Chapter Twelve
The westbound train is running four hours late.
A dozen times at least it’s pulled into a siding,
And the passengers listen, and wonder,
And listen, and wait
For the growing thunder and then the dying thunder
Of troop train or freight
Taking the right of way.
The conductor’s an old man, patient and grey:
He’s ridden this road for thirty years or more,
And he knows the score.
‘Yes, Sir,
Wartime riding’s not peacetime riding.’
Six hours late. The slim quicksilver bar
On the wall of the coach has climbed to ninety-four.
It isn’t a real coach, but a baggage car
Hauled from retirement, fixed to meet the rush:
The seats are upright, covered in dirty plush;
The sides, windowless iron, vibrate with the heat.
In back, two businessmen unfasten their collars
And loosen their shoes to ease their swollen feet.
They missed the Limited – scrambled on at a run.
‘This is a hell of a train,’ says the paunchy one.
‘I wouldn’t take it again for a thousand dollars.’
But the thin one has a son
In Africa or the Arctic (he doesn’t know which –
This is a crazy war),
And to him it doesn’t matter any more
Whether he travels the poor man’s way or the rich.
He knows the score.
Yes, Sir.
Folks know things now they never knew before.
From ‘Wartime Journey’, published in Atlantic Monthly
‘GELIEBSTER SOLDAT’ – ‘Beloved soldier’ – Jan wrote to Dolf from Durham, North Carolina on 13 February 1943. She was determined to be a tower of strength for him as he left for the Army. ‘I am really glad they accepted you after all. It is hell to be separated, but I know you’d have felt disappointed if you hadn’t got in. The great thing is that it’s only “limited service” so that somehow or other we’ll be able to meet sometimes. I feel I’m actually in the Army myself, or possibly the Navy, as I’ve spent so much time travelling with them all. I made friends yesterday with a bunch of four Naval Reserve men & we pooled all our meagre provisions during an interminable journey from Greenboro’ to Durham. They had some candy and I had some bananas.’
Dolf was worried: would there be any kindred spirits in the Army? Jan reassured him.
I spent a gorgeous evening yesterday with the Army at Fort Bragg, watching a show being put on for the benefit of their Soldiers’ Lounge Fund. One of my poems was set to music by Otto Guth, a sergeant, Viennese Jew, late of the Prague Symph. Orch. Then a beautiful youth came on & played music, & the Master of Ceremonies said, ‘You see? In the daytime he learns to fire the big guns – and in the evening he practises his violin. Let’s give him an extra-big hand.’ Which we did. I only hope to God that you get into as nice a camp, and that they discover about your piano-playing. Sweetheart, I know you must be dreading it in a way – I mean things like woollen underwear & bean farts & the lack of privacy – but DO remember that it isn’t an army of hicks & bloggs & toughs – I’ve met dozens of mild spectacled cultivated-looking soldiers during this journey, who all must have dreaded it.
Jan was on another lecture tour. Topic: ‘A Pocketful of Pebbles’, said her Details of Engagement from Clark Getts. Englewood, Glen Ridge and Summit, New Jersey; Greenboro, Durham and Charlotte, North Carolina; Greenville, South Carolina; Cincinnati and Delaware, Ohio; Detroit, Michigan; Indianapolis, Indiana … she travelled for two months, giving three or four lectures a week.
‘There is one great – and, so far as I can see, insuperable – problem in a lecturer’s life,’ she said to her audiences.
Speaking engagements are usually planned many months ahead, and it’s only natural that the programme’s chairmen, who have to deal with publicity, should want to know well in advance what one is going to talk about. Now, this wouldn’t present any difficulty if one was a learned professor with some highly specialized subject like ‘Ancient Chinese Music’ or ‘The History of English Painting in the 18th century’. But if, like me, you are not an expert or a specialist in anything at all, but only a quite un-highbrow human being whose main interest is in the day-to-day feelings of other un-highbrow human beings – well, then it’s practically impossible to decide on a topic months ahead, because it all depends upon what’s going to happen to the world in the meantime. So when this date was first arranged, and my lecture manager called me up and asked what the title of my talk was going to be, I replied that I hadn’t the faintest notion. He said, very patiently, ‘Well, but you see, the sponsors want to know.’ I said that this was just as bad as being asked to decide on a Monday morning what you were going to talk to your family about at supper a week from Saturday. And then I had an idea. I remembered having once described how ‘Mrs Miniver’ used to save up all the thoughts and incidents of the day so that she could discuss them in the evening, and how ‘Clem’ did the same thing, and how it was as if each was turning out a pocketful of pebbles that they’d collected for each other during the day. So I said to my lecture manager, ‘Look! You just tell them that the title of my talk will be ‘A Pocketful of Pebbles’, and that’ll leave me entirely free to speak about anything which occurs to me between this and then.
