The Real Mrs Miniver (28 page)

But she was finding it harder and harder to wind down after these lectures, and she was beginning to resort to sleeping-pills. Here she describes to Dolf, in one unbroken paragraph, a typical forty-eight hours of her spring 1943 lecture tour.

I was talking to people almost without a break from 10 a.m. till midnight … An autographing ‘Do' from 2–3.15 & another from 3.15 to 4.30. Back to my hotel, where an Irish-Minnesotan guy called Kennan interviewed me (and gave me a drink). Then a rapid dressing, then dinner [with the sponsors] … Then the lecture, at which I talked to a packed theatre (2,000, I shd think) for an hour and answered questions for another half-hour … [Then she had agreed to be driven to Toledo by a stranger, Mr Hardgrove, a necessity of the gasoline shortage.] I was relieved to see that Mr Hardgrove was a kindly respectable humorous blondish ‘family man'. By the time we set off from Akron it was 12.30 a.m. & the roads were a sheet of ice, & we were running through thick white fog, with trucks suddenly looming up. But I was so utterly exhausted that I slept more than half the time. I had to ask him to stop once, so I could get out and p— in the snow, but we were neither of us in the least embarrassed. Exhaustion reduces people to complete simplicity. We finally got into Toledo at 3.45 a.m. The car doors were frozen & my eyes were gummed up with sleep. I opened them just long enough to check in & get to my room & then collapsed into bed, hoping to sleep till 9. But my blasted mental alarm-clock woke me at 7.15. Then at 9.30 a visit to Edna Rowe's school – and the heartrending experience of being presented with a flower-posy by a boy called Chuck (four years old), who was born blind & is terribly cross-eyed & very ugly & very sweet, while the press photographer struggled to get a picture of the ceremony without showing Chuck's eyes. Chuck kept stroking me and snuggling up to me but turning his face to the camera, & I had to keep trying to get him to turn the right way without saying anything obvious. And the photographer kept saying ‘You just keep right on smiling and talking, Miss Struther.' ‘Keep smiling' – my God, I wanted to cry all the time … I managed
not
to cry during that, but when the singing class of the school began singing ‘London Bridge is falling down, my fair lady' which is for me the quintessence of
Heimweh,
I'm afraid I pretty well broke down. Not in their sight, but in Miss Rowe's office … [That same evening, she gave another lecture, to 1,000 people.] I spoke for one and a half hours to an absolutely
tops
audience … I think I had more applause here than I've ever had before – maybe my technique is improving; I know I stand more still & speak more flowingly than I used to. Then half an hour of questions (good ones, too, giving lots of opportunities for stories & wisecracks & sly digs at
U.S.
class distinctions, etc.) Then a biggish party at a ‘By
ood
iful Home', where I drank punch and was forced by Edna Rowe to read some of my poems … I went back to my hotel at 12.45 and thought, Now the Day is Over … But the telephone rang … It was Harold [Harley, Editor of the Toledo
Times
], asking if I'd like to come over to his room and have a nightcap. So I said I'd come for 10 minutes. I went, & stayed till 3 a.m., lying on a sofa & discussing poetry, philosophy, medicine, psychology, love – with particular reference to
his
love life, not mine … To bed at 3.15, took a sleeping-pill (which I hadn't for several nights) and planned to sleep till noon. I need hardly tell you that I woke up at 8.30. I am a
little
tired. (Department of British Understatement.)

One of the poems she read out at the ‘byoodiful home' was a ballad she had just written, ‘The American Way of Life':

I met an old man

    The other day:

His eyes were small

    And sharp and grey;

His paunch was fat

    And his lips were thin,

And his cheeks were as dry

    As a rattler's skin.

And all the time

    As he talked and ate,

In went victuals

    And out came hate.

Like a burst of hail,

    Like a creek in spate –

His own particular

    Hymn of Hate.

‘I don't know whether

    You share my views,

But it makes me mad

    When I read the news.

