Don’t Blame the Stars: The Redgraves by Donald Spoto
Rachel
Rachel Kempson, born to a science teacher and his crimson-haired wife in Dartmouth, in 1910, could not have been expected to embrace the theatre as whole-heartedly as she did. But the world of the theatre was warm and accepting to a young woman who felt “pushed away” by a coldly indifferent mother. She showed early promise in a variety of Shakespearean roles, and met Michael when she was invited to the Liverpool Repertory to act in a popular John van Druten play of the day. She recalled that she fell in love with him when “I saw his photo outside the theater on the day I arrived.” She was a shameless romantic and as for Michael, he found they had similar tastes and aspirations. It wasn’t long before she popped the marriage question in this heated but chaste relationship. Moved by her articulate but worshipful nature, Michael confessed. “He said that there were difficulties in his nature.” She swept these concerns away and the rest, as they say, is history.
This is a woman, devoted to Michael, the theatre, and perhaps above all, her children, who often seems too good to be true. But from all Spoto’s accounts, she really comes off as an exceptional character, worthy of the respect he shows her. After Michael’s death in 1985, while researching the life of Laurence Olivier (Rachel was a close confidante of Olivier’s wife Vivien Leigh), he was drawn into Rachel’s circle. She and the biographer became fast friends, often sharing tea at her flat in Chelsea. It is refreshing to discover that years after remaining the faithful wife to Michael, even accepting his longtime lovers into her home, she herself became involved with the actor Leo Genn. Michael accepted this arrangement with relief as he did years later when she became entwined with Glen Byam Shaw, also a bisexual and talented director in his own right.
It should be noted that the strength of this book lies not in the sometimes pedantic and linear accounting of countless episodes in Michael and Rachel’s personal and professional lives. Rather, it’s in the supposed sincerity of the subjects’ own accounts, the degree of unabashed trust they must have placed in Spoto. That in particular speaks well for the writer’s own professionalism and dedication.
The Children – Vanessa, Corin and Lynn
It would be hard to make up a more auspicious arrival for the baby born to Rachel on January 30, 1937. Michael was co-starring at the Vic with Laurence Olivier in Hamlet when the news came. At curtain finale, Olivier stepped out and announced to the audience: “Tonight a great actress has been born — Laertes has a daughter.” Named after Virginia Woolf’s sister and the mother of Michael’s school chum, Julian Bell, Vanessa entered the limelight.
Even at three, interestingly enough, she showed spunk. Michael noted that “any attempt to compromise brings on a real temperamental fit of tears.” There’s much most readers already, mistakenly or not, know and think of this amazing, tempestuous actress. For younger readers, Spoto does his best to fill in the necessary blanks but what emerges is sketchy, if telling. Just how much cooperation he received from Vanessa herself is anyone’s guess.
Too tall to be the ballerina, she showed an early adeptness for accents and languages. Before her 14 birthday, she so wowed her teachers and classmates with her rendition of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan that a celebrity photographer took pictures of her as a representative of the next generation of Redgraves. Stage and screen roles followed and with them, a growing, even phenomenal success. If it’s true that “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” her early involvement with director Tony Richardson was as headlong and romantic as her mother’s own surrender to Michael’s charms. Richardson also had many gay escapades and perhaps she thought she could succeed where her mother had failed.
But it was in politics where she was making another kind of news. Joining philosopher Bertrand Russell and others in the Committee of 100 in 1961, she took parts in various acts of civil disobedience, and was ultimately arrested. Michael himself had strong socialist leanings but after some embarrassing wartime experiences, could only feel his daughter was being used. Years later, what the public would erroneously judge as anti-Semitism, was a direct result of her support of the Palestinians that had fled from a Lebanese refugee camp after a right-wing Jewish militia killed more than 3,500 people leaving camp in search of water. She was outspoken against the Jewish Defense League that was preaching a radical form of Jewish nationalism. The film industry never forgave her, and as Meryl Streep, who had a small role in Julia with the actress, remarked, “The repercussions to her career were catastrophic.”
Her life, certainly as impassioned as her father’s on many fronts, could have warranted a larger role in the overall scope of the book. Certainly, the woman touched the lives of many, and it would have been enriching if Spoto had included more observations from these individuals. This is not to suggest a voyeuristic digging for the underside of a career but only for the truth, which Spoto seems to hold so dear.
Her younger brother Corin was as striking with his tall blond looks as Vanessa, but acting was not his first ambition. He had the talent to become a classical pianist but took up directing at Cambridge, where he showed considerable aptitude. It was with an Arnold Wesker play that moved to the West End and subsequently to Broadway that established his credentials with an American audience. Lynn, born in 1943, was the youngest, the sickliest, and the most forlorn of the Redgrave children. By early 1960, she had developed the dangerous habit of binging and starving, even after she was accepted into the Central School of Speech and Drama. An ironic twist of fate brought her luck, when she was cast as a plump, ungainly young woman in Mod London. The film, Georgy Girl, was an unexpected hit and Lynn didn’t even have to lost weight for it. Her career was on its way.
Of Vanessa’s three children — Natasha and Joely by Tony Richardson and Carlo by her second husband, Franco Nero — Natasha’s star shone the brightest. It was all the more tragic when this talented actress died in early 2009 during a ski accident in Canada’s Laurentian Hills. For Vanessa, who had just finished a solo performance in Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, portraying a woman who has lost both her husband and daughter, it was a wrenching experience.
Interviewers still refer to the Redgraves as a dynasty. At the end of Spoto’s book, Vanessa simply replies, “We are a family.” Spoto has done the family as well as his readers a service in the telling. If nothing else, he has laid the vital groundwork for more biographies on this fascinating troupe we can only hope are waiting in the wings.