Audiences enjoyed this friendly babble: it was the antithesis of lecturely pomposity. The loose title enabled Jan to break the lecture up into sections rather than droning on about a single subject for sixty minutes. She liked to give an impression of off-the-cuffness in her lectures, though in fact she honed them for hours in the silence of her hotel rooms. ‘I know a lot of folks who say they always make their talks extemporaneously,’ she said in an interview for the Charlotte Observer in February 1943 before one of her lectures. ‘Yes, and they sound like it, too.’
‘Please tell us something about your husband,’ said the Charlotte journalist. ‘If you want my husband’s name,’ replied Jan, smiling, ‘you’d better get out your pencil, because it’s pretty long. He’s called Anthony Maxtone Graham. He’s a prisoner-of-war in Italy. And he’s doing nicely. I had a letter from him only four days ago. It was written last October.’
* * *
That letter had taken fourteen weeks to arrive. Some took longer. Most did not arrive at all, whether to or from Tony. The weekly allowance for a POW to send was one airmail letter form, and one postcard. Out of a total of fifty Tony sent to his family from Chieti Camp in Italy, only three were delivered. To judge from these three that have survived (none to or from Jan), it is clear that captivity (or rather, the consequent freedom from the responsibility of being grown-up) had an inspiring effect on Tony. He blossomed. Jan, in her scathing Ogden-Nashese poem about fidelity, had advised against ‘letting him [one’s husband] in for amateur dramatics in any shape or form’. But now she wasn’t watching. Tony’s latent talents as an impresario were reflected by his election as ‘Chairman of Chieti Entertainment’. To Jamie and Ysenda he wrote:
I have written a longish 1-act play & am going to embark on the most ambitious play-writing project shortly … Music is going strong; we have a theatre variety orchestra, a dance band & a chamber-music orch., all of which come under my aegis. We had a Mozart concert on Sunday which was hugely successful. We are lucky in having Tommy Sampson, a dance band leader in private life, & above all Tony Baines, the Philharmonic player, who is superb. They work from dawn till lights out, scoring & rehearsing … We have not had any scores supplied to us yet, tho’ we got the instruments without too much difficulty. The theatre is great fun, & we have produced an enormous variety of entertainments. Again we have no play scripts but James Oliphant [Tony’s middle names – his POW nom-de-plume] has been kept busy! I have done three 1-act plays, one full-length thriller, and one full-length trial so far – very successful, though I say it. Every show runs for 4 performances – about 300 of an audience at each … I have had good letters from USA but no acknowledgement of any of mine … Tobacco is my principal want; and books on playwriting, and books of plays.
An illuminated testimonial given to Tony by his fellow prisoners mentions the forty-five plays he produced, including The Admirable Crichton, The Man Who Came to Dinner, and HMS Pinafore (there was much ironic cheering at the line ‘Or an Ital-i-an’).
A prisoner-of-war-camp theatrical production. The ‘bead’ curtains are made of thousands of rolled-up cigarette papers
While Tony had respected Rommel’s soldiers, he held his Italian guards in contempt and up to ridicule. Notices were put up warning the prisoners not to walk or loiter too close to the barbed-wire fences, drafted by the commandant, too proud to ask for a translation from the Senior British Officer, with the help of his pocket commercial dictionary: ‘PASSAGE AND DEMURRAGE NO ALLOW’. As a marine insurance broker, Tony knew that ‘demurrage’ was the charge paid by ships which loiter too long in port. The pompousness of the notice inspired Tony and his fellow prisoners to all the more fun, in spite of the guards.
While Jan was keeping up the morale of the lecture-going public in America, Tony was doing the same for the Chieti prisoners, many of whom might have sunk into despair but for his contagious good spirits.
* * *
Dolf, in uniform, boarded his Army train, and set off westwards across America with ‘the buddies’. Far from being the violin-playing types Jan had hoped for, they were sweet-natured, thick-necked men who talked about girls and tried to prise from Dolf the truth about his love life. Catching his first sight of the Mississippi, one whistled and said, ‘There she is, the big mother fucker.’
