Piffy, Bird & Bing

by Jane Dunn

  Daphne’s frustrations that Ellen would not enter into her fantasy love affair began to be replaced by a make-believe game with Gertie, who was much better equipped to play. ‘How much easier life would have been had you only been another sort of woman, beloved,’ Daphne wrote to Ellen, ‘but as you are not, and never will be, the only thing I can do is try not to think about it, but plunge into fantasy with someone who makes fantasies too. Which is cynical, and rather bloody-minded, I know, but one cant always be a hermit.’27

  Fundamental to Gertie’s character was not just her irrepressible sense of fun but also her voracious appetite for men. Even the waiter at lunch was a focus for her narcissistic ego. She was rampantly heterosexual, but was also a joker and an enthusiastic participant in any prank; perfectly happy to accommodate Daphne’s kindnesses and concern, and to play along with her impersonation of Gerald. Daphne invited Gertie and her husband Richard Aldrich to spend Christmas at Menabilly, ‘the sort of thing that Daddy would have done’.28 She continued to imitate his way of dealing with leading ladies by meeting Gertie for dinner and drinks at the Savoy and buying her presents from Cartier.

  To Daphne’s disappointment, Gertie decided at the last moment not to come to Menabilly as the weather was so cold (and perhaps she knew the house would be arctic) but Daphne’s family were much relieved, especially Angela and Muriel who had complained that they did not really know her well (and Muriel may have felt she did not really want to be on too intimate terms). While Daphne’s obsession with Ellen was in transition, as Gertie moved into the frame, news reached her of Nelson Doubleday’s death. She was able to write some remarkable letters of comfort to Ellen, for a while forgetting her own needs. She had so wanted to practise being less selfish in her relationship with her friend and had grasped her opportunity in the summer of 1948 when Nelson was deathly ill and facing an operation.

  She had decided to overcome her fear of flying and take the plane with Tommy to New York to offer her services to Ellen, promising she was there solely to support her and ‘would’nt worry you with nonsense’. She had wanted just to sit silently beside her as she suffered, but couldn’t resist making her own emotional demands and felt sorry afterwards and wrote to apologise. Daphne had been thinking about Ellen’s suggestion that she was starved of love. On the contrary, she had insisted, she had ‘all the affection in the world’, from Tommy and the children and from Christopher Puxley too, but she felt she was ‘taking from them all the time, and I don’t want to take, I want to give’.29

  Daphne was in fact capable of acts of great generosity and unselfishness to those within her inner circle of friends and family. In early 1949, when a big royalty cheque arrived, she gave £500 to Margaret the nanny to help her set up a business and £500 to her mother-in-law, and the same amount to a friend who was in need; all substantial amounts of money at the time. However, when in the grip of an obsession she could be blind to others and consumed by her own needs. Daphne never lost the sense that she was an actress in the play of her own life, always watching herself from the wings. She really liked the idea that she had an almost superhuman power to affect others: her beauty and wit had always drawn people into her orbit and having money to dispense to those close to her helped bolster this power.

  Daphne believed, as she told Ellen, that when Nelson rallied for a while it was the force of her own will and prayers that effected the improvement. Seeing Ellen’s real care for her husband, even through the trials of illness, depression and alcoholism, made Daphne think about her relationship with Tommy and admit that she could not offer him the same kind of selfless love. ‘Perhaps that really is the answer,’ she wrote to Ellen, ‘you are a complete woman, and I have never been, I’ve only put up an act at being one, and got away with it because I was an actor’s daughter.’30

  Being an actor’s daughter certainly meant the theatrical world was somewhere Daphne felt at home, and her growing fascination with Gertie and her familiar chameleon qualities was rewarded by the actress’s own infinite sense of fun and capacity for make-believe. Daphne had been so long away from London theatre life, had lost touch with the energy that had suffused her childhood and animated her father, that now, reminded through Gertie and the cast of September Tide, she embarked on another novel to keep this rediscovered excitement alive. She decided to follow the lives and characters of three step and half siblings of a theatrical family, the Delaneys, and called her book The Parasites.

