Neverland

by Piers Dudgeon

  Jim’s plan was to dispense with Nanny and move Michael and Nico in there with him.

  On 4 September 1917, Jack, who had served the war in the Royal Navy, married Geraldine Gibb after a year-long engagement. Peter was still away at war and already in a relationship with Vera Willoughby, a love affair which would keep him out of the family until 1921.

  Jim, without consulting Nanny, arranged for Jack and his new wife to take over the running of 23 Campden Hill Square.

  When the young couple arrived, Nanny, unprepared and deeply offended by the assault on her authority, turned her back and refused to speak to Gerrie, who was to take her place. Jack was furious. Nico and Michael, however, wouldn’t have a word said against Nanny. Tensions were high between the two factions, but when Jim was there he appeared completely oblivious.

  Doggedly, and not a little courageously, Nanny continued to ignore Gerrie, and would not give in to Jim by resigning her position.

  Then one night Nanny pushed a note under the door of Jack’s bedroom. It read –

  Things have been going on in this room of which your father would not have approved.

  It is not known what Jack made of it, but the response within the family was shameful. Gerrie later recalled that Edward Coles, husband of May du Maurier, and therefore Michael’s uncle, read Nanny’s note and quipped: ‘She probably heard the bed squeaking.’

  Why did no one do anything? ‘Because they were intimidated,’ admitted Gerrie to Andrew Birkin in 1975. ‘All the other relations said they were intimidated.’

  Certainly Jim could be intimidating. Dolly Ponsonby was afraid of him; Denis Mackail recalled that he would meet your conversation with an expression ‘horribly like a sneer’. There was something dark about him. Norma Douglas Henry, a friend of both George and Jack, had this to say:

  I think one or two people were rather disturbed about Barrie, though of course it was never talked about openly. There was something sinister about him, rather shivery.8

  Brave Nanny stood alone against Uncle Jim. But she could not win. She issued an ultimatum to Gerrie to leave Campden Hill Square. Gerrie and Jack retreated to a Knightsbridge hotel, where Gerrie suffered a miscarriage. Nanny broke down, never fully to recover.

  Peter, at war in Flanders, wrote to her, ‘It seems to me from what I’ve heard which is very little – that things are happening otherwise than they might have happened had I been at home; Nico would be heart-broken if you were to go – Michael too, I think. But I know so little – I wish you’d write.’

  But it was too late. Nanny had resigned. She refused compensation of £1,000, made up of £500 left to her by Sylvia and £500 put up by Jim. By Easter 1918, Michael and Nico were installed at Adelphi Terrace House. Campden Hill Square was closed down.

  The ability Jim had developed to disturb and intimidate was the result of his success, but also of the nature of the material on which his success was built, and his own increasingly morbid, possessive personality.

  To the Tommies (his various fantasy personae) in his armament at the time of his possession of Sylvia – the broken fellow, the good-natured cynic, the haughty boy, the grave author – he had added ‘the Establishment figure’ and ‘the Demon Boy’.

  Both were controlling. Both made one feel what Dolly had felt when they had met after Arthur Davies’s death that ‘he absolutely sees right through one & just how stupid I am’. But they won him many admirers too.

  Jim’s contacts during the war went high in the military. He had a close trusted friend in General Freyberg, VC, DSO, and was once given a privileged personal ‘view’ of the front line, conducted with utmost security. This explains how he knew within a few hours that George had been killed. He also dined with prime ministers, and found himself in the humbling position of being offered a knighthood, and then in the chastening position, after turning it down, of settling on a baronetcy instead – a little irony here, for this was an inherited title, and there was no chance of a natural-born son. By 1917, this Tommy was interviewing Lady Cynthia Asquith, daughter-in-law of the recent Prime Minister, now Leader of the Liberal Party, to become his secretary. He was part of the Establishment, rich and successful, and this was intimidating enough. But even more intimidating was the ‘other’ Jim, the supernatural Jim, the Demon Boy who purported to live in a Peter Pan world and was so untouchable that he could, in the most casual way, announce his part in the demise of Michael’s parents:

  In the house of Mr and Mrs Darling... there never was a simpler happier family until the coming of Peter Pan.

