Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime

by Joanne Drayton

  The final bolt from the blue was news that Eileen Mackay had died. This death was immediate and personal because they had worked together so closely over the years, beginning with their collaboration on a children’s book, and ending with the script for False Scent. It was the loss of a friend and a cherished history. Ngaio was devastated.

  But there had been events and milestones to celebrate, too. In March, she had put on a luncheon at Marton Cottage for Lady Freyberg, the widow of former Governor-General and much-decorated soldier Lord Bernard Freyberg. Just a party of either 8 or 10’ guests, Ngaio wrote in an invitation to Gerald Lascelles, ‘so don’t get yourself involved in a cause célèbre but do come & be the son of the house once more’. In the absence of family, Gerald was her surrogate son in New Zealand.

  There had been her opening speech at Evelyn Page’s retrospective exhibition at the National Art Gallery in Wellington, and, in September, Agatha Christie’s 80th birthday had been celebrated around the world. Christie was still writing. In the early hours of the morning, Ngaio was linked by satellite to London and interviewed by the BBC. Unfortunately, the interviewer organized for the event failed to turn up at the studio and a technician was roped in. His first question was: ‘So what do you think of Agatha Christie’s Lord Peter Wimsey?’ Ngaio gaped like a goldfish, not knowing quite what to say, and the interview went from bad to worse. But it was a technological undertaking that underlined the changes the world had seen in her lifetime. In the late 1920s she had taken a dilapidated coal-fired steamer to England; now she was being beamed there on radio waves.

  There were now just two Queens of Crime left alive. In December 1957, Dorothy Sayers had died suddenly of a heart attack, at the age of 64. She was working on a translation of ‘Paradiso’, the third volume of Dante’s Inferno. Sayers had been out shopping and was found at the bottom of her staircase surrounded by Christmas gifts. She had long since given up writing about Lord Peter Wimsey, but took the real mystery of her illegitimate son to her grave. Margery Allingham had died more slowly and sadly of breast cancer in June 1966. A Cargo of Eagles, the crime novel she was writing, was completed by her husband, Philip Youngman Carter, and published in 1968. He wrote two more Campion novels before stopping in 1970. Christie was still writing a novel a year. Ngaio’s rate was a novel every 18 months to two years, but this picked up rather than diminished as she directed fewer plays in her last years.

  Tied Up in Tinsel proved more difficult to finish than Ngaio expected. In February 1971, the ‘new’ book needed just ‘3,000 words & a week’s hard concentration, but can I get into it? No: It will have to be finished during the voyage I fear.’ She was planning another trip to England.

  ‘I do wish that you could come to New York to enjoy our spring or even our autumn. It would be heavenly to see you again,’ wrote Dorothy Olding. These words were the spur for Ngaio to try very hard to get a ship to England via New York, but this was impossible in the timeframe. ‘I’m sorry you can’t find a ship,’ Olding responded. ‘We would all love to have you here again, much more than you know.’ They planned to meet in London anyway. Olding would be there on business, arriving just two days after Ngaio, and she was prepared to change her tickets to fit around her author’s schedule. ‘I most certainly will want to see you very early in my stay (at the Connaught),’ she told Ngaio when their arrangements were more settled, ‘preferably dinner and a nice long evening.’ They planned to meet on the 17th, 18th or 19th of May, depending on Ngaio’s availability.

  Ngaio’s friend Bessie Porter moved into Marton Cottage to look after the cats, and, after a week-long stay with the McIntoshes who had returned to Wellington, Ngaio left from Auckland on the Orsoua on 3 April. In Sydney, they picked up flood-contaminated water that began a gastric scourge of the ship. Ngaio was sick and on a ‘dose of 6 antibiotic pills every 4 hours & a drench in a bottle that made one as sick as a cat’. She was not well again until after Cape Town, but the remainder of the journey was ‘enchanting’.

  She arrived in London in spring when the city sparkled and looked its best. Initially, she stayed at her favourite Basil Street Hotel. Once again she faced agents’ and publishers’ meetings, mixed with ‘exhaustive flat-hunting’—and her rendezvous with Dorothy Olding. The chemistry between the women had lain dormant since New York in 1960, but their meeting again in London a decade later proved as memorable and dynamic as their last. ‘I so much hated you going that I suddenly jibbed at walking out on the pavement & then thought how damn silly & made after you,’ Ngaio wrote. But just at that moment she was called back into the hotel to take a telephone call, and when she returned to the street Olding had gone. Ngaio began plotting a longer encounter. She arranged to travel by ship with Dorothy from Nassau in the Bahamas through the Panama Canal, with stopovers in Acapulco and San Francisco.

