The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas (50 page)

Michel left Monaco feeling depressed and disillusioned. ‘It greatly embarrassed Grace. We remained friends, but did not speak of her husband.’

Michel returned to his home in Benedict Canyon one evening to find that Barry had disappeared. He began a desperate search of the immediate neighbourhood but found no evidence of him anywhere. ‘The next day I put up signs all over the canyon, printed ads in the Beverly Hills paper, and tried everything. I searched and searched for a week. Each day was an eternity.’

On the seventh day he went to bed, slept fitfully and awoke early from a strange and haunting dream. ‘In it, Barry came to the back porch accompanied by a man, a stranger. Barry went to his usual place where he had his food and water and the stranger stood beside him as he ate. He finished eating, looked towards me and then turned and followed the stranger out of the garden into the woods.’

Michel got up and left the house and entered the woods where Barry had disappeared in the dream. He found a steep path that led up into the hills and began to climb. ‘It was not anywhere we usually went together, but I felt compelled to follow the path I saw in the dream. I walked for about fifteen minutes and found his body slumped in a small clearing. It was a lonely spot. He must have gone there to die and had a heart attack.’

The unexpected death of his wartime companion was a profound shock and a terrible loss. ‘I still miss him today. After that I could not look at other dogs or touch them for a long time. To think of having another dog would have been an insult to his memory.’
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Yves Montand became a friend when Michel taught him English for the film Let’s Make Love, in which he starred with Marilyn Monroe. The French film star took a large suite in the Beverly Hills Hotel with his wife, Simone Signoret. Directly opposite, across the corridor, Marilyn Monroe and playwright Arthur Miller were installed in a similarly luxurious suite. ‘Simone’s English was good, but not idiomatic, and the title to her had the literal and single meaning it did in French. She thought it unbelievably vulgar. She said she couldn’t understand how the Americans could make a film called “
Let’s Have Sex
”.’

Michel arrived every day to teach Montand English and coach him for his part. The actor presented a challenge that almost defeated Michel, who found himself baffled by the lack of progress. He then discovered that Montand knew no French grammar and had no concept of verb tenses. Michel developed a system of hand signals to indicate past, present, future and conditional tenses, and this simple visual aid unlocked the language for his pupil. Montand was so influenced by the experience that he wrote articles, and gave interviews, describing how he had come to understand French grammar through learning English.

As Michel spent time with Montand at the suite in the Beverly Hills Hotel it became clear how close the famous couples had become. ‘They practically wanted to live together.’ Simone Signoret then returned to France to make a movie, and a few days later Arthur Miller flew back to New York to work on a play. ‘That left Yves Montand and Marilyn Monroe alone with their front doors facing each other. And the inevitable happened.’

Montand confided to Michel about the affair in an angry outburst.

‘So it happened,’ Michel said philosophically. ‘Why are you so angry?’

‘I’m angry at Arthur.’

‘At Arthur? What on earth has he done to you?’

‘He has gone to New York! Why did he leave? How could he leave us alone? How could he do that to me?’ Montand was on the verge of tears as he turned to Michel,
‘Je ne suis qu’un homme… Je ne suis qu’un homme’
- I’m only a man.

Montand explained that as a kid from the slums of Marseille he had never dreamed, while running wild with his copains, that he might one day have an affair with somebody like Marilyn Monroe. And now he was involved with the greatest sex symbol in the world.

‘How about Simone?’ Michel asked pointedly. ‘How do you feel about her?’

‘I love Simone.’

‘How do you think this will affect your marriage?’

‘There is no question - I want to be with Simone.’

‘I strongly recommend that you call Simone and tell her the whole story. It will make a big difference if you tell her before she finds out through some gossip column. The chances will then be strong that you will lose her.’

Montand looked depressed and sorry for himself, but he made the call. Simone Signoret flew back to Hollywood on the next plane to reclaim her husband. She remarked acidly that she did not seem to be the only person who had taken the title of the film literally. ‘They all survived this brief affair. It was only a fling really. But Marilyn, so insecure and desperate to be liked, was deeply hurt by the rejection.’

