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"I believe," remarks Propter, "that, if you want the golden fleece, it's more sensible to go to the place where it exists than to rush round performing prodigies of valour in a country where all the fleeces happen to be coal-black."
Aldous Huxley went to Southern California about 18 months ago, not to write film plays but because of his eyes. In 1911 he contracted keratitis, which, he says, "left one eye slightly, and the other almost completely, covered with scar tissue, besides inducing large errors of refraction." He went to Los Angeles for instruction in the Bates method of training his eyes to "relax." Although he moves about like a partially blind man, and his right eye looks blind (a blue film), he now reads without glasses, can do things "I couldn't have any more done than a fly a year ago."
In 1938 he wrote a film version of Eve Curie's life story of her mother. Garbo was to have played it, but the story was shelved. Just completed, in collaboration with Jane Murfin, is an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
For the past six months his home has been a secluded wooden cottage in Pacific Palisades, overlooking Santa Monica. With his wife and niece he lives very quietly, takes long walks—sometimes 20 miles—in the Santa Monica hills. The only movie people he sees much of are Ronald Colman, Anita Loos, Directors Cukor and Mamoulian, and Charlie Chaplin, "an old and good friend." Another friend he sees fairly often is Bertrand Russell, now a professor at U. C. L. A. Recently he gave a picnic; the guests were Russell and Garbo.
As for rumors that he is developing a "new religion," he says: "There is no question of concocting a new religion. Certain people have been preoccupied with similar psychological experiments and with speculations concerning them for the past three thousand years. . . ."