For the Time Being (27 page)

And even that title is not in capital letters, although it would appear from the start of her life that she was all capital letters anyway. Born to patrician parents, Father a doctor, Mother a suffragette and more besides, she had siblings in quantity, was swamped with loving and plenty. A perfect example of an East Coast family of moderately comfortable means: never too rich, never too poor. Educated, educatable, together, sharing, loving intensely. A splendid way to begin; very useful for an actress. All this,
plus
the comforting chink and clink of pennies in the pocket, gives enormous courage and stability, even arrogance. You can turn down anything you like, without too much fear.

Thus her childhood was spent in the comfort and safety of a loving, rumble-tumble family. There was History, English, French, motorcars, golf clubs, tennis courts; and her father had the local
police chief as a patient. Useful for a learner-driver, a tom-boy, a determined young woman. Nannies, governesses and so on were followed by the elegance of Bryn Mawr, which she disliked and which did not seem to like her much either. But there she stood, educated, secure and sure of herself. Not bad for a budding actress. Better than being scooped up in some drug store on Sunset, or working at a gas station.

With a patrician background, a firm education, this striding young woman was also blessed with amazing beauty. A beauty manifested very early on, according to photographers, which would serve her without fail all her life. The astounding bones which gave her the determined, but beautiful, jawline, the high cheeks, the brow, the wide-set eyes. With a singular voice and a flaming head of hair, she hit the theatre. You cannot have better equipment than that to assault the capricious, cruel profession. And assault it she did; absurdly easily, it seems.

She never intended to fail and, for a time, she did not; but, naturally enough, she did. Failure was modified, hardly the wrist-slashing kind; slapping rather. None the less, to an arrogant creature it was daunting; making her sit back and reassess, then carry on again. Never one to fall with failure, she simply tripped. She learned hard.

It seems to me that she absorbed very easily. She read a script like a sheet of music, she saw Great Acting in simplicity. Here is her description of one of the greatest actresses in the American theatre, Laurette Taylor, in
The Glass Menagerie:

… she seemed to me to sort of sketch and be the inside of the part, the outside of the part: just indicate dialling the phone, indicate anything the audience had in its immediate experience, suggest it, let them get it, then get on with it, effortless, easy, then suffuse, illuminate the character.
One could never see the wheels go round.

The italics are mine.

That is perfect acting, the kind that many critics detest. It is disliked because they prefer a watch to have a glass back so that
they
can
see the wheels go round. That was not for Miss Taylor, nor for Miss Hepburn, and not for, perhaps, the greatest
film
-actor of all, Spencer Tracy. Of them she writes:

A few strokes here – there. No agony of preparation – like the Method – no constipation. They were born able to show you … make you watch. It WAS real life. That's what tore them apart.

And that is how it is. Accurate, on-the-nose reporting.

She married, a loving, kind, dullish fellow whom she loved – but to whom she did not stay married – all her life. She stuck it out in Hollywood, quietly hating it, but sensibly knowing that the work was there.

She had four idyllic years with Howard Hughes whom she both loved and admired greatly, but finally broke with him and led a solitary life until the arrival of Leland Hayward, a different fellow in every respect, but passionately loved, as indeed were all her men. Actually she is never unpassionate about
anything:
acting, love, making soup or purchasing a Maserati.

Finally, with Spencer Tracy, the passion reached a pitch of sheer, devoted, uncompromising, selfless love for almost thirty years. For this incredible man she sublimated the strident, arrogant, ambitious, flamboyant creature that had for some years made her box-office poison, gained her a fistful of Oscars, packed out legitimate theatres from New York to London and made her a triumphant, blinding Star.

She retired, more or less, into a small house at the bottom of George Cukor's garden on Cordell Drive. With the love of her life. Between them Cukor, Tracy and Hepburn brought to world screens some of the most elegant, funny and glorious films that had ever been seen:
Tlie Philadelphia Story, Adam's Rib, Born Yesterday,
among others.

She has an odd way of liking quite unlikeable people, from Louis B. Mayer to the cold David Lean with whom she worked on
Summertime,
giving the only performance with true heart in a Lean film since the somewhat irritating
Brief Encounter:
not only true
in heart but (amazing in a Lean film) heartbreakingly funny (an astonishing feat to pull off with a brilliant ‘Technical-Director').

