Dinah in The Tatler, London, 1935
She fell in the street in Varese or Stresa, not long after Jimmy’ death. The Carabinieri picked her up, saying, “Has the Signora perhaps had a bit too much to drink?”
“No,” she answered. “The Signora has had a great deal too much to drink.”
Something happened at that moment that hadn’t happened before. Her burden lifted. Something came up in her from the inside that no longer needed to rebel, to be acknowledged, to seek courage in a glass. She found a small AA group in the mountains and began to help people with her presence. Often she was the only one in attendance at the weekly meeting, making coffee and sitting by herself for 90 minutes in case a wanderer stumbled in. The “TH” of her letter to me, for example, very famous, found sobriety in Varese with Dinah at his side. He was the only actor of whom she presumed to ask for comp tickets at the theatre in London.
“It’s something I’ve always held back about,” she told me later, “because it was one of the rules laid down by my theatre family: 1) Never ask for free seats. 2) Always be on time. 3) Let your hands applauding be seen. But with T it’s different, and I think it’s because I was an AA loner on Lago Maggiore when he came there after a collapse in Paris. I didn’t do anything, but I was there.”
She was there. In the end, she published four books, out of the many she began and abandoned. Her first was an account of wartime London, The Battle of Waterloo Road, which depicted ordinary Britons, photographed by Robert Capa, coping in the Blitz. She had an affair with Capa, either then or later, and spent a few weeks in the London Hospital after “refusing to come down from a rooftop” during the last air raid of 1941. I have no further details about that episode. There followed A Cat and a King in 1949, the fictionalized account of a great dramatic actor, the “Garrick of his day,” and a besotted girl caught in his orbit, both revering and resenting him. The characters were plainly modeled on her own family, the Forbes-Robertsons, and, concerning the feelings of the girl, on her relations with Jimmy Sheean. Dinah had labored for years to find a plot that suited them all and I loved her for it — it was exactly the problem I had encountered when trying to write fiction. She wrote to a friend in mid-composition:
As for the magnum opus it progresses apace. Really at a very great pace, too; in fact I write far too much, and the digressions that take place will make up most of the book. Tant pis, I will write what I can, and it can do nobody any harm. … I doubt if there is any story in the whole thing, it is just a lot of people going about feeling things, which is exactly the kind of book I abominate, except when it is written by Proust. I have got to stop for a while now, and think a bit, because I am finding the temptation to meander happily on very great, and it is simply turning into a book about nothing, and in which nothing happens. I have got to think of some happenings quickly.
In 1963, after many discarded novels, Dinah published Footlights for Jean, a book classified for young adults, in which – as Diana Forbes-Robertson -- she recounted the adventures of a young girl starting out in the professional theatre. A year later came the jewel in her crown: My Aunt Maxine, a biography of her mother’s sister, the actress and socialite Maxine Elliott. The book is a classic of theatre and social history and lifted Dinah to the first rank of modern biographers, lauded by both the reading public and scholars in the field. In her day, Maxine Elliott had occupied a position unique among stage performers, admired less for her acting than her astonishing presence — “tall and stately,” a contemporary wrote, “remarkably beautiful, with grand, lustrous eyes, a bright, clear complexion, and a wealth of raven black hair.” She was rarely described in the press as anything but a perfect beauty, “the handsomest woman of her generation,” according to The New York Times, the Gibson Girl made flesh. By 1964 she was almost forgotten, a casualty of time and altered tastes. Dinah brought her flamingly back to life, and at the same time managed to tell her own story as the daughter of Britain’s leading actor of the 1890s and early 20th century.
