young woman. Despite her faintly beady piglet eyes and an elongated slash of a mouth that her lip rouge accentuated to near-freakish proportions, she was an undeniably attractive specimen of feminine allure, except that hers was a kind of chilly, standoffish, inaccessible beauty – ‘marmoreal’ was the fancy adjective that came to mind – by which he personally had never felt aroused. The caption to her photograph read: ‘22-year-old Patsy Sloots, Mr Farjeon’s ill-fated discovery’.
Trubshawe now turned to the article itself.
Shaken to its glamorous foundations, the British cinema world was in mourning today following the tragic death of Alastair Farjeon, the celebrated producer of such classic pictures as
An American in Plaster-of-Paris, The Perfect Criminal, The Yes Man Said No
and others too numerous to mention.
The 47-year-old Mr Farjeon perished in a fire yesterday afternoonwhile week-ending at his luxurious and secluded residence in Cookham. A second fatal victim of the flames which swept uncontrollably through the wooden chalet-style villa was Patsy Sloots, the 22-year-old dancer and promising motion-picture actress whom Mr Farjeon, widely regarded as the British cinema’s foremost discoverer of new talent, had spotted in the chorus line of the Crazy Gang revue,
You Know What Sailors Are!
, currently in its second year at the Victoria Palace.
It was at exactly 4.45 pm that the Cookham police and fire brigade were simultaneously alerted to the conflagration by one of Mr Farjeon’s neighbours, a Mrs Thelma Bentley, who reported to them of having seen, as she stepped into her garden to mow the lawn, a ‘wall of flames’ rising out of the villa’s living-room windows. Unfortunately, by the time three separate fire-engines had arrived on the scene only a few minutes later, the fire was too far advanced to be immediately extinguished and the villa itself proved impossible of access, or even of approach, so intense was the heat given off.
The priority of the eighteen-strong team of firemen was therefore to get the blaze sufficiently under control to ensure that it would not spread to adjacent residences, all of whose occupants were speedily evacuated. At the height of the conflagration, a heavy pall of smoke was visible from a distance of up to thirty miles away.
At 6.15 firemen were finally able to gain entry to what was now no more than a smoking, skeletal carcass. There the horrific discovery was made of two badly burnt corpses. These havestill to be officially identified, but the police have already let it be known to this reporter that there would seem to be no doubt at all that they are Mr Farjeon, the film producer, and his young protégée.
Asked if there was any suspicion of foul play, Inspector Thomas Calvert of Richmond C.I.D., the officer in charge of the case, confined himself to stating that the circumstances of the catastrophe would be thoroughly investigated but that every indication so far suggested that it had been a tragic accident.
Later, interviewed on the telephone, the well-known film-maker Herbert (
I Live in Grosvenor Square
) Wilcox paid a warm and heartfelt tribute to Mr Farjeon. ‘His death,’ he said, ‘is a tragedy for the post-war revival of the British film industry. He was a true artist who brought clever ideas and bizarre angles to a medium which has never been more sorely in need of them. One did not have to approve of all his work to sense that one was in the presence of genius.’
Maurice Elvey, whose many popular pictures have included
The Lamp Still Burns
and
Strawberry Roan
, declared, ‘I doubt we shall see his like again.’
The investigation continues.
Trubshawe then turned to the newspaper’s necrological page. There was, as he noted at once, a lengthy, laudatory obituary of Farjeon himself but none at all of the far less celebrated Patsy Sloots. Her name, indeed, was mentioned only once in Farjeon’s own obituary, as the actress who had beenselected to
Trubshawe now turned to the article itself.
Shaken to its glamorous foundations, the British cinema world was in mourning today following the tragic death of Alastair Farjeon, the celebrated producer of such classic pictures as
An American in Plaster-of-Paris, The Perfect Criminal, The Yes Man Said No
and others too numerous to mention.
The 47-year-old Mr Farjeon perished in a fire yesterday afternoonwhile week-ending at his luxurious and secluded residence in Cookham. A second fatal victim of the flames which swept uncontrollably through the wooden chalet-style villa was Patsy Sloots, the 22-year-old dancer and promising motion-picture actress whom Mr Farjeon, widely regarded as the British cinema’s foremost discoverer of new talent, had spotted in the chorus line of the Crazy Gang revue,
You Know What Sailors Are!
, currently in its second year at the Victoria Palace.
It was at exactly 4.45 pm that the Cookham police and fire brigade were simultaneously alerted to the conflagration by one of Mr Farjeon’s neighbours, a Mrs Thelma Bentley, who reported to them of having seen, as she stepped into her garden to mow the lawn, a ‘wall of flames’ rising out of the villa’s living-room windows. Unfortunately, by the time three separate fire-engines had arrived on the scene only a few minutes later, the fire was too far advanced to be immediately extinguished and the villa itself proved impossible of access, or even of approach, so intense was the heat given off.
The priority of the eighteen-strong team of firemen was therefore to get the blaze sufficiently under control to ensure that it would not spread to adjacent residences, all of whose occupants were speedily evacuated. At the height of the conflagration, a heavy pall of smoke was visible from a distance of up to thirty miles away.
At 6.15 firemen were finally able to gain entry to what was now no more than a smoking, skeletal carcass. There the horrific discovery was made of two badly burnt corpses. These havestill to be officially identified, but the police have already let it be known to this reporter that there would seem to be no doubt at all that they are Mr Farjeon, the film producer, and his young protégée.
Asked if there was any suspicion of foul play, Inspector Thomas Calvert of Richmond C.I.D., the officer in charge of the case, confined himself to stating that the circumstances of the catastrophe would be thoroughly investigated but that every indication so far suggested that it had been a tragic accident.
Later, interviewed on the telephone, the well-known film-maker Herbert (
I Live in Grosvenor Square
) Wilcox paid a warm and heartfelt tribute to Mr Farjeon. ‘His death,’ he said, ‘is a tragedy for the post-war revival of the British film industry. He was a true artist who brought clever ideas and bizarre angles to a medium which has never been more sorely in need of them. One did not have to approve of all his work to sense that one was in the presence of genius.’
Maurice Elvey, whose many popular pictures have included
The Lamp Still Burns
and
Strawberry Roan
, declared, ‘I doubt we shall see his like again.’
The investigation continues.
Trubshawe then turned to the newspaper’s necrological page. There was, as he noted at once, a lengthy, laudatory obituary of Farjeon himself but none at all of the far less celebrated Patsy Sloots. Her name, indeed, was mentioned only once in Farjeon’s own obituary, as the actress who had beenselected to
Similar Books
