by Jane Dunn
Despite ceremoniously attending the production every year, this was the first time his daughters saw their father bring to life the great mythic characters he had helped create. Luckily, having heard so much about his brilliance and how he had had no equal, Gerald managed once more to spring across the stage, almost as athletic as he was of old, and conjure the pathos and menace of Hook. He was superb, Angela loyally declared. But Gerald was getting tired of it all and Daphne realised he had long ago lost his enthusiasm for capering about on stage in a Charles II wig, brandishing a toy sword. Anyway, he admitted, ‘it plays the devil with your back, your voice, and your temper the next morning’.44 Never one to enjoy modern life, living always with a nostalgic backward glance to his father and brother Guy and the youthful times that would always seem more golden, he felt a weariness and lack of sympathy with the world. He was now in his late fifties, had far outlived his hero brother and was getting close to the age when his beloved father had given up the fight and abandoned them all for death.
Daphne recalled how Gerald, always in need of distraction and entertainment, happiest when at the centre of things, was growing increasingly sad and lonely. He mourned his lost elder daughters:
Gerald was hungry for companionship; he longed for Angela and Daphne to tell him everything, to discuss their friends, to solve their problems, to share their troubles; but the very quality of his emotion made them shy … he was so changeful, so inconsequent a man, a judge intolerant and hard one day, and human, all too human on the morrow. They were never quite sure of him, never certain of his mood, and they walked away from him.45
In an attempt at throwing off Carol Reed’s attentions towards his daughter, Gerald organised for Daphne to join the party on board Otto Kahn’s luxury yacht for a three-week cruise in the Baltic, through a Mr Fixit, the writer and theatrical impresario Rudolph Kommer. If he had had a clue about his daughters’ private lives, he might have realised that Daphne’s morals were far less likely to be compromised in her continued romantic friendship with the shy and honourable Mr Reed. Instead, in her current mood of newfound sexual allure, she was let loose on a boatload of strangers.
Otto Kahn was a vastly rich and charismatic investment banker, philanthropist and patron of the arts. He was older even than Gerald, suave and easy-going in temperament and used to having his own way. Although reluctant at first, Daphne loved the cruise, amazed by the luxury of the boat and thrilled by the scenery. She was amused too by the changing configurations among the ten varied guests, but she was possibly the only member of the party who enjoyed herself so much. At the end of the holiday, she was told by the man at whom she had initially set her cap (a gentle beardy like Tennyson, she thought) that she had ruined the cruise for all five of the other women present. Daphne, oblivious to the effect of her behaviour on others, seemed nonplussed. ‘A little horseplay, neither more nor less,’46 was how she responded. After all, she had entertained in her cabin a besotted wing commander called George, purely to tease, but had not realised this would upset his wife no end. Although the beautiful German girl who had come along as Kahn’s companion was sidelined by the host’s increasing interest in Daphne, it was hardly her fault. While alone with Kahn on the banks of a spectacular fiord, she had evaded his increasingly amorous approaches by stripping naked and diving into the crystal cold water in front of his astonished eyes, apparently unaware that this might inflame his passions further. At their next stop he offered to buy her a fur coat, but she asked for a dagger instead.
By now, Rudolph Kommer was regretting taking on Gerald’s wayward daughter. Her faithful diary records this analysis from its emotionally blinkered owner:
I think we are all getting on one another’s nerves. Kommer hasn’t spoken to me for two days, I don’t know why. The women are on edge. Irène got blind drunk at lunch. She’s lovely to look at but such a crashing bore, perhaps that’s why Kahn went off her and the other men didn’t fall. As for George [the Wing Commander] he is at the moment lying on my bed, purely to rag, as the poets would say! As long as he doesn’t start snoring I don’t care.47
But the faithful diary could not offer a little psychological insight in return. It was perhaps significant that Daphne, now grown-up at twenty-two, showed little solidarity with the other women, and less sense of concern for the ease and enjoyment of her fellow guests, with apparently scant understanding of why they might have felt discomforted.
