Kissing the Joy: The Autobiography of Rosalinde Fuller OBE

By Rosalinde Fuller

This is the disarmingly frank autobiography of the English actress Rosalinde Fuller. At the age of 18, she was taken by her brother, along with her two elder sisters, to sing folk songs in America. Seven years and as many tours later, their singing career ended when the US joined the first World War. By then Rosalinde knew she wanted to be an ac

• Language: English
• Publisher: Letterworth Press
• Release date: Apr 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9782970065449

Book preview

Contents

Illustrations

Introduction

How It All Began

Bankruptcy

Folksingers

First Love

Folies-Bergère

New York Alone

Broadway and Francis Bruguière

Hamlet

Eugene O’Neill and Robert Le Moyne Barrett

Germany and Belasco

The First Death

Making films

Cats, Perversions, and Kings

Shakespeare, Wolfit, and Digs

The Second World War

The Battle of Britain

Peace and Death

49 Fellows Road

Fräulein Else and Solo Performances

A New York Gamble

Israel and the Middle East

South African Tour

Europe, South Africa, and Sudan

Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Mauritius

Europe and behind the Iron Curtain

Round the World

Buckingham Palace

Notes

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Kissing the Joy

the autobiography of

Rosalinde Fuller, obe

Edited, with an introduction and notes, by

G. Peter Winnington

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Published in Switzerland by the Letterworth Press

http://www.TheLetterworthPress.org

© The Estate of Rosalinde Fuller 2017

Editing, Introduction and Notes

© G. Peter Winnington 2017

ISBN 978-2-9700654-4-9

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Contents

Illustrations

Introduction

How It All Began

Bankruptcy

Folksingers

First Love

Folies-Bergère

New York Alone

Broadway and Francis Bruguière

Hamlet

Eugene O’Neill and Robert Le Moyne Barrett

Germany and Belasco

The First Death

Making films

Cats, Perversions, and Kings

Shakespeare, Wolfit, and Digs

The Second World War

The Battle of Britain

Peace and Death

49 Fellows Road

Fräulein Else and Solo Performances

A New York Gamble

Israel and the Middle East

South African Tour

Europe, South Africa, and Sudan

Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Mauritius

Europe and behind the Iron Curtain

Round the World

Buckingham Palace

Notes

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Illustrations

Frontispiece: silhouette of RF cut out by a Belgian refujew in Woolworth’s around 1916

RF as the bride-of-today in What’s in a Name? photographed by Campbell Studios in 1920

Cynthia photographed by Francis Bruguière. (Gelatin silver print; 23.8 x 18.9 cm. Image courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles)

Nude group: RF with (presumably) Paul Osborn and Florence, photographed by Francis Brugière in 1932. (Image copyright Sather Bruguière, supplied by the George Eastman Museum.)

RF as Jill-all-Alone, with Nigger, in Merrie England, 1934

The slave-girl revolts: RF in Chu Chin Chow, 1940

RF as Kate with Jean Forbes-Robertson as her sister Helen in Berkeley Square, 1941. Photograph by Angus McBean, courtesy of Harvard Theatre Collection.

‘Call me Peter!’ RF as Kate with André van Gyseghem as Peter in Berkeley Square, 1941. Photograph by Angus McBean, courtesy of Harvard Theatre Collection.

A publicity photograph for RF’s Australian tour

RF bathing, date not known

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Introduction

Rosalinde Fuller was an English actress whose career took off with a bang when she played Ophelia to John Barrymore’s Hamlet on Broadway in 1922. Five years later she moved back to the UK where she performed until the mid-1970s. In all, she acted in more than 130 plays and shows (including revivals) and nine films, plus about a dozen radio and tv plays. From the mid-1950s onwards she gave countless solo performances of short stories that she had adapted for the stage. In 1964 alone, she gave five performances a week during an eight-month world tour under the auspices of the British Council. In the 1966 New Year honours, she was awarded the OBE for a lifetime of services to the theatre.

