Daphne's terrible secret (original) (raw)

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." The opening line of Rebecca is surely the most evocative in the whole of English fiction.

And on a summer day in 1966, I sat down to lunch at Menabilly, the secluded Cornish manor house that had partly inspired the fictional Manderley.

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At the head of the table, chameleon-like, secretive, and with her customary air of mystery and mockery, sat my hostess, Daphne (later Dame Daphne) du Maurier, in private life Lady Browning, the most celebrated and successful female storyteller of her age.

By then, I had been a regular visitor to Menabilly, and a friend of Daphne's, for some years, but the only other guest on this occasion - my sister, Jean, 12 years my senior - was meeting her for the first time.

Daphne, her blue eyes full of mischief, an enigmatic smile hovering on her lips, looked from one to the other of us.

"Yes," she said, "I can see the family resemblance.

"You seem unusually close for brother and sister.' Then she fired her favourite torpedo. "Tell me, what do you both think about incest?"

As conversational gambits go, it was not exactly your everyday dinner party ice-breaker. A sideways glance revealed my sister's reaction as profoundly startled and frozen with astonishment.

My own was less surprised, for by then I had heard the question before, more than once.

Indeed, during the years that I had known Daphne, it had become overwhelmingly obvious that incest was a subject that both obsessed and haunted her.

In conversation with trusted friends, she returned to the topic over and over again.

Margaret Forster, in her highly controversial and questionable official biography of Daphne, concluded that she was "so tortured for much of her life", a verdict utterly rejected and derided by those who knew her really well, as Forster never had.

Miss Forster, accepting at face value certain claims made by Daphne - always unwise in the case of a woman who was a lifelong fantasist and roleplayer - also chose to believe that she was a closet lesbian, an opinion that equally fails to stand up to scrutiny and for which there is not one iota of independent proof.

Tonight, on the eve of the centenary of Du Maurier's birth, BBC2 is screening a docudrama about the writer with Geraldine Somerville as Du Maurier and Janet McTeer as the musical comedy idol Gertrude Lawrence, her alleged lesbian lover.

This, like Forster's biography, promises to fall a long way short of the truth. For it was not closet lesbianism that was at the heart of Daphne's confusion of identity.

Instead, it was a secret far darker, more oppressive and more deeply shocking than mere alleged attraction to her own sex.

This secret she had confessed to me a year before my sister's visit to Menabilly, during Daphne's first desolate weeks of widowhood following the death of her husband, Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick ("Boy") Browning - "Tommy" to his family and friends - formerly Comptroller of the Household to Queen Elizabeth II, and treasurer to the Duke of Edinburgh.

When I visited Menabilly in 1965, after Tommy's death, Daphne appeared to be reassessing her life.

A number of family secrets were aired then for the first time, among them the true inspiration for her most celebrated novel, Rebecca, which she confessed had taken shape in her mind after discovering - and covertly reading - a bundle of love letters written to her husband by his former fiancee, the dark and exotic society beauty Jan Ricardo, who later threw herself in front of a train.

Guiltily reading through these letters in their strong and confident hand, which seemed to eclipse her own unimpressive spidery scrawl, Daphne became consumed by jealousy.

In her mind was born the mousey and uncertain second wife, undermined by the reputation of her glamorous predecessor, who furtively opens a book that does not belong to her and reads, in that same bold hand, "Max from Rebecca".

Jealousy, which had inspired her greatest novel, was also at the root of the most important and traumatic relationship of her life: her love-hate affair with her father, the West End matinee idol, Sir Gerald du Maurier.

Gerald, or "D", as Daphne invariably called him, was handsome, capricious, charming and enigmatic.

As a child, Daphne, the second and by far the favourite of his three daughters, worshipped him uncritically.

She used to relate how, when Gerald took her and her sisters, Angela and Jeanne, out to tea, she saw a woman nudge her companion and whisper "That's Gerald du Maurier", and realised, with a sense of shock and rage, that "D" - "my Daddy" - did not belong to her alone.

Gerald, an all-powerful star of the London stage, was regarded as a fierce homophobe.

But Daphne always believed that there were "deep ambiguities" in her father's sexuality, and that his attitude towards her was oddly homoerotic.