Mother – what? Dolf had never heard the expression before, and his Viennese sensibilities were ruffled. Saying that about a river? He tried not to think of Pauly.
His address, in the coming months, was ‘Company B, 77th Infantry Training Battalion, Camp Roberts, California’. As soon as it was discovered that he could type, he was marked out for desk work, rather than combat duty. His wartime service, as he later described it, was ‘on the typewriter front’. Three thousand miles away from anyone he knew, six thousand miles away from his homeland, he relied on Jan’s letters for sustenance. And they came.
‘When are you going to write your next book?’ journalists often asked Jan. A sequel to Mrs Miniver, or a book about America?’ ‘Next week, positively next week, I will begin writing that book,’ she sometimes replied. But, in truth, no such book was germinating inside her. Apart from her lectures and occasional poems, all her creative energy was channelled into communicating with Dolf. It was the only writing which seemed worthwhile to her.
The war was causing a great slowing-down of transport across America. Trains ran six, seven, eight hours late, and Jan spent these hours at a standstill with pad and pen. Gasoline rationing meant that people had to share rides and forgo non-essential journeys, but despite the shortage three thousand people attended her lecture in Greenville, South Carolina, a fact which astonished her. Would nothing stop them from going to lectures? One thing the gasoline shortage did put a stop to, however, much to her relief, was the compulsory sightseeing drive the morning after.
Darling [she wrote on 16 February 1943], I managed to catch the Cincinnati Express – the station authorities at Richmond were persuaded to hold it for me! (The station-master was a Miniver fan, & had heard me speak at Loew’s Theatre last July.) So I rushed across the tracks, & clambered on to the train to find there was no food on it. However, the conductor gave me his only apple, and the Pullman porter came up to my bunk & shyly said, ‘Ah hev an orange yew could hev ef yew lakke…’ I ate them and then slept for eight hours & feel fine.
Don’t worry about me: I’m tired but at the very TOP of my form, making gorgeous speeches & writing gorgeous poetry. I can’t be unhappy when I’m in my present state of acute, starry, clear-headed but burning-hearted inner fertility. I’ve gone down to 108 lbs & am size 10 again. I feel all the time as though I’m walking – no, dancing – on air & my head is bursting with poems and ideas. Forgive my arrogance but who wouldn’t be arrogant if they had my luck? – The greatest part of which is to have been your lover for three such perfect years & to know that I am still loved by a great poet who I know is also going to be a great soldier …
Dan [Jan’s friend Dan Golenpaul, the businessman behind Information, Please!] is going to put me on Inf. Pl. at least once a month, if not oftener, as the ‘anchor’ guest on the opposite week from Oscar Levant: and as I now get $400 a time instead of $200, you can see what a difference this will make to my finances. But you know nothing changes me inside, whether it’s success or revenues, just as long as I have enough vitamins and red corpuscles. (And love. Not sex, but LOVE.) Sweet love, I adore you, & I carry round with me two of the photographs I took of you in Battersea Park just before our last agonizing farewell!
Dolf didn’t feel that he was being a great soldier. What he was experiencing for the first time in his life – like so many people new to the Army – was boredom. Jan longed for his news: for hilarious details about barrack rooms, or about any violinists he had unearthed. But Dolf could think of little to report, except which film he had seen in downtown Los Angeles during his twenty-four-hour pass. ‘Just came back from my pass, which was on the lonely side, as usual.’
From Jamie in England, too, Jan received letters hinting at the loneliness and newslessness of the soldier. Jamie was at Pirbright Camp, having joined the Scots Guards in October 1942. Army life was too repetitive and dull to write about. The only news Jamie – like Dolf – felt inspired to give was what he had done on his leaves. There was no home to go to in London (the lease on Halsey Street had been given up, and Wellington Square was shut up, its rooms draped with dust-sheets), so he stayed in friends’ flats, and went out for solitary dinners at the Martinez in Swallow Street. For spiritual sustenance, he went to National Gallery concerts: in one letter he enclosed a programme of Schubert songs accompanied by Gerald Moore, to which he went alone on 19 April 1943. These concerts always reminded him of the one he had been to with his mother on the day before she sailed.
