Josephine Tey

by Jennifer Morag Henderson

  She was not alone, however. As a contract writer, she had to work with several other writers, and the script was soon found to be problematic.12 Melville Baker is given the main credit on the final film, but shooting started before the script was even finalized, and, as Stewart and Sullavan’s chemistry became clear, three other writers were brought in: Doris Anderson, Rose Franken and Preston Sturges. Baker, Anderson and Franken all had solid careers in scriptwriting and re-writing, but were never names to conjure with. Preston Sturges, on the other hand, was one of the first modern writer/directors to emerge in Hollywood – he was to become an Oscar-winning writer, who specialized in the witty, fast-paced screwball comedies of the 1930s and later worked with Howard Hughes.

  Next Time We Love did not too badly at the box office and gained good reviews for its stars. It was adapted for American radio three times, in 1938, 1948 and 1951 – in the first adaptation, Margaret Sullavan reprised her screen role, whilst Jimmy Stewart did the same in the 1951 production.

  The continued success of Preston Sturges, Jimmy Stewart, and the other people who collaborated on this film gives an intriguing glimpse of where Daviot’s writing career could have taken her. Gordon’s love of cinema didn’t leave her after her short experience as a scriptwriter. Late in 1936 she was still pursuing her interest in film, spending a day visiting John Gielgud on the set of Alfred Hitchcock’s Secret Agent.13 Gordon found the slow pace of on-set film-making and acting boring, though her love of films themselves was not diminished. After the Second World War, Gordon’s friend Lena remembered that ‘a large box of chocolates and a visit to the cinema embodied Gordon’s idea of bliss. If the chocolates were from Barbellion and the star of the film Danny Kaye the bliss was transcended.’14 Beth MacKintosh’s family were convinced that, if she had lived, the next step in her writing career would have taken her back to writing for Hollywood.15

  However, the collaborative part of scriptwriting was not something that Daviot enjoyed, and neither was it where her strengths lay. It was also logistically difficult, since she was still based in Inverness. If Gordon was to work again for Hollywood, or return to it later, she wanted to do so on her own terms. In later life, she had the possibility to do that with the plots of her hugely popular Josephine Tey novels, but in 1936 what the experience of Next Time We Love had given her was the idea for her next book, the first novel to be published in the UK under the name ‘Josephine Tey’. A Shilling for Candles features Hollywood actresses and screenwriters, and a glimpse of the world that Beth was shown in Next Time We Love – and it was to take her back into the world of film when it was adapted by Alfred Hitchcock.

  The mid-1930s was still the period when Gordon Daviot’s career was in the ascendency. Queen of Scots had not been such a success as she hoped, but she was still in regular contact with her actress friends in London, regularly visiting them, and regularly receiving offers of work. A production of Richard of Bordeaux was now touring Australia, a new acting edition of the play was published, and she, or her agent, were receiving regular requests for permission to put on amateur productions of her plays.16 She had written a new play, to be called The Stars Bow Down, and discussions concerning its casting were already underway. There were, however, some problems starting to arise. 1935 was the first year since 1929 when Gordon did not have a new play or novel out. ‘I have had a grand year doing nothing’, she wrote cheerfully to her old Anstey room-mate Marjorie Davidson.17 It was not entirely true, as she was engaged in writing for Hollywood, but she felt no urgency to produce a new play. Her main aim wasn’t to earn money, or to maintain her profile, or even to have another hit. Her distance from London gave her the freedom to write for herself, for the love of writing. However, another complication arose when her agent, David Higham, broke away from his employer, the large agency Curtis Brown, to set up on his own.18 Gordon was happy to follow him and be part of his new agency, but Higham was, for now, specializing in literature. Over the next few years Gordon Daviot had to find different representation for her playwriting and her novels. This, along with the massive cast required, had an impact on the discussions surrounding her new play The Stars Bow Down – and helped her to return to crime fiction and the pen-name Josephine Tey.

