Madeleine

by Helen Trinca

  Despite their clashes, Madeleine and Colette were soon sharing a house again: Madeleine and Chris fled Chica’s when the atmosphere soured after Chica began an affair with one of the tenants. In Oxford Street, Madeleine squeezed onto the enclosed back balcony and Chris camped on a sofa in the adjoining sitting room. Chris recalled that one morning as he lay in bed, Madeleine, barely awake, came in and punched him in the eye. She was mortified when she realised what she had done.6

  After a year or so at the Herald, Chris knew reporting was not for him. He was asked to interview again for a foreign affairs job, but his lack of confidence ruled him out of the diplomatic life. He was accepted as a trainee talks officer in radio and television at the ABC, and when an information sheet was sent around for Fulbright scholarship applications, he wrote to half a dozen American universities to see if he could get a place as the first step in applying for a the grant. By chance an old St Paul’s friend, Mike Rubbo, who had used his Fulbright to go to Stanford the year before, saw Chris’s application to the Mass Communications course there and urged the department to take him on. There was a specific grant available to Australians—the Melville J. Jacoby Scholarship—and soon it was sorted. Chris would go to Stanford in the middle of 1965 for a boutique documentary-making course. It was a big break for the young Australian.

  Chris parked the Renault down at Lady Macquarie’s Chair on the harbour and broke the news to Madeleine. They should both go, Chris said, but first they should get married.

  Madeleine responded: ‘You don’t have to.’ She was giving Chris a way out. To Chris, there was some attraction in breaking off the engagement, yet it was also unthinkable given their shared history.

  Whatever his own hesitations, Chris insisted they would go to the US together, and they drove to Clifton Gardens to tell Val and Ted that they were getting married. Ted made a wry remark about wanting to ‘recover the sofas’ that year but there was never any question that he would pay for the wedding.7 A date was set for shortly before Chris’s departure by plane for San Francisco. Madeleine decided she would follow by ship. A long sea voyage met her desire for living in style, and Chris was happy enough to confront the first few weeks at Stanford without the extra pressure of Madeleine’s volatility.8

  Some of Madeleine’s friends were surprised when the wedding invitations arrived in the post: they had not realised the relationship was serious. Colette wondered if her sister’s decision to marry had been a way to win Ted’s approval. Despite their fractious relationship, Madeleine often tried to gain his attention and love.9 Felicity Baker recalled that Madeleine had always had a ‘deep ambition’ to marry, to attain a ‘respectable married status, to create a home and family for a respected man’.10

  At 5.30 p.m. on Friday 4 June 1965, Madeleine and Chris were married. There had been a small crisis when Ted decided he did not want to walk his daughter down the aisle to ‘give her away’ and had to be persuaded by Val.11 Madeleine was almost hysterical by the time she battled her way through the Friday afternoon traffic to enter the church. Her uncle, Bill Baker, performed the ceremony at the Church of St James—where Val and Ted had married a decade earlier. Madeleine’s choice of venue startled her friends, who had expected something less ‘establishment’ from the woman who had played Lolita Montez.12

  Madeleine had refashioned herself since university. She had lost weight and looked stunning in an expensive Chris Jacovides dress. But she banned photographs. She controlled every aspect of the wedding, and she enjoyed being perverse. She wanted to be different. Colette recalled that Madeleine thought being in the social columns was terribly infra dig, ‘the lowest of the low’.13 Not having photographs was about showing she did not care a toss about such things. Madeleine was also sensitive about her appearance, so may not have wanted pictures. Looking back, Chris wondered whether she refused to be photographed because she did not want to be recorded as married.14

  Colette was a bridesmaid and she, too, wore a white Jacovides number. A superb dressmaker like her grandmother, Colette had planned to make the dresses for Madeleine and herself and had even bought the fabric. But at the last minute, Madeleine changed her mind. Colette was upset, even more so when she found the Jacovides bridesmaid dress did not suit her.

