by Helen Trinca
She also proved to be a consummate performer in her letters. At the end of October, she wrote to Joan extolling Chris’s virtues as a filmmaker and artist:
He really is remarkably clever, I don’t think it can be too long before we are not the only people aware of it…He wrote a wonderful poem on Sunday, to cheer me up when I was feeling ‘blue’. He is working very hard & doing a lot of reading & I think, finding life altogether stimulating.19
Madeleine made some ‘lovely muffins’ for her appreciative husband and announced she wanted a white kitten for her birthday. The praise for Chris was just a touch excessive, even for a young bride.
Madeleine and Joan swapped book recommendations and ideas. ‘I don’t care very well for H. Miller,’ Madeleine told her mother-in-law:
I think his ideas are a little simple, but I haven’t read Maroussi—Chris says it’s wonderful. I too didn’t care for Lady Chat’s Lover—in fact I found it a very poor novel. What I really love is Henry James—please try, say, The Portrait of a Lady, and tell me how you find it. Have you read any of Marianne Moore’s poetry? You’d love her.20
After a Thanksgiving spent with Jill Roehrig, Madeleine was in bed with a cold, rereading Blake and encouraging Joan to have a go at the modern Greek poets Cavafy and Seferis.21
Chris’s life had taken off. He told his mother he was ‘way past my ears with work’ and thrilled by George Stoney’s leadership. ‘The points he keeps hammering home are psychological rather than technical…you can’t make a film by standing on the sidelines—you have to be in the thick of it…’22 Chris was making two films: his own three-and-a-half-minute ‘boy doesn’t meet girl’ film featuring Jill Roehrig and an MG; and another with a colleague, Saad Raheem, about the campus of the University of California being built at Santa Cruz, sixty-five kilometres away on the coast. Students and staff were living in trailers among the redwoods while the residential colleges were built. Chris wrote an expanded treatment for his film and successfully applied for $500 from the University of California to reshoot it as a ten-minute documentary.
Madeleine had a nine-to-five routine at the bookshop, but Chris spent hours in the basement editing room at the university. ‘Time passes quickly and sometimes I’ll go down at 7 p.m., and emerge a little before dawn,’ he wrote home. ‘It’s common practice for someone editing his film to take a sleeping bag & toothbrush & camp there.’23 Madeleine never hinted at it in her letters, but she must have been lonely in this period as her husband’s horizons expanded.
Colette turned twenty-one in December 1965, and Madeleine and Chris sent greetings to her in London. Madeleine made a multi-leaved card with US dollars hidden between each sheet and Chris sent a poem to his sister-in-law:
Nor think to falsify your hair with wigs or rinses, tints or dyes
Forbear such foolishness for men, low creatures, find
less interest in a head than a behind.24
Christmas ‘wasn’t quite Christmas’ that year for Madeleine and Chris, who felt ‘rather bereaved, having Christmas in a cold & strange climate’. Madeleine had never professed a great love of Australia but, after six months in the US, she was homesick and hoped to be back in Sydney for Christmas 1966, although she admitted this looked less likely. Playing the dutiful wife, at least on paper, she wrote: ‘Chris’s career comes absolutely first & if it is necessary for him to stay on a bit longer here, then stay we must.’25 Chris had finished his short film, and Madeleine announced it was ‘a lovely thing with perfect jazz music score and titles, all of which should gain him an A grading’.26
The Tillams were disappointed that they received only one Christmas card from Australia. Madeleine had little correspondence from Clifton Gardens and noted that Val’s letters were ‘somewhat staid’, while Ted didn’t often find time to write. Joan was a far more dedicated correspondent. She and Madeleine exchanged letters independently of Chris, an indication of a closeness that exceeded the usual relationship between in-laws.
In many ways, Madeleine grew closer to Joan as she sensed her husband drawing away. In the new year, Chris grew a beard and Madeleine reported he was turning into ‘rather an extrovert’ who worked very hard and was ‘rather witty & loves film-making’.27 The power was moving further away from Madeleine.
