Georgette Heyer

by Jennifer Kloester

  Crosse first met the Rougiers in Albany and initially found Georgette a “very forbidding woman of few words”—an impression he later revised after they got to know one another better (“call me George” she told him). Months after that first meeting he was summoned back to Albany and asked if he could help them. It took some time to wrest the files and the company seal from Rubens, who was resisting the change. The accounts were eventually delivered to Crosse, who quickly discovered the mess their finances were in. Not only had their former accountant failed to take the necessary measures to protect Georgette when the government had closed a number of tax loopholes, but he had neglected to submit her recent tax returns and keep her accounts current. When Crosse asked Georgette about her expenses, she had no idea because she rarely claimed any.

  After working his way through the tangle, Hale Crosse advised Georgette to terminate her contract with Heron in return for a lump sum payment and to ask The Bodley Head to issue all future contracts in her own name. Over the years Heron had amassed over £80,000 in its account which Georgette could not touch without paying an exorbitant amount of tax. Crosse wanted to sell the company (and its eighteen copyrights) for the sum in Heron’s account, but Georgette would not entertain the concept. While she liked the idea of having a large capital sum in her account, she could not rid herself of the feeling that it was “rather as if Susie were offered x thousand pounds for Nicholas!”

  Frere thought selling her copyrights a ludicrous idea and said so. Reinhardt, too, advised caution and suggested that if she did “want to get rid of the company I would much rather we formed a little consortium of some of your friends and bought it ourselves, with yourself or a member of your family also having an interest in it.” Georgette’s other “alternative was to run the Company down—& if I can be sure that my debt won’t land me, or my heirs, in Dutch, I expect that’s what I shall do.” She appreciated Reinhardt’s suggestion, however. It only served to confirm her view that, like Frere, he was the perfect publisher.

  By the mid-1960s, Georgette and Max Reinhardt had become great friends. She met his American wife Joan Reinhardt in 1964 and (despite Georgette’s broadly anti-American sentiments) liked her very much. The Rougiers regularly invited the Reinhardts and the Freres to F.3. for dinner. Georgette and Ronald were excellent hosts and over the years the six of them enjoyed many congenial evenings in Albany (despite their mutual dislike, on the surface Ronald and Frere were always cordial to each other). They often found themselves at the same cocktail parties and dinners or arranging a table together for events like the Authors Ball.

  Georgette preferred small intimate dinner parties to larger, more boisterous events where she was expected to talk to people she did not know. She enjoyed cooking and serving a sumptuous meal for a few friends, with Ronald organizing the wine and changing the plates between courses. She appreciated good food, and Ronald was happy as long as there was plenty of the best fresh caviar and the “Proper Vodka.” On social occasions Georgette would often make a point of deferring to her husband and give the impression that Ronald was in charge. Partly out of consideration for him, in her private life she was always “Mrs. Rougier,” never “Georgette Heyer.” She preferred not to talk about her books at dinners or parties (confining that particular discussion to her regular lunches with Max Reinhardt as she had with Frere) or to draw attention to her enormous literary success. Despite having determined the course of her own life for over forty years, Georgette still needed the presence of a strong man, and clung to the old-fashioned view of the dominant male who was master of his own house and made the decisions. Ronald could certainly be decisive (and, according to friends, stubborn) and although Georgette was herself strong and frequently the driving force in their relationship, she still relied on his approval and support.

  Although Reinhardt was hoping there would be a new Heyer novel in 1966 he carefully refrained from asking Georgette about it. In April she wrote to say that “as a reward for NOT asking me, I enclose a singularly useless description of the meretricious work.” It was entitled Black Sheep. The idea for it appears to have come from a story Diana Sinden had told one evening at a party in F.3. The Sindens and the Rougiers had become friends after Ronald met the great thespian Donald Sinden at the Garrick Club. The two couples occasionally dined together and also met at parties. Diana Sinden’s story was about the difficult son (“a Black Sheep”) of a family who had sent him out to Australia from where he had returned “grown up and with a fortune.” As she told the story Mrs. Sinden saw a “glance pass between Georgette and Ronald; something had registered.”

