Gerald Quotes

“He spent much of his time pottering in the drawing-room and looking through old letters of Guy’s, old sketches of Papa’s. It was as though he wanted to soak himself in the past and shut away the present and the future.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Gerald: A Portrait

“The door opened and Muriel came into the room. She looked round her a moment, smiling; and, instead of the powdered little actress she had expected, Mummie saw a tall slim girl, with light brown hair and no paint on her face, dressed simply in good clothes, a girl with wide-apart eyes who looked right amongst the furniture from New Grove House and Kicky’s drawings on the wall, and the books and the rugs. As Mummie went to greet her, Muriel ran forward and took her hands and kissed her, and said, ‘I am so glad to be here with you all’; then looked a little troubled, and lowered her voice, glancing towards the door, and said, ‘I’m in such a way about Gerald, he is starting one of his horrid colds.’ Mummie looked at the girls and smiled, Trixie nodded her head, and Sylvia and May leant back with a sigh of relief. The ewee lamb was safe in the fold at last.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Gerald: A Portrait

“His demon of depression was always ready to close in upon him and stifle him, shutting out the beauty and loveliness of life, reminding him that blindness would one day be his, turning his little world to darkness. He used to hold out his hand before his eye. ‘Pem, it’s not so clear as it was. I can’t focus when I look this way. It’s getting worse, I tell you.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Gerald: A Portrait

“Everything she wrote on these delicate matters was tactful—the truth was between the lines—but many of her father’s contemporaries were outraged on his behalf and regarded what had been written as a betrayal.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Gerald: A Portrait

“This was much the same view that, over sixty years ago, Papa and Mummie had looked down upon from their window in Church Row; but their eyes had not seen as far, their range was limited, and the lights were not so bright nor yet so many. They had been contented with obscurity; they had not ventured far, and had dreamed dreams amongst the firelight and the shadows.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Gerald: A Portrait

“When asked by one of the children suddenly out of the blue, ‘Mummy, why was Daddy knighted?’ she looked up from her knitting, pushed back her spectacles, thought solemnly for a few minutes, and then replied, ‘I don’t think we’ve ever quite known.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Gerald: A Portrait

“Which do you prefer, Sir Gerald?’ asked an anxious and hopeful reporter, his stub of pencil in his hand. ‘Acting for the films or acting on the stage?’ ‘I prefer strolling down the street,’ said Gerald, smothering a yawn. It was a typical reply, and must have astonished the young journalist, used to interviewing actors and actresses who declaimed about their Work with a capital letter.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Gerald: A Portrait

“Do what you like with the play,’ Edgar had wired from Hollywood, ‘and God love you, Gerald.’ The message of faith and affection made Gerald more determined than ever to produce a success and to be able to repay Edgar for his trust and generosity. By a tremendous effort the play was pulled into shape and presented to the public on the 9th of February, but it was overshadowed on the opening night with the grave news that the author was dangerously ill in Hollywood with a sudden attack of double pneumonia. The following day the message came that Edgar Wallace was dead.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Gerald: A Portrait

“He knew better. He had done all that he would ever do. He had played his little part. He had had his say. There was nothing more degrading than the popular favourite who clings to his pedestal, and with anxious eyes watches the faces of his friends. Thank God he had the sense to know when his time had come. A few more years, and then oblivion. But in the meantime he had to live.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Gerald: A Portrait

“When you are approaching sixty, unless you have led the life of an ascetic, or possess a tremendous faith in yourself and your achievements, you have neither the force nor the inclination to set out on a crusade. The days of battling are over, and you want to sit back and have things made easy for you. Younger people must carry banners and storm cities.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Gerald: A Portrait

“Then, after hours of waiting for a cloud to pass, a scene would be ‘shot’. And Gerald, as the wretched fugitive from prison, had to scramble about ditches and climb over walls, panting for breath and feeling almost as exhausted as if he were a genuine convict, only to discover, when he had played his scene, that it would have to be taken all over again. He had thought that playing the same part for eight performances a week in the theatre was tiring and monotonous enough, but it was a paradise of ease compared to this.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Gerald: A Portrait

“A play that would have had a fair chance of success a few years back failed now to draw at all, and screen stars from Hollywood bathed in the glamour that had once invested English actors and actresses. The new talkies had seized the public fancy, developing into as great a craze, and with the same popular appeal, as the dancing boom of the immediate postwar years.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Gerald: A Portrait

“He was tremendously proud when Daphne wrote her first novel, and furious when no salesman could produce it at a bookstall.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Gerald: A Portrait

“He was also worried about May, who was desperately ill and not likely to recover. He realized that she was fated to follow Trixie and Sylvia, and that he would soon be alone, without one member of the du Maurier family left.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Gerald: A Portrait

