Madeleine (13 page)

Madeleine, too, was under strain. She was still trying to find a proper job and she was using sleeping pills. Things improved when she found work at the university bookshop. She was to work five days a week, with Fridays and Sundays off, and at last she would have an income rather than relying on savings.

But just a few days after Madeleine started her new job and less than three months into their marriage, the couple argued. This was nothing new, but this time Chris retreated to the study, taking with him a bottle of Madeleine's sleeping tablets. He spread the pills out on the desk and then swallowed half of them. Madeleine discovered him, blue in the face, and he was rushed by ambulance to the Palo Alto State Hospital. Four attendants held him down as doctors pumped his stomach. When he regained consciousness, Madeleine was there. His first words to her were ‘I'm sorry I did not make a proper job of it.'
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It must have been devastating for Madeleine. In Sydney, she had been aware Chris's moods could swing, but now she was far away from family and friends. In the past she could rely on Chris, but now the future must have looked uncertain. There had been silence around the details of Sylvette's death, but she knew enough of her mother's history with sleeping tablets to be alarmed by this latest development.

Yet, on the surface, life quickly returned to normal. After a couple of days, Chris came home from the hospital. Madeleine was at work at the bookshop so, still in his dressing-gown, he took a cab back to their apartment. He began attending weekly psychotherapy sessions, with a month or so to pull himself together before term commenced at the end of September. There was little or no discussion of what lay beneath Chris's behaviour. The young couple were becoming practised at papering over the cracks in their relationship.

Madeleine was cheered by a letter from Colette in London. Her sister was ‘adoring' the metropolis, and Madeleine wrote to Joan that she was ‘so pleased to get in touch with her again'.
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But life at Stanford was still a challenge. Madeleine told Joan that she enjoyed her work at the bookstore but arrived home ‘terribly tired & not feeling terribly prosy or creative'. The Tillams were short of money and were watching a lot of television rather than going out. But the cultural offerings of the area beckoned and Madeleine hoped that ‘by mid-October we'll be more straightened out & able to do more'.
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A couple of weeks later Chris typed a long letter to Joan, and filled it with details of things seen—including a football game between Stanford and the Navy—and books read. He did not mention his recent crisis and the letter was chatty but distant. Term would start the following day, the holidays had been ‘pretty quiet', the car was costing Chris more in oil than in gas, and the weather was ‘getting a bit cooler'. Madeleine had a twenty per cent discount on books from the bookshop where she worked and she and Chris were buying up. Chris was reading ‘a Canadian English professor, Marshall McLuhan, who has some revolutionary ideas about how the electronic media are shaping our sensibilities'.
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It was a time of cultural and political upheaval in the US. In August, Congress had passed the Voting Rights Act, which finally outlawed the discrimination against blacks that remained in several US states. It was history in the making. That year also saw a dramatic escalation of American involvement in the Vietnam conflict amid controversy at home. Stanford was relatively quiet, a ‘hotbed of rest', as Henry Breitrose recalled.
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But across the bay, Chris told his mother, Berkeley was ‘the spiritual home of practically all civil-disobedience groups in America. It's here, on the west coast, that feeling against US Vietnamese policy runs strongest and there are the biggest and most regular demonstrations.'
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The cultural change transforming America was taking shape in California and it was impossible to ignore. The Summer of Love—when 100,000 hippies flooded into the Haight-Ashbury area of San Francisco—was two years away, but sex, drugs and creativity were breaking out all over. ‘There is a bit of a local cult here, centring on the author Ken Keesey [sic],' Chris told Joan. ‘Keesey has written one novel so far,
One Flew Over
the Cuckoo's Nest
.'
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At Stanford:

one meets characters who appeared in the books of Jack Kerouac, there is a flourishing drug coterie—and a lot of serious investigation goes on as well into the whole psychedelic question. Rumours at the moment of a campaign to be launched this fall at Berkeley, over the bay from SF, for the legalisation of marijuana…
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In the second semester, Chris was much happier. The emphasis of the course, with new lecturer George Stoney, a well-known documentary maker from New York, suited Chris, and his work improved.

