Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties

by Rachel Cooke

  But however different their personalities, Joan and Nancy were a match. Theirs was not, by any stretch of the imagination, an exclusive relationship. There were times when it seemed to outsiders more like a business partnership than anything else; they pooled their resources and their ideas. But they were extraordinarily close, a reticent intimacy that was sealed for ever by the events of 1952.

  In Why I’m Not a Millionaire Nancy describes 1952 as a ‘vintage year’ largely, it would seem, because Fleet Street had finally come calling; she had joined the Daily Express as its book critic* and had met Beaverbrook for the first time. And perhaps, looking back, this was the most important thing to happen to her: work was always at the centre of her life. But she also refers, with startling breeziness, to the arrival of one Thomas Bartholomew Laurie Seyler, ‘the youngest of Jonnie’s responsibilities’, making it quite plain that she was present at his birth (strikingly, she uses the word ‘damp’ to describe his hair the first time she saw it). What would her readers have made of this? She had just told them that Jonnie’s husband was dead. Who was supposed to have fathered this new baby, born on 27 August 1952?

  Most people must have assumed that the baby was the result of an illicit affair on the part of Jonnie, and that Nancy was merely playing the loyal and devoted ‘aunt’ when she explained that she loved this boy ‘desperately, hopelessly, devotedly’. And perhaps this is what their friends thought too, for almost no one was told the full story at the time. Even those who were in a position to know that Joan had not been pregnant, and that the boy could not therefore be hers, were vague about his parentage. Nick Werner Laurie (he dropped the Seyler as an adult) remembers going to collect his new baby brother in the same red MG as they had picked up Nancy two years before. Where did he think the baby had come from? ‘The baby shop.’ And when he was older? ‘I used to call him my adopted brother.’ What did he feel when he finally discovered the truth? ‘I thought, Ah, that explains all sorts of things.’

  In her memoir Nancy came closer to acknowledging the reason for her devotion to Thomas Bartholomew than she ever did in life. For she was indeed present at his birth; it would have been exceedingly difficult for her to be anywhere else, given that she was his mother. But how had she hidden her pregnancy from her friends? With great difficulty, probably, though since those who knew her were in no doubt about her sexuality they would perhaps have seen only what they expected to see. There is a story that when Angus McBean came to photograph her for the cover of one of her detective novels, her pregnancy was so noticeable that he had to ask her to lie down so he could shoot her from above. Jonnie’s brother Dick remembers her squeezing by him one day in the kitchen of Carlyle Square. ‘Well, you’ve probably noticed I’m pregnant,’ she said; later he received a letter from Jonnie, informing him that he had a new ‘nephew’. Certainly Nancy must have worn something extremely forgiving for her first meeting with Beaverbrook, for she was by then six months pregnant. But in general her condition simply did not register. Years later, when the truth emerged, friends were shaken as much by their failure to notice what should have been obvious as by Nancy’s concerted subterfuge.

  For all her warmth, Nancy was an expert builder of compartments. Once she and Jonnie had taken the decision that he would be brought up as Nicky’s brother – both boys called Nancy ‘Tig’ – and that Nancy would not acknowledge Thomas as her son, there could be no half measures. If her story was to hold, if she was not ever to slip up, it was vital that she resist telling even her closest friends and family. Her parents never knew they had a grandson, nor was her sister told, or at least not at the time. As Nick Werner Laurie puts it, ‘He was there every day: her son. She had to go total.’

  It was Joan who registered the birth. A copy of the certificate is beside me now as I write. The baby’s father was recorded as Paul Clifford Seyler, a cattle rancher of Buenos Aires – a double falsehood, given that the man in question had been dead for two years. The baby’s mother was named as Anne Brooker Seyler, formerly Brooker – in other words, a fictitious character with elements of both women’s names. The baby was then swiftly handed over to a nanny, that Nancy and Jonnie might return to work. Did this arrangement cause Nancy pain? No. She was not given to backward glances. In time it would be as though she had forgotten the truth herself. Why, though, did she do it? Mostly, she was probably thinking about her career. In 1952 an unmarried mother was unlikely to get work presenting Woman’s Hour or anything else on the Home Service, opportunities that would soon come her way. She and Jonnie may also have thought it was better for the children to grow up believing themselves to be brothers. But another school of thought has it that Thomas was her gift to Jonnie: I love you so much I will give you my child.* What do I think? I think that secrets, even those kept with the best of intentions, can be destructive; and in the fullness of time this one would indeed cause a great deal of collateral damage. For the time being, though, it worked like a spell, binding those who kept it tightly and reassuringly together.

