The Real Mrs Miniver

by Ysenda Maxtone Graham

  In Evansville, she certainly didn’t. The lecture went across ‘swell’ again. She wrote to Dolf on ‘Hotel McCurdy’ paper embossed with a picture of a dreary building with too many windows. ‘Loew’s Theatre was completely crammed – about 2,500 in the audience. They laughed at all the jokes and (to judge by the comments from the mob at the bookstore later) took the serious bits to heart with gratitude. And this is Indiana! I’m not exactly tired, but I have done (today) one lecture, four interviews, a “sidewalk” broadcast, & a two-hour autographing party at a bookstore (where we sold out completely).’

  The most tiring bit, Jan found, was the morning after lectures, when she was collected from her hotel by the sponsors and taken on sightseeing tours of the Old Governor’s Palace, or the Angel Mounds Historical Site. Sightseeing was never a pastime she enjoyed – she preferred street-wandering. At Fort Wayne, Indiana she got her own back by taking two of the sponsors (Mrs Mary Ann Doody and Mrs Myron R. Bone) to the cinema in the evening. ‘I think they were pretty exhausted,’ she wrote to Dolf, ‘and they never go to Westerns, but of course they couldn’t get out of it, so I led them off to a very low common mean little movie house where everybody was eating buttered popcorn, & they unbent considerably from their ladylikeness and became quite girlish … I thought it would be a piquant change for the lecturer to outlast the sponsors’ vitality for once.’

  Jan could see the isolationists’ point of view. She understood why the northern Midwest states were the most isolationist of all: for not only did they contain a great many people of German descent, and not only were they midway between the two oceans, but they were almost literally isolated by the vast north–south expanses of the Great Lakes. But she was not prepared for the level of anger her presence could induce. At Grand Rapids, Michigan on 11 October she was woken in her hotel bedroom at seven by the first of a stream of abusive anonymous telephone calls. ‘I don’t particularly mind the abuse,’ she wrote to Dolf, ‘but I get as mad as hell when they refuse to give their names. Finally I left a message that I considered anonymity un-American & that I would only talk to people who had the courage to give their names. That stopped that. I did manage to lure one America Firster (a man, a doctor, by the way. I LIKE men better than women, I do) into (a) giving his name & (b) having coffee with me at my hotel. We talked civilly for an hour, & neither of us convinced the other.’

  Over coffee and rolls in the palm court, the America Firster raged against the ‘war-mongering’ Roosevelt administration; Jan replied (quoting William Howard Taft), ‘Too many people don’t care what happens so long as it doesn’t happen to them’. When they were about to part, Jan said, ‘I just want to say one more thing. Did you notice that waiter who has been standing behind the palm-tree listening to us?’

  ‘Yes, I was aware of him,’ said the doctor. ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, do you realize how lucky you are to be living in the kind of set-up where he won’t go off and report you to the SS men for the things you’ve been saying about your own government?’

  ‘You do not understand,’ he explained. ‘This is America.’

  ‘Neither do you,’ Jan said. ‘This is the world.’

  ‘We parted as courteous adversaries,’ Jan wrote to Dolf, ‘& really he was very nice and polite, but oh God! so hopelessly out of touch about Europe. I was left with a feeling of impotence. Those folks HATE Roosevelt. They hate him more than they love the ultimate good of their own country. I almost believe he could do us more good if he pretended to be against us: they might then rush to our help. And there are 15 million of them…’

  As she crossed the border from Wisconsin into Iowa, she wrote, ‘I miss you more and more, the further west I go towards “our” country…’

  ‘They Think She Is Like Mrs Miniver And Offer Her Tea’ ran a sub-headline in the El Paso, Texas Herald three weeks later, in early November. All eyes were on this exotic woman’s habits. ‘She Drank Coffee.’ Jan’s distaste for tea was intensifying. She had discovered that at women’s afternoon meetings it was an honour to be asked ‘to pour’. Jan hated pouring tea, but as the guest of honour she could not avoid it without giving offence. Tea at these gatherings was made with teabags immersed in less-than-boiling water, with their cardboard labels attached and also immersed, gradually dissolving. The sight made Jan turn away in revulsion.

