My Ears Are Bent (26 page)

REPORTER:
I would like to tell you I think that isn’t true.

SHAW:
I am very amazed at your state of innocence.

REPORTER:
What is your opinion of Henry L. Mencken?

SHAW:
Mr. Mencken seems to have unusual intelligence for an American.

REPORTER:
What do you think about Hitler?

SHAW:
When a man opens his career as a politician with a persecution of the Jews, he is like an army
officer starting his career cheating at cards. By the way, I understand you people tried to persecute the Catholics. Tell us, does the Ku Klux Klan still exist?

No one replied.

SHAW:
Sometimes I stand amazed at the American people and wonder what will happen to them.

REPORTER:
Do you think there is any hope of us changing?

SHAW:
You better ask the Almighty about that.

REPORTER:
I didn’t know you had relations with the Almighty, Mr. Shaw.

SHAW:
No, but the American people have.

REPORTER:
Can you tell us one useful thing that your thirty volumes of plays have accomplished?

SHAW:
All of them must have been some use to somebody.

REPORTER:
Where do you think you will go when you die, Mr. Shaw?

SHAW:
I sincerely hope when I die it will be the end of me. Do you think I am entertaining an eternity of George Bernard Shaw? How do you like the idea?

No one had an opinion.

REPORTER:
What would you care to do or to see in New York if you stayed a little longer?

SHAW:
Get out of it.

REPORTER:
Do you enjoy making insulting remarks?

SHAW:
Now, look here. If I say to an American, “You’ve got a hat on,” he runs up and says, “See here, what do you mean saying I have a hat on?”

REPORTER:
Do you think any of your plays will live a century?

SHAW:
You never can tell about that. I’ve always said the sooner a reputation is done with the better. So long as the royalties last I will be satisfied.

WOMAN
REPORTER:
Would you like to go to the zoo, Mr. Shaw?

SHAW:
I have a horror of the zoo. If I went to the zoo I would let out all the animals.

REPORTER:
What do you think the next civilization will be?

SHAW:
For all we know, the next civilization may be Negro.

REPORTER:
Do you find humanity as stupid as you did when you were young?

SHAW:
I look at the children leaving the school-houses. They seem to be the same old lot. I’m disappointed.

Thomas W. Lamont, who had heard Mr. Shaw say in his Opera House address that all financiers were 95 percent insane, accompanied Mr. Shaw to the boat in his automobile.

SHAW:
His feelings didn’t seem to be hurt.

REPORTER:
What do you think of Eugene O’Neill?

SHAW:
I didn’t come here to say anything about my colleagues.

While reporters kept asking questions, Mr. Shaw reached into his pocket, brought out a watch, and said:

“I am through now. I have an appointment with my lawyer and my publisher.”

He was sidetracked. Almost before he realized it, he found himself in the main lounge facing a battery of sound and still cameras. A dozen flashlight bulbs exploded at once. He stamped on the floor, raised his voice. “You mustn’t suddenly explode them like that,” he shouted. “And these microphones must be taken away.”

He saw a newsreel man talking with Archibald Henderson. He went over and broke up the conversation.

“Now listen here,” he said, “you are trying to get Mr. Henderson to welcome me to America again or some such silly thing, and I won’t have it. Move those microphones out of here!”

Suddenly Mr. Shaw wheeled around and faced the microphones. He grabbed two of them and hauled them aside. One fell over and upset a long line of wires. In another part of the room a machine began clicking.

“Will you please stop that microphone!” he yelled. “What’s that noise over there?”

“That’s a sound camera, chief,” said a cameraman. “It’s all right.”

Mr. Shaw expressed disapproval of the chairs in which he and Professor Henderson were asked to sit. The Professor began moving them off the floor.

“He wants you to walk up and I will get out of a chair and shake hands with you,” said Mr. Shaw. “What nonsense! I won’t do it. What are those for, those things over there? Are they microphones? All right, I’m leaving.”

He left the floor hurriedly. Professor Henderson followed, trying to persuade him to return.

“Hell, I told Queen Marie to pull up her dress,” said a cameraman. “This guy doesn’t bother me. If he wants to come back, O.K. If he doesn’t, let him stay in his hole.”

