Bernard Shaw
Page 109
‘We never met,’ regretted Mae West, ‘but I would have been happy to entertain the gentleman.’
The speed with which absolutely nothing happened was often breathtaking. By the autumn of 1943 an agreement for three Shaw films had been signed with Arthur Rank. ‘We make Caesar and Cleopatra,’ Pascal announced. This sounded like the perfect vehicle for a superspectacle to top Ben Hur and The Ten Commandments. Rank assumed total responsibility for the cost, gambling on drawing in large audiences from a war-weary public after Hitler had finally been defeated. At the eleventh hour Pascal was in his seventh heaven. ‘But I pity poor Rank,’ Shaw told him. ‘The film will cost a million.’
‘John Gielgud is Caesar. Vivien Leigh is Cleopatra,’ Pascal declared as he stepped off a boat at New York. ‘Wonderful, no?’ John Gielgud certainly thought it wasn’t wonderful. ‘I do not like filming, and should be terrified of risking giving an indifferent performance... So I must reluctantly say no to the film, and hope that you will let me do the play some time not so far distant.’ What this meant was that Gielgud had no confidence in Pascal as a director. Six months later, in what critics were to call ‘an utterly negative and phantom Caesar’, Pascal cast Claude Rains who had taken the lead in The Invisible Man and Phantom of the Opera.
His other choice, Vivien Leigh, was best known to film audiences as Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, but had recently filled the Haymarket Theatre for over a year in a revival of The Doctor’s Dilemma. She longed to play Shaw’s Cleopatra but was bound by an exclusive contract with David O. Selznick, until Pascal leased her with £50,000 of Rank’s money.
The shooting began on 12 June 1944, six days after D-Day. On 29 June Shaw visited the set at Denham Studios. Never had there been so splendiferous a sight as Pascal’s Egypt. The interior of the Memphis Palace with its pseudo-granite columns each weighing two tons, its carvings of men with wings, hawks’ heads, black marble cats, was to cover 28,000 square feet; while the palace steps and quayside were immense exterior sets constructed for the thousands of extras he had hired. All their costumes, the hieroglyphs and statues were copied from originals – even the formation of the stars behind the mighty Sphinx was designed by an astronomer. It was impossible not to be impressed. ‘When I look back on my work as a young man with my colleagues in the theatre, it seems to me we were like children playing with wretched makeshift toys,’ Shaw said. ‘Here you have the whole world to play with!’
Pascal had indeed created a wonderful toyshop for G.B.S. to play in. Placing a Roman helmet on his head, he posed for photographs. Then, as he left the studios accompanied by Miss Patch, a voice called out from the ranks ‘Hail Caesar!’ And all the soldiers stood to attention as the old man and his secretary passed by.
From the start exotic jealousies blossomed on the imported sand and choked the production. Most dramatic was Vivien Leigh’s unexpected pregnancy. ‘Everyone is very, very cross & keeps asking me how I suppose they are going to make me look like the 16 year old Cleopatra,’ she wrote in mid-August. ‘...I think it is a very good thing really because they’ll just have to hurry up with the film.’
Yet everything conspired towards delay. No sooner had Pascal rearranged the schedules to shoot Vivien Leigh’s scenes first, than she suffered a miscarriage after running up and down the palace beating a slave. Blaming him for not employing a double, she tried to get Pascal replaced. Amid the jungle of intrigues, his accent grew more heavily impenetrable. ‘I was surrounded by saboteurs,’ he later grumbled.
There was also the war. Four days after filming began the Germans launched their V2 rocket attacks. ‘I am having the same gay start on the picture as I had with Major Barbara during the blitz,’ Pascal wrote to Shaw. One flying bomb exploding in a field nearby damaged the Pharos set, another destroyed the dressmaking workrooms and a third almost killed some members of the production unit. Senior centurions changed from their armour into civilian suits and went off for Home Guard drill. Teenage girls were suddenly collected by their mothers from the palace pool and taken to work in factories in the north of England. Supply depots closed; telephone lines came down: and then there was the weather. For weeks, and then months, the cast waited on the gigantic location-sets of ancient Alexandria for the sun to shine. ‘We had to clear away great slushes of snow,’ Stanley Holloway remembered, ‘and even then our breath was coming out in clouds...’
