J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys

by Andrew Birkin

  I don't remember ever having read Peter Pan to Anno or his brothers. I don't think he ever saw The Lost Boys, or read this book. He didn't need to. Whether I make my Barrie film remains to be seen. But yes, Anno, I do have something new to say.

  Andrew Birkin

  Wales, March 2003

  Introduction

  ‘May God blast any one who writes a biography of me’ warned J. M. Barrie in one of his last notebooks. The curse, scrawled across the page like the hieroglyphics on an Egyptian tomb, seems as good a reason as any to state at the outset that this is not a biography of Barrie; nor is it a critical assessment of his works; nor a psychological dissection of his mind – ‘an attempt to dig up the dead and twist a finger in their sockets’, as he put it. It is, rather, a love story told through the words and images of the dramatis personae concerned. Unlike The Lost Boys, a trilogy I wrote for BBC television, this is a documentary account, and I have tried to limit my role to that of an editor, allowing the letters, diaries, notebooks, interviews, photographs, and Barrie's own works, to unfold the narrative with a minimum of editorial interference. There is, of course, no such thing as a totally objective documentary, for were I to withhold my opinion throughout, a degree of subjectivity would still be evidenced by what I had chosen to include or omit. Indeed, my selection of material has not been particularly objective: I have quoted certain items of questionable merit simply because they appealed to me, while other things of more possible value have been discarded.

  Much of the material here has never appeared before in print, with one main exception: Barrie's novels and plays. I make no apology for this, since his works – many of them long out of print – are inextricably bound up with his own private world. Moreover I am fond of them. It has become fashionable to dismiss Barrie as being sentimental or ‘whimsical’; neither adjective describes him fully, a fact recognized by contemporary critics who were obliged to resort to such neologisms as ‘Barrieish’, ‘Barriesque’, and ‘J.-M.-Barrieness’. When Barrie died in 1937, The Daily Telegraph wrote of him, ‘A romantic, indeed, he never was. … Whether one liked his work or not, he owed nothing to anybody or any school. … He was not so much a great artist – though the sanest critic knew he was that, too – as a man who could see visions.’ I hope this book may prompt some to rediscover those visions for themselves.

  Notwithstanding my own evident partiality for Barrie's writing, I have endeavoured to leave this account tolerably free of opinion and judgement. It is not a scholarly work, though I have striven to ensure the accuracy of its content, and have supplied references for sources not identified in the text.

  Many people have provided documents, reminiscences, and helpful advice. In particular I should like to thank Michael Asquith; Elisabeth Bergner; Lord Boothby; Isabella Bruce; Clive Burt; Theodora Calvert; Sir Roger Chance; Jeremy Clutterbuck; Patrick Crocker; George Llewelyn Davies Jnr; Geraldine Llewelyn Davies; Peter Llewelyn Davies Jnr; Ruthven Llewelyn Davies; W. A. Darlington; Norma Douglas Henry; Janet Dunbar; Sebastian Earl; Carl Michael Emyers; Diana Farr; Dr Michael Finlay; Dr Morris Fraser; Roger Lancelyn Green; Anthony Hall; Mary Hill; Eiluned and Medina Lewis; Joan Ling; the late Johnny Mackay; Sir John Masterman; Major and Mrs John Mathias; Angela and Daphne du Maurier; Doreen Nisbet; Mark Oliver; the Dowager Lady Ponsonby; Sir James Pitman; Foy Quiller-Couch; Pia Hewlett; Mary and Anne Mackail; Sir Peter Scott; Her Grace the Duchess of Sutherland; Margaret Ogilvy Sweeten; Julian Vinogradoff; Joan Waldegrave.

