Colin Wilson on a cinema charlatan
The Disciple and his Devil Valerie Pascal (Michael Joseph £3.00) One of the most interesting chapters of Hesketh Pearson's biography of Shaw was called 'The Strange Case of Frank Harris '. I always felt it was a pity Pearson had not written a chapter called ' The Strange Case of Gabriel Pascal ' for, from all accounts, Pascal was quite as extrordinary as Harris. Unfortunately, no one seemed to know much about Pascal, and the few scraps of information about him in print contradicted one another. Now here, at last, is a full-length book about him by his widow, and it confirms the legends. Pascal was as mad as Harris, if a great deal less superficial.
Shaw often referred to Pascal's 'Cagliostro charm.' What he was saying — politely — was that there was more than a touch of the charlatan about Pascal — charlatan, mystic, adventurer, exhibitionist and magician. His real name was not Gabriel Pascal. Nobody seems to know what it was — not even his wife. Nor can she give his date or place of birth. And when she asked him about his parents, he replied, "I had none." The story of how he became an actor in Vienna is sufficiently typical of him to be true. He strode into the Hofburg Theatre and announced imperiously to the secretary that he wanted an audition arranged immediately. When the secretary declined, Pascal told him that he would call every day for a week, and if the audition was not forthcoming on the seventh day, there would be trouble. . . . Each day, Pascal appeared at the theatre and held up a number of fingers to indicate how much time was left, then strode out. On the sixth day, the secretary's nerve broke — he suspected that Pascal must have some influential patron in the government. So the audition was arranged. Pascal stunned everybody with a piece of method acting — it was To be or not to be' — and became a member of the company.
It can be seen that what Pascal had was an Orson Welles type of flamboyance, as well as a charm that seemed to depend Upon boyishness and a Hungarian accent. He also had the kind of luck of a character In the Arabian Nights. Working as a groom after the first war, he used to gallop naked on two horses; one day he galloped into a crowd in the middle of a field. It turned out to be a film company on location. Pascal joined them, learned the film business, and soon became rich and famous.
It is a pity we only have Pascal's word for many of these stories. He was not exactly a liar — he took himself too seriously for that — but he had an uncontrollable imagination. Valerie Pascal tells the .story of how he met Shaw, swimming naked off Cap d'Antibes. Pascal swam out to a red buoy, and found Shaw — also naked — attached to it. Pascal recognised his hero and talked enchantingly, telling Shaw that he ought to allow his plays to be filmed. Shaw called after him — as he swam away — "If you're broke one day, Come and see me." Ten years later, Pascal was broke, so he arrived, unannounced, to see Shaw. The Hungarian charm worked; within a few weeks, Shaw had agreed to let Pascal film Pygmalion . . .
There is only one objection to the first part of this story. When Pascal described his relationship with Shaw, in the Birthday Book published when Shaw was ninety, he doesn't mention the Antibes episode. Neither does Stephen Winsten in his biography of Shaw — the only one with anything to say about Pascal. If it was true, surely Pascal would have printed it, or at least told it to Winsten?
And so one has to accept that Pascal's stories about himself are no more reliable than Frank Harris's. But at least, the main outlines of his career after Pygmalion are clear enough. And they are depressingly tragic. Pygmalion, with Leslie Howard, confounded every prophecy by becoming an immense success. Pascal could write his own ticket. He should have done so, and built up a reputation as a good all-round director. Instead, he decided to stick to Shaw. And no one really believed he could bring off another success like Pygmalion. They were right. Major Barbara was a succes d'estime, but, without the fairy tale plot, no record-breaker. Pascal was always such an insane perfectionist that he always exceeded his budget, and usually spent his own share of the profits in advance. In Caesar and Cleopatra he overspent so wildly that even the hare-brained film world was shocked by his extravagance, and Pascal was virtually blacklisted. He spent the remaining years of his life trying to raise money and confidence, still roaring like a lion and exploding like a volcano. His only other completed venture, Androcles and the Lion (which, in my opinion, was every bit as good as his Pygmalion), was a flop, and Pascal's career foundered slowly and cruelly, like some huge Spanish galleon. It is one of the most shattering and upsetting stories I have read for a long time, and I almost suspect it has given me a few grey hairs. I certainly finished it feeling as if I had watched an earthquake.
The final irony is that Pascal's last mad idea was a musical based on Pygmalion. He broke himself — and several other people — keeping up the option payments on it. But he was dead — of a cancer — before My Fair Lady opened, to make the kind of money that could have re-launched his career.
At the end of the second war, Valerie Pascal was a young film actress in Hungary, many years Pascal's junior. She went to do a screen test for him in Paris, and Pascal asked her to turn up at their first meeting in simple clothes, without makeup. One suspects that he had already decided to fall in love with her — that he had been looking around for a long time for a girl to whom he could be father, husband and Svengali all in one. And it should have worked out, for she emerges from the book as simple, honest, very intelligent, and totally devoted to Pascal. Unfortunately, Pascal had no time to give her; his career was sinking, and he had to rush around the world charming financiers, auditioning actresses, and trying to stop Shaw from wrecking everything with his homemade contracts. Mrs Pascal got depressed and resentful, they began to quarrel, and the marriage became one more tragic mistake.
If Pascal were more like Frank Harris, one could read the book with a certain detachment. But he was a greater man than Harris, and the last chapters remind one of that painful essay of Orwell's about trying to kill an elephant. All his life he had a genuine hunger to become a monk.
He was a disciple of the Hindu teacher Sri Meher Baba (whom he sometimes called 'the sweet charlatan '), and he admired St Francis and Gandhi so much that he wasted years trying to raise the cash to make films about them. And it is this enormous sincerity that finally emerges above the conflicting currents of his per sonality, and gives the book its tragic dimension. Mrs Pascal is obviously accurate when she says : "He remained for ever the outsider, the fiery, impatient romantic, the impractical chaser of visions, always suffering with the deep, wild• suffering of youth." It sounds overemotional, but it turns out to be true.
At least the book has a kind of happy ending. One day Pascal looked at his wife's hand and said with amazement, 'I am going to leave you millions.' Nothing seemed less likely; he died penniless and deeply in debt. But the book ends with the first night of My Fair Lady . . . .
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