The Rebecca Notebook Page 6

  Tom Armstrong showed him Punch’s Almanack, which he had brought over from London, and pointed out the drawings of Keene and Leech, insisting that if Kicky chose to do so he could draw as well as either. If a fellow wanted to earn his living by his pencil, London was the place to start, Tom Armstrong urged. He was returning himself in May, he could get Kicky introductions to Punch and to other weekly illustrated papers. Several of their friends had moved from Paris to London, and artistic London was a world away from the dreariness of Pentonville and chemical laboratories. There was every reason why the move should be made now, before it was too late and Kicky had allowed himself to settle to the life of a second-rater in a German provincial town. How about it?

  Young du Maurier looked about him. The season in Düsseldorf was beginning once again. The same little narrow circles meeting at the same parties. The same concerts, the same idle chatter, the same frothy flirtations meaning nothing. Amusing last year, coming as it did after the anxiety with his eye, but amusing no longer. He was fit again, he was well, and he wanted to draw, he wanted to be independent, and he wanted to be able to keep his mother, instead of his mother keeping him. He was twenty-six. If he did not pull himself together he would become another Gyggy, reduced to the ranks after bad behaviour.

  Once again, as in Malines, it was Wightwick influence that finally decided him. Not Mrs Wightwick this time, but the daughter, Emma. She and her mother had come out to Düsseldorf to see the du Mauriers, and especially Isobel, who had stayed with them in London. Kicky remembered Emma as a long-legged, handsome schoolgirl, with a plait swinging from her shoulders. She was now grown up and very lovely, with a pair of eyes that made Miss Lewis’s seem like boot buttons. When she looked at him, gravely, yet with understanding, it did something to his heart that no woman had done before. He decided to go to London…

  So in May 1860, borrowing ten pounds from his mother’s annuity, young George du Maurier set forth from Düsseldorf to London, travelling with Tom Armstrong and the Wightwicks. The personality that Tom Armstrong found so sympathetic reveals itself clearly enough in the letters that he wrote to his mother, with the moods at times sanguine, at times despondent, but more often than not eager for life and for experience, and for what he could contribute towards both. In those days he used to feel within himself two persons: the one serious, energetic, full of honest ambition and good purpose; the other a wastrel, reckless and careless, easily driven to the devil. It seemed to him, in such a mood, that only the love and influence of Emma Wightwick could save him from disaster. Possibly, like all young men, he was too introspective. He had yet to learn the philosophy of the middle years. He wrote very fully to his mother, keeping little or nothing from her. He shared with her both his gaiety and his disillusions. Some robust quality of understanding in her, inherited surely from Mary Anne, made it easy for him to be frank with her on matters delicate. She even twitted him, during his long engagement, on his excessive purity, telling him it was bad for his health, and quite unnecessary. Sure of her faith in him, he could not help showing her, from time to time, a little-boy conceit. He was anxious, so desperately anxious, to do well. Therefore he must pretend sometimes that he had already arrived, that editors were running after him, that critics were openmouthed, that London society—and especially the women of that society—were kneeling at his feet. This quality of cocksureness, this tendency to show off, to talk big, betrayed itself to the mother who bore him as inner doubts and fear of failure, as a sort of bolster to his youthful pride so swiftly wounded by a careless word. Because of it he endeared himself to her all the more, and knowing his faults, unable to help herself, she loved him the better for them.

  Emma Wightwick, who was to become his wife, saw no fault in him at all, except that, when he was not with her, he was inclined to become tipsy at evening parties. Also he smoked over-many cigarettes. And sometimes he worked too hard, and stayed up too late, and was apt to talk nonsense to his friends. Besides, rather foolishly, admiring too many pretty faces, which he would sketch from memory on the backs of old envelopes. She felt that Paris had induced bad ways in him which she must correct, and his tendency to think of himself as a Frenchman, and a bohemian, was something it would be better for him to forget. He must learn to become an Englishman, and a respectable one at that. Which indeed he did, without too much agony of the spirit. But that France and its memories still possessed some part of him, he showed in his novels some thirty years later…

  There is a description of him by a contemporary, the daughter of Frith the artist, who, writing her memoirs in 1908, remembered young George du Maurier in the 1860s, when he had not been married very long, and was still making his way in the London world. Here is what she says of him:

  ‘When I first knew du Maurier he was living in rooms over a shop quite close to the British Museum, and in great terror of losing his sight.

