Daphne in Venice: Part Two
“A star is a star is a star,” Gertrude Stein observed, although it equally holds for the Gertie we’re discussing today.
Indeed, when Julie Andrews played Ms. Lawrence in the sixties, the film was imaginatively titled Star!. Famed for near-sinking 20th Century Fox, barely solvent since The Sound of Music; it was a calamity of Heaven’s Gate proportions. (Serves them right for how they butchered My Cousin Rachel!) Dame Julie lamented the public’s indifference to GLaw: a woman who, like her, came up through the hardscrabble world of music hall. By the interwar period, Gertie was the toast of the West End and Broadway. Noël Coward, the stage partner to whom she was closely identified, said: “She could wear rags and look ravishingly beautiful. She was irresponsible. Magical but quite mad. Exaggerated her humble beginnings. Had affairs with just about everybody. Treated her beaux abominably. Made everything about her seem platinum-plated”.
If the story of La Lawrence was antediluvian by 1968, she returned to England twenty years earlier a relic of a bygone age. After reviving her fortunes in a 1945 New York staging of Pygmalion – Shaw had hitherto resisted her playing Eliza – Gertie’s British comeback proved a damp squib. In those days, celebrity meant jewels, stoles and jaunts to the Riviera. Ms. Lawrence had the bankruptcy filings to show for it: she was nearly always in debt! But such extravagance didn’t wash in the socialist utopia of Clement Attlee. Gertie played Stella, Daphne du Maurier’s facsimile of Ellen Doubleday, in September Tide to half-empty houses. Touring the provinces, audiences were principally pensioners who remembered her from her vaudeville heyday. (After all, attending the theatre is one way of saving on your fuel ration!) But if the show wasn’t a fitting return for a prodigal daughter; the relationship she formed with its author compensated.
As I’m fond of saying: I often feel I’m the Thelma Ritter of everybody else’s existence, rather than the leading lady of my own. Daphne, too, muddled through: a character player observing life’s drama from the wings. Perhaps, that’s why I’m drawn to her. Let’s face it, women like us are brilliant (in my case, it’s hampered by crippling inadequacy and wells of untapped potential). Daphne was brilliant and beautiful and had the money and connections to insure them. A geriatric Judy Garland swooning over Clark Gable, she scribbled September Tide with a portrait of Ellen Doubleday on her bureau. Penned in a mere fortnight, it failed to exorcise her of her obsession.
Rather like my sending thirst traps (although being so chonky; they’re “hunger hooks”!) after I’ve had a prosecco too many; Daphne’s letters to Mrs. Doubleday were issued once she fortified her nerves with brandy and gin. Our drunk DMs have nothing on Daphne du Maurier’s epistolary friendships. I pretend to be a harmless clown who doesn’t know any better. It’s always a good idea to add a little joke to your texts to distract from the oversharing. Daphne suffused her communication with self-deprecating humour – though one would never consider her side-splittingly funny – and eventually learned to rein in the flippancy.
Our heroine was capable of inventing whole worlds and deftly plotting her stories, but emotional intelligence eluded her. Blinded by passion, empathy was never a strong suit. She struggled to make (and keep) healthy relationships. Doesn’t that sound like a certain Glenn Close-loving bear who shall remain nameless but whose initials are “M. O’D.”? Actually, speaking of Glennie, Daphne was briefly a proponent of Moral Re-Armament in the UK, the sect-like group Our Number One Lady escaped aged twenty-two. Individuals searching for their own identity have always been sacrificial lambs for cults. Glenn’s father was a Greenwich surgeon; Daphne, the Princess Royal of a famous family. They were not disadvantaged, vulnerable people.
I’m eager to get away from this diversion into psychobabble. But I do feel by watching Gertrude Lawrence live “her truth”, Daphne discovered hers. Or at least, put some of her neuroses to bed. And the author wasn’t a sleeping partner: Gertie’s link with her theatrical lineage led to a remarkably fecund period in her output. There was a roman-à-clef entitled The Parasites. Another project was suggested wherein Gertie (or “Cinders” in du Maurier-speak) would play Mary Anne Clarke, Daphne’s great-great-grandmother, mistress to the Duke of York. Most importantly, Cinders helped bring her long-deceased Pa back to life.
Daphne didn’t even attend her father’s funeral in 1934 – she released pigeons on Hampstead Heath, instead – but wrote Gerald: A Portrait in the same year. “Thank heavens, my daughter can’t write!” wags sighed, when the Mommie Dearest of its day arrived in time for the Christmas market. Fifteen years after Daphne’s references to his “stable” in what turned out to be neither hatchet job nor hagiography, she became involved with one of the fillies. Heaven knows what Freud would’ve made of a father and son sharing the same mistress, let alone a father and daughter! But Daphne always struggled to be the son Gerald craved. There have even been suggestions of incest – in the way the relationship between J.M. Barrie and the Llewelyn Davies boys, Gerald’s nephews and the inspiration for Peter Pan, is now problematic. (One of them, Michael Llewelyn Davies, drowned in an Oxford college in the arms of another male undergraduate. When Daphne delivered Rebecca to her fate, she surely had this cousin in mind.)