  I must also record my thanks to the many institutions which have given access to material. By far the most vital source has been the Walter Beinecke Collection – the largest Barrie collection in existence – housed in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Marjorie Wynne and her staff have provided a constant stream of xeroxes, photographs and microfilm, often at panic notice, and their help and enthusiasm throughout the long period of research has been invaluable. The National Trust for Scotland has shown equal courtesy, and I am much indebted to Olga Bennell and her staff at the Trust's Barrie Birthplace, Kirriemuir, for their assistance and hospitality. Additional acknowledgements are due to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Los Angeles), the Bodleian Library, the BBC, the British Film Institute, British Movietone News, the British Library, the British Theatre Museum, Colindale Newspaper Library, Dumfries Academy, Edinburgh University, EMI – Pathé News, Eton College, Glasgow University, the Houghton Library (Harvard University), the University of Illinois, Kensington & Chelsea Public Library, the Lillie Library (Indiana University), the National Film Archives, New York Public Library, Norland Place School, Oxford University, Radlett Public Library, the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle, the University of Southern California, St Andrews University, Texas University, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. The many publishers who have given permission to quote copyright material are acknowledged in the Select Bibliography at the end of the book. I am particularly beholden to the generosity of the Barrie Estate for permission to quote so extensively from Barrie's unpublished notebooks, letters, and other writings; to the Great Ormond Street Hospital, who control the copyright of all works that fall into the category of The Peter Pan Gift; to Barrie's principal publishers: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd in England, Charles Scribner's Sons in the U.S.A.; and to the Llewelyn Davies family, for permission both to quote from unpublished family papers, and to reproduce photographs from various family albums.

  On a more personal level, I should like to thank all those concerned with the BBC television production of The Lost Boys, particularly my producer Louis Marks and director Rodney Bennett who tolerated trials and tribulations above and beyond the call of duty; Jane Annakin and the William Morris Agency, whose services have amounted to unregistered charity; my copy-editor and fellow-pedant, Herbert Rees; Frank Dunn for his comprehensive index; my long-suffering publishers; Linda Siefert; Gary Smith and Dwight Hemion; Mia Farrow; Bruce Robinson; Colin Rogers; my sister Linda, who restored a number of photographs to their former glory; Peter Lodge and the National Westminster Bank, without whose support there would have been no Lost Boys; David Puttnam and his family: Patsy, Debbie, and especially Sacha, my technical advisor on boyhood and unwitting author of the best lines in the script; Nicholas Borton, Paul Spurrier and Alexander Buss, who supplemented Sacha's contribution with ideas of their own; Ian Holm, for bringing Barrie miraculously to life, his wife Bridget, who undertook most of the photographic labour of this book, and their son Barnaby, who earned himself a small fortune playing the young George Llewelyn Davies, and a larger one correcting galley proofs at a shilling a mistake; and finally my own family, for being a constant source of encouragement and offering me much valuable advice.

  Two acknowledgements remain, though the term does scant justice to the debt of gratitude I owe them. Sharon Goode, my co-researcher, has devoted three years of her spare time to The Lost Boys, both television and book, and much of the content is solely due to her diligence, perseverance and skill; moreover, her efficiency and organization has more than compensated for my own failings in those fields. But even her efforts, not to mention my own, would have been wasted had it not been for the full co-operation and assistance of Nicholas Llewelyn Davies throughout this enterprise. I am reluctant to praise his contribution too fully, since an element of coercion may be suspected. When Sharon Goode first tracked him down in 1975, he wrote to her, ‘I am certainly ready to help in any way I can, but I must warn you that I am entirely devoted to Barrie's memory, by which I mean that you will hear little but praise from me.’ Nico has been true to his word. Knowing that I was a scriptwriter, he no doubt suspected that I was after a ‘good story’ – which I was – and that truth might take second place to dramatic licence – which it did, frequently, until he cajoled me back onto the right path; but never under pressure. As principal copyright holder of his family's letters and papers, he had every right to ask for script approval. He didn't, so I gave it to him. Th
at he made no use of it almost led me to suspect that he had consigned the finished script to the waste-paper basket unread (and at 540 daunting pages I wouldn't have blamed him); but I then received a letter from him telling me that he had sent, under separate cover, ‘a few notes of things that aren't quite accurate, but they don't amount to much, so of course disregard them if you want’. By the next post arrived a large package containing the few notes: four dozen sheets of closely written comments, each one relating to some factual error in the script. Subsequent drafts were subjected to the same treatment, and at the beginning of rehearsals Nico journeyed up to the BBC with his wife, Mary, to spend an afternoon fielding a barrage of questions from both cast and production team. A similar process of involvement took place on the book; answering questions (with over two hundred letters), making suggestions and checking proofs, but again without restraint. This may not seem particularly remarkable, until one considers the amount of speculation that has arisen in the last decade over Barrie's sexuality. Several psychiatrists have classified him as a paedophile, while a number of critics and viewers jumped to the same conclusion on watching The Lost Boys. It would seem that sexual categories, like so many judgements, lie in the eye of the beholder, and some readers will inevitably behold similar ambiguities in this book. As Barrie's sole surviving adopted son, perhaps Nico is better placed than most for determining the truth; and so, while thanking him profoundly for having allowed me to trespass so freely on his past and present, I give him the last word: ‘Of all the men I have ever known, Barrie was the wittiest, and the best company. He was also the least interested in sex. He was a darling man. He was innocent; which is why he could write Peter Pan.’

