1953
After the scandal of Mama’s behaviour on the set, she stayed at home for a week in a darkened room, seeing no one. She was permitted back to the studio to film what remained of her scenes. Luckily most of the picture was complete but there were some reshoots needed; since the blonde actress refused to be in the same room as Mama, they were filmed separately and the film edited to make it seem as if they were together. Everyone else was remarkably forgiving and kind; they knew Mama was ill and they all remembered the marvellous, entrancing Delilah, and loved her still.
Once the final few shots were finished, Mama went back to the house and collapsed completely, unable to do anything but lie in bed, weeping, occasionally falling into a frenzy and calling wildly for Papa, before sinking into a grim and miserable torpor that nothing could lift her out of. This pattern went on ceaselessly for three days, with Mama refusing all food and only drinking water.
‘I don’t know what to do, Papa!’ Xenia cried, over a crackly line to England. She had barely slept herself, trapped in a nightmare of Mama’s despair, living every moment of it with her until she felt she was going mad herself. ‘You have to help us.’
‘Poor Xenia.’ Papa sounded desperately worried but was obviously trying to control it. ‘We need to get her home as soon as possible. Do you have a doctor there?’
‘Yes, the studio sent a doctor and a nurse. They keep sedating her, but she’s only calm for a while, then it all starts again!’ She started to weep, longing for home and Papa. ‘I can’t do it any more.’
‘You’ve been so brave and strong, only a little while longer now. I’ve made arrangements for you to come home. Are you listening, Xenia? Pay attention, it’s most important. You’re coming home.’
The next day, a new nurse came to the house and, once Mama was dressed for travel, injected her with a powerful sedative. Zombie-like, Mama allowed herself to be put in the car to the airport and then onto the plane. The nurse came with them, and topped up the sedative when needed through the long flight home. All the way back, Mama remained in her absent state, not sleeping or awake, but a living shell of her former self. Xenia, exhausted and glad of the presence of the nurse, slept at last.
Papa, looking grim and sad, was there on the tarmac as they disembarked in London, accompanied by two men in suits. He hugged Xenia but only looked at Mama. ‘Oh, Natalie. Oh, my poor dear.’
She appeared hardly to notice him and made no protest as the men stepped forward and escorted her to where a private ambulance waited near the terminal. Obediently, she climbed into the back and the doors were shut.
‘Where are they taking her?’ cried Xenia, agitated. ‘Where’s she going? I thought we were going home!’
‘Somewhere they can help her,’ Papa said, holding her tight.
‘Where?’ Her eyes filled with tears and she pressed her cheek against the scratchy wool of his jacket.
‘A hospital.’
‘She’ll hate it, she won’t be able to stand being away from us.’ The tears began to flow and she sobbed. ‘When will she come home?’
‘My dear, I can’t say. When she’s better. We can’t help her any more, you must see that. Come along, let’s go.’
Charcombe Park felt empty, only half alive without Mama, but it was also peaceful, the strain of her illness mercifully absent. Xenia, exhausted by everything she had been through in America, slept and slept. She dreamed of Anderson all the time, wondering if perhaps he might try to contact her, and took long walks so that she could fantasise about him coming to England to find her. There was no one to mind her now, for Gunter had retired while Xenia was in America, moving to a little cottage by the sea, and Xenia could live in a haze of daydreams with no one to interrupt her. One day, in the village shop, she saw an old film magazine from America that had an article about him, so she bought it and cut out the pictures to stick on the wall by her bed. She talked to him at night before she fell asleep. There was also a big feature on the blonde actress, adorned with pictures of her in a swimsuit, sitting in a giant martini glass while looking astonished, and in a tight white dress on a long pink sofa, posing happily with a fluffy white cat the same colour as her hair. Those photographs made Xenia feel sick; she didn’t see the candyfloss sweetness, the smile and the pout, but the scarlet mark on the girl’s face where Mama had slapped her, her look of horror, the screech of outrage. She ripped them up and burned them in the grate.
It was late summer when Mama returned, a thin shadow of her former self, with a defeated air but quiet and calm. She was muted, and oddly sweet like a scolded child determined to be good again. She spent long hours sitting outside in the sunshine, as if soaking warmth into her bones and blood, coming back to life like a butterfly fresh from the chrysalis.
