Madeleine (14 page)

She noted cultural differences between American and Australian men. American men ‘didn't hate women' in the way she sensed many men did back home. Years later, Madeleine recalled that the men at Stanford opened doors, treated her with respect and ‘liked women, quite frankly and quite unselfconsciously'. It was taken for granted, she said, that ‘men and women were made to have pleasure in each other's company'. It was ‘quite an extraordinary thing to experience for the first time'.
³⁵
One day in the refectory, she saw a golden Californian boy buy a glass of milk, pour it into a saucer and gently feed it to his little kitten. No Australian man would be seen doing such a thing, she thought, for fear of being torn to shreds as a sissy.

Madeleine fell hard for a colleague at the bookshop. ‘There was something about him that was kind of foreign', and she was drawn to this man who looked so different from her own husband. Madeleine's interest was reciprocated. ‘You could practically hear the violins,' she recalled. ‘It was just amazing. It was one of the great
coups de foudre
of my life and I couldn't do a damn thing about it.' When she told the man she was married, the affair ended before it had begun.
³⁶

Around her the social rules were in flux. The increasing availability of the pill made it a time of experimentation with sex and lifestyles. Yet Madeleine was more cautious than many of her generation. In later life, she said that in sixties California she had been ‘far too young to take advantage of it, far too crazy to use this experience to grow up and get away from the mess I had got myself into'.
³⁷
The mess she referred to was her marriage to Chris. But if that was her state of mind at the time, she gave little away.

The Tillams entertained visitors from Australia. Tina Date dropped in for five days, fresh from her success with a hit album,
A Single Girl
. Playing guitar Joan Baez–style, she was now one of Australia's leading exponents of folk music. Madeleine welcomed Tina, but she was privately disparaging of her in a letter to Antony, thanking him for the ‘hysterical cutting' he had sent about Tina. Antony kept Madeleine up to date with developments back home: he sent a new Australian dollar shortly after the switch to decimal currency on 14 February 1966. It was ‘greatly interesting to see, though I don't think I like it; in some ways it's good. But marvellous to have; thank you again so very much,' she wrote back.
³⁸

Her restlessness was obvious to her Stanford friends. Tom Bell thought she ‘looked like a person who couldn't wait to move on, as if she was parked in Palo Alto on the way to someplace else'.
³⁹
Madeleine told him that given the education system in Australia considered London to be the ‘centre of the cultural universe, the least [the government] could do would be to give us an airline ticket there'.
⁴⁰

Madeleine maintained her composure in letters to Joan. She wrote of her latest purchases—an expensive navy blue and ‘frightfully French' overcoat and a ‘marvy new pr. of sunglasses—big circular white frames'. She had spring-cleaned the apartment, washed curtains, sewn on buttons, mothproofed clothes, and made a ‘divine' cheesecake for Chris's birthday. Colette had sent her a ‘gorgeous Jaeger jumper—pale blue, quite plain' from London.
⁴¹

She was now spending more time alone. Chris went on the road making a documentary film of the famous 300-mile protest march of striking farm workers from Delano to Sacramento. His world was opening up, and Madeleine resented her role as ‘the main breadwinner. It was just horrific, it was all work, work, work.'
⁴²
At the end of April, Chris spent almost a week at a television conference at Monterey Bay. Among the participants was Marshall McLuhan.
⁴³
When he returned home, Madeleine found her husband tired and ‘undervitamised looking' after days of staying up till 2 a.m.
⁴⁴
Chris was planning to spend three months in Europe to make a documentary on the Stanford courses offered there, but Madeleine was not happy about it, even admitting this in a letter to Joan, saying ‘how vile' it would be without her husband around.
⁴⁵

In the end, the project did not go ahead, but Madeleine was sounding tired—and almost sad—in letters to Joan:

Very sunny, the sprinkler playing outside & Brahms on the gramophone, leaf shadows flickering on the page as I write—a pretty scene. I wish life had this quality more often. But there is so much rushing about, one barely has time to enjoy these simple pleasures of mood & moment.
⁴⁶

The Tillams exchanged gifts for their wedding anniversary on 4 June—an amber cigarette holder for her and a book on the Aztecs for him—but they were tiring of their relatively suburban existence.
⁴⁷
‘We are both mad to get out of the Stanford area and move to the city,' Chris told his mother. They had friends in San Francisco, where rents were cheaper and there was more to do. ‘Palo Alto doesn't exactly swing at the best of times, and in summer it's…incredibly motionless. And the last three days there's been a heatwave, 95 all day.'
⁴⁸
It's likely they were hoping the move would alter the state of their marriage, but they had to wait. Chris got a job in Henry Breitrose's department for the summer and so they stayed on in their apartment at Menlo Park.

