Friday, August 31, 2018

My Log 639 August 31 2018: Chronicles from the Tenth Decade: 75 A surprise visitor from Buenos Aires recalls a boyhood hero of mine: by way of her research into a small town in British Columbia


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 Yesterday I was unexpectedly reminded of a boyhood hero of mine and the reminder came from an extremely roundabout source. Here is the story:
I recently had an inquiry from a young woman filmmaker from Buenos Aires in Argentina if there was any possibility that we could meet during her approaching visit to Montreal. Yesterday she arrived, Laura Tusi, a fairy intense, enthusiastic woman in, I imagine, her thirties, who  has been brought to Canada by her interest in making a documentary film about a small group of Argentinians, most of them Quakers, if I have the story correctly,  who many years ago established a community in a British Columbia town called Argenta, in the very heart of the Kootenays.
Here is the Wikipedia entry about Argenta:
Argenta is a settlement in British Columbia. Located on the west side of the Purcell Mountains, on the northeast shore of Kootenay Lake, it was founded during a silver mining boom in the 1890s. Argenta was given its name by the Argenta Mining Company from the Latin word for silver, argentea.[1]
In 1952, Quakers settled in the town. Primarily from California, they first established the Delta Co-operative Association in 1954. They then went on to found and operate the Argenta Friends School, a boarding school, from 1959 to 1982. Students studied academic subjects, as well as gardening, how to milk cows, chop wood, and cook on a wood stove.[2]
In the 1960s, Argenta attracted anti-war protesters, as well as hippiesback-to-the-land residents, and members of the counter-culture.
With a population of just 100, many residents have gone on to great things, including one who worked as an economist at the World Bank in Washington. Another former student of the Friends School is head of disaster relief for the UN in Nairobi, Kenya. Nancy Herbison changed her name to Nancy Argenta and became a well-known opera singer based in London.
Laura Tusi’s aunt, now in her eighties is one of the Argentinians who took up residence in Argenta, and is still there. During her description of the town Ms Tusi mentioned that a prominent personality had been Hugh Elliot, a man who had worked in China in the pre-Communist years as a teacher at a school deep in the interior that had been run by a New Zealander called Rewi Alley.  Alley is the boyhood hero I mentioned in my introduction. He disembarked in China from a ship in 1929, and stayed there for the rest of his life, becoming such a famous figure that his eightieth birthday in 1987 was celebrated by a banquet given by, and attended by, all the leaders of the Communist government of China.
In the 1930s Alley founded the Chinese Industrial Co-operatives, but when this was destroyed during the Japanese invasion, he decided he should retreat to the far reaches of the country, and establish a self-sufficient school to train rural workers that would be impervious to invasion.  So, his school --- the Baily school named after an American who was its first principal --- was established in a village called Shandong, supported by the contributions of well-wishers in New Zealand, Australia, the United States, and probably elsewhere.
When the Communists swept into control of the country, Alley concluded they were trying to do for the nation what he was doing on a local scale in his school, so he became an enthusiastic supporter.  The government demanded he renounce foreign money in support of his school, but they kept it going, and eventually it was transferred into the city of Lanzhou and given the status of a university.
When I visited China as a member of a National Film Board crew in 1978, one of my first requests was to meet Rewi Alley, who to me, was an almost legendary figure. We were put off with one excuse or another, but when we were making our obligatory visit to the model commune of Tachai (for which  absurdly exaggerated production figures were claimed as part of a misguided attempt to persuade other communes to more effort), I noticed one evening in the dining room an old white man dining with a group of Chinese officials.  I thought he looked like Rewi Alley, so I went over and introduced myself, and sure enough it was the man himself.  He apologized for not being able to meet us, but later came over to our table, and I had the pleasure of a talk with him in his room.  He told me then --- prophetic words --- that he was not worried about the Chinese being able to make things: they were an industrious, clever people, and could make anything, What worried him was their ability to feed their people.  His primary interest was, what is happening to the water table?  With thousands of wells being sunk all over the country especially in the agricultural areas, how could the water table, that underground system of acquifers that keep everything going, last?   That is probably China’s number one problem to this day.
Alley was one of a handful of old China hands from abroad who chose to stay in the country after the Communist takeover. Hugh Eliott was one of those expelled.  In the Macarthy-ite atrmosphere of the United States in the 1950s, he found it impossible to settle there, so he moved north to Argenta, where he became one of the pillars of the community. He apparently died a few years ago, but his work is about to be immortalized by Laura Tusi, if she ever gets to make her proposed film.
