Angela dined out on the story of her flying debacle so many times that the family and her closest friends coined the phrase ‘an orchestra’ to mean a long tale of melodramatic disaster. After this mishap she realised she hadn’t the mettle to be a proper actress because she did not believe that the show had to go on regardless. She was much more inclined to take to her bed if she felt under the weather. But although she was battered and bruised, her nerve shattered, Gerald insisted she return to the theatre the next day, conquer her fear of flying, and perform in the afternoon show.
Angela’s careering flight was one of the few outside incidents to merit a mention in Daphne’s continuing angst-ridden correspondence with Tod, who was living in some splendour at Burrough Court in Leicestershire, tutoring Averill the daughter of a rich, recently widowed businessman, the 1st Viscount Furness. Daphne teased Tod by suggesting that her much-loved governess should become the next Lady Furness. In fact, the Viscount’s taste unhappily ran on rather more exotic lines as he was already engaged to one beautiful American socialite, and would end up married to another, who promptly became the mistress of Edward, the Prince of Wales.
Daphne’s adolescent introspection and sense of the pointlessness of life was about to be challenged. At eighteen it was her turn to go to finishing school in Paris, the city of her imagination. She was not bound for the Ozannes’, where Angela’s experiences had been mixed, but to a school run by Miss Wicksteed at Camposena, some five and a half miles south-west of the city. Miss Wicksteed, or ‘Wick’ as she was known by the girls, was a reassuringly solid middle-aged Englishwoman with white hair and a no-nonsense manner. On 16 January 1925, after a blast of Christmas parties and dances, Daphne headed off to Paris for what would be the defining experience of her life.
Jeanne was now nearly fourteen and life for her was changing too. She was enrolled in Francis Holland School at Clarence Gate near Regent’s Park to start in the autumn term a more formal education with art and sports on the curriculum. Having had generous notices for her Wendy the first time round, Angela contracted to do one more season of Peter Pan, but the critics this time sharpened their quills. Already ambivalent about her future as an actress, exhaustion, demoralisation and a stage fight with real swords, in which her nose was almost severed, put paid to her faltering ambition. Her famous theatrical name was both a boon and a liability. If she was to be an actress as a du Maurier she would have to be particularly dedicated and particularly good, and she feared she was neither.
During her run as Wendy, Angela had been conned by a well-known elderly photographer into posing for him in the nude, and been appalled and embarrassed by the results. A happier experience was provided by their young friend Cecil Beaton when he asked Angela and Daphne to be models in two of his earliest photographic experiments. They were shown into his old nursery where he had set up his props and various cameras and tripods and, with the help of his elderly nanny, and a great deal of laughter (and ineffectual fiddling around it seemed to the girls), produced his inventive portraits of the sisters: ‘Daph’s and my heads appearing magically under wineglasses.’42 Stilted and ludicrously artificial to the modern eye, the photographs were considered by Angela later in life to be the most flattering portraits of them both ever created. Hers hung in pride of place in the Italian house of her great friend Naomi Jacob, until the Germans arrived in the Second World War and either purloined or trashed it.
Angela could never confide her hopes or fears to her parents and without prospects of a career she drifted rudderless and ill-equipped for independent life. Years later she mused on how celebrity affected those closest to it:
I wanted to be a good actress, and with a name like du Maurier I could not afford to be a bad one … Possibly too much is expected of the children of the great; I would definitely say, in fact, that both as an actress – admittedly of only one part – and as a writer, I have found my name as big a handicap as ever it was a help. As Wendy I was Gerald du Maurier’s daughter – and it had been an amusing ‘stunt’ to try me out in a star part straight off …43
Her lack of training and the chance to work her way up from the bottom had also robbed her of the opportunity to graduate to being a producer, which was where her true talents possibly lay, though as a young woman gazing into the unknown she could not have been aware of this at the time. Girls of her background and education did not aspire to have serious careers apart from becoming actresses and the wives of famous men. While Angela waited for the man she would marry, the parties continued. In a private room at the Garrick, Gerald occasionally invited an eclectic group of friends and acquaintances to lunch. One memorable gathering on 23 October was recorded by Angela in her diary, and also by her old crush, Roland Pertwee.
The party was organised to wave off in style on an Australian tour their friends and colleagues, the actor-director Dion Boucicault Jnr and his actress wife Irene Vanbrugh. Apart from Muriel, Gerald, Angela, Roland and the Boucicaults, there was also (with Angela’s comments in italics) ‘Dame Nellie Melba (most excited about [her] for whom I had (rightly) boundless admiration), H. G. Wells (too sweet), Augustus John (overawed by him and sat far away), Sir Squire Bancroft,’ and the sisters’ lifelong heroes, John Barrymore and Gladys Cooper. Roland continued the tale:
half-way through lunch Irene said to Melba: ‘Tip us a stave, Nellie.’ And Nellie Melba, over a loaded fork, for she was a hearty trencherman, opened her throat and sang like a lark.
That lunch, which started at one fifteen went on until seven thirty, when John Barrymore rushed off to appear as Hamlet at the Haymarket, and gave one of the most sensational performances of his career.44
This was the kind of glamorous world that the du Maurier sisters inhabited, some of them more happily than others. Angela, still childlike at twenty, was standing tentatively on the edge of this world she was reared to join, while Jeanne was allowed to remain a girl for a few years more. Daphne, who had been so reluctant to grow up and did not care for her parents’ kind of high society or attitudes to love, was back in Paris in the heat of her first real love affair. This time she would give her father real reason for outrage. Luckily, he never knew.
4
Love and Losing
I for this and this for me.
DAPHNE DU MAURIER, Growing Pains
DAPHNE HAD NEVER before been away from home and everyone expected her to be homesick – after all, Angela’s time in Paris had been spoiled by a heart-clutching nostalgie. But Daphne suffered not one twinge. Why would she? She already adored Paris, not for its shopping and its shows, but for its possibilities, the ancient alleyways, the hidden squares, the imaginative connection with her ancestors, and the dark stories embedded in its stones. Daphne had found life at home limiting, her parents’ suspicions claustrophobic, and she had never been happy with the relentless socialising expected of her in London. She had grown up with a sense of her own exceptionalism, something her father’s attention had encouraged, and always felt separate and alien, and quite unlike other people.
Desperate to escape the envelope of make-believe and good manners that had maintained her in a suspended state of childhood, Daphne could not have chosen a better springboard for her flight. Paris between the wars was the most exciting city in the world, a City