In Tasmania (35 page)

‘She was Chinese,' Doone Kennedy said.

Kennedy's father-in-law had owned the Anchor tin mine at Lottah in Tasmania's north-east where there were many Chinese workers from Guandong, among them Alfred Ernest Chintock, one of whose 13 children was Charlotte or ‘Lottie' Chintock. ‘My father-in-law told me it was common knowledge, Merle being Lottie's daughter.'

It suggests an encounter as devastating as her meeting at sea with Errol Flynn. A day later Merle and Wolders left Hobart. Not long after her return to Malibu she collapsed with a myocardial infarction. The following November Tasmania's famous daughter was dead.

 

Merle did give one interview while in Tasmania, to Edyth Langham, a radio journalist. The recording is lost, but one Easter Sunday, I visited Edyth at her property outside Hobart airport where she bred horses and red setters.

I obeyed instructions to go slowly up a drive and halted at a low building with a notice: ‘Please leave your pets in the car until advised.' This was the kennels. Edyth lived in an identical building on the right. She opened the door, a petite, sparky lady in her sixties. Groomed blonde hair, turquoise track suit, red lipstick. An Irish setter at her side.

We went into her drawing room, decorated with porcelain setters and casts of racehorses. A string quartet was playing and there was a bunch of lilies beneath a painting of Edyth as an intense young lady in a lilac evening gown.

I complimented her on her dog's looks and she revealed the secret. ‘Mutton-bird oil is wonderful for setters' coats. Give it in their food and it comes through in their coat and they just gleam.'

She settled on a chaise longue, stroking her dog.

‘Tell me about your interview with Merle Oberon,' I said.

 

She had requested the interview for the reason that Merle's story was well known to her. Edyth's aunt and uncle, Con and Zel Bidencope, used to go for holidays at St Helen's and they remembered Merle as a child running in and out of their hotel and making sandcastles.

This was the story as she learned it from them: Lottie Chintock was the daughter of a Chinese tin-miner from the myrtle forests near Weldborough. As a young woman she took the bus from Weldborough to St Helen's where John Willis Thompson, who ran the bus service, also owned a hotel. Thompson gave Lottie work as a chambermaid.

‘She was very beautiful and quite gracious. My uncle and aunt treated her like a treasured friend. Con used to go into the hotel and they'd say to him, ‘Lottie's in the kitchen, go in and talk to her.' She was more than a retainer. She had a long affair with Thompson while his wife just stayed in a room upstairs, a recluse.'

Round about 1910, Lottie became pregnant by Thompson. She travelled to Hobart to have the baby. Merle was born at 62 Montpelier Retreat in a room that became Pipkin's, the barber shop. Edyth knew a woman who swore that her grandmother, Philadelphia Flyn, had delivered her at 3 a.m. using forceps. She weighed ten pounds.

‘Lottie takes the baby back. So the baby grows up in the hotel. People are aware of her in the St Helen's area. Especially a couple called O'Brien, from India, who played with her on the beach.

‘St Helen's is very different now,' Edyth said. ‘Then it was quite social. Everyone went for their holidays. It was an especial favourite with the Indian Army. According to the story – and I'm sure this is right – Thompson had this cousin O'Brien and he and his wife didn't have any children and so they adopted Merle and took her back to India. They adopted children in those days in the way you pick up dogs these days. I believe she was six.'

The next time Merle returned to Tasmania, 61 years later, Edyth was waiting.

 

To begin with, there were to be no interviews, but Edyth telephoned Wrest Point, was put through to Merle's suite and was told, yes, Merle would like to speak to her – ‘although I might have been warned to keep off Tasmania'. An interview was arranged for 4 p.m., but when Edyth arrived ‘there was suddenly a big flurry and the interview was off. No way was there going to be an interview.'

Edyth left the hotel to pick up her daughter from Collegiate, where she received an urgent message: ‘Merle had gone to the Town Hall and where was I?'

Merle was waiting in the Lady Mayoress's room.

‘She looked absolutely perfect. A beautiful blue dress, powder blue frock and coat. Her young husband was there, he was divine. I remember he discussed their age difference. He said there was no difference. ‘I feel she's my age. She's so child-like.' And she
was
child-like. She wasn't cunning or manipulative. I don't like Chinese dolls, but, yes, she was very doll-like.'

‘What about her skin?'