  In this novel, the main characters were an actress Maria, a composer son Niall and an artist Celia, all aspects of her own self, she admitted, and very revealing of her feelings at the time. There were also shades of other people who mattered in her life. Gerald was strongly present in the lachrymose Pappy Delaney, Muriel in Mama (who was quickly killed off in a nasty accident), Niall was her boy-self combined with Christopher Puxley, whom Daphne had thought of as a kind of fated twin, and Gertie’s histrionic energy partly inspired Maria. Even Daphne’s idea of Ellen could be found in the nurturing, self-sacrificing side of Celia who gave herself up to nursing Pappy for years, as Ellen did Nelson (and indeed as did her sister Jeanne, neglecting her painting for her dutiful war work and care of their mother).

  Daphne was aware how marriage, motherhood and money had protected her from the real hard labour that other women were engaged in during the war and how she, and even Angela, had been relatively free to pursue their love affairs and writing while others, like their friend Angela Halliday, risked their lives. The fighting men too: how different were their experiences from those who stayed behind. Early in the story, Maria’s war-hero husband Charles, whom she finds dull, rounds on them all with contempt and exasperation. He accuses them of being like parasites feeding off the lifeblood of others:

  You always have been and you always will be. Nothing can change you. You are doubly, triply parasitic; first, because you’ve traded ever since childhood on that seed of talent you had the luck to inherit from your fantastic forebears; secondly, because you’ve none of you done a stroke of ordinary honest work in your lives, but batten upon us, the fool public who allow you to exist; and thirdly, because you prey upon each other, the three of you, living in a world of fantasy which you have created for yourselves and which bears no relation to anything in heaven or on earth.31

  Daphne’s writing hut had been delivered to Menabilly and here she could work in the garden, sealed off even from the life of the house, itself protected from the outside world by deep woods and distance. Her imaginative life and the people she created were given full rein, hardly impinged on by real people and the everyday life that surged beyond her door. She enjoyed writing The Parasites and indeed it had some wonderfully funny parts to it, not least when ‘those dreadful Delaneys’ spent a weekend with Charles Wyndham’s conventional aristocratic family, with some sharply observed clashes in culture: ‘To see Pappy at Coldhammer [the Wyndhams’ country house] would be like wandering into the bishop’s rose garden and coming suddenly upon the naked Jove.’32 In the book Daphne explored one of her favourite themes, that of emotional incest within a family. She developed the intensity of Maria’s relationship with her stepbrother Niall, who ended the book in a leaky boat without a pump, calmly contemplating death, the ocean as welcoming as a maternal lap.

  Within the isolation of the hut, Daphne lived out in her imagination her unrequited passion for Ellen and her flirtation with Gertie and the dramaturgical world of her childhood. Clear-sighted and highly analytic, she reported to Ellen the flights of her fancy and the beatings of her heart. These letters were mostly light-hearted, bursting with wit and ideas, but sometimes angry and bitter with frustration at Ellen’s lack of response. Yet, even at her most self-centred, even as she railed, at times with real venom, against Ellen’s restraint, Daphne did not lose completely her sense of humour or her fundamentally generous spirit.

  She wrote to Gertie too but, however much fun she was in person and game for anything, Gertie’s letters in return did nothing to fuel the fant
asy. For a start, she gave Daphne the nickname ‘Dum’. Like many nicknames it brought more amusement to the giver than the receiver. Daphne was not amused and never used it in return; even though she was to Gertie always ‘Darling Dum’ this did not fit with the heroic boy she liked to play to Gertie’s eternal girl. Gertie also had her secretary, Evie Williams, type her letters and they were mostly short, jokey, practical and completely lacking in intimacy. Daphne described them to Ellen as, ‘all perfectly harmless’,33 and added that they had been burnt because she never kept letters except from her children and closest family. Daphne’s letters to Gertrude were a different matter and after Gertie’s death her formidable business manager Fanny Holtzmann assured Daphne, with some menace, that they ‘were all under lock and key’.

