21 Whiteheads Grove, Cadogan Terrace, W.l. [Around 1920)
Beloved Beloved Beloved,
After a quarter of a century still Beloved- either you or I or both of us are abnormal. These things don't happen in our profession. (I believe there may be two f's in 'proffession' but now I've written it I'm sure there aren't.)
If I hadn't thrown cold water on that subject last night in the drawing room things would have been different. All was well till I did that. It only shows you how easy it is to destroy and how difficult to rebuild. Can you come back to me next Sunday? Not to the concert, to ME.
I am just answering another appeal from Viola Tree with a stern refusal in spite of the fact that she has billed me all over the Tube ...
P.S. about profession. I'm sure there are.
There is a photograph of the two of them in the garden at the end of his life, strolling up a path between Michaelmas daisies. His face has the lines of exhaustion that Richard Burton's had, straight features, soft flesh drawn down, terribly sad. Eva had the remains of beauty, but clenched, yet her voice even decades later had a wonderful lightness. I remember her infectious laughter. Jill used to say that if they had played mother and daughter on the wireless they would have had to reverse roles, Eva as skittish daughter, Jill with a lower voice playing the more mature mother. Eva's enthusiasm and love of life, her absurdity ... 'O Jill, do look ... The tits are in their nests.'
Even though Harry had lived for some years as hazily as a ghost, his death in Paris of pneumonia elicited an avalanche of letters. He was missed by the entire profession and millions of theatregoers. King George and Queen Mary, who had seen a number of his plays and his Shakespearian performances, offered condolences. As Miss Sybil Thorndike wrote to Eva: 'Doesn't it seem strange that out of a big personal grief comes sometimes a wonderful recognition of warmth that's in the hearts of outsiders?'
This aching void Eva allowed to be filled with her love for Larry. While her entourage had called Gerald du Maurier 'The young Greek god', and Harry 'The genius', she shared Jill's perception of Larry as having the potential for both, especially in his quest for versatility. She came to adore him, sometimes called him 'Harry' instead of 'Larry'. He called her 'Mum'. Despite his horrified denials of fifty years later there is no doubt of his love for her then, as their letters will show.
Reading plays out loud was a constant exercise, far more than a mere parlour game. It resembled rehearsals and was followed by lots of notes and the post-mortems associated with a green room. Of Harry's plays, Larry's favourite was 'The Law Divine'. It is the story of a couple who were happy until the outbreak of the Great War. The husband is called up and his wife becomes obsessed with 'doing her bit'. He returns to a drawing room which has been converted into an office, and a bedroom with a telephone on her side of the bed. His dilemma is whether to retire into the background or revolt against the interrupted home life. This was close to what happened to the Esmonds. The climax of the play is the wife's recollection of the early years, of their love in full flower, running bare-foot along a moonlit beach.
Eva's own son Jacky had tried without success in the theatre and turned his hand to motor racing and other businesses. Her experience as an actress and determination to pass it on centred on Larry. She knew what equipment he needed and the route he had to follow. He was a willing recipient. Much of what she wrote about Harry in her own autobiography Exits and Entrances, could have been written about Larry a generation later:
His character studies were real people, not bundles of eccentricities with amazing and repulsive tricks; they were real old people, treated, where it was demanded, with humour, but a humour which was from the heart and spoke to the heart, and not only apparent to the eye of the beholder. His young men were charming, virile and obviously enjoying life. He could play devout lovers, rakes (and what delightful rakes, too, they were!), old men, and mad men, and play them all with more than a touch of genius.
If Larry had inherited his sensitivity and artistic gifts from his mother's genes, her death while he was so young imbued him with the gift of pathos. He himself ascribed his power to move audiences to the effects on him of this loss, which he drew upon when playing in tragedy, whether in the loftiest roles or the most pitiable, to cauterise his trauma.
Harry's early death had not been equally affecting for Jill, but it had left its mark. Their times together had been special. She resembled him and shared his love of literature. She had read Hardy's Jude the Obscure aged twelve. She and Larry had much in their backgrounds they were able to share. There were many of their generation orphaned by the Great War, and once this was accepted they had also the universal gaiety of that time. They had house parties and even imposed on them their eternal live readings of plays, often at Larry's insistence. When Jill asked him to do something else for a change he would whisper fiercely: 'Don't you realise ...I want to be the greatest actor in the world!'
Even so, they did play tennis, cheat at croquet and go for long walks. At night when it was moonless dark, the favourite party game was 'Strike a Light'- a fast-run panting hide-and-seek outside on the golf course. 'He' had ten matches, and whenever called upon had to strike one wherever he was hiding, and dash through the darkness to somewhere else, to crouch in a bunker, lie in the rough grass, stretch along a branch and hold his breath in silent agony.
A grassy knoll divided the rough from the fairway and they would sit on it, and look at the distant lights of Marlow: no cars, just stars, the night sky, the watchful owl. Jill would imitate it, clasping her hands together and blowing: to-woo to-woo.
She had grown up in the countryside. As a girl she had shot rabbits and rooks, and had once had to hide in stinging nettles from the gamekeeper. She was well made and had good legs, but moved awkwardly and bit her nails. Larry was skinny. He used to joke about his feeble arms: 'These little wires which hang from my shoulders' and his hairy chest: six hairs which grew upwards. He could laugh at anything, and made others laugh with him, even at his own shame. For he was deeply ashamed of his undernourished and undeveloped physique, and he set about body-building in addition to his voice training, to improve his 'noble proportions'.
