Lonely, hungry, cold, she found the telephone number of the Scarlet Pimpernel – her married and chaste admirer from Rouen – who was delighted to hear Priscilla’s voice. Daniel’s wife and children were still living in the south, and he was temporarily on his own in a grand apartment in Rue Beaujon. They arranged to meet. ‘He paid enthusiastic court to me,’ Priscilla wrote. He invited her to restaurants, exhibitions, bought her clothes, ‘taught me to take more care of my appearance, to see my stockings were on straight etc.’ However, she refused to let him take her stockings off.
Priscilla liked Daniel and was grateful to him, but ‘I must confess that I had no difficulties in keeping him at arm’s length.’ This was fortunate, because at the end of November the telephone rang. Robert had been released. A crop-producing landowner, he was suddenly vital to the German war effort.
Her husband spent a distressing night with Priscilla on his way to Boisgrimot. Fearing a famine, the Germans had set him free ‘on condition that he should cultivate his land in Normandy’. But he would not be able to live with Priscilla whose status as an enemy alien prevented her from joining him in the countryside. He planned to spend the weekdays at Boisgrimot, the weekends with his wife in Paris. Yet what a life it was going to be. How could he farm with enthusiasm, knowing that he was growing his crops for the Reich? Guy was still in Germany. Robert realised the situation would not change. He felt guilt over his capture. He was miserable and difficult to talk to.
Priscilla tried in vain to cheer him up. It was better than digging potatoes in Chartres. Or being in a prison camp. At least he was free.
She remembered his fingers whitening around the knife handle; his bloodshot eyes bulbous and shiny. ‘You still haven’t grown up. You don’t realise what war means. There will be nothing to smile about until this war ends.’ There were cuts on his cheeks where he had shaved with cold water. It was one of their worst evenings – made more fraught by the news from Boisgrimot. A tempest had torn through the avenue which the Doynels held so sacred.
Monsieur Carer believed that the wind-broken oaks which fell crashing to earth would have obliterated the division of Rommel’s troops that, until the day before, was camped beneath them. The gale came at night and was strong enough ‘to take the horns off a cow’.
‘I remember that tempest,’ said Zizi Carer. ‘It was like a tornado. Almost all the trees blew down.’
It was snowing when Robert departed. Left on her own in the freezing apartment, Priscilla renewed contact with an English friend.
Jacqueline Grant – fair-haired, slim, the same age – had arrived in Paris with her mother Ruth. British passport-holders like Priscilla, the Grants had been ordered to leave their home on the north coast. Priscilla visited them in their hotel on the Ile de la Cité.
Jacqueline’s father was a professional at the Golf Club in Le Touquet and a friend of P. G. Wodehouse, who was writing the last chapters of Money in the Bank when the Germans arrived. Jacqueline had worked as secretary to Wodehouse’s wife Ethel, helping out with parties and driving Ethel to Paris to do her shopping – on these excursions meeting up with Priscilla.
She told Priscilla about the May invasion. How she had built a bonfire on Wodehouse’s terrace and burned his ‘anti-German’ articles. How her family and the Wodehouses had fled Le Touquet together, ‘Plum’ leading the small convoy in his blue Lancia, followed by Jacqueline driving a Red Cross van and her father behind in his Simca. But after two miles Jacqueline’s van broke down, its carburettor clogged with sand. Wodehouse reappeared to say that the confusion on the road ahead was too awful and they had returned home, going to sleep with pillows over their heads to drown out the sound of bombs. They were trapped in Le Touquet when the Germans rolled through the pine forest – first the motorcycles, ‘noisy, brutal and fast’, in Ruth Grant’s words, then car after car in which grey-green officers sat in tiers, all facing ahead. ‘Nobody seemed to be watching them but the trees.’
Jacqueline’s father had since been interned with P. G. Wodehouse in a former mental asylum in Upper Silesia. Ordered with her mother to Paris, Jacqueline retaliated in small ways. One day, a Mercedes drove up with four officers who asked her the road to somewhere, ‘and I told them very politely to go in the opposite direction’.
