The Real Mrs Miniver

by Ysenda Maxtone Graham

  Old,

  Bold,

  True American Way of Life.’

  She sent a copy of the poem to Eleanor Roosevelt, on the off-chance that she might like it.

  ‘LATE STAR FINAL! BLUE STREAK EDITION!’ she wrote to Dolf, at the end of her letter of 19 March. She enclosed the following:

  The White House

  Washington D.C.

  Dear Miss Struther,

  Many thanks for your letter & for the ballad. I love it! It is a grand answer. Would you be willing to have the President read it on his next broadcast?

  Sincerely yours,

  Eleanor Roosevelt

  ‘Oh boy, oh, boy, oh Jesus F. Christ … my cup is full (very nearly – if you were here it would be quite!). Oh, oh, oh I’m so excited. I called her up at once (as soon as I’d got my breath back) & talked to the sec. as she was out of town. You ought to have seen Anne’s [Jan’s secretary Anne Curtis Brown’s] face of utter deliberate gloating nonchalance as she put through the person-to-person call and heard the operator gulp.’

  * * *

  At the Academy Awards ceremony, Mrs Miniver won five Oscars: best actress (Greer Garson), best supporting actress (Teresa Wright), best directorial achievement (William Wyler), best written screenplay, and best achievement in black-and-white photography. Greer Garson made a long speech through her tears, thanking everyone, including the doctor who had brought her into the world.

  She bought a new home in Los Angeles, 680 Stone Canyon, and her Miniver-esque life there was described by visiting journalists. ‘You feel as if you were walking into the Miniver home when you visit Greer Garson,’ wrote Mary C. McCall. ‘It’s a homely, mildly Tudor white brick manse secreted in its own little canyon through which a brook flows, with some artificial goading, under ancient sycamores.’ The rooms were panelled in bleached oak, with Scottish crests on the doors. Tea, by the poolside, included cucumber sandwiches, Banbury tarts and marmalade rolls, and Greer Garson loved to chat about her favourite poet, John Donne.

  * * *

  ‘If you come to Washington,’ wrote Eleanor Roosevelt to Jan on 28 March 1943, ‘do let me know. Both my husband and I will be happy to see you.’

  Jan replied: ‘Thank you for your lovely letter. It was sweet of you to write again, and as for the invitation, I am at a loss how to answer it except with the all-expressive phrase, “You bet”.’

  To Dolf she wrote, ‘Will I go to Washington? Will I drop in on her and her old man? I have waited almost three years for this, and it has come exactly the way I hoped it would, without official wangling but through human recognition of a co-guerrilla fighting for the same cause.’

  She stayed the night at the White House, as a guest of the Roosevelts, on 16 June 1943, and her hours there were perhaps the pinnacle of her ascent to fame and success. ‘Darling,’ she wrote to Dolf, on White House writing paper, ‘I am writing this IN LINCOLN’S BED (stark naked, incidentally, because it is a terribly hot night) … The President is a perfectly GORGEOUS man, more than up to my wildest hopes & much funnier than I ever imagined. Mixes an excellent cocktail (his own special, with his own hands), & you can say absolutely anything to him. We were just six of us, & I sat on his right, & we ate dinner on the terrace with softshell crab & strawberries & fireflies & lots of amusing talk (with serious undertones). There’s a bell by my bed with 3 buttons saying “Maid”, “Butler” & “Usher”. I can’t imagine what I could need an usher for, unless Lincoln walks. More when we meet. All my love.’

  She sealed the letter to Dolf and began one straight away to Tony. To conceal her whereabouts from the Italian censors, she used her own blank paper and headed it ‘Casablanca’. Naked in Lincoln’s bed, dashing off letters to her lover and her husband, she felt in control of her parallel lives.

  So desperate and determined was she to see Dolf that she was ready to jump at any opportunity to go to California. And one came. Louis B. Mayer wanted another box-office phenomenon like Mrs Miniver. He wanted Jan to write the original material for MGM to spin, once again, into Hollywood gold. It could be a sequel to Mrs Miniver, it could be something new – anything she liked, Mayer implored her, but please could she produce it soon?