Madeleine's letters to Joan were shorter now, often mere thank-you notes for gifts received. The news they contained was trivial. She had seen a wonderful set of steak knives—French, stainless-steel blades with ivory handles hafted on with tiny brass rivets. Madeleine loved beautiful objects and she was determined to twist Chris's arm to buy them. They were not, after all, ‘terribly expensive'. She was weary but she maintained her pose with Joan in that same letter: ‘Have just had a shattering bulletin from Chris—“We're out of tea!”—which I cannot live without. Will have to get some tomorrow, or dreadful derangement will set in!'
⁴⁹

Madeleine was bored. ‘Nothing much happening,' she wrote to Joan. ‘Went to an open-air concert, L'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande doing Honegger, Debussy & Pétrouchka—lovely setting in the Frost Amphitheatre at Stanford, beautiful summer's evening…but orchestra somewhat disappointing. Their American debut. Ansermet very, very old—a figure of the past.'
⁵⁰

In the fall of 1966 the Tillams finally packed up and moved to San Francisco. Strong winds whipped the leaves as high as their rented second-floor apartment in California Street, next door to the fire station. From Sydney, the ever-thoughtful Joan sent dozens of yellow roses and white carnations to welcome them to their new home with its white walls and woodwork, billowing light curtains, honey-coloured timber floors and woven mats. Madeleine and Chris bought white chairs and art nouveau lamps from a charity shop and daisies from the Union Square flower stores.

They were not far from Jill Roehrig's flat, which she shared with her friend Kathy Kettler, who had grown up on the fringes of the Hollywood movie set in Los Angeles. Madeleine and Kathy got along well. The young Australian was funny and sharp and Kathy found her a pleasure to be around.

Once again, Madeleine found some casual work in a bookshop and began keeping house. And she painted an image of domestic harmony in her letters. ‘I must attend to the
poule au pot
.
Au revoir
and write soon,' she signed off to Joan in September. It could almost have been a line from a novel.

San Francisco was pleasant, and Madeleine had family around. Ted's sister Florence and her husband Frank Heller and their three children had arrived for Frank's teaching appointment at Berkeley and were living across the bay. Madeleine was delighted, although she told Joan: ‘I felt I ought to apologise to Chris for not being able to escape my voluminous family—fancy a branch of it turning up on our doorstep like this!'
⁵¹

They had yearned for the move to San Francisco, but almost as soon as they arrived, the Tillams were hatching plans to leave. Chris could not find a permanent film job in the city and Madeleine applied for unemployment benefits. Out of the blue came a phone call from George Stoney, who had taught Chris at Stanford. He had recommended Chris for a film-making job with Dr Edward A. Mason of the Laboratory of Community Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School. Mason, a psychiatrist, had pioneered the use of film to teach students more effectively, and Harvard had funded him to expand his work. Chris and Madeleine were excited by the thought of ‘working for Harvard and having $7,200 a year'.
⁵²

They waited to see whether anything would come of it, where Chris's work would take them. It was an unsettling time and old tensions resurfaced. Indeed the relationship was worse than ever. Jill Roehrig had seen huge arguments between the couple when they all lived in Sydney. But now she thought Madeleine was ‘disturbed'. Chris was ‘just trying to stop her jumping off the ledge', she recalled.
⁵³
Jill thought things were so bad between them that Chris was trying to leave her.
⁵⁴

