IN MAUGHAM’S LUGGAGE WAS his new play, Our Betters, which he had worked hard to complete, knowing how anxious Frohman had been to see it. But suddenly Frohman was no longer there. On May 1 he had sailed from New York on the Cunarder Lusitania, but seven days later, just off the Irish coast, the ship had been torpedoed with a loss of nearly two thousand lives, Charles Frohman’s among them. From the accounts of survivors it appears that the impresario had behaved with singular sangfroid, handing his life jacket to another passenger and remaining coolly on deck to finish his cigar. With a flourish that may owe more to journalistic flair than to fact, his last words were reported to have been a quotation from Peter Pan, “To die would be an awfully big adventure.” The news of Frohman’s death was a sad shock to Maugham, who had come to like and trust this dedicated man of the theater; there was, however, no time to lose in putting into action plans for the play’s production. “I am very glad to know12 that everything is to be continued just as though poor C.F. were still alive,” Maugham wrote to Frohman’s business partner, Al Hayman.
A lonely child, guarded and withdrawn.
Robert Maugham, hard-working legal adviser to the Paris Embassy.
The charming and beautiful Edith Maugham.
The Rev. Henry Maugham, “a far from intelligent cleric.”
Kindhearted Aunt Sophie.
Willie and his uncle outside the vicarage.
“Life was before him …”
Maugham as a pupil at the King’s School, Canterbury.
Willie, Charlie, and Harry Maugham at St. Moritz.
The acerbic F. H. Maugham in middle age.
The painter Gerald Kelly, a lifelong friend.
Kelly’s portrait of the irresistible Sue Jones.
Ethel Irving shocking audiences in Lady Frederick.
Gladys Cooper, Maugham’s favorite actress, in The Sacred Flame.
Syrie Wellcome, lively, stylish, and unstoppably ambitious.
The Maughams with Liza at Le Touquet.
Gerald Haxton, “charming but very naughty.”
Maugham leaving New York aboard RMS Aquitania.
Eddie Knoblock, Maugham, Hugh Walpole, and Gerald Haxton with Douglas Fairbanks in Hollywood.
A. S. Frere in his office at Heinemann.
Eddie Marsh, ruthless “diabolizer.”
The Villa Mauresque.
Maugham with Liza at her wedding to Vincent Paravicini.
Maugham and Haxton in Central Park, New York.
In the tradition of Restoration comedy, Our Betters follows the path set by Goldsmith and Sheridan but with a reach considerably extended, the twin pivots of the action not London and the country but England and the United States. Its world is that of the dollar princesses who migrated from America to marry into the more impoverished sections of the British upper class. Leader of this flamboyant flock is the fascinating Lady Grayston, who, bored by her dull baronet husband, consoles herself with a series of lovers, the current incumbent the millionaire Arthur Fenwick, owner of a chain of department stores. Pearl Grayston’s little sister, Bessie, has recently arrived in England, and Pearl plans to marry her off to young Lord Bleane. Bessie, however, has a mind of her own, and although initially dazzled by the splendor of her surroundings, is soon repelled by the cynicism, greed, and flagrant immorality of her wealthy compatriots and returns with relief to America.
Our Betters, “a dazzling icy glitter,”13 as one critic described it, is a highly polished, highly expert comedy of manners, chic, sophisticated, and extremely amusing—just the play, in fact, to appeal to a war-weary London public. Unfortunately, that public was to be denied it. The Foreign Office, nervous about upsetting the sensibilities of its most powerful potential ally, suddenly decided that such a depiction of transatlantic vulgarity was anti-American and banned it. Instead of being premiered in London, Our Betters opened in March 1917 in New York, where, ironically, it was a resounding success. Despite a few expressions of outrage at the immorality of the theme—“morally sordid” and “offensive” according to the New York Dramatic Mirror—critics loved it and audiences came flocking. Louis Kronenberger, later drama critic for Time magazine, wrote that “no playwright since Vanbrugh … had drawn so harsh and unredeemed a picture of London society as Maugham did in Our Betters … one of the best testimonials to American push ever written.” When in 1923 the play eventually arrived in London, it was rated just as highly. Desmond MacCarthy praised it as “mercilessly amusing,”14 while the influential James Agate acclaimed it “one of the most brilliant plays15 which has ever fallen from the pen of an English dramatist … a magnificent piece of satire, and the work of a master of the theatre.”
