The Magic of Believing: A Lansbury Family Memoir

By Edgar Lansbury

Set against the seismic events of the twentieth century, "The Magic of Believing" is an inspiring family memoir of hardship, courage, hope and triumph. In 1940, as bombs fell on London, Charlotte Lillian McIldowie ("Moe") boarded a steamer with her daughter, Angela, and twin boys, Edgar and Bruce, to cross the Atlantic. Dodging icebergs and German U-Boats, they eventually arrived unscathed in the United States, the first leg of a lifelong adventure from London to Broadway to Hollywood populated by the most creative and fascinating personalities of the day. 

 

The Lansbury family has a proud theatrical tradition that began with the nineteenth century Shakespearean tragedian Robert Mantell and continued with Moe, who under the stage name Moyna MacGill became one of London's golden leading ladies. Angela's storied career launched in 1942 when she signed with MGM and appeared in her first big screen roles, "Gaslight" and "The Picture of Dorian Grey." Decades later, she is known and beloved internationally for scores of defining film roles, Broadway musicals such as "Mame,""Sweenie Todd," and "Gypsy" and, of course, for her portrayal of the beloved Jessica Fletcher in TV's "Murder She Wrote." The Lansbury twins wasted no time moving into the family business as well. Bruce became a prolific television writer, series creator, producer, and a senior executive at Paramount Pictures. He produced such legendary TV series as "Mission Impossible" and "The Wild, Wild West." Edgar began in theater as a scenic designer and eventually produced his first Broadway play, "The Subject Was Roses," which won the Critics Circle and Tony Awards, and the Pulitzer Prize. He went on to produce several films and dozens of plays on and off-Broadway, including the international smash-hit musical "Godspell."   

 

Throughout their lives and respective professional careers, in good times and bad, Moe's creative muse and her undying belief in 'the possible' provided the energy and magic that fueled the family's dreams and success.  

• Language: English
• Publisher: JLML Press
• Release date: May 22, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393081326

Book preview

The Magic of Believing

A Lansbury Family Memoir

Edgar Lansbury

The Magic of Believing: A Lansbury Family Memoir

Copyright © 2020 by Edgar Lansbury

All rights reserved.

Paperback ISBN: 979-8-6443-0684-8

Published by JLML Press, 2020

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

For permission requests, please email the publisher, subject line: The Magic of Believing Permissions at [e-mail]

~

Back cover portrait by Louise Peabody

Book design by Sarah E. Holroyd (https://sleepingcatbooks.com)

Front cover design by Dolores Frey

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Part One: The Early Years

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Family Album Part One

Part Two: Adventure at Sea

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Part Three: Sign That Girl!

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Part Four: It’s Always the Woman Who Decides These Things

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Part Five: The Korean Adventure

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Part Six: Matrimony

Chapter One

Chapter Two

A Family of Players

The Century Association

Bruce

Epilogue: Fruit from the Tree

Family Album Part Two

Acknowledgements

During the several years that this book has been in the making, I have prevailed upon many to help me through the process. First among those is my wife, Louise Peabody, who read the early manuscript and contributed her thoughts and encouragement. Before his untimely death in 2017, I collaborated with my dear brother Bruce on recollections of our story and that of the family. The edits and suggestions of Jessica Weber were a positive influence on the first draft of the manuscript, and her professional experience in the business of publishing has been invaluable. My thanks also to Dolores Frey, a graphic designer who helped me organize and caption the photographs. Finally, I have to credit my son Michael who contributed his overview and edits to various versions of the work, set me on the right course, and has since become my primary partner in the effort to see the work published.

Prologue

On March 1, 2014, Angela Lansbury opened at the Gielgud Theater in London’s West End in a production of the play Blythe Spirit by Noel Coward in which she played the wildly eccentric medium Madame Arcati. It was the same role she had performed two years before in a New York production that drew critical raves, won her a Tony Award, and ran successfully for many weeks. The production in London was equally well received, and Angela was roundly praised for a performance of astonishing energy and comic panache that garnered her the coveted Laurence Olivier Award for the Best Supporting Actress.

For Angela, the reception was certainly gratifying, and there was a piece of family history attached to the event that made it especially important for her. The recently renamed Gielgud Theater in which she was appearing in 2014 was originally named the Globe Theater. It was the very theater where, in 1918, our mother, at the age of 23, had made her theatrical debut in Love in a Cottage, establishing herself as Moyna MacGill, a leading lady in the London Theater.

