role in Churchill’s backing of Tito and his partisans during the Second World War, influenced British government policy. Michael knew Maclean well (they were both first elected to Parliament in the 1945 Labour landslide) and Michael surmised that Maclean had advised the government that whatever the rights and wrongs of the case, the Serbs, in control of the central government and its army, were bound to crush the Croats. But the British government underestimated Croatian and then the Bosnian, resistance. The Germans and the Americans understood the situation on the ground much better than the Major government, which made such a show of not intervening, Michael added.
Michael and Jill returned to Dubrovnik in December 1994, having followed a roundabout route by bus from Zagreb. Part of the twelve-hour trip took them near the Bosnian war zone, but these intrepid octogenarians were overjoyed to return to their beloved city. Dubrovnik, not yet fully recovered from the shelling, but bathed in sunshine two days before Christmas, seemed to Michael “never so beautiful.” They wanted to make a film about the 1991-92 siege. “During that time we had been in touch with some of the people we had known before the war.” They went to see their friend, the painter Duro Pulitika, whose studio had been used as a lookout post during the siege. A frustrated Michael had not even been able to persuade the British government to send in a food ship. It would be considered an act of war, he was told. “But the Italians are sending in a food ship,” he replied in amazement.
Michael and Jill stayed nearly a month in the Villa Dubrovnik, then occupied by refugees. Jill and Michael interviewed the mayor and defenders of the city. Although Michael narrated the film, Jill’s writing, editing, and direction were what counted, he told me again and again. He had a hard time adjusting to the role of narrator. Jill’s grandson, Jason Lehel, a professional filmmaker who did the camera work, argued that Michael ought to be replaced. Instead, Jill coached Michael day after day, slowing eliminating the stentorian style that had become habitual after so many years on the hustings and in Parliament.
To obtain funding, “We went round to our friends with lots of bloody money,” Michael recalled. One friend, Harold Lever, a multimillionaire, sympathised with Dubrovnik’s plight, finding parallels with what had happened to Spain when the Western democracies failed to support the Republican government’s resistance to Franco’s attack. Yet he did not heed Michael’s plea. Then a fund-raising meal with Sidney Bernstein, founder of Granada Television, and a Labour Party supporter, also proved a disappointment. “I had to pay for the bloody lunch in the end,” Michael said, laughing. Michael resorted to using his own retirement money and Jason cajoled his friends in the film industry to work with no pay, except what they might receive should the film be sold to the BBC or ITV. Finally, a BBC showing of the film, with a panel discussion to balance the film’s pro-Croatian bias, allowed everyone involved to just about recover their expenses.
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“I had just finished my book on H. G. Wells,” Michael noted, recollecting their September 1995 holiday in Dubrovnik. “Jill read it here. Couldn’t do much about it then.” I laughed, knowing that Michael was referring to her reservations. “I don’t say she agreed with every word”—a vast understatement! “She thought I was too enthusiastic about Moura Budberg—the magnificent Moura, as I called her.” The mysterious Moura might have been a better appellation because of Budberg’s murky history in the USSR. She has been accused of being a Soviet spy, exciting a good deal of controversy about her. Michael, an ardent champion—indeed an idoliser—of his heroes and heroines, had befriended Moura’s daughter, Tanya. Michael was enchanted with what she told him about Wells and Rebecca West visiting Moura at her country home outside London on weekends during the war. “My mother could hold her own in any company, although with Rebecca she was inclined to be a little quieter,” Tanya told an admiring Michael.
I could imagine the skeptical Jill listening to Michael’s impassioned description of Moura’s “wonderful, serene countenance—one of the most beautiful faces I’ve ever seen, in spite of all the turmoil she had. Jill didn’t know Moura, but she said to me, ‘I think you’re a bit thick about Moura.’”
The talk of Moura reminded me of a joke I’d been told about Rebecca attending a funeral for one of H.G.’s mistresses: She turned to another mistress at the ceremony and said, “I guess we can all now move one up.” Michael laughed. “Would you like to meet Tanya?” he asked. Moura and Tanya had nothing to do with my biography of Jill, but it was typical of Michael to corral Jill into the pen of his enthusiasms. He had extended a similar invitation for me to meet Stanley Kubrick’s wife. Kubrick and Jill had had a casual friendship, meeting on a few occasions, and Jill was an extravagant admirer of his films, but Kubrick’s wife had not known Jill—as Michael knew.
I shifted Michael’s attention back to Jill’s Dubrovnik film, wondering aloud whether any other subject could have galvanised her belated return to filmmaking. Michael still seemed to have Jill’s letter to Balcon in mind when he said, “If you look at the whole bloody thing, I was stopping her from what she should have done. She should have been making films all the time.”
Dubrovnik probably was the scene of Michael’s finest marital moment. He put himself entirely in Jill’s hands when it came to the kind of holidays they enjoyed there. He followed her directions for the making of Two Hours From London without so much as a quibble so far as I could tell. Kathy Wilks, an Oxford don who was made an honorary citizen of Dubrovnik for her heroic efforts to save lives during the siege, was aghast at how Jill ordered Michael around during the filming—until Kathy realised that this was how Michael wanted it. At first, Kathy, a deep admirer of Michael and his politics, had trouble getting along with Jill. I can see why: Kathy was like everyone else—especially women—who treated Michael as though he were a sort of saint, the man on the Left with the most integrity, a man who was also so gentle, obliging and incorrigibly cheerful. He was just as cheerful about doing Jill’s bidding, believing that she was a master of the visual media, about which he knew little. As he had done with Aneurin Bevan, Michael adored submitting to those he deemed at the top of their form. In this one realm he wanted Jill to be a genius and perhaps that is why I could catch him in a vulnerable moment: admitting that he had not done enough to foster Jill’s film career.
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A lunchtime talk with Stevan Dedijer yielded surprisingly little about Jill. She had sent him a list of questions about the siege of Dubrovnik—none of which he could recall. He promised to send me her list, but I never got it. He was more Michael’s friend than Jill’s. I often had the feeling (as did Jill) that with Michael around she simply did not count for much. As Julie said, “There were problems in the relationship. Michael was very much in demand.” Julie recalled Pamela Berry luncheons in the 1950s. Berry, wife of the owner of the Observer, kept a sort of salon. She didn’t like Jill, but this did not stop Michael going without her. Richard Crossman’s diaries portrayed the “hardboiled, journalistic atmosphere” of Berry’s “male-oriented” parties.
I later discovered a letter from Michael to Jill alluding to the Berry problem. He was writing shortly after their 1963 road accident and release from hospital. He was convalescing at Beaverbrook’s estate in the south of France after Jill had returned to London for an operation on her gravely injured hand: “My dear child, I was relieved to get your telegram, although I am still shaken by our conversation. Whatever has arisen, it’s sad that you should have fresh anxieties when you have enough to put up with. However, nothing can be done about this until we talk and I am confident then that all will be well.” Berry had sent a letter or a book—Michael couldn’t recall—and Jill thought that “there was a closer relationship with the woman than was the case,” he said. “You weren’t having an affair with Pamela Berry?” I pressed. “No, no affair,” Michael insisted.
Julie thought the situation was especially hard for her mother because at that point Jill wasn’t making her own money. In the early 1960s she had quit screenwriting, frustrated because directors made such a botch of her scripts. Then her life was thrown into turmoil when she crashed her car into a lorry. Michael
