[CR] Do you think that if she had not met and married Mike Bessie she would have married you?
[MF] Well, I’m not quite sure. I don’t think she really wanted to live here. As it turned out, it was probably better for both of us.
I made another try:
[CR] As a personality, was Connie anything like Jill?
[MF] No. I don’t think really. Just let me think ...
A minute went by:
[CR] Did she have Jill’s feminist interests?
[MF] I don’t know that she did exactly. She practiced it—that is to say, she was a strong liberal.
The word liberal triggered his mention of coming to New York in 1954 during the Army-McCarthy hearings. Michael and Jill stayed with Connie’s father, Morris Ernst, famous for his defence of Ulysses.
Mike Bessie’s discussion of Michael and women brought me to the issue of Michael’s infidelity. I was keen to know what Mike Bessie, an old hand at publishing, would make of the ‘‘Lamia’’ story. I wondered how he thought I should handle it in the biography. “I have a suggestion to make,” he began:
You don’t know how you will handle it until you do. If it comes out to your satisfaction and you are inclined to use it, I would give it—not send it—to Michael, saying, “Here’s a part of my book that I believe to be true and that I would like to use, but it is not sufficiently important for me to use if it distresses you in any way.”
Although at the time I agreed that this was good advice, I should have known that I would never take it. My vision of Jill’s biography—any biography I chose to write--took precedence over anyone else’s feelings. The truth came first, Dr. Johnson asserted, even at the cost of hurting others.1 But how I would pursue that truth in the light of Michael’s own trust in my judgment I had not decided upon.
At this point Mike’s second wife, Cornelia, joined the conversation and I asked her for her impressions of Jill. Cornelia felt Jill was conflicted, playing the good wife to Michael, but being a feminist. “There were those moments when she and Michael disagreed,” Cornelia said. “My dear child,” Mike broke in, imitating Michael’s habitual method of addressing Jill. “That must have been fun to watch,” I said. “It was fun,” Cornelia agreed, because “my dear child” would bring out the feminist in her. “All of a sudden she was on her hind legs snarling—sweetly snarling but snarling.”
11
In June 2000, I had settled into a cosy stay at Pilgrim’s Lane. Only later would I begin to see that by providing me with so much access and comfort, Michael was buffering the biography. I don’t mean that he made some sort of calculation that I would be indebted because of his generosity—although this is exactly what his nephew Paul Foot would later say: I was abusing Michael’s hospitality by dealing with issues that for Michael’s sake should be left out of Jill’s biography. It was simply in Michael’s nature, I believe, to extend his liberality, which easily segued into his thinking I would produce a biography in the same spirit of amity that characterised our jolly talks together.
I did not realise then that I could not count on Michael to be his own man. He had a minder, Jenny Stringer. I met her during the course of my June 2000 stay at Pilgrim’s Lane. Although she promised me an interview, it would be quite some time before she would sit for one. “I better not stay.” Jenny said after stopping by to look in on Michael and I think, monitor my progress. “Why not stay?” Michael asked. “I have things to do,” she said.” “Better not stay,” Michael muttered, “doesn’t sound very convincing to me.” This was the sort of banter Michael enjoyed with the women—and it was mostly women—who catered to him.
Jenny was a friend of Victoria Reilly’s, Michael’s godchild and the daughter of Paul Reilly, whose father, Sir Charles Reilly, had introduced Michael to Jill at a London party in late 1944 just before Jill embarked on her most important film, The Way We Live. Jenny had not met Michael and Jill, however, until 1963, when they bought their home in Pilgrim’s Lane, close to Jenny’s home. Jenny became one of the younger women Jill encouraged, praising her as both homemaker and worker. They shared the same politics and Jenny was deeply involved in Labour Party affairs. When Jill realised she was dying, she began to worry about what would happen to Michael. Although Jenny never said so in so many words, I believe she made a promise to Jill to look after Michael. She was always cordial to me, but in her view, I was an interloper not to be trusted, especially since I always seemed to carry with me what she grimly called the “black box”—my cassette recorder.
12
The world seemed to turn on Michael’s likes and dislikes—as I learned when I mentioned I was giving a talk about Dr. Johnson at Cambridge. Michael objected to him as though Johnson was just another Tory politician. Indeed, literature seemed another form of politics and one had to declare a position. “What’s all this anti-Johnson stuff,” Michael’s brother John had asked him. “It won’t stand up,” John said. Michael explained his complaint to me:
It all derives from Johnson’s attack on Swift. Several people I admire very much like Alan Taylor was also a tremendous admirer of Lives of the Poets. No one can deny what a wonderful book it is. But he describes Swift’s madness without any kind of qualification. Once you look into it the story is absolutely false. He was not mad at all. Even Swift admirers like George Orwell swallowed the story of Swift’s madness.
Michael took fire on the topic of comic geniuses, putting Swift at the top with Shakespeare, followed by Rabelais, Charlie Chaplin, and Dickens. “I’m anti-Thackeray—I know that people will say that’s a foolish thing to say—because of what he said about Swift. “They tried to destroy Swift. If they had their way, he’d be dismissed as an absolute maniac. Terrible, what Thackeray said about him. Partly it’s because of his treatment of the women, but in my view he was in love with Stella and Vanessa.” The “they” almost sounded like a political party.
Talk of Stella and Vanessa transitioned in Michael’s mind to the question of fidelity and then to an old joke. A chap comes home and finds his wife in bed with another man. He upbraids her. She gets up and says, “That just proves you don’t love me. You’d rather believe your own eyes than what I tell you.”
13
After an afternoon at the British Film Institute, I returned to Pilgrim’s Lane in quite a state of excitement, eager to read a letter to Michael that I had found in Jill’s papers. She had written to Michael Balcon, a friend of hers and Michael’s, asking him for the opportunity to direct a film. Although she had made her name during the war as a director of documentaries, her work had received mixed reviews and when postwar developments in British cinema closed off her efforts to continue her career, she turned to script writing for Ronnie Neame and his producer, John Bryan. Essentially Jill was making a pitch to Balcon for making films about contemporary women, a subject ignored or poorly handled in 1950s Britain, which she nonetheless had explored with considerable success in an Evening Standard series of articles. Balcon sent her a polite but firm brush-off. I wondered if Michael knew about this letter and how he would react.
I read the letter to him in the living room while he played classical music. “An amazing letter,” I said. 2 “Good, isn’t it?” Michael replied. “How could anyone not hire this woman?” I asked. “Yes, I think so too,” he said. “I daresay she was disappointed.”
Michael asked again the date of Jill’s letter. It was written in 1958. This was a shattering period for both Michael and Jill. He had recently lost his bid to recover his Plymouth seat (he had been out of Parliament since 1955). At around the same time Michael had had a row with Nye Bevan, his mentor, closest friend, and ally. Bevan’s refusal to endorse unilateral disarmament came as a bitter disappointment to Michael, who continued to campaign for it, putting tremendous strain on the Bevanite faction of the Labour Party. The acrimony reached its climax when Bevan smashed one of Jill’s antique chairs and called Michael a cunt in his own home.
In 1959, Michael reconciled with Bevan, then dying