Less-gifted directors have said that Miss Hepburn is ‘undirect-able', for which one has to thank God, having seen the effects of their work on others. She always went to work and did it
her
way when the going got bumpy; and you cannot fault her work on
Summertime
or the enchantment, delight and love she offers in
The African Queen.
After Cukor, whom she adored and who was her greatest friend in California, she was her own best director.

Tracy never married her; a Roman Catholic, he would not divorce his wife, who always thought Miss Hepburn was ‘merely a rumour'. He died, making a cup of tea in the kitchen when she was not, at that precise moment, with him. She heard him shuffle about, clink a pot, stumble and fall. His life had ended. She got back into the saddle again and rode on. Brave, indomitable, tough. The most courageous, beautiful, fearless ‘terrible lizard' of her time.

Oh! My golly! How lucky WE have been to have her! Thrilling!

Daily Telegraph,
28 September 1991

The World of Minack: A Place for Solitude
by Derek Tangye
(Michael Joseph)

Having lived abroad for more than two decades, I find I am greatly out of touch with many things in the UK. It has its complications. I did, with yearly regularity when my parents were alive, return to see them, have my annual check-up, buy a few tins of tongue or a brand of tea I preferred, and go to Hatchards for a stack of books to keep me occupied through the long, sometimes harsh, Provence winters.

Somehow or other, however, I missed out on Derek Tangye and all his works; and
The World of Minack
sat me down slack-jaw'd with admiration and surprise.

Mr Tangye, long before clever Peter Mayle discovered a sort-of-Provence for the urban-lost, opened up Cornwall and, in consequence, has caused enormous happiness and joy to the baby-bunny lovers and all those who think, as the subtitle of this present volume suggests, that they are seeking ‘A Place for Solitude'.

His book is a compilation of ‘favourite passages, many of them chosen by readers, from sixteen of the Minack Chronicles'. Sixteen, you may whisper to yourself; well, that's a lot of books on the one subject. I had no idea so many volumes could be, and indeed have been, mined from so thin a seam.

A cottage on the Cornish coast, a sea view, all swamped with daffodils and potato fields. I did not know, as now I do, that hundreds of worshipping readers make pilgrimages there, that these slender books sell in trillions and that so much bounty had been denied me for so long. I admire them, certainly, but I close the covers in baffled silence.

Mr Tangye has tapped an amazing ‘nerve'. He writes for all those
who have never been able to manage, for one reason or another, the lemming-urge to get up and run away from the dull, mediocre, noisy, agonizing pressures of city life. The desire just to clear off to that ‘magic dream cottage', or to accept the ‘I MUST have that' gut-reaction to a place suddenly seen round a bend in a country lane or buried deep in a (usually damp and always dark) bluebell wood.

It is, one is always assured, a return to our roots. Once we get to our dream, instead of fighting British Rail and its mostly sullen and ill-spoken servants, we can wrestle joyously with the climate, the beasts of the field, the elements generally.

This is exactly what Mr Tangye and his extremely pretty wife did years ago. They wrenched themselves out of the rat-race (it is always called that by the rats who get trapped in it) and started their lives anew on a wind-swept point of land sticking into the sea. And they discovered they had tapped a continually running spring of
nostalgia and longing, which would slake the thirst of the thousands of readers lost, for one reason or another, in the monotony of Hendon Central. It is persuasive stuff. Consider this:

When disgruntled people in the cities march to meetings on May Day holding high their banners of protest, the white flowers of the blackthorn lie in drifts in Minack woods and along the shallow valley which slopes towards the sea.

Pretty good, if all you have is a view over someone else's roof, and they are chucking beer cans at each other on the street below.

Escape to the sound of howling wind in the chimney, the crackle and sigh of logs in the hearth, the womb-like feeling of snugness and safety, the touch of good earth under the fingernails and a good stew, of local produce you have nurtured yourself. Satisfaction! An escape to what-will-never-be. Dreamland. Most people would absolutely hate it if they actually had it; they have lost the habit of that life, lost the way on the road.