Exploiting Rank’s belief that British films had been handicapped by ‘a faintly claustrophobic indoor quality’, Pascal persuaded him to move the location to Egypt itself. The enormous papier-mâché Sphinx was divided into sections, crated and sent down to the docks with all the other properties and costumes, and reassembled in the desert. As the British army reached the Rhine, Pascal came to Cairo. At Beni Ussef he waited for a tremendous sandstorm to subside so that he could produce a more filmic flurry of sand with the miraculous use of two aero-engines operated by the Royal Air Force. Two hundred and fifty horses had been placed at his disposal by the Egyptian Government which also supplied him with over 1,000 troops. Ephemerally dressed in the costumes brought out from England, they were charmed by the papier-mâché shields which, coated with a delicious sauce of fish glue, were quickly consumed, leaving the army defenceless.
Shaw continued to advise on all things: Caesar’s smile, Cleopatra’s accent, Britannus’s eyebrows. ‘In Heaven’s name, no Egyptian music,’ he appealed. Listening to the BBC’s Third Programme he had kept his knowledge of twentieth-century music up-to-date, admiring Prokofiev and Sibelius, and praising Debussy, Schönberg, Scriabin and Stravinsky. ‘Radio music has changed the world in England,’ he was to write. Among British composers he was ‘very much struck’ by the originality of Benjamin Britten who ‘had the forgotten quality of elegance’. The score for Pygmalion had been written by Arthur Honegger, that for Major Barbara by William Walton whom Shaw advised to add ‘the effect of a single trombone sounding G flat quite quietly after the others have stopped. Undershaft pretending to play it. It ought to have the effect of a question mark.’ But neither Walton nor Britten nor even Prokofiev were available for Caesar and Cleopatra. ‘Write your Blissfullest,’ Shaw urged. But Arthur Bliss took one look at Pascal and withdrew. Eventually Pascal contracted Georges Auric, a member of Les Six, who had written scores for René Clair’s A nous la Liberté, Jean Cocteau’s L’Eternel Retour and most recently Michael Balcon’s Dead of the Night. Shaw came to a recording session by the National Symphony Orchestra. When the Roman soldiers raised their swords and Caesar’s galley sailed from Egypt at the end, Auric’s music, he said, ‘is almost Handelian’.
The end of the film coincided with Japan’s formal capitulation and the end of the Second World War. During these fifteen months Pascal, still looking very much himself, would go regularly to Ayot.
‘Have you killed Ftatateeta yet?’ G.B.S. asked one day.
‘Killed her yesterday,’ said Pascal, with satisfaction.
‘How did you manage her death-scream?’
‘Like this,’ said Pascal and began to scream at the top of his voice.
‘Too high,’ said Shaw. ‘Lower. Like this.’
Then he too started to scream in a deeper register, and the two of them stood in the garden counter-screaming.
On 13 December 1945, exactly ten years after the signing of the Pygmalion agreement, Caesar and Cleopatra had its première at the Odeon, Marble Arch. Queen Mary attended, and there was the most chaotic traffic jam since VJ Day – so impenetrable that Pascal arrived too late to be presented. It was ‘a good picture, in my opinion,’ said Blanche Patch. But many critics disagreed, and although the American notices were more favourable when it was shown in the United States the following year, Caesar and Cleopatra was to gain legendary fame as ‘the biggest financial failure in the history of British cinema’. The Rank Organization had estimated a budget of £550,000, but when the shooting went on for nine months longer than expected costs rose to £1.5 million (equivalent to around £31 million in 1997).
Whenever Pascal began speaking of new productions – The Doctor’s Dilemma for Alexander Korda, The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet for Mary Pickford – his face would glow translucently, his smile crack open and all past tribulations fall away. He raced around Europe trying to raise money, find studios, sell his dreams. But the film world had lost confidence in him – what could be more ludicrous than his idea of a Pygmalion musical by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe?
