Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties

by Rachel Cooke

  Most stunning of all, though, was the success of Betty Box, the sister of Muriel’s husband Sydney. Betty had produced Doctor in the House, the film that had made a star of Dirk Bogarde, whom she had cast as the duffle-coated student medic Simon Sparrow in the face of stiff opposition from her bosses at Rank. It was the biggest film of the year by a mile and there was already talk of a sequel. ‘An uproarious, devil-may-care, almost wholly ruthless picture of the goings-on in medical training at a London hospital,’ the critic Dilys Powell had written of it, a view with which Muriel, who did not always adore the work of her more commercially minded relative, wholly concurred. Oh, yes. That was the other thing: women film critics were ten a penny. The most famous were Powell at the Sunday Times and C. A. Lejeune at the Observer, but there were others too: E. Arnot Robertson at the Daily Mail, Isabel Quigly at the Spectator, Elspeth Grant on the Daily Sketch. In 1956 a woman, Penelope Houston, was even appointed editor of Sight and Sound, the highbrow journal of the British Film Institute, a job that would be hers for more than three decades.

  Muriel was a curious mixture: easily disheartened yet doggedly ambitious. When she heard that the distributors of To Dorothy a Son, her fifth film as director, would not be giving it a West End run she fell into a depression; in the days before it opened the headaches that plagued her became worse. But she also knew the territory. You had to keep going. Even as the critics sneered at it she was working on a script – it was called The Truth about Women – that she believed would change her fortunes. The one thing that she and Wendy Toye, Joan Henry, Thelma Connell and her sister-in-law Betty had in common, apart from their sex, was that they were as tough as boots. They ate setbacks for breakfast. Muriel was perfectly aware that directing, in particular, was difficult for a woman. It wasn’t only the men who were against you (Michael Balcon, who ran Ealing Studios, would tell anyone who would listen that women lacked the qualities necessary to control a large film unit). Some women were too. Kay Kendall, soon to appear in Simon and Laura, would later say that it had felt ‘strange and uncomfortable’ to be directed by Box; Muriel Pavlow, her co-star, acknowledged Box’s capabilities but insisted ‘I think I respond better to a male director.’

  The other thing Muriel had by the bucketload was experience. She was forty-nine years old by the time she made To Dorothy; her hair, about which she tended to fret, would have been threaded with grey were it not for her fortnightly trips to the hairdresser, and her doctor was always telling her – somewhat unhelpfully – that the tiredness she sometimes experienced was down to her impending menopause. She had been working in the film industry since 1929, when she quit her typing job at a corset factory in Welwyn Garden City and joined British Instructional Pictures. There was a sense in which she had seen it all before. On her sideboard at home stood the Oscar she and her husband had won in 1946 for the screenplay of The Seventh Veil, a film starring James Mason that was one of the first pictures to take psychiatry seriously. But thrilled though she’d been to receive it, the distinct sense of anti-climax she felt when the statuette arrived from Hollywood in a straw-filled packing case had turned out to be something of a portent. Three years later she directed her first feature, The Lost People, and the reviews were ‘foul, on the whole’. Beginning a new diary in 1950, she wrote that she was glad to see the back of the old year, ‘the worst yet for us [her and Sydney] as far as reputation goes’. It was probably best, she thought, not to take anything too seriously. If the doldrums could follow hard on the heels of an Academy Award, then a flop could be succeeded just as swiftly by a smash hit.

  Violette Muriel Baker was born in 1905, in New Malden, Surrey. Her father was a railway clerk, her mother an assistant in her uncle’s magic lantern shop. The family, as she put it in her autobiography Odd Woman Out, belonged to the ‘respectable poor’. Her parents often rowed about money and sometimes physically fought over it; her mother, who would weep and sing hymns to herself after these altercations, occasionally had to pawn her wedding ring in order to buy food. Caroline Baker was slightly snobbish, the kind of woman who hearthstoned her doorstep every week the better to keep it bright white, but surreptitiously, so as to avoid detection (her neighbours all had maids or daily help). Thanks in large part to her, the household was gloomy yet tinged with hysteria. By the time Muriel was thirteen her parents no longer shared a bedroom, her mother having discovered that her father was having an affair with a woman who lived close by.

