‘Irresponsible nonsense had an attraction for Shaw,’ Miss Patch observed, ‘which would lure him into correspondence of the most futile sort.’ She found herself conveying his views on world slaughter, the fourth dimension, the existence of fairies. ‘Why are you silent on public affairs?’ demanded one man. That was a tricky one to answer. So was the woman who wrote regarding the forceps inside her, and the London busman who objected to Shaw’s lack of interest in King George V and threatened to run him over with his bus.
Though it was all water off a duck’s back to Miss Patch, much of what she fingered on to the paper and sealed into envelopes had that mixture of rare sense and inspired nonsense the world had learnt to call Shavian. A cheque for £400 to a poet whose clothes had gone up in smoke was accompanied by a note explaining how much Shaw disliked his poems. Someone in search of shock therapy was recommended to shave her head, put on a white wig and stand in front of a mirror. One fan who wanted a lock of his hair was advised to ‘cut a wisp off the nearest white dog’. A family called Shaw who had christened their son George Bernard was accused of perpetrating a ‘shocking outrage on a defenceless infant’.
Some of Miss Patch’s typed replies were to gain fame. When he was asked ‘Have we Lost Faith?’, she sent back: ‘Certainly not, but we have transferred it from God to the General Medical Council.’ When G.B.S. came across one of his works in a second-hand bookshop with his handwritten inscription on the flyleaf, Miss Patch was able to pack it up carrying a Shavian postscript – ‘With the author’s renewed compliments. G.B.S.’ — and post it back to the original dedicatee. She rather relished some of their point-blank rebuffs. To a hostess who sent a card stating that on a certain day she would be ‘At Home’, the succinct reply had been: ‘So will G. Bernard Shaw.’ Then there was the matter of the Prime Minister: ‘Absence from town and a strong sense of humor,’ she typed, ‘will prevent me from accepting your invitation to dine in acknowledgement of the political eminence of Ramsay MacDonald.’
Over the worst period Miss Patch had to cope with up to three proposals of marriage a week. She helped to see off an actress from Zurich who claimed that since she had the greatest body in the world and Shaw had the greatest brain, they ought to produce the most perfect child, with a celebrated transposition: ‘What if the child inherits my body and your brains?’ But not all the famous stories were true. For example she had never sent Winston Churchill two tickets for the first night of a Shaw play inviting him to bring a friend ‘if you have one’; and she had never received an answer from Churchill saying that he could come to the second night ‘if there was one’. That was a journalistic invention.
Among Miss Patch’s skills was the making of parcels. People liked to send things to Whitehall Court and, if they were not mislaid, she could send them back. ‘I hate presents,’ Shaw had said and on the whole she agreed with him, because they received such silly presents. A few presents, such as the rather handy axe, she could see he actually liked; but the bits of coal garnished with ivy, the seaweed, the bison-foot inkstand and enamel washing-bowl with its base deeply registering the G.B.S. profile were nothing but trouble.
More often people wanted things from Whitehall Court – hats, handkerchiefs, trousers, really anything at all. One man of the streets demanded G.B.S.’s boots, and despite the awkwardness of packing them up, Miss Patch was actually obliged to post them off to him. But they had not reckoned on this pedestrian returning them whenever they were in need of repairs. Such episodes, Miss Patch noticed, seemed to amuse G.B.S.
But she was not so easily amused, particularly by the hordes of time-wasters who arrived at the door. Right up to the end they came. She didn’t mind Charlotte’s lunch guests – Barry Jackson, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, the aviator Amy Johnson, the actress Ellen Pollock, though Lady Astor rather overrated herself, she was inclined to think. She quite liked some of the more casual visitors, such as Maurice Chevalier who seemed ‘exceedingly nervous’ in her company, or even Charlie Chaplin who was ‘quiet and serious’ when she took him round the flat. When people were separated from her and got stuck with G.B.S., they had to take their chances. ‘Shaw talked knowledgeably about Kemal Atatürk,’ remembered the Hungarian actress Zsa Zsa Gabor who had been invited to London by the British Council. Of course there was no accounting for tastes and all tastes seemed to be catered for at Whitehall Court. ‘There was such a wonderfully free atmosphere about, you were sure that nothing you said or did would shock or surprise them,’ D. H. Lawrence’s widow Frieda declared. ‘If you had suddenly turned a somersault they would have taken it along with the rest.’ Blanche Patch was rather glad she hadn’t. ‘You have no notion,’ she typed, ‘of the hosts of people who knock at my door every day... because my picture in the papers resembles their grandfathers.’ There was the young man who had been directed in a séance to make off with the doormat in case ‘some benefit might accrue to me’ and landed up in an asylum; and, perhaps worst of all, the climbing American who, after publishing letters to them in the personal columns of The Times, scaled his way into the flat and had to be arrested by Scotland Yard.
