YOU MIGHT HAVE THOUGHT that with love, fortune, fame, a devoted nest of friends, and a couple of occasionally charming children that my mother would have been content, even happy. But there you would be mistaken. She was as funny and outrageous as ever, she went to parties, she gave parties, she appeared on television, she had written a best seller, and for the first time in her life she could buy just about anything she pleased for anybody who pleased her. Freddie knew his place, caused no trouble, and slept without complaint on his collapsed mattress (the legs had fallen off his bed long ago, transforming it into an impromptu futon) downstairs. She had the house in France, where she could be alone with Hylan whenever she felt like it. She was a success, and she had a man who loved her. What more could a girl possibly want?
A naive question, I know, and one posed not by me but in a letter from an old boyfriend called Archie Albright, who lived in New York and had just read Jane:
You play games with me when you reject the suggestion that it is remotely autobiographical … but it is a very good book, and literary critic though I’m not, I have always regarded you as one of the most articulate people I have ever known. You use words, even little ones, so incredibly well. Anyway, I am enormously pleased for you. Do you feel any different—do you feel happier—to be rich and “successful” at the same time?
Even when my mother’s life was going better than she could ever have dreamed it would, the furies were still there. Her volatility and bouts of depression were merely signs that they were getting bored and restless, and felt like a bit of an outing in the nice fresh air aboveground. Of course not everybody was allowed to meet them. They restricted their social visits to my mother’s immediate family, and to a tiny handful of fortunate friends.
Much as Hylan loved my mother—and he truly did—he was sometimes stunned by her behavior.
“The fearlessness and wit could instantly morph into a nasty remark which would be amazingly mindless in terms of collateral damage.”
My mother, quite naturally, was better acquainted with the furies than anybody else, and had tried over the years, with the help of shrinks, to evict these troublesome guests from her house. When I was about fifteen she once said that she had never found a shrink as smart as she was. So what was the point?
At eighteen my mother had written a long letter to her closest friend, Bunny Lang, who was one of the very few people who had ever been allowed behind the fortifications. In it she described her family and childhood.
Darling, you hit your head square on numerous nails in your analysis of me—however what I add up to is, and always has been very clear to me. I was a very unhappy, sensitive little girl—I was gawky for years and was continually overshadowed by my brother whom everyone adored and who deserved all the good things he got—that I wanted. My father and mother hated each other for as long as I can remember; my father drank heavily and my mother has never been completely well, and recently has been getting worse rapidly. [She must have meant her mental, not physical health. Ox-strong, my grandmother died at ninety-eight.]
My brother had—call it character—enough to study, never waste time etc and of course has made a success of it—I didn’t. We didn’t have much money and it was a struggle to keep him in college, so I gave up and laughed my way through high school—literally never brought a book home—and decided I would get the love and security I longed for in my own way.
Once years ago my mother told me she despised me … and it did something to an eleven year old that could never be repaired. After the life my mother and father have had together I don’t have much faith in love. I don’t have much faith in anything. I am a very discouraged, bewildered person who seems doomed to be unhappy.
I know I am an awful listener but I don’t mean to be rude. And I admit that I don’t like to be told things—the usual way of people who realize they are not the hot shots that they try desperately to believe they are. Stanislavsky again—“If you believe it, the audience will.”
So even at eighteen she knew she had to be an actress. A glittering carapace was constructed to impress and entertain the world, and if other people fell for it, which they did, maybe she could trick herself into believing in it as well. But not really. She was not deluded, and I think that as she got older and life got tougher, it became harder and harder to keep the mask in place. The furies would go walkabout more frequently, and the strain of trying to contain them must have been exhausting.
From an early age I remember being told by my mother that my grandmother was crazy (my aunt and uncles believed this too) and not just insane but nasty, bitter, destructive, and foul-tempered as well. She screamed at her sweet, harmless husband (no wonder the poor man consoled himself with cocktails) and withheld from her children the love and encouragement they craved. Apparently her own mother had also been “unbalanced,” and had treated her family in much the same way. Could this delightful duo’s behavior be attributed in part to their shared genes? A terrifying thought that surely must have crossed my mother’s mind and was probably instantly suppressed. Oscar Wilde (so clever, so funny, so tragic) had always been one of her special heroes, and she loved to quote his awful prophecy about mothers and daughters, making me squeal, right on cue, in mock horror. But when I quoted it back to her, she didn’t laugh.
