Enid Bagnold A Life

To celebrate A new production of The Chalk Garden after 30 years at London's Donmar Warehouse Theatre a new edition of

Enid Bagnold a Life

is available in paperback for £9.99 from anne@annesebba.com

Synopsis
This biography brings to life one of the most gifted and active women of her generation. Best known as the author of National Velvet and The Chalk Garden, Enid Bagnold was born in 1889 and was determined from an early age to have it all: literary acclaim, social success, motherhood, marriage and lovers.

Escaping her stuffy military family to seek excitement in Chelsea, she painted with Sickert and was sculpted by Gaudier Brzeska. As a journalist, she worked with and was seduced by Frank Harris before falling in love with socialite Prince Antoine Bibesco. During World War 1 she worked as a VAD and, encouraged by Desmond MacCarthy, wrote an expose of hospital cruelty which won her instant fame. Her marriage to Sir Roderick Jones, head of Reuters, enabled her to combine motherhood and a glittering social life with the thrill and turmoil of a long and varied career on both sides of the Atlantic. In the 1930's she openly supported Hitler despite her love for an anti-Nazi German diplomat. Although the post-war film of National Velvet brought her international acclaim, her passion remained the theatre involving such legendary stars as Cecil Beaton, Edith Evans, Gladys Cooper, Irene Selznick, Charles Laughton and John Gielgud.

Programme Notes for The Chalk Garden 2008 by Anne Sebba

In the summer of 1952 Enid Bagnold returned from New York where she had been for the opening of her play, Gertie. Bagnold, author of a controversial memoir of World War 1 called Diary without Dates, which had shot her to youthful fame, and then National Velvet (later a Hollywood film launching the then unknown Elizabeth Taylor) immediately set about engaging new staff for her enlarged household. This included retired husband, Sir Roderick Jones, war-wounded son, young daughter-in-law and three year-old granddaughter. For she knew that without peace of mind on the domestic front no writing would be possible.

She advertised for a nanny for the child, asking simply for a “lady,” without qualifications. The shoal of extraordinary applicants immediately provided inspiration. It seemed as if all the originals and castaways of Hove and Brighton came out of their single rooms to present themselves at her door, she noted. One of them, a woman “with a high roman nose and white hair,” was given the job.  Bagnold was intrigued. She watched this woman living in a sort of inner silence into which she tried to enfold the child, never entering family conversation if she could help it. Then, one day, a judge friend came to lunch.  Bagnold noticed that the new nanny, sitting at a separate table with the child, “showed a strange, almost trembling interest” in the lunch guest.  “She not only turned around, she came right around as a ship turns and you see its bowsprit.” The fuse had been lit.  What, Bagnold wondered, had caused such an intense reaction?

Thus she set about writing a new play in which the lady of the house, Mrs St Maugham, was, like Enid Bagnold herself, a character only just discovering about life and death problems. The governess, the more interesting of the two women, had had plenty of time to think already. Within a year she considered the play ready to show her agent, Harold Freedman, who was immediately excited by it and sent it to Binkie Beaumont, the most influential producer in the London theatre. Binkie prevaricated. He asked her if the play had a deliberate state of madness.

Harold, deeply disappointed by this reaction, decided to bypass Binkie by opening in the United States, which he believed was more receptive to fresh work, and then bring it to England later with an American management. With this plan in mind, he sent the manuscript it to Irene Selznick, daughter of the legendary Louis B. Mayer and a woman who could pull in “stars.”

Enid had met Irene once, briefly, in New York at a reception given for Gertie. She was entranced by her exotic beauty, her wealth and power. She called her “a thinking machine, making intermittent contact, brimful of resolves, rather silent.” Irene had been brought up a Princess of Hollywood, was once married to David Selznick, but now, in her mid 40’s, divorced and determined to make a reputation as a successful producer. She was as greedy for success in her own right as Bagnold, in her mid 60’s, was for fame as a playwright.

From the outset, Selznick insisted she loved the play and was haunted by it’s “gossamer flashes of poetry and beauty.” But she wanted a tighter focus. She offered to come to London “to pull the threads straight.” No writer herself, she knew what was needed and was prepared to push and prod Bagnold into doing it. There was much rearrangement of material. But, as Bagnold commented, “when one has been alone so long with the white page, criticism is a burning shock.”  Selznick did not have time for tact. She marked in red pencil instead. Bagnold had collected hundreds of bon mots in baskets, which she called her plums. She took to stringing these up on a washing line across the room. Selznick saw it as her job to lighten the diet of “plums” which made many of the speeches indigestible. She had to discipline Bagnold out of her self indulgence with words, refusing to allow anything to remain merely because it sounded wonderful. She taught her that every single line had to work if the play was to be successful.

For months they worked together either at Selznick’s home, a luxury suite in New York’s Pierre Hotel, or at Rottingdean, the faded family house with character that Bagnold tried to recreate on stage in The Chalk Garden. They fought over lines, over sets and finally over casting with Bagnold pinning her hopes on Edith Evans playing Mrs St Maugham and Selznick hoping for her friend, Kate Hepburn, as Miss Madrigal. In the event it was Gladys Cooper, still beautiful at 67, who was the first to play Mrs St Maugham.

The battles raged on throughout rehearsals but, by the time The Chalk Garden opened at the Barrymore Theatre in New York on October 26, 1955, the day before Enid’s 66th birthday, everyone was pulling together to reveal the clever, courageous and thoughtful mind behind the witty, polished words. Enid found it “a balloon of a play. It rose in the warm air to the ceiling.” She wept when she read the next day how the critics praised it. Within hours of the New York reviews Binkie cabled: he wanted to put it on in London as soon as possible.

On April 11, 1956, The Chalk Garden opened at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket with the longed for (by Bagnold) Dame Edith Evans as Mrs St Maugham in a production directed by Sir John Gielgud. The following Sunday the leading British critic of the day, Kenneth Tynan, wrote: “ On Wednesday night, superbly caparisoned, the cavalry went into action and gave a display of theatrical equitation which silenced all grumblers …the occasion of its triumph was Enid Bagnold’s The Chalk Garden, which may well be the finest artificial comedy to have flowed from an English (as opposed to an Irish) pen since the death of Congreve…We eavesdrop on a group of  thoroughbred minds , expressing themselves in a speech of exquisite candour,  building ornamental bridges of metaphor, tiptoeing across frail causeways of simile, and vaulting over gorges impassable to the rational soul.”

As Mrs St Maugham declares: “Love can be had any day! Success is far harder.” With The Chalk Garden,  Enid had won what she so desperately craved: success.

Anne Sebba, London 2008

Anne Sebba is the author of Enid Bagnold a Life ( 1986)

Terence de Vere White, reviewing the book in The Irish Times, wrote: “I know of no other book with a theatrical background which gives such an absorbing picture of what it is like to be involved in the production of plays.”