Rosalinde wrote her autobiography in the 1970s and sought to get it published, but it was turned down on both sides of the Atlantic on the grounds that for British readers there was too much about Americans and for Americans too much about the Brits. The truth of the matter was probably that it was too explicit, for Rosalinde had many lovers, many of whom were still alive in the 1970s; had they known that they were named, some of them, or their immediate families, might have objected to publication. Sir Norman Angell, for instance, had made arrangements for his papers to go to an American university library after his death; before they were sent off, his secretary destroyed most of Rosalinde’s letters to him, along with letters from Arthur Dakyns (who had tried to get her to marry him) that she had passed on to Angell. Today, with the passage of time and greater acceptance of women’s sexuality, I feel it can be published without a qualm.

Carol Odell sent me a copy of Rosalinde’s typescript when I was writing the life of Walter Fuller (Rosalinde’s brother), and it proved a useful source of information. A few pages were missing; I found copies of all but a page-and-a-half from chapter 1 in Princeton University Art Museum. Rosalinde’s friend Nina Howell Starr had been seeking an American publisher for her, and after Rosalinde’s death, she gave her collection of memorabilia, including the autobiography, to the Museum. Learning of this, the executor of Rosalind’s estate, Conrad Dehn, requested the return of the manuscript. That copy can no longer be found. (I gratefully acknowledge here the help I received from Professor Peter Bunnell and Princeton University Art Museum.)

For all its disarming frankness, there are some things that Rosalinde does not mention, starting with her birth name and date. She makes no secret of being born on February 16th, but she carefully avoids naming the year, which was 1892. This is because, when she moved back to England at the end of 1927 and re-launched her career, she dropped nine years off her age. London theatre reviewers, unaware of her five years on Broadway, hailed the arrival of this ‘young beginner’: at the age of thirty-six, she was passing for twenty-seven, and carried it off. Opening chapter 24, she writes that 1962 was an especially important year for her – but she doesn’t mention that it was the year she turned 70. By then, she was wearing plenty of make-up with heavy black lines around her eyes so that no one noticed the wrinkles. Two years later, she set out on an gruelling eight-month round-the-world tour. She acted like – let me re-phrase that: she behaved as though she really was only 63, and bathed in each new ocean that she reached (with or without a bikini).

She was christened Ivy Rosalind (without the final ‘e’) and her family called her Ivy until she was twenty-one, when she decided that she preferred Rosalind. At this point, she was touring the United States, singing folksongs with her sisters. Did she feel that Rosalind (with its Shakespearean echoes) fitted better alongside her sister’s names, Dorothy and Cynthia, both ‘sweetly old-fashioned names’ to American ears? Or had she noticed that the word Americans most readily associate with ‘ivy’ is poison? At any rate, Rosalind was highly unusual at that time. (In a sample of 78,755 girls born in the United States between 1891 and 1900, 5565 were called Mary and 40 were called Ivy – but there were no Rosalinds at all.)

She added a final ‘e’ some years later. The story goes that in 1919 a numerologist told her that she would never be a success on the stage unless there was one more letter in her name. Shortly after that, she landed her first role in the United States, in a show rather appropriately called, What’s in a Name? At first ‘Rosalinde’ was just her stage name; then she came to use it in everyday life.

We all construct our identity, some more consciously than others, and actors more conscientiously than anyone else. Some people re-write their past to fit their chosen identity, but not Rosalinde. Having read several hundred Fuller family letters, I can confirm that what she writes is largely corroborated by other sources. There may be omissions – as with the year of her birth – but she does not mis-represent things. Recounting her stormy relationship with Arthur Dakyns, she introduces him by quoting a letter dating from May 1916 in which he acknowledges that he has not written to her  for ‘some time’. She does not let on that he had proposed to her almost exactly six years before, and she had not heard from him for five years. (His artless proposal is reproduced on page 56 of Walter Fuller.)

She could not mention everything that had happened in her life; much compression was called for. So she chose not to mention that in 1910, for instance, at the time when Dakyns proposed, she was living with Dorothy in London and demonstrating with the Suffragettes. That Christmas, her eldest sister, Oriska, reported to her future husband that Rosalinde had come home suffering from ‘Suffrage madness’, guilty of ‘many wicked, naughty things’ in town. She was already breaking the mould at the age of 18.

She is also modest. When she tells how The Fuller Sisters sang ‘The Five Souls’ by W. N. Ewer to music adapted from Beethoven, she does not mention that it was she who did the adapting. Nor does she tell us about the two dozen or so radio plays that she acted in during the 1930s, or her part in the first ever live television play broadcast by the BBC. This is probably because much of her pleasure as an actress came from the relationship she established with the audience, her ability to seduce them (just as she seduced so many men). From this point of view, acting for radio and tv is sterile.

