A Dame at a Dig

Come, Tell Me How You Live is so little known among the works of Agatha Christie that it sometimes is omitted from her bibliography. The book, subtitled “An Archaelogical Memoir,” was written under her married name, Agatha Christie Mallowan, and published in 1946.

Agatha (nee Miller) Christie married Max Mallowan in 1930, having divorced her first husband, Archibald Christie, in 1928 after fourteen years of marriage. Mallowan was an established archeologist; however, his wife’s fame—though she would not be Dame Agatha until 1971, after her husband had been knighted in 1968—had already eclipsed his. By the time of their marriage, Christie had already published several novels, her first in 1920 being The Mysterious Affair at Styles. This mystery novel featured the first appearance of Hercule Poirot, her longest running detective. Styles, incidentally, was the name of the Christies’ house in Sunningdale, Berkshire.

Eventually, Agatha Christie would become the best-selling novelist of all time, her books selling approximately four billion copies in more than one hundred languages. Her play, The Mousetrap, famously, has been in constant production since its premier in 1952. She has been outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare.

Come, Tell Me How You Live makes a delightful departure—as it must have been for Christie herself. It is a rambling, day-to-day memoir that recounts several seasons of archeological digs in the Middle East during the 1930s, prior to the Second World War. Reading it gives one some insight not only into the goings on of a dig in that period but into the character of Christie that in various ways becomes manifest in the array of personalities in her novels. This is a very human, interesting and interested individual, who pays attention to both the vast and the minute. And she’s funny! This memoir is truly entertaining to the point of chuckling aloud from time to time. So many memoirs take themselves far too seriously, and this one doesn’t fall into that trap.

Christie’s prewar Middle East digs provided fodder for several of her popular mysteries, including Murder in Mesopotamia (1936) and Death on the Nile (1937). When the war began, the digs ended and Christie set aside the memoir. In 1944 she took it up again, saying,

But now, after four years of war, I have found my thoughts turning more and more to those days spent in Syria, and at last I have felt impelled to get out my notes and rough diaries and complete what I had begun and laid aside. For it seems to me that it is good to remember that there were such days and such places, and that at this very minute my little hill of marigolds is in their bloom, and old men with white beards trudging behind their donkeys may not even know there is a war.

Readers today are the richer for Christie having taken up the memoir she laid aside before the war. And we can see, through her keen eyes, into a world that has, unfortunately, been largely lost forever.

June and Gypsy

When actress June Havoc died a few weeks ago at age 97, an era truly ended.

End-of-an-era labels are easily applied without justification, but this case is different. June’s long career began in vaudeville, and she was one of the few remaining performers who could make that claim. But there are other reasons that make her end-of-an-era label spot on.

Born Ellen Evangeline Horvik in Vancouver, British Columbia, she was the apple of her mother’s eye — and the root of her stage mom’s hopes for success in vaudeville. Ellen/June actually was American, her mother, Rose Thompson, having married a Swedish American named John Olaf Horvik. When Rose divorced John, it was Ellen as a child vaudeville star who, along with a sister named Rose Louise, kept income flowing for the struggling family. Ellen’s stage name was “Baby June.” The “June” stuck even after she fled her stage mother’s overbearing presence in 1928, when she was about 15.

Rose Louise, called Louise in the family, took over the “baby” franchise, which she soon outgrew. Mama Rose’s hopes could have been dashed right then, as vaudeville was in its death throes. But vaudeville was being superceded by burlesque, and it was there that Rose Louise blossomed — as Gypsy Rose Lee, the iconic stripper.

June and Gypsy’s story was immortalized in the hit stage musical Gypsy, which premiered on Broadway in 1959. It featured a book by Arthur Laurents, music by Jule Styne, and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, based on Gypsy’s own 1957 self-titled memoir. Gypsy’s was the flashier story — especially with the titillation of her having been a striptease artist — and she could write it. (She also wrote mystery novels, notably The G-String Murders; I have a copy on my bookshelf.) But June’s career post-vaudeville was not without note.

As June Havoc, Ellen Horvik gained a measure of fame on Broadway in shows such as Sigmund Romberg’s Forbidden Melody in 1936 and later Rogers and Hart’s Pal Joey. In the Forties she moved to Hollywood, where she starred in Gentlemen’s Agreement (1947, see photo) and other films, continuing to play various roles well into old age, and well after her more famous sister, Gypsy, had died in 1970 at age 59.

June Havoc’s long life and career was a quintessential Hollywood tale — an overbearing mother, a more-famous sister, and a somewhat tawdry undercurrent of marriages and divorces, all overlaid by the sequin-studded success of show biz. June even wrote about it herself, a couple of times. Predictably, she used her first memoir, Early Havoc, as the basis for a stage play of her own, Marathon ’33, which played briefly on Broadway, starring Julie Harris.