And There I Stood with My Piccolo

23

23. WE FINISHED UP THE FIRST Good News season in a blaze of glory, splitting a forty rating just about fifty-fifty with our opposition , Major Bowes. The plan was to go off the air for the summer, so I thought, If I'm ever going to get to Europe I'd better go. We crossed in about six days, and Plymouth looked just like it did in the history books. We did the usual sight-seeing in London—the Wax Museum and everything—and then took a plane for Paris and ran into Abel Green, the editor of Variety, which was just fine, and also good luck because Mr. Green ran Variety's Paris office some years before and sure did know his way around Paris. One day we took a drive to Versailles and on the way we passed through a sleepy little village which looked completely deserted and a. thousand years old. Mr. Green bet me a franc that he could pick out any door along the street and it would turn out to be a place where we could buy an 158 American coke. I took the bet and we stopped the car and opened the first door we saw. It led into a courtyard and there sat Erich von Stroheim, posing with studied nonchalance in faultless white flannels, with a great Dane on one side and a beautiful blond secretary on the other—just in case somebody should walk in, I guess, yet so far as we knew there wasn't anyone within forty miles of there. Herr von Stroheim rose and clicked his heels. Across his face there brushed a slight trace of satisfaction that this charming tableaux hadn't been wasted on an empty garden. Aside from that, however, he was completely in character— the implacable Prussian officer impeccably relaxing between wars. A waiter appeared. I had a cup of tea and one lump. For Mr. Green, an American coke and of course one franc—my franc. We refreshed ourselves,expressed our thanks, and quietly slipped out as Le Grand Illusion automatically resumed his upstage situation between his lovely Scandinavians—the beautiful blond secretary and the gorgeous great Dane. Back in London, the BBC invited me to see a television broadcast, which was pretty exciting for the first thirty seconds while you were saying to yourself, My, my! How can they possibly send pictures through the air like that? But beginning with the next thirty seconds and thereafter it was simply a boring short subject on a home movie set, and I may be dumb 159 but I still think that television will be only as successful as the quality of entertainment they give you on that little screen. A real nice man named Fred Bates showed me around and invited me to conduct a broadcast with the BBC orchestra, but in the meantime a cold I had picked up flying back from Paris got worse and made me beg off the broadcast on account of my ears were stopped up and, although I felt completely okay, I wouldn't have been able to tell an A from an A flat, or muted brass from open, and naturally, wanting to put my best foot forward, I simply sent word that I was ill and couldn't do the broadcast. That evening I was having cocktails in the hotel when two very embarrassing things happened simultaneously, (i) Mr. Fred BBC Bates walked in, giving me a somewhat quizzical, not to say restrained, greeting just as (2) the proprietor turned on the radio which said, "The broadcawst you will now hehya is seated in international good will, occasioned as it is by the circmstnce of a tempry disorder affecting the health of the Ameddican conductor, Mr. Mededith Willson of the NBC to whom, on his couch of pain, the subsequent items of this program are dedicated." I should have been able to explain to Mr. Bates, but I just turned red, left a half crown and a half-finished martini on my couch of pain, and left. 160 To get my mind off this unhappy turn of events, I stopped in at a small antique shop on King's Road to inquire about an old tortoise-shell snuffbox I saw in the window. This shop was fitted in under the stairway of the adjoining building and was only maybe four by six feet...