Did You Really Shoot the Television? by Max Hastings Read Free Book Online Page B

the nineteenth century, they seemed respectable, hard-working, decent Christian people. But glamour and romance were lacking from their lives. Lewis, by contrast, towered over every room he entered. Even in old age, in any company he looked willing as well as able to knock down any man who deserved it. Like so many black, or at least grey, sheep he was much more fun than the chaps who got made head of house at school or lived blameless lives in – well, Trinity Square, Borough, where the Tribe grew up. And by 1914, the fun in Lewis’s life had hardly started.

THREE
Stagestruck
    My father disliked the name with which he was christened, Douglas, almost as much as his own father Basil resented being Basil. Grandfather sought to assuage the pain by signing himself in print Basil Macdonald Hastings. Once Douglas Macdonald Hastings escaped from infancy, he became universally known as ‘Mac’. At the time of his birth in 1909, his father was a struggling freelance journalist. A year later, Basil became assistant editor of the Bystander magazine, then in its heyday. In this role, he once sought to persuade Max Beerbohm to contribute an article about his schooldays at Charterhouse. ‘Dear Hastings,’ Beerbohm wrote back, ‘I fear that I must decline, for if I accepted I know that the poison would creep into my pen.’ How well I recognised this sensation as I read the letter seventy years later! By then I had myself experienced the miseries of the same school.
    Basil prospered at the Bystander , and spread his wings. In 1911 he wrote a comic play entitled The New Sin , and sent it to the Vendome-Eady theatrical management. They accepted it at once, gave him a princely £10 on account of royalties, and a contract promising him 5 per cent of weekly receipts, rising to 10 per cent on anything over £1,000 a week. After the play’s first night at the Criterion, there were fears. A pessimistic producer muttered about ‘complete failure’ – then was confounded. The New Sin became the hit of the season and ran for two years. It was translated all over Europe and performed on Broadway with an all-star cast. Basil travelled to New York on the Lusitania for its opening. Six thousand copies of the play were sold in bookshops. There were negotiations for the cinematograph rights. Basil wrote: ‘Heaven send me a few more such “complete failures”.’
    The plotline of The New Sin , a comedy, concerns a man who needs to stay alive, because if he dies ten feckless siblings stand to collect large inheritances. Originality derived from the fact that its characters were all male. Pasted into the flyleaf of our family copy of Saki’s Beasts and Superbeasts is a note from the Cocoa Tree Club in St James’s Street: ‘12.2.12 Dear Mr Hastings, congratulations on your brilliant play, sincerely yours, H.H. Munro.’ A host of other literary stars, including J.M. Barrie, paid tribute. Great things were predicted for Basil. By the time young Mac became conscious of the world, his father was a recognised figure in the London theatre.
    Basil’s subsequent plays, though cast with such starry names as H.B. Irving (elder son of Henry) and Cyril Maude, were notably less successful. Love – and What Then? flopped. ‘Though witty and amusing,’ said The Times , ‘it has a weak and unconvincing story.’ The Tide in 1914 did no business. When The Advertisement openedat the Kingsway Theatre in April 1915, The Times was again unenthusiastic: ‘There are in it excellent passages, interesting ideas and some dramatic situations, but on the whole it resembles the chief character in being good only in parts.’ A 1915 collaborative effort with Stephen Leacock, Q , was likewise a box-office failure.
    Basil was much more successful, however, as a writer of revues, which enjoyed immense popularity throughout the First World War, especially with men back from the trenches. At one moment in 1915 he had three productions running simultaneously in the West