Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings

by Craig Brown

  The next day, the board hears the students play their own work. When Rachmaninoff finishes, Arensky turns to Tchaikovsky and says that this pupil has written some piano pieces in ternary song form for his class. Would he care to hear them?

  Tchaikovsky nods his assent. Rachmaninoff remains at the piano, and starts to play; he knows them by heart.

  When he comes to an end, the board holds a secret discussion, each writing his mark in the examination book. Afterwards, Rachmaninoff watches as Tchaikovsky goes over to the examination book and writes something else in it. Rachmaninoff has no idea what he has written, good or bad. It is a full two weeks before Arensky tells him that the board has granted him a 5+, the highest rating, and that Tchaikovsky himself added three further plus signs to this mark, one above it, one below it, and one beside it.

  The excitement runs both ways. Tchaikovsky’s sister-in-law, Anatol, remembers him arriving back from the Conservatory with a spring in his step. ‘For Rachmaninoff,’ he proclaims, ‘I predict a great future.’

  Rachmaninoff’s success in the examination remains the talk of the Conservatory for some time. ‘We all heard of his success, we know what an extraordinary sight reader he is, what a perfect ear he has, and we are infected by his love for Tchaikovsky,’ writes a fellow student.

  As Rachmaninoff prepares to graduate, Tchaikovsky further encourages him by commissioning an arrangement of The Sleeping Beauty for piano duet from him. Rachmaninoff is known as a diligent student with a sure sense of purpose, and it is apparent to everyone that he has the makings of a composer. Yet he shies away from this task. ‘I am burdened with work, but to tell you the truth, I do little, and scarcely practise the piano at all. I simply can’t get down to work. My laziness is gigantic,’ he writes to his sister Natalia in September 1890.

  He eventually sends his transcription of The Sleeping Beauty to Tchaikovsky in June 1891, but it is no good. Tchaikovsky can scarcely believe its incompetence. ‘We made a great mistake in entrusting this work to a boy, no matter how talented,’ he writes to Rachmaninoff’s tutor, complaining of his pupil’s ‘lack of courage, skill and initiative’ and declaring that ‘in general, inexperience and lack of boldness can be sensed at every step ... these proofs have so upset me that I haven’t been able to sleep – I feel a sickness approaching ...’

  Rachmaninoff recognises the truth of these criticisms. ‘Tchaikovsky swears terribly at me for the transcription. And quite reasonably and justly. Of all transcriptions mine is undoubtedly the worst.’

  In fact, he has been diverted by his own compositions, among them the opera Aleko, his first piano concerto, and the Prelude in C-Sharp Minor. When he hears them, Tchaikovsky, always generous, brushes aside his earlier irritations and celebrates the advent of a new composer. Attending the last rehearsals of Aleko, he timidly asks Rachmaninoff if he would object to having his work produced alongside one of his own. Rachmaninoff is overjoyed. ‘To be on the poster with Tchaikovsky was about the greatest honour that could be paid to a composer, and I would not have dared to suggest such a thing. Tchaikovsky knew this. He wanted to help me but was anxious not to offend or humiliate me ... He literally said – “Would you object?” – he was fifty-three, a famous composer – and I was only a twenty-year-old beginner!’

  Tchaikovsky sits alongside Rachmaninoff during rehearsals. Rachmaninoff is upset by some of the conductor’s ideas, but is too frightened to say anything. Sensing this, Tchaikovsky leans over and says, ‘Do you like this tempo?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then why don’t you say so?’

  ‘I’m afraid.’

  During a break, Tchaikovsky says to the conductor, ‘Sergei Vasilyevich and I think that the tempo in that part might be taken a little faster.’

  Aleko is premiered at the Imperial Theatre on April 27th 1893. Rachmaninoff’s father and grandmother are in the audience. As it draws to its close, Tchaikovsky leans far out, so that the audience can see him applauding the new work.

  In October of that year, the two men set off in opposite directions. ‘You see, Seryozha, we’re famous composers now!’ jokes Tchaikovsky. ‘One goes to Kiev to conduct his opera and the other to Petersburg to conduct his symphony!’

  On November 6th, Tchaikovsky dies of cholera. When he hears the news later the same day, Rachmaninoff immediately starts composing his Trio Élégiaque for piano, violin and cello. He dedicates it ‘to the memory of a great artist’.

