Reflections on a Teapot: The Personal History of a Time

By Ronald Sanders

"We are the generation...to whom nothing much ever happened, who seemed to get skipped over by the major collective experiences of the twentieth century." This from Ronald Sanders in his introduction to this memoir written in his forties when wondering what somebody only in his forties might have to say about his life that would interest people. And what Sanders came up with is that struggles with life's problems, even during times of uneventfulness, maybe even especially during times of uneventfulness, can still be epic.

This is a great memoir of a young Ronald Sanders, born of a Liverpool musician father and a Brooklyn Jewish mother and his youth in New York.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dzanc Books
• Release date: May 8, 2018
• ISBN: 9781945814235

Ronald Sanders

Ronald Sanders was an American journalist and writer--publishing 10 works of non-fiction to high regard. From 1966-1975 he was on the staff of Midstream magazine, and from 1973-1975 was its editor-in-chief. He was the first recipient of the B'Nai B'Rith Book Award for his The Downtown Jews.

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Preface

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When a man writes his memoirs before he has reached forty, some kind of apology is in order. Autobiography written in midlife or sooner has become a fashion lately, it is true, but most of the authors of such works are people who have achieved early distinction or have had some remarkable personal experience. I belong in neither of these categories; my life and exploits have not been entirely humdrum, but they have not been extraordinary either.

Yet these are precisely the traits of the kind of person whose story I wanted to tell. In the course of writing several books and articles dealing with historical individuals, I have often found myself less interested in their public accomplishments than in the relationship between their most personal experiences and the unique conditions of time and place under which these occurred. It seems to me that every generation, and every group within a generation, has a particular set of common experiences which belongs to it alone, and which colors and is colored by every life within it. On one level, the individual experience is merely personal; on another, it is history—and this is true of even the most ordinary persons. A life can have ways in which it significantly reflects the experiences of a generation even if it includes no great achievements; indeed, if a life is too public, it can lose spontaneity and much of what makes it characteristic.

Now, it is generally very difficult for a researcher to obtain material about the life histories of individuals who have not lived largely on the public level. Public people leave records of themselves, and private people usually do not. This is why historians usually confine themselves to dealing with individuals whose achievements are writ large. I have done this in my own historical writing, but never without certain misgivings. I more and more wished I could obtain an extensive and intensive view of the life of someone deeply involved in the collective experiences of his generation, but whose personal history was not affected by its having been on display. Then I thought of the one such subject about whom the material available to me was not merely rich but overwhelming, and I began writing this book about myself.

What I am offering, then, is primarily an essay in the cultural history of a certain time, or better, in the history of its moods, those unsung conditioners of human events. The particular generation whose first twenty-five years I am describing here is, indeed, one whose history has been characterized more by moods than by events; for we are the generation—born in America in the thirties, condemned to reach maturity in the fifties—to whom nothing much ever happened, who seemed to get skipped over by the major collective experiences of the twentieth century. The story is so uneventful, in fact, that for a long time I thought it wasn’t worth telling; then one day I realized that a great collective struggle with the problems of uneventfulness has epic qualities, too. Furthermore, now that important things have been happening to people younger than ourselves, and to ourselves in a way as a result, I think the story of our own youth has the value of providing some perspective on the times.

But it would be disingenuous to claim that I wrote this book purely out of a concern with cultural history. Essentially, this is the story I had once dreamed of writing as a novel and, in various of its parts, tried doing as fiction from time to time. But I finally perceived that I was unable to tell it any other way than straight, just as it happened. I then wrote it in the spirit in which I have written historical books, but with some of the poetic aspirations of a novelist as well. The result is a kind of factual Bildungsroman, my own particular fling at the traditional autobiographical romance of a young man growing up.

There even are bits of fiction in it. I have telescoped successions of events here and there when literary form required it and I could do so without violating the essential facts of the story. Also, for reasons of discretion, I have given fictitious names to almost everybody dealt with other than myself and my family on the one hand and public personalities on the other. In some cases, to further the concealment of identities, I have also changed a few circumstantial facts and place names, none of them crucial to the essential factuality of what was being described.

