Friday, January 12, 2018

Oscar Wilde's last play

Romano’s. This restaurant is quite different at lunch from dinner. Groups of theatrical people entering; mutually known, a few actresses. Pretty and vapid. On the whole the most ingenuous crowd of people to be seen in any restaurant in London. Waiting bad. Tables too close together as usual.
   F[rank] H[arris] told me more fully than ever before the story of Oscar and Mr and Mrs Daventry [play produced at the Royalty Theatre in October 1900].  He said he gave Oscar [Wilde] £50 for the screen scene and  £50 for the whole scenario. He never got the scenario, though he paid for it. Oscar was to have written the first act. Mrs Pat [the actress Mrs Patrick Campbell] insisted on F.H.’s writing the first act. F.H. refused as it had been allotted to Oscar. Then Oscar refused. So F.H. did it. F.H. then found out that Oscar had sold the screen scene and the scenario to Leonard Smithers [a disreputable publisher], and the latter showed him the whole MS of scenario signed by Oscar. F.H., after saying to Smithers that he didn’t want the scenario and that in any case he owed him nothing, promised £50 in any case and  £100 if play succeeded well. He said he hadn’t a cent at that time. Smithers got the money from F.H. in tens and twenties. F.H. gradually found out that Oscar had sold the scenario and screen scene to eleven different people. When taxed with this by F.H, Oscar didn’t deny it. He merely said, ‘The fact is, Frank, by writing this play and getting it produced you’re taking away one of my sources of income!’ Later Oscar asked for another £150. He badgered F.H. until he got it. He then said, ‘Frank, you’ve  paid me £250 for the screen scene from The School for Scandal; and you’re a very poor man of business.’ Thus F.H.’s version.

   F.H. said that Oscar was most brilliant as a talker during his last days in Paris. He had listened to him for five or six hours together, saying nothing but, ‘Go on, Oscar. Go on.’
                                                                                     Arnold Bennett's Journals - October 21st  1912

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