Talking of sterility, Rosalinde must have realized, early in her sex life, that the chances of her falling pregnant were negligible. It soon formed part of her philosophy:

I don’t think that creating another life is really the fulfilment of oneself. That can only come through the expression, the communication of oneself to another, maybe to many others. To be a tuning fork that sets the whole orchestra playing in harmony.

Making love without the risk of motherhood liberated her, just as the arrival of the contraceptive pill liberated many women fifty years later, and made her a pioneer in the field of women’s sexual freedom. It also gave her a stereotype image of the actress who slept with whomever she chose. This did not bother her in the least: ‘I have made out a set of values for myself and am only sensitive or interested in criticism of my work.’

Consciously drawing up that set of values in her twenties shaped her personality, and she seems to have changed little in the ensuing fifty years. This was apparent to all who met her. ‘You have evidently charmed Father Time,’ observed Stark Young, seeing her again in New York after an interval of thirty years. Joseph Chelton said much the same: ‘I first met you when I was twenty-four [and she was forty]; I have nearly doubled that, and yet I feel myself still a lover of the same woman and it is as fresh as though it had just begun.’

* * *

In preparing this book for publication, I have chosen the title; the typescript was  nottitled, but I believe that Rosalinde called it ‘Subject to Love’. I could have called it ‘One Hectic Spark’, after Rosalinde’s depiction of herself on the stage at the Folies-Bergère: ‘there was always one hectic spark darting mysteriously about by itself, and that was me.’ However, she refers so often to Blake’s claim that ‘He who kisses the joy as it flies / Lives in eternity’s sun rise,’ and so clearly lived by it, that it seemed self-evident to call it Kissing the Joy. I have checked the spelling of proper names (whenever possible), revised the punctuation, and cut out a few repetitions. Otherwise, it is substantially as Rosalinde wrote it.

I have added some biographical notes at the end, indicated by an asterisk in the text. They concern people important to the story; notes identifying everyone that Rosalinde mentions would be almost as long as the autobiography itself.

Mauborget, March 2016

Sources

G. Peter Winnington, Walter Fuller: the Man Who Had Ideas. Letterworth Press, 2014.

 In my biography of Rosalinde’s brother Walter, the interested reader will find a more detailed account of the Fuller family and Rosalinde’s early years; the sisters’ tours in the United States, singing folksongs under Walter’s direction; and a brief assessment of echoes of Rosalinde in Scott Fitzgerald’s fiction.

Given Name Frequency Project, http://www.galbithink.org/names/us200.htm.

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How It All Began

‘I don’t know whether you attract mad people, or whether you drive them mad,’ observed Francis Bruguière,* the New York photographer whom I loved and with whom I lived for twenty-five joyous years. It is true that in my life I have met a lot of charmingly mad people, and I suppose I come from a rather mad family.

Certainly my introduction to acting was somewhat strange. When I was a child, my father was a draper and behind his shop he added a hall – known locally as ‘Fuller’s Hall’ – in which he organized ‘Pleasant Sunday Afternoons for the People’. The entertainment included recitals by children, and I hated and feared the whole business. I protested violently when once a grown-up tried to put some make-up on my face for an amateur show, yet in a few years I became a professional actress and the theatre my whole life.

In 1942, bombing had closed the London stage and most actors were on tour. I was starring in Desire under the Elms and one free day went to Portsmouth, where I was born, to evoke memories of that child who didn’t want to act.

It was a day of sun and fast-moving clouds. Great shadows swept across the countryside and excited thoughts tumbled about in my mind like clothes in a spin-drier. At the Commercial Road, I looked for the draper’s shop that had belonged to my father. It had vanished along with ‘Fuller’s Hall’. Across a bomb crater you could see one high bare wall with a handrail still attached, to which people in the gallery had clung as they groped their way down to their seats, there to be entranced by my eldest sister, aged twelve, playing on a golden harp, or listen to black-faced minstrels singing negro spirituals and watch magic-lantern slides of foreign parts shown by some well-meaning missionary.

