My Autobiography (52 page)

After lunch I was taken to the Elysée and there made a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur.

*

I shall not describe the wild enthusiasm of multitudinous crowds that attended my second arrival in Berlin – although the temptation is almost irresistible.

Apropos of this I am reminded of Mary and Douglas showing a film record of their trip abroad. I was all prepared to enjoy an interesting travelogue. The film started with Mary and Doug’s arrival in London with enormous enthusiastic crowds at the station and enormous enthusiastic crowds outside the hotel, then their arrival in Paris with even more enormous crowds. After being shown the exterior of hotels and railroad stations of London, Paris, Moscow, Vienna and Budapest, I innocently asked: ‘When are we going to see a little of the town and country?’ They both laughed. I confess I have not been overly modest in describing my own welcoming crowds.

In Berlin I was the guest of the democratic government, and Countess York, a very attractive German girl, was assigned my attaché, as it were. It was 1931, soon after the Nazis had emerged as a power in the Reichstag, and I was not aware that half the Press was against me, objecting that I was a foreigner and that the Germans were making themselves ridiculous by such a fanatical demonstration. Of course that was the Nazi Press, and I was innocently oblivious of all this, and had a wonderful time.

A cousin of the Kaiser kindly conducted me around Potsdam and Sans Souci. To me all palaces are preposterous, a tasteless, dreary expression of ostentation. In spite of their historic interest, when I think of Versailles, the Kremlin, Potsdam, Buckingham Palace, and the rest of those mausoleums, I realize what pompous egos must have created them. The cousin of the Kaiser told me that Sans Souci was in better taste, small and more human; but to me it had the feeling of a vanity case and left me cold.

Frightening and depressing was my visit to the Berlin Police Museum – photographs of murder victims, suicides, degenerates and human abnormalities of every kind. I was thankful to leave the building and to breathe the fresh air again.

Dr von Fulmuller, author of
The Miracle
, entertained me at
his house, where I met German representatives of the arts and the theatre. Another evening I spent with the Einsteins in their small apartment. Arrangements were made for me to dine with General von Hindenburg, but at the last moment he was indisposed, so I went to the South of France again.

*

Elsewhere I have said that sex will be mentioned but not stressed, as I can add nothing new to the subject. However, procreation is nature’s principal occupation, and every man, whether he be young or old, when meeting every woman measures the potentiality of sex between them. Thus it has always been with me.

During work, women never interested me; it was only between pictures, when I had nothing to do, that I was vulnerable. As H. G. Wells said: ‘There comes a moment in the day when you have written your pages in the morning, attended to your correspondence in the afternoon, and have nothing further to do. Then comes that hour when you are bored; that’s the time for sex.’

So, having nothing to do on the Côte d’Azur, I had the good fortune to be introduced to a very charming girl who had all the requisites to alleviate that blue hour of boredom. She was footloose like myself and we accepted each other at face value. She confided in me that she had just recovered from an unhappy love affair with a young Egyptian. Our relationship, though not discussed, was understood; she knew that eventually I would return to America. I gave her a weekly allowance and together we went the rounds of casinos, restaurants and galas. We dined and tangoed and did all the usual foru-foru. But propinquity caught me in the meshes of her charm and the inevitable happened, my emotions became involved; and thinking about returning to America, I was not too sure about leaving her behind. The mere thought of leaving her excited my pity; she was gay, charming and sympathetic. Nevertheless, there were occasions that provoked my mistrust.

One afternoon at a
thé dansant
at the casino, she suddenly clutched by hand. There was ‘S—’, her Egyptian lover, whom she had told me so much about. I was nettled; however, a few moments later we left. As we neared the hotel, she suddenly discovered that she had left her gloves behind and must go back for
them, telling me to go on ahead. Her excuse was too obvious. I put up no resistance and made no comment but went on to the hotel. When she had not returned after two hours, I came to the conclusion that there was more than a pair of gloves involved. That evening I had invited some friends for dinner, and when the time drew near she was still missing. As I was about to leave the room without her, she showed up, looking pale and dishevelled.

‘You’ve left it too late for dinner,’ I said, ‘so you’d better go back to your nice warm bed.’

She denied, pleaded, implored, but could give no plausible excuse for being absent so long. I was convinced that she had been with her Egyptian lover, and after a tirade of invectives I went off without her.