Anything else I might have to say in the way of an apologia is in the book itself. I therefore will not detain the reader any longer except to offer a few thanks that are due: to Shlomo Katz, editor of Midstream, for urging me to write this book and providing encouragement all along the way; to Ann Harris of Harper & Row for giving valuable criticism and advice; to my sister, Marilyn S. O’Bradovich, for making many important suggestions; to Arnold and Lotti Tobler of Shaftsbury, Vermont, and their family, for generously providing me with a part of their house and the best possible conditions within which to finish this work; and to my wife, Beverly, for giving me things like these and so much more.

Shaftsbury and New York

September, 1971

1

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The Teapot Song

I’m a little teapot, short and stout,

Here is my handle, here is my spout.

When I get all steamed up, then I shout:

Just tip me over, pour me out!

Let me inform you of the true origins of this song. Among those of you who happen to be acquainted with it, there apparently are many who have thought it to be an anonymous nursery rhyme, composed at some obscure moment in England’s Victorian past, perhaps alongside the hearth of a forgotten kitchen; but this isn’t so. The truth of the matter is it was written one day in the spring of 1939 by my father, George Harry Sanders, with the help of his partner, Clarence Kelley, in the office of a modest music publishing enterprise of theirs located at the corner of Broadway and Fifty-second Street in New York. This was the heart of New York’s popular-music publishing district, then still known as Tin Pan Alley.

My father and Kelley wrote the song with an eye to publishing and selling it, of course, but it was occasioned by a more private purpose. Like my father and many of his friends in those days, Kelley was engaged in several business activities at once to make ends meet, and among these was a children’s tap and ballet school which he ran with his wife. Such schools had become quite popular by then among American parents of the sort who, while sharing in the conventional middle-class desire to provide their children, especially their daughters, with the grace that only dancing lessons can give, were inspired more by Ruby Keeler or Fred Astaire than by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. The Kel-leys’ school specialized in teaching the Waltz Clog, a tap-dance maneuver that was all the rage and had the additional virtue of conveying an air of complexity to the paying parent while being basically easy to master. (It was a nifty five-step embroidered into an old-fashioned three-quarters beat, which went roughly like this: East-2-3-4-5 Side-2-3-4-5, West-2-3-4-5 Side-2-3-4-5, all-2-3-a-round-2-3-the town.) Yet for all its relative simplicity, this step represented an achievement reserved exclusively to the older kids at the school; for there also happened to be a substantial number of pupils there, known as the tots, who were only of an age just beyond that at which one learns to walk properly. There were to be no Waltz Clogs for them, nor little else of the Kelley repertory, for that matter. In fact, it was not at all clear what their parents expected them to learn; but it would seem they expected something, which they looked forward to seeing in all its glory each spring at the end-of-term recital. This, specifically, was the problem to which Kelley and my father (who was, as usual, to be the piano accompanist at the recital) addressed themselves on that spring day in 1939.

What they had decided to do was provide the tots with a simple song to sing, the words of which would coach them through the gestures of a rudimentary dance. I think The Teapot Song fulfilled this requirement rather well. Try it yourself: one arm, serving as the handle, is cocked elbow outward with the back of the hand placed on the hip; the other arm, the spout, is extended loosely like a swan’s neck with the hand cupped palm down and pointing outward. The main recurring movement of the dance is the tipping and make-believe pouring, but there are other significant maneuvers, too, as when the pot sings: I can change my handle or my spout. Then—well, you can imagine the scene, the little girls with huge ribbons in their hair, short white dresses pleating out like asphodels, shiny black patent leather shoes buckled on their feet, executing in earnest though only vaguely coordinated gestures the dance that came to be known as the Teapot Tip. It was the hit of the evening, overshadowing even the Waltz Clog numbers in the enthusiasm it aroused among the audience. The whole thing had proved to be an admirable fusion of content and purpose; which is, incidentally, one of the principal aims of art—but my father would have been quite uncomfortable had he heard me saying this.

