The Times Great Women's Lives

by Sue Corbett

  The principal comedian in that revue was Archie Pitt, with whose productions she was for many years associated and whom later she married. For two years from February, 1916, they played together in It’s a Bargain, and in 1918 began a tour of seven years in Mr Tower of London, probably the most successful touring revue ever produced. It several times filled the bill at London music halls, including notably the Alhambra, and in it the charm, humour, and freshness of Gracie Fields began to attract general notice. After a period in another revue, By Request, she appeared again as a single act, and in February, 1928, was engaged by the late Sir Gerald du Maurier to act as Lady Weir with him in SOS. The fact of one of the most popular “legitimate” actors of his day thus choosing a young music hall singer for a leading part in one of his productions caused a considerable stir at the time. This was, however, her only “straight” part, and before long she was back again in variety and revue, one of her chief successes being in The Show’s The Thing, at the Victoria Palace, and subsequently at other London theatres. In 1930 she paid her first visit to America, to perform at the Palace Theatre, New York.

  The following year saw the beginning of her screen career, her first film being Sally in Our Alley, in which she introduced “Sally”, the most popular of all her songs. Her later films included Looking on the Bright Side, Love, Life and Laughter, Sing As We Go, and Look Up and Laugh. She signed in 1935 what was then stated to be the biggest contract ever made by a film or stage artist in this country, computed to bring her in about £150,000 in two years. The sale of her gramophone records, too, was vast, four million of them being sold in less than five years. In 1937 she received the freedom of her native town of Rochdale, and in 1938, she was created CBE. A woman of great generosity, she established an orphanage at Peacehaven in Sussex.

  Gracie Fields’s first marriage was dissolved in 1940, and she then married the Italian-born entertainer Monty Banks. It was typical of her lively generosity of spirit that during the Second World War she appeared wherever she could to strengthen morale and enliven servicemen and workers. One almost legendary tour took her, in six weeks, from Scapa Flow to Plymouth, giving three performances a day in army and air force camps and in factories. The performances were themselves unstintedly generous, and the last was no less fresh and vigorous than the first.

  After the war, and the death of her second husband in 1950, the pace of her career slackened still further. Her third marriage, to Boris Alperovici, in 1952, saw her partial retirement to a home in Capri.

  The comparative rarity of her public appearances seemed not to lessen her popularity or her place in the normally fickle memory of the public. She was, in her later days, less a legend than a personal friend of every member of her audiences, a happy, honest, and good-hearted visitor to whose appearances everybody looked forward. Her autobiography, Sing as We Go, was published in 1960. It conveyed a good deal of the directness, simplicity, and reticence of an artist who never lived or could have tolerated the idea of living her personal life in public. Between the lively, adored entertainer and her private concerns, with their great generosity and secretive kindness, a tactful curtain was always drawn.

  She toured Britain, Canada and Australia in 1964 and the United States a year later. She returned to Rochdale in 1978 to open a theatre named after her and was warmly greeted (which warmth she returned in good measure and in characteristic uninhibited style) and subsequently made a surprise appearance at what was to be her last Command Performance. In the New Year Honours List (of 1979) she was advanced to DBE and in February received the insignia at an investiture held by Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.

  Undoubtedly Gracie Fields was the outstanding figure of the music hall in the years between the wars. To compare her hold upon the public with that of the great personalities of an earlier generation — say Marie Lloyd or Miss Vesta Tilley — would be pointless, since she worked in such changed circumstances and was able to supplement her music-hall work with the new media of the talking film and the wireless. But though the screen and the radio helped to build up her tremendous reputation, though she made some extremely successful and enjoyable films of an unsophisticated kind and was a tremendous draw also upon the air, she was, first and foremost, a music hall performer, and those who never saw her in the flesh, singing to an audience actually present, never knew the essential Gracie Fields.

  Slender, rather tall, with a slight stoop, thin lips and strongly marked, somewhat pointed features, she caught the attention immediately she appeared. Her face, crowned with a mass of hair rippling back from a broad, high forehead, was intelligent rather than beautiful. As a performer she had two great gifts, a delicious sense of burlesque and genuine, homely fun, and an exceptionally beautiful and flexible voice, with a wide range. Her vocal technique improved steadily throughout her career, and even late in life the beauty of her high notes and the precision and neatness of her phrasing were remarkable. The excellence of her singing, indeed, at one time seemed a menace to her performance, for the sentimental ditties, on which she lavished so much artistry, were quite unworthy of her talent. Early in her career she had an entrancing trick of indicating her real opinion of these tearful ballads by introducing into the middle of her song some ludicrous trick of voice, or by absentmindedly scratching her back between high notes. Then for a time she became, to the disappointment of her more discerning admirers, more and more a serious sentimental singer, and her charming little buffooneries and her comic songs in her native Lancashire dialect became less and less prominent in her act. Later, however, though she did not return to the burlesque of her sentimental numbers, she restored a proper proportion of comic singing, and would give eight or 10 songs on end, alternately sentimental and humorous.