  Los Angeles, January 1979

  Since the appearance of the first edition in 1979, new material has inevitably come to light, though nothing that alters the overall portrait. I have included the best of this material in the form of extended photo captions.

  The majority of the dramatis personnae who gave so readily of their time and memories have now died, including dearest Nico himself. He too was a darling man, whom I trust lives on through the pages of this book.

  Kensington, February 1986

  Prologue

  On April 5th, 1960, a middle-aged publisher, Peter Llewelyn Davies, left the Royal Court Hotel, London, crossed Sloane Square, walked down into the local underground station and threw himself beneath an on-coming train. Eight days later a Coroner's Jury returned a verdict of ‘suicide while the balance of his mind was disturbed’.

  Peter Llewelyn Davies at Barrie's funeral in 1937

  Peter Davies had been a leading figure in the London publishing world since 1926, when he founded his own publishing house, Peter Davies Ltd. Compton Mackenzie called him ‘an artist among publishers’, and Herbert van Thal, writing in The Times, described his death as ‘an irreparable loss to the publishing trade, for here was a personality, witty, astringent, with a brilliant and remarkable knowledge of literature, and withal he possessed a deep and kindly understanding of his fellow men’.

  Apart from the tributes of friends and colleagues, the death of a publisher would normally warrant little more than a tidy obituary in the better-class newspapers. That his death made front-page news around the world was not due to Peter Davies, publisher, but to his namesake, Peter Pan.

  ‘BARRIE'S PETER PAN KILLED BY A LONDON SUBWAY TRAIN’ announced The New York Times, while Fleet Street seized upon the evident irony implicit in the story: ‘THE BOY WHO NEVER GREW UP IS DEAD’ …‘PETER PAN STOOD ALONE TO DIE’ … ‘PETER PAN'S DEATH LEAP’ … ‘PETER PAN COMMITS SUICIDE’ … ‘THE TRAGEDY OF PETER PAN’. The Daily Express informed its readers:

  ‘Until he died at 68* Peter Davies was Peter Pan. He was the Little Boy Who Never Grew Up; the boy who believed in fairies. The name was the gift to him of playwright Sir James Barrie and Peter Davies hated it all his life. But he was never allowed to forget it until, as a shy, retiring publisher, he fell to his death on Tuesday night.’

  Despite the inaccuracies, the article was correct in one respect: the mass media never allowed Peter Davies to forget his namesake, and it was little wonder that he came to loathe his association with what he once referred to as ‘that terrible masterpiece’. Nor were his four brothers immune to the same treatment. Every time George, Jack, Peter, Michael or Nico made news, however insignificant, Peter Pan took the headlines – whether it was George in 1914: ‘PETER PAN ENLISTS’, Michael in 1919: ‘PETER PAN FINED FOR SPEEDING’, Nico in 1926: ‘PETER PAN GETS MARRIED’, or Peter, on the birth of Peter Davies Ltd: ‘PETER PAN BECOMES PUBLISHER’:

  ‘Mr Peter Davies, the publisher, was as shy as the boy who inspired Pan when a “Daily Express” representative called on him yesterday. He would speak about his first book, but not a word would he utter about Peter Pan. “Please forget that,” he said, and his lips seemed to say, “I'm grown up now, you know.”’

  But was Peter Davies the real Peter Pan? Barrie claimed that he was an amalgam of all five Davies boys:‘I made Peter by rubbing the five of you violently together, as savages with two sticks produce a flame. That is all he is, the spark I got from you.’ Certainly the Five had a profound influence on Peter's creation—as indeed that creation and his creator had on each of them—but they were as much the inspiration for the Lost Boys and the Darling family as they were for Peter Pan.

