Daphne du Maurier and her Sisters

With the horror still raw, somehow Gerald thought it a good idea to take his young impressionable daughters with him to Pentonville. The girls were shown over the whole prison by the governor Major Blake; they saw the locked cells with their miserable inhabitants, the patients in their beds in the hospital wing, the condemned cell and the hanging shed, and even had the drop gruesomely demonstrated. The unmarked graves of the hanged added their own grim melancholy. Amongst them was wife-murderer Dr Crippen, the Irish revolutionary Roger Casement and, perhaps most poignantly, the twenty-year-old Bywaters, whose unfailing loyalty to his lover was remarked on by all in the press.

Daphne could not get the images out of her mind and sketched the cell and the hanged man’s drop in her diary. This episode showed how peculiarly contrary Gerald could be. He was almost hysterically protective of his daughters and wished to keep them as children for ever, but then he was capable of taking Jeanne, just thirteen, and Daphne, seventeen, to see people at their most degraded and dangerous. He had even exposed them to the horror of the process and apparatus for judicial murder by hanging. Had Angela been there too it might well have elicited a fit of uncontrolled crying, but Daphne just digested the images and added them to her already jaundiced view of human nature and the harm people do each other. She wrote a poem in her diary and wondered later if it was inspired by the visit:

Sorrow for the men that mourn

Sorrow for the days that dawn,

Sorrow for all things born

Into this world of sorrow.

And all my life, as far as I can see,

All that I hope, or ever hope to be,

Is merely driftwood on a lonely sea.

Emboldened by her first kiss with a member of the Eton cricket XI, Angela next attempted to break out from the social straitjacket of home. Aged twenty, she developed a crush on a woman notorious for her lesbian proclivities. It showed a certain courage and boldness of character that this conscientious and obedient young woman should make a stand over this friendship. Her father was particularly hard to withstand. He was emotionally extreme and a practised actor and could work himself into a fit of temper that seemed close to insanity. Beverley Nichols had watched this amazing facility in action in rehearsal: ‘He can precipitate himself into a state of hysteria with the speed of a sporting Bugatti, and the moment afterwards is playing a love scene with admirable timing and sentiment.’

When Angela persisted with her desire to see this forbidden woman, both parents raged and threatened. Angela resorted to asking the Almighty to intervene. ‘Oh God,’ she wrote in her diary that autumn, ‘help something to happen to get them to change their minds.’

Their minds remained made up and Angela later reflected that this intensive control of her behaviour pushed her, from this time on, into subterfuge, secrecy and barefaced lies.

She did not name the focus of her desire in her memoir, but she was almost certainly an actress and most likely Gwen Farrar – the sensation of the highly successful revue at the Duke of York’s Theatre, The Punch Bowl, that ran through 1924 and the following year. She was witty and lively, a natural boyish clown who attracted men and women alike. She was partnered in the revue by her partner in life, the more conventionally pretty Norah Blaney, a friend of Angela Halliday, who was to become a close and lifelong friend of Angela du Maurier’s.

Daphne’s eye had also been caught by the unconventional attractions of the crop-haired Gwen when she saw the revue and wrote a fan letter to the actress. She admitted this to Tod and begged her discretion:

I adored Gwen Farrar! I wrote to her last night (not a word of this) saying ‘Dear Gwen, I think you are quite perfect, Daphne.’ Shall I be drawn into the net too? I wonder. I hope she won’t show the letter to anyone, or I shall be tarred with the same brush!

Being ‘drawn into the net too’ implied that someone else was in that net, and perhaps this was a reference to her elder sister, whose stormy rows with their parents over her unsuitable friendship could not have gone unnoticed. Daphne then added a significant coda: ‘Life’s no fun, unless theres’ a spark of danger in it.’

Angela did not relish the fights with her parents and, although she held out for a couple of months, in the end the force ranged against her was too much to withstand. She regretted her parents’ slur on the reputation of this intriguing woman and the thwarting of her own longing for friendship with her: ‘in all the weeks and months I knew her I never met anyone kinder, more generous, more amusing and so utterly uncontaminating in influencing the impressionable girl I was’. Angela’s diary at the end of October 1924 relayed the rollercoaster of her life, the italics are hers:

Dreadful scene with Daddy over X and Z (another friend) [possibly Gwen and Norah]. He stormed like a madman. Went to the dentist, awful time as he injected me with cocaine and jabbed a colossal needle into my jaw. Extraordinary feeling. Lilian and Joyce to lunch (Lilian Braithwaite and [daughter] Joyce Carey). Spent rest of day making frock. Polling Day – exciting results on wireless.