  Jan liked the idea: it was a good one in theory. She sat on trains with her pen poised over a blank sheet of paper, hoping a new character would walk onto it. She couldn’t write any more Mrs Miniver. She was becoming sick to death of Mrs Miniver, and she had lost the desire to describe married life. What she could write about was love – sudden, magical, illicit love, and wartime separation from the beloved, and living three thousand miles to the west of one’s husband and three thousand miles to the east of one’s lover; about exiled Jews, and the dreadful, paradoxical feeling that you half-wanted the war to end, and half-wanted it to carry on for as long as possible because it postponed the moment of having to make a heart-breaking decision.

  But she couldn’t possibly write about that. It was deeply secret. Such a storyline from ‘happily married’ Jan Struther would cause a catastrophe in the family and a scandal across America. It was unthinkable. So she wrote to Dolf instead: ‘Darling, I adore Oklahoma. The train service was impossible y’day but I had the luck to be driven from Tulsa to Okla City – about 120 miles – along Route 66, & I got such secret delight out of passing places where we’d stopped to eat together.’ Or she wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt, describing inspiring sights she had seen. One of her favourite things about America were mailboxes, which had come into being through ‘R.F.D.’ – rural free delivery, which ensured that mail was delivered to every home across the country. The mail-boxes stood in coveys on the sides of roads, perched on top of crooked posts at all angles, each reminding you that there was a home and hearth to which it belonged, hidden along a drive or down a wooded path. With their rounded tops, mail-boxes seemed to Jan to be the ghosts of covered wagons, and she wrote to Mrs Roosevelt, ‘Much as I love almost the whole of this country, the two things I like best about it are FDR and RFD.’

  But none of this got her any nearer to writing profit-making script material. Perhaps, Louis B. Mayer suggested, if Jan were actually to live in Hollywood for a few months, the muse might come to her. Surely, if she spent enough time fraternizing with script-writers, producers and film-stars in such magic surroundings, she could not fail to be inspired?

  ‘You bet’ was once again the gist of her reply. Paid to spend the summer in Los Angeles! She would bring the children with her, and Gracie, the daily, to do the housekeeping. She would be only a short drive away from Dolf, who was now stationed at his regiment’s headquarters at Culver City, in the personnel section. It was perfect. Their star seemed to be watching over them with amazing attentiveness.

  The working holiday was doomed to fail, as Jan, had she thought it through properly, could have foreseen; but she was swept along by the power of the Culver City coincidence.

  She was there, with Janet and Robert and black Gracie, from mid June to early September. It was sweltering in Los Angeles that summer: much hotter than California was supposed to be. The only way to cool down their soulless rented house (paid for by MGM) was to spray water over the roof. Janet and Robert were now fifteen and twelve – old enough to crave freedom and the company of friends. At number 1061 of an interminable road off the interminable Westwood Boulevard, they were isolated, and there was nothing much to do.

  Mail-boxes like those Jan loved

  Jan, in the mornings, sat looking out at other similarly soulless houses, trying to write the story for a book or film, but no story came. Rather than inspiring her, Hollywood had the opposite effect: it seemed to paralyse her creative spirit entirely. Partly, she was both physically and mentally tired: her months of travelling from city to city, and the endless succession of lectures and hotel rooms, were beginning to take their toll on her energies. And partly she was ‘blocked’ by the fact that the only storyline which preoccupied her at the moment was the one she must keep secret. But there was also a sort of cussedness in her, al
most a wilful refusal at the last fence, which made her stall when success was so easily in her reach. All around her were movie moguls, producers and script-writers, hungry for her words. The conditions were too perfect: and the pressure was too great.

  She took the children to a grand dinner at Louis B. Mayer’s mansion – Robert’s first-ever grown-up dinner party – and all the men went off and played pinochle in a darkened room fuggy with cigar smoke, and everyone drank too much, and Robert and Janet yearned to go home. Jan arranged for Janet to spend a tedious day on the beach with Shirley Temple. Jan and the children had breakfast with Groucho Marx, who wasn’t funny, and lunch with the screen ‘monster’ Boris Karloff, who was sweet. She went on her own one afternoon to see Greer Garson at 680 Stone Canyon, and was treated to tea with cream in first. Greer Garson was now a navy wife: she married Richard Ney in July 1943 (much to the disapproval of the press – Ney was fifteen years younger), and after the honeymoon he went to sea as Ensign Ney. Jan had much in common with Greer which she could not discuss.

