The Magnificent Mr Maschwitz
Songs, scripts, military sabotage — what couldn’t the man do?
“He has written a few songs that people sing, a few plays that are still occasionally performed; he has had great happiness from women and made several good women unhappy, seen men die beside him in a war, worked hard at too many things Eric Maschwitz on himself in 1957
One of the most versatile and influential people in 20th-century British entertainment. Eleanor Allen
The early life Eric Maschwitz reads like that of a Soviet spy from central casting. A graduate of Repton School and Caius College, Cambridge, he glided into the BBC, quickly rising into its senior management. A future director general surely — a pillar of the establishment. Or perhaps selling it to Moscow for kicks.
Only the Birmingham-born son of a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant was at heart a song and dance man. A posh one, with the versatility of Noel Coward. And the Maschwitz musical legacy was of a similar order. Three solid gold standards for a start — These Foolish Things, Goodnight Vienna & A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.
In the early 1920s Eric first rose to prominence as a stage actor. When he joined BBC in 1926 the young organisation was rigidly news bound. He pioneered a move into light entertainment, skilfully negotiating the strict Reithian demand for high end culture. A good example was the radio operetta Goodnight Vienna — the song and film would later follow.
The suits were impressed by one of their own. They asked him to edit a the house listing magazine — The Radio Times.
Well, that wasn’t going to fill a Maschwitz working day. So taking improbable nom du plume Holt Marvell, he teamed with Sir John Geilgud’s bro, Val, in a side-hustle — writing and producing BBC radio dramas. These needed scripts and song lyrics.
These Foolish Things
Eric was not a big day-off guy. These Foolish Things was dashed off one Sunday morning (‘fortified by coffee and vodka’) while the rest of the world was still reading the papers
Rumours have swirled about the muse who inspired the lyric. There were plenty of possibilities from a lively private life amongst the fast set. In his memoir Eric takes the gentlemanly route and plays safe: all he’ll reveal is that it’s about “fleeting memories of young love”.
The smart money has the shortlist down to three impossibly glamorous A-ist celebrities. Cabaret singer and Nazi escapee Jean Ross was a friend of Christopher Isherwood and the model for Sally Bowles. Ross was not mentioned in the memoir but claimed it was her lipstick on that cigarette after a passionate affair.
Second wife Hermione Gingold begged to differ. She was a huge film star in the 50s but gracefully conceded that her husband would not have been mooning over his future beloved in the early 1930s.
That left the betting market favouring Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong, whose career was derailed by the coming of talkies. There were strong rumours of a passionate affair, never confirmed or denied.
Mr Chips and Berkeley Square
In 1936 Eric was awarded an OBE. He was alos receiving dizzyingly lucrative offers from Hollywood. In 1939 he moved Los Angeles, co-authoring the adaptation of Goodbye, Mr. Chips, for MGM-British. This was a huge hit and earned an Academy Award nomination, losing out to Gone With the Wind.
While mooching around the MGM lot, Eric took a gig teaming up with Hollywood composer Manuel Sherwin. Their brief was to create a song evoke falling in love under a London sky. I tell the story here.
Spoiler alert: the happy ending was that Nightingale was a huge hit in 1940. Not that Mr Maschwitz, OBE, had time for a victory lap. There was a war on, and he was needed by the British Army Intelligence Corp. So James Bond, basically — Ian Fleming was a colleague.
In later years Eric wound down by writing a musical for George Formby and heading Light Entertainment for first the BBC and then ITV. And as Sandra Burlingame notes:
Maschwitz’s show business successes enabled him to dedicate energy to working with amateur groups, helping them to stage both his musicals and the works of other writers… he even staged operas for amateur companies.
There’s only one black mark against this magnificent record of musical invention and public service — the title of his 1958 autobiography: No Chip On My Shoulder.
Really, Eric? Is that the best pun you could manage? Up there in the great-classroom-in-the sky Mr Chips is shaking his head sorrowfully.
Read the story behind A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square here (4 min)
