Mrs Zigzag: The Extraordinary Life of a Secret Agent's Wife (15 page)

Eventually, the properties were split between Young and the Chapmans, with Young taking the London properties and the Chapmans taking the Brighton ones:

We took over the Brighton side of the property business. We lived in Brighton for about two years, the three of us, and our marvellous nurse who moved with us also, who was with us for about nine years, Marjorie Richards. She was a wonderful woman who told me to give up the ‘filthy habit’ of smoking. Our property business went on for some years and it ended up a disaster.

Jacobs had become a director of their company, and got them into a great deal of trouble:

He would sign for work to be done regardless of how it was going to be paid for. He signed thousands and thousands of pounds worth of orders for work to be done in London, Brighton and so on. We were listed as an investment company and when it came to pay the tax it was wrongly listed. Robert Jacobs had signed the forms for the work to be done, and since he was an official of the company, we were responsible for tax on the work which, in some cases was never done. The consequence was we lost a lot to the tax man, and it eventually put us under as far as those investments were concerned. Terence Young was the only one who made any money out of our properties, and he went on to make another of his Bond movies.

This seemed to become a pattern with Young. In the 1960s he would be the only one, according to Betty, to make money out of the film of Eddie’s wartime activities,
Triple Cross
.

Eddie and Betty had gone into the antiques business as well in the late 1950s. ‘I had to find something for Eddie to do,’ Betty says. They opened a shop on the Kings Road in Fulham, Griffin Antiques, the stock of which came from a friend who was also an antiques dealer. Betty took out a loan to pay for the stock. ‘I ran the antique shop for about a year,’ Betty recounts. ‘I quite enjoyed it because I got to know quite a bit about the business, the totters, and all that. Totters are people who pick up stuff. They buy it from the dustbin men, or they go round to auctions and pick up bits and pieces. Sometimes you get some really quite good small antiques from them from which you could earn quite a lot of money.’

Typically of Eddie, he had an affair with the dealer’s girlfriend and moved in with her. To compensate the dealer for his ‘loss’, Eddie handed him the stock of the shop. ‘So, there I was, no husband, no stock, a young child and a bank loan to repay,’ Betty says with a smile. She can laugh about it today, but at the time it was serious.

This episode in Betty’s life was difficult. She had to try to keep normality for the sake of her daughter, and she also had to generate an income since Eddie was in no position to maintain her. In fact, it was Betty who maintained Eddie and, amazingly, sent him money on a regular basis. Although she continued to be hurt by his infidelity and his cavalier treatment of her, she was becoming stronger. She was an extremely attractive woman and had no lack of admirers. She says herself that she has always been a romantic and, throughout her life, has fallen in love on a regular basis. However, she always fell short of the final step of commitment to someone else. This was partly her own sense of morality, partly – in the case of admirers who were married – a desire not to be the cause of another family’s unhappiness, and partly a belief and fear that Eddie simply would not let her. However, looking back, she remarks with a degree of understatement that there were some pleasant interludes.

8

D
OUBLE
C
ROSS
ON
T
RIPLE
C
ROSS

B
etty always had a good head for business, but even she was not prepared for swimming with the sharks of the film industry, one of whom turned out to be one of Eddie’s best friends. At the time that the negotiations for the film rights to Eddie’s story were under way, Eddie and Betty were living separately. He was living in Rome with Mariella Novotny, and Betty was living in London and trying to pull the film deal together.

Betty takes up the story:

Despite continual interference from MI5, there was still hope of turning Eddie’s story into a film. The company that owned the rights to Eddie’s book was called ‘Eddie and Betty Chapman literary properties Ltd.’ Terence Young wanted to make the film of it. A company in France were also involved in the negotiations for the rights for the film. Even Alfred Hitchcock came from America wanting to buy the rights to the film, with Cary Grant to play Eddie. Richard Burton was also mentioned as a possibility. I met Hitchcock in London. For some reason he had to go to the American Embassy to have someone sworn to enable this meeting and such discussions to take place. In the end, he didn’t buy the rights because Eddie had already met a man called Fred Feldkamp who also asked to make the film. Eddie had already done the deal with him, giving him an option to buy the rights for about £250. Feldkamp had the rights for about two years. He was trying to get people interested in putting up the money; he ended up selling the rights to masses of people. After making a killing selling the rights to
Triple Cross
, he formally declared himself bankrupt, I don’t know how, but he did.

One time I had gone to New York to talk to Feldkamp, but the plane landed elsewhere due to bad weather, outside New York. I asked the reception if I could get a lift to Manhattan. I was alone. I heard the man say, ‘Is there anyone here who would like to give a lift to Mrs Chapman to Manhattan?’ A man offered to give me a lift and asked if I was anything to do with Eddie Chapman. I told him that he was my husband. I went with him and his girlfriend, we all went for dinner and that night he told me that his mother had been robbed of her entire savings by Feldkamp by trickery – buying some rights. We ended up at Trader Vic’s, and we got absolutely legless and helped each other up the stairs back at the hotel.

This was about as much pleasure and reward as Betty ever got from the film. At the point where Feldkamp went bankrupt, Terence Young stepped in with a French banker to buy the rights. But the banker was also involved in some skulduggery over the US $6 million borrowed to make the film. He got into trouble with the bank, set fire to the bank vault containing all of the documents and contracts related to the film, and blew his brains out. ‘So,’ Betty says, ‘Terence Young was left with so many people after his blood, he borrowed more money and made the film. No one that had the rights, nor us, ever got any money for it. Terence was the only person who made money. I could never understand that.’ She continues:

Terence and Eddie were very close. I was invited to go to the chateau in France where
Triple Cross
was being filmed, a few hours from Paris. It was right up on a hill. I went with my daughter and Terence Young and on the way there we stopped in Paris and stayed at the George V. The following morning we were waiting to leave and there was this beautiful new Bentley outside with a chauffeur. I raised my eyebrows to Terence and he looked at me and said, ‘Yes, it’s mine, bought by
Triple Cross’
; in other words, they helped themselves to what they wanted from the budget. I was not to know at that point that Eddie and I would never see a penny from the film itself.

