Piffy, Bird & Bing

by Jane Dunn

  The boy she had wanted to be had been consigned to a box locked within herself and now, unexpectedly, had escaped – and it was thrilling and alarming to her in equal measure. For Daphne it was as if Peter Pan, the hero of their youth, had suddenly flown into her imagination to taunt the grown-up Wendy with what she had forfeited in choosing adulthood and the real world over the dreams and limitless possibilities of Neverland.

  The friendship with Ellen Doubleday was to be the most important creative relationship of Daphne’s life, conducted largely through Daphne’s baroque imagination and her remarkable letters: funny, descriptive, confessional. Their infrequent meetings, especially when Ellen occasionally came to Europe, were often a disappointment. They were so utterly unalike as women, enjoyed such different things and Ellen, merely mortal – and a privileged American – had a much greater need for comfort and security (Daphne was scornful when Ellen checked herself into a Parisian hospital when she had a cold). The real Ellen could never live up to the curlicued creation of Daphne’s fantastical mind.

  Daphne hung all kinds of different personae round Ellen’s neck – not just her own Rebecca and Mary Stuart, but the Madonna de la Esperanza and Eleanor of Aquitaine. This could be burdensome for a literal-minded, conventional and sympathetic woman like Ellen. Daphne saw her as a consummate woman, everything that she could not and did not wish herself to be. Ellen was undoubtedly beautiful but also soignée and groomed in a way that utterly defeated Daphne. She ran the Doubleday mansions and their numerous servants with social grace and iron discipline and entertained immaculately. She was the professional wife of a highly successful and difficult man, shouldering her role with the kind of flair and commitment Daphne had never been able to offer Tommy in his career. A motherly presence, she appeared to preside effortlessly over a happy brood of children.

  But most importantly for Daphne, Ellen was to be the imaginative inspiration for two fictional characters. She was Stella, the mother in September Tide, a play Daphne began writing on her return to England, even requesting the name of her signature scent (Coty’s L’Aimant) so that the actress could wear that on stage. More significantly, her idea of Ellen animated Rachel in My Cousin Rachel, the book she thought of as ‘the most emotionally-felt book I had ever written’.8

  Daphne was obsessed with Ellen during the first years of their relationship. She bombarded her with scintillating but demanding letters: by Christmas 1947 she pointed out that she had written six long letters to Ellen’s measly two and requested the reasons for this dereliction. It did not occur to Daphne until later that the avalanche of demanding emotion and longing she directed towards her new friend would never be reciprocated and possibly even came close to harassment, so wrapped up was she in her own imagined world.

  This was Daphne’s first trip to America. Alarmed at the prospect of being subjected to impertinent questions that revealed her working methods and exposed what felt to her to be her very being, she most feared being forced to admit that the spur to her story was her jealousy of Tommy’s former fiancée. This would have been a revelation of female weakness that the swaggering boy in her psyche found shameful to contemplate. She sat in the imposing gloom of the New York District Court on Foley Square, pale and slightly bowed.

  Harrison Smith, one of the editors at the Saturday Review of Literature who was called as an expert witness on the case, watched her on the witness stand and thought she was obviously suffering and deeply embarrassed. The prosecuting barrister Mr Rosenshein read out statements she had made when writing about her father and forebears that implied the du Mauriers were sometimes loosely acquainted with the truth. He pointed out that at least one previous female ancestor had broken more than one of the commandments. Despite enduring having her own honesty and veracity impugned, Daphne conducted herself in a highly disciplined way and remained outwardly serene.