  Whether she had been inspired by Diana Sinden’s story or not, a month later Georgette was able to tell Pat Wallace:

  My nose is sore from the grindstone, but I have made some progress with Black Sheep, & am feeling more hopeful about it since the appearance on the scene of the New Model Heyer-Hero. I rather wondered if I could handle him, but as he has already made my Life’s Companion burst out laughing at least six times, I obviously can. But he’s a bit tricky. And really a New Model!

  Black Sheep was set in Bath with a new plot and one of her satisfyingly unromantic romances between her hero and her older, outspoken heroine. Georgette described her careless leading man as “an amiable cynic” and admitted to having a lot of fun with him. Reinhardt immediately set things in motion for autumn publication while Joyce Weiner approached Woman & Home rather than Woman’s Journal and got four thousand guineas for the new novel, sight unseen. Dorothy Sutherland had finally retired from Woman’s Journal but Georgette liked the new editor no better. After thirty years of successful association Frederica was her last publication with the magazine.

  In May they learned that Ronald had been “elected a Bencher, which affords me, & his son, great satisfaction. He is being very Scotch about it, &, when asked what it means, says: ‘Two hundred guineas!’ but I think he’s secretly pleased.” To be recognized as a senior member of the Inner Temple (Master of the Bench) was a feather in Ronald’s cap and a timely recognition given that retirement was not far off. Three years earlier he had been named Deputy Chairman of Quarter Sessions in Essex, another appointment of which Georgette was very proud, although she would not say so directly. She went to Chelmsford to see him in action and “found him very impressive, & (as I told him) almost respected him!” There was a lot of laughter in their relationship.

  Georgette finished Black Sheep in June and Reinhardt sent a cheerful note with the contract informing her that her royalties would now start at twenty percent (on domestic sales). She responded in typical fashion by telling him that she hoped to start the next book “in better time, & put some life into it!” Only Georgette could accuse her books of having no life in them. In July an interview with the famous Mersey Beat pop singer Cilla Black appeared in the teen magazine Petticoat. Entitled “My Kind of Book,” in it Cilla told her readers that her kind of book “has to be fun and fast enough to keep you interested. F’r instance Arabella by Georgette Heyer.” Several long extracts from the novel followed, interspersed with the singer’s comments: “‘Funny,’ said Cilla, ‘the author knows so much about the Regency period that you start to imagine yourself arriving in London, like Arabella, and taking all by storm.’”

  As Pan sales of Heyer books soared into the hundreds of thousands Reinhardt suggested asking for a larger advance from the paperback publisher. Georgette wrote a cautious reply: “About Pan, I don’t think I’m in favor of trying to force the price up, are you? Sooner or later they will feel it’s time to call a halt, & I don’t want to seem like the daughter of a horse-leech.” But when Pan’s rival, the New English Library, offered a £7,500 advance for Black Sheep, Pan countered with their own £7,500 advance and a twelve and a half percent royalty. Georgette’s reaction was to demand of Reinhardt if the New English Library were mad. Her response to Pan’s offer was to tell him: “Good God, yes! You haven’t bullied Pan into it, have you? No, I’m sure you haven’t! I don’t want an unwilling
publisher, or one who isn’t happy to publish me, you know. The worst of bad policy!”

  The lease on F.3. Albany was due to expire in November that year and was not available for renewal as the owners wished to live there themselves. Georgette had not been able to secure a ground-floor set and the steep flight of steps up to their chambers was proving too much for her. She still smoked heavily and found carrying her shopping up to the top floor left her uncomfortably breathless. After twenty-four years it would be a wrench to leave Albany but by August she was able to tell Reinhardt “that we have practically taken a flat in Jermyn Street, & expect to get possession at the end of September… It has constant hot water, & central heating, & if I had Domestic Difficulty I could run it with one hand tied behind me.” Jermyn Street was just one block south of Piccadilly and conveniently close to all of Georgette’s favorite haunts.

  Having decided to move, Georgette called in Black Sheep’s advance in order to pay for the furnishings and improvements needed for the new flat. It was exciting but also daunting. Late September found her “engaged on the ghastly job of Turning-Out. After 25 years, the accumulation of junk is appalling. I am becoming ruthless about it!” Three weeks later her resolve quailed somewhat before “the stacked piles, in every edition & every language of My Works!…What am I to do with them? I can send the foreign to a certain hospital, but what about the Duttons, Penguins, Pans, Aces, Bantams, Longmans, & God Knows how many Differently priced editions???”

