these exotic trappings, he seemed to the ecstatic young Englishwoman to be a god-like creature, and he was going to be hers: ‘This was IT at last … For two months life was at its most blissful, and Casanova himself wrote no better letters I’ll swear.’23
Angela’s exuberance had got the better of her. But this time she had jumped the gun and pressed an engagement ring on him, he possibly too politely Japanese or hamstrung by courtly etiquette to demur. In her dream of marriage to the demi-god she had already decided on delphiniums for her wedding and pictured Betty Hicks and Daphne accompanying her and Daddy up the aisle. But once again her hopes, so brightly coloured and quickly inflated, were vulnerable to the unwelcome prick of reality. After just eight weeks of happiness, the unnamed and unofficial fiancé declared he could not marry her and disappeared from view, possibly back to Japan; the seductive letters ceased and Angela was left feeling duped and bewildered. Angela told no one in the family except Daphne that she had been jilted, as she saw it, and endured her heartache and humiliation in silence. Such were the shared confidences of the sisters it is very likely that this episode of emotional cross-purposes and piercing betrayal in Angela’s life may well have been the inspiration for one of Daphne’s recently discovered early stories, ‘And His Letters Grew Colder’.24
Angela’s family were great dog lovers and had always had Pekineses, little imperial dogs that were considered to be largely Muriel’s pets. Daphne had had a succession of more sporty hounds, from her favourite West Highland Terriers to various mongrel mutts whose independent way of life had courted death a few too many times. There had been many tears shed in the family over the untimely loss of animals, mostly belonging to Daphne. Now Angela, still in a state of shock and grief at the undoing of her dream of marriage, one day found herself in Selfridges and there, gazing back at her in the Pet Department, was a tiny Pekinese puppy, for sale for the princely sum of six guineas. She immediately bought her and called her Wendy – or, in full, Wendy Pansy Posy Lollypop Stone-Martin – and puzzlingly ‘Penelope-Anne’ for short. And there began, with her first Pekinese, one of the more enduring love affairs of her life.
The du Maurier family were very lucky in the creative partnerships that Gerald managed to forge with remarkable men. First there was J. M. Barrie, whose plays he produced and starred in to great acclaim. Then there was the business genius of his partner Frank Curzon whose natural astuteness conjured huge sums of money from theatrical enterprises that funded for years the extravagant du Maurier way of life. Then in 1926 a towering personality burst into their world. Edgar Wallace was in his mid-fifties and already famous as a journalist, crime writer and playwright. His creative energy was phenomenal: he was reputed to have dictated a whole crime novel over one weekend. His publisher boasted in the 1920s that a quarter of all the books read by an avid British public were written by him. He had a clumsy childlike personality full of energy, exuberance and fun. In fact as a character he resembled his most famous creation, King Kong, though Kong was yet to be born when this powerhouse of activity whirled into the du Mauriers’ view. Wallace wanted Gerald to produce his new play, The Gaunt Stranger. Gerald was canny enough to recognise that this story of a legendary assassin motivated purely by personal revenge, and which somehow managed to keep the suspense going to the last act, would be a sure-fire hit. The only proviso he made was that Wallace change the name to The Ringer, which he promptly did.
The whole Wallace family became firm friends of the du Mauriers, and Pat, his clever, lively daughter, ‘with glasses, and an amount of intelligence and brain that was almost startling’,25 was just a year younger than Daphne, and became a particular friend of the sisters. Angela wrote about Edgar Wallace with gratitude and affection. She found him inordinately generous, sometimes frightening, the most compelling storyteller, and the kindest of men.
The play’s first outing was on 3 May, the night before the start of the momentous General Strike of 1926, when nearly two million workers downed tools in support of the miners’ struggle with the government to protect their wages and prevent the conditions of their lives becoming even harsher. D
aphne wrote to Tod in Australia, ‘nothing much happened beyond the fact that buses & tubes were driven by good-looking undergraduates in plus-fours but no body knows or cares what it’s all about’.26 The du Mauriers’ main interest was whether the theatres, restaurants and parties could continue through the strike.
Edgar Wallace threw an extravagant first night party at the Carlton Hotel. London was about to grind to a halt but his glittering guest list ran into the hundreds and everyone, dressed to the nines, sat down either side of a very long table to eat, drink and toast a long run. Despite the chaos in the country and the temporary closing down of the transport systems, The Ringer was a terrific success, as Gerald had predicted it would be. And thanks to Wallace’s generosity in sharing the proceeds, further riches poured into the du Maurier coffers.
