Daphne du Maurier and her Sisters. Jane Dunn

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      This was a highly visible group that intersected with the du Mauriers’ theatrical milieu, with Angela on the verge of being carefully launched on a world that seemed half-crazy. One of the revellers, and barely a year older than Angela, was Evelyn Waugh. He famously satirised this period of relentless futility and emotional dead-ends in his novel Vile Bodies:

      Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John’s Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming-baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris – all that succession and repetition of massed humanity … Those vile bodies …¹

      The popular press was also hungry for distraction and avidly followed the antics of this gilded youth, reporting in middle-class papers such as the Daily Mail and Evening Standard activities that made Bertie Wooster and the Drones look positively intellectual and patrician. Journalists coined a term for this group of gorgeous wastrels: they were the Bright Young Things, and by breathlessly recording every move in their newspapers, from the scandalous to the banal, they initiated modern celebrity culture. The Bright Young Things were delighted with this newfound fame based on nothing more than being fabulous. They courted the publicity, dashing for the papers each morning and counting how many photographs or news flashes they could find in the accommodating press.

      Among this group exaggeratedly camp behaviour became the norm, and male homosexuality, at the time illegal and socially suicidal, was accepted, its mores copied and celebrated. Eddie Gathorne-Hardy, Stephen Tennant, Brian Howard and Beverley Nichols were amongst the more flamboyant and it was only their influential connections that protected them from the dangers of prosecution and ostracism by mainstream society. Lesbians too were suddenly fashionable and famous comedy revue acts like Gwen Farrar and Norah Blaney were extremely popular and welcomed into the boisterous parties thrown by these giddy young. Norah played the piano and sang in a sweet girlish voice while Gwen, with circular horn-rimmed glasses and a cello between her knees, played the fool with her comedy basso profundo voice. The bisexual American actress/phenomenon Tallulah Bankhead and Radclyffe Hall, known as John, were part of these artistic social sets. Severely cropped hair, masculine attire, male nicknames and a swaggering culture of smoking, drinking and drug-taking became daringly chic.

      The blurring of gender and flaunting of an exaggeratedly theatrical style caused great unease as social norms appeared to break down. A popular song of the 1920s sung by, amongst others, Gwen Farrar, was called Masculine Women, Feminine Men:

      Hey, Hey women are going mad today

      Hey, Hey fellers are just as bad I’ll say,

      Masculine Women, Feminine Men

      Which is the rooster, which is the hen,

      It’s hard to tell ’em apart today? And SAY

      Auntie is smoking, rolling her own

      Uncle is always buying cologne …

      You go and give your girl a kiss in the hall

      But instead you find you’re kissing her brother, Paul

      And so it continued, with the suggestive frisson of what was still considered by the law, and society at large, to be aberrant behaviour.

      The richer or more famous you were the easier it was to express such freedoms. Amongst this social group, largely centred on London, the 1920s became notorious for its subversive energy and flair, for freedom from the social constraints of the previous generations and for a feverish pursuit of pleasure that loosened rigid hierarchies of class and behaviour. The anarchic spirit of Peter Pan presided over the age in the irrepressible energy and rejection of responsibility, unlike the elder brothers who had marched so tragically to war. The newspapers built a picture of celebrity idlers dancing their lives away, when not otherwise engaged in various amoral pursuits.

      The gossip of drug-taking and heterosexual promiscuity, however, was much exaggerated. Given that many of these young men were only just out of all-male public schools and universities with drinking clubs like the Oxford Hypocrites Club that lived by the unwritten law that ‘gentlemen may prance but not dance’, and that young women were mindful of their marriage prospects, it was not surprising that both were still sexually shy in each other’s company. Nevertheless, the gossip appalled the mothers of well-brought-up girls – and none more than the du Maurier parents who watched as their two elder daughters entered the dubious social fray.

      Before Angela was let loose, but in a very controlled way, she had to ‘finish’ her education in Paris. When she was nearly eighteen she and Betty Hicks, the daughter of the actor Seymour Hicks and his actress wife Ellaline Terriss, were sent to the smartest and most famous finishing school, situated close to the Eiffel Tower and run by the three unmarried Ozanne sisters, daughters of a Protestant minister. Angela had known Betty since she was fourteen and would come to consider her ‘my extra sister’;² they would remain close friends for life. They shared similar upbringings: both were daughters of actress mothers, celebrated for their beauty, and ambitious actor-manager fathers, and both girls were made to feel they were plain and failed to live up to their parents’ high aesthetic expectations.

      After a bout of flu, Angela arrived a little late in January 1922 full of excitement at the idea of being in Paris, but once again poleaxed by homesickness. Betty had been a boarder at Roedean School and was used to being away and consequently found the regime free and easy in comparison. Angela, horrified by the rules and regulations, thought it more like a prison. A wide range of rich and glamorous young women passed through the doors of what was a strictly run establishment more concerned with culture than education. Angela and Bet were slightly disconcerted to overhear themselves described in hushed tones by one of the Mesdemoiselles Ozanne as filles d’artistes and rather patronisingly commended for being surprisingly well brought up. Angela felt she learned little; in fact her French, which under Tod’s tuition had progressed quite well, actually deteriorated.

      Nancy Cunard, who had attended the Ozanne school a few years before, bitterly complained that the lessons were almost infantile and she loathed the dull, heavily chaperoned outings to churches and museums. But her visits to the Opéra and the discovery of César Franck’s music saved her sanity. Angela’s love of music was nurtured by the richness of Parisian culture but her singing and piano teachers crushed the life out of her dreams of performance. Her voice training was put in the fiercely competent hands of Gabrielle Ritter-Ciampi, a famous lyric soprano who, in her mid-thirties, was still in her prime with many performances before her. She declared herself initially quite impressed with Angela’s voice but her rigorous demands and tempestuous response to any slackness or stumble – she once flung across the room a small bunch of violets Angela had brought her – destroyed her pupil’s fragile confidence.

      The eldest du Maurier daughter was not a fighter. Her sheltered and genteel education had not taught her resilience. ‘I have to be encouraged; whether over a short story, a song, a love affair or the receipt of a bunch of flowers.’ If Angela’s voice wobbled over the middle C, Madame ‘behaved as though the Huns were at the gates of Paris, and oneself just the most imbecile of an entirely imbecile race’.³ This was too much for a student who had offered her heart in her singing and now quivering, tearfully excused herself from any further training.

      Her natural exuberance and pleasure in playing the СКАЧАТЬ