Their adventures had been fun, but Shaw was too old for any more. He urged Pascal to find ‘new friendships and new interests and activities’, and to ‘live in your generation, not in mine’. Yet this was now curiously difficult. ‘Somehow, whenever I try to be unfaithful to you and do any other picture than yours,’ Pascal explained, ‘I have no luck.’ His marriage was failing; he was suffering from cancer; and it seemed there was ‘an invisible conspiracy against me’. Each week he returned to Ayot. ‘If you will not take care of your interests and think of your prospects when I am dead, I must do it for you,’ Shaw wrote on 3 July 1950. ‘Don’t force me to break with you for your own sake.’
Had Charlotte still been living it might have ended differently. ‘She liked me and sold all my ideas to him,’ Pascal remembered. Without Charlotte, G.B.S. had withdrawn into deeper isolation. ‘I have in me the makings of a first rate hermit,’ he acknowledged.
‘Don’t leave me in a vacuum,’ Pascal had pleaded. But though Shaw refused to give the English language rights of his films to anyone else, ‘I do not want to see you,’ he wrote. ‘I do not want to see ANYBODY... Keep away, Gabriel. Keep away EVERYBODY.’
5
The Story Continues
Only in dreams my prime returns.
Epigraph to Buoyant Billions
In Everybody’s Political What’s What? Shaw tried to provide a basis for post-war social reconstruction. He had received his political education in the last two decades of the nineteenth century when government intervention, though setting limits to individual liberties, had brought great improvement to most people’s lives. The problems of poverty and unemployment, homelessness, education and health would not be met, he believed, by a trickling down of money from the riches of privatization and profit-taking, but by investment in public services and leadership that encouraged pursuit of the common good. ‘Parliament kills everyone except careerists,’ he wrote. Politics for Shaw was simply the complicated business of ‘organizing human society so as to secure the utmost possible welfare for everybody through a just sharing of the burden of service and the benefit of leisure’.
Everybody’s Political What’s What? is a ragged patchwork of autobiography, sociology, history and political economy, a rambling narrative of almost 200,000 words that repeats ideas that he had given better elsewhere and then repeats itself. The book had kept Shaw company over the war years, helping to guard his solitude. He moves across its pages like a solitary wanderer through the abstract scenery of economics from the false prosperity of laissez-faire to the imaginary riches of Social Credit.
Yet this summary of a life’s teaching was a prodigious achievement for a man who at the time of its publication was in his eighty-ninth year. When he warns us that in a commercialized world everything is bought and sold; reminds us that no State may be accounted civilized that has poor people among its citizens; instructs us that democracy must find a use for every person and not put him off with a dole: when he attacks fundamentalists as the enemies of religion and advises us to canonize our modern literature, we can feel again a prophet of change conjuring his powers of transcendental reasonableness. His book is most eloquent as simple rhetoric:
‘Socialism is not charity nor loving-kindness, nor sympathy with the poor, nor popular philanthropy... but the economist’s hatred of waste and disorder, the aesthete’s hatred of ugliness and dirt, the lawyer’s hatred of injustice, the doctor’s hatred of disease, the saint’s hatred of the seven deadly sins.’
It was not as the adherent to a party line that Shaw had permeated the minds of more than one generation, but as a dreamer whose dream ‘burned like a poem,’ Edmund Wilson remembered, ‘...stirring new intellectual appetites, exciting our sense of moral issues, sharpening the focus of our sight on the social relations of our world’. Within a year the book had sold 85,000 hardback copies in Britain. ‘When it is finished I shall be finished too,’ he had predicted in a letter to Lillah McCarthy. Yet in the prefaces he would add to Geneva and Good King Charles during 1945, and then in the articles and letters he issued from his garden shed at a production rate of almost seventy a year over the next five years, he precipitated G.B.S. into the atomic age.
‘Do not tell me that war profits nobody: I know better,’ he had written in Everybody’s Political What’s What? ‘...I have never written a line to start a war... I feel the losses on both sides... I loathe war.’ He welcomed the defeat of Hitler and Mussolini, ‘but I don’t intend to celebrate at all,’ he told the New York Journal-American. ‘The war won’t be over on VE-Day.’ On 6 August 1945 the United States exploded an atom bomb on Hiroshima. ‘The war came to an end when the first atomic bomb was dropped,’ Shaw stated in the News Chronicle. ‘It is very doubtful if we have the right ever to drop another.’ Another was dropped on Nagasaki three days later for experimental purposes, and even before Japan formally surrendered, G.B.S. had started Shavianizing the bomb.