  SERGEI RACHMANINOFF

  IS DROWNED OUT BY

  HARPO MARX

  The Garden of Allah, Los Angeles

  Summer 1931

  Forty-three years later, Rachmaninoff’s youthful Prelude in C-Sharp Minor remains by far his most popular piece. ‘One day the Prelude simply came and I put it down,’ he recalls. ‘It came with such force that I could not shake it off even though I tried to do so. It had to be there – so it was.’

  And so it remains, his albatross. Now devoting himself exclusively to his career as a concert pianist, it exasperates him that it is the only piece of his that audiences ever want to hear him play: they seem to think he has never composed anything else. Consequently, he has grown to detest it, and prefers all his other preludes. ‘I think them far better music than my first, but the public has shown no disposition to share my belief,’ he complains. The piece pursues him everywhere, an obligation he can never shake off. When he played it in London a few months ago, one critic detected a certain grudging quality about it, complaining that he ‘flung it at the audience like a bone to a dog’.

  If it is a bone, it doubles as a boomerang. ‘The big annoyance of my concert life is my C-Sharp Minor Prelude. I’m not sorry I wrote it. It has helped me. But people ALWAYS make me play it. By now I play it without feeling – like a machine!’

  Between concerts in Texas and Chicago, the elderly Rachmaninoff is taking a break in a bungalow at The Garden of Allah. Sometimes known as ‘the Uterus of Flickerland’, the Garden of Allah consists of twenty-five bungalows set around a main hotel, in lush grounds full of orange, grapefruit, banana and palm trees. Built in 1927 by Alla Nazimova, a star of the silent movies, its vast swimming pool is shaped like the Black Sea, to remind Nazimova of her childhood in Yalta.

  It is, in a way, the Los Angeles precursor of New York’s Chelsea Hotel, a refuge for transients from the East Coast like Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker.95 Alexander Woollcott describes it as ‘the kind of village you might look for down the rabbit-hole’. Over the years, it has certainly been populated by some outlandish figures. The switchboard was once taken over by an operator who believed he could read character from voices, and refused to put through calls from anyone whose voice he disliked. Many residents drink to excess, regularly losing their footing and tumbling headlong into the pool. ‘I used to wait for them to come home and fall in,’ says the playwright Arthur Kober. ‘It was like waiting for a shoe to drop. I’d hear the splashes and then I’d go to sleep.’ Tallulah Bankhead used to like strolling naked around the pool by moonlight. Less seductively, while filming The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Charles Laughton loved to swim in it with his hump still on.

  Perhaps Sergei Rachmaninoff should have guessed from its reputation that the Garden of Allah would not offer the necessary respite from his busy concert schedule. But, then again, how was he to know who his next-door neighbour would turn out to be?

  For three years, the Marx Brothers have been on the road, performing their stage show Animal Crackers across America. But in 1931 they are offered a film contract by Paramount, and move to Los Angeles. Harpo, the brother who never speaks, chooses to rent a bungalow at the Garden of Allah. He thinks that his bungalow – a little distance from the main hubbub – will let him exercise both sides of his character, extrovert comedian and introvert harpist.96 He takes to the Garden of Allah like a duck to water. It is, he says, ‘the best place to practise I ever had’.

  But one day while he is practising his harp, the sound of a piano shatters the peace.

 
‘I was looking forward to a solid weekend of practice, without interruptions, when my new neighbor started to bang away. I couldn’t hear anything below a forte on the harp. There were no signs the piano banging was going to stop. It only got more overpowering. This character was warming up for a solid weekend of practice too.’

  He storms over to the office to register a complaint. ‘One of us has to go,’ he says, ‘and it’s not going to be me because I was here first.’

  But the management prevaricates. When he discovers that the neighbour ‘whose playing was driving me nuts’ is none other than Sergei Rachmaninoff, it occurs to him that they will never ask such an illustrious guest to move. He has only one weapon left in his armoury: his harp. ‘I was flattered to have such a distinguished neighbor, but I still had to practise. So I got rid of him my own way. I opened the door and all the windows in my place and began to play the first four bars of Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C-Sharp Minor, over and over, fortissimo. He wished he’d never written it. After playing it for two hours I knew exactly how he felt ... My fingers were getting numb. But I didn’t let up, not until I heard a thunderous crash of notes from across the way, like the keyboard had been attacked with a pair of sledgehammers. Then there was silence. This time it was Rachmaninoff who went to complain. He asked to be moved to another bungalow immediately, the farthest possible from that dreadful harpist. Peace returned to the Garden.’

