Straight on Till Morning

by Mary S. Lovell

  All the best

  George P. Gutekunst

  Shortly after this letter was posted, George Gutekunst received a telephone call from Barry Schlachter. Whilst interviewing Beryl, he had learned of George’s role, and now he was interested to see if George would be prepared to take his interest any further. ‘How?’ George asked. Barry’s idea was that they should collaborate on a television documentary about Beryl’s life. Could George arrange any financing? George was very interested and promised to do some research.

  Barry Schlachter meanwhile had some strings he could pull. His brother-in-law, Andrew Maxwell-Hyslop, was a British film director who was holidaying in India. Coincidentally Andrew had just finished reading West with the Night when Barry telephoned to ask if he would be interested in working on the TV documentary. Having secured Andrew’s interest, Barry went on to work on a treatment – an outline which the documentary might follow. He then rounded up Garry Streiker, a respected news cameraman based in Kenya, and two sound recordists. As a long shot they filmed interviews with Sir Michael Blundell, a Kenya notable from the old days, and James Fox, who had already given them an assurance that the TV documentary would not conflict with his interest in any feature film. With this footage Barry travelled to the USA and there with George Gutekunst showed his film treatment along with the two interviews to a few would-be investors whom Gutekunst had lined up.30

  In the early spring Andrew Maxwell-Hyslop received a telephone call from Gutekunst. ‘When will you be free to go to Kenya and start work on the documentary?’ he asked. Within weeks the crew were assembled and work started on the documentary.

  April 12 1984

  Dear Beryl,

  I arrive in Nairobi early in the morning of June 24 for a 14 day stay. Needless to say, I am profoundly excited! As you may know through either J.A. Couldrey or Barry Schlachter, there is a strong possibility of doing a documentary (one hour) for Public Television here and for BBC in England tentatively entitled Beryl Markham’s Africa. After my rediscovery of your splendid book and its republication here in the United States, a great deal of interest in you and your remarkable life has ensued – so much that I have had no trouble in raising a great deal of commitment money if we can put the documentary package together. I am sure you know that West with the Night has sold and continues to sell remarkably well here and I’m sure will do equally well in Britain when it is released in August…It is my hope that you are fit enough to participate in the documentary if we can make it. After all Beryl, you are the ‘star of the show!’

  George

  Beryl had been suffering from back and stomach pains which resulted in an enforced stay in hospital and had caused her friends great concern; for when discharged, Beryl, always slim, was skeletally thin. Many thought this dramatic weight loss sinister, but Beryl recovered and was soon back at the racetrack. She was well aware of the physical penalties of age, and disliked them intensely.

  There began, at about this time, a series of visits by reporters and journalists, which was to continue for the rest of her life. Beryl’s role in the lives of Karen Blixen and Denys Finch Hatton was now well known, and a major feature film, based on the couple’s love affair, called Out of Africa after Karen Blixen’s book, was in production. Beryl was represented in the film as a minor character named Felicity. Among the first of these was the British journalist Lesley Ann Jones who interviewed Beryl in January 1983 and wrote an article for a women’s magazine.31 She had been warned prior to her visit that Beryl might be difficult and ‘bloody vague’. Beryl was neither. She was pleased to see her, and came to the door all smiles, wearing flared jeans, a loose shirt and a pink scarf. She was barefoot of course. With her blonde hair she appeared twenty years younger than her eighty years. Beryl ended the interview by saying that though Kenya had been her home for most of her life she was lonely there and thought she’d like to go back to America.

  Another visitor, James Fox, produced a colourful article published in the UK by the Observer and in the USA by Vanity Fair. Beryl was unhappy about the article and some of the implications. She told me, ‘I can’t think where he picked them up. He was a charming man, though. He was here writing about Joss Erroll’s murder. I helped him with it – I think I’m mentioned in the book.’32

  George Gutekunst had meanwhile formed a small corporation33 to finance what he called a ‘guerrilla shoot’, a technical term meaning, apparently, filming without a detailed script, though Schlachter’s treatment was used throughout as a guide. With promised financial backing of $115,000 and the guarded verbal backing of KQED – a San Francisco television station – George threw in $20,000 of his own money and flew to Africa. Schlachter had also done the ground work and located many people from Beryl’s past, including Sonny Bumpus, who rode Wise Child to the Kenya St Leger victory in 1926 and Bunny Allen, one of the white hunters on the 1928 and 1930 royal safaris.

