The Real Mrs Miniver

by Ysenda Maxtone Graham

  She dashed from Radio City to Grand Central Station, to go to Janet’s school play. While she was contemplating the smallness of the school auditorium compared with the one she had just left, film critics across New York were at their typewriters.

  Some of them, it turned out the next morning, were almost literally lost for words. ‘I have wasted all the superlatives in the dictionary on lesser films,’ wrote Lee Mortimer of the New York Mirror. ‘Mere words are inadequate to express the emotional impact of this superb picture,’ said the Albany, New York Times. ‘Out of the rather casual jottings that were made into a best-seller called Mrs Miniver,’ said the New Yorker, ‘a movie has evolved that might almost be called stupendous.’ ‘Perhaps it is too soon to call this one of the greatest motion pictures of all time,’ said the New York Times, ‘but certainly it is the finest yet made about the present war, and a most exalting tribute to the British who have taken it gallantly. One cannot speak too highly of the superb understatement and restraint exercised throughout this picture.’

  Audiences emerged from the film shocked and red-eyed. Word spread fast. In its first four days at Radio City, the film was seen by 98,207 people, and people carried on seeing it at the rate of 20,000 a day. Its value as propaganda quickly became apparent. The head of the US Office of War Information, Elmer Davis, called for the film to be released nationally ‘to convey its message to as many Americans as possible, as soon as possible’. As it opened in Loew’s theatres across the the United States, Jan travelled from city to city, a useful component of MGM’s publicity machine, giving first-night talks immediately after the screenings. She walked on to the stage, into the spotlight, holding one of MGM’s ‘Mrs Miniver’ roses, produced for publicity purposes by the American botanist Dr Eugene Boerner, and stood peering out at her audience. ‘I feel certain that if your cities here have to undergo the bombing ordeal that England’s cities have, your ordinary people are going to behave in the same way we have, in the same way as the Minivers you have just seen.’ She walked out through the foyer, where war stamps and war bonds were being sold, and went back to her hotel alone.

  At Atlanta, Georgia on 13 July there was a message for her in the hotel pigeon-hole. She had sent a cable to Tony in North Africa six weeks before: he had let her know that he was in charge of No. 19 Anti-Tank Platoon. ‘Pommel Rommel good and hard’ she had cabled – she knew he would enjoy the rhyme. Now she opened the envelope: Tony was ‘missing on active service, presumed captured’.

  It had happened at the Battle of Gazala, the costly struggle which ended with the Allied surrender of Tobruk after a week of siege. Jan sank down onto a chair in the hotel lobby to absorb the news. A member of staff brought her water: Atlanta was proud to help Mrs Miniver at this terrible moment. And what forbearance she showed! said the papers in the following days, when word spread that ‘Mr Miniver’ had been captured. ‘She telephoned her children, attended a luncheon given for her, and visited wounded soldiers at Lawson Hospital, showing none of the fear and sorrow which must be in her mind.’ The journalists could not know that fear and sorrow were only two of the multitude of emotions which swarmed in Jan’s mind, heart and conscience.

  She decided not to break the news to Janet and Robert until she had heard for certain whether Tony was alive.

  * * *

  Mrs Miniver went into its sixth week at Radio City Music Hall, equalling the record held by Rebecca and The Philadelphia Story. It opened in Britain at the Empire, Leicester Square, on 11 July. Critics once again sat at their typewriters; predictably, they were crueller than their American counterparts, just as they had been about the book. The Times: ‘The picture of England at war suffers from that distortion which seems inevitable whenever Hollywood cameras are trained on it.’ The Manchester Guardian: ‘The eldest son comes down from Oxford sporting a bowler hat and a Canadian accent, a naїve and inarticulate college boy who could not possibly be the product of Eton and Oxford.’ The Observer: ‘No gents’ outfitters of our acquaintance supplied Mr Miniver with his pyjamas.’ Time and Tide: ‘The village church has a medieval circular tower which seems to have strayed from Conwy Castle.’ The Spectator: ‘The film ponderously reveals us on Sunday September 3rd 1939 as a collection of simple-minded innocents basking in a smile from the squire’s pew and without any inkling whatsoever that we may be at war before the service is over.’

