Self help messiah, p.16
Self-help Messiah, page 16
Realizing that his show required “a complete rewrite job,” Thomas once again contacted Carnagey for help. He also offered the speech instructor a position as business manager for the tour, a job that would bring a cut of the profits. The young teacher agreed to help and attended several of Thomas’s shows “until I became familiar with his films and material.” Plans were quickly drawn up for passage to England, since the London performance was slated to begin shortly.8
Thomas, Carnagey, and cameraman Harry Chase sailed for Europe on the French ship La Lorraine. As they crossed the Atlantic, the trio labored frantically, usually twelve hours a day, on a new version of the show. “All day and far into the night, Dale, Chase, and I were huddled over our projector and scripts, working under the pressure of an opening less than two weeks off,” Thomas said. “But by the time we docked in Southhampton, we had put together the two parts of a tight, swiftly moving show: ‘The Last Crusade—With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia.’ ” In addition, the team also created advertising that would be used on billboards and in newspapers.9
Upon arrival, the three Americans and Percy Burton quickly joined forces to put everything into place and tidy up the last details. The show opened spectacularly. Burton arranged to rent the “Moonlight on the Nile” stage set from the opera-oratorio Joseph and His Brethren and hired the prestigious Band of the Welsh Guards, forty members strong, who presented an overture onstage and then moved to the orchestra pit to provide musical accompaniment throughout. The show began on a mysterious, evocative note, as Thomas related:
The curtain opened on the Nile set, the moon faintly illuminating distant pyramids. Our dancer glided onstage in a brief Oriental dance of the seven veils. We had set to music the Mohammedan call to prayer and, from the wings, a lyric tenor sent this haunting, high-pitched melody sailing away to the farthest reaches of the theater. Two minutes later, I stepped into the spotlight and began to speak … “Now come with me to the lands of mystery, history and romance.”
He then told the audience how he first encountered the centerpiece of the show while walking down a street in Jerusalem. “I met a man clad in the gorgeous robes of an oriental potentate; and, at his side, hung the curved gold sword worn only by the descendants of the prophet Mohammed. But this man had none of the appearances of an Arab. He had blue eyes; and the Arabs’ eyes are always black or brown.” It was, of course, T. E. Lawrence.10
The revamped show worked beautifully as the carefully crafted narrative, tightly synchronized film and photographs, and complementary set, music, and lights melded into a seamless whole. It was a triumph and the reaction, both popular and critical, was ecstatic. “Afterward, the audience stood and applauded for ten minutes,” Thomas noted, while the London newspapers—The Times, Morning Post, Daily Mail, Lloyd’s Weekly News—ran front-page pieces on the show. “One paper said it was the most wonderful film ever seen in England and all London would shortly be talking of nothing else,” Carnagey wrote his mother. According to Lloyd’s Weekly News, “For two hours great audiences sit, never moving; such is the enthrallment of the pictures they see and the thrilling story they hear.” In fact, the success of the show was so overwhelming that the original seven-day engagement at the Royal Opera House was extended to nearly five months and the opera season postponed for six weeks to compensate. As the demand for tickets skyrocketed, the show was moved to Royal Albert Hall for six weeks, and then to Queen’s Hall for several more weeks. As The Times reported, “Even Royal Albert Hall (the largest concert auditorium in the world) is proving hardly large enough for the crowds who want to enjoy it. It is a unique and wonderful entertainment.” More than one million eventually would attend the London performances.11
Carnagey played a central role in this success. All promotional materials for With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia noted that it was “Under the direction of Dale Carnagey,” but, in fact, his job was much bigger. He served as the general manager for the entire operation: hiring two business managers, overseeing bookings, resolving technological issues with film, bulbs, and projectors, and dealing with a thousand and one details of this complex presentation. For such an important job, Carnagey had worked out a profit-sharing plan with Thomas, wherein he received a percentage of the weekly take after operating expenses and a special rental fee for Thomas’s films were taken off the top.12