In the program for the London production of Our Betters there was printed a curious little note from the playwright: “Owing to various rumours16 which were circulated when the play was produced in America, the author wishes to state that the characters in it are entirely imaginary,” a statement owing more to a fear of libel than a respect for the truth. The “various rumours” that six years earlier had raced around New York referred to the close similarity between Arthur Fenwick, Lady Grayston’s lover, and Syrie’s lover, Gordon Selfridge, the department store tycoon. By his own later account Maugham had based the one on the other without troubling himself very much about differentiating between the two, even underlining the parallel by giving the fictional version the name of another big London store, Fenwick, and endowing him with all of Selfridge’s well-known bombast and sentimentality. Of these Maugham had learned during the long weeks when he and Syrie were in Rome awaiting the birth of Liza, and Syrie had told him stories about her former admirers, chief among whom was Selfridge. “She was very amusing17 about him,” it transpired. According to Syrie, “[Selfridge] had fallen madly in love with her and had offered to settle five thousand a year on her. She refused,” Maugham recorded, adding drily, “I did not know what to believe and what, with the hope of impressing me, she invented.” In the play the besotted old man lavishes presents and money on Lady Grayston, for which she has an insatiable appetite, but makes her wince by insisting on addressing her as “girlie”:
PEARL: I wish you wouldn’t call me girlie,18 Arthur, I do hate it.
FENWICK: That’s how I think of you…. I just say to myself, She’s my girlie, and I feel warm all over….
It did not pass unnoticed that Gordon Selfridge, a famous first-nighter, gave the first night of Our Betters a miss.
IF MAUGHAM HAD BELIEVED that by taking Syrie abroad he could keep their relationship undercover, he was soon to be disabused. After the acrimonious separation from his wife, Henry Wellcome had appeared to show little interest in her activities, indifferent to whom she saw or what she did as long as she behaved herself during those times when she had care of Mounteney. But in fact Wellcome was not indifferent, and his bitterness over Syrie’s departure had calcified over the years into a determination to divorce her as soon as the ideal opportunity arose. When Wellcome learned of Syrie’s affair with the celebrated playwright, he knew he had got her just where he wanted: Maugham was rich and he was unmarried,* and the scandal of being judged the guilty party in such a high-profile divorce should ensure the ruin of Syrie’s reputation forever. As early as January 1912 Wellcome’s lawyers had started gathering evidence, hiring private investigators to track the couple’s movements, for instance, at the Imperial Hotel, Hythe, where the two of them were observed spending the night, “[Mr. Maugham] and Mrs. Wellcome19 occupying adjoining bedrooms.” By the time Maugham and Syrie returned to London after the birth of Liza, Wellcome’s legal team was already in Rome collecting information, and with the help of the British consul, interviewing witnesses, including the nurses at the hospital and the English doctor who had attended “Mrs. Wells” during her confinement.
Maugham, meanwhile, knew nothing of this, his mind set on returning to some kind of war work. “I was at a loose end,”20 he complained. “and nobody seemed to want me.” It was Syrie who came to the rescue: one o
f her girlfriends was the mistress of a Major (later Captain) John Wallinger, an officer in the foreign section of the Secret Service bureau (later SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service), and it was arranged that the four of them should dine together one evening. Wallinger, who supervised a network of British agents in Germany and Switzerland, was impressed by Maugham and offered him a job in Geneva. It was arranged that he would go out there at the end of the year.
