Nerina Shute, 96, Scandalous Memoirist and ‘It’ Girl’ of the 1920s

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The New York Sun

Nerina Shute, who died in England on October 12, at age 96, wrote acerbic film reviews, risque novels, histories, and memoirs of which none aroused greater interest than “Passionate Friendships” (1992), a “book of confessions” published when she was in her 80s.


“I am a private person,” Nerina Shute wrote in the foreword. “For many years I have managed to keep my secrets to myself, protecting the men and women I have loved. Now all my loved ones are dead and no longer vulnerable. No one is left who might be hurt or damaged by these confessions unless it is myself. The time has come to tell a story which requires to be told.”


Among other eye-popping revelations, Nerina Shute told how her marriage to Howard Marshall, BBC broadcaster, D-Day hero, Oxford rugby Blue and author of a book about Scott of the Antarctic, hit the rocks after she confessed to having an affair with their French housekeeper. She also chronicled her 22 years of “friendship, happiness and love” with the British doyenne of ballroom dancing, Phyllis Haylor.


Nerina Shute was born on July 17, 1908 in north Wales, where her parents had briefly repaired after her father lost all his money on the stock exchange; but she spent her early childhood in a house in London, her father having inherited money from a relative.


Shute’s mother, Renie, was a novelist and bohemian, the author of such scandalous works as “The Cross Roads” and “The Unconscious Bigamist.” Her father, Cameron Shute, was her mother’s second husband, the first having been killed in the Boer War. He came of an army family “distinguished, snobbish and pleasantly immoral.” His father, General Sir Charles Shute, had fought at Balaclava and was MP for Brighton from 1874 to 1880. A rakish character, Sir Charles was described by Elinor Glyn to Nerina’s mother as “the wickedest man in England, my dear!”


But Nerina’s father was made in a more conventional mold. He did not approve of his wife’s arty friends, with their “long damp curls and horrible ideas,” and was embarrassed by her literary efforts, even though he seldom had a job himself. By the outbreak of World War I, their marriage was effectively over, and in 1920 Renie Shute abandoned her husband and baby son and took Nerina to Hollywood, having received an offer for one of her novels.


There she bought a gold mine in which she and her husband were to lose what remained of their inheritance, created a scandal by embarking on an affair with a married man, then attempted suicide after her lover was killed in a motor accident.


Rapidly recovering from this tragedy, Renie then married a Hollywood actor, despite still being legally married (under English law) to Nerina’s father, thus becoming, consciously or unconsciously, a bigamist. It was at this point that the 18-year-old Nerina decided to return to London, where her father (now living in Le Zoute, Belgium, a hideaway for impoverished gentry), had found her a job as a typist for the Times Book Club.


From this small beginning, Nerina Shute became a gossip columnist for Film Weekly, writing acerbic pen portraits of film stars and causing offense to a generation of British film personalities. E.A. Dupont, the director of Piccadilly, was so annoyed by the comments she made about him that he banned her from the studio floor. She sneaked back disguised as a rabbi.


By now Shute had become the 1920s equivalent of an “It Girl,” famous for her outspoken opinions, her passion for sexual politics and broad-brimmed black hats. She moved in bohemian circles and attended louche parties where “we talked endlessly about free love and homosexuality.”


At the same time, she embarked on her first novel, “Another Man’s Poison,” published in 1930 when she was 22. This was, in effect, an apologia for her mother’s life and was thus considered deeply shocking (by this time her mother was on her fourth husband; there would be two more). But the book also excited opprobrium for its depiction of “Paula,” an “ambi-sextrous” character whom Shute portrayed as someone who simply lived by a “different code” and as no better or worse, morally speaking, than the rest of us.


“Miss Shute writes,” opined Rebecca West in The Daily Telegraph, “not so much badly as barbarously, as if she had never read anything but a magazine… Yet she is full of talent.” As a result of this review, Shute was asked to write a series of articles for the Sunday Graphic as “the Girl with the Barbarous Touch,” and was given a job by Lord Beaverbrook as a reporter for the Daily Express, from which she was sacked after six months. Afterwards she found a job as a film critic for the Sunday Referee.


