Violette Cunnington

Wink's and Doodie's conversation as they drive home from Southampton after the arrival of Leslie, Ruth and Doodie aboard the RMS Aquitania in August, 1939:

Now that the laughter had subsided, we sat reflectively silent. We were somewhere along the Hog's Back—the wind tugging at the car, disarranging my sister's elaborately coiffeured curls—before I said: 'It doesn't make sense.'

'What doesn't?' Doodie leaned towards me, clutching her fur.

'You all coming back like this—at the eleventh hour. There's bound to be a war. You should have stayed in Hollywood till things were a bit clearer. Why didn't you?'

'Because we didn't want to. We weren't that passionately attached to the place. Anyway, who knows, we might have got stuck there. Besides, Wink, it wasn't all that pleasant.'

'Why not?' I said blankly.

Doodie gave me a wide-eyed, slightly ambivalent look.

'Well, for Mother, you nut—with Daddy leading his double life with-you-know-who.'

'Oh, God, I'd forgotten...' Or did I really know?

'Living here one might. Out there we couldn't very well.'

I certainly wasn't aware of the latest developments. Anyway, the details of Leslie's somewhat bisected existence were rarely, if ever, discussed. A kind of family taboo surrounded his emotional life. It was a grey area, a terra incognita and certainly one I preferred not to explore. In a kind of male chauvinist way I thought his private life was his own business. In any case, I'd convinced myself long ago that his behaviour was the inevitable norm—par for the Howard course, as it were—and not wanting to be too closely involved buried my head in the sand.

'Must have been rather awkward,' I said lamely.

'You could say that,' said Doodie. 'Bit like Chinese torture—exquisite in its way—with Daddy slipping down from Beverly Drive to pay us irregular visits, looking rather like the condemned man.'

I confessed to having been rather out of the picture. Perhaps I was being dense but the few postcards I'd received of views of Hollywood had not exactly been explicit. Though Leslie had, apparently, been full of his usual solicitude and kindness, doing his best to be charming, though regrettably divided self, things had, naturally, been rather upsetting for Mother. She found it a little difficult to have a sense of humour about.

'It had its funny moments, mind you—even the travel plans were like a comic opera. I'll tell you the whole story sometime.' Doodie smiled, shaking her head a little sadly. 'That's why we wanted to leave—quite apart from the war situation. Anyway, Stowe Maries is home, Wink, not 606 North Camden Drive, Beverly Hills. That was just an arrangement.'

[Leslie Howard family home Stowe Maries in Dorking, Surrey]

If it was difficult to think about, it was even harder to talk about with the wind tearing the words from our lips—and I sped on fast, though not exactly furious, towards Westcott and Stowe Maries. If my sister found the situation somewhat more trying than I did, it was understandable. She had to live with it. In the present situation I felt a little helpless—even though the questions that formed in my mind were not new ones. But in a male way I pushed them away from me. Anyway. they could wait. I only hopped the air inside the Cadillac had not been as pungent as the aside to the driver of the sports car, and that any recrimination had been silent.

Stopping for a drink at our local pub we steered the conversation along lighter lines, discussing the film Leslie was apparently so keen on but Doodie wondered whether he would ever make with the threat of war so close. She also explained, with ironic humour, the crowning subtleties of their departure from Hollywood, their reunion with Leslie in New York and the journey home en famille across the Atlantic. I imagined the situation could have been quite funny—like the plot of a farcical, triangular movie—to someone not too closely involved.

When we arrived home half an hour later we saw the Cadillac parked by the garage and hurried indoors where my sister was greeted with hugs and kisses by Miss Gospel, our old nanny-housekeeper, who deserves a book to herself. She had, more or less, brought us up—and was always known, affectionately, as 'Gargy'. Of Ruth and Leslie there was no sign save their luggage in the hall. I was a little worried that they might have got the cudgels out, or even the duelling pistols, and looked enquiringly at 'Gargy'. But she didn't bat an eyelid, being a wise woman with a gift for keeping her own brand of quiet counsel. She simply remarked that they had gone to the stables to see the horses.

When Doodie and I, setting off across the garden, reached the corner by the loose-boxes there was no blood-bath to greet us, in fact, the reverse. There was Leslie, in the best of spirits, chatting away with Jack Hessey, the groom, while rubbing the noses of his polo-ponies as he fed them lumps of sugar. He was getting acquainted with his Texan friends again, almost as if he'd never been away. Nearby stood my mother, watching this scene of reunion, without a hint of recrimination in her face. It was a look of almost tender approval. Was it forgiveness, reconciliation I read there—or simple benign resignation? I wasn't, at first, at all sure.

In Search of my Father, pgs. 28-29

"...now the romantic adventure could not, so whimsically, be shrugged aside. It took a far deeper hold on him...in 1938, at the age of forty-five, he found himself drawn into a far more enduring relationship than he might have dreamed possible. It was not another peccadillo, another of Leslie's birds in a gilded cage—the hectic pursuit in the tight-rope world of the theatre, with a safety net for his fall. This time the girl was not an actress but a humbler, more modest sort of person altogether: a film company secretary. It was to develop into the most serious, the most compelling attachment Leslie had ever known." In Search of my Father, pg. 44

"A profounder link had been forged that was not even to be broken by her death at the early age of twenty-nine." In Search of my Father, pg. 45

"...it could not be crushed, yet for its survival it demanded of Violette far more than it demanded of Leslie—the role of mistress is a dead end, with no guarantees, for the man can walk out when he pleases, and there are generally no children. It is subject to subterfuge, evasion and humiliation by its very nature. That Violette accepted all this was due not only to the intensity of her feelings for Leslie but to her sensitive understanding and unselfishness in playing the role she had decided for herself—and because she would never have consciously upstaged anyone, least of all my mother whom she not only admired but to whom she always maintained what the French are schooled to observe in these situations, a correct sense of protocol. She was a far more intelligent and a far rarer bird than one normally encounters in the film world, and Leslie was very lucky."  In Search of my Father, pg. 46

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