  The El Paso Herald, after commenting on the non-tea-drinking, went on to quote from the lecture: ‘Miss Struther believes that the feeling that Hitler must be beaten has been solidifying in the Midwest of the US in the last six months. “This country is like a body of water,” she said. “When you tip it one way it rushes in that direction. It’s rather terrifying.”’

  On the morning after that lecture she was taken to Radford College for Girls, ‘where [she wrote to Dolf] to my horrified surprise I was expected to get up in front of 1,300 schoolchildren and give them an Uplift Message.’ Two days later, in the Town Hall at San Antonio, Texas, she found herself addressing ‘the entire troupe of this year’s débutantes’. Her favourite question from the floor was, ‘Will you please tell me whether you prefer Bach or Boogie-Woogie?’ The next day’s report in the San Antonio Express was devoted entirely to describing what members of the audience were wearing. ‘Mrs Walter Grotehouse wore a black pinstripe tailored suit with a striking pin of turquoise, amber and gold’, and so on.

  In Texas, Jan noticed that she had ceased to be hounded by abusive telephone callers. Maybe she was right: perhaps the great American ‘body of water’ really was starting to tip in the Allied direction. Nobody will ever know what the outcome of the isolationist-versus-interventionist argument might have been if the Japanese had not attacked Pearl Harbor on the morning of Sunday, 7 December. Four days later, America was at war with both Japan and Germany.

  Chapter Eleven

  No, Mrs Poppadum, I didn’t write the film. I always think it’s better for authors who know nothing about script-writing to keep their fingers out of the pie. Yes, Mrs Marchpane, I simply loved the film. Since I had nothing to do with making it, I can speak quite freely. Why, yes, Mr Syllabub, I thought the casting was excellent. The station-master? Oh, yes, exactly the way I always imagined him to be. (And then I would know that Mr Syllabub hadn’t read the book, because the station-master didn’t come into it.)

  From J.S’s unfinished book on America, ‘Cactus and Columbine’

  THE ABBREVIATIONS FOR American radio and television stations, CBS, WNEW, WSB, KTMS and WEVD, pepper the pages of Jan’s engagement book for 1942. ‘B’cast, 5.30.’ Her voice, speaking to a country at war, was becoming a national morale-boosting presence on the airwaves. Often, the ‘b’cast’ was preceded by ‘H.D.’ – hairdresser’s – in the morning.

  For these hairdressing appointments, Harlem beckoned. When no one was looking, she took a bus northwards up Third Avenue, on and on, as the buildings grew seedier and the hair curlier, like her own. Sitting in the salon of her choice, which throbbed with Afro-American life, she flicked through the hairstyling magazines and discovered that the advertisements here were not for permanent waves, but permanent straightening. She returned to Upper East Side, refreshed by this glimpse of the other New York which carried on its gritty existence fifty streets to the north.

  ‘Morale is something like vitamins,’ she said, speaking to five continents through the microphone at NBC on 1 March. ‘You can’t see it, you can’t touch it, you can’t taste it, yet if you haven’t got it you’re sunk.’ ‘If we begin to make plans now for a better world structure,’ she said during a broadcast in favour of Federal Union, ‘we shall have no moments of despair. We shall only have moments of acute impatience, because we cannot start to build it straight away. Nothing on earth is more fun than planning a new house in which we shall live. The thoughts that we are thinking now will be its bricks and mortar.’ It was quotable oratory, and America lapped it up.

  Almost as frequent as the word ‘b’cast’ in the engagement books is the word ‘dentist’. Between January an
d March 1942, it appears ten times. The London Times had pointed out the ‘flaw’ in Mrs Miniver’s perfection, betrayed by her mid August dentist’s appointment. Four years later, her creator was still dashing from glamorous luncheon to dentist’s chair with alarming frequency. Sometimes her mouth was numb for broadcasts. ‘I had a fever, an ice-bag and a left cheek the size of a football,’ she wrote to her lawyer Melville Cane after her Easter broadcast, ‘and I talked out of the side of my mouth like a Brooklyn gangster. I hope it came through on the air all right – personally I remember nothing about it except that somebody dragged me out of bed and got me to the studio five minutes before airtime, and somebody else shoved a mike in front of me and said Okay, Miss Struther, you’re on right after the Ave Maria and the Lord’s Prayer. The rest was delirium.’

