The Real Mrs Miniver (24 page)

Greer Garson was not happy about accepting the role of Mrs Miniver. How could she – a beautiful, thirty-three-year-old actress with what journalists called ‘a nimbus of red-gold hair' – possibly play the mother of a man aged twenty-one? It was absurd. Surely, if she accepted the part, she should be ‘aged', with wrinkles, greying hair, horn-rimmed spectacles and padded hips? William Wyler, the director, disagreed. He said she looked just the right age as she was. ‘That hit a nerve,' wrote Michael Troyan in his biography of Greer Garson,
A Rose for Mrs Miniver.
(Actually, Garson was not thirty-three but thirty-seven: she always subtracted four years from her true age, and it was only after her death that her year of birth was found to be 1904, not 1908.)

William Wyler had the reputation of being an impossibly demanding director to work with. Both Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon had to be begged by Sidney Franklin to say ‘yes', but at least there was no need for begging when it came to casting the twenty-three-year-old (and already-divorced) Richard Ney as Mrs Miniver's son Vin: ‘I picked him out of a bunch of silly kids,' said William Wyler, ‘because he seemed the silliest.' Ney, who had merely stopped by at MGM to visit a friend and decided on a whim to do a quick screen test, could not believe his luck when he was offered the part. Culver City seemed to him like the Garden of Eden: ‘I was in paradise, eating apples everywhere.'

Was it love at first sight? The scene, in Sidney Franklin's office, was imaginatively described in an article by Beth Emerson entitled ‘Secret Romance': ‘Greer looked up, prepared to see the usual young actor. Instead, she observed a tall, slender fellow with a sensitive, studious face. Richard Ney looked down … His startled blue eyes flashed to her slender ankles, even as Greer's startled green eyes took heed of the width of his shoulders; and then their delighted glances met again, met and locked and held.'

The burgeoning clandestine love-affair between screen-mother and screen-son was a new sub-plot in the
Mrs Miniver
story. Jan was unaware of it as she set off from Pennsylvania Station on 4 October for her longest lecture tour so far.

*   *   *

She perused her time-table.

Schedule for Miss Struthers [the Clerk Getts secretaries often spelt her surname wrong]:

Saturday, Oct. 4th: Lv Pennsylvania Station, train 31, 6.05 EST. Lower Berth 12 in Car 318.

Sunday Oct. 5th. Arrive Terre Haute, 11.13 am CST. Change trains. Lv Terre Haute, Chicago & Eastern Illinois R.R. 1.45 pm CST. Ar. Evansville 5.05 pm CST. Reservation at McCurdy Hotel …

This went on for three pages. She would be travelling on
The American, The Spirit of St Louis, The Blue Bonnet, The 20th Century, The Morning Zephyr, The Black Hawk
and
The Rocket.
(What would Tony give to ride on these famous trains! She must write to him during the journey.) She was to give twenty-three lectures in six weeks, and local newspapers from Michigan to Texas were growing excited. ‘In a full week of activities ahead,' said the Evansville, Indiana paper, ‘probably the one most talked about is the appearance of Jan Struther, the English woman whose much-read
Mrs Miniver
has made her to the public “Mrs Miniver” herself.' She mustn't disappoint her public.

In Evansville, she certainly didn't. The lecture went across ‘swell' again. She wrote to Dolf on ‘Hotel McCurdy' paper embossed with a picture of a dreary building with too many windows. ‘Loew's Theatre was completely crammed – about 2,500 in the audience. They laughed at all the jokes and (to judge by the comments from the mob at the bookstore later) took the serious bits to heart with
gratitude.
And this is Indiana! I'm not exactly tired, but I have done (today) one lecture, four interviews, a “sidewalk” broadcast, & a two-hour autographing party at a bookstore (where we sold out completely).'