The couple soaked up the culture on offer. They heard Rosalyn Tureck play Bach and listened rapt through four encores; they went to a John Coltrane and Theolonius Monk concert 28 and another with Dizzy Gillespie and the Modern Jazz Quartet; they saw the film of My Fair Lady, which Madeleine found ‘frightfully disappointing’ apart from the Cecil Beaton costumes, the Ascot scene and the performance of actor Gladys Cooper as Henry Higgins’s mother. Cooper was ‘quite perfect, & she has the loveliest sitting room, which we see right at the end—all blue and white, leading into a little conservatory. One longs to have a blue and white room just like it,’ she told Joan. Not to mention a ‘moss-green dining room one day…with white woodwork’.29
In January 1966, they attended a screening of Sergei Eisenstein’s movie on the October Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World. In the audience was the octogenarian Alexander Kerensky, the last survivor of the government overthrown by the uprising. It was the first time that Kerensky, who lived near Stanford, had seen the film.30
Madeleine was beginning to look to England. Colette wrote from London to say she had been invited to a wedding. Madeleine relayed the news of the ‘chi-chi’ event to Joan and said she hoped Colette would:
meet some nice young men there, anyway—she complains that she hasn’t met anyone (male) really gorgeous yet, so I hope she will soon, since everything I learn about London makes me think of it as the ideal setting for a love affair—all those Bond Street shops, spring flowers, quaint nooks, courtyards & streets, millions of intimate restaurants, etc. and plenty of cold weather.31
Madeleine surprised friends and family back home with her embrace of America. She wrote to Antony Minchin:
I think you mean to flatter me when you say you didn’t imagine me & the USA hitting it off. Annabel wrote and said the same. So I’ve asked her to tell me why, so that I can explain. [America] is really not what one imagines it to be—it’s really a marvellous, exciting country. Very bad things & very good things too. I could never live here for ever (mainly because I’m too much of a socialist to do so, also because Australia is my place) but for a while it’s just divine.32
‘Don’t believe everything you read in books, Anna darling, or you will never see the world!’ she wrote to Annabel. ‘After all, is all of Australia like Patrick White’s Sarsaparilla?’33
Madeleine was a keen observer of human nature and the physical landscape and now she absorbed the style and mores of her temporary home. She asked if Antony had read Robin Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness, published in 1960, which had cast a highly critical eye over the Australian aesthetic:
[Boyd] makes a very just comparison of Aussie chrome & brashness and American ditto. So you wouldn’t see, in these parts, anything very much more startling than you can see in parts of Sydney. For the rest, there are millions of Americans who are anything but brash—there’s a tradition of politeness & good manners here which one hadn’t expected—a sort of fine old American thing. There are a lot of ‘fine old American’ traditions and practices that make us Australians seem very young and raw & undeveloped. I’ll explain at length one day.34
She noted cultural differences between American and Australian men. American men ‘didn’t hate women’ in the way she sensed many men did back home. Years later, Madeleine recalled that the men at Stanford opened doors, treated her with respect and ‘liked women, quite frankly and quite unselfconsciously’. It was taken for granted, she said, that ‘men and women were made to have pleasure in each other’s company’. It was ‘quite an extraordinary thing to experience for the first time’.35 One day in the refectory, she saw a golden Californian boy buy a glass of milk, pour it into a saucer and gently feed it to his little kitten. No Australian man woul
d be seen doing such a thing, she thought, for fear of being torn to shreds as a sissy.
Madeleine fell hard for a colleague at the bookshop. ‘There was something about him that was kind of foreign’, and she was drawn to this man who looked so different from her own husband. Madeleine’s interest was reciprocated. ‘You could practically hear the violins,’ she recalled. ‘It was just amazing. It was one of the great coups de foudre of my life and I couldn’t do a damn thing about it.’ When she told the man she was married, the affair ended before it had begun.36
Around her the social rules were in flux. The increasing availability of the pill made it a time of experimentation with sex and lifestyles. Yet Madeleine was more cautious than many of her generation. In later life, she said that in sixties California she had been ‘far too young to take advantage of it, far too crazy to use this experience to grow up and get away from the mess I had got myself into’.37 The mess she referred to was her marriage to Chris. But if that was her state of mind at the time, she gave little away.
