In Tasmania (34 page)

‘
IS THAT WHY YOU DIDN'T MARRY?
'

Ivy stared into her teacup and the reflection played over her face. ‘Our cousin Betty said: “You've had everything but a man.” And I said: “I don't want one, either.” Mum always said that once you got in with the opposite sex that's when your troubles start. What you never had you don't miss,' and glanced at her sister.

Maud said after a long moment: ‘We didn't marry because we had plenty going on. All work and no play. Dash upsetting times we had.'

Ivy said: ‘We were helping other people. And we saw too much of the others, what they was doing. Dear, oh dear. Gwen was pretty useless with the little fellas, wasn't she, Maudy? She'd be getting sick all the time and everyone here got sick of it. She's in bed sick and I'm trying to clean the house up, Good Old Faithful.'

And so the two sisters had stayed in paradise, milked the cows, cut their flowers, reared their Jerseys and Herefords, and only ever brought in men to do the fencing and for harvest. ‘Men came to help with potatoes, young fellas. Useless looking bags,' Ivy said. ‘You want paying to have them around, useless things.'

‘Do you wish you had descendants?' I asked.

‘Not now, when you see the way things go on. Only when you're really young you'd be thinking about it. But you get a bit wise, don't you, when you see a bit? It's easier to live life how you are. Cousin Betty reckons we're the lucky ones now – that's what they're all saying.'

‘Is there anywhere you'd like to have seen?'

‘I suppose I would have liked to have gone back to England, wouldn't we? I would have liked to see where the Horderns used to live. 'Course that would have been nice, but you can't do it, can you, when you're tied up with things you've got to do. You couldn't leave this.'

‘Where's the furthest you ever travelled?'

‘Launceston. That's as far as we ever got,' Ivy said. ‘But that was years ago.'

Launceston was no further than 70 miles away. ‘When was this?'

‘Oh, 1947.' Ivy had taken the train when they ran cheap excursions from Ulverstone. Her father arranged the tickets. It was a day trip with her mother and sisters and they came back late. ‘We looked round the parks. Mother took us on a tram. We went up the main street. Not much else. It wasn't frightening. When you're young you do a lot of things. You gad around.'

‘So how many times have you left here?'

‘About half a dozen.' She and Maud used to go on expeditions to Devonport to buy their dolls. ‘We were well known. There'd be good smiles on their faces when we walked in!'

‘And the last night you spent away from this farm?'

There was some discussion. Ivy thought it was when she went to stay with Aunt Ethel in Devonport. ‘That would have been in 1943.'

Otherwise, they had not travelled further south than the farm or further east than Launceston in their lives. Reports from family who had ventured further afield had not, they implied, been enticing.

‘Dad never went to Hobart. He took mother to Melbourne for their honeymoon and wished they hadn't done.'

There was also the experience of Ivy's twin Heather. She had never left Tasmania, but when she was 54 she did make a visit to Hobart, 120 miles south, with her husband.

Maud giggled. ‘She was taken to a shoe shop and he couldn't get her out.'

‘
A frock shop too
,' Ivy said disapprovingly. ‘I shouldn't say it. She's a snob. There are more ways of keeping up your appearances than how you dress. It's how you behave.'

But I still could not believe that the last time they had spent a night away from Boode House was 60 years before.

Ivy tried to explain. ‘It's not so easy to get away on a farm.'

Even so, she and Maud made Bruce Chatwin's brothers in
On the Black Hill
look like frequent flyers. I added it up. In a span of almost 80 years the sisters' ventures outside Boode House seemed to have consisted of half a dozen doll-buying excursions, the Sunday morning walk to church and an annual visit to the local Daffodil Show, held in the Leven Theatre opposite G. & A. Ellis's store.

‘Is that it?' I wanted to know. Was that the total extent of their exposure to the world?

‘Didn't we go to the cinema?' Maud remembered.

Very occasionally, as a special treat, their brother-in-law would drive them to the Leven Theatre to watch a film.

‘We don't go now,' Ivy said. ‘You got it in your own house. We don't look at that either. Not fit to look at, what they have.'