Warmly wrapped – Priscilla in a ski jacket and thick wool socks that Daniel had bought her, Jacqueline in a beaver fur coat purchased in Harvey Nichols a year before (‘I’m sure that comes from Austria,’ said a German soldier, stroking it) – the two young women walked past their pre-war haunts: W. H. Smith’s on Rue de Rivoli, which had once displayed SPB’s books – now called ‘Frontbuchhandlung’. Maxim’s – taken over by Göring’s favourite chef. The Champs Elysées – ‘Man spricht deutsch’ signs in Valrose where, encouraged by Gillian (‘That’s for you!’), Priscilla had bought a navy off-the-peg frock. This time Priscilla saw nothing in the window – the dresses, hats, stockings all snapped up by Wehrmacht soldiers for their Gretchens.
One day, Priscilla visited Gillian’s building in Rue de Clichy where she learned from the concierge that the Gestapo had turned up on 15 June, the morning after the Germans entered Paris. Cyril Hammond’s name was on their list. ‘We are too late,’ muttered the Gestapo agent, when informed that the Hammonds had departed six days earlier. A Wehrmacht officer now occupied the apartment.
Back in the street, Priscilla flicked her eyes to the fifth-floor balcony where she and Gillian used to sunbathe. She was overcome by thoughts of Gillian. ‘I missed her badly.’
16.
FRENCH RESISTANCE
In England, Gillian had not forgotten Priscilla. She had arrived in London with her family on 10 June, occupying the lower part of a house in Moore Street. ‘Vertès was very much on my mind that day in June. Also Pris.’
Knowing no one in London, Gillian posted Vertès’s letter of introduction to the art director Vincent Korda, who invited her to Prunier’s for lunch, and in the afternoon showed her around Denham Studios. Korda was about to fly to New York, but he urged Gillian to contact the producer John Sutro. When Sutro came to see Korda off at Waterloo, Korda slipped him a piece of paper with Gillian’s telephone number on it. ‘She’s a refugee from France. She knows Marc Allegret, she’s an actress, please help her.’ Sutro telephoned Gillian on returning to his office.
At 7.30 p.m. the following evening, 24 June, Gillian observed a large, dishevelled man heaving himself out of a chauffeur-driven Armstrong Siddeley. Her father also was watching from the window.
‘“Who is that negroid-looking man ringing the bell?” he asked me, true to form in his usual ghastly way, not realising he was seeing for the first time his future son-in-law.
‘“That man is a film producer who is taking me out to dinner.”
‘I went to open the door to John and said, “Let’s go off at once.” I saw no point in introducing him to my parents.’
Gillian plonked herself in the back of the car, followed by her dinner-date whose name had vanished from her head. ‘For me, John was a film producer who I hoped would help my career.’
John Sutro was thirty-seven. Today, the grass has grown over his name, but at Oxford, where he had founded Cherwell, he was at the centre of a circle that included Harold Acton and Evelyn Waugh. He wrote in an unpublished memoir: ‘Harold became, I suppose, with Evelyn my closest friend.’
After Oxford, Sutro pursued a career in films, but his character was too vulnerable and trusting. His involvement with ruthless impresarios like Vincent Korda’s brother Alexander ended up ruining him; that and what Gillian called ‘his fatal weakness’ for putting pleasure first. His production company was named Ortus: Sutro spelled backwards.
Gillian was clutching her studio photographs from Paris to show him. But he neither asked to look at them, nor invited her to audition for the film about which he talked with great excitement over dinner at the Dorchester. This was 49th Parallel, starring Laurence Olivier. The money had at last been found: Sutro had come dire
ctly from signing the contract to Gillian’s door.
John Sutro’s failure to give Gillian a screen test became a grievance that she nursed in bruised silence for forty-five years, not bringing it up until June 1985 when he lay dying in a hospital room in Monte Carlo. ‘When John could still make sense and speak, we came out with things which had been left unsaid for many years.’ One of her complaints dated back to June 1940. ‘I always thought I should have been tested for the part. I could have done it. I was the right age. Even my accent would have been right.’ John looked up at Gillian, stunned. ‘If only you had spoken at the time.’ It had never occurred to him. Of course, Gillian should have been tested. Of course, he should have looked at her photographs. ‘Instead, I fell in love with you.’
Their evening ended at the 400 Club in Leicester Square. A waiter fetched John’s individual bottle of whisky with his name on it, and they danced in the dim light. ‘He swung around, light as a gazelle in spite of his bulk,’ Gillian remembered. The sirens went off while he held her. They stayed on, dancing, until the all-clear sounded at 4.30 a.m. When John dropped her home, they found Gillian’s mother on the doorstep in her pyjamas, ‘worried to death about being out so late with a total stranger in an air raid’.
