Relationship With Their Mother

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

regarding Leslie's and Ruth's attitudes about Leslie's extra-marital affairs:

"Leslie's public efforts of concealment [of his affairs] were scarcely so well-concealed from my mother and, undoubtedly, in the early stages of their marriage, these theatrical liaisons, though short-lived, considerably bewildered and perplexed her. Ruth was essentially an earthier, simpler creature altogether than Leslie, a country girl who, on her first arrival in America, found the theatrical coterie in which Leslie circulated odd and unsympathetic. She felt herself something of an outsider in this sophisticated world of clever people and witnessed the temptations to which Leslie was exposed with some alarm. Yet over the years by forbearance, understanding and much swallowing of pride she preserved the outward image of an unruffled marriage.

"Ideally, Leslie expected his domestic needs and extra-mural desires to be run together, as it were, in a double harness. The continental approach, perhaps, where once respectably married one strayed into affairs, yet carefully kept the marriage and the affairs separate, out of sight of one another and hermetically sealed by a kind of unwritten protocol. Equally ideally, in the English sense of the word, Leslie hoped not to be found out."

In Search of My Father, pg. 41

"Following the birth of my sister in 1924 there were to be no more children and their relationship appeared to reach a kind of undemanding quiescence, a plateau of acceptance. They shared a home and family responsibilities—but occupied separate rooms." In Search of My Father, pg. 42

"Though his needs and desires were constantly in conflict, his need for his family was greater—and always won in the end." In Search of My Father, pg. 43

"...and so it was not surprising that, when my mother and sister arrived in the film capital towards the middle of April, there was Leslie—in full view of the public and press—a bunch of flowers in his hand, waiting to meet them at the Los Angeles railway station." In Search of My Father, pg. 50

"His vagueness, actual or imagined, was also a wonderful shield. For a man who was supposed to be unable to remember his own name, he was quite an able businessman. Though he always left to my mother the organization of all the nasty, dull things like tickets and passports and luggage, he made all the major family decisions himself; then, if the decision did not suit everyone, he could squeeze by on the basis that he was too vague to understand what he had done knowing that my mother could readjust the details." A Quite Remarkable Father, pg. 11

"He wore [his glasses] whenever he went out, particularly to opening nights or events where a fan might see him, which irritated my mother, who felt he earned his living from the public and should try to be attractive. The sight of him dodging along, his hat down on his nose, his hand over his mouth, and his glasses firmly planted, made her quite violent and she told him he looked as though he had come to rob the safe. He invariably asked her the same question: what did she expect him to do—drift down the aisle tossing back his wavy hair, with one hand on his hip, gurgling, 'Here I am fans, come and get me?' This argument was always fruitless, and he continued to dart about like an espionage agent." A Quite Remarkable Father, pg. 12

Leslie Ruth wrote the following in response to her father's diary entry: "Feeling particularly depressed. Part seems hopeless and ineffectual—does me very little good—another packed house."

"To understand the contradiction of this, one has first to understand the young man. He was capable of great industry, and while he was working hard he could not think too seriously about himself. Then—and Ruth learned to expect this every time—the play would settle into a routine; Leslie would relax and begin to ponder why he was doing it, how bad his health was, and how ghastly it was anyway to work in the theater at all. Ruth had a difficult job keeping him on the path between joy and despair, the common road of the majority of the world's population.

"The most significant change that took place in Leslie's personality as he grew older was the gentle submission to this comfortable grayness, the careful avoidance of the too-strong black, the too-glaring white. Whether from laziness, exhaustion, or plain common sense, he became a strong advocate of compromise and the middle-road policy. It may have seemed to his associates that this was always his maxim. Only his wife knew better, for only with her could he afford to be temperamental. He would never make a public exhibition of his feelings." 

A Quite Remarkable Father, pg. 90

about a letter Ruth received from Leslie after he left home in 1929 to begin work on a new play:

"Ruth, often torn asunder by his [Leslie's] casual acceptance of marriage and of herself, held this letter close—carried it with her until it yellowed and fell apart. This was her Leslie—the one that only she knew—gentle, loving, and deeply dependent. He might change in a day, and indeed he could, becoming interested in the people he met, concentrating on his work, friendly, self-possessed, detached. But underneath, there would be these quick flashes of love and his need for her." A Quite Remarkable Father, pg. 161

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