  Nancy Spain photographed by Angus McBean for the cover of Cinderella Goes to the Morgue

  (© The President and Fellows of Harvard College.)

  In 1952 Gilbert Harding was as famous as Stephen Fry is today, though somewhat less avuncular. A Cambridge-educated former schoolteacher, he made his name as a regular on What’s My Line?, a BBC programme in which a panel had to guess the profession of a mystery guest. It sounds laughable now: ‘Do you work with your hands? Do you visit people’s houses? Are they pleased to see you? Are you a postman?’ But Harding, one of the first household names of the television age, succeeded in making it compelling viewing by dint of the fact that no one knew when he would next explode in frustration: ‘He acquired the reputation of being as remorselessly rude as Dr Johnson used to be two hundred years ago,’ as Compton Mackenzie once put it. Was his rudeness a put-on job? His contemporaries thought not. Harding never owned a television set himself, and was often unable to hide his contempt for the medium. He was also shy, lonely and thwarted. As a homosexual, his private life was fraught with danger; as a Catholic convert, perhaps it was also the source of self-loathing.

  Nancy Spain met Gilbert Harding at a dinner party, four months after the birth of her son. She thought him clever and funny, and instantly became his ‘slave for life’. It was a form of slavery that involved an endless round of lunches, teas and telephone calls – and, in 1954, a trip to Jamaica on a banana boat. Harding had trouble with his lungs and his doctors, as they were periodically wont to do, had given him a year to live. He needed rest, fresh air and sunshine. Jonnie and Nancy, meanwhile, had also been coping with illness – abdominal surgery for Jonnie, pneumonia in the case of Nancy – and they had recently moved to a new house in Clareville Grove, Kensington. In addition, both had big new jobs. Nancy had begun presenting a ‘Personality Diary’ for Woman’s Hour (a chance to recycle her assignments for the Daily Express). She was also enjoying a stint as a film critic for another of Beaverbrook’s papers, the Evening Standard. Jonnie was busy developing a women’s magazine for the National Magazine Company, to be called SHE, a title that would cause a revolution in the world of publishing on its launch in 1955. (‘On average,’ Jonnie said later, ‘not more than about twelve [readers] a month cancel their subscriptions because of the horror at my lack of refinement in choosing the contents . . . SHE has dealt in full detail with menstruation, hysterectomy, breast cancer, lung cancer, leprosy, brain tumours. We have even told our readers exactly what a bidet is for.’) It was agreed that the two women would join Harding on a ship called Matina, which would leave Liverpool in early March.

  No sooner had the boat set sail, however, than Nancy was filing copy to the Express; copy in which she wrote all about her celebrity travelling companion. One thing led, as it is apt to do, to another. In London the gossip columnists sharpened their pencils. ‘Is Gilbert Harding thinking of marrying?’ asked the Daily Sketch’s writer. ‘I hear talk of a romance between the irascible 47-year-old TV
bachelor and novelist Nancy Spain, who is 37.’ The next day all the national dailies cabled the ship demanding news of the happy couple. Doubtless these journalists did not really believe Gilbert and Nancy to be a couple, but the story was irresistible all the same. Nor did it do Nancy any harm: by the time the Matina returned to Southampton she was firmly lodged in the national consciousness as the woman who might be about to usurp Gilbert Harding’s housekeeper, Mrs Clarke, in his affections.

