by Anne Edwards
Gertrude came home to England each summer, Ernest Hartley in alternate summers. Vivian preferred to remain at the convent with the nuns most other holidays, although she usually had invitations to visit with her friends. She continued her reading on her own and for a young girl had surprisingly sophisticated tastes. From Kipling she had gone on with much fervor to Dickens and Shakespeare. There were her lessons, the school orchestra in which she played cello, the choir, her classes in ballet, and the theatrical productions in which she was now an active participant. All the girls thought she was splendid and that someday she would surely be famous.
When her father was home they spent tranquil days in Connemara in the west of Ireland, where she would watch him battle the river trout in the waters that surrounded the village. Hartley was proud of his daughter, and at the same time guilty of the need for them to be separated so much of the time. When she was a child he had always spoiled her with toys. Now, as a growing girl, he indulged her with expensive clothes to wear on holiday and exotic presents of Indian jewelry, pearls, and silk stockings. Often, to brighten the dull convent fare, he would send hampers of delicacies, which Vivian would share generously with the other girls.
Her friends thought her the most glamorous girl in the school. Certainly she did show an unusual flair for fashion, seeming always to know how to assemble the right dress, necklace, and scarf in those rare times she was able to shed her uniform. The girls loved to help her pack and unpack, trying on her clothes and jewelry, and she was exceptionally generous and adored giving presents whenever she could to all her friends. “Oh, you do truly like it,” she would comment when a girl would say how lovely something of hers was. “Do keep it. Do!” she would press.
Boys were mysteries, a great excitement. If the plumber came to school they were all thrilled. Yet, in spite of the cloistered nature of their existence, sex, though a special kind of exciting thing, did not seem an impossible fantasy. There were, in fact, two suspected lesbians in the school (older girls), and that created enormous excitement and a lot of whisperings. There were also many older girls who had experimental sex with each other and discussed it with the other girls. Taken as a group, the students at Roehampton were quite worldly and seemed to accept the discovery of sex as part of their education—though not a part learned in the classroom or under the tutelage of the sisters! Most of them confessed to be waiting for the “real thing” to happen, Vivian Mary Hartley among them.
Suddenly, it seemed, she was thirteen—slim, exquisite, exceptionally bright, and rather disconcertingly “forward” in her thinking. The time seemed right for her parents to return to England. Hartley had made a substantial amount of money, and he and Gertrude were both still young. On July 7, 1927, Vivian left Roehampton on her father’s arm, packed and ready for a trip with her parents to the Continent, her head filled with fantasies, her eyes gleaming with anticipation.
Her next four years were spent in Europe’s most fashionable resorts—San Remo, Kitzbühel, Dinard, Biarritz—perfecting her French and learning German and Italian. The family took a boat across the English Channel, landing in Dinard at the height of season. The place had been founded by Welsh abbots in the sixth century and looked across the River Ranee to Saint-Malo, a rocky peninsula with a fifteenth-century castle and narrow winding streets crowded with Renaissance churches and houses. Her parents rented a villa overlooking the water, with a private beach. She had, of course, taken an ocean journey years before and had often walked the banks of the rivers in western Ireland. But it was in Dinard that she fell in love with water—its tranquillity, its colors, and its peace—and at the same time was conscious of its grasp on her emotions, making her restless and at times depressed. She would sit, her knees bunched up under her, and stare out at the vast blue expanse before her for hours, as she had once stared at the softly rippling surface of the lake at Roehampton. She missed Mother General and the sisters, but she knew it was impossible to go back, that, in fact, she did not really want to.
Hostilities grew between Gertrude and Ernest, making her feel like a curious outsider. For long periods she would withdraw deeper into her own world. Then suddenly she appeared to be bursting with energy and good humor. During these times she seldom slept more than five hours a night and managed to fill every waking moment with activity. Early mornings found her at daily mass, nights she would read for hours in bed. She was wraithlike but seemingly healthy, never appearing to tire.
Her father attributed her fluctuating moods to “boy fever,” noting how popular his daughter was with the boys of Dinard. Gertrude, though concerned, was more impressed by her daughter’s orderliness—her room immaculately kept, her clothes impeccably tended, her undergarments washed immediately after their removal. Vivian was never late for anything and always ready to do a favor or run an errand. The occasional spells of moodiness that came and went seemed unimportant to Gertrude, and in her opinion were simply signs of her daughter’s new “womanliness.” The things Gertrude liked about Vivian were her instinctual good manners, her natural intelligence, and her ability to make friends easily.
By the end of the summer both Gertrude and Ernest agreed that plans had to be made for her future education. Since she had seemed so happy at Roehampton they enrolled her in a convent school in Dinard that September and left shortly after for Biarritz on the Bay of Biscay, where the weather was milder in the winter months.
The convent school in Dinard was a difficult adjustment for Vivian. Two factors were involved. First, in this new environment she was no longer the youngest, the pet of the school, and cosseted; nor was she the center of her own group. And after the sense of freedom she had experienced during the summer, she felt that she was being reined in by the school’s rules and restrictions. She coaxed and wheedled her parents into meeting her in Paris on school holidays so that she could go to the theatre, but otherwise she felt that she was marking time.
