The Sunday Gentleman (20 page)

Today, safe in the knowledge that he is an institution. Holmes spends more and more time in his rambling, plantation-style, wooden home, called “Topside,” located on a hill a mile above crowded Hollywood Boulevard. This dozen-roomed brown house, once a riding club for silent day film stars, and owned for six years by Francis X. Bushman (who gave it Hollywood’s first swimming pool, where Holmes now permits neighborhood children to splash), was purchased by Holmes in 1930. “I had that M-G-M contract,” he says, “and it earned me a couple of hundred thousand dollars. Well, everyone with a studio contract immediately gets himself a big car, a big house, and a small blonde. I acquired the car, the house, but kept the blonde a mental acquisition.” For years, Holmes also owned a Manhattan duplex decorated with costly Japanese and Buddhist treasures, which he called “Nirvana.” Before Pearl Harbor, Holmes sold this duplex, with its two-million-dollar collection of furnishings, to Robert Ripley, the cartoonist and oddity hunter.

Now, in his rare moments of leisure, Holmes likes to sit on the veranda of his Hollywood home and chat with his wife. Before he met her, he had been involved in one public romance. Gossips, everywhere, insisted that he might marry the fabulous Elsie de Wolfe, actress, millionaire decorator, friend of Oscar Wilde and Sarah Bernhardt, who later became Lady Mendl. Once, in Denver, Holmes recalls, a reporter asked him if he was engaged to Elsie de Wolfe. Holmes replied, curtly. No. That afternoon, a banner headline proclaimed: BURTON HOLMES REFUSES TO MARRY ELSIE DE WOLFE!

Shortly afterward, during a photographic excursion. Holmes met Margaret Oliver who, suffering from deafness, had taken up still photography as an avocation. In 1914, following a moonlight proposal on a steamer’s deck, he married Miss Oliver in New York City’s St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, and took her to prosaic Atlantic City for the first few days of their honeymoon, then immediately embarked on a long trip abroad.

When his wife is out shopping, Holmes will stroll about his estate, study his fifty-four towering palm trees, return to the veranda for a highball, thumb through the National Geographic, play with his cats, or pick up a language textbook. He is on speaking terms with eight languages including some of the Scandinavian, and is eager to learn more. He never reads travel books. “As Pierre Loti once remarked, ‘I don’t read, ft might ruin my style,’” he explains.

He likes visitors, and he will startle them with allusions to his earlier contemporaries. “This lawn party reminds me of the one at which I met Emperor Meiji,” he will say. Meiji, grandfather of Hirohito, opened Japan to Commodore Perry. When visitors ask for his travel advice, Holmes invariably tells them to see the Americas first. “Why go to Mont St. Michel?” he asks. “Have you seen Monticello?”

But when alone with his wife and co-workers on the veranda, and the pressure of the new season is weeks away, he will loosen his blue dressing gown, inhale, then stare reflectively out over the sun-bathed city below.

“You know, this is the best,” he will say softly, “looking down on this Los Angeles. It is heaven. I could sit here the rest of my life.” Then, suddenly, he will add, “There is so much else to see and do. If only I could have another threescore years upon this planet. If only I could know the good earth better than I do.”

WHAT HAS HAPPENED SINCE…

Only a small portion of Burton Holmes’s wish for “another threescore years upon this planet” was allowed him. After my story about him appeared in
The Saturday Evening Post
during May of 1947, Burton Holmes lived on for another eleven years and one month. However, there was little new that he ventured or achieved in those eleven years to alter the story I had written about him.

For one year, after I met and wrote about him. Burton Holmes actively continued to present his beloved travelogues in person. After that, he quit the public platform and legitimate stage to serve an organization, Burton Holmes Travelogues, in an advisory capacity. Not until two years before his death did he submit to complete retirement from work.

During almost six decades, he had been Everybody’s Rover Boy. And for doing what he enjoyed most in life, he had earned five million dollars. But at the age of eighty-eight, no longer able to leave his hill above Hollywood Boulevard, he was ready for that one last journey. He died in July of 1958, and he was cremated at his own request. His mortal remains, his ashes, were deposited in a favorite Siamese urn, one which he had cherished.

