My Autobiography (36 page)

New York’s hospitality serenaded me. Frank Crowninshield, editor of
Vogue
and
Vanity Fair
, shepherded me through the glittering life of New York, and Condé Nast, owner and publisher of those magazines, gave the most glamorous parties. He lived in a large penthouse on Madison Avenue where the élite of the arts and wealth gathered, decorated with the pick of the Ziegfeld Follies Girls, including the lovely Olive Thomas and the beautiful Dolores.

At the Ritz, where I was staying, I rode on the crest of exciting events. All day long the telephone rang with invitations. Would I spend a week-end here, attend a horseshow there? It was all very town and countryish, but I loved it. New York was full of romantic intrigues, midnight suppers, luncheons, dinners
crowding every moment – even to keeping breakfast engagements; Having skimmed over the surface of New York society, I now desired to penetrate the intellectual subcutaneous tissue of Greenwich Village.

Many comedians, clowns and crooners in capering through success arrive at a point of wanting to improve their minds; they hunger for intellectual manna. The student shows up among the unexpected: tailors, cigar-makers, prize-fighters, waiters, truck-drivers.

At a friend’s house in Greenwich Village I remember talking of the frustration of trying to find the precise word for one’s thoughts, saying that the ordinary dictionary was inadequate. ‘Surely a system could be devised,’ I said, ‘of lexicographically charting ideas, from abstract words to concrete ones, and by deductive and inductive processes arriving at the right word for one’s thought.’ ‘There is such a book,’ said a Negro truck-driver: ‘Roget’s
Thesaurus’

A waiter working at the Alexandria Hotel used to quote his Karl Marx and William Blake with every course he served me.

A comedy acrobat with a Brooklyn ‘dis’, ‘dem’ and ‘dose’ accent recommended Burton’s
Anatomy of Melancholy
, saying that Shakespeare was influenced by him and so was Sam Johnson. ‘But you can skip the Latin.’

With the rest of them I was intellectually a fellow-traveller. Since my vaudeville days I have done a considerable amount of reading, but not thoroughly. Being a slow reader, I browse. Once I am familiar with the thesis and the style of an author, I invariably lose interest. I have read every word of five volumes of Plutarch’s
Lives;
but I found them less edifying than the effort was worth. I read judiciously; some books over and over again. Over the years I have browsed through Plato, Locke, Kant, Burton’s
Anatomy of Melancholy
, and in this piecemeal fashion I have gleaned as much as I have wanted.

In the village I met Waldo Frank, essayist, historian and novelist, Hart Crane, the poet, Max Eastman, editor of
The Masses
, Dudley Field Malone, brilliant lawyer and controller of the Port of New York, and his wife Margaret Foster, the suffragette. I also lunched at Christine’s Restaurant, where I met several members of the Provincetown Players, who regularly
lunched there during rehearsals of
Emperor Jones
, a drama written by a young playwright, Eugene O’Neill (later my father-in-law). I was shown over their theatre, a barnlike affair no bigger than a six-horse stable.

I came to know Waldo Frank through his book of essays,
Our America
, published in 1919. One essay about Mark Twain is a profound, penetrating analysis of the man; incidentally, Waldo was the first to write seriously about me. So, naturally, we became very good friends. Waldo is a combination of mystic and historian and his insight has penetrated deeply into the soul of the Americas, North and South.

In the Village we had interesting evenings together. Through Waldo I met Hart Crane, and we dined at Waldo’s small flat in the Village, talking until breakfast-time the next morning. They were enthralling symposiums, the three of us reaching out mentally for the subtle definition of our thoughts.

Hart Crane was desperately poor. His father, a millionaire candy-manufacturer, wanted him to enter his business and tried to discourage his poetry by cutting him off financially. I have neither ear nor taste for modern poetry, but while writing this book I read Hart Crane’s
The Bridge
, an emotional out-pouring, strange and dramatic, full of piercing anguish and a sharp diamond-cut imagery, for me a little too shrill. Perhaps the shrillness was in Hart Crane himself. Yet he had a gentle sweetness.