Meanwhile, having taken up the cause of free love, she had embarked on an affair with “Charles,” a playboy former doctor who had been struck off the medical register for performing an illegal abortion. She went to live with him in Liverpool, where he had found a job as a traveling salesman. But the sex was unsatisfactory, and their “trial marriage” soon came to an end. She found consolation in the arms of “Josephine,” a monocle-wearing Roman Catholic who took comfort from the fact that “there’s nothing in the Bible against lesbians.” Their affair lasted until 1936, when Shute, in a “wild attempt to escape the homosexual world,” married James Wentworth Day, a prominent High Tory journalist who regarded homosexuals as “perverts.” Her marriage brought her a brief period of respectability. She went fox-hunting and was photographed at Ascot in a huge hat; but she soon tired of married life and left her husband after a year.


By now Shute had been sacked from two more jobs in journalism and had become an agent for the beauty firm Max Factor in a Bond Street salon. After her marriage ended, she moved in with “Helen and Andy,” a pair of professional women – respectively a dentist and a gynecologist – who shared a house in Portland Place. Nerina and Helen soon became lovers. “With her beautiful strong hands she had pulled out the teeth of many well known people who later became her friends,” Shute recalled. “I discovered that her beautiful hands were equally good at making love.”


In 1940, by which time she had returned to writing, Shute was invited to be interviewed on a radio program by Howard Marshall, a BBC broadcaster and cricket commentator popularly known as the “Voice of England” for his homely weekly programs about cricket, fishing, home and family.


Marshall was married with a wife and two sons sitting out the war in America, but he and Shute began an affair. Marshall became chief war correspondent for the BBC, served in north Africa and accompanied the troops to France on D-Day, filing the first live radio report of the landings before chronicling the campaign in Normandy and the fall of Paris. They married in 1944 when Marshall was home on leave.


Shute did not tell her husband about her affairs with women, realizing instinctively that he would be shocked. But if he was ignorant of this aspect of his wife’s past, he could not have harbored any illusions about her morals. In 1945 she published “We Mix Our Drinks,” a selective account of her life in permissive pre-war London. The book (mysteriously dedicated to “Three I Love”) caused a stir in the more puritanical postwar atmosphere. Shute’s new mother-in-law never recovered from the shock.


After the war, Marshall found work in public relations, and Shute embarked on a series of historical novels based around the lives of Fanny Burney, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Of “Georgian Lady,” her novel about Fanny Burney, a reviewer in the Nottingham Journal was moved to predict that: “Those who have come to appreciate Jane Austen’s novels will certainly enjoy this charming story.”


The Marshalls moved to Mayfair, but Nerina soon found herself becoming bored with the restrictions of married life; her husband did not like parties and she missed her old friends. Her gloom was lifted by the arrival of Renee, a young French housekeeper. The two women became close, and though Nerina regarded their relationship as akin to that between mother and daughter, it soon became obvious that there was more to it. One day, Renee approached her mistress, duster in hand: “Madame j’envie de faire l’amour.’ The next minute she was in my arms.”


But the sudden deepening of their relationship seemed to bring about a crisis in Renee’s life. She became emotionally unstable; there were fits of temper, and she began to imagine that Marshall was trying to poison her. After being incarcerated for a time in a mental institution at Epsom, Renee returned to France.


Her lover’s departure plunged Nerina into a deep depression from which her husband, ignorant of its cause, was unable to rescue her. It was Nerina who brought matters to a head. On New Year’s Eve 1953, in the course of a violent argument, she told her husband about her love for Renee. “You have been unfaithful to me. I can never forgive you,” said Marshall. “But I haven’t been unfaithful,” Nerina protested. “Loving a woman is quite different from loving a man.” But Marshall could not understand. The marriage was over.


Shute returned to her mother, by now living with her sixth husband, Noel Sparrow. Just before her mother’s death in 1958, Shute decided to take up ballroom dancing and joined a dance club. Before long she had met and fallen in love with Phyllis Haylor, a well-known figure in the ballroom dancing world. Shute and her stepfather moved to live nearer Phyllis in London, where Shute found work as a secretary at a hostel for unmarried mothers and later as a social worker.


After Noel Sparrow’s death in 1967, she and Haylor bought a cottage together in Hertfordshire and eventually lived together in London. “I had never been so happy in all my life,” Nerina recalled. Their relationship lasted until Haylor’s death in 1981.


Nerina Shute’s other books include a memoir of her mother, “Come Into the Sunlight” (1957); “The Escapist Generations” (1973), a memoir of her own life, but without the explicit references to sex; two books about the history of London; and a history of the relationship between the royal family and the Spencers, published in 1986.


She is survived by her close friend, Jocelyn Williams, who nursed her devotedly in her later years.


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