This morning I was idling browsing Youtube for
videos that may be relevant to any of the playlists in the GBS Youtube Channel (subscribe, pretty please!).
After a few minutes I came across a short documentary video about Hearst Castle, the mansion built by William Randolph Hearst. In the description, it is said
that Shaw deemed this stately house "the place God would have built if he
had the money."
The video had been uploaded by the Smithsonian
Institution to
their Official Youtube Channel, so I had every reason to believe
that the quotation was legitimate. But, alas, no source was provided.
After searching my database for a few minutes,
I found that the quotation had indeed been pronounced by Shaw during the few
days they (he and Charlotte) were guests of Hearst and his mistress Marion Davies (24th to 27th March, 1933). In the
editorial material preceding a letter Shaw wrote to Hearst (in fact, an
inscription in Hearst's copy of What I Really Wrote About the War), Dan H. Laurence writes that Shaw, when asked by a fellow
guest what he thought about the building, replied: "This is the way God
would have built it, if He'd had the money." We are told that Shaw spent
those days "luxuriating in the indoor and outdoor swimming pools and
enjoying his proximity to the exotic animals and birds with which the
ranch was stocked." In addition, they were "surrounded by a bevy of
Hollywood starlets and intimate friends of Davies" (See Collected
Letters Vol. IV, 1926-1950, p. 332-333).
Laurence, in turn, provides Walter Wagner's You Must
Remember This (New York: Putnam, 1975) as his source. Sure enough, the quotation
and the accompanying anecdote are mentioned on page 85.
However, other sources do not attribute the
quotation to Shaw, or at least attribute the same words to a different person.
Specifically, Howard Teichmann's George S. Kaufman: An Intimate
Portrait (New York: Atheneum, 1972), quotes the American critic on page 127 as having said "This is
what God could have done if He'd had the money." Kaufmann's words,
however, do not express his awe at Hearst's castle-like mansion, but rather at
the 2,000 pine trees that Moss Hart had transplanted to the once-barren land
he owned in Bucks County, Pa. The same story is reported in a 1977 issue
of People Weekly (7 Feb. 1977, p. 32).
For good measure, however, the above
attribution is, in turn, considered apocryphal by a letter to the same magazine
(published three weeks later, on Feb.
28). The letter,
signed by David A. France from New Hope, Pa., claims that it was "AlexanderWoollcott who, after inspecting the [Hart's]
gardens and "the Gertrude Lawrence Memorial Wing" snapped, "It's
exactly what God would have done—if He'd had the money."" The letter
provides no source for this, although the editor's reply to the letter concedes
that the author of the article (Kitty Carlisle Hart, Moss's wife) "had always associated the
quote about God with Kaufmann," "but it may well have been Alec. It
sounds like Alec."
Once again, an alleged Shaw quotation has to be
quarantined until a definitive source surfaces. Whatever the case may be, the
time the Shaws spent at Hearst's is worth recording as one of their most
remarkable international visits. GeoShaw material, in other words.
