When asked what it was like to be famous, Homer Simpson once remarked: "It's great. You are always meeting people who know your name, but you never know theirs!" Brevity, indeed, is the soul of wit as any great speech maker will know. One of the best Oscar speeches that never was, apart from Gweneth Palthrow's recent performance, surely most have been George Bernard Shaw's on winning the 1938 Award for Best Screen Play.
Though he never lived to see T-shirts with his face printed on them, GBS was no stranger to fame. He practically wrote the PR handbook for all literary exiles that followed. When the cult of celebrity was in its infancy, the celebrated Shaw was sharp enough to see its Faustian implications. His rejection of an Oscar for Best Screenplay in 1938 for Pygmalion was the climax of a life-long struggle to safeguard his art from the clutches of the burgeoning consumerism of the studio system.
When he died, it wasn't long before hungry producers sank their teeth into what was to become one of the most commercially successful musicals and later films of the era, My Fair Lady. Shaw was never a fan of the musical, and thought dancing [was] a very crude attempt to get into the rhythm of life. Literary clubbers take note!
A cautious courtship
GBS was astutely aware of the potential of his Fabian-inspired art to reach a wider audience through the growing medium of cinema. As early as 1914, he prophesied that cinema "will form the mind of England, the national conscience, national ideals and tests of conduct will be those of film." The prescience of such a statement was borne out in the Nazi propaganda films of Leni Riefenstahl and Goebbels.
Shaw's courtship with the moguls was a cautious one. Before the advent of the talkies several offers were made to gain the rights of his plays for conversion into film. The most tempting, perhaps, was an offer of $1 million for his entire theatrical output.
A business meeting with Goldwyn in the 1930s resulted in the ironic Shavian observation; "The difference between you and I, Mr Goldwyn, is that you are interested in art and I am interested in money." Shaw rejected all such offers, including a bid for Pygmalion as early as 1917, convinced the studios were interested only in his reputation and would reshape his scripts into mere amusements.
In the Greek myth, Pygmalion desires the ideal woman, who at the time happens to be the goddess Aphrodite. Her failure to materialise in his bed prompts him to carve a statue out of ivory as a substitute, which he lavishes with delusional affection. Eventually the gods respond to his pleas and send him Galeta, whom he happily settles for and marries, and with whom he has two sons.
Stinging indictment
Shaw's Pygmalion plays with the notion of ideals and illusion in the shape of a Victorian man's (Higgins) desire to create a lady out of a lowly Cockney flower seller (Eliza) for a bet. The self-declared Mister Punch and scourge of the Victorian ruling classes, delivers in Pygmalion a stinging indictment of the mores of the Victorian moneyed classes. Higgins shapes his ideal woman and Eliza becomes a "May-Fair Lady".
But the means to liberation entail an entrapment of sorts. In order to be considered a lady she need only take on the trappings of wealth and finery. The superficiality of wealth and privilege are thus hideously exposed.
With the arrival of sound to the movies in 1934, a renewed bid for adaptation was launched on several fronts. Shaw rejected French, Italian, German and Dutch proposed screen plays between 1935 and 1937, to which the words "blunder", "abomination" and "loathe" tripped from his tongue.
Won over
One day a Hungarian producer, Gabriel Pascal, arrived on Shaw's doorstep claiming an Indian Guru had foretold of their collaboration. It seems this approach was enough to win Shaw over, for he agreed to collaborate with Pascal on the condition that he himself would write the screen play for his beloved Pygmalion.
He wasn't cold in the grave when his entrusted collaborator sold the rights of Pygmalion to give birth to one of the most popular musicals of the age, My Fair Lady, in 1954. An 18-year-old Julie Andrews launched her career playing the lead role as Eliza. It ran for six years, clocking up over 4,000 shows in the West End and Broadway.
The reworked text, tailored to suit the generic Broadway Musical and Hollywood happy-ever-afters, ignored Shaw's 1938 insistence on resisting the romantic frills between Higgins and Eliza. In the 1938 film the ending focuses on Higgins delighting in a future vision of Eliza and Freddy being married and owning a flower shop in Kensington.
Shaw's great understanding of the complexity of human passions and the irrational nature of desire perhaps came to the fore best in epigram; "A man's power to love and admire is like any other of his powers: he has to throw it away many times before he learns what is really worthy of it."