The above description kind of strayed from what Shaw actually said in several places, though.
No, Eliza and Freddy did not move in with Higgins and the Colonel. No, Higgins’s life was not “disordered” when Eliza moved out to begin married life with Freddy. No, Shaw was not trying to imply in a discreet Victorian way that Higgins was homosexual.
Note that the musical does refer to Shaw’s description of what happens to Eliza.
Linky no worky.
Here’s a better one. Watch from 1:30
The highlight of my acting career came, as a 12-year-old in a day camp production of MY FAIR LADY, when I finished that song and the house went dark, and in the dark, I said my final line: “Liza?”
When the house lights came back up, and “Liza” and I took our bows, I saw the mascara running down the cheeks of half the moms in the audience, making them look like so many Oedipus Rexes, and I thought “Holy Shit! I did that?”
Lesson One in the Power of Art.
Except that he got along fine without her for all the rest of his life.
Also note that Higgins had several rather young and attractive upstairs maids. hmmm.
As an aside, according to this calculator on the Bank of England’s website, that £500 in 1912 is the equivalent of about £47,000, or $58,000 USD, in today’s money. The Colonel was apparently quite a generous old coot.
Which shows my feeling that Eliza should be with the Colonel at the end. He’s the only one who treats her with kindness and consideration throughout. Cast a younger actor in the role and it would work perfectly.
Nah, it’s a perfect May/December romance. When he drops dead, she will be a rich widow. Then she can marry Freddy, and everyone will be happy.
From today’s McSweeney’s:
Interesting, thanks.
The latest revival, from 2018 which we saw in Lincoln Center, had Eliza walk out on Higgins at the end, changing the sense of the original musical. Lots of justification for it in the program. It also had Pickering making goo-goo eyes at Higgins.
The Pygmalion movie was British, so I wonder why Shaw went off at Hollywood about it. My reading of a collection of Shaw’s works, which had the above quoted letter, led me to think that Shaw knew about the “happy” ending which he accepted though not thrilled about. (A google confirms this.) So, the ambiguous ending got changed to a clear rejection of Higgins by Eliza.
Yes, Higgins is rich. I’m not sure he inherited any money yet, since his mother, played by Rosemary Harris in the production we saw, is still alive and is an attendee at Ascot. I assume Higgins does not make his money from language lessons.
It sounds to me like a man whose entire experience of women is listening to complaints from his married or courting friends at “the club.”
Ah. I knew the song, but hadn’t read the play, so I didn’t realize that connection
And yet, when they first meet, Pickering asks Higgins “Is there a living in that?” (“That” being phonetics.) Higgins replies “Oh, yes, quite a fat one.” So the implication is that yes, he does make a lot of money from his language expertise. Somehow.
The implication is that he does for wealthy people who are embarrassed by their speech what he’s doing for Eliza for free - and since he’s an expert, he can prey on wealthy people’s insecurities so they think that his services are desperately needed
While a “confirmed bachelor” could be gay, he also could be a man who in his younger days was never quite satisfied both physically and intellectually by the woman he tried dating. Somewhere in middle age he decides that he never will be, so he gets his sexual satisfaction by visiting prostitutes (expensive ones, of course). Perhaps he gets his satisfaction from an upstairs maid that he hires telling her that he will pay her to sleep with him, for which she will get a very high salary. After a few years of working for him, the maid will have saved enough money that she and the confirmed bachelor decide that she can move on. The bachelor will then hire a new maid for this job. The maid have saved enough money that she can persuade a middle-class man to marry her, even though he understands what she has been doing for several years.
Another humorous aside; in my first playthrough of Fallout: New Vegas, I took the “Confirmed Bachelor” perk early in the game because the bonus damage against male humans sounded like a good idea since most of the enemies in the game are men, without realizing until much later in the playthrough that that perk gives your character the ability to flirt with men and pursue gay relationships. It definitely makes collecting on Santiago’s debt to the Garrets a lot more interesting, as you can talk him into working off his debt by becoming a prostitute.
I meant “women he tried dating”.
But she’s a widow, IIRC. It would have been quite normal for a wealthy Victorian gentleman like the late Higgins Sr. to have left his widow a comfortable amount to live on while bequeathing most of his fortune to his son(s).
I’ll agree that’s possible, but plays from that period never seem to go into the tawdry details of the finances of the rich - unless the subject is how they are almost out of money.
My reading of Higgins is that he is so set in his ways that he can’t handle the changes that letting a woman into his life would entail. Perhaps a bit like Shaw.
The new version, by the way, really played up Higgins’ dismissal of Eliza having any part in her education and ability to pass as upper class. I’m sure this was in the original version, (I last saw it quite a while ago) but it was thrown in our faces.