I felt quite offended when John Fraser, the Globe and Mail journalist in his book on his experience as a correspondent in China, wrote a vicious denunciation of Alley for having followed the Communist party line through thick and thin, treating him as nothing more than a crude propagandist. He was, of course, “struggled” against by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, but nothing could shake his faith in China and their rise from being the world’s most despised people.
I met Alley again in 1983 when I was researching a proposed film for UNICF about child services in China: he was in hospital, already declining in health, and he died four years later at the age of 90.
To give a flavour of his life, work and attitudes, I cannot do better than quote from some of his statements, recorded in the Wikipedia entry about   him:
“Never mind about whether you are a student of China or not, as long as you are among the ordinary people you will get an understanding, a real understanding of this country. You're already in amongst it... Some very bad things happened. The price of China breaking free of foreign domination and the bad things of its past was enormous. They reckon that it cost 30 million lives to build new China. The West should have a bit more gratitude for the struggle of the Chinese. If it wasn't for the resistance in China during the Second World War, the Japanese would have had tens of thousands more men and they may have got as far as Australia and New Zealand. Back then sides were clear-cut. They were clearer even before the war, if you had the wit to see it. I became involved in China's struggle and I chose my side. After the war and the revolution, I knew I had a choice. I could have joined the critics of China, but China had become like my family and as in all families, even though you might have been arguing with each other, when the guests come you present a loyal unified face to the world. I could have joined the journalists and so-called sinologists in condemning everything about the revolution, but I had already chosen my side.
"This place (China) is a great case study of humanity; one of the biggest examples of humanity's struggle. If you can't feel for these people, you can't feel anything for the world. Although it was in France, in the First World War, that I first had a taste of China. I can remember when there were a lot of shells falling and we had our rifles and our steel helmets on and there were these coolies. Coolies, that's a word people don't use much any more; but that's what they were, these Chinese labourers. Coolie comes from the word bitterness. These blokes were eating their fair share of bitterness in France. Navvies for the poms, they were. Shells bursting and the ground shaking like there was an earthquake, and they were stripped to their skinny waists and just kept unloading the wagons. I saw endurance and a determination that I had seldom seen before. Then later, back there in the thirties, I was involved in the factories in Shanghai and I can remember seeing sacks in the alleys at the back of the factories. At first I thought they were sacks of rubbish, but they weren't, they were dead children. Children worked to death in the foreign-owned factories. Little bundles of humanity worked to death for someone's bloody profit. So I decided that I would work to help China. I suppose then it was like a marriage of sorts and I wrote what I wrote and said what I said out of loyalty to that marriage. I know China's faults and contradictions; there are plenty of those. But I wanted to work for this place and I still do. I woke up to some important things here and so I felt I owed China something for that."
"I had human principles and I made choices based on these. I have always been and will always be a New Zealander; although New Zealand has not always seen me as that. But I know my own motives. The buggers even refused to renew my passport at one point and they treated my adopted son very badly. Did you know that when Robert Muldoon visited Mao Zedong in the 1970s he was the last head of state to see him? Well I'm told that when Muldoon asked what he could do for Mao, Mao is supposed to have said 'Give Alley his passport back.'
"I love New Zealand, and sometimes miss it. New Zealand is a good country, populated by basically just and practical people. But there is a fascist streak in New Zealand as well, and we must always be vigilant to prevent it from having too much sway. I remember as a boy, I was walking along the beach near Christchurch and there was a group of men coming back from a strike, or a picket of some kind. Suddenly, out of the dunes came police on horseback and they rode into these unarmed workingmen, swinging their clubs as if they were culling seals. I will stand up against such forces as long as I can stand. Even here, in the Cultural Revolution, when some young blokes came in here and started breaking things I grabbed one of them and put him over my knee and gave him a proper hiding. I got army guards on the gate after that. That was thanks to Zhao Enlai, looking after an old mate from Shanghai; but I stood up to them. I know many in New Zealand see me as a traitor to their culture, but I have never betrayed New Zealand. What I betrayed was the idea many New Zealanders had of what a Kiwi should be and what was right and wrong in the political world. There is a very big difference.
"Successive New Zealand governments have tried hard to discredit me as if I was some sort of communist threat to them or a traitor. Well I am a communist, but I am not a traitor. I have always loved New Zealand. I just said what I thought was important and true."











