College of One (Neversink)

by Sheilah Graham

  Shame and ruin wait for you.

  And there was the brave Sir Richard Grenville—

  At Flores in the Azores, Sir Richard Grenville lay,

  And a pinnace, like a flutter’d bird, came flying from far away.

  “Spanish ships of war at sea! We have sighted fifty-three!” …

  Then sware Lord Thomas Howard, “ ’Fore God I am no coward.”

  He wanted to flee because they were six to fifty-three, but Sir Richard wouldn’t hear of it. They went down, of course, but were patriotic to the last gurgle of water. I wept for them and was proud of being British, as I was in the poem I wrote at the orphanage on the Battle of the Somme:

  We came out victorious

  As Englishmen always do,

  But still we were precautious

  And so were our allies too.

  This wasn’t much worse than my play Dame Rumor, written in 1938 under the supervision of Scott Fitzgerald and abandoned after the second act. At twelve I wrote an essay titled “The Night” that began, “When twilight visits the earth, and the world is shrouded in a thick mist of darkness.” Not very good, but it was considered brilliant at the orphanage, and I was made to recite it to the assembled school. I knew it by heart and afterward repeated every word over and over, remembering all the eyes fixed admiringly on me. We put on a revue for the teachers, and, wearing a soldier’s cap and a cane with the drab school uniform, I marched up and down on a stage made of long dining tables and sang:

  “I’m Burlington Bertie,

  I rise at ten-thirty …

  I stroll down the Strand

  With my gloves on my hand,

  And when I come back they are off …

  I’m Bert, Bert,

  And royalty’s hurt,

  When they ask me to dine I say no.

  I’ve just had a banana

  With Lady Diana.

  I’m Burlington Bertie from Bow.”

  Another girl, a blond cherub, sang:

  “I’m Pierre de Bon Ton de Paris, de Paris.

  I drink to ze wine, eau de vie, eau de vie.

  When I walk in ze park

  All my friends zey remark,

  ‘He’s Pierre de Bon Ton de Paris, de Paris.’ ”

  I would have preferred to sing that one because of the French.

  I can never forget the songs of the orphanage.

  Here, a sheer hulk, lies poor Tom Bowling,

  The darling of our crew-oo;

  No more he’ll hear the tempest howling,

  For death has broached him to.

  Some of the words don’t make sense, but that is what I sang. And “Where the bee sucks, there suck I.” And “Night of love and night of stars,” from Tales of Hoffmann, and from where I don’t know, “Buddha made the harvest and made the winds to blow, Sitting at the doorway of a day of long ago.” I could sing you the rest but I can hear my daughter saying firmly, “No, Mother. No.”

  After being clumsy as a child, I became well coordinated simply because I longed to be. I had to shine in all areas of endeavor, and sports were important. In my last year I was appointed captain of the girls’ cricket team—the only team at the school ever to beat the boys. How proud I was of that. I can still hear them calling, “Lily Shiel [my real name], are you ready?” And me drawing a deep breath and replying, “I am ready.”

  There were debates at the orphanage. One I remember: Monarchy versus a Republic. The headmaster called my name unexpectedly to lead the side for the Republic. I was thirteen and, beneath the cocksure exterior, full of uncertainty and shyness. My cheeks burned. I looked wildly for escape. There was none. Everybody was looking at me, waiting. My mind has always worked fast when I am in danger. Like a shaft of heavenly light, the sudden memory came to me from a Bible class that God had been very much against the children of Israel having a king. He had insisted that a God was enough. They wanted a king and had crowned Saul and after him David and all the others. But disaster had followed, and now look where we all were. I was complimented by several teachers for making such a good case. I could not stop repeating what I had said. As later, when Constance Bennett called me the biggest bitch in Hollywood and I replied quickly, “Not the biggest bitch, Connie, the second biggest bitch.” Saying it over and over, weeping, as I drove home. I sometimes think I have a record-player in my head.