While successful openings and rave reviews were not a new experience for Angela, this moment completed a cycle in her relationship with our mother that, during the past 88 years, had encompassed hard times, good times, and triumphs. As Angela’s star rose in the firmament and Moyna’s waned, it caused occasional strains in their relationship. For Angela that evening of March 1, 2014, gave her a chance to say, You did it, Moe! We did it, Moe!

This is the story of our mother—whom we call Moe—the men she loved, and the children she bore and, amidst war and hardships, brought to America.

Part One: The Early Years

Chapter One

Charlotte Lillian McIldowie was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on the 10th of December 1895. Her father, William McIldowie, was described by the Belfast paper as an urbane gentleman of kindly nature, who made hosts of friends and was said by many to have been the best-known solicitor in Northern Ireland.

He was also keenly interested in all things theatrical, and in his younger days performed in amateur performances and recitals. As an adult he was a participant in the local Shakespearean Society. He possessed a fine tenor voice and was an active member of the Belfast Operatic Society. He was also a member of the Belfast Philharmonic Society and sat on the board of the Royal Belfast Opera House, all of which gave his family access to the finest in operatic and theatrical performances to be found in that part of Ireland.

Charlotte’s mother, Elizabeth Jane, was a Mageean. Her family, like many Northern Irish, was of Scottish origin. Her passion, besides her children and grandchildren, was the game of bridge, which she played with a coterie of close friends all her life. When Charlotte (Chattie, or Moe, as she came to be called) eventually went away to school and a theatrical career in London, her mother would write newsy letters to her and describe the bridge hands won and lost during the previous week and never failed to report on the comings, goings, and occasional foibles of her various bridge partners. My sister Angela recalls sitting at Elizabeth’s knee learning handicraft skills in sewing, needlepoint embroidery, and the art of crocheting, skills she would practice all her life. She was occasionally allowed to light Granny’s cigarettes, and on many occasions in the 30s would accompany her to the cinema to see the latest Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers film musical. Rogers became a heroine for young Angela and instilled in her the desire to dance beautifully and sing like a bird.

The McIldowie home was Sandymount, an imposing house on Belfast’s fashionable Eglantine Avenue. Being Northern Irish and Protestant, the McIldowies and the Mageeans had a long history with England’s occupation of Ireland. One of Elizabeth’s forebears had a distinguished career in the British Navy as a surgeon and served with Lord Nelson at the battle of Trafalgar. As children, my twin brother Bruce and I played for hours with his ceremonial sword, which was kept in a closet in our attic in London. Also kept there in an aging cardboard box was Elizabeth’s wedding dress with a bodice that, as hard as we tried at the age of five or six, amid paroxysms of giggles, we found impossible to lace ourselves into—a testament to the waspwaisted brides of that era.

Chattie had three siblings: a younger sister, Marjorie (called Mars); a younger brother, Dennis; and an older brother, James, whom she idolized but who died quite young from typhoid fever contracted during his soldiering with the British Army in the trenches during the Great War. All had attractive looks and a characteristically Northern Irish nasal twang, quite distinct from the southern Irish brogue.

In 1904, when Chattie was nine years old, the Abbey Theater of Dublin was founded by Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn, and W.B. Yeats. The Abbey enjoyed great initial success, and created a fertile environment for the development and growth of talent of a uniquely Irish nature, as exemplified by the budding playwrights Padraic Colum, John Millington Synge, George Bernard Shaw, Lady Gregory, W.B. Yeats, Sean O’Casey, and Paul Vincent Carroll. This theatrical activity at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, before the advent of film, was an important focus of entertainment and performance art for the elite cultural establishment.

Chattie’s father William’s love for the theater and his enjoyment of it influenced the whole family—both of Chattie’s brothers acted professionally on the stage. Dennis appeared in a play called Whoopee! and toured the United States in a production of John Drinkwater’s Bird in Hand. He adopted the stage name of Dennis Mantell after the name of one of his uncles from the Mageean side of the family, Robert Bruce Mantell, a contemporary of the American actor Edwin Booth. Robert Mantell had made a career for himself touring as a Shakespearean tragedian in the English provinces in the latter part of the nineteenth century. He later came to America and barnstormed the countryside to great acclaim for two decades.

But it was Chattie’s father who was the principal male influence in her young life. She confided to me many years later, with surprising but characteristic candor, that once he had left home for a day at the office, she would bask in the exciting essences that pervaded his bathroom shaving soap, colognes, powders, etc., an early introduction to that mysterious male realm. She was also deeply affected by his cultural sensitivity and artistic interests, qualities she would seek in men her whole life.

Chattie spent her early years in Belfast attending a local school until, at the age of 12, and much to her annoyance, she was sent away with her sister Marjorie to finish her education at the Scarborough Boarding School in England. There she received the rudiments of arithmetic, geography, and history, read copiously, learned to write beautifully, and developed a searching, inquiring mind and a strong social conscience and sense of justice.

