Harold Meets Some Film Stars.

[poliphilo]

Harold and Vita's grand tour of the USA eventually takes them to California- where the desert landscape reminds him of Persia. They spend a few days in Hollywood, where they have lunch with four film directors whom he finds "quiet cultured people- not in the least the noisy boasting lot we had supposed" but annoyingly fails to name- I suspect because he didn't think them important enough.

And then...

"Gary Cooper comes to join us... The beginnings of a double chin and the hint of greying hair indicate that he may cease to be the jeune premier. Yet he is a nice shy quiet modest young man, devoid of any brains...The stage-hands and property-men greet (him) with "'lo Gary, how's life?' He is very nice to them. He then leaves us to look for a house with a huge fence where he can live in peace."

The next day Harold is introduced to the actor his hostess (an all but forgotten British writer) tips as the one who is set to steal Gary's laurels. The young man's name is Leslie Howard.

"We find that Adonis at tea- he looks like an assistant master at some inferior private school. Glasses and bad teeth. But he is a nice man"..."

"Nice" as you may have gathered, is one of Harold's favourite words.

Comments

[cmcmck]

Gary Cooper came from Gillingham.

Truefact!

[poliphilo]

The people who made Hollywood the capital of world cinema came from far and wide and only a percentage of them were American by birth.

[sovay]

The people who made Hollywood the capital of world cinema came from far and wide and only a percentage of them were American by birth.

That I agree with, not to mention the reinvention even of actors who were American. The shaping of stage names—the whitewashing of origins—has particularly come to get on my nerves over the years. [edit] I know people are always reinventing themselves on their own time, but the degree of diversity that was publicity'd out of view was severe and still with us.

[sovay]

Gary Cooper came from Gillingham.

His mother did. He himself was born in Montana, though he spent a portion of his childhood in the UK.

[sovay]

"We find that Adonis at tea- he looks like an assistant master at some inferior private school. Glasses and bad teeth. But he is a nice man"..."

"Well, now you have me. It's that thing called charm. Without it, there is a not particularly personable, slightly skinny gent in an old loose tweed jacket and trousers with a patch on the seat and tortoise-rimmed glasses, pulling on a blunt pipe. With it, there is Leslie Howard."

—Ruth Rankin, "Leslie Howard – Perennial Charmer" (1936)

[poliphilo]

I don't think Harold took film people seriously, but the whirligig of time brings in its revenges and 90 years later Leslie Howard is still famous and Harold Nicolson is an historical footnote.

[sovay]

I don't think Harold took film people seriously, but the whirligig of time brings in its revenges and 90 years later Leslie Howard is still famous and Harold Nicolson is an historical footnote.

I'm glad he's a footnote whose diaries are worth reading, but I do think Leslie Howard deserves to last.