After all this it was hardly a great surprise for Miss Patch to find on the doorstep one day towards the end of 1935 a swarthy Transylvanian gentleman commanding her to ‘go and tell your master’ that the film producer from Rome he had once met at Cap d’Antibes was here. ‘Tell him,’ he added, ‘the young man with the brown buttocks.’ How did he get past Miss Patch? ‘He had no appointment, and we knew nothing of this caller who was obviously a foreigner,’ she objected. But there was something appealing about him. At any rate, perhaps because ‘his name made Shaw curious’ too, he agreed to see this stranger and she ushered Gabriel Pascal into the study.
*
‘The man is a genius,’ Shaw announced ten years later. Like Vandeleur Lee, Pascal was a charlatan genius ‘quite outside all ordinary rules’. He made Shaw laugh with his whole body, throwing his shoulders about ‘while the laughter ran up his long legs and threatened to shake his head off’. As Blanche Patch saw, ‘G.B.S. never met a human being who entertained him more’.
Pascal was a short, powerful-looking man with broad shoulders, high cheekbones, a strong head and dense black hair. When he smiled he gave an enormous grin with a gap at the centre of his front teeth. He entered Shaw’s study like a gorilla.
Their previous meeting had been something Pascal would have shrugged off had it not already entered the repertoire of his legendary past. One blue and golden summer morning, his story went, he had been swimming naked in the Mediterranean and, coming across G.B.S. treading water far out from shore, made himself known as the person whose destiny it was to make wonderful pictures from the Shavian playground. As he swam away, revealing his buttocks, Shaw had called out: ‘When you are utterly broke... come and call on me... and I will let you make one of my plays into a film.’ So here he was. He spoke in low solemn tones and with a strong Central European accent – then cracked open his enormous grin like an urchin. It was impossible to resist him.
‘He reminds me of Frank Harris,’ Shaw wrote to Trebitsch. Pascal was to gain a reputation in films similar to Harris’s in journalism: that of a Svengali who discovered new stars while remaining curiously in need of discovery himself. In fact his name was not Pascal any more than Harris’s name had been Frank. He was born Gabor Lehöl, yet ‘Gabriel Pascal’ was not so much an invention as a mutation – as Samuel Goldwyn was a mutation of Schmuel Gelbfisz.
When Pascal recalled his early years, the air would fill with fleeting images and sounds – the bright flames of a burning house, the despairing cries of women, a ramshackle gypsy caravan sauntering across the Alps; then cut to the life of a poor shepherd boy deeply attached to the earth; and afterwards to a daring circus acrobat who miraculously defied gravity, a rebel cadet at a famous military academy, a prodigy at the Imperial Hofburg Theatre in Vienna... and behind all these sets and scenes hovered the mysterious Jesuit priest who was his patron. Did Royal Blood course t
hrough his veins? Had he been kidnapped? Everything depended on the translation, the direction, and the rewrites.
He knew he had been born for great things but (again like Frank Harris) might be stopped from reaching them by his lack of height. ‘Someday,’ he promised, ‘I shall try to figure out why this incomprehensible world confuses heroism with height.’ He gained in mythical stature from his tall stories. To Shaw, who knew so well the springs of self-dramatization, there was a gallantry about adventures that could turn failure, poverty, obscurity and the ostracism and contempt which these invite, into such gorgeous entertainment. When he spoke of his wartime escapades either as a cavalry officer advancing along the Italian Front accompanied by two dachshunds, or hosting sumptuous banquets for his prisoners on the Russian Front, he brought back the innocent world of Arms and the Man. His favourite play was Shaw’s melodrama The Devil’s Disciple with its picturesque hero; but the talk in Shaw’s study turned to the filming of Pygmalion.