The play brought various friends into the family’s circle, but one in particular was of the greatest importance to Angela and would remain so until she died. Betty Hicks, her childhood friend, was playing the ingénue and shared a dressing room with the character actress, author and extraordinary personality, Naomi Jacob, known to one and all as Micky. In the play, Micky had to portray a drunken old charwoman, and she played the part with gusto. She was a Catholic, Jewish Yorkshirewoman and liked to point out that she embodied all the romance and true grit that that hybrid implied. Short and stout and dressed in a gentleman’s suit and tie, her hair a short-back-and-sides, she was completely comfortable with the fact that she was not made for marriage or conventional femininity. On the other hand, she exhibited an enormous capacity for nurturing and love: a bossy Jewish mother to all her many friends. Micky and Bet’s dressing room at the theatre was suddenly the focal point for anyone in the production, or out of it, and the talk and laughter that emanated from that small room warmed the hearts of everyone who gathered there.
At the Wallaces’ first night party, Angela had been riveted by the sight of Micky, at ease in the midst of all the evening dresses and jewels, wearing a velvet dinner jacket, her hair closely cropped to reveal ‘a head like Beethoven’.27 In later years Naomi Jacob was to become famous for her writing and radio broadcasts and had legions of fans; she cherished the letters she received, one of her favourite from a man who had seen her photograph and not surprisingly mistaken her for a man, for whom he felt some solidarity: ‘The Catholic faith is only suited to actors and servant girls. It is no faith for a gentleman.’28 This piece of fraternal advice was greeted with Micky’s hearty great laugh.
While visiting Betty Hicks in her dressing room, Angela met this remarkable woman for the first time. She was still hurt by the flight of her Japanese phantom fiancé and was in need of solace. Beneath the surprising gentlemanly exterior, she recognised Micky’s lion heart and larger than life personality that could accept and love her for whom she was. Here was someone who, like her, adored Pekinese dogs, opera and Italy; someone who thought she was wonderful – and best of all, pretty. Micky wrote about her first sighting of the diffident twenty-two-year-old:
One hot afternoon, I remember she made her first visit [to the famous dressing room], a small, exceedingly pretty little girl, in a flowered dress carrying a parasol, Angela du Maurier, who one likes on sight, and loves when one knows her.29
She recognised Angela’s vulnerability and tucked her under her wing. And there she remained, visiting Micky when she was in London in her flat in Harrow Road every week for tea (Micky wrote in her diary ‘A.T.4’ and it became a ritual that both relied on). They wrote when they were apart and Angela visited Micky when she moved to Italy for her health. For almost forty years Micky was ‘my comforter and help and adviser and tear-wiper on more occasions than I care to remember’.30
The du Maurier parents were having a difficult time steering their daughters into conventional adulthood. Gerald did not want this natural transformation to happen, while Muriel hoped to marry the girls off with society weddings to wealthy, well-bred men. Instead, their eldest was falling for unsuitable men or cosying up for tea with an unashamed lesbian, twenty years her senior and dressed flamboyantly like a man. Jeanne had yet to set off any parental alarm; Daphne, however, was even more troubling to them. As the girl who had often felt an outsider and uneasy in social situations, the growing recognition of her power of attraction was thrilling and she was to spend the next few years fine-tuning her capacity to disturb men and women alike.
The next focus for her interest, after Ferdy, was a svelte, shingle-headed young actress called Molly Kerr, whom she met in June as part of the cast in a Galsworthy play, Escape. Ironically, this play of gentleman prisoner-on-the-run was to be filmed in 1930 with Gerald as the lead, two years before John Galsworthy was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Earlier in the year Molly had returned from New York having triumphed as Bunty Mainwaring in Noël Coward’s new play, The Vortex, in which she had caught the great theatre critic James Agate’s eye with her ‘vanity, and her sleek aristocratic head’.31
Daphne found Molly Kerr so attractive, she told her diary, that she could easily lose her head over her. With her newfound sexual confidence, she did not leave it merely as a crush conducted from afar, but pursued the relationship and continued to see her, causing great consternation to both her parents and pangs of jealous hurt to Mlle Yvon. Even dancing with the Prince of Wales at a select party thrown by Lord Victor Paget was not as exciting: Daphne at barely nineteen dismissed the Prince, thirteen years her senior, as rather a pathetic little figure.