Before Shaw got into his stateroom a woman reporter stopped him, asked a question about the Scottsboro case.

“Blow the Scottsboro boys!” he shouted, slamming the door. “I didn’t come here to interfere with your silly laws.”

Mr. Shaw called the American Constitution “a charter of anarchy” in his speech last night.

“I meant just that,” he said today. “It should be set aside. It is merely an accumulation of efforts on the part of a people to escape governing themselves. I realize that in this world it is a difficult matter to be
free. I want to be free, but I can’t be free the whole time. If we cannot have complete freedom, we can have it within limits and escape the present tyranny of laws no one wants.”

Mr. Shaw, turning to another phase of the speech last night, said, “I did not mention William Jennings Bryan to illustrate the perfect example of a 100 percent American. He was a magnificent man, an enormous man who spent his life on the issue of silver, which he thought would change the world and improve the entire human race. I did not mention him, but I might readily have done so.”

Mr. Shaw pretended he could not understand American interest in him.

“Why, for instance,” he asked, “are you all around me here? It is admiration of a sort, but why? If you had read my books I could understand it, but few people who say they admire me have read my books or know anything about me except what they read in the newspapers.

“I am interested in this abstract longing, your sense of admiration, and only wish that it could be turned into a direction that were sensible. Perhaps I should say that you people are filled with unemployed emotions.”

It was suggested his books were widely read.

“What?” Shaw replied. “You have not met nonreaders
of Shaw books who admire Shaw? Then you have met the wrong people. There are stacks of people whose eyes fill with tears when you mention Bernard Shaw.”

Mr. Shaw told Lawrence Langner, of the board of managers of the Theatre Guild, which has produced many Shaw plays, that he had other plays in contemplation. Mr. Langner, his wife, Armina Marshall, Robert Lorraine and the Princess Kropotkin were Shaw’s breakfast guests aboard ship.

Only six persons grew tired and left last night as Shaw stood behind a great basket of flowers on the stage of the Opera House and spoke 16,000 critical words in 100 minutes. He was applauded vigorously as he berated almost every American institution. The audience displayed more laughter than applause when he said America might possibly save the world.

Mr. Shaw declared that President Roosevelt’s four years, “if he has to go on under the Constitution with the usual rotten Congress and all the rest of it,” will inevitably be as great a disappointment as Mr. Hoover’s administration.

He said the smallest smattering of the knowledge of political science would teach us that the first thing to do to get out of the present mess is to nationalize banks.

George Bernard Shaw, who hates birthdays almost as much as he hates beef, beer, tobacco smoke and Americans, will be eighty tomorrow, but it is doubtful if he will celebrate the occasion because, as he once told a reporter, “public interest in me depends on things I can do that nobody else can, and anybody can have a birthday.”

The celebrated vegetarian, playwright and wise-cracker is in sound health except for an occasional cold, according to one of his American representatives, Howard C. Lewis of Dodd, Mead & Company. And to judge from one of his letters, an explosive letter which Mr. Lewis decided to make public today, Mr. Shaw still is in possession of the acrid wit which has made him one of the firebrands of English letters.

The letter has to do with sections of the contract between the publishers and Mr. Shaw concerning school editions, anthology reprints and fees for producing his plays.

“I will have nothing to do with schools and colleges at any price; no book of mine shall, with my consent, ever be that damnable thing, a schoolbook,” wrote Mr. Shaw. “Let them buy the dollar editions if they want them. By a school edition they mean an edition with notes and prefaces full of material for
such questions as, ‘Give the age of Bernard Shaw’s great-aunt when he wrote “You Never Can Tell” and state the reason for believing that the inscription on her tomb at Ballyhooly is incorrect.’ The experienced students read the notes and prefaces and not the plays and forever after loathe my very name.”

Mr. Shaw wrote that when he is asked for permission to include one of his plays in an anthology, “it is my custom to blackmail the publisher to the extent of a donation to the Society of Authors or the Authors’ League of America.”

