remarks, which I included in a draft without using Mervyn’s name and I could see that unless I identified my source, neither Michael nor the reader would take the criticism seriously. Mervyn warned me that Michael would not be able to see—or admit?—that Jill had an overbearing quality.
What enchanted Michael? I asked Mervyn. “Beauty,” he said, but then added:
For a political man to have a wife with a career of her own and was an achiever you could be proud of was, at that time, unusual. Labour leader wives were uneducated. But most people thought of Jill as Michael Foot’s wife. That’s not what you want and that’s not what Michael wants. That’s a big hurdle in the writing of the biography.”
If this was true, I thought, what does that say about Michael?
6
“Gloria mentioned a woman at Tribune who was in love with Michael. She could only remember her first name: Sheila,” I told Mervyn. “That was my impression too,” he answered. “Mind you, she hated Jill, presumably because she was in love with Michael.” I encountered Sheila Noble on several occasions in Michael’s home, where she would come for a day to help him with his correspondence. When I asked her for an interview, she just smiled and shook her head. “Sheila adored Michael. I don’t believe she ever had an affair,” Mervyn said. “The other person to see is Elizabeth Thomas, Michael’s personal secretary—way back, in the 1940s. Then she started working at Tribune and then when Michael became a minister, she was his political advisor. They were never lovers, I don’t think.” Mervyn was wrong on that last score, as I learned later from Michael himself in a rather trying scene. Like Sheila, Elizabeth rebuffed my request to interview her about Michael and Jill. It is apparent now that certain women formed a cordon sanitaire around Michael, one that Jill grew to resent.
Did Michael ever stray with other women? I asked Mervyn.1 “I’m convinced it was a rare event,” he replied.
Actually, Elizabeth Thomas, an extremely sensible woman, told me an anecdote about Michael straying. He spent a night with another woman. He came home at breakfast time and Jill was completely furious and said, “I’m divorcing you.” He managed to smooth it over. My respect for Elizabeth is that she had never told me the story before and she didn’t want to tell me this story while I was writing a biography of Michael. If I put it in, the press would have fun with it. It would have run away with the biography, of course.
I was beginning to feel uneasy about falling into the authorised biographer’s trap of becoming privy to secrets that could not be divulged. I could see that I was heading toward some kind of confrontation with Michael. The way he handled it would be another means of assessing his character.
Talk about Michael sex’s life segued into a discussion of Arthur Koestler’s rape of Jill, a story that Michael himself first revealed in a review of a book about Koestler. He caused an uproar in the press and among Jill’s and Michael’s friends. Frederic Raphael wrote a piece questioning Jill’s account, suggesting she had exaggerated or perhaps had even led Koestler on. There were other skeptics, although another woman came forward, writing a letter to the press that described Koestler’s assault on her (she managed to escape being raped). Then it was revealed that Koestler had also raped one of Dick Crossman’s wives.
Jill had kept the rape secret for more than 40 years—supposedly not even telling Michael—but had blurted it out late one night at a small party with her friends, many of whom I would interview on subsequent trips to England. Mervyn was skeptical about the story, although he believed Koestler quite capable of rape. Mervyn had asked Jill, “Did you tell Michael?” She hesitated and said, “Michael saw the scratches on my arm. He said, ‘What’s this?’ I didn’t tell Michael I was fully raped but that I was assaulted and that it was Arthur.” It all seemed a strange story to Mervyn, especially when Jill said Michael’s response was, “Well, you have to admit he’s a very good writer.” Mervyn thought this was an unbelievably “crass thing to say. A man has raped your wife—I couldn’t believe Michael had said this.”
As I pieced together the story of Jill’s rape for my biography of her, I realised there was a missing element: exactly what Michael knew and what he did about it. I spoke with him many times about the rape but never came close to comprehending what, in the end, was the truth. But I also held back certain testimony, which led me to believe that Mervyn’s assessment of Jill and his belief in Michael was misguided. The Koestler rape became just one of many instances when Michael did not stand by Jill. To do so, would have meant an ugly confrontation with his wife’s rapist, a writer Michael would continue to rhapsodise over in our conversations.
1 “Michael always struck me as being an exceptionally monogamous person,” said his old friend Mike Bessie. “Did I think the same thing was true of Jill? I never observed in all the years of their marriage any signs that she longed for other male companionship.”
June 2000
7
“I went to see Mervyn,” I told Michael at the beginning of my second stay at Pilgrim’s Lane.
[CR] I raised the issue with him that there were things about his book that Jill didn’t like. I mentioned the house and the garden. My impression is that to this day, this is something Mervyn doesn’t grasp. He admired you. He admired your politics, but the domestic side did not become part of the story. Jill must have been terribly disappointed.
[MF] Mervyn has quite a good artistic interest. In fact, he got on with Jill, you see, earlier. In a kind of way he was understanding Jill as well as anyone. But she did say, “Fancy him, writing the book without appreciating what this house was.”
I made no comment but thought, ‘How could Michael be so wrong about Mervyn?’ Other than a few respectful comments about Jill’s film career and her passionate commitment to nuclear disarmament, his tone was highly dismissive of her.
Michael had an aching need to show the world what Jill had not been able to display herself, much as Thomas Carlyle had done for his late wife Jane and H. G. Wells had done for his Jane after she died. These men relied on women to perform in what Martha Gellhorn liked to call “the kitchen of life.”
Just then the phone rang and before Michael could heave himself into motion, his housekeeper, Emma, answered the call. “She’s a great help,” Michael said, “She’s knows what she’s up to.”
“My legs are not quite properly operating and I’m having physiotherapy every Tuesday,” Michael said after Emma had beaten him to the phone. I accompanied him on one of these sessions, where he had to wait like anyone else for his turn. I was amazed that he did not have someone come to the house and that the therapy was not more frequent. He could barely walk now. But he was loyal to the National Health Service, the creation of his hero Nye Bevan and avoided any appearance of seeking special treatment or assistance outside the NHS.
“Tomorrow I’m going to see Bill MacQuitty,” I told Michael, who responded: “He knew Jill before I did. He was the producer of her films and a wonderful friend to her and to us. I hope he is in as full possession of his faculties as I am,” Michael said, laughing. I asked him if he had read MacQuitty’s memoir, A Life to Remember, which included passages about Jill. “I haven’t, really,” Michael admitted. I would continue to be surprised at how little Michael knew about Jill apart from what she herself had told him. She had been able, in fact, to fashion an image of herself for him that he could not bring himself to contest, even when I began to present him with evidence that Jill had sometimes misrepresented her life.
When I mentioned that Jill had a brief career