  Peter had seen many tragedies, but he had forgotten them all... ‘I forget [people] after I kill them.’9

  Jim published these lines less than twelve months after Sylvia died, around the time he forged her Will. He identified himself with Peter in Peter and Wendy, but wrote about him as if he was describing someone else.

  Theatre-goers lapped up his supernatural plays, but never quite understood why, as Denis Mackail recalled of the thousands who flocked to Mary Rose:

  For 399 performances... audiences wept, sniffed, swallowed and choked, without ever being able to explain what had reduced them to this state. Being human, some of them still sought for a meaning, but it was never vouchsafed. For nobody knew it. The players certainly didn’t, and the author had told everything by this time and had nothing more to say.

  He had transmuted himself into a Demon Boy by means of his alchemic texts, and everyone played the game – ‘between two worlds’ – as cricket writer Neville Cardus showed in his classic account of staying at the Adelphi Terrace flat, described by Nico as ‘vividly true’.10

  This week-end at Barrie’s flat will make so strange a story that I must assure the reader that in telling it I have made no exaggeration and have carefully overhauled my memory. Maybe I suffered from delusions; I do not deny the possibility; the point is that if delusions did seize me they were so potent as to become inextricable from fact.

  After ascending in a lift to the penthouse suite, Cardus was met at the door by his host.

  After Barrie had greeted me he showed me my bedroom and a shiver went down my spine when he told me, unnecessarily as I still think, that it had been ‘Michael’s’ room.

  Michael had drowned four years before. Cardus surrendered his baggage to Barrie’s manservant, Thurston, and was shown into the long study room.

  Thurston had a ghostly face; he was from a Barrie play – so was Barrie, and the flat, and everything in it; the enormous cavern of a fireplace, the wooden settle and old tongs and bellows, and the sense the place gave you that the walls might be walked through if you had been given the secret. Barrie trudged the room smoking a pipe; on the desk lay another pipe already charged, ready for immediate service; he coughed as he trudged and smoked, a cruel cough that provoked a feeling of physical pain in my chest; and his splutterings and gaspings and talk struggled on one from the other. At last he came to sit facing me in front of the smouldering logs, and for a while the silence was broken by groans only to be heard in our two imaginations – the groans of men separated for ever by a chasm of shyness and uneasiness. Until midnight we lingered on. He offered me no refreshment. Thurston apparently went home to sleep each night. Or perhaps he merely dematerialised.

  Throughout Cardus’ stay, people appeared as if out of nowhere and disappeared, so that he too began to feel he was a character in a Barrie play. At one stage he came upon a woman who was the spitting image of Margaret Ogilvy. By that time he was ready to believe that he had indeed come face to face with Jim’s mother, dead these thirty years. But it turned out to be Barrie’s younger sister Maggie, who invited Cardus to a ‘conversazzione’ in her boudoir, and surprised him with the news that she had been in communication with his own mother ‘on the other side’.

  And that my mother and she had loved one another at once, and that my mother was proud of me and that they, the two of them, would watch over and take care of me. I was naturally ready to perspire with apprehension. Was I
to be mothered or Wendy’d in this flat in the tree – I mean chimney tops?

  This is extraordinary information. Scottish Presbyterian Maggie Barrie is now, under her brother’s influence, a medium! The story shows beyond any doubt how far the Barries had flown on George du Maurier’s coat-tails.

  In such a context as this, is it not credible that what had been ‘going on’ with Michael in Barrie’s bedroom at Campden Hill Square, and what Nanny Hodgson had tried to report, was not sex, as May’s husband quipped, but a psychic ritual of some sort, hypnosis or perhaps a séance? It makes more sense for another reason. Would Nanny have stood by for so long had Jim and Michael been having sex? I think not.

  When finally Cardus’s long weekend came to an end, it was with a sense of relief that he made his goodbyes.

  Thurston led me to Barrie... he was in bed in a bandbox of a room, bare and uncomfortable – what little I could see of it through thick tobacco smoke, for his pipe was in full furnace as he lay there, frail in pyjamas, like a pygmy with one of those big pantomime heads. He hoped I had enjoyed my stay and would come again; the flat was open to me at any time: I had only to give him short notice. Thurston carried my suitcase down the lift cage. He got me a taxi. In my highly emotional condition – feeling I had emerged from another dimension, and only just emerged – I forgot to tip him. I called on Barrie at the flat once or twice after this experience; but never stayed the night. I prefer my Barrie plays on the stage in front of me, where I can see what they are doing; I don’t like them taking place behind my back in the night.

