My Autobiography (39 page)

At last we were entering that enclosing sound of a railway station – Waterloo! As I stepped off the train I could see at the
end of the platform vast crowds roped off, and lines of policemen. Everything was high tension, vibrant. And although I was beyond assimilating anything but excitement, I was conscious of being grabbed and marched down the platform as though under arrest. As we approached the roped-off crowds, the tension began to loosen: ‘Here he is! Here he is!’ ‘Good old Charlie!’ Then they burst into cheers. In the midst of it I was bundled into a limousine with my cousin Aubrey, whom, I had not seen in fifteen years. I had not the presence of mind to object to being hidden from the crowds, who had waited so long to see me.

I asked Aubrey to be sure we went over Westminster Bridge. Passing out of Waterloo and down York Road, I noticed the old houses had gone and in their place was a new structure, the L.C.C. building. But when we turned the corner of York Road, like a sunburst Westminster Bridge came into view! It was exactly the same, its solemn Houses of Parliament still erect and eternal. The whole scene was just as I had left it. I was on the verge of tears.

I chose the Ritz Hotel because it had just been built when I was a boy and, passing its entrance, I had caught a glimpse of the gilt and splendour inside, and ever since I had had a curiosity to know how the rest of it looked.

An enormous crowd was waiting outside the hotel and I made a little speech. When at last I was settled in the rooms my impatience to get out alone was excruciating. But the milling crowds were outside, shouting their greetings, and I was obliged to go on the balcony several times and, like royalty, acknowledge their cheers. It is hard to describe what went on under such extraordinary circumstances.

My suite was crowded with friends, but my one desire was to get away from them. It was four O’clock in the afternoon, so I told them I would take a nap and would see them that evening for dinner.

As soon as they had gone, I hurriedly changed my clothes, took the freight elevator and left unnoticed by the back entrance. Immediately I made my way down Jermyn Street, hired a taxi and was off, down the Haymarket, through Trafalgar Square, down Parliament Street and over Westminster Bridge.

The taxi turned a corner, and at last Kennington Road! There
it was! Incredible! Nothing had changed, There was Christ Church at the corner of Westminster Bridge Road! There was the Tankard at the corner of Brook Street!

I stopped the taxi a little before 3 Pownall Terrace. A strange calm came over me as I walked towards the house. I stood a moment, taking in the scene. 3 Pownall Terrace! There it was, looking like a gaunt old skull. I looked up at the two top windows – the garret where Mother had sat, weak and under-nourished, losing her mind. The windows were closed tight. They were telling no secrets and seemed indifferent to the man who stood gazing up at them so long, yet their silence communicated more than words. Eventually some little children came up and surrounded me. I was obliged to move on.

I walked towards the mews at the back of Kennington Road, where I used to help the wood-choppers. But the mews had been bricked in, the wood-choppers had gone.

Then on to 287 Kennington Road, where Sydney and I had lived with my father and Louise and their little boy. I gazed up at the second-floor windows of the room that was so familiar with my childhood despair. How innocuous they looked now, calm and enigmatic.

Then on to Kennington Park, passing the post office in which I had a savings account of sixty pounds: money I had skimped to save since the year 1908, and it was still there.

Kennington Park! In spite of the years, it still bloomed green with sadness. Then to Kennington Gate, my first trysting place with Hetty. I paused a moment and watched a tram-car stop. Someone got on, but no one got off.

Then on to Brixton Road, to 15 Glenshaw Mansions, the flat which Sydney and I had furnished. But my emotions were spent; only my curiosity was left.

On my way back I stopped at the Horns for a drink. It had been rather elegant in its day, with its polished mahogany bar, fine mirrors and billiard-room. The large assembly room was where my father had had his last benefit. Now the Horns was a little seedy, but it was all intact. Near by was the seat of my two years’ learning, the Kennington Road County Council School. I peered into the playground: its grey patch of asphalt had shrunk with additional buildings.

As I wandered through Kennington, all that had happened to me there seemed like a dream, and what had happened to me in the States was the reality. Yet I had a feeling of slight uneasiness that perhaps those gentle streets of poverty still had the power to trap me in the quicksands of their hopelessness.