‘I was close. She had a magnolia complexion. It wasn't pitted. The significant thing for me was the wide cheekbones. She didn't have Indian features.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘Listen, I've judged Miss Tasmania pageants, Woman of the Year, dog shows all over Australia. And I breed horses. Breeding is something that stands out for me: it's all to do with heredity, particularly with dogs. It's the bone structure that interests me. I look at someone to see what's behind them. It's so interesting in dogs, it comes out generations later. It's like people who have convict heritage and want to hide it. Or Aboriginal blood.' And she mentioned a descendant of Kemp's, still alive, who, she told me, was always believed to have ‘black blood'.

‘It's in the mmmoouth,' she said, blowing up her lips. ‘He has the lubra look.'

No, she could tell that Merle Oberon was definitely Chinese.

 

Gloria, the large and cheerful woman who ran the History Room (the little museum) in St Helen's, had no doubt: Merle Oberon's father was John Willis Thompson, the taciturn former coach driver who had owned the Telegraph Hotel.

She showed me his photograph – a short Alf Garnett figure with a walrus moustache, round spectacles and a thick neck. ‘He was known as Gimlet or Grandfather or JWT.'

‘How do you know he was Merle's father?'

‘Just feelings I have.'

Friends of Gimlet Thompson described a chubby, weather-beaten face, a deadpan humour and a quick mind that liked to live up to a reputation for ‘closeness' and for never letting ‘his right hand know what his left was about'. He was regarded in St Helen's as eccentric, wandering around with his eyes half-closed, seldom removing his hat, and hardly saying a word. On the few occasions that he did open his mouth, he spoke with excruciating slowness. He was a teetotaller, who would reply, if offered a drink, ‘No, thanks. But I'll have a cigar.' This is almost his only recorded utterance, although there was one song in particular that he liked to sing, ‘The Holy City'. I found a postcard that he wrote in February 1909 to a friend called Flossie. ‘About those two boys, you want to whack hard and often. Don't ever let them be top dog or you will repent it. You need never be afraid of being too harsh so always go one more than what you think is a fair thing.' It was around this time that Gimlet Thompson employed Lottie Chintock as a chambermaid.

Lottie laid out starched cloths in the dining room, polished the silver till it gleamed, and carried out trays of home-made lemonade, a marble in the top of each bottle. Among the guests whose sheets she changed were Lord and Lady Rowallen, Sir Ernest and Lady Clark, Sir Hugh and Lady Binney. She may have also scrubbed the floor of the silent movie theatre that Thompson had created in a hall attached to the hotel.

Dudley Edward Madden worked as a porter and was one of several who noticed that Thompson and Lottie were very close. When Lottie became pregnant, it was ‘common knowledge' who was the father.

I spoke to Thompson's great-granddaughter. She had been brought up on the story, like mutton-bird oil. How Merle was Thompson's daughter by Lottie, who had risen to become his housekeeper and who nursed Thompson when he became ill after his wife's death. ‘My father worked as a porter at the hotel, and in his later years he would tell me that when JWT became older – he owned the picture theatre in the hall, but then it moved up the street – this particular night he wasn't very well, he had a cold, and the family tried to stop him going out. “I'm going, Will, because that's my daughter in the film.”'

Thompson died in May 1934.
The Private Life of Henry VIII
had come out in England in 1933. It is possible – just – that his last sight of his daughter was of her execution.

 

At the hotel in St Helen's where her mother was said to have worked the name Merle Oberon drew a blank with the new manager, Jobi Watts.

‘Merlot?' He had not heard the story. He led me into a bar where five men were drinking. Bearded, tattooed, doleful, these were the heirs to Lord Rowallan and Con Bidencope.

‘Jumpy – he'd know,' one of them said. ‘But you'll have to pay him. How much do you want to know?'

Jumpy was summoned by telephone from a counter splashed with beer. Meanwhile, Jobi took me up to the chambermaid's quarters above the kitchen.

In the 1980s Jobi had worked in the hotel as an apprentice and used to climb to the attic for a smoke.

‘I reckon the rooms are haunted,' he said, creaking ahead of me up narrow hardwood stairs that were worn in the centre. He led the way into a small bedroom with green skirting and mustard yellow panels carved from Tasmanian blackwood. The slanting window was painted over, admitting a treacly light. There was not much space for anything in here but a bed.