  Jan made two new male friends at about this time. The first was this lawyer, Melville Cane, of Ernst, Cane & Young, whom she had employed to negotiate her contracts, but whom she quickly saw to be a kindred spirit, a poet at heart, unfulfilled in his legal job. The second she met at a fund-raising Republican dinner-party given by the heiress of the Wells, Fargo and Company mail-carrying service. Sitting on her right was a man who spoke like an Englishman, called John Beverley Robinson, whom Jan instantly warmed to and instinctively trusted. Such wisdom and understanding shone out of his eyes that she was disarmed. She felt an overwhelming urge to divulge to him the secret she had been holding inside her breast since her arrival in America. She could not stop herself. ‘He’s called Dolf. I know you’d like him, and he you … I don’t know why I’m telling you. I’ve only known you for an hour…’

  Tony in Egypt, 1942

  Her instinct was right: ‘Bev’ Robinson was a truly compassionate man, who kept Jan’s secret and did not condemn her for her double life. He was sixteen years her senior, and married. His family lived in Toronto and he spent his weeks working in New York, living at the Westover, a residential hotel. He and Jan became great friends. A week later she invited Mel, Bev and Dolf to supper at East 49th Street, and they sang folk songs to a recorder she had picked up at a junk shop in Mission, Nebraska. The room was alight with candles, music, poetry, wine and laughter, and for a fleeting evening Jan and Dolf basked in the illusion that they were an accepted ‘couple’.

  Tony, ‘five hours nearer the sun’, was preparing to go to North Africa on active service with the 2nd (Motor) Battalion of the Scots Guards.

  * * *

  At Culver City in Hollywood, meanwhile, a new Mrs Miniver was coming into being. ‘You allowed your tear to spill over just a second too soon,’ William Wyler said to Greer Garson. ‘Now, if you can get the tears again, I want you to hold them there. And then I want you to let that tear run down your cheek.’

  At her wits’ end over the impossibility of pleasing this director, Greer Garson thought herself back, for the hundredth time that day, into Mrs Miniver’s skin. The camera moved in, and, amazingly, she felt tears stinging her eyes. She held them in, counting the seconds, until one ran down her cheek. Wyler nodded and smiled. It was awful working for him, but it could not be denied that he was a master craftsman.

  Greer Garson had been scooped up by Louis B. Mayer on his talent-spotting tour of London theatres in 1937. She came to live in Hollywood with her mother, and had a miserable first year, offered demeaning parts (such as the woman who gets papered to the wall by the Marx Brothers in A Day at the Races), which she refused. Reluctantly, in 1938, she accepted the small part of Katherine Chipping in James Hilton’s Goodbye Mr Chips, and was nominated for the Oscar for Best Actress. Vivien Leigh won, for Gone With the Wind, but Greer Garson was now a star, and her luminous beauty was recognized. Mrs Miniver was an ideal role for her. When she threatened to walk off the set after William Wyler had made her light Walter Pidgeon’s cigarette so many times that she became ill from the smoke, her friend Bette Davis encouraged her to carry on. ‘You will give the great performance of your career under Wyler’s direction,’ she said. It was true.

  The film’s sets were full of Hollywood fakery. The Minivers’ house was unlike any ordinary English country house of the 1940s: to suit the camera lens, it was open-plan. The village, Belham (a name invented by the script-writers), crawled with roses on trellises at every corner. As for the plot, it bore only these resemblances to the original book: Mrs Miniver is a loving, loyal, wise wife and mother, married to a charming, witty man named Clem; their children are Vin, Judy and Toby; Mrs Miniver gets off a bus in a hurry to rush back to a shop, deciding to buy something after all (originally an engagement-book, a hat in the film); Clem buys a new car.

  Out of the fertile imaginations of the producer and his five script-writers came astonishing additions to pad out these four vestiges of the book. Jan blinked with surprise when she went for her early viewing. A village flower-show was the running sub-plot of the film: Lady Beldon (played by Dame May Whitty) expected to win, as usual, but was horrified to hear that Mr Ballard the station-master (played by Henry Travers) was entering ‘The Mrs Miniver Rose’. Jan could only admire the film’s creators, who had brazenly invented the flower-show, Lady Beldon, Mr Ballard, and ‘The Mrs Miniver Rose’. On and on it went, for an hour and a half: an unfolding love-story and war-story, full of new material, totally gripping, and impossible to watch without soaking a handkerchief.

