Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties

by Rachel Cooke

  Betty fought for Doctor in the House all the way. The studio wasn’t keen on the idea of a medical comedy – jokes? About doctors? – and it told her, over and over, to keep costs down. There was also strong opposition to her casting of Dirk Bogarde as Simon Sparrow; hitherto known mostly for playing spivs, according to her bosses Bogarde was not funny. When the film was complete, Rank’s sales force wanted to call it ‘Campus Capers’, on the grounds that no previous film about hospitals had ever been successful. Betty thought this a dire idea: ‘They produced a poster with four or five young, American-type students sitting on the grass under a blossoming tree, eating apples and studying anonymous-looking books. I seem to remember the girls even had ribbons in their hair. I almost vomited then and there.’

  (ITV Global/The Kobal Collection.)

  Previews usually had her throwing up with nerves, but not the one for Doctor in the House: ‘From the first scene to the last, the audience was with us, and the laughter nonstop.’ The reviews were fantastic. The film was profitable within six weeks; it was a hit in New York and in Australia. Kenneth More won a BAFTA for his performance as Richard Grimsdyke, perpetual student. ‘What’s good for them is good for you,’ ran a Guinness campaign of the day, featuring the film’s stars (Bogarde, Kenneth More, Donald Sinden and Donald Houston) drinking pints. ‘Guinness is as good as a Doctor in the House.’ Bogarde, a star at last, was thrilled: ‘I honestly have never been so happy,’ he wrote to Betty. ‘Or felt more confident in my director and producer. My admiration for you both is colossal!’ The following year, 1955, she and Ralph made a sequel, Doctor at Sea (escaping boredom as a GP, Dr Starling becomes the medical officer on a cargo ship, the SS Lotus). It was the third most popular movie of the year, after The Dam Busters and White Christmas.

  Betty would grow increasingly reluctant to produce Doctor movies (there would be a further five, though Bogarde eventually bowed out, to be replaced by Leslie Philips); she didn’t want to push her luck. But their astonishing success – even the later sequels made money – did give her and Ralph some room for manoeuvre. Among all the light comedies, the melodramas and the thrillers, you do find riskier Box/Thomas films: Conspiracy of Hearts (1960), a film about Italian nuns who rescue Jewish children, deals fairly explicitly with anti-Semitism; No Love for Johnnie (also 1960), about a Labour MP seduced by power, helped its star, Peter Finch to two awards for best actor, a BAFTA and a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.

  Did Betty’s instincts ever fail her? Only rarely. She chose to make A Tale of Two Cities (1958) in black and white rather than Technicolor, thinking that this would give it some arthouse cachet – a mistake, she felt afterwards.* The story goes that she turned down the script of the first James Bond film, but she always denied this: ‘I didn’t turn them down. I didn’t want to make them. I could have made two or three films of my own choice while the Bond people were spending a year setting up and a year shooting and finishing.’ What really happened was this. In 1956 she was co-producing the Cold War comedy The Iron Petticoat with Harry Saltzman. The film, which had a screenplay by Ben Hecht, starred Katharine Hepburn and Bob Hope. Hepburn had stipulated that she would do no interviews during shooting, but the journalist Nancy Spain was a friend of Betty’s, and as a favour she arranged an interview for her alone. ‘As a token of her appreciation, Nancy sent me a proof copy of Ian Fleming’s Dr. No. The book lay on my desk when Harry Saltzman came to see me. When he’d gone, the book had gone, too. He eventually made the film and started the series. I didn’t want to do it.’

  Betty with Katharine Hepburn and Ralph Thomas during filming of The Iron Petticoat

  At Pinewood’s restaurant every head would turn when Betty walked in. And in a room full of movie stars! She was immaculate in Dior and Courrèges and Balenciaga. Her jewellery jangled. Her honey blonde hair shone. There she would sit, surrounded by her coterie: Bogarde, More (until they fell out*), Phipps. She had, by all accounts, a tough exterior. Somebody in publicity once made the mistake of writing in a press release that Petula Clark would sing a ‘little’ song (this must have been in the film Don’t Ever Leave Me, a 1949 Gainsborough comedy in which Clark played the teenage daughter of a Shakespearian actor who is kidnapped by an elderly crook). ‘I never produce anything little,’ said Betty, putting a line through it. Unlike Muriel, she was offered two multi-movie contracts by major American studios. But she was perfectly happy at Pinewood, playing Queen Bee.†