  ‘But…’ Nearly all these reviewers, having vented their spleen, succumbed to a final ‘but’ clause: ‘But it is years since I remember being so touched by any film’… ‘But it would be the grossest ingratitude to do anything but thank our American friends for this warm-hearted picture’… ‘In spite of the foregoing, it is my duty to certify that in my vicinity two medical students, three naval officers and a sergeant in the RAF sobbed loudly and continuously throughout.’ (This last from the Tatler, which carried a photograph of Jan’s brother Douglas Anstruther at the British première. He was now Major Anstruther, and he was becoming quite an eccentric. He wore a judge’s wig when dining, to keep the draught off his neck. Jan had sent him funds for an ambulance: he bought the body and fitted it to the chassis of his Rolls-Royce, named the ambulance ‘Mrs Miniver’ and proudly showed it off. ‘It can carry ten men into action, or carry two stretchers and two sitters, or be a canteen. It carries fourteen gallons of drinking-water and eight for washing up.’)

  There was no ‘but’ clause in Harry Ashbrook’s quiveringly angry article in the Sunday Pictorial of 26 July. Jan read it and felt once again the mixture of guilt and a sense of unfairness that Sheridan Russell’s letter had engendered. ‘She’s a Disgrace to the Women of Britain!’ ran the headline.

  This is England – the England of the miners. Settling into their comfortable beds, exhausted by a day’s shopping, Mr and Mrs Miniver congratulate each other for being born into the British upper middle class. ‘We are very lucky people,’ they chorus. Talking of lucky people, in the North of England is a town called Jarrow. Nine out of ten men of Jarrow were out of work before the war. While Mrs Miniver drifted around village flower shows, the men of Jarrow looked for work. I’ll say you were lucky, Mrs Miniver. Mrs Miniver’s creator Jan Struther said recently, ‘I plan to stay in America for the rest of the war because my children are happily settled here and I don’t want to disturb them.’ The ordinary working people of Jarrow, Clydeside and Coventry are fighting this war and all the old nonsense of tea-parties and flower-shows has gone. Their life would make a grand film, Mrs Graham. But you’ve got to come back to see them before you can write it.

  Vera Brittain saw the film twice in the weeks after its British release. ‘I love it,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘but I think Jan Struther is a charlatan posing as a patriot in the safety of the USA.’

  * * *

  Tony was safe, a prisoner-of-war. Jan received airmail letters from both Tony and Jamie, and she smiled with relief when she found that Tony’s experiences had already become the stuff of anecdote.

  He had been captured on 13 June at a place in the desert called Maabus-el-Rigel, known as ‘Wriggly Ridge’. He was forty-two, twenty years older than his fellow subalterns; helmetless, and almost completely bald, he was taken by the Germans for a high-ranking officer. The finer points of British badges of rank were a bit of a mystery to them. ‘Daddy was put into an enormous staff car,’ Jamie wrote, ‘and whisked off amid a flurry of Teutonic salutes.’ ‘What are you doing in that car?’ asked a fellow prisoner. ‘They think I’m a general,’ answered the departing Tony. That night, two or three of the Scots Guards officers taken at the same time managed to slip past the sentries, back to the British lines, but Tony was by then far to the rear of the German position. Eventually, he was discovered to be just an elderly lieutenant.

  * * *

  Mrs Miniver-mania continued to grip the United States. The millionth ticket was purchased on 19 July by a Mrs Harry M. Simon, blushing as she was photographed. The film went into its ninth week at Radio City Music Hall, and its tenth. Jan was a guest o
f honour at Radio City, with Walter Pidgeon and William Wyler, to celebrate the film’s record run. Now, at the height of her celebrity, she moved house, from East 49th Street to an address worthy of it: 214 Central Park South. This time, she didn’t take a lodger. Dolf and she could at last spend days and nights ‘at home’ together, when no one was looking.

  Mrs Miniver opened in Canada, and a journalist named Roly, in his weekly column ‘Rambling with Roly’, took the art of rambling to new heights: ‘A couple of days ago, I came back to the office after seeing Mrs Miniver and tried to write a review of the film. I think I made a hash of the attempt. It was the toughest review I ever tried to write because my mind was in an emotional turmoil and I couldn’t seem to find the words to say what I wanted to say…’ Like so many others, he was lost for words. The film was shown to the British Army in Cairo, and generals and colonels wept: many had not seen their families in England since the Blitz. Major Eric Sandars, the father of Clare Sandars, who played Judy, was one of those who saw it in Cairo. His daughter had been evacuated to the United States at the outbreak of war, and spotted by Hollywood scouts as a ‘typical English child’.

