Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings (24 page)

IS DENUDED BY

Villa Galanon, Cap d’Antibes

Summer 1928

Harpo Marx is cheery by nature. ‘I am the most fortunate self-taught harpist and non-speaking actor who has ever lived,’ he claims. But nothing has ever proved so much fun as the French Riviera in summer. ‘The living was easy in 1928. Life was mostly fun and games and the world was our private, million-dollar playground.’

Staying in the Villa Galanon with his friend from the Algonquin Circle, Alexander Woollcott, Harpo spends his days swimming, feasting, visiting the casinos and playing badminton. While they are playing badminton one afternoon, the postman cycles up the drive with a special-delivery letter. When Woollcott spots the return address, he utters a joyful little gasp, and tears it open, recalls Harpo, ‘like it was money from home’.

‘Harpo,’ he says. ‘He’s coming to have lunch with us next Wednesday. Bernard Shaw!’

‘Bernard Shaw?’ replies Harpo, who likes to make a play of his lack of education.
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‘Didn’t his name used to be Bernie Schwartz? Ran the cigar stand in the Hotel Belvedere?’

The coming of Mr and Mrs George Bernard Shaw to Villa Galanon is, in Harpo’s words, ‘Woollcott’s supreme coup of the season’. For days, Woollcott fusses about the menu he should roll out. He knows Shaw is a vegetarian, but does not know to what extent. One guest thinks Shaw would eat bacon, but Woollcott finds this hard to believe. He finally settles on an omelette with truffles, broiled tomatoes and eggplants, asparagus, artichokes, green salad, hot breads, aspics, mousses, ices, cheeses and wild strawberries with thick cream. Harpo senses that Woollcott thinks him
unsophisticated and would rather he made himself scarce until their honoured guest has been and gone.

On the Monday before Shaw’s arrival, Woollcott and his French chef spend the day deciding which wines to serve. On the Tuesday, they shuttle from the village market to the villa all day long, with load after load of groceries.

When Wednesday finally comes, Woollcott seems ‘as jittery as a girl getting ready for her first date’, and can’t decide what to wear. At last, he sets off in his car to collect the Shaws from their hotel in Antibes wearing an Italian straw hat and a linen cape. The other guests go upstairs to change, while the French chef remains down in the kitchen ‘screaming at the aspic to gell’.

Finding himself alone, Harpo walks down the cliff to a sheltered cove. He takes off his clothes, goes for a swim, and stretches out his towel on the sand in order to sunbathe. He plans to get dressed and go back up to the villa in his own time, ‘maybe in time for lunch, maybe not’.

He is dozing in the nude stretched out on his towel when he hears an Irish voice blaring from the top of the cliff, ‘Halloo! Halloo! Is there nobody home?’

Harpo wraps the towel around himself and scrambles up the rocks to see who it is. There he finds ‘a tall, skinny, red-faced old geezer with a beard, decked out in a sporty cap and a knicker suit’, with a woman at his side.

‘Where the devil’s Woollcott?’ asks the bearded man. ‘And who the devil are you?’

Harpo Marx introduces himself. The man grins.

‘Ah yes, of course. I’m Bernard Shaw.’

Shaw puts out his hand, but instead of shaking hands he makes a sudden lunge for Harpo’s towel and snatches it away, leaving Harpo ‘naked to the world’.

‘And this,’ says Shaw, ‘is Mrs Shaw.’

At this point, Woollcott arrives back, ‘wild-eyed and wringing wet with flop sweat’. He breathlessly explains that he had driven to the hotel, to find that the Shaws had not checked in. He had then gone to the railway station, where he learned that a couple answering to their description had already hired a driver to take them to Villa Galanon. He is in the midst of this long-drawn-out apology when Shaw interrupts him.

‘Nonsense, my boy,’ says Shaw. ‘We had a grand reception here. We were met by a naked jackanapes, your immodest Mr Marx. A bit shocking, but quite grand!’

The lunch goes well. It is a dazzling one-man show, with Shaw excelling himself, flinging himself in and out of doorways, performing Chaplin’s shuffle, dashing around like Douglas Fairbanks, and mounting full-scale impersonations of some of the famous characters he has known ‘from Disraeli and Lenin to Darwin and Huxley, from Gilbert and Sullivan to Liszt and Debussy, from Oscar Wilde to Henrik Ibsen’, as Harpo remembers it.