Going into a little flower shop nearby, I bought two dozen corn-flowers. ‘What happened to Fuller’s Hall?’ I asked the woman who was tying them into a tight bunch, like blue glass.

‘It got a direct hit,’ she replied.

‘I was born over that shop,’ I told her. Pressing my hand, she made some sympathetic noises and I went out to continue my search. Taking a bus up Portsdown Hill, a yellow-grey ridge like the back of a cat, I came to a small church with a green and fertile cemetery. Seeing some Shakespearian grave-diggers, I asked if they knew of a grave marked ‘Fuller’. One of them found it for me. The tombstone was shaped like a book because reading had been such a joy in our lives. Putting the flowers in an old jar with some water, I read the names: Walter Henry Fuller,* Elizabeth* his wife, Walter Gladstone Fuller* his son, and the latest name, Oriska Ward,* his daughter.

There were five children in this family. First a boy, Walter; then two years later a girl, Oriska; then after eight years three little girls: Dorothy, Rosalinde, and Cynthia. So I was the next-to-last. My mother had expected me on Valentine’s Day but I was a little late for my entrance, and appeared on February 16th.

We lived in a four-storeyed house above the big drapery shop. Its front spread bravely along the Commercial Road; along it was written in gold letters fuller and son. My father was the son.

It was an ugly building, but inside the magic began. You went in through a large door marked Private, and up some wide stone steps. At the top an ornamental arch made of cork led into a big conservatory with palm trees, rockeries and ferns. The tops of some of the trees almost reached the glass roof that was opaque, so whether the sky was blue or grey made very little difference to us children. There was a large aquarium with rocks and long waving plants through which gold and orange fish swam or hung suspended. On parts of the floor were patches of square glass bricks, which shone brightly in the winter when the lights were on in the shop below. To us they were fairy islands. There was a swing on which you could propel yourself so high that your black-stockinged legs were far above your head and you looked down on the discreet Victorian-Greek statues that my father delighted in touching up with gilt or bronze paint. It was always an exciting and extravagant time when he got hold of a pot of gilt and a free afternoon. The sun gilding the earth was not more effective than he. The cork decorations would be high-lighted, even the aquarium would be brightened so that it rivalled the fishes.

The house itself was rather mysterious. The drawing room was a medley of uncomfortable, richly-carved, Indian furniture. Japanese swords and black, mailed gloves hung on the walls. One end of the room was cordoned off by a delicate, high, white-painted trellis-screen with three arches. It looked as though it had come from some Turkish harem. We called it the Yeldiz. All these things had been brought home by my mother’s brother Jim who was in the Merchant Navy.

In this house lived a very united, impractical and self-sufficient family. It was an island of love and hope. I think the sense of insularity came from my mother’s family. Her father, George White, had been a ship’s carpenter and lived in the dockyard in Portsmouth. His photograph shows a fine, sensitive, bearded-face with light, sea-gazing eyes. Of his parents we know very little. It was supposed that his mother was a foreigner, possibly an émigrée from France, which may have accounted for his apparent isolation from the other workers. He was an atheist and a great admirer of the politician Charles Bradlaugh. He had a large family, his two sons going into the Merchant Navy and his daughters to a Dame School. They were never allowed to play in the street like other children and their shoes were always highly polished.

When my mother was a girl she was called ‘the pretty Miss White’. She was delicately built and had high cheekbones, a grecian nose and great dignity that made her look taller than she was. At sixteen she was apprenticed to fuller and sons and was rather shocked when she noticed that some materials in the shop windows were marked ‘fast colours’. These she supposed were for immoral women. Her apprenticeship did not last long, for my father fell devotedly in love with her and they were married.

Her ideal man was tall, strong, distinguished and unemotional, and my father was rather small, ardent and demonstrative. As a child her hero had been Lord Byron and she told us how she would hang his picture on the wall and, turning the armchair round to face it, would pretend he was her husband and that her bread was buttered on both sides! My father certainly had Byron’s idealism and romantic feelings, but somehow she was always a little scornful of his devotion and affection and brought us up to regard love-making and petting as ‘silly’. I don’t think she especially enjoyed making love with him, but she did enjoy having children and loved each one of us.