Tuesday, August 28, 2018

My Log 638 August 28 2018: Chronicles from the Tenth Decade: 74 Time to describe the few and far between joys of old age: introducing the doctrine of Wot the hell!


It suddenly occurred to me yesterday that although I call these pieces chronicles from the tenth decade, most of them have been mere reminiscence, about earlier times in my life, and that maybe it is time to explain what it is like to be 90. I began to think about this when I decided to get out the walking stick I have had since I fractured the Achilles tendon on my right leg a couple of years ago.  It never properly healed, left me with a slight limp, which naturally has placed more strain on the left leg. I never found the walking stick made much difference but recently the strain on my left leg has re-emerged as a tweak in my groin, making walking more laborious than before.
This Achilles problem was caused by my false pride. I was visiting a friend in Dubrovnik, Croatia for three months.  Dubrovnik is a small town surrounded by high stone walls, within which almost all of the streets are too narrow to accommodate vehicles, and precipitously steep. Every morning I went for a walk, up 287 steps, then down into the town again, and was quietly proud that I could still do it at 88.  In my last days there I felt a slight soreness in my ankle, but did not think anything about it until I returned to Montreal. I had my bicycle in the shop for a tune-up, and when I emerged with it, I pushed off with my right leg, and snap!  I felt my Achilles go, knew what it was (thanks to my years of following games), and that it would take months to heal; and off I went immediately to the hospital, where I was equipped with one of those cumbersome boots for the next three months or so. Gone was my bike, gone the 30 km rides I used to take around the periphery of Ottawa, or even the quick rides along de Maisonneuve to the coffee shop on Peel and Sherbrooke.
Although I had noticed, ever since I turned 80, that the debilitating effects of old age increased exponentially as one lived on, this reduction in mobility was the first effect that really made a difference to my life, restricting severely the range that I could travel on two legs, something I had always liked to do. In the previous 80 years I had been pretty free of health worries: tonsils out in my forties; prostate gland scraped in my seventies;  a couple of attacks of gout; high blood pressure --- nothing that couldn’t be kept under control. Sex, of course, was well into my past by his time.
It was a different story in the following year as I approached the tenth decade, and became more brutally aware of the joys of old age. Three days after I returned from another trip to Dubrovnik (my last, I fear, given my debilitated condition), I was suddenly assailed by a failure to urinate, blocked by blood discharges. These discharges I had had for some 30 years, but they had never before blocked my urinating function. I had always supposed the bleeding was caused by an inefficient job done on my prostate, but that was mere supposition, arising from my intense medical ignorance. I had discovered that the presiding doctor had moved to Alabama, so evidently nothing good could be expected of such an idiot. A sentiment typical of my medical wisdom….
 In the emergency room at the Jewish General my problem was cleared by means of an overnight catheter that I wore for 20 hours. It was a painful and pretty horrendous business, for whenever the flow blocked, the nurses had to come along, clear it out by means of agitating it and re-establishing the catheter. But if I thought I was over the worst, I had another think coming. Less than three weeks later, the day before my eighty-ninth birthday, I was due to go to an annual dinner given by my union ACTRA to its pensioners. I was looking forward to it, for it was being held in the Ritz-Carlton, a posh hotel where, in the 1950s, as a reporter on the hotel beat, I was a frequent guest at the opening night of the American singers they booked in the Ritz Café, most of whom I had interviewed earlier in the day. I had never set foot in the place since then, believing it to be beyond my means, and was remembering the many excellent dinners we had had here. On the way I had to call into a UPS office to send something to my daughter in Costa Rica. While in that office I began to tremble in a way I had never known before, and by the time I arrived at the hotel I was shaking all over like a mammy in a Lagos ju-ju club. I asked for water, sat down, and slowly began to realize I wasn’t going to make the dinner. The hosts bundled me into a taxi to send me home, and the last thing I remember was getting out of the taxi and struggling to step up on to the pavement. When I woke up I was in a hospital.  