The Search for Anne Perry

by Joanne Drayton

  An anxious Imogen Taylor from HarperCollins in Hammersmith, London, contacted Ruth Needham at the MBA office for instructions. Already, they were being hounded for an official response to the story. ‘Here … is the fax we received from Jeremy Flint at the Christchurch Star this morning. I passed it to Nick Sayers who … would be most grateful to know as soon as possible what line we should take with the press in general.’43 In response, Lynne Kirwin sent an official statement.

  This event was over forty years ago and since then Anne has slowly rebuilt a life for herself and her family. We can only ask you now not to destroy it. She does not seek to deny what happened, and she never has. But she is deeply grieved at the distress that this will cause to her family and friends, who have given her such unstinting love and support over the years. For their sakes she had hoped that these events could remain in the past.44

  Lynne Kirwin added that if there was anything HarperCollins felt unable to handle, they were to contact her.

  When Meg returned from Wales she was hit by an avalanche of correspondence and messages, among them letters from publishing colleagues. Anne’s editor at HarperCollins, Susan Opie, wrote:

  I hope that you had a good break, if indeed break is what it turned out to be. You’ll have been talking to Nick, I know, about all the news, but I would just like to add that we are keeping our fingers crossed that Anne will be all right. She seems to have come through so much, I’m sure that she can get through this, too.45

  And Imogen Taylor said:

  I just wanted to write and say how sorry I am to see all the press reports on Anne Perry. Very tough for her, and pretty difficult for you too. She’s an extraordinary woman of course, with tremendous will and great faith, so I’m sure she’ll pull through, but it must be a bitter blow all around.46

  There were many requests for interviews, among them a letter from David Lomas, producer of the New Zealand current affairs television programme 60 Minutes, promising a 15-minute segment of the show, which screened in prime time at 7.30pm on Sunday. ‘Anne Perry’s story is of considerable interest in New Zealand with the release this month of a movie on the Parker–Hulme murder trial. Also in the last two years there has been a stage play and a book about the murder.’47

  This application was declined, along with requests from Oprah Winfrey, the Gerry Ryan Tonight Show in Dublin and the magazines Who: Weekly and the Australian Time and Life. But Oprah Winfrey was seriously considered by Meg and Kim Hovey, who were working together on the publicity fallout. The long-distance relationship was rocky at times, but they were united in their interest in Oprah Winfrey, who was completely revamping her old-style television talk show to make it more substantial and less sensational. Kim researched the changed programme format after the departure from the show of long-time producer Debra DiMaio. ‘I’m not going to be able to spend from now until the year 2000 talking to people about their dysfunction,’ Oprah announced to People magazine in December 1994. ‘Yes, we are dysfunctional. Now, what are we willing to do to change it?’48 Although Anne was a perfect fit for the new show, and although ‘one appearance on Oprah could make a book a bestseller’,49 Meg and Kim decided against it because the new format was largely untested. They agreed to interviews for USA Today and People magazines, and an article appeared in the German magazine Der Spiegel. Anne made appearances on NBC television’s morning news programme, The Today Show, and weekly news magazine Dateline, and on the National Public Radio’s Fresh Air programme, which was syndicated to 450 radio stations across the United States.

  As time went on more interviews were added, including one for the ABC’s 20/20 programme and an important interview with John Darnton of the New York Times. Anne spoke coherently and well in the interviews, but behind the front she was fragile. Meg worried about suicide, and Anne remembers black days when she could hardly function or get herself out of bed. After Lynne Kirwin was released from her role as emergency PR agent, all responsibility for handling publicity fell on MBA and Ballantine.

