Chapter Eleven
No, Mrs Poppadum, I didn’t write the film. I always think it’s better for authors who know nothing about script-writing to keep their fingers out of the pie. Yes, Mrs Marchpane, I simply loved the film. Since I had nothing to do with making it, I can speak quite freely. Why, yes, Mr Syllabub, I thought the casting was excellent. The station-master? Oh, yes, exactly the way I always imagined him to be. (And then I would know that Mr Syllabub hadn’t read the book, because the station-master didn’t come into it.)
From J.S’s unfinished book on America, ‘Cactus and Columbine’
THE ABBREVIATIONS FOR American radio and television stations, CBS, WNEW, WSB, KTMS and WEVD, pepper the pages of Jan’s engagement book for 1942. ‘B’cast, 5.30.’ Her voice, speaking to a country at war, was becoming a national morale-boosting presence on the airwaves. Often, the ‘b’cast’ was preceded by ‘H.D.’ – hairdresser’s – in the morning.
For these hairdressing appointments, Harlem beckoned. When no one was looking, she took a bus northwards up Third Avenue, on and on, as the buildings grew seedier and the hair curlier, like her own. Sitting in the salon of her choice, which throbbed with Afro-American life, she flicked through the hairstyling magazines and discovered that the advertisements here were not for permanent waves, but permanent straightening. She returned to Upper East Side, refreshed by this glimpse of the other New York which carried on its gritty existence fifty streets to the north.
‘Morale is something like vitamins,’ she said, speaking to five continents through the microphone at NBC on 1 March. ‘You can’t see it, you can’t touch it, you can’t taste it, yet if you haven’t got it you’re sunk.’ ‘If we begin to make plans now for a better world structure,’ she said during a broadcast in favour of Federal Union, ‘we shall have no moments of despair. We shall only have moments of acute impatience, because we cannot start to build it straight away. Nothing on earth is more fun than planning a new house in which we shall live. The thoughts that we are thinking now will be its bricks and mortar.’ It was quotable oratory, and America lapped it up.
Almost as frequent as the word ‘b’cast’ in the engagement books is the word ‘dentist’. Between January and March 1942, it appears ten times. The London Times had pointed out the ‘flaw’ in Mrs Miniver’s perfection, betrayed by her mid August dentist’s appointment. Four years later, her creator was still dashing from glamorous luncheon to dentist’s chair with alarming frequency. Sometimes her mouth was numb for broadcasts. ‘I had a fever, an ice-bag and a left cheek the size of a football,’ she wrote to her lawyer Melville Cane after her Easter broadcast, ‘and I talked out of the side of my mouth like a Brooklyn gangster. I hope it came through on the air all right – personally I remember nothing about it except that somebody dragged me out of bed and got me to the studio five minutes before airtime, and somebody else shoved a mike in front of me and said Okay, Miss Struther, you’re on right after the Ave Maria and the Lord’s Prayer. The rest was delirium.’
Jan made two new male friends at about this time. The first was this lawyer, Melville Cane, of Ernst, Cane & Young, whom she had employed to negotiate her contracts, but whom she quickly saw to be a kindred spirit, a poet at heart, unfulfilled in his legal job. The second she met at a fund-raising Republican dinner-party given by the heiress of the Wells, Fargo and Company mail-carrying service. Sitting on her right was a man who spoke like an Englishman, called John Beverley Robinson, whom Jan instantly warmed to and instinctively trusted. Such wisdom and understanding shone out of his eyes that she was disarmed. She felt an overwhelming urge to divulge to him the secret she had been holding inside her breast since her arrival in America. She could not stop herself. ‘He’s called Dolf. I know you’d like him, and he you … I don’t know why I’m telling you. I’ve only known you for an hour…’
Tony in Egypt, 1942
Her instinct was right: ‘Bev’ Robinson was a truly compassionate man, who kept Jan’s secret and did not condemn her for her double life. He was sixteen years her senior, and married. His family lived in Toronto and he spent his weeks working in New York, living at the Westover, a residential hotel. He and Jan became great friends. A week later she invited Mel, Bev and Dolf to supper at East 49th Street, and they sang folk songs to a recorder she had picked up at a junk shop in Mission, Nebraska. The room was alight with candles, music, poetry, wine and laughter, and for a fleeting evening Jan and Dolf basked in the illusion that they were an accepted ‘couple’.
