February 25, 2009
Wodehouse in Hollywood (1931)
In the depths of the Depression, P.G. Wodehouse still managed to have a good time. The author was in Hollywood, earning $2,500 a week as a contract screenwriter for MGM when he was invited to visit media baron William Randolph Hearst and his lover, Marion Davies, at San Simeon. The 44,000-acres ranch with its own zoo and massive house crammed with European antiques impressed the writer used to staying at English country house.In a letter to a friend, he described a week’s stay along with 50 guests as disorienting at times: “The train that takes guests away leaves after midnight, and the one that brings new guests arrives early in the morning, so you have dinner with one lot of people and come down to breakfast next morning and find an entirely fresh crowd.”
He also noted dinners in the Refectory, a two-story hall lined with Renaissance tapestries, Italian city flags and a stone fireplace large enough to accommodate four persons. Meals were served on a long monastic dining table with Hearst and Davies sitting on each side in the middle. Wodehouse noted an unusual seating arrangement for guests: “The longer you are there, the further you get from the middle. I sat on Marion’s right the first night, then found myself being edged further and further away till I got to the extreme end, when I thought it was time to leave. Another day, and I should have been feeding on the floor.”
It was probably the high point of Wodehouse’s stay in Hollywood. Despite a successful career writing successful Broadway musicals, he was frustrated at finding little of his work being used. When he mentioned to a reporter that he had earned over $100,000 for doing next to nothing, he thought he was speaking off the record and with a self-denigration common among the English. But its appearance in print caused an uproar among the bankers and studios that cost him his contract and gave him a rueful lesson: “It just shows that with these American reporters you must weigh every word before you speak.”
Born: Carlo Goldoni, playwright, Venice, 1707; Taras Shevchenko, poet, essayist, Morintsy, Ukraine, Russian Empire, 1814; Marcel Pagnol, novelist, playwright, filmmaker, Aubagne, France, 1895; John C. Farrar, book publisher, Burlington, Vt., 1896; Adelle Davis, self-help author, Lizton, Ind., 1905; Mary Coyle Chase, playwright, Denver, Colo., 1907; Frank Slaughter, novelist, Washington, D.C., 1908; Anthony Burgess, novelist, critic, composer, Manchester, England, 1917; S(hivadhar) S(rinivasa) Naipaul, travel author, Port of Spain, Trinidad, 1945.
Died: Thomas Moore, poet, satirist, Whitshire, England, 1852; Paul Reuter (ps. Israel Beer Josaphat), news agency founder, Nice, France, 1899; John Tenniel, illustrator, London, 1914; Mario de Andrade, author, São Paulo, Brazil, 1945; Grace Metalious, novelist, Boston, 1964; Robert Hayden, poet, Ann Arbor, Mich., 1980; Tennessee Williams, playwright, New York City, 1983; W(illiam) O(rmond) Mitchell, author, Calgary, Alberta, 1998.
Quote for the Day: "You want to know what 'out there' [Hollywood] means to me? Once I was coming down a street in Beverly Hills and I saw a Cadillac about a block long, and out of the side window was a wonderfully slinky mink, and an arm, and at the end of the arm a hand in a white suede glove wrinkled around the wrist, and in the hand was a bagel with a bite out of it." — Dorothy Parker
Also from “Writers 365”:
- Hemingway Pays Back His Friends (1926)
- Babbitt Does Stockholm (1930)
- C.S. Lewis: Can You Hear Me, God? (1931)
- Edgar Lee Masters Assassinates Lincoln (1931)
- Arkansas Prays for Mencken (1931)
- Dashiel Hammett’s dirty weekend (1931)
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