  As part of his expertise, Harrison Smith had read every second-wife novel he could find and been amazed at how many there were and the similarity of their plots, with mysterious mansions, portraits of first wives with uncanny eyes, hauntings and madness much in evidence. However, as he told Judge John Bright, ‘of them all, Rebecca was the most original and the most vital. Danvers, the grim housekeeper of Manderley, was an original conception, as was the entire section dealing with Max de Winter’s murder of Rebecca … the evidence of the novel’s originality was plain for anyone to see’.9

  Daphne suffered by day, feeling flayed by lawyers in the courtroom, and then returned to the balm of Nelson and Ellen’s luxurious hospitality each night. Barberrys, the spacious house specially built for the Doubledays on prime coastal land with a panoramic view of Oyster Bay, was glamorous with Aubusson carpets, Louis XVI furniture and an impressive wood-panelled library. It was also a comfortable family home and the levels of luxury that Daphne, Tod and the children enjoyed there were a far cry from the chill and bareness of Menabilly. Daphne had never been a woman to pamper herself but there was something divine about warm scented baths, feather beds, delicious food brought on silver trays and civilised company (Noël Coward dropped in during her stay). ‘I do adore fragrant, fragile, softness, for the simple reason, I think, that I’ve never had it … I could really go through life with a cake of soap and a toothbrush.’10

  Ellen proved to be a compellingly attractive hostess and friend; the women would sit together at the end of a long day and talk. There appeared to be more confidences, however, flowing from Daphne to Ellen than in the opposite direction and when Daphne returned to England she realised how little she knew about the real woman she had embellished with her fantasies: ‘I’ve told you everything about myself, you’ve told me nothing … stay well. Stay lovely.’11

  In many ways it helped not to know too much about Ellen as Daphne’s fantasy about her was so important she was disconcerted if real life intruded, at odds with the story. This meant Daphne was prescriptive about how Ellen should look – when they next met she asked her to wear her ‘Mary Stuart dress’, she hated her in trousers (Daphne’s domain as the boy-suitor) and also told her not to perm her hair and what combs to wear.

  The judge was eventually to pronounce that Daphne had no case to answer. When the trial was over, however, Daphne collapsed into bed, emotionally exhausted. In fact, she later believed she was close to a nervous breakdown. Her hostess’s thoughtful ministrations triggered in her mind her lifelong hunger for a loving and sympathetic mother, and Ellen who had seemed to her both the siren Rebecca and the heroic Mary Queen of Scots, somehow fitted the bill now as her ideal mother, ‘the mother I always wanted’.12 Daphne wrote to Ellen, pointing out that she belonged to her as much as did Ellen’s three children and claimed that somehow the spirit of Ellen’s fourth and stillborn child had alighted on her: ‘I’m your child, just the same.’13 The idea, awkward as it might have been for Ellen, comforted Daphne. Early in their relationship Daphne described the effect on her of Muriel’s antipathy to her as a child and then added, ‘how distressing, if my desire to be with you at all moments of the day, is merely a sub-conscious thwarted longing to have sat on Mummy’s lap at the age of two!!’14 She recognised that the women who had obsessed her in life were psychically tied to her search for a mother-substitute. ‘I have carried it [the dependence on Mother] for years, because of missing it, hence my “women” pegs,’15 she explained to a writer friend.

  Daphne was remarkably insightful about her own creative impulses and the problems they could cause in her life. She gave perhaps the best explanation to Foy Quiller-Couch, some years later, of the transformations she wrought on the characters of Christopher Puxley, Ellen, and later Gertrude Lawrence:

  The attributes of the living become mingled with the people we create. And then you project on to these ‘pegs’ attributes that are imaginary, so that the living person, when encountered, is no longer the character he or she once was, but becomes invested with the fictitious attributions of the story. This can be vexing and sometimes a bit frightening!16

 
This explained her adamant rejection of any sexual stereotyping of her impulses. Cornwall had always attracted artists and more than its fair share of people who felt they did not easily fit in with the mainstream of society. Daphne looked at Jeanne’s and Angela’s friends, some of whom were lesbian, and distanced herself from them, her obsession with particular women springing, she believed, from a completely different source:

  Nobody could be more bored with all the ‘L’ people than I am. They either lie about in studios with dirty nails drinking brandy and painting bad pictures, or else they are incredibly hearty, wearing broad-brimmed hats, and breeding dogs. I like to think that my Jack-in-the-box was, and is, unique.17

  Daphne resisted all her life any alignment with lesbianism, even while declaring her devotion for an idealised woman. She insisted her boy-self was something creative rather than carnal, an embodiment of freedom and adventure not of hot embraces, despite her romantic fantasies about kissing the beloved in the narratives she spun for herself. Having been an actress all her life, it was always for her about playing the boy with the sword, rather than the man/woman in the boudoir. It was more about the stimulation of her imagination and the satisfactions of power than the desires of the flesh.