Unfortunately it was a French hospital, and my inability to understand what was being said to me in French --- another of the joys of old age, that had gradually overcome me!--- was compounded by the fact that they insisted that everyone who came into my room wear a mask. At first they thought I had pneumonia with the possibility of tuberculosis down the road; but after assiduous investigation they decided I had a kidney infection, and put me on a rigorous diet of antibiotics  which lasted for nine days. As we left the hospital, the reigning specialist muttered to one of my sons that a man of my age normally didn’t survive what I had been through.
Okay, one up for me. But four days out of hospital, my urination problem hit me again with a vengeance. Back into the Emergency Room, where they managed to relieve the problem, allowing me to have a cystoscope three or four days later. This was a veritable horror show in which a urologist took a ton of blood clots out of my bladder and told me if my problem reoccurred within the next 24 hours I should return to the emergency and insist they finish the job.
By the end of the next day it had reoccurred, and my daughter (visiting me by his time) accompanied me back to the hospital for another catheter. This time, a young nurse tried unsuccessfully to fit the catheter, but failed, and decided to leave it to someone else. Fortunately, in trying she had unblocked the system, so after an anxious night in the hospital I was allowed to go home without treatment. Blood continued to flow out of me for the next four days before, suddenly, like magic, it just stopped, disappeared from my urine, and has never been seen since.
I’ve never been able to decide since whether to the hospitals  the aged are just a damn nuisance, or whether they welcome the fact that the older you are, the more you can be poked and prodded, the more likely it is that they will find things wrong with you. As I passed through the various scopes --- colonoscope (up your bum--2), cystoscope (down your penis --2), brachyoscope (down your throat ), CT scan (if I remember correctly, an all-over examination the results of which could keep the doctors in work for years),  ETC or ECT or something like that, XYZ and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all,  I felt I had to tell them: my body is 90 years old.  The more  you keep looking, the more inefficiencies you will find in it.
Indeed, one of the things I have discovered --- I am on to the Aged Wisdom section of the story now --- is that one by one, piece by piece, the various organs that keep you alive begin to wear out --- eyes, ears, nose and throat, stomach, kidneys, lungs, heart --- you name it, at 90 it isn’t working as well as it used to. What do the young know of such conditions as the deviated septum (crooked nostril), post-nasal drip (always blocking your throat with phlegm,  thanks to --- you’ve got it, the deviated septum), the swelling of the prostate gland, the five times a night up to the bathroom, the slow dribble, if that,  that is the old-age urinating function, the loss of hearing (inclining the young, especially the impatient young, to repeat what they had just said in quarter-time, and at double volume, as if you are a blithering idiot), the shortness of vision….you name it, bro, I have it, or have had it, all, and more.
Now, just to finish off, here I am almost 12 months later, with lung cancer. I spotted it in April. Three X-rays, two lung scans, another CT scan, a wrong diagnosis of pneumonia, a reluctant admission it could be cancer, followed by five radiation treatments, and now the prospect of a miracle cure from some expensive  pill used to treat the rare mutation of my tumour that I am promised I have…. All to be followed I am sure, by an early death. So here I am, patience itself,  smiling beatifically, always gentle and unassuming just as I have always been,, immensely grateful for our socialized medicine system,  and, in spite of my manifold sins and crimes, omissions and mistakes,  cruelties and haughty  indifference,  not at all worried about being recycled into the continuing drama of life on planet Earth.
So that is my one piece of Aged Wisdom: there don't seem to be many joys of old age, even when you are a non-querulous, unexcitable, straight-forward, easily pleased  guy like me. Is it any wonder that in these sere years of my aged contentment, my mantra has become Wot the hell, wot the hell,  toujours gai, toujours gai!
Yes, after all, wot the hell?