  Six years later, Harpo exacts further revenge. In A Day at the Races, he appears in a battered top hat playing the piano with increasing ferocity. The more he plays the piano, the more he wrecks it; by the end, he has reduced it to smithereens, leaving only the plate, which he then picks up and plays as a harp.

  Is it really a coincidence that the piece he destroys in this memorable scene is the Prelude in C-Sharp Minor by Sergei Rachmaninoff?

  HARPO MARX

  IS DENUDED BY

  GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

  Villa Galanon, Cap d’Antibes

  Summer 1928

  Harpo Marx is cheery by nature. ‘I am the most fortunate self-taught harpist and non-speaking actor who has ever lived,’ he claims. But nothing has ever proved so much fun as the French Riviera in summer. ‘The living was easy in 1928. Life was mostly fun and games and the world was our private, million-dollar playground.’

  Staying in the Villa Galanon with his friend from the Algonquin Circle, Alexander Woollcott, Harpo spends his days swimming, feasting, visiting the casinos and playing badminton. While they are playing badminton one afternoon, the postman cycles up the drive with a special-delivery letter. When Woollcott spots the return address, he utters a joyful little gasp, and tears it open, recalls Harpo, ‘like it was money from home’.

  ‘Harpo,’ he says. ‘He’s coming to have lunch with us next Wednesday. Bernard Shaw!’

  ‘Bernard Shaw?’ replies Harpo, who likes to make a play of his lack of education.97 ‘Didn’t his name used to be Bernie Schwartz? Ran the cigar stand in the Hotel Belvedere?’

  The coming of Mr and Mrs George Bernard Shaw to Villa Galanon is, in Harpo’s words, ‘Woollcott’s supreme coup of the season’. For days, Woollcott fusses about the menu he should roll out. He knows Shaw is a vegetarian, but does not know to what extent. One guest thinks Shaw would eat bacon, but Woollcott finds this hard to believe. He finally settles on an omelette with truffles, broiled tomatoes and eggplants, asparagus, artichokes, green salad, hot breads, aspics, mousses, ices, cheeses and wild strawberries with thick cream. Harpo senses that Woollcott thinks him unsophisticated and would rather he made himself scarce until their honoured guest has been and gone.

  On the Monday before Shaw’s arrival, Woollcott and his French chef spend the day deciding which wines to serve. On the Tuesday, they shuttle from the village market to the villa all day long, with load after load of groceries.

  When Wednesday finally comes, Woollcott seems ‘as jittery as a girl getting ready for her first date’, and can’t decide what to wear. At last, he sets off in his car to collect the Shaws from their hotel in Antibes wearing an Italian straw hat and a linen cape. The other guests go upstairs to change, while the French chef remains down in the kitchen ‘screaming at the aspic to gell’.

  Finding himself alone, Harpo walks down the cliff to a sheltered cove. He takes off his clothes, goes for a swim, and stretches out his towel on the sand in order to sunbathe. He plans to get dressed and go back up to the villa in his own time, ‘maybe in time for lunch, maybe not’.

  He is dozing in the nude stretched out on his towel when he hears an Irish voice blaring from the top of the cliff, ‘Halloo! Halloo! Is there nobody home?’

  Harpo wraps the towel around himself and scrambles up the rocks to see who it is. There he finds ‘a tall, skinny, red-faced old geezer with a beard, decked out in a sporty cap and a knicker suit’, with a woman at his side.

  ‘Where the devil’s Woollcott?’ asks the bearded man. ‘And who the devil are you?’

  Harpo Marx introduces himself. The man grins.

  ‘Ah yes, of course. I’m Bernard Shaw.’

  Shaw puts out his hand, but instead of shaking hands he makes a sudden lunge for Harpo’s towel and snatches it away, leaving Harpo ‘naked to the world’.

  ‘And this,’ says Shaw, ‘is Mrs Shaw.’

