Bamboo

by William Boyd

  And was an almost immediate and enormous success. Chaplin began to write and direct his own films as well as star in them. He moved into an apartment in the fashionable Athletic Club and acquired a valet as well as opened several bank accounts. He wrote to his brother Sydney, in his inimitable style, urging him to come over. “I have made a heap of good friends hear and go to all the partys etc … I am still saving my money and I have 4000 dollars in one bank, 1200 in another, 1500 in London not so bad for 25 and still going strong thank God. Sid, we will be millionaires before long.”

  And he was. At the age of twenty-five, while Europe was embarking on the long agony of World War One, Charlie Chaplin from the slums of Lambeth set about mining one of the most lucrative seams in show business. Given the privations and suffering of his early life the money Chaplin made was always of vital importance to him and he was never in any doubt about what he was worth. Sydney duly came over and became his manager, and between the two of them they negotiated some of the shrewdest and most remunerative contracts in Hollywood’s history. One New York journalist observed, after Chaplin had spent a month in the city, that he “kept his bankroll exclusively to himself …never has Broadway known a more frugal celebrity.”

  Chaplin could have contented himself with cranking out Keystone-style comedies, amassing his personal fortune and living the good life in the lotusland that was Hollywood, but his artistic ambitions were there from the start and always drove him on to greater challenges. He saw the huge potential of the movies at once, both as a means of mass entertainment on an international scale and also as an art form in their own right. Very soon after his initial success with the short comedies he tried his hand at a film of greater length and polemical heft—The Immigrant—the first of the series of comedies with a marked social comment that was to establish him as one of the founding geniuses of the movie industry.

  Coexistent with the inexorable rise of his fame and fortune (his salary in 1918 was over a million dollars a year) his emotional life by contrast proved a far rockier business. After an affair with his leading lady in The Immigrant—Edna Purviance—Chaplin became infatuated with a smalltime teenage actress called Mildred Harris (she was sixteen years old and, as Chaplin put it, “no mental heavyweight”). This was the first of a series of disastrous liaisons with very young girls, a sexual obsession that was to dog Chaplin well into middle age, and was to provide his enemies with powerful ammunition.

  Mildred became pregnant and to avoid the prospective scandal Chaplin married her. It was hardly a grand amour and what little affection Chaplin had for his bride evaporated when the pregnancy turned out to be a false alarm. As always, when his emotional life distressed him, Chaplin turned to his work. Shoulder Arms was made to boost the war effort and, in association with his old friends Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, United Artists was formed—the novel idea of a film studio controlled and run by actors that gave rise to the phrase, spoken by a disenchanted producer, that “the lunatics have taken over the asylum.” United Artists was to be another phenomenal money-spinner for Chaplin, but in the meantime the war was ending and his marriage was in ruins. Chaplin was editing his next film, The Kid, when Mildred Harris sued for divorce on the grounds of mental cruelty. It was finally granted in 1920.

  In the celebrated dream sequence in The Kid a twelve-year-old child actress called Lita Grey played the part of an angel. Something about her fascinated Chaplin and he put her under contract. However, a more celebrated dalliance with the spectacularly beautiful actress Pola Negri dominated the gossip columns and there was a farcical series of on-off engagements that had more to do with enlarging Pola Negri’s public profile than any great infatuation. Chaplin was deeply embarrassed by this public speculation about his private life, and in fact Pola was not his type. It is hard to say exactly when his affair with Lita Grey began but by 1924, when she was fifteen, she had been signed up—to the dismay of his colleagues—as leading lady on Chaplin’s next big film The Gold Rush. When she signed the contract it was reported that she jumped up and down clapping her hands and crying “Goody, goody!” Lita was no star, and not much of a beauty—she was described by one journalist as a “peculiarly shy, reticent and far from loquacious girl. She seemed phlegmatic.” Chaplin’s folly was compounded in September of that year when Lita announced she was pregnant. Sexual relations with an under-age girl were regarded as de facto rape in California, a crime that carried up to thirty years’ imprisonment. The arranged marriage that followed took place covertly in Mexico. Press releases gave Lita’s age as nineteen.