The nine-mile journey to see
Dick Tracy
or
The Lost Moment
took them to another situation. They would sit down in the dark dress circle, where they had won prizes for orange cakes and knitting, and look at stories that had the effect of validating their lives. If they needed confirmation of their mother's belief that all troubles emanated from the opposite sex, it was there in the Leven Theatre in flickering horror.

‘It would be late when we finished. Time to go home.'

I thought of Ivy on the road to North Motton, at night, her mother's advice coming back with thunderous effect.

‘It was nicer once we had Technicolor,' and she fished around in an old handbag, bringing out a fragile grey rectangle of paper. ‘We would cut out film stars from books. We had some up on the wall.'

The worn piece of paper was stamped with the words ‘Admit One'. It was from about the right period.

‘Did you ever see Merle Oberon on screen?' I asked.

‘Yes, I've seen her,' and she took back the ticket. ‘Why?'

NOT MANY PROOFS OF TASMANIA'S REMOTENESS, AND OF THE
tendency of Tasmanians to deny their history, can surpass the case of Merle Oberon who overnight found herself billed as ‘a true daughter of Tasmania'. In some quarters it is an eminence that she still enjoys. In my
Examiner
of February 19 are listed under ‘Today's Birthdays' Carson McCullers, Prince Andrew, Hana Mandlikova and ‘Tasmanian-born British actress Merle Oberon'.

The story of Merle Oberon illustrates a common Tasmanian habit of concealing social or racial origins, and of emphasising some aspects of one's past to the cost of others. Before he burst with his musket through a settler's door, the bushranger Michael Howe blackened his face with charcoal, presumably to give the impression to the house's appalled occupants that he was an Aborigine. Buried next to Kemp in Albuera Street Cemetery was the ‘White Aborigine' William Buckley, who spent 32 years with the Wallarrange tribe in West Victoria. Kemp himself used to drink at the Labour in Vain in Campbell Street, for which perhaps he also supplied the spirits. The bar's sign was of a charlady scrubbing a black child with soap suds. This became Merle Oberon's predicament.

It takes a while to extract Merle's first 21 years from the biographies, essays, soap operas and documentaries that had accumulated like duck-fat around her. Her origins were complicated, but not, in the end, mysterious.

She was born in February 1911 in St George's Hospital, Bombay (now Mumbai), christened two months later Estelle Merle Thompson and nicknamed ‘Queenie' following a visit by Queen Mary to India that year. She grew up in the Bombay suburb of Khetwadi. Her mother Constance was 14 years old, part Maori, part Eurasian. Her father, Arthur Thompson, an engineer from Durham, worked for the Indian railways. Three years later, he was sent as a sapper to Flanders and died of pneumonia at the Somme.

In Bombay, Constance married another Englishman and gave Merle to her grandmother to look after. Merle grew up believing that Constance was her half-sister and that her grandmother Charlotte was in fact her mother.

Charlotte took Merle to Calcutta when she was six. There they lived in Lindsay Mansions. At 16, Merle was working as a switchboard operator. In the evenings, she put on a backless dress and danced at Firpo's nightclub with English stockbrokers, flirting with them in a high-pitched Anglo-Indian voice. She had an olive complexion, almond eyes, a heart-shaped face, gondola black hair, a long neck, the fluttery hands of a ‘temple-dancer' and the ambition of Eva Peron. Already she viewed her mixed-race origins as an impediment. To disguise her Eurasian blood, she started using ‘Fair and Lovely', a powder containing a potentially damaging chemical that did eventually ruin her skin. She never appeared to her best advantage in colour films.

In 1928, she set out with Charlotte for Europe on an Italian freighter. From this time on, she introduced Charlotte as her Bengali servant. In London, she worked in a flower shop next to Bucks Club and as a hostess in the Café de Paris alongside the future Lady Docker. She became the mistress of a film producer who gave her bit parts. She was not a natural actress. After one of her screen tests, Jack Warner telegraphed the producer: ‘If you want to sleep with women go ahead, but don't waste my money testing them.'

Towards the end of 1931, the flamboyant Hungarian director Alexander Korda arrived in London and set up London Film Productions. The following April, his studio announced the signing of four starlets on a five-year contract at £20 a week, including the ‘exotic' Merle Oberon. She appeared wearing thick spectacles in
Wedding Rehearsal
, after Ann Todd was injured in a car crash. One reviewer remarked that she seemed ‘totally at a loss as to how to behave, let alone act'. The French critic Marcel Ermans wrote: ‘If I were Korda I would get up in the night, steal the negative and quietly drop it into the Thames.'