So much, then, for the song’s purpose; but what about its content? Why a teapot? you may well ask. This question is reasonably well answered by the fact of my father’s origins: for he was born an Englishman in the twilight of Queen Victoria’s reign. In this sense, his song was a Victorian nursery rhyme, but out of its time and place, and by no means of anonymous authorship. If a teapot seems a rather incongruous object among the cocktails and cigarette ends of Tin Pan Alley—that realm of incongruities —it was really no less so than the figure of my father himself among his colleagues there. Like his teapot, he represented to the world in which he made his career a certain definitive English type that seems to have come exclusively out of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. This type, an utterly dignified fellow—yet not as a rule so lofty in manner and loyalties as to exceed the upper limits of middle-class identification—is perhaps best known in America for the tone of his voice, which may be discerned in such varied manifestations as D’Oyly Carte performances of Gilbert and Sullivan, Rex Harrison performances of Shaw, and a proper reading of The Wind in the Willows. The tone is characterized by a certain pursed-lip quality that no nation but the English has ever been able or, indeed, ever wanted to achieve, and by an air of gentlemanly decency that is mildly ironic—self-effacingly so, one might say—even in its most serious moments, that is reticent even when passionate, and somehow sounds manly even when chattering over teacups. It is a tone ideally suited to certain uses, such as the kind of genteel rendering of erotic moods that was the trademark of several popular English male film stars during my childhood, two of the foremost of whom—Ronald Colman (after whom I was named) and Leslie Howard (a wonderful actor who turned out, pleasantly enough, to have been the son of a Hungarian Jew)—were admired by my father with something like a sense of deep spiritual kinship.

Another use for which the tone of voice I have been describing is admirably suited is that of addressing children at some length, particularly for the purpose of telling a story. Here are its echoes, for example, in the middle refrain of I’m a Little Teapot:

"Polly, put the kettle on,

And we’ll all have tea,"

Grandma used to sing.

Though since then our taste has changed

In so many ways,

Yet, to the pot we cling.

These lines make it clear not only why many people imagined that this song was some folk companion to Mother Goose, but also why Mother Goose seemed so typically English in the first place. It is no accident that a very large number of the foremost classic works of children’s literature come from England, and from Victorian England at that, a culture suffused with an overwhelming nostalgia for childhood.

My father succeeded in imparting to me a nostalgia for his childhood so great that, to this day, it exceeds any which I feel for my own. By the time I came into the world, nostalgia seemed to have lost a good many of its most favored objects, anyway. I doubt if there were many horse-drawn carriages, cobblestoned streets, or kitchen hearths left in Union City, New Jersey, by the time I was born there in July, 1932; certainly few such things were visible in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn during the time I grew up there from the age of one month onward. When I was still quite young we even began using tea bags in our house, despite the song’s insistence that we would cling to the pot. What was left for me to become sentimental about but the environment of my father’s childhood?

Not that the Liverpool of the turn of the century should in any way be construed as some ideal Merrie England; it was too well saturated with the dampness of slums and the smoke of factories to be that. But it was nevertheless a last repository of many of the objects and conditions of a quieter and purer age. When my father was born there in 1893, a very large part of the everyday life surrounding his home—the predominant use of horses for small-scale transportation, for example—was still essentially the same as it had been in unbroken continuity for hundreds, even thousands of years. This was, of course, even more true of the surrounding countryside than of the city. What particularly bereaves me when I compare the world of my childhood with that of my father’s is the loss of a certain quality of the relationship between city and surrounding countryside that still had existed then and that had utterly vanished by my time, at least in America. This quality was reflected, for example, in the fact that it once was possible to set out on foot from one’s doorstep in the heart of a city and, within a reasonable length of time, walk into open fields and woods. How close to nature a city person could then still be! Since that time, a steady obliteration of the borderlines of great cities has taken place, especially in America. The transition from midtown to countryside can now be achieved only with the aid of mechanized transportation. The old human scale of foot, or of bicycle pedal for that matter, has been buried under vast stretches of continuous urbanization.

