Daphne in Venice
In April 1952, George Cukor sailed for England. Failing to lure Garbo from retirement; he hoped to recruit Vivien Leigh for his next project, My Cousin Rachel, and to meet its author Daphne du Maurier in Cornwall.
What made Vivien so wrong for Rebecca, twelve years earlier, a heroine so mousy she wasn’t accorded a name (Joan Fontaine played “I” or “the second Mrs. de Winter”) made her perfect for Rachel. A mysterious, slightly mature woman; menacing to men. As though Rebecca, who doesn’t even appear in her story, is promoted to star billing. Du Maurier wrote to her paramour Gertrude Lawrence, then the toast of Broadway in The King and I, that casting Cukor’s film would cause a catfight among Hollywood’s sirens – just as Hitchcock’s had in 1940. In many ways, the newer book was its spiritual sequel. It almost matched its acclaim. At the zenith of her talent in the early fifties, du Maurier was the master of symmetry. Her canon felt cohesive without ever drawing on nostalgia or her readers’ goodwill. People forget what an enormously important shaper of popular culture she was: the Sally Rooney of her day! Although she never wrote the same novel thrice. How different is Jamaica Inn to Rebecca and Frenchman’s Creek? True, they hadn’t all been served by superlative adaptations – but with the great “woman’s director” on board and the recently minted Best Actress winner for A Streetcar Named Desire, My Cousin Rachel had the makings of a classic.
The movie-maker, star, and novelist toasted its success when an ominous phone call came from California. Zanuck was pulling the plug. Shooting on location was out; it was more economical to do so on the Century City backlot. Using a script that du Maurier found “quite desperate”, Fox yes-man Henry Koster assumed directing duties – and Olivia de Havilland, entirely inappropriate, given the lead. Symmetry! Joan Fontaine triumphed in an excellent Rebecca; her sister floundered in the lousy follow-up. Indeed, My Cousin Rachel is best remembered for bringing Cukor’s exciting Welsh find, Richard Burton, to Hollywood. A quickie rushed out by the end of the year, du Maurier was appalled. But she had more distressing news. In September, a telegram arrived at her Cornish estate. Gertrude Lawrence was dead.
They’re a curious race, lesbians. I’ve never had much to do with them – but I long to learn the secrets of their industriousness. Not unlike Canadians, they exist under the radar. Wonderful people. I once knew a girl who had a “Mum” and a “Mummy”. The biological mother was a real go-getter who, through the expedient of marrying an elderly man of means, installed herself in a South Dublin manse. Great privilege! After establishing a high-flying career (and putting the husband under the sod and the daughter through Europe’s best schools), she then became a dyke. Sensible! That strikes me as the right way to do it – not our custom of rolling into bed with anyone who smiles at us.
At the other end of the scale, I have a cousin in social housing: “Lesbian Lil”. She claims to be bicoastal. (They’re all bicoastal now.) But a pretty piece. Oh, it pains me to see her with her latest girlfriend, too common for words, hanging from her. “Find yourself a nice young man,” I should say if I took leave of my manners “and put this nonsense behind you”. Mind you, her brother, Gay Graham, is also bicoastal – this lad makes Liberace look butch – and he’s going with a girl! A dead ringer for Billie Eilish. “Do Billie Eilish’s parents know you’re on the other bus?” I might suggest if I wasn’t so well-bred “the poor thing. End it and end it now. Find yourself a nice young man!”.
Like day drinking or not paying tax, fluid sexuality belongs to a Better Sort. And Daphne and Gertie were certainly of the haut monde. The lady who preceded Ms. Lawrence in her affections was grander still: Ellen Doubleday, the Long Island chatelaine married to her American publisher. As I alluded to in the beginning, du Maurier exerted a peerless influence over the day’s fiction. It wasn’t surprising, then, that plagiarism accusations followed her like barking dogs: vexatious litigants that would make Gwyneth Paltrow blush. At Nelson Doubleday’s invitation, Daphne journeyed to America on the Queen Mary in 1947 to put these smears to rest. His wife Ellen was also aboard. Daphne, a striking woman of forty (though at her wit’s end from an increasingly erratic husband), expected Mrs. Doubleday to be a vulgar clone of Wallis Simpson. She turned out to be Rebecca de Winter herself! Their brief encounter – apt considering Noël Coward moved in the same circles – began Daphne’s “lesbian era”. Or “Venetian tendencies” in the Mitford-esque lexicon of the du Mauriers.