The summer holidays did not come quickly enough for her. She met Gertrude in Paris and they joined her father in Biarritz. He was delighted to see her and took her everywhere they were invited. She wrote her Roehampton friends that she was madly in love and that several boys were madly in love with her. She sent everyone presents and begged them not to forget her. But her days at Biarritz—with its seven miles of sandy beach, the glistening golden bodies of the international set sprawled upon them—came to an end with the approach of September.
The Convent of the Sacred Heart in San Remo, on the Italian Riviera off the Ligurian Sea and close to Monte Carlo and Nice, was now selected as the next school for her to attend. It was a direct affiliate of Roehampton, and some of the girls Vivian knew were enrolled there. Also, since Vivian had done so well in French, Gertrude reasoned that Italian would make an excellent third language. Vivian, now nearly fifteen, abhorred the stiff, unflattering navy blue convent uniform and shed it whenever she could. The clothes she was forced to wear were not her only complaint about San Remo. There was the Victorianism and hypocritical prudery of the nuns.
The school was in the old upper town near the twelfth-century Romanesque church of San Siro and overlooked the sea. The girls would have to dress in black bathing costumes with high necklines, long sleeves, and skirts that reached their ankles, then march single file down the steep hillside and through the modern town to the beach, where they would then dash across the narrow strip of sand and submerge immediately to their necks in the water. Vivian buried herself in religious fervor as well, collecting peonies and scattering the petals at the feet of the robed priests from San Siro as they walked on the ancient cobblestone roads in solemn procession at the feast of Corpus Christi. And she never missed early mass.
But she was beginning to question a good many things about Catholicism, and whereas at Roehampton she had dearly loved and respected the nuns, such was not the case at San Remo. There were far too many hints that sexual liaisons existed between certain nuns and the priests at San Siro. More upsetting were the blatant hints of lesbianism
among the sisters. It was not the sexual promiscuity of the convent staff that disturbed Vivian so much as the religious hypocrisy involved. For the first time her grades were poor. Always marvelous with language, she even did badly in Italian. Her father was amused, but not Gertrude, when the Reverend Mother wrote that Vivian had become “unruly” and that her conduct had been reprehensible. Enclosed was a note containing a few words, undeniably in Vivian’s handwriting and apparently confiscated, that said “Reverend Mother is a . . Alongside this was a sketch of an angry, bristling cat.
The Hartleys summered in Ireland in the wilds of Galway, and Patsy Quinn came up to visit. The two girls spent their time acting out plays together, making them up as they went along. Both were fresh from reading The Light That Failed, and so Patsy would be an artist going blind and Vivian the loving heroine. They soon found themselves crying broken-heartedly, so moved were they by their own performances, at which point they broke up with hysterical laughter. By the end of the summer and with a great deal of persuasion on the part of both Vivian and Ernest, Gertrude agreed that she could attend a fashionable school in Paris in the residential district of Auteuil, along with another friend Molly McGreachin. Vivian was ecstatic. Paris was the magic city, and she would be there without the restrictions of a convent school. Her happiness was increased when an actress from the Comédie Française joined the faculty, and Vivian and a few other special students were given speech, deportment, and drama under her tutelage. There were only twenty girls of Vivian’s age in the school and the headmistress was young and progressive-minded and permitted them midnight feasts, the use of makeup, and cared very little if any of them attended mass or church services.
On their return to Zurich from a ski trip in the Bavarian Alps, Gertrude and Ernest ran into a friend who had seen Vivian at a theatre in Paris on a free afternoon and informed them that she had looked strikingly beautiful as always, but to their surprise was wearing rouge and lipstick and a rather revealing frock. The Hartleys wasted no time in hurrying back to Paris and pulled Vivian out of the school to her great and dramatic objections. They then drove across France and Switzerland to a school near Bad Reichenhall near the Austrian border which Gertrude had previously investigated.
Vivian was entered in mid-term, and despite her gloom at having been forced to leave Paris she adored the school from the beginning. The original plan was for her to complete only that term before finding still another school. But when Vivian joined her parents in Kitzbühel for the spring holiday, she begged to be allowed to continue, and, pleased at her progress in German, Gertrude agreed.
Those last semesters of her education on the Continent were her happiest. Salzburg was less than an hour away, and she attended the music festivals. Vienna was near, and she was permitted to go there to the opera, which she loved, particularly the dramatic Wagnerian works. Christmas was spent with her parents for a second time in Kitzbühel. She was never a good skier, since she suffered from a balance problem, which also made riding a bicycle difficult; but she adored the mountains and the hikes in the snow and felt, she wrote to her Roehampton friends, that she was closer to God on the peak of an Alp than she had ever been in the front pew of a church.
At Easter 1931 Vivian was seventeen, her studies completed. Gertrude came to collect her and they spent ten days together in Munich, visiting the opera nightly. Gertrude sat in the opera box each night staring at her daughter much of the time instead of watching the performances. The young woman suddenly seemed a stranger to her. There was an intensity about her that she did not recognize as Vivian strained forward to study the movement on stage; and there was her ability to so totally involve herself (which Gertrude could not) that she wept, laughed, and appeared wildly distracted. Somehow it unsettled Gertrude and made her feel truly protective toward Vivian for the first time, and when they left the Continent to join Ernest in London after the ten days were past, she did so with a curious feeling of apprehension.