Absorbed in her own experiences, exploring her own ideas, this seemed more of a kind of emotional blindness in Daphne than any malice. With the insouciance of a novice she was exercising the undeniable power of her sexual attractiveness, unaware of how this unsettled the men and upset the women. Years later she recalled the excitement of her youthful experimentation at the Wallaces’ skiing holiday and her experience on Kahn’s yacht: ‘I wildly remember [being promiscuous with my kisses] for a few months, thinking I had Power when I was about twenty-one – because it’s like putting on too much lipstick, one suddenly doesn’t know when to stop!’48
Upbraided by Ferdy for being weak and selfish like Cousin Geoffrey, Daphne knew her detachment from normal human feeling and her selfishness were necessary to her writerly self: ‘the writing me is different from the living me, yet they’re both mixed-up. If writing goes there would be no longer any reason for living. It’s the opposite extremes that makes the conflict.’49
Daphne’s fatal attractiveness may have blighted everyone else’s holiday, but she came home refreshed and empowered and she stored the cruise experience away in her memory to reprise it in I’ll Never Be Young Again. To write, to write, this was what she most wanted to do, but still had not found her way. Uncle Willie, her mother’s brother, had published in his magazine Bystander her much-edited short story, ‘And Now to God the Father’, and she had earned £10. Celebrations indeed! He had also introduced her to the literary agency Curtis Brown, and to Michael Joseph, the man who ran their fiction side. Michael Joseph suggested she write a novel before trying to get a collection of short stories published, just as Daphne was thinking about writing about Jane Slade and her Cornish family. She admitted she did not yet feel up to the task. Continue with the stories then, was his sage advice. Having fled once again to the warm embrace of Paris and Ferdy, Daphne found a constellation of new ideas for stories suddenly crowded her mind. She began to write.
If the young Daphne had any muse it was Katherine Mansfield, whose stories she so admired and longed to emulate. It had excited her very much to hear that when the du Maurier girls were children, Katherine lived in the next road to Cannon Hall and used to watch them playing on Hampstead Heath and longed to talk to them. She was not quite twenty years older than Daphne and had died tragically young of tuberculosis when Daphne was fifteen. Discovering this connection had made her believe that something of Katherine’s creative spirit had entered her soul. Now grown up, Daphne was suddenly desperate to visit Katherine’s grave and Ferdy organised a taxi to take them to the old forest cemetery at Avon near Fontainebleau. After some trouble they found the overgrown headstone. There was something poignant and pathetic about the fact her husband Middleton Murry had never visited it, and Daphne wished she could afford to pay to have the site tended. On the simple stone slab was inscribed Hotspur’s words from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, words he had used when being warned of the riskiness of his plan, words that Katherine had loved and lived by: ‘I tell you, my lord fool, out of this nettle danger we pluck this flower, safety.’
Ferryside beckoned for the summer but the house was too full of family and friends coming and going for Daphne to have the concentration necessary to start her novel, but by autumn everyone returned to London and she could begin. Luckily Carol Reed was busy, although his plaintive letters told her how much he longed to see her. Cousin Geoffrey, older, seedier, divorced again, his life pretty much washed up, plucked at her coattails too. But Daphne was not interested enough in either. Carol was her son-like acolyte and Geoffrey the weakling brother: neither was im
portant enough to her for any sacrifice of Fowey and her writing life.
Jeanne, having made her decision that art was to be her future, was now eighteen and had brought her friend Elaine with her to Ferryside. Together they and Daphne, and a cousin Ursula, Uncle Willie Beaumont’s daughter, set out to find Menabilly again, from the difficult eastern approach. This time they made their way through the wild woods that had turned Daphne and Angela back the first time. They still seemed sinister and impenetrable but they did manage to find the house and enter it by the derelict, unfinished north wing. Excited, and yet also daunted by the dust and debris and the weight of the past, they climbed back to the present through a downstairs window. As Daphne secured the catch, a great white owl flew out of an upstairs window.