  In a heartfelt, headlong letter she explained to Ellen all the reasons why she had been so confounded when Ellen had first walked into her cabin. Daphne characterised her feelings as springing from her boy-self, the most creative and true part of her, suddenly finding imaginative and emotional expression after years of repression. This was something quite different, she insisted, from anything as run-of-the-mill as lesbianism. She saw herself instead as a ‘half-breed’: female on the outside but, in her heart, not a man but a romantic adolescent boy. It was an almost pantomime version of the Principal Boy. She longed to play the courageous protector, the heroic crusader. ‘I want to ride out and fight dragons for you,’ she wrote to Ellen, ‘or else I want to conquer new worlds, and bring you the Holy Grail.’18 Her imagined self was a character straight out of the historical romances she devoured as a girl. But she admitted that it was only the boy-in-the-box who was romantic, the woman in her as expressed in her erotic friendship with Christopher Puxley was ‘hard and down-to-earth’.19

  Ellen’s reaction to Daphne’s remarkable confession was inevitably disappointing. It was embarrassing to be the focus of a passion you could not return. It was burdensome being cast in a fantasy of heroic proportions when you were struggling to live in the present and all too aware of your failings. As a good prosaic woman, she could not appreciate the arcane nuances of what Daphne had been telling her. ‘Your letter about the boy in the box didn’t surprise me, dear,’ Ellen wrote after nearly a month had elapsed since the confessional. She told Daphne she thought she had done exactly the right thing in suppressing her boy-self:

  a lifetime of that particular kind of love called by any name seems to me fated to frustration and deep inward unhappiness and you have been wise with your Jack-in-the-box, wise to look him in the face, control him, and not be ashamed of him. I am way out of my depth, of course, and probably not making one word of sense. Just put the whole thing down to my pre-1914 upbringing.20

  Daphne thanked Ellen for her ‘heavenly’ and ‘sweet’ response to her revelation but was not deterred by her friend’s obvious reluctance to engage. Wonderful words still flowed from her typewriter expressing a fluency of ideas, news and emotion. Far more letters winged their way across the Atlantic from Cornwall than returned in the opposite direction. But then this relationship with Ellen was always much more about Daphne and her life of the imagination than about Ellen.

  In less than two weeks of intense writing in February 1948, Daphne finished her play September Tide (the working title was ‘Mother’), inspired by this new flowering of emotion. She had been looking at a photograph Ellen had given her of a portrait of herself, and begun to fantasise about what she would have thought of the subject had she been the artist. From these seeds the play grew. Daphne set the play in Fowey, in a house much like Ferryside, where a beautiful widow, Stella, lives alone. When her daughter’s artist husband falls in love with her as he paints her portrait at the house she was alarmed, then flattered and hopeful of another chance at love. Stella has to choose between fulfilling her own desires, thereby betraying her daughter, or settling for safety in a dull marriage to someone of her own generation. As with her earlier play, The Years Between, the heroine follows the path of duty rather than of passion, although her ultimate decision is left hanging in the air.

  As Daphne based Stella on her idea of Ellen, both women knew that her artist son-in-law had a great deal of Daphne’s manner and character. The conversation between them is quick-fire and brittle in a Cowardian way, with no real sense of love but more of an instantaneous, diverting attraction. As Daphne could not dedicate the play to Ellen by name, without people drawing comparisons and wondering about Ellen’s relationship with her real son-in-law, Daphne decided on a more cryptic dedication that only the two of them would understand, but one that would also give inadvertent pleasure to Muriel. ‘It is, as I say, dedicated To my Mother. And Mummy, who has never been called Mother by me in my life, will be so thrilled and happy, she has had nothing of mine dedicated to her, ever, it will delight her.’21 It did not occur to Daphne that if people might have wondered about Ellen’s relationship with her son-in-law, they would as likely wonder about Muriel’s with Tommy. She also seemed unaware of Ellen’s alarm that the character of Stella would be too closely associated with her.