Chapter Three
By 1931 D. H. Lawrence’s controversial book Lady Chatterley’s Lover had gained notoriety, and Vivian read it from cover to cover and then reread it. She was a romantic young woman, blossoming with a new sexuality and possessing a rare, breathtaking beauty that caused strangers on the street to turn and stare. The grace of her slim, delicate body, the chiseled perfection of her oval face, the startling vividness of her gray-green-blue eyes, the dazzling whiteness of her skin, and the long graceful curve of her neck gave her the look of a Modi-gliani sculpture. Her one imperfection was her hands. They were curiously oversized for her arms and body and she was self-conscious of them, making a point of pocketing, gloving, or folding them away out of sight.
Although her peers thought she was the most beautiful girl they knew, Vivian had little vanity. The combination of Gertrude’s training and that of the nuns at Roehampton had imposed a kind of self-lessness upon her that was to remain with her all of her life. She would nervously dismiss any compliment and was the first to notice something special about the other person.
Reading was still one of her passions, as were art (she seemed never to tire of museum trips), music, theatre, and parties; and she continued to sleep less than six hours a night without appearing weary-eyed the next day.
Gertrude and Vivian had met Ernest in London, where the three of them had seen several plays before traveling to Aasleagh in County Mayo, Ireland, where they spent the summer. In October they returned to a bleak London in the throes of a depression. Ernest, with his usual optimism, was confident that Great Britain would overcome the severe economic slump. But in London the Hartleys saw hunger marchers, listened to talk about the distressing rise of Fascism in Germany and Italy, and read headlines about the Japanese invading Manchuria. Hartley was inclined to believe Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald’s statements of optimism, yet the family was experiencing a “pinch” as his investments began to decline in value.
A formal coming out party for Vivian was out of the question, and as the Hartleys were living in a London hotel a series of smaller parties could not be considered. They chose instead to lease a house for the winter in the West Country near Teignmouth, where living would be a good deal less expensive, and where Ernest’s good friend and former associate at Piggott Chapman, Geoffrey Martin, his wife, and daughter Hilary lived nearby. The two girls were friends and spent a gala holiday season as belles of all the local festivities. But by the New Year the Hartleys could see that country life would be no advantage to Vivian. More important, she seemed restless and somewhat “wrought up.”
There was serious talk about sending her back to India for a year to stay with good friends, but Vivian put an end to that. She had for weeks been thinking about the possibility of an acting career. To everyone’s astonishment Maureen O’Sullivan, who was only two years older, was out in Hollywood, and a film in which she was a star was opening in the West End. Gathering her courage, Vivian announced to her parents that she wanted to study to become an actress. Hartley was openly pleased and immediately made plans to enroll her at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. It was February and she had to wait until the first of May, when the next term began.
One of the last galas she attended in the West Country was the South Devon Hunt Ball held on Torquay Pier. There she was introduced to a rather attractive man with pale, serious eyes and blond wavy hair. His name was Herbert Leigh Holman, but his friends called him Leigh and his family had a country place in the next village, Holcombe Down. Vivian was taken with him. At thirty-one he was the oldest bachelor she had met, which in itself attached a bit of extra glamour to the meeting, as all the young men Vivian had known were no more than a few years her senior. He also resembled one of her favorite actors, Leslie Howard, had attended Harrow and Cambridge, and was a barrister at law with chambers in the Middle Temple in London. She blurted out to him that she would soon be in London herself. Plans were made for them to meet again at that future time and he confessed before they parted that he had seen her on the street
of Holcombe Down a few days before and inquired who the girl with the beautiful profile dressed in black might be. Upon hearing that she was to attend the South Devon Hunt Ball, he also decided to attend, though such affairs generally did not take his fancy.
For days thereafter Vivian went about the house in a daze. She was certain she was in love and confided to her friends that she was positive Leigh was the man of her dreams. Alerted when Vivian suggested they allow her to go to London earlier than originally planned to stay with one of her Roehampton friends, Gertrude promptly packed her off to Grandmother and Grandfather Hartley in Bridlington, using the true pretext that they were not well and that her visit would be a great boon to their spirits.
Many weeks of daily correspondence between Bridlington and the Middle Temple followed, and Grandmother Hartley made sure that Gertrude and Ernest were apprised, voicing her own opinion that Vivian should not be permitted to be alone in London. The Hartleys, therefore, preceded Vivian to London and took a flat in Cornwall Gardens, where Vivian joined them about a week before she was to begin her new course of study.
Vivian suspected that Leigh did not think highly of theatre people, so she neglected to discuss with him the extent of her ambitions. On his part Leigh assumed that her interest in theatre was a hobby and that her parents regarded the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art as a finishing school. “Although no more enchanting girl than Vivian could have existed,” Leigh Holman says today, “she did not seem to me at that time to have ambition or those qualities that brought her fame. I was taken by surprise as it happened.”
