would have approved!”
I knew that both Jill and Michael had liked my biography of Rebecca West, but just how much quite astounded me. I had kept them apprised of my progress on the book, sending them chapters for their comments. Jill could be exceptionally critical, especially on the subject of feminism and I worried that she would find my chapters on Rebecca’s early years as a radical feminist wanting. But her praise was more than gratifying. Michael later touted my book in his biography of H. G. Wells. They had discussed my work often, Michael said.
Michael had published articles in praise of Rebecca West’s patriotism. Unlike many others on the Left, he did not find her fierce anti-Communism troubling. Indeed, it was in accord with his own mission to develop a Socialism that would provide the world with an antidote to Soviet tyranny. Mervyn Jones told me that while researching his biography of Michael, he had been impressed with the vehemence of Michael’s own anti-Communism as expressed in the hard Leftist Tribune, which Michael edited for several years.
Biographers are often made to feel like supplicants. But Michael’s first phone call was a wooing, making me feel that as the biographer of Rebecca West, I was conferring an honour on Jill. He provided me not just with unfettered access to Jill’s study: I was to live with him whenever I was in London. I was to go about the house as if it were my own. I could rifle through every drawer, cupboard, room and receptacle. I slept on a sofa bed in Michael’s library. Each night before retiring, I would go through a shelf or pile of books (his only filing system) filled with letters and reviews and notes. Every night brought a new revelation. A few letters from Mary Welsh, Hemingway’s fourth wife, whom Michael had known in the war, were tucked into Hemingway books. In a debunking biography of Michael’s hero, Aneurin Bevan, founder of the National Heath Service, I read Michael’s comment on the flyleaf, which began “read with rising anger ... ”
I often thought of Boswell and Johnson during my stays with Michael Foot. In Michael’s company, I was very much a Boswell, keen to get the great man to talk. I recorded everything, compiling a hundred hours of Michael reminiscing and nearly another hundred of others commenting on him. Scholars estimate that Boswell spent something like four hundred days in Samuel Johnson’s company. Over a period of three years and ten trips to England, I lived for something like one hundred days with Michael. Boswell knew Johnson much longer (more than twenty years), but he did not live with his subject and see him throughout the entire course of a day and night. I was with Michael from breakfast through to dinner in the evening and everything in between and usually more talk right up until bedtime. I watched the cycle of Michael’s days and became a part of them, sometimes locking up the house at night or taking messages when he was away for part of a day—and once having to rush down the stairs of his Hampstead house and into the street to pick up him when he had tripped and fallen.
Michael was a gallant man who rarely let down his guard. But with me, perhaps because I was American and because we spent so many continuous hours together, he would sometimes reveal himself. He was profoundly angry the night I had to pick him up in the street. Sitting at the kitchen table, he nearly sobbed and said, “You don’t know what it is like to grow old. You don’t know.” His humiliation was palpable.
Our conversations—like most conversations—were circular. Michael would keep coming back to the same topics, digress, then lose his place—“I was just ... [un-huh] ... I was just ... ” A soundtrack accompanied his conversations. He could not walk without making noise, groaning in different octaves and punctuating many expressions with a “whee!”
Michael wanted my biography of Jill to do what she could not do for herself: write the whole story of what it means to be a woman. Like the subjects of Daughters of Dissent, her never completed epic about the struggle for female suffrage, Jill saw herself as a dissident fighting for recognition.
2
Our March meeting lasted for nearly two hours. Toward the end of the interview, I brought up Michael’s relationship with Julie Hamilton, Jill’s daughter by her first marriage:
[CR] Mervyn mentions that when you first married Jill, Julie wasn’t happy about that.
[MF] We’ve had our problems over the years, but ... anyhow you talk to her ... anyhow I don’t think we had much trouble. We had some other ... you talk to Julie. You’re going to see her tomorrow?
I did. Michael was never one to discuss relationships in depth. I would have to press him again and again—usually in response to what others said—to get him to open up. His pauses were blanks I had to fill in by talking to others.
Michael was not openly recalcitrant, but he would often cut off discussion by reverting to the sort of encouragement that became a refrain in our relationship: “Anyhow, Carl, I’m very glad that you’re doing it. I’m going to have a sleep now.”
Even as Michael was heading off for his nap and I was backing out of Jill’s study, where our first conversation about my biography of her took place, I stopped and said, “I’ve just got to take a quick peek in here [a drawer]. I want to see if it contains more manuscript.” As I fingered photocopies and note cards, Michael said, “There’s nothing to be hidden.” I took him at his word.
3
“Michael’s life is one long love affair. It is a love affair with the Labour Party, a love affair with Hazlitt, Swift, H. G. Wells, and my mother,” Julie told me over drinks in a pub the next day.
Julie first caught sight of Michael right at the end of the war, shortly after her mother had made her film The Way We Live, shot in bombed-out Plymouth and featuring a cameo performance by Michael Foot who was campaigning for a parliamentary seat during what became the Labour landslide of 1945. Jill, a beauty, had had her pick of men and was then involved with a handsome suitor, her producer William MacQuitty, while at the same time conducting an affair with a good looking painter, Denis Matthews. She was also still married to her second husband, Jeffrey Dell.
Yet to Julie’s amazement, Jill set out to captivate Michael early on. “He was the most revolting specimen of a man I’d ever seen,” Julie recalled. “He had asthma and eczema. How could my mother touch him, let alone get in bed with him?” This shy, myopic man appealed to Jill because unlike so many of her other lovers, he talked of building a better world and took her entirely on her own terms, barely inquiring about her past. What he did know only made him prouder of his conquest. He would later brag to me about how Jill had led on so many men. He spoke of winning her. During the early days of their courtship, she had shown up at a miner’s gala event in Durham with another man, “But,” he chortled, “she came home with me.”
Michael’s brothers, by his own account, were astounded when he won Jill. Brought up as a strict Methodist, Michael never had the easygoing attitude toward sex that seemed second nature to Jill. With Jill, Julie could talk about sex freely, sharing the most intimate details of her relationships. Sex, in Michael’s Plymouth home, had been unmentionable: “Don’t put your hands under the covers, young man!” his mother admonished him.
“Slowly, slowly, slowly,” Julie began to appreciate Michael. Although she found him reticent and difficult to have fun with, he was always there for her when she was in distress. “He took me to movies like Ivanhoe and Scaramouche I loved to see and that mother was not interested in at all.” Later, as Julie developed a love of opera, she would share record albums with Michael. “He thinks he shared everything with Jill,” Julie noted, adding that Jill would say, “I’m not the one who loves opera.”
Michael’s trusting nature, his absolute faith in Jill, irritated Julie. The director Ronnie Neame, who employed Jill in the 1950s to write screenplays for The Million Pound Note and Windom’s Way, was, Julie recalled, “always round the house.” The teenaged Julie became suspicious.
