Returning from the south of France after Christmas, the Freres were greeted with news of Georgette’s new book—not yet planned but in the offing: “I cannot think whether I will write Manifold, or Gideon—but one or the other I must write, if the fantastic demands of the I.R. are to be met.” Despite her grumbles, she was more relaxed about money than she had ever been for her royalty income had grown large enough to cover even the most alarming tax bill and Joyce Weiner was negotiating the huge sum of £3,500 for the next serial in Woman’s Journal. Meanwhile, Georgette was planning a new book and her son’s wedding, which was to be in June. Since Susie’s mother could not afford a lavish reception it was decided to hold it in Albany.
On 2 June 1962, Richard George Rougier married Susanna Whitworth Flint at the Kensington Registry Office. Susie quickly found her place in the family and Georgette was delighted to discover that her new daughter-in-law “has our own type of humor. This makes life very easy, for one doesn’t have to edit one’s conversation. She’s quick-witted too, & dearly loves a joke.” It was a great happiness for Georgette to see her son married and to a young woman whose company she so much enjoyed. She had long thought she did not want a daughter and had clung to her maxim that “Boys tell their mothers, and Girls tell their fathers.” But her perception was based on her own experience of having “been a daughter;” the advent of “Our dear Susie” into her life soon convinced her she was wrong.
Within six months of the wedding Georgette told her old friend and former landlady, Isabella Banton, that “I made a lot of Good Resolutions, when Richard married, about Never Intruding on them, or Making Demands, but Susie smashed the lot—so that I find myself wondering if all is well at 56 Cornwall Gardens, if I don’t get a telephone call from her.” Unlike Richard, Susie talked to her mother-in-law regularly, exchanging news and gossip and keeping her up-to-date with family events. It did not take Georgette long to realize that Richard had never really told her anything. Susie’s little boys also brought a new dimension to her life. She and Ronald enjoyed being step-grandparents to six-year-old Dominic and four-year-old Noel. Altogether, Georgette judged Richard’s marriage a great success.
A month after the wedding she finished The Nonesuch. It was another of her quiet books with the action mainly centered in the fictional village of Oversett in Yorkshire. The Nonesuch reflected Jane Austen’s famous advice that “3 or 4 families in a country village is the very thing to work on.” The book may also have been inspired by Georgette’s tour of England’s north earlier in the year when she had accompanied Ronald to the Northern Optical Conference where he had presided as chairman of the General Optical Council (a Privy Council appointment). During the inevitable round of factory tours, presentations, lunches, and banquets Georgette had encountered several memorable characters. One local mayor had “turned out to be a honey”:
He informed me at the outset that he was a plumber, and he had the instinctive savoir faire which characterized Bevin, and is so endearing. I may mention that he won my heart at the outset by telling me that Ee, he was glad to have me beside him, because he had wanted, at the Ball on the previous night, to coom a bit closer to me, because he couldn’t hear all I said, but enough to show him that I was “a natural-born ’umorist!” so was he! We had a splendid time—and a lovely talk about cricket, with particular reference to Brian Statham.
The rest of the delegates she felt did not come “out of quite one’s own drawer, so great care had to be taken not to offend tender susceptibilities.” Georgette’s particular brand of snobbery was not always clear cut. While her preference was for those individuals perceived to be from her own class or above, a person did not have to be well-born to win her over. Intelligence, strength of character, and a sense of humor were the prerequisites for her friendship.
In May Frere sent through the contract for The Nonesuch. For the first time since sacking L.P. Moore in 1951 Georgette actually read the document. She was stunned to find that it contained an option clause giving Heinemann first refusal of her next two books. Incensed, she immediately wrote to tell Frere that she had struck out Clause 14 and that he would “be as surprised as I was to see that it had been inserted.” She reminded him that since 1947 her contracts had been one-book deals and that their own verbal agreement (after sacking Moore) had been for the contract to be the same. It did not occur to her “that the formula would be altered, and a clause inserted without my consent, and I regret to say that I didn’t bother to read through the COTILLION contract—or any of the succeeding ones.” She now went back and read her last eleven contracts and was appalled to find that the clause appeared in every one.