  The real genesis of the Boy Who Would Not Grow Up had begun almost one hundred years prior to Peter's death in 1960, in the little Scottish weaving town of Kirriemuir, where James Matthew Barrie was born on May 9th, 1860.

  * He was actually 63.

  1

  1860–1885

  ‘On the day I was born we bought six hair-bottomed chairs, and in our little house it was an event’, wrote Barrie in Margaret Ogilvy1 a portrait of his mother and his own boyhood. Certainly his birth caused little stir in a family that already numbered two boys and four girls, but the implied poverty was an affectation adopted by Barrie in later life. His father, David Barrie, was a hand-loom weaver of more than average means, and the dominant priority in the Barrie household was one of fierce educational ambition rather than a struggle for survival. By the time James Barrie was six, that ambition had been partly realized. Alexander Barrie, the eldest son, had graduated from Aberdeen University with first-class honours in Classics, and had opened his own private school in Lanarkshire. The second son, David, was thirteen, and showed every sign of emulating Alexander's achievements; moreover he was tall, athletic, handsome and charming, the Golden Boy of his mother's eye. Margaret Ogilvy (who had retained her maiden name in accordance with an old Scots custom) was the driving force of the family, and all her hopes were focused on the aspiration that David would one day become a Minister. The six-year-old James was, by comparison, something of a disappointment. He showed no particular academic promise, nor did he possess his brother's looks. He was small for his age, rather squat, with a head too large for his body. In short, the runt of the family.

  Barrie aged 6

  Barrie's birthplace: Lilybank in the Tenements, Kirriemuir. The wash-house in foreground was the theatre of Barrie's first play, written and performed at the age of 7. It was also, according to his Dedication to Peter Pan, ‘the original of the little house the Lost Boys built in the Never Land for Wendy’

  Until he was six, James Barrie lived in the shadow of David. But in January 1867, David was killed in a skating accident on the eve of his fourteenth birthday. Barrie was too young to remember the tragedy with any clarity, his chief memory being that of playing with his younger sister Maggie under the table on which stood David's coffin. For his mother, however, it was a catastrophe beyond belief, and one from which she never fully recovered. ‘She was always delicate from that hour, and for many months she was very ill’, wrote Barrie in Margaret Ogilvy. ‘I peeped in many times at the door and then went to the stair and sat on it and sobbed.’ Barrie's elder sister, Jane Ann, was quick to perceive the damaging effect that Margaret
Ogilvy's protracted grief was having on her youngest son:

  ‘This sister told me to go ben to my mother and say to her that she still had another boy. I went ben excitedly, but the room was dark, and when I heard the door shut and no sound come from the bed I was afraid, and I stood still. I suppose I was breathing hard, or perhaps I was crying, for after a time I heard a listless voice that had never been listless before say, “Is that you?” I think the tone hurt me, for I made no answer, and then the voice said more anxiously “Is that you?” again. I thought it was the dead boy she was speaking to, and I said in a little lonely voice, “No, it's no' him, it's just me.” Then I heard a cry, and my mother turned in bed, and though it was dark I knew that she was holding out her arms.

  Margaret Ogilvy in 1871

  Barrie aged 9

  ‘After that I sat a great deal in her bed trying to make her forget him. … At first, they say, I was often jealous, stopping her fond memories with the cry, “Do you mind nothing about me?” but that did not last; its place was taken by an intense desire … to become so like him that even my mother should not see the difference, and many and artful were the questions I put to that end. Then I practised in secret, but after a whole week had passed I was still rather like myself. He had such a cheery way of whistling, she had told me, it had always brightened her at her work to hear him whistling, and when he whistled he stood with his legs apart, and his hands in the pockets of his knickerbockers. I decided to trust to this, so one day after I had learned his whistle (every boy of enterprise invents a whistle of his own) from boys who had been his comrades, I secretly put on a suit of his clothes … and thus disguised I slipped, unknown to the others, into my mother's room. Quaking, I doubt not, yet so pleased, I stood still until she saw me, and then—how it must have hurt her! “Listen!” I cried in a glow of triumph, and I stretched my legs wide apart and plunged my hands into the pockets of my knickerbockers, and began to whistle.