  Longing to proclaim her love for Dolf from the rooftops, Jan found a brazen (but oblique) way of doing so at a lecture in Los Angeles in aid of the United Jewish Appeal. She stood on a platform and spoke passionately about the plight of the Jews, with particular reference to a few individuals she knew well, giving them made-up names. Elizabeth, Max, Liesl and Willi, the characters whose plight she described, were disguised members of Dolf’s family held in Nazi concentration camps – cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents – and Jan loaded her lecture with heartbreaking detail. The lecture raised thousands of dollars from the wealthy Jewish audience: one member came up to Jan afterwards and said, ‘My dear, I feel PURRRGED.’

  The ‘goldfish-bowl prison-visit’

  Janet and Robert had no idea that nice Viennese Dolf, who came to visit them fairly often during the summer in Los Angeles, was anything more than a great friend of their mother’s. The pretence was faultlessly maintained, but it was a strain. This was admitted at the end of the holiday: ‘I’m glad you didn’t come to the house to say goodbye,’ Jan wrote to Dolf on 10 September. ‘I knew that if I had another harrowing farewell with you I should really vomit. I couldn’t bear to have another travesty of a meeting with you, with no time alone & no chance for even our eyes to kiss each other. Our relationship has stood up to so much, but I honestly think this sort of goldfish-bowl prison-visit period is the hardest of all. We shall be nearer together, I think, when geographically apart, than in this farcical set-up. But we have had some beautiful hours this summer, and we will have lots more, darling, somehow, somewhere. I know it.’

  In this letter of 10 September 1943, there was the first hint that the balance of the relationship was changing: ‘It is you who keep up my morale, rather than the other way round.’ For nearly four years, Jan had been the dazzling one – the acclaimed author, the English beauty, sought-after wherever she went. Dolf had been the dazzled one: the penniless refugee, the addresser of envelopes, the lowly private in the Army, hardly able to believe that the illustrious Jan Struther could love him. But now, returning from the strained summer in California, Jan felt herself ageing and her powers of writing dwindling, and she knew that Dolf was becoming the stronger of the two.

  Chapter Thirteen

  In small countries the landscape is a roomful of pictures

  Framed in the window of the train.

  There is composition – an old mill in the centre

  With a cow on one side of it and a horse on the other,

  Or a manor-house, perhaps, set among elm-trees,

  Or old men on a bridge, and a boy fishing.

  In large countries the landscape is a wallpaper

  Lining an enormous room.

  It slides past the window of the train

  With variation, repeated variation,

  Yet no real change.

  A wooded hill, a lake, a long white town,

  A hill, a lake, a town, a wooded hill,

  A lake, a long white town.

  There is length, but never any centre

  For things to cluster round.

  From ‘Small Countries’, 1944 (unpublished)

  IT SEEMED TO come quite suddenly, this new phase of Jan’s life, when blackness of heart rather than resolute cheerfulness was her dominant emotion. Over that summer of 1943 she changed from the powerful and frivolously confident guest in Lincoln’s bed to a much frailer woman, at the mercy of short-lived ‘highs’ and long-drawn-out ‘lows’.

  She had experienced mild depression before: hints of it had appeared in her early poems, and she had even managed to project it, twelve years before, onto Mary Magdalene in her hymn ‘Unto Mary, demon-haunted’ for Songs of Praise. The refrain went:

  Banish, Lord, our minds’ confusion,

  Fear and fever drive away;

  Down the valleys of illusion

  Spread the kindly light of day.

  There was a streak of depression in the family: a surviving teenage diary of Jan’s mother Eva suggests that she too experienced it, and later, in 1951, Jan’s brother Douglas suffered a depressive nervous breakdown. In Jan’s case, confusion seemed to be its overriding symptom. This poem, written in 1944, echoes her earlier hymn’s refrain:

  It took me forty years on earth

  To reach this sure conclusion:

  There is no heaven but clarity,

  No hell except confusion.