  As a comic singer she was delicious. Her fun, which was always good-humoured, inoffensive and full of character, seemed to bubble out of herself, and needed none of the extravagant make-up or costume upon which many comediennes have relied. Gracie Fields could change in a second from the heart-broken night-club frequenter begging for “Music, Maestro, Please” to the Lancashire mill girl who owned “The Biggest Aspidestra [sic] in the World” or had been to the christening of “Mrs Binns’s Twins” without changing her dress or even altering the set of her hair. Just as quickly and easily she could become the young Welsh girl whose family had “Got to Keep up with the Joneses”. Gracie Fields had a very great spontaneous comic talent, a lovely voice and a personality (perhaps the most important asset of all, since the basis of the art of the music hall is personality) which made her, whether she was being funny or sentimental, always unaffectedly good and likable company.

  Dame Gracie Fields, DBE, popular entertainer, was born on January 9, 1898. She died on September 27, 1979, aged 81

  Editor’s note: Dame Gracie Fields died while publication of The Times was suspended; this obituary appeared in The Times Obituaries Supplement two months later.

  DAME REBECCA WEST

  * * *

  WRITER WHO BROUGHT A NOVELIST’S FLAIR TO HER POWERFUL WORKS OF JOURNALISM

  MARCH 16, 1983

  Dame Rebecca West, DBE, the author, journalist and critic, died yesterday in London. She was 90.

  Into no one of these departments of literary activity did Rebecca West fit with entire ease, though she shone in them all. As a novelist, she had an analytical mind, somewhat too ruthless, perhaps, at stripping away pretence and pathetic disguise in the character she was exploring or the human motives she was exposing, entirely to win the reader’s allegiance. It is as though one watched a brilliant surgeon operating rather than admired a physician at the gentler work of healing.

  Somewhat at odds with this sharp method of dissection was an impressive, but occasionally orotund literary style, the perfect instrument for catching a scene of tension, but, in involved passages of deduction and comparison, demanding from the reader a close attention to the argument which not everyone was capable of offering. Yet when she was reporting direct, and analysing only in bri
lliant asides and sharp descriptive cuts, no writer of her time could excel her. The New Yorker early recognized her as a valuable contributor, and her association with that magazine, the iconoclastic nature of which so perfectly reflected her own temperament, was a long and happy one. It is, perhaps, as a Great Reporter of our time, rather than as a novelist, that she is likely to be remembered. Nevertheless, at least one of her novels The Fountain Overflows (1957) was of a stature to encourage a higher estimation of her as a novelist, though planned sequels on the life of the Aubrey family never appeared.

  She was born in London on December 21, 1892, the third and youngest daughter of Charles Fairfield, who has been variously described as a journalist, a war correspondent and pamphleteer. He was of Irish extraction. Her mother was a Mackenzie, a native of Edinburgh, and an excellent fictional portrait of both parents appears in The Fountain Overflows.

  Born a few months after her family’s return from Australia, whither her father had followed one of his passionate quests to right some injustice, she was christened Cicily Isabel Fairfield. It was not until she was 19 that she assumed the name of Rebecca West by which she was later to become so well known. The first 10 years of her life had been spent in the huge house in South London in which she was born. After her father’s death, her mother moved the family to Edinburgh and the girls received their education at George Watson’s Ladies’ College.

  At the age of 18 she descended upon London to make a career. The moment was propitious for the encounter, but strong characters who are to make a mark on the world are often kept waiting in the wings for a little, and it was not until after she had been trained for the stage at a London dramatic academy and had appeared briefly in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm that she abandoned the prospect of an acting career. Her pen name “Rebecca West” was a reminder of an Ibsen role she had once played in an empty theatre.

  The rights of women were being hotly debated. H. G. Wells’s Ann Veronica had shocked one section of society. To another, the intelligent, ambitious, younger people of Rebecca’s generation, it was accepted as a great pronouncement. The establishment of women’s rights was not hastened by Wells’s most intelligent novel, but it had a very wide public. It led to some dramatic gestures, and it had its part in the loosening of the rigid bonds of Victorian society in the post-war freedom of the 1920s.

  Into this exciting debate Rebecca flung herself with the enthusiasm for a cause she had inherited from her father but with the cool detachment she had got from her mother. In 1911 she joined the staff of The Freewoman and in the following year, when she was only 20, became a political writer on The Clarion. She continued to play an active part in the fight for women’s suffrage, while contributing a whole stream of political essays and literary criticisms to The Star, the Daily News and the New Statesman.

  Attractive in appearance, with a quick mind, a biting wit, and an iconoclastic outlook, it is not surprising that H. G. Wells, then in his “phase of imaginative dispersal”, when he was beginning “to scandalize the whisperers”, should have found this young disciple a good deal more to his taste than some of those who, inspired by Ann Veronica, were prepared to throw off family ties and fling themselves at his feet. Rebecca’s first encounter with him was when, as a young reporter, she was sent to write him up. The attraction between them was immediate, in spite of the considerable difference in age.