In fact, Dinah wasn’t Forbes-Robertson’s daughter – that is, not his natural daughter. The actor had married late and began to have children – four girls -- only in his 50s. Dinah learned sometime after his death that she was really the child of Alexander Scott-Gatty, “an actor friend of the family,” called “Jack” and, by Dinah, “Funniman.” The revelation both haunted and intrigued her. She dug into it deeply and connected with other Scott-Gatty relations happily at the end of her life. Her mother’s affair neither surprised nor bothered her, nor her family’s total discretion in the matter of her birth — Forbes-Robertson was “Dad” to her always. Not long before his death in 1937, she stood with him in the garden of their seaside home in Kent, cheek by jowl with the White Cliffs of Dover, “on a magnificent evening with stars hanging down on strings. … Dad, well into his 80s,” she recalled, “was leaning very lightly on my arm, and as he looked up, he merely said, `It’s very big isn’t it?’” It was “a Zen-ish moment between us,” she wrote, “the most important moment I ever had with my beloved father.”
But the acting bug never bit her. “I’m a sort of student-vagabond type,” she announced. “As a child, I wanted above all two things, to be an archaeologist and to write. And I wanted to be a dancer, but I grew and grew and grew. And I wanted to paint.” She was prone to sudden and intense enthusiasms and pictured herself as a character in The Beggar’s Opera, John Gay’s 18th-century satire of poverty and public mores. "I'm Like A Skiff on the Ocean Toss'd," she would say with a lift of the head, and “I didn’t spend a childhood dressed up as Captain McHeath for nothing. … I went mad about [John Lothrop] Motley too at one time, and couldn’t think of anything but William the Silent and the sack of Antwerp, etc.” She was the model for the “Dinah” of Philip Barry’s Philadelphia Story, the little sister of Katharine Hepburn’s Main Line ice maiden, fresh, precocious, and determined to be helpful. Barry became her friend when Jimmy Sheean first brought her to New York in 1938 and left her hanging in the background, “not knowing at all who I was.”
Their romance – their up-and-down marriage – was a marvel to her. That it happened at all amazed her till she died. They had met in 1935 at a party thrown by Hamish Hamilton – “Jamie” – in honor of the poet and novelist Rose Macaulay. Hamilton was both the London publisher of Jimmy’s Personal History and Dinah’s former brother-in-law, briefly married to her sister Jean. He had asked her to come along that night as his partner and she was glad to oblige, “delighted to go out in a far more adult world” than she was used to, feeling at last, at age 20, that she was meeting people as an equal, not just as a daughter of the house. Jimmy asked her to dance, and they kept on dancing, “dancing and talking,” drifting away from the party eventually and out into the city at night. Dinah was “mesmerized.” She didn’t get home until three in the morning, wondering if she would ever see Sheean again.
A week later he invited her to tea and when she left gave her a published excerpt from Personal History – a chapter on “Revolution” -- that had appeared in Harper’s magazine. She read it at home and was "knocked for a loop," the writing “so good,” the story “so strong.” But she didn’t see him again while he was in England and frankly didn’t know what her feelings for him meant. She was a debutante, presented at Court, and one of the most “eligible” girls in London, a notion that made her roar with laughter 50 years later.
In March 1935 Dinah went to Italy with her sister Chloe, who had “crumpled in the London winter” and needed to “re-bloom.” Jimmy was in Naples working on a novel. Dinah wrote to him directly and they met up several times, but the success of Personal History guaranteed that other people were always present at his dinners and parties and they found no time to be alone.
“I think a part of him had expected about three friends to read it,” Dinah said, “and no one else, not ever the great impersonal general public that push people onto bestseller lists, write fan letters and bring the dollars rolling in.” She kept to the side of things until one night, “obliquely,” Jimmy let her know that he was “fond” of her. This was as close as he came to a declaration of love. Stunned, she told no one, especially not Chloe, her sister, who had thrown herself at Jimmy and made up her mind that he was in love with her. It was “complicated,” Dinah said. She wrote to me in 1986:
I can’t remember if I’ve burbled to you about my three sisters. Well, sister Chloe was the one nearest to me in age, five years older than me, the others much older. And she was the one I spent my childhood with. I suppose I was about eight when I began to realize she was a bit odd ... She didn’t go away to school, she couldn’t manage life at all, but lived in a dreamworld in which she was divinely beautiful (she wasn’t) brilliant (she wasn’t) and an expert on music and art ... She suffered from the Forbes-Robertson conviction that she was a genius. Looking back I see that she must have been schizophrenic … Until I married and left home I used to haul her around like a sack of potatoes ... Terrifying. It was like trying to deal with wads and wads of cotton.
