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  • Flights & Footlights
  • Michel W. Pharand
Lanayre D. Liggera. The Life of Robert Loraine: The Stage, the Sky, and George Bernard Shaw. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2013. xv + 243 pp. $80.00

ACTOR, SOLDIER, AVIATOR. Charming, endearing, affable. Impatient, diffident, proud. Will the real Robert Loraine please stand up? “In some ways,” writes Stanley Weintraub in his foreword, “Loraine never left the stage. Instinctively, he was acting all the time.” Briskly told and packed with incident, this new biography of Robert Loraine (1876–1935) surveys the eventful life of a fascinating, self-contradictory personality.

Acting was in Loraine’s blood—literally: his father Henry was an actor—and he made his London stage debut thanks to George Alexander, actor-manager of St. James’s Theatre, and to Henry, a member of the company. He was even noticed, in passing but positively, in The White Heather (1897) by the drama critic for the Saturday Review, one Bernard [End Page 117] Shaw. But a few years later he exchanged costume for uniform: when the second Boer War broke out, Loraine volunteered (a month shy of twenty-four) and served in the Royal Horse Artillery, where he became adept at using the deadly Colt machine gun.

In two years he was back on stage, this time in New York (thanks to an offer from producer Charles Frohman), where the tabloids dubbed him “Beautiful Bob” and a “latter day Adonis.” Women admirers deluged him with letters. He had a rooftop penthouse with two servants and rode through Central Park every morning on a white horse. Loraine had it all—except good reviews: To Have and to Hold (“his love making is only skin deep”); Frocks and Frills (“His art, if he has any, was quite extinguished by a succession of extraordinary waistcoats”); Pretty Peggy (“could not make the character human”).

Reenter GBS. En route from Boston to New York, Loraine read Shaw’s just-published Man and Superman (1904): he “danced a jig of delight up and down the corridor of the train,” he writes, rejoicing “at the prospect of producing and acting in a masterpiece.” A reluctant Shaw sold him the American rights for £200 (about $1,000), “all the money I have,” wrote Loraine. Adieu penthouse, servants, horse. At their first meeting—in London on 6 June 1905 at the Royal Court Theatre production of the play—Loraine noted Shaw’s “penetrating seer’s eyes” and “transparent delicate alabaster skin,” but also lamented Harley Granville Barker’s red-bearded Tanner’s “mock imitation of Shaw.” His own Tanner would be much like himself: impetuous, edgy. The play would also be a critical and financial success: the six-month New York production and subsequent multicity tour earned Loraine a whopping $200,000.

Three weeks later he was back in England, again in Man and Superman, in (ironically) a new Royal Court production: another hit. Despite initial artistic differences, he and Shaw soon became lifelong friends, at times vacationing together and even almost drowning together off the Welsh coast. (Loraine would recount their near-death experience in an unpublished 1926 article, “What G.B.S. Thought When He Was Drowning.”) Although he continued to star in other Shaw plays (Arms and the Man, Getting Married, Press Cuttings), Loraine was being drawn into a new passion: when Louis Blériot flew the English Channel in July 1909, Loraine declared to a friend: “I’m going to buy an aeroplane at once.”

So off he went to France, entered Blériot’s school (he was soon dismissed), and eventually earned his pilot’s license at the Farman School. [End Page 118] He bought his first plane and over the next two years competed in aviation meets. Despite near-fatal episodes—as Weintraub aptly notes, biplanes were “little more than motorized box kites”—Loraine even set flight records. In between aerial exploits he continued to act, including a five-month stint as actor-manager of, yes, Man and Superman. But then came 98.9, a phenomenal flop—I’ll let readers discover what the play is about and why it failed—that forced Loraine to sell his house and planes and to head to the United States...

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