  * First performed in 1917, starring Gerald du Maurier.

  * Charlie Chaplin.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Daphne’s initiation

  Principal among Jim’s contacts within the wider du Maurier family, and vital to the success of his strategy since Sylvia’s death, was Gerald du Maurier, Sylvia’s brother, the youngest of George’s children.

  Born in 1873, Gerald was a spoilt, irresponsible, irrepressible youth when Jim first met him around 1900–01 – great fun, but cheeky and a show-off. Hopelessly unacademic at Harrow, he was nevertheless a social success and a natural actor. He made his first appearance on stage in An Old Jew, a comedy by Sydney Grundy, in January 1894, and thereafter he had a small part in every play produced at the Garrick, until he toured with Mrs Patrick Campbell’s company. ‘I have taught a clown to play Pelleas,’* Mrs Pat is supposed to have exclaimed.

  Eight years older than Gerald, Mrs Pat gave him what he needed: discipline. And took him into her bed. When in November 1901 she let him go and went off to New York, she became his destroyer too – a goddess indeed. It was then, when Gerald returned deflated to his mother, that Jim stepped in and was only too pleased to take him on. Jim loved Gerald’s boyish good looks and ‘gay, happy-go-lucky’ flair. Nico said that Jim ‘thought Gerald irresistible’; and for Jim, Gerald was ‘the only manly actor on the stage’.

  For a week in the summer of 1902, Gerald joined the Barries and the Llewelyn Davieses on the second of the Black Lake holidays. In November of the same year Jim made Gerald an offer of a part in his new play, The Admirable Crichton. This play not only made Gerald’s name in the theatre, it wrote him into an amorous situation with an actress called Muriel (‘Mo’) Beaumont and, as ever with Jim, shadows of the dream clung to the reality. In the script, Jim sent his fictional characters to a coral island to fall in love – which the real Gerald and Mo promptly did. Daphne was, of course, born of this fantasy union; in effect, she was written and produced by Uncle Jim.

  The relation of writer to actor is susceptible to the ‘peculiar equilibrium’ that Jim sought to establish with people to whom he was attracted, wanting at once ‘to own them and be dominated by them’, as Peter Davies put it. The playwright’s fantasies are fed into the actor; the actor then makes them his own. Thereafter, the playwright controls the actor’s very identity from within. This was the rapport Jim developed with Gerald. ‘The author and actor must go hand in hand to make a success of a play,’ Jim wrote in 1931 – and he was a very hands-on playwright indeed, attending rehearsals and discussing Gerald’s parts in depth.

  But perhaps because Gerald was resistant to closeness with Barrie, or thought he should be, Gerald always kept a gap between them. Gerald had an abhorrence of homosexuals. Possibly he was himself a repressed homosexual. Given his way, he would have rid the West End theatre of homosexuals. Intimacy between men was not something he was going to be so unmanly as to admit.

  He put himself across as a ladies’ man, shamelessly boasting to his young daughter Daphne about his liaisons with beautiful actresses. But when Daphne questioned him about boys ‘making friends with other boys’ at Harrow, he responded abruptly, as if she had touched a nerve. Also, rather surprisingly for a ladies’ man, on stage he had what Daphne described as an ‘oddly hostile’ attitude to women. ‘He seldom kissed women, unless it was on the back of the neck or the top of the head, and then he would generally slap them on the face afterwards, and say, “you old funny, with your ugly mug”.’1

  The friendship between Gerald and Jim was a perilous intimacy. As Mackail commented:

  They thought they saw through each other, and then again they weren’t at all sure that they weren’t being seen through themselves. There was often a kind of jealousy, too, when each found himself wanting the other’s more special and peculiar gifts – though of course as well as his own . . .