The Tillams entertained visitors from Australia. Tina Date dropped in for five days, fresh from her success with a hit album, A Single Girl. Playing guitar Joan Baez–style, she was now one of Australia’s leading exponents of folk music. Madeleine welcomed Tina, but she was privately disparaging of her in a letter to Antony, thanking him for the ‘hysterical cutting’ he had sent about Tina. Antony kept Madeleine up to date with developments back home: he sent a new Australian dollar shortly after the switch to decimal currency on 14 February 1966. It was ‘greatly interesting to see, though I don’t think I like it; in some ways it’s good. But marvellous to have; thank you again so very much,’ she wrote back.38
Her restlessness was obvious to her Stanford friends. Tom Bell thought she ‘looked like a person who couldn’t wait to move on, as if she was parked in Palo Alto on the way to someplace else’.39 Madeleine told him that given the education system in Australia considered London to be the ‘centre of the cultural universe, the least [the government] could do would be to give us an airline ticket there’.40
Madeleine maintained her composure in letters to Joan. She wrote of her latest purchases—an expensive navy blue and ‘frightfully French’ overcoat and a ‘marvy new pr. of sunglasses—big circular white frames’. She had spring-cleaned the apartment, washed curtains, sewn on buttons, mothproofed clothes, and made a ‘divine’ cheesecake for Chris’s birthday. Colette had sent her a ‘gorgeous Jaeger jumper—pale blue, quite plain’ from London.41
She was now spending more time alone. Chris went on the road making a documentary film of the famous 300-mile protest march of striking farm workers from Delano to Sacramento. His world was opening up, and Madeleine resented her role as ‘the main breadwinner. It was just horrific, it was all work, work, work.’42 At the end of April, Chris spent almost a week at a television conference at Monterey Bay. Among the participants was Marshall McLuhan.43 When he returned home, Madeleine found her husband tired and ‘undervitamised looking’ after days of staying up till 2 a.m.44 Chris was planning to spend three months in Europe to make a documentary on the Stanford courses offered there, but Madeleine was not happy about it, even admitting this in a letter to Joan, saying ‘how vile’ it would be without her husband around.45
In the end, the project did not go ahead, but Madeleine was sounding tired—and almost sad—in letters to Joan:
Very sunny, the sprinkler playing outside & Brahms on the gramophone, leaf shadows flickering on the page as I write—a pretty scene. I wish life had this quality more often. But there is so much rushing about, one barely has time to enjoy these simple pleasures of mood & moment.46
The Tillams exchanged gifts for their wedding anniversary on 4 June—an amber cigarette holder for her and a book on the Aztecs for him—but they were tiring of their relatively suburban existence.47 ‘We are both mad to get out of the Stanford area and move to the city,’ Chris told his mother. They had friends in San Francisco, where rents were cheaper and there was more to do. ‘Palo Alto doesn’t exactly swing at the best of times, and in summer it’s…incredibly motionless. And the last three days there’s been a heatwave, 95 all day.’48 It’s likely they were hoping the move would alter the state of their marriage, but they had to wait. Chris got a job in Henry Breitrose’s department for the summer and so they stayed on in their apartment at Menlo Park.
Madeleine’s letters to Joan were shorter now, often mere thank-you notes for gifts received. The news they contained was trivial. She had seen a wonderful set of steak knives—French, stainless-steel blades with ivory handles hafted on with tiny brass rivets. Madeleine loved beautiful objects and she was determined to twist Chris’s arm to buy them. They were not, after all, ‘terribly expensive’. She was weary but she maintained her pose with Joan in that same letter: ‘Have just had a shattering bulletin from Chris—“We’re out of tea!”—which I cannot live without. Will have to get some tomorrow, or dreadful derangement will set in!’49
Madeleine was bored. ‘Nothing much happening,’ she wrote to Joan. ‘Went to an open-air concert, L’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande doing Honegger, Debussy & Pétrouchka—lovely setting in the Frost Amphitheatre at Stanford, beautiful summer’s evening…but orchestra somewhat disappointing. Their American debut. Ansermet very, very old—a figure of the past.’50
In the fall of 1966 the Tillams finally packed up and moved to San Francisco. Strong winds whipped the leaves as high as their rented second-floor apartment in California Street, next door to the fire station. From Sydney, the ever-thoughtful Joan sent dozens of yellow roses and white carnations to welcome them to their new home with its white walls and woodwork, billowing light curtains, honey-coloured timber floors and woven mats. Madeleine and Chris bought white chairs and art nouveau lamps from a charity shop and daisies from the Union Square flower stores.