Throughout the performance, Harpo has been trying to work out whether or not Shaw is wearing a tie beneath his famous long beard. At one point, Shaw throws back his head and laughs. Harpo spots not only that he is not wearing a tie, but he has no collar either.

Shaw breaks from his anecdotes to ask him why he is staring at him so oddly.

‘I just discovered,’ says Harpo, ‘that you couldn’t have sat downstairs at Loew’s Delancey Street Theatre.’

‘What do you mean? Why not?’

‘The downstairs seats are strictly high class at Delancey Street. A man has to be wearing a tie to sit downstairs. Otherwise he must sit in the balcony.’ He explains to Shaw that the assistant manager used to stand by the entrance, lifting up each beard as it passed, saying, ‘Upstairs ... Downstairs ... Upstairs ... Downstairs ...’

Shaw replies that he would be flattered to go upstairs ‘with the sensible crowd who know what a beard is for’.

Woollcott is delighted at his bringing together George Bernard Shaw and Harpo Marx. ‘He loved playing the game of Strange Bedfellows,’ recalls Harpo. ‘“Harpo Marx and Bernard Shaw,” he used to say, with that smirking chuckle of his. “Corned beef and roses!”’
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For the Shaws’ farewell dinner at Villa Galanon, Harpo Marx adds to the game of Strange Bedfellows when he secretly invites another pair of guests. At the appointed time, in walk Peggy Hopkins Joyce, the raunchy, multi-husbanded American actress, together with Oswald Mosley.

CRASHES HIS BICYCLE INTO

Penallt, Monmouthshire

September 12th 1895

How many intellectuals does it take to crash two bicycles?

George Bernard Shaw is staying with the socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb
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at their house in Monmouthshire. Though aged twenty-nine, he is still learning to ride a bicycle, and is doing so with a recklessness at odds with his usual physical timidity. He regularly falls off at corners, simply because no one has satisfactorily convinced him of the need to lean into them. Faced with a steep downhill slope, he places his feet on the handlebars, and is then unable to steady himself when he hits a bump. Whenever he falls off his bicycle, which is often, he never admits to a mistake, behaving as though it had always been his intention.

‘Many of his falls, from which he would prance away crying “I am not hurt,” with black eyes, violet lips and a red face, acted as trials for his optimism,’ notes his biographer, Michael Holroyd. ‘The surgery afterwards was an education in itself. Each toss he took was a point scored for one or more of his fads. After one appalling smash (hills, clouds and farmhouses tumbling around drunkenly), he wrote: “Still I am not thoroughly convinced yet that I was not killed. Anybody but a vegetarian would have been. Nobody but a teetotaller would have faced a bicycle again for six months.” After four years of intrepid pedalling, he could claim: “If I had taken to the ring I should, on the whole, have suffered less than I have, physically.”’

But his incompetence on bicycles never deters him from employing them in intellectual propositions. ‘The man who is learning how to ride a bicycle has no advantage over the non-cyclist in the struggle for existence; quite the contrary,’ he writes in
Back to Methuselah
. ‘He has acquired a new
habit, an automatic unconscious habit, solely because he wanted to, and kept trying until it was added unto him. But when your son tries to skate or bicycle in his turn, he does not pick up the accomplishment where you left it, any more than he is born six feet high with a beard and a tall hat.’

The Webbs’ other house guest is the twenty-three-year-old Bertrand Russell, an up-and-coming young philosopher, recently married to the American heiress Alys Pearsall Smith. He too will, in years to come, employ the example of a bicycle in all manner of philosophical propositions. In
On Education
(1926), he argues that learning to ride a bicycle allows one to pass from fear to skill, which is, he adds, ‘a valuable experience’; in
An Outline of Philosophy
(1927), he compares the acquisition of speech to learning to ride a bicycle; and in
The Analysis of the Mind
(1921), he uses the bicycle to highlight the broad distinction between instinct and habit, observing that while every animal eats food by instinct, ‘no one can ride a bicycle by instinct, though, after learning, the necessary movements become just as automatic as if they were instinctive’.

But do they? On this bright September day, fate seems determined to prove the antithesis: that the necessary movements for riding a bicycle will always remain, for at least one of the two men, just out of reach.