Now Madeleine was the watchful, wary one. The power had shifted slightly in Chris's favour, now that he had ‘punished' Madeleine by taking an overdose.
¹⁶
She could no longer take his fortitude and devotion for granted. If, as she later claimed, she had married Chris in search of security, she must have had cause to wonder in those first months at Stanford as her new husband became more independent.

Madeleine made an impression on campus. She was far more memorable than her quiet and civilised husband, according to Chris's classmate Tom Bell. She was an extrovert who loved to talk literature and ‘spoke in complete sentences, if not paragraphs. There was a kind of acute articulateness to her speech.' Tom recalled that her style of dressing set her apart: she was ‘carefully put together'.
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She smoked constantly, usually unfiltered cigarettes such as Gauloises. Jill Roehrig, who was now back in San Francisco, noted how Madeleine flicked the tiny shreds of tobacco from her lips with the edge of a fingernail.
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Madeleine had always yearned to be a
femme fatale
.

She also proved to be a consummate performer in her letters. At the end of October, she wrote to Joan extolling Chris's virtues as a filmmaker and artist:

He really is remarkably clever, I don't think it can be too long before we are not the only people aware of it…He wrote a wonderful poem on Sunday, to cheer me up when I was feeling ‘blue'. He is working very hard & doing a lot of reading & I think, finding life altogether stimulating.
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Madeleine made some ‘lovely muffins' for her appreciative husband and announced she wanted a white kitten for her birthday. The praise for Chris was just a touch excessive, even for a young bride.

Madeleine and Joan swapped book recommendations and ideas. ‘I don't care very well for H. Miller,' Madeleine told her mother-in-law:

I think his ideas are a little simple, but I haven't read
Maroussi
—Chris says it's wonderful. I too didn't care for
Lady Chat's Lover
—in fact I found it a very poor novel. What I really love is Henry James—please try, say,
The Portrait of a Lady,
and tell me how you find it. Have you read any of Marianne Moore's poetry? You'd love her.
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After a Thanksgiving spent with Jill Roehrig, Madeleine was in bed with a cold, rereading Blake and encouraging Joan to have a go at the modern Greek poets Cavafy and Seferis.
²¹

Chris's life had taken off. He told his mother he was ‘way past my ears with work' and thrilled by George Stoney's leadership. ‘The points he keeps hammering home are psychological rather than technical…you can't make a film by standing on the sidelines—you have to be in the thick of it…'
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Chris was making two films: his own three-and-a-half-minute ‘boy doesn't meet girl' film featuring Jill Roehrig and an MG; and another with a colleague, Saad Raheem, about the campus of the University of California being built at Santa Cruz, sixty-five kilometres away on the coast. Students and staff were living in trailers among the redwoods while the residential colleges were built. Chris wrote an expanded treatment for his film and successfully applied for $500 from the University of California to reshoot it as a ten-minute documentary.

Madeleine had a nine-to-five routine at the bookshop, but Chris spent hours in the basement editing room at the university. ‘Time passes quickly and sometimes I'll go down at 7 p.m., and emerge a little before dawn,' he wrote home. ‘It's common practice for someone editing his film to take a sleeping bag & toothbrush & camp there.'
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Madeleine never hinted at it in her letters, but she must have been lonely in this period as her husband's horizons expanded.