‘Look!’ Xenia said, showing her the newspaper. ‘The film is a success. This critic says your performance is a work of great artistry.’
Mama looked at the article with only a flicker of interest and said, ‘How nice’, as though she barely remembered making the picture at all.
‘Listen to this.’ Xenia read from the piece. ‘ “Miss Natalie Rowe returns to a form we’ve not seen since Delilah. She captures perfectly the spirit of desperation and the force of forbidden passion in her portrayal of Rhonda.” ’ She smiled at Mama. ‘Isn’t that wonderful?’
‘Wonderful,’ Mama agreed, but she didn’t seem to care at all, even though she was nominated for awards, and won several, brought to the house by friends and colleagues and received by her with the same lack of interest. They made her happy in a vague way, as if they were part of a life long forgotten that meant nothing to her.
The truth is, Xenia thought, I doubt she will ever act again. Perhaps that’s a blessing, considering what it does to her.
‘What was the hospital like?’ she asked once, when Mama was sitting as usual in the sunshine in the garden, watching the birds flutter about the lawn and the shrubbery.
‘Horrible!’ Mama shuddered. ‘They locked me away as if I were insane. I had no say in anything. They gave me ice baths and medicine and fed me on the most disgusting things I’ve ever eaten in my life. I didn’t know how to tell them that I was perfectly fine, and quite as sane as they were. The more I told them that, the more ice baths they gave me. So I stopped saying anything and just smiled like an idiot. Then they decided to stop the baths and give me normal food again. Isn’t that silly?’
‘And being ill . . . ?’ ventured Xenia. ‘What is that like?’
A shadow passed over her face. ‘Imagine the worst nightmare there could be, knowing that you’re trapped in it and you can’t wake up. The harder you try to escape it, the worse the horror and fear become until you’d rather die than carry on.’ She looked tired and scared just talking about it. ‘But when that feeling goes away, something else happens. I’m filled with an energy like nothing else, a sense that anything is possible and I can do it all, and I’m full of light and sparkle, bigger than the world and immensely powerful. Darling, it’s a marvellous feeling!’ She laughed but it quickly faded and she looked bleak again. ‘But it isn’t worth the horror.’ She reached out for Xenia’s hand. ‘I’d do anything to be better again. Anything.’
To Xenia, it seemed that Mama was not merely happy to be home, but grateful. She was adoring around Papa, who treated her kindly while maintaining his distance, as though she were someone he’d once known well but could only vaguely remember. He spent more time away from her, reading in the library, out walking, taking trips alone to London on business. When he was at home, Mama was clingy and affectionate, pulling his hand to her cheek, kissing his fingertips, calling him to her whenever she could. When she tried to embrace him, he stiffened a little before accepting her arms around him.
‘Do you love me still, Paul?’ she would ask him, holding out her hands beseechingly.
‘Of course, dear,’ he’d reply politely, but almost at once, he’d ask her: ‘Are you better, Natalie? Are you well?’
Mama would reply, ‘Oh, almost, Paul. I can feel it, I’m making such progress!’
But Xenia could tell that Mama remained in the same delicate, sensitive state, and did not seem to be getting anywhere close to her old self. She was trying hard – she didn’t smoke or drink – but she remained as fragile as glass, just a tap away from shattering into a thousand pieces.
In the autumn, no one even mentioned the possibility of Xenia returning to school. Instead, as the summer faded and the garden lost its bloom, the illness came back, in waves this time. First, the low spirits, where she would often be found mumbling incoherently to herself, or lost in intense thought, that sunk downwards into a depression. That led to a heightened nervousness that climbed to full-blown hysteria, when she could not stop herself from falling into a frenzy, shouting and wailing, trying to hurt herself and attacking anyone who came near her, first with words and then with fists, though her intention was not to hurt anyone, merely to prevent them from touching her.
‘You want to send me away!’ she would shriek, as the maids or even the gardeners tried to manhandle her back to bed so that the doctors could be summoned with their sleep-inducing medicine. ‘You want to put me back into that hospital, lock me into an institution and drive me truly insane!’
The only person she would not lift her hand to was Xenia. Papa, unable to bear seeing her in that state, did not come near her at all. The longer Mama went on being ill, the more he could see that the woman he had loved so much and whose future was so glittering and bright was lost to him.
