Fearless in Love and Life

One Leg Over
by Robin Dalton
Text, 2017, 197 pages, $33
____________________

Robin Dalton, literary agent and film producer, is best known for her first memoir, Aunts Up the Cross, which begins, “My great Aunt Juliet was knocked over and killed by a bus when she was eighty-five.” That slim book, originally published under Dalton’s maiden name Robin Eakin, has always been a favourite with Australian readers.

Now aged ninety-six, Dalton has produced a snappily titled sequel, One Leg Over. The back cover blurb quotes from page 11:

During the five months’ duration (weekends only) of my marriage I did not even learn what an orgasm was. Neither did I learn this from the American servicemen with whom I exultingly tripped though the first years of our Pacific War. It took the British Navy, or second wave of wartime visiting servicemen, to teach me this.

Despite this burst of frankness, Dalton archly claims in the afterword that the title refers to the struggle to heave an ageing body out of the bath, one leg at a time.

Born in Sydney in 1920, Dalton was the daughter of a Kings Cross doctor and his spirited wife. Endowed with a remarkable body, high intelligence, wit and courage, she has had an amazing life. The great scandal of her young life, conveniently forgotten in Aunts Up the Cross, was a much publicised divorce when she was only twenty years old. At nineteen she had done the conventional thing and married an apparently successful man, a barrister in his thirties. She walked down the aisle in a pink tulle dress, perhaps best forgotten. In One Leg Over her memory has returned, helped by perusal of the 1940s newspaper files in the Mitchell Library. “Socialite Divorce”, the papers gloated, quoting at length from diary entries by the young bride. In her husband’s absence, Robin had seen no need to stop flirting with admirers or dancing at nightclubs like Prince’s. John Spencer hired a detective to follow his wife and accused her of adultery with three men. The story made the front pages and was widely syndicated.

The mortification and cruelty would have cowed a lesser woman, but Robin Dalton is resilient. She taught herself to type, found a job with the American army, and continued her round of partying with young servicemen. She writes that the sexual encounters linger in the memory far less than the romantic preliminaries, dancing to “You and the Night and the Music” and similar tunes.

A large number of the young dancing partners proposed marriage, and by 1946 Dalton had an official Scottish fiancé, a secret English lover, and an air ticket out of Australia. “For the undamaged survivors the 1940s were a magical period,” she reflects.

The fiancé received short shrift. Although he and his family were delightful, Dalton found Glasgow grey and forbidding. She broke off the engagement, returning to London and her English lover, David Mountbatten, Marquis of Milford Haven. She was vaulted instantly into privileged circles: “With David I got to know quite a few kings, ex-kings, and almost-kings.” That insouciance helped her win and keep many friends, in creative circles as much as in royal ones. She was not yet earning her living, but her father obligingly offered to send her a regular allowance. This was supplemented by extra cash from her mother and aunts if they happened to have a win at the races. These funds from home were apparently sufficient to keep Dalton in designer clothes and black-market food. It was, of course, an era when men picked up the bill in restaurants and hotels. Dalton’s first forays into journalism, columns of art and society news, signalled that her talent went well beyond the ditzy diarist of the Spencer divorce. She became a casual contributor to papers in London and Sydney and later helped to publicise films.

To an extent, One Leg Over is a shorter, revised version of Dalton’s earlier work An Incidental Memoir. Topped and tailed with new material, it retains most of the gems from the previous book, but some of the omissions are regrettable. In the new memoir she hazards that Milford Haven’s love waned because he needed to marry someone with money. In the previous book she mentioned his mother’s increasing frostiness and the extra public scrutiny he faced when he acted as best man at the wedding of his cousin, the Duke of Edinburgh. As a divorcee, Dalton was excluded from the Royal Enclosure at Ascot. More seriously, no one related to the Royal Family could marry a divorcee without permission from the King. Luckily, Dalton’s ardour was also cooling, thanks in part to a “divinely attractive Swede”, Lars Schmidt.

The skittish tone of the memoir changes entirely when Dalton meets the love of her life, her husband Emmet Dalton, a handsome young Irish doctor. The pair were mutually smitten at first sight, determined to marry despite his rare heart condition—a sub-aortic stenosis. If her future husband’s short life expectancy were not trouble enough, the divorce from John Spencer became a real stumbling block. Emmet Dalton, staunchly Catholic, was torn between his love for Robin and his loyalty to his church. An annulment was out of the question: it would take years and he could not hope for a long life. The wedding day was not a happy one for the groom’s parents: “My husband left his home and his weeping Catholic mother and unspeaking Catholic father at 9 a.m. one morning, to meet his divorced Presbyterian future wife at Caxton Hall.”

On her honeymoon in Cornwall, Robin Dalton was asked by one of her almost-king friends, Prince Chula of Thailand, whether she would like to be a spy for his government. The job was based in London and, although the details remain vague, it seems to have involved gathering intelligence on communist influence in the British press. Dalton mentions attending a course in Thai at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies and making several trips to Thailand. Her boss, a general, was a charming man who entertained sumptuously, giving lavish Thai presents to all overseas dignitaries. Years later Dalton was confronted by a contrary view of this general, seen by some as a king-pin in the opium trade.

Dalton had a few deliriously happy years with Emmet. Unfortunately he became seriously ill during her first pregnancy. He recovered; a second child was born, but a sudden collapse and unsuccessful heart surgery led to his death at only thirty-three.

Widowed, grief-stricken, and responsible for two small children, Robin Dalton needed all her resilience. Her friends proved loyal and generous, two of them undertaking to pay for the children’s education.

With this personal tragedy at its heart, One Leg Over is not a jolly romp like Aunts Up the Cross. Dalton’s enterprising spirit led her to a new profession, becoming a sought-after literary agent with a stellar list of clients such as John Osborne, Edna O’Brien, Iris Murdoch and Arnold Wesker. She was endlessly versatile, becoming a film producer with credits including Country Life, Madame Sousatzka and Oscar and Lucinda. Later, she developed a talent for “filler” interviews on late-night television.

In One Leg Over the brilliant career comes second to the love life, travel and friendships. After living with the film writer William Fairchild for nearly thirty years, Dalton married for a third time in 1992. The pair enjoyed “thirty-seven years of true companionship, laughter, shared interests, and the luxury of a shoulder to lean on”. Widowed once more, Robin Dalton continues to live in London and to negotiate bathtubs with great care.

She writes that love has been the keynote of her life. I won’t argue with that, but to me her defining characteristic is fearlessness.