  Chris recalled that he felt ‘incredibly alone’ that day. He had given up his rented room as he prepared to fly to the US, so he dressed for his wedding in a stranger’s house. Then he met the groomsman at the Pioneers Club in nearby Bent Street. The wedding ceremony was a blur, and years later Chris could not recall the name of the groomsman. It was a strange period for the twenty-four-year-old. He was getting married, but within a few days would be separated from his bride as he headed for Stanford alone.

  Seventeen-year-old Annabel Minchin was overwhelmed by the romance of the day and cried her way through the proceedings. Winton Higgins was an usher, even though he had had little contact with Madeleine in the previous couple of years. Marilyn Taylor was intimidated by the whole show, despite the fact she was already ‘on the wireless’ at the ABC. Many of the Octopus gang had not been invited, so rapidly had their lives moved apart since university. But Colleen Olliffe and Richard Walsh were among the guests. Richard was not close to either Madeleine or Chris, but assumed he was there due to his connection to Ted, whom he had come to know through the Oz trials the previous year. Ted had defended the printer of the magazine, Francis James, in the court case in which Walsh, Richard Neville and artist Martin Sharp had been charged with publishing an obscene issue.15 At the church, Richard shocked Colleen when he whispered, ‘Imagine her being the first of you to go!’16

  As they walked back down the aisle as man and wife, Madeleine dug her nails into Chris’s arm and whispered, ‘Too fast!’17 She had a picture in her mind of how the event should unfold and she had no hesitation in trying to control Chris. But it was a stressful day for Madeleine. Chris recalled, ‘We were both taking a leap, escaping Oz, escaping family.’ Looking back, he felt it must have been confronting for Madeleine to have chosen the kind of church of which Ted approved, yet to know that Sylvette was not there to see her wed.18

  The reception in the sunken living room at Vino del Mar turned out to be a ‘spiffing affair’ according to Colleen.19 But there was an awkward moment when Ted rose to say a few words. He loved making speeches, but when Madeleine announced ironically, ‘Well, you won’t get a speech out of him!’, Ted backed off.20 At the end of the evening, Madeleine changed from her wedding dress into her going-away outfit of a grey woollen pants suit. She was glowing.

  As they prepared to leave, the new Mr and Mrs Tillam stood in the elevated entrance area of Vino del Mar gazing down at the guests. ‘It was as if she was saying, look at me, this is my moment,’ Marilyn Taylor recalled.21 Her pants suit had been made by a men’s tailor but had not been entirely successful, according to Colette. Madeleine thought the suit made her look like a lesbian; Colette thought it was the kind of suit worn by little Italian boys at a wedding.22 Nonetheless, Madeleine wore it.

  The young couple drove in the Renault to the Bundanoon pub, about 150 kilometres from Sydney in the Southern Highlands. A couple of days later they were back in the city, at the stylish Belvedere Hotel near Kings Cross. Colette recalled that Madeleine had been enchanted with the Belvedere when they had seen the hotel as children. The next morning the newlyweds took photographs on the balcony, Chris in his tweed jacket, cigarette in hand, Madeleine in her grey suit.23 Then Roger Tillam drove them to Sydney airport for their goodbyes, and Chris flew out to San Francisco. It was 10 June 1965.

  Three days later, Madeleine wrote to her mother-in-law to thank her for her wedding gift of a necklace ‘which I shall wear with the greatest pleasure’.24 Joan had given Chris a Sidney Nolan painting, and Madeleine, staying temporarily in Paddington, told Joan that she could not wait to have a household for the painting. It was ‘heart rending’ to leave the wedding present behind for a year but the Nolan was too valuable to cart to Stanford and she asked Joan whe
ther she could leave the painting in her care.