What Angela, and no doubt her family, considered ‘exciting results’ was an increased majority for the Conservatives and a rout of the Liberals under Asquith.

Gerald perhaps decided it was time to divert his eldest daughter’s energies away from unsuitable love affairs and into some kind of suitable career. Out of the blue he suggested that she play Wendy in the annual Christmas and New Year performance of Peter Pan at the Adelphi. This was a daunting role for someone who had never been trained as an actress. Peter Pan, however, was so well known to the du Maurier sisters, and loved by them all that each was word perfect in every character. Daphne did not envy her one bit. To appear before an audience, even in such a special play, she said, ‘would be agony’.

Angela, more extrovert, trusting and naïve, did not hesitate. She could have ‘jumped over the moon with glee’. This was always her part in the family shows and she had not missed one of the professional productions since she was first taken at the age of two. Highly professional and famous actors were hired to co-star with her. The lovely Gladys Cooper was Peter Pan, Mrs Patrick Campbell was Mrs Darling, and Hook and Mr Darling were played by a young South African actor, Ian Hunter, for whom Angela had already conceived a crush.

There were rehearsals all day and Angela was still socialising at night. She had always found attending rehearsals generally fascinating and enjoyed nothing more than sitting in the darkened stalls watching her father tease performances out of his company as they brought a play to life. This time, Angela struggled with the director’s vision of Peter Pan, which contradicted her own childhood memories of how it should be played. She also struggled with the acting. After weeks of work, her diary for late October 1924 lamented:

rehearsal all day 3rd act morning. Daddy came down and I was very bad. Lisped worse than ever, spoke quickly and forgot my words. Lunched Jill [Esmond, who was playing Nibs]. Last act afternoon. Ian so sweet, I had to prompt him and he said, ‘Bless you.’ I am a fool.

The middle-aged Angela wrote of her youthful sense of folly: ‘How true, how true!’

In retrospect she realised also that she had been parachuted in ahead of all the other young actresses who would have hoped for the part. Jill Esmond for instance, although younger, was fully RADA-trained and merely had a minor part. The nepotism involved in her selection and Angela’s lack of training, together with her naïve belief that she could just reprise her nursery performances, all set her up for a fall. Unfortunately it was a literal and almighty one.

Each actor who was required to fly had to don an uncomfortable harness and then be lifted into the air and manipulated by a man pulling wires in the wings. In the last act Wendy, John and Michael all flew through the window back to their nursery, alighting in the middle of the stage. But Angela was flown too vigorously and crash-landed on the footlights. She was catapulted into the orchestra pit, taking the double bassist and his instrument with her. There was an appalled hush from the audience: no one knew if she would emerge alive. She was dazed and in pain but recovered enough to creep under the stage and reappear as Wendy in her bed in the nursery. ‘The ovation which greeted me was almost frightening. The audience stood and clapped and yelled, and with tears running down my face by then (from emotion not pain) I blew them all a kiss and then the play went on.’

Angela dined out on the story of her flying debacle so many times that the family and her closest friends coined the phrase ‘an orchestra’ to mean a long tale of melodramatic disaster. After this mishap she realised she hadn’t the mettle to be a proper actress because she did not believe that the show had to go on regardless. She was much more inclined to take to her bed if she felt under the weather. But although she was battered and bruised, her nerve shattered, Gerald insisted she return to the theatre the next day, conquer her fear of flying, and perform in the afternoon show.

Angela’s careering flight was one of the few outside incidents to merit a mention in Daphne’s continuing angst-ridden correspondence with Tod, who was living in some splendour at Burrough Court in Leicestershire, tutoring Averill the daughter of a rich, recently widowed businessman, the 1st Viscount Furness. Daphne teased Tod by suggesting that her much-loved governess should become the next Lady Furness. In fact, the Viscount’s taste unhappily ran on rather more exotic lines as he was already engaged to one beautiful American socialite, and would end up married to another, who promptly became the mistress of Edward, the Prince of Wales.

