Did You Really Shoot the Television? (6 page)

There is an exchange in
The New Sin
where one character says to another, who is a playwright: ‘Bah! Your plays are just prostitution.’ The playwright answers: ‘I’m not proud of them, but I’m proud of the fact that I can sell them.’ Basil was a professional, wholly unembarrassed that he wrote for money. At his first meeting with Conrad to discuss collaboration, he said frankly: ‘There are not two forms for a work of art. This thing is only worth doing for the money there may be in it. If you are rich, it would be absurd for you to agree.’ In truth, Conrad was anything but rich – at that time, his income was smaller than Basil’s. But the playwright minded about the money much more than did the novelist. Having experienced middle-class poverty after his father Edward’s death, Basil was determined to cling to the place he had won for himself, significantly higher up the economic and social scale than that of his nineteenth-century forebears.

Hanky-Panky John
, a farce of his creation, achieved a modest success in 1921, but by that date he was earning much of his income as a dramatic critic and journalist, mostly for the
Daily
and
Sunday Express
. The tenor of his essays is well captured in a sample from the index to one of his published collections,
Ladies Half-Way
: ‘Actresses, insulted; Americans, affectionate; Bennett, A., prostrate; Carnations, eating; Conrad, letter from; Crocodiles, kinder to; Eggs, awkward with’. Basil was a humorous columnist whose pieces about – for instance – the merits of cocktails and changing women’s hairstyles would fit as readily into the feature pages of a modern newspaper as they did into those of the 1920s. At that time also, he published a bad novel entitled
The Faithful Philanderer
, but we should not hold that against him.

I am a shade doubtful about the quality of Basil’s judgement. He opposed the mooted creation of a National Theatre, on the grounds that such an institution would encourage endless productions of Shakespeare, an author whom he thought better read than performed: ‘All the world’s worst actors, the offspring of what is known as Shakespearean experience, would flock to the stage door.’ When he was theatre reviewer of the
Daily Express
, he incurred the wrath of Arnold Bennett, a director of the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith. Basil
dismissed a Chekhov production at the Lyric as ‘fatuous drivel’, and described its author as ‘a great writer of stories, but a paltry dramatist’. In similar vein, Basil listened to some 1926 radio broadcasts by Winston Churchill, then commented: ‘I hope political hopefuls do not listen in when Mr Churchill broadcasts. He speaks clearly and powerfully, and every word, I am sure, could be heard in Tattersall’s in the five minutes before the start of a big race, but his pauses between sentences – and even between words – suggest an Olympian contempt for the value of time. How often must listeners have shouted out the word he was groping for!’

Yet Basil’s verdicts were perhaps no worse advised than those of many newspaper pundits of the past century, including others named Hastings. He understood that a good columnist must be a professional controversialist, seeking to tease and provoke. At home as well as in print, though essentially benign, he liked to play the part of the irascible grumbler. At Christmas, he hung a sign in the hall of the family house in Holland Road, West London, proclaiming ‘Peace and goodwill to all men, with the following exceptions:’. He appended a pencil, with which visitors were invited to make their own additions to his list.

In that clubbable age, he loved the Savage, whose members were almost all writers, painters, actors, musical hall stars. He was a regular performer, sometimes producer, at the club’s smoking concerts. Poems were recited, songs sung, turns rehearsed by some of the great comics of the day, including George Robey and Wee Georgie Wood – who lived long enough for me to be introduced to him at the Savage. Though Basil was a Londoner by upbringing and instincts, he professed a devotion for rural life, which caused him to rent a country cottage, tend his vegetable garden, and enthuse about the superiority of Sussex pubs to London ones. He organised a regular Savage ‘Country Members’ Night’, at which his friends dressed in yokels’ smocks and sang jolly rustic songs. Keenly gregarious, Basil was never happier than when chattering in the club bar with a cluster of theatrical friends

He never made a fortune, but achieved a comfortable living by
the standards of the day. His account books, meticulously kept by his wife Billie, who also typed his manuscripts, show him earning £1,333 in 1912; £870 in 1914; £815 in 1915; £1,100 in 1916. In 1922, his most successful year, largely because of back royalties, he received £2,550. It is interesting to notice the scale of payments for journalism at the period. In 1905, Basil received a guinea apiece for occasional contributions to newspapers; by 1915 this had risen to seven guineas a time from the
Evening Standard
and four guineas from
Punch
. His books earned tiny sums, and theatrical royalties were never large, but he was well paid for
Victory
.