  Joan had grown very fond of Madeleine. A few days later, she sent a box of flowers to her daughter-in-law’s cabin as her ship departed for San Francisco. From Auckland, Madeleine posted a letter of thanks and enjoyed the blooms all the way to Honolulu.25

  CHAPTER NINE

  American Dreams

  In his first days in the US, while he waited for Madeleine to arrive, Chris bought a second-hand Chevrolet and rented an apartment at 1159 Bay Laurel Drive in Menlo Park, the suburb closest to the Stanford campus at Palo Alto. It was the top floor of a two-storey house set back from the street on a circular drive. There were huge trees everywhere in the slightly unkempt garden, as well as birdbaths and a sundial, squirrels, jasmine, Virginia creeper and bees, and magnificent magnolia trees lined the streets.1 The Tillams’ landlord lived below, but upstairs was private and roomy with casement windows, a large living room and a study as well as a double bedroom. It was, Chris told his mother, ‘sylvan, airy and quiet’.2

  Chris threw himself into his course, which was led by Henry Breitrose, one of the most influential film and mass communications academics of his generation. When Chris arrived in the summer of 1965, Breitrose’s Documentary Film Program was at its height. His students, including Chris, were smart, highly educated, artistic and literary. Many were being exposed to the technical side of film-making for the first time, and the department buzzed with experiment and energy.

  ‘It looks like being exciting & tough,’ Chris wrote to Joan ten days before the course began.3 Mike Rubbo was showing him the ropes, but Chris was apprehensive. Mike was leaving big shoes to fill: he had been a social and academic success in the course and was about to leave for a job at the Canada Film Board, the Mecca for documentary makers in those years.

  Around the middle of July, Chris went to the San Francisco wharves to collect his wife after her sea voyage. He was late and found a grumpy Madeleine, shoulders slumped, sitting on her suitcase. The trip had been a disaster, her cabin mate appalling, the whole experience nothing like her dream of a stylish ocean journey.

  Chris had always been her rock, but now he was torn between his role of Madeleine’s pacifier and the demands of his course. Madeleine, to her credit, stumped up early the next morning to accompany him to the Central Valley to record some audio of a horserace for one of his projects.

  She found work house cleaning in Palo Alto for $14 a day while she looked for a proper job. She told Joan in a letter at the end of July that America was ‘too exciting for words—there is so much of absolutely everything, both good things and bad, and everything is so much bigger! There are marvellous shops near us without even going into San Francisco. But of course, San Francisco is—superlative.’4 She loved the ‘posh department stores’ in San Francisco, with their scented air and floors of beautiful clothes:

  It’s all terribly clean—like the rest of these parts—and the climate is perfect—cool, crisp and sunny…there are the most wonderful old houses…flowers and vines grow in every available space—you see a lot of window boxes, with geraniums tumbling down onto the foot-path.5

  The letter was upbeat and positive. Nothing less would have been expected back home at the start of such an exciting American experience. But Madeleine was already becoming adept at presenting an image that was not always based on reality.

  Chris was ‘frantically busy’ with his course and Madeleine apologised for his not writing to Joan.6 When Chris did write to his mother, he grumbled about the workload in his course, saying, ‘there isn’t really enough time to do any one project properly’.7 In fact, it was worse than that. Chris knew he was not coping with some aspects of the course, and this was confirmed when Henry Breitrose told him that he was not performing at an appropriate level.

  Madeleine, too, was under strain. She was still trying to find a proper job and she was using sleeping pills. Things improved when she found work at the university bookshop. She was to work five days a week, with Fridays and Sundays off, and at last she would have an income rather than relying on savings.

  But just a few days after Madeleine started her new job and less than three months into their marriage, the couple argued. This was nothing new, but this time Chris retreated to the study, taking with him a bottle of Madeleine’s sleeping tablets. He spread the pills out on the desk and then swallowed half of them. Madeleine discovered him, blue in the face, and he was rushed by ambulance to the Palo Alto State Hospital. Four attendants held him down as doctors pumped his stomach. When he regained consciousness, Madeleine was there. His first words to her were ‘I’m sorry I did not make a proper job of it.’8

  It must have been devastating for Madeleine. In Sydney, she had been aware Chris’s moods could swing, but now she was far away from family and friends. In the past she could rely on Chris, but now the future must have looked uncertain. There had been silence around the details of Sylvette’s death, but she knew enough of her mother’s history with sleeping tablets to be alarmed by this latest development.