Gillian tried to put John off when he broached the subject of marriage. ‘I told him I was not marriage material, wild, undisciplined, and that the idea of being caged in by wedlock appalled me. I needed, because of my childhood, my freedom.’ Plus she could not cook. She omitted to tell him about Vertès.
But Gillian’s Hungarian lover had not been in touch. And John was persistent. Towards the end of summer – after learning that Vertès was living in the Waldorf Astoria with his wife – Gillian consented to marry him. ‘I had to punish Vertès for choosing New York instead of London.’
She liked John Sutro a lot. His lethal send-ups made her laugh. His father was a rubber merchant, and Sutro’s mobile face seemed composed of the same material. With his crunched-up nose, generous mouth and musical voice, he reminded her of Erwin Blumenthal, a photographer she had known in Paris – so ugly that he was attractive.
John’s absence of vanity appealed to Gillian. She approved of the fact he was Jewish – he told her that his name in Hebrew meant ‘small in the eyes of the Lord’. His self-deprecation touched her. ‘Unfortunately, I am a Jew born without the characteristics which make a Jew successful.’ In Harold Acton’s opinion, John was too sensitive to flattery; but he was also a man of great intelligence and innocence, easily hurt and fragile, and she could picture herself with him. ‘Beauty and the beast,’ one friend inevitably called them. His pet name for himself to Gillian was ‘Boro’. She always called him John.
She was proud that she had never lied to him. ‘I told him whom I was lunching or dining with, as it seemed to me far simpler, if someone saw me in a restaurant and then told John, that he knew it already. Of course, I never went into details about what may or may not have occurred later. He didn’t ask, I didn’t say.’
Their relationship would be open and rocky, but it calmed with the years. ‘I was very unfaithful, but at the same time very faithful,’ she decided at the end of her life. ‘Faithfulness belongs to the heart, not to the body.’
Analysing why the marriage had endured, she thought it was because of an essential tenderness between them. He wrote to her once: ‘Darling, I love you so wonderfully, so strongly, so wistfully that there is nothing I would not do to make you feel happier.’ And once on a hotel message pad after an argument: ‘I love you, I love you, I love you, you are my life, you are my life, you are my life, fortunate, fortunate, fortunate Boro.’
Gillian did not want children – ‘I never wanted them even when I was young.’ Nor did he. She was his child, as Priscilla was to Robert, and for all her unfaithfulness Sutro trusted her. He continued to regard her, she said, with the eyes of a love that refused to spot the flaws. ‘I was like a picture he had chosen because he admired it. If the picture was loaned out at times to various galleries, this did not disturb him. It was always returned undamaged, even if now and then the frame was chipped.’
She repayed his trust. ‘I’ve had lots of adventures, but only one true love.’ Whoever Gillian’s lover of the moment, her husband remained her priority: ‘John always came first. All the men who have loved me have hit on that hurdle.’
Despite its oddities, the marriage made sense. ‘In some ways he could not have married more suitably. I possessed all the qualities he lacked: resilience, resourcefulness, courage and total fearlessness. In other ways, he married someone who hated “society” and was a loner who functioned like a man and was highly sexed. John was probably highly sexed in his head, but the body did not follow.’ This did not worry Gillian. ‘John offered me something I valued far more, marriage with freedom.’
Strangely, sex was the one subject that remained taboo on his death bed. ‘That was the most dodgy part of our marriage. And the cause of many disasters.’
Like Priscilla, Gillian had married a much older father figure with whom she had no physical relationship.
On the night before the wedding, Gillian’s mother tried to give her ‘virgin daughter’ the facts of life. ‘Darling, tomorrow is your wedding day. There are certain things I feel you should know.’
‘Mother, please.’
Daphne looked relieved. For one moment, Gillian felt like telling her about the Baron and Vertès ‘and the Rue de Provence and the clap and the brothels and that yesterday I’d been to a gynaecologist whose verdict was “clean as a whistle”.’