But Burton Holmes left more than ashes behind in 1958. He left behind a Name, a vast audience who responded to that name, and an organization to represent that name by proxy in order to hold onto the vast audience. Several years before his death, Burton Holmes, person, had become Burton Holmes Travelogues, corporation. When the person was no more, the corporation remained to carry on.

Today, the corporation, promoting the Burton Holmes name, consists of four people, all of whom were close to Holmes before his death. The most dominant member of the corporation, yet now the least active, is the Great Traveler’s widow, Margaret O. Holmes, who had been his spouse for forty-four years. At the age of eighty-six, Mrs. Holmes still lives on in “Topside,” with two companions. Although she keeps an eye on the corporation, Mrs. Holmes’s retirement is largely devoted to basking in the memory of the old glories, and to occasionally strolling about her three acres or, if the weather is hot, taking a swim in her pool. The only times she emerges from seclusion, and descends from “Topside” into the bewildering new world of freeways and television antennas, is when a Burton Holmes Travelogue series is being presented in Los Angeles. Then she attends each film and lecture. Sometimes, too, she will go forth to see what the competition is doing, quietly slipping into an auditorium where some young lecturer with new film is attempting to challenge the corporation and the Name.

The active head, heart, and limbs of the Holmes corporation consist of three lively, energetic gentlemen, who, because they knew and respected Holmes, possess a shrewd understanding of what was valuable in the past—as well as what is necessary in the present and the future. The president of the corporation is a Phi Beta Kappa named Robert Mallett, a former foreign correspondent who once interviewed Sir Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle. Mallett’s main concern is the business side of the corporation. But sometimes, when the fever is on him, he will take to the boards. Recently he personally narrated the descriptive lectures for travelogues on Sweden and Japan. The least publicized member of the corporation, who managed the travelogues before Holmes died and who manages them today, is Walter T. Everest. The most colorful member of the trio, Andre de la Varre, bears an uncanny resemblance to the Master. The Burton Holmes trademarks—“Vandyke beard, erect bearing, precise speech”—may all be found in de la Varre, who had made 120 travel short subjects for three motion picture studios and had won a Motion Picture Academy Award before joining Holmes. Today, de la Varre produces many of the corporation’s films, and presents some of them (such as the ones on Italy and Switzerland) in person. These men consider the Holmes organization to be the leading producer of travelogues in the United States.

If the shade of Burton Holmes were to return to earth, it is likely that he would be satisfied with the way his heirs have perpetuated his travelogues. Basically, little has changed. Had Holmes’s shade visited the Academy of Music in Philadelphia to attend the Holmes Seventieth Anniversary series, consisting of five different subjects presented during four weeks in January and February of 1963, he would not have been disappointed. At a top price of two dollars a seat for a single evening, or the bargain rate of eight dollars for all five shows, he would have been able to see Robert Mallett presenting “Today’s New and Progressive Japan,” then “America’s Wonderland: the Pacific Northwest,” then “Grand Tour of Delightful Sweden.” On alternate nights, Holmes’s shade would have seen Andre de la Varre presenting “Playground of the World: Switzerland” and “Sicily and Byways of Italy.” And Holmes’s shade would have been happy to know he was part of a full house.

Yet Holmes’s heirs, while adhering to certain Burton Holmes traditions—such as projecting the sharp original Kodachrome film and not prints or copies, delivering narration live while standing beside the film being projected rather than succumbing to sound tracks, and making all their appearances in white tie and tails—have tried to keep pace with our fast-moving, ever-changing times.

For one thing, five absolutely new films are presented every year. There are no reruns of the old Burton Holmes reels, which are preserved in storage. When I asked a member of the corporation if any of Holmes’s original material was usable or ever used today, I was told, “We frequently utilize short film segments from the footage Burton Holmes shot in the early days of motion pictures.” When the heirs recently made “Roundabout London,” they could not resist including film shots of Queen Victoria, which Burton Holmes had once taken. When the heirs produced “Lands of the Nile,” they spliced in some 1933 scenes of Emperor Haile Selassie’s coronation in Ethiopia, taken by the only motion picture photographer present—Burton Holmes himself. Occasionally, too, the heirs will lift an appropriate excerpt from Holmes’s old lectures to use in one of their modern-day narrations.