One of her friends at Scarborough was Barbara Lewis (called Bab), who remained a lifelong pal. A snapshot taken in April of 1914 shows Chattie, Mars, and Bab surrounded by a large group of classmates gathered in diaphanous costumes and identified in a caption as The Bluebird Society.

In adulthood Chattie never thought of herself as particularly well educated, but she always had a great respect and humility for learning and the learned. I believe this may have been brought on by an underestimation of her own intellectual capabilities. Like most young ladies of that era she lacked aspirations for higher education. However, at an early age she showed a passion and natural aptitude for the arts. While Chattie was still in her teens, her father saw to it that these talents were developed by enrolling her in the Slade School of Fine Art in London. The Slade, housed in an imposing Neo-Classic building in Bloomsbury, was known for an alumni that boasted some of the best late nineteenth and early twentieth century British artists, including Augustus John, William Orpen, Wyndham Lewis, Stanley Spencer, and, more recently, Lucien Freud.

While there, Chattie studied painting and drawing from the figure, and developed skills in traditional watercolor techniques in which she excelled and planned to pursue as a career. She later described these arts as her first love. It was a talent she exercised throughout most of her life wherever she lived.

Chattie’s father’s activities in the opera and theater inspired her growing interest in the theater and created a family environment rich in events relating to all the performing arts. This included the recitation of verse, for which Chattie had a natural aptitude. This was a prevalent form of entertainment among educated, upper-middle class families, long before the advent of cinema. Although Chattie never studied acting per se, her father recognized in her a natural talent for the art of recitation, and while she was quite young he enrolled her in classes in diction and voice from the foremost teachers in Belfast, cultivating her voice and other skills required for the recitation of poetry and verse.

The program cover from one of these recitations showed a svelte, languorously posed young Irish beauty, stylishly dressed in a long green velvet gown, inviting the viewer to share with her the magic of her Celtic sorcery. It is captioned Recital by Chattie McIldowie. It is clear from this image that by the time she was in her teens she had developed into an extraordinarily beautiful young woman.

Chattie performed all over Ulster, the programs typically consisting of poems steeped in the Irish vernacular, such as Percy French’s Ach, I Dunno, Cuttin’ Rushes, and The Road to Ballybay. They also included Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant, and a lullaby poem, The Fearsomest Beasts, delivered in a Scottish brogue. She was soon recognized as an inspired and unrivaled interpreter of Celtic folklore. As one early admirer described these recitals and the images they conjured up, Leprechauns sat in a fairy ring on toadstools around her feet as she spoke, and water-kelpies clung to her hair. There was a special magic in her cadences. Her art was white sorcery; she cast a spell.

Chattie carried this recital repertoire with her, and for most of her life continued to captivate audiences by the magic of her white sorcery. Forty years later, following a recital in New York City, the noted English director/playwright Harry W. Gribble was quite besotted and wrote to her, "You were a lovely creature bestowing the strong beauty that a child or a man and all brave women ask for. You point with firm delicacy to lovely things and to those that threaten, so that we feel always your affectionate concern for every human venturer. You are Eve tasting the apple, and the wise Lilith who knows the futility of it, and you are woman who bravely bears the cost of man’s security.

And you greet everyone lavishly with undeserved garlands of most delicate blooms. It is not a brief hour of refreshment, but a lingering loveliness that you leave with us.

Chapter Two

By the closing years of WW1, Chattie was no more than 19 when she met and fell in love with Reginald Denham (Reggie), a dashing young Englishman from Streatham who still held a commission in the British Army but was ambitious to make a name for himself as an actor, writer, and director. They commenced a heated affair that I believe was probably Chattie’s first. She was to give a recital at the Ulster Hall in Belfast and arranged for Denham, a talented singer and composer, to assist her, which he did, writing musical accompaniments to the poems Loughareema and Johneen" and by singing a group of Hebrides folk songs.

Though William McIldowie knew almost nothing about Reggie except what Chattie had told him, he took an instant dislike to their liaison and didn’t hesitate to let her know that Denham, with aspirations of a career in the theater instead of the professions, was not a qualified suitor for her hand. His opposition to Denham exhibited a double standard in light of his own and his two sons’ activities in the theater and opera.

Despite that, Chattie planned a trip home to Belfast from London with Denham, intending to formally introduce him to her parents in the hope that it might sway her father’s opposition to the match.

