The Man Who Rented His Parents
A century ago, the British author MICHAEL ARLEN made a great success with his novel “The Green Hat.” Arlen’s novel, with its sharp, witty dialogue and “modern” point of view, was one of the bristling hits of 1924. Arlen kept himself beautifully dressed and groomed, and was someone people wanted to meet. It was Arlen who introduced Duff Wysden to Ernest Hemingway, who immortalized her as Lady Brett in his novel “The Sun Also Rises.”
Michael Arlen married the lovely Greek countess Atalanta Mercati. It seemed to outsiders like an easy life, and he wanted it to. He knew how to write, and he’d caught the spirit of this new age, the 1920's.
But “Michael Arlen” was very much a self-creation; he was born into an Armenian family, as Dikran Kouyomdjian. He’d spent his first years in Bulgaria, until his parents, a little nervously, moved to England. They remained immigrants and knew in their bones that even the most precious things can be taken from us. They were cautious, and a touch suspicious of good fortune.
Dikran was a highly observant child, a gifted mimic, and he made himself a British boy, full of wit and strength and even a British sense of irony, one of the hardest traits for a foreigner to capture. And when he submitted some early writing to a publisher, who suggested a more “British” pen name, he dubbed himself “Michael Arlen” and never looked back.
He did not want the advice of his parents, or of the ancestors. He was an Englishman, sure that those dumb old fears and hatreds were relics in the gleaming 1920’s. Michael was at home with the marvels of the new age: science and machinery, new social mores and modern art. Fearless about what was coming. Not taking anything too seriously. Suave and confident — but with that great pride that is always a little dangerous.
In 1930, Atalanta gave birth to a son whom she and Michael also named Michael. Michael J. Arlen, the son called himself, both enjoying and resenting the similarity between his father’s name and his own; it meant that his own writing got both more and less credit than it deserved.
Arlen, Jr. grew up half in England and half in the United States, marked by the early years in England, wanting to be firmly American but with a little British polish, and unsure what the Armenian legacy meant to him, or should.
World War Two began and Michael Arlen took a minor position in the British war effort, a symbolic post, but when a politician publicly questioned why “a foreigner” held this post in wartime, Arlen was stung and not only resigned the post but left England, moving his family to New York City.
Michael Arlen was not very productive in New York, but he put on a good show. Long lunches with book editors. Talk of a new novel he’d started. But too many editors asked him, ‘Got another “Green Hat” up your sleeve?’ He disliked so much attention going to just one of his books. He’d written many other novels, he’d remind people.
‘But they didn’t sell as well,’ returned the editors. Editors were frank about being in business. After all the chit-chat and literary gossip, it always came back to that. Arlen had loved “The Green Hat” because it caught something essential about the young in 1924, but his publishers had loved it because it sold very well, and was made into a Greta Garbo movie.
A decade passed, and it was 1954. Michael J. Arlen was doing his U.S. Army duty in England. Like many writers who went into the service, he was put on the staff of the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, first in Germany and then in London, where he served under a U.S. Brigadier General from Texas named O.K. Wilmerding.
Wilmerding was a patriot, proud of serving in the Army. But his passions in peacetime were meeting celebrities and mastering the game of golf. Wilmerding wanted Michael J. Arlen to be stationed at a U.S. Air Force base outside London covering U.S. Army golf tournaments. It was, Arlen,. Jr. reflected later, “a weird soft life.” He was neither enamored of golf nor of Air Force bases.
When he learned that his father was in London and was sick, Arlen Jr. received official permission to leave the Air Force base and join his father in London. He took a flat in Brompton Square, so much more cosmopolitan than an Air Force base, and helped to nurse his father back to health.
Soon the senior Arlen was well and flew back to New York City. The decent thing for his son to do was to return to the Air Force base. But he was so enjoying London… so he pretended his father was not well, and still needed his son as a nurse and companion. General Wilmerding was, like so many others, an admirer of “The Green Hat,” and was touched by the son’s devotion to his father. So long as Arlen, Jr. commuted out to the Air Force base and covered some golf tournaments, all was okay with the Brigadier General.