By this time matters were coming to a head at home, for it was now that Syrie received a letter from Wellcome’s attorney stating her husband’s intention to divorce her and to cite Maugham as corespondent. For Syrie this was an entirely desirable development: she longed to be rid of Wellcome, and she was far too tough a character to care very much about damage to her reputation as a consequence of divorce as long as she could be assured of remarriage at the end of it. For Maugham, however, who had always believed Syrie’s assertion that Wellcome had no wish to change the status quo, the news was devastating. The case, unquestionably, was indefensible: he was to be publicly identified as corespondent and he knew very well it would be considered disgraceful if he refused to wed Syrie after it. He felt trapped, deceived, and very angry. Syrie, who had persisted in ignoring the fact that Maugham had never shown any wish to marry her, now felt frightened by his reaction, terrified that he might somehow renege on what she saw as his irrefutable obligation toward her. Desperately she sought a way to win his sympathy.
One evening Maugham was dining quietly with a doctor friend in Chesterfield Street when Syrie telephoned; she told him she had taken an overdose of sleeping pills and that he must come at once. The two men immediately went to her hotel, where the doctor, as Maugham put it, “got busy,” while he telephoned the Begum, asking her to come and look after her daughter for a couple of days until she was fully recovered.
Frustratingly for Syrie, Maugham remained unmoved by her staged attempt at suicide, still reluctant to make the final commitment. In order to prepare himself for the forthcoming case he consulted a leading divorce lawyer, Sir George Lewis, who told him candidly that his situation was bleak: the evidence against him was incontrovertible and Wellcome was preparing to make the most of it, his one concession, agreed at Maugham’s particular request, that there should be no mention of the child, Liza, in court. Lewis strongly advised Maugham to buy Syrie off: he had formed a poor opinion of her, seeing her simply as a gold digger, an aging adventuress in search of a large income. “You’d be a fool to marry her,”21 he told his client, suggesting that instead he offer to give £20,000 or £30,000, which, with the £1,000 a year Wellcome had promised if she did not remarry, would keep her in comfort for the rest of her life. Maugham was powerfully tempted, and yet his sense of honor was strong; he could not quite bring himself to abandon Syrie, for whom he still had a residual fondness and who was, after all, the mother of his child. There was another consideration, too, one that he may not have chosen to discuss with Lewis. Syrie was aware of his homosexuality and even had the names of some of the men he had slept with: ruthless as he knew her to be, it was not impossible that she might use this information to blackmail him. “D’you want to marry her?” Lewis asked irritably. “No,” Maugham replied, “but if I don’t I shall regret it all my life.” Lewis shrugged his shoulders. “Then there’s nothing more to be said.”
It was after this final interview with Lewis that in November 1915 Maugham left for Switzerland to begin his espionage work for Wallinger, and here shortly before the case was due to be heard that Syrie joined him, hoping to avoid the publicity that the divorce would inevitably attract. It was a miserable period for both: Maugham was obliged to be constantly on the move, leaving Syrie by herself for days at a time; when he returned she was either irritable and resentful, or, in the face of his frigid politeness, tearful and clinging, constantly declaiming her love, imploring him to tell her what she was doing wrong and whether he still had any feeling for her. They bickered endlessly. “If we were married22 it would all be different,” Syrie told him. “B-b-but it might be worse,” Maugham grimly replied. One evening he went to the theater and was wryly amused to see enacted on stage an almost exact replica of his own predicament. In Amoureuse by Georges de Porto-Riche, a husband is driven frantic by his wife’s cloying devotion, her egotism, her oversensitivity to his moods, the way she will never let him read or work in peace. He explodes in an outburst of bitter complaint to a bachelor friend:
Tu n’as pas encore perdu23 le droit d’être seul! … [Ta maîtresse] n’est pas jalouse, obsédante et questionneuse…. Elle ne se penche pas sur ton épaule, quand tu écris une lettre … elle n’opère point par de petites phrases vagues, insinuantes, qui n’ont l’air de rien, mais qui se glissent dans l’esprit et entament le courage…. Et si, par hazard, tu dines dehors sans elle, tu ne la retrouves pas à minuit, éveillé dans son lit, le visage immobile, mais la voix altérée et l’oeil plein de jalousie….*
“It positively made my blood run cold24 as I sat & watched,” Maugham confided to Kelly.
