Accent on Living
IT WAS a great pleasure to receive for these pages recently a little piece from René MacColl. The piece is quite out of season, having to do with Wimbledon tennis and British television, but we propose to publish it next month, mainly because we like the piece but partly because MacColl is surely one of our most singular contributors, and knowing him has been a sort of bonus amid the other satisfactions of editorial work. I find trouble in getting him on paper, a fast-traveling news reporter for the London Daily Express, whose copy may come one week from Azerbaijzhan, from Caracas the next, and from a Los Angeles courtroom a few days later. One evening in New York I overheard an old China hand, who was obviously preening himself on a recent trip, ask MacColl if he had been in Red China. MacColl reflected briefly. “Yes,” he said, “but only three times.”
“But I mean since the war,” said the old China hand.
“Oh,” said MacColl apologetically, “so do I.”
Between his global swings MacColl lives in a Sussex village and writes a semiweekly column for the Express. He has spent about half the past twenty years in the United States, and this has given his view of both countries a certain jovial detachment that makes him extraordinarily good company for an American traveling in England. His schedule is necessarily rather flexible. I had just set out with him on one occasion on what was to be a sampling of British country inns. We had fared grandly at Windsor and at The Bear in Woodstock, and we were having a lighthearted lunch at Sevenoaks, when MacColl reminded himself to make his daily call to his paper. He came back to the table with a long face: leave immediately for London and take a plane that afternoon for Buenos Aires. It was hard on our tour of the inns, but it sounded as if a big story were at hand. Perón, so the Express had learned from its own phenomenally alert intelligence connections, was in for a rough time. MacColl left without finishing his lunch, and I went back to London later on the train.
MacColl’s first story from Buenos Aires a few days later seemed to me ample justification for his assignment: an eyewitness account of the sacking and burning of the Jockey Club by a mob. What gave it a rather special quality was MacColl’s seeming familiarity with the art treasures for which the club was celebrated, and one looked in vain in the competing papers for his easy references to Velasquez, Goya, and other Spanish masters whose great works came tumbling, one after another, from the tall windows only to be ripped and shredded by the citizenry. I asked him about it when I next saw him some months later in Washington, and it transpired that he had merely had the prudence, before sitting in on the riot, to provide himself with a guidebook which described, in colorful detail, the Jockey Club’s principal rooms and their contents.
The paths of MacColl and the Atlantic Monthly first crossed early in World War II, when he was putting up a characteristically energetic job for the British Information Services in New York, in charge of its press and radio efforts. One way to carry on such work is to play it all very carefully and achieve little beyond keeping out of trouble, but MacColl’s was a far livelier program. Some of his insouciant correspondence, on H. M.’s government letterheads, would have caused a Washington civil servant to blench and tremble. “I can’t get you General Blank,” he once wrote us, in our joint pursuit of an article, “but London wistfully suggests that General X might do. He happened to be my C.O. in France, and I can assure you that he is a harmless old chap who might serve very well.” Coming from MacColl this was high praise, and the article proved very successful indeed. His description of another office episode was equally in character. “I noticed this man turning up every day in the office,” he said, “and I learned that he had really quite a distinguished career. It seemed to me that here was a potentially valuable bit of Crown property going to waste, so I decided to make a military expert out of him. He’s been getting on beautifully. Last night I had him on the March of Time.”
The velocity of service provided by MacColl’s office on all sorts of queries and requests from editors still seems to me unique in government establishments. It was no infrequent thing to receive by midafternoon a London response to a query of that morning, and MacColl quickly became famous among the working press for the stream of British war heroes, statesmen, celebrities, and eccentrics which he kept ceaselessly on tap for interviews.
MacColl’s entry into journalism began when he went to work, fresh from Oxford, as secretary to a rich American publisher with a fondness for special trains, engraved menus at all meals in his London house, leasing whole wings of sizable hotels for out-of-town parties, and chartering planes for flights to distant places. A year or more before Lindbergh’s Atlantic crossing, MacColl accompanied his employer on a flight from England to Java, a trip enlivened by the publisher’s habit of shedding $20 bills on the natives wherever the plane happened to put down. At one point, while the Dutch pilot was banking above Victoria Falls to afford his passengers a proper view, MacColl was ill-advised enough to try to rouse the publisher, who was sound asleep in his chair. Shaking him gently by the shoulder, MacColl gestured to the window. “The falls,” he said. “Victoria Falls.”
The publisher opened one eye and grunted. “Tell ‘em,” he said, “tell ‘em I won’t give ‘em a goddam cent,” and went back to sleep. The publisher eventually gave MacColl a job in this country as a police reporter at $35 a week. “I could not help noticing,” says MacColl, “that with almost each mile on our way to the United States he became more and more parsimonious.”
We have published over the years a dozen or more light pieces by MacColl on odd subjects. They still seem to me very funny as I reread them. A first — and thus far last — novel of his was something else again. Its title was Assignment Stuffed Shirt, and its sales in the United States were a cut below negligible. My own diagnosis of its main fault was that its various characters, oddballs all, unbelievable people whom MacColl collects as another man might go after Wedgwood or antique rugs, would overtax the credulity of even the most eager reader. “I can’t help
it,” was MacColl’s reaction. “The trouble is that it’s all true.” And I am sure it was. In any case, I hope you will enjoy his “Tennis on TV” piece next month.