The Pursuit of Laughter

by Diana Mitford (Mosley)

  ‘The Chief is gone, the man we all called Boss; Colossus of an age that changed the world; The galleons of his genius knew their course, his finger-tips around the cosmos curled’, wrote Nick Kenny, the Hearst papers’ poet laureate, when W.R. died. And that must be one of the most American verses ever penned in English.

  The Life and Good Times of William Randolph Hearst, Tebbel, J. (1953)

  Eleanor Roosevelt

  Born in 1884 to a family ravaged by alcoholism, Eleanor Roosevelt was an orphan when she was ten. Her father died of drink, and her maternal uncles all succumbed to the demon. Brought up by her grandmother, nobody bothered to get a clever American dentist to do something about her unfortunate teeth.

  All her relations were what Americans call aristocrats, descended from passengers in the Mayflower or a similar Dutch ship. Her father’s brother was President Theodore Roosevelt.

  Eleanor was sent to Allenswood, a school near London run by an intelligent head mistress, Mlle Souvestre. It was a positive nest of lesbians; one mistress was Lytton Strachey’s sister Dorothy who wrote Olivia by Olivia, a lesbian love story. Natalie Barney had been a pupil. Mlle Souvestre had favourites, of whom Eleanor was one, and they went all over Europe together.

  Back home, she married her distant cousin Franklin, and had to live with her detestable mother-in-law for years. With no say in running the house, she had six children and became thoroughly bored. A redoubtable prig, she longed to do good in the world but until Franklin went into politics she only joined a few ‘leagues’ and committees for this or that good cause. When she discovered he had a love affair ‘the bottom dropped out of her life’; she moped for a few months, but then rediscovered her love of feminists and civil rights enthusiasts. Roosevelt did nothing to discourage her, busy with his career. But she was mocked by her sons.

  Her good causes really were good, and she and her lesbian friends were worthy in the extreme. Two with whom she shared a cottage gradually came to consider Franklin more important than Eleanor, a sin she could never forgive. She dropped them, and went galumphing dressed in knickerbockers with two others, who had the words ‘TOUJOURS GAI’ painted on their house.

  Franklin nearly died of polio, and Eleanor nursed him devotedly, but during his long convalescence in Florida she stayed in New York, teaching at a school she bought, chairing endless committees and working as a journalist and speaker all over the country. She was careful to keep her private life out of the newspapers because of Franklin’s career.

  He was elected President in 1932 and Eleanor could hardly conceal her dismay. She loathed the idea of living in the White House as first lady, unable to dash about serving her causes. Fortunately at this juncture she fell deeply in love with a woman journalist sent by AP to cover the new President’s wife. Both ladies were about fifty; the passionate letters Eleanor wrote have survived.

  The book ends with Roosevelt’s inauguration in the depth of the slump. Banks failing, businesses bankrupt, the stability of the country was threatened.

  Seen from outside, American presidential elections are still exhausting and crazy. But as with Eleanor’s middle aged liaison, it’s their business, not ours. Written in American, this biography is instructive and occasionally comic. I look forward to the next volume.

  Eleanor Roosevelt, Cook, B.W. Evening Standard (1993)

  Hollywood

  It is highly interesting to try to discover how a cinema star of the 30s and 40s became President of the United States for eight years, succeeding finally in ending the Cold War and helping to bring about the collapse of communism. It is such an unlikely story.

  Ronald Reagan was a convinced anti-communist even when he supported ‘liberal’ causes in his youth. His history is the classic rags-to-riches so popular in America. Born in 1911 in the mid-western town of Dixon, he went to Hollywood to seek his fortune. He found it, and by the time he was 30 was a star and a box-office success.

  He worked for Warner Brothers, first generation immigrant Jews who had fled from pogroms in Russian Poland. The Warners discovered him not only as an actor who excelled in outdoor roles as the good guy, but also as a speaker and committee man who was adept at defending the motion picture industry when it was under attack, as it rather frequently was.