His 1923 adaptation of A.S.M. Hutchinson’s novel
If Winter Comes
failed in London, but Basil cherished high hopes for its New York production. For its opening, he crossed the Atlantic on the
Aquitania
, which he adored, as he did the play’s star, Cyril Maude. From the ship, he wrote to his wife full of hopes:

26 March 1923

Adorable Bill,

No, I’m not a bit worried about the London failure. They are cowardly and incompetent and one can only pity them. The play is a great success in Australia. Sir George Tallis cables: ‘Winter opened splendidly. Excellent performances. Prospects good. Think undoubted success.’

We shall succeed here, don’t you worry. How I will fondle you when I come home. I almost reel when I think of pressing your hair to my face. Billie, I love you, I love you. If you don’t spend
at least £10 on yourself, I shall be angry
. Everything you have on when I come home must be new to me…There is a certain amount of dancing every night, but the ship rolls too much for it to be enjoyable. Maude is splendid company. I have had the entire story of his past life, as I fancied I would, not to mention complete details about all his family…Cyril is very perturbed as to whether to be a bad man for the rest of his life or very religious. I have persuaded him to be very religious. We lunch today with Lord Chichester in the Ritz Carlton restaurant. His name is ‘Eggy Eric’.

There is a priest on board, and there will be mass tomorrow in the card room. I was amused to find that the water is rough in the swimming bath.

From the St Regis in New York a fortnight later, he wrote:

About a million damned Irishmen have just marched down Fifth Avenue because of St Patrick’s Day. I longed for a machine-gun. Did all the shows. David Belasco rang me up this morning and offered me seats for
The Comedian
on Thursday, and
Kiki
on Friday
. Kiki
has been running for years and is said to be wonderful. Here’s a letter I’ve had from Mac. I think I’ll write to him now – and Beryl. I’ll buy them both wrist-watches – and for you a handbag, silk stockings, & (I hope) some undies. [On dress rehearsal night] over 1000 dollars advance booking yesterday! Laurette Taylor has asked me to dinner and is going to show me the film of
Peg o’ My Heart
at her house. She’s a darling, but I can’t fall in love with any more girls just now. Rather rotten for you about the drains – keep Weston up to the scratch. No, I’m not dancing, but I have a good time apart from aching for you.

We open at the Gaiety (perfect theatre) on Easter Monday. Cast splendid. It will be a vastly better show than London. Peggy is a divine Effie…Everyone predicts gigantic success – but, oh dear, how often have I heard that word! Gave a dinner party and bought a bottle of whisky for
two guineas.
Saw
Nazmura
last night – worst play I’ve ever seen…Your eternal lover, BASIL.

Mac wrote to his father from Stonyhurst: ‘Thanks awfully for your letters, you seem to be staying at a ripping hotel. I hear you are having filthy weather in New York. I should like if you please a present of a wrist watch from America, a little one. So with heaps of love and good luck to the success of the play…’

However, to Basil’s bitter dismay, the New York venture failed. The play closed within a month. He returned to London, still the man who wrote
The New Sin
, a pillar of the Savage Club, friend of George
Robey and Edgar Wallace, favoured literary protégé of Lord Beaver-brook. He was painted by the fashionable portraitist James Gunn, but though he was still in his early forties, Basil’s features already suggest a disappointed man, rather than a rising one. His income declined steadily. He had saved nothing in the good times. From 1925 onwards, his health declined rapidly. Late in 1926 he was diagnosed with bowel cancer, which had killed his mother Lizzie only six years before. The last months of his life were a torment of pain and financial fears. Like all the family, Basil had lived for the day, spent freely, taken no heed for the morrow. Royalty income from his plays had dried up. He was soon almost incapable of writing. The family lived in a rented house, and owned no property. Mac, in his last year at Stonyhurst, was abruptly brought home. School fees could no longer be paid.

Basil was driven to increasingly desperate measures, begging loans. He wrote to a friend in March 1927, appealing for £50: ‘If I die before I have paid, I shall tell Billie that the £50 has first call on my estate…Feel good today – I have done a comic article about my broadcasting experience for 2 LO.’ 2 LO was the forerunner of the BBC. Basil’s first radio broadcast, a reading from his own essays, was almost his last professional engagement. Most of his friends, struggling writers like himself, felt unable to respond to his pleas for loans. The Royal Literary Fund sent him a modest cheque, which sufficed only to keep the family fed. In the opiate-drowsy months which followed, Basil scribbled desperate, almost incoherent instructions to Billie: ‘Big ledger must be shown to no one, not even solicitors.’ He urged her to seek financial help from Lord Beaverbrook and other former mentors, and to dispose carefully of his books, especially those signed by famous names. There was £2,000 in life assurance money, he said. He died in agony early in 1928, aged forty-seven. It was a dreadful end to a life and career which had seemed full of promise barely fifteen years earlier, yet lapsed into disappointment, indeed misery. Having striven so hard to achieve a prosperity and celebrity which eluded his father, Basil quit the stage knowing that he left his wife and children almost penniless.