  ‘He was never a robust man, but had immense vitality, and was one of those charming natures which give out hope, life, and amusement to all who come in contact with them, and I should sum him up in one word—joyous. Naturally he had his dark days and times, but these he never showed in public. In the days I knew him he was not at all well off, and he had an increasing family, but he had married one of those wives of that period, the women who lived for their homes and their husbands, and there was not a load that Mrs du Maurier did not take from his shoulders when she could, not a thing she would not do to help him, and see that no small worries stood between him and his work.

  ‘She was one of the loveliest creatures of her time, and from her statuesque beauty her husband drew his inspiration, and has immortalised her over and over again in the pictures in Punch. She had quantities of lovely dark hair, and in those days often twisted a yellow riband among her locks with a most ravishing effect. It was always a delight to me to watch du Maurier draw, while Mrs du Maurier sat and sewed, and the children played about the floor unchecked.

  ‘Du Maurier became a rich man, and had a big house, but I question if any days were happier, although all were happy, than those first days when he sang at his work in the front room over the corner shop…

  ‘His talk was most delightful, but above all the delight caused me by his singing is a thing I shall never forget.

  ‘He would sit down to the piano, and in a moment the room would be full of divine melody, not loud, not declamatory, but music in the fullest sense of the word; a nightingale singing in an orchard full of apple blossom was not as sweet, and I have heard a sudden hush come over a large assembly should he sing, albeit he liked a small audience. I have only to close my eyes, and I can hear him once more—a perfect silence would fall upon us all.

  ‘Der Lieben Langen Tag wailed out across the night, and I was gazing at the moon across the sea, listening to the mingled ripple of the waves on the shore and the lovely voice in the drawing-room, my eyes filling with tears, I do not quite know why, and my heart beating as sentimentally as that of any lovesick maiden in her ’teens. Never did any moon shine before or since as that did, or any sea and voice mingle as did those. Then the tone would change; dainty little ripples ran along the keys of the piano; we were in France. Despite the very obvious moonlight on the sea the sun shone, soldiers clanked along the boulevard, girls came out and beckoned and smiled, the leaves rustled on the trees, and all was spring, and gaiety and pleasure. One never had to ask him to continue; one little song after another would make the evening memorable; he knew his audience, knew that we could never have enough, and he played upon us all with his voice, another Orpheus with his lute, until we travelled miles into the country of make-believe, and wandered with him along the myriad roads of fancy. How I wish I could reproduce that voix d’or! At any rate, I possess it always, and can never forget the evenings when we were sung to by du Maurier.

  ‘I always think that those who knew and loved such a genius as his can never lose him; he may die, he himself may pass into the shadows, but how much he leaves behind…’

 
The Matinee Idol

  [1973]

  My father Gerald was born on the twenty-sixth of March 1873, so if he were alive today he would be a hundred years old. The words make no sense to me, and by no possible feat of the imagination can I conjure up a vision of some lean and slippered pantaloon sitting in a wheelchair, propped up by pillows, deaf, perhaps, mouth half open, fumbling for telegrams of congratulation.

  When he died on April 11, 1934, at the comparatively early age of sixty-one, after an operation for cancer—and I have it on good authority that with the surgical skill and medical treatment of today they could have saved him—he knew, despite plans for convalescence and smiles of reassurance to my mother, sitting by his bedside (he died on the thirty-first anniversary of their wedding day), that his time had come. Ripe old age was not for him. The weeks and months ahead held no promise. He had neither the energy nor the inclination to read plays which he would be bored to direct and equally bored to perform; and as for hanging about a film studio all day waiting to speak half a dozen lines that would later be cut, this might serve to pay off what he owed for income tax, but would only increase the sense of apathy within. To what end? An expression he often used in those last years, half joking, half serious, and then would follow it up with his favourite quotation: ‘Now more than ever seems it rich to die, to cease upon the midnight with no pain.’