Tony, ‘five hours nearer the sun’, was preparing to go to North Africa on active service with the 2nd (Motor) Battalion of the Scots Guards.
* * *
At Culver City in Hollywood, meanwhile, a new Mrs Miniver was coming into being. ‘You allowed your tear to spill over just a second too soon,’ William Wyler said to Greer Garson. ‘Now, if you can get the tears again, I want you to hold them there. And then I want you to let that tear run down your cheek.’
At her wits’ end over the impossibility of pleasing this director, Greer Garson thought herself back, for the hundredth time that day, into Mrs Miniver’s skin. The camera moved in, and, amazingly, she felt tears stinging her eyes. She held them in, counting the seconds, until one ran down her cheek. Wyler nodded and smiled. It was awful working for him, but it could not be denied that he was a master craftsman.
Greer Garson had been scooped up by Louis B. Mayer on his talent-spotting tour of London theatres in 1937. She came to live in Hollywood with her mother, and had a miserable first year, offered demeaning parts (such as the woman who gets papered to the wall by the Marx Brothers in A Day at the Races), which she refused. Reluctantly, in 1938, she accepted the small part of Katherine Chipping in James Hilton’s Goodbye Mr Chips, and was nominated for the Oscar for Best Actress. Vivien Leigh won, for Gone With the Wind, but Greer Garson was now a star, and her luminous beauty was recognized. Mrs Miniver was an ideal role for her. When she threatened to walk off the set after William Wyler had made her light Walter Pidgeon’s cigarette so many times that she became ill from the smoke, her friend Bette Davis encouraged her to carry on. ‘You will give the great performance of your career under Wyler’s direction,’ she said. It was true.
The film’s sets were full of Hollywood fakery. The Minivers’ house was unlike any ordinary English country house of the 1940s: to suit the camera lens, it was open-plan. The village, Belham (a name invented by the script-writers), crawled with roses on trellises at every corner. As for the plot, it bore only these resemblances to the original book: Mrs Miniver is a loving, loyal, wise wife and mother, married to a charming, witty man named Clem; their children are Vin, Judy and Toby; Mrs Miniver gets off a bus in a hurry to rush back to a shop, deciding to buy something after all (originally an engagement-book, a hat in the film); Clem buys a new car.
Out of the fertile imaginations of the producer and his five script-writers came astonishing additions to pad out these four vestiges of the book. Jan blinked with surprise when she went for her early viewing. A village flower-show was the running sub-plot of the film: Lady Beldon (played by Dame May Whitty) expected to win, as usual, but was horrified to hear that Mr Ballard the station-master (played by Henry Travers) was entering ‘The Mrs Miniver Rose’. Jan could only admire the film’s creators, who had brazenly invented the flower-show, Lady Beldon, Mr Ballard, and ‘The Mrs Miniver Rose’. On and on it went, for an hour and a half: an unfolding love-story and war-story, full of new material, totally gripping, and impossible to watch without soaking a handkerchief.
The air-raid-shelter scene from the film of Mrs Miniver
The aura of excellence about the film derived from various sources. William Wyler’s directing was one, with his instinct to pare down rather than fill out. In the original screenplay, when Vin was called up to join the Royal Air Force, Mrs Miniver’s lines were: ‘I’m all mixed up, thinking about Vin. Oh, you men! What a mess you’ve made of the world! Why can’t we leave other people alone?’ But during filming, that was all cut. In the finished version Mrs Miniver simply says, ‘Isn’t he young? Even for the Air Force?’ and Clem answers, ‘Yes, he’s young.’ In the Dunkirk sequence, too, Wyler leaves the horrors to the imagination. Clem sails off in the middle of the night, and returns with five days’ growth of beard. ‘You’ve heard it on the news,’ he says to his wife. ‘I’m glad. That means I don’t have to tell you about it.’