  It felt, during these periods of ‘confusion’, as if her way was lost in what she called ‘the mind’s jungle’: the tangled, chaotic mass of entwining worries and fears which existed in her head where once was ‘starry, clear-headed inner fertility’. In an effort to befriend and make light of this new, recurring affliction, she gave it a nickname, ‘the Jungles’.

  As the tide of the war turned in the Allies’ favour and talk of the invasion of mainland Europe began to be heard on people’s lips, Jan knew that the time was coming when she would have to make a decision about the situation which she had allowed to develop in her life. During a war, the rules were slackened: you could live in a state of suspended reality, basking in the present moment, not questioning the consequences. But at the end of a war you had to emerge again, wake up from the dream, and pick up real life where you had left it.

  The subject had to be broached with Dolf. Out of their preliminary talks came an awareness, devastating for Jan’s confidence, that the relationship was not set in stone. Nothing had ever been promised: the love-affair had survived, so far, on trust alone.

  Jan told Dolf that when the war ended, she would have to go back to Tony. She couldn’t simply abandon him, so that he would return from his POW camp to wifelessness. He and the children needed her: the ‘family pattern’ was the foundation of their sense of security.

  But having broken this news to Dolf, she could not then expect him to be loyal to her; he had every right to look elsewhere for love if she intended to go back to her husband when the war ended. Dolf falling in love with somebody else did not bear thinking about: but she did think about it, and her love for him, her need for him and her fear of losing him became more rather than less intense.

  This was a major cause of her ‘Jungles’. There was also physical exhaustion, panic at the loss of her magic touch as a writer, a sense of anti-climax after stepping down from the pinnacle of fame, and an increasingly acute feeling of missing Jamie.

  As soon as she returned to New York from the Los Angeles summer she became physically ill, with gastritis. Her physical and mental states were from now on closely linked. When she was depressed she couldn’t keep food down, or sleep, and this made her feel worse. ‘Maybe it’s not good for two human beings to get so happy in one another’s company,’ she wrote to Dolf from her bed, ‘when they are doomed to live in separate cages of skin and flesh which may be separated by circumstances at any moment and for oh! so long. In one way, though, I feel closer to you here than I did in that farcical pseudo-proximity without privacy in California. At least
I am living in the home we shared together, among furniture & books on which our eyes have rested.’

  Her doctor, Max Schurr (who had been Sigmund Freud’s personal physician), advised her to cancel her October 1943 lecture tour. ‘I’m horribly disappointed,’ she wrote to Dolf, ‘but I can’t go trailing about the country in this state, never knowing whether I’m going to throw up into the next microphone or otherwise disgrace myself in front of The Ladies.’ The cancellation was a relief and brought about a gradual physical recovery, so she did not have to cancel her sixteenth appearance on Information, Please!

  I am getting stronger physically [she wrote a month later], but it appears that with every increase of strength comes an increase of awareness & therefore of sadness. I seem to have no heart for anything except you. Everything else is empty and senseless. This is all WRONG, & it’s sort of undignified for any human being to become so dependent on another human being for mental & spiritual sustenance. But I don’t even care about that. The hell with dignity. I only want to be in your arms – No, that’s not true. If it were, I should say the hell with my duty to Tony & my compunction about the children’s peace of mind & my value as Allied propaganda, & just leap on a train & come to you. But that would be going AWOL – and you know that we can’t do that, whether we are official or unofficial soldiers. There are some things that one could not DO, if one wanted to retain one’s self-respect & peace of mind for ever afterwards. But I just want you to know how I wish I could see the slightest chance of our spending our future lives together.

  Dolf had been promoted to the rank of corporal, and was now Classification Clerk at Inglewood, California. ‘I am still having fun,’ he wrote to Jan, ‘or at least some part of me is having fun, while the rest is numb and dead. I was so disappointed that I couldn’t get my call through to you, but the lines were jammed, i.e. the waiting time was 8–10 hours, so I had placed the call too late. Furthermore, hearing your voice on Inf. Please stirred so many things up in me that I felt a little weak anyway, and when it didn’t come off I felt something like “a cowardly relief”.’