Basil’s wife Billie suffered a nervous breakdown following his death. His last years had been overwhelmed by financial troubles overlaid upon the horrors of a disease whose symptoms contemporary medical science could do little to ameliorate. She was left struggling in a morass of debts. Theatrical friends organised a West End benefit matinee which raised a little money. Lord Beaverbrook and Edgar Wallace made a generous offer, which Billie accepted, to pay for her daughter Beryl to go to finishing school in Paris. Those two rich benefactors also offered to fund Mac through Oxford. With a delicate sense of honour, which he afterwards regretted, the young man refused. He said that he thought it his duty to go out and make a living, to support his mother. For the rest of his life, Mac was nagged by self-consciousness about his lack of a university education, and displayed an exaggerated deference towards those who possessed it. Though in old age he talked volubly about most of his experiences, he said nothing about this period, which left enduring scars. For a few miserable months, he devilled as a clerk at Scotland Yard. Then his fortunes improved. He found a job in the publicity department of J. Lyons, located at 61 Fleet Street, where he hugely enjoyed himself for the next nine years.

Lyons dominated Britain’s catering industry. The company processed and retailed all manner of foods, owned teashops in almost every town in Britain, together with prestige hotels and restaurants in London, of which the Trocadero in Piccadilly Circus was the most famous, Lyons’ Corner House in Coventry Street the most popular.

Mac, in those days eagerly gregarious, discovered that he was good at writing advertising copy, and that Lyons offered unparalleled opportunities to enjoy what a somewhat credulous young man perceived as the high life. Almost every night, dressed in white tie and tails, he disported himself at one or other of the company’s restaurants or show palaces. He learned to call C.B. Cochrane’s Young Ladies by their first names – and more important, as he observed gleefully, they learned to know him by his. He practised the ‘Buchanan roll’ with the famous performer Jack Buchanan, and was dispatched on a notably unsuccessful ballroom dancing course at Lyons’ expense. Less happily, offered unlimited access to free drinks, he acquired a taste for alcohol in extravagant quantities.

Mac had charm, enthusiasm and talent, and made the most of all three. He was a true believer in almost everything except God. He possessed that gift more useful than any other in public relations, of espousing passionately any cause to which he was professionally committed. He did not pretend to love Lyons, he really did so. He became a protégé of Montague Gluckstein, the company’s boss, who indulged him. ‘Major Monty’, as the staff called him in accordance with common practice so soon after war service, often sent for Mac in the morning while he was being shaved in the barber’s shop of the Royal Palace Hotel. The young publicist was expected to pass on gossip from the shop floor, and also to make Major Monty laugh. Once, Mac was summoned to account for an outrageous expenses claim following a press dinner he had given on Lyons’ chit, opening with cocktails and champagne, ending with Château d’Yquem, old port and cigars. After an inquest, the great man put down the frightful bill and said: ‘When you leave this firm, Hastings, I sincerely hope that you will remain one of our customers. God knows, you are the sort we need.’ Mac continued to party not merely night after night, but year after year. In his twenties, he could take it.

He prospered in the job, for he was good at stunts. When Lyons were building the Cumberland Hotel by Marble Arch, he arranged for them to complete a room on the top floor first, then gave a big media lunch, for which guests had to ascend ladders through the
building’s skeleton. This might not win the approval of modern Health & Safety gauleiters, but it played big with the press in 1934. On another occasion, Lyons showcased the great novelty of frozen foods. Journalists were invited to throw steaks at the wall, then sit down and eat them.

When his sister Beryl had completed finishing school and a secretarial course, through Mac’s intercession she became personal assistant to ‘Major Monty’. After a few years at Lyons, she used the expertise she had acquired to start her own restaurant in the City of London. She ran successive places with her mother Billie, and eventually her husband Leslie, for forty years. Though mid-market catering never made them rich, it provided them with a decent living. Beryl, devoid of the social pretensions which have been the undoing of so many Hastingses, was a tough, cheerful professional who worked hard all her life, neither demanding nor receiving a break from anybody. The harsh experiences of her youth rendered her prudent and cynical. She admired her brother’s gifts and later success, but despaired of his excesses, alcoholic and financial.