  When it was shown in Buenos Aires, the German Embassy there protested strongly to the Argentine government against the showing of such an anti-Axis film. It was the last Hollywood film to be shown in Budapest before the Nazis put a stop to all US film imports.

  In neutral Sweden, as in Switzerland, Axis and Allied films vied for popularity. The Germans took half-page spaces in the Stockholm newspapers to boost the new Jannings film about Frederick the Great which had won first prize at the Venice Film Festival; it ran for seven days in a half-empty cinema. Mrs Miniver ran for twenty weeks, showing at four cinemas in the centre of Stockholm.

  * * *

  ‘I’m sitting in a Pullman pouring with sweat,’ Jan wrote to Dolf on the way from Louisville to New Orleans in mid July. ‘At every big-town stop (even for five minutes) there is an MGM man, a Loew’s man, a photographer, a reporter, and a local Lady Beldon on the platform to give me a bo-kay, usually so-called ‘Miniver’ roses, but if unobtainable, orchids. It’s all very, very comic.’

  Janet and Robert were at summer camps in Maine, and Jan was travelling incessantly, signing rolls of honour, selling war stamps, autographing stamp books, recording scripts to be used in broadcasts such as the ‘Cleveland at War’ programme, and running along station platforms and jumping onto trains just as the man was calling ‘’Board!’ It was impossible to get away from America’s Mrs Miniver-itis. Leafing through a Boston magazine she came across this:

  Mrs Miniver’s Haircut – it’s soft and pretty and easy to manage. It’s very wearable with the new hats and a joy to take care of, especially if you assure it with a new Slattery permanent wave. Phone HANCOCK 6600 for appointments.

  Sitting down to lunch a week later at a restaurant in Toledo, Ohio, she found ‘Mrs Miniver’s Fruit Salad Plate’ on the menu.

  America launched contests to name its ‘Mrs Minivers’ – women who ‘served on the home front’. ‘Vote for YOUR favourite Mrs Miniver and vote today!’ cried the Lewistown, Pennsylvania Sentinel. The Los Angeles Herald printed the names of Los Angeles’s Mrs Minivers, ‘who run their houses smoothly and still find time for the war effort; the women who have sacrificed sons and husbands, and carry on with indomitable courage.’ Los Angeles even awarded a bouquet of Dr Eugene Boerner’s roses to its ‘Mrs Miniver of the Day’.

  Surely, Jan hoped, with the film so successful, and with Mrs Minivers popping up in major cities all over America, she could escape from the burden of being mistaken for her saintly fictional creation. And gradually during 1942, the longed-for release did begin to take place. Greer Garson willingly took over as the embodiment of Mrs Miniver in the public imagination. And the public were relieved to discover that Greer Garson’s favourite drink was afternoon tea: two bags, cream in first.

  Greer Garson and Jan in Hollywood

  Up until this time, during her journeys across America, Jan had known that sooner or later she would be going ‘home’ to Dolf in New York. Wherever she travelled, she could rest assured that he was within a three-mile radius of Columbia University, and waiting for her. (He had crossed the campus at Columbia in June 1942 for a job as an assistant bibliographer at the Avery Architectural Library.) But suddenly at the beginning of 1943, this changed. Dolf, who had been granted American citizenship in 1942, volunteered to join the United States Army. He knew he would eventually be drafted, and hoped that as a volunteer he would be allowed to choose his ‘combat theater’: he wanted to go to Germany to kill Hitler with his own hands. In a thick Viennese accent he swore his oath of allegiance, and became Private A.K. Placzek. For his basic training, he was to be stationed in California. Once again force majeure was sending him three thousand miles to the west, away from Jan.

  Chapter Twelve

  The westbound train is running four hours late.

  A dozen times at least it’s pulled into a siding,

  And the passengers listen, and wonder,

  And listen, and wait

  For the growing thunder and then the dying thunder

  Of troop train or freight

  Taking the right of way.

  The conductor’s an old man, patient and grey:

  He’s ridden this road for thirty years or more,

  And he knows the score.

  ‘Yes, Sir,

  Wartime riding’s not peacetime riding.’

  Six hours late. The slim quicksilver bar

  On the wall of the coach has climbed to ninety-four.