"If only she'd been born a boy," he lamented in a strongly suggestive poem addressed to her.

"My very slender one," he wrote, 2so feminine and fair, so fresh and sweet, so full of fun and womanly deceit."

Friends noticed that Gerald was constantly tactile with his second daughter.

"He couldn't keep his hands off her," observed one of their neighbours, the tennis star Bunny Austin. "It was quite embarrassing at times."

In her teenage years, Daphne's attitude towards her father underwent a sharp change. She became aware of his numerous casual affairs with young actresses.

Her reaction was a mixture of jealousy and deep resentment of the humiliation caused to her mother.

One of his many mistresses was Gertrude Lawrence, to whom Daphne's original attitude was one of intense hostility. "She hated her," said Bunny Austin, "calling her 'that bloody bitch'."

Was it some long-delayed revenge on Gertrude that 20 years later, as if taking her father's role as seducer, she attempted to make people believe that she was her lesbian lover?

Daphne also began to encourage "inappropriate intimacies" between her father and herself. "We crossed the line," she admitted to me in 1965, "and I allowed it. He treated me like all the others - as if I was an actress playing his love interest in one of his plays."

In 1932, when Daphne was 25, Tommy Browning, then a 35-year old major in the Grenadier Guards, came sailing into Fowey Harbour in his boat, Ygdrasil, to claim her as his bride.

Gerald broke down and wept, repeating "It's not fair, it's not fair" over and over again. Her possessive father simply couldn't face the idea of her marrying.

In 1934, when Gerald died at the age of 61 from cancer of the colon, Daphne wrote an astonishingly candid biography of him, revealing his vanity, his drinking and his extreme and frequent mood swings, in which his celebrated charm gave way to ugliness and violence.

At Menabilly, a life-size portrait of Gerald dominated the staircase. Daphne sometimes stood in front of it, gazing up at it and murmuring gently: "Oh D! Oh D!"

Browning, ten years her senior, now became both father and lover, though their marriage was never easy, and he had been besotted by his former fiancee, Jane Ricardo, who became, in Daphne's mind, Maxim de Winter's beautiful first wife Rebecca.

After the war, when Browning returned from his exploits at the Battle of Arnhem - inspiration for the film A Bridge Too Far - he and Daphne were virtual strangers, despite their three children, Tessa, Flavia and Kits.

During his absence, Daphne had an affair with a Hertfordshire landowner, Henry 2Christopher" Puxley.

Browning himself had brought back with him from the war a beautiful 23-year-old staff officer, Maureen Luschwitz, whom Daphne instantly believed - and went on believing - was her husband's mistress.

Perhaps it is not an entire coincidence that it was to Maureen, by then the wife of the executor of her estate, Monty Baker-Munton, that Daphne wrote, in 1957, a long and curiously contrived letter explaining her feelings.

She said that "my obsessions - you can only call them that - for poor old Ellen (Doubleday - the wife of Daphne's American publisher) and Gertrude (Lawrence) were all part of a nervous breakdown going on inside myself, partly to do with my muddled troubles, and writing, and a fear of facing reality".

Was this evidence of lesbianism? Margaret Forster chose to believe it was. I think not.

Ellen and Daphne had met in 1947, when Daphne was 40, and Ellen became both an emotional soundingboard and the inspiration for the character of Rachel in the novel My Cousin Rachel.

But on the unvarying admission of both women, there was never any physical intimacy between them.

In 1952, when Gertrude Lawrence died from cancer at the early age of 54, Daphne, according to Margaret Forster, was "virtually catatonic".

Daphne admitted to me that this was true, but her shock was not for Gertie, a woman she frequently derided.

It was for her father, Gerald, who had been the lover of them both, and whose spectre once again came back to haunt her.

Browning's later years were more than difficult for Daphne.

Appointed Comptroller of the Household at Buckingham Palace, he somewhat embarrassingly "fell in love with the Queen", according to Daphne, and could not even enter a room where the Monarch was without going to pieces.

His drinking became chronic, and a severe nervous breakdown forced his resignation from the Palace.