  In London, Ngaio headed for her stamping ground of the early 1960s, taking a three-room basement flat at 5 Montpelier Walk, in Knightsbridge. It was ‘very small & like every last—hovel in this area—fiendishly expensive’, but she delighted in the ‘leafy little square & walking down the darling little streets to my old shops’. There was Capri, her Italian grocery, and a ‘wine shop whose family greeted me as if I’d only been away for the weekend’. For the first time Ngaio noticed the difference in exchange rates and cost of living between New Zealand and Britain. ‘There’s no denying it’s very very expensive here. Food, rents, fares—everything had spiralled like crazy.’

  The year before, she had had another tax scare. Her tax was difficult to keep track of. In the United States, she paid an alien tax of 30 per cent in the dollar, and there were national differences in currency and tax laws. Agatha Christie had tax troubles, too, magnified by the same problem of worldwide sales. Ngaio Marsh Ltd paid for Ngaio’s tickets to England and her upkeep, but costs were high and her income subject to flux. Ngaio felt financially vulnerable now and watched what she spent.

  She was aware, too, of time slipping away. Her Danish publisher, Samleren, invited her to Copenhagen for a fortnight. This was ‘another great chunk out of precious, precious time’ that she had paid for in London. Ngaio wanted her Copenhagen visit shortened, but in the end thoroughly enjoyed her all-expenses-paid stay at one of the city’s most exclusive hotels. There was a succession of television, radio and press interviews, but her trip to Kronborg Castle near the town of Helsingør, immortalized as Elsinore in Hamlet, was unforgettable. She left feeling her Danish sojourn had been ‘a huge success’.

  One of the tasks she returned to was Tied Up in Tinsel. The book had been a struggle. In mid-June, she promised Dorothy Olding she would look at it again and possibly ‘shorten the 1st part a bit’. It was another month before she handed the finished manuscript to her agents. Reaction to the book was subdued, and she was asked to make revisions. Ned Bradford of Little, Brown in Boston was almost alone in his enthusiasm. He instantly offered her a contract on the usual terms of $10,000 advance against a royalty of 15 per cent. Collins also confirmed their commitment, and publication was set on both sides of the Atlantic for early 1972. The typescript was sent out to serializing magazines and distributing publishers. Serial rights were sold to the Woman’s Journal, but the general response was that, in style and setting, it was too dated and English.

  Ngaio worked on the revisions until early August, when Lord Ballantrae and his wife invited her to visit them in Scotland. Ballantrae was Sir Bernard Fergusson, Governor-General of New Zealand from 1962 to 1967, and later Baron Ballantrae of Auchairne and the Bay of Islands. Ngaio had met the Fergussons through Doris and Alister McIntosh and they became firm friends. ‘Bernard & Laura were both in wonderful form. What a lovely, friendly, shabby old house it is & what dears they are.’ In spite of his 30-year career as a soldier and the demands of public life, Lord Ballantrae was a published author, military historian and romantic, and this was his link to Ngaio. Her visit to Scotland consolidated their friendship, and in the future she would confide in him about her books. He was a t
alented man with a pedigree that appealed. This was a friendship she cultivated.

  When Ngaio returned to London, she began work on yet another novel dramatization: of When in Rome. ‘I must say I still think the book is an extraordinary choice…& I have many doubts about the outcome,’ she explained to Doris McIntosh. This time Ngaio collaborated with travel book and script writer Barbara Toy. Hughes Massie, Ngaio’s literary agents in Britain, initiated the project. Even when Ngaio departed for a ‘double cruise’ in the Mediterranean in mid-October, she took her secretary Joan Pullen so that she could work on the dramatization. ‘Talk about a working holiday! I…worked on the play every morning [Joan] typed in the afternoon & I revised in the evening.’ Back in London Toy worked, too, and when Ngaio returned they burned the midnight oil to bring it to completion.