  In the midst of the chaos Georgette “was rung up by a male character, who asked me if I would speak to Sir Mark M[ilbank]. As Black Sheep was just out, & I had been besieged by telephone calls from the worst kind of reporter, I was wary, & said, very frostily, ‘Who is Sir Mark?’ The voice responded starchily: ‘I am speaking from Buckingham Palace!’ Rocked off my balance, I said weakly that I would speak to Sir Mark. He turned out to be the Master of the Household, & he’s quite a poppet.” He had rung to ask if Georgette would “lunch informally with the Queen & the Duke on Nov. 3rd? (‘We are all madly keen on your books here!’).” Stunned, she meekly informed him that she would be honored.

  A fortnight later (the hired) Harrods’ chauffeur drove her to Buckingham Palace in Ronald’s Rolls Royce. Georgette was a little nervous but the chauffeur reveled in the occasion and on arrival at the Palace gate told the policeman “haughtily, ‘Miss Georgette Heyer to lunch with Her Majesty!’ The rozzer then bowed, & stepped back, & the chauffeur inclined his head graciously––! and swept on, visibly at bursting point!” She had been uncertain about attending but in the end found the event congenial and amusing. When Georgette eventually sat down to lunch (after drinks and conversation and the corgis jumping all over the Queen) “a certain air of unreality came over me” and she could only think, “like the old woman in the nursery-rhyme, ‘Lawks-a-mussy on me, this is none of I!’”

  She enjoyed herself, though she thought “it was the oddest party! There were ten or twelve guests, & I was the only Female!!!…I have since learned that there is never more than one woman at these informal lunches she gives to People in the News.” Georgette sat on the Duke’s right hand and they conversed amicably through the first two courses before he turned his back on her and spoke to his left-hand neighbor for the remainder of the meal. Having been “brought up NEVER to slew round in my chair at a dinner-party, presenting my back to my other neighbor,” Georgette was a little shocked and “pleased to see that the Queen was also brought up like that!”

  She had liked the Queen, whom she perceived “had a merry twinkle, & quite a lively sense of the ridiculous” and she was amused to discover that her monarch seemed to be a little in awe of her. Carola Oman had warned her of the possibility “because Royals are always frightened of Inkies. I didn’t foresee it, but it rapidly dawned on me that she was! She kept on stealing sidelong looks at me, & blushing pink whenever I happened to catch her eye.” A few days after this memorable lunch Georgette visited Harrods book department, where the manager told her that the Queen had been in to buy twelve copies of Frederica. Her Majesty had mentioned Georgette’s visit and remarked “she’s a formidable woman.” Georgette’s reaction on telling Reinhardt this story was to say loudly over lunch: “I’m not formidable! Am I formidable, Max?” But the Queen was right. It was the word friends and family most often used to describe her.

  The Rougiers were due to move to Jermyn Street at the end of November. On 21 October, Georgette and Ronald held a “house-cooling party” in Albany for about seventy guests. It was a great success and a fitting farewell to the home in which they had enjoyed so many pleasant evenings with friends. She had written twenty-two novels in F.3. Albany: many of them what Frere called her vintage works. He always said that “Her apogee was the move to Albany.”

  The shift to Jermyn Street went smoothly, although the renovations went on longer than Georgette had planned. She was still dealing with decorators at Christmas. And the new year brought bad news: Boris had suffered two strokes and was no longer capable of running an inn. Georgette wanted to help him but apart from financial support it was difficult to know how best to respond to her brother’s problems. She had her own share of difficulties, although her new accountant was at last sorting out her money situation. Crosse’s idea to sell Heron and its copyrights to a larger public company that would pay Georgette and Ronald a lump sum as well as annual directors’ fees and bonuses was beginning to find favor. A year earlier she had declared: “If I sold, it would only be for some astronomical sum! The Heron books, remember, include FREDERICA, which looks like being a little gold-mine.” By spring she was much less hostile to the idea of selling and even hopeful that Crosse had found the solution to their tax problems.