I lingered a moment, battling to picture Lottie in bed, the creak on the staircase, the door-handle turning. Was Merle Oberon really conceived here?

In the bar Jumpy, hair slicked back, pointed nose, a 76-year-old ex-sailor, told me what I already knew.

I bought him a beer.

Aged 13, he, too, had been a porter in the hotel. ‘I quite believe Merle was Tasmanian born.'

‘Give him another and he shagged her round the bushes,' cackled a beard with a tattoo.

 

Late one night, while most Tasmanians slept, the ABC put out a documentary that dared to challenge Merle Oberon's status as a Tasmanian, and also showed the first photograph of Lottie I had seen, a snapshot taken in 1920 when she was 34. I had the impression of a long face beneath a dark hat, an elbow resting on a fence and a hand cupping her left ear, smiling. Standing beside her was a son, Ronnie, aged nine.

I recognised several of the people interviewed: Edyth Langham, Cassandra Pybus, Doone Kennedy. The director had spoken also to Lottie's great-nephew (who said that Lottie saw every film with Merle in it, sighing ‘I wish Merle was with us'); to Lottie's doctor, who remembered Merle returning to Weldborough after Lottie's death in 1951; and to an archivist in the Hobart births and records office who could not trace a single reference to Lottie having given birth to a daughter.

According to the film, in another variant of the story Lottie was forced to leave her baby girl in Hobart, where an Indian silk merchant who lived in Argyle Street opposite the fire station adopted her. She went to the Old Model school until she was seven, then to India. Other versions had her fostered out to the O'Brien family in Moonah, to a group of travelling players also called O'Brien and to a policeman in New Town called Thomson. The film showed a clip of Merle Oberon in a black and white movie, saying: ‘One can never be sure of anything with a past like mine.'

The documentary ended in Toronto, tracking down Harry Selby. He was the son of Merle's mother Constance, who after Arthur Thompson died on the Somme had married Selby's father. Constance told Selby when he was twelve that Merle was her sister. Selby had now located Merle's birth certificate in Mumbai. This was a revelation. Giving her date of birth as February 18, 1911, it showed that Estelle Merle Thompson was the daughter of Arther [sic] Thompson and Constance Thompson, of Khetwadi. In other words, Merle was not his aunt but his half-sister. And there was nothing Tasmanian about her after all.

The unearthing of Merle's birth certificate did not deter the audience at a screening of the ABC documentary in Hobart's State Cinema.

‘It didn't worry me a tiny bit,' Edyth Langham told me. ‘I've known lots of Indian students – boys who come out here with the papers of their dead brother. They don't think twice about forging.'

Bill Penfold was another who had grave doubts about the Indian birth certificate. ‘You can knock one up in five minutes.'

‘But why hasn't anyone knocked one up in Tasmania?' I asked.

‘We're truthful people,' he said.

Edyth Langham was determined to have the last word. After the credits had rolled, she stood and faced the audience. ‘I said, “Could we have a show of hands to say whether or not we believe Merle Oberon is Tasmanian?”'

‘And the result?' I asked.

‘An overwhelming show of support for Merle being Tasmanian.'

 

On the wall of an empty pub above the Weldborough myrtle forest, I was pointed out an old photograph of a broad-faced Oriental woman in a mannish pinstripe. The publican dipped his head at a corrugated iron barn across the road. I stared obligingly at the four boarded windows, the bolted door. In that shed, he claimed, Charlotte Chintock conceived her famous daughter. ‘Merle was definitely born here.'

The pub followed a Tasmanian tradition of wrestling to be three things at once: the Irish pub, the Worst pub, and the Weldborough Hotel. I wondered if clients might have been put off by the menu outside, advertising cooked Tasmanian devils, kangaroo tits, witchetty grubs, possum pie and maggot mornay. In boom-time, I had read, ‘the lights were never dimmed and there were three shifts to every bed'.

I drove up three dead ends looking for Weldborough's cemetery. Then I saw a wisp of smoke coming from the roof of a wooden house. A small woman with no teeth pointed the way, speaking in an American accent. Bev Warren once owned a fish and chip shop in the English town of Amesbury. Yes, she knew Lottie's son, Ronnie. He used to help out in the Weldborough Hotel. Uniquely, Ronnie would never talk about Merle Oberon. ‘He'd say, “Nothing to do with me.”' As I was shortly to discover, he was probably quite right.