Shortly afterward, during a photographic excursion. Holmes met Margaret Oliver who, suffering from deafness, had taken up still photography as an avocation. In 1914, following a moonlight proposal on a steamer’s deck, he married Miss Oliver in New York City’s St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, and took her to prosaic Atlantic City for the first few days of their honeymoon, then immediately embarked on a long trip abroad.
When his wife is out shopping, Holmes will stroll about his estate, study his fifty-four towering palm trees, return to the veranda for a highball, thumb through the National Geographic, play with his cats, or pick up a language textbook. He is on speaking terms with eight languages including some of the Scandinavian, and is eager to learn more. He never reads travel books. “As Pierre Loti once remarked, ‘I don’t read, ft might ruin my style,’” he explains.
He likes visitors, and he will startle them with allusions to his earlier contemporaries. “This lawn party reminds me of the one at which I met Emperor Meiji,” he will say. Meiji, grandfather of Hirohito, opened Japan to Commodore Perry. When visitors ask for his travel advice, Holmes invariably tells them to see the Americas first. “Why go to Mont St. Michel?” he asks. “Have you seen Monticello?”
But when alone with his wife and co-workers on the veranda, and the pressure of the new season is weeks away, he will loosen his blue dressing gown, inhale, then stare reflectively out over the sun-bathed city below.
“You know, this is the best,” he will say softly, “looking down on this Los Angeles. It is heaven. I could sit here the rest of my life.” Then, suddenly, he will add, “There is so much else to see and do. If only I could have another threescore years upon this planet. If only I could know the good earth better than I do.”
WHAT HAS HAPPENED SINCE…
Only a small portion of Burton Holmes’s wish for “another threescore years upon this planet” was allowed him. After my story about him appeared in The Saturday Evening Post during May of 1947, Burton Holmes lived on for another eleven years and one month. However, there was little new that he ventured or achieved in those eleven years to alter the story I had written about him.
For one year, after I met and wrote about him. Burton Holmes actively continued to present his beloved travelogues in person. After that, he quit the public platform and legitimate stage to serve an organization, Burton Holmes Travelogues, in an advisory capacity. Not until two years before his death did he submit to complete retirement from work.
During almost six decades, he had been Everybody’s Rover Boy. And for doing what he enjoyed most in life, he had earned five million dollars. But at the age of eighty-eight, no longer able to leave his hill above Hollywood Boulevard, he was ready for that one last journey. He died in July of 1958, and he was cremated at his own request. His mortal remains, his ashes, were deposited in a favorite Siamese urn, one which he had cherished.
But Burton Holmes left more than ashes behind in 1958. He left behind a Name, a vast audience who responded to that name, and an organization to represent that name by proxy in order to hold onto the vast audience. Several years before his death, Burton Holmes, person, had become Burton Holmes Travelogues, corporation. When the person was no more, the corporation remained to carry on.
Today, the corporation, promoting the Burton Holmes name, consists of four people, all of whom were close to Holmes before his death. The most dominant member of the corporation, yet now the least active, is the Great Traveler’s widow, Margaret O. Holmes, who had been his spouse for forty-four years. At the age of eighty-six, Mrs. Holmes still lives on in “Topside,” with two companions. Although she keeps an eye on the corporation, Mrs. Holmes’s retirement is largely devoted to basking in the memory of the old glories, and to occasionally strolling about her three acres or, if the weather is hot, taking a swim in her pool. The only times she emerges from seclusion, and descends from “Topside” into the bewildering new world of freeways and television antennas, is when a Burton Holmes Travelogue series is being presented in Los Angeles. Then she attends each film and lecture. Sometimes, too, she will go forth to see what the competition is doing, quietly slipping into an auditorium where some young lecturer with new film is attempting to challenge the corporation and the Name.
The active head, heart, and limbs of the Holmes corporation consist of three lively, energetic gentlemen, who, because they knew and respected Holmes, possess a shrewd understanding of what was valuable in the past—as well as what is necessary in the present and the future. The president of the corporation is a Phi Beta Kappa named Robert Mallett, a former foreign correspondent who once interviewed Sir Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle. Mallett’s main concern is the business side of the corporation. But sometimes, when the fever is on him, he will take to the boards. Recently he personally narrated the descriptive lectures for travelogues on Sweden and Japan. The least publicized member of the corporation, who managed the travelogues before Holmes died and who manages them today, is Walter T. Everest. The most colorful member of the trio, Andre de la Varre, bears an uncanny resemblance to the Master. The Burton Holmes trademarks—“Vandyke beard, erect bearing, precise speech”—may all be found in de la Varre, who had made 120 travel short subjects for three motion picture studios and had won a Motion Picture Academy Award before joining Holmes. Today, de la Varre produces many of the corporation’s films, and presents some of them (such as the ones on Italy and Switzerland) in person. These men consider the Holmes organization to be the leading producer of travelogues in the United States.
