CHAPTER 22

ON OUR return to England from the two years away in Italy and Australia, children at last unprotesting and relatively contained at school for most of the day, time on my hands and precious little money in the bank, I looked around for something to do which would leave me free for the school holiday travels. I had re-met my teenage sweetheart in Sydney, now running a successful advertising agency. We thought it would be a tremendous joke if I did a television commercial for him and it was even more of a joke that the product was a mattress. The mattress was called a Don. On a very hot day in a very small studio, surrounded by an enthusiastic crew, I rolled around on one half of a rumpled double bed on the other side of which was prominently displayed a pipe and a crumpled pillow. I had to look at the camera mouthing in the most sultry tones I could muster ‘It MUST be a DON!’, while writhing a bit under the sheets. The company won the advertising award of the year. Everyone we knew stayed at home to watch it on the nights it was shown, and it ran for a year.

This gave me the idea that I could perhaps claim experience as a TV performer. Having a few friends in the industry, I telephoned around, and Peter Willes, then Head of Drama at Associated-Rediffusion, put me in touch with a nice woman running their advertising section. Commercial television had just started in competition with the BBC but although they could now produce programmes they had no advertisers as yet to pay for them. In the sparse slots put aside for advertising there were big blank gaps for which nobody was paying. Something called advertising fillers was born and I think I was born to fill them. I soon discovered that, given a microphone, I could talk quite happily until someone pressed a button to stop me. I talked about a variety of things: advice on travelling with young children, for which I was very well qualified; reviewing books for which I was semi qualified if one overlooked training and substituted a certain amount of taste, plus some literary grounding thanks to my grandmother’s guidance in childhood; wine tasting for which I believed I was well equipped but not knowing nearly as much as I pretended to know, which was a good deal more, however, than the average viewer in 1960. I must have been quite proficient at it as they got into the habit of telephoning me the night before a slot had to be filled saying, ‘Can you fill in two minutes for us tomorrow?’—or five, sometimes ten, sometimes only a minute. This occurred about once a month. Could I regard it as a career? It didn’t quite pay the rent but it paid for the odd luxury and encouraged me to feel that an abyss was not about to engulf me. More important, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I forgot about trying to be someone’s housekeeper. It did, perhaps, serve as good training.

We were in the swinging sixties: I had grown up and no longer needed to swing. I had joined the working mothers’ world. Without a thought or a plan, I then became a literary agent through a set of fortuitous circumstances similar to those which had made me an agent for a foreign government. I was equally ill-equipped and inexperienced but, as with South East Asian politics, I did not get found out until I had had time to learn a little. I also learnt that ignorance coupled with confidence and femininity could prove a positive bonus: men successful in their profession are happy, perhaps flattered, to be asked for help and guidance by a woman. I am not sure that the men who guided me would have been quite so generous with their time to another man. I also believe the role of agent comes more naturally to women, it being more satisfying to nurture than to compete. A healthy proportion of the most successful have been women.

After a fruitful and enjoyable fifteen years as an agent I slid into film producing having spent some years putting together the elements for a film on behalf of my clients. Not many women were producing films then, and the heads of financing studios were nearly all men: bonus time again. Being a woman may not have helped me obtain finance for the five feature films I produced but it gave me the confidence to ask—in two cases, from the most unlikely sources. However, those fifteen years as a literary agent and twenty-five as a film producer are part of another story and do not belong here.

More pertinent here is that, as an agent, I had acquired as a client a successful screenwriter, playwright and novelist, William Fairchild. After twenty-nine fun-filled years of working, travelling and living together, I married him. Unlike many wives of writers, I never felt irritated, thwarted, or neglected by hours he spent at his desk rather than with me, as I derived pleasure and sometimes professional profits from the results. Should he ever ask for my opinion of his work we both knew that our aim was the same. He was prolific, talented and successful enough to need it seldom. He wrote five plays which made it on to the West End stage; some thirty feature screenplays which made it onto the screen; innumerable TV plays; one very good novel and one very amusing non-fiction book. He died before he was able to finish his memoir: that remains, like that of my husband, Emmet’s, unfinished and on my conscience as I had promised to finish both. I regret not having done so, if only for the chance of using the title ‘Two Hips and a Heart’. This title came from the day I accused him of being a hypochondriac, to which he relied ‘Two hips and a heart and I’m a hypochondriac?’ He had, indeed, had two hip replacements and a heart operation, following a heart attack.

With this third husband I had, as well as the essential preliminary romance, thirty-seven years of true companionship, laughter, shared interests, and the luxury of a shoulder to lean on. As he called me his ‘rock’ I think a fair amount of reverse leaning also took place. A great deal of our time together was spent in Biarritz on the south west coast of France where I had bought first an elegant and grand apartment and then a tiny and adorable house on a cliff overlooking a beach. Now after more than forty years it is a second home to me. Bill spent more time there than I could: he could write at his leisure and enjoy being one of the few eligible and attractive men around—for many years he remained legally single. I think the attentions of the eager Biarritz females in which he basked was the reason I finally married him. Those Biarritz years are also part of another story.

After Bill’s death, my working years over, the romance-filled years long gone, at ninety-five I still feel the benefits of being a woman: people bring one flowers; accountants are perhaps more patient as one pleads ignorance or incapability; the electrician is more understanding when you tell him you do not know how to insert a light bulb or twiddle a knob on the TV set; the delivery boy shows no sign of irritation when asked to place bags of groceries in specific easy-to-reach corners; neighbours are more lenient when one has grabbed the last parking space. Age may play some part in this, but I think a man would meet with more exasperation. Being a woman has been icing on the cake.