Then there was the acting, which despite Wyler’s insistence on endless takes gave an impression of naturalness. Mr and Mrs Miniver teased more than they praised one another: the strength of family love was not stated outright, but hinted at through casual snatches of conversation. Judy and Toby (played by Clare Sandars and Christopher Severn) spoke their cringe-making sugary lines, but the sight of them peacefully asleep in the air-raid shelter, only waking and crying with terror and bewilderment when their own house was hit, was deeply touching. No scene went on for too long.
Mrs Miniver with her daughter-in-law Carol Beldon (played by Teresa Wright), also from the film
Then there was the shocking twist in the plot at the end of the film. It was the producer Sidney Franklin’s idea that Vin’s young wife Carol Beldon (played by Teresa Wright) should die, rather than Vin, the RAF pilot: a civilian death would bring home to American audiences what this war was really like for the British population. William Wyler sat up late into the night with Henry Wilcoxon (who played the vicar), rewriting the film’s final sermon. It began quietly – ‘We, in this quiet corner of England, have suffered the loss of friends very dear to us’ – and worked its way to a climax: ‘This is the people’s war! It is our war! We are the fighters. Fight it, then! Fight it, with all that is in us! And may God defend the right!’ The film, they decided, would end with the closing hymn, ‘Onward, Christian soldiers’, sung by a dazed congregation with gaps in the pews, and bomber planes visible over the roofless church.
‘THIS was their finest hour and THIS is your finest attraction’, ran MGM’s advertisement in Kinematograph Weekly. ‘Not only the best of the year … Not only the best of the War … but the best EVER produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer!’ Mayer had told Greer Garson that she must on no account let her romantic attachment to Richard Ney become public knowledge at this delicate time. The hint of incest would be disastrous for publicity.
Jan was a guest of honour in the audience at the film’s première at Radio City Music Hall on Thursday, 4 June 1942. The MGM lion roared. Two paragraphs of scene-setting gothicky words rolled down the screen, to the stringed strains of a familiar tune:
Oh God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast
And our eternal –
The final cadence was an unresolved minor chord. It was the signal to sit back and prepare for tears.
Jan decided, wincing every now and then during the performance, that she would never be rude about the film in public. Whatever she might think privately about the liberties MGM had taken with her book, whatever she might feel about the idealized representation of English village life or the irritating ladylikeness of Greer Garson’s Mrs Miniver, she knew that it was her duty, as an unofficial ambassadress for Britain, to uphold the film without reservations. ‘I was apprehensive’ – this was the message she put across in interviews – ‘but as a matter of fact I got a lovely surprise when I saw how closely the film had followed the characterisations in the book. The whole Miniver family behaved in the film exactly as I had always believed and hoped they would behave when the bad times came. I feel convinced that there are Mrs Minivers in every freedom-loving country in the world, and that they and their families, like the characters in my book, will be able to meet any trial that may come with the same courage, fortitude and faith.’ She instructed Janet and Robert, also, never to say a bad word about the film to anyone outside the family.
She dashed from Radio City to Grand Central Station, to go to Janet’s school play. While she was contemplating the smallness of the school auditorium compared with the one she had just left, film critics across New York were at their typewriters.
Some of them, it turned out the next morning, were almost literally lost for words. ‘I have wasted all the superlatives in the dictionary on lesser films,’ wrote Lee Mortimer of the New York Mirror. ‘Mere words are inadequate to express the emotional impact of this superb picture,’ said the Albany, New York Times. ‘Out of the rather casual jottings that were made into a best-seller called Mrs Miniver,’ said the New Yorker, ‘a movie has evolved that might almost be called stupendous.’ ‘Perhaps it is too soon to call this one of the greatest motion pictures of all time,’ said the New York Times, ‘but certainly it is the finest yet made about the present war, and a most exalting tribute to the British who have taken it gallantly. One cannot speak too highly of the superb understatement and restraint exercised throughout this picture.’