We discussed the purpose of poetry. I said it was a love letter to the world. ‘A very small world,’ said Hart ruefully. He spoke of my work as being in the tradition of the Greek comedies. I told him that I had tried to read an English translation of Aristophanes but could never finish it.

Hart eventually was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, but it was too late. After years of poverty and neglect he had turned to drink and dissipation, and when returning to the States from Mexico in a passenger boat he jumped into the sea.

A few years before he committed suicide he sent me a book of his short poems called
White Buildings
, published by Boni and Liveright. On the fly-leaf he wrote: ‘To Charles Chaplin in memory of
The Kid
from Hart Crane. 20 January, ‘28’. One poem was titled
Chaplinesque
.

We make our meek adjustments,

Contented with such random consolations

As the wind deposits

In slithered and too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find

A famished kitten on the step, and know

Recesses for it from the fury of the street,

A warm torn elbow coverts.

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk

Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb

That slowly chafes its puckered index towards us,

Facing the dull squint with what innocence

And what surprise!

And yet these fine collapses are not lies

More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;

Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.

We can evade you, and all else but the heart:

What blame to us if the heart live on?

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen

The moon in lonely alleys make

A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,

And through all sound of gaiety and quest

Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

Dudley Field Malone gave an interesting party in the Village and invited Jan Boissevain, the Dutch industrialist, Max Eastman and others. One man, an interesting fellow introduced as ‘George’ (I never did know his real name), seemed highly nervous and excited. Later somebody said that he had been a great favourite with the King of Bulgaria, who had paid for his education at Sofia University. But George overthrew his royal patronage and became a Red, emigrated to the States and joined the I.W.W. and eventually was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment. He had served two years of it and had won an appeal for a new trial and was now out on bail.

He was playing charades, and as I watched him Dudley Field Malone whispered: ‘He hasn’t a chance of winning his appeal.’

George, with a tablecloth wrapped around him, was imitating
Sarah Bernhardt. We laughed, but underneath many were thinking, as I was thinking, that he must go back to the penitentiary for eighteen more years.

It was a strange hectic evening and as I was leaving George called after me: ‘What’s the hurry, Charlie? Why going home so early?’ I drew him aside. It was difficult to know what to say. ‘Is there anything I can do?’ I whispered. He waved his hand as if to sweep the thought aside, then gripped my hand and said emotionally: ‘Don’t worry about me, Charlie. I’ll be all right.’

*

I wanted to stay longer in New York, but I had work to do in California. First, I intended to hurry through my contract with First National, for I was anxious to get started with United Artists.

Returning to California was a let-down after the freedom, lightness and the intensely interesting time I had had in New York. The problem of completing four two-reel comedies for First National loomed up as an insuperable task. For several days I sat around the studio exercising the habit of thinking. Like playing the violin or the piano, thinking needs everyday practice and I had got out of the habit of it.

I had feasted too much on the kaleidoscopic life of New York and I could not get unwound. So with my English friend, Dr Cecil Reynolds, I decided to go to Catalina to do a little fishing.

If you were a fisherman, Catalina was a paradise. Avalon, its sleepy old village, had two small hotels. The fishing was good all the year round. If the tuna were running, there was not a boat to be hired. In the early morning, someone would shout: ‘They’re here!’ Tuna, weighing from thirty to three hundred pounds apiece, would be thrashing and splashing about as far as the eye could see. The sleepy hotel was a sudden hum of excitement; there was hardly time for dressing, and, if you were one of the lucky ones who had ordered a boat in advance, you stumbled into it, still buttoning up your pants.

On one of these occasions the Doctor and I caught eight tuna before lunch, each weighing over thirty pounds. But as suddenly as they appeared they would disappear, and we would
go back to normal fishing again. Sometimes we fished for tuna with a kite which was attached to the line and held the bait, a flying fish, flapping on the surface of the water. This type of fishing was exciting, for you could see the tuna strike, making a whirl of foam around the bait, then run with it for a couple of hundred feet or more.