If the shade of Burton Holmes were to return to earth, it is likely that he would be satisfied with the way his heirs have perpetuated his travelogues. Basically, little has changed. Had Holmes’s shade visited the Academy of Music in Philadelphia to attend the Holmes Seventieth Anniversary series, consisting of five different subjects presented during four weeks in January and February of 1963, he would not have been disappointed. At a top price of two dollars a seat for a single evening, or the bargain rate of eight dollars for all five shows, he would have been able to see Robert Mallett presenting “Today’s New and Progressive Japan,” then “America’s Wonderland: the Pacific Northwest,” then “Grand Tour of Delightful Sweden.” On alternate nights, Holmes’s shade would have seen Andre de la Varre presenting “Playground of the World: Switzerland” and “Sicily and Byways of Italy.” And Holmes’s shade would have been happy to know he was part of a full house.
Yet Holmes’s heirs, while adhering to certain Burton Holmes traditions—such as projecting the sharp original Kodachrome film and not prints or copies, delivering narration live while standing beside the film being projected rather than succumbing to sound tracks, and making all their appearances in white tie and tails—have tried to keep pace with our fast-moving, ever-changing times.
For one thing, five absolutely new films are presented every year. There are no reruns of the old Burton Holmes reels, which are preserved in storage. When I asked a member of the corporation if any of Holmes’s original material was usable or ever used today, I was told, “We frequently utilize short film segments from the footage Burton Holmes shot in the early days of motion pictures.” When the heirs recently made “Roundabout London,” they could not resist including film shots of Queen Victoria, which Burton Holmes had once taken. When the heirs produced “Lands of the Nile,” they spliced in some 1933 scenes of Emperor Haile Selassie’s coronation in Ethiopia, taken by the only motion picture photographer present—Burton Holmes himself. Occasionally, too, the heirs will lift an appropriate excerpt from Holmes’s old lectures to use in one of their modern-day narrations.
Besides using glossier new film, the heirs have made other changes in the travelogues. When I reminded them that Burton Holmes had told me there were two ingredients he had studiously avoided in his films—adventure and politics—I got the impression that the heirs (who insisted that Holmes’s policy was “still in effect,” but admitted that “this does not mean we avoid showing a country in true pe
rspective”) were not averse to injecting a little adventure and politics. I suspected that here and there they had conceded that life was real, life was earnest, and that romanticism and escape finally had to make their compromises with the grimier and grimmer realities of the Nuclear Age.
One member of Holmes’s organization was more candid about a change that had taken place. “Last year, we presented a film on Hong Kong,” he said, “and this not only showed the usual tourist attractions but included treatment in depth of the housing problems and the menace of the Red China border a few miles away. It is our feeling that the public is considerably more interested today in world affairs and getting to know the citizens of another country than they were prior to World War II. It is not enough to present a picture-postcard approach to a subject any more. There was a time, of course, when color motion pictures alone were novel enough to satisfy an audience. This is no longer true…However, we do continue to inject a feeling of taking a trip by the use of scenes showing tourists boarding trains or planes, and enjoying the attractions of the country. Basically, our audiences are people who have already traveled extensively or hope to in the future. Our narrations always include helpful suggestions to the would-be tourist.”
Remembering that Burton Holmes had told me he was less popular in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Indianapolis, and Toledo than elsewhere, and that he avoided Pomona, California, completely, I wondered if there had been a geographic shift in the popularity of his travelogues after his death. The heirs would only comment that “bad cities” were the result of “bad local management and support,” and that most big cities were “good cities,” including Philadelphia which was one of their best. They felt that they often did well in cities where the ethnic origin of the community paralleled the subject of the film—in other words, Scandinavian subjects did wonderfully well in Minneapolis, and German subjects were popular in Chicago and environs.
The Burton Holmes team admitted that they are faced with two problems that the Master had not had to contend with in his day. The first problem is the cost of producing a travel motion picture today, a major burden being the rise in the price of transportation and living abroad. The second problem, a more serious one, is the population shift in the United States, which has directly affected the Burton Holmes audiences and the lecture itineraries. Audiences are moving from the city to the country. “Many patrons,” confessed a Holmes heir, “find it unattractive to drive scores of miles from an outlying community to the center of a large city. In some large Eastern cities, older patrons have been discouraged from going out at night by newspaper reports of crime and violence.” To combat this urban exodus, the Burton Holmes corporation made the decision to follow its audience into suburbia. Today, while the Chicago box office has shown a decline, this loss has been balanced by profits from travelogues offered in the outlying suburban communities of Greater Chicago.
One enemy, with whom Burton Holmes himself had never really competed, was the dragon that I felt most endangered his heirs. This dragon had not been mentioned. I mentioned it. I used the dread word—“television.”
I asked, “Why should people continue to come out of their homes and pay to see and hear a live travelogue when free television, in their homes, shows them the wonders of the world for nothing? Burton Holmes had no such competition. You have. What are you doing about it?”
The heirs appeared unconcerned. Television travel films, they said, are ruined by poor prints and by the frequent advertising spiels interjected into the half-hour or hour-long programs. The true travelogue aficionado would not have his Kyoto or Taj Mahal or Matterhorn sullied by constant talk about the newest detergent or filter-tip cigarette. The true aficionado prefers the beautiful original film to the grainy print, the original with its illusion uninterrupted by grating pitchmen. Paid television, without commercials, is another thing. This, I gathered, the heirs would not try to lick but try to join. “We are following with great interest the development of pay television,” I was told. “This would seem to be the perfect answer to our problem of reaching the vast untapped audiences in smaller cities across the country.”