The most tiring bit, Jan found, was the morning after lectures, when she was collected from her hotel by the sponsors and taken on sightseeing tours of the Old Governor's Palace, or the Angel Mounds Historical Site. Sightseeing was never a pastime she enjoyed – she preferred street-wandering. At Fort Wayne, Indiana she got her own back by taking two of the sponsors (Mrs Mary Ann Doody and Mrs Myron R. Bone) to the cinema in the evening. ‘I think they were pretty exhausted,' she wrote to Dolf, ‘and they never go to Westerns, but of course they couldn't get out of it, so I led them off to a very low common mean little movie house where everybody was eating buttered popcorn, & they unbent considerably from their ladylikeness and became quite girlish … I thought it would be a piquant change for the lecturer to outlast the sponsors' vitality for once.'

Jan could see the isolationists' point of view. She understood why the northern Midwest states were the most isolationist of all: for not only did they contain a great many people of German descent, and not only were they midway between the two oceans, but they were almost literally isolated by the vast north–south expanses of the Great Lakes. But she was not prepared for the level of anger her presence could induce. At Grand Rapids, Michigan on 11 October she was woken in her hotel bedroom at seven by the first of a stream of abusive anonymous telephone calls. ‘I don't particularly mind the abuse,' she wrote to Dolf, ‘but I get as mad as hell when they refuse to give their names. Finally I left a message that I considered anonymity un-American & that I would only talk to people who had the courage to give their names. That stopped
that.
I did manage to lure one America Firster (a man, a doctor, by the way. I
LIKE
men better than women, I do) into (a) giving his name & (b) having coffee with me at my hotel. We talked civilly for an hour, & neither of us convinced the other.'

Over coffee and rolls in the palm court, the America Firster raged against the ‘war-mongering' Roosevelt administration; Jan replied (quoting William Howard Taft), ‘Too many people don't care what happens so long as it doesn't happen to them'. When they were about to part, Jan said, ‘I just want to say one more thing. Did you notice that waiter who has been standing behind the palm-tree listening to us?'

‘Yes, I was aware of him,' said the doctor. ‘Why?'

‘Well, do you realize how lucky you are to be living in the kind of set-up where he won't go off and report you to the SS men for the things you've been saying about your own government?'

‘You do not understand,' he explained. ‘This is America.'

‘Neither do you,' Jan said. ‘This is the world.'

‘We parted as courteous adversaries,' Jan wrote to Dolf, ‘& really he was very nice and polite, but oh God! so hopelessly out of touch about Europe. I was left with a feeling of impotence. Those folks
HATE
Roosevelt. They hate him more than they love the ultimate good of their own country. I almost believe he could do us more good if he pretended to be against us: they might then rush to our help. And there are 15 million of them…'

As she crossed the border from Wisconsin into Iowa, she wrote, ‘I miss you more and more, the further west I go towards “our” country…'

‘They Think She Is Like Mrs Miniver And Offer Her Tea' ran a sub-headline in the El Paso, Texas
Herald
three weeks later, in early November. All eyes were on this exotic woman's habits. ‘She Drank Coffee.' Jan's distaste for tea was intensifying. She had discovered that at women's afternoon meetings it was an honour to be asked ‘to pour'. Jan hated pouring tea, but as the guest of honour she could not avoid it without giving offence. Tea at these gatherings was made with teabags immersed in less-than-boiling water, with their cardboard labels attached and also immersed, gradually dissolving. The sight made Jan turn away in revulsion.

The El Paso
Herald,
after commenting on the non-tea-drinking, went on to quote from the lecture: ‘Miss Struther believes that the feeling that Hitler must be beaten has been solidifying in the Midwest of the US in the last six months. “This country is like a body of water,” she said. “When you tip it one way it rushes in that direction. It's rather terrifying.”'

On the morning after
that
lecture she was taken to Radford College for Girls, ‘where [she wrote to Dolf] to my horrified surprise I was expected to get up in front of 1,300 schoolchildren and give them an Uplift Message.' Two days later, in the Town Hall at San Antonio, Texas, she found herself addressing ‘the entire troupe of this year's débutantes'. Her favourite question from the floor was, ‘Will you please tell me whether you prefer Bach or Boogie-Woogie?' The next day's report in the San Antonio
Express
was devoted entirely to describing what members of the audience were wearing. ‘Mrs Walter Grotehouse wore a black pinstripe tailored suit with a striking pin of turquoise, amber and gold', and so on.