Daphne’s adolescent introspection and sense of the pointlessness of life was about to be challenged. At eighteen it was her turn to go to finishing school in Paris, the city of her imagination. She was not bound for the Ozannes’, where Angela’s experiences had been mixed, but to a school run by Miss Wicksteed at Camposena, some five and a half miles south-west of the city. Miss Wicksteed, or ‘Wick’ as she was known by the girls, was a reassuringly solid middle-aged Englishwoman with white hair and a no-nonsense manner. On 16 January 1925, after a blast of Christmas parties and dances, Daphne headed off to Paris for what would be the defining experience of her life.

Jeanne was now nearly fourteen and life for her was changing too. She was enrolled in Francis Holland School at Clarence Gate near Regent’s Park to start in the autumn term a more formal education with art and sports on the curriculum. Having had generous notices for her Wendy the first time round, Angela contracted to do one more season of Peter Pan, but the critics this time sharpened their quills. Already ambivalent about her future as an actress, exhaustion, demoralisation and a stage fight with real swords, in which her nose was almost severed, put paid to her faltering ambition. Her famous theatrical name was both a boon and a liability. If she was to be an actress as a du Maurier she would have to be particularly dedicated and particularly good, and she feared she was neither.

During her run as Wendy, Angela had been conned by a well-known elderly photographer into posing for him in the nude, and been appalled and embarrassed by the results. A happier experience was provided by their young friend Cecil Beaton when he asked Angela and Daphne to be models in two of his earliest photographic experiments. They were shown into his old nursery where he had set up his props and various cameras and tripods and, with the help of his elderly nanny, and a great deal of laughter (and ineffectual fiddling around it seemed to the girls), produced his inventive portraits of the sisters: ‘Daph’s and my heads appearing magically under wineglasses.’

Stilted and ludicrously artificial to the modern eye, the photographs were considered by Angela later in life to be the most flattering portraits of them both ever created. Hers hung in pride of place in the Italian house of her great friend Naomi Jacob, until the Germans arrived in the Second World War and either purloined or trashed it.

Angela could never confide her hopes or fears to her parents and without prospects of a career she drifted rudderless and ill-equipped for independent life. Years later she mused on how celebrity affected those closest to it:

I wanted to be a good actress, and with a name like du Maurier I could not afford to be a bad one … Possibly too much is expected of the children of the great; I would definitely say, in fact, that both as an actress – admittedly of only one part – and as a writer, I have found my name as big a handicap as ever it was a help. As Wendy I was Gerald du Maurier’s daughter – and it had been an amusing ‘stunt’ to try me out in a star part straight off …

Her lack of training and the chance to work her way up from the bottom had also robbed her of the opportunity to graduate to being a producer, which was where her true talents possibly lay, though as a young woman gazing into the unknown she could not have been aware of this at the time. Girls of her background and education did not aspire to have serious careers apart from becoming actresses and the wives of famous men. While Angela waited for the man she would marry, the parties continued. In a private room at the Garrick, Gerald occasionally invited an eclectic group of friends and acquaintances to lunch. One memorable gathering on 23 October was recorded by Angela in her diary, and also by her old crush, Roland Pertwee.

The party was organised to wave off in style on an Australian tour their friends and colleagues, the actor-director Dion Boucicault Jnr and his actress wife Irene Vanbrugh. Apart from Muriel, Gerald, Angela, Roland and the Boucicaults, there was also (with Angela’s comments in italics) ‘Dame Nellie Melba (most excited about [her] for whom I had (rightly) boundless admiration), H. G. Wells (too sweet), Augustus John (overawed by him and sat far away), Sir Squire Bancroft,’ and the sisters’ lifelong heroes, John Barrymore and Gladys Cooper. Roland continued the tale:

half-way through lunch Irene said to Melba: ‘Tip us a stave, Nellie.’ And Nellie Melba, over a loaded fork, for she was a hearty trencherman, opened her throat and sang like a lark.

That lunch, which started at one fifteen went on until seven thirty, when John Barrymore rushed off to appear as Hamlet at the Haymarket, and gave one of the most sensational performances of his career.

This was the kind of glamorous world that the du Maurier sisters inhabited, some of them more happily than others. Angela, still childlike at twenty, was standing tentatively on the edge of this world she was reared to join, while Jeanne was allowed to remain a girl for a few years more. Daphne, who had been so reluctant to grow up and did not care for her parents’ kind of high society or attitudes to love, was back in Paris in the heat of her first real love affair. This time she would give her father real reason for outrage. Luckily, he never knew.