Audiences emerged from the film shocked and red-eyed. Word spread fast. In its first four days at Radio City, the film was seen by 98,207 people, and people carried on seeing it at the rate of 20,000 a day. Its value as propaganda quickly became apparent. The head of the US Office of War Information, Elmer Davis, called for the film to be released nationally ‘to convey its message to as many Americans as possible, as soon as possible’. As it opened in Loew’s theatres across the the United States, Jan travelled from city to city, a useful component of MGM’s publicity machine, giving first-night talks immediately after the screenings. She walked on to the stage, into the spotlight, holding one of MGM’s ‘Mrs Miniver’ roses, produced for publicity purposes by the American botanist Dr Eugene Boerner, and stood peering out at her audience. ‘I feel certain that if your cities here have to undergo the bombing ordeal that England’s cities have, your ordinary people are going to behave in the same way we have, in the same way as the Minivers you have just seen.’ She walked out through the foyer, where war stamps and war bonds were being sold, and went back to her hotel alone.
At Atlanta, Georgia on 13 July there was a message for her in the hotel pigeon-hole. She had sent a cable to Tony in North Africa six weeks before: he had let her know that he was in charge of No. 19 Anti-Tank Platoon. ‘Pommel Rommel good and hard’ she had cabled – she knew he would enjoy the rhyme. Now she opened the envelope: Tony was ‘missing on active service, presumed captured’.
It had happened at the Battle of Gazala, the costly struggle which ended with the Allied surrender of Tobruk after a week of siege. Jan sank down onto a chair in the hotel lobby to absorb the news. A member of staff brought her water: Atlanta was proud to help Mrs Miniver at this terrible moment. And what forbearance she showed! said the papers in the following days, when word spread that ‘Mr Miniver’ had been captured. ‘She telephoned her children, attended a luncheon given for her, and visited wounded soldiers at Lawson Hospital, showing none of the fear and sorrow which must be in her mind.’ The journalists could not know that fear and sorrow were only two of the multitude of emotions which swarmed in Jan’s mind, heart and conscience.
She decided not to break the news to Janet and Robert until she had heard for certain whether Tony was alive.
* * *
Mrs Miniver went into its sixth week at Radio City Music Hall, equalling the record held by Rebecca and The Philadelphia Story. It opened in Britain at the Empire, Leicester Square, on 11 July. Critics once again sat at their typewriters; predictably, they were crueller than their American counterparts, just as they had been about the book. The Times: ‘The picture of England at war suffers from that distortion which seems inevitable whenever Hollywood cameras are trained on it.’ The Manchester Guardian: ‘The eldest son comes down from Oxford sporting a bowler hat and a Canadian accent, a naїve and inarticulate college boy who could not possibly be the product of Eton and Oxford.’ The Observer: ‘No gents’ outfitters of our acquaintance supplied Mr Miniver with his pyjamas.’ Time and Tide: ‘The village church has a medieval circular tower which seems to have strayed from Conwy Castle.’ The Spectator: ‘The film ponderously reveals us on Sunday September 3rd 1939 as a collection of simple-minded innocents basking in a smile from the squire’s pew and without any inkling whatsoever that we may be at war before the service is over.’