The case finally came to court in February 1916, by which time both respondent and corespondent were back in London, Maugham having returned from Geneva as he was obliged to be on hand for the final rehearsals of a new play. If he had hoped to avoid publicity, the timing could hardly have been worse: the case was heard on February 14, less than a week after the opening night of Caroline, a glamorous occasion, widely reported, ensuring that the playwright’s name was already prominently in the public eye. In the circumstances the press were remarkably restrained, however, mainly confining themselves to briefly summarizing the evidence and reporting the judgment, which granted Wellcome a decree nisi and custody of Mounteney. Maugham himself returned almost at once to Geneva, while Syrie retired to a clinic to rest for a few days before going to Paris, which she planned to make her headquarters for the following twelve months. “You will be doubtless seeing her25 in a few weeks,” Maugham wrote to Kelly, “& she will tell you the very sensible plan which we have elaborated. I think you will agree on its wisdom.” The details of this “very sensible plan” remain obscure; what is clear, however, is that Maugham’s frame of mind was rather less tranquil than indicated in his letter to Kelly. To his brother F.H. he was more open about the stressful nature of the recent ordeal:
The whole matter has been a great distress26 & worry to me, but I try to console myself by thinking it is only through undergoing all varieties of human experience, however distressing some of them may be, that a writer can hope in the end perhaps to produce work of permanent value. I fancy the worst of my troubles are over, but what the final result of the misadventure will be only time can show, and in any case the future can not possibly have in store any worse harassment than I have undergone during the last eight months.
It was perhaps fortunate that Maugham could not foresee the long misery of his future with Syrie, and at least for the moment he was able to put most of his anxiety behind him and take pleasure in the dazzling success of his latest theatrical venture.
Produced by Dion Boucicault at the New Theatre, Caroline was an instant hit, a dexterous and supremely efficient piece of the kind Maugham could now write with one hand tied behind his back. “I have never had such an enormous success27 as Caroline,” Maugham boasted to his brother. “We play to over £2000 a week, which Dion Boucicault tells me is the largest sum he has known a comedy to earn in his whole experience of the theatre.” Originally titled The Unattainable, the play’s eponymous heroine, played by Irene Vanbrugh, is a grass widow whose husband, stationed abroad for the past ten years, suddenly dies, leaving her free to marry Robert, a delightful KC with whom she has long conducted an enjoyable and entirely blameless amitié amoureuse. Nothing, it seems, could be more suitable, but Robert and Caroline find to their dismay that neither regards the prospect with pleasure, and gradually they arrive at the realization that their great attraction for each other lies in Caroline’s unattainability. Despite the efforts of their friends to see them made man and wi
fe, Caroline eventually contrives to return to the status quo ante by “discovering” that the announcement of her husband’s death was a mistake and therefore she and Robert can happily return to their old relationship.
“Light as a feather,”28 said The Sunday Times, “the quintessence of natural gaiety” according to the Daily Mail, Caroline nonetheless derives from some painful areas of experience. The shadow of Syrie is darkly apparent, with the fast-approaching threat of marriage, so deftly avoided in the play, providing a somber resonance, first heard in an exchange between Caroline and her maid, Cooper:
COOPER: Well, ma’am, my belief29 is that men don’t want to marry. It’s not in their nature. You ’ave to give them a little push or you’ll never bring them to it.
CAROLINE: And supposing they regret it afterwards, Cooper?
COOPER: Oh, well, ma’am, it’s too late then.
WITH CAROLINE SET FOR a long run, Maugham returned on his own to Switzerland to resume his duties in Geneva. His job there, working for British military intelligence, was already well under way, having materialized after his introduction to Major Wallinger over dinner the previous summer. Wallinger had taken to Maugham, and Maugham to Wallinger, who struck him as both unscrupulous and astute, both essential qualities in a spymaster.
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham Page 21