As an eighteen-year-old Georgette had read her first contract with assiduous care. As the years had passed, however, she had grown less attentive to such things and more inclined to assume that her relationship with Frere was safeguard enough. It had taken forty years for her to realize “how very unwise I had been to have taken even a Heinemann contract on trust” (and she still did not appear to notice the reduction in her royalties). After twenty-five years of regular correspondence, this was to be her last letter to Frere in his capacity as her publisher at Heinemann. While she did not blame him, both the tone and the contents of the letter indicated her growing dissatisfaction with the firm.
The Heinemann director appointed to manage her books in Frere’s place was Derek Priestley. He did his best to win over their star author with friendly yet businesslike letters and it is possible that in time Georgette would have built a relationship with him. But Heinemann had blotted its copybook in its treatment of Frere and no one else would do. Priestley’s civil communiqués were not to be compared with Frere’s familiar banter and Priestley did not belong as Frere belonged. He did not yet understand her or speak her language (he fatally addressed her as Mrs. Rougier). Her relationship with her publisher was a vital part of her writing life, and with Frere’s time at Heinemann almost at an end Georgette felt that change was in the air.
On 16 August she celebrated her sixtieth birthday at Greywalls. A few days later she received an urgent telegram from Richard to say that her mother had suffered a stroke. She and Ronald rushed back to London and for the next three months Georgette endured the nightmare of watching her mother suffer the sorts of impairments Sylvia had most dreaded. The stroke had robbed her of her speech and left her partially paralyzed and there was little anyone could do other than sit with her. Georgette made almost daily visits to the hospital and to the nursing home where Sylvia spent her last weeks, but her mother could only speak a little and toward the end was in great distress. Georgette found some comfort in Richard’s and Susie’s kindness and understanding. Susie offered to share the visiting “but quite saw that I couldn’t share it with anyone & refrained from nagging at me.” Sylvia Heyer died on 27 November 1962 in a nursing home in Kilburn. Georgette was devastated. “Only a monster could have wished her to linger on,” she wrote to Isabella Banton. “Her death leaves me feeling shattered, & strangely lost. Exhausted too.”
It took Georgette some time to recover. The changes at Heinemann did not help. Ten days before The Nonesuch was published Derek Priestley wrote to ask about “progress with a new novel” and then compounded this misdeed by ringing Georgette in Albany to ask again. She told him frankly that he “should have been trained by Frere never to ask directly about plans for a book. She would let us know when she had a plot and a book in her head.” Priestley naively thought: “No harm done, obviously by enquiring—may even have spurred her on.” Georgette had thought of a new book—but with the option clause now deleted from her contract, she intended that it should reach neither Priestley nor Heinemann.
By Christmas Georgette knew that Frere was resigning from Heinemann and joining the board of The Bodley Head. Although he had already cleared his desk it was not to become public knowledge until the new year. A few days after Christmas Joyce Weiner asked Georgette about rumors of change at Heinemann and offered to discuss a plan of action with her. But
Georgette had no need to talk with anyone. She had already decided to follow Frere to The Bodley Head.
The rival firm was owned by his friend Max Reinhardt, who had entered publishing after the War. A tall, congenial man of cosmopolitan background and convivial manner, he lived in Albany, was a member of the Savile Club (and later the Garrick), was a talented bridge player, knew all the right people and, as far as Georgette was concerned, was Frere’s ideal replacement. A year earlier Reinhardt had been part of a proposed merger between Heinemann and The Bodley Head, but the deal had fallen through, and with it the plan to give Frere the chairmanship of the company and an active role in the management of its authors (which would have meant a comeback for Frere). Instead, Frere accepted a position on the Board and when he left Heinemann at the end of 1962 for The Bodley Head he took Georgette, Graham Greene, and Eric Ambler with him.
