Memoirs of a Private Man (21 page)

Nigel Tangye, a Cornishman, descendant of the Tangyes who moved from Cornwall to Birmingham to establish their engineering works and make their fortunes, had inherited the family home of Glendorgal, near Newquay, but very little else. After a fine war career he had become Air Correspondent for the
London Evening News
, but soon afterwards he married the film actress Ann Todd and became her manager. This marriage fell apart when Ronnie Neame, director of my first film,
Take My Life
, had for his next assignment been appointed director of
The Passionate Friends
, from the Wells novel, with Ann Todd in the leading role, and had found himself unable to work out any understanding with or cooperation from her. David Lean was called in to take over and at once fell in love with his star, and she with him. So the Tangye–Todd marriage ended in divorce, and Ann married David.

Before this the tremendous smash hit of
The Seventh Veil
, starring Ann Todd and James Mason, had made her an international star, and Nigel, managing her affairs, had prospered mightily with her. (I remember when I was first going to America in 1950 Nigel said to me that the only possible way for a young British author to go to New York was
en prince
. I repeated this to Alan Grogan, my agent – and hers – and he replied, with a cynical glint in his eye, ‘He means, on Ann's.')

But the divorce, apart from the very genuine distress it caused Nigel, literally did leave him without a meal ticket, and it occurred to him that one way of making a living was to convert the handsome family house, Glendorgal, into a hotel. Its position was ideal, being built on a promontory between two sandy beaches, and it required only a few extra bedrooms to turn it into a profitable concern. This he had done, and to my admiration he had made a great success of it. Of course it appealed to the snobbery in us all. No one was better connected than Nigel, or knew more famous people, and he was able to get many of his friends to come as paying guests. Prices were high and food rather pretentious, but the service and ambience were excellent. Nigel himself played the piano to his guests every evening (among his many talents was an ability both to compose light music and to play it), and who knew what famous film star or member of the aristocracy – particularly the sort of aristocracy that got itself in the news – one might meet at this small and select hotel?

By the time of our European trip things had moved on, and Nigel had married again. Baron, the then famous society photographer, while staying at Glendorgal, had said to Nigel, ‘Would you like me to introduce you to the most dangerous woman in England? Her name's Lady Marguerite Hayward. She's divorced, with two children, and she's living in Cornwall at present, modelling in St Ives.' It was too great a temptation for the handsome Nigel Tangye to resist.

Throughout that winter he would drive over to St Ives twice a week, usually on his great motorcycle, and usually he would call on us on the way, since our house was medially situated. In the cold weather he would come in so wrapped up, his long hair straggling, looking like a great bear. Sometimes he carried a hot-water bottle and we would refill it for him.

Eventually they married and Marguerite came to help at the hotel, receiving and looking after guests. She was in fact one of the most beautiful women in England, certainly one of the most darkly fascinating I have ever seen. But after a few years she tired of the hotel and wanted to separate herself from it. So Nigel bought her a small house on the other side of the cove, and she came over to help or didn't come over, as she thought fit. Then she began to refuse to allow Nigel even to touch her, and he had to take sedatives to subdue his natural instincts.

It was at this stage in his life that I joined him and Don for the trip in Europe. Alan Grogan, my agent and a sophisticated man of the world, expressed himself slightly shocked (‘surprised' was the word he used) that I should go on such a holiday with two such randy playboys.

For Donegall too, of course, had had and was having a varied love life. He had married a Combe (of the brewery family) and had considered that he and his wife-to-be had achieved a good, sexually matter-of-fact relationship before they married. But right at the beginning it turned out all wrong because she took great exception on their wedding day to his keeping a golfing engagement in the afternoon; and their semi-companionate marriage never really worked out. They were now long separated but she refused to divorce him, being determined that there should be only one Marchioness of Donegall so long as she was alive. For our present trip Don had made a date to meet a new girlfriend in Paris for the weekend which was to terminate our trip. Thereafter we were to make our several ways home.