Meanwhile, Harold Acton, whom John had asked to be best man, was visiting the groom in the Royal Court Hotel – ‘so as to see him for the last time as a bachelor’. It is a bit of a mystery whether John was bisexual; Gillian does not say so, but the implication is there. She recalled Acton’s ‘shrewd eyes examining the girl one of his closest friends had chosen to marry’. Prepared for a disagreeable surprise, Acton was seduced. ‘Behold a slim shy girl more French than English, who looked as if she had just been let out of a convent,’ he wrote in his memoirs. ‘Her voice evoked Colette’s Claudine and she moved with the natural grace of a Persian cat.’ Acton had quickly become resigned to the marriage, writing to the couple after it: ‘You two doves . . . warmed the old dry cockles of my heart. So that they are now . . . alive alive oh.’
Gillian described her wedding day, 19 October 1940, as ‘a brute of a day’. She wore a black dress, out of memory for her past and out of anxious solidarity with Priscilla. ‘John never thought it odd that I got married in black from top to toe. I don’t think he even noticed I felt in mourning for France, for the smashed love affair, my childhood girlfriend stuck in Paris and probably in peril.’ Gillian had been the witness at Priscilla’s white wedding. She bemoaned that not one of her friends in Paris knew of her marriage. Gillian’s desolate mood, exacerbated by the extraction of a wisdom tooth, which had left her with a swollen face, set the scene for what happened next.
After a reception in Moore Street and a dinner at the Carlton Grill, the couple were driven twenty miles to Nonsense House, a small rented property near Slough, not far from Denham Studios, which was to be their base for the next three months. As the chauffeur carried in the same battered suitcase which Gillian had lugged from Rue de Clichy, John said with a satisfaction that infuriated Gillian: ‘Well, we’re spliced.’
The word snapped something. ‘Spliced,’ she said, tugging off the ring and throwing it out of the bedroom window. ‘John looked stunned. I realised I had hurt him. And said “Why do you use that word?” I rushed outside to search for the ring, John lumbering behind. I needed a torch as it was dark.’
The chauffeur appeared, alerted by the commotion. He wondered what they were doing rootling through the bushes – ‘instead of being in bed as newly-weds’. It took forty-five minutes on all fours to find the ring, ‘by which time we were too exhausted for anything but sleep’.
‘Let’s go to bed,’ Gillian said. ‘Tomorr
ow is another day. It can’t be worse.’
She took possession of the master bedroom and installed John in the second front bedroom. ‘After all, it was the agreement.’ Her wedding night turned out to be even more chaste than Priscilla’s.
Night after night German bombers thrummed over Nonsense House. The rooftops of Slough were jaggedly black against the copper glow. A single bomber could start up to 150 fires in a three-mile radius. The raging flames kept Gillian in ‘a state of permanent tiredness, living on one’s nerves, smoking too much, going out most nights’. She wrote in her notebooks of the long months that followed: ‘I was very unhinged during those war years,’ and cited as contributing factors her strange marriage and her brutal separation from Vertès. But another reason for her frenetic behaviour was ‘my worry over Priscilla – no news at all from her’.
She shared her worries with Vertès, who had got in touch, sending a hurt note from the Waldorf Astoria after learning that she was to be married. ‘You’re starting a new life. You must try and distance yourself from me. I’ve already taken enough years of your life.’ Gillian’s reply is lost, like all her letters to him, but in it she appears to have offered up the example of Priscilla’s fidelity to Robert as a model to which she could aspire, from now on, in her relationship with Vertès: she could be faithful to Vertès despite her marriage.
Vertès, for whatever reason, was doubtful. He wrote back on Christmas day: ‘It’s so touching, it’s so good and kind of you to assure me of your fidelity . . . but do not compare yourself to Priscilla, mon amour chérie, because Priscilla does not like physical love. But you, you cannot change your temperament.’
49th Parallel kept John away at the studios during the day. For three months, Gillian sat in sullen silence at Nonsense House, glaring with loathing at her smouldering surrounds. She was back in her own country, but it did not seem so to her. Stranded at the end of a long lane in this ‘aptly named’ house with a pond, and looked after by a dour couple with eyes like black olives, Gillian felt herself to be ‘this Brit-Frog’, a foreigner with an accent. ‘Through my marriage I had gone back to square one again. I was a phantom wife.’ What pained her most was the total disregard for France of the people she met. ‘I suppose they felt that France had let England down and now they were left alone to face the Nazis.’
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