  Well, he had his wish. He had no pain. My aunt, who was with him at the time, told me he had a curious, puzzled look in his eyes, as if asking a question. I can believe it. He had the same look when I smiled at him from the doorway and waved good-bye before his operation.

  This is no way to start an article about a matinee idol. The end before the beginning. The trouble is that, as his daughter, I never saw the beginning, only grew up through childhood and adolescence when the tide of his popularity was running at full flood. He was thirty-three in 1906, a year before I was born, when he made his first big success as Raffles, the cricketer turned cracksman, a play packed full of action from start to finish, a novelty in those days, which delighted his Edwardian audiences as much as a similar theme about a Georgie Best turning out to be one of the Great Train Robbers would enthrall a pack of shouting teen-age fans in 1973. In 1906, however, his applauders were not children—except on half holidays: they were respectable fathers of families, middle-aged matrons, wide-eyed spinsters, stolid businessmen, sisters and aunts up from the country, anyone and everyone who had money enough in his pocket to pay for a seat in gallery, pit or stall, and desired above all things not to be made to think but to be entertained. It was exciting, and rather shocking, to have the hero of a play a burglar—and not an obvious burglar, the spinster ladies told themselves, who wore a cloth cap and a muffler, but a gentleman strolling about with his hands in his pockets. It gave them a frisson. And the men in the audience nodded in agreement. Nonsense, of course, but jolly good fun, and how easy du Maurier made the whole thing look, from lighting a cigarette to handling a gun. No wonder the women were mad about him.

  Easy, perhaps, but in 1906 this sort of acting was new, and a critic of the day was even more impressed than the audience. ‘To play such a scene as this, slowly but surely working to a tremendous emotional climax, with few words and the difficulty of an assumed calmness which needs much subtlety, is the achievement of a tragedian of uncommon quality.’

  I wonder if Gerald read this notice and whether, for a moment, he thought, ‘Tragedian? Me? Could I ever? Dare I ever?’ then, with a smile, threw the thought away with the newspaper, and continued to give his public what it wanted. Arsène Lupin, a French crook and a duke, Jimmy Valentine, the safe opener, one impossible con man after another, and the greatest crook of them all Hubert Ware in George Bancroft’s The Ware Case, who murdered his brother-in-law by drowning him in a lake, and lied his way out of the witness box with the help of a down-at-heel accomplice. Immoral, if you come to think of it. No message to the masses. It did not send the audiences home pondering about world problems (it was first produced in 1915, and the men who shouted their applause were all in khaki), but it allowed them to forget that they were going back to the trenches: the murder of a brother-in-law in a lake made sense and war did not.

  Lists of plays that were popular successes between the years 1906 and 1918, all produced at Wyndham’s Theatre, where Gerald had gone into management in 1910 with a non-acting partner, Frank Curzon, would be of little interest to the reader of 1973. He will never see them. None, except those of J. M. Barrie, is likely to be revived. Suffice it to say they were of their era, and Gerald, who had a genius for knowing when the moment was ripe for something old or something new, a revival once popular and acclaimed a second time or a novelty catching the passing mood, never failed to ‘bring them in,’ as the saying went. ‘House Full’ boards went up outside the theatre, the queues lengthened, the taxis rolled.

  This, it could be argued by the young of today, sounds somewhat tame. Bourgeois, middle class. Nothing like a Pop Festival in Hyde Park or the Isle of Wight, where boys and girls will sleep out in the open and wait twenty-four hours in the rain to hear the beloved reach for his mike or twang his guitar. Football players are mobbed as they leave the ground, film stars (and they grow fewer every day) besieged outside their hotels, disc jockeys accosted in the streets; anyone who happens to hit the headlines in the morning appears on television that same evening and is seen by millions. Instant fame is the order of the day. Herein lies the difference between our time and forty, fifty, sixty years ago. There was no hysteria then. Applause, yes, and plenty of it, and boos and catcalls too, when a play had offended, reviews the following morning written by critics of repute who did not hesitate to damn author and cast alike if they deserved it, yet at the same time spared the newspaper reader the cheap gibe or flourish of wit.