Both Dolf and Jamie, cut off though they were from Jan, could see her name on the screen and hear her voice on the airwaves. ‘Mrs Miniver was shown at Pirbright cinema at the weekend,’ Jamie wrote. ‘I thought Vin was awful, but it is getting a terrific reception here.’ He also heard Jan on a trans-Atlantic Brains Trust programme, broadcast from New York. Dolf sometimes tuned in to Information, Please!, just to hear Jan’s voice. And, knowing he might be listening, she secretly spoke to him, or sang to him: ‘Oh, if you listened last night I hope you got my message! There was a question – “Sing a line of a song containing the word ‘Johnnie’.” So I upped and sang, “I would give them all for my handsome winsome Johnnie”, and thought so so longingly of you while I sang.’
She was still being strong for them both. ‘The Placzek–Struther Axis is strong and we’ll lick the world yet, whether we’re in each other’s arms or not. When I’m up on a platform trying to sway an audience, you’re standing invisibly beside me saying, “Stand up straight, & let’s have a nice Joycerl smile.” And when you’re on kitchen duty peeling potatoes with hands that should be playing Mozart, then I’m beside you, saying “Hold the knife the other way, you sweet left-handed son of a bitch.”’
At about this time, though, she began to betray small hints of the exhaustion which was beginning to seep into her body and mind. Adrenalin enabled her to sail, glowing, through evenings like this one at the Weir Cove Community Women’s Club of West Virginia:
But she was finding it harder and harder to wind down after these lectures, and she was beginning to resort to sleeping-pills. Here she describes to Dolf, in one unbroken paragraph, a typical forty-eight hours of her spring 1943 lecture tour.
I was talking to people almost without a break from 10 a.m. till midnight … An autographing ‘Do’ from 2–3.15 & another from 3.15 to 4.30. Back to my hotel, where an Irish-Minnesotan guy called Kennan interviewed me (and gave me a drink). Then a rapid dressing, then dinner [with the sponsors] … Then the lecture, at which I talked to a packed theatre (2,000, I shd think) for an hour and answered questions for another half-hour … [Then she had agreed to be driven to Toledo by a stranger, Mr Hardgrove, a necessity of the gasoline shortage.] I was relieved to see that Mr Hardgrove was a kindly respectable humorous blondish ‘family man’. By the time we set off from Akron it was 12.30 a.m. & the roads were a sheet of ice, & we were running through thick white fog, with trucks suddenly looming up. But I was so utterly exhausted that I slept more than half the time. I had to ask him to stop once, so I could get out and p— in the snow, but we were neither of us in the least embarrassed. Exhaustion reduces people to complete simplicity. We finally got into Toledo at 3.45 a.m. The car doors were frozen & my eyes were gummed up with sleep. I opened them just long enough to check in & get to my room & then collapsed into bed, hoping to sleep till 9. But my blasted mental alarm-clock woke me at 7.15. Then at 9.30 a visit to Edna Rowe’s school – and the heartrending experience of being presented with a flower-posy by a boy called Chuck (four years old), who was born blind & is terribly cross-eyed & very ugly & very sweet, while the press photographer struggled to get a picture of the ceremony without showing Chuck’s eyes. Chuck kept stroking me and snuggling up to me but turning his face to the camera, & I had to keep trying to get him to turn the right way without saying anything obvious. And the photographer kept saying ‘You just keep right on smiling and talking, Miss Struther.’ ‘Keep smiling’ – my God, I wanted to cry all the time … I managed not to cry during that, but when the singing class of the school began singing ‘London Bridge is falling down, my fair lady’ which is for me the quintessence of Heimweh, I’m afraid I pretty well broke down. Not in their sight, but in Miss Rowe’s office … [That same evening, she gave another lecture, to 1,000 people.] I spoke for one and a half hours to an absolutely tops audience … I think I had more applause here than I’ve ever had before – maybe my technique is improving; I know I stand more still & speak more flowingly than I used to. Then half an hour of questions (good ones, too, giving lots of opportunities for stories & wisecracks & sly digs at U.S. class distinctions, etc.) Then a biggish party at a ‘Byoodiful Home’, where I drank punch and was forced by Edna Rowe to read some of my poems … I went back to my hotel at 12.45 and thought, Now the Day is Over … But the telephone rang … It was Harold [Harley, Editor of the Toledo Times], asking if I’d like to come over to his room and have a nightcap. So I said I’d come for 10 minutes. I went, & stayed till 3 a.m., lying on a sofa & discussing poetry, philosophy, medicine, psychology, love – with particular reference to his love life, not mine … To bed at 3.15, took a sleeping-pill (which I hadn’t for several nights) and planned to sleep till noon. I need hardly tell you that I woke up at 8.30. I am a little tired. (Department of British Understatement.)