  This is not to say she was grand. On set she made a point of mucking in. Shooting Campbell’s Kingdom (1957) in Italy, she spent her evenings helping the crew to make poppies from orange and yellow crêpe paper so they could replicate a Canadian spring. (David O. Selznick, working on A Farewell to Arms in the next valley got to hear about these poppies and asked her if she would consider selling them to him for his picture.) On the same film, she would drive every morning through the deep snow to pick up the British newspapers for her crew, who couldn’t live without them (a desperate race against Selznick’s emissaries, sent out in search of the same booty, for the same reason). In India to shoot The Wind Cannot Read (1958), she got the wardrobe department to build half a dozen pockets into her poncho, the better that she could hide small bottles of gin and whisky in them on India’s dry days (another way to keep the crew happy). When she was awarded the OBE in 1958 her first instinct was to turn it down: ‘I was paid handsomely for doing work I loved. Why should I be rewarded further?’ (In the end, she accepted it for her mother’s sake.)

  Betty with Dirk Bogarde

  Like her brother, Betty never forgot her hardscrabble childhood; she liked being rich and felt no need to apologise for it: ‘Goodies I’d never in my wildest dreams hoped to have were now mine for the taking, and I seized them with both hands . . . I already owned five fur coats, so I ordered a white mink, floor length, and wore it with pleasure, even if it did make me look like I was rolling along on casters – all five foot three inches of me.’ She never bought one of anything, even cars: she and Peter owned a Rolls-Royce and an Aston Martin – each. By the end of the Fifties, she and Peter were living at Drummers Yard, a grand house near Beaconsfield which they had bought from Dirk Bogarde. It stood in extensive grounds, and because part of it was a tower some of their furniture had to be specially made so it would stand against the curved walls. But as someone who truly adored her work she insisted that she would have been happy to work for less.

  Though not, of course, for less than the men. When she discovered that in spite of all she had done for the company, her fees were still lower than those of Rank’s male producers, she went to see its director, John Davis, a man as unpopular as he was parsimonious, and demanded that the figures be ‘adjusted’. Davis blustered. ‘What do you need the money for? Another mink coat? You have a rich husband – you don’t need a rise.’ But, somehow, she faced him down. By the time she removed herself from his office her request had been ‘amicably granted’.

  In 1959, Muriel’s fears about her husband’s health came true when Sydney suffered a cerebral haemorrhage. His doctors told him that he must give up work completely for a least a year and while he rested in Spain and the South of France – he handed the reins of his business to Peter Rogers – Muriel made only one picture: The Piper’s Tune, for the Children’s Film Foundation. She also wrote a novel, The Big Switch, a satire about what would happen if women ruled the world. It was eventually published in 1964.

  Sydney made a surprise return to the industry in 1963 when he launched an unsuccessful bid to acquire British Lion films. He made his last movie – and Muriel’s – in 1964: Rattle of a Simple Man, a second-rate comedy about a naive young man (played by Harry H. Corbett) who travels to London from Manchester for the FA Cup, where he unwittingly falls in love with a prostitute. Betty’s film career continued a little longer but it too came to a halt in the end. Her last movie, directed by the stalwart Ralph, was the lamentable Percy’s Progress in 1974. A sequel to Percy, it was a comedy – I use the word loosely – abo
ut the recipient of the world’s first penis transplant.

  The Boxes’ time had passed. They were middle-aged people at a moment when middle-aged people suddenly seemed very old indeed – a trend that the movies, as ever, ruthlessly exaggerated. First there had come the films of the New Wave, muscular and bitter: Room at the Top, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Look Back in Anger. Then London had begun to swing, and the pictures with it: Georgy Girl, Darling, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush. In this context, even the best of the Boxes’ films felt tattered. Their gentle comedies, their plucky, proud-to-be-British affairs about love and war, were relics to be put away, like antimacassars and the novels of Nevil Shute.

  Betty took this in her stride. She said she was retired, and she meant it. She wafted around in her kaftans and natty trouser suits, she embroidered exquisite cushions and she thought about all the good times. ‘I cherished them,’ she said. ‘The opportunity I was given to show that a woman could do the job as well as any man.’

  For Muriel, things were more difficult, at least at first.

  On 30 October 1964 the telephone rang at Mote End, and though she somehow managed to stand at the hall table long enough to politely take a message she felt as though she was falling, that her head would hit the floor at moment. Sydney, she grasped in as long as it took to find a pencil, was having an affair. The flat in town he had been keeping as a writing den was in fact a love nest, shared with a woman called Sylvia Knowles.