It had had ‘its momentary success,’ he wrote, and now we could see that the institution of world war was reduced to absurdity. ‘The wars that threaten us in the future are not those of London or Berlin or Washington or Tokyo,’ he believed. ‘They are civil wars... to say nothing of wars of religion... fundamentalists and atheists, Moslems and Hindus, Shintos and Buddhists.’ He tried to move the debate from atomic warfare to atomic welfare. ‘Atomic disintegration will some day make heat cheaper than can coal-burning,’ he predicted. But, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, ‘we may still practise our magic without knowing how to stop it, thus fulfilling the prophecy of Prospero’. Occasionally G.B.S. warmed his frail spirit in this atomic conflagration which would ‘end all our difficulties’.
Ever since a war crimes commission had been set up late in 1943, he had declared his opposition to putting the civil and military leaders of Nazi Germany on trial for crimes against humanity. For after the raining down of 200,000 tons of bombs on German cities and the dropping of a second atom bomb on Japan, where could we find the spotless men and women to act as judges? When the verdicts and sentences of the first Nuremberg tribunals were announced in the autumn of 1946, he gave his reaction to the press.
‘We are all self righteous enough to enjoy reading denunciations of the condemned men as... hideous freaks of German nature who deserve all they suffered and are about to suffer, and a bit more... Instead of a row of countenances stamped from birth as murderous villains for exhibition in wax effigy in a chamber of horrors, what confront me are nothing but perfectly commonplace middle-class gentlemen who differ in no respects from any common jury or row of pewholders in the nearest church... it is as clear as daylight that if they had been left in their natural places they would have been no worse than an equal number of Bayswater ratepayers... Disfranchise them by all means. Disqualify them for the posts and powers they proved so tragically unfit for. I should let them loose as nobodies... I believe they will be quite har
mless and negligible. Why make martyrs of them?’
In the opinion of Mrs Laden, Shaw ‘could not bring himself to believe in the German concentration camps like Dachau and Belsen’. When he branded Hitler a ‘rascal’ or described the camps as if there were bad cases of overcrowding, his vocabulary became disablingly inadequate. ‘It is sometimes better not to think at all than to think intensely and think wrong,’ he wrote in the Preface to Geneva. Some thinkers were convinced that the hanging of war criminals was a final solution to war crimes. ‘Ought we not rather to hang ourselves’? Shaw enquired. We were all potential criminals, he believed, and the solution lay in renewing ourselves through another morality.
Shaw had supported William Beveridge’s report on social insurance, which led to the welfare state, as a modest instalment of socialism, and had prophesied Churchill’s defeat at the general election of 1945. The red-hot socialist who once delighted William Morris with his cascading oratory, who, thin as a whipping post, had marched with Annie Besant to Trafalgar Square on Bloody Sunday, made speeches at street corners with Keir Hardie, met Engels and known Eleanor Marx was a legend to many younger socialists in the late 1940s. But he was also an ubiquitous nuisance. He, who accused Churchill of being ‘a century out of date’, was himself ‘an obsolete Old Pioneer’ in the words of a future Labour Party leader Michael Foot. ‘One of the foremost educators of the past,’ Foot wrote, he had become a ‘blind seer’ confusing his disciples just when many of his ‘early dreams have started to be translated into fact’.
The last political initiative of his life was the Coupled Vote. Nearly twenty years after women had been granted the vote, the British people were ‘misrepresented at Westminster’ by 24 women and 616 men. Shaw’s remedy was to make the electoral unit ‘not a man or a woman but a man and a woman’. He called it the Coupled Vote. Having placed this democratic reform in the Manchester Guardian and his extended Preface to Good King Charles, Shaw handed over his plan to Lady Rhondda’s Six Point Group. ‘It is the right organ for it,’ he wrote, ‘...for I want it to come from the Women’s organizations and not from a man.’ At the end of 1948 the campaign was launched under the headline ‘Revolutionary Political Idea’ on the front page of Wife and Citizen. But the Six Point Group quickly ran out of money and the Coupled Vote receded into the history of Shavian might-have-beens.