One of the poems she read out at the ‘byoodiful home’ was a ballad she had just written, ‘The American Way of Life’:
I met an old man
The other day:
His eyes were small
And sharp and grey;
His paunch was fat
And his lips were thin,
And his cheeks were as dry
As a rattler’s skin.
And all the time
As he talked and ate,
In went victuals
And out came hate.
Like a burst of hail,
Like a creek in spate –
His own particular
Hymn of Hate.
‘I don’t know whether
You share my views,
But it makes me mad
When I read the news.
Helping the Russians
And helping the Jews …
Rationing sugar
And rationing shoes …
All these orders
And all these bans,
Cutting out coupons,
And counting cans.
Oh, I know – the war …
And I know – Lease-Lend …
But where is the whole thing
Going to end?
I view with fear
And deep misgiving
This change for the worse
In our manner of living:
In fact, as I frequently say to my wife,
We’re in danger of losing our own way of life –
Our own,
Known,
Sure,
Secure,
Great American way of life.’
Said I to him,
‘Well, that may be.
I’m only a guest
From across the sea,
And I’ve only been here
Two years or three;
But this is the way
It seems to me.
‘The men who founded
And built this land –
They didn’t do it
On food that was canned,
But on home-made broth,
And home-cooked hash
And hominy grits
And succotash.
The men who trudged
Through Cumberland Gap
Wore buckskin boots
And a coonskin cap;
And the men who crossed
The Great Divide,
They slept rolled up
In buffalo hide.
The things they owned
Were simple and few;
They used them well
And they made them do.
They made their own songs,
And they loved to sing ’em;
They thought their wives
Looked fine in gingham;
And though they ached
From their own day’s labours,
They were never too tired
To help their neighbours.
They’d strength in their arms
And breadth in their backs;
They won this land
With rifle and axe,
They followed their stars
And they earned their stripes,
And they didn’t have time
For groans and gripes.
‘Now I’ve travelled this land
Two years or three;
I love it next
To my own countree;
And from what I hear,
And from what I see,
This is the way
It seems to me:
‘Something was lost –
Not lost but hidden,
Like a sleeping hound
That wakes when it’s bidden;
But out of this danger and out of this strife
Is springing afresh your own way of life –
The plain,
Sane,
Old,
Bold,
True American Way of Life.’
She sent a copy of the poem to Eleanor Roosevelt, on the off-chance that she might like it.
‘LATE STAR FINAL! BLUE STREAK EDITION!’ she wrote to Dolf, at the end of her letter of 19 March. She enclosed the following:
The White House
Washington D.C.
Dear Miss Struther,
Many thanks for your letter & for the ballad. I love it! It is a grand answer. Would you be willing to have the President read it on his next broadcast?
Sincerely yours,
Eleanor Roosevelt
‘Oh boy, oh, boy, oh Jesus F. Christ … my cup is full (very nearly – if you were here it would be quite!). Oh, oh, oh I’m so excited. I called her up at once (as soon as I’d got my breath back) & talked to the sec. as she was out of town. You ought to have seen Anne’s [Jan’s secretary Anne Curtis Brown’s] face of utter deliberate gloating nonchalance as she put through the person-to-person call and heard the operator gulp.’
* * *
At the Academy Awards ceremony, Mrs Miniver won five Oscars: best actress (Greer Garson), best supporting actress (Teresa Wright), best directorial achievement (William Wyler), best written screenplay, and best achievement in black-and-white photography. Greer Garson made a long speech through her tears, thanking everyone, including the doctor who had brought her into the world.
She bought a new home in Los Angeles, 680 Stone Canyon, and her Miniver-esque life there was described by visiting journalists. ‘You feel as if you were walking into the Miniver home when you visit Greer Garson,’ wrote Mary C. McCall. ‘It’s a homely, mildly Tudor white brick manse secreted in its own little canyon through which a brook flows, with some artificial goading, under ancient sycamores.’ The rooms were panelled in bleached oak, with Scottish crests on the doors. Tea, by the poolside, included cucumber sandwiches, Banbury tarts and marmalade rolls, and Greer Garson loved to chat about her favourite poet, John Donne.