  On 8 December, Ngaio set sail from Southampton aboard the Oronsay, ‘with more than the usual regrets’ about a visit that had been rushed and frustrating. The voyage back that she had planned with Dorothy Olding had its wild moments of compensation. Olding was concerned about monopolizing Ngaio’s time. ‘All I can say to that,’ she replied, ‘is the more you monopolise it the better I shall like it.’ Ngaio attempted to get a cabin closer to her friend’s, and on one ‘exhausting’ but memorable evening together they went out to ‘three parties in one night’. But Dorothy Olding, 15 years younger than Ngaio, noticed the age difference. A colleague wrote to Olding, hoping the trip ‘wasn’t all busman’s Holiday’. Privately, Olding admitted that the voyage was restful, but she was surprised to find Ngaio ‘really quite frail & more than a little deaf. Also, she came down with the ship’s chest and was laid low for several days.’

  Ngaio was feeling her age and finding trips overseas increasingly demanding, but Anita Muling and Marjorie Chambers were on the wharf to meet her when she returned, and she had a ‘happy arrival into the arms of my old Crawsie’. Sylvia Fox, who had been her housekeeper in England, flew back to New Zealand rather than taking the boat and ‘arrived hot on my heels’. ‘Syl looks a bit exhausted after her 3 day hop with only one stop at Los Angeles, but says she feels grand.’

  On her first day home, Nekko-San, her cat, followed her constantly, Every time she sat down the cat leapt up, ‘all 2 stone of him’, and began kneading her lap with ‘loud purrs & much dribbling’. Apart from the fact that Bessie Porter had eaten almost everything in the deep freeze—‘Gallons of steak. Several fowls’, three curries, mulberries, casseroles, preserved fruit…and the list went on—it was good to be home. The weather in January was settled, and ‘so one takes up the familiar routine’.

  Almost immediately, there were discussions about Ngaio directing the inaugural production for the James Hay Theatre in the new Christchurch Town Hall. It was a tempting offer, but she decided to take her time and think about it. This would be a huge undertaking and she was not sure she was physically up to it. By April she had accepted the commission: ‘Henry V is on in Sept. or Oct. God help us.’ She agreed on the basis that Helen Holmes, a player of old and now her assistant, was able to carry much of the administrative weight. But, at 77, could Ngaio cope with the stresses and strains? This was not a student production but something approaching professional theatre, which required experienced repertory players. As auditions were organized, everyone wondered how Ngaio would hold up, but once in the director’s chair she was ‘again that vital, sensitive, determined, decisive, enthusiastic, joyfully intense force that we knew of old’. She was every bit as tireless and exacting in her search for best actor for the role as ever. ‘I hope most ardently that Jonathan Elsom may come out to play Chorus,’ she wrote to Doris McIntosh. In the meantime, she had 100 actors to audition for about 30 speaking parts.

  Ngaio’s old friend Olivia Spencer Bower was one of those who auditioned. She had been at Marton Cottage for lunch with Ngaio, who, out of the blue, asked her why she did not try for a part.

  ‘Don’t be so silly,’ I said, ‘I’m too old—I haven’t acted for years.’

  ‘Well, read the play again,’ she replied.

  Of course I did & I auditioned & got the part of Alice.

  Because the James Hay Theatre was new, there were no costumes and props from previous productions, so these had to be purchased or hired and Ngaio ‘hardly expected to break even’. The 1,000-seat theatre, however, looked ‘more & more exciting’ as it approached completion. As they rehearsed solidly for eight weeks, it was ‘hectic beyond measure’. ‘Rehearsals going reasonably well,’ Ngaio wrote in a rushed letter to Doris McIntosh in August, ‘but all sorts of side alarms almost continuous. Jonathan E. arrived & lovely to have him.’