After that, Jimmy and Dinah courted by letter, writing nearly every day when the sisters returned to London. That summer he asked her to meet him in Salzburg for the Festival and she rushed to comply, hiding the correspondence from Chloe and “telling huge whoppers” so she could get there by herself; she had spent a “finishing” year in Vienna and made excuses about meeting some Austrian friends. “I was frankly terrified,” she told me, “because there had been this to and froing of letters, BUT would I actually recognize him physically when we met? I did. And Jimmy put a stop to the agonizing shyness which had suddenly come by suggesting instant marriage.” He proposed in a taxi “in bright sunlight on a bridge over the Salzach" and she accepted at once, cabling the news to her parents because she was still underage, not yet twenty-one.
"Our relations were totally pure,” Dinah pointed out, “but I rather suspect that permission for me to marry came with special speed because my poor mother may then have been in a panic about what was going on.” Lady Forbes-Robertson announced the engagement to the press; Dinah was described in newspapers as "a handsome, dark girl of twenty,” “very musical, and also good at a number of games," while Jimmy came off as “a young-looking man of thirty-five, with the kind of personality that makes him liked wherever he goes.” They flew to Vienna for a civil wedding on August 24, 1935, and returned to Salzburg the same day in time for a performance of Fidelio, with Toscanini at the podium. Music would be the bond that held them always, no matter the degrees of marital upset they otherwise reached. That year, they attended every concert and opera on the calendar in Salzburg and “the whole thing glittered and danced and laughed,” in Dinah’s words. “We fell in love with each other instantly,” she told reporters. “It is all a real romance.”
But what was Jimmy Sheean up to? Since the death of Rayna Prohme, his communist heartthrob, in 1927, there had been no women in his life – no one woman, better put, for Jimmy adored women and wooed them as a jester might, amusing them, flattering them, cheering them on, sitting alongside them in awe of their composure and command. He seems to have decided to marry Dinah on a whim in Arolo, four hundred feet above Lago Maggiore, while he wrote San Felice, a historical novel about Naples in the French Revolutionary Wars. He wanted stability and, for that matter, respectability as fame washed over him and put him directly in the public eye. He wanted to be, or at least to play the part, of a devoted husband.
“At the time,” said Dinah, “I really didn’t know that the success of Personal History had made it possible for him to marry at all. Heavens, he was solvent." But Jimmy needed a wife as a figure more than a person, she would learn, a character of his own devising, who would act her role contentedly without otherwise affecting his life. Sheean was self-driven and self-focused, a one-man show in every way. “I can talk with myself,” he once said, “but not with many others. When I'm talking to myself, I'm always telling the truth.”
To Dinah, he was not telling the truth, or not fully. Jimmy Sheean had secrets to hide from the woman he now called his “Child Wife.” To say he was “gay” and “in the closet” slaps him with terms from a later time that don’t rightly apply. He was a lapsed Catholic, ridden with guilt about leaving the Church, in deep conflict about his sexual nature, and comfortable sexually with neither men nor women. In the late 1920s, having penetrated the Bloomsbury scene in London, he was the lover of Eddy Sackville-West, cousin of the more famous Vita, whose husband, Harold Nicolson, he might also have slept with. Jimmy’s romance with Eddy was conducted almost in the open, but in an environment – Bloomsbury – where such things were barely noticed. In those days, immediately after Rayna Prohme’s death, he was apparently unrestrained, “the most notorious bugger in Europe,” as a friend described him cheekily (Jimmy quoted the line himself with evident glee). But with world fame came caution and resolve. Sheean wanted steadiness, and gave signs of desire for men only rarely thereafter, when sloppy and drunk, as was the fate of so many in his era.