  Beryl was a poor performer on camera. Many hours of filmed interviews had to be discarded because she simply would not cooperate when the camera was running. Part of the problem was that the interviewer required Beryl to talk about her experiences in a situation which Beryl later described to me as ‘a crowd’. Beryl has never boasted of her achievements, nor has she ever talked of her various liaisons and friendships, except to close friends on the few occasions when intimacy has been appropriate. When the interviewer overstepped these bounds her annoyance showed. ‘Oh I’m fed up with this…I’m going!’ Her answers to the questions often appeared rambling, but this might have been a deliberately evasive tactic. She was quite willing to participate in the film, enjoying all the attention and hairdressing sessions. But she wasn’t giving anything away.

  Two or three scenes only were able to be used in the documentary: Beryl at the racetrack during an early morning workout; where she must have felt securely at home; her greetings to the grooms, softly spoken ‘Jambo, jambo, jambo…’ the tall, fair-haired figure moves slowly, and now there is a shadow of a stoop to the once upright posture dressed in pale blue shirt and denims with a colourful shawl about her shoulders providing a touch of chic, she watches a horse gallop around the track; cameras forgotten, her face is a study in professional concentration.

  Another shot shows her seated on the veranda outside her cottage, pointing out old navigational plots marked on her aviation charts. ‘Nairobi, Kilimanjaro, Naivasha, Nairobi,’ she intones, indicating the route of a single flight culled from the log book at her elbow. Finally she is shown about to embark in a modern aircraft for a flight to Njoro. Seated and strapped in, she smiles and waves from the rear window. It is a poignant moment captured on film, for the smile recaptures a ghost of the shy, boyish grin of the woman stepping into the Vega Gull nearly fifty years earlier.

  George, busy with administrative details of the filming, managed to see Beryl privately only on one day. One evening after a hard day’s shooting, he had been out to dinner and afterwards to a nightclub and had arrived back at his hotel in the early hours. It seemed a very short time later that he was awakened by the insistent shrilling of his bedside telephone. ‘Georgie Porgie! Is that you?’ Beryl’s unmistakable cultured voice demanded. Shaking the sleep from his brain George grunted that it was. ‘Where are you?’ ‘Well, I’m in bed,’ he said, squinting at his watch to find that it was only shortly after seven a.m. ‘Alone?’ asked Beryl. ‘Yes,’ said George, grinning into the phone. ‘Oh how perfectly dreadful for you, sweetie. Come over here right away and have a vodka!’ Several hours later George appeared at Beryl’s cottage and the two spent the day chatting and drinking.34

  ‘I fell in love with her,’ he told me, but explained that this is in addition to his love for his wife Berta to whom he has been married for over forty years. When he was first introduced to Beryl she responded quickly, ‘George…ah yes, like Georgie Porgie.’ George, uninitiated into English nursery rhymes, was perplexed by the sobriquet until it was explained to him, and then he was enchanted. The nickname stuck, as much at his insistence as fo
r any other reason.

  In all, during that three weeks or so of filming, the crew managed to amass some twenty-four hours of film, but the planned documentary was to run only an hour. A mammoth task lay ahead in the cutting room to edit and produce a documentary from the colourful material George bore home in triumph.

  The mass of film, which included archive material from British newsreel sources such as EMI Pathé and Movietone, gathered by Maxwell-Hyslop during a period of frenzied activity covering four or five weeks, was delivered to KQED’s Steve Talbot. ‘A lot of it was useless but there was the germ of a very good documentary,’ Talbot said.35 Using Barry Schlachter’s researches, Talbot wrote a script following the biographical line of Beryl’s life. He then called in Joan Saffa as editor and producer and Judy Flannery as executive producer, and the huge footage, backed up by stills and US newsreel clips, was distilled into a manageable unit of one hour. With Diana Quick, the British actress,36 reading Beryl’s own words in voiceovers, the documentary entitled World without Walls was first shown in the Bay area of San Francisco in January 1986.