  Each interview was an ordeal, and inevitably Anne was ‘forced to pick over the scars’, but she was an adept public speaker and this was a matter of survival as an author.50 And some were a success, such as her 20/20 interview with Barbara Walters, which aired on 19 February 1995. ‘I’m so pleased you thought the 20/20 piece went all right,’ said Meg to Ken Sherman. ‘I’m waiting to get an English-video copy from the ABC. Anne is good at these things, but I’m glad she didn’t show the strain she’s been under. I’m also much relieved I didn’t look as terrified as I was — although from the sound of it I look at least 10 years younger than I am.’51 Barbara Walters finished her segment with inimitable style, saying: ‘Boy, I never read her before. I sure want to now.’52

  But negotiating the media and managing Anne’s state of mind became a point of friction between Meg and Ballantine. Meg was anxious to protect her client’s psychological well-being, while Ballantine was concerned to get her story out to the American people who represented 56 per cent of her readership. Kim announced to Meg that a journalist from the New York Times was travelling to interview Anne in Portmahomack. Meg, who wanted to keep Anne calm and was hoping for a more comprehensive article in the New Yorker, rang and cancelled the arrangement. Kim and her colleague, who was in charge of publicity for Ballantine on the west coast, ‘did their nut with me and un-cancelled him’. As Heavenly Creatures opened in London on Friday, 10 February 1995, and was about to go nationwide, ‘media interest has got to screaming pitch,’ Meg told Don Maass.

  It’s a hell of a strain. Anne’s bruised and exhausted, & the journalists just want to re-hash it all. But it’s so difficult to turn down publicity, when we’ve been trying so long to build Anne, and on the other hand I’m seriously scared of selling her down the river. The bloody press lie and wheedle.53

  Most years Anne made two United States tours, one in spring and another in fall, and although three books were published in 1994 — The Hyde Park Headsman, Traitor’s Gate and The Sins of the Wolf (the new Monk title) — only the first two were intended to tour. This was a huge relief for Ballantine, because it meant they had more time to plan Anne’s spring trip in March 1995.

  The Sins of the Wolf, which came out in the midst of the revelations about her identity, was a personal book for Anne. Hester Latterly comes to the fore in this story when she answers an advertisement in a London newspaper. A prominent Edinburgh family is looking for a young woman of good character to accompany elderly Mary Farraline from Edinburgh to London. ‘One of Miss Nightingale’s ladies would be preferred’ because Mrs Farraline’s health is precarious. The position is perfect for Hester, who immediately purchases a second-class ticket on an overnight train to Scotland to pick up her charge.

  In Edinburgh, ‘the Athens of the North’, Hester meets the Farralines, who are Scottish publishing magnates and yet another overly privileged, dysfunctional family. But this does not stop Hester accompanying the elderly woman in a first-class carriage on the overnight train to London, or administering her essential medicine. On the journey Mary Farraline reveals herself to be a person of depth and character. ‘What an unpredictable faculty memory is. The oddest things will bring back times and places we had long thought lost in the past,’ she tells Hester.

  When Hester wakes as the train is coming into London she is cold and stiff, but not as cold and stiff as Mary Farraline. Hester calls out, asking if she has slept well. There is no reply. She touches the old lady’s shoulder, which is frozen and unyielding. Her face is white, her eyes are shut. Mary Farraline has been dead all night. A sad, shocked Hester must call the stationmaster immediately.

  Although the death will make a wretched blot on her curriculum vitae, it is the pearl-encrusted pin belonging to Mary Farraline found in her possession that has Hester thrown into jail for theft, and then murder when the toxicology report shows that Mary has been poisoned. Once again, Anne makes use of her own experience. She knows Hester’s cell, ‘ten or eleven feet square, with a cot on o
ne side and … a single high, barred window’, and the women prisoners belonging to a different social class and none of them guilty.

  Anne knows, too, that Monk is right when he contemplates the wardress’s attitude to Hester. ‘She would hate her also for not having lived up to the privilege with which she was born. To have been given it was bad enough, to have betrayed it was beyond excusing.’ In prison Hester finds there is no privacy: ‘it was both totally isolated and yet open at any time to intrusion’. On the way to court Hester’s prison van is heckled by angry mobs. She can hear the newsboy shouting out the headline about her and the crowd calling for her execution. But the hardest thing is the silence she must assume:

  Connal Murdoch was talking about meeting Hester in the stationmaster’s office. It was an extraordinary thing to stand and hear it recounted through someone else’s eyes and be unable to speak to correct lies and mistakes.

