Piffy, Bird & Bing Read online

  it’s such an entirely natural thing, this ‘falling’ for older girls and mistresses, that I cannot think why there is always such a song and dance made when novels deal with the subject. Victorian adults put their heads together and mutter ‘Unhealthy’; what is there unhealthy in putting someone on a pedestal and giving them violets? Or hoping – in a burst of homesickness – to be kissed goodnight?5

  Although Angela would always appreciate the beauty and fascination of Paris, her unhappiness during two terms at school there clouded her feelings for the city. She never recaptured the rapture that Daphne, for instance, never lost. But then Daphne enjoyed a seminal experience and successfully established herself as the centre of attention when it came to her ‘finishing’, three years later. Angela’s confused emotions and homesickness were slightly relieved, however, by the arrival in March 1922 of her family, who whisked her off on holiday with them to Algiers, and then on to the South of France.

  Daphne was almost fifteen and fell for Paris in a big way. She wrote to Tod, ‘I adored [all the sights] and loved Paris. You don’t know how I long to have a good talk with you and pour out everything. I never tell anyone anything and there is no one to turn to.’6 Gerald had been knighted in the New Year’s Honours and this was their first holiday as Sir Gerald and Lady du Maurier. They travelled in style, or as Angela remarked, ‘en prince’. They were due to be away from England for seven weeks and in their party was not just the family of five but Aunt Billy, Gerald’s secretary, as well as two of his theatrical pals, the actor Ronald Squire and playwright E. V. Esmond, invited as the entertainment.

  They travelled by rail and Billy had booked a fleet of cabins for their use. All Gerald’s needs were accommodated, his clothes and brushes and potions all set in place, every eventuality catered for. When it came to holidays he was difficult to please as he complained he would rather be at Cannon Hall or in his favourite club, the Garrick, where he would always find his friends offering admiration and bonhomie. If anything did not meet his approval he would cast a stricken look at Billy, ‘and soon some wretched manager bowed to the knees with grief would emerge and some Rajah would be turned from comfort and ourselves installed, and – “Send the chap a case of cigars, Billy darling,” Daddy would remark.’7 His mercurial emotions and lurking dissatisfaction made everyone rather tense and edgy, and keen to keep him happy if they wanted the holiday to continue, as he seemed to be always on the verge of flight.

  Algiers was the most exotic place yet for a du Maurier family holiday. Settled into the Hotel Mustapha St George, the girls were excited by this assault on the senses. Daphne wrote to Tod, displaying her cavalier approach to spelling, ‘lovely hotel, beautiful gardens. Full of luxerious flowers and orange trees.’8 She was fascinated by the Arab quarter, the Moorish buildings, the carpet stalls and the noisy bartering over every transaction. Jeanne, not yet eleven, was still in her tomboy stage but perhaps her painterly eye was stimulated by the patterns of crimson madder, yellow ochre and soft turquoise that made the street and its inhabitants so vivid. Angela was more in the mood for love. She had just read The Garden of Allah, an atmospheric and intense romance by Robert Smythe Hichens where an unconventional Englishwoman (Domini) and an inscrutable stranger (Boris) meet and fall in love at an oasis in the desert. Angela thought it the greatest book ever written. Desert erotica was becoming all the rage since Valentino’s smouldering portrayal of The Sheik in the silent movie sensation of the previous year, and young women were full of romance about the Orient. Angela described herself at the time as, ‘eighteen, rather plump, hair just up (and in consequence always falling down), desperately serious and very much under the influence of [the novel]. I was ready to find a Boris under any palm tree.’9 Soon after their arrival their paths crossed with the talented Mr Pertwee.

  Roland Pertwee was a thirty-six-year-old actor, artist, playwright and producer. He had booked into the hotel seeking distraction from the shock of being dumped by his wife, and mother of their two young sons, for a wild Russo-French soldier, whom he had befriended and was half in love with himself. His pain had been slightly mollified by the payment of a remarkable £2,000 for his first serial to be published by The Saturday Evening Post, America’s most widely circulated weekly, famous for its Norman Rockwell covers.