My father used to cycle alone into the Lancashire countryside on Sundays when he was a boy. I no longer suppose that landscape to be either so perfectly, so brilliantly green or so unadulteratedly pastoral as my imagination made it whenever I listened as a child to my father’s accounts of his cycling trips, yet I remain sure of what must have been some of its qualities. What I think must have been particularly satisfying about it for him—and would have been so for me—was the fact that, rustic as the scene undoubtedly was, it was in no way a wilderness. His appetite, like mine, was not for primeval forest, but for nature tempered through a thousand years of indwelling upon it by men and women who had in turn been tempered by a thousand years of being born and nurtured on the land, a millennium of Dutch-painted landscapes that has since been ended by the advent of man’s ability to ravage nature unchecked by nature. There was a time when a village still seemed, not like a kind of bivouac, but an organic growth that had pushed its own way up out of the hillside, when you could go there to discover what it alone had to offer you as the goal of your journey, rather than merely to encounter in yet another place what had been transported ahead of you by speedier means.

For young George Sanders, the particular village offering that constituted the true climax of his journey was its cheese; nothing in life, he would tell me, ever was to taste so good again as those morsels of English country cheese he would eat on his boyhood cycling trips. I can imagine him finding a shady tree in some secluded spot just down the road from the village shop. There he would sit in the grass, his feet thrust straight out in front of him, biting off and chewing each savory chunk and washing it down, perhaps, with a bit of cider: a perfect picture of English pastoral innocence, the boyhood of a teapot. This is the lost image of Victorian boyhood I have often longed to recover every bit as much as my father did once he had grown out of it.

George managed to live out a boyhood true enough to the Victorian ideal, even though circumstances forced a somewhat down-at-the-heels version upon him. There are photographs in our family album which provide glimpses of the story. There, for example, we see little George in some poses on a family excursion to the Isle of Man, primly dressed in knickerbockers, jacket, and Eton cap, standing uncomfortably by himself for the camera in one, or somewhat more exuberantly sitting behind the wheel of a full-sized replica of one of the giant motorcars of the day in another. In the back seat are his parents: mother Esther in black crinoline, with massive hat and billowing shoulders, her mouth grimly taut in polite acquiescence to the photographer’s request for a smile, and next to her, father James, looking a bit smaller, sheepishly debonair in straw hat and narrow shoulders, smiling sweetly under his great, greying moustache. In later years, whenever I would forgetfully ask my father what grandfather James had done for a livelihood, he would reply: Not much of anything, poor chap. For the most part it was grandmother Esther, taking in work as a seamstress, who by solemn strivings kept the family just narrowly this side of respectability.

Poverty set limits upon George’s Victorian boyhood not only in scope but in time as well. The idyll came to an end early, when he was thirteen years old and had to leave school without graduating to help earn the family bread. But George had a poetic spirit, to which he found a way of making circumstances conform even when necessity imposed itself upon him. He was able to get a job selling programs in the Shakespeare Theatre of Liverpool. From the outset, this position meant a great deal more to him than the mere farthings and pence he earned at it, for in his inmost heart he yearned to be an actor—and a classical actor, at that. At school he had been able to astonish his teachers by reciting whole speeches from Shakespeare by heart. Shakespeare’s language represented to him a noble music which could lift his spirit above any situation into which life might force him. As a program-seller at the Shakespeare Theatre, he was able to stand in back of the empty auditorium during rehearsals and watch young men, of origins often as humble as his own, being trained in all the graces appropriate to a classical player, from fencing to the proper way of making obeisance to kings and queens. Every aspect of this training struck George as having the utmost importance, for although his ambition to become an actor was in part kindled by the attractions we usually associate with such a career—the sheer excitement of the stage, the prospect of fame as well as fortune, the romance of being an artist—there was one which meant more to him than any of these. To him, the theater was above all a place where a young man of his station in life could become schooled in the qualities that make a gentleman: it was a poor boy’s Eton and Oxford.