* * *
‘If you come to Washington,’ wrote Eleanor Roosevelt to Jan on 28 March 1943, ‘do let me know. Both my husband and I will be happy to see you.’
Jan replied: ‘Thank you for your lovely letter. It was sweet of you to write again, and as for the invitation, I am at a loss how to answer it except with the all-expressive phrase, “You bet”.’
To Dolf she wrote, ‘Will I go to Washington? Will I drop in on her and her old man? I have waited almost three years for this, and it has come exactly the way I hoped it would, without official wangling but through human recognition of a co-guerrilla fighting for the same cause.’
She stayed the night at the White House, as a guest of the Roosevelts, on 16 June 1943, and her hours there were perhaps the pinnacle of her ascent to fame and success. ‘Darling,’ she wrote to Dolf, on White House writing paper, ‘I am writing this IN LINCOLN’S BED (stark naked, incidentally, because it is a terribly hot night) … The President is a perfectly GORGEOUS man, more than up to my wildest hopes & much funnier than I ever imagined. Mixes an excellent cocktail (his own special, with his own hands), & you can say absolutely anything to him. We were just six of us, & I sat on his right, & we ate dinner on the terrace with softshell crab & strawberries & fireflies & lots of amusing talk (with serious undertones). There’s a bell by my bed with 3 buttons saying “Maid”, “Butler” & “Usher”. I can’t imagine what I could need an usher for, unless Lincoln walks. More when we meet. All my love.’
She sealed the letter to Dolf and began one straight away to Tony. To conceal her whereabouts from the Italian censors, she used her own blank paper and headed it ‘Casablanca’. Naked in Lincoln’s bed, dashing off letters to her lover and her husband, she felt in control of her parallel lives.
So desperate and determined was she to see Dolf that she was ready to jump at any opportunity to go to California. And one came. Louis B. Mayer wanted another box-office phenomenon like Mrs Miniver. He wanted Jan to write the original material for MGM to spin, once again, into Hollywood gold. It could be a sequel to Mrs Miniver, it could be something new – anything she liked, Mayer implored her, but please could she produce it soon?
Jan liked the idea: it was a good one in theory. She sat on trains with her pen poised over a blank sheet of paper, hoping a new character would walk onto it. She couldn’t write any more Mrs Miniver. She was becoming sick to death of Mrs Miniver, and she had lost the desire to describe married life. What she could write about was love – sudden, magical, illicit love, and wartime separation from the beloved, and living three thousand miles to the west of one’s husband and three thousand miles to the east of one’s lover; about exiled Jews, and the dreadful, paradoxical feeling that you half-wanted the war to end, and half-wanted it to carry on for as long as possible because it postponed the moment of having to make a heart-breaking decision.
But she couldn’t possibly write about that. It was deeply secret. Such a storyline from ‘happily married’ Jan Struther would cause a catastrophe in the family and a scandal across America. It was unthinkable. So she wrote to Dolf instead: ‘Darling, I adore Oklahoma. The train service was impossible y’day but I had the luck to be driven from Tulsa to Okla City – about 120 miles – along Route 66, & I got such secret delight out of passing places where we’d stopped to eat together.’ Or she wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt, describing inspiring sights she had seen. One of her favourite things about America were mailboxes, which had come into being through ‘R.F.D.’ – rural free delivery, which ensured that mail was delivered to every home across the country. The mail-boxes stood in coveys on the sides of roads, perched on top of crooked posts at all angles, each reminding you that there was a home and hearth to which it belonged, hidden along a drive or down a wooded path. With their rounded tops, mail-boxes seemed to Jan to be the ghosts of covered wagons, and she wrote to Mrs Roosevelt, ‘Much as I love almost the whole of this country, the two things I like best about it are FDR and RFD.’
But none of this got her any nearer to writing profit-making script material. Perhaps, Louis B. Mayer suggested, if Jan were actually to live in Hollywood for a few months, the muse might come to her. Surely, if she spent enough time fraternizing with script-writers, producers and film-stars in such magic surroundings, she could not fail to be inspired?
‘You bet’ was once again the gist of her reply. Paid to spend the summer in Los Angeles! She would bring the children with her, and Gracie, the daily, to do the housekeeping. She would be only a short drive away from Dolf, who was now stationed at his regiment’s headquarters at Culver City, in the personnel section. It was perfect. Their star seemed to be watching over them with amazing attentiveness.