Unfortunately, the young couple were unable to control their libidos during the visit, and the flagrant cohabiting that went on in the rooms at Sandymount further exacerbated William’s dislike for the proposed union. Aware of what had been going on, he summoned up his best courtroom manner and accused both Chattie and Reggie of their sexual transgression, and when faced with innocent denials from both parties, held up a stained bed sheet and described the evidence as ocular proof! Later in life, Chattie, with unabashed candor, was glad to share the moment with Angela, Bruce, and me (then barely in our teens), and that expression, ocular proof, was passed down in our family and subsequently applied to multiple situations and became the source of many jokes and innuendos.

William followed up this confrontation with a letter to Reggie that left no doubt as to his feelings. Reggie remembered it as being so icy with disapproval that it froze to my fingers. The lovers left Belfast promptly, and in 1917, just prior to the end of the Great War, they decided to marry and settle down in London. Chattie was just 22.

Moving easily among the youth in the theater and fledgling film life of the city, Chattie and Reggie began to pursue their individual goals: Reggie his acting, directing, and writing and Chattie her art studies at the Slade. She later told me about a typical evening spent in the company of artists and musicians at which the young Polish pianist Arthur Rubinstein played works unfamiliar to the West by the Russian composers Tchaikovsky, Scriabin, and Mussorgsky.

Europe was in turmoil in the aftermath of the Great War. Tsar Nicholas and his entire family had been assassinated, victims of the Bolshevik revolution. In Europe there was no shortage of fleeing émigré talent of all kinds. A few years earlier Sergei Diaghilev and his Ballet Russe had stormed Paris with ballets by Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky, and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. At the same time, he had introduced Western Europe to the avant-garde paintings and designs of Benois, Roerich, Goncharova, Tchelitchew, Repin, and Bakst. Chattie and Reggie found themselves immersed in a period ripe with change and opportunity.

As a student at the Slade, Chattie had become involved with many of her liberal classmates in the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPT), also called the Women’s Party, joining the ranks of Christabel Pankhurst and her mother, Emmeline Goulden Pankhurst, the founder of the suffrage movement in England.

In the thrall of the Pankhursts, Chattie became an organizer for the Women’s Party. Though relatively ignorant of political matters, she was instructed to read all the morning papers and then deliver an intelligent oration on current events with an emphasis on suffrage, pacifism, and social issues.

Though Chattie was secure in front of an audience as a recitalist, as a public speaker in some corner of Hyde Park, before a sometimes hostile audience, her natural shyness took hold. As she later wrote about the experience, I’ll never forget the terror I felt, especially as I knew nothing much about politics. When the usual heckling started, we would hurriedly climb down off our soapbox and crawl away, only too thankful it was over. Our audiences generally consisted of nurses with prams, and maybe a few stray soldiers.

For those who knew Chattie, this kind of activity would seem not to fit the shy young woman they knew. It was hard to match this sensitive, artistic, and beautiful creature with this militant group, fighting the conservative establishment on behalf of women’s right to vote and the improvement of conditions for the poor. While her sympathies were aligned with the suffragist movement and social causes, it is not recorded and, indeed, unlikely that Chattie actively participated in the kind of violent demonstrations that Pankhurst encouraged—the burning of more than a hundred buildings, smashing of store windows, and bombing of public areas. In one notable instance, in a desperate attempt to garner public sympathy, the ladies chained themselves to the gates of Buckingham Palace. To gain allies in her cause, Pankhurst attempted to join the left-leaning Independent Labor Party, recently founded by George Lansbury and Pankhurst’s friend, the socialist Keir Hardie. Ironically, she was denied membership because of her sex.

Chapter Three

Chattie was still in her early twenties when she was noticed riding on the London Underground by George Pearson, one of England’s most distinguished silent film directors. He was so impressed by her poise and Irish beauty that he subsequently cast her in several of his early short silent films. She played the leads in Pearson’s Garryowen and Nothing Else Matters, in which Reginald Denham also played small roles. Together, they made quite a stir in film and theater circles and Chattie attracted the interest of West End theater producers. In 1918, at the age of 23, she appeared in her first London stage role at the Globe Theater in Love in A Cottage. Here she drew the attention of Gerald du Maurier, a prominent actor/manager and the father of novelist Daphne. He hired Chattie to understudy the principal role in J.M. Barrie’s Dear Brutus. She eventually took over the role, costarring with du Maurier.