“Being in love with me,” he told a friend, “is a dreadful waste of time. … My instability is not only in my character and emotions, but in the life I lead, so that you literally can’t be sure where I am, in any sense at all.”
Dinah knew nothing of these things – at least, not until years after, and then only as a general notion in “the huge dramatic dream of Jimmy’s life.” During multiple breakdowns and “shemozzles,” he had talked about desires and “obscenities” that haunted him, without, it seems, explaining what he meant — “on principle,” he refused to see psychiatrists or enter “confessional” cures. And when Dinah talked with me, it was in relation to my experience of such things, as a man, now openly gay, who still surrounded himself with women as his closest friends and advisors. At the height of my success, this picture was familiar to her. She never used the word homosexual in relation to Jimmy, complaining instead, to me and many others, about his “dire lack of physical affection” and “inattention” as a lover, a difficulty she encountered early on.
“I know that the entire root of the trouble between Jimmy and me was sexual,” she wrote to me frankly. “Poor Jimmy, tortured by that Irish Catholic sense of sin, and me, when I married, so breathtakingly ignorant and uninformed that I didn’t even know what to expect. We were sure to hurt one another.” In Salzburg already, on what was meant to be their honeymoon, Jimmy flew into a rage when Dinah praised a performance by the Italian bass Ezio Pinza, whose “utter wedding of a voice and a personality and a part and the music” in Don Giovanni had left her weak in her seat. Jimmy “began to scream,” she remembered, accusing her of “only wanting to look at Pinza’s legs in white tights.”
"I could not endure the way he strutted his masculinity,” said Jimmy later. “There is some absolutely appalling vulgarity about the Italian male when he is over-conscious of his central organs, and Pinza had this to an insufferable degree." Transferring his own obsessions to his wife, he put her in the angry category of “all women … thinking sexually and never having any ideals except self glorification in the eyes of a man, never wanting anything but sex and gewgaws.” Dinah quickly understood that Jimmy was “afraid of women” and that his fantasies about Rayna Prohme, for instance — a long shadow over their marriage — and his devotion to “great ladies” like Dorothy Thompson were a substitute for dealing with any woman intimately.
"It is no good saying that [they] do it to him,” she wrote. “They don't lift a finger, he does it all himself of his own free-will in some strange mother-complex nonsense which is utter blight upon any other relationship." It wouldn’t be long before she began to fulfill his prophecy and have affairs on the side, and not long either before she started drinking heavily. That Jimmy paid such lavish attention to other women in public, “that he was the most natural, unaffected, and utterly friendly person” in any room while she stood in the corners alone, burned her deeply. He once said that he wanted only women as pallbearers at his funeral: “Dorothy at the head of the coffin; Dinah at the foot; Clare Boothe Luce and Agnes De Mille on one side and Greta Garbo and Marian Anderson on the other." That she would be at the foot of it always was Dinah’s tragedy in marriage.
"Actually one asks very little,” she wrote years later, following their first divorce. “I believe I would be content if I could feel that it was to be counted on that a point of trust and certainty existed between us which would be unshakeable. … But when he allows himself to be absorbed [elsewhere] to such an extent I do not think that a woman can, with the best will in the world, live with him without dying of starvation. One has to have something.” To me she put it simply and sadly. “It isn’t enough to have private reassurances and reconciliations,” she said. “He never learned that a wife must be seen to be preferred to other people.”
Diana Forbes-Robertson by Walter Sickert, 1933
For some material on the Sheeans and their marriage I am indebted to the late Carl Johnson, whose doctoral thesis, A Twentieth Century Seeker: A Biography of James Vincent Sheean, contains quoted letters from Dinah Sheean and other points of detail and comments on the Sheeans’ lives.
Learning more and more! You tapped into a whole network of fascinating people. Thank you for sharing with the rest of us in your beautiful prose… bien sur!
If nothing else, to be the model for Dinah in “Philadelphia Story”…