  Unable to sleep or to eat she left for a hotel, where she put herself under the care of her doctor. Half mad with grief, she began to think. This man she had loved so devotedly for so long: hadn’t he always been disappearing to Brighton to hole up in a hotel while he rewrote his latest script? It was as if she had been blind, and now she could see.

  For a time she rallied. She remembered his spoony notes, the frequent and lavish bouquets. (Sydney, perhaps because he had a guilty conscience, had the outward appearance of an exceptionally uxorious husband.) More soberingly, she considered the way her destiny seemed always to have been tied to his. But over dinner at Maxim’s in Paris, where she and Sydney were seeing in 1965, it only took one cool question on her part and several martinis on his for it all to seep out, noxious as gas. As if he was merely talking her through a film budget or a casting list, her solid, loving, reliable Sydney now told her that he had never been faithful; that he had slept with any woman who had offered herself to him over the years; that he enjoyed and participated in ‘every known kind of sexual perversion’. His sex life, he went on, was compensation for his ‘gammy leg’. Living half the time with Sylvia had calmed things for the present. But if he felt the need he would, rest assured, soon ‘indulge’ again.

  Reading Muriel’s diary for this period is painful. Her terrible suffering (she was undone). His cruelty (he would not leave, but nor would he give Sylvia up). For Muriel, the humiliation of it all. The walking-dead separations. The eager, pathetic reunions. Her dignity in pieces, just like the collection of movie clips she’d had as a child.

  Eventually they made an arrangement. Sydney would live with Sylvia and Muriel would be his new lover – and for a while, though she knew she had debased herself by agreeing to this, she had hope. At least she had something to look forward to, and perhaps an hour on a Saturday afternoon would eventually lead to a holiday.

  But it could not last. In 1966 Sydney suffered a heart attack. Muriel was now reduced to hounding her husband and Sylvia from afar: with letters, phone calls and, on one occasion, a clandestine visit to their flat, made when she saw its front door standing ajar. In 1967, they escaped her by moving to Perth in Australia, and in 1969 Muriel and Sydney were finally divorced.

  In 1992 Betty Box received the first UK Women in Film lifetime achievement award. She died of cancer at her home in Gerrard’s Cross on 15 January 1999. Peter Rogers died on 19 April 2009.

  After her divorce, Muriel Box, fully recovered and utterly sane once again, co-founded Femina, Britain’s first feminist publishing house. She edited its first book, The Trial of Marie Stopes, herself. She now became an active campaigner for women’s rights, working with her friend, Edith Summerskill, the Labour politician, to reform Britain’s divorce laws. In 1970 she married Gerald Gardiner, the Lord Chancellor.

  Sydney Box died in Australia on 25 May 1983.

  Muriel Box died on 18 May 1991. In 2012 To Dorothy a Son was, unaccountably, released on DVD.

  Digging for Victory

  Jacquetta Hawkes, archaeologist

  (© Derek Allen/National Portrait Gallery, London.)

  ‘Let me . . . behave badly’

  It was painfully obvious what the Blitz had done to urban Britain: rubble was all around; hundreds of thousands of people had been made homeless; houses needed to be built, and in vast numbers. But in time the destruction had other, more curious effects. The most badly affected cities seemed almost to have been turned inside out by the bombs (not for nothing did the French describe their own destroyed towns as éventré, or ‘disembowelled’), with the result that their inhabitants could hardly help but consider the churned earth and what might lie beneath – and when archaeologists began digging at sites newly revealed by bomb damage or reconstruction work the response could be swift and hungry. In September 1954 W. F. Grimes, the director of the Museum of London, started excavating the site of the Roman Temple of Mithras in the City of London; it was a race against time, for the temple stones would soon have to make way for the new offices of Legal & General.* During the two hours the site was open to the public every evening some eighty thousand people came for a look. There were moments when the crowd was so swollen the police had to be called in to control it.

  The excavation of the Temple of Mithras

  (Getty Images.)