In Texas, Jan noticed that she had ceased to be hounded by abusive telephone callers. Maybe she was right: perhaps the great American ‘body of water' really was starting to tip in the Allied direction. Nobody will ever know what the outcome of the isolationist-versus-interventionist argument might have been if the Japanese had not attacked Pearl Harbor on the morning of Sunday, 7 December. Four days later, America was at war with both Japan and Germany.

Chapter Eleven

No, Mrs Poppadum, I didn't write the film. I always think it's better for authors who know nothing about script-writing to keep their fingers out of the pie. Yes, Mrs Marchpane, I simply loved the film. Since I had nothing to do with making it, I can speak quite freely. Why, yes, Mr Syllabub, I thought the casting was excellent. The station-master? Oh, yes,
exactly
the way I always imagined him to be. (And then I would know that Mr Syllabub hadn't read the book, because the station-master didn't come into it.)

From J.S's unfinished book on America, ‘Cactus and Columbine'

 

T
HE ABBREVIATIONS FOR
American radio and television stations, CBS, WNEW, WSB, KTMS and WEVD, pepper the pages of Jan's engagement book for 1942. ‘B'cast, 5.30.' Her voice, speaking to a country at war, was becoming a national morale-boosting presence on the airwaves. Often, the ‘b'cast' was preceded by ‘H.D.' – hairdresser's – in the morning.

For these hairdressing appointments, Harlem beckoned. When no one was looking, she took a bus northwards up Third Avenue, on and on, as the buildings grew seedier and the hair curlier, like her own. Sitting in the salon of her choice, which throbbed with Afro-American life, she flicked through the hairstyling magazines and discovered that the advertisements here were not for permanent waves, but permanent straightening. She returned to Upper East Side, refreshed by this glimpse of the other New York which carried on its gritty existence fifty streets to the north.

‘Morale is something like vitamins,' she said, speaking to five continents through the microphone at NBC on 1 March. ‘You can't see it, you can't touch it, you can't taste it, yet if you haven't got it you're sunk.' ‘If we begin to make plans now for a better world structure,' she said during a broadcast in favour of Federal Union, ‘we shall have no moments of despair. We shall only have moments of acute impatience, because we cannot start to build it straight away. Nothing on earth is more fun than planning a new house in which we shall live. The thoughts that we are thinking now will be its bricks and mortar.' It was quotable oratory, and America lapped it up.

Almost as frequent as the word ‘b'cast' in the engagement books is the word ‘dentist'. Between January and March 1942, it appears ten times. The London
Times
had pointed out the ‘flaw' in Mrs Miniver's perfection, betrayed by her mid August dentist's appointment. Four years later, her creator was still dashing from glamorous luncheon to dentist's chair with alarming frequency. Sometimes her mouth was numb for broadcasts. ‘I had a fever, an ice-bag and a left cheek the size of a football,' she wrote to her lawyer Melville Cane after her Easter broadcast, ‘and I talked out of the side of my mouth like a Brooklyn gangster. I hope it came through on the air all right – personally I remember nothing about it except that somebody dragged me out of bed and got me to the studio five minutes before airtime, and somebody else shoved a mike in front of me and said Okay, Miss Struther, you're on right after the Ave Maria and the Lord's Prayer. The rest was delirium.'

Jan made two new male friends at about this time. The first was this lawyer, Melville Cane, of Ernst, Cane & Young, whom she had employed to negotiate her contracts, but whom she quickly saw to be a kindred spirit, a poet at heart, unfulfilled in his legal job. The second she met at a fund-raising Republican dinner-party given by the heiress of the Wells, Fargo and Company mail-carrying service. Sitting on her right was a man who spoke like an Englishman, called John Beverley Robinson, whom Jan instantly warmed to and instinctively trusted. Such wisdom and understanding shone out of his eyes that she was disarmed. She felt an overwhelming urge to divulge to him the secret she had been holding inside her breast since her arrival in America. She could not stop herself. ‘He's called Dolf. I know you'd like him, and he you … I don't know why I'm telling you. I've only known you for an hour…'