  In the winter of my thirteenth year I decided to teach myself French. I had found a small French dictionary, and I can see myself after a supper of two slices of gray-white bread covered with rancid margarine, and a watery mixture they called cocoa, sitting on the lukewarm heating pipes that spanned the classroom floor and memorizing French words but not knowing how to pronounce them. French was the language of the well-educated young ladies at Hadley Hall. In the other exclusive schools I read about, the girls all struggled with French. Even then I wanted to be as good as the best. I was trying to create my own College of One.

  I was two classes ahead of my closest rival, and it was suggested to my mother that I try for a scholarship that would ultimately take me to a university where I would be trained to teach. I wanted to go to college, although the idea of taking the examinations alarmed me. What if my brain had one of its numb periods and the fallibility of my scholastic prowess was exposed? My genuine disappointment was mixed with relief when my mother informed the headmaster that the scholarship was not possible. She needed me at home to do the housework and look after her. She was dying of cancer. If things had been different, I might have had my education then. I probably would not have come to America, halfway round the world to Hollywood and Scott Fitzgerald.

  And then, as if rocketing to another planet, I was blasted from my warm place as the best student at school, admired by my contemporaries, revered by the smaller girls, a big figure on the sports field, debating on this and that, reading the poems of the nineteenth-century social reformer Elizabeth Fry in an impassioned voice and dreaming of conquering the magical world outside—to the reality of scrubbing floors, waiting my turn at the food shops, scraping fish, cooking, washing dishes, washing clothes, and looking after my poor uncomplaining mother.

  My education froze at the point of leaving the orphanage. I had a fair amount of English history, including the First World War, a faint smattering of European history and ancient Rome—I would never forget Pope Gregory the Great’s comment on the blond blue-eyed English slaves, “Angels, not Angles”—nothing of American history except a brief chapter on the war of 1776. Later, when my College of One professor mentioned the War of 1812, I didn’t know what he was talking about. The mowing down of the British at the Battle of New Orleans was absent from my history books at the orphanage. My arithmetic had reached: “If Farmer John’s 15 chickens lay 30 eggs in 4 days, how many chickens would be required to lay 72 eggs in 6 days?” This problem was always difficult for me to solve even when my brain was racing. Songs, but no knowledge of music. No art at all, although we drew some still lifes, flowers and an occasional apple or orange. I had no talent for painting and envied the girls whose daffodils and fruit were recognizable. My handwriting is poor to this day. The subjects taught were simple history, geography, arithmetic, and English—very little grammar, and mine has always been weak. I understand verbs because Scott Fitzgerald explained they were essential to good writing, but I still sometimes have to be reminded of what a pronoun is, and I have never quite conquered the “I” and “me” puzzle. This is what I learned during my childhood. It wasn’t bad, considering the circumstances, but it wasn’t much and it stopped too soon.

  At home in the East End, I lived only to visit the nearby dance halls, where my new prettiness (my skin had emerged petal-smooth from the years of eczema) brought me the same kind of attention from the Cockney seventeen- and eighteen-year-old boys that my excellence as a student had given me at the orphanage. Perhaps my looks would be a door of escape from the drudgery at home. I dreamed of “Young Lochinvar”—a favorite poem at the orphanage—who would come out of the Wes
t, lift me onto his white charger, and away we would go. I never quite knew where, but it would be a place where people were admired without the pressure of having to be the brightest scholar. I couldn’t guess that Young Lochinvar would be an exhausted, married, middle-aged American author.

  In the East End no one cared that I could recite poetry by the yard and that I knew all the dates of the English kings. Having a smart line with boys was more important. Dancing. Hokey-Pokies (ice-cream sandwiches) afterward. Pressing hard against the boy. Kissing passionately in doorways. Reading the News of the World. Wondering about the girls who, according to the newspaper, were raped or who vanished mysteriously in the alarming business of white slave traffic. You must never go off with a stranger. He or she might be an agent. You would vanish into a brothel in South America and be cast out when you were twenty-five, old and broken. It was safer to tease the boys to the limit and remain technically pure for the knight who would carry you off to his castle and marry you.