There had been little in Pascal’s career since the war, except perhaps his production of Franz Lehár’s operetta Friederika in Germany, to raise confidence. ‘I believe that the prospect of too much success frightened me,’ he explained. Around the time of Hitler’s rise to power he had left Germany (for he could have been a Jew as well as a Catholic and a Jesuit) and began roaming the world. ‘I loved the California climate, but I did not like the coldness of Hollywood, where they called me the hobo producer.’ He went to India to see his ‘awakener’ Meher Baba. But though he was presented with Baba’s magic sandals, Pascal could not find his way to the Oriental film he longed to make on reincarnation. At last his vagrant path led to Whitehall Court.
He claimed that ‘only a foreigner could translate Shaw into films’. But Shaw had received plenty of these proposals from foreigners – Samuel Goldwyn, Alexander Korda, Louis B. Mayer, Harry Warner – all immigrants or the children of immigrants from Eastern Europe, now creating from gangster and horror movies, musicals and westerns, a vast national fantasy for native-born Americans. Pascal was the joker in this pack. He was driven by a similar need to bury his unstable past under an empire made from other people’s dreams. Only this time it should be an empire of Shavian myths and dreams.
At their first interview on 8 December Shaw had asked Pascal what capital he had – ‘How are you fixed for money?’ – and Pascal, emptying his pockets, cracking open his smile, pointed to one or two small coins. At their second meeting at Whitehall Court, G.B.S. decided to take a big chance. ‘I have disposed of the English film of Pygmalion to Gabriel Pascal,’ he wrote to Trebitsch two days later.
As for Pascal, ‘I was the happiest man in the world.’
‘I have had to forbid Pascal to kiss me,’ Shaw wrote again to Trebitsch, ‘as he did at first to the scandal of the village.’
*
Shaw estimated that his Pygmalion contract was worth £60,000 (equivalent to over £1.5 million in 1997) to Pascal. But although there ‘wasn’t a studio in the world that wouldn’t have given its gold teeth for the rights to Shaw’s plays’, S. N. Behrman wrote, ‘...Pascal found it seemingly impossible to get the money to screen them’. His headlong optimism carried him over two miserable years during which his gift for lighting up people’s enthusiasms was regularly quenched by what one of his wives was to call ‘Gabriel’s genius for messing up anything’.
Shaw’s letters of agreement, which were always confined to one play at a time, gave Pascal only restricted rights to produce the film and retained for himself the contractual rights with all those clauses (five-year licence, author’s control of script and a royalty of ten per cent of the gross receipts) to which film companies objected. Pascal felt corralled by these bristling business habits. For G.B.S. did not want extra fame and money. He wanted victory over Hollywood and had chosen Pascal as his champion.
So Pascal rode desperately on. But he appeared to be permanently riding into a setting sun. His head blazed with visions of a dozen simultaneous schemes and whenever he was on the verge of roping one of them, he would utter his jubilant refrain: ‘I go now see the old man to talk cast.’ After a year of galloping activity he had got nowhere. As one studio after another turned him down, Pascal looked shabbier and shabbier. He kept visiting Shaw and one day brought with him a financial backer who had made his fortune in flour. This was Joseph Arthur Rank. Suddenly he had the beginnings of a syndicate.
Pygmalion was finally scheduled for production at Pinewood Studios on 11 March 1938. ‘I do not propose to interfere in the direction of the picture,’ Shaw notified Pascal, ‘since I cannot, at my age, undertake it myself.’ He interfered as much as possible from a distance and whenever Pascal came ‘to talk cast’. Wendy Hiller had been Shaw’s choice for Eliza and he predicted that she would be ‘the film sensation of the next five years’. He had wanted Charles Laughton to play Higgins and felt that Pascal’s choice of Leslie Howard was ‘fatally wrong’ – ‘the trouble with Leslie Howard is he thinks he’s Romeo’. In his screenplay Shaw had tried to strengthen the role of Freddy Eynsford-Hill to make him a romantic second lead, but he suspected that the public would love Leslie Howard ‘and probably want him to marry Eliza, which is just what I don’t want’.
It was Anthony Asquith who made Pygmalion a success. Pascal as producer was a whirlwind. There was ‘a terrible row and throughout the whole shooting of the picture we were never on speaking terms,’ remembered Wendy Hiller. ‘But as the direction was in the expert hands of Anthony Asquith we managed remarkably well.’