Swordfish caught around Catalina are from one hundred up to six hundred odd pounds. This type of fishing is more delicate. The line is free and the swordfish gently takes the bait, a small albacore or a flying fish, and swims off with it for about a hundred yards. Then he stops and you stop the boat and wait a full minute to give him time to swallow the bait, reeling in slowly until the line is taut. Then you sock him hard with two or three jerks and the fun commences. He makes a run of a hundred yards or more, the reel screaming, then stops; quickly. you reel in the slack line, otherwise it would snap like cotton. Should he make a sudden turn while running, the friction of the water will cut the line. He begins to leap twenty to forty times out of the water, shaking his head like a bulldog. Eventually he sounds bottom. Then the hard work begins, pumping him up. My own catch weighed one hundred and seventy-six pounds and took me only twenty-two minutes to land.

They were halcyon days, the Doctor and I holding our rods and dozing in the stern of the boat on those beautiful mornings with the mist on the ocean and the horizon merging into infinity, the vast silence giving importance to the cry of seagulls and the lazy chugging of our motor-boat.

Dr Reynolds was a genius in brain surgery and had achieved miraculous results in that field. I had known many of his case histories. One was a child with a brain tumour; she was having twenty fits a day and degenerating into idiocy. Through Cecil’s surgery she completely recovered her health and grew up to be a brilliant scholar.

But Cecil was a ‘nut’. His obsession was acting. This insatiable passion drew him to me as a friend. ‘The theatre sustains the soul,’ he would say. I often argued that his medical work should be sustaining enough. What could be more dramatic than turning a drivelling idiot into a brilliant scholar?

‘That’s merely knowing where the brain fibres lie,’ said
Reynolds, ‘but acting is a psychic experience that expands the soul.’

I asked him why he had taken up brain surgery.

‘For the sheer drama of it,’ he replied.

He often took small parts at the Amateur Playhouse in Pasadena. He also played the parson who visits the jail in my comedy
Modern Times
.

When I returned from fishing news came that Mother’s health had improved and now that the war had ended we could bring her safely to California. I sent Tom to England to accompany her on the boat-trip over. She was put on the passenger list under another name.

During the voyage she was perfectly normal. She dined every night in the main saloon and during the day participated in the deck games. On her arrival in New York she was quite charming and self-possessed until the head of Immigration greeted her: ‘Well, well, Mrs Chaplin! This is indeed a pleasure! So you’re the mother of our famous Charlie.’

‘Yes,’ said Mother sweetly, ‘and you are Jesus Christ.’

The officer’s face was a study. He hesitated, looked at Tom, then said politely: ‘Would you mind stepping aside for a moment, Mrs Chaplin?’

Tom knew that they were in for trouble. However, after a lot of red tape the Immigration Department was kind enough to pass Mother through on a year-to-year permit on condition that she would not be dependent on the state.

I had not seen her since I was last in England, a period of ten years, so I was somewhat shocked when a little old lady stepped off the train at Pasadena. She recognized Sydney and me at once and was quite normal.

We arranged for her to live near us in a bungalow by the sea, with a married couple to run the house and a trained nurse for her personal care. Sydney and I would occasionally visit her and play games in the evening. During the day she liked going on picnics and excursions in her car. Sometimes she came to the studio and I would run my comedies for her.

Eventually
The Kid
opened in New York and was a tremendous success. And, as I had prophesied to his father the first day I met him, Jackie Coogan was sensational. As a result of
his success in
The Kid
, Jackie earned in his career over four million dollars. Each day we would receive clippings of wonderful reviews:
The Kid
was proclaimed a classic. But I never had the courage to go to New York and see it, I much preferred to stay in California and hear about it.

*

This discursive autobiography should not preclude essaying a few remarks about film-making. Although many worth-while books have been written on the subject, the trouble is that most of them impose the cinematic taste of the author. Such a book should be nothing more than a technical primer which teaches one to know the tools of the trade. Beyond that the imaginative student should use his own art sense about dramatic effects. If the amateur is creative he needs only the barest technical essentials. To an artist complete freedom to do the unorthodox is usually most exciting, and that is why many a director’s first picture has freshness and originality.