Like that maddening little girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead, my mother could skip from one extreme to the other—leapfrogging right over that dull bit in between—with greater agility and conviction than anybody I’ve ever known. Good Mummy rescued a penniless young friend from a dismal summer in London by sending him a plane ticket so he could come and stay with us in France for as long as he liked. She visited an old friend in the hospital, bringing some of her own homemade leek-and-potato soup—as well as a china bowl, a linen napkin, and an elegant Georgian silver spoon to eat it with. (The spoon was left behind as a birthday present.) Wildly generous, when she went shopping for herself—whether for shoes at Charles Jourdan, cashmere sweaters at Harrods, or a painting at Bonham’s auction house—she never could resist getting something for her sister and me, as well as various friends along the way. Checks were sent off to any organization that helped animals, cash was surreptitiously concealed inside an innocent container (once she painted a walnut shell gold, hung it on the tree with all the other ornaments, and when I opened it there was a hundred-pound note), and at Christmas no lonely soul was safe from her absolute insistence that they come and spend the day with us.
Even though she was an actress, the kindness and generosity were not acts. She knew what it felt like to be unhappy, insecure, and to have no money, and she had a visceral empathy for, and a desire to help, anybody who found themselves inhabiting the despairing underbelly of life. Her acting talents were confined to dazzling the world with her wit and brilliance. And since she was a natural writer, her letters were employed to this end. Some people, like my father, stuck them in leather-bound albums; some read hilarious extracts out loud to their families; while others kept them tied up in ribbons in old shoeboxes, and after her death many of them were returned to me, where they now live in a basket at the back of my closet. Years ago I remember running into one of her friends at a party in New York, who couldn’t stop talking about all the wonderful letters my mother had written her, which were carefully preserved in a special drawer in her desk.
“You are so lucky, you must have many more of them than I do!”
But no, I don’t. Curiously I have none at all, and neither does my brother or my aunt. The letters were part of the glittering carapace, so what would have been the point in sending them to people who had seen through it long ago?
LOOKING BACK, I had no understanding at the time of the depth of my mother’s discontent (Hylan was probably the only person who did), and with all the insouciant, and I hope forgivable, selfishness of youth I was far more concerned with what was going on in my own life. Being George Weidenfeld’s publicity director may have been fun—the books, the parties, the fascinating writers—but it was starting to bore me. Maybe I should look for a new job? A friend, Jerry Kiehl, whom I had met in Paris while staying with the triste Monsieur Bretiane, was one of the producers of a huge, ambitious documentary project called The World at War. Whenever we had lunch in some Italian dive in Soho, l would listen jealously as he told me all about his research at the British Library, the interview he had done with Albert Speer, and his discovery, in the bowels of the Imperial War Museum, of some never-before-seen footage of Hitler stomping around Paris with his favorite architect. Yes, this is what I should be doing. Instead of hustling television producers to interview argumentative Israeli generals, I would switch sides and become a producer myself.
The host of the only program on television that took a serious interest in the arts, he also somehow found time to write searing, sensitive books, in the manner of D. H. Lawrence, set somewhere in the north of England—not that I had bothered to read any of them. He was about six feet tall, with eyes every bit as sensitive as his novels, and hair as thick and dark, but far more lustrous, than any pit pony’s mane. Just the man I was looking for. He may not have known it yet, but he was destined to be the magic key that would open up my new career in television. Armed with a glass of warm white wine and a laughable amount of misplaced confidence, never stopping to think whether the gentleman in question had the slightest interest in meeting me, I barged through the crowded party and introduced myself. Sadly, our conversation never did get around to what job on his program might best suit my talents, because he made a lightning escape, leaving me alone with the man he’d been standing with.
From that moment until the end of the evening we never stopped talking. It was that absolutely fatal combination of cleverness and funniness, but in its most extreme form. Lunch the next day turned into lunch once, sometimes twice a week, and still we never shut up. We always went to the same restaurant, Bianchi’s on Frith Street, we always sat at the same corner table upstairs where nobody could see us (known as the adulterers’ table, except we weren’t), and I always had the same dish (brains au beurre noir—why waste time with the menu, when we could be talking and laughing instead?). Peter worked at the BBC, where he made documentaries, apparently about anything that caught his fancy. How about a series on the alternative press around the world? We’ll get Harry Evans to front it, and I’ll go to San Francisco and New York to do Rolling Stone, then I’ll need at least ten days in Paris for Le Canard Enchaîné, after that I fly direct to Mexico City for Proceso, and from there I’ll come back to London to do Private Eye?
“What a brilliant idea! Off you go, you clever chap, and don’t worry about how long it takes or what it costs. Nothing but the best for the BBC.”