Helping the Russians

    And helping the Jews …

Rationing sugar

    And rationing shoes …

All these orders

    And all these bans,

Cutting out coupons,

    And counting cans.

Oh, I know – the war …

    And I know – Lease-Lend …

But where is the whole thing

    Going to end?

I view with fear

    And deep misgiving

This change for the worse

    In our manner of living:

In fact, as I frequently say to my wife,

We're in danger of losing our own way of life –

            Our own,

            Known,

            Sure,

            Secure,

Great American way of life.'

Said I to him,

    ‘Well, that may be.

I'm only a guest

    From across the sea,

And I've only been here

    Two years or three;

But this is the way

    It seems to me.

‘The men who founded

    And built this land –

They didn't do it

    On food that was canned,

But on home-made broth,

    And home-cooked hash

And hominy grits

    And succotash.

The men who trudged

    Through Cumberland Gap

Wore buckskin boots

    And a coonskin cap;

And the men who crossed

    The Great Divide,

They slept rolled up

    In buffalo hide.

The things they owned

    Were simple and few;

They used them well

    And they made them do.

They made their own songs,

    And they loved to sing 'em;

They thought their wives

    Looked fine in gingham;

And though they ached

    From their own day's labours,

They were never too tired

    To help their neighbours.

They'd strength in their arms

    And breadth in their backs;

They won this land

    With rifle and axe,

They followed their stars

    And they earned their stripes,

And they didn't have time

    For groans and gripes.

‘Now I've travelled this land

    Two years or three;

I love it next

    To my own countree;

And from what I hear,

    And from what I see,

This is the way

    It seems to me:

‘Something was lost –

    Not lost but hidden,

Like a sleeping hound

    That wakes when it's bidden;

But out of this danger and out of this strife

Is springing afresh your own way of life –

            The plain,

            Sane,

            Old,

            Bold,

True American Way of Life.'

She sent a copy of the poem to Eleanor Roosevelt, on the off-chance that she might like it.

‘
LATE STAR FINAL
!
BLUE STREAK EDITION
!' she wrote to Dolf, at the end of her letter of 19 March. She enclosed the following:

The White House

Washington D.C.

Dear Miss Struther,

Many thanks for your letter & for the ballad. I love it! It is a grand answer. Would you be willing to have the President read it on his next broadcast?

Sincerely yours,

Eleanor Roosevelt

‘Oh boy, oh, boy, oh Jesus
F. Christ
 … my cup is full (very nearly – if you were here it would be quite!). Oh, oh,
oh
I'm so excited. I called her up at once (as soon as I'd got my breath back) & talked to the sec. as she was out of town. You ought to have seen Anne's [Jan's secretary Anne Curtis Brown's] face of utter deliberate gloating nonchalance as she put through the person-to-person call and heard the operator gulp.'

*   *   *

At the Academy Awards ceremony,
Mrs Miniver
won five Oscars: best actress (Greer Garson), best supporting actress (Teresa Wright), best directorial achievement (William Wyler), best written screenplay, and best achievement in black-and-white photography. Greer Garson made a long speech through her tears, thanking everyone, including the doctor who had brought her into the world.

She bought a new home in Los Angeles, 680 Stone Canyon, and her Miniver-esque life there was described by visiting journalists. ‘You feel as if you were walking into the Miniver home when you visit Greer Garson,' wrote Mary C. McCall. ‘It's a homely, mildly Tudor white brick manse secreted in its own little canyon through which a brook flows, with some artificial goading, under ancient sycamores.' The rooms were panelled in bleached oak, with Scottish crests on the doors. Tea, by the poolside, included cucumber sandwiches, Banbury tarts and marmalade rolls, and Greer Garson loved to chat about her favourite poet, John Donne.

*   *   *

‘If you come to Washington,' wrote Eleanor Roosevelt to Jan on 28 March 1943, ‘do let me know. Both my husband and I will be happy to see you.'