‘But…’ Nearly all these reviewers, having vented their spleen, succumbed to a final ‘but’ clause: ‘But it is years since I remember being so touched by any film’… ‘But it would be the grossest ingratitude to do anything but thank our American friends for this warm-hearted picture’… ‘In spite of the foregoing, it is my duty to certify that in my vicinity two medical students, three naval officers and a sergeant in the RAF sobbed loudly and continuously throughout.’ (This last from the Tatler, which carried a photograph of Jan’s brother Douglas Anstruther at the British première. He was now Major Anstruther, and he was becoming quite an eccentric. He wore a judge’s wig when dining, to keep the draught off his neck. Jan had sent him funds for an ambulance: he bought the body and fitted it to the chassis of his Rolls-Royce, named the ambulance ‘Mrs Miniver’ and proudly showed it off. ‘It can carry ten men into action, or carry two stretchers and two sitters, or be a canteen. It carries fourteen gallons of drinking-water and eight for washing up.’)
There was no ‘but’ clause in Harry Ashbrook’s quiveringly angry article in the Sunday Pictorial of 26 July. Jan read it and felt once again the mixture of guilt and a sense of unfairness that Sheridan Russell’s letter had engendered. ‘She’s a Disgrace to the Women of Britain!’ ran the headline.
This is England – the England of the miners. Settling into their comfortable beds, exhausted by a day’s shopping, Mr and Mrs Miniver congratulate each other for being born into the British upper middle class. ‘We are very lucky people,’ they chorus. Talking of lucky people, in the North of England is a town called Jarrow. Nine out of ten men of Jarrow were out of work before the war. While Mrs Miniver drifted around village flower shows, the men of Jarrow looked for work. I’ll say you were lucky, Mrs Miniver. Mrs Miniver’s creator Jan Struther said recently, ‘I plan to stay in America for the rest of the war because my children are happily settled here and I don’t want to disturb them.’ The ordinary working people of Jarrow, Clydeside and Coventry are fighting this war and all the old nonsense of tea-parties and flower-shows has gone. Their life would make a grand film, Mrs Graham. But you’ve got to come back to see them before you can write it.
Vera Brittain saw the film twice in the weeks after its British release. ‘I love it,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘but I think Jan Struther is a charlatan posing as a patriot in the safety of the USA.’
* * *
Tony was safe, a prisoner-of-war. Jan received airmail letters from both Tony and Jamie, and she smiled with relief when she found that Tony’s experiences had already become the stuff of anecdote.
He had been captured on 13 June at a place in the desert called Maabus-el-Rigel, known as ‘Wriggly Ridge’. He was forty-two, twenty years older than his fellow subalterns; helmetless, and almost completely bald, he was taken by the Germans for a high-ranking officer. The finer points of British badges of rank were a bit of a mystery to them. ‘Daddy was put into an enormous staff car,’ Jamie wrote, ‘and whisked off amid a flurry of Teutonic salutes.’ ‘What are you doing in that car?’ asked a fellow prisoner. ‘They think I’m a general,’ answered the departing Tony. That night, two or three of the Scots Guards officers taken at the same time managed to slip past the sentries, back to the British lines, but Tony was by then far to the rear of the German position. Eventually, he was discovered to be just an elderly lieutenant.
* * *
Mrs Miniver-mania continued to grip the United States. The millionth ticket was purchased on 19 July by a Mrs Harry M. Simon, blushing as she was photographed. The film went into its ninth week at Radio City Music Hall, and its tenth. Jan was a guest of honour at Radio City, with Walter Pidgeon and William Wyler, to celebrate the film’s record run. Now, at the height of her celebrity, she moved house, from East 49th Street to an address worthy of it: 214 Central Park South. This time, she didn’t take a lodger. Dolf and she could at last spend days and nights ‘at home’ together, when no one was looking.
Mrs Miniver opened in Canada, and a journalist named Roly, in his weekly column ‘Rambling with Roly’, took the art of rambling to new heights: ‘A couple of days ago, I came back to the office after seeing Mrs Miniver and tried to write a review of the film. I think I made a hash of the attempt. It was the toughest review I ever tried to write because my mind was in an emotional turmoil and I couldn’t seem to find the words to say what I wanted to say…’ Like so many others, he was lost for words. The film was shown to the British Army in Cairo, and generals and colonels wept: many had not seen their families in England since the Blitz. Major Eric Sandars, the father of Clare Sandars, who played Judy, was one of those who saw it in Cairo. His daughter had been evacuated to the United States at the outbreak of war, and spotted by Hollywood scouts as a ‘typical English child’.