With the success of the London show secured beyond doubt, Carnagey recrossed the Atlantic in the late fall of 1919 to oversee a duplicate version of the show in Canada and the northeastern United States, which was completely under his management. Hopeful of gaining more profit in the long run, he had refused a salary in favor of another percentage of the take. But the organizational, logistical, and financial tasks facing him were enormous. As he explained, “I have to rehearse the talk with my machine operator, have to get advertising going in the newspapers, have to tend to bookings, have to get some films copied, slides colored, and a thousand things you never dreamed of.” He also trained lecturers to replace Thomas. More pressure came when Canadian attendance proved very spotty. Carnagey gained a few additional bookings in New York and Baltimore, and by March 1920 he had wrapped things up and returned to England.13
While Carnagey primarily saw the Thomas show as a moneymaking venture, a more personal motivation also entered into his calculations. For the youth who had left the Midwest to study acting, but then aborted his theatrical career, this production served as a vindication. In 1920 he wrote to his parents on letterhead stationary reading “The Lowell Thomas Travelogues: ‘With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia,’ Under the Direction of Dale Carnagey.” The message within was a triumphant one. “You used to be always saying to me, mother, that I had never done as well at anything else as I did with Armour. What do you think about it now?” he wrote. “I think both you and father thought I was making a mistake when I went to New York to go on the stage, but you see what it has led to indirectly.”14
Carnagey in a poster for a version of the travelogue show in London he had helped put together with Lowell Thomas.
Back in England in May 1920, Carnagey rejoined Thomas to finish up a tour to Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Glasgow, and Edinburgh. When the production’s popularity elicited an invitation to bring it to Australia and New Zealand, Thomas decided to go. Carnagey stayed in England to take a second version of With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia to a succession of smaller cities throughout the country. Once again, the young American faced a mountain of work. “We have to either rent or arrange to play on a sharing basis every town in England containing more than fifty thousand,” he explained. “I have two men now out doing this work for me … [but] all the decisions will rest with me.”15
Carnagey astride a camel in a 1919 publicity shot for Lowell Thomas’ Allenby and Lawrence show.
Thomas sailed for Down Under in July 1920, and Carnagey took the show on the road to provincial England. But problems quickly developed. People so identified the show with Thomas that significant numbers stayed away upon hearing that a replacement lecturer would be speaking. Moreover, trouble with finding suitable venues also created a snarl of problems as profits began to drain away. Carnagey decided to deliver the lectures himself, a move that only created more difficulties. While a skilled public speaker, he had never been to the Middle East, and a notable uneasiness often became obvious as the photographs and films flew by on the screen. According to a magazine, during one of the shows, “he baffled his audience by saying simply, ‘Here is a beautiful picture of the East. Let us enjoy it in silence.’ ”16
Finally Carnagey buckled under the strain of these mounting problems. “There was bad news waiting for us when we docked at Melbourne—a cable from London reporting that the Allenby-Lawrence road companies had folded; poor Dale Carnagey had suffered a nervous breakdown over it,” Thomas recalled later. “In the meantime, we had lost a good deal of money and poor Dale was sick, blaming himself. There wasn’t a thing in the world I could do about it at a range of ten thousand miles except to cable him my absolute confidence that he had done all anyone could expect.” Thomas’s memory was faulty on one point—the English show had not closed down completely but Carnagey’s enthusiasm certainly had.17
After regaining his emotional equilibrium, Carnagey limped on with the production until the end of the year. Then in December 1920 he looked over the ledger sheets and discovered “that we had taken in about $20,000 and that our expenses had been about the same.” Carnagey had had enough, and he cabled Thomas that he wanted to resign from the show. He agreed to stay on until March 1921 but at a salary.18
Meanwhile, in early 1921 Carnagey enjoyed greater success by helping the popular English hero Sir Ross Smith put together a public lecture. In 1918, Smith had made the first flight from England to Australia, winning both a knighthood and a prize of $10,000 offered by the Australian government. Now Thomas’s organization brought him back to London and arranged for him to star in another travelogue show based on his exploits. Carnagey organized this new production, wrote the lecture, and trained Smith in delivering it. The Ross Smith Flight: From England to Australia, a production of “The Lowell Thomas Travelogues, Under the Personal Direction of Dale Carnagey,” enjoyed a four-month run at the Philharmonic Hall in London.19
In the spring of 1921, Carnagey’s venture with Thomas came to a close. It might have seemed obvious that the young teacher would return to New York City and resume his lucrative teaching endeavors with the YMCA. But an unexpected development muddied the waters and made his future direction unclear. Dale Carnagey had fallen in love.
The August 4, 1921, edition of the Belton Herald carried a brief wedding announcement. Submitted by James and Amanda Carnagey, it noted that their son Dale had married Lolita Harris of Baltimore on July 4, 1921, in Dorking, a small town on the River Mole in Surrey County, England, about forty-five miles southwest of London. According to British records, the couple had applied for a license, registered their marriage, and received a marriage certificate from local civic authorities. “The ceremony was performed in the Congregational Church and luncheon was served at the Deepden Mansion, formerly the country home of Lord Francis Hope,” the Belton Herald continued. It added that the newlyweds flew from London to Amsterdam two days later, spent two weeks touring Holland and Belgium, and then sailed from Antwerp for America on July 21.20
Carnagey’s decision to marry had been rather impulsive. Having met his new bride only a few months before, he knew little about her in terms of personality, habits, and values. In fact, she had an interesting and unusual background. Born Lolita Baucaire on October 29, 1886, in Ulm, Germany, to a family of French ancestry, she had resided in Germany until 1903, when she emigrated to the United States and became an actress in a touring theatrical company. In later life, she would claim to be a countess, but that seems unlikely. In 1909, she had married Charles C. Harris, a prosperous dentist from a prominent Baltimore family of dentists. He had been president of the Maryland State Dental Association in the 1890s, while his father, James H. Harris, was on the faculty of the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery, one of the most prestigious institutions for dental training in the United States. Charles had been married before—to Grace Harris since 1888—and apparently divorced his wife to marry Lolita. Given his wealth and the fact that he had been born in 1860, thus making him twenty-six years older than his new European wife, it seems clear that she was something of a social climber.21
As Mrs. Charles Harris, Lolita enjoyed the 1910s as “the wife of a fashionable Baltimore doctor,” in her words, who was “a member of the Baltimore Country Club, and was prominent in the social circles of that city.” Speaking four languages fluently, she crossed the Atlantic more than a dozen times to travel extensively in Europe. But the marriage did not last. Lolita and her husband were divorced in 1920, and she took up with Carnagey, whom she apparently met in Baltimore when he was touring with the American version of the Lowell Thomas show. After he returned to England, she followed a few months later in September 1920.22
For the Missouri farm boy, the cosmopolitan figure of Lolita Baucaire must have exerted a powerful pull. Photographs from the period reveal an attractive young woman with dark eyes and wavy, bobbed brunette hair, who was habitually outfitted in fashionable attire. Letters and postcards noted her love for skiing and hiking, and a proclivity for playing poker. In other words, Lolita was the prototype of the 1920s New Woman—liberated from Victorian convention, adventurous, and displaying an added patina of European sophistication and style. More worldly in matters of romance and sexual maneuver, and bereft of support after divorcing her rich husband, she had drawn young Carnagey in quickly and entranced him. As a writer, teacher, and business manager for one of the most popular entertainment ventures of the era, he must have appeared to her as an interesting, promising, and potentially lucrative catch. In fact, their 1921 marriage inaugurated a period of footloose living in Europe that lasted for the next four years. With economic disarray on the Continent in the aftermath of World War I, Europe provided an inexpensive living environment for Americans with dollars. The Carnageys took full advantage of the situation.23
Lolita Baucaire several years after marrying Carnagey in 1921.
In early 1922, after a brief trip to the United States, Dale and Lolita Carnagey spent most of the subsequent year traveling in the Azores, Spain, Algiers, and Italy. In the Azores, he got a crash course in European economic deprivation, discovering that a policeman there was paid a salary equivalent to $8 a month. After some time in Cadiz, Spain, the couple crossed the Mediterranean to Algiers, where they encountered scenes of widespread poverty and an Islamic culture vastly different from their own. After journeying to Palermo, Sicily, they went on to Naples and several weeks of touring through Italy before arriving in Rome in February 1922. By June they were in Cortina, in the far north of the country in the Dolomites. Ensconced in a beautiful but inexpensive hotel, partaking of delicious food, hiking and picking wildflowers, and encountering breathtaking views of the Italian Alps on a daily basis, Carnagey exuded a palpable contentment. “This is certainly the life,” he commented to Lolita in Cortina. “Yes, who wants to live in New York when you can live here?” she replied.24
The Carnageys spent much of 1923 and 1924 in central Europe, living for varying periods in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Hungary. In a September 1923 letter to his hometown newspaper, the Maryville Democrat-Forum, Dale reported that he had spent the last winter in the “Black Forests of Germany” and was now in the Austrian Alps. He provided colorful descriptions of mountain rivers—“not the babbling brooks that the poets sing about, but veritable roaring torrents, foaming in cascades over thousands of huge granite boulders”—and glaciers “200 feet thick that had been there on the side of the mountain in the days of Belshazaar and Babylon.” The Carnageys spent much of a summer in a spa town in the Austrian Alps near Salzburg, staying at a hotel adjoining a beautiful old church. “We dine out in a garden under the chestnut trees, close enough to the church to hit it with a rock,” he wrote. “It is Catholic and built in 1789.”25
They toured several other cities—Zurich and Wehrliverlag in Switzerland and Kitzbehel in the Tirol province of Austria—with Lolita’s sister and her husband as companions. Dale described a stint in Vienna, visiting a palace of Franz Josef where “the haughty Hapsburgs lived until 1910.” They also traveled deeper into the Continent. The Carnageys lived for six months on an island in Budapest, and Dale reported hunting wild geese “on the Hortobagy Desert down in Hungary, away out by the borders of Romania.” He also noted, “I didn’t get a goose, but I did get within gunshot of Russia.”26
By September 1924, the Carnageys had settled in France, where they would spend much of the following year. “I am living just now at Versailles on the edge of Paris,” he wrote to the Maryville Democrat-Forum. “Almost every day I spend an hour walking through what is probably the most famous park and garden in the world. Every day I walk by the Grand Palace of the most ostentatious king that ever misruled and oppressed humanity.” Warming to his anti-aristocracy theme, he declared that Louis XVI “got what he needed—the guillotine, what he and all that crowd needed, and what the Russian czar needed, and Herr Wilhelm and others that I won’t mention.” Playing to his Missouri audience, he also contended that Marie Antoinette’s gardens at Versailles paled beside the natural beauty of the countryside near Maryville, and that farming in France, in terms of efficiency and productivity, “is a joke in comparison to the farming in Nodaway county.”27
While in France, Carnagey enjoyed a visit from Homer Croy, along with his wife and two children, and the two families spent some vacation time together on the French Riviera. The old pals from Maryville also took a six-hundred mile trip by automobile through the French countryside, where they wondered at the lack of fences, observed women washing their clothes in the creeks because they did not have money to heat water, pretended to be wine tasters, and grew astonished at the sight of grain being cut by hand with a scythe. In Paris, Carnagey found himself questioning the business values of visiting Americans. He noted that many of them came to Europe for relaxation and uplift and then talked only of “the bargains they had bought, the amount of money they had saved, or how much they had been overcharged.” Carnagey defended a different standard. “I would want my child to be prepared for the appreciation of the finer things of life; to be able to come to Paris and enjoy its music and art, for there are two worlds in which a man should live: the one the world of reality, of beans and potatoes, or iron and steel … and another world, a greater, a finer, a nobler world, that gives to life its beauty and content and color, the world of the mind and the world of the soul,” he wrote. “Therefore I would train my child for leisure, for what a man does in his leisure hours is equally as important as that which he does in his working hours.”28
