rough in the swimming bath.
From the St Regis in New York a fortnight later, he wrote:
About a million damned Irishmen have just marched down Fifth Avenue because of St Patrick’s Day. I longed for a machine-gun. Did all the shows. David Belasco rang me up this morning and offered me seats for The Comedian on Thursday, and Kiki on Friday. Kiki has been running for years and is said to be wonderful. Here’s a letter I’ve had from Mac. I think I’ll write to him now – and Beryl. I’ll buy them both wrist-watches – and for you a handbag, silk stockings, & (I hope) some undies. [On dress rehearsal night] over 1000 dollars advance booking yesterday! Laurette Taylor has asked me to dinner and is going to show me the film of Peg o’ My Heart at her house. She’s a darling, but I can’t fall in love with any more girls just now. Rather rotten for you about the drains – keep Weston up to the scratch. No, I’m not dancing, but I have a good time apart from aching for you.
We open at the Gaiety (perfect theatre) on Easter Monday. Cast splendid. It will be a vastly better show than London. Peggy is a divine Effie…Everyone predicts gigantic success – but, oh dear, how often have I heard that word! Gave a dinner party and bought a bottle of whisky for two guineas. Saw Nazmura last night – worst play I’ve ever seen…Your eternal lover, BASIL.
Mac wrote to his father from Stonyhurst: ‘Thanks awfully for your letters, you seem to be staying at a ripping hotel. I hear you are having filthy weather in New York. I should like if you please a present of a wrist watch from America, a little one. So with heaps of love and good luck to the success of the play…’
However, to Basil’s bitter dismay, the New York venture failed. The play closed within a month. He returned to London, still the man who wrote The New Sin, a pillar of the Savage Club, friend of George Robey and Edgar Wallace, favoured literary protégé of Lord Beaver-brook. He was painted by the fashionable portraitist James Gunn, but though he was still in his early forties, Basil’s features already suggest a disappointed man, rather than a rising one. His income declined steadily. He had saved nothing in the good times. From 1925 onwards, his health declined rapidly. Late in 1926 he was diagnosed with bowel cancer, which had killed his mother Lizzie only six years before. The last months of his life were a torment of pain and financial fears. Like all the family, Basil had lived for the day, spent freely, taken no heed for the morrow. Royalty income from his plays had dried up. He was soon almost incapable of writing. The family lived in a rented house, and owned no property. Mac, in his last year at Stonyhurst, was abruptly brought home. School fees could no longer be paid.
Basil was driven to increasingly desperate measures, begging loans. He wrote to a friend in March 1927, appealing for £50: ‘If I die before I have paid, I shall tell Billie that the £50 has first call on my estate…Feel good today – I have done a comic article about my broadcasting experience for 2 LO.’ 2 LO was the forerunner of the BBC. Basil’s first radio broadcast, a reading from his own essays, was almost his last professional engagement. Most of his friends, struggling writers like himself, felt unable to respond to his pleas for loans. The Royal Literary Fund sent him a modest cheque, which sufficed only to keep the family fed. In the opiate-drowsy months which followed, Basil scribbled desperate, almost incoherent instructions to Billie: ‘Big ledger must be shown to no one, not even solicitors.’ He urged her to seek financial help from Lord Beaverbrook and other former mentors, and to dispose carefully of his books, especially those signed by famous names. There was £2,000 in life assurance money, he said. He died in agony early in 1928, aged forty-seven. It was a dreadful end to a life and career which had seemed full of promise barely fifteen years earlier, yet lapsed into disappointment, indeed misery. Having striven so hard to achieve a prosperity and celebrity which eluded his father, Basil quit the stage knowing that he left his wife and children almost penniless.
Basil’s wife Billie suffered a nervous breakdown following his death. His last years had been overwhelmed by financial troubles overlaid upon the horrors of a disease whose symptoms contemporary medical science could do little to ameliorate. She was left struggling in a morass of debts. Theatrical friends organised a West End benefit matinee which raised a little money. Lord Beaverbrook and Edgar Wallace made a generous offer, which Billie accepted, to pay for her daughter Beryl to go to finishing school in Paris. Those two rich benefactors also offered to fund Mac through Oxford. With a delicate sense of honour, which he afterwards regretted, the young man refused. He said that he thought it his duty to go out and make a living, to support his mother. For the rest of his life, Mac was nagged by self-consciousness about his lack of a university education, and displayed an exaggerated deference towards those who possessed it. Though in old age he talked volubly about most of his experiences, he said nothing about this period, which left enduring scars. For a few miserable months, he devilled as a clerk at Scotland Yard. Then his fortunes improved. He found a job in the publicity department of J. Lyons, located at 61 Fleet Street, where he hugely enjoyed himself for the next nine years.
Lyons dominated Britain’s catering industry. The company processed and retailed all manner of foods, owned teashops in almost every town in Britain, together with prestige hotels and restaurants in London, of which the Trocadero in Piccadilly Circus was the most famous, Lyons’ Corner House in Coventry Street the most popular.
Mac, in those days eagerly gregarious, discovered that he was good at writing advertising copy, and that Lyons offered unparalleled opportunities to enjoy what a somewhat credulous young man perceived as the high life. Almost every night, dressed in white tie and tails, he disported himself at one or other of the company’s restaurants or show palaces. He learned to call C.B. Cochrane’s Young Ladies by their first names – and more important, as he observed gleefully, they learned to know him by his. He practised the ‘Buchanan roll’ with the famous performer Jack Buchanan, and was dispatched on a notably unsuccessful ballroom dancing course at Lyons’ expense. Less happily, offered unlimited access to free drinks, he acquired a taste for alcohol in extravagant quantities.
Mac had charm, enthusiasm and talent, and made the most of all three. He was a true believer in almost everything except God. He possessed that gift more useful than any other in public relations, of espousing passionately any cause to which he was professionally committed. He did not pretend to love Lyons, he really did so. He became a protégé of Montague Gluckstein, the company’s boss, who indulged him. ‘Major Monty’, as the staff called him in accordance with common practice so soon after war service, often sent for Mac in the morning while he was being shaved in the barber’s shop of the Royal Palace Hotel. The young publicist was expected to pass on gossip from the shop floor, and also to make Major Monty laugh. Once, Mac was summoned to account for an outrageous expenses claim following a press dinner he had given on Lyons’ chit, opening with cocktails and champagne, ending with Château d’Yquem, old port and cigars. After an inquest, the great man put down the frightful bill and said: ‘When you leave this firm, Hastings, I sincerely hope that you will remain one of our customers. God knows, you are the sort we need.’ Mac continued to party not merely night after night, but year after year. In his twenties, he could take it.
He prospered in the job, for he was good at stunts. When Lyons were building the Cumberland Hotel by Marble Arch, he arranged for them to complete a room on the top floor first, then gave a big media lunch, for which guests had to ascend ladders through the building’s skeleton. This might not win the approval of modern Health & Safety gauleiters, but it played big with the press in 1934. On another occasion, Lyons showcased the great novelty of frozen foods. Journalists were invited to throw steaks at the wall, then sit down and eat them.
When his sister Beryl had completed finishing school and a secretarial course, through Mac’s intercession she became personal assistant to ‘Major Monty’. After a few years at Lyons, she used the expertise she had acquired to start