  Dignity, perhaps, was the operative word. Dignity, and ease of manner. Recognition of talent, technique and training, and understanding on the part of critic and playgoer alike that the men and women on the other side of the footlights had worked long and hard during the weeks of rehearsal to bring pleasure to those who sat and watched. If they had failed, too bad; the play would be withdrawn, the cast dismissed, the management lose money, and a start must begin all over again to find a play that would please the audience better.

  A point in favour of the old actor-manager of the past was that those he endeavoured to entertain connected him with one particular theatre. The playgoers from 1910 to 1925 did not have to search the newspapers to discover where Gerald du Maurier was performing: it could only be at Wyndham’s Theatre. (And after 1924, when the partnership with Frank Curzon ended and Gilbert Miller took his place, the St James’s Theatre became the new home.) The cast changed, of course, from play to play, but there was continuity in the theatre staff, the commissionaire in front of the theatre, the stage doorkeeper, the cleaners, the dressers, the stage manager, the manager in the box office. Thinking back, after all too many years, I can feel the swing doors with the bars across them under my hands; surely I had to reach up to them? And Bob, the stage doorkeeper, smiling down from his stool. The stairs to the dressing room, stage entrance on the left, stairs to the other dressing rooms on the right. The musty, indefinable theatre smell of shifting scenery, with stage hands moving about and Poole, Gerald’s dresser, who had rather a red face and mumbled as he spoke, hovering at the entrance to the dressing room.

  The colour of the room, in retrospect, seems to be green. There were playbills all over the wall on the left. A large mirror on the right, and a flat sort of divan beneath it on which my sisters and I used to sit. It was good for dangling our legs. A curtain, seldom pulled, divided the inner sanctum where Gerald changed and made up. A different smell came from it, not musty—grease paint (I’m told they don’t use it today), eau de cologne and something else, cool, clean, that must have been Gerald himself.

  To us children there was nothing singular or surprising that in a moment he would come bursting in from the door that led direct t
o backstage, calling for Poole, and that we would hear the distant sound of applause which meant that the audience was still clapping after the final curtain, before ‘God Save the King’. This was his life. Other children’s fathers, perhaps, went to an office; ours went to the theatre. Then, maybe, friends or acquaintances who had been to the matinee would come round to see him, which meant standing up and shaking hands on our part, and listening, yawning, while the chatter passed over our heads. The people who came always seemed excited, thrilled, entering the star’s dressing room was an event. It was a relief when the exclamations and the congratulations were over and we were just ourselves, with Gerald sitting down and taking off his makeup at the dressing table. Pity, though, I sometimes thought. He looked nicer with it on, bolder, somehow, and his eyes very bright. Still, it was all part of the game of make-believe that was his, and ours as well. Life was pretending to be someone else. Otherwise it was rather dull.

  I suppose I must have been about six, or possibly seven, when I first realised that Gerald—Daddy, as we called him—was recognised, known, by strangers outside the theatre. We were entering a restaurant—it was probably the Piccadilly Hotel, because he had not yet started his custom of going to the Savoy, and for some reason or other he was taking us out to lunch; perhaps it was my elder sister Angela’s birthday. There were several people standing about and I was lagging behind. Then a tall woman—all adults seem unbearably tall to a small child—nudged her companion with a knowing look and said, ‘There’s Gerald du Maurier.’ She sounded excited, and there was a gleam in her eye. The escort turned and stared, and a knowing look came into his eye too. Both of them smirked. Somehow, I don’t know why, I found this offensive. I looked up sharply at my father, but he was humming softly under his breath, as he often did, and took not the slightest notice of either the tall woman or her escort, but I knew that he had heard the exclamation, and he knew that I had heard it too. Waiters suddenly approached, bowing, pulling back chairs from our table. Heads turned. The same gleam, the same nudge. We sat down and the business of the lunch proceeded, and the whole scene sank into a child’s unconscious mind, but the penny had dropped.