The working holiday was doomed to fail, as Jan, had she thought it through properly, could have foreseen; but she was swept along by the power of the Culver City coincidence.
She was there, with Janet and Robert and black Gracie, from mid June to early September. It was sweltering in Los Angeles that summer: much hotter than California was supposed to be. The only way to cool down their soulless rented house (paid for by MGM) was to spray water over the roof. Janet and Robert were now fifteen and twelve – old enough to crave freedom and the company of friends. At number 1061 of an interminable road off the interminable Westwood Boulevard, they were isolated, and there was nothing much to do.
Mail-boxes like those Jan loved
Jan, in the mornings, sat looking out at other similarly soulless houses, trying to write the story for a book or film, but no story came. Rather than inspiring her, Hollywood had the opposite effect: it seemed to paralyse her creative spirit entirely. Partly, she was both physically and mentally tired: her months of travelling from city to city, and the endless succession of lectures and hotel rooms, were beginning to take their toll on her energies. And partly she was ‘blocked’ by the fact that the only storyline which preoccupied her at the moment was the one she must keep secret. But there was also a sort of cussedness in her, almost a wilful refusal at the last fence, which made her stall when success was so easily in her reach. All around her were movie moguls, producers and script-writers, hungry for her words. The conditions were too perfect: and the pressure was too great.
She took the children to a grand dinner at Louis B. Mayer’s mansion – Robert’s first-ever grown-up dinner party – and all the men went off and played pinochle in a darkened room fuggy with cigar smoke, and everyone drank too much, and Robert and Janet yearned to go home. Jan arranged for Janet to spend a tedious day on the beach with Shirley Temple. Jan and the children had breakfast with Groucho Marx, who wasn’t funny, and lunch with the screen ‘monster’ Boris Karloff, who was sweet. She went on her own one afternoon to see Greer Garson at 680 Stone Canyon, and was treated to tea with cream in first. Greer Garson was now a navy wife: she married Richard Ney in July 1943 (much to the disapproval of the press – Ney was fifteen years younger), and after the honeymoon he went to sea as Ensign Ney. Jan had much in common with Greer which she could not discuss.
Longing to proclaim her love for Dolf from the rooftops, Jan found a brazen (but oblique) way of doing so at a lecture in Los Angeles in aid of the United Jewish Appeal. She stood on a platform and spoke passionately about the plight of the Jews, with particular reference to a few individuals she knew well, giving them made-up names. Elizabeth, Max, Liesl and Willi, the characters whose plight she described, were disguised members of Dolf’s family held in Nazi concentration camps – cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents – and Jan loaded her lecture with heartbreaking detail. The lecture raised thousands of dollars from the wealthy Jewish audience: one member came up to Jan afterwards and said, ‘My dear, I feel PURRRGED.’
The ‘goldfish-bowl prison-visit’
Janet and Robert had no idea that nice Viennese Dolf, who came to visit them fairly often during the summer in Los Angeles, was anything more than a great friend of their mother’s. The pretence was faultlessly maintained, but it was a strain. This was admitted at the end of the holiday: ‘I’m glad you didn’t come to the house to say goodbye,’ Jan wrote to Dolf on 10 September. ‘I knew that if I had another harrowing farewell with you I should really vomit. I couldn’t bear to have another travesty of a meeting with you, with no time alone & no chance for even our eyes to kiss each other. Our relationship has stood up to so much, but I honestly think this sort of goldfish-bowl prison-visit period is the hardest of all. We shall be nearer together, I think, when geographically apart, than in this farcical set-up. But we have had some beautiful hours this summer, and we will have lots more, darling, somehow, somewhere. I know it.’
In this letter of 10 September 1943, there was the first hint that the balance of the relationship was changing: ‘It is you who keep up my morale, rather than the other way round.’ For nearly four years, Jan had been the dazzling one – the acclaimed author, the English beauty, sought-after wherever she went. Dolf had been the dazzled one: the penniless refugee, the addresser of envelopes, the lowly private in the Army, hardly able to believe that the illustrious Jan Struther could love him. But now, returning from the strained summer in California, Jan felt herself ageing and her powers of writing dwindling, and she knew that Dolf was becoming the stronger of the two.