Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime

by Joanne Drayton

  She could not explain why she bothered to return home, but she did and, shockingly, it was without many of her precious Italian photographs. Harrod’s had sent her slides back to Italy to be processed and they were lost. ‘It’s absolutely maddening…Can you beat it,’ she exclaimed to Doris McIntosh. She stewed over her losses and decided to put them to work by using photographic prints as the clue to expose her murderer in When in Rome.

  The photographs belong to the Dutch Baron and Baroness Van der Veghel. The couple remind Barnaby Grant of the Etruscan bride and bridegroom who lie on a ‘sarcophagal couch’ at the Villa Giulia. They are similar in appearance—heavy and large-framed like the terracottas with almond-shaped eyes and timeless Etruscan smiles—and in their all-consuming passion for each other. It is as if the sculptures have come to life. The tourists take photographs deep down in the pagan excavations of the Mithras house under San Tommaso’s. The Baron calls the party together. He and his wife want a group photograph, with Barnaby Grant in the middle. The Baron, because he is tall, stands at the back. The Baroness is delighted: ‘Good. Good. And so, all are ready? Freeze, please. I shoot.’ They stand crowded together in near-darkness and nothing happens. Her bulb has blown. There is a frenzied search for a new bulb, and after much delay the picture is finally taken. The Baroness then replaces the Baron in the group and another photo is snapped that includes her. Kenneth Dorne has also taken a group shot.

  ‘It is a pity,’ the photographic expert tells Roderick Alleyn, ‘there has been a misfortune. Light has been admitted.’ All the Van der Veghels’ photographs taken under San Tommaso’s are mysteriously blank. ‘I cannot understand this,’ the Baron says to Alleyn, as he fingers the exposed prints. Nothing has survived except Kenneth Dorne’s single photograph, and the person missing from his snap is Mailer’s murderer. In the darkness, the killer has slipped away from the group and murdered the blackmailing drug dealer. The evidence is there in black and white; or rather the evidence of absence.

  ‘I have no Roman [film] since the one Marcello’s friend developed & only some from Florence & Perugia which have somehow survived,’ wrote a despondent Ngaio. She had told Annette Facer that Rome and its treasures were impossible to capture on film, never realizing Fate would take her literally. She left London ‘feeling cheated’. There were many things she still wanted to do, but so much of her time had been taken up with business and promotion.

  Her trip back to New Zealand at the end of August was purgatory. After a stopover in Naples, she became ill with food poisoning. It was not uncommon for her to get stomach complaints, but this was a vicious attack of diarrhoea and vomiting that left her so weak that she collapsed in her bathroom, coming to badly bruised and with a bleeding nose. The food on the ship was awful. ‘The meat tastes of stables or nothing…the vegetables are sodden & sour. Even hard boiled eggs taste like straw out of a wet mattress.’ There was almost a mutiny among the passengers.

  But her spirits lifted when she arrived home to the news that her Clutch of Constables was doing exceptionally well. It had been chosen as book of the month in Britain and the United States. Ngaio was pleased, because they paid ‘about a thousand quid (of which I get about a third)’. Her agent was thrilled, Collins was delighted, and Dilys Wynn writing for The New Yorker magazine topped everything by stating, ‘It’s time to compare Christie to Marsh instead of the other way round.’

  In the New Year of 1969, Ngaio wrote excitedly to Doris McIntosh, ‘I’m dug into a new one set…you will be flabbergasted to learn, in Rome.’ Ngaio would dedicate When in Rome to ‘the Ambassador and Mrs McIntosh and the Staff of the Residence, New Zealand Embassy in Rome who made it possible’.

  By mid-February, Ngaio had written 16,000 words of the manuscript and was still developing ideas about how she would finish her ‘complex plot’. For the moment, however, it was put aside. Ngaio thought coming back after a break might clarify her approach, and she was considering tackling A Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘if we can stage & light the kind of job I’d like to make of it’.

  At the end of February, she was making preparations. ‘Sorry this is blotched with black,’ she said of a letter to Doris McIntosh. ‘I’m doing costume designs for the theatre & showcard colour abounds.’ In the same letter she described fainting at a vice-regal buffet dinner, after standing too long in a small, stifling, crowded room. She came to with the Governor-General leaning over taking her pulse. He took her into a quiet side room and they talked while she recovered. ‘Wasn’t it too shaming & awful. Never, never, never again, a buffet dinner for this old girl.’ Ngaio’s health was fragile, yet she willingly took on the huge task of another student production. The theatre was her life-blood and young people a reminder of spring in her autumn years.