Who has not sat talking above the noise of sobbing saxophones and the humdrum and clatter of a night-club, depressed with sudden loneliness? You sit with others, acting the host, but you are inwardly tormented. When I returned to the hotel she was not there. This threw me into a panić. Had she gone already? So quickly! I went into her bedroom and to my great relief her clothes and other things were still there. She came in ten minutes later, bright and cheerful, and said she had been to a movie. Coldly I told her that as I was leaving for Paris the next day, I would settle up my accounts with her and this was definitely the end. To all this she acquiesced, but still denied having been with her Egyptian lover.

‘Whatever friendship there’s left,’ I said, ‘you kill it by keeping up this deception.’ Then I lied and told her that I had had her followed and that she had left the casino and had gone with her Egyptian friend to his hotel. To my surprise she broke down and confessed it was true, and made vows and promises that she would never see him again.

The following morning while I was packing and getting ready to leave, she began quietly to weep. I was going in the car of a friend who came up to announce that everything was ready and that he would be waiting downstairs. She bit her index finger and now began weeping bitterly. ‘Please don’t leave me, please don’t – don’t.’

‘What do you expect me to do?’ I asked coldly.

‘Just let me go with you as far as Paris; after that I promise never to bother you again,’ she replied.

She looked such an object of pity that I weakened. I warned her that it would be an unhappy journey and that it did not make sense, because the moment we arrived in Paris we would separate. She agreed to everything. That morning the three of us left for Paris in my friend’s car.

It started out a solemn journey, she quiet and subdued, I cold and polite. But this attitude was difficult to keep up, for as we travelled along something of mutual interest would catch our eye, and one of us would comment. But it was all outside of our previous intimacy.

We drove directly to her hotel, then said good-bye. Her pretence that this was her final farewell was pitifully transparent. She thanked me for all I had done for her, shook my hand and with a dramatic good-bye disappeared into the hotel.

The next day she rang up and asked if I would take her to lunch. I refused. But as my friend and I left the hotel, there she was outside all dressed in furs and what-have-you. So the three of us had lunch together and afterwards visited Malmaison, where Josephine had lived and died after Napoleon had divorced her. It was a beautiful house, in which Josephine had shed many tears; a bleak autumn day befitted the melancholy of our situation. Suddenly I missed my lady friend; then I found her in the garden sitting on a stone seat dissolved in tears – imbued, it seemed, with the spirit of the whole atmosphere. My heart would have relented had I allowed it, but I could not forget her Egyptian lover. So we parted in Paris and I left for London.

*

Back in London I saw the Prince of Wales several times. The first time I had met him was in Biarritz through a friend of mine, Lady Furness. Cochet, the tennis player, two others and myself were at a popular restaurant when the Prince and Lady Furness came in. Thelma sent a message over to our table asking if we would join them later at the Russian Club.

It was a perfunctory meeting, I thought. After we were introduced, his Royal Highness ordered drinks, then got up and danced with Lady Furness. When he came back to the table, the
Prince sat down beside me and began to catechize: ‘You are an American, of course?’ he remarked.

‘No, I’m English.’

He looked surprised. ‘How long have you been in the States?’

‘Since 1910.’

‘Oh.’ He nodded thoughtfully. ‘Before the war?’

‘I think so.’

He laughed.

In the course of conversation that night I said that Chaliapin was giving a party for me. Quite boyishly the Prince remarked that he would like to come along. ‘I am sure, Sir,’ I said, ‘Chaliapin would be honoured and delighted,’ and I asked permission to arrange it.

The Prince won my esteem that evening by sitting with Chaliapin’s mother, who was in her late eighties, until she retired. Then he joined the rest of us and had fun.

And now the Prince of Wales was in London and had invited me down to Fort Belvedere, his house in the country. It was an old castle that had been renovated and furnished in rather ordinary taste, but the cuisine was excellent and the Prince a charming host. He showed me over the house; his bedroom was simple and naïve with a modern red silk tapestry with the royal ensign at the head of his bed. Another bedroom quite bowled me over, a pink and white affair with a four-poster bed that had three pink feathers at the top of each post. Then I remembered; of course, the feathers were the Prince’s royal coat of arms.