  Beth’s experiences writing Next Time We Love had sparked A Shilling for Candles, a crime novel and sort-of sequel to The Man in the Queue – but the subject matter was very different from her ‘serious’ historical and literary plays and novels. She decided to have the novel published under the new pseudonym Josephine Tey, which she had probably first used or considered at the time of the publication of the US edition of The Man in the Queue. The name Josephine, of course, was taken from her mother, while she believed that Tey was the name of an English ancestor on her mother’s side of the family. Having traced back Beth’s family tree, I have not come across any ancestors called Tey – though, interestingly, there were some called ‘Fry’, and, in the old handwriting this was written in, it looked at first like ‘Tey’. Perhaps Beth (or her storytelling mother or grandmother) had made a mistake with the name.19 Beth herself said ‘Tey’ was the name of a Suffolk great-great grandmother, though, and the strong association with her mother – and with her favourite country, England – shows just how important Beth felt this strand of her writing was.

  In 1936 A Shilling for Candles was published, a crime novel written by Josephine Tey and featuring an Inspector Alan Grant. Those with long memories might have remembered that Alan Grant had first featured in The Man in the Queue by Gordon Daviot, but no publicised connection was made with the previous book. Even in 1960, the Pan paperback edition of the book still had ‘Inspector Grant’s first case’ emblazoned on its front cover. From now on ‘Gordon Daviot’ wrote plays, while ‘Josephine Tey’ wrote crime fiction novels. Much has been made of the distinction between the two names, but, rather than a conscious decision to separate her ‘serious’ and ‘light’ writing, the initial change may have had more than a little to do with the situation with her agent. The name ‘Josephine Tey’ had first shown up in that intriguing, undated note on her 1929 short story ‘Deborah’, so may have been in Beth’s mind for some time, and its clear associations with her mother’s family show that the name, and the work she produced under that name, was not in any way worth less to her than her more weighty literary novels or her plays. The new name also had the added advantage for Beth of concealing her identity once again. After the unpleasantness surrounding The Expensive Halo, with its too-close portrayal of her family, and the publicity and allegations of plagiarism surrounding Richard of Bordeaux, she could once again get on with what she enjoyed: writing.

  A Shilling for Candles returns to the free, accessible style of The Man in the Queue: unlike Queen of Scots or The Laughing Woman, Josephine Tey was not held back by the weight of research or the need to stick to a real-life story. She was free to embroider a plot around facts that she had come to know well: the Hollywood actresses and scriptwriters she had met or heard so much about during her time working on Next Time We Love, and the theatrical life she had become a part of since Richard of Bordeaux. A Shilling For Candles includes characters such as the actress Christine Clay, and Jay Harmer, the Jewish songwriter. Like The Man in the Queue, the novel opens with the discovery of a body, and, again like its predecessor, the book features an innocent man accused of the crime. A new type of character is introduced, however, in Erica Burgoyne, the daughter of the police chief. An unworldly (but not naive) young woman, she is convinced of Robert Tisdall’s innocence and helps him to prove that he did not kill actress Christine Clay. Gordon Daviot was to use this type of young woman in a later play to great effect, though personally I’ve always found Erica less appealing than some of her other characters: she is a girl written by a woman from memory of her own childhood, rather than, like Betty Kane in The Franchise Affair, from the perspective of a teacher who has taught a lot of adolescents.

  Another character, Marta Hallard, Grant’s actress friend, helps the reader
navigate through London’s West End and its relationship with Hollywood. This is a clear homage to Marda Vanne, who was beginning to assume more and more importance in Tey’s life.

  Fictional Christine Clay, the murdered actress at the centre of A Shilling for Candles, is married to Lord Edward Champneis (‘pronounced Chins’) introducing another stratum of society (and harking back to the aristocracy of The Expensive Halo), while Christine’s poor background and religious brother introduce other class distinctions. The wonderfully drawn journalist, Jammy Hopkins, whose slangy stream-of-consciousness contrasts vividly with Grant’s careful thought processes, shows Josephine Tey had the playwright and novelist’s ability to create characters and voices that were genuinely different from each other. Tey is exploring motivations in her crime fiction, and her characters are not projections of her own identity but carefully observed, differently motivated individuals. She does manage to introduce some of her own views into the book, however, and, although the plot is driven by the underlying need to find Christine’s killer, the story takes in tangents on widely varying topics from horoscopes to religion, in a manner that would have delighted Rhoda Anstey.