It WAS a little unnerving, though, when General Wilmerding would ask after the health of Arlen, Sr. and Arlen, Jr. was obliged to offer up false updates on his father’s condition.
Then one day, General Wilmerding announced he was going into London himself and would like to stop in and see Michael Arlen, Sr. or at least phone his room. Arlen, Jr. quickly concocted a reason why contacting his father would be impossible — but then felt he had to add that his father and mother were throwing a cocktail party in London in a week’s time and would be honored if General Wilmerding and his wife would attend.
The Wilmerdings accepted the invitation with alacrity.
Now, what? How will I manage this? thought Arlen, Jr. Having his parents fly to London for a party was not logistically feasible. Also, though his father was very proud of having a son in the Army, the old man hated military officers and would surely bristle at being told to make nice with a Brigadier General. His mother might see through the whole thing.
Arlen Jr, wondered: Should I tell General Wilmerding that Dad suddenly died? No, that was too big a lie. Besides, the general would want to attend the funeral.
So Arlen, Jr. decided to stage the cocktail party with actors playing the parts of Michael Arlen, Atalanta, and a few other distinguished guests. He was fairly sure that General Wilmerding had not seen photographs of Michael Arlen or of Atalanta, so it was not imperative that the actors look like the people they were impersonating. But they must look and act like a distinguished writer and his wife. And the actor playing his father should be impeccably dressed, with perhaps a Sulka shirt, and an ascot at the neck.
Arlen, Jr’s friend Kenneth Tynan was a drama critic and knew a great many unemployed actors in London. Tynan told him he had just the fellow to play Arlen, Sr., a man named Charlie Banksmith. Tynan also found Arlen, Jr. an ideal Mrs. Arlen, an actress named Edie. Six or eight other actors were hired, given their names and a few sketchy details about who they were, but told to at all times, act Very Important, and encouraged to smile at the brigadier general and inquire politely about the U.S. Army.
Arlen, Jr. hired two rooms at the Dorchester Hotel, a luxury hotel on Park Lane which was a little “bright and tacky” for his taste but was a great favorite with the military because it was so solidly constructed. Dwight Eisenhower had made a suite at the Dorchester his headquarters in 1944.
Arlen, Jr. laid out some booze and edibles, and the party went off beautifully, except that Charlie Banksmith drank too much and made a clumsy pass at Mrs. Wilmerding. Arlen, Jr. had to take his “father” aside and tell him to knock it off.
Mrs. Wilmerding was annoyed, but her husband seemed flattered that the great writer Michael Arlen was so enamored of Mrs. Wilmerding.
And the Brigadier General allowed Arlen, Jr. to keep his Brompton Square flat.
Two years later, the real Michael Arlen was dying of cancer. His son was back in New York, watching as his father withdrew from literary society. It had been 10 years since Michael Arlen had published a book, and he seemed to have lost all interest in writing. The apartment was dark, and he was sad and off-balance, though he still read a good deal, which gave father and son something to talk about: authors who were little read, and deserved better.
Michael Arlen felt his withdrawal from the wider world was involuntary, forced upon him by his condition. His son disagreed, wanted his father to do more, write a little, see people. Atalanta was heartbroken by her husband’s decline, wanting her husband and son to have this time together, pressing her son to say that his father was on the mend, and would fully recover…
On the last day of Michael Arlen’s life, father and son sat talking. It was noon, the only hour of the day when his bedroom got good sunlight, and though his body was badly wasted, Michael Arlen seemed intensely alive, his eyes shining bright and his voice strong, as he told some of the old stories.
Then suddenly he seemed to tire. He told his son he was going to rest a little, and 20 minutes later he was dead.
Some weeks later, Michael Arlen, Jr. and his mother were still grieving, when she showed her son an odd condolence letter sent from a couple in Texas named Wilmerding, offering their sympathies and recalling fondly “what good times we had together in London.”
“What,” Atalanta asked, “do you suppose they meant by that?”