Shocked by her sudden departure, Derek Priestley tried to persuade Georgette to remain with Heinemann, reminding her of her forty years with the firm and their success with The Nonesuch (sixty thousand copies sold and already in its second printing). But she was adamant. She told Priestley: “Her loyalty and her enthusiasm in writing for publication were directed to one person, Frere.” She also explained that she, Graham Greene, and Eric Ambler had long since “got together and decided there was no point in their staying now that Frere was going.” Priestley took Georgette to lunch and made one last attempt to persuade her to change her mind. It was to no avail:
Very many thanks for your letter—& for my enjoyable lunch! The occasion was a gloomy one, but I am so glad to have met you; & I hope that my secession from the ranks won’t preclude our meeting again. You were very persuasive, but my decision wasn’t reached without a great deal of thought. In fact, to be asked to think any more about it almost makes me drum with my heels: Frere has been preaching Thought, Consideration, & Caution ever since I told him that I should leave the firm when he did. I don’t doubt I should get on beautifully with you, but there is more to all this than the personal friendship angle. A lot of very murky water has been flowing under the Heinemann bridge, & I don’t like it. It can serve no useful purpose to enlarge upon what I said to you yesterday, so I will merely say that I am sorry, but my mind is made up.
Priestley gave up the fight and resigned himself to losing one of Heinemann’s most successful authors. With rare perception he later described Georgette as “an immensely determined woman with a good brain and a very sentimental streak which she has spent her life in covering up.”
27 In fact, Kathleen Lindsay wrote 904 books under a series of pseudonyms and for many years held the record as the world’s most prolific novelist.
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Or shall I come just as Little Me—really the simplest of creatures, happiest when pottering about my kitchen (my books just seem to come to me, you know), but just too touched & happy for words.
—Georgette Heyer
Georgette and Frere celebrated their move to The Bodley Head with a “lovely” new year lunch. She was relieved to “have things settled, & to be sure that my Favorite Publisher is still my publisher.” But Frere’s position on the board gave him no direct role in the management of the firm’s authors; it was to be Max Reinhardt who would fill the position Frere had held in Georgette’s writing life for the past twenty-five years. She was confident that she would be in good hands, however, and was already “toying” with her idea for her next book. “It ’ud shake The Bodley Head a bit…if I favored them with a Synopsis of my Forthcoming Work!” she told Frere before he left for an extended overseas trip.
Her first letter to Max Reinhardt was typical Georgette: “So Frere thinks it a pleasure to deal with me, does he? He must have forgotten how broad a view I’ve always taken of his duties toward me.” A month later she wrote to say that her first book for the firm would be called False Colors. Although she assured Reinhardt that “I do know what it’s going to be about!” it was April before she had worked out the plot. She wrote a lengthy outline but balked at sending it to Reinhardt for fear of causing him to “suffer a stroke” and sent it to Frere instead.
It was another of her new plots, with identical twins who must “rescue their entrancing but wholly irresponsible Mama from her financial difficulties” (Georgette had based her fictitious mama on Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire). She gave Lady Denville an unlikely cicisbeo (gallant admirer) in Sir Bonamy Ripple, “one of my more felicitous creations.” An enormously fat gourmand, he proved to be another of her superb comic characters. The plot was “just the sort of nonsense which suits my particular brand of humor,” she told Reinhardt. Already she had warmed to her new publisher and an early letter had begun: “Dear Mr. Reinhardt—No: on second thoughts I’ll alter that to Dear Max.” Within weeks of joining The Bodley Head Georgette was writing to Reinhardt exactly as she had always written to Frere.