  A Shilling for Candles also has a link with Gordon Daviot’s own life in the strange will of Christine Clay. Apart from the ‘shilling for candles’ that inspires the title of the book, Clay leaves all her money to the National Trust, as Gordon Daviot was to do much later. Daviot was already making a considerable amount of money from her writing and, without the expense of a household of her own, she was already considering what to do with it. As early as 1940, Gordon Daviot made reference in letters to Gwen and Marda saying that she had signed away the profits of some of her writing to charity – and was having trouble with income tax because she had not filled in some forms correctly.20

  Erica Burgoyne’s unworldliness appealed to another reader, and provided a new link in the chain of movies that surround this period in Beth’s life. Alfred Hitchcock was drawn to the book, and adapted it for film. Despite his approaching Tey’s publishers with a view to involving the author in the film, this time, perhaps remembering her experiences with rewrites for Universal and the day on set observing Gielgud and Hitchcock, she refused to work on this adaptation and a team of screenwriters were employed. Josephine Tey had nothing to do with the making of the film. Hitchcock changed the title to Young and Innocent (and The Girl was Young in America), and Erica was made central to the plot, with secondary characters such as Christine’s brother disposed of entirely. Even Alan Grant doesn’t make it into Hitchcock’s version, and most of his policemen are inept, comedy figures. Young and Innocent is a man’s version of an ingénue, instead of Tey’s woman’s version, and Erica is not such a sturdy, sensible girl. The movie moves further and further away from Josephine Tey’s original plot until Erica drives her car into an old mineshaft and almost plunges to her doom, but there are some lines which are lifted in their entirety from A Shilling for Candles. This black and white film is good fun, and was Hitchcock’s own favourite from among his British films.21 In a way it provides another entry into Beth’s world, showing the fashions of her time; the clothes people wore (the hats stand out); the cars they drove; and the things they saw and did every day that were considered normal by the standards of the time. Hitchcock changed the identity of the murderer, and his film ends up at the Grand Hotel courtesy of a last-minute clue of a box of matches, where the evil ex-husband (a drummer in blackface) reveals himself with a maniacal laugh.

  ‘Based on the novel entitled A Shilling for Candles by Josephine Tey’ was emblazoned across the screen at the start of Young and Innocent, just under the title and the names of the stars, Nova Pilbeam and Derrick de Marney. Beth, sitting in the dark of one of Inverness’s cinemas, could see her success as a writer once again, quietly and without the press intrusion and madness of Richard of Bordeaux and London.

  Beth was visiting London regularly at this time, and there seemed no reason to think that her career wouldn’t continue in this fashion, but personal problems were starting to emerge. One of these problems was Marda. The fictional Marta Hallard is a wonderful character, a foil for Inspector Grant, an actress whose flaws the author sees clearly, a striking figure dressed to advantage in black and white. Despite her name, Marta is not a straight portrayal of Marda, but a mixture of many actresses and theatrical people Gordon now knew, from the talented Gwen to the well-dressed Dodie Smith. The real Marda was something different. Unlike Gwen, who wanted a committed and faithful relationship, Marda was promiscuous and challenging. She was far more open, within the confines of the time, about her sexuality than Gwen would ever be. As the daughter of wealthy, titled parents Marda had the confidence of the ruling class, and her status as an outsider was already established by her South African upbringing. After sloughing off her early marriage, and having stepped outwith her family and society’s moral code, she now felt that she could create her own rules to live by. There was no reason, in Marda’s world, to deny herself anything she wanted. If she liked a young girl, she would try to entice her into an affair. Angela du Maurier was one of the women she had an affair with. Gwen, resigned to Marda, sent them away together one weekend to Tagley Cottage, even preparing them a little food, since they were both hopelessly undomesticated. When Marda grew bored of the affair and moved on, Angela, still infatuated, altered her will in order to leave all her possessions to Marda. Marda, amused, remarked that Angela was not the first young lady to do that.22