Besides using glossier new film, the heirs have made other changes in the travelogues. When I reminded them that Burton Holmes had told me there were two ingredients he had studiously avoided in his films—adventure and politics—I got the impression that the heirs (who insisted that Holmes’s policy was “still in effect,” but admitted that “this does not mean we avoid showing a country in true perspective”) were not averse to injecting a little adventure and politics. I suspected that here and there they had conceded that life was real, life was earnest, and that romanticism and escape finally had to make their compromises with the grimier and grimmer realities of the Nuclear Age.

One member of Holmes’s organization was more candid about a change that had taken place. “Last year, we presented a film on Hong Kong,” he said, “and this not only showed the usual tourist attractions but included treatment in depth of the housing problems and the menace of the Red China border a few miles away. It is our feeling that the public is considerably more interested today in world affairs and getting to know the citizens of another country than they were prior to World War II. It is not enough to present a picture-postcard approach to a subject any more. There was a time, of course, when color motion pictures alone were novel enough to satisfy an audience. This is no longer true…However, we do continue to inject a feeling of taking a trip by the use of scenes showing tourists boarding trains or planes, and enjoying the attractions of the country. Basically, our audiences are people who have already traveled extensively or hope to in the future. Our narrations always include helpful suggestions to the would-be tourist.”

Remembering that Burton Holmes had told me he was less popular in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Indianapolis, and Toledo than elsewhere, and that he avoided Pomona, California, completely, I wondered if there had been a geographic shift in the popularity of his travelogues after his death. The heirs would only comment that “bad cities” were the result of “bad local management and support,” and that most big cities were “good cities,” including Philadelphia which was one of their best. They felt that they often did well in cities where the ethnic origin of the community paralleled the subject of the film—in other words, Scandinavian subjects did wonderfully well in Minneapolis, and German subjects were popular in Chicago and environs.

The Burton Holmes team admitted that they are faced with two problems that the Master had not had to contend with in his day. The first problem is the cost of producing a travel motion picture today, a major burden being the rise in the price of transportation and living abroad. The second problem, a more serious one, is the population shift in the United States, which has directly affected the Burton Holmes audiences and the lecture itineraries. Audiences are moving from the city to the country. “Many patrons,” confessed a Holmes heir, “find it unattractive to drive scores of miles from an outlying community to the center of a large city. In some large Eastern cities, older patrons have been discouraged from going out at night by newspaper reports of crime and violence.” To combat this urban exodus, the Burton Holmes corporation made the decision to follow its audience into suburbia. Today, while the Chicago box office has shown a decline, this loss has been balanced by profits from travelogues offered in the outlying suburban communities of Greater Chicago.

One enemy, with whom Burton Holmes himself had never really competed, was the dragon that I felt most endangered his heirs. This dragon had not been mentioned. I mentioned it. I used the dread word—“television.”

I asked, “Why should people continue to come out of their homes and pay to see and hear a live travelogue when free television, in their homes, shows them the wonders of the world for nothing? Burton Holmes had no such competition. You have. What are you doing about it?”

The heirs appeared unconcerned. Television travel films, they said, are ruined by poor prints and by the frequent advertising spiels interjected into the half-hour or hour-long programs. The true travelogue aficionado would not have his Kyoto or Taj Mahal or Matterhorn sullied by constant talk about the newest detergent or filter-tip cigarette. The true aficionado prefers the beautiful original film to the grainy print, the original with its illusion uninterrupted by grating pitchmen. Paid television, without commercials, is another thing. This, I gathered, the heirs would not try to lick but try to join. “We are following with great interest the development of pay television,” I was told. “This would seem to be the perfect answer to our problem of reaching the vast untapped audiences in smaller cities across the country.”

Well, despite these reassurances of the hearty future of the live travelogue, I found myself concerned and apprehensive. Perhaps the Burton Holmes corporate heirs are doing the best that can be done in this field in the United States. Perhaps they have tuned in to the times, and the mechanics of their filming and projection are better than in the past, and their subjects possess the fresh dimension of timeliness. Still, I suspect, in order to compete with free television presentations, the live travelogues require a single dynamic, persuasive, and colorful personality around which to build a cult. When a travelogue comes to a legitimate theater today, it is one more diversion, not an event. In the old days, when Burton Holmes appeared, it was an event, like the rare visit of the rich and wise uncle from faraway who, alone, could afford to see and do everything, and was ready to share with his poorer relatives the marvels he had enjoyed.