Michel moved from the house in Benedict Canyon to a large apartment in the Chateau Marmont, the legendary hotel on Sunset Strip, where he lived for the next eight years. Movie star clients were fun and helped pay the bills, but Michel’s focus was on setting up a model school to demonstrate revolutionary teaching techniques. He created a non-profit Foundation for Better Learning to raise funds and interest in an independent Demonstration School dedicated to advancing innovative educational approaches. ‘The idea was to have children from varying social backgrounds and levels of ability, from nursery through high school. We would bring together a cross-section and provide a curriculum with outstanding teachers on the principle that no school can be better than its teachers.’

The model school was designed to be a showcase, any part of which could easily be replicated and applied. The plan was to assemble a staff of first-rate educators who used affordable programmes that any interested state school would be able to adopt. A staff of experts, each one a specialist in his own field, would assist teachers to prepare their curricula. Educational assistants and clerks would be made available to relieve teachers of routine tasks, allowing them the time and freedom to concentrate on the creative aspects of their profession. I saw the teacher’s role as creating a relaxed atmosphere and assuring students that their questions would be respected and understood. And to encourage students to be sufficiently courageous to have opinions - to dare to be wrong.’

There was to be a Guidance Department that would work to improve greater understanding between pupils and their homes and schools. Community members from outside the school - scientists, industrialists, lawyers, artists, writers and doctors - would be invited to help on specific assignments in which they were better qualified than any available teacher. The school would also have an internship programme, similar to the one used in hospitals, where young teachers serving as apprentices would be able to watch master teachers in action. ‘There would be workshops providing teachers with the opportunity to continue to develop, simplify and refine the approach to their subject. Since most teachers don’t have the time or the money to keep abreast of the accelerated developments even within their own field of knowledge, the school would provide the means to bring a wide range of scholars and educational research specialists to the aid of the teaching staff.’ And special attention would be paid to the design of the building for the maximum comfort of both student and teacher.

The plan was elaborated over time and attracted a great deal of attention. It was an ambitious and exciting project involving innovative and extraordinary people, but Michel now began to experience the cycle of frustration and rejection that came to dog all his attempts at educational innovation. Marvin Adelson, a professor from the University of California Los Angeles, explained: ‘A lot of the opposition and distrust of the assertions that Michel makes comes out of the belief that if his method was really that good, it would have caught on before now and spread like wildfire and displaced everything else in the world. People find it hard to believe. And I found it hard to believe - at first.’

But Adelson soon became a convert to Michel’s revolutionary educational ideas, and an avid proselytiser. An original thinker and brilliant scientist himself, the professor laid claim to an eccentric academic background spanning a number of disparate disciplines. After leaving the army he took a degree in electrical engineering and then made a dramatic switch to study for a PhD in psychology. ‘Had the war not started I would probably have been a doctor.’ He became associated with various non-profit think-tanks involved in national policy studies, and worked on a project connected with the space programme. He then managed the command, control and information systems at Hughes Aircraft for five years. He moved on to become the principal scientist at the System Development Corporation, a think-tank that was a spin-off of the Rand Corporation, and then abruptly changed career yet again when he was appointed professor of architecture at UCLA, a post he held for twenty-three years.

Among Adelson’s particular interests were the educational needs of the future and the potential of accelerated learning. ‘If you do it right you might not be able to teach everybody everything, but you can teach a lot of people a lot of things. I was initially sceptical of Michel’s claims, but I listened to his tapes. They were simply better than anything else I’d ever run across in my life. Since then I have never encountered a person who has heard them and not been impressed.’

But he was mystified by the mumbo-jumbo and rationalisation that many people seemed to need to accept the success of the method. ‘People attached all sorts of attributes to Michel, and one was that he hypnotised students. Why that should work, or what was wrong with hypnosis if it did work, there was no way to understand. It was clear to me that Michel had thought through his system from the learner’s perspective, which is what is missing from so many other approaches, including the academic approach.’

Enthused, Adelson began to talk about the method within the academic world and made an astonishing discovery: not only were there people in the language-teaching community who were not prepared to try the method, there were also a large number who did not want anybody else to try. ‘It was a shock. I was very dismayed.’ Adelson did not have to go far to discover the reason. ‘Vested interests. If you make it possible to learn a language in a weekend, a week, or even a year, you’re going to thrust into obsolescence a whole institutionalised structure. And that puts people’s livelihoods and professional status at risk. I was amazed, over and over again, by the essential conservatism of the system of thinkers who are supposed to be leading-edge. Michel drives these people crazy. They don’t like the idea that the teacher takes responsibility for the student’s progress; they don’t like the concept of no written work, not allowing students to do homework or take notes - it all violates the conventional idea that students screw up because they are not doing enough work. Teachers don’t like to admit that it might be their fault, that they are simply teaching badly.’

Adelson, who was with Systems Development Corporation at the time, worked with Michel for more than a year to develop a detailed prospectus for the Demonstration School. The proposal had already been fully approved by the Ford Foundation, after eighteen months of consultations, and only needed a signature. ‘Unfortunately there was a potential struggle going on at Systems at the time with regard to education,’ Adelson explained. ‘The proposal fell into the hands of a person who mirrored the attitudes of the university faculty, which was murder for the programme and the result was that nothing happened.’
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‘I was completely disillusioned and emotionally drained by the experience,’ Michel says. ‘After so much work and coming so close to realising the dream, this wiped me out. I gave up!’

Rejection by the educational establishment began to become something of a routine, and followed a pattern. An enthusiastic university chancellor, ambassador or lawyer would take the course and excitedly recommend it to an academic body or government department. Reasons would then always be found by elements within the particular organisation concerned not to adopt it.

At the University of Pittsburgh, for example, the chancellor, Wesley Posvar, invited Michel to give a ten-day demonstration programme in French and Spanish to a group of forty faculty, staff and students. ‘Most took up the language at the beginning level, and achieved a satisfying degree of conversational, reading and writing proficiency in that period of time,’ Posvar wrote in a letter to the futurist Herman Rahn, at the Hudson Institute. ‘Some had previously studied the language but felt they really did not know it, and they were brought to what they described as a state of fluency. Whatever claims or comparisons might be made, of this I am sure: eighty or ninety hours spent in this method is more effective than two or three semesters in college training, which is several times as time-consuming and not nearly as exciting.’
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The chancellor expected sceptics, but was unprepared for everyone on the staff of the various language departments to refuse to attend the demonstration. A professor in the linguistics department dismissed the system without further investigation because he said that he only accepted a method as viable when it was theory-based and empirically proven. The head of the French department also stayed away, declaring that she was always suspicious of methods that claimed quick results.

People even found reasons to reject the method after its results had been clearly demonstrated to them. Charles Morin, an attorney in Washington DC - from the large and powerful law firm Dickstein, Shapiro, Morin - introduced Michel to a number of political clients, including John Connolly, when he was governor of Texas, and Lyndon Johnson, when he was vice president. (Michel taught LBJ’s daughter, Lynda Bird, French. At dinner with the Johnsons one evening, Michel was surprised to see that everyone’s massive steak was exactly the same odd shape. They had all been trimmed to resemble the outline of the state of Texas.) Morin took two days of French with Michel and was so impressed by the results he talked about it all over Washington. The CIA heard about the method and sent a French woman to test the attorney. ‘I was certainly not fluent, but felt I could communicate,’ Morin said. ‘I asked the woman, in French, if she could speak more slowly. She said she was from Paris and Parisians always spoke fast. We talked for about an hour.’ The woman returned to the CIA and wrote a report on the encounter in which she declared that Morin had to be making false claims as it was impossible to learn to speak grammatically correct French in such a short time.
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