Daphne (“Bing”) and her sisters Angela (“Piffy”) and Jeanne (“Bird”) had nicknames for everything. Piffy was also a writer, albeit a frustrated one, while Bird distinguished herself as a painter. Openly living with female partners, both addressed their sexuality with a frankness that condemned them to Daphne’s shadow. (Bing sublimated herself to the conventional “routes” of wedlock and motherhood.) From the Brontës, they appropriated “Gondal”: the world of make-believe. They were always more comfortable discussing the Brontës – or indeed their grandfather George du Maurier, inventor of Trilby and Svengali – than their own works. Embarrassment was “waine” and “Witherspoon”, a dullard. “Robert” was code for menstruation. When Daphne made love with her war hero hubby, Sir Frederick “Boy” Browning (“Tommy” or “Moper”), she exotically referred to it as “Cairo”. Sapphic experiences brought her to “Venice”.
“Pegs” didn’t concern Prince William’s sexual fetishes. It was the inspiration for their characters. The hook on which they repurposed real-life people and events. Famously, this was how Daphne fictionalised Tommy’s former fiancée, the beautiful and accomplished Jan Ricardo, as Rebecca; and herself as “I”, the insignificant second wife. In My Cousin Rachel, she gave herself the male form of Philip Ashley. But pegs worked the other way. A character could penetrate a person. And that’s precisely what happened in the late forties.
Pinpointing where Rebecca and Rachel stop and Ellen Doubleday begins is difficult. She never physically reciprocated Daphne’s lust, but was nonetheless flattered to be the source of her infatuation. Ellen was everything Daphne wasn’t. A woman confident in her own gender. The perfect wife and hostess. “The Rebecca of Barberrys”, Daphne called her; queen of a magnificent North Shore property. In Britain, Daphne resented her role of “Lady Browning”. Tommy had been made Comptroller and Treasurer to the young Princess Elizabeth after the war, and she avoided the social obligations and public spotlight it brought her like the plague.
Nelson and Ellen’s world was easy opulence; the Brownings’, one of ration coupons and a crumbling house: Menabilly (alias “Manderley”), the West Country estate Daphne was permitted to lease but not buy. Daphne made do with “jam-along” clothes: slacks and blazers; “Ellen is always so smart, so well-turned out”. In Daphne du Maurier: A Daughter’s Memoir, Flavia Leng who accompanied her mother to the States in ‘47 recalls a scene that is just short of Mrs. Danvers rifling through her mistress’s knicker drawer:
“Bing and I were amazed by the variety of clothes in (Ellen’s) cupboards. It smelt deliciously of her scent and she would let us look at her lovely evening dresses, wonderful silks and velvets. Bing would stare at herself in the looking-glass with a look of despondency which swiftly turned to wry amusement when Ellen caught her eyeing the wardrobe”.
Every storyteller knows the only thing to do about an obsession is write your way out of it. As a mark of appreciation to her American hostess, Daphne bequeathed her original Rebecca manuscript (that proved her innocence in the plagiarism trial) to Ellen. But back in Cornwall, she got to work. Sucking on Fox’s Glacier Mints in her writer’s hut, she scribbled round the clock. Daphne’s conflicted feelings about her own identity welled up. It was as if Ellen unearthed the “boy in the box” buried deep within her psyche. Daphne always secretly thought of herself as a “half-breed”; physically female, but “with a boy’s mind and boy’s heart”. That pressure built until it unleashed itself in a new project. Like a dam breaking. It wasn’t quite My Cousin Rachel, but the elements were there. A play about the quasi-incestual relationship between a young man and his in-law. Daphne originally gave it the Oedipal title of Mother, but soon rechristened it September Tide.
Daphne set her heart on the patrician Peggy Ashcroft playing Ellen (pegged as “Stella”). She couldn’t have been more displeased with the vulgar peroxide tart chosen. A thespian who’d belonged to her actor-manager father Gerald du Maurier’s stable in the twenties. “I was staggered,” Daphne recalled of the casting, before adding diplomatically: “it wasn’t exactly my idea”. But then a curious metamorphosis happened.
And while Ellen Doubleday rejected Daphne’s advances; Gertrude Lawrence embraced them.