In 1933, her fortune changed when she was auditioned for the part of Anne Boleyn in
The Private Life of Henry VIII
. As the author and editor Michael Korda tells it, his uncle entered the studio with his wife Maria who took one look at Merle, dug her nails into Korda's arm and cried out, ‘There she is, you fool! Look at that face! It's worth a million pounds. There is your damned Anne Boleyn.'

It was most probably Korda's publicity director, John Myers, who came up with her stage name as well as the story that she had been born in Tasmania. He decided that her prospects would be improved by eliminating all traces of her Indian background. Tasmania had two advantages. It was famous for having no native population, and it was too far away to check the story. The actor Maurice Bredell remembered Myers ‘roaring with laughter' as he made Merle memorise her upbringing in a place ‘so remote that most people had not the slightest idea where it was'.

For the next 45 years, Merle Oberon suppressed all mention of ‘Queenie' Thompson of Bombay. She remembered a father she tragically had never met, a dashing English Major (rather in the mould of Kemp), who worked in a vague capacity for the government in Tasmania where he had died in a horse-riding accident (sometimes it was pneumonia) while out hunting kangaroos (sometimes it was foxes) shortly before she was born. Fortunately, she had been able to fall back on the generosity of her uncle, Major-General Sir George Bartley, and her godmother, a Lady Monteith, who ensured that she not only completed her education in Hobart but went on to finishing schools in Paris, London and Darjeeling.

In Tasmania, the story was swallowed hook, line and sinker. On December 19, 1933, the
Mercury
carried extracts from an interview that ‘the tiny dark-haired Merle with her glistening white teeth and oh-so-trim figure' had given to
Film Pictorial
, under the banner:

‘The remarkable rise to fame of Merle Oberon, the Tasmanian-born girl who has been proclaimed one of the most promising actresses of the day.'

Some months later, a black and white film appeared at the Leven Theatre in Ulverstone in which a young Tasmanian actress dressed as a queen prepared to have her head chopped off. As she knelt to receive the blow, she said: ‘Mine is such a
little
neck.'

Merle's success in
The Private Life of Henry VIII
galvanised the
Launceston Weekly Courier
to include her in a list of the most famous Tasmanians alive. ‘Just 13 years ago a small girl, then seven years old, lived a typical girl's life near Hobart. Her name was Merle Thompson O'Brien.' Presently, she had travelled to England and there she had adopted her stage name. ‘Take a small, slenderly-built figure, warm brown curly hair to match curly eyes, a creamy magnolia skin and an expressive scarlet mouth. In other words meet Merle Oberon, famous at the age of 21. And what is more important, a true daughter of Tasmania.'

‘In Tasmania we tell stories to reassure ourselves we have not slipped unnoticed over the rim of the world,' writes the Tasmanian historian Cassandra Pybus in a clear-headed essay on Merle Oberon – whose Tasmanian origin was recorded on the Fantales wrappers that Pybus collected as a child. In the month of her interview in the
Courier
, November 1934, Merle met an as yet unknown actor who
had
been born in Tasmania. Travelling to New York on the SS
Paris
, she was appalled when a man from second class burst into her presence. It is a tantalising moment. Did he question her about Tasmania? Did he ask about the Freycinet Peninsula? Or Wineglass Bay, where his father, a professor of marine biology and discoverer of the squaladont, a mammal 26 million years old, would every Easter go camping (and once found washed up a large species of jellyfish, ‘a somewhat distant cousin of man himself …')? Or Kempton, where as a boy he used to stay, right on the edge of Kemp's estate, and scandalise the farmers by chloroforming sheep (and once tied a prize rooster to the blade of a windmill and watched it spin)? No-one knows what passed between them, but shortly before her death she gave vent to her ‘total disgust' at the mention of his name. Errol Flynn, she said, she considered ‘utterly despicable'.

Merle's inability to produce a Tasmanian birth certificate threatened to scupper her marriage to Korda in 1939. As the couple prepared to wed in Antibes, Korda had to call on his lawyer, the formidable Maître Blum, to persuade the Mayor of Antibes to conduct the ceremony without the necessary document.