  We were all in the same boat in the East End. We had all left our schoolbooks at the age of fourteen. No one asked embarrassing questions, nor did many persons ask them later in my “society” period—for different reasons. The poor didn’t know. The well-educated were so sure of their position that there was no necessity to discuss what they had learned at Eton, Harrow, Oxford, Cambridge, or the smart finishing schools in Paris or Lausanne.

  If my mother had not died when I was seventeen, I might have married one of my ardent dance partners and lived ignorant ever afterward. I would certainly not have met my first husband, Major John Graham Gillam D.S.O., and, at his urging, emigrated to America. However, it is a probability that I would have left the East End. From the time I had been taken with my class at the orphanage to the Tower of London, an expedition that culminated in the West End with tea and currant buns at Selfridge’s on Oxford Street, I had dreamed of revisiting that dazzling community. While my friends in Stepney and Bow were content with the movie palaces in the neighborhood—if you went alone, as I sometimes did in the afternoon, you were likely to find a male hand halfway up your clothes—Saturday night would usually find me in the gallery queue for a musical comedy in the West End. If I could not get anyone to go with me, I went alone. From the top tier of the Vaudeville Theatre in the Strand I saw the first Charlot’s Revue, with Beatrice Lillie and Gertrude Lawrence. I have never forgotten Miss Lillie’s monotone rendition of “I’ve got ten baby fingers and ten baby toes, waiting there for me, down in Tennessee.” When we sang it together not long ago, I knew the words better than she did.

  I sometimes wonder how I jumped the barrier. In England your accent is the straitjacket that holds you securely in the class to which you are born—with some exceptions now. If you can sing and play a guitar, and come from Liverpool, you might go pretty far. It’s easier in America, where ambition, success, or merely the desire can erase the class and poverty lines.

  After my mother died and I obtained a job selling toothbrushes at Gamage’s store in Holborn, halfway between the East End and West End, I decided to go all the way and live in a boarding house in Sussex Gardens, a brisk five-minute walk from Oxford Street and Selfridge’s. I was immediately aware that Major Gillam was “class” when he bought a toothbrush from me and at the same time offered me a job. He had the voice and manner I remembered from the trustees at the orphanage. He was a gentleman. I knew that even before he said, “By Jove!” which I imagined was standard conversation for majors. He was in his early forties, very handsome, and I fell in love with him.

  Major Gillam, an agent for iron and steel foundries on the Continent, with a soft-goods department—lamps, laces, clocks, Turkish delight—on the side, had two girl secretaries and a young man assistant, who whenever he deigned to notice me was scornful, or so I thought. While the two secretaries were less class-conscious, one in particular made no attempt to hide her amusement at my mispronunciation of the French words that sometimes came up in the letters I was delegated to close and stamp. Major Gillam had written a book, A Gallipoli Diary, and was engaged on another that necessitated frequent visits to the British Museum. When he asked me to go with him, I hastily invented an excuse. He would be aware at once that I was extremely ignorant. I have learned since that time that men who are in love are not interested in whether the girl knows an A from a B at the beginning of the relationship. Afterward they usually try to improve her.

  My manners were on a par with my level of learning, and they were more noticeable. When I ate, I stuffed my mouth to capacity and tried to guzzle things down as though fearful they would be grabbed away if I didn’t. Bits of food from my mouth dribbled all over my clothes. I had only a faint idea of the function of a knife and fork. There was a grab-all, snatch-all system to my eating. The first time we ate a meal together at the Mars, a Greek restaurant in Soho, Johnny watched me in friendly amazement as I plowed through the seven courses. For three shillings and sixpence—a carafe of wine was a shilling extra—they gave you hors d’oeuvres, soup, a small sole and salad, followed by a somewhat hairy chicken with two vegetables and tiny roast potatoes. Vanilla ice cream for dessert. Then cheese and crackers, fruit and nuts, and coffee. I was like a runner who couldn’t wait for the starting pistol. I devoured everything in sight and it was as though a locust had dined. Johnny in his kind manner showed me how to fold my hands on my lap between bites and to place my knife and fork side by side on the plate when I was finished. In England, if you want to be mistaken for a swell, you never shake salt directly on the food. “You pour it on the side of your plate,” said Johnny. I have never seen the sense of this. My table manners are much better today, although I still eat as though every meal were my last.