  Ngaio had a plan for the opening night. Stall seats were booked for the McIntoshes, who were flying down to see the inaugural performance. Ngaio urged them not to be late, as those who arrived after the beginning would not be admitted until Scene Three. ‘I couldn’t bear you to miss Jonathan’s opening Chorus which is I hope going to pack a considerable surprise.’ On opening night the curtain rose and out onto a misted blue stage walked William Shakespeare: the Bard himself would play Chorus. The audience gasped, clapped spontaneously, and as Jonathan Elsom stepped forward he could only hope there would be quiet for his opening lines. The applause died away, and for the first time in public on that new stage Shakespeare’s words were spoken:

  O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend

  The brightest heaven of invention,

  A kingdom for a stage…

  The audience was captivated, the actors were electrified, the director had pulled off a coup: Ngaio’s three-cornered world was working in perfect unison. ‘I was lost in admiration of much of it,’ wrote Bruce Mason in an ecstatic letter to Ngaio, ‘the Droeshout idea [a reference to the famous portrait of Shakespeare] was inspired, and brilliantly executed by Jonathan…The opening was quite unforgettable: a brilliant idea, and astonishing and dazzling.’ Mason was in the audience reviewing the inaugural performance for the Listener. This response was echoed in many of the other published reviews. As Olivia Spencer Bower told a friend, ‘Every seat was taken for the full 2 weeks but the place was booked so we had to stop.’

  The production was blighted by teething difficulties, however. ‘All I can say is…the James Hay theatre must have the jaws and dental equipment of a dinosaur,’ Ngaio told Mason, in response to his letter. Their achievement had been against technical odds. At each performance there were anxieties about the fire curtain, and one night the audience waited an hour for it to rise.

  By mid-November the financial results of Henry V were available. ‘We made a net profit of $12,000,’ Ngaio announced to Doris McIntosh, ‘a staggering result from a 10 day season & pretty hefty costs on the production.’ This was a ‘gratifying’ outcome, and Ngaio was warm in her thanks to cast and crew. In October, she sent a ‘round-robin’ letter to those she felt had made it possible. Annette Facer’s read: ‘Throughout the rehearsal period, the very difficult and all too short preliminary days in the theatre and the season itself, you were the sort of company that a director dreams of but very seldom sees.’ Ngaio saw their success as a ‘corporate achievement’ that had come out of their combined efforts and spirit.

  As usual, Ngaio had stopped a book in mid-flow to direct the production. She had begun Black As He’s Painted not long after she arrived back in Christchurch, but the novel had started ambivalently as she tossed up whether it should be set on a boat at sea or in London. In the end, London won. The setting was Knightsbridge, and more specifically Montpelier Walk, where she had lived with Jonathan Elsom in 1960-61 and on her most recent trip to England.

  The basement flat had brought back memories of the little cat she and Elsom had adopted, so Lucy Lockett would become a central character in Black As He’s Painted, and an agent in the murderer’s undoing. The real Lucy had been given to Ngaio and Elsom by their housekeeper, ‘a Miss Gordon-Lennox,’ Elsom recalls, ‘and, I think a member of the Cats Protection League’. Lucy had been discovered wandering round West
minster.

  Lucy was black, sleek, and enchanting with a small white ‘bib’ under her chin, and when I was about to depart for an acting career in Southwold and then Dundee, and Ngaio was soon to sail off for NZ…I arranged…a new home with a little spinster, a Miss Clinch (retired Headmistress) friend of my ‘adopted family’ down in Burgh Heath (Surrey). Lucy lived on for many years after, and I’d renew acquaintance when I visited my ‘family’ in Surrey.

  Lucy was named after a character in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. ‘Ngaio always said Lucy was “no better than she oughta be”—it seemed a suitable name for our little cat with loose morals.’

  It is Mr Whipplestone who finds Lucy Lockett in Black As He’s Painted: she is wandering around Capricorn Walk. Just before the book’s publication, Ngaio received a memo from Collins publishers in London: ‘I have a sneaking feeling that Capricorn stands pretty much for Montpelier, with the street, square, mews, etc., and that the Oratory is none other than the Brompton Oratory. Am I right? If so, we could make a rough map of that particular area substituting Capricorn for Montpelier.’ The recently retired Mr Whipplestone is walking along Capricorn Mews and into Capricorn Place. As the traffic noise rages around him, he realizes ‘that he himself must now get into bottom gear and stay there, until he was parked in some subfuse [sic] lay-by’ and finally towed away. Suddenly a cat, thin and black, flashes in front of him, then there is the inevitable screech of brakes and a ‘blot of black ink’ on the pavement. A group of louts laugh at the neat little heap. Mr Whipplestone stops, leans down and, in a flash, the cat leaps into his arms and is ‘clinging with its small claws and—incredibly—purring’. It has blue eyes and is black, except for the last ‘two inches’ of its tail, which are snow white.