The sisters were keen sea bathers and loved to swim naked from the secluded coves that proliferated around Cornwall’s south-east coast. One day, lying in the sun, salty from the sea water, Daphne felt overwhelmed with an urgency to write: ‘Sometimes my book comes so strongly on me that it’s like a restless urge within saying “Get on! Get on!” I want silence more than anything, the peace of solitude, long hours for reflection … No striving after cleverness, nor cheap and ready-made wit. Sincerity – beauty – purity.’ A line from ‘Self-Interrogation’, a poem by her favourite Emily Brontë, was suddenly vivid in her mind: ‘The Loving Spirit’ was what she would call it.
Angela too was quietly considering her future now that she felt her best hopes of marriage had been thwarted. Could she also write a novel? But her ambition was more tentative and secretive than Daphne’s. Just as her father and mother were the actors in the family, Jeanne was the artist, and Daphne the writer, Angela knew it would take some extra confidence in her to trespass on these territories already marked out by her family. Love was everything to Angela, and if she was to write that would be her theme, despite her limited personal experience.
Love, or rather to be the object of love, was paramount for Gerald too. His creative powers might be failing and his power over his daughters on the wane, but he nevertheless continued his restless flirtations and inconsequential conquests. While he was obsessing over Angela’s and Daphne’s morals, a popular limerick was doing the rounds:
There was a young lady called Gloria
Seduced by Sir Gerald du Maurier,
Jack Hulbert, Jack Payne,
Sir Gerald again
And the band of the Waldorf Astoria
But then Victorian fathers and their twentieth-century daughters were bound to find that a gulf opened up between them on the matter of sex, bridged if at all with many misunderstandings, but widened by double standards and hypocrisy.
6
Set on Adventure
Oh, the utter joy of looking across the harbour once again. Blue smoke curling from the grey houses opposite, the haze over the water, the noise & smell of ships … What more on earth should I want but these things? I’m here, I’ve always been here, and yet the me of the past is still going on …
DAPHNE DU MAURIER, Growing Pains
THE 1930S WERE a very different era from the glamour and carefree exuberance of the previous decade. The Jazz Age was becoming the age of austerity. The Wall Street Crash and ensuing worldwide depression brought a new mood of anxiety, and belt-tightening gloom. The popular press no longer followed the antics of the privileged young with slavering admiration. As working men marched for jobs, and hungry children ran shoeless in the streets, there was a growing disgust at flamboyant wastefulness and wanton excess. Uncle Willie’s weekly magazine, Bystander, recognised the mood had turned against the feckless rich. When a ‘Red and White’ fancy dress party (the host in white silk pyjamas, long kid gloves, ruby and diamond bracelets and a muff made of white narcissi) coincided with a march of the unemployed, it thundered its disapproval. ‘When such ill-bred extravagance was flaunted, as hungry men were marching to London to get work,’ it asked, who could be surprised if people turned in revolt to communism?1
The dancing was over too for the du Mauriers. Gerald, approaching sixty, was becoming increasingly disenchanted with everything. He missed his brilliant theatrical partner Frank Curzon who had died in 1927 at not yet sixty. He had managed to leave the world in his customary style, dying a month after making his last trip to Epsom racecourse, against doctor’s orders, to see his horse Call Boy win the Derby. Gerald had lost too his business partner, the irreplaceable conjuror Tom Vaughan. Together these men had been father figures, oiling the wheels of Gerald’s work and home life and effortlessly, it seemed, keeping the fountain of gold sovereigns flowing. Now both were dead he felt abandoned, his daughters were growing up and did not need him, and the Revenue was still pursuing him. His last success in the theatre was Cynara, made memorable by the magic of acting once more alongside Gladys Cooper who played his betrayed wife. Celia Johnson made her triumphant debut as the luminous shop girl, whom Gerald’s character was meant to prefer to this legendary beauty.