Mac’s trouble was that he never knew when to stop. It was tremendous fun to party with chorus girls, but in 1936 he went a disastrous step further, and married one. He was twenty-six, she was a fifty-two-year-old divorcee named Eleanor Daisy Asprey. The alliance lasted only a few months, but he was obliged to pay his ex-wife maintenance almost until the day he died. With misplaced chivalry and a dislike of rows, even when a well-wisher informed him thirty years later that his ex-wife was cohabiting with a man whom he, Mac, had been effectively supporting for years, he refused to go back to court. He admired women, and they were often attracted to him. But he lacked the slightest notion about how to treat them as human beings, or else was too selfish to learn, a vice which some claim can be hereditary.

It took time for Mac to achieve his ambition of becoming a journalist. While working at Lyons, he offered occasional contributions to newspapers and magazines, then in the late 1930s began to do some broadcasting. He performed first for the commercial station Radio Normandy, graduating to becoming a contributor for the BBC. His
early ‘talks’ were whimsical, rather in the style of Basil’s essays. Mac was deeply, indeed exaggeratedly, conscious of his father’s reputation, which flickered on for some years. He often asserted that one of the best days of his life came when a stranger said, ‘I really enjoyed that piece of yours.’ Mac said, as he had grown accustomed to saying, ‘I think you mean of my father’s.’ The stranger replied, ‘No, no – it really was yours.’ In due course, I would experience the same sensation myself.

Mac was prompted to make a clean break with Lyons by an experience one night as he stood waiting for a girl in the foyer of a restaurant, clad in carnation, white tie and tails. Tapping a patent leather shoe impatiently, he was reflecting upon what a fine figure he cut when a stranger approached, demanding: ‘Have you got a table for two?’ To Mac’s horror, he perceived that instead of looking the perfect man-about-town, as he supposed, he had acquired the proprietorial demeanour of a head waiter. He resigned from Lyons amid expressions of mutual regret – sufficiently sincere that years later, Monty Gluckstein sought to woo him back on generous terms – and set about making his living as a freelance writer and broadcaster.

Mac’s surrogate father in the 1930s was his uncle Lewis. Indeed, Lewis became a far more potent role-model for him, and later for me, than was his father Basil. Although Mac remembered Basil with love and respect, his memories were tarnished by the horrors of the last years, and of financial ruin. Basil was also a domesticated body, a man of the pavements. Mac’s imagination had become fixed on the wide-open spaces. He wanted adventure, and his uncle was its embodiment. Lewis stood six foot two, and was broad to match, a leonine figure with flowing hair and military moustache, in all respects larger than life. He was forever bursting with ideas and enthusiasms. Having relished the war, he set about securing a livelihood. In 1920 he married a Scottish heiress named Marigold Edmondstone, whom he met while recuperating in a military hospital from the after-effects of a bad trench gassing. Marigold was divorced, an unusual condition in grand families of the time. C.S. Forester’s General Sir Herbert Curzon, meeting his future wife for the first time, was struck by a
sudden thought that her features resembled those of Bingo, ‘the best polo pony he ever had’. This seemed to me true of Marigold when I met her in later years, but I doubt whether Lewis bothered to look much at her face. Her fortune kept him in some style for the rest of his life, and her earlier mis-hit at marriage was a matter of indifference to him.

Uncharacteristically bitchy family gossip, broadcast by grandmother Billie and my aunt Beryl, held that Lewis never bothered to divorce his first wife, Clare – acquired and discarded in South Africa with equal insouciance around 1911–12, and recalled by his sister-in-law in shameless period vernacular as having ‘a touch of the tarbrush’ – before marrying Marigold. Such a solecism would certainly have accorded with his ruthless, reckless character. The notion of Lewis as a bigamist caused some later family amusement. Both Marigold and her son Stephen – who became Sir Stephen Hastings, MP – were keenly conscious of pedigree. Marigold recoiled from the vulgarity of Basil and family, especially his wife Billie. Class, class, class reared its head in the Hastings family as often as it does everywhere in British life. Billie was a woman of exceptional good nature, who endured her tribulations without bitterness. But she extracted from Mac a promise that he would never be nice to Marigold, because this queen of the hunting field was so damnably condescending to her. I always wonder why Lewis gave no financial help to Basil in the desperate circumstances of his brother’s last months. Either the two were no longer close, or Marigold held the purse strings too tightly. In any event, the gulf between the financial circumstances of Basil’s widow in her little West London flat and those of Lewis’s family in a succession of manor houses obviously exacerbated tensions between them.