  From around the middle of 1935, when Gordon was working hard on the script for Next Time We Love, Marda kept a diary, which she wrote in the form of a letter to Gordon.23 Marda began to convince herself that she was in love with Gordon, and wrote how desperately unhappy she was that Gordon was ignoring her. Gordon was oblivious to the romantic feelings she was inspiring in Marda, and the tension this was starting to cause with Gwen. The joint letters Gordon sent to Gwen and Marda around this time include cheerful mentions of her writing work, discussions of the weather and the plants in her garden, her walks around town and breezy thank-yous for the happy times they had spent together in London.24 Marda continued her diary-letter to Gordon from April 1935 until January 1936. Some time in 1936, the year of publication of A Shilling for Candles, Gordon visited London, and Marda showed her some of her writings, and thus declared her feelings.

  Marda chose to do this in a slightly roundabout way.25 She told Gordon that she was writing a book, a diary based on her experiences. Appealing to Gordon’s admiration for Gwen, she could show how she had lived through such interesting times that the book might appeal to the general reader. But the manuscript that Gordon received was a thinly disguised fiction, and mainly a description of how Marda felt about her.

  There is no doubt that Marda did seriously consider writing her memoirs. Her papers survive in parts amongst the Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies archive, and there are several attempts at writing a memoir preserved there. It would, however, have been a difficult one to publish, as she meant to tell the real story of her lesbian love affairs. There was precedent, with the 1928 publication of The Well of Loneliness, and Angela du Maurier’s own attempts to write a novel with similar themes, pleading for greater tolerance and understanding.

  Gordon Daviot’s handwritten reply to Marda after reading the diary is a masterpiece of restrained tact.26 Written from the Cowdray Club in London after a face-to-face meeting with Marda, Gordon chooses to believe Marda’s story that the diary is fictional and for publication, and treats it as a piece of literature, yet she also tries to gently explain to Marda that she is not only not interested in a relationship, but had not even contemplated the existence of such a relationship. ‘Dear Marda,’ she wrote,

  I have written the report on the diary extract as I should if I were a publisher’s reader [...]. I read it with interest and with an odd mixture of pleasure and regret. Pleasure in the good bits of writing, and regret that I should have been the unwitting cause of so much unhappiness. I have not often made people unhappy
. Put it down not to hard-heartedness nor lack of imagination, but to inability to deal with something so foreign to my understanding that the chatter of Martians would be limpid sense by comparison. So foreign that I have continually to be chastening my sub-conscious which insists on believing that no one really does feel like that!

  Gordon was tolerant of her friends’ sexuality but, as her own romantic history with Hugh shows, she herself was attracted to men. Private letters from Gordon to various friends, at various times, mention other men she found attractive. Jokingly, Beth says that she ‘left her heart behind’ after encountering some soldiers on a train, while in later letters she discusses male cinema stars she liked.27

  Alongside her letter to Marda, Gordon affixed a sheet of A4 with her handwritten ‘Reader’s Report on M.S.S. entitled MARCH’. ‘This is the diary,’ Gordon wrote, ‘kept by a woman unhappily in love, in an effort to rationalise her world, but the love affair, far from being the central theme, is merely the background and the refrain.’ Gordon recognized that Marda’s ‘love’ was not entirely about Gordon; a lot of it was about Marda, and how she perceived herself. Marda was used to the women she liked falling at her feet. Gordon’s ‘report’ continues its focus away from the ‘love affair’ by giving some extremely practical and commercial suggestions for improving the writing: ‘Characters who are introduced by name only should be amplified into pencil sketches, even if it is only by the old trick of the constant epithet’. The report shows how experienced a writer Gordon was. She knew what a publisher was looking for, and gives practical examples of how to change things, giving tricks to get over common beginners’ writing problems. As a report, it is far more interesting for what it reveals about Gordon’s approach to writing than what it reveals about her feelings, and, as such, it must have been very disappointing for Marda.