  Back on dry land, she did nothing to disabuse the public of this idea. The rumours rumbled on into 1955, when Nancy, by now herself a panellist on What’s My Line?, announced that her remaining ambition in life was to marry Harding. She followed this declaration with the planting of a kiss on his cheek. The trouble was that Nancy knew good publicity when she saw it, and though the friendship with Harding was genuine – he was, it seems, one of the very few people she told about Tom – it would not be unfair to say that she sacrificed a measure of his dignity for her own gain. Her love for her friends was shot through with a pragmatism that could border on the ruthless. The same was true of her relationship with the children. As a boy, Nick ate lunch at the Ivy so often he knew how to make crêpe suzette before he was nine. But such treats failed to compensate for the days – weeks, sometimes – when he and Tom saw their mothers not at all; for the fact that they were brought up by a series of nannies, each one more incompetent than the last. When they were older and at boarding school – Tom was sent away at the age of six – the boys were expected to stay put during the holidays if Nancy and Jonnie had something better to do (the ‘something better’ might involve work, but it could also include renting a villa in Cannes). When Nick was fourteen he blew up the school chemistry lab. During the six weeks he spent in hospital recovering from the accident, he received not a single visit from Jonnie or Nancy.

  Was Nancy any more careful of Jonnie’s feelings? Hardly. In 1955, shortly after the publication of her final detective novel, The Kat Strikes, she was asked to introduce Marlene Dietrich on stage at the Café de Paris in Piccadilly, an event for which she wore a pink silk dress with an ostentatious bow – a frock that wouldn’t have deceived ‘a drunken child of two and a half’, according to Noël Coward. At some point after this she and Dietrich began an affair.* ‘Dear me,’ she writes in Why I’m Not a Millionaire. ‘How Marlene mops us all up . . . Ageless, genderless, so blazingly attractive that she snuffs out any woman in the room with her as effectively as a searchlight would obliterate a candle flame, Marlene is at her very best when all the props have been thrown away and she stands there in slacks, or an admiral’s overcoat, or a simple well-tailored little suit.’

  Joan with Nick and Tom in Clareville Grove

  (Dick Laurie collection.)

  But this dalliance was brief. More serious by far was her relationship with one of Dietrich’s lovers, Ginette Spanier, the directrice of Balmain. (Dietrich and Spanier were involved, on and off, for some six years.) She and Nancy met in 1956, Noël Coward having played matchmaker. Coward was staying with Spanier and her husband in Paris, during which time he happened to be devouring a proof of Millionaire. ‘You must read this,’ he said. Spanier inquired after the book’s author: Nancy who? ‘I vaguely remembered . . . pictures of a girl in a sweater on the front of buses in London, advertising Basildon Bond writing paper, I think.’ So what, she asked, was this Nancy like? ‘Tough,’ said Coward. ‘A duck. Is mad about Beaverbrook, and me.’

  Soon after, encouraged by Coward, who informed her that simply everyone stayed with Ginette in Paris, Nancy invited herself to lunch (she was in France to interview the Duke and Duchess of Windsor for the newly launched SHE). Ginette was smitten. She describes their first encounter in her 1970 memoir And Now It’s Sables: ‘In my sitting room when I rushed in late I saw a young woman in a navy suit looking up from a book. One of my books, from one of my shelves. Soft eyes. Shy. Why had Noël said she was tough, I thought. How often in the years that followed was I to see Nancy Spain look up from a book to greet me, at airports, in restaurants . . . We laughed right through lunch. We had each found a friend. The quicksilver brain, the instant understanding, the sense of humour, the biting wit; they never lost their fascination for me.’ Things Nancy and Ginette both loved: work, the heat of the sun, laughter, music halls, work again. Things they hated: ‘what other people think’, amateurs, laziness, antiques.

  Spanier’s outward appearance – elegant, immaculately dressed, never without her crimson lipstick and a string of good pearls – gave no hint of the unconventional, determined character within. She and her husband Paul-Emile, a doctor, had somehow managed to survive in Occupied France in spite of the fact that they were Jewish, an experience that gave her a lifelong hatred of Germans (another thing she and Nancy had in common). She had joined Balmain in 1947, at the invitation of the designer’s mother, who had seen her berate the sales staff for trying to sell unsuitable clothes to the daughter of a friend. A born saleswoman, she remained the directrice of the company for the next thirty years, a job she adored – not least because it brought so many glamorous names to her door. In the Fifties guests at her Avenue Marceau apartment, with its fifty-foot drawing room and grand piano, included Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, Judy Garland, Claudette Colbert and Louis Armstrong. Signed photographs of these visitors adorned the walls of her bathroom – caught, as Nancy put it, ‘like flies in amber’.