  There was, however, no question who was in control. ‘Barrie understood Gerald much more than Gerald understood Barrie,’ Daphne said with utter conviction in 1973.2

  Whatever was going on deep down, they came together brilliantly on stage:

  Gerald’s best performances took place most especially in the plays of J.M. Barrie. He was made for these parts, as no one else can ever hope to be. He brought a delicate, pristine quality into his interpretation of those characters so peculiarly and lovably original: a note from the woods and the wild places – something wistful, something gay, a faun-like carelessness, a happy-go-lucky shrug of the shoulder.3

  The earliest roles Jim created for him pointed a finger at Gerald’s empty soul. In The Admirable Crichton he cast him as the Hon. Ernest Woolley, an outwardly impressive upper-class Englishman, who is two-dimensional, ignorant of deeper issues. In Jim’s stage directions he is ‘light-natured’, ‘endearingly selfish’, ‘too busy over nothing to think of anyone but himself, happy to be the person he is (whom he regards as ideal), a bachelor (but not of arts) and a favourite of the ladies, a man who dresses in excellent taste but with a dash of humour that saves him from the dandiacal’. He was Gerald in and out of costume. Daphne’s abiding memory of her father was ‘wearing silk pyjamas from Beale and Inman of Bond Street, topped by a very old cardigan full of holes that once belonged to his mother’.

  After The Admirable Crichton came Jim’s Little Mary (1903), in which Gerald played the lead, the weak-minded son of the Earl of Carlton. Casting Peter Pan in 1904, Jim was bound to think of Gerald for the ineffectual Mr Darling.

  But then along came Captain Hook, a ‘dark and sinister’ man, based on the pirate Swarthy, who famously made Peter Davies walk the plank into the Black Lake. Hook was the menacing side of Jim, deemed ‘by those in the know’, as the playwright put it, ‘to be autobiographical’. Gerald wanted Hook. Jim was not so sure, but finally agreed that he should play both Mr Darling and Hook, and, to ease the fit, made the pirate a product of ‘a famous public school’, whose traditions ‘still clung to him like garments’.

  The actor in Gerald responded by at last welcoming the dark spirit of Jim ‘inside him’, his own two-dimensional self gaining a terrifying substance. ‘When Hook first paced the quarterdeck,’ wrote Daphne, ‘children were carried screaming from the stalls.’ On another occasion she marvelled at Jim’s possession of her father in the role, writing: ‘Alas! James Hook, that dark, unhappy man, what pains were endured in his begetting’ – so similar to her comment about Sylvia’s boys, whose
‘possession will remain a memorial to them for all time’.

  This was the secret of Jim and Gerald’s success on the London stage. So empathic did the relationship between writer and actor become that, as Mackail put it, Gerald made Jim’s plays ‘even more like Barrie plays than they were already, though he hated, or thought he hated, everything fanciful and whimsical, and swore by whisky and cold beef and golf’.

  The relationship reached a turning-point with Jim’s hit play What Every Woman Knows, which began its long run in 1908. Jim gave the two leading parts characters (and a situation) which reflected their own: he ‘pegged’ them on himself and Gerald. Again, Barrie was meddling with alchemic texts.

  A controlling character, Maggie Wylie (Jim), writes speeches for susceptible railway porter John Shand (Gerald), which get him elected as a Member of Parliament. Shand is nothing without Wylie, who, unknown to Shand, not only guides his career but loves him. The question is: will Shand (Gerald) return the love of Wylie (Jim), or succumb to the young aristocratic beauty Sybil? (In real life the hopelessly unfaithful Gerald would undoubtedly have chosen Sybil.)

  Gerald wrote to his mother after the first night: ‘It’s all over and we’re none of us sorry. It was a highly strung, nervous business, and no good to one’s internal arrangements.’

  After What Every Woman Knows Gerald made an attempt to go his own way. As Mackail wrote, ‘there was a long and complete break’. He did not act in a Barrie play for another seven years.

  Rejection for Jim again. It was not in his nature to forgive, but he needed Gerald. Arthur Llewelyn Davies had died in 1907. Jim was getting ever closer to the boys. He needed to keep Gerald sweet, needed him on side.

  Out of the blue, the theatre manager Frank Curzon offered Gerald an actor-management deal, whereby he would be paid £3,000 a year and receive 25 per cent of any profits. It was an excellent deal, but there was a downside. Gerald could be wiped out if a play failed, for as his eldest daughter Angela said,4 the du Ms ‘were hardly well-to-do people’ at the time. Gerald wrote to his mother: ‘It’s rather a knotty problem,’ and he wondered if he could count on Barrie letting him have a play ‘later on’.