you look at the whole bloody thing, I was stopping her from what she should have done. She should have been making films all the time.”
Dubrovnik probably was the scene of Michael’s finest marital moment. He put himself entirely in Jill’s hands when it came to the kind of holidays they enjoyed there. He followed her directions for the making of Two Hours From London without so much as a quibble so far as I could tell. Kathy Wilks, an Oxford don who was made an honorary citizen of Dubrovnik for her heroic efforts to save lives during the siege, was aghast at how Jill ordered Michael around during the filming—until Kathy realised that this was how Michael wanted it. At first, Kathy, a deep admirer of Michael and his politics, had trouble getting along with Jill. I can see why: Kathy was like everyone else—especially women—who treated Michael as though he were a sort of saint, the man on the Left with the most integrity, a man who was also so gentle, obliging and incorrigibly cheerful. He was just as cheerful about doing Jill’s bidding, believing that she was a master of the visual media, about which he knew little. As he had done with Aneurin Bevan, Michael adored submitting to those he deemed at the top of their form. In this one realm he wanted Jill to be a genius and perhaps that is why I could catch him in a vulnerable moment: admitting that he had not done enough to foster Jill’s film career.
22
A lunchtime talk with Stevan Dedijer yielded surprisingly little about Jill. She had sent him a list of questions about the siege of Dubrovnik—none of which he could recall. He promised to send me her list, but I never got it. He was more Michael’s friend than Jill’s. I often had the feeling (as did Jill) that with Michael around she simply did not count for much. As Julie said, “There were problems in the relationship. Michael was very much in demand.” Julie recalled Pamela Berry luncheons in the 1950s. Berry, wife of the owner of the Observer, kept a sort of salon. She didn’t like Jill, but this did not stop Michael going without her. Richard Crossman’s diaries portrayed the “hardboiled, journalistic atmosphere” of Berry’s “male-oriented” parties.
I later discovered a letter from Michael to Jill alluding to the Berry problem. He was writing shortly after their 1963 road accident and release from hospital. He was convalescing at Beaverbrook’s estate in the south of France after Jill had returned to London for an operation on her gravely injured hand: “My dear child, I was relieved to get your telegram, although I am still shaken by our conversation. Whatever has arisen, it’s sad that you should have fresh anxieties when you have enough to put up with. However, nothing can be done about this until we talk and I am confident then that all will be well.” Berry had sent a letter or a book—Michael couldn’t recall—and Jill thought that “there was a closer relationship with the woman than was the case,” he said. “You weren’t having an affair with Pamela Berry?” I pressed. “No, no affair,” Michael insisted.
Julie thought the situation was especially hard for her mother because at that point Jill wasn’t making her own money. In the early 1960s she had quit screenwriting, frustrated because directors made such a botch of her scripts. Then her life was thrown into turmoil when she crashed her car into a lorry. Michael was not expected to live (his chest was crushed and one of his lungs collapsed) and Jill, hurt nearly as badly, almost lost one of her hands. It was saved only at the cost of many painful operations and a physical discomfort she tried to alleviate with special bandages. It took her mother a long time to recover physically and mentally, Julie said.
The early 1960s was not a happy period for Jill, according to Julie:
She sold a Renoir painting to help her mother and buy me a Leica camera [Julie was embarking on a successful, if short, career as a photographer]. Michael gave her housekeeping money, but it wasn’t enough. He wasn’t in touch with domestic life, to put it generously. I was hostile to him then because I thought he was treating my mother very casually.
This last comment triggered Julie’s memory of a visit to Beaverbrook at his Cap d’Antibes estate. There Lady Beaverbrook, who was very fond of Jill (I found dozens of affectionate letters from her to Jill in Jill’s study) observed that Jill did not have a very nice dress to wear and ordered one made:
This humiliated my mother. She held it against Michael. I don’t know how you can use stuff like that. She felt that he was oblivious when he humiliated her. He didn’t know that £8 a week when my husband was giving me 20 and only earning a pittance wasn’t enough. She never liked to ask for money. She had her pride. When she couldn’t earn it, she’d sell something.
23
Julie told me that during the first week of Michael’s Dubrovnik stay (I arrived at the beginning of their second week there) several of his London friends had flown over as part of his commemoration of Jill in the City she loved. The wife of Bob Edwards (an intimate of Michael’s who edited Tribune after Michael left the job) told Julie that Michael was one of the most selfish men she had ever met. It seemed a shocking statement to me at the time; Michael was so affable and so obviously engaged with other people. He did not strike me as a monomaniac who would hold forth only about himself. But in effect, in Jill, he found a collaborator—as Carlyle had done with Jane—who might complain from time to time, but who never seriously challenged his own vision of himself or of the world he had a right to rule.
By making no demands (for example, “You must give up your career”), by seeming not to interfere in crucial decisions (should she abort the child she had conceived by him before they were married?) he effectively placed the burden of all decisions on her. She was the one who had to choose—over and over again. Michael could just be himself. This is the free ride men so often enjoy in their marriages.
Much later, when I interviewed Michael’s parliamentary colleague Leo Abse, I discovered that Leo viewed Michael’s solipsism in political terms; that is, because Michael could not see beyond the perimeters of the loving world constructed around him, he became (or perhaps always was) incapable of dealing with a world undreamt of in his philosophy. He was a partisan for his point of view, and it was very difficult for him to argue for any side other than his own. This is a common human failing, I suppose, but we seldom pursue our self-absorption with as much passion as Michael showed.
24
Jenny Stringer, as usual, was in charge of Michael’s itinerary. She was concerned that he get enough exercise. It was difficult but essential for him to walk. When I first met him in the mid 1990s, he could still walk quite vigorously with a cane but since then, the muscles in his legs had atrophied. He should have had physical therapy regularly, with home visits, but he had stopped even his once a week visits to a Hampstead therapist.
Jenny announced that she would come for Michael at eleven:
[MF] I’m doubtful Jenny.
[JS] Oh for heaven’s sake, it’s ridiculous. You’re not going to hang around here all day.
[MF] Hang around? I’ve got things to do.
[JS] I know. You can still come in [into town] for the walk. Can’t you?
[MF] No. Tell you what I might do ... I don’t want to disrupt your day.
[JS] You’re not disrupting it.
[MF] What I might do with you is walk up those steps [the Villa Dubrovnik had a steep set of steps up to the street] and then walk the opposite way.
[JS] Would you like to do that now?
[MF] No.
[JS] Why not? Then you won’t be doing any exercise all day. At the end of every day you say you need to get more exercise. The last three days have been very bad. You need to reform your ways. Let’s do it.
[MF] If you’ll just help me up the stairs. I’ll walk that way [away from town], come back and have the lightest lunch in Christendom, possibly only bananas.
The conversation reminded me that in spite of how accommodating Michael could be, a resistant element in him defied even the most skilful cajoling. But Jenny and Michael were not through, now almost putting on a show. Jenny ventured:
[JS] Supposing I said Tony Blair had sent a Rolls Royce to be up there at half past eleven?
[MF]