  When Johnny married me and asked me to break the news to the sister and brother-in-law who were financing him in his business, I realized from their distress that Johnny had made a very bad match indeed. A girl from the East End with a Cockney voice! How awful. The brother they loved could have married a girl with a good education, and to waste himself on someone whose vowels were so atrocious! I could understand their chagrin.

  With the lack of family assistance after our marriage, Johnny’s business failed. I hesitantly suggested that perhaps he should get a job where his experience could be useful. He became angry and told me I didn’t know what I was talking about. I didn’t. But it made no sense to me to be in business on your own when there was no money and no business. I soon concluded that Johnny and Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield had a great deal in common. The fortune to be made was just around the corner, tomorrow, meanwhile lend me a fiver today. With his sister unyielding, Johnny turned to the moneylenders. It was a nightmare: the gas and the electricity discontinued, the telephone suspended, the threat of eviction from the small flat on Wigmore Street (W.1.) that I had begged him to rent after a succession of dreary boarding houses, some of them worse than that of my first adventure in living alone.

  Johnny had acted as an amateur with the Birmingham Repertory Company, and he was convinced that my accent could be cured by stage experience. He used some of the moneylenders’ cash to enroll me at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where I suffered the humiliations of an outsider. I had nothing in common with the other students. They always seemed in a hurry when I made attempts at conversation. And what could I say to the woman who sat next to me in most of my classes, a twenty-eight-year-old graduate of Girton College, Cambridge? Charles Laughton, bored with his father’s hardware business up north, had enrolled on the same day I had, but while his accent was strictly Yorkshire, no one dared laugh at him. His startling talent was aristocracy enough. He spoke French like a native and starred in all the French plays.

  I was determined to learn French. Shortly before our marriage Johnny had sent me to Paris for two weeks, hoping the experience would widen my horizon and make me less awkward. I was tremendously excited and had written to a finishing school for girls at Neuilly. To my delight it accepted me. But when the principal learned that I had only two w
eeks in which to be finished, he said in English, “It would take two years at least to make a lady out of you”—and, in an aside, something about its being impossible to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse, which made the girls at the round dining table giggle while my cheeks burned with shame. A sow’s ear. Would I always be so low?

  When my isolation at RADA became unbearable and Johnny’s desperate situation with the moneylenders made it difficult for me to stay there, I used my low rating at the end of the first term as an excuse to leave. I would never be a Shakespearean actress. I might have done better if I had dared to let go, but I was always on guard and miserable about my vowels, which one of my teachers mercilessly exposed to the grinning class. I was fairly good at miming, but too self-conscious to go far. At the end of the term my class put on a Cockney play for friends and relatives. I was so carried away by the applause (mostly from Johnny’s corner) that, completely ignorant of my lapse of etiquette, I stepped forward and took the bow for the entire cast, Laughton included.

  I told Johnny that a student had said rather condescendingly, “With your face and figure, you really should go in for musical comedy.” Johnny thought it was a good idea, and we could use the money. He found the cash for singing and dancing lessons and after about six weeks of intensive training believed I was ready to explode on the West End. With his sublime faith and my desperate determination, I landed in the final weeks of The Punch Bowl at the Vaudeville Theatre, then into Charles B. Cochran’s chorus at the London Pavilion in Piccadilly Circus, where I was an unexpected success.

  I became the ewe lamb for a group of lively wolves that included an equerry to the Prince of Wales and one of his friends, a rich fiftyish baronet, Sir Richard, who wanted to fulfill my childhood dream by adopting me. It was too late for that, which was fortunate, as he proved to be a masochist. One day after an exquisitely cooked luncheon in his elegant home in Belgravia, he suddenly bared his chest and excitedly asked me to pinch his nipples—“hard.” It was my first experience of this sort of thing, and I was shocked. I hesitantly touched one of Sir Richard’s nipples. “Harder,” he begged. I made an excuse about “a rehearsal” and fled.