  Yet, on the surface, life quickly returned to normal. After a couple of days, Chris came home from the hospital. Madeleine was at work at the bookshop so, still in his dressing-gown, he took a cab back to their apartment. He began attending weekly psychotherapy sessions, with a month or so to pull himself together before term commenced at the end of September. There was little or no discussion of what lay beneath Chris’s behaviour. The young couple were becoming practised at papering over the cracks in their relationship.

  Madeleine was cheered by a letter from Colette in London. Her sister was ‘adoring’ the metropolis, and Madeleine wrote to Joan that she was ‘so pleased to get in touch with her again’.9 But life at Stanford was still a challenge. Madeleine told Joan that she enjoyed her work at the bookstore but arrived home ‘terribly tired & not feeling terribly prosy or creative’. The Tillams were short of money and were watching a lot of television rather than going out. But the cultural offerings of the area beckoned and Madeleine hoped that ‘by mid-October we’ll be more straightened out & able to do more’.10

  A couple of weeks later Chris typed a long letter to Joan, and filled it with details of things seen—including a football game between Stanford and the Navy—and books read. He did not mention his recent crisis and the letter was chatty but distant. Term would start the following day, the holidays had been ‘pretty quiet’, the car was costing Chris more in oil than in gas, and the weather was ‘getting a bit cooler’. Madeleine had a twenty per cent discount on books from the bookshop where she worked and she and Chris were buying up. Chris was reading ‘a Canadian English professor, Marshall McLuhan, who has some revolutionary ideas about how the electronic media are shaping our sensibilities’.11

  It was a time of cultural and political upheaval in the US. In August, Congress had passed the Voting Rights Act, which finally outlawed the discrimination against blacks that remained in several US states. It was history in the making. That year also saw a dramatic escalation of American involvement in the Vietnam conflict amid controversy at home. Stanford was relatively quiet, a ‘hotbed of rest’, as Henry Breitrose recalled.12 But across the bay, Chris told his mother, Berkeley was ‘the spiritual home of practically all civil-disobedience groups in America. It’s here, on the west coast, that feeling against US Vietnamese policy runs strongest and there are the biggest and most regular demonstrations.’13

  The cultural change transforming America was taking shape in California and it was impossible to ignore. The Summer of Love—when 100,000 hippies flooded into the Haight-Ashbury area of San Francisco—was two years away, but sex, drugs and creativity were breaking out all over. ‘There is a bit of a local cult here, centring on the author Ken Keesey [sic],’ Chris told Joan. ‘Keesey has written one novel so far, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.’14 At Stanford:

  one meets characters who appeared in the books of Jack Kerouac, there is a flourishing drug coterie—and a lot of serious investigation goes on as well in
to the whole psychedelic question. Rumours at the moment of a campaign to be launched this fall at Berkeley, over the bay from SF, for the legalisation of marijuana…15

  In the second semester, Chris was much happier. The emphasis of the course, with new lecturer George Stoney, a well-known documentary maker from New York, suited Chris, and his work improved.

  Now Madeleine was the watchful, wary one. The power had shifted slightly in Chris’s favour, now that he had ‘punished’ Madeleine by taking an overdose.16 She could no longer take his fortitude and devotion for granted. If, as she later claimed, she had married Chris in search of security, she must have had cause to wonder in those first months at Stanford as her new husband became more independent.

  Madeleine made an impression on campus. She was far more memorable than her quiet and civilised husband, according to Chris’s classmate Tom Bell. She was an extrovert who loved to talk literature and ‘spoke in complete sentences, if not paragraphs. There was a kind of acute articulateness to her speech.’ Tom recalled that her style of dressing set her apart: she was ‘carefully put together’.17 She smoked constantly, usually unfiltered cigarettes such as Gauloises. Jill Roehrig, who was now back in San Francisco, noted how Madeleine flicked the tiny shreds of tobacco from her lips with the edge of a fingernail.18 Madeleine had always yearned to be a femme fatale.