The Baby's Skin Colour

To save time, why don’t we compile a list of people who don’t think it’s perfectly normal to speculate about which of its parents a baby might resemble more?

Hesketh Pearson’s biography of George Bernard Shaw relates that a strange lady from Zurich once wrote to the playwright, suggesting that with her looks and his brain they should produce the most perfect child. Shaw is said to have replied that the risk would be of the child having his looks and her brain.

The same story is told about Anatole France and Isadora Duncan, Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe, and Albert Einstein and an unnamed chorus girl.

It is entirely within the bounds of possibility that all these stories are apocryphal, or perhaps cases of reporters inserting contemporary famous names into an old, anonymous piece of repartee.

Now, we should not let the mere fact that nobody ever said it get in the way of a good story, should we?

On the other hand, in the current case, perhaps we should let this non-story drop because it wouldn’t have been of the slightest significance even if somebody had said it.