  In March, when she began auditioning, ‘a huge dirty, barefooted, filthy-jeaned, shoulder-length undergraduate’ turned up to challenge her sensibilities. ‘Yeah but Ah’ma not setting ma sights at a fairee,’ he announced to her in a husky voice with a New Zealand twang. Ngaio was horrified. ‘A brief and staggering vision of him as Oberon very nearly unseated me.’ Collecting herself, she replied with gravity that perhaps it would be better if he tried for a mortal role. In the end, she decided he was ‘a nice, intelligent chap’ as long as you stood ‘windward of him’.

  Ngaio had been directing student productions for nearly 30 years, and over that time fashions and faces changed, but never the sense of camaraderie and respect that developed between a director and players. Ngaio changed her ideas. Directing students kept her contemporary. She accepted the challenge of working with a late 1960s-early 1970s generation, a fresh group of players accepted her guidance and authority, and once again they brought something magical to life. It was not vastly different from what Ngaio had done before, but more refined and sophisticated in its presentation.

  The leading roles went to established players like Mervyn Glue, who was Nick Bottom, and David Hindin, who was Peter Quince, but also to a new group that included the future film and television actor Sam (Nigel) Neill as Theseus, Catherine Wilkin as Hippolyta, and Paul Sonne and Jane Thompson as Oberon and Titania. Ngaio had an instinct for a star when she chose Sam Neill.

  Ngaio also had a wild card: Elric Hooper had put a ‘west end engagement’ aside to come out and play Puck. She was in negotiations with the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council to raise money for his fare. He was perfect for the role with his boyish looks, irascible character and Puck-like humour, and she knew he would be a drawcard. Ironically, the Arts Council that she had done so much to launch had a short memory, and it was Ngaio who paid. ‘Whether I get the cash back…is anyone’s guess. I don’t really care…it’s splendid having him here & his Puck will be dynamic.’ It meant that she could not afford a trip to meet Doris McIntosh in London.

  The show was a massive undertaking for a 74-year-old. Elric Hooper and Annette Facer were Ngaio’s assistant directors for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and this alleviated some of the stress, but performances were not without drama. Glue, a talented and well-seasoned actor, developed the practice of nipping down to the local Bush Inn for a quick drink between scenes. Ngaio, who, confoundingly for an agnostic, ritually crossed herself before curtain rise on first-night performances, would have done so more vehemently had she realized that Glue timed his expeditions to the last minute. On one occasion Gerald Lascelles, who had been anxiously pacing the theatre car park for Glue’s return, threw him Bottom’s donkey head seconds before he stepped onto the stage. Then one night the inevitable happened. Lascelles scanned the car park. No Glue roared up. After a frantic backstage consultation he flung on Bottom’s head himself, and he and Annette Facer, who was hiding in the rude mechanics’ hut as his prompt, took to the stage together. Stagehands shifted the hut with Facer still ensconced, badly gashing her heels, but this was the only blood spilt, because Lascelles had made a passable ass and saved Glue’s Bottom.

  This was one problem averted. Fiddler on the Roof and some ‘very good concerts’
were stiff competition for the production, and Ngaio complained that she only had to produce A Midsummer Night’s Dream ‘to bring about hideous snowstorms & floods. Last time…it coincided with the severest snowstorm in N.Z. history. This time—blizzards, snow, record low temperatures & flooding.’ Against the odds, houses filled to capacity each night and ‘we were turning them away by dozens at the end’.

  Hooper was as dynamic a Puck as she had hoped, and a ‘shot in the arm’ for both the cast and the members of the public who attended his lectures and classes. This was the self-perpetuating artistic enrichment she longed for—New Zealanders teaching New Zealanders. She saw it as a sign of cultural maturity.

  During the show she found time to see the Frances Hodgkins retrospective exhibition at the Robert McDougall Art Gallery. ‘Wonderful!’ she wrote ecstatically. She longed to own one of the works, as Doris McIntosh did. Hodgkins’s drawings and still-lifes set in landscape were ‘superb’. She was an expatriate whose work changed New Zealanders’ ideas about art. This was what Ngaio wanted for the theatre.