Frank Curzon, co-manager with du Maurier of Wyndham’s Theatre in the West End, must have found Charlotte McIldowie far too cumbersome on a marquee and encouraged her to change her stage name to Moyna MacGill. Thus she was launched on a distinguished career and into stardom as the leading lady in a number of West End productions, including St. John Ervine’s John Ferguson. In 1923 she played Sally in Success by A.A. Milne, and appeared later that year in an English translation of Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. She played opposite such leading English actors of the day as Godfrey Tearle, Herbert Marshall, Basil Rathbone, and Philip Merivale. She was in Eugene O’Neill’s The Great God Brown with John Gielgud and played Desdemona in Othello opposite Godfrey Tearle in the role of the Moor and Basil Rathbone as Iago. Now known as Moyna MacGill (but still Chattie to her family and close friends), in a few short years she established herself as a leading actress of the London stage. Reggie Denham described her performance in Othello as the finest Desdemona he had ever seen.

Concurrently, Reggie pursued his own career, establishing himself as an actor, director, and playwright, and soon as the director of a succession of films for the Elstree Studio. In 1920 Moyna and Reggie celebrated the birth of a daughter, christened Isolde after the Wagnerian heroine. Moyna’s burgeoning career was momentarily put on hold.

* * *

Early in 1921, while participating in a socialist/suffrage occasion at a cricket match in the East End of London, Chattie met my father, Edgar, the son of George Lansbury, the East End Labor politician.

George had immigrated to Brisbane, Australia, with his wife, Bessie, and their three children in the late 1880s, lured there by the empty promises of emigration agents eager to enlist able-bodied British laborers and their families in the development of the land. His account of this episode is a tale of nineteenth-century hardship and injustice. But finally, exploited, disillusioned, and broke, after what George termed an annus horribilis, the family set sail on April 21, 1885, aboard the S.S. Merkara for England where, determined to right the wrong that he felt had been perpetrated on him and thousands of other emigrants, George’s active connection with politics commenced.

George Lansbury was a churchgoing Christian, a teetotaler, and a pacifist. The calling to help the less fortunate, his gift of speech, and his passion, drove him into politics, an arena in which he could put all his talents and his beliefs to work. In 1892 he left the Liberals to become a socialist propagandist, and in 1910 entered the House of Commons as the Labor Member for London’s Bow and Bromley constituency.

Edgar Lansbury, whom Chattie had met at that cricket match, was born within the sound of Bow Bells, which they say makes you a real Cockney. There is an old ditty which the children of that era learned:

I owe you five farthings,

Say the bells of St. Martins.

When will you pay me?

Ask the Bells of Old Bailey.

When I grow rich,

Say the Bells of Shoreditch.

When will that be?

Ask the Bells of Stepney.

How could I know?

Asks the Great Bell of Bow.

George Lansbury, or G.L., as he came to be known, regularly attended Bow Church, one of the oldest houses of worship in east London. Throughout his life he remained committed to easing the lives of those who lived in the underbelly of society, with a government that, in his view, seemed not to care a damn for the poor or disabled. It was a time you would not recognize today.

Children worked long hours in menial and often dangerous jobs with no maximum hour protections and little schooling. England was not yet out of the era of Charles Dickens. Radicalized by his experiences in Australia, Lansbury and his family became confirmed socialists and early believers in the Bolshevik experiment that was developing in Russia. One of his daughters, Violet, was a Socialist/Communist, who eventually went to Russia. Her sister, Daisy, a committed suffragette, helped Sylvia Pankhurst escape from the police by covering her face with a dark veil and surrendering herself to the constables who, unaware of the switch, thought she was Pankhurst. Daisy was Edgar’s favorite sister; she eventually married the writer Raymond Postgate, a socialist, author, and gourmet who founded the Good Food Guide.

A story persists to this day that during this time Edgar carried a cache of Tsarist crown jewels around London sewn into the lining of his jacket with the intention of selling them to provide funds for G.L.’s socialist newspaper, The Daily Herald.

By 1921, G.L. had become a confirmed thorn in the side of the Tories and was elected Labor Mayor of Poplar, a poor district in the East End of London. With Edgar at his side, he led what became known as the Poplar Rates Rebellion. It was intended to divert unfair and onerous tax money due the government and distribute them instead to the poor and needy. Our grandfather and the entire Poplar City Council were sent to jail: 21 men to Brixton Prison, including Edgar, and 6 women to Holloway Prison, including Edgar’s first wife, Minnie. The Lansbury, father, son, and daughter-in-law, were jailed for six weeks, during which time the Poplar councilors stuck to their guns and succeeded in causing reformation in the administration of the Poor Law, and the harsh tradition of the Poor House. The victory was not without losses. Minnie Lansbury died while in prison from pneumonia contracted during her incarceration. Today, her martyrdom is honored with a plaque in Bow, proclaiming her heroic actions on behalf of the young and the poor.

Judging by the letters from Edgar to Moyna while he was still in Brixton prison, their relationship had shifted soon after their meeting at