  Beryl’s book, though (as before) lauded by critics, had by no means been a big seller before the documentary. The first print of 5000 copies seemed adequate for a book which was considered a specialized subject. After the first year and another reprint it had sold 9100 copies. By the end of 1985 it had sold 15,000. But after the documentary was televised, bookshops in the area served by KQED sold out of copies overnight. North Point Press immediately set about reprinting and within months had sold 100,000.37 But earlier, in 1984 it was the publicity surrounding the filming and the interest from journalists, rather than the first small royalty cheques from her book, that gave Beryl a new interest in a life which she told many had recently become ‘rather boring’.

  Her ancient Mercedes, although repaired after its assault by bullets during the attempted coup, had finally given up. Part of the problem was Beryl’s driving. She used to drive two or three times a week to the local shopping centre at Ngong. ‘More often than not she’d get in, put the car into first gear and drive all the way without ever changing up,’ Jack Couldrey told me. Eventually the repair bills were so huge that Couldrey told Beryl the car could no longer be considered repairable – it was just too costly.38 Beryl tried a smaller replacement and loathed it. ‘Nasty little thing,’ she said, ‘I could never get on with it.’ There was an upsetting incident in 1984 when one of Beryl’s dogs was kidnapped, but her friends were able to ransom it back for her after some weeks.

  Despite all the interest, money was still slow in filtering through to Beryl’s account. Publishers have what are called ‘accounting days’, on which royalties due on books sold during the previous six months are calculated. It may be weeks or even months after the accounting date that the author receives a cheque. So despite all the growing interest in the United States, Beryl was still only moderately better off, and at times Jack Couldrey was driven to asking friends such as the Bathurst Normans for more financial help to make ends meet.

  Moves were also afoot to make a film version of West with the Night, though at the time of Beryl’s death these had still not crystallized. Age was making her forgetful and eventually Couldrey had to recommend that her remaining horses should go. There were only three: one of them – Supercharger – was the horse with bowed tendons belonging to David Sugden, and there were two belonging to Charles Ferrar, the professional golfer. For a while Beryl was left with only Supercharger. David Sugden had returned to England and leaving the horse there. ‘Really for her to keep, to give her an interest,’ he said. ‘Beryl used to say to me, “I’ll get that horse right one day, you know.” She was convinced that the horse had tremendous potential if she could only keep him sound.’39 But eventually even Supercharger had to go as Beryl’s health deteriorated. ‘She stopped training only when some of us, by sleight of hand, disposed of her last horses which were costing her a fortune to maintain,’ Jack Couldrey recalled.40

  She must have read the following letters with mingled amusement and pleasure:

  2nd August 1985

  Mrs B. Markham

  Nairobi.

  Dear Mrs Markham,

  At a meeting of the Jockey Club of Kenya held in the Members’ Room, Nairobi Racecourse, on 28th July 1985 it was agreed to invite you to become an Honorary Member of the Jockey Club of Kenya.

  Please let me know if you are willing to accept this invitation.

  Yours sincerely,

  D.C. Bowden – Managing Director

  July 22 1985

  My Very Dearest Beryl,

  I know you feel that I have not been a good boy about writing you. Well, my darling, you never write me…! Had I been his same age don’t you think for a moment I would not have tried to replace Tom Campbell Black in your life…or any of your lovers. I ADORE YOU! Beryl darling I really want you to ‘hang in there’ and take care of yourself and behave and go to the doctor when you are supposed to. Damn it, don’t you know how much I love you? And how much I worry about you? You are a very special person to me. My dear darling Beryl, please be a good girl and take care of yourself until I can…see and kiss you again. Promise me! With all my love.