Friday, August 24, 2018

My Log 637 August 24 2018: Chronicles from the Tenth Decade: 73 Revelation: Royal family serves second-rate Lyons food at receptions; Peter Hall’s diaries reveal a lot about the tempests of the world of theatre


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Many years ago I was enthralled by James Boswell’s London Journal which led me on to his amazing Life of Johnson, a work that established the biographer as a far greater writer than the man he was describing.
These experiences should have led me on to reading more Journals, but somehow or other, they didn’t, perhaps because Journals always seem to be so voluminous.  I do all of my book-reading in bed, so naturally I have always tended towards smaller books that are easier to hold up to the light. Okay, I know it is a foolish reason, but ‘tis mine own.
As I established in my last chronicle I have embarked on the nearly 500-page diaries of Peter Hall, the drama producer who became the most important theatre administrator of the last 50 years in the crowded minefield that is the English theatre.   I am not sure I really like the bloke who is portrayed therein, but I have to confess that this form does throw up some wonderful insights into the workings of otherwise obscure institutions.  Having hit the 200-page mark, I thought I would share with my readers some gems that Hall revealed when he dictated his diaries into a microphone at the end of every working day.
Looming over all of his work was the figure of Laurence Olivier, the most renowned actor of his time, who became the director of the first National Theatre, a long-established objective that finally came into physical existence just as Olivier was declining into old age. At first, while the new building for the long-promised theatre was being built --- it was to have three stages ---  the institution got off the ground, and began productions in the entirely inadequate premises of the Old Vic theatre, which for many years had been he centre of Shakespearean production in London. In recent years, a newcomer, the Royal Shakespeare Company, an off-shoot of the Stratford–on-Avon company, had been established by the youthful Peter Hall in the Aldwych theatre, where, in company with Peter Brook, an acknowledged genius of theatrical production, the newcomers began to set new standards for modern theatre previously unmatched in Britain.
Brook apparently had no stomach for the minutiae of the work of establishing and running a theatre; and  when, as the completion of the new building was further and further delayed into the future, Olivier began to tire of it all, it fell to Peter Hall to be anointed as the new director. It was a task he undertook with enthusiasm. Of course he soon found it was a close-to impossible job. He had to keep the Old Vic productions going, but always with a mind of establishing a company that would be able to fill the three stages of the great new theatre that awaited them. He began to get future commitments   from virtually all of the greatest directors, the finest actors, designers and so on in the country, and pretty soon the complainers emerged saying this great new National Theatre with its vast subsidies, would be the killing of British theatre as it was known.
When Hall took the job it was at a salary far below what he could earn in commercial theatre: he needed a good deal of money because he had several children by successive wives, a total of eight people dependent upon his earnings. He figured he might be able to make a go of it if he could earn 5,000 pounds a year from peripheral activities, so while planning and negotiating with the emotional characters who would comprise the meat and drink of the distant NT, he had to think of taking offered jobs to direct schlocky films, had to accept jobs as an actor for a German film,  and had to accept to direct filmed  advertisements for various products --- and all just for the money, as he keeps repeating….
There are some wonderful descriptions of the sensitivities of these theatrical people. Jonathan Miller, who first emerged as a comedian in the renowned Cambridge university show Beyond the Fringe,  was a brilliant man, already a qualified doctor, who later became a prominent director of plays and operas. At an early stage he proposed that he should direct for the NT a production  of Oscar Wilde’s glorious comedy The Importance of Being Ernest  --- with the difference that it would have an all-male cast. After much discussion this idea was nixed, but Miller took it so badly that he got into a kind of funk. Hall eventually had a meeting with him:
“I asked him why he had been behaving in a Coriolanus-like way, booking himself up outside the NT, as I’ve now discovered he has been, so that there was no possibility of employing him for the next year or so; yet going around saying he was resigning as he was fed up with not being used. There was a complete breast-beating scene. He said he always loud-mouthed against authority, was always against the father-figure, was verbally promiscuous….I asked him why he went about saying the National wasn’t using him. He apologized, asked to stay. I don’t believe he will.”
Managing these high-tempo stars was far from easy. In preparing a production of an Ibsen play, Hall had managed to cast Wendy Hiller, Ralph Richardson, Peggy Ashcroft, three of Britain’s greatest theatre stars, along with a lesser-known player Alan Webb, who became violently ill, as was Wendy Hiller, who nevertheless appeared for rehearsal against doctor’s orders, wheezing, coughing and voiceless. He began to think of opening without the two sick players. "Ralph is an instinctive tennis player, ” Hall commented. “If he finds himself playing a scene with an actor who doesn’t interest him, he chunters through as quickly as possible. Alan forces him to play good tennis.”  And then:
“There was a ridiculous moment today at rehearsal when Peggy and Ralph sat side by side on the sofa. Peggy said it was much too high for her to work on, Ralph said it was just right. I soothed things over by saying we should practise with some lumps of foam rubber and get a compromise height. Ralph, as he left, his motorbike helmet securely on his head, winked and whispered to me: ‘Don’t touch that bloody sofa.’ ”
A few days later:
“Dreadful dream. My mother and father and I were looking at coffins and selecting my father’s for he had agreed to die that afternoon. Mother was in a frightful temper because…she found it extremely inconvenient of father to decide to die on this particular afternoon. Father was, as usual, cheerful about the whole proceeding and accepting it with a good grace.
“Considerable feeling of distress today as if I have been through some long physical disaster. I begin to think what is the point of working at this pressure and putting up with all the shit about the National  Theatre. I have only 2 ½ years of my contract to run so I shall be getting rhe new building open for somebody else to use. Is it worth it?’ ”
Part of the job put Hall in touch with the highest in the land:
“To Buckingham Palace for the Queen’s Reception for the media…Newspaper editors, television controllers, journalists and commentators. Heath looking like a tanned waxwork; Macmillan a revered side show, an undoubted star; a few actors (Guinness, Ustinov, Finney), and all the chaps like me…
“It was two and a half hours of tramping round the great reception rooms eating bits of Lyons pate, drinking oversweet warm white wine…. and that atmosphere of jocular ruthlessness which characterizes the Establishment on its nights out. Wonderful paintings, of course, and I was shown the bullet that killed Nelson.
“As we were presented, the Queen asked me when the National Theatre would open. I said I didn’t know. The Duke asked me when the National Theatre would open. I said I didn’t know. The Prince of Wales asked me when the National Theatre would open. I said I didn't know. At least they knew I was running the National Theatre….
“Home by 2 am with very aching feet. Who’d be a courtier?”