Early in October, on a fleeting visit to America, Ted St John called in to see his daughter. He had decided to stand for federal parliament at the November election and he was about to enter a grueling preselection contest. He had only a day in San Francisco and spent the afternoon at the apartment in California Street. Madeleine organised a small party for his recent fiftieth birthday and the Hellers came over. It went well, yet, as always, Madeleine judged her father harshly. She wrote to Annabel Minchin that ‘T talked about himself most of the time, but don't breathe a word,
ma cousine
'
.
⁵⁵

Madeleine was at pains to hide the problems in her marriage. She and Chris were ‘as happy as 2 birds in a tree', she told Annabel. She had stopped work and her cake making ‘& general kitchen repertoire' had improved enormously.
⁵⁶
The Hellers saw it differently. Madeleine nagged Chris endlessly and he seemed no match temperamentally for his intense wife. Frank, a social scientist, was blunt. ‘I don't think that will work,' he told Florence.
⁵⁷
Perhaps Madeleine knew it too. Despite the fictional domestic idyll she presented in her letters, she knew she was in trouble. ‘I was out of my mind,' she recalled years later. ‘I was totally screwed up.'
⁵⁸

She was anxious about the idea of moving to Boston. She had found Jill and Kathy to be good friends. Kathy had lived with a suicidal mother and she had quickly become a strong support for Madeleine. For the first time, Madeleine felt that she was among people who understood her pain. Now she was about to lose that support. But the Harvard job made sense for Chris, who needed to show practical skills in film-making as part of his Stanford degree. When the job offer came through, Madeleine claimed she was delighted. She wrote to Annabel Minchin:

I greatly look forward to living in Boston…one of the oldest American cities, full of Pilgrim Fathers & the wonderful Georgian architecture, a 1st class symphony orchestra, Harvard University (Chris will be on the staff), a fabulous museum, marvellous New England countryside nearby & New York 4 hours away!
⁵⁹

On the surface, she was embracing the move to the east coast, but she was in a highly emotional state.

By mid-October it was settled. Chris would take the Greyhound bus across the US to Boston on 19 October, and Madeleine would follow. But the impending move crystallised Madeleine's anxieties. When Chris left, she moved in with Jill and Kathy. Years later, Madeleine said, ‘After I had been away from my husband for a week I realised that I should stay there.' She flirted with independence, but she could not make the break.

Around mid-November, Madeleine left San Francisco to join her husband in Boston. It was, she said later, ‘a really bad move'.
⁶⁰

CHAPTER TEN
Letters Home

Madeleine's reunion with Chris after their month apart went badly from the start. Whether through anger or fear or depression, she could scarcely speak to her husband. She was hunched over and frozen, her silence an accusation. Later, she recalled arriving in Boston and thinking: ‘What the fuck am I doing here?'
¹

Soon, Chris discovered that Madeleine thought he had been having an affair. She pointed the finger at twenty-three-year-old Allegra May, who had been employed, like Chris, as a filmmaker to work with Edward Mason at his Fenwood Road unit in Cambridge.

Allegra was the daughter of the famed psychologist Rollo May and had grown up in a privileged, intellectual family in New York. By the time she arrived at Harvard she had trained as a filmmaker and spent time working in Montreal. She invited Chris to stay in her share-house while he waited for Madeleine to arrive from San Francisco. Working together, Chris and Allegra bonded quickly. Allegra loved talking philosophy and literature with her new Australian buddy. Chris thought she was a little ‘mixed up', but he admired her views on film.
²

They had become close when they went with Edward Mason on a two-day business trip to New York. Then, one weekend, Allegra invited Chris to Manhattan to stay at her parents' house on the Upper West Side. Chris wrote to Madeleine in San Francisco to let her know his plans. When he and Allegra arrived at the May apartment, he was surprised to discover her parents were out of town. He felt he was on ‘thin ice', but he slept alone, in the high, book-lined study.
³

Madeleine's wordless accusation when she arrived in Cambridge distressed Chris. He tried to calm her fears, denying an affair and explaining the circumstances. Madeleine was unconvinced, but she held herself together well enough to spend the Thanksgiving weekend with Chris and Allegra at the New York apartment. In early December, she seemed to accept that there had been no affair and Chris reported to Joan that ‘Madeleine and I have found [Allegra to be] a good friend'.
⁴
They had also become friends with Allegra's sister Caroline and her husband Frank Mazer.