“Since Guy had died Gerald had lived without the company, the true understanding, and the equality of a deep and genuine male friendship. He possessed friends, of course.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Gerald: A Portrait

“It spoke well for his inner nature and his true personality that his character was not objectionable and impossible.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Gerald: A Portrait

“The big holidays were not, then, always the joyous, carefree things they might have been; there would be an under-current of anxiety to spoil the best moments; a strain of nervous expectation on the part of family, friends, and children that ‘Gerald was going to be bored.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Gerald: A Portrait

“People did not tell the truth or speak with any sincerity, and when they allowed themselves to be plain-spoken, they went to the other extreme and became insulting and offensive. Men and women became the pitiful representatives of an unattractive age. Although the guns were silenced and peace had apparently enveloped the earth, there was no quietude. Dance mania was the new fever, and the air was poisoned by the braying of the saxophone, the whine of love songs, and the stamping rhythm of the cotton-fields.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Gerald: A Portrait

“War was a great leveller. It smoothed out the furrows between men; it proved the futility of snobbism and the comparative unimportance of position and prominence when faced with a universal problem. The Armistice came in time to prevent Gerald from seeing the ugliness and horror of war from personal fighting experience, but those months at Bushey shook him to a certain extent, and acted as a splendid antidote to self-importance.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Gerald: A Portrait

“It was possibly a combination of these feelings that led Gerald to join the army in the summer of 1918. There was really no necessity for him to do so. He was forty-five, with a family and responsibilities, and, whatever his private thoughts about the stage as a career, he held a prominent position in public life. He was hopelessly unfitted for a soldier’s duties.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Gerald: A Portrait

“Generations never understood one another. That was one of the tragedies of life.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Gerald: A Portrait

“It would have been amusing to have had a son there, like many of his contemporaries, but, strangely enough, he never wanted to turn his daughters into boys.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Gerald: A Portrait

“Those who watched Gerald as Will Dearth in 1917 saw, not a performance of an imaginary character, but the revelation of a living man, his hopes, his fears, his little ghosts and dreams, what he might have been, what he might yet become, a challenge and a confession in one.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Gerald: A Portrait

“Wait till you come to forty year,’ Papa had said. In a fortnight’s time he would be forty-two, and his soul was sick with a fear and a horror that Papa had never known, and he felt tired, and used, and immeasurably old. He was in his dressing-room at the theatre when the telegram came to tell him that Guy had been killed.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Gerald: A Portrait

“Mummie, however, fretted in the nursing-home. She longed for her lost comforts, her maid Julia, and the food she had been accustomed to. The operation was performed, and she was not strong enough to stand it, as her sons had feared. She died with her arms around them both, on the anniversary of her wedding to Kicky just fifty-one years before. She was buried beside him in the grave in the Hampstead churchyard.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Gerald: A Portrait

“These are super-strenuous times, [Gerald wrote to Mummie, still at Seaford] in London, in club-lands, fools are greater fools, wise people are wiser, and it is difficult to keep a sober outlook. Armchair soldiers, pessimists, jingoists—and, worst of all, those people who’ve just seen somebody who knows—telling one the truth.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Gerald: A Portrait

“Ardent love-making on the stage Gerald considered very bad theatre. He did not attempt it himself, and strongly discouraged it in others. ‘Must you kiss her as though you were having steak and onions for lunch?’ he would say. ‘It may be what you feel, but it’s damned unattractive from the front row of the stalls. Can’t you just say, “I love you,” and yawn, and light a cigarette and walk away? Unfortunately, nobody was able to do this quite as he did it himself. He had methods of his own. He seldom kissed women on the stage, unless it was on the back of the neck or the top of the head, and then he would generally slap them on the face afterwards, and say, ‘You old funny, with your ugly mug,’ and walk away talking of something else as though he did not care.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Gerald: A Portrait

“They had a certain youthfulness inbred in them—a look of eye, a tone of voice—that proved they would never grow old; and for all their love of life, and the world they lived in, they made haste to leave it.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Gerald: A Portrait

“He was old-fashioned and advanced; strict and lacking all discipline; more ribald than the poets of the Restoration and as easily shocked as the author of The Daisy Chain.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Gerald: A Portrait

“It was the century that had changed, and Gerald belonged to it. He was in advance of his time, and a forerunner of the restless age. He declared himself an enemy to progress, a hater of motor-cars and speed, but even as he protested his love for quiet, for the days of carriages, and dignity, and grace, his feet were beating to a jazz tempo and his hands reached out for the cocktail-shaker.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Gerald: A Portrait