  The Warners were naturally very pro-war, and from 1939 urged US involvement in every way they could, making anti-German films and propaganda for recruiting, particularly in the glamorous Airforce.

  Reagan’s film career did not prosper after the war, but his politics and his anti-communism did. He knew America was now the most powerful nation on earth, and he gloried in it. Freedom and power together could, he was convinced, bring to an end the ‘evil empire’, as he called it, or Soviet Russia.

  What was his secret? Probably his touching belief in the American dream, his unquestioning conviction that America must lead the world to prosperity and freedom. He was not clever, or even ambitious, but he was certain of the righteousness of his cause and he convinced the electors. Possibly Ronald Reagan was the only completely disinterested President America has ever had.

  Vaughn’s book is far from hagiographical, and is very carefully annotated. He seems to have told everything known about Reagan’s Hollywood years. Just as the parts he played in his films were in fact himself, so when he became President he went on being Ronald Reagan. Is it possible to get to the top of the greasy pole without intrigue, or guile? It almost seems as if in this case the answer may be yes.

  With its ugly type face and garish cover the book is not a credit to the Cambridge University Press.

  Ronald Reagan in Hollywood, Vaughn, S. Evening Standard (1994)

  Paul Mellon

  This beautifully produced book is the autobiography of a man who has everything; he is very handsome, clever, perceptive, kind, enormously rich and incredibly generous.

  As in all human affairs, there have been clashing personalities to deal with, soothed and smoothed by Paul Mellon, who must occasionally have wondered why he took so much trouble and spent so much for education, science, university scholarships and similar good works. His own passions were horses, the countryside and works of art.

  Paul Mellon’s childhood was saddened by the acrimonious divorce of his parents. He and his sister lived with them both in turns. His father was a genius at money making, only taking time off to rush to Europe with Mr Frick and buy old masters. These splendid pictures were then hung in the hideous, plush-curtained rooms of his house at Pittsburgh, then a grimy, foggy centre of heavy industry. His mother, who was English, also had a house at Pittsburgh, and a garden full of flowers. Love was in short supply.

  Life only began to be enjoyable for Paul Mellon in 1925 when, aged eighteen, he went to Yale, and then to Cambridge (both showered with money later on). He loved hunting, in England and Virginia. He started breeding race horses, finally to reach the pinnacle of success with Mill Reef, which won the Derby and the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe in 1971.

  His father disapproved. He thought hunting dangerous, and racing plain silly, as everybody knows one horse can run faster than another. The aesthetic side of it (Mill Reef ‘walking like a ballet dancer’), which meant so much to Paul Mellon, passed him by.

  His father had amassed great wealth, and at President Harding’s request, he went to Washington and served as Secretary of the Treasury for eleven years. The National Gallery was his munificent gift to his country; he left it all his pictures. Paul Mellon was twice psychoanalysed, first by Jung in person, and later, in Washington, he went to a Freudian analyst, who successfully swept away the shadows of childhood.

  His wife died and he married a lady who, like him, loved pictures. They collected English eighteenth century and French impressionists, and built a new block for his father’s National Gallery, now one of the great collections of the world.

  The reader gets a strong image of Paul Mellon as a near-saint, untroubled by politics and religion, loved and loving. Even his war service, though frustrating and uncomf
ortable, he can joke about. This memoir was very well worth writing. To think of him buying miles of coast and thousands of acres to save them forever from developers, restores faith in human nature.

  Though possessing more than one lovely oasis in the ugly desert mankind is making of the planet, he unselfishly spent millions so that at least part of the United States could keep its pristine natural beauty for future generations. He sails through the eye of a needle with ease.

  Reflections in a Silver Spoon: A Memoir, Mellon, P. Evening Standard (1992)

  Leo and Gertrude Stein

  Leo and Gertrude Stein were both educated at Harvard. She planned to be a doctor but failed to graduate, and in 1901 she ‘chucked the whole thing into the waste paper basket’ and decided to be a New Woman, and change America.

