A Rose for Mrs. Miniver: The Life of Greer Garson

First Chapter

"Tea with Greer Garson," a visiting journalist once remarked, "is one joyous afternoon with an elusive sprite who deflects hard questions with peals of laughter. But, push her beyond the punch line, try to get her to say something deeper ... and she pulls rank on you. The imperious Garson is suddenly in charge." Among the inquiries most frequently asked by interviewers, and seldom answered by Greer, were questions about her birth. Typically, she attempted a diversion with an offer of a second cup of tea or a Scotch scone from her silver tea service. She might mention her astrological sign. "I was born under the sign of Libra," she would remark. "Libra is supposed to mean balance. But it is an uncomfortably high-tension balance and the slightest thing sets it swinging. I am very impatient by nature, quick-tempered, and high strung with a tendency to want things done at once, or not at all." An exasperated writer, after some diligent research, might come up with the birthdate of September 29, 1908, from a contact at MGM. Greer would recall that the birth occurred, "rather horridly, and three days ahead of time, which may account for my unpunctuality through life," in a nursing home in Belfast, Ireland. She was born a redhead, which surprised her mother, nineteen-year-old Nancy Sophia Garson, but Greer would later say with a smile, "Mother seems to have outgrown her initial displeasure at the sight of her first child."

    On April 9, 1996, the Belfast Telegraph reported, "Legendary film star Greer Garson went to her grave in Dallas today--believing the great myth about her origins was still intact." Although newspaper obituaries around the world published her birthdate as 1908, as journalists and film historians had done for years, the discovery of her birth certificate in London only a few months before had lifted the veil on the shadowed origins of one of Hollywood's most secretive stars.

    It was on September 29 that a baby girl was born to George and Nancy Garson. But the newly christened Eileen Evelyn Greer Garson was not born in Ireland, nor was the year 1908. It was in the Garsons' modest London home, in 1904, where she was laid upon a ceremonial pink satin pillow that had been in the Garson family for generations. When he notified G.E. Morgan, registrar of the subdistrict of North East Ham in the county of Essex, of his daughter's birth, thirty-nine-year-old George Garson listed his profession as commercial clerk in a London importing business.

    His ancestors were adventurous Scandinavian seafarers who, beginning in the eighth century, had sought out more temperate conditions than their homeland. They crossed the 170 miles from Norway to the isles of Shetland, Caithness, and Orkney oft the coast of Scotland. Among these colonists were the Garsons, members of the Clan Gunn, who settled in Orkney. After several generations, some of the Orcadians filtered down into the southern, coastal section of Scotland and then to England, becoming respectable Scotch Presbyterian members of their communities. Such was the intention of George's father, Peter Garson, a very fine and popular cabinetmaker who married Jane Firth in Kirkwall, the capital of Orkney, and shortly thereafter moved to London. George was the third child of a family that would swell to nine, born on June 15, 1865, with an older sister, Alexina Logie, and brother, James. An industrious young man, George quickly became independent, managing lucrative government commissions and running branch offices as far distant as Shanghai. He also found time to court a petite, beautiful young woman, recently arrived in the city, who was seeking employment as a city magistrate.

    Her name was Nancy Sophia Greer, but she preferred "Nina." If George found that her career was an unusual one for an eighteen-year-old woman at the turn of the century, it was just one in a string of disclosures that surprised him during their courtship. Her petite size and soft, Scotch-Irish brogue thinly disguised an assertive, forthright nature. She had refused to follow the family pattern to attend Queen's University in Belfast and get married. Instead, she took the civil service examination for women, passed with honors, and moved to London despite family disapproval.