When it was shown in Buenos Aires, the German Embassy there protested strongly to the Argentine government against the showing of such an anti-Axis film. It was the last Hollywood film to be shown in Budapest before the Nazis put a stop to all US film imports.
In neutral Sweden, as in Switzerland, Axis and Allied films vied for popularity. The Germans took half-page spaces in the Stockholm newspapers to boost the new Jannings film about Frederick the Great which had won first prize at the Venice Film Festival; it ran for seven days in a half-empty cinema. Mrs Miniver ran for twenty weeks, showing at four cinemas in the centre of Stockholm.
* * *
‘I’m sitting in a Pullman pouring with sweat,’ Jan wrote to Dolf on the way from Louisville to New Orleans in mid July. ‘At every big-town stop (even for five minutes) there is an MGM man, a Loew’s man, a photographer, a reporter, and a local Lady Beldon on the platform to give me a bo-kay, usually so-called ‘Miniver’ roses, but if unobtainable, orchids. It’s all very, very comic.’
Janet and Robert were at summer camps in Maine, and Jan was travelling incessantly, signing rolls of honour, selling war stamps, autographing stamp books, recording scripts to be used in broadcasts such as the ‘Cleveland at War’ programme, and running along station platforms and jumping onto trains just as the man was calling ‘’Board!’ It was impossible to get away from America’s Mrs Miniver-itis. Leafing through a Boston magazine she came across this:
Mrs Miniver’s Haircut – it’s soft and pretty and easy to manage. It’s very wearable with the new hats and a joy to take care of, especially if you assure it with a new Slattery permanent wave. Phone HANCOCK 6600 for appointments.
Sitting down to lunch a week later at a restaurant in Toledo, Ohio, she found ‘Mrs Miniver’s Fruit Salad Plate’ on the menu.
America launched contests to name its ‘Mrs Minivers’ – women who ‘served on the home front’. ‘Vote for YOUR favourite Mrs Miniver and vote today!’ cried the Lewistown, Pennsylvania Sentinel. The Los Angeles Herald printed the names of Los Angeles’s Mrs Minivers, ‘who run their houses smoothly and still find time for the war effort; the women who have sacrificed sons and husbands, and carry on with indomitable courage.’ Los Angeles even awarded a bouquet of Dr Eugene Boerner’s roses to its ‘Mrs Miniver of the Day’.
Surely, Jan hoped, with the film so successful, and with Mrs Minivers popping up in major cities all over America, she could escape from the burden of being mistaken for her saintly fictional creation. And gradually during 1942, the longed-for release did begin to take place. Greer Garson willingly took over as the embodiment of Mrs Miniver in the public imagination. And the public were relieved to discover that Greer Garson’s favourite drink was afternoon tea: two bags, cream in first.
Greer Garson and Jan in Hollywood
Up until this time, during her journeys across America, Jan had known that sooner or later she would be going ‘home’ to Dolf in New York. Wherever she travelled, she could rest assured that he was within a three-mile radius of Columbia University, and waiting for her. (He had crossed the campus at Columbia in June 1942 for a job as an assistant bibliographer at the Avery Architectural Library.) But suddenly at the beginning of 1943, this changed. Dolf, who had been granted American citizenship in 1942, volunteered to join the United States Army. He knew he would eventually be drafted, and hoped that as a volunteer he would be allowed to choose his ‘combat theater’: he wanted to go to Germany to kill Hitler with his own hands. In a thick Viennese accent he swore his oath of allegiance, and became Private A.K. Placzek. For his basic training, he was to be stationed in California. Once again force majeure was sending him three thousand miles to the west, away from Jan.