  Angela immediately recognised her Boris. He, however, was not inhabiting the same novel and failed to recognise the femme fatale she hoped to be. ‘Very different [the sisters] were from each other,’ Roland noted in his memoir. ‘Angela was admittedly romantic. Daphne practical, observant and a shade cynical. Jeanne was sturdy, and behaved like the boy she was supposed to have been … Angela spent most of her time writing infatuated letters in reply to infatuated letters from girlfriends from her finishing school.’10 Roland was amused to find that she was not just in love with these nameless girls but her infatuation extended to him too. In a mad moment he wished she was ‘not so dreadfully young, for no one was ever sweeter. Her grave, thoughtful eyes, fixed on me were very disturbing.’11

  Looking back at her diaries in middle age, Angela was highly embarrassed by her behaviour. She thought Roland deserved a knighthood for gallantry for not taking advantage of her naïve eighteen-year-old self: ‘If anyone threw themselves – unconsciously – at someone’s head, I did.’12 In Roland’s memoir of these two weeks of intimacy with the du Mauriers, he teasingly reproduced part of a letter Angela had shown him from one of her Parisian school friends:

  I never actually saw what [Angela] wrote of me, but I saw a letter replying to one of hers, in which was the phrase: ‘If he is all you say he is, how could his wife ever have left him.’ There was another passage that struck a warning note. ‘Darling, do be careful!!!!! I know, but you have yet to learn, how deceiving men can be!!!!! I would not have your heart broken for all the world.’

  Roland found her admiration and affection rather gratifying. She wrote in her diary how she had smoked her first cigarette and rather liked it and, in another attempt at grown-up cool, had her hair washed and waved, much to her parents’ dismay: ‘Looked topping, row over it, however, but Roland liked it.’13 He then had apparently kissed her hand. Such bliss!

  Her father, however, ruined it all for his eldest daughter with his desire to amuse, even at the expense of another, however vulnerable. ‘Gerald, who never missed a trick, used to call me “Puffin’s latest crush”,’ Roland wrote, ‘then Angela would go a kind of black red, for whatever her feelings may have been, nobody was supposed to know anything about them.’14

  Gerald amused himself with his men friends, talking shop, fooling around, changing subjects as rapidly as shadows passing over water and Roland thought there could be no one in the world who was a better companion, investing ordinary events with a spirit of gay adventure. Meanwhile, his daughters went about their very different interests. Angela’s emotionalism affected everyone; Daphne found her crushes oppressive and told Tod her sister was quite hopeless. Daphne was filled with an irritable ennui, perhaps affected by her father’s innate restlessness but also isolated and alarmed by Angela’s obsessional mooning over one love object after another. Is this what it was to grow up? To Tod, she confided:

  I must be an awful rotter as we have a ripping time always and no kids could be more indulged and made more fuss of, yet I long for something so terribly and I don’t know what it is … Everyone thinks I’m moody and tiresome and I suppose I am; and I really don’t know why I feel like this. People say I’m acid and bitter, perhaps I am on the outside but I’m not really.15

  Daphne wished she could be as placid and happy as Jeanne. She was grieving for the childhood she was being forced to leave behind, while her sister, four years her junior, was still in that uncomplicated place, sturdy and boy-like, safe in the pretence that she was one of the Dampier brothers. Only a couple of days after Roland Pertwee first met Jeanne, he was disconcerted by her arrival in his bedroom where she wordlessly folded his trousers and underwear before putting a strip of Kolynos toothpa
ste on his toothbrush. ‘When I asked her what it was all about she replied: “I’m Dampier, your fag. Shout if you want anything else”,’16 and gravely left the room.

  Before the end of their time in Algeria, an expedition into the desert and the Atlas Mountains was planned by the men, and the sisters and Muriel were driven to meet them at Bou-saada, a small trading town surrounded by date palms in a true oasis on the edge of the Sahara. Having had all kinds of desert adventures, the men eventually met up with the women for dinner. Afterwards, Roland linked arms with Daphne and Angela and walked them into the night to watch the moon rise over the desert. To Angela it must have seemed as if The Garden of Allah had come to life. But before they had got very far, the romantic and mysterious atmosphere was suddenly riven with a ghastly cackling laugh, dwindling to a moan. The girls clutched his arm. The shrieking laugh came again. Roland enquired of a passing young Arab who was it laughing so devilishly. ‘A hyena in the cemetery,’ he replied. ‘He is eating the dead.’17 Then when a shot rang out in the still air, and the young man explained it was the armed guard in the gardens firing at desert robbers, Angela and Daphne decided they had had enough of moonlight and romance and would rather go home.

