The Real Mrs Miniver (25 page)

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.'