  Georgie Porgie

  Beryl was still driving herself about, ‘dangerously’,41 when in October 1985 she suffered a thrombosis. On that afternoon, which was Kenyatta Day – a public holiday – Paddy Migdoll received a telephone call from Beryl’s manservant, Odero. ‘Please come quickly,’ he said. ‘The memsahib is very ill.’ Paddy knew at once that it was serious, for Odero only called her in emergency. She rushed over to the racecourse, a journey of sixteen miles or so, to find Beryl unconscious on the floor. ‘She had had a massive thrombosis and was dying,’ said Paddy.42

  Beryl didn’t die, though she was very ill for a long time. She pulled through only because of a fierce determination to live. She could not talk much at first, but Paddy could read the will to live in her eyes. Her legs were terribly swollen and as she recovered she was unable to walk. She was particularly distressed that her long slim legs and pretty feet were often red and puffy following her illness. ‘Hideous!’ Beryl recalled with revulsion. Through the winter and spring she made a slow recovery, confined to her armchair and waited on, literally hand and foot, by her two servants.

  Occasionally friends came to call, and as her book sold all over the world, visitors to Kenya stopped off at the cottage just to meet her or ask for an autograph. She loved to meet new people, but now, sometimes, her mind wandered and those unfortunate enough to time their visits badly reported to the world that she was senile. It was not so, but clearly it was the prelude to such a condition.

  Mercifully Beryl did not know of these small lapses, though she was understandably annoyed and ‘a look of despair came into her eyes’43 when she tried to recall an incident in her past but could not summon it to mind. She had great support from Paddy Migdoll and Daphne Bowden, but even the visits that they were able to make seemed to Beryl to occupy a small time in her long, interminably long days. ‘I’m so bored, I hardly ever see anyone,’ she complained.

  With her two servants she enjoyed an almost farcical relationship, calm and insouciant in her manner one minute, the graceful English lady ordering tea – lashing them with her tongue in rapid Swahili the next. Usually they took this in good part but on one occasion when both were badly hungover after a night spent drinking a bottle of brandy purloined from Beryl’s drinks cabinet, she reduced Adiambo to tears and Odero to an anxious hovering shadow who could do nothing to please. A nurse called several times a week, visits which Beryl did not relish. ‘Why does everyone treat me like a two-year-old?’ she asked fiercely.

  When I visited her in March and April of 1986 Beryl welcomed the daily visits with a flattering eagerness. ‘Are you sure I’m not tiring you?’ I asked constantly. ‘No-o. I love to have company, sweetie. What shall we talk about?’ she would invariably reply.

  In early April, showing indomitable determination, she was
able to walk a little. Upright she seemed to shed years and the tall, slim woman standing so triumphantly on her veranda was ageless. On 6 April it was Derby Day in Nairobi and Beryl decided quite suddenly, a few hours before the race, that she would like to attend. It was her first social engagement since the previous October. She dressed for the outing with care in an outfit as modern as the day – crisply pressed pale blue denim trousers, a pale blue silk shirt, a scarf in bright shades of pink and cerise tied stylishly at her neck. A blue leather blouson jacket completed the ensemble. Her hair, silvery ash blonde, was carefully styled, and her fingernails and toenails were painted a matching glossy clear red. Her skin still glowed with pink and white colour, showing no traces of the effects of hot climates.

  I drove her to the races with George Gutekunst. Though with determination she could walk a little, the seat organized with admirable promptitude by the Jockey Club was on a high vantage point overlooking the finishing post and she had to be carried up the narrow stone stairway to the terrace of the Owners’, Breeders’ and Trainers’ Club. She enjoyed watching the races and flirting with her male friends. ‘How lovely to see you, darling.’ She reminisced with Lady (Elizabeth) Erskine about old times, and chatted to Lady Erskine’s daughter Petal. It was the start of the rainy season, and though the rain held off during the afternoon, a chill wind sprang up and she borrowed a headscarf to save her hairstyle from being blown awry.

  But the day of triumph and happiness, enhanced by the numerous friends who came over to greet her, turned sour. When Beryl asked to leave, a volunteer came forward to carry her downstairs. He was young and strong and used to the task, for he regularly carried an invalid friend in similar circumstances. Beryl grinned as he swept her up into his arms. But descending the steep, narrow stairway, and failing to notice a wet patch on the stairs, he slipped and fell and the pair tumbled to the bottom.