LifeWorks Volume 12 No 8 August 2008
Most nights our house is empty. Our kids are grown and gone; our grandchildren have moved away with them. So, to keep a family tradition going, I read at night to my wife, Vicki. For the past few nights, I’ve been reading one of our favorites of all read-out-loud-books, Peter Pan, by James M. Barrie. Later, Vicki and I began talking about J. M. Barrie and his connection with Daphne du Maurier author of Rebecca, The Scapegoat, The House on the Strand, and Jamaica Inn. J. M. Barrie and Daphne du Maurier were associated much closer than six degrees of separation.
Six degrees of separation refers to the concept that if a person is one rung away from each person they know and two rungs away from each person who is known by one of the people they know, the mathematical progression indicates that everyone is approximately six rungs away from each person on Earth.
In 1990, an American playwright John Guare wrote the play Six Degrees of Separation that, in 1993, was adapted for the screen. Soon other television and cinema scripts would incorporate the concept, launching the phrase into everyday lexicon. The game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon posits the challenge to link any actor who has appeared in a movie with Kevin Bacon through no more than six connections. (A computer analysis has shown that the actor Rod Steiger has more connections with other actors than any other movie star.)
In 2001, a Columbia University professor, Duncan Watts, used 48,000 e-mail senders in 157 countries to demonstrate that the average number of messages to deliver packages to strangers was around six. A 2007 study examining data from 30 billion conversations among 240 million people found that the degree of separation, before strangers were connected to each other was 6.6.
Gregarious people have a smaller degree of separation. In the book, The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell compared change in social phenomena with the spread of infectious diseases. The moment in an epidemic when a virus reaches critical mass is known as the tipping point. When the tipping point is reached the graph showing the rate of infection goes straight up. Gladwell contends that social actions sometimes behave just like outbreaks of infectious disease. A drop in crime rate, a book by an unknown author exploding into a best seller, the sudden development of a “must have” product, the popularity of a movie—all these sudden changes can result from social epidemics. According to Gladwell, the tipping point in social change results from the confluence of three types of people that he calls agents of change:
- Mavens accumulate a wide-range of obscure knowledge and share it with others.
- Salesmen are charismatic people who have an impalpable trait that makes others want to be in agreement with them.
- Connectors have a special gift of making friends with just about everyone. Randomly take a list of 250 surnames from a phone book. Go down the list and give yourself a point every time you see a surname that is shared by someone you know. The higher the score, the more connected you are. Gladwell has given this test to almost 400 people. Of those 400, two dozen had scores under 20, eight had scores over 90, and four had over 100 points.
Connectors bring to mind a friend of mine. Jeff Savell knows just about everyone. Go to a football game and the fans, the yell leaders, the coaches, and even Reveille wave at Jeff. At international conferences, everyone from all over the world knows Jeff. Go to a large party and all of the guests feel that Jeff is their best friend. Jeff’s reputation engenders this story: Jeff is so popular that he is given a private audience with the Pope. During their meeting, the Pope invites Jeff to accompany him on the balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square and wave to the huge crowd below. Two people in the crowd look up at the two men waving from the balcony. One asks the other to identify the two people on the balcony. The man replies, “I don’t know the guy wearing the white cassock and zucchetto, but the man standing next to him is Jeff Savell.”
J. M. Barrie was the Jeff Savell of his day. He counted Robert Louis Stevenson, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and Thomas Hardy as his friends. Barrie founded a cricket team consisting of Conan Doyle, A.A. Milne, G. K. Chesterton, P. G. Woodhouse, and other luminaries. He was godfather to the son of Robert Falcon Scott, the Antarctica explorer. He told stories to the young daughters of the Duke of York, who would become Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret. During the height of his career, Barrie was better known than any writer of his time.
The Arthur Llewelyn Davies family consisting of the parents Arthur, Sylvia, née du Maurier, and their five sons George, John, Peter, Michael, and Nicholas (Nico) played an important role in Barrie’s career. Barrie met the boys in Kensington Gardens where he walked his Newfoundland dog Porthos. He entertained the boys with his stories. When Arthur Llewelyn Davies died in 1907, Barrie provided financial support for the family. Following Sylvia’s death in 1910 Barrie became the boys’ guardian. The boys served as inspiration for the characters in the play Peter Pan that had its first stage appearance in 1904.
With Sylvia Llewelyn Davies and her children, we come to the connections between J. M. Barrie and Daphne du Maurier.
Ø George du Maurier—Daphne’s grandfather and author of Trilby, the story of a young girl transformed into a diva by the evil musical genius Svengali. Trilby inspired the 1910 novel, Phantom of the Opera, that was later adapted into the longest running Broadway show in history. The word “Svengali” has entered the language meaning a person who, with evil intent, manipulates another into doing what is desired.
Ø Gerald du Maurier— Daphne’s father and actor acclaimed for his dual role of George Darling and Captain Hook in J. M. Barrie’s play, Peter Pan
Ø Angela—Daphne’s sister and a beautiful actress who played Wendy in Peter Pan.
Ø Peter—Daphne’s cousin and publisher of her first short story, identified as the name source of the play, Peter Pan.
Now the circle closes in the dénouement: We are all connected, perhaps not as dramatically as the Barrie-du Maurier connection, but we are all linked nonetheless. This idea gives me great comfort, because Vicki and I are moving to Virginia to be nearer to our children and grandchildren who live in the Carolinas. As we move, we trust that the connections we have made in College Station will remain unseparated by six degrees.
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