They were not far from Jill Roehrig’s flat, which she shared with her friend Kathy Kettler, who had grown up on the fringes of the Hollywood movie set in Los Angeles. Madeleine and Kathy got along well. The young Australian was funny and sharp and Kathy found her a pleasure to be around.
Once again, Madeleine found some casual work in a bookshop and began keeping house. And she painted an image of domestic harmony in her letters. ‘I must attend to the poule au pot. Au revoir and write soon,’ she signed off to Joan in September. It could almost have been a line from a novel.
San Francisco was pleasant, and Madeleine had family around. Ted’s sister Florence and her husband Frank Heller and their three children had arrived for Frank’s teaching appointment at Berkeley and were living across the bay. Madeleine was delighted, although she told Joan: ‘I felt I ought to apologise to Chris for not being able to escape my voluminous family—fancy a branch of it turning up on our doorstep like this!’51
They had yearned for the move to San Francisco, but almost as soon as they arrived, the Tillams were hatching plans to leave. Chris could not find a permanent film job in the city and Madeleine applied for unemployment benefits. Out of the blue came a phone call from George Stoney, who had taught Chris at Stanford. He had recommended Chris for a film-making job with Dr Edward A. Mason of the Laboratory of Community Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School. Mason, a psychiatrist, had pioneered the use of film to teach students more effectively, and Harvard had funded him to expand his work. Chris and Madeleine were excited by the thought of ‘working for Harvard and having $7,200 a year’.52
They waited to see whether anything would come of it, where Chris’s work would take them. It was an unsettling time and old tensions resurfaced. Indeed the relationship was worse than ever. Jill Roehrig had seen huge arguments between the couple when they all lived in Sydney. But now she thought Madeleine was ‘disturbed’. Chris was ‘just trying to stop her jumping off the ledge’, she recalled.53 Jill thought things were so bad between them that Chris was trying to leave her.54
Early in October, on a fleeting visit to America, Ted St John called in to see his daught
er. He had decided to stand for federal parliament at the November election and he was about to enter a grueling preselection contest. He had only a day in San Francisco and spent the afternoon at the apartment in California Street. Madeleine organised a small party for his recent fiftieth birthday and the Hellers came over. It went well, yet, as always, Madeleine judged her father harshly. She wrote to Annabel Minchin that ‘T talked about himself most of the time, but don’t breathe a word, ma cousine’.55
Madeleine was at pains to hide the problems in her marriage. She and Chris were ‘as happy as 2 birds in a tree’, she told Annabel. She had stopped work and her cake making ‘& general kitchen repertoire’ had improved enormously.56 The Hellers saw it differently. Madeleine nagged Chris endlessly and he seemed no match temperamentally for his intense wife. Frank, a social scientist, was blunt. ‘I don’t think that will work,’ he told Florence.57 Perhaps Madeleine knew it too. Despite the fictional domestic idyll she presented in her letters, she knew she was in trouble. ‘I was out of my mind,’ she recalled years later. ‘I was totally screwed up.’58
She was anxious about the idea of moving to Boston. She had found Jill and Kathy to be good friends. Kathy had lived with a suicidal mother and she had quickly become a strong support for Madeleine. For the first time, Madeleine felt that she was among people who understood her pain. Now she was about to lose that support. But the Harvard job made sense for Chris, who needed to show practical skills in film-making as part of his Stanford degree. When the job offer came through, Madeleine claimed she was delighted. She wrote to Annabel Minchin:
I greatly look forward to living in Boston…one of the oldest American cities, full of Pilgrim Fathers & the wonderful Georgian architecture, a 1st class symphony orchestra, Harvard University (Chris will be on the staff), a fabulous museum, marvellous New England countryside nearby & New York 4 hours away!59