There are sad bits, too, in Mr Tangye's story, which is right and proper for a ‘good read'. A loving assistant on the farm dies suddenly, taking everyone by shocked surprise. ‘A year ago she was celebrating her prize for bunched violets. She was so pleased with that win,' they are told, and the lady was ‘unconscious even when she fell off her bicycle'.

But mostly it is a happy saga; you will hear the gulls, smell the salt spray, see the nodding daffodils and, very probably, ‘laugh and cry' all the way through. You could not want more. Nor do you, so it seems; the amazing sales have quite proved that. And now the World of Minack, owing to all your efforts and love, has become part of English heritage.

Daily Telegraph,
23 November 1991

A towering, magisterial, epic hurricane of a book has roared into the fat-end of the year and sent the dust, the candy-wrappings and the dead leaves of the seasons swirling into oblivion and the Colefax and Fowlers of chic Lit. London scattering back to their wallpapers and tapestries. John Osborne's
Almost a Gentleman: An Autobiography, Vol. II 1955-1966
(Faber) is what a book should be like, how a book should be written, and shows how words can explode with muscular magic. It is a complete triumph.

Daily Telegraph,
23 November 1991

They Tied a Label on
My
Coat
by Hilda Hollingsworth (Virago)
A Time for Love
by Shirley Anne Field (Bantam Press)

In the late summer of 1939 I was eighteen and awaiting my call-up papers. This slack period, for me, was taken up by being sent off with a pretty girl named Cissie in her red MG sports car stuffed with gas-masks into which we forced elderly and resisting ‘cottagers' who lived beyond the village confines: ‘Dad ‘ere ‘as ‘ad ‘is beard nor what he were twenty an' ‘e ain't about to let you chop it orf now!'

We were not, I fear, very successful all the way from Chailey to Piltdown, which was the geographical limit of our endeavours.

We were suffused with pride in ‘doing our bit for the war', and when the gas-mask caper ended we set to, along with our willing hands, to ‘make good' a couple of aged barns in which to shelter, provisionally, the hordes expected to descend upon our timid village. This was the time not of the cuckoo, turtle or swallow, but of the Evacuee – a new word in our lexicon and one which struck terror into anxious hearts. It also bore the full weight of scorn, loathing, curiosity and dread. There was precious little compassion flying around.

At this time Hilda Hollingsworth and her sisters Roberta and Pat were being readied to leave their homes in the East End of London for ever. They were destined to be a part of this new group, the Evacuees. Dressed in their best, a paper carrier-bag of personal possessions (change of knickers and vest, one clean dress) in their hands, a gas-mask slung around their necks, a label tied to their coats, they were marched off, with thousands of others, to an unknown destination.

No one, it seemed, knew exactly where they were going, not
even their parents. All they knew was that it was to a Safe Area far from the expected destruction by high explosives and instant gassing. Unfortunately, Hilda and her siblings did not reach our immaculate barns or our pretty, kindly, anxious Lace-Up-Shoes-Middle-Class village. They passed us by: we got an upgraded lot from Croydon and Cricklewood. Nice enough, to be sure, but not East Enders.

Hilda and her sisters were sent straight on to an astonished Kent, which rather considered itself to be Front Line. But they were welcomed and treated kindly and almost started to enjoy it all, until Kent in fact became a Danger Area and they were moved about the country like a grubby pack of cards in a bar-room poker game. Hilda, because of her incredible courage, resilience and strength, held what remained of her family firmly together, with love, sense and a blinding belief in belonging. She was ten years old.

Eventually, after two comparatively pleasant ‘postings', they were sent off again out of harm's way to a mean, bigoted, dank, suspicious, On-The-Knees-Twice-A-Day-At-Chapel mining village in the dead heart of Wales. And dead it was. After the rumble-tumble of the East End, the gregariousness and warmth, any sense of happiness swiftly drained away and childhood came to a terrifying end. The acute distress experienced here was quite unique. The cruelty, even viciousness, of the people among whom they had to live was extraordinary and utterly ‘foreign', as indeed
they
appeared to be to the people in the village.