He said amateur fees (for producing his plays) were hardly worth collecting and that he was in the habit of allowing little theaters professional fees (5 percent on the gross receipts when they do not exceed $250), “providing they constitute themselves permanently and keep all the money they make in the concern, instead of giving it away to charities, or else getting drunk with it in the regular professional way.”

Mr. Shaw also had several personal things to say in discussing the length of his agreement with the publishing house.

“The limit of five years probably will be quite forgotten by us, as the agreement goes on automatically to all eternity if we are satisfied with it,” he wrote. “But if Frank [Frank Dodd, president of Dodd, Mead] goes mad, and Edward [Edward Dodd, chairman of the board] and Chase [Arthur Chase, treasurer]
are hanged, and Lewis takes to publishing pornographic literature and is Comstocked for it, how am I to get out unless I can break at six months’ notice? Besides, you may want to get rid of me in case I become too infamous for any respectable publisher to touch me.”

Mr. Lewis said that, on the eve of the playwright’s eightieth birthday, he would like to make an attempt to eradicate the impression, widespread in the United States, that Mr. Shaw is “mercenary, dollar-mad and penny-pinching.”

“I hope he will have an extremely pleasant birthday,” said Mr. Lewis, “because I admire him. In 1933 I went to London to ask him to change publishers, to change from Brentano’s to Dodd, Mead. I went to see him at his home, 4 Whitehall Court, and he got to talking. We talked for hours about Russia, about foreign sections in New York, about the Comstock laws, and things as disparate as that. Finally his secretary rushed in and said I would have to go. Shaw told me to come back the next day.

“The next visit the same thing happened. Shaw talked and talked and we never got around to the business of changing publishers and writing out a contract. Just before I left Shaw said, ‘Well, we haven’t had time to talk about the contract, but I’ll tell you what I’ll do, I’ll write one out tonight and send it to
you.’ The next morning a messenger arrived at my hotel, the Savoy, with the contract.

“It was in his handwriting and it was an absolutely satisfactory and fair arrangement. It was the fairest contract I ever saw and as legal as any lawyer could make it. It was a complicated contract, because the matter was involved, but he made it clear as water. I had heard that Shaw was mercenary, and I was surprised at the absolute fairness of the paper. With it was a note asking me to send him a copy of the contract when I got back to the United States. When an author, especially one with the reputation for shrewdness that Shaw has, trusts a publisher to that extent, it is news.”

Since his seventy-ninth birthday Mr. Shaw has uttered a few more of his customarily straightforward pronouncements. Informed of the death of Robert Loraine, the famous British actor, he said, “I cannot sympathize about his death because I am going to die myself shortly.” The biggest ruction he stirred up during the year involved a postcard he wrote to the Children’s Aid Society of London, which had asked him to support one of their charities. (Mr. Shaw’s attitude toward charity is unbending; he describes it as “a pernicious evasion of public duty.”)

“As the world at present is not fit for children to live in,” Mr. Shaw scribbled on the back of the postcard, “
why not give the little invalids a gorgeous party and then, when they have eaten and danced themselves to sleep, turn on the gas and let them all wake up in heaven?”

Judging from this polite missive, the cranky vegetarian is not getting to be a softy in his old age.

Night and day in a hot soundproof room in the Brunswick Building, Gene Krupa is whacking a new band of swing musicians in shape for a tour. Gene Krupa is a skinny, shambling young man with long fingers and the grin of a happy maniac, who began messing with a trap drum while jerking soda in a “dime-grind” resort on a river outside Madison, Wisconsin, and is now, fourteen summers later, considered the best drummer in the world. He left Benny Goodman a few weeks ago and organized a band of his own, selecting his men from bands all over.

“I got certain ideas about music I couldn’t carry out with Goodman,” said Mr. Krupa. “I wanted to go further. There was an expedition to Africa that made some recordings of drummers in the Congo jungle, and I got hold of them, twelve sides of them, and I’ve been studying them. Those boys know how to drum. They tell me I know something about beating a drum, and I guess I do, but those boys can sure handle a
drum. I want to get some of that stuff, that genuine African drumming, into my band. Right out of the jungle, you might say.”