  What Wells may not have recognized at first was the vein of seriousness beneath the girl’s daring talk. Between the shy, sensitive Scots-Irish girl of upper class origin, her romantic heart constantly being directed by her intelligent brain, and the successful, hard-headed son of the lower classes vibrant with life and intelligence and the charm these qualities exercise over others, there was a strong attraction but a profound difference of outlook, and a union between them, especially one of an irregular kind, was bound to end in disaster. But the association lasted for some years. A son was born to them who was given the name Anthony West. It was this relationship which was probably responsible for the iconoclastic views on marriage which Rebecca was to enunciate with such firmness for many years to follow.

  It was in this period that she published her first book, a critical study of Henry James. Her first work of fiction, The Return of the Soldier, appeared in 1918. This was followed by The Judge (1922), The Strange Necessity (1928), Harriet Hume (1929), and The Thinking Reed (1936). These books demonstrated both the remarkable range of her powers of observation, and at the same time her limitations as a novelist. The theme and background of every book was different from its predecessor, ranging from the shell-shocked soldier in the first, to the fashionable heroine of the last one. She seemed to penetrate beneath the surface of human conduct, and to find new and convincing motives for behaviour: the reader is compelled to admire her craftsmanship and to accept the explanations of her narrative. Her style imitated no one; she brought to her story-telling a fresh use of language, and these novels stand high above most of those that appeared in the 1920s and 1930s.

  Yet they are not great novels. Something that Hardy, Wells, Conrad, or Henry lames could communicate in their different ways to the reader is missing here. It is intuition, that last and greatest gift that is given to true genius. Hardy and Tess, Dickens and David Copperfield, Tolstoy and Natasha, Wells and Kipps, that deep intuitive understanding between the creator and his creation is missing from these admirable works of fiction, and they are lost in the mists of time with other works of far less quality. Rebecca West’s brain had come to command her heart; which is sensible in life but is a loss to the great novelist. But this loss was to be recovered in her last work of fiction, The Fountain Overflows, published 20 years after The Thinking Reed. For the background to this work, designed to be written in three parts, she turned back to her own childhood and the image of a beloved mother. It had a large public.

  This work might have appeared earlier but for the interruption of the Second World War. In 1930 she had married Henry Maxwell Andrews, a private banker with literary tastes, who did much to encourage and help her in her literary work. In the mid-1930s they made several journeys to Serbia, Macmillan having commissioned from her a travel book of 80,000 words. Her interest in the subject deepened as her knowledge of the country widened. She went back again and again, collecting and sifting her material. The war had been going on for more than a year, and the bombs were beginning to fall in London when she delivered to her publishers the book which they had contracted for several years before. It had grown to a quarter of a million words, but it had grown from a travel book to a masterpiece of biography, not of a man but of a whole people. It was published in 1941 in two volumes under the title of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, and was immediately recognized as a magnum opus, as astonishing in its range, in the subtlety and power of its judgment, as it is brilliant in expression. As a result of this work she was invited during the war to superintend the BBC broadcasts to Yugoslavia.

  The trials that followed the war offered her talents a fresh opportunity for pyrotechnic display. She was present at the Nuremberg Trials. Her graphic accounts appeared in the New Yorker and were subsequently published, together with accounts she gave of other trials following the war arising out of the relation of the individual to the state, in two memorable books, The Meaning of Treason (1949) and A Train of Powder (1955). These she followed with a critical work of originality and brilliance, The Court and the Castle (1958), which is an enlargement of a theme first stated in some lectures she was invited to give at Yale University.

  Later books were The Vassall Affair (1963), The New Meaning of Treason (1964), and a final novel The Birds Fall Down (1966), a parable of disloyalty and espionage worked out within the framework of a historical romance. This was translated into a BBC television serial in 1978.

  In an age when broadcasting and the style of reporting developed by such magazines as Time have accustomed us to the declamatory and breathless, her descriptions of great events caught the reader’s imagination by emphasizing the ordi
nariness of the men given outsize parts in them. Her description of the scene of the attempted assassination of Dr Verwoerd, the patient beasts at an agricultural show, the Boer farmers, and one farmer like a beast that has broken away from the stall stumbling towards the Prime Minister with a gun in his hand, caught the imagination of the reader and fixed the scene in his mind far more vividly than did the breathless messages of other journalists less gifted. She was a novelist who used her great gifts for journalism. At the same time, a journalist who brought to that fleeting work the powers of observation, the absorption with the motives of human conduct, the complexity of human character which his more leisurely production allows a novelist, but not a journalist, time to explore.

  She was created CBE in 1949 and advanced to DBE 10 years later. In 1957 she was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, and in 1968 a Companion of Literature. Her husband died in 1968.

  Dame Rebecca West, DBE, writer, was born on December 21, 1892. She died on March 15, 1983, aged 90

  LILLIAN HELLMAN