  Prone to self-dramatisation, Muriel had one of those indelible childhoods, bulging with incident. She claimed, for instance, to have lost her virginity at the age of six to a twelve-year-old boy who had come to stay one summer, and who liked to ‘snuggle’ in her bed while they played noughts and crosses. Not that she found this traumatic. ‘As the weeks went by, his play in the mornings became more intimate,’ she writes in Odd Woman Out. ‘But since he was a jolly boy and I liked him, I found nothing objectionable in what he did. The reverse in fact . . . Not until many years later when I happened to be discussing the subject of sex with a male friend who inquired whether I had found defloration painful and unpleasant, did I realise that I had never experienced it in the usual way.’ Certainly, it made much less of an impression than the accident that befell her older brother around the same time. Badly burned by boiling oil in the kitchen, Vivian required grafts, the skin for which Muriel provided in an operation that took place at the same time as a tonsillectomy. It was performed by the family doctor in an upstairs bedroom at home; the same man operated on Vivian too. (The tonsillectomy was successful, but the grafts failed and Vivian was transferred to St Thomas’s in London for further treatment.)

  The children – Muriel also had a sister, Vera – spent their holidays with their maternal grandmother, who owned a genteel boarding house at Southsea in Hampshire, an establishment crammed with Victoriana: music boxes, ostrich eggs, fans, a lizard in a glass box. Even more fascinating, on the first floor lived a retired actress, Mademoiselle le Thière, a creature who was reputed to have been in the original cast of one of Oscar Wilde’s plays. Thanks to this long-term tenant, her grandmother had once seen such greats as Henry Irving and Herbert Beerbohm Tree perform, and now, when funds allowed, she took Muriel to see the stage heart-throbs of her own day: Gerald du Maurier, Matheson Lang, Owen Nares.

  In 1914, war broke out. At first, this was exciting: two Tommies, cheerful cockneys, were billeted with the family and the mood indoors lifted. But after they were drafted to France the house was more of a mausoleum than ever. Everyone was preoccupied with food, or rather the lack of it. Muriel began to live for her visits to the Kinema in Kingston upon Thames. She and her siblings had to walk the two miles there and back, and they had to watch the picture from low wooden benches just under the screen, necks aching. But it was worth it: ‘It was the heyday of the cliffhanging serials, the one and two-reel slapstick comedies, and the flickering newsreels. King Edward the Seventh’s funeral was the most impressive spectacle we had ever seen.’ When an old friend of her mother’s – an immigrant she’d befriended some years before – turned up offering the family free seats for any show they cared to see in the cinema he now ran (also in Kingston), Muriel took him at his word, presenting herself twice weekly at its door. For a while, this was tolerated. One day, however, she was shown a high wooden chair on the deserted stage behind the screen and told that from now on this was where she would watch the film.

  This wasn’t ideal. She missed the theatre’s plump upholstered seats and the whirring of the projector almost drowned out the music from the orchestra pit (this was still the era of silent films). It was difficult to read the subtitles, which now appeared in reverse; she deciphered them with the help of a mirror that hung on the theatre wall. But there were advantages: when the show was over she was sometimes allowed to rewind the spools, and if the film had broken the projectionist would let her help him stick it together again, which made her feel important. Even better, she was allowed to take home the frames that were ‘lost’ in th
e course of this operation: ‘I had a fine collection of tiny clips in a secret store for many years, examined and gloated over with the passions of a connoisseur.’ Her interest in film was becoming a passion. At school she took to reading Picture Show, a weekly cinema magazine, in the most tedious lessons.

  By the time she hit puberty her older siblings had left home, which meant that the full force of her mother’s ‘didactic, despotic personality’ was directed only at her. Mostly, her inclination was to give as good as she got, with the result that the two of them would spend hours at a time verbally tearing each other apart. But on other occasions she would take the silent approach, wondering how long her mother could carry on without getting any response. All she could think about was the day when she could start earning her own living and begin her escape. Her father was content for her to be a shorthand typist or a railway clerk like him. Her mother, though, had other, grander ideas and knowing this Muriel, ever the opportunist, took her chance. ‘I want to go on the films,’ she said. To her amazement, this was not dismissed out of hand, perhaps because it seemed such a remote possibility.