  The air-raid-shelter scene from the film of Mrs Miniver

  The aura of excellence about the film derived from various sources. William Wyler’s directing was one, with his instinct to pare down rather than fill out. In the original screenplay, when Vin was called up to join the Royal Air Force, Mrs Miniver’s lines were: ‘I’m all mixed up, thinking about Vin. Oh, you men! What a mess you’ve made of the world! Why can’t we leave other people alone?’ But during filming, that was all cut. In the finished version Mrs Miniver simply says, ‘Isn’t he young? Even for the Air Force?’ and Clem answers, ‘Yes, he’s young.’ In the Dunkirk sequence, too, Wyler leaves the horrors to the imagination. Clem sails off in the middle of the night, and returns with five days’ growth of beard. ‘You’ve heard it on the news,’ he says to his wife. ‘I’m glad. That means I don’t have to tell you about it.’

  Then there was the acting, which despite Wyler’s insistence on endless takes gave an impression of naturalness. Mr and Mrs Miniver teased more than they praised one another: the strength of family love was not stated outright, but hinted at through casual snatches of conversation. Judy and Toby (played by Clare Sandars and Christopher Severn) spoke their cringe-making sugary lines, but the sight of them peacefully asleep in the air-raid shelter, only waking and crying with terror and bewilderment when their own house was hit, was deeply touching. No scene went on for too long.

  Mrs Miniver with her daughter-in-law Carol Beldon (played by Teresa Wright), also from the film

  Then there was the shocking twist in the plot at the end of the film. It was the producer Sidney Franklin’s idea that Vin’s young wife Carol Beldon (played by Teresa Wright) should die, rather than Vin, the RAF pilot: a civilian death would bring home to American audiences what this war was really like for the British population. William Wyler sat up late into the night with Henry Wilcoxon (who played the vicar), rewriting the film’s final sermon. It began quietly – ‘We, in this quiet corner of England, have suffered the loss of friends very dear to us’ – and worked its way to a climax: ‘This is the people’s war! It is our war! We are the fighters. Fight it, then! Fight it, with all that is in us! And may God defend the right!’ The film, they decided, would end with the closing hymn, ‘Onward, Christian soldiers’, sung by a dazed congregation with gaps in the pews, and bomber planes visible over the roofless church.

  ‘THIS was their finest hour and THIS is your finest attraction’, ran MGM’s advertisement in Kinematograph Weekly. ‘Not only the best of the year … Not only the best of the War … but the best EVER produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer!’ Mayer had told Greer Garson that she must on no account let her romantic attachment to Richa
rd Ney become public knowledge at this delicate time. The hint of incest would be disastrous for publicity.

  Jan was a guest of honour in the audience at the film’s première at Radio City Music Hall on Thursday, 4 June 1942. The MGM lion roared. Two paragraphs of scene-setting gothicky words rolled down the screen, to the stringed strains of a familiar tune:

  Oh God, our help in ages past,

  Our hope for years to come,

  Our shelter from the stormy blast

  And our eternal –

  The final cadence was an unresolved minor chord. It was the signal to sit back and prepare for tears.

  Jan decided, wincing every now and then during the performance, that she would never be rude about the film in public. Whatever she might think privately about the liberties MGM had taken with her book, whatever she might feel about the idealized representation of English village life or the irritating ladylikeness of Greer Garson’s Mrs Miniver, she knew that it was her duty, as an unofficial ambassadress for Britain, to uphold the film without reservations. ‘I was apprehensive’ – this was the message she put across in interviews – ‘but as a matter of fact I got a lovely surprise when I saw how closely the film had followed the characterisations in the book. The whole Miniver family behaved in the film exactly as I had always believed and hoped they would behave when the bad times came. I feel convinced that there are Mrs Minivers in every freedom-loving country in the world, and that they and their families, like the characters in my book, will be able to meet any trial that may come with the same courage, fortitude and faith.’ She instructed Janet and Robert, also, never to say a bad word about the film to anyone outside the family.