The theater, and more recently the cinema, have of course traditionally been places in which men and women of humble origins have achieved elegance and grandeur of person as well as wealth, in America as in Europe; but there was a uniquely English and Victorian coloring to George’s ambition in this respect. In his eyes, the great stars of the classical stage were something like genuine Lords and Ladies. His outlook, a truly English distillation of elements from the feudal and the liberal democratic traditions, was based on the assumption that a just world is not necessarily one in which aristocratic hierarchies do not exist, but simply one in which positions on the hierarchy are available to those who have earned their claims to them. And one way such claims were earned was the cultivation of dignified manners and fine speech, a task to which George applied himself as a boy in the same spirit of hard work and self-discipline as that of someone else of his class and generation serving an apprenticeship in a shop with the hope of becoming a proprietor himself one day. The task thus brought to bear a combination of the lower-middle-class sobriety that was part of George’s legacy from his mother and whatever touches of aristocratic dash he had inherited from his father’s dreams. It made life itself into a performance of classical drama: this is why the theater seemed as good a catalyst for the picaresque ambitions of a young Englishman like George Harry Sanders as the Church or the army had seemed for those of a Julien Sorel in France. The conferring of a Lord’s title not long ago upon a great classical actor, Laurence Olivier, would have seemed wholly just to my father had he lived to know of it.

The outlook I am describing here is represented in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion with great richness and ambivalence, for it is there held up to ridicule and yet implicitly endorsed at the same time. The play is a splendid illustration of the intimidating power the criterion of fine speech has had in the classical drama that is English life, and of the untold possibilities of self-transformation that lay in the ability to play one’s role well. In my own life I was made aware of all this, not only by the fervor with which my speech was corrected at home when I was a child, but also by my father’s horrified reaction years later when I came home from college using the aggressively New York-plebeian speech mannerisms my school friends and I had cultivated as a form of inverse snobbery. This was not, for an Englishman of my father’s generation, the way an educated gentleman was supposed to sound.

Ironically, the world had changed since George’s youth in this respect, and not once, but twofold. For not only had George’s choice of living in America brought him into a society in which his ideal of fine speech was considerably less relevant than it had been in his boyhood, but England itself was becoming transformed in the meantime. Even there American-style democracy of speech has now begun taking effect. It is as if that center stage which once had been ruled by the classical style of an Olivier or a Gielgud has now, after a roughneck assault by the Angry Young Men some years ago, yielded a good deal of its space to such recently prominent folk voices as those of the Beatles—offspring of a Liverpool my father had once struggled to leave completely behind him. In terms of this scheme, that English play of the late fifties The Entertainer, written by the Angry Young Man John Osborne and starring Laurence Olivier in the role of a music hall performer, speaking his lines with lower-class accent and mannerisms, may quietly have signalled a turning point in English cultural history.

In a sense the music hall has long been the lower-class answer to the classical theater in English entertainment culture; it is more democratic than the latter, which perhaps is why its equivalent in America—vaudeville, and all its latter-day offshoots in theater, movies, and television—has been more successful than most attempts to create an indigenous classical drama on this side of the Atlantic. Perhaps it bespoke the beginnings of an American destiny, then, when my father found his career going in the direction of the music hall rather than the classical theater in his youth, in spite of himself. This event was a disappointment he never quite got over. He simply was not equipped temperamentally to play the aristocratic role he aspired to, and this shortcoming manifested itself in an inability to make a career as an actor at all. In the family album, there is a picture of George as a small boy in a school play, wearing an eighteenth-century costume complete with satin leggings, vest, sword, white wig, and a mole pasted on his cheek; he is quite a dashing and haughty fellow here. But he could not sustain this aristocratic flamboyance into young manhood, when he began to show an un-Thespian tendency towards great modesty and self-effacement. Unable to project his personality directly from the stage, he had to find something to project it for him.