  A Midsummer Night’s Dream finished with a huge cast party for 80, at Marton Cottage. ‘It too was a howling success if somewhat exhausting.’ In the end the production made a ‘remarkable’ $3,000 profit.

  While she worked on the play, Ngaio kept writing to Doris McIntosh, checking details for When in Rome. Sometimes she forgot the answers. ‘As always I destroyed your last two immediately,’ she said of the most recent letters. Ngaio had a strict practice of destroying her correspondence with Doris and, it seems, assumed that her own was also being disposed of. But Doris McIntosh valued Ngaio’s letters more than her privacy and stashed them away, so half of their detailed communication about When in Rome has survived. Both of the McIntoshes were a huge help, and Ngaio derived immense pleasure from working with them. She struggled with her writing, moving material backwards and forwards to get the right balance of clues, motive and narrative flow. At one stage she had Alleyn photographing a footprint under San Tommaso’s twice because she had shifted the episode in the text and forgotten to eliminate the original.

  Before Christmas, she sent the manuscript off to Edmund Cork in trepidation. An even-mannered man, his response was ecstatic. It was ‘the best yet’ and ‘it made him want to pack his bags & take off for Rome at once’. As Cork predicted, it proved to be one of her most acclaimed late novels, coming out in London in 1970, and Boston in 1971.

  ‘I had the usual tree & as always enjoyed it very much,’ Ngaio wrote to Doris McIntosh in January 1970. ‘So did everyone else, I think. The children did a lovely play with George & the Dragon lasting every second of eight minutes.’ Since the mid-1940s, Ngaio had held a Christmas party at Marton Cottage with a tree and presents for her players, friends, family, when they were around, and their children. It went so far back in people’s minds that it was like Christmas itself, a much-anticipated ritual. Ngaio staged the event as she did a production, with precision, the props, timing and parts all organized. This was her way of giving, but also of experiencing Christmas anew in the faces of children as they saw the tree, the lavish decorations, the piles of presents, the candles, and the table, all crystal, crackers and sumptuous food.

  Ngaio’s parties brought back the ghosts of Christmases past. As the long days of summer warmed the tussock-covered hills around Marton Cottage, her parents would move her bed onto the verandah so that she could sleep outside. A hot nor-west Christmas under the stars was what she remembered. She left notes for Father Christmas at the top of a solitary pine tree, which were collected, and kept a secret Christmas book containing her first ‘attempt at descriptive writing’. On Christmas Eve, she scanned the skies for a sleigh. It was all part of the Marsh ritual, as was the fantasy and theatre created by her father, who became Old St Nick himself with a beard, ‘red outfit with white facings’ and a bag of presents. Henry, who was ‘Bah humbug!’ about organized religion, took great pleasure in bringing the spirit of Christmas to his daughter. ‘Very c-o-o-o-ld in the chimney to-night,’ he would announce in his deepest, gruffest voice, as he stepped onto the verandah. Then, hanging up Ngaio’s stocking, he would consult his notes out loud to see whether she had been a good or a bad ‘little girl’. He was thrilled to watch her expressions of delight as Christmas unfolded. Ngaio was convinced—or at least reluctant to disbelieve—until her mid-teens.

  Sylvia Fox was there, ‘of course’, at Ngaio’s Christmas tree parties, along often with Betty Cotterill, sometimes Anita Muling, with Val when he was alive and then with Marjorie Chambers, Crawsie and her husband Andy, and over the years many friends and players and their children. Memories stretched back. ‘Do you remember bringing Mark when he was a Heavenly gruff little job of about 5?’ Ngaio asked John Schroder. ‘I remember you suggested that he should give me a kiss.’ Young Mark, stabbed with embarrassment, had said that his father might like to do it instead.

  The Christmas of 1969-70 gave her the idea that a Christmas tree party could be the genesis of a plot for a book. She began Tied Up in Tinsel, and by June was ‘up to 22,000 words…& making heavy weather of it’. Her books became progressively harder to write and there was more editing for the publishers at the other end, but the fact that she was still writing successful sellers made the agonizing process worthwhile.