*

Much nonsense has been written about my profound melancholy and loneliness. Perhaps I have never needed too many friends – celebrity attracts them indiscriminately. To help a friend in need is easy, but to give him your time is not always opportune. At the height of my popularity, friends and acquaintances crowded in upon me excessively. And, being both extrovert and introvert, when the latter prevailed I would have to get away from it all. This might account for those articles written about my being elusive, lonely and incapable of true friendship. This is nonsense. I have one or two very good friends who brighten my horizon, and when I am with them I usually have an enjoyable time.

Yet my personality has been high-lighted and low-lighted according to the disposition of the writer. For example, Somerset Maugham has written:

Charlie Chaplin… his fun is simple and sweet and spontaneous. And yet all the time you have a feeling that at the back of all is a profound melancholy. He is a creature of moods and it does not require his facetious assertion: ‘Gee, I had such a fit of the blues last night I didn’t hardly know what to do with myself’ to warn you that his humour is lined with sadness. He does not give you the impression of a happy man. I have a notion that he suffers from a nostalgia of the slums. The celebrity he enjoys, his wealth, imprison him in a way of life in which he finds only constraint. I think he looks back to the freedom of his struggling youth, with its poverty and bitter privation, with a longing which knows it can never be satisfied. To him the streets of southern London are the scene of frolic, gaiety and extravagant adventure… I can imagine him going into his own house and wondering what on earth he is doing in this strange man’s dwelling. I suspect that the only home he can ever look upon as such is a second-floor back in the Kennington Road. One night I walked with him in Los Angeles and presently our steps took us into the poorest quarter of the city. There were sordid tenement houses and the shabby, gaudy shops in which are
sold the various goods that the poor buy from day to day. His face lit up and a buoyant tone came into his voice as he exclaimed: ‘Say, this is the real life, isn’t it? All the rest is just sham.’
^*

This attitude of wanting to make poverty attractive for the other person is annoying. I have yet to know a poor man who has nostalgia for poverty, or who finds freedom in it. Nor could Mr Maugham convince any poor man that celebrity and extreme wealth mean constraint. I find no constraint in wealth – on the contrary I find much freedom in it. I do not think Maugham would ascribe such false notions to any character in his novels – even in the least of them. Such glibness as ‘the streets of southern London are the scene of frolic, gaiety and extravagant adventure’ has a tinge of Marie-Antoinette’s airy persiflage.

I found poverty neither attractive nor edifying. It taught me nothing but a distortion of values, an over-rating of the virtues and graces of the rich and the so-called better classes.

Wealth and celebrity, on the contrary, taught me to view the world in proper perspective, to discover that men of eminence, when I came close to them, were as deficient in their way as the rest of us. Wealth and celebrity also taught me to spurn the insignia of the sword, the walking-stick and the riding whip as something synonymous with snobbery, to know the fallacy of the college accent in estimating the merit and intelligence of a man, and the paralysing influence this myth has wrought on the minds of the English middle classes, to know that intelligence is not necessarily a result of education or a knowledge of the classics.

In spite of Maugham’s assumptions, like everyone else I am what I am: an individual, unique and different, with a lineal history of ancestral promptings and urgings; a history of dreams, desires, and of special experiences, all of which I am the sum total.

*

After my arrival in London, I found myself constantly in the company of Hollywood friends. I wanted change, new experiences, new faces; I wanted to cash in on this business of being a celebrity. I had just one date, and that was with H. G.
Wells. After that, I was free-lancing, with the dubious hope of meeting other people.

‘I have arranged a dinner for you at the Garrick Club,’ said Eddie Knoblock.

‘Actors, artists and authors,’ I said jokingly. ‘But where is this exclusive English set, these country homes and house parties that I’m not invited to?’ I wanted that rarer sphere of ducal living. Not that I was a snob, but I was a tourist sight-seeing.

The Garrick Club had a chiaroscuro atmosphere of dark oak walls and oil paintings – a sombre haven, in which I met Sir James Barrie, E. V. Lucas, Walter Hackett, George Frampton, Edwin Lutyens, Squire Bancroft and other illustrious gentlemen. Although it was a dull affair, I was extremely moved by the touching tribute of the presence of these distinguished gentlemen.