He found this in music, an art he had acquired at an early age as if by osmosis. It would seem that his introduction to what was to be the field of his life’s endeavours—and the only music lessons he ever was to receive from any person other than himself —had come from his sister, ten years older than he, who had once taught him the rudiments of the keyboard at the family upright, after which she ceased to play any role of importance in his life.He also sang as a boy soprano for a while in a church choir, but this too was a form of schooling that passed completely out of the picture; after his voice changed he left choir, church, and all forms of institutionalized religion for good. From then on, his musical development was entirely in his own hands. George had a great capacity for self-instruction. He obtained his lessons in harmony and orchestration from books alone, borrowing from the public library at first, then buying them with his painstakingly accumulated savings. In time, he began working regularly as a music hall pianist, then as a conductor.

By the time he was seventeen, George was conducting a small traveling orchestra that made the rounds of some of the English seaside resorts each summer. Out of this situation came an incident which was later to constitute one of his favorite stories of his youth. Once, while rehearsing the orchestra for the evening’s performance at one of the hotels, he learned that a certain regiment billeted nearby was going to be in the audience. He promptly sought out someone who could sing the regimental song to him and he listened to it, wrote it down, and incorporated it into the overture. That night he stepped onto the podium, tapped the stand, waved his arms, and began conducting the usual opening chords; but suddenly, after a few bars, the familiar and rollicking melody of the Old Regimental burst forth. There was immediate pandemonium. Burly voices roared the words of the song from every corner of the auditorium. In a few moments, George felt himself being lifted bodily from the stage and placed on epauletted shoulders, where he remained until every last chorus had been sung and he had been carried several times around the hall. It was his first great success—although this was by no means to be the last time George would win the hearts of an audience by discovering the melodies peculiar to it.

The course of musical success even brought him as a conductor back to the Shakespeare Theatre where he had sold programs as a young boy. This might have been a marvelous triumph, but for the fact that George was still plagued by loftier ambitions, represented by that stage which had been the original horizon of his aspirations and which he could now view at closer and more tempting range from the podium. No doubt he recognized that his lack of formal training placed definite limits upon his career prospects in music. He could hardly be a classical musician without schooling; but he could perhaps still be a classical actor, and he had not yet given up this hope. As if to proclaim to himself and the world the status for which he still believed himself destined, he carried at this time a stack of calling cards which read:

GEO. H. SANDERS,

Character Actor & Monologue Artiste.

Excerpts from Shakespeare Etc.

But it would be wrong to suppose George was alone in regarding himself in this light. If he continued to see himself as not merely a music hall conductor but an all-round artiste of the theater, he was emphatically supported in this view by at least some members of a circle of friends he was part of at the time. I know this for a fact, because I received a letter from one of them some forty-five years later, after George’s death, describing their life in Liverpool. We were never introduced, Montague Ward, known to his friends as Bert, wrote of my father and himself at the time of their first encounter in about 1912. We met casually on a Sunday evening ‘parade’—numbers of young fellows and girls walking to and fro. Many of us knew each other slightly. I was usually with Wilfred Pearson, a Jewish boy with whom I had been to school, and we lived in the vicinity. George didn’t, and in fact I never knew where he did live. He just turned up. It was very much in character for George to appear unceremoniously like that—or to depart, almost self-effacingly, in the same manner.

I was quite interested in the theatre, as a playgoer, Bert Ward went on. Quite casually it came out that George actually worked in a theatre, and was a musician. What a man! And so, birds of a feather…. I used to spend quite a lot of time in the public library, reading literary and dramatic reviews. Closing time was about 9:30. The Shakespeare Theatre, where your father was musical director, I think, was an easy stone’s throwaway and about once a week I would walk over and wait for him. That was no hardship! Being able to ask the stage door-keeper if I might speak to Mr. Sanders gave me a lovely excuse for getting in. Once Murray Carrington in his Shakespearean costume had just come off the stage and passed close to me. What a thrill! When your father was ready—and there was no hurry on my account, you may be sure—we used to walk towards his home, talking world affairs in general and theatre in particular until it was time for me to turn back in order to get a late train for my lodgings in the opposite direction.