Someone that evening introduced a game that was prevalent in America, called ‘Frank Estimations’. The guests were each given a card with ten qualifications on it: charm, intelligence, personality, sex appeal, good looks, sincerity, sense of humour, adaptability, and so forth. A guest left the room and marked up his card with a frank estimation of his own qualifications, giving himself from one to the maximum of ten – for instance, I gave myself seven for a sense of humour, six for sex appeal, six for good looks, eight for adaptability, four for sincerity. Meanwhile, each guest gave an appraisal of the victim who had left the room, marking his card secretly. Then the victim entered and read off the marks he had given himself, and a spokesman read aloud the cards of the guests to see how they tallied.

When the Prince’s turn came he announced three for sex appeal, the guests averaged him four, I gave him five, some cards read only two. For good looks, the Prince gave himself six, the guests averaged him eight, and I marked him seven. For charm he announced five, the guests gave him eight, and I gave him eight. For sincerity the Prince announced the limit, ten, the guests averaged him three and a half, I gave him four. The Prince was indignant. ‘Sincerity is the most important qualification I think I have,’ he said.

As a boy I had once lived in Manchester for several months. And now that I had little to do, I thought I would run up there and look around. In spite of its grimness, Manchester had a romantic appeal to me, something of an intangible glow through fog and rain; perhaps it was the memory of a Lancashire kitchen fire – or it was in the spirit of the people. So I hired a limousine and went north.

On the way to Manchester I stopped at Stratford-on-Avon, a place I had never visited. I arrived late Saturday night, and after supper took a walk, hoping to find Shakespeare’s cottage. The night was pitch-black but I instinctively turned down a street and stopped outside a house, lit a match and saw a sign: ‘Shakespeare’s Cottage’. No doubt a kindred spirit had led the way – possibly the Bard!

In the morning Sir Archibald Flower, the Mayor of Stratford, called at the hotel and conducted me over Shakespeare’s cottage. I can by no means associate the Bard with it; that such a mind ever dwelt or had its beginnings there, seems incredible. It is easy to imagine a farmer’s boy emigrating to London and becoming a successful actor and theatre-owner; but for him to have become the great poet and dramatist, and to have had such knowledge of foreign courts, cardinals and kings, is inconceivable to me. I am not concerned with who wrote the works of Shakespeare, whether Bacon, Southampton or Richmond, but I can hardly think it was the Stratford boy. Whoever wrote them had an aristocratic attitude. His utter disregard for grammar could only have been the attitude of a princely, gifted mind. And after seeing the cottage and hearing the scant bits of local information concerning his desultory boyhood, his indifferent school record, his poaching and his country bumpkin point of view, I cannot believe he went
through such a mental metamorphosis as to become the greatest of all poets. In the work of the greatest of geniuses humble beginnings will reveal themselves somewhere – but one cannot trace the slightest sign of them in Shakespeare.

From Stratford I motored up to Manchester and arrived about three in the afternoon. It was Sunday and Manchester was cataleptic; hardly a soul stirred on the streets. So I was happy to get back to the car and be on my way to Blackburn.

When touring as a boy in
Sherlock Holmes
, Blackburn had been one of my favourite towns. I used to stay at a little pub there for fourteen shillings a week, board and lodging, and in the off hours play on their small billiard-table. Billington, England’s hangman, used to frequent the place and it was my boast that I had played billiards with him.

Although it was only five o’clock and quite dark when we arrived in Blackburn, I found my pub and had a drink there unrecognized. The ownership had changed hands, but my old friend the billiard-table was still there.

Later I groped my way to the market square, about three acres of blackness which could not have been lit by more than three or four street-lamps. Several groups were listening to political speakers. At the time it was the depth of England’s depression. I walked from one group to another, listening to the various speeches: some were sharp and bitter; one talked of socialism, another of Communism and another of the Douglas Plan, which, unfortunately, was too involved for the average worker to understand. Listening to the smaller groups that formed after the meeting, I was surprised to find an old Victorian conservative airing his views. Said he: ‘The trouble is that England has been living off our own fat too long; the dole is ruining England!’ In the dark I could not resist my twopence worth, so I piped in: ‘Without the dole there’d be no England,’ and I was supported by a few ‘hear, hears!’