  It isn’t a real coach, but a baggage car

  Hauled from retirement, fixed to meet the rush:

  The seats are upright, covered in dirty plush;

  The sides, windowless iron, vibrate with the heat.

  In back, two businessmen unfasten their collars

  And loosen their shoes to ease their swollen feet.

  They missed the Limited – scrambled on at a run.

  ‘This is a hell of a train,’ says the paunchy one.

  ‘I wouldn’t take it again for a thousand dollars.’

  But the thin one has a son

  In Africa or the Arctic (he doesn’t know which –

  This is a crazy war),

  And to him it doesn’t matter any more

  Whether he travels the poor man’s way or the rich.

  He knows the score.

  Yes, Sir.

  Folks know things now they never knew before.

  From ‘Wartime Journey’, published in Atlantic Monthly

  ‘GELIEBSTER SOLDAT’ – ‘Beloved soldier’ – Jan wrote to Dolf from Durham, North Carolina on 13 February 1943. She was determined to be a tower of strength for him as he left for the Army. ‘I am really glad they accepted you after all. It is hell to be separated, but I know you’d have felt disappointed if you hadn’t got in. The great thing is that it’s only “limited service” so that somehow or other we’ll be able to meet sometimes. I feel I’m actually in the Army myself, or possibly the Navy, as I’ve spent so much time travelling with them all. I made friends yesterday with a bunch of four Naval Reserve men & we pooled all our meagre provisions during an interminable journey from Greenboro’ to Durham. They had some candy and I had some bananas.’

  Dolf was worried: would there be any kindred spirits in the Army? Jan reassured him.

  I spent a gorgeous evening yesterday with the Army at Fort Bragg, watching a show being put on for the benefit of their Soldiers’ Lounge Fund. One of my poems was set to music by Otto Guth, a sergeant, Viennese Jew, late of the Prague Symph. Orch. Then a beautiful youth came on & played music, & the Master of Ceremonies said, ‘You see? In the daytime he learns to fire the big guns – and in the evening he practises his violin. Let’s give him an extra-big hand.’ Which we did. I only hope to God that you get into as nice a camp, and that they discover about your piano-playing. Sweetheart, I know you must be dreading it in a way – I mean thing
s like woollen underwear & bean farts & the lack of privacy – but DO remember that it isn’t an army of hicks & bloggs & toughs – I’ve met dozens of mild spectacled cultivated-looking soldiers during this journey, who all must have dreaded it.

  Jan was on another lecture tour. Topic: ‘A Pocketful of Pebbles’, said her Details of Engagement from Clark Getts. Englewood, Glen Ridge and Summit, New Jersey; Greenboro, Durham and Charlotte, North Carolina; Greenville, South Carolina; Cincinnati and Delaware, Ohio; Detroit, Michigan; Indianapolis, Indiana … she travelled for two months, giving three or four lectures a week.

  ‘There is one great – and, so far as I can see, insuperable – problem in a lecturer’s life,’ she said to her audiences.

  Speaking engagements are usually planned many months ahead, and it’s only natural that the programme’s chairmen, who have to deal with publicity, should want to know well in advance what one is going to talk about. Now, this wouldn’t present any difficulty if one was a learned professor with some highly specialized subject like ‘Ancient Chinese Music’ or ‘The History of English Painting in the 18th century’. But if, like me, you are not an expert or a specialist in anything at all, but only a quite un-highbrow human being whose main interest is in the day-to-day feelings of other un-highbrow human beings – well, then it’s practically impossible to decide on a topic months ahead, because it all depends upon what’s going to happen to the world in the meantime. So when this date was first arranged, and my lecture manager called me up and asked what the title of my talk was going to be, I replied that I hadn’t the faintest notion. He said, very patiently, ‘Well, but you see, the sponsors want to know.’ I said that this was just as bad as being asked to decide on a Monday morning what you were going to talk to your family about at supper a week from Saturday. And then I had an idea. I remembered having once described how ‘Mrs Miniver’ used to save up all the thoughts and incidents of the day so that she could discuss them in the evening, and how ‘Clem’ did the same thing, and how it was as if each was turning out a pocketful of pebbles that they’d collected for each other during the day. So I said to my lecture manager, ‘Look! You just tell them that the title of my talk will be ‘A Pocketful of Pebbles’, and that’ll leave me entirely free to speak about anything which occurs to me between this and then.