Hitchcock’s Partner in Suspense: The Life of Screenwriter Charles Bennett

18. The Avenger

223 18 the avenger John charles Bennett Avenger: one who inflicts punishment in return for an injury or offense. —merriam-webster.com My father was the second of three sons born to Lilian Bennett, the eldest child of a wealthy shipping magnate. Lilian was the caretaker of eight siblings ; and when inevitably she rebelled, she was cruelly cast off. Described by Charles as “wildly stagestruck” and by her cousins as “a bit frisky,” Lilian hooked up with itinerant actors and a theatrical con man. Her sons were bastards. Charles was told that his father—unbelievably surnamed Bennett—had died in a London boiler explosion when Charles was four. But that story doesn’t stand up to scrutiny—Charles’s earliest memory of the brokers’ men, presumably by age four, placed Lilian’s extreme poverty before her husband’s death. Anyway, she was producing melodramas as the Miss Lilian Bennett Repertory Company in 1900 and 1901, which eliminates any husband from the picture. Penniless, Lilian “shot the moon” to escape her lodger-spies and dragged her starving children from one flat or city to the next—etching Charles’s identification as the original man on the run. Lilian’s father, following attitudes of Victorian-era gentry, identified the family name with a seventeenth-century landowning family, Bennett of Pythouse, Wiltshire. In 1929 Lilian asked Charles to motor to Dorset to research that fabled Bennett lineage. Charles believed he found the miss- HitcHcock’s Partner in susPense 224 ing ancestral link, a seventeenth-century south-of-Shaftesbury landowner, William Bennett, Gentleman. Research at the London Society of Genealogists indicated William was the uncle of a Thomas Bennett, Gentleman, the personal secretary to Prince Rupert, nephew of King Charles I, and commander of the Royalist cavalry. That discovery elevated Charles in his saddle and was the basis for one of his celebrated stories. Unfortunately, my research told a different tale. Charles’s ancestors descended from Pythouse through a cadet line of Quaker millworkers and tanners. The family endured a shameful 1767 bankruptcy, disclosing its illiteracy by an “X” signed on a relocation document. I believe that Lilian sensed her family’s denial of its blue-collar roots. Abandoned by her own father and her sons’ father(s), Lilian placed an emotional burden on her boys. Her shame imprinted Charles’s psyche and conditioned his plays and films. Eventually it festered out of proportion, making its most graphic appearance as an extraterrestrial slime imperiling humanity in The Hinges of Hell (ca. 1963, unpublished novel). Lilian sparked Charles’s interest in Victorian melodrama. She taught himtoreadandencouragedhimtowritestoriessuchas“TheMillMystery” (1907). She directed him to find work as a child and teen actor with multiple touring companies. And throughout his career, Charles provided Lilian her financial support. After his younger brother committed suicide, Charles became her devoted caregiver. He dutifully accepted responsibility for this “great woman” and put off marriage to assist her. After Lilian’s death, he often wired flowers to her graveside; and, in his nineties, the only photo at his bedside was an eight-by-ten, silver-framed portrait of his mother. The reader will by now recognize Charles as a master of mimesis, routinely projecting his personal drama onto stage and film. In 1915 he was the orphaned tanner’s apprentice, the silent-screen John Halifax, intent on rising above his lowly status. In 1916 he contemplated illegitimacy while acting as Edgar in King Lear. In his early twenties he was a repertory Romeo seducing country lasses. In 1927, at the apotheosis of his acting career, he strutted as King Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. His older brother, Eric, was the World War I soldier remembered in Charles’s first play, The Return. The molestation of a woman friend inspired his second play, Blackmail. Experiences of self-fulfilling prophecy prompted The Clairvoyant. His “shooting the moon” with Lilian the avenger 225 instigated the “man on the run” Richard Hannay handcuffed to Pamela in The 39 Steps—neither Pamela nor the handcuffs appeared in the John Buchan novel. He populated his scripts with suave psychopaths, who were as emotionally absent as his father. And this pattern continued throughout his writing. Charles’s first play, The Return, teems with issues of maternal codependence , patricide, abandonment, illegitimacy, and shame. He divided Lilian’s personal issues between two female characters—the widowed Mrs. Norcott, who takes a load of village gossip, and Miss Mary...