Because of continuing concerns over whether the British government might attempt legal action to prevent filming,
Triple Cross
was mainly filmed in France. The place chosen for location shooting, the Chateau Villascreaux, 70km south of Paris, had itself been used by various Nazi intelligence services during the war, and stood in for the Nantes
Stelle
where Eddie had trained for his sabotage operations.

Betty enthusiastically recalls: ‘What was it like being on the set of
Triple Cross
? Fantastic! We were made a great fuss of. Terence Young wanted to use me for a shot in the film as Eddie’s wife but Eddie said absolutely not! Yul Brynner,
¹
who played Baron von Gröning, made a terrible fuss of our daughter.’ Betty’s daughter, coming from a famous family herself, was not about to be star-struck by Brynner, although she remembers him as a ‘nice man’. What struck her in particular was that he watered his houseplants with bottled Evian mineral water, which she thought was ‘rather odd’. Betty continues: ‘We also liked Christopher Plummer’s wife. She was a real sweetie. At some point whilst the film was being made Eddie received a call from the German ambassador of the time, telling him that it was his father that flew him into England.’ Other members of the cast included Romy Schneider as the Countess,
²
Trevor Howard as the British Intelligence officer, and Claudine Auger as Paulette.
³
Betty remarks: ‘Christopher Plummer was miscast as Eddie. He didn’t even walk like Eddie. Eddie was very light on his feet and walked almost like a cat.’

Whilst the film was being made, Betty recalls that Eddie was sent to Greece:

To keep him out of the way because there had already been so many stoppages. They didn’t really want Eddie involved any more. He went with his friend Richard Johnson. They stopped at Rome on the way, stopping at a bathhouse en route that was run by nuns. A nun asked Eddie what he did and he said he was a writer. She said that she was also writing a book, about Our Father. Eddie said, ‘Oh, what did your father do? Did he do something very special!?’

In his autobiography, Christopher Plummer said that Eddie was to have been a technical advisor on the film but the French authorities would not allow him in the country because he was still wanted over the alleged plot to kidnap the Sultan of Morocco during the
Flamingo
affair. Nevertheless, the film premiered in Paris and elsewhere, and Betty was there to see it:

The premieres of
Triple Cross
started across the globe. I went to two, one in Paris with another fellow, along the Champs Elysees. The press went crazy at ‘Madame Chapman!’ when we arrived! Afterwards we had a party at a restaurant opposite. I took my daughter to Rome to another premiere, where Eddie was already, we went with a friend of ours who spoke Italian so he could translate. There we met Romy Schneider, who played one of the leads. When I went to the Rome premiere, there was Eddie sitting in the front row with Mariella and her husband. I couldn’t get a seat because Eddie had put a stop on everything. In the end, I managed to get a seat on the front row next to him. Cameras all along the front row were frantically snapping. What a lovely picture for the family album: mistress, husband, mistress’s husband, wife and daughter.

The London premiere of the film took place in the prosperous north London enclave of Golders Green at the very cinema – according to the film’s publicity people – that the hero of the film had robbed thirty years before. ‘Utter nonsense,’ spits Betty. The studio publicity machine went into further overdrive: ‘It is so fantastic, exciting and gripping it was feared if the story weren’t handled properly, movie audiences would consider it just another far-out espionage tale…’.

Terence Young, arriving at the premiere, stated: ‘It will make a hell of an exciting film.’

Actually, it didn’t. For all the fulsome praise heaped on the film by the studio, the reviews were just the opposite: ‘thoroughly dull and implausible’ (
New Statesman
); ‘unsatisfactory yarn’ (
Sunday Mirror
); ‘a rather shoddy, anachronistic, badly directed attempt to re-create one of the most thrilling of all war adventures’ (
Observer
); ‘double-crossed by the script’ (
Sunday Express
).

Eddie had had enough of the whole business: ‘I’m in the antiques business now and it can’t hurt me,’ is supposed to be his only recorded comment about the quality of the film. In private, he had only one word: ‘crap’. ‘The only thing hurting me is the fact that those stars have been paid so much money for making my story while I’ve received nothing,’ he continued.

This wasn’t strictly true. When it became obvious to Betty that there was going to be no return to her and Eddie from the film itself, she began a vigorous legal campaign to get the film stopped:

I engaged a lawyer in France and I suppose they also knew I wouldn’t know much about the publishing of the film, so they just kept taking money and I kept going backwards and forwards. We had a few hearings and nothing came out of it until I ran out of money. My only recourse was then to go to the various places who were distributing it. We were always in the land of promises: it will be very successful and you can retire. Meantime, what they didn’t know was that I had a roving husband who had taken off with someone, and he had a contract for personal appearances in America, for which he was being paid thirty to forty thousand pounds for doing masses of appearances on these different shows in America, like
Neil St John, Johnny Carson
and all sorts of shows. Eddie didn’t
want
the film stopped. As long as he was getting money it didn’t really bother him. He was the one that had run off and he was angry with me for trying to stop the film. He also had it splashed across the front page of the papers that I had stolen money from him. In the end, all my efforts really to try to stop the film were in vain. All I really ever got out of that was notoriety and aggravation. Everybody thought, ‘My gosh, they must be rolling in it.’ Later, the film was appearing all the time on television (and still is), but without money you can’t stop these things. Lawyers are like sharks: when there is no more blood to be got there are no more words to be spoken.