We three youngest girls never went to school but had a governess, so we did not mix with other children. This, I think, accounted for our lack of curiosity about sex. Of course we knew men and women were different shapes because we had seen them naked in statues and paintings, and I had heard the servants giggling about men’s ‘private parts’. We didn’t trouble to think what they did with the extra thing they had between their legs, a sort of addition or decoration; we simply dismissed it as that ‘hanging thing’. We were too busy in our make-believe world to be curious about real people.

One of my earliest memories is of going with my sisters down into the large, dark shop before it opened. There we would find all sorts of wonderful things to play with. Walking quickly through the Manchester department with its strange acrid smell of cotton goods, we came to the millinery where there were brass hat-stands of various heights. These became people that we grouped into families, finding them homes among the blankets. Umbrellas with their different-shaped handles could easily become characters. My favourites were made of cherry wood with knobbly heads; pressing my nose against the wood, I found it smelt as sweet as a flower.

Both our parents were very fond of music so we were all taught to play an instrument as well as the piano. I studied the ’cello and Dorothy the violin. My eldest sister Oriska played the harp, and often in the evenings we would all sing and play together.

I don’t think it ever occurred to any of us that our lives would be ordinary. We were brought up to be ‘not like other girls’ instead of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’. As we got older we felt we had a sort of mythical tail which sometimes prevented us from making friends, because if anyone noticed it, they would shy away frightened or apprehensive.

My brother Walter was a brilliant, persuasive man with a tremendous enthusiasm for life and ideas. As he was the eldest child and a boy, most of the money was spent on his education, though Oriska did go to High School and had private lessons on the harp. My mother wanted him to be a doctor, so he went to Manchester to study medicine, but he was far too sensitive of physical pain and too interested in ideas and journalism to qualify as a doctor. Walter spent a lot of his time at college forming a Student Representative Council and editing a paper called the Owens College Magazine. Failing his final exam, he wrote to Oriska:

Dearest,

down another cropper. Of course the examiners are quite right: I am not a safe man to let loose on a trusting public. Oh, I know a doctor is a wonderful person. He does so much good etc. But it is not for me. I’m sure when I tell Mother and Father the things I know I can do and am going to do, they will understand. No more exams, no more failures. Let me do some melodramatic boasting … of my dreams, my grandest possessions, that I would not exchange to be the King’s physician.… I swear that one day I shall succeed. My playtime is over now, I am going to work. Tomorrow is leap year and I mean to make the best of this extra day thrown in by the astronomers. I think there is something quite weird about a day composed of the leavings of past years. Don’t regret my failure, dearest. It is a waste of time.

Your lover,

Walter

He had no difficulty in convincing Mother and Father that his ideas for a new liberal magazine would not only be a financial success but soul-satisfying as well, and necessary to the whole world.

He was in love with us all and we with him, but he was especially in love with Oriska. When she was eighteen years old and studying the harp, the piano, and singing on a scholarship to the Royal College of Music, he and she wrote to each other every week and his letters to her read like love-letters:

My dearest,

I don’t know what Mother’s magic secret can have been that has bound us so closely together. It isn’t only that we love one another very deeply, I really think that we belong to each other. For either of us to think of loving anybody else is rank treachery. I cannot help being wildly jealous – in a real lover-like way – of anyone who may be so audacious as to fall in love with you. And when I even think of loving any other girl than you, I have a sense of shame.

Your lover,

Walter

He was not only our lover, he was a sort of father-figure to the whole family. His ideas became our ideas. My mother would allow him to take down Alma Tadema and Leighton from the walls and substitute Turner and Constable. ‘You can send these others to the Blind School,’ he would say. My father willingly changed from reading the Daily Mail to the Westminster Gazette and other liberal papers. Walter would often quote to us children Thomas Carlyle’s poem,

So here hath been dawning

Another blue day:

Think wilt thou let it

Slip useless away?

Then he would encourage us to imagine what we might do. ‘Would you like to be the first woman Prime Minister?’ he would ask me. ‘Or write poems, or music, or be a great ’cellist?’ And whatever he suggested with enthusiasm and eagerness, I would feel I could do. I felt excited and somehow glorified.