  Tied Up in Tinsel is substantially autobiographical, but it opens in a very different Christmas world from that of Ngaio’s childhood. The countryside around Halberds Manor is a barren picture of white snow and black fallow paddocks. On a hillside nearby, a sightless scarecrow swivels in freezing winds that cut and carry away bits of straw from its cuffs and collar. This is the romantic winter Christmas that young Ngaio had seen on Christmas cards and read about in books.

  Troy is staying at Halberds, painting a portrait, while Alleyn is working on an extradition case in Australia. The subject of her commission, Hilary Bill-Tasman, has invited her to stay for his Christmas tree party, which he puts on for the children of local prison officers and their parents. Like Ngaio, he is an agnostic, but for him Christmas is a timeless tradition, reaching back through ancient pagan ritual to the earliest Druids. He spends days planning. There are rehearsals. His uncle, Flea, will be Father Christmas. Hilary’s showpiece is a costume with a superb beard and wig, plus a long golden gown that the grand old man Flea wears as he delivers his presents. The plan is that he will come in through the french windows to the recorded strains of Christmas carols, drawing presents on a golden sleigh behind him. Hilary will oversee the present distribution, while Uncle Flea escapes back out into the snow. Thirty-one children are coming and a dozen or so adults.

  In the ‘long room’ stands the tree, decorated all in gold. ‘They hung golden glass baubles…[and] mounted a golden angel. There were festoons of glittering gold tinsel and masses of gilded candles. Golden stars shone in and out of the foliage.’ The tree is a vision, completed when the children’s presents arrive in large golden boxes, one for each family. There is even a ‘Crib’ that Hilary’s Aunty Bed bought for him in Oberammergau when he was a child. Hilary is sensitive about his paganism. ‘You think I’m effete and heartless and have lost my sense of spiritual values,’ he says defensively to Troy as they survey the splendour. He has read her mind.

  Would Troy have thought the same of her creator? Is Ngaio using a fictional character to test her own behaviour? Or is she just thinking out loud? Whatever the answer, Ngaio, like Hilary, was motivated more by festivity than faith, but her religious beliefs were conflicted. While she was writing When in Rome, she found that Roman churches were dedicated to saints or well-known biblical or historical figures. She decided on a cryptic dedication for San Tommaso’s. ‘Mine will be Doubting T. [Thomas],’ she announced, ‘for whom I have always entertained a considerable amount of sympathy.’ Ngaio loved the theatre of religion and the magic of the Christmas story but, like her father, she could never entertain the idea of faith without doubt. Her scepticism, though, was fraught with her mother’s superstition. N
gaio bought crucifixes and icons as gifts, ‘prayed for’ and ‘blessed’ people, and had an enquiring mind about the spiritual dimension of human existence. She read books on spiritualism, telepathy, faith healing and fortune telling, and, in 1967, paid to have her palm read.

  By the end of 1970, she was a long way through the first draft of Tied Up in Tinsel, and her Christmas tree at Marton Cottage ‘was a great success & really did look pretty stunning being all GOLD,’ she told Doris McIntosh. ‘The boxes [were] golden too.’ She spent a hectic eight days getting ready for her 30 guests. Ngaio usually had Christmas and Boxing Days on her own. Sylvia would go and stay with her nephew, Richard, his wife Ginx, and their two children, while Ngaio enjoyed the stillness and liberty to do what she wanted. Her life was so full of people that she treasured the chance to pause and reflect. Being alone did not mean loneliness: it meant the space to potter around and do ordinary things and meditate. The year had been a busy one, but her major theatrical involvement, a production of Arthur Pinero’s The Magistrate for the Canterbury Repertory in November, had been less taxing than working with students.

  The year had begun with the sad news in January of the death of Allan Wilkie, at the age of 91. This was the end of an era for Ngaio, and for the theatre: he was one of the last actor-managers with a touring troupe.

  In June, she received the shocking news that Brigid Lenihan, just 41 years old, had probably committed suicide in Melbourne. She had taken an overdose of sleeping pills and it was not clear whether this was accidental or deliberate. Her stage life had been dazzlingly brief and exotic. ‘She was a brilliant and most loveable creature,’ were Ngaio’s closing words in a collection of tributes, organized by Bruce Mason and published in Act magazine in 1970. The fictional stage that Martyn Tarne walked onto so effortlessly in Opening Night had never been there for Lenihan. She had so much potential and talent, but it was a gargantuan undertaking to break into an English theatre world driven by class and networks. Ngaio saw her death as a tragedy.