Back at Menabilly, his alcoholism and erratic driving became a local scandal, and he took up a mistress in Fowey, right under Daphne's nose.

Yet when he died from a coronary in 1965, her grief was mixed with guilt. Had she been too selfish, spending all those hours away from him, shut up in the little wooden hut in the grounds, tapping away at her aged portable typewriter?

Margaret Forster's subsequent allegations of lesbianism have created strains and tensions within the Du Maurier family.

I was asked by her three children to hand to Forster, who was chosen as Daphne's official biographer, all of the letters which she had sent to me over the course of 30 years.

I did so, with certain significant omissions. These included Daphne's sometimes trenchant comments on her own children, and in particular on her daughters' divorces.

Tessa, the eldest child, had divorced her first husband, Major Peter de Zulueta, a promiscuous and predatory bisexual, and also a chronic alcoholic, before becoming the wife of the second Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, son of "Monty", the wartime Field Marshal.

And her sister, Flavia, had divorced Captain Alastair Tower, a Coldstream Guards officer, before marrying General Sir Peter Leng.

Tessa's elevation to the peerage appeared to produce in her a certain hauteur that her mother was inclined to mock.

When, three years after Daphne's death, a London gossip columnist announced that Forster would be publishing passionate love letters alleged to have passed between Daphne and Gertrude Lawrence, a furious Tessa elected to blame me - and, even more astonishingly, her own brother, Christian "Kits" Browning - for this supposed "leak".

In fact, the story was a myth. No such letters have ever been found. Yet even when she was confronted by proof that her brother and I were innocent of her accusation, she still imperiously declined to apologise to either of us.

Matters became still more inflamed in 1993, shortly after the publication of Forster's book, by the arrival in London from her home in Hollywood of Gertrude Lawrence's 75-year-old only child, Pamela Clatworthy.

A feisty character whose relationship with her mother had been volatile, she was incensed in the extreme that Forster had branded her mother as Daphne's lesbian lover without even attempting to contact her.

"I do vehemently state," she wrote, "that it is very wrong indeed of her (Forster) to make any such hypothetical conclusion, in print - without any regard for positive proof" and "no consultation with the surviving family of Miss Lawrence".

Pamela derided the lesbian allegations and the claim that Gertie, in one of Daphne's most obvious fantasies, is supposed to have uttered the words, "from the pillow, to me as I left her for the last time about 2am": "Go from me, and don't look back, like a person walking in their sleep."

She commented: "My mother could never have got that line out without shrieking with laughter.

"I would have no moral objection to her having a lesbian relationship, but she was the last person in the world to do so.

"She was heterosexual to the point of nymphomania, and disliked other women even touching her."

In the final analysis, it is Daphne du Maurier who had the last laugh. Though Forster went on searching for some years, not a single letter came to light that could support the existence of a sexual relationship between Daphne and Gertrude Lawrence.

Forster's biography, dismissed by one reviewer as "the portrait of a cavalier, painted by a puritan", was not a resounding success.

And now, in the newly-published The Daphne du Maurier Companion, even the writer's daughter, Viscountess Montgomery, admits that Forster's lesbian allegations

"tainted the whole thing for me because she made such a song and dance about Gertrude. My mother did act a lot herself.

"There was an awful lot of play-acting in her life; she rather used people and did get crushes on them".

On April 16, 1989, three days before she died in her sleep from bronchopneumonia at the age of 81, Daphne, a skeletal figure, weighing just six stones, braved lashing wind and rain to pay a last nostalgic visit to her adored Menabilly, the rented house she had loved and lost when it was reclaimed by its owner, Philip Rashleigh, in 1967, consigning her to the estate's infinitely less romantic and atmospheric dower house, Kilmarth.

It was Menabilly, her "house of secrets", and her father, that remained the enduring loves of her life, not Gertrude Lawrence or Ellen Doubleday.

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again."

That long and vivid dream, in which a great storyteller's make-believe so often merged with reality, producing some of the most haunting novels ever written, had come to its final chapter.

DAPHNE is screened on BBC2 tonight at 9pm. The Daphne du Maurier Companion, edited by Helen Taylor, is published by Virago at £9.99.

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