On the drive round Europe, which in fact confined itself to Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and France, I was heavily outgunned, so far as knowledge of women was concerned, by the experiences and reminiscences of my two formidable friends. I was the ingenuous one. But by pure chance I was able to make a much better showing than they did on this particular holiday.

On the way home we spent a couple of nights in Geneva, where Nigel wanted to interview potential staff to engage for his hotel next summer, so I telephoned my dear friend Vreni Wittmann, who came over in her car, a pretty blonde in a smart Alfa, and bore me away with her to spend a most entertaining afternoon and evening. Our next stop was Dijon, where I discovered that my friend Nadine Alari – my failed protégée from
Night Without Stars
five years before – was playing the lead in a French production of the Emlyn Williams play
Night Must Fall
. I told the other two to go on to Paris without me, and I would join them by train in a couple of days, so that I could see the production and take Nadine to dinner afterwards. Then when we did get to Paris one of the wealthy young married ladies dining with Don on his first evening at the Ritz took a great interest in me, and complications ensued.

Thereafter, whenever our holiday together was mentioned by my two companions, I was always referred to as ‘ The Dark Horse'.

These ladies deserve a few extra paragraphs to themselves.

Vreni Mettler, as she then was, came to Cornwall to stay for some months just before the war. She had apparently strained her heart skiing and had been sent to England to recuperate. This did not prevent her dancing and surfing and playing tennis. And flirting. During the war I heard nothing of her, but after it I heard from her that she had married a lawyer called Réné Wittmann and had two children. Her great ambition all her life was to be a painter. Her father, who lived in St Gall, had been a woollen manufacturer and had made a fortune supplying both sides in the First World War, but, instead of investing in stocks and shares, he bought paintings. Vreni, a teenager coming home from art school, would show her father the results of her work, and he would look at them and then at the Toulouse-Lautrecs, the Cézannes, the Utrillos on his walls and shake his head at her.

When Vreni married during the war her husband, knowing the wealth of her parents, virtually gave up his practice, preferring to live the life of a studious gentleman. Vreni, having produced two children, employed governesses to look after them and took up painting in earnest. She never spent less than five hours a day at her easel and eventually came to have a number of successful exhibitions in Switzerland and Austria. I have two of her paintings.

When her father died her mother said Vreni and her three brothers should share his collection between them, each child having a halfdozen on loan for a year and then changing with one of the others. Old Mrs Mettler kept the best Toulouse-Lautrecs for herself. She was tempted by outrageous offers from American galleries, but she said she found greater pleasure in looking at them in her house than from all the extra money she would have in the bank. Because of the peculiar tax situation in Switzerland (where apparently people are taxed on the value of their possessions) the pictures were never insured. I often wonder what happened to them after she died. Vreni was killed in a car crash some years ago. In spite of the ready brilliance of her smile, she was a sad woman. Her children did well, but her own marriage was a formality and she never quite attained her ambition as a painter. She had the strange arid fatalism of some Swiss, and from what she said the last time I met her I think that death – though certainly not sought – would not have been unwelcome.

The second lady, the one I met in Dijon, was, as I have said, Nadine Alari. After that first meeting, five years before, when we had taken a strong liking to each other, we had met several times, and she had invited me to see the French farce in which she was then playing, and after that to join her and her company for the annual dinner and dance and other festivities, held annually in the Place de la Concorde on the 13th of July, when all the actors and many of the notorieties of Paris congregate for a tremendous party which goes on all night. (I wrote about this in
After the Act
.) It had indeed been a memorable night for me, in more ways than one. So finding her so unexpectedly in Dijon was a special bonus, and I rang her and, as I have said, we had a happy reunion.

Since then Nadine has had a successful career on the French stage and in the French cinema; but as far as I know she never did do a film in English. She spoke it fluently. Had things turned out differently, with her playing the lead in
Night Without Stars
and partnering Paul Scofield, who knows what might have happened, or how much more successful the film might have been?