  Her brother left Baltimore for Europe; he was an aesthete excited above all by the paintings of Mantegna. He came back for Gertrude and they set up house in Paris, inseparable. With enough money to live simply, they could just afford to buy pictures. Leo chose the pictures and they shared the expense. He bought Japanese prints, paintings by Cézanne, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso and Matisse. Cézanne died in 1906, and by then their flat in the rue de Fleurus was papered from floor to ceiling with masterpieces.

  Every summer they went to Tuscany, where they met the Berensons. Bernard Berenson enjoyed talking about pictures with Leo. Mary Berenson described them: ‘a fearful apparition, a round waddling mass and a tall blaze of bright brown beside it. These queer things turned out to be Gertrude Stein and her brother, she fatter than ever (but fairly clean). They simply hurt one’s eyes.’ Another friend of Gertrude’s wrote: ‘she rather got on my nerves by her habit of not bathing and wearing the same clothes all the time’.

  Gertrude, in Baltimore, Paris or Tuscany, was surrounded by a group of American friends whom she harnessed to her chariot, Lesbians who worked hard to get her books published. She wrote the whole time; her cupboards were stuffed with MSS returned by unwilling publishers. Sometimes the friends went too far, suggesting she might be less repetitious, or do some cutting or re-writing. She angrily rejected advice: convinced she was a genius there was to be no compromise.

  Meanwhile Leo had a block and could not write at all. He took to painting, but was dissatisfied with the result, unlike his sister who loved her own work. He talked brilliantly to visitors when he showed his collection, but he worried about his health and digestion.

  Alice Toklas came to Paris from California, and after a while moved into the rue de Fleurus. She typed, worshipped, did the housework and remained Gertrude’s devoted slave for thirty five years. Leo was quite pleased to have her there, she took his sister off his hands after a lifetime together. He was attached to Nina of Montparnasse, a failed singer and fille de joie [prostitute] whom he loved and who loved him.

  The catalyst of the Steins’ separation seems to have been Picasso. Leo had bought his work for years, but after Les Demoiselles d’Avignon he never bought again. When Leo and Gertrude parted they divided the treasures without much quarrelling, and thenceforth Gertrude bought Picasso and Francis Rose. Leo went to Tuscany with fifteen Renoirs and Cézanne’s apples, and hung them in a villa he owned. He also had his Picasso drawings.

  Gertrude’s breakthrough to fame and fortune came after an exhibition of post-impressionist art in New York. In London a sensation, in New York it was a cultural earthquake. Nobody dared admit to being puzzled or startled, and Gertrude Stein was the woman who knew the wild men from Paris and had been their friend and collector for years. The woman who had been painted by Picasso, and whose prose, like his painting, might be difficult but must be admired. Her novels and stories and Portraits found publishers, her books were in every drawing-room, her lecture tour a sell-out.

  The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, written in ordinary prose which everyone could understand, was a bestseller. In it she pretended it was she who recognized the greatness of the post-impressionists at the beginning of the century. Leo was never mentioned.

  Gertrude died one year before Leo. They had never spoken since they parted; she and Alice lived through the second war in France, Leo and Nina survived in Italy. At the end he wrote the book on aesthetics he had wanted to write all his life. It was a great success. But he had committed the unforgivable treachery. He had implied that the emperor might have no clothes.

  Brenda Wineapple has told the story of the Stein siblings in fascinating detail. She admires Gertrude’s inexorable will, and understands her desire for fame. As to Leo, at last given his due, he charms the reader.

  Sister and Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein, Wineapple, B. Evening Standard (1996)

  Harriet Beecher Stowe

  The author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was born in 1811 and lived to be 85. Her collected works filled twenty five volumes, but most people would be hard put to it to name more than one. She kept her family in relative affluence with her writings.