  When Ellen read it she was mightily relieved to find the likenesses between them were mostly in Daphne’s imagination and that in reality there was little of herself in the character. Also rather deflatingly, she told Daphne she would never have contemplated a love affair with the artist son-in-law (whom Daphne had based on herself), who ‘would have left me cold’.22 If Daphne had been willing to listen to Ellen, this was the closest her polite and self-contained friend could come to telling her that she could not enter her romantic fantasy, and had no interest in playing along with the role Daphne had taken for herself.

  In Daphne’s mind, however, Stella was so psychologically important to her that when it came to cast the play she was filled with an agitated gloom at the impossibility of any actress embodying her vision. It was doubtful that even Ellen herself could have measured up to the part. But then, the real Ellen was not what interested Daphne, much more fascinating was her idea of the complete woman that Ellen conjured up in her mind. She knew she became obsessed by people who provided the spur to her imagination and recognised that it could be tedious, even alarming, for the real person on whom this artificial self was grafted. It made her question whether love was always somehow fabricated by need, ‘don’t think I ever had much [passion]; it was mostly imagination, clothing some unfortunate human being with my misguided fantasy’.23

  The next person to be clothed with Daphne’s fantasy was a woman much more used to make-believe than Ellen Doubleday could ever be. When Gertie Lawrence, Gerald’s old flame, was eventually chosen to play the role of Stella, Daphne was at first horrified. Gertrude seemed so tawdry compared to the image she nurtured of Ellen, ‘in your black and red Mary Stuart [dress] just sitting at the head of the dining-room table, completely poised, and still, radiating a sort of glow’. It made her almost physically sick to have Gertie on stage impersonating her. ‘She looks, and is, or has been, a hardened dyed haired tart.’24

  Quite quickly, however, her nostalgic du Maurier pulse started to quicken. The thrill of the theatre, the volatile expressiveness of theatre people excited her, for these were the people she had grown up with and this the atmosphere that drew her closer to her father. It was an atmosphere from which she had been exiled for so many years and which, she suddenly realised, she truly missed. Above all, Gertie reminded her of Gerald. She had always thought they were so similar, both pranksters, both insubstantial, fireflies in the stage lights, dancing as fast as they could to stop age and th
e glooms from overcoming them.

  In fact, in a strange metamorphosis, Daphne began to behave like her father. When she went to Oxford for the play’s opening night, she turned up laden with presents and flowers for every single member of the cast and a case of champagne, because that was just what he used to do. Much as Gerald would have done too, Daphne threatened to smack Gertie’s bottom when she came upon her unexpectedly in her dressing room, dressed only in her underwear. She felt an overwhelming nostalgia for her childhood in which the theatre and her father loomed so large, ‘like the sniff of brandy to an alcoholic. I hate it, and I love it, all in one.’25 And Gertie’s skill as an actress began to overcome Daphne’s prejudices that she was not Ellen. Through the alchemy of the play, the magical atmosphere of the theatre, the imaginative pretence that characterised Daphne’s life, Gertie became Ellen for that fleeting time on stage and her creator was overcome with emotion. To Ellen she wrote, ‘every now and then, quite unconsciously, she gets an American inflexion in her voice, which gives me God’s own nostalgia for you, so that I have to walk out of the theatre! … well, it might be you!’26

  Daphne explained to Ellen that she had suddenly understood something her father had tried to explain to her for hours when she was a girl – the difference between women you marry and those with whom you have an affair and she could now see what her father had found so attractive about Gertie. She was obviously the kind of woman you did not marry, and what Daphne herself saw in Ellen, was the poised, deep, much-loved ‘wife’ figure. Gertie began to assume in Daphne’s fertile imagination a more accessible and amusing contrast to Ellen, but somehow symbiotically attached to her through the part she played in September Tide. Combined with her intimate connection with Gerald, this made a strong psychic brew.