But I felt the evening did not quite come off. When the illustrious forgather, the occasion calls for an easy congeniality, and this was rather difficult to achieve when the guest of honour was a celebrated parvenu who had insisted on no after-dinner speeches; perhaps that was what was lacking. During dinner, Frampton, the sculptor, attempted levity and was charming; but he had difficulty in scintillating in the gloom of the Garrick Club, as the rest of us sat eating boiled ham and treacle pudding.

In my first interview with the English Press, I had inadvertently said I had come back to revisit the environs of my English boyhood, to savour again stewed eels and treacle pudding. As a consequence, they gave my treacle pudding at the Garrick Club, at the Ritz, at H. G. Wells’s; even at Sir Philip Sassoon’s opulent dinner the dessert was treacle pudding.

The party soon dispersed, and Eddie Knoblock whispered that Sir James Barrie would like us to come to his apartment in Adelphi Terrace for a cup of tea.

Barrie’s apartment was like an
atelier
, a large room with a beautiful view of the river Thames. In the centre of the room was a round stove with a chimney-pipe ascending to the ceiling. He took us to a window that looked out on a narrow side-street with a window directly opposite. ‘That’s Shaw’s bedroom,’ he said mischievously with his Scotch accent. ‘When I see a light
on, I flip cherry-stones or plum-stones at the window. If he wants to chat, he opens it and we do a little back-yard gossiping, and, if he doesn’t, then he pays no attention or turns out the light. Usually I flip about three times, then give up.’

Paramount was going to film
Peter Pan
in Hollywood. ‘
Peter Pan,’
I told Barrie, ‘has even greater possibilities as a film than a play,’ and he agreed. He expressly desired a scene showing Wendy sweeping up some fairies into the bark of a tree. Said Barrie also that evening: ‘Why did you interpose a dream sequence in
The Kid?
It interrupted the flow of the story.’

‘Because I was influenced by
A Kiss for Cinderella,’
I answered frankly.

The following day, Eddie Knoblock and I went shopping, and afterwards he suggested that we call on Bernard Shaw. No appointment had been made. ‘We could just drop in on him,’ said Eddie. At four o’clock Eddie pressed the doorbell at Adelphi Terrace. While we waited I suddenly developed a blue funk. ‘Some other time,’ I said, and ran up the street with Eddie running after me, vainly assuring me that everything would be all right. It was not until 1931 that I had the pleasure of meeting Shaw.

The next morning I was awakened by the telephone ringing in the sitting-room, and then heard the metallic voice of my American secretary: ‘Who?… The Prince of Wales!’

Eddie was there and, since he claimed to be versed in protocol, took the phone. I could hear Eddie’s voice saying: ‘Are you there? Oh yes. Tonight? Thank you!’

He announced excitedly to my secretary that the Prince of Wales would like Mr Chaplin to dine with him that night and started for my bedroom.

‘Don’t wake him now,’ said my secretary.

‘Good God, man, this is the Prince of Wales!’ said Eddie indignantly, and launched into a tirade on British etiquette.

A moment later I heard the handle of my bedroom door turn, so I pretended to be just waking. Eddie came in and announced with suppressed excitement and a phoney nonchalance: ‘You must keep tonight open; you’re invited to dine with the Prince of Wales.’

Assuming a similar nonchalance, I told him it would be
awkward, as this evening I had a previous engagement to dine with H. G. Wells. Eddie ignored what I said and repeated the message. Naturally I was thrilled – the thought of dining with the Prince at Buckingham Palace! ‘But I think someone must be spoofing us,’ I said, ‘because only last night I read that the Prince was up in Scotland, shooting.’

Eddie suddenly looked foolish. ‘Perhaps I’d better telephone the Palace and find out.’

He returned with an inscrutable look and announced unemotionally: ‘It’s true, he’s still in Scotland.’

That morning news came that Fatty Arbuckle, my associate at the Keystone Company, had been charged with murder. This was preposterous; I knèw Roscoe to be a genial, easy-going type who would not harm a fly, and expressed this view to the Press when they interviewed me about it. Eventually, Arbuckle was completely exonerated, but it ruined his career: although he was reinstated with the public, the ordeal took its toll, and within a year or so he died.