Ward and Pearson both had received more schooling than George; I think they may even have been university students at this time. Ward’s attitude towards George was, to some extent, one that is traditional among students of a certain type when they discover someone their own age who is out in the world and doing the things that interest them. If the person so admired has not been to school, as it were, then the student will often become philosophically persuaded that all his own education has been worthless. As the bearer of such attitudes, Bert Ward represented a relationship of a sort that was to give my father special satisfaction whenever it recurred. George always secretly longed for the higher education that had been denied him, and his attitude towards it and those who had obtained it wavered all his life between resentment and esteem.

But above all he sought the admiration of the well-educated, and warm evaluations by them of his accomplishments. This situation would always be for him a major test of the quality of his experience and hard solitary efforts at self-improvement. And there was indeed ever to be a mystique about George which was able to call forth such feelings from Bert Ward and his spiritual successors, right down to myself. He would always have an aura of the lone, valiant yeoman of the spirit. Perhaps he even sought too zealously at times to see this aura reflected in people’s eyes, but he deserved at least this modest amount of admiration in his life. In the end, the world was not too lavish in the honors it gave him. But in Bert Ward’s eyes, at least, George’s special luster never died, nor did the vision of some great thing he might yet do in the theatrical world. I was always hoping he was going to turn up in the theatre news, Ward wrote to me. "There was a George Sanders, a film actor, and I was disappointed when it became plain that it was not the George Sanders."

It is widely held that an era came decisively to an end in 1914, and this certainly was true in George’s case. That year he reached the age of twenty-one, and the world at large seemed altogether too ready to celebrate the passing of his youth. About the beginning of 1914, according to Bert Ward, George was turning over in his mind the idea of a music-hall sketch. What it was to be all about I never fully understood, but I was to be in it, and that was enough for me. I was to be George’s stooge, I suppose.… Then came the First World War. The sketch was never written, and Bert and George never saw one another again.

Not that George passed into the new era in the stark, dramatic way so many members of his generation took, through the mud of the trenches. He had a choice in the matter, and he had never been one for whom the battlefield held so much as a moment’s passing appeal; there was not in him the slightest potentiality for any nostalgie de la boue. On the other hand, as a Liverpool boy, he had often felt the lure of the sea, and this is what he yielded to in 1914; he volunteered for wartime service as a merchant seaman. The next four years, which opened up new worlds to him, proved to be pleasant in their way. His Flanders Fields were the sunny decks of freighters sailing to and from South American ports; indeed, George never was to get over his own brand of World War nostalgie du soleil. One of his favorite narrative descriptions to me during my childhood was of the arrival of his ship in the harbor of Rio de Janeiro—of the way in which a great wall of cliffs seen from the sea would suddenly seem to swing open and expose that warm and luxuriant entranceway. After several such arrivals, there apparently was even some daughter of the warm South American climate present at the port to enhance his welcome. In all, the south became a vision of paradise for George that was to haunt him ever afterwards—right down to the last winter of his life, which he spent in Florida at last, anticipating warm Decembers for the rest of his days.