  Oliver Rathbone brings his brilliant legal talent to Hester’s defence, and Monk his super sleuthing skills, which take him as far as Mary Farraline’s croft in Portmahomack. His journey there is intrepid. He rows across the Moray Firth, hires a horse and puts in a solid ride before he stops in wonder. ‘He could see mountains beyond mountains, almost to the heart of Scotland: blue, purple, shimmering white at the peaks against the cobalt sky … It was vast. He felt as if he could see almost limitlessly.’

  Anne dedicated The Sins of the Wolf to ‘Kimberley Hovey for her help and friendship’. Kim’s continued friendship was important to Anne, as were her marketing skills. In spite of all the negative publicity circulating around the murder, Anne’s books continued to sell, and Kim was a vital part of the team that achieved it. ‘Wonderful to see Anne on the Publishers Weekly bestseller list!’ Meg wrote to Kim in September. ‘I’ve been waiting for this moment for years — and now can’t wait to get to the next rung up! Thank you very much again for your part in making this happen.’54 And to Don: ‘HOORAY FOR US!!! PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BESTSELLER LIST!!!’55 Ballantine’s support had been vital. ‘I just want to thank you so much for everything you’ve done for Anne,’ she wrote to Leona. ‘Besides publishing her superbly … it’s also been great to feel the support of the company as well.’56

  Leona supported Anne and her crime writing, but ‘Tathyr’ was another matter. In November Meg told Don that she had broken the news to Anne that ‘Leona doesn’t like the book and feels the characters could use some more work’. She had reassured Anne that it was more a case of editing than starting from scratch, but there were now implications for the publishing schedule. Perhaps it was time to think about ‘selling the book elsewhere’.57 To Meg’s relief, Don rang Anne overnight. ‘A BIG thank you for talking with Anne yesterday in such a way that I didn’t have a suicidal author on the phone last night! And for promising to look at TATHYR later on and coming up with some ideas.’58

  Meg also sent Don a pile of fax notes about Anne’s French Revolution novel for his comment. ‘Please let me know if you can’t read them — they were mostly made while we were in the car driving through the countryside! Anne seemed to think better that way. There’s piles more notes, plus a plot outline and several drawings to the “shape” of the book, which I don’t have copies of.’59 Anne was under strict instructions from Meg to send her a complete chapter breakdown before she began to write.

  Anne still found non-crime books difficult to plot. ‘I’m not a good plot constructor. My early historical novels are a shambolic rambling; I used to put in all the research that interested me. With crime novels, you can’t waste time.’60 Although her primary interests in the historical novels were context and characterization, murder tended now to creep in as a stabilizer to structure her storyline, as her French Revolution novel would prove.

  Meg was negotiating a deal with Prince Edward’s television company, Ardent, for the Monk series. She announced the news to Don in mid-November: ‘The Prince had had to be informed, of course, of Anne’s past; maybe they even had a natter about it at the Palace! Life just gets stranger.’61 Edward was generous in his response to Anne’s background, reassuring them that he felt she had paid her dues for the crime.

  Meg was also helping to organize a 10,000-word piece on Anne for the New Yorker by Robert McCrum, editor-in-chief for Faber & Faber, and a novelist and poet. ‘We had a very good preliminary chat yesterday … it’s a general article and good for her profile. And, happily, Anne meets … Prince Edward next Wednesday. All very exciting!’62 As she told Ken Sherman, ‘I’d never aspired to Anne being discussed in high-brow circles!’63

  One of the books Anne was working on when her identity was revealed was Cain His Brother, published in 1995 and ‘dedicated to the people of Portmahomack for their kindness’. Perhaps more than anything else, this novel encapsulated how she felt at the time. It is 1859, and a bitterly cold January, when Genevieve Stonefield visits Monk’s offices to enlist his help. Her husband has gone missing and she must find him dead or alive. She has five children to support, and a business she cannot dispose of until Angus Stonefield is found.

  The awful possibility is that his twin brother, Caleb, has killed him. For while Angus lives in Mayfair and is a prominent businessman and a ‘pillar of respectability and orderly family life’, Caleb lives in Blackwall and ‘survives by theft, intimidation and violence’. Ultimately, Caleb — who is murderously jealous of his brother’s perfect life — is arrested for killing him.