The plan when we reached Paris – I two days late – was for Don to meet his new girlfriend, who was coming from England to join him, and they would stay at the Ritz. Neither Nigel nor I fancied ourselves as gooseberries overlooking this new romance; and in any case the Ritz was far too expensive for our pockets. So we took rooms at the Hôtel d'Alsace in the Rue des Beaux-Arts, in the heart of the Latin Quarter. The Hôtel d'Alsace was run by a crippled lady called Madame Gely, and it was at this hotel that Oscar Wilde had died. Those who passed the test of her approval – as we did – were shown the first-floor bedroom and the actual bed. After making suitable comments in our broken French, we tiptoed reverently out.

For my part I would in any case far rather have stayed at the d'Alsace than the Ritz. It was totally, marvellously French; nearby were the famous cafés, Le Flore and Les Deux Magots. Michael Ayrton told me a splendid story of when as a very young artist he had gone to Paris with a French friend and stopped for a drink at Les Deux Magots.

After they had been there a few minutes his friend gripped his arm and said: ‘Look! Picasso!' And there was the great man himself with three friends, seated at a nearby table. They watched with fascination, while trying not to watch.

Then again Michael had his arm gripped. ‘Look, just look and then glance away. He's sketching something!' There was Picasso, pencil in hand, drawing on the paper tablecloth.

And then: ‘Don't look again. I think he's drawing you!' Michael Ayrton was a good-looking young man, but he was transfixed at the thought that the great Picasso should think him worthy of a sketch. Sure enough, one more glance showed the great man's eyes fixed thoughtfully on him as he worked with his pencil. After a few minutes he stopped, then he paid the bill and the quartet left.

What was more amazing was that Picasso had actually left his sketch behind. Quickly, before anyone else could take the table, Michael and his friend rushed over, sat down and looked at the tablecloth. On it was written: ‘2 café filtres, 8 f., 1 cassis, 6 f., 1 absinthe, 8 f., pourboire 2 f., total 24 francs.'

Faithful to his old friends, Don invited us both to dinner at the Ritz to meet his girlfriend, but at the last moment Nigel was unwell, so I went alone. It was a glittering company. I remember by name only the Earl of Dudley, le Comte et Comtesse de la Fregonnière, Sir Duncan and Lady Mitchell-Clegg, and of course Don's girlfriend, of whom much more later. Both the foreign ladies seemed to take a fancy to me. Dickie de la Fregonnière's fancy was innocuous. She was American born, middle-aged, jolly and gnarled. Anoushka Mitchell-Clegg's fancy was not. She was Duncan's third wife, thirty years younger than he, sultry in a way only a Russian woman can be sultry, and very, very beautiful. We looked at each other aghast.

During the next few days I lost touch with Don and his girlfriend and, emerging daily from my artistic slum, was caught up in a whirl of social engagements: cocktail parties at the Meurice, luncheon parties at the de la Fregonnières' house in Neuilly, dinner parties at the Crillon. It was a world I had never moved in before – a world in which money was never mentioned because it was so abundant that it was unimportant. (One does not discuss water when all one needs to do is turn on the tap.) Health was much talked of, particularly one's liver. A Brazilian I met was flying back to Rio on the morrow to see his dentist because one of his teeth was giving trouble. Social engagements were discussed, and ‘a little trinket' from Cartier's, and hunting, and one's liver, and the place one had on the Riviera, and occasionally the misbehaviour of chefs – and one's liver.

It was a supremely sophisticated society, and supremely decadent. I remember discussing this once with Prince Chula Chakrabongse, the then senior prince of Thailand and the king's uncle – and himself half-Russian – and he said: ‘I am a millionaire but I am not welcome in that society. I am not sufficiently sophisticated for them.'

However, a young Englishman,
un
sophisticated but temporarily unattached, and agreeable, was welcomed – literally – with open arms.

Sir Duncan Mitchell-Clegg was a Canadian millionaire. He was large and gruff and elderly and suspicious. He accompanied his wife everywhere. We took dinner together, as a threesome. We took tea together in their hotel suite, as a threesome. It was very trying for two of us. Then the day before I was due to leave, when things were coming to a terrible crisis, I was struck down with a remnant of Nigel's virus. It saved me – at least temporarily – from a fate much better than death.