As I intimated in Part One, Daphne was the only one of her siblings to marry and have children. She doted upon son Kits (who later married Miss Ireland 1961, Olive White, a working-class girl from Crumlin) – but was distant to daughters Tessa and Flavia. As her own mother, Muriel, had been to her. In time, Daphne cut Lady du Maurier some slack. It’s not easy being the object of an infatuation you cannot return. Treated as a canvas on whom someone projects their emotional needs. Gerald made Daphne his golden child, and his inhibitions informed hers. He was blindly homophobic. The shame Daphne felt about her own “Venetian tendencies” made her adopt two personas as an act of self-preservation. A feminine wife-and-mother, and a masculine Lothario.
The two Daphnes combined to give us her incredible body of work. Even her biographies (of Gerald, Francis and Anthony Bacon, Branwell Brontë) read like novels. A mélange of fact and fiction with assumed thoughts and imagined dialogue. When she had a “peg”, Daphne wrote compulsively. Therefore, despite Gertie’s presence from 1948 on, verbose letters continued to shoot across the Atlantic. By this point, Nelson Doubleday was dying. A fatal combination of alcoholism, illness and depression. Daphne, who couldn’t imagine nursing her own husband through such travails (she eventually would; causing much strain), tempered her correspondence to Ellen with sensitivity. “You are a complete woman,” she mused “and I have never been. I’ve only put up an act at being one, and got away with it because I was an actor’s daughter”.
Still she secretly hoped once Nelson was out of the picture, Ellen and she would be together. Daphne wasn’t being callous; she was merely ignorant about love. Ellen and Daphne did go to Venice – well, Italy at any rate and it was an utter disaster. On this vacation, Daphne finally grasped that Ellen hadn’t a Venetian bone in her body and, like Muriel, would never be emotionally demonstrative. (“How I wish there was a chink somewhere in the armour of the Iron Curtain,” she lamented.) Just as Rebecca was not drafted in England but in the brutal heat of Egypt where she was stationed as Tommy’s unhappy bride; Daphne’s next Cornish epic germinated here in Florence. A thriller about a widow who may or may not have poisoned her husband. “When I had that (to me, rather silly, now!) thing about Ellen, which was pure Gondal,” she cheerfully wrote “it was only by making up My Cousin Rachel, and pegging the Rachel woman on her, that I was able to rid myself of it!”.
And while this project satisfied Daphne’s artistic needs; Gertrude Lawrence fulfilled another. The “liaison” between the two is the topic of much conjecture, but a 1950 holiday with Gertie to Florida was certainly more of a romantic getaway than perusing Italian cathedrals and stuffy art galleries with Ellen: “We behaved like two schoolgirls”. Daphne reciprocated with visits to Menabilly (or “Mena”), when General Browning was in London, where the two would put on trousers and go for long hikes along the coast. (God knows, that’s not a traditionally lesbian pastime!) Let’s face it, everyone should have the right to be their true self and be open about their sexuality. Gertie, I fear, was game for anything – but made Daphne feel accepted for who and what she was, and that is not to be underestimated. It’s what we all want! Under Gertie’s tutelage, Daphne took an interest in clothes; wearing Edward Molyneux ballgowns, instead of her jam-along duds. It’s never wise to change your personality to accommodate your lady-loves, of course, but Gertie gave her one shining moment of contentment. Ms. Lawrence’s earthy intuition was the perfect foil to du Maurier’s analytical brain. Moreover, the relationship defused her attachment to Ellen and put her feelings for both her parents and her workaholism in a better place. After My Cousin Rachel, her career never again reached such dizzying heights. Poor Daphne was condemned to the realm of “popular lady novelist”, instead of the critical adulation she craved.
“Hello young lovers, whoever you are, I hope your troubles are few, all my good wishes go with you tonight, I've been in love like you.”
So sang Gertie every night as Anna Leonowens in The King and I, a musical specifically tailored for her in 1951. In many ways, Mrs. Anna provided the same function for the polka-dancing King of Siam (a follicly-challenged thirty-year-old named Yul Brynner) as Gertie had for Daphne. An external mediator who uses unorthodox methods to resolve issues, and then departs. But her newfound happiness was not to last. Yul Brynner knew it, too. Right up until August of the following year, they performed his death scene with a special poignancy. It was Mrs. Anna who was fading.
When Gertie succumbed to cancer of the abdomen and liver, she was buried in her “Shall We Dance?” pink crinoline. Broadway marquees were dimmed in her honour, reputedly the first time such a tribute had taken place. At Mena, Daphne was plunged into a state of catatonic grief. Having killed Rachel, who finished as a hybrid of Ellen and Gertie, she deadpanned: “You have to be jolly careful with pegs!”. She hid her mourning. Because Daphne’s Venetian period was private, she had to get over Gertie’s death alone. As always, writing alleviated her pain. She swiftly dispatched an eerie short story, The Birds, and Mary Anne, a chronicle of her wanton ancestor. The dedication page of the latter read: “To Gertrude Lawrence who was to have acted the part on the stage, died New York, 6 September 1952”.
Through this period, Flavia Leng thought her mother was ill; and the true extent of Daphne’s feelings for Cinders was kept secret for decades. In December, they attended the premiere of Henry Koster’s film of My Cousin Rachel. Daphne endorsed Richard Burton as Philip Ashley, a dashing swashbuckler of whom Gertie would’ve approved. It brought him the first of seven fruitless Oscar nominations. But Olivia de Havilland, queasily earnest, was miscast in the title role; in a ridiculous get-up that made her resemble the Duchess of Windsor.
“She looks like Ellen Doubleday!” Flavia cried when de Havilland made her entrance. Troubled by this revelation, Daphne said nothing.