Shaw’s scenario cut down the dialogue and opened up the play for the screen. He also added some extra scenes at Pascal and Asquith’s suggestion, but did not accept all their proposals for giving the film more exteriors, greater movement and visual variety. It was then modified by various unseen hands which came together to sweeten the story and glamorize Higgins. Nevertheless, by Hollywood standards it was faithful to Shaw’s work.
And Charlotte liked it. Two days before the première she and G.B.S. came to a preview and at the end Charlotte told everyone: ‘This is the finest presentation of my husband’s work.’ Pascal had been trembling with nerves, clutching Charlotte’s hand and almost wringing these favourable words from her. He had shot three alternative endings to the film and chosen the romantic one anticipating the marriage of Higgins and Eliza. When questioned about this happy ending, Shaw answered that apparently some ‘20 directors seem to have... devised a scene to give a lovelorn complexion at the end to Mr Leslie Howard: but it is too inconclusive to be worth making a fuss about.’
Pygmalion went on to break all box-office records and, as Lawrence Langner wrote, ‘won the hearts of audiences and the plaudits of critics all over the world’. In the United States, where a censored version had to be shown to meet the Protection Code Administration’s objections to ‘comedy treatment of illicit sex’, it was given two Academy Awards. Shaw happily described his Oscar for the year’s best-written screenplay as ‘an insult’, by which he meant that Pygmalion should be advertised as an ‘all British film made by British methods without interference by American script writers... a revolution in the presentation of drama on the film’. This served well in his propaganda war, and Pygmalion was soon being spoken of as having ‘lifted movie-making from “illiteracy” to “literacy”’.
Against most odds, Pascal had carried Shaw to the top of the most powerful myth-making empire in the twentieth century. It was ‘a tremendous triumph’. He felt as if Pascal had opened an Aladdin’s cave, and the effect was spectacular. ‘You... persist in making plans for me on the assumption I am 35; but actually speaking I am a dead man; and a grasshopper is a burden,’ he tried to complain. ‘I discovered you ten years too late.’ But as Charlotte saw, Pascal’s extraordinary vitality had rejuvenated her husband so that he was ‘twenty-five years younger’.
‘I am Cagliostro to Shaw,’ Pascal boasted, ‘ – I keep him alive fifteen years more.’
5
Three Plays for Historians
‘Does it matter?’ My reply is that it does.
What I Really Wrote About the War (1931)
If it had been the love of money-making that kept him at work, as some neighbours at Ayot suspected, Shaw would have moved wholeheartedly into films. ‘It would pay me better to turn my old plays into scenarios,’ he wrote to Trebitsch who was growing increasingly dependent on his Shavian income. But ‘I cannot do this’. He still had new work to do. In the late 1930s he composed a pleasant and an unpleasant play, began a ‘Comedy of No Manners’ and completed a variant ending to a Shakespearean romance.
Cymbeline Refinished was conceived at a Governors’ meeting at the Stratford-upon-Avon Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. The business of improving on Shakespeare had been going on since Colly Cibber’s popular adaptation of Richard III and the ‘happy’ version of King Lear by Nahum Tate. As a drama critic Shaw had often ridiculed the acting versions put on by Henry Irving and other actor-managers of the Victorian theatre which he now saw as precursors to the sentimentalities of Hollywood. But, by perpetrating ‘a spurious fifth act to Cymbeline’ was he not joining this optimistic band of saboteurs himself?
Shaw’s battles were fought against the surrender of power from composers to performers. In principle he had little objection to a ‘collaboration’ between authors. Updating a post-Marlowe play into a post-Ibsen play was a type of translation.
It was while preparing Ellen Terry for her part in Irving’s mutilated production at the Lyceum that he had become involved with the text of Cymbeline. His flights of invective against ‘this silly old “Cymbeline”’ were largely improvised to raise Ellen’s spirits and get her over the difficulties of giving a convincing performance. But it had fixed the last act in his mind as a hopeless mess. Now, while preparing to tie the dangling ends into a Shavian knot, he found that Shakespeare’s last act was full of verbal workmanship and theatrical entertainment.
Bernard Shaw Page 101