I was a rather delicate child and was ashamed of it, spending quite a lot of time pinching my cheeks to make them red. The anticipation of some joyous event would inevitably give me a bilious attack, so when my sisters and I went to the annual children’s fancy dress ball at the Portsmouth town hall, I would spend all the time lying in the ladies’ room, listening to the music and excited screams of the other children. By the time the party was over, I would have recovered, but now it was too late and I would be put in the cab with my sisters and driven home.

This made me greedy of time. I was always in a hurry to enjoy things. I would never suck a sweet slowly but would bite and chew it and finish it long before other people had relished theirs. I was afraid my joys would disappear before I could experience them. Bathing at Shanklin, I would keep my eyes on the shiny-silk sea, tearing off my clothes in an agony of desire, feeling it might dry up before I reached it. This over-eagerness has followed me all my life.

My sister Dorothy was two years older than me and used to tease me by taking one of my dolls and, putting on a very high voice, would make it say, ‘I am dead.’ Seizing it from her, I would insist that it wasn’t dead, to which the high voice replied, ‘I am.’ I didn’t know then that the dead can’t talk and one day I would speak to someone I loved and there would be no answer. Having a quick temper I took my revenge by pulling her hair or locking her in the cupboard. But these were only passing moods; we really got on very well together. In the evenings we three would play in the fire-lit security of our nursery, covering the floor with a paper kingdom. This consisted of whole families cut out from fashion magazines. What a delight it was to find a well-dressed child standing alone and not eternally joined to some chair or table. We took great care that all the people should be of relative size. They lived in houses that we made out of newspapers pinned together, and there were boats for them to sail in on the calm linoleum of our floor.

We lived for about nine years in this wonderful unreal house above the shop. Then one day reality in the form of bad drains caused Cynthia and me to get diphtheria. When we recovered, we left Portsmouth and moved to Portchester where we had a short period of what seemed like wealth.

We had the open sky instead of the glass roof of the conservatory and quite a large garden with a lawn in front of the double-fronted house, a vegetable garden at the back and at the side a wild uncut lawn with a summer-house. We also had a collie called Laddie. Every morning my father was driven in a little pony trap to the station by the gardener, returning from Portsmouth every evening. Mother had brought the cook and housemaid and life seemed very comfortable.

We still had a governess who came every day. We didn’t learn much in the way of school-learning because I think our governess was really engaged for her kind qualities. We learnt to read and write and did some arithmetic, managing to get as far as long-division before our education in this form stopped. For history we had an enchantingly painless book called Little Arthur’s History of England. When the continual wars became slightly boring, the book would say ‘And now, dear little Arthur,’ so bringing us into the scene again. We each felt we were Arthur, and I saw myself as a gallant, velvet-suited page. It was fun taking sides in the royal family quarrels. I was a Lancastrian because I love the colour red, Dorothy a Yorkist. She supported the Stuarts, but I, feeling deeply about the wrongs of the people, joined the Roundheads.

I was not always enthralled by our lessons and sometimes masturbated under the table. When the governess noticed my concentrated expression and asked me what I was doing, ‘Nothing,’ I would reply, quickly wiping my pencil and putting it back to its proper use.

In the summer we had our lessons in the little summer-house on the wild lawn and in the fifteen-minute break would run out into the garden that buzzed with insect noises. Pushing our way through the powdery sweetness of the pinks bordering the path, we rushed to the strawberry beds that lay side by side like graves. Gently moving aside the straw with my fingers, I would find the warm, plump bodies of the berries and greedily suck them off the cone-shaped tower frilled around with tiny green leaves.

Our favourite lessons were composition and poetry. We learnt a lot of poems that we would recite to the governess. Dorothy was a very talented child and could sing, draw, and recite beautifully. Feeling I couldn’t possibly do as well, I would declaim as badly as I could, or make objections to the context of the poem. ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus’ used to bother me a lot because there was a line about the skipper’s daughter who had a ‘breast as white as snow’. I hated to mention the word ‘breast’ and when I started to have two small swellings with faint raspberry-coloured nipples, I felt ashamed; it seemed to me to be a weakness. I liked to think I was exactly like a boy. The fact that I had no penis didn’t bother me. At that time I didn’t know the importance or pleasure of that vital organ.

I was always rather jealous of Dorothy. Like my other sisters, she had a very lovely, Leonardo-shaped face with rosy cheeks. Her hair was so long she could throw it about, whereas I was pale-faced