  Cannes and Monte Carlo were their next destinations. Gerald liked to live life with a flourish: he carried gold sovereigns, using them to tip extravagantly and after paying for a purchase with gold would not bother with the change. Occasionally he was a spectacularly lucky gambler on the horses, no doubt encouraged by his partner at Wyndham’s, Frank Curzon, who became as famous and successful as a racehorse breeder as he was a theatrical manager. Gerald chose horses purely on their names reminding him of something significant in his life: he naturally backed Frank Curzon’s horse Call Boy, which went on to win the 1927 Derby. Then he bagged the 1928 Derby winner Felstead (the name was an amalgamation of Hampstead and his sister’s house Felden) a 40–1 outsider on which he won the considerable sum of £500. He probably made an even bigger return on the 1929 Grand National when his pick Elton, at even more remarkable odds of 100–1, romped home. During the good times, when Frank was running the show, the money kept on rolling in and Gerald was extremely generous and adept at spending it, with little thought of the morrow.

  During the euphoric 1920s, the Casino in Monte Carlo was filled with rich and well-connected Englishmen and women intent on diversion. Daphne found it energising: ‘It had a great atmosphere of a sort of suppressed excitement all the time.’18 Here was another natural stage for Gerald’s flamboyant insouciance. His friends and daughters observed him in his familiar role:

  There was something about a casino which inspired Gerald to put on an act. He was conscious of the interest he excited, and moved briskly through admiring crowds – alert and on his toes. He had a dashing air as he roved among the tables, saying, ‘Banco’; greeting a friend: ‘Hello Portarlington!’; picking up cards and tossing them down: ‘Neuf! Too bad!’; ignoring the money he had won, and having to be reminded of it. A casino offered the opportunity to display his casual, throw-away methods.19

  Not only was he a great showman, Gerald also relished confounding people’s expectations. On their escapade to the Atlas Mountains, the four men had stopped at the oasis at Laghouat, having drunk a good deal of Cointreau. Here they were entertained by the famously beautiful belly-dancing prostitutes of the Ouled Nail. These Englishmen, however worldly wise, were nevertheless born Victorians and hardly immune to the earthy sensuality of the girls, dancing in magnificent costumes and then naked, except for their elaborate jewellery and headdresses, their exotic looks made more dramatic with make-up and kohl-rimmed eyes.

  Gerald took one young beauty aside and began to tell her the plot of his forthcoming production of The Dancers and determined, against his friends’ advice, to act out every scene. Ronnie Squire lost his temper and told him to pay the poor girl some money and let her go, but Gerald took offence. ‘This intelligent girl is highly interested,’ he said in clipped actorly tones, and insisted on keeping her into the night while she sat perplexed, uncertain what was required of her and whether her traditional services might be called upon, and if so, when.

  Significantly, perhaps, Gerald was not as keen on practical jokes if he was the victim. One of the actresses who sprang to fame in Gerald’s successful production of The Dancers – alongside Tallulah Bankhead – was Audrey Carten. She became a great friend of the family, a romantic interest of Gerald’s, and was as much a practical joker as was he. She went too far one night, however, when she filled the fountain outside the eminently respectable Cannon Hall with empty champagne bottles, suggesting some great Bacchanalian orgy had taken place behind its genteel walls. Gerald was not amused.

  After Monte Carlo, Roland Pertwee and Ronnie Squire were deputed to take Angela with them to Paris where she was to return to finishing school. The train was packed and they could not get any sleeping berths, so huddled together and eventually slept, Angela’s head on Roland’s knee. When she awoke she was green with motion-sickness and dashed for the lavatory. Roland noticed as they approached the school that Angela shed her newly acquired veil of sophistication – ‘she had the smiling gravity of a small Mona Lisa’20 – and became a schoolgirl again as they deposited her at the Ozannes’ front door. Angela’s diary recorded her feeling like a dog being left at the vet’s.