The paucity of successes in the theatre and the need for money made him turn with reluctance to film. Their old friend Basil Dean, who had wanted to cast Daphne as the Reluctant Nymph, now cast her father as the fugitive hero in Escape, a movie shot at Elstree and on Dartmoor. British film-making in its infancy was a long way from the luxury of being a celebrated actor-manager in your own West End theatre in its heyday. Gone was the civilised luxury he craved and a leisurely start to the day. Now Gerald had to rise early and then hang around until needed to clamber over the moor’s rocky outcrops, and clamber again, and repeat ad nauseam, until Dean had perfected the take. If two performances a day in the theatre was a chore then mindless repetitions of a scene, while the light changed or camera angles were adjusted, was almost unendurable. For a man with a very low boredom threshold, the experience of film-acting was close to purgatory. The youthful technicians did not hold him in the same affectionate awe as did his faithful staff at Wyndham’s and, although Muriel was there to soothe him, he felt himself a dinosaur from another age.
He returned to the stage with another dull melodrama, John Van Druten’s Behold, We Live, but this was made significant by the fact that his co-star was the great Gertrude Lawrence. As mercurial and mischievous as Gerald himself, she became ‘the last of Daddy’s actress loves’.2 She was so similar to him it was like Narcissus gazing at his own reflection in the pool. Fascinating, highly strung, quicksilver in her moods and repartee, ravenous for male attention, she was a woman who lived life at such a tempo that, like Gerald, she defied and feared old age. In fact, as they were to both die well before their allotted span, both managed to evade the decline they dreaded.
Another great friend of Gerald’s, and a different force of nature, died young and without warning: the unexpected news of Edgar Wallace’s death at fifty-six shocked the world. He was in Beverly Hills, working on the original screenplay for a ‘gorilla picture’ that was to become King Kong. For such a gargantuan personality, so vastly energetic and prolific in output, it had been impossible to think of him slowing down, let alone dying. Pure willpower had driven him on, despite any unacknowledged failures of his body. When he had a late diagnosis of diabetes so serious the doctors could not believe he was still functioning, the realisation of his mortality overwhelmed his will to live. Within days the creator of Kong was dead. He was never to know just how iconic the great gorilla was to become.
For Gerald, the death of Edgar was a terrific blow. Another titan of his past was gone. He had been such a large-spirited friend, the creative and energetic engine of so many collaborations. The whole du Maurier family owed him much, for his brilliance and generosity had helped finance Ferryside, the house that would transform all three sisters’ lives. His death reinforced Gerald’s sense of futility. To be a theatre actor was to know that your life’s work was evanescent, that nothing remained of your triumphs except in the fading memories of others. Life too seemed to flee before him and film, the medium that captured something for posterity, seemed to him such a poor two-dim
ensional thing, and tedious beyond belief.
But both he and Gertie needed to pay off the taxman and they embarked together on another film, Lord Camber’s Ladies, with the family’s friend Nigel Bruce as Lord Camber and a younger friend, Alfred Hitchcock, as producer. It was slight and inconsequential, a quota quickie, about an aristocratic love affair, a poisoned wife, false accusations of murder – all tied up predictably in a bow.
The film did not improve Gerald’s mood. Existential boredom and despair meant his habitual reliance on endless practical jokes to enliven and dominate proceedings got increasingly out of hand. He had as his partner in crime his mischief-making co-star Gertie. Hitchcock’s appreciation of cruelty and control made him an ally too in the worst of Gerald’s jokes. Daphne realised how desperate was this need in her father for distraction, and for maintaining his role as the arch manipulator, yet how trying it all was for the other members of the cast. It was also another example of how, despite being extremely sensitive and touchy about his own feelings, he could be oblivious to the discomfort and embarrassment he inflicted on others:
with his pockets full of tricks and practical jokes that he let fly amongst the feet of cameramen, electricians, and directors in a sort of desperate effort to relieve the tedium. Practical joking during these months developed to a pitch of positive frenzy … hardly a moment would pass without some faked telegram arriving, some bogus message being delivered, some supposed telephone bell ringing … It was a game that could be carried too far, and settling as it did into a daily routine, ceased before long to be genuinely amusing, and almost developed into a vice.3