I have recently seen two thoughtful and provocative films, each based on the true story of a famous man and each raising interesting questions about an extraordinary woman in his life.The first, Lord Mountbatten: the Last Viceroy (1985 BBC mini-series), is about the last days of British rule in India and the difficult transition to independence. The second, Bride of the Wind, directed by Bruce Beresford in 2001, is a biopic about Gustav Mahler.

The women? In each case, the woman referred to was a wife who played a vital role in her husband’s historic achievements. In the case of Lord Louis “Dickie” Mountbatten, an heroic figure who helped to ease India’s path to independence, it was his wife Edwina. In Mahler’s case, it was his wife Alma – helpmate, partner and protector of the composer’s legacy.

The questions? While Edwina was clearly an asset to Mountbatten and beloved by the people of India for her work on their behalf, the film hinted at, but did not explore her friendship/love for Nehru which by implication went far beyond the formalities one might have expected in the circumstances. And Alma, Mahler’s devoted partner – did she ultimately betray the legacy she claimed to be protecting?

These questions are raised, but left unresolved in the films mentioned. The female side of these stories needs telling; these women, Edwina and Alma, deserve their own biopics!

Edwina Falls in Love with India

It is generally agreed amongst reputable biographers that the Mountbattens had what is often called an open marriage; they both had affairs and on more than one occasion. One of Edwina’s lovers was the celebrated conductor Sir Malcolm Sargent.

By the time of the Indian sojourn when they were in their 40s, Mountbatten was single-mindedly intent on furthering his career and Edwina was not entirely happy being merely a ceremonial naval wife. Enter Jawaharlal Nehru, a highly westernized Hindu, Cambridge graduate, very handsome, widowed and lonely, future prime minister of India. Nehru and Edwina became soul-mates. But Nehru was also very close to Dickie Mountbatten. These relationships have been extensively documented by biographers over the years – most recently by the Mountbatten’s daughter Pamela in India Remembered: a Personal Account of the Mountbattens During the Transfer of Power.

Pamela Mountbatten, who was nineteen in 1947, when she went with her parents to live in India, kept a diary. In India Remembered, she confirms the intensity of the relationships but states unequivocally that in the case of Edwina and Nehru it was never more than platonic. After the Mountbattens left India, Edwina remained in close touch with Nehru. He wrote her hundreds of letters and when Edwina died in 1960 the letters were given to Pamela. Again, she states unequivocally that there is nothing in the letters that would embarrass her father.

Edwina became a beloved figure in India because of the way she dedicated herself to helping Hindu and Moslem refugees during the years of turmoil before and after independence. She traveled across India with the Red Cross, often at great personal risk, helping the wounded and the starving hordes.

Minding Mountbatten’s Business

Edwina’s work for the people of India is well known but the counsel she gave both her husband and Nehru in these troubled times was far less known or understood. It is depicted well in the film with Ian Richardson as Nehru and Janet Suzman as Edwina, and a sensitive script by David Butler, but Edwina’s influence on Mountbatten apparently went much deeper and the story is well told in a new book by Alex von Tunzelmann: Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire.

After the war Mountbatten took the lead in Britain in championing the aspirations for independence amongst the former colonies. According to Tunzelmann, in these matters “he was led by his wife.” Tunzelmann makes Mountbatten out to be a bumbling royal, especially during his naval career, but claims that he deserves less of the blame for the debacle in India than is often directed at him. He argues that Mountbatten rose to the occasion and did the best he could under the circumstances, and what he did achieve often involved Edwina. There is evidence, writes Tunzelmann, to show that Edwina not only had a very close relationship with Nehru on a personal level, but also managed to influence him on matters of domestic and foreign policy.

Alma the Stifled Soul

Then we have the strange case of Alma Mahler. The composer married her in 1902 when he was 41 and she was 22. She was a talented pianist and an aspiring composer herself, but Mahler insisted that she give up her own ambitions and devote herself entirely to him.

Like Edwina, Alma ultimately chafed under the leash which held her in check. When her five-year-old daughter Maria died of diphtheria in 1907, Alma collapsed and went to recover in various spas and sanatoria. While she was at one such place in Tobelbad in 1910 she took a lover, the architect Walter Gropius. Mahler discovered the relationship and he was devastated. Perhaps only then did he really begin to understand his wife and how important it was to let her nurture her own creative energy. By all accounts Mahler and Alma were reconciled and devoted to each other in the last year of his life. By then he was seriously ill. He died in 1911. They had been married for eight years.

The Men After Mahler

Bride of the Wind accurately depicts Alma and Mahler’s troubled marriage and Alma’s relationship with Gropius and another with the painter Oskar Kokoschka. In fact, Kokoschka depicted himself and Alma romantically intertwined in the painting Bride of the Wind from which the film takes its name. Alma and Oskar had an intensely passionate relationship but she ultimately tired of it and left him. Koskoschka never got over Alma: he had a life-size doll of Alma made and carried it everywhere with him. Then came Alma’s marriage to the poet and novelist Franz Werfel. In her diary Alma wrote horrible things about Werfel but she married him anyway and they ultimately fled wartime Austria and settled in the United States. How very odd that Alma held the most loathsome anti-semitic views, was a Nazi sympathizer, and married two Jewish men (Mahler and Werfel)!

Managing Mahler’s Music

After Mahler’s death Alma actively promoted his music. And why not? For many years it was her primary source of income. Did she really love and understand his music? Reading her letters one wonders. She is certainly a source of great frustration amongst Mahler scholars. Mahler wrote many long letters to her but it has been determined that before these letters were published she radically edited them to show herself in a better light. Apparently, she also destroyed about 200 other letters, and circulated dubious stories about the creation and significance of some of Mahler’s symphonies. For Mahler researchers this became known as “the Alma problem.”

As the years went by Alma lost the charms which had attracted the attention of some of the most gifted artists of the day and became a rather sad figure. After Werfel’s death in 1945 journalist Claire Goll penned a savage portrait of the grieving Alma:  “In order to freshen up her fading charms, she wore gigantic hats with ostrich feathers; nobody knew whether she wished to appear as a funeral horse pulling a hearse, or as a new d’Artagnan. On top of that, she was powdered, made up, perfumed and inebriated. This bloated Valkyrie drank like a fish.”

Thomas Mann knew Alma most of her life. He called her the Grande Veuve or Great Widow as she dined out on the reputations of her late husbands Mahler and Werfel.

Alma and Edwina were both gifted and difficult women who used their considerable charms to get what they wanted – or at least what was available to them at the time. Their troubled lives suggest that what they really wanted they couldn’t have in the age in which they lived, except through attachment to powerful men.

Paul E. Robinson

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