    If Nina was a rebel in the ranks of her staid Presbyterian relatives, she came by that quality honestly. For she was a descendant of one of the most infamous families in Scotland. The wealthy and powerful Clan MacGregor of Glen Orchy owned land in Perthshire and Argyll in the volatile Highlands. They were a complex people--outspoken, hot-tempered, ambitious, and violent, yet honorable, proud, and fun-loving. J.M. Barrie, playwright and author of Peter Pan, once observed, "You Scots are such a mixture of the practical and the emotional that you escape out of an Englishman's hand like a trout." The MacGregors' bold family motto was "Royal Is My Race," for they claimed royal descent from Gregor, the third son of Alpin, King of the Scots. When the MacGregors suffered a devastating defeat by the Colquhouns in 1602, the families dispersed, and many became outlaws, including Rob Roy MacGregor, the legendary Scottish Robin Hood. Crossing the North Channel, some members of the persecuted family settled in the North of Ireland, hiding their past behind a new name--Greer--utilizing the Irish contraction of Gregor. Gradually, the hot-blooded clan of warriors and cattle thieves cooled into a respected assemblage of parsons, teachers, doctors, and barristers. Among them was David Greer, an honored sergeant in the Royal Irish Constabulary who retired as an estate agent in the province of Ulster. There he settled on a farm in Castlewellan, County Down. The small market village was surrounded by a vast windswept pastureland of dark, lonely moors and bright streams, bordered by the Irish Sea to the west, Belfast Lough to the north, and the majestically beautiful Mourne Mountains to the south. His wife, Sophia, bore him a son, Robert Francis, and three daughters: Elizabeth Laura, who died in infancy, Nancy Sophia, and Bertha Eveline.

    The tranquil, green countryside in which Nina was reared belied the country's more infamous aspects, for the Ireland of the 1880s was a country as torn by bloody conflict as Scotland had been for the MacGregors. Ulster was a center of violent dissension, where the wholly Scottish Presbyterian community opposed Home Rule, creating "Orange Lodges" to protect the union with Great Britain and terrorizing opposing Catholics with the "Peep O'Day Boys." The Fenians, protesting English domination, struck back by scattering about the countryside murdering pro-British landlords and looting and burning their homes. In the middle was Charles Stuart Parnell, the Irish MP for West Meath, who was a champion of these restless, landless Irishmen impoverished by the Potato Famine of 1845-49 and agrarian competition from abroad.

    As a respected elder in the Castlewellan Presbyterian congregation, David Greer instilled religion in his daughters from an early age. "Prayer is your strength," he told them. He also passed on his belief in family pride: "Always remember `Archdoille,'" he told Nina. The Greer family motto translated as "To the Top of the Hill. Nothing Is Beyond Your Grasp!" Little did he realize how profoundly Nina--and later her daughter--intended to live up to that standard.

    George and Nina married, and the newlyweds indulged in their favorite pastime together: travel. After their European honeymoon, they settled in a home outside London, only two streets away from the home in which George had grown up, at 88 First Avenue, Manor Park, Essex. "From the composite picture I have formed of my father since I have grown up," Greer would recall, "I think he was the kind of man with whom I, too, could have fallen in love. He had a profound appreciation of music--I think my love of music comes from him--spoke three or four languages, could recite whole pages from Goethe, Schiller, Shakespeare and the Bible, and satisfied his wanderlust by visiting a different country in Europe every year." Eileen, their firstborn, was a dangerously fragile infant who developed pneumonia within her first two months of life and showed indications of a heart malady, which worried the family doctor. Despite Nina's constant ministrations, he prepared the Garsons for their daughter's early death.

    Two years later, Eileen was still alive. But Nina's triumph was short-lived. In 1906 her husband suffered an attack of appendicitis, was rushed to a London hospital, and died from surgical shock during the operation. The families were devastated and listened in numbed silence as the will disclosed that George Garson was, in his daughter's words, "one of those charming men who live generously but leave very little when they die." The blow was terrific and one for which Nina was unprepared. She could only sit in shocked silence in her darkened house holding her sniffling infant as many of the lovely, exotic furnishings from their numerous trips abroad went out the door for debt payments.

