in 1959. Helping Michael, he acknowledged, became a full time job for Jill—“the election and the actual process of settling there [in Tredegar, part of Michael’s constituency].” It was a distraction. I’m sorry to say it must have often happened. She was turning away from what she had been doing in the film industry.” In fact, Jill’s last substantial film work was a screenplay for Windom’s Way (1957), a vehicle for Peter Finch. She did not produce another substantial work until Who Are the Vandals? (1967), a BBC television documentary about tower blocks and public housing. In that film she resumed her passion for architecture and town planning. She also caused an uproar in the Labour Party and among architects with two articles for the Times in which she accused both of reneging on their promise to provide housing on a human scale. Michael admired the ruckus Jill caused, but he seemed unable to understand why she did not continue with her causes. She would not make another film until the 1990s, when Michael’s retirement from Parliament allowed him to put himself at her disposal. Initially he had balked at the idea of her doing a film about the Balkan Wars, but then he capitulated to a suddenly adamant Jill, determined to make the film no matter what.
Was he making amends? Or was he simply caught up in her own passion to tell the story about the breakup of Yugoslavia and the shelling of Dubrovnik, their beloved holiday retreat? If Michael was no Carlyle when it came to reassessing his marriage, was the film nevertheless an act of restitution?
I watched Michael mulling over Jill’s letter to Balcon. Michael mentioned his friendship with the film producer but seemed unable to grasp that Jill had been rejected. “They should have pressed her more,” he said vaguely. Who “they” were was in doubt. Jill apparently never told Michael about the letter, and to me that was as heartbreaking as the letter itself.
But then, Jill had another life that Michael acknowledged but did not share. A case in point was Tom Driberg , a part of the Bevanite faction. Driberg’s personal affairs, as Michael described them, were a mess:
He had an unhappy life, Tom, because of his sexual ... He was taking terrible risks before the whole change had happened in the atmosphere of what could be done and not done. Tom from his earliest days was a homosexual, but he couldn’t enjoy sex with members of his own class. So he was constantly engaged in affairs ... you know ... in a way that was not at all ... In his last few years he used to come up here quite often and talk to Jill. He wouldn’t say all this to me. Jill was very good to him.
Michael then described a scene with a dejected Driberg standing alone on the street with his belongings, not knowing how to arrange a move into new lodgings. Jill understood this kind of male helplessness—as did all those women around Michael—and she soon had Driberg settled.
The ‘Dribergs’—the hapless males of this world—often turned up on Jill’s doorstep, Michael recalled. The artist Stanley Spencer would come calling, unwashed and dishevelled. He would ask: “Why am I so attractive to women?” and he was, Michael explained. At one point Spencer turned out a quick sketch of Michael, which Jill thought awful. She destroyed it, Michael recalled, adding that Clementine Churchill had done the same with Graham Sutherland’s portrait of her husband.
Just then Julie arrived. “How are you?” Michael asked. “Okay,” she replied. “Doesn’t sound very enthusiastic,” Michael said. Michael seemed to crave big entrances and provocative pronouncements, and he liked to send visitors away with some kind of provoking comment: “Drive properly,” he would say to Jenny. He knew that would get a rise out of her and prolong, if only for a moment, their comic crosstalk.
Julie got up to get us drinks, refusing my offer of help. When she returned, she handed me a whiskey (with Michael, I almost always drank whiskey, a cheap Scotch I would down while eying the superb collection of single malts—gifts from admiring visitors—displayed on the mantel).
I had brought a copy of my Rebecca West biography for Julie. “You should read it for your education,” Michael said to her. “My ongoing education,” Julie tittered. She would be the first to say she was not an intellectual. It had often been hard on her simply to be in the company of Michael, Jill, and leading lights in theatre, politics, and the arts who frequented the Foot /Craigie dinner parties. Julie loved private, domestic life and she had little patience for the sacrifices Jill made to Michael’s status as a public man. She was fond of Michael but critical as well—as she was of her mother. Michael would eventually sour on me because I gave Julie so much of a voice in my biography of her mother. But Julie had also been a problem for Jill and Michael, running through three marriages (as her mother had done), borrowing money, and bitching up her life while wanting Jill and Michael to give her not only economic but moral support. To many of Michael’s and Jill’s friends, Julie’s motives were mixed. To Julie, however, families were meant to help out, and she had certainly helped out at certain crucial points in Michael’s and Jill’s lives.
Just then, Julie was planning a two-week stay at the Villa Dubrovnik, where Michael and Jill had spent so many happy holidays. Jill’s friends were assembling, as were many Croats, who honoured Jill and Michael for making a documentary about the shelling of their city. Two Hours From London marked Jill’s astonishing return in her eighties to filmmaking. Of course, I had to be on hand to meet as many of her friends as I could. “Fun is to be had there,” Julie said. “You’re making it impossible for me to say no,” I replied. “That’s what we like to hear,” Michael chimed in. Michael and his entourage planned the rendezvous for that September. I did not know then that he was paying the way for many of these people, including Julie.
14
After Julie left us at Pilgrim’s Lane, I came back to the question of Michael and women, which he had alluded to when describing his period at Oxford. I pointed out to him that one of Jill’s obituaries referred to him a “man about town” during the war, while another claimed he had been a “womaniser” in the period before he met Jill. “What I want to know,” I said to him, “is how much of a ladies’ man you were.” “Well I wasn’t at all, hardly,” Michael replied. I laughed, “What a disappointment, Michael!” “I wish I could have made the boast,” he added. “I sometimes had eczema so badly I wouldn’t go out of the house. For quite a long time I didn’t think any woman would look at me.” The word womaniser bothered him. “It should be exterminated from history.” Frank Owen, his colleague at the Evening Standard, seemed to attract women effortlessly, but Owen was no womaniser. In Michael’s book, the term implied one-way gratification and in Owen’s case the women received as good as they got. “I was in awe of such men and thought, ‘How do you do that?’” Michael continued: “In the 1930s, I was tremendously inhibited about sex. I was very backward in such matters. I started reading H. G. Wells properly then. He liberated me.” Michael adored novels like Ann Veronica and thought the world would have been a poorer place if H.G. had not had his affair with Rebecca, no matter how many hardships and griefs their liaison caused. Rebecca had attacked H.G.’s feeble characterisations of women such as Margerie in his novel Marriage. But in subsequent novels, Michael pointed out, Wells included much more complex portraits of women—some of them clearly based on Rebecca herself.
I was still trying to piece together what Michael was like when he first met Jill:
[CR] She must have seemed an extraordinary woman. She was doing this film [The Way We Live]. She had been married twice before. She had a child. What was that like for you?
[MF] Yes, oh well ... By the way, I was tremendously admiring of all the time she gave to Julie. Sometimes Julie poorly appreciated that.
I didn’t think he was going to answer my question, but he continued:
It didn’t happen all at once, you know. After the [1945] election we started doing some things together. I was living at sixty two Park Street and she came up and saw there was no music, and she put a radiogram in the corner and played Mozart. Jill was the one who really made me understand what music was—all such things.
[CR] Was it difficult for her to divorce Jeffrey Dell?
[MF] I didn’t know about that at all, really. I don’t think it was difficult. We weren’t pressing to marry, but my father was in favour of it.
Such dialogues were