Having secured Marigold’s hand and fortune, and thereafter produced two children with her, Lewis resumed his old roaming habits. He acquired a tobacco farm in Southern Rhodesia, and spent many of the interwar years there, leaving his offspring and often his wife to amuse themselves as they saw fit. He published a slim volume of poetry, became first president of the Tobacco-Growers’ Association,
a member of the Rhodesian parliament and eventually of its cabinet, and indulged a lifestyle that would have commanded the respect of Kenya’s Happy Valley set. The novelist Doris Lessing, who grew up in Rhodesia, encountered Lewis when she was a gawky teenage girl. In her memoirs she left a pen-portrait of him, as MP for Lomagundi in the 1930s, which has always delighted me.

He was famous for his oratory. He was famous for his love affairs, possibly because he wrote poems not unlike Rupert Brooke’s, and a good many were love poems. Very handsome he was, like a lion. He was a dandy, with a suggestion of military swagger, but this was used for dramatic effect. He would stand at ease on his box platform and entertain the farmers and their wives and their children with speeches…garnished with Latin and Greek. The crowd stood about in the red dust, the men in their khaki, the women in their best dresses, the children behind him on the verandah, while the ox wagons went groaning past on their way to the railway tracks, and Major Hastings said – he was talking about Native Policy, but don’t imagine that he disapproved,
‘Volenti non fit injuria –
which means, as of course you all know, “No harm is done to him who consents.”’ And everyone laughed…Major Hastings loved his audiences too much to despise them…[He] did it all with just a touch of parody, his smile inviting us all to share with him his style, his bravura. How could wives not fall in love with him? Not to mention daughters. There are men who – with not so much as one second’s impropriety, with no more than a look – perhaps without even intending it, promise a half-grown girl that one day she, too, will be a member of the freemasonry of love.

Lewis blew into London at irregular intervals, towering over the bar of the Savage Club as he captivated Mac with his tales of shooting elephant and lion, of camps in the bush under the stars. A passionate nationalist, pillar of the Empire Society, he foresaw a splendid future for East and Southern Africa, producing food for Britain – this, though his own agricultural ventures in Rhodesia were wholly
unprofitable. Lewis’s personal behaviour, not least towards the wife whom he exploited without scruple, may not deserve admiration. The violence of his enthusiasms and enmities could alarm more temperate folk. But he was no line-shooter. He lived as he talked – physically fearless and bent upon draining every cup to the dregs. His son Stephen, who found it hard to relate to him, wrote: ‘He strode in and out of our lives like a whirlwind. As well as weaver birds’ nests he brought exhilaration, suspense and uncertainty. His was a life of stirring and haphazard adventure.’ In Rhodesia in 1973, I met an old Afrikaner who had farmed next door to Lewis forty years earlier. ‘
Ach
, I never forget Major Hastings,’ he said, in the inimitable accents of the veldt. ‘I used to see him go out to hunt in the morning with his rifle, wearing only a cartridge belt and tennis shoes. He said he felt closer to nature that way.’

By courtesy of Marigold’s money, in England Lewis was able to hunt, fish salmon, shoot pheasants and inhabit country houses appropriate to his acquired status as a country gentleman. His writings and later broadcasting made him modestly well known, but I doubt whether his earnings would have paid his cook’s salary. Lewis didn’t care. He believed that life was for living. Mac spent time with him whenever he could. In 1933 they drove to Germany together, to take a first-hand look at Nazism. Irked by hearing constant renditions of ‘The Horst Wessel Song’, at the famous Femina nightclub in Berlin Lewis insisted upon leading a rousing chorus first of the Cape Mounted Police song, then of ‘The Red Flag’, to the stunned horror of Brownshirts in the audience.

I still possess his heavily annotated copy of the English edition of Hitler’s
Mein Kampf
. Lewis did not doubt for a moment that it would soon be necessary to fight Hitler. Although approaching sixty in the 1930s, he looked forward eagerly to a second round with the Hun. Meanwhile, Africa remained his happy hunting ground, its peoples his favourite companions. He wrote: ‘When I think of the African it is not as a kind of raw material for sociological experiment, but instead as clear-cut individuals, like Chidota my devoted and ruthless camp boss; Mafuta the dandy; Chiunda the tracker, and my old
fighting Swazi and superb ox-driver Hendrik. I remember their separate ways and tricks and quite unquenchable laughter.’