    Despite her parents' wishes, Nina intended to stay in London. She did not want to become a poor relation, nor did she want her daughter treated as an invalid as she feared her family would do. So she went to work, managing a row of old townhouses that she inherited from her husband and raising her child independently. Almost immediately the Garson aunts, most notably Mrs. Alexina Logie Cathles, swept into their lives. "Aunt Alexina was a very strict Scotch Presbyterian," Greer recalled, "a most excellent woman, a so-called Tower of Strength, a very present help in time of trouble. Aunt Alexina was so fearful lest mother, because of her youth and beauty, became a `Merry Widow' that she did everything in her considerable power to guard against it, including the gift of a widow's toque with a crepe veil so long and heavy it would have blacked my poor, little mother out."

    Despite her mother's efforts, little Eileen Garson's earliest memories of this dreary environment were not pleasant. She remembered the house at 88 First Avenue as "small, dark and narrow and in a dreary part of London. But beauty-loving as she is, and resourceful, mother made the inside of our house as attractive as possible." Nina painted the rooms in bright colors. The bathroom was done in red and yellow, and the curtains throughout were scarlet and blue. They lived in "genteel poverty," a phrase that, Greer quipped, "is more attractive than the experience."

    Nina's finances were worsened by her daughter's constant illnesses, including chronic bronchitis. Following the doctor's advice, Eileen was confined to bed every winter and for six weeks every spring and autumn. She was wrapped in blankets, clothed in flannel underwear and mufflers, and fed a variety of medications, cough syrups, and cod-liver oil. Not only was she prone to colds and bronchitis but to fainting spells as well. "By the time she was fifteen," Nina recalled, "she had enough illnesses to fill most lifetimes."

    Despite the gloom of her home and her constant sickness, Eileen was not an unhappy child. From her insular existence sprang a remarkable imagination, and from close relationships with adults, rather than children, came a vibrant precocity. She knew her letters by the age of two and could read by the age of four. Nearby, at 3 Tower Hamlets Road, Forest Gate, Grandfather Garson read constantly to the bedridden little girl. "I lived the characters in every book he read," she recalled. "When I was first on the stage, I could memorize pages of dialogue quite effortlessly and veteran actors would ask me, `Where did you learn that sense of timing?' I often felt like telling them, `By talking to myself,' but feared I might be misunderstood. Nevertheless, the mechanics of the craft came very easily to me and I do believe I have long hours in the Land of Counterpane to thank for it."

    Dismissing Grandmother Greer's dire observation ("Early precocity, early decay"), Nina was determined that Eileen would receive her education in a schoolroom and not at home as an invalid. So early one cold September morning, Nina dressed her weeping five-year-old with special care and stuffed pills and lozenges in with her lunch. Walking her to the door of Essex Road Elementary School, she sharply admonished the frightened Eileen to "keep your mouth closed, lest you catch a germ." That first day confirmed all the nightmarish visions that the child's considerable imagination could conjure up. Surrounded by children her own age, she became shy, withdrawn, and self-conscious. She was particularly embarrassed about her bright red curls and endured endless nicknames of "Ginger," "Copper Knob," and "Carrots." "I think I was pretty until I lost my teeth," she recalled. "After that, I was pale-faced, spindly and very earnest; had a lot of freckles, a huge smile and a perfectly understandable phobia against being photographed."

    Sensitive about her looks and prim and scholastic in her behavior, she did not make many friends. "I was an odd kid, a `queer `un,' and no mistake," she said. Her studies became paramount. In the afternoons while other children were playing games, Eileen rode her bicycle far into the countryside with a small black tin of cookies to do field work for her botany class. On weekends, she studied music and singing. "I loved my Saturday mornings," she recalled, "and thought of them, priggishly, as `Dedicated to the Arts.'" Her absorption in her studies did not endear her to the local children. Years later she recalled an edition of the school paper that revealed her caricature of young Eileen surrounded by a sea of books and studying an oversized volume "with my brow furrowed like the Grand Canyon of the Colorados." Concerned about Eileen's fragile health, inability to socialize, and tendency to sequester herself in her room with her books, Nina consoled herself with an ever-strengthening belief that her daughter's future lay in the sheltered world of academia.