4

Love and Losing

I for this and this for me.

DAPHNE DU MAURIER, Growing Pains

DAPHNE HAD NEVER before been away from home and everyone expected her to be homesick – after all, Angela’s time in Paris had been spoiled by a heart-clutching nostalgie. But Daphne suffered not one twinge. Why would she? She already adored Paris, not for its shopping and its shows, but for its possibilities, the ancient alleyways, the hidden squares, the imaginative connection with her ancestors, and the dark stories embedded in its stones. Daphne had found life at home limiting, her parents’ suspicions claustrophobic, and she had never been happy with the relentless socialising expected of her in London. She had grown up with a sense of her own exceptionalism, something her father’s attention had encouraged, and always felt separate and alien, and quite unlike other people.

Desperate to escape the envelope of make-believe and good manners that had maintained her in a suspended state of childhood, Daphne could not have chosen a better springboard for her flight. Paris between the wars was the most exciting city in the world, a City of Light that cast her home town distinctly in its shade. Intellectuals and artists were attracted to its vibrant energy, where the revolutionary movements of Cubism, Surrealism and Dadaism evolved from the studios of painters like Picasso, Matisse, Giacometti and Chagall. American jazz was the thrilling accompaniment to the modernist experimentations that energised intellectual debate and transformations in design. Excitement spilled from the cafés and bars of the Left Bank – a favourite haunt of Daphne’s all her life. Her pulse could not have failed to quicken to its beat.

Daphne’s only concern was that she had to go to school and her fellow pupils would be a dull lot, as she wrote to Tod, adding revealingly, ‘I know so few girls that I will probably think them all fools at first.’

She was accompanied by Doodie Millar, the daughter of another Hampstead family. Doodie, a lively, good-looking girl she had known from childhood, had already been to boarding school and so was sanguine about the whole experience. The house at Camposena was cold and far less comfortable than Cannon Hall but was situated in fine parkland close to the small town of Meudon, and a short train trip from Paris itself, which more than made up for its lack of luxury. The bedroom she and Doodie shared was barely furnished and bitter even in October, and Daphne thought the girls looked as dull and boring as she had expected. However, she liked the mistresses, and one in particular. She wrote to Tod, her faithful confidante, ‘the head kind of mistress, Mlle Yvon, is obviously “Venice” [her code for lesbian], many of the girls, & one mistress, are mad about her. She has a sort of fatal attraction about her, I feel I shall fall for her before too long!!’

During her flirtatious skirmishes with Cousin Geoffrey, Daphne had learnt of her singular power to attract: having been the sister who had always drawn the most attention, she was not used to having to compete with others for favour. She was stung by the school’s assessment of her as being merely middling in her abilities, placing her in the B stream. The elite A girls, who clustered around Mlle Yvon, were privileged to choose where they sat at dinner and – the height of excitement – could follow her afterwards to a special room, the salon du fond. Here they played an uncomfortable game called ‘Truths’ that would reduce a few of them each night to tears. The atmosphere was febrile with girlish intrigues and emotion, encouraged by the green-eyed, soignée Fernande Yvon.

Daphne was determined that she would somehow penetrate this inner sanctum and claim her rightful place as favourite at its centre. Despite remaining in stream B and therefore outside the charmed circle, she showed her father’s chutzpah when one night she picked up her book (a French classic by Edmond de Goncourt whose académie had founded the most prestigious literary prize Prix Goncourt) and strolled nonchalantly into the lionesses’ den. The girls greeted this uninvited interloper with surprised hostility, but Mlle Yvon appeared to be amused by her presumption and motioned her to sit at her feet by the fire. ‘My triumph was complete,’ Daphne wrote, recalling her heroic boy-self, ‘even Eric Avon, bowing to the crowd from his balcony above Lord’s cricket ground, had never achieved such a victory.’

But this kind of power was heady and dangerous and, as with Cousin Geoffrey, the thrill of a clandestine and forbidden connection exerted its own power to enslave. Fernande Yvon, in her thirties, unmarried and with limited prospects, inevitably enjoyed the influence that her position as directrice of an exclusive finishing school gave her, and the devotion of well-connected girls brought its own rewards both socially and emotionally. There was little doubt that the teacher set out to seduce her new pupil, but also that the pupil was ready to be seduced, or certainly desired the power that being favourite bestowed. Daphne wrote to Tod: