*
Shaw was well aware that Molly Tompkins brought out qualities he shared with Professor Higgins. He sent her twice a week for lessons in diction to Professor Daniel Jones, who taught phonetics at London University. But principally he tutored her himself. ‘You just do what I tell you,’ he explained. He told her how to address an envelope and stick stamps on it; when to use make-up and how to order a vegetarian meal at a restaurant without risking early death. He described the correct manner of bargaining for white oxen when in Italy; went through the drill for curing a fear of bats; and strongly recommended parrots as preferable to dogs as pets for beautiful women. He instructed her in the art of having rows (‘for heavens’ sake make them as rowdy as possible’) and of saying ‘No!’ with conviction (‘It is the most useful accomplishment in the world’). Finally he provided hints on how to take all this advice: ‘When you get a bit of advice, don’t bolt it. Chew it fortyseven times; and then it will digest all right.’
It was curious that the more advice his ‘Mollytompkins’ heard, the more she appeared to need. ‘The old should not prevent the young making fools of themselves,’ he concluded. In this sense at least he was successful.
He went to see her at Gower Street, where she was learning eurhythmics and fencing as well as acting, and invited her to lunches at Adelphi Terrace where she met Barrie, Galsworthy and others who ‘didn’t register with me’. In the afternoons he sometimes gave her help with the lines she was learning. ‘I was supposed to be able to go to Adelphi Terrace whenever I felt like it and make myself at home,’ she remembered, ‘but when Shaw wasn’t there Charlotte was cool, and she could be very icy indeed... so I just went when I was invited.’
Molly was invited to spend part of the spring at Stratford-upon-Avon with the Shaws in 1922, and Laurence (her husband) came too. Then, when RADA broke up for the summer and Charlotte went to Ireland, G.B.S. invited them both to meet him at a Fabian Summer School at Godalming and accompany him on a motor tour of English cathedral towns.
At Godalming Molly and Laurence acted as a shield against some of the more pressing Fabian ladies, especially one fiery redhead. And then there was a moment in the garden at Godalming when Molly spoke her feelings for Shaw. ‘You will grow out of your Shavian infatuation (alas! for I hope it is a great pleasure to you),’ he had told her. Later on he explained ‘why I was so shy at Godalming’. Whatever age they might be in fairyland, in prosaic society (and what could be more prosaic than a Fabian garden) they were an old man and a young thing. ‘La Rochefoucauld says that the very old and the very young, if they desire to avoid making themselves ridiculous, should never allude to the garden at Godalming.’
They began the tour, bowling along the English lanes in Shaw’s car, ‘open, high, doorless, with gears outside, and painted a hideous brown, but it was enchanting,’ Laurence thought. ‘...We took turns sitting up front with the chauffeur or in the back with Shaw.’ They went to the music festival at Glastonbury, to Salisbury Cathedral, to Wells in Somerset and then diagonally across the country up to Northumberland. Shaw dressed for this adventuring in what Molly called ‘old-fashioned knickers with stockings and a Norfolk jacket with pleats down the front and belt’. At night, while Molly and Laurence changed into evening clothes, Shaw presented himself in a buttoned-up, double-breasted, blue outfit, ‘like a sailor’s reefer’.
Molly was not an easy travelling companion, wanting to go off with G.B.S. to less historical sites and objecting to being booked into a separate hotel with Laurence. Their destination was Scarborough where another Fabian Summer School was taking place, and where they saw again the Fabian redhead. It was obviously she who had placed Molly in an annexe, sharing a cramped little room with Laurence far removed from Shaw. So ‘just before dawn we packed and walked out,’ Molly recorded, ‘hired a car and went into Scarborough to catch a train to London’. But there were no London trains till the afternoon, so they took a room in a hotel and went out to ‘a movie’.
Shaw came into Scarborough, searched the station, searched the hotels, and found them. There were no explanations. They sat through the film to its end, then he took them to their train, promising to see them in London that autumn. Laurence had thought Shaw would never speak to them again after they had run away without a word. But their bad behaviour actually seemed to have made him more friendly.
Shaw wanted Molly to finish her course and win the Gold Medal. But, hearing that the Plymouth Repertory needed a leading lady, she caught a train to Plymouth where the hypnotized manager engaged her. Kenneth Barnes and Claude Rains breathed with relief, and Shaw wrote to congratulate her. Yet there remained a problem. ‘If you had a sense of humor...’ Shaw began. But she hadn’t. Unfortunately the stock company at Plymouth wanted comedies. ‘I do not think she’s any good for the stage,’ the theatre manager notified Shaw. So she took to the road searching for a tragic lead.
Besides G.B.S., she had another champion in Johnston Forbes-Robertson, three years older than Shaw and soon to be knighted. A quarter of a century ago there had been a romance between Shaw’s handsome Caesar and the girl Shaw had wanted for his Cleopatra and who became his Eliza. Now, for the second time, playwright and actor were led away by similar good looks. Forbes-Robertson ‘seemed to ask me to every first night at the theatre,’ Molly noticed, ‘and to lunch or supper whenever I had a free moment’. A shadow-rivalry soon developed between her two septuagenarian suitors. ‘I envy Shaw being so near you at the play, and seeing you in your lovely green dress,’ Forbes-Robertson lamented: ‘Oh, he doesn’t like your earrings, doesn’t he? Well I do, and I must come first, so there.’ And Shaw enquired reprovingly: ‘I gather that another gentleman of my age, and famous for his good looks and charm, was bolder.’ Molly was always opening letters from these two fond old men. It seemed that G.B.S. wrote ‘every day and Forbes-Robertson two or three times a day’.
These letters were also read by a Plymouth drama critic called Mollie Little, who had taken on the role of secretary and housekeeper to the Tompkins family in London, and who in 1925 tried to use them to blackmail Molly’s admirers. With Forbes-Robertson, whose knighthood might have been imperilled by such revelations, Miss Little appears to have had some success. But, following the publication of his correspondence to Stella Campbell, Shaw was unable to take the threats seriously.
‘Suddenly I was sick of the whole business,’ Molly decided. ‘...I wasn’t supposed to be an actress.’ She turned to Shaw for further advice. ‘I see no reason on earth why you should not go to Italy,’ he volunteered. ‘Everybody should go to Italy.’
So Molly went to Italy, taking Laurence and inviting G.B.S. to join them. ‘I will not come to Italy to share the fate of Achilles,’ Shaw replied. In England – at Godalming for example – he had been ‘bound to behave very well indeed for the credit of the [Fabian] Society,’ he explained. But there were not the same constraints abroad.
*
During the late spring and early summer of 1925, Shaw’s diary and letters record, he had been ‘ill in bed’ and ‘crawling about a bit’; after which, between July and October, Charlotte raced him away on a bracing tour of the Orkneys and the Shetlands ‘up to our eyes in scenery’. But by spring the following year his health had seriously collapsed. ‘I had been ill for many months,’ he later told Harriet Cohen. Charlotte was determined to take him somewhere so that he could get over his shivers. On 5 August 1926 they arrived at the Regina Palace Hotel at Stresa, overlooking Lake Maggiore.
It seemed an inspired choice. Before starting out by train, he had felt ‘an obscure fire within me that craves for cold water’. At Lake Maggiore he was able to bathe every morning – ‘& I bathe sometimes,’ added Charlotte in a letter to Apsley Cherry-Garrard. ‘Altogether I think we have fallen on our feet & GBS is far more bright and happy.’ They were particularly lucky to have found ‘some gay bright young friends here’. She was referring to the conductor Albert Coates who owned a villa three miles from their hotel on the opposite si
de of the lake, ‘a magnetically charming person,’ Charlotte described him, with a ‘wife [Madelon] we like too’, and some interesting guests including Cecil Lewis and his wife ‘Dooshka’, who turned out to be a ‘Prima Donna from Moscow’.
When not listening to music and bathing ‘on the clean side’ of the lake, Shaw was at the other side near Pallanza sitting for a statuette by Prince Paul Troubetzkoy who had ‘a big studio & an astonishing wife,’ Charlotte reported to Beatrice Webb. ‘...It has kept GBS employed & amused going over day after day & sitting.’ Much of the time ‘we are on the lake in motor boats’. One of the Isole Borromee round which they boated – the tiny luxuriant island of San Giovanni – was advertised in their hotel as being available for renting from an Italian prince. In fact, it had been taken by Molly and Laurence Tompkins.
Shaw knew this before setting out for Stresa. ‘At last an address!’ he had written to Molly the previous month. But when he arrived, their palazzo was being renovated and Molly and Laurence were in Paris. ‘I cannot tear myself away from the Isola Molli,’ he wrote. ‘I sailed round it again today...’ On receiving his letter, Molly left Laurence and rushed down on the Orient Express. She arrived at the Regina Palace in a horse and carriage, the dust rising in the sunlight behind her.
She went bathing and picnicking with the Shaws’ ‘gay bright young friends’, but could not enjoy herself. The presence of Charlotte, invariably dressed in black – sometimes in a black taffeta swimsuit with a stuffed canary on the shoulder – clouded her spirits. ‘I like it best without Charlotte,’ she stated. And when she was with Shaw alone, she found that Charlotte had been watching them through powerful binoculars. ‘You and Charlotte have got to come to some arrangement,’ Shaw insisted. But they could not. Molly hated Charlotte’s air of ladylike superiority, and could not understand why everyone else seemed to like her. One day, Charlotte had accused her of having ‘an evil mind’. Molly wondered as she lay in her lonely room that night what was making her so cross. Next morning she caught an early train back to Paris. Four postcards from Shaw pursued her: ‘Your life seems to be one of considerable quite unnecessary friction,’ he wrote. ‘I didn’t exactly want to leave,’ Molly explained to Laurence. So, she despatched a telegram and let Laurence put her on the train for Italy.
Back at the Regina Palace, the concierge handed her a note from Shaw. They had not known when she was arriving, had stayed in till half-past two and were now on a previously arranged excursion to Orta, the silent green lake to the west, from which they would be back at dinner. ‘Fury blazed up inside me,’ Molly remembered. He had not detached himself and waited for her. ‘So sorry to miss you this trip. Returning to Paris immediately,’ she scribbled on a Tiffany card, and caught the afternoon train back. ‘Return immediately to hell,’ Shaw replied to her that night, ‘...and never dare write to me or approach me or mention your poisonous island to me again as long as you live.’
Even Laurence was ‘almost beginning to lose patience’. There seemed only one thing to do. ‘I suppose it’s the only thing you can do,’ Laurence agreed. So once more he put her on the train, the same train, and she checked into the Bellevue Hotel at Baveno on the edge of the lake two and a half miles from Stresa. ‘Driving along the road to Stresa, which Shaw called the road to Baveno, I promised myself this time I’d be good.’ And she very nearly was. After sun-filled days and quiet evenings, when they sat in a boat rowed by the leisurely stroke of the fishermen, Shaw would walk her back to Baveno, ‘and then I would walk back with him halfway to Stresa and then he would return again to leave me at Baveno on the steps of the Bellevue, striding off into the night, the sound of his brogues fading into the lap-lap of wavelets from the lake’. On her last day, with autumn in the air, Molly accompanied the Shaws to a garden-party; then after they had taken Charlotte back to the hotel, Shaw ‘came with me up to the station and put me on the train to Paris’.
*
He felt miraculously restored, ‘better and much stronger than I had been for years before my illness’. This new vigour was ‘partly you, I think,’ he wrote to Molly. She had confided her growing adoration of him in a ‘bothersomely honest letter’ at Stresa, and this adoration was now ‘an indispensable Vitamin in my bread of life’.
‘I have still two years of youth left,’ he had assured her when retreating from their tête-à-tête at Godalming: ‘so make the most of them.’ Now that he was seventy and she not yet thirty, it was time for some advice: ‘Find your own way,’ he tried to tell her; ‘never mind me.’ She must also mind Laurence who ‘will certainly be vamped, and elope,’ he warned. ‘You have trained him to be imposed on.’ Unless he found his roots back in the United States, Laurence would never do anything: the Jamesian era for ‘deserting America to live in Europe as an artistic vagabond (like the sculptor Story, whom Charlotte knew quite well) is gone by’. But after this direct exhortation to Laurence came the irresistible afterthought: ‘By the way, you might leave Molly behind if you are tired of her.’
He tried again. Molly was a coquette ‘and the sooner you realize that what is fun to you is heartbreak and homebreak to your victims, the better,’ he admonished her. ‘Not that that will stop you; for the instinct which delights in dancing on the edge of a precipice when you have lured a giddy man there, knowing that your own head is sound and that you can get back in safety, is incurable.’ In which case she had better leave all those young Italians she mentioned in her letters, and ‘remain faithful to me, your ancient Shotover’.
Something had gone seriously wrong with the Shavian advice-machine. ‘Love me as long as you can,’ he wrote; ‘but make young friends.’ Yet he did not always want to shield her. ‘You would get wearied if I were always nice and considerate of your feelings,’ he wrote early in 1927. ‘...And anyhow, you must take me as I come... I am beginning to let the mask slip occasionally and damn the consequences.’
Early in 1927 Charlotte took G.B.S. to stay with the Webbs at Passfield Corner. Beatrice and Charlotte appeared to be getting on more affectionate terms as they grew older. Charlotte interested Beatrice. ‘She has developed admirable manners and a pleasing and cheerful personality... there is fascination in an exquisitely clothed and cared-for person, if those artifices are combined with personal dignity and graciousness. Certainly she holds fast GBS’s respect and affection.’
In her analysis of the Shaws’ married happiness, Beatrice took no account of Charlotte’s incurable arthritis and the pain she sought to rise above, through religious meditation; nor did Beatrice sense the dangerous restlessness that took possession of G.B.S. whenever he relaxed from his writing. In this state the attraction of Molly on her magic island grew ‘very strong’. He knew that ‘it is a mistake to go back anywhere’ and that if he did go back to Lake Maggiore ‘my infatuation would be suspected at once’. All the same, he still dreamed of the Baveno road.
To the Webbs, Charlotte had kept discreetly silent about Molly. Only to T. E. Lawrence did she show a glimmer of her feelings. ‘She has no influence, but what she has is bad – you will understand.’ Charlotte knew that G.B.S. wanted to return and felt another holiday in Italy would benefit his health. He could listen to music again with Albert Coates, and pose for a full-length statue this time by Troubetzkoy. By the first week of July 1927 they were back in the same corner suite at the Regina Palace.
Laurence and Molly were now living in their palazzo on the Isolino San Giovanni, and each morning Shaw and Charlotte came over the Bay of Pallanza in a small motorboat to swim. After lunch all four of them would return to the mainland and go off by car into the Lombardy hills. As the summer progressed and the heat intensified, Charlotte more often preferred to stay on the island during these afternoons: it was cooler to sit reading on one of the terraces under the trees in her black taffeta bathing dress than to bounce over the country roads at a mile a minute with Molly at the wheel. Laurence, too, was grateful to get back to his studio. So, while Charlotte read and Laurence worked, Shaw and Molly would dr
ive off together into the mountains, sometimes staying late to eat supper at a trattoria or to watch movies in one of the towns round the lake, and coming home so late that Charlotte began to feel uneasy and ‘even Laurence would frown’.
One day, as they were raising a cloud of white dust behind them, Molly turned off the road and bumped the Renault over the hollows and rough grasses of a field until they reached a copse of trees by a concrete emplacement ‘just right for parking a car’. Not far from these trees flowed the river Toce, its smooth green surface concealing strong currents and treacherous whirlpools. They walked to the low sandy banks, and sat down under the eucalyptus trees. ‘For a long time we lay on the river bank looking down at the water, or up at the tree limbs and sky, content and with no need to talk,’ Molly remembered. ‘All the million things I had to say to Shaw were forgotten.’ Later, in his ‘curiously enchanting voice’, he began talking of what was ‘uppermost in both our minds’, and at the end Molly turned to him, ‘so full of you, and the river, and trees, and sweetness’ – but suddenly out of the landscape a soldier appeared and informed them that they were in a military zone, had perched their car on a gun emplacement and must remove it. Subito! He saluted and was gone.
This afternoon was the high point in their romance. Molly, who confessed to being ‘dazed by the violence of my desire’, went on to imply that there had been some sexual liaison between them that ‘gave my body and my mind and my heart peace when I lay by the side of a river’. Shaw, too, appears to suggest that he may have come near to celebrating his seventy-first birthday that July as he had celebrated his twenty-ninth. ‘I hoarded my bodily possessions so penuriously that even at seventy I had some left,’ he reminded Molly eighteen months later, ‘but that remnant was stolen from me on the road to Baveno and on other roads to paradise through the same district. Now they are all dusty highways on which I am safe because nobody can rob a beggar.’
Bernard Shaw Page 78