  But in the summer of 1920 the films came to her. On a train to Southsea she fell into conversation with a stranger. He asked her if she liked the movies – she had her nose deep in Picture Show, as usual – and when she told him that yes, she did, very much, he plied her with questions. In the end they talked about D. W. Griffith, the pioneering American director of the civil war epic The Birth of a Nation, all the way to the coast. As the train pulled into Southsea he handed Muriel his card; if ever she wanted to see a film being made, he said, she should give him a ring.

  ‘JOSEPH GROSSMAN’, she read, as her new pal disappeared into the seaside crowd. And then the miraculous words: ‘STOLL PICTURE PRODUCTIONS’. This was amazing. Muriel knew all about Stoll, where Grossman was studio manager. Its latest film, The Glorious Adventure, a melodrama about the Great Fire of London, was being shot in a new colour process called Prizma and starred Lady Diana Manners, the famous society beauty; the word was that she looked utterly marvellous in her close-ups. And so it was that six months later she made the first of what would be several visits to Cricklewood, the home of Stoll. Muriel was too shy to broach the subject of a job, and in any case her meagre wardrobe, which consisted only of her school gym tunic, the bridesmaid’s dress she had worn at her sister’s wedding and one old skirt, would barely have seen her through the week. But watching the actors and technicians was heaven even if she wasn’t being paid for it, and eventually Grossman gave her, unprompted, a few days’ crowd work in The Old Man in the Corner, a silent movie based on Baroness Orczy’s detective story of the same name.

  It was at this point, half fainting beneath the heat of the Klieg lights, that it dawned on Muriel that she was about as likely to be ‘discovered’ by a director in a crowd scene as she was to fly to the moon. She needed another way in. Back at home, she set to thinking. What about the theatre? Soon afterwards she persuaded her parents to pay for her to enrol on a course at the Margaret Barnes School of Dancing in Surbiton. She understood that she had left it a little late to learn to dance; she was now seventeen, after all. But she was determined, and she worked hard at her entrechats and her pliés, and at the end of the year she was able to scrape through a preliminary examination adjudicated by the celebrated ballerina Adeline Genée. Meanwhile, she tried to pick up other skills. She sang with a local choral society; she signed up for a course taught by Sir Ben Greet, the Shakespearian actor-manager (‘anything I know about acting I owe to Ben Greet,’ she said later); she joined an amateur dramatics society.

  But there was trouble ahead. Muriel had somehow contrived to fall in love with an associate of her father’s, Stanley, an Aneurin Bevan lookalike and a keen amateur pianist. Unfortunately, he was fourteen years her senior and her mother thought him wildly unsuitable. The atmosphere between mother and daughter now shifted from tetchy to poisonous and continued that way until, one summer morning, Muriel simply walked out. In one pocket of her mackintosh were three shillings, a toothbrush, some soap and a sponge; in the other a couple of apples, some raisins and a copy of E. V. Lucas’s The Open Road (‘A Little Book for Wayfarers’). She took a train to Dorking and for three days she lived rough on the downs. Meanwhile, her father went round to see Stanley and threatened to give him a good horsewhipping. This was wildly unfair: poor Stanley had known nothing of her plan.

  When she returned – it was humiliating, but her money had run out and she was hungry – things were even worse. Her mother began censoring her post, and cross-examined her after her every outing. Muriel felt like she could kill her, sometimes. ‘To avoid striking her, my fists clenched with such force the nails dug into the palms and drew blood. I would catch myself staring at her as she ranted on about some misdemeanour of mine, amazed at my own sinister thoughts: “Now I know what it feels like to commit murder!” and wondering how long it would be before I lost control and throttled her.’ In the end, she did not wait to find out. A couple of days before her twentieth birthday, Muriel put everything she owned into a bag and left home once again. This time, it was for good.

  She went to Welwyn Garden City, where her sister’s mother-in-law had offered her a room on the condition that she helped out with the housework. Of course she would also need a job, and there seemed nothing for it now but to admit that her father had been right: she would just have to become a secretary after all. Stanley lent her fifty pounds. It wasn’t much, but if she was careful it would see her through a course at Pitman’s College. For the next six months she spent nothing at all save for the cost of her daily train ticket to London and lunch at the ABC restaurant in Southampton Row, an establishment whose three menus she would remember for the rest of her life: (I) a roll, butter, St Ivel cheese and a cup of tea; (2) a sausage roll, biscuits, butter and a cup of coffee; (3) macaroni cheese, a roll and a cup of tea. The soles of her shoes she patched with cardboard; when the winter arrived she had to bulk out her summer coat with newspaper.