That seemed to be how it worked.
Our innocent lunches went on for several months until one day something changed. The fateful turning point came after a particularly lengthy session, involving too much wine, the usual brains (his and the poor dead calf’s one on my plate), and a meandering conversation encompassing Freud, Peter’s father’s childhood in Vienna, his halcyon days at Harvard studying with Noam Chomsky, and his mother’s relationship with Oskar Kokoschka, who had painted her portrait. Christ, it was after four, time to get back to the Weidenfeld office above the clapped-out movie theater in Clapham Junction.
Rather gallantly he offered to drive me in his brand-new claret-colored MG (affectionately called the “Jew’s canoe” by my dear friend Emma Soames, which only reinforced Peter’s theory about the amiable, happy-go-lucky anti-Semitism of the English upper classes. Still, he did laugh.). The “Jew’s canoe” weaved its way toward the South Bank via Parliament Square, where it stopped obediently at a red light beside the sober, gray walls of the Treasury building. Then, quite suddenly, its driver leaped out, leaving the door wide open and the engine running. What the hell was he doing? I couldn’t drive, the light was about to change, and the cars behind us had already started honking.
A quick pee—that was all it took to make me fall in love. The chutzpah, the recklessness, he’d taken a chance—it was exactly what my mother would have done if only she’d been a man.
“Ooh, he’s got ever such a nice voice, that fellow who keeps calling for you. I’ve always been partial to a man’s voice; tells you everything you need to know about them. I think you should marry him.”
Maureen, the kindly and, as it turned out, prescient lady at the office switchboard, spoke the truth. Peter had the most seductive voice on earth, and she hadn’t even heard what he could do with it beyond, “Please may I speak to Gully?” And she hadn’t seen his hands, as beautiful as a Michelangelo drawing, or his almond-shaped green eyes, or his smile. She didn’t know that when I was with him I felt as though I’d finally come home to where I belonged.
OH, TO BE YOUNG, in love, and in Paris—and I was. No more “Towering Infernos,” but rather an old town house (now a hotel) just off the rue Jacob that had been divided up somewhat haphazardly into a warren of rooms, wallpapered in faded toile de Jouy, with uncertain plumbing and a cagelike elevator that cranked its way up to the top floor, where we collapsed in a daze of happiness on our sagging bed. Once again Peter had come up with an idea for a documentary that the BBC could not resist. Sitting around one afternoon, with an inspiring bottle of Glenlivet between them on the desk, he had told the head of his department about a book called Montaillou, by the French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie that he had just finished reading.
The title referred to a village in Languedoc where, during the early fourteenth century, Jacques Fournier, the bishop of Pamiers (later Pope Benedict XII), had led the Church’s inquisition into the inhabitants’ obstinate dedication to the Cathar heresy. While snuffling around in the Vatican archives, Le Roy Ladurie had found the bishop’s astonishingly detailed notes on the case, which illuminated every aspect of these poor, deluded, and doomed peasants’ lives—what they ate, whom they slept with, how many sheep they had, all their innermost desires and beliefs—and from this had fashioned his brilliant book. Peter was going to take Ladurie back to Montaillou, where they would shoot some footage of sheep and goats wandering about the hills, and talk at great length to the descendants of these brave heretics, most of whom still spoke the ancient local language (La langue d’Oc) and bore the same names as their ancestors.
Now, if that didn’t keep the viewers glued to their television screens, Peter didn’t know what would.
“Sounds splendid! We’re bloody well not going to be dragged down to the level of those ghastly commercial channels. We need to maintain our standards. Nothing but the best for the BBC [etc.].”
Peter could not have agreed more.
MONSIEUR LE PROFESSEUR was everything a distinguished historian should be. Silver-haired, sexy in an elderly Frenchman way—tweed jacket, suede patches at the elbow, mouse-colored corduroy trousers, an old Hermès tie—supremely erudite, never boring, and delighted to take us to his local bistro for dinner. Bien sûr, he knew my Oxford tutor Theodore Zeldin, and yes, of course Claude Lévi-Strauss was an old friend, who had inspired him to set forth on his particular path, uncovering the hidden lives of forgotten ordinary people who had been unjustly neglected by old-fashioned historians’ obsession with the nefarious doings of kings, queens, and emperors. Oui, s’il vous plaît, a silver platter of oysters (resting on their green mattress of popping seaweed), a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, and then we will look at the menu again. Would Mademoiselle prefer the civet de lièvre or the canard aux navets, or maybe she was more in the mood for a simple coq au vin? Mademoiselle was lost in love, for Peter, for the Professor, for the two sad ladies at the next table, for the fussy old waiter, for the drooping tulips in a jug at the end of the bar, for Paris, for the entire world, and could not have cared less what she ate next—or if she ate anything else ever again.