  In the flesh, however, Gertie was always a most flirtatious and playful creature, willing to embark on any reckless adventure. On one occasion when Daphne spent a weekend with her in Florida in November 1950, the relationship moved fleetingly into a different phase, for Daphne at least. She had visited Ellen first and had been feeling for some time the pain of being more in need of Ellen’s affection than Ellen was of hers. Daphne liked to be powerful and Ellen’s evident self-containment and unwillingness to enter into her games undermined her sense of control. Gertie and the sunshine of Florida beckoned and fooling about on the beach with her made Daphne feel like a girl again. It was fun to be with someone who, although older and not in the best of health, always seemed so much younger than she was, more uninhibited and at ease with her own physical self. ‘We giggled like a couple of school-girls over everything and everybody,’34 Daphne related to Gertie’s secretary Evie Williams.

  Sex for Gertie was always about men and an almost neurotic need for affirmation of her attractiveness and youth. However, amongst all this girlish larking about and in a moment of amused generosity it seemed that Gertrude invited Daphne into her bed and they kissed and possibly more. Then as Daphne left later that night, Gertie said rather dramatically: ‘Go from me, and don’t look back, like a person walking in their sleep’35 – words Daphne gave the mysterious murderess in her short story, ‘Kiss Me Again, Stranger’.

  Being allowed into Gertie’s arms without embarrassment or demur meant that for the first time Daphne felt truly accepted for who she was, without artifice or pretence, without judgement or categorisation. It never happened again but at the time it seemed transformative to her, mixed up as it was with her feelings for Ellen, her father, her lack of mother love, nostalgia for the theatrical way of life, but mostly her creative impulse and the imperative of work.

  Always so aware of her own feelings, Daphne tried to explain to Ellen what had happened, showing remarkable insight and tenderness towards herself and the two very different women who dominated her dreams at the time:

  It’s all mixed up, with you. (Not your fault, darling) But if there had never been a September Tide, I would not have seen [Gertie], in fantasy, as doing what I wanted you to do, or started the gay, happy friendship [‘gay’ in general usage still meant carefree]. But for the knowledge that you really could’nt be what I wanted you to be, I would never have gone on that Florida week-end; and so become beguiled, and bewitched. (Nothing, except gay flirtation, had ever happened before that.) No regrets. It was such fun, and so happy, and so entrancing. Never sordid. I suppose, cold-bloodedly, you could say ‘Two lonely people getting rid of inhibitions.’ … The odd thing is, once you have loved a person physically, it makes the strangest bond. (I suppose not always, No sometimes, I think it could mean nothing, like playing tennis.) In this case, it did mean a lot. I could’nt talk to her, you know, like I can to you, or have the peace, that you give, (or the fever either!) but there was so much warmth there and generosity of giving … there was a mutual language. Something all mixed up with theatre and writing. Knowing only that, and ‘work’, were what mattered most.36

  Daphne loved Ellen but she was as emotionally inaccessible to her as was Muriel. ‘How I wish there was a chink somewhere in the armour plating of the Iron Curtain,’37 she wrote to her. Worse still, Daphne feared her demands for attention and love were sometimes tedious to Ellen. That thought was humiliating in the extreme to someone who was proud and liked always to have the upper hand. However, becoming involved with the theatre again, being reminded what it was to feel young and light-hearted with Gertie, reconnecting to her father and her du Maurier roots, had revivified Daphne. During the few years she was juggling her romances with Ellen and Gertie, her imagination was alive and her creative energies were at full throttle. She finished The Parasites and, although the critics were once more lukewarm, Gertie loved it and immediately wanted to play Maria in a musical or some kind of theatrical production.