  While Jeanne perfected her tennis and took up golf, Daphne’s mind turned questioningly to religion. She was confirmed at St Paul’s Cathedral by the Bishop of London in the early summer of 1922, in spite of Gerald’s atheism – as this was just the done thing – but within the year lost any zest she may have felt for organised religion when the priest she liked became interested in spiritualism. In a letter to Tod she attempted to work out what she believed:

  I suppose some people would say that I’m an atheist, but I’m not exactly that. I sincerely believe that the world is in a state of evolution, and so is everybody in it. Also I think the idea of re-incarnation has a lot in it. As for Heaven & Hell & all that rot, its absurd. Everyone, sooner or later, gets punished for their sins, in their own lives, but not by the way priests tell one.21

  Daphne compared herself with Angela, who was much less critical and tough-minded. She was ill at ease with the extremes of emotion that characterised her elder sister and was proud of her own rational self-sufficiency:

  I know she secretly wants to become [a Roman Catholic]. Of course some people do need an emotional sort of religion like that! You know how emotional and rather sentimental she is. It wouldn’t do for you & me I’m afraid! Not that I’m matter-of-fact but I do hate sloppiness, & I think R.C. is rather bent that way.

  This thoughtful, mistrustful adolescent was painted by Harrington Mann during this time. His portrait captured Daphne’s wariness, her shoulders hunched, her body in an S-shaped slouch, her world-weary eyes slipping away from the gaze of the spectator. She was persevering with her short stories, exploring with a thoroughly unsentimental eye relationships and ideas that concerned her. She showed some to her father who found them quite good, and this encouragement spurred her on. Years later she explained the creative spring of her fiction:

  the child destined to be a writer is vulnerable to every wind that blows … the essence of his nature is to escape the atmosphere about him … But escape can be delusion, and what he is running from is not the enclosing world and its inhabitants, but his own inadequate self that fears to meet the demands which life makes upon it.22

  The fact Daphne was becoming rather an accomplished writer of stories had come to the attention of a young dandy photographer out to make his name, Cecil Beaton. The elder du Maurier sisters had become friendly with him, possibly at the Peter Pan party where he had taken many photographs of famous people, including the du Mauriers, and sold them to the papers. He had begun to get his strikingly posed portraits accepted by Tatler and the daily newspapers. ‘We’d worked & plotted for our success & we’d got out in every paper except the Mirror and the Evening Standard!’23
Beaton declared in triumph at the beginning of the new year of 1923. It was during this time, when Beaton was making a name for himself in society, that Angela began to meet him at parties and dances.

  When Angela returned to Cannon Hall she was officially ‘out’. A ball was given for her at Claridge’s and she became part of the generation of Bright Young Things who went to each other’s parties, not always in the company of parents. This important event in Angela’s young life caused great anxiety and grief to her, and a temporary rift in the family. Angela was so afraid of being upstaged by her prettier younger sisters that she declared she did not want either Jeanne or Daphne at her coming-out party. Muriel gave her an ultimatum: your sisters or your dance, and Angela gave in. She nevertheless could not but think that they inadvertently stole her show:

  They wore pale blue velvet frocks and both looked dreams, dancing every dance; I was at my fattest and wore a white satin frock that stuck out like a crinoline and must have made me look even fatter. I wore my hair in a low knot or bun at the back of my neck, and I would imagine a tear-stained face.24

  During the celebration that should have been one of the more triumphant moments of her entry into adulthood, she was given an unkind letter from her latest crush telling her he did not want to have the all-important supper dance with her.

  Despite the advent of the Jazz Age and the general casting off of stays, the social life for young women of the du Mauriers’ social class was still very formal. Anyone going to the theatre and sitting in a box or the stalls or first rows of the dress circle was expected to wear full evening dress. No woman or girl would dream of lunching out without an immaculate frock, and a hat on her head. If you were a well-brought-up young woman you could not be seen in nightclubs, although it was considered safe for Angela and her friends to flock to the Embassy Club or Ciro’s, the glamorous dance club and restaurant that had been favourite family venues and where birthday parties were often held after an evening at the theatre.