  They went to Venice for ten days in May and stayed at the famous Cipriani’s Hotel on the Island of Giudecca, having a wonderful time shopping and sightseeing. Reinhardt had sent Georgette Ed O’Connor’s novel All in the Family for the trip and she reported liking it

  immensely—& I’m damned if I know why! Perhaps because of his gift of creating very likeable characters in whose careers one feels great interest…Oddly enough—I didn’t find myself compelled to skip the political part, though few things bore & disgust me more than the American political scene…Mind you, the book is too long, & has, I felt, too many irrelevant episodes & characters. But Americans nearly always seem to revel in verbiosity [sic].

  Georgette sometimes forgot that Joan Reinhardt was an American and occasionally she would “hold forth about Americans” before remembering her friend’s nationality.

  She and Ronald were rarely averse to expressing their very decided opinions to their friends. When the Six-Day War ended in June 1967 Georgette wrote to Pat Wallace: “I won’t bore you with my valueless thoughts about the Lightning War in the Middle East. I’m not fond of Jews, but I’m delighted that they’ve licked the hell out of the Wogs.” She also told Reinhardt (prophetically) that “I wish I could see a solution to the problem, but I can’t. It looks like another uneasy truce in a Hundred Years’ War!”

  If, as she always said, her grandfather was indeed Jewish, it did not prevent Georgette from making anti-Semitic remarks, any more than her agent Joyce Weiner’s Jewishness prevented them from becoming friends. In her novels Georgette usually cast her occasional Jewish characters as moneylenders and referred to them in disparaging terms. Only in The Grand Sophy, however, did she ever flesh out a Jewish character beyond a walk-on part. The result, in Mr. Goldhanger, was a literary caricature of an avaricious moneylender whose antecedents were undoubtedly Dickens’s Fagin and Shakespeare’s Shylock. She did not repeat the experiment. Frere once described Georgette as “a strict old fashioned High Tory like Dr. Johnson” and Ronald as “even more conservative.” Certainly those who knew the Rougiers well tended to avoid discussing politics or foreign affairs with them on social occasions.

  In June Ronald was named in the Queen’s Birthday Honors List for his services to the General Optical Council. They returned home fr
om Venice in time for him to receive his CBE. Soon afterwards Georgette sent Reinhardt an outline of her next novel with a warning not to “ask me a whole lot of questions about this epic! I know what it’s ABOUT, but I also know (knowing myself) that it will probably undergo many changes as my Fluid Pen progresses. No doubt some utterly unforeseen person will push himself into the plot, and do his best to disrupt it.”

  Cousin Kate was to be a departure from her usual style of book. As Georgette’s own version of the Gothic novel, its characters included a sinister matriarch in Lady Minerva Brede (Broome in the final book), a mentally unstable pseudo-hero with homicidal and suicidal tendencies, a charming heroine, and a hero designed to look like the villain. Reinhardt was delighted with the synopsis and keen to achieve “a bumper subscription of 60,000 odd before you have even started writing a single word.” He was certain that Cousin Kate would be another bestseller. Frere was also convinced and a few months earlier had made a point of highlighting Georgette’s enormous success with Black Sheep in a letter to The Times:

  Sir,—Ten thousand was a best-selling figure in the pre-paperback days when Galsworthy, Bennett and Wells were writing. Miss Georgette Heyer’s latest novel, published in hard-back and not yet in paperback, has to date sold 62,000. This seems to make a nonsense of Mr. Temple Smith’s “fact that fewer people now buy hard-cover books.” Within my knowledge, inaccurately informed writers have been burying publishers for the past 40 years. In spite of that, some of them seem to be doing pretty well. Yours faithfully, A.S. Frere H5 & 6 Albany

  A few months later Hale Crosse conveyed to Georgette an offer from Booker Bros. to buy Heron Enterprises. A large food wholesaler, this company had recently set about diversifying its interests. One of Jock Campbell’s (the chairman) most unusual investments was in literary copyrights. The company had discovered a loophole in the British tax system which enabled them to buy an author’s copyrights, and pay her fees or bonuses (partly at the taxpayer’s expense) while the company collected the royalties. Booker Bros. had already purchased the Ian Fleming estate and fifty-one percent of Agatha Christie Ltd. Now they wanted Heron and its eighteen copyrights.