  This thought excited Daphne too, just as Ellen had been the prototype for Mother in September Tide, so Gertie, intermixed with her own actress self, was the impulse for Maria. Almost immediately Ellen was used once more as the imaginative spur for another work, but this time it would be My Cousin Rachel, Daphne’s masterpiece written at the peak of her powers. In this, her narrator, Philip, is male, with much of Daphne in his character – as both she and Ellen admitted – and in thrall to a woman who is the irresistible centrifugal force of the book. Daphne wrote to Ellen: ‘The reader never quite knows if she is loving, and warm, and human; or the most cold-blooded designing bitch ever born … I may add that Rachel will be a widow. And I dont want a libel case on my hands.’38

  In a burst of creative energy in the autumn of 1950, Daphne had sketched out the whole book, making notes for each chapter, as she had done for Rebecca, but this time it only took her five to six days. She skipped off to America in November and, excited and liberated by her escapade with Gertie in Florida, returned fired up with the idea. After Christmas, and in the bleakest weather, she set to with a will, going daily to her hut to work with a dedication that was ‘almost trappist’, and wrote just under 60,000 words in less than four weeks.

  Daphne was completely absorbed and enthralled by the new world she had created and wrote to Ellen that it was as exciting as falling in love, although, as with any new love affair, the thrill of writing each novel ended up being fundamentally the same. She was interested to see that she had made Rachel much nastier in her notebook, ‘but in the writing of the novel [I] turned myself so completely into Philip, that I was beguiled, and she could have poisoned the entire world, I would not have minded. Besides, I dont think she did. She merely “impelled” disaster!’39

  Atmospheric, suspenseful, brilliantly plotted, the book was a terrific success and the critics, particularly in America, hailed it as an improvement even on the mighty Rebecca. Everyone was intrigued by the disarming character of Rachel, and baffled as to whether she was sinned against or sinning. Film rights were quickly auctioned. Gertie Lawrence dashed off one of her characteristic notes, fizzing with energy:

  My darling Dum,

  So very thrilled about your book and its film sale – wish I could do your kind of job in blue jeans and in privacy and make so much dough!!!40

  Twentieth Century Fox were the successful bidders and Daphne hoped that Greta Garbo might play Rachel, aware that this would upset Gertie who fancied the part for herself. Even Vivien Leigh, Daphne thought, would be better than the distinctly ‘un-menacing’ Olivia de Havilland, who eventually landed the role. Daphne got her way with the casting of Philip who was played to brooding effect by a young Richard Burton. The film appalled her. She thought that Olivia de Havilland looked like the Duchess of Windsor, and Flavia thought she looked like Mrs Doubleday, which gave Daphne (and Tommy, she said) pause for thought.

  Daphne was surprisingly modest about the huge success, the fame and fortune her writing career brought her. She put various book and film incomes into trusts for each of her children and then barely ever looked back on her work but ploughed on to the next. The most important thing in her life after Menabilly was her creative flame and the ability to conjure up imaginary worlds in which she felt mo
st at home. She was terrified that she might lose her remarkable capacity for building characters and castles out of air. To be prevented from inhabiting these alternative kingdoms of the mind would be worse than death.

  In My Cousin Rachel she so closely identified Ellen with Rachel that when she killed off her fictional character, her obsession with Ellen died too, leaving just a warm friendship. Some ten years later, she looked back on it with better understanding of her creative impulse: ‘When I had that (to me, rather silly, now!) “thing” about Ellen, which was pure Gondal [make-believe], it was only by making up My Cousin Rachel, and pegging the Rachel woman on to her, and making her die, that I was able to rid myself of it.’41 But in the loss of obsession and the powerful fantasy element of this important relationship, Daphne lost some of her creative energy too.

  The triumph of the book and the cooling of her romance over Ellen was quickly followed by Gertie’s unexpected death on 6 September 1952, while performing in the huge Broadway success The King and I. It stunned Daphne. Gertie had represented such a powerful combination of emotions, implicating Daphne’s sense of identity and her whole visionary spirit, that her death seemed for a time to have deprived her of the energy to live. Her family could not understand why she collapsed into such a trough of grief, after all, Gertie was a middle-aged actress who had been more of a friend to Gerald, it seemed, than to his daughter. What they could not know was that being with Gertie, with her appetite for life and childish sense of fun and her acceptance of whatever came her way, had liberated Daphne and filled her with inventive energy. Gertie had reconnected her to her father and her theatrical past and made her feel less alone. She was also, most powerfully, a spur to her imagination: