TO DENIS MACKAIL
Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios
Culver City
California
June 26. 1930
Dear Denis.
Frightfully sorry I haven’t written before. I have been in a whirl of work. After three months absolute deadness, my brain began to whirr like a dynamo. So you see one does recover from these blank periods. I hope yours is gone. I have written three short stories, an act of a play, and the dialogue for a picture in three weeks, and have got six brand new plots for short stories!!! I believe our rotten brains have to go through those ghastly periods of inertness before getting a second wind.
[…]
Susan is dead.1 Did Ethel tell you? Apparently she just toppled over quite quietly in the Park, and it was all over in a minute. She had no pain, thank goodness. It’s just like losing part of oneself. The only thing is that everything is so unreal out here and I feel so removed from ordinary life that I haven’t yet quite realized it.
Mrs Patrick Campbell came to dinner the other night and talked a lot about you. It made me feel I wasn’t so far from civilization, after all.2 This is the weirdest place. We have taken Elsie Janis’s house.3 It has a small but very pretty garden, with a big pool. I have arranged with the studio to work at home, so I sometimes don’t go out of the garden for three or four days on end. If you asked me, I would say I loved Hollywood. Then I would reflect and have to admit that Hollywood is about the most loathsome place on the map but that, never going near it, I enjoy being out here.
My days follow each other in a regular procession. I get up, swim, breakfast, work till two, swim again, work till seven, swim for the third time, then dinner and the day is over. When I get a summons from the studio, I motor over there, stay there a couple of hours and come back. Add incessant sunshine, and it’s really rather jolly. It is only occasionally that one feels as if one were serving a term on Devil’s Island.
We go out very little. Just an occasional dinner at the house of some other exile – e.g. some New York theatrical friend. Except for one party at Marion Davies’s place, I have not met any movie stars.4
The second day out on the liner I developed a terrific attack of neuritis, and spent the rest of the voyage in bed. I managed to get rid of it about two weeks later. One of the rules, when you have neuritis, is that you must knock off drink, so I got a flying start with that two weeks and kept on the wagon for another six. Then I had to go to a party, and I couldn’t go through it without cocktails. They have the damnable practice here of inviting you to dine at seven-fifteen. If you are a novice, as I was, you arrive at seven-fifteen. You then stand round drinking cocktails till nine-thirty, when the last guest arrives. Then you go in to dinner. At Marion Davies’s, I refused all drinks and it nearly killed me. By dinner time I was dying on my feet. Poor old Snorky had to talk to the same man from seven-fifteen till 9.30 and then found she was sitting next to him at dinner!! Fortunately, it was such a big party that we were able to sneak off without saying goodbye directly dinner was over. Gosh, what an experience.
On the other hand, teetotalism certainly makes one frightfully fit. Also slim. I have become a lean-jawed, keen-eyed exhibit, like something out of Sapper.5
The actual work is negligible. They set me on to dialogue for a picture for Jack Buchanan. I altered all the characters to Earls and butlers, with such success that, when I had finished, they called a conference and changed the entire plot, starring the earl and the butler. So I am still working on it. So far, I have had eight collaborators. The system is that A. gets the original idea, B. comes in to work with him on it, C. makes a scenario, D. does preliminary dialogue, and then they send for me to insert Class and what-not. Then E. and F., scenario writers, alter the plot and off we go again.
I could have done all my part of it in a morning, but they took it for granted I should need six weeks. The latest news is that they are going to start shooting quite soon. In fact, there are ugly rumours that I am to be set to work soon on something else. I resent this, as it will cut into my short-story-writing. It’s odd how soon one comes to look on every minute as wasted that is given to earning one’s salary. (Now, don’t go making a comic article out of this and queering me with the bosses!!)
Let’s have a line soon. Tell me all the news. I hear nothing out here. Have you resigned from the pest house yet?6
Yours ever
Plum
1 Wodehouse’s beloved Pekingese dog.
2 Mrs Patrick Campbell (1865–1940), British stage actress, born Beatrice Stella Tanner, who appeared in several motion pictures, best remembered today as being the original Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion (1914).
3 Elsie Janis, stage and film actress and writer, who had starred in Miss 1917 and Oh, Kay!
4 Marion Davies (1897–1961), American film actress, known for her relationship with newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst. She made a number of comedies and musicals during the 1930s, and had appeared in PGW’s Oh, Boy! (1917) and Miss 1917. She maintained a long relationship with Hearst, though the two were never married.
5 Herman Cyril McNeile (1888–1937), British author, who published under the name of ‘Sapper’, best known for creating hearty, sportsman-like characters such as Bulldog Drummond – a former officer of the First World War who spends his post-war leisure time as a private detective.
6 The Garrick Club. PGW was persuaded to join it in 1922, but soon came to dislike it and had resigned his membership.
TO ARNOLD BENNETT
724 Linden Drive
Beverly Hills, California
Aug 16. 1930
Dear A.B.
How awfully nice of you to write to me about Jeeves.1 I am so delighted that you liked him. I would rather have a card from you than a column from anybody else.
I can never see why printers should do their job so slackly. I had to leave England without seeing page proofs, but I went to enormous trouble over the galleys. In one place I had written ‘festive s.’, meaning ‘festive season’, & they printed it ‘festives’. So I wrote on the margin of the galley as follows: – ‘Not ‘festives’. Please print this as two words ‘festive s.’, – ‘festive’ one word, ‘s’ another. Bertie occasionally clips his words, so that when he means ‘festive season’ he says ‘festive s.’ This is quite clear, isn’t it? ‘Festive’ one word, ‘s’ another?” And so the book has come out with the thing printed as ‘festives’. I see now that I didn’t make it clear enough.2
I am having a very pleasant time out here. I do nothing but work and swim in the pool in the garden. It is a great place for work.
Yours ever
P. G. Wodehouse
1 Very Good, Jeeves (1930).
2 To add to the confusion, Doubleday Doran printed it in the American edition as ‘the festivities’. In the 1931 Jeeves Omnibus, Herbert Jenkins changed it to ‘Christmas’.
TO WILLIAM TOWNEND
Metro-Goldwyn Studios
Culver City
California
Oct 28. 1930
Dear Bill.
[…]
Well, laddie, it begins to look as if it would be some time before I returned to England. The Metro people have taken up my option and I am with them for another six months. And Ethel has just taken a new house for a year! Which means that I shall probably stay that long.
I only wish you could come out here. Would you be able to if I got you a job?
[…]
Anyway, I think I have definitely got a pull with these people now, so write and tell me how you stand on the subj. California would suit Rene, wouldn’t it.
If you came over here and settled down, I think I would spend at least six months in every year here. I like the place. I think Californian scenery is the most loathsome on earth, – a cross between Coney Island and the Riviera, but by sticking in one’s garden all the time and shutting one’s eyes when one goes out, it is possible to get by.
Listen, laddie, as life goes on, don’t you find that all you need is about two real friends, a regular supply of books, and a Peke?
They have rather done the dirty on me at the moment. There was a musical comedy called Rosalie – imaginary kingdom stuff – which was bought for Marion Davies. Everyone had a go at it, including myself. The big boss has now worked out a story on his own, which isn’t at all bad, and he has told me [to go] off to do it. But – and here is the catch – he wants me to write it as a novelette, – which is about eight times as much sweat as just doing dialogue. I wrote my first version of Rosalie – in dialogue form – between Sunday and Thursday of one week. This is going to take me a couple of months and is a ghastly fag. However, I don’t suppose they will hurry me.
[…]
Snorky is on the payroll of Metro Goldwyn at fifty dollars a week, and has worked out quite a good picture. If they like it, she ought to strike for more.
We move into our new house Nov 16. I shall absent myself for a couple of days during the moving. […]
I am still bathing vigorously three times a day, though in the early morning the water is pretty chilly. They tell me that with care you can bathe all through the winter. The swim I enjoy most is before dinner. I have a red hot bath and get absolutely boiled, and then race down the back stairs with nothing on and plunge in. Rather like the Turkish bath system. […]
Winks is barking like blazes in the garden. I think it must be the Japanese gardener, whom she hasn’t accepted even after seeing him every other day for six months.
Last night Maureen O’Sullivan (screen actress) brought her new Peke round here, and Winks was very austere.1 Do you remember the day you and Rene and Bimmy arrived in Norfolk St? I had been looking forward sentimentally to the reunion of the two sisters, and as I came down stairs I heard the most frightful snarling and yapping, and there was Winks trying to eat Bimmy. Odd, too, how the row all stopped directly we took them out on the steps. Apparently a Peke only resents visitors in the actual house.
Leave It to Psmith seems to have got over very big.2 Thanks for the notices. Of course no-one else ever thought of sending me any. (Aren’t people funny about that? They write and tell you there was something awfully nice about you in the Phoenix (Arizona) Intelligencer, and take it for granted that you must have seen it yourself.)
Psmith did twenty-four hundred quid at Golders Green and two thousand and seventeen first week at Shaftesbury, during which week, of course, a lot of free seats had to begivne – or, rather – given – away. (By the way, have you ever thought what wonderful names you could invent for characters simply by misspelling words on the typewriter. I can see ‘Begivney’, for instance, as a rather sinister butler.) Damsel in Distress only did sixteen hundred in its first week in London.
What rot most pictures are. I haven’t seen more than one decent one since I came here.
I had a wild idea of dashing over to England, seeing you, watching the Haileybury match and dashing back after ten days in England. But then the thought of the distance appalled me. That’s the trouble about being here. You say to yourself you’ll dash away when so disposed, but you don’t.
[…]
There is great business depression over here. Movies are doing terribly badly and miniature golf-courses have bust up altogether. Magazines are at a very low ebb, except for the big ones, and even they have lost twenty five per cent of their ads.
I’m afraid it will be another year or so before things get easy again. And before that Mussolini will have started another war, I suppose!3
Write again soon.
[…]
Yours ever
Plum
1 Maureen O’Sullivan was the screen actress famous for her role as Jane in Tarzan and the Apes. She was later married to the writer John Farrow. She and PGW became great friends. PGW dedicated Hot Water to her in 1932.
2 Leave It to Psmith had been dramatised by PGW and Ian Hay, and opened in London in 1930.
3 The Italian dictator was then arousing comment. His invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 confirmed many people’s fears.
TO DENIS MACKAIL
1005 Benedict Canyon
Beverly Hills
California
Dec 28. 1930
Dear Denis.
I feel an awful worm, not having written to you for so long, but a genuine pressure of work stopped me. The studio wished an awful job on me – viz. They made me write a perfectly rotten picture as a novel!! Exactly eight times as much sweat as doing an ordinary picture. What the idea was, I don’t know, unless they thought that, writing it in that form, I would put in a lot of business which they could use. It ran to 45,000 words, and I was writing a little thing of my own at the same time against the clock. It shows what a great climate this is, that I didn’t succumb.
Asked to what he attributed his success, Mr Wodehouse replied that he thought, on the whole, that it could be attributed to cold water. Have you ever taken a cold bath? I bet you haven’t. Well, listen. Every morning before breakfast – and I mean every morning, not once a month – I put on a bathing suit, do my exercises, and then plunge into our swimming-pool, the water of which is now exactly fifty degrees. And, what is more, I like it. I can’t think what has come over me since I’ve been here. I used to loathe anything but the hottest water, and now, even if I do have a hot bath, I take a cold shower after it. The result is that I have lost seven pounds in weight and am almost unbelievably beautiful.
The great advantage of this place is that it is so loathsome the moment you get outside the garden that there is no temptation to do anything but sit at home and work. I am turning out incredible quantities. I don’t get any more ideas than I used to, but – give me an idea – and I can deliver in a couple of days.
[…]
I say, laddie, a significant thing showing what will happen to you and me later on. Strand Christmas number. Story by Conan Doyle inside. On the cover no mention of him. Could you have foreseen that twenty years ago?
Snorky is still in New York. Having a wonderful time, by all accounts. She proposes to return some time or other via Cuba, Palm Beach, New Orleans etc. I rather hope she doesn’t return here till the Spring. We get torrential rains soon, I believe, and she is having much more fun in New York than she could get here.
Ethel and I were discussing what to give her for Christmas. Ethel had a cocktail and suggested two hundred and fifty dollars. Then she had another cocktail and raised it to five hundred. Finally, after a liqueur brandy, she said sentimentally that one was only young once and so on, with the result that Snorky got a cheque for one thousand bones. I suppose she’s spent it by now.
[…]
Well, so long. Send me more news soon.
Yours ever
Plum
P.S. The maddening thing about this place is that I haven’t been able to get a single story out of it yet. I suppose there are plots to be found in Hollywood, but I can’t see them. For the moment, then, our old line of Dukes and Earls will continue as in the past.
The next letter to Townend marks the beginning of Wodehouse’s problems with MGM. That week, the show business magazine, Variety, had published the following note: ‘Following Variety’s report of the ludicrous writer talent situation, eastern executives interrogated the studios as to instances such as concerned one English playwright and author who has been collecting $2,500 a week at one of the major studios for eleven months, without contributing anything really worthwhile to the screen.’ The note foreshadows the indignation in Hollywood when, a few months later, in an interview with Alma Whitaker of the Los Angeles Times, Wodehouse spoke about how much he liked Hollywood, and how much he had enjoyed his stay – his one regret being ‘that he had been paid such an enormous amount of money without having done anything to earn it’.
TO WILLIAM TOWNEND
M-G-M Studios
Culver City
California
March 14. 1931
[…]
Does the Spring make you restless? I have been feeling rotten for some days, but today have been fine. I have a hunch that the studio won’t engage me again after May. I shall spend the summer here and return in the Autumn, I think. I have a lot of work to do in the way of stories.
If you have a moment of leisure, here is a bit of a story that is bothering me. I want a tough burglar to break into a country-house and there to have such a series of mishaps that his nerve breaks and he retires from the profession. The conditions can be anything you like, – e.g. Pekinese on the floor who bite his ankle etc. It ought to be one of my big comic scenes like the flower-pot scene in Leave It to Psmith. Don’t bother about it if you’re busy, but if anything occurs to you send it along.
I am doing a picture version of By Candlelight now for John Gilbert.1 This looks as if it might really come to something. Everything else I have done so far has been scrapped, – not my fault, mostly.
But I doubt if they will give me another contract. The enclosed par from Variety can only refer to me, and it looks to me darn sinister. My only hope is that I have made myself so pleasant to everyone here that by now I may count as a relative. The studio is full of relatives of the big bosses who do no work and draw enormous salaries.
I must stop now, as I have to go out to dinner. (Corinne Griffith, as a matter of fact. She is a ripper).2
[…]
Cheerio
Yours ever
Plum
1 The play By Candlelight, adapted from Siegfried Geyer’s original by Harry Graham, had been very successful in London.
2 Corinne Griffith (1894–1979), famous silent movie actress. Griffith did not survive the transition to talkies – her first sound movie had been released the year before and critics had decided that she ‘talk[ed] through her nose’.
Wodehouse’s friendship with the comic writer Will Cuppy was to last for many years.
TO WILL CUPPY
1005 Benedict Canyon
Beverly Hills
Cal.
April 29. 1931
Dear Mr Cuppy.
Thanks most awfully for sending me the two books. I immediately fell upon the Dorothy Sayers one, and loved it. It is extraordinary how much better she is than almost all other mystery writers. I started the Hammett one last night, as I find you have to be feeling pretty robust for him. […]
Hammett is out here now, by the way, but I have not met him. They tell me he gets tight pretty often and is rather tough when under the influence.1
[…]
In re The Hermit, which I have just read right through once again.2 Apart from its gorgeous humor, what fascinates me about it is the atmosphere. I used to live on the south shore of Long Island, and I always felt what a wonderful retreat that sand bar across the Great South Bay would make. I don’t know exactly where Jones Island is, but it must be somewhere near Bellport, where I settled in 1914.
Before the war, I had a cottage on the Hampshire coast in England, just like your place. I just put in a bed and a few deal tables and chairs and let the furnishing go at that.
[…]
How are you feeling now? I have just passed through one of those Byronic spells, caused principally by two days rain. In England, I love rain, but here it is an outrage. I brooded somberly until yesterday, when I went for a seven mile walk at top speed in hot sunshine and sweated off about three pounds and had a swim in my pool and felt marvellous. I just sat down and dashed off the last fifteen hundred words of a short story, and then immediately wrote a thousand words of a new one. Pure intellect – that was me.
Of course, if you have to read twenty-four detective stories at a stretch, I can see how life may seem a bit of a wash-out to you occasionally. I think there ought to be a law that all mystery stories should have an English setting. As soon as I come on the words ‘precinct’ or ‘district attorney’, all my interest goes. Murders ought to take place only in old English country-houses.
I see Dorothy Sayers has got a new one out in England, – The Five Red Herrings. If you want to get rid of your copy, shoot it along.
Well, so long. Do write again soon. I find I get far too few letters out here.
Yours ever
P. G. Wodehouse
1 Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961), American author of hard-boiled detective novels and short stories, including the quintessential detective, Sam Spade.
2 Cuppy’s book, How to Be a Hermit, or, How a Bachelor Keeps House, was published in 1929.
TO DENIS MACKAIL
1005 Benedict Canyon Drive
Beverly Hills
California
May 10. 1931
Dear Denis.
Your letter arrived yesterday, and I am answering it today. You will note the improved efficiency.
[…]
My contract with MGM ended yesterday, and they have shown no sign whatever of wanting to renew it. My plans are to stay out here till September and then dash over to England if only for a short visit. I say, why don’t you come over here and stay with us in August? Could Diana spare you? The trip would pay for itself over and over again, as I know you would get a novel out of Hollywood. Think this over and let me know. You could do all the writing you wanted in this house.
I haven’t been able to get much out of Hollywood so far, but then I have been restraining myself from satire out of love and loyalty for dear old M-G-M. Now that the pay envelope has ceased, maybe I shall be able to write some stuff knocking them good.
This place has certain definite advantages which make up for it being so far from home. I love breakfasting in the garden in a dressing-gown after a swim in the pool. There’s no doubt that perpetual sunshine has its points. I’ve never been able to stay more than a few months in one place before, let alone a year. And the people here are quite fun. I find I enjoy going out to dinner.
[…]
I have done a twenty thousand word scenario of a new novel, and shall be starting it soon. I find that if one has the energy to make a long scenario, it makes the actual writing much easier.
I have written eleven short stories since the first of June last, which is better than I have done for years.1 I have also written a play and made a novel out of it and novelized that Good Morning, Bill thing I wrote some years ago.2 I find this a good place for work.
[…]
The movies are getting hard up and the spirit of economy is rife. I was lucky to get mine while the going was good. It is rather like having tolerated some awful bounder for his good dinners to go to his house and find the menu cut down to nothing and no drinks. The only thing that excused the existence of the Talkies was a sort of bounderish openhandedness.
Do think over the idea of visiting us. It would be a wonderful change for you and would fill you with new ideas.
Yours ever
Plum
1 PGW had been working on his Mulliner stories, along with Laughing Gas (1936).
2 Who’s Who, a play co-written with Guy Bolton, ran for nineteen performances in 1934; this became the novel If I Were You (1931). The ‘novelized’ version of Good Morning, Bill was The Medicine Girl (US title), serialised in Collier’s Weekly in 1931. The UK title was Doctor Sally (1932).
TO WILLIAM TOWNEND
May 19. 1931
Dear Bill.
[…]
How have you been doing lately? I’m afraid things must have been bad, with your illness. The world seems to have taken a sort of nose-dive, doesn’t it. The movies are in a rotten state, and MGM showed no desire whatever to re-engage me when my contract lapsed last week. (Keep writing there still, as I go and fetch my letters. I like having an object for a walk.)
[…]
Have you noticed how everybody is writing like Hemmingway [sic] nowadays? I read a book called Iron Man the other day, and it might have been written by him. It seems to me a darned easy way of writing, – just short, breathless sentences.
I have started another novel, and it is coming out fine.1 The only trouble is that it is really a sort of carbon copy of Leave It to Psmith. I hope people won’t notice it.
Well, cheerio. Love to Rene.
Yours ever
Plum
P.S. Don’t mention the enclosure when you write.2
1 Hot Water (1932).
2 This is PGW’s usual method of mentioning that he is sending a cheque. He was always anxious that Ethel should not know about these regular subsidies.
TO WILL CUPPY
1005 Benedict Canyon Drive
Beverly Hills
California
Aug 17. 1931
Dear Cuppy.
Thanks most awfully for the books. I want a serious word with you about our old pal, Dorothy Sayers. She writes so darned well that one gets the illusion for a while that this last one of hers is a good story. Laddie, it’s a lousy story.1 It drools on and on and round and round, and oh, God! those time-tables with their ‘arrive Peebles 4.32 unless you go round by Loch Katrine and take the 6.27 boat for McCockle, stopping at Wulliewuakie’.
Tick her off and make her get back to the old snappy stuff.
[…]
I’ve just sweated for three solid months in a roasting temperature and finished my masterpiece. It really is the best thing I’ve done, I believe, the only trouble being that it’s a little like some of the others.
Cheerio
Yours ever
P. G. Wodehouse
P.S. I shall be here another three months, so bung some more books along.
1 PGW refers to Sayers’ Five Red Herrings.
TO WILLIAM TOWNEND
1005 Benedict Canyon Drive
Beverly Hills
Cal.
Aug 26. 1931
Dear Bill.
I was thrilled by your description of battle with Pop Grimsdick.1 I’m awfully glad the thing has been settled and they are going to publish We Sailors. (Wouldn’t there be someone who would suggest In the Blood as a title!). I hope the Book Society people take the book, as it means a big boost. I had no notion they got their books quite so cheap, though.
[…]
I have never been able to concentrate so on a novel before. This is a marvellous place for work, as the life is perfect monotony. Except for an occasional dinner I have been able to give every day up to the story for three and a half months.
Our plans have clarified to the extent that we are definitely going to be back in London at the end of next April. We leave here in November and are still doubtful as to how to fill the gap. I want to go round the world on the Empress of Britain – you know the sort of thing, one day at Naples, two in Egypt, snatch and sandwich [sic] and race through the Holy Land etc. I thought I might get a novel out of the cruise, but the family are afraid we might get terribly fed up with our fellow passengers, so the latest scheme is to sail from San Francisco and visit the Far East. I’m not so keen on this, as I can’t see myself getting any material out of Japan and India. I suppose we shall settle something eventually.
Of course, my career as a movie-writer has been killed dead by that interview. I am a sort of Ogre to the studios now. I don’t care personally, as I don’t think I could ever do picture writing. It needs a definitely unoriginal mind. Apparently all pictures have to be cast in a mould. […]
We are becoming gradually infatuated with Maureen O’Sullivan’s Peke, Johnnie (female in spite of the name). This was the one which was run over and lost an eye. We sent her to the vet and the eye has been neatly treated so that now it looks all right. The vet also clipped her. Have you ever seen a clipped Peke? She looks weird, but very attractive.
Isn’t it odd how short dogs’ memories are. Do you remember the historic meeting between Winks and Bimmy which ended in the sort of scene you have in your stories, – real waterfront saloon stuff. Exactly the same thing happened when Johnnie returned. She and Winks had been the greatest friends when she left a week before, but the moment she entered the house Winks flew at her. An hour later all was well and they are now inseparable again.
Golly, it’s been hot here this summer. Nothing like it last year. It was 97 in shade yesterday, hottest day of year, and I spent two hours in the pool in the morning and another hour in the afternoon. You’re right about this climate. I think it would get me in the end. Still, it has had a wonderful effect on my figure. I weighed myself yesterday and I was exactly thirteen stone. When I left England I was fifteen stone in my clothes, so presumably I have lost about seventeen pounds.
[…]
Love to Rene. I’ll write again soon.
Yours ever
Plum
1 Derek Grimsdick was the chief editor of Herbert Jenkins Ltd who took over the company after Herbert Jenkins’ death.
TO WILLIAM TOWNEND
Sept 14. 1931
Dear Bill.
This business of writing to you has taken on a graver aspect, the authorities here having raised the ante to five cents per letter. I can bear it bravely as far as you are concerned, but, darn it, I do grudge having to spend five cents on a letter to some female in East Grinstead who wants to know if I pronounce my name Wood-house or Wode-house.
Have you seen the Cosmopolitan yet? ‘Sport!’ is prominently featured and magnificently illustrated, and I am boiling with fury at the thought that they only paid you $250 for such a masterpiece. Also, how in the name of everything infernal did a story like that go begging all that time? I can only suppose that most American editors sheered off it because of its intensely English atmosphere. Honestly, it is the best thing you have done for years.
I have had exactly a month of nerve-wracking idleness. I have thought of one or two plots, but don’t seem to get them into just the shape where I can start writing. I have three more stories to do for the American, and the editor has put me right out of my stride by asking me to write about American characters. My difficulty is that Americans aren’t funny. If they were, there would be more than about three American humorous writers. I’ve a darned good mind to tell him that if he insists on non-Wodehouse stuff, I’ll do it but he can’t expect it to be funny. But nowadays one can’t alienate an editor. I suppose I shall work out something.
We dined last night with Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. She is a most intelligent woman, quite unlike the usual movie star. I talked to her all the evening.1
We are still debating what to do to fill in between November and April, when we return to England. We talk of a trip round the world, but the more I think of it the less I feel I want to see foreign countries. I wouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t stay on here. It’s great here in the winter, and I have become very keen on tennis, we having a court. Ethel plays, too, so we have lots of it. But I feel a bit unsettled, and my brain doesn’t seem to work properly. Isn’t it ghastly when you have finished a novel and have to turn to something else. For three and a half months I had the most marvellous time, not a dull moment. I feel now as if I couldn’t write at all.
The news from England is pretty depressing. Snorky had a letter this morning from Charles le Strange, saying that he has got to clear out of Hunstanton as he can’t afford to live there. I don’t know how I shall get on without Hunstanton to go to. It was the most wonderful place of refuge.
We have just had four friends of Snorky’s staying here for a week. Quite nice, but gosh how it congested the place.
Did you read Milne’s serial in the Mail? I thought it good. Nothing happened in it, but his characters were so real. I wonder how a book like that sells. Do people want a story or not?
Miss Winks kept Ethel awake the whole of one night by scratching and was bundled off to the vet, who said she had been overfed. She came back full of beans and smelling like rotten eggs from a sulphur bath.
[…]
Well, laddie, write again soon.
Yours ever
Plum
1 Known as ‘Hollywood royalty’ (Fairbanks was often called ‘the King of Hollywood’), silent film stars Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford married in 1920. Both were instrumental in forming United Artists in 1919, along with Charlie Chaplin and D. W. Griffith, ‘to avoid being controlled by the studios and to protect their independence’. The two famously entertained at their Beverly Hills estate, ‘Pickfair’, but parted in 1933. Before moving to Hollywood and becoming a film star, Fairbanks had been on Broadway, and starred in the first theatrical adaptation of Wodehouse’s work in August 1911, when he played Jimmy Pitt in A Gentleman of Leisure.