Colette turned twenty-one in December 1965, and Madeleine and Chris sent greetings to her in London. Madeleine made a multi-leaved card with US dollars hidden between each sheet and Chris sent a poem to his sister-in-law:

Nor think to falsify your hair with wigs or rinses, tints or dyes

Forbear such foolishness for men, low creatures, find

less interest in a head than a behind.
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Christmas ‘wasn't quite Christmas' that year for Madeleine and Chris, who felt ‘rather bereaved, having Christmas in a cold & strange climate'. Madeleine had never professed a great love of Australia but, after six months in the US, she was homesick and hoped to be back in Sydney for Christmas 1966, although she admitted this looked less likely. Playing the dutiful wife, at least on paper, she wrote: ‘Chris's career comes absolutely first & if it is necessary for him to stay on a bit longer here, then stay we must.'
²⁵
Chris had finished his short film, and Madeleine announced it was ‘a lovely thing with perfect jazz music score and titles, all of which should gain him an A grading'.
²⁶

The Tillams were disappointed that they received only one Christmas card from Australia. Madeleine had little correspondence from Clifton Gardens and noted that Val's letters were ‘somewhat staid', while Ted didn't often find time to write. Joan was a far more dedicated correspondent. She and Madeleine exchanged letters independently of Chris, an indication of a closeness that exceeded the usual relationship between in-laws.

In many ways, Madeleine grew closer to Joan as she sensed her husband drawing away. In the new year, Chris grew a beard and Madeleine reported he was turning into ‘rather an extrovert' who worked very hard and was ‘rather witty & loves film-making'.
²⁷
The power was moving further away from Madeleine.

The couple soaked up the culture on offer. They heard Rosalyn Tureck play Bach and listened rapt through four encores; they went to a John Coltrane and Theolonius Monk concert
²⁸
and another with Dizzy Gillespie and the Modern Jazz Quartet; they saw the film of
My Fair
Lady
, which Madeleine found ‘frightfully disappointing' apart from the Cecil Beaton costumes, the Ascot scene and the performance of actor Gladys Cooper as Henry Higgins's mother. Cooper was ‘quite perfect, & she has the loveliest sitting room, which we see right at the end—all blue and white, leading into a little conservatory. One longs to have a blue and white room just like it,' she told Joan. Not to mention a ‘moss-green dining room one day…with white woodwork'.
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In January 1966, they attended a screening of Sergei Eisenstein's movie on the October Revolution,
Ten Days That Shook the World.
In the audience was the octogenarian Alexander Kerensky, the last survivor of the government overthrown by the uprising. It was the first time that Kerensky, who lived near Stanford, had seen the film.
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Madeleine was beginning to look to England. Colette wrote from London to say she had been invited to a wedding. Madeleine relayed the news of the ‘chi-chi' event to Joan and said she hoped Colette would:

meet some nice young men there, anyway—she complains that she hasn't met anyone (male) really gorgeous yet, so I hope she will soon, since everything I learn about London makes me think of it as the ideal setting for a love affair—all those Bond Street shops, spring flowers, quaint nooks, courtyards & streets, millions of intimate restaurants, etc. and plenty of cold weather.
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Madeleine surprised friends and family back home with her embrace of America. She wrote to Antony Minchin:

I think you mean to flatter me when you say you didn't imagine me & the USA hitting it off. Annabel wrote and said the same. So I've asked her to tell me why, so that I can explain. [America] is really not what one imagines it to be—it's really a marvellous, exciting country. Very bad things & very good things too. I could never live here for ever (mainly because I'm too much of a socialist to do so, also because Australia is my place) but for a while it's just divine.
³²

‘Don't believe everything you read in books, Anna darling, or you will never see the world!' she wrote to Annabel. ‘After all, is all of Australia like Patrick White's Sarsaparilla?'
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Madeleine was a keen observer of human nature and the physical landscape and now she absorbed the style and mores of her temporary home. She asked if Antony had read Robin Boyd's
The Australian Ugliness
, published in 1960, which had cast a highly critical eye over the Australian aesthetic:

[Boyd] makes a very just comparison of Aussie chrome & brashness and American ditto. So you wouldn't see, in these parts, anything very much more startling than you can see in parts of Sydney. For the rest, there are millions of Americans who are anything but brash—there's a tradition of politeness & good manners here which one hadn't expected—a sort of fine old American thing. There are a lot of ‘fine old American' traditions and practices that make us Australians seem very young and raw & undeveloped. I'll explain at length one day.
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