Determined not to put a foot wrong with his new author, Reinhardt commissioned Georgette’s favorite illustrator, Arthur Barbosa, to design the jacket for False Colors. She loved Barbosa’s subtle, elegant pictures, which she felt exactly captured the style and tone of her novels. They were a stark contrast to what she saw as the vulgar Pan paperback covers: “I have been meaning for some time to protest against any suggestion that a book written by me will be found to contain lurid sex-scenes. I find this nauseating…and I have enough sense to realize that new readers, attracted by a sex-suggestive cover, will suffer nothing but disappointment if they are misled into buying the book.” She had recently signed a new agreement with Pan for a substantially increased advance and a rise in her royalty rate from three to seven percent and was pleased when the paperback publisher informed her of their plans to improve the quality of their covers.
As promised, Georgette finished False Colors in June. She had written for twenty-four hours straight at the end and at 104,000 words thought the manuscript wanted cutting. “Bits of it aren’t bad,” she told Reinhardt, “but there are moments when I look upon it with complete nausea.” She thought the fans would be happy, however, and hoped Reinhardt would read it and not be disappointed. She also asked her new publisher to tell his printers that “I don’t want my book repunctuated, or my spelling corrected…when I write ‘realize,’ I do not mean ‘realise!’” But Reinhardt was no fool (and he had the benefit of the inside running from Frere). He wrote to her just three days after receiving the manuscript. He had read False Colors and was “delighted with it…How clever your dialogue is and how rich all these Regency words sound…I enjoyed my weekend very much. Thank you.” Georgette was gratified and also pleased to learn that the printer had been instructed to follow her manuscript to the letter.
She received her advance copy of False Colors at the Blue Bell Hotel in Belford, Northumberland, where she and Ronald were spending September with Susie, Richard, “the babies and the Swiss help.” She had dedicated the novel to Susie in a gesture which summed up Georgette’s feelings about her daughter-in-law. “Susie wins all hearts—including ours!” she told Isabella Banton. “Indeed, we wonder what on earth we did without Our Susie. She is the daughter we never had, & thought we didn’t want.” Richard’s marriage was a source of happiness in Georgette’s life and she enjoyed watching her son be a father to Susie’s two boys. The holiday was a great success and they returned home to a letter which Georgette was to treasure for the rest of her life.
She received a lot of fan mail and, despite her protests, liked to know her books were read and enjoyed. Although she could be dismissive of her correspondents’ effusive praise, she frequently took the time to write a personal reply. It would have been out of character for Georgette to openly acknowledge her readers’ admiration and it had long been her “practice to destroy all letters as soon as I have replied to them”—including those from family and friends.
The letter she kept was from a Rumanian woman who, with her sister, had been held as a political prisoner there since 1949. With the help of the Leon family in America, in 1961 Nora and
Annie Samuelli were ransomed and finally brought out from behind the Iron Curtain. Nora had written to Georgette from the United States to thank her “on behalf of hundreds of women political prisoners in Rumania… for having helped us escape—for a few hours at least—from the weary drabness of our prison days and the evil that surrounded us.” She was referring to Friday’s Child, which she and Annie remembered practically verbatim and which they had recited to their fellow prisoners over and over again (translating as they went) with “all the quips and Ferdy-isms which are so much a part of it.” Thirty years later, in her memoir Women Behind Bars in Romania, Nora’s sister Annie also recorded one of many occasions when Georgette’s novel had been the saving grace in an appalling situation. Locked in a small, claustrophobic train carriage with eight other women and unsure of whether they were to live or die, she was asked:
“Do you think you could tell us a story, it would be such a help to pass the crawling hours!”
“Oh do!” exclaimed Sanda. “I would so much like to hear Friday’s Child again! Girls it’s terrific!”
I was quite willing. The exertion might stem the rising tide of panic and hysteria that engulfed me too. I was glad that Sanda had spared me the effort of thinking of a book. Friday’s Child by Georgette Heyer was what my sister and I called my “best-seller.” The pranks of Hero Wantage in the spacious mansions and cool country side of early nineteenth-century England assisted a little in whiling away the sweltering, airless afternoon. Once again, this tale like many others was the means of momentarily escaping from prison hardships without even approaching the window bars…Never had an ancient poet had a more rapt audience.
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