Sometime later that night we decided to get married.
LIKE ANY AMBITIOUS Bostonian matron in the Gilded Age who had dragged her daughter to London for the season, my mother assumed I would “marry well.” She had given me all the things she’d never had as a child—pretty clothes, deep love, an education, stability, and an easy entrée into the sunny uplands of London social life. And what did I do? I went to Paris with some man she had never met and came back and told her I was going to marry him.
“Is he rich?”
A very good question. I’d forgotten to ask. But I had to admit (but not to her) that it seemed unlikely. The BBC was definitely a bad sign, and so were the émigré parents, who had left Vienna just before the Anschluss to make a new life in London. Can’t pack a castle in a suitcase, always assuming you had one to pack. In fact Peter’s mother came from what I suppose you’d call the landed gentry, and before the war there had been lots of servants, a brick factory, and a hunting lodge on a small estate in northern Germany, but by the time Mr. Hitler had finished with his shenanigans, everything had disappeared. Peter’s father’s story was even worse. A penniless Viennese Jew (he had been even more of a hit with his wife’s mother than Peter was with mine) who through his not inconsiderable wits had turned himself into a publisher. Not an easy journey and, alas, not necessarily a wildly profitable one either. It was not a pretty picture.
But what about the house in Hampstead? Apparently it was so big that Peter had divided it into two flats, and kindly allowed his elderly, and presumably hard-up, parents to live in the spacious ground-floor one, which opened onto a lovely garden full of apple trees. Sometimes we would spend the night there, and as I nodded off to sleep, I would think of those nice people in their cozy flat downstairs, and marvel that they had managed to produce a son with such a huge heart, overflowing with so much parental love. What a good father he would be to our children. (The situation, oddly enough, turned out to be quite the reverse. In fact, it belonged to his kind parents who allowed Peter to live in the upstairs flat, but when they died, we inherited the house, so what was a mere slip of the tongue?)
However, the fact remained that Peter was not a half black socialist duke who had set up a foundation to save Africa’s entire population of dogs from disease and starvation and had recently been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
And for that my mother never forgave him.
THE WIND RUSTLED in the willows, boxing-glove clouds scudded by, baby ducks bobbed about in the river, and a beet-faced man in a boat called Fancy That chugged by and turned to wave at the wedding party lined up on the dock. The bride was leaning over to adjust the sash on the little girl’s dress, so she didn’t see him, but the tall older gentleman with a sunny wide-open smile—must be her dad—waved back, and so did all the others, except for that lady in the sunglasses, who didn’t look too pleased with the proceedings and kept her arms folded in front of her. The man in the boat thought back to his own wedding day, and felt a twinge of masculine sympathy for the nice-looking young man with the flower in his buttonhole—must be the groom—who had no bloody idea what he had just let himself in for.
Somewhat surprisingly lunch moved along smoothly from champagne on the terrace, with something or other to eat in the dining room in between, and then on to more champagne with dessert. The two publishers—Peter’s father and Colin Haycraft—talked books, my mother-in-law charmed Freddie, and Nick, an assiduous scholar of all things punk, kept some sort of conversation going with my Wells brother, Christopher, an international relations major at Columbia. And there were my mother and father laughing away together—she even had her hand on his arm—the thing that every child of divorced parents always longs to see. Peter was chatting with my beautiful stepmother, and I gazed around the table, lost in some inane reverie about the miraculous melding together of all the members of my funny family.
Wreathed in yellow rosebuds, pale green leaves trailing prettily across its snowy icing, the wedding cake rose up in sedate tiers, a silver knife sitting by its side. My father got to his feet, tapped the side of his glass, and I heard my mother mutter, “Oh Christ, he’s going to make a speech.” Yes, that did seem to be his boring, conventional, sentimental idea. The father of the bride had come flying across the Atlantic for his only daughter’s wedding, and he’d quite like to say a few words on this happy occasion, if that was okay with his ex-wife.
A few months later Peter persuaded the BBC that he would be just the man to run their office in New York.
“What a good idea! There’s quite a nice house in Greenwich Village that comes with the job; don’t stint on the entertaining, frightfully important to show the BBC flag in America. I’m sure your wife will be a splendid hostess. Off you both go. Bon voyage!”