  While Hester, Monk’s benefactor Callandra and other philanthropic women run a makeshift typhoid hospital in the seedy Limehouse district of London, Monk is engaged in a flirtatious romance with the ravishing Drusilla Wyndham. After meeting by chance on the steps of the Geographic Society in Sackville Street, they see each other a number of times before Drusilla suddenly tears her gown, scratches wildly at her flesh and leaps screaming from their hansom cab. This happens in front of a crowd emerging from a Mayfair party, and Drusilla’s performance suggests that Monk is forcing himself on her. Monk is shocked. ‘One moment they had been the closest of companions, happy and at ease; the next she had changed as if she had ripped off a mask and exposed something hideous, a creature filled with hatred.’

  In his desolation he goes to Hester, who immediately takes his side, working out an amusing scheme to reverse the toxicity of Drusilla’s vengeful plan. The effect of Hester’s support is subtle but profound. ‘Nothing had changed. Yet now he no longer stood alone. That took the despair away, the very worst of the pain.’ As Monk investigates, he discovers Drusilla is someone from his past whose life has been ruined by his callous ambition. Oliver Rathbone has the compassion to understand how Monk must feel. He can just imagine ‘the bitter horror of living inside a man you did not know. The one thing which in all eternity you could never escape was yourself.’

  Monk’s efforts to untangle the complex relationship between the good and evil Stonefield twins take him to the Berkshire village of Chilverley, where he meets the vicar, Reverend Nicolson, who has known the Stonefield family for decades. There is a seat and a vast estate. But Angus turns out to be the illegitimate and only son of Phineas Ravensbrook — so who is Caleb? Could they be the same person? When the case comes before the court, Reverend Nicolson suggests a solution to the coroner:

  Is it not possible that in his unhappiness, and his feeling of rejection, obligation and loneliness, that the boy created an alternative self … might it not begin as an escape within the imagination of an unhappy child’s hurt and humiliation?

  Listening to the proceedings, Monk thinks that ‘perhaps no one else in the room could feel so deeply and with such an intimate pity for a man divided against himself, forever in fear of a dark half he did not know’. Anne also knew what it was like to have two identities, good and evil. ‘I don’t think the world is ever going to forget that I am both of these people … It’s not ever going to go away,’ she told Robert McCrum.64

  Anne refused to see Heavenly Creatures: she regarded it as a ‘grotesque and distorted portrait of herself’
made by ‘idiotic moviemakers’.65 From reports she had heard about the film, she felt it made two-dimensional caricatures of her family, especially her mother. Anne’s life had been turned upside down by a film that had been made, as she pointed out, without her knowledge or support. ‘What others see as fair and objective is not [the] way you see yourself,’ she explained in interviews.66 ‘There is a good deal of fantasy in the film — which is the film-maker’s self expression.’67

  Her life had been used creatively by Peter Jackson. ‘I ask people to bear in mind that it is necessarily fiction in part,’ read the draft of her official statement on Heavenly Creatures.68 Here was her ‘most painful event’ translated into popular art and projected on the big screen. ‘Most people in the developed world came to hear about’ the film and the revelation of her identity.69 As she explained, ‘it’s like having some disfigurement and being stripped naked and set up in the High Street for everyone to walk by and pay their penny and have a look. I would like to put my clothes on and go home, please, be like anybody else.’70

  Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, on the other hand, believed they had made a compassionate contribution to a revisionist view of the case. ‘These two girls had been demonized in the press and we wanted to know who they were and why they did it, not turn them into monsters,’ Fran Walsh told a reporter for the New York Post.71 ‘If we had any agenda, it was to show they were human beings and to find out what really happened.’ They had used material that was already largely in the public domain to re-examine the vilification of two teenagers. ‘It’s too bad this has deteriorated to cross fire in the press … we wanted to tell their story from a humanitarian perspective to New Zealanders who’ve seen the girls as monsters all this time.’72 Anne’s inflexible attitude and her hurt-filled, ill-informed comments made Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh bridle with indignation. ‘In all the interviews we’ve done for the movie, we’ve treated her with absolute respect. And while it’s clear she has no respect for us.’73 The version of events Anne was presenting to media appeared to undermine their own work and felt like a conscious act of sabotage.