The two spindly intellectuals set off on their bicycles through the rolling hills of Monmouthshire. Before long, Bertrand Russell, slightly out in front, stops his bike in the middle of the road in order to read a direction sign and work out which way they should head. Shaw whizzes towards him, fails to keep his eyes on the road, and crashes right into the stationary Russell.

Shaw is hurled through the air and lands flat on his back ‘twenty feet from the place of the collision’, in Russell’s empirical estimation. Following his normal practice, Shaw picks himself up, behaves as though nothing is wrong, and gets back on his bicycle, which is, like him, miraculously undamaged.

But for Russell, it is a different story. ‘Russell, fortunately, was not even scratched,’ Shaw tells a friend, adding mischievously, ‘But his knickerbockers were demolished.’ Russell’s bicycle is also in a frightful state, and is no longer fit to ride. Russell says of his assailant: ‘He got up completely unhurt and continued his ride. Whereas my bicycle was smashed, and I had to return by train.’

The train is extremely slow, so Shaw is easily able to outpace it. Never one to let tact get in the way of comedy, he pops up with his bicycle on the platform of every station along the way, putting his head into the carriage to jeer at Russell. ‘I suspect that he regarded the whole incident as proof of the virtues of vegetarianism,’ suggests Russell sixty years later.

Their relationship never fully recovers, though it bumbles on for half a century or so.
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Russell concludes that, ‘When I was young, we all made a show of thinking no better of ourselves than of our neighbours. Shaw found this effort wearisome, and had already given it up when he first burst upon the world. My admiration had limits ... it used to be the custom among clever people to say that Shaw was not unusually vain, but unusually candid. I came to think later on that this was a mistake.’

For Russell, the bicycle is to remain a source of sometimes uncomfortable inspiration for years to come. In the spring of 1902, he is cycling from Cambridge to Grantchester, when ‘suddenly, as I was riding along a country road, I realised that I no longer loved Alys’. He finally agrees to a divorce in 1921, threatening to commit suicide if Alys drags the name of his lover, Lady Ottoline Morrell, into the proceedings. ‘Thereupon her rage became unbearable. After she had stormed for some hours, I gave a lesson in Locke’s philosophy to her niece, Karin Costelloe, who was about to take her Tripos. I then rode away on my bicycle, and with that my first marriage came to an end.’

BUTTERS BREAD FOR

43 Hasker Street, London SW3

October 1964

Sixty-nine years later, Bertrand Russell befriends a huge white Pyrenean mountain dog which has taken to prowling past his front door in Chelsea.

The dog’s name is Addo. He is owned by Sarah Miles, the sexy young actress who lives at number 18. Addo has recently been the subject of a petition from various other residents of Hasker Street, who want to stop him roaming around unaccompanied. If his roaming continues, dog and owner may both face eviction.

Sarah thinks this most unfair. ‘If Addo had been ferocious, I would have understood, but except for lusting after cleaning fluid and window-cleaners, he’d never put a foot wrong. How could I hold up my head coming home to Addo, knowing he was chained up in a dark, smelly patio? Simply too cruel after almost two years of front-doorstep heaven.’

One morning, she looks out of her drawing-room window and notices Addo walking along the street with an old man in carpet slippers. ‘They were so deep in conversation that I thought I’d leave them to it.’ Over the course of the summer, she often spots the two of them out together. ‘Off they’d set on their meander in harmless rhythmic contemplation.’

One afternoon, opening the window, she notices the old man, still in his carpet slippers, sitting with Addo on the doorstep in the sunshine. She surmises that the old man and the dog are locked in silence, ‘as if mutually having discovered the secrets of the universe’. But the sound of the window opening breaks the spell. The old man turns round to look at her. ‘And in that instant,’ she recalls, ‘I knew he was a flirt.’

‘What a day we’re having!’ he exclaims.

‘Splendid. You and Addo certainly hit it off.’

‘We have ... how shall I put it? ... an affiliation.’

The other-worldly Sarah Miles is surely the only person in the street not to know that the old man at number 43 is the most famous philosopher in the world. Two years ago, his ninetieth birthday was celebrated with a
festschrift
with contributions from, among others, Dr Martin Luther King, Leonard Bernstein, Jawaharlal Nehru, Kenneth Kaunda, U Thant, Albert Schweitzer and David Ben-Gurion. But Sarah mixes in different circles: Robert Morley, Eric Sykes, Terry-Thomas, Flora Robson and Benny Hill are all in her next film.
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