Well, despite these reassurances of the hearty future of the live travelogue, I found myself concerned and apprehensive. Perhaps the Burton Holmes corporate heirs are doing the best that can be done in this field in the United States. Perhaps they have tuned in to the times, and the mechanics of their filming and projection are better than in the past, and their subjects possess the fresh dimension of timeliness. Still, I suspect, in order to compete with free television presentations, the live travelogues require a single dynamic, persuasive, and colorful personality around which to build a cult. When a travelogue comes to a legitimate theater today, it is one more diversion, not an event. In the old days, when Burton Holmes appeared, it was an event, like the rare visit of the rich and wise uncle from faraway who, alone, could afford to see and do everything, and was ready to share with his poorer relatives the marvels he had enjoyed.
I miss Burton Holmes, as do his audiences, I am sure, just as we all miss Count Leo Tolstoi, Admiral Dewey, the Emperor Meiji, who peopled that other day when life was simpler and safer and the world still kept its secrets from the Many. I recall that when Burton Holmes died in 1958, Life magazine offered him a two-page pictorial obituary. There we saw the man who had been so much a part of our younger days, and was no more—Burton Holmes, Vandyke and all, immersed in a Japanese bathtub. Burton Holmes in Seoul wearing Korean traditional mourning attire, Burton Holmes dressed as a Greek soldier in Athens.
Without this Burton Holmes, I fear the travelogue will not survive this generation. And it is not the loss of Holmes himself or the expansion of television that may sound the death knell, but the contraction of the planet on which we live.
Before the Second World War, the world was still large, and its marvels—the pyramids of Egypt, the Colosseum of Rome, the Acropolis of Athens, sacred Fujiyama of Japan—were still faraway. Most men could enjoy them, and their promise of adventure and romance, only secondhand, through reading or viewing films or listening to tales spun by the travelogue lecturer. And so millions of persons paid money to escape their workaday worlds and enjoy vicariously the more exotic worlds offered by the travelogue lecturer. As a result, the Burton Holmeses flourished.
After the Second World War, most of this changed. During the war, the sons and daughters of the Burton Holmes audiences had been uprooted from their insular existence and transported to the aged cities of Europe, to the sands of Africa, to the islands of the Pacific, and they had seen these faraway places through the cynical eyes of reality. They had been where the travelogue lecturers had been, and what these young people had seen and lived was, for the majority, neither romantic nor adventurous. Disillusioned, they had returned home, and for a long time after, most of them had little patience with glossed-over narratives delivered by professionals, or with the crusted credulity of their parents who did not know better.
By the 1950’s, the faithful old audience of the travelogue lecturer was dying off. Its heirs had not been converted to this form of escapism, and the new generation appeared more interested in a do-it-yourself philosophy, since a revolution in transportation had made this possible. Members of the new generation and their growing offspring had little inclination to listen to adventures related from a platform or to do their sightseeing by watching colored celluloid, when, in little more time than it took to attend a travelogue, they could visit in person, by jet-propelled aircraft, and often at cut-rate prices, the Mosque of St. Sophia in Istanbul, the Blue Grotto on Capri, or the Parsee Towers of Silence in Bombay. The wonders of the world were suddenly accessible to anyone with a small savings account or an active credit card.
In short, I am suggesting that an international war and the turbojet, added to free television and the absence of a Big Personality, may be the graveyard of the travelogue as it was invented and popularized by Burton Holmes.
Happily, this was not to be Burton Holmes’s
graveyard. He lived long, but he died soon enough—certainly soon enough to avoid the ignominious end of fading into obscurity. Burton Holmes did not outlive his audience, and so he escaped the cruel fate of becoming an anachronism. Instead, like Nellie Bly, he became an American legend, and as a legend, if not as a corporation, he will enjoy immortality.
6
Paragon of the
Paperbacks
It is unlikely that you will find Gilbert Patten’s name in many biographical dictionaries, or serious studies of literary criticism. Yet his pen, perhaps the most prolific in the whole of American authorship, was inspired to create a character whose name became part of our living language and whose feats encouraged a great proportion of today’s eminent male Americans to strive for success.
Gilbert Patten, who rarely wrote under his own name and never received a penny in royalties for most of his 648 published books, died a half-dozen years ago, a forgotten man at seventy-eight. But the character he created lives on, immortal, for Gilbert Patten gave birth to Frank Merriwell. And it was through the fictional Frank Merriwell, exponent of the clean life and chivalrous act, master of the ninth-inning home run, that Patten made his indelible imprint on American thought and action, by influencing countless leaders who today direct and guide American life.
Christy Mathewson, Woodrow Wilson, and Babe Ruth were early and fanatic Frank Merriwell followers. O. O. Mclntyre, Al Smith, Floyd Gibbons, and Wendell Willkie worshipfully regarded Merriwell as a beacon for good, ranking behind only Church and Mother.
The Sunday Gentleman Page 16