  At this point, Woollcott arrives back, ‘wild-eyed and wringing wet with flop sweat’. He breathlessly explains that he had driven to the hotel, to find that the Shaws had not checked in. He had then gone to the railway station, where he learned that a couple answering to their description had already hired a driver to take them to Villa Galanon. He is in the midst of this long-drawn-out apology when Shaw interrupts him.

  ‘Nonsense, my boy,’ says Shaw. ‘We had a grand reception here. We were met by a naked jackanapes, your immodest Mr Marx. A bit shocking, but quite grand!’

  The lunch goes well. It is a dazzling one-man show, with Shaw excelling himself, flinging himself in and out of doorways, performing Chaplin’s shuffle, dashing around like Douglas Fairbanks, and mounting full-scale impersonations of some of the famous characters he has known ‘from Disraeli and Lenin to Darwin and Huxley, from Gilbert and Sullivan to Liszt and Debussy, from Oscar Wilde to Henrik Ibsen’, as Harpo remembers it.

  Throughout the performance, Harpo has been trying to work out whether or not Shaw is wearing a tie beneath his famous long beard. At one point, Shaw throws back his head and laughs. Harpo spots not only that he is not wearing a tie, but he has no collar either.

  Shaw breaks from his anecdotes to ask him why he is staring at him so oddly.

  ‘I just discovered,’ says Harpo, ‘that you couldn’t have sat downstairs at Loew’s Delancey Street Theatre.’

  ‘What do you mean? Why not?’

  ‘The downstairs seats are strictly high class at Delancey Street. A man has to be wearing a tie to sit downstairs. Otherwise he must sit in the balcony.’ He explains to Shaw that the assistant manager used to stand by the entrance, lifting up each beard as it passed, saying, ‘Upstairs ... Downstairs ... Upstairs ... Downstairs ...’

  Shaw replies that he would be flattered to go upstairs ‘with the sensible crowd who know what a beard is for’.

  Woollcott is delighted at his bringing together George Bernard Shaw and Harpo Marx. ‘He loved playing the game of Strange Bedfellows,’ recalls Harpo. ‘“Harpo Marx and Bernard Shaw,” he used to say, with that smirking chuckle of his. “Corned beef and roses!”’98

  For the Shaws’ farewell dinner at Villa Galanon, Harpo Marx adds to the game of Strange Bedfellows when he secretly invites another pair of guests. At the appointed time, in walk Peggy Hopkins Joyce, the raunchy, multi-husbanded American actress, together with Oswald Mosley.

  GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

  CRASHES HIS BICYCLE INTO

  BERTRAND RUSSELL

  Penallt, Monmouthshire

  September 12th 1895

  How many intellectuals does it take to crash two bicycles?

  George Bernard Sh
aw is staying with the socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb99 at their house in Monmouthshire. Though aged twenty-nine, he is still learning to ride a bicycle, and is doing so with a recklessness at odds with his usual physical timidity. He regularly falls off at corners, simply because no one has satisfactorily convinced him of the need to lean into them. Faced with a steep downhill slope, he places his feet on the handlebars, and is then unable to steady himself when he hits a bump. Whenever he falls off his bicycle, which is often, he never admits to a mistake, behaving as though it had always been his intention.

  ‘Many of his falls, from which he would prance away crying “I am not hurt,” with black eyes, violet lips and a red face, acted as trials for his optimism,’ notes his biographer, Michael Holroyd. ‘The surgery afterwards was an education in itself. Each toss he took was a point scored for one or more of his fads. After one appalling smash (hills, clouds and farmhouses tumbling around drunkenly), he wrote: “Still I am not thoroughly convinced yet that I was not killed. Anybody but a vegetarian would have been. Nobody but a teetotaller would have faced a bicycle again for six months.” After four years of intrepid pedalling, he could claim: “If I had taken to the ring I should, on the whole, have suffered less than I have, physically.”’

  But his incompetence on bicycles never deters him from employing them in intellectual propositions. ‘The man who is learning how to ride a bicycle has no advantage over the non-cyclist in the struggle for existence; quite the contrary,’ he writes in Back to Methuselah. ‘He has acquired a new habit, an automatic unconscious habit, solely because he wanted to, and kept trying until it was added unto him. But when your son tries to skate or bicycle in his turn, he does not pick up the accomplishment where you left it, any more than he is born six feet high with a beard and a tall hat.’