  This wasn’t the first time the British had fallen in love with archaeology. In 1922 newspaper readers had feverishly followed the story of Howard Carter’s discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, as told by H. V. Morton in the Daily Express. Now, though, their passion was to be more enduring. Exciting things would keep happening. In 1949 the process of radiocarbon dating was discovered. In 1953 it was revealed that the bone fragments long known as Piltdown Man, and supposedly of an early human, were in fact a hoax. In 1959 excavation began at Henry VIII’s magnificent Nonsuch Palace in Surrey. And then there was the media. The BBC television game show Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?, in which distinguished academics competed to guess the origin and purpose of an artefact on loan from a British museum had made stars of Glyn Daniel, its presenter (later Disney Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge University), and Mortimer Wheeler,* a regular panellist (Wheeler was a professor at the Institute of Archaeology at the University of London, whose major excavations included Roman Verulamium and the Iron Age hill fort at Maiden Castle, Dorset). In 1954, Wheeler was named Television Personality of the Year; twelve months later, Daniel succeeded him. Also popular were the series Buried Treasure and a Home Service documentary programme, The Archaeologist. According to David Attenborough, who began his career as an assistant producer on Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?, the BBC’s output caused a sudden rush to the dusty and hitherto ignored archaeology sections of Britain’s libraries. ‘It was a sensation,’ he recalled in a speech to the Personal Histories Project at Cambridge University in 2009. ‘Librarians around the country wrote to us at the BBC, and said the shelves on which archaeological books had sat for decades untouched, were suddenly empty. Archaeology became a huge success. Archaeology became a matter of interest to anybody with any intellectual curiosity at all.’

  But it was a woman who led the pack. In 1951 the poet and archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes published A Land, a slim volume with illustrations by Henry Moore. On the surface of it, the book’s prospects should have been dim. Ardent and strange, A Land is a literary peculiarity. Part archaeology, part geology, part memoir, it tells the story of Britain from the moment the ‘white-hot young Earth’ dropped into its place ‘like a fly into an unseen four-di
mensional cobweb’ to the present day, with daring recourse to both science and culture. It is patriotic and romantic and crammed with arcane information. Why did Queen Victoria favour granite? Where will you find Dudley locusts? What is the connection between ammonites and fifteenth-century knights?* But it also hums with something akin to what we would call New Age-ism. Hawkes’s affinity with the ancient past is so intensely felt you would not be surprised to turn the page and find her taking part in some half-baked Druidical rite.

  Nevertheless, it struck a chord. The critics, almost without exception, adored it. ‘Mrs Hawkes is that rare and necessary combination,’ wrote Cyril Connolly in the Sunday Times. ‘A reverent scientific aesthete.’ In the Observer, Harold Nicolson described the book as ‘an enchantment’. Hawkes, he wrote, was trying to arouse in her readers ‘the child-like wonder that we experience when we see our own house from a long way off . . . there is a weird beauty in this prophetic book . . . [it was] written in a passion of love and hate’. It was a Daily Mail Book of the Month and the recipient of a special prize from the Sunday Times. Readers loved it, too. It sold madly well, quickly running into several editions, and in 1959 its popularity was acknowledged with its appearance as a Pelican paperback: yours for only 3/6 pence. Its author, meanwhile, rapidly became an intellectual celebrity. She, too, began appearing on Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?

  What few people realised at the time was that A Land was forged in extremis. Its author was out of love with her husband and passionately in love with one of Britain’s most famous and beloved (not to mention married) writers. Her book, meanwhile, was dedicated to the memory of a third man, a lover who had died suddenly in 1946, leaving Hawkes with ‘an all-consuming sense of loss’. A Land can be read as precisely what it purports to be: a book about Britain and the influence its land forms had on its civilisation. But it may be understood, too, as an expression of longing. Jacquetta Hawkes, outwardly at least, was a rather starchy figure: thin-lipped, stern-eyed, with a voice that even by the standards of the day sounded strained and formal. (One afternoon in the British Library Sound Archive I listened to several recordings of Hawkes; she made Celia Johnson sound like Olive from On the Buses.) Yet she begins A Land with a wild, almost sexual description of herself lying, late at night, on a meagre patch of grass in the garden of her Primrose Hill home. ‘Exposed’ in this ‘open box or tray’, she likes to feel the hard ground pressing against her bones; it makes her ‘agreeably conscious’ of her body. ‘In bed I can sleep,’ she writes. ‘Here I can rest awake.’ The image that is evoked, though this seems to have passed by her reviewers (they were, needless to say, all men) is of a woman on the run from a certain kind of domesticity. Like the cats that rustle in the creeper on the garden wall, she is temperamentally unsuited to the myopic quiet of the carpeted hall, the lino-floored kitchen. No wonder, then, that at the sounds of the night – a barge on the Regent’s Park Canal, a train pulling out of Euston Station – her ears prick. She pictures the huge city around her, and all the people in it. Some of them are asleep, ‘stretched horizontally a few feet above the ground’; others, more excitingly, are in transit, ‘moved about the map by unknown forces’. As metaphors go, this is hardly subtle. Hawkes had written a book about the past, but it was the future that was pulling at her heart.