In the middle of July she went on an outing with Molly, perhaps taking a picnic, to Richmond Park. Something significant happened between them and Daphne, on her return, had to prevaricate to suspicious parents as to where she had been and what she had been doing. After this visit, she wrote the poem that previous biographers have been sure was written about a man:
‘Oh, we played halma [a board game], talked, and read,
After all, one has to live.’
This is what I vaguely said
To those who were inquisitive.
But more beautiful, less drear,
Was the vision in my mind
A greater risk, a happy fear,
Halma of another kind,
Crushed ferns amidst a haze of blue –
The sun, egg sandwiches – and you.
The poem was written on the back of an unsigned letter that again, it was surmised, came from an unknown man. This letter was rather feminine in its expression and is much more likely to have been a letter from Molly Kerr, referring to the incident in Richmond Park that Daphne mentioned in her diary. The letter read: ‘Just got home from leaving you to your bluebells – very late – very quiet – I never want to wake from the trance into which I shot suddenly. Don’t ever wake me and don’t put it in your diary – oh, that diary! Dangerous, indiscreet and stupid.’32
This relationship with Molly survived two quick visits Daphne made to France to be with Ferdy and a trip by the young actress to New York for the play Loose Ends that opened on 1 November at The Ritz on Broadway. Certainly Daphne’s parents were rattled by Daphne and Molly’s friendship, oddly much more than they seemed to be by that with Mlle Yvon. Gerald, in one of his draconian father moods, threatened to ruin Molly’s acting career if Daphne did not give her up. If he meant it, it was an outrageous threat, but showed just how much the whole business distressed him, and just how much power he thought he had.
Part of his rage might also have been fuelled by his public spat in 1924 with Noël Coward, the new crown prince of British theatre. The Vortex was Coward’s first big commercial success and had just finished a triumphant run on Broadway. The author played the frenetic juvenile lead, and Molly Kerr his girlfriend. The subject matter had genuinely shocked Gerald. He did not see theatre as a mirror of all aspects of human life and in this play Coward had unapologetically flaunted the seedier elements of high society: cocaine addiction, suppressed homosexuality and incestuous feelings between mother and son. Scandalised by the airing of such ‘filth’, as he called it, Ger
ald was alarmed too at the thought that the theatrical tide was turning against his kind of plays, his style of acting, and that he would be left washed up on the shore, out of date and disregarded. After all, he was in his mid-fifties and already growing tired of the whole show. It was galling that Coward, this Mannered, sleekly sophisticated young man who scintillated as playwright, producer, actor and singer/songwriter, was only in his mid-twenties, and already too confident, too successful, too clever by half. Unwisely, perhaps, Gerald publicised his disapproval of what he insisted was ‘dustbin drama’ and Noël Coward struck back in a newspaper article with even greater venom and unerring aim:
Sir Gerald du Maurier, having – if he will forgive me saying so – enthusiastically showered the English stage with second-rate drama for many years, now rises up with incredible violence and has a nice slap all round at the earnest and perspiring young dramatists.
He then turned Gerald’s rather pompous call for reticence and reverence back on himself with the cattish dig: ‘Sir Gerald’s reverence so far seems to have been devoted to the box-office.’33
Molly’s career continued but her name did not occur again in Daphne’s ‘dangerous, indiscreet and stupid’ diary. But then this episode with Molly Kerr, as she suggested in her poem, had been a game, an experiment with her sexual attraction that remained something separate from her real self – the watching, analytical writer ready to process experience through imagination, to create the fictions in which she truly lived.
Despite her recoil from masculine sexuality, Angela was already longing for conventional marriage and children, perhaps provided through immaculate conception. Jeanne, so much younger and still enjoying her male persona as David Dampier, was at school in Hampstead where, Daphne told Tod, she ‘appears to get top marks for every lesson’.34 Like her elder sister, Daphne was now officially launched on society and therefore considered in need of a husband, although she had no desire for a marriage like those of her parents and her friends. While with Ferdy in Brittany that August she had written a poem reflecting her long-held beliefs, using the metaphor of a property much like Cannon Hall, with the house enclosed by the walled garden complete with tennis court and croquet lawn: