Shaw's Vampire

"Stella,

"... I hope you have lost your good looks; for while they last any fool can adore you, and the adoration of fools is bad for the soul. No: give me a ruined complexion and a lost figure and sixteen chins. . . . Then you shall see me come out strong." So wrote, not perverse Jonathan Swift to his 18th-Century Stella, but moonstruck, middle-aged George Bernard Shaw to the lovely Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Year after year, in a stream extending from the '90s till long after the war, the most merciless of scoffers wrote the lady the most extravagant of love letters (as he also did to Actress Ellen Terry). To her the scoffer even babbled baby talk. For her he wrote Pygmalion. Against her, even when she tacked on her own ending to the play, he was powerless. When Beatrice Stella Campbell died at 75 last week, with her ended Shaw's second famed platonic love affair.

Not for nothing did she enjoy such un-Shavian homage. A dark, passionate beauty with Italian blood in her veins, she reputedly inspired Burne-Jones to paint, and Kipling to write. The Vampire. In her prime--when she played The Second Mrs.Tanqueray, Magda, Romeo and Juliet, Pelleas and Melisande--she shared honors with Bernhardt, Duse, Ellen Terry. She knew everybody in England, from Oscar Wilde to Edward VII. She was fearless and formidable, a woman who shared her love letters with the world, who had atrocious manners but a superb air, and a wit that Shaw himself might envy.

Once, after a furious row during rehearsals, she turned on her vegetarian adorer with: "Some day you'll eat a pork chop, and then God help all women!" Much more blandly she told bald Playwright Marc Connelly that she hadn't recognized him right off because he was wearing his hair a new way. She could meet any situation. One day, when her dog misbehaved in a taxicab, the driver let off a stream of profanity. Stella Campbell stared coldly at him, drawled, "Young man, that was me." She always did as she pleased. She was reputedly the first woman ever to smoke in public in the U. S. She demanded $25 for newspaper interviews--and got it. She went into telegraph offices and insisted on dictating her wires. Even when, an old woman down on her luck, she went to Hollywood, she refused to kowtow, would ask world-famous movie stars whether they "were connected with the cinema." In no time she had alienated everybody who might have helped her: an awed Alexander Woollcott likened her to "a sinking ship firing on its rescuers." Though Stella Campbell published many of Shaw's letters to her, she did not publish all. Years ago the middle-aging philanderer, alarmed by the number of his ardent avowals that had got into print, put his foot down, reportedly cabled her, "I won't play horse to your Lady Godiva."

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