The seafaring career had enough charms for George to induce him to stay with it another year or two after the end of the war. The next time I heard from him, Ward wrote, he was in the band on an Atlantic liner sailing to New York. Actually, George served for a while as a regular ship’s officer—I think as a purser. We have a picture of him from this epoch, standing on deck wearing his gleaming white uniform, tall and slender as a matchstick, his lips slightly pursed in that English way, with a touch of gentleness about his eyes that gives the lie to his quasi-military bearing. George is certainly playing a role here, and he is handsome and photogenic enough to be an actor; he is also enjoying himself in a whimsical way, fully aware of himself as the neighborhood toff who has traded in his straw hat for an officer’s cap. Like a true sailor, he couldn’t swim a stroke. Did he contemplate a possible future at sea? Perhaps the thought shimmered before his mind’s eye a moment like sunlight on the ocean’s dancing surface, a last fleeting intimation of some role in life appropriate to the aristocratic ideal that the classical theater had represented to him: the braid of his sailor’s cap could be his rouge, just as the buskin of drama had been his nair. He even studied Morse code for a time, this being an appropriate translation of his musical talent into the skills of the sea.

But the fact was that the hiatus of wartime service had performed for George the function it has performed for many others before or since: that of allowing ample time for thought about life’s prospects, and for distinguishing the genuine possibilities ahead from the fanciful ones. In the end, the braid and the buskin both were put aside for good, along with some of the other dreams of George’s youth. Meanwhile, his frequent transatlantic crossings had caused a new adventurous scheme to form in his head. His glimpses of America had shown him a society in which class distinctions, theatrical and otherwise, were far less in evidence than they were in England. Furthermore, New York seemed to be a lively market for a young musician’s talents. Why not try his fortunes there? And shortly after that, Bert Ward wrote, he was living in New York. And you folks know more about that than I do.

It is possible to characterize the New York of that day as being, in one respect, the West Atlantic terminal of a well-established Anglo-American music hall circuit. Classical actors from England debarked there, too, of course, but they were part of a different phenomenon: visiting Lords and Ladies offering glimpses of an aristocratic culture to the democratic hordes of the New World. They came and went right back, as a rule, perhaps without ever having arrived spiritually in America at all. The popular artists of the music hall, on the other hand, were of a culture that was more innately American even when it was on English home soil, and it is no coincidence that some of the best music hall artists who came to America from England—most notably Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel—found their true destiny here. If America was no longer quite the frontier for sod busters or industrial empire-builders it once had been, it was now very much a frontier for the pioneers of show business.

An entertainment revolution was going on in the Western world in the years following the First World War, creating new cultural forms and new ways of life, and America was as much its homeland as Russia was the homeland of the Marxist one. The disciples of this revolution, its newly forming cadre, were flocking to its capitals—mainly, midtown Manhattan and the suburbs of Los Angeles—from all over England and America. This was, in a sense, the last great Anglo-Saxon migration in a history that had begun with the Virginia expeditions of the sixteenth century. Like most of the others before it, it was made up of migratory movements within the confines of continental America as well as movements to it from across the Atlantic, but unlike most of its predecessors, it contained a significant element of non-Anglo-Saxon origin. The entertainment revolution had brought its new cultural values not only into the small towns and suburbs of England and America, radically changing their ways, but into the immigrant quarters of their cities as well; and the revolutionary cadres were also coming in great numbers from these immigrant areas. My father’s relatively long trip across the Atlantic to mid-town Manhattan in search of a future in show business was taken at the same time as many shorter but no less momentous trips towards the same destination by young men and women from such areas as Manhattan’s Lower East Side or the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. These varied life histories were now beginning to converge.

The spirit of this entertainment revolution, whose participants aspired in part to greater wealth as did the participants of any such democratic upheaval before it, was distinguished from that of its predecessors primarily by a certain notion of the conjunction of wealth with style rather than with power. If the classic success story of late-nineteenth-century American capitalism was embodied by the former poor boy now striding in spats and gold-tipped cane from Fifth Avenue mansion to Wall Street office, making and breaking economic empires through the smoke of huge cigars, the equivalent story for the entertainment revolution of the nineteen twenties was typified by the former small-town boy sitting, in tuxedo or in white silk scarf and dressing gown, on a sofa in the first-class stateroom of a luxury liner, smoking his cigarette in a way that bespoke elegance. Indeed, the elegance often came before the fortune, and, properly applied, could bring the latter into being.

This pattern, repeated, for example, both on and off camera throughout the history of Hollywood,