Now we know why they are among the richest families in Britain.
Serving second-rate Lyons products with warm white wine! I know about Lyons  and their food from my three months working in their factory as a labourer in 1952, never dreaming that the food was going out to the highest in the land.
And always the worry about money:
“All my personal accounts are overdrawn. And Kimble (his accountant) is now telling me I must earn between 10,000 and 15,000 pounds a year more…. (Three weeks later): “A dreadful hour with Kimble. There is no hope for my future peace of mind unless  I can cut down the cost of my family overheads. Something will have to go. But I can’t think what….My impulse at the moment is to take to my heels and run --- from every responsibility and every family tie. Is this the fine gesture of the revolutionary saving his creative self? Or is it (and I think it is) the ostrich wanting to place his head in the sand? The truth is that work in the subsidized theatre can never earn me the kind of money I need to keep everyone in comfort. I knew this when I went to the National.”

I couldn’t help asking myself why, as the working class boy he proclaimed himself to be at the beginning of these diaries, he had to keep his children in such expensive private schools. But I guess he knew the British class system better than I…..
Finally, for those who have admired Laurence Olivier as actor and producer over the years, Hall offers up an intriguing picture: occasionally fussy, reluctant to give up, always popping up unexpectedly even after he had retired, anxious always to have his say. His last 20 years were marked by severe illnesses, and Hall gives us a graphic description of their effect on him (this was written in 1975):
“To Roebuck House to see Larry. He is alert, humorous with a mind dancing from subject to subject much as in the old days. But the scale of him seems to have been pressed, reduced; the strong physical presence seems to have gone….He has surmounted cancer, surmounted phlebitis and this recent muscular virus should have been the death of him, but he has surmounted that, too. He told me that every muscle in his body was affected. He couldn’t keep his eyelids open. He couldn’t swallow, so he had to be fed intravenously. Only one muscle continued to operate properly ---the muscle in his right thumb. This he used gently to press the bell for the nurse.  He has had to learn to walk again, to write again, and ---- most importantly --- to train his voice again. It is still high, still a parody of its former self, but it is improvin…. He said he didn't like going into town very much as crossing the road was  diffucult. He could move at an even pace, but if he needed to take two quick steps to avoid a car his knees might give way…. He said he has to cease being a NT asssociate director this autumn, that anyway was when his contract was up….I said he must…somehow take part in the opening of his theatre. He answered that he knew there would be disappointment if he didn’t act in the new theatre, but he would sooner that than have people disappointed if he did. I urged him to accept the presidency of the National. He said he would think about it.”

It is a measure of the great actor’s determination that he not only overcame all these physical problems, but was still acting fourteen years later in the year of his death, 1989, at the age of 82.