  The course completed, she found a position as a secretary at Barclays Corsets in Welwyn. It was dull work and she was lonely too, the long-suffering Stanley having finally ended their seven-year affair. The only way to survive was by filling up the evenings. Luckily Welwyn, a suburban utopia popular with Fabians and Quakers, fairly throbbed with societies. She joined the Welwyn Folk Players and soon landed herself the lead in Hindle Wakes, Stanley Haughton’s 1912 play about a Lancashire mill girl who, despite pressure from her family, refuses to marry the man with whom she has spent the weekend. She perfected her accent by listening to the girls in the canteen at the corset factory, most of whom had been recruited from Lancashire.

  Two years passed. In 1929 Muriel landed a new job. The work was the same, and she would still be stuck in Welwyn, but her employer was British Instructional Films, where she worked in the Scenario Department. ‘Life suddenly became very interesting and unpredictable,’ she said later. ‘Everything was in a state of flux, the company turning over from silent pictures to “talkies”, an operation fraught with anxiety and many pitfalls.’ Loopy as it sounds now, it was a while before producers realised they would need to hire dramatists to craft proper dialogue – at first they stuck with the scenarists who had written the clipped subtitles that accompanied the silent movies – and this gave Muriel a small opportunity. Directors would sometimes accept her suggestions for improvements to the scripts she typed up, and though her efforts were doubtless just as ‘execrable’ as those of the scenarists, slowly she was able to pick up the rudiments of screenwriting. Sometimes she was also required as a last-minute extra, which meant she got to see the new films being made.

  She got another small break when the continuity girl on Puffin Asquith’s* first talkie, a drama about Gallipoli called Tell England, fell ill with appendicitis. Asked to step in until a substitute could be found, Muriel worked on the film for the next three weeks. It wasn’t easy: as she later admitted, she had only the vaguest notions of
how much the director, editor, camera-operator and even the costumier relied on her notes. She watched the scruffy-looking Puffin – Asquith was famous for his dishevelled appearance – direct his stars Fay Compton, Ann Casson and Carl Harbord in blissful ignorance of the effect her shortcomings might be having on the film’s progress, not to mention its budget. But she hardly needed to worry. No sooner had it wrapped than she found herself back at her desk, and soon after this a third of BIF’s staff were laid off, Muriel among them: the silent films the company had on its stocks could not now find distributors, and its debts had piled up. Her only consolation was that Asquith wrote her a reference.

  Joe Grossman would now make another serendipitous appearance in her life. Having applied to British International Pictures at Elstree for continuity work, Muriel discovered that he was the studio’s latest boss. And he remembered her. Hired by Joe in spite of her inexperience, she could only muddle through at first. On day one the function of the clapper board had to be explained to her (this bit of kit had not been a feature of her brief stint on Tell England), but somehow she survived. By the time she lost her job several movies later – continuity girls were hired by the film, so it was always a precarious living – she was competent enough to be able to pick up work as a freelance.

  In 1932 she joined Michael Powell’s company in Wardour Street. Powell was then directing four-reel pictures, or ‘quota quickies’: B movies, shot on a shoestring, often in a matter of days.* Tired of train journeys, Muriel decided to move to London and found herself an attic in a house overlooking Regent’s Park. The room was not luxurious. Water had to be hauled up a flight of stairs in a bucket, and her underwear washed in a pan on top of the stove. But she could have coped perfectly well with these things if she hadn’t felt so lonely. ‘The utter blankness which confronts one on trying to be self-sufficient and philosophical,’ she confided to her diary one day after a walk in the park. ‘The condition became so acute I was even forced into tears when eating my supper. It’s strange crying alone . . . At these moments, I almost wish some accident would finish me off completely.’ In an effort to lift herself out of this depression she auditioned for RADA: she would be perfectly happy to forfeit her so-called career in the movies for the chance to act again. But when the big day arrived and she launched into Mirabelle’s speech from Congreve’s The Way of the World, her courage ebbed, replaced with ‘a suffocating, creeping despair which, three quarters of the way through, literally choked me’. Back in her room, she cried for several hours: ‘My last chance! And I had muffed it!’