  But Ginette was also, Nancy noticed, restless. The ‘undiluted couture diet’ was beginning to pall; something in her longed for what she later called the ‘hammy’ side of life. Nancy’s response was typically over-the-top. She decided to turn la directrice into a personality. First, she interviewed her on the radio. Then she wrote about her in the Express. Finally, she helped her to write a memoir. And when It Isn’t All Mink was published in 1959 she travelled with her to the US to publicise it, ostensibly acting as her secretary. (Thanks to Nancy, Spanier would go on to appear on both Desert Island Discs and This Is Your Life.)

  Nancy with Ginette Spanier

  Nancy’s letters home during this book tour are ostentatiously devoted. Jonnie is ‘Darling sweet Mrs Bunny’ and ‘my best beloved little cat’, and even as she waits for her plane to New York she makes the time to pick up her pen and say that she is finding ‘it all very strange and rather frightening’ (though she carefully omits to say precisely what ‘it’ was). Later she makes a great deal of her homesickness. But there is also a strong element of performance about them, and when she writes that she hopes Jonnie will be ‘okay and Sheila [will] look after you very nicely’, it sounds like nothing so much as a gentle reminder. You have your friendships, she whispers, and I’ll have mine.*

  Sheila? Ah, yes. In 1958, or thereabouts, the household at Clareville Grove had gained a new member: Sheila van Damm. Sheila was famous in her own right both as a rally-car driver and as the daughter of Vivian van Damm, the owner of the Windmill Theatre in Soho, an establishment she now helped to run. A stay of a few days while she looked for a new flat had somehow turned into a permanent arrangement, as a result of which she now formed the third side of an increasingly complicated triangle. If, as those who knew them will tell you, Jonnie never grieved over Nancy’s affairs, perhaps this was because she already had a stalwart ally of her own.

  Sheila van Damm was a small, well-padded woman with a gap-toothed smile and a brisk, no-nonsense manner. In her bulky twin sets and with her hair tightly set she looked, more than anything else, like a maiden aunt. This seemed to surprise people. Strangers expected something wilder, more risqué, though why this should be, Sheila never quite understood. As she noted in her memoir We Never Closed, the Windmill Theatre was not the den of iniquity outsiders imagined it to be: ‘Our fan dance was usually such a masterpiece of timing it could have been performed at a vicarage fête with scarcely a tut-tut of embarrassment.’ Not that Sheila was a dancer, fan or otherwise. Her figure wasn’t built ‘for terpsichorean fantasies’. In the early days, when she played teenage understudy to
the theatre’s publicist, she was required to deliver fliers by hand, a job that meant she spent most of every day on foot. Alas, any weight she might have lost was dealt with between calls: ‘I had to keep reviving myself by stopping at a milk bar.’

  Sheila was born in 1922, the youngest of three sisters. The family was Jewish. There was, as she later put it, ‘only one male in the home, and he dominated it completely’. This was her father, Vivian van Damm. A more dynamic man it was hard to imagine, and it took Sheila many years to acknowledge that, just occasionally, he could be wrong. ‘He was kind, generous, lovable – and a complete dictator,’ she said. ‘We regarded him with immense respect, verging on awe, and complete trust. It was not a case of father knows best: father knew everything.’ Vivian van Damm had begun his working life in the garage trade, eventually opening the first service station in Britain. By the time Sheila was born he had moved into the cinema business, a world that better suited the showman in him, for he knew instinctively how to pull in the crowds. As manager of the Polytechnic cinema in Piccadilly, he showed a documentary, made originally for soldiers, on the hitherto unmentionable ‘perils’ of venereal disease. But he had two prints made: one showed certain ‘startling’ scenes, the other did not. Screened alternately, furious arguments would break out between those who had seen print one, and those who’d seen print two. The only way to resolve such arguments was for customers to pay to see the film again, a ploy so successful the police had to be called in to control the swelling crowd, and two nurses employed, ready to revive swooning patrons.*