Roy wrote: (Has it ever occurred to you that Bernard Shaw's play "Pygmalion" -- and with it, "My Fair Lady" -- is set over a six- to seven-month period in 1912 and GBS doesn't mention the Titanic disaster even once??)
Hi, Roy. May I interject a theory about that? Shaw had been involved in a controversial debate with Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle and others which took place in the editorial pages of the London Daily News and Leader throughout May 1912. Shaw made some savvy yet rather ill-timed criticisms of the "British heroes" in the Titanic disaster, pointing the finger quite rightly at the London media for whipping the public up into a species of euphoric mourning and adulation of the men lost on Titanic. However, his stinging wit had the effect of seeming to insult and even assault Captain Smith and his officers. He also made a joke at the expense of Lucile (Lady Duff Gordon) which was seen by many as an attack on her. Conan-Doyle and others defended Lucile, out of chivalry if nothing else, but Shaw never apologized.
So, in a nutshell, Shaw had had enough of Titanic when he set out to write Pymalion in 1913-14. I have never understood why he chose a 1912 action date, however.
As an aside let me say that the comments Shaw made about Lucile were calculated as he had a long-running professional dislike of her, mainly due to the overwhelming publicity she attracted for her stage costuming, which often distracted attention from the play itself. He made the remark to a reporter in 1911 that he was tired of seeing the dresses of leading ladies advertised more than the productions and had "no intention of lining the dainty pockets of Lady Duff Gordon." Nor was she ever commissioned to dress any of his plays. Consequently, when Mrs. Patrick Campbell, the star of Pymalion (and Shaw’s lover), asked for Lucile, she got Mme. Handley-Seymour, a lesser-known court dressmaker, instead.
But Lucile had the last word in a way. When Sir Cecil Beaton costumed the film version of Pymalion — My Fair Lady, of course — in 1964 he modeled many of the gowns, especially those in the famous Ascot scenes, on Lucile designs he had admired as a youth. In fact the dress Audrey Hepburn wears in the scene of the big ball was based on Lucile’s opening act gown for Lily Elsie in The Merry Widow in 1907. Shaw would not have approved!
By the way, Shelley is being very modest in these posts, since she was quite a close friend of Richard Matheson at one time. If anybody knows the inside scoop on Somewhere in Time, it’s this lady.