That year she starred opposite Laurence Olivier in
Wuthering Heights
. The film marked the zenith of her career. Lady Korda's dependence on ‘Fair and Lovely' had begun to disfigure her skin with the kind of leper spots that John Updike inflicts on one of his characters, ‘in the same relation to one another as Australia and Tasmania'. According to her biographer Charles Higham, ‘her entire face and neck were covered with hundreds of red, oozy pustules.' Higham quotes her friend Edie Goetz, the daughter of Louis B. Meyer: ‘I couldn't believe what I saw. It was like the disease that sometimes attacks the exquisite white leaves of a camellia. That perfect face and now just a mass of sores!' In her mania still to be perceived as white, she built Ghalal in Acapulco, a white palace in which everything was the colour of snow. The effect intimidated her neighbour, Rod Steiger, who remarked that the bathroom was so clean he felt unable to urinate. Not until 13 months before her death did Merle Oberon visit her ‘birthplace' for the first time. She would not recover from the experience.

 

The idea came from Robert Wolders, her fourth husband, a Dutchman 20 years her junior. In October 1978, at the end of a trip they had made to Sydney, he pressed Merle to fly south. ‘I wanted to see her birthplace. I realise now that she must have suffered terribly.' No sooner did she agree than she regretted her decision. ‘She became increasingly nervous and ill. She wept often, clearly from the strain,' Wolders told Higham. ‘When we got to Hobart she was more and more upset.' She could not explain to Wolders what the matter was. ‘When I asked her to come to a graveyard to look for her family, she refused.' They hired a car and took a two-hour drive to Port Arthur, during which she said little. ‘She was so sad.' But on her return she waved in a vague way at the crenellated sandstone towers of the Governor's Residence and told her husband: ‘That's where people say I was born.'

In Hobart, they stayed at the Wrest Point Hotel, built on foundations taken from Kemp's convict quarters at Mount Vernon. The telephone started ringing as soon as she checked in – people who remembered Merle at school in Hobart, at a hotel in St Helen's on the east coast, watching her boyfriend ‘Skitchy' James play cricket at New Town. Declining to give interviews, she left ‘strict instructions that she would speak to no-one' and that she ‘had decided to stay silent while in Tasmania'.

On Friday, October 13, she emerged to judge the Miss Tasmania Quest in the Wrest Point's Cabaret Room. In white pearl earrings and a high-collared, white sparkling dress, she awarded the title of ‘Miss Tasmania 1979' to the weather-girl Sue Hickey. Three days later she attended a civil reception at the invitation of the Lord Mayor of Hobart. It was an afternoon event, played down as a cup of tea with the Lord Mayor. Neil Coulson drove her from the hotel to the Town Hall. According to Coulson, as they walked up the steps, she said to him: ‘It's probably a bad time to bring up the fact I wasn't born in Tasmania.'

‘Where were you born?'

‘India.'

Merle Oberon visiting Tasmania, 1978

Once inside the building she signed her name in the Lord Mayor's visitors' book, giving as her address: ‘Malibu & Tasmania'. Soon afterwards, according to several who were present, she fainted. Her husband said: ‘She began her speech of acceptance, referring to her childhood, and then started to cry and I had to leave the room.'

Another witness was Alderman Doone Kennedy. ‘I couldn't believe this was the film star,' she told me. ‘When I went home, I said to my husband she was the kind of lady who if you passed her in the street you'd stop and ask if you could help. She was wearing a cotton frock and a cardigan and looked drugged.'

Why had she fainted? The pressure of the false biography she had been living must have contributed. Her husband realised: ‘She would have to say to me that she had committed an untruth.' One guest had overheard her fielding questions from a group who were eagerly probing into the circumstances of her upbringing in Tasmania. She had become quite agitated. ‘No, no, I was born on a ship that was passing through.' But the situation was more complicated than simply the anxiety of watching cracks race through the foundation on which she had constructed the last four decades of her life.

Several guests who spoke to Merle had no inkling of her Indian blood nor of her childhood in Bombay. On the other hand, they seemed perfectly aware that her father was called Thompson. Stranger still, they claimed to know her mother. They knew, for instance, that Merle's mother was not English, nor was she Indian.