‘It is time for special measures,’ Papa declared when Mama was no better. ‘I’m getting the real experts involved now. Proper doctors, with scientific methods.’
Dr Hanrahan duly arrived. He was distinguished-looking, with handsome grey eyes and wings of silver hair at his temples. He brought with him a white box with dials and switches on the front of it.
Mama was upstairs, pacing her bedroom and bathroom like a caged animal, shouting occasionally to be let out when she wasn’t mumbling disjointedly to herself under the watchful eye of a nurse.
Papa and Xenia sat with the doctor in the drawing room, Xenia apprehensive while Papa, dressed like a country squire in tweeds, seemed excited. ‘Tell us, Doctor, what you’re going to do.’
The doctor gestured to his white box. ‘I’m going to help your wife, Prince Arkadyoff. I will cure her of this awful condition.’
Xenia leaned towards the doctor, filled with astonished hope. Was it really that easy, with that little box? ‘You can do that?’
‘Yes. This treatment is widely accepted as being efficacious for the kind of mania Miss Rowe is displaying. Let me explain. I’ll administer a general anaesthetic of sodium pentothal mixed with a muscle relaxant, so that she’ll feel no pain. Then, while she’s unconscious, I will attach electrodes to the side of her head – both sides, in her case, as bilateral shock will be more effective for her condition – and pulse an electric current through the brain. That will cause her to convulse, and when she wakes, you’ll find that she is normal again.’ The doctor smiled reassuringly.
‘Just like that?’ Xenia said, disbelieving and yet ready to hope.
‘This will cure her?’ Papa demanded.
‘Yes, I believe so.’
‘Then what are we waiting for? Let’s start at once.’
The treatment took place in Mama’s bedroom and Xenia did not see the shocks administered. She could not bear even to listen at the door, in case Mama screamed, or she heard electricity buzzing through her mother’s head. It made her think of the films of Frankenstein’s monster, hit by a fearsome bolt of lightning, jolted into life. It was difficult to understand how a current shooting around her brain could help Mama, but Xenia knew she had no choice but to trust the doctor knew what he was doing. At least he seemed to know what was wrong, and had a name for it. Mania. That’s what Mama has.
She remembered Sly Manikee shouting to get that maniac off his set. He’d been right – but calling someone a maniac was an insult. It was scornful, contemptuous. But poor Mama can’t help it. She’d do anything to be well.
Mama emerged from her treatment the next day, pale and, to Xenia’s horror, with two burn marks standing out vividly on her forehead, but eerily calm. The doctor stayed for several days and administered six doses of the electroconvulsive therapy. On the sixth day, he packed up his box and said, ‘I’m delighted to announce that the treatment has been a complete success. Miss Rowe is cured.’ Then he went away.
Xenia rushed to Mama and hugged her with delight. ‘You’re better! I’m so happy!’
Mama smiled in her absent way, as though the matter hardly concerned her.
Papa was exuberant. ‘There, Natalie! You’re well! You’ll soon be making a film as great as Delilah again.’
‘What are you talking about, Paul?’ Mama asked with a laugh. ‘Delilah? I’ve never heard of it.’
Great patches of Mama’s memory disappeared. The doctor told them that the memories would return in time, but until then, she had large blanks in her mind. It didn’t seem to bother her; if anything, the loss of her past seemed to set her free from anxiety. Perhaps, Xenia thought, that was why the shock treatment worked.
Except that it didn’t work. For another year or so, Mama was fine. There was talk of her acting again. They went on holidays, touring the south of France, flying to Italy and visiting friends. But when Mama heard that Archibald Thomas had died suddenly of a massive heart attack, it triggered the depression that heralded the return of the mania. That struck with full force on a train in Italy on a blazing hot day, when Mama, agitated since they boarded, went into a full frenzy and began running up and down the train, throwing anything she could get her hands on, then tearing off all her clothes. She was wrestled by Papa and a guard back into their private compartment. Xenia, frantic, was the only one who could eventually calm her and persuade her to get dressed again.
Papa was so appalled he couldn’t look at her, even when Natalie was calm once more. She sobbed and cried and apologised, for she knew she had done awful things, even though she couldn’t remember them. Papa could not bring himself to speak to her.
Back at home, there was more ECT, more induced convulsions, more treatment. But Mama was no better.