His shame had overtones: moral, spiritual, engendered by a sense of sin imposed at an all-male boarding school for clergymen's sons. The catch phrases were 'self-abuse', and 'inadequacy before God', whose forgiveness had constantly to be sought even for normality. The result was frustrating for Jill, who enjoyed kissing and had a liberal outlook. In 'A Kiss for Two' Harry had written a speech for an Irish soldier, Captain Patrick Delaney, setting out the polarities between nature and bigotry. This was personified by the Esmonds and Oliviers.
It's a legend I'm tellin' ye, an' all true legends begin with 'My Dear and My Judy'. Well, My Dear and My Judy, one fine day Mother Nature, havin' nothin better to do, she made a man. You know what a man is? That's all right then- well, she made a man, and this mighty fine piece of work tickled her to death, it did, and so she went to bed devilish pleased with herself, had a beautiful dream, woke up next morning, went one better than the day before - she made a woman. You can't say you know what a woman is, for she's a mystery to the lot of us. Well, she made a woman, and then she said to the man, 'That sweet lookin' thing's all yours.' ... The stuffy old men then started to make laws. Oh, them laws that they made, sure they forgot all about the days of their youth, when their blood was warm, and the sunshine was singin' in their hearts. They just sat there on them cold stones in that old Town Hall, chilled to the marrow, and made them laws to stop love-making.
And while they were at it, there came a tap at the door, and they all gave a jump - which showed you they were doin' something they were ashamed of … and there in the sunlight stood a beautiful young woman, lookin' in at them, her eyes all agog with wonder. 'What the devil are you doin'?' says she. 'None of your business,' says they. 'True for you,' says she. An' she took them at their word, and slammed the door, an' she's been slamming the door on them same laws
ever since!
For 'stuffy old men' read 'Farve'.
Eva's description of Harry's acting could also describe Larry's, who all his life sought after realism, and it reflects what she passed on to him:
His voice was wonderful; he could put more tenderness, without the least touch of sentimentality, into his words than anyone I've ever heard. To hear Harry say 'My dear', as he did in 'The Law Divine', was to hear all the essence of love-making, with all the love in the world behind it, put into two words. His gesture was superb; he was not, as so many actors are, apparently afraid of using a big sweeping movement; he was never afraid that a big gesture would look ridiculous …
All his movements were good ... during his telling of the 'Legend', he used that sweeping gesture of his arm. Seated in a chair, leaning forward, carried away by the story he tells, he comes to the words: 'and there in the sunlight stood a beautiful young woman', - out went his arm, his eyes following it, the fingers outspread to take in the whole of the picture, until, when he looked behind him, looked to where his arm and hand had pointed, you might almost have seen her, 'her eyes all agog with wonder'.
The 'Bird in Hand' was a play attacking 'class'. Jill played the Bright Young Thing whose 'common' parents owned a pub. Larry was type cast as the puritanical young 'squire', in love with love, all anguish and yearning and no deeds, except prissily kissing the outside of her bedroom door. It perfectly reflected his then 'cretinous romanticism'.
During rehearsals, with prospects surging for a brilliant First Night and his first West End success, he proposed. She knew he would, was thrilled, and somehow found the words to delay matters without killing his fragile self-esteem. He proposed several times. She loved him too, and knew that one day he would be for her, but she wanted him to mature, to provide a love that was real and more experienced.
She overheard a conversation between director and producer, all about Larry. They agreed that he was a fine young actor, wonderful gifts, exciting ...But all that hair: 'Makes him look so bad-tempered, almost Neanderthal . . .'
Jill repeated this to him in his dressing room, filled his glass with whisky and set to work with a pair of tweezers until he could bear it no more. There were a number of painful sessions, plucking one hair out after another. Later, whenever she looked at photographs of him with his new hairline, she felt as if his looks were partly of her making.
His innocent guilt did bring a kind of determined sweetness to him.
An actor friend, Roland Culver, told me how, at about that time, Larry drove him all the way down to Hurley - an hour's drive then, as now, but through hedge-lined roads with only one or two other cars to avoid. He parked beside Hurley Church, where he went to Communion every Sunday, and led the way to the river. He loped along the towpath and sat down on the riverbank, opposite a rock on the far side. He contemplated the rock, turned to Roley, then said, 'Last Sunday - Jill. She dived off that rock.' Then he drove him in silence all the way back to London.
He did not apply Prince Hamlet's advice:
Be not too tame, neither: but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance: that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature.
Larry's modesty was unnatural. Any forward move from Jill led to his prayers for forgiveness, on his knees. It could not but 'make the judicious grieve', and she was judicious. She was driven mad by his coy immaturity, and decided to give him time to grow up. She escaped to New York, unfortunately still in the 'Bird in Hand' which she had been in for far too long.
He knew that she was right about his problems not being fair on her. They did confide in each other to a very great degree. She took the opportunity she was offered on Broadway for emotional rather than career reasons. It suited him to do the opposite: he stayed behind in London for another play.
So Who's Your Mother Page 40