Jan replied: ‘Thank you for your lovely letter. It was sweet of you to write again, and as for the invitation, I am at a loss how to answer it except with the all-expressive phrase, “You bet”.'

To Dolf she wrote, ‘
Will
I go to Washington?
Will
I drop in on her and her old man? I have waited almost three years for this, and it has come exactly the way I hoped it would, without official wangling but through human recognition of a co-guerrilla fighting for the same cause.'

She stayed the night at the White House, as a guest of the Roosevelts, on 16 June 1943, and her hours there were perhaps the pinnacle of her ascent to fame and success. ‘Darling,' she wrote to Dolf, on White House writing paper, ‘I am writing this
IN LINCOLN'S BED
(stark naked, incidentally, because it is a terribly hot night) … The President is a perfectly
GORGEOUS
man, more than up to my wildest hopes & much
funnier
than I ever imagined. Mixes an excellent cocktail (his own special, with his own hands), & you can say absolutely anything to him. We were just six of us, & I sat on his right, & we ate dinner on the terrace with softshell crab & strawberries & fireflies & lots of amusing talk (with serious undertones). There's a bell by my bed with 3 buttons saying “Maid”, “Butler” & “Usher”. I can't imagine what I could need an usher for, unless Lincoln
walks.
More when we meet. All my love.'

She sealed the letter to Dolf and began one straight away to Tony. To conceal her whereabouts from the Italian censors, she used her own blank paper and headed it ‘Casablanca'. Naked in Lincoln's bed, dashing off letters to her lover and her husband, she felt in control of her parallel lives.

So desperate and determined was she to see Dolf that she was ready to jump at any opportunity to go to California. And one came. Louis B. Mayer wanted another box-office phenomenon like
Mrs Miniver.
He wanted Jan to write the original material for MGM to spin, once again, into Hollywood gold. It could be a sequel to
Mrs Miniver,
it could be something new – anything she liked, Mayer implored her, but please could she produce it soon?

Jan liked the idea: it was a good one in theory. She sat on trains with her pen poised over a blank sheet of paper, hoping a new character would walk onto it. She couldn't write any more Mrs Miniver. She was becoming sick to death of Mrs Miniver, and she had lost the desire to describe married life. What she could write about was love – sudden, magical, illicit love, and wartime separation from the beloved, and living three thousand miles to the west of one's husband and three thousand miles to the east of one's lover; about exiled Jews, and the dreadful, paradoxical feeling that you half-wanted the war to end, and half-wanted it to carry on for as long as possible because it postponed the moment of having to make a heart-breaking decision.

But she couldn't possibly write about that. It was deeply secret. Such a storyline from ‘happily married' Jan Struther would cause a catastrophe in the family and a scandal across America. It was unthinkable. So she wrote to Dolf instead: ‘Darling, I adore Oklahoma. The train service was impossible y'day but I had the luck to be driven from Tulsa to Okla City – about 120 miles – along Route 66, & I got such secret delight out of passing places where we'd stopped to eat together.' Or she wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt, describing inspiring sights she had seen. One of her favourite things about America were mailboxes, which had come into being through ‘R.F.D.' – rural free delivery, which ensured that mail was delivered to every home across the country. The mail-boxes stood in coveys on the sides of roads, perched on top of crooked posts at all angles, each reminding you that there was a home and hearth to which it belonged, hidden along a drive or down a wooded path. With their rounded tops, mail-boxes seemed to Jan to be the ghosts of covered wagons, and she wrote to Mrs Roosevelt, ‘Much as I love almost the whole of this country, the two things I like best about it are FDR and RFD.'

But none of this got her any nearer to writing profit-making script material. Perhaps, Louis B. Mayer suggested, if Jan were actually to live in Hollywood for a few months, the muse might come to her. Surely, if she spent enough time fraternizing with script-writers, producers and film-stars in such magic surroundings, she could not fail to be inspired?