MASSCULT AND MIDCULT
225
a distance from the individual since it is specifically designed
to affect not what differentiates him from everybody else-that
is what is of liveliest interest to
him-but
rather to work on the
reflexes he shares with everybody else. So he is at a distance.
But people feel a need to be related to other people. The
simplest way of bridging this distance, or rather of pretending
to bridge it, is by emphasizing the personality of the artist; the
individual buried in the mass audience can relate himself to the
individual in the artist, since they are, after
all,
both persons. So
while Masscult is in one sense extremely impersonal, in another
it is extremely personal. The artist is thus charismatic and his
works become the expression of this charisma rather than, as
in the past, objective creations to be judged in and by themselves.
In
his
alcoholic last years, John Barrymore gave an extreme
illustration of this principle.
Six months ago [runs a story in
Time
of November 6, 1939] a
ham show opened
in
Chicago. Last week it was still running there.
It had become a civic institution.
It
had played to 150,000 people
and grossed over $250,000. The theatre was sold out three weeks
in advance .. .
The answer was . . . that the leading man [was] the great
John Barrymore--sometimes ill, sometimes tight, but always a
trouper ... "Yep," says the doorman, "he arrives every night, dead
or alive." ... He says anything that comes into his head. When he
is well wound up,
My
Dear Children
may bumble on till after mid–
night. Once a fire engine sounded in the street. Sang out Barry–
more: "I hope they get to the fire in time." Once he saw Ned
Sparks in the audience. Walking to the footlights, Barrymore
shouted: "There's that old bastard Ned Sparks." Once he couldn't
hear the prompter
in
the wings, yelled: "Give those cues louder!"
[etc.] Once, unable to stand up, he played the whole show sitting
down. Another time, when he couldn't even issue from the dressing
room to stage, he said: "Get me a wheel chair-I'll play Lionel."
Audiences eat it up. They complain to the box office only on
those rare occasions when Barrymore plays
his
part straight.