  Her father, husband and brothers were all nonconformist clergymen, pillars of temperance, scourges of the infidels, though their fiercest hatred was reserved for the Scarlet Beast (sic) of Rome and popery. The whole family moved from New England to the Middle West to do God’s work there, and come to grips with this dread opponent, flooding into America: the Irish escaping the potato famine and Poles fleeing Russian persecution.

  Cincinnati in Ohio was the hog capital of America. Thousands of hogs were herded in daily from the countryside to the abattoirs, eating the garbage in the streets (there were no drains) making an indescribable mess and stink, and polluting the Ohio River. A quarter of a million a year were ‘processed’ and sent in river boats all over the US.

  It was to this hell on earth that the Beecher clergymen came to preach about the other hell, awaiting everyone but the strictest Calvinist after death.

  Harriet Beecher married a Mr Calvin Stowe, and henceforward is called by the author ‘Stowe’, which is fashionable but apt to lead to muddle unless Stowe himself is to be known as Calvin, which he often is. It is by way of being demeaning for a woman to be called by her first name, but if not Harriet, ‘Beecher’ might have been a better choice since it was her own name.

  Poor Harriet, or Stowe, had an appalling life with Calvin. Frequent pregnancies and miscarriages were her lot, as well as dire poverty. Calvin was a learned theologian earning very little, and scolding when his children made a noise. Stowe never felt well, and the prescriptions of her ignorant doctor made her worse. She supplemented their meagre income by writing homely little notes and sketches for magazines. Sometimes she taught in a school run by her unmarried sister, and she planned to write a manual on how to bring up Christian children. Luckily she postponed this venture until her seven were grown up, because as it turned out one was an alcoholic, one a morphine addict, and her twin girls frivolous spinsters. Her favourite baby died of cholera, which not surprisingly swept through filthy Cincinnati like the black death. Not allowed wine, the family had only dirty water to drink. After years enduring these miseries, and having failed to wean the Catholics from their errors, the family moved back to the healthy East.

  Cincinnati was a frontier town, divided from Kentucky, a slave-owning state, by the broad Ohio. Stowe heard many lurid tales from escaping slaves, who were free once they managed to get across the river. In 1850 a new law was enacted making it a crime to harbour a runaway slave, who must be handed back to the owner. This outraged not only the growing number of abolitionists, but all right-thinking people like Stowe. In furious protest she wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, became a world celebrity and made a large fortune. The book was translated into every language, and if it has now dwindled from a long Victorian novel to a short book for children, nevertheless everyone knows the story of dear old Uncle Tom, angelic Eva and cruel McGree. She followed it up with A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, giving authentic accounts of slavery so that no one could say she had made it all up. Stowe had, in fact, never been to the Deep South when she wrote Uncle Tom.

  Stow
e and her family went to Europe and she was lionized by prominent liberals like Lord Shaftesbury and Lord Carlisle. Back in America she built herself two houses and gave her girls silk dresses. She had to keep on writing—her family was big and demanding.

  Harrowed by the Civil War, in which half a million died, Stowe was received at the White House by Abraham Lincoln, who called her the little woman who had made the great war. Undoubtedly her book affected people deeply, though perhaps according to modern ideas she was not quite sound on class, gender, or even race.

  Joan Hedrick has made the very most of Stowe and her entourage, their sufferings and their triumphs. If anyone wishes to know about them, this is the book to read.

  Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life, Hedrick, J. Evening Standard (1994)

  Henrik Ibsen

  When Ibsen’s father lost all his money he sent Henrik away from home to work as a chemist’s assistant. Henrik earned a tiny wage and shared a bedroom. Only in the shop, between customers, was he alone for a few moments. Yet he studied, borrowing books.

  He fathered an illegitimate son and had to pay maintenance to the mother from his minute salary. Ibsen knew real poverty, even hunger, and was threatened with prison if he fell behind with the payments. He dreaded the scandal. He took Latin lessons given in the shop at odd times. He, who so loved solitude, could never be alone except for long walks on Sundays.