  Chaplin’s marriage to Lita Grey brought him two sons and a degree of misery and personal torment that almost drove him insane. In his autobiography he devotes no more than a couple of lines to the whole episode: “For two years we were married and tried to make a go of it, but it was hopeless and ended in a great deal of bitterness.” In typical consolation he concentrated on his work with demonic intensity. As soon as he finished the arduous shoot of The Gold Rush he embarked on The Circus and shortly after the completion of that film, Lita walked out with her two children. The acrimony and publicity of the subsequent divorce action—its sexual innuendo and scurrility—drove Chaplin to a nervous breakdown. His hair turned grey overnight, he would bathe repeatedly and compulsively wash his hands dozens of times a day, and at night, paranoid and suspicious, he would patrol his empty house with a shotgun. As Lita prepared to announce to the world the names of five prominent women she alleged Chaplin had slept with during their short marriage (they included Marion Davies, newspaper magnate Randolph Hearst’s mistress) Chaplin agreed to a cash settlement of $600,000. It was the largest such settlement in American legal history.

  While Chaplin’s personal life reached its nadir his films and popularity seemed ever on the ascendant. After the acrimonious divorce one headline read simply: “CHARLIE IS A REAL HERO.” But at about this time, unknown to him, a new factor had entered his life that was to have profound consequences later. The FBI, under its director J. Edgar Hoover, had, since its inception, been convinced that Hollywood and the film community were a nest of vipers, of corrupt and seditious Communist degenerates who were undermining the moral fabric of the United States. The first file the FBI opened on Chaplin was in 1922, recording the fact that Chaplin had hosted a reception for a prominent labour leader. At the end of his life the full dossier was discovered to be 1,900 pages long. One report was titled “Affiliation of Charles Chaplin with Groups Declared to be Communist Subversive Groups.” Chaplin’s politics were broadly, if idiosyncratically, left wing, and he made no secret of them. But something about the FBI’s diligence in singling him out from the other “parlor Bolshevists” of Hollywood suggests a more malign vendetta, one probably inspired by Hoover himself. Chaplin and Hoover had met at a dinner early in Hoover’s career and whatever took place that night initiated a dislike and distrust that were corrosive. Chaplin, moreover, did his cause no favour, in the eyes of the righteous, by never taking up American citizenship, by being regularly engaged in tax disputes with the IRS, and in making films with a pointed humanist-socialist message. They were also convinced he was Jewish (which he was not: faced with the accusation once Chaplin replied, “I’m afraid I do not have that honour.” This did not stop the FBI from labelling his files: “Charlie Chaplin alias Israel Thon-stein.”) His Achilles heel, however, proved to be the sexual scandals he became embroiled in. Lita Grey’s bitter muck-raking set a tone of derogation and abuse that was finally to bring him down.

  In the thirties, during the Depression and beyond, the crescendo of redbaiting and witch-hunting provided a hysterical and shrill backdrop to Chaplin’s film career. After The Circus came City Lights (1931)—a remarkable silent movie success in the first heyday of the talkies—and then Modern Times (1936), that brilliant satire on the machine age and its complementary dehumanization of the worker. Chaplin’s fame was worldwide and he fraternized with the Great and the Good—Winston Churchill, Gandhi, H. G. Wells and the Mountb
attens among others—on many continents. In the thirties too, perhaps the most adult and emotionally fulfilling of his relationships thus far occurred. He had a long affair with Paulette Goddard (whom he persuaded to change her peroxide blonde hair back to her natural brunette) and to whom he was briefly married. The rise of fascism in Europe pushed Chaplin further to the left and was responsible for his reluctant conversion to sound. His trenchant satire of Adolf Hitler in The Great Dictator (1940) was courageously prescient, as well as being the last appearance on film of the Little Tramp.

  To Hoover and the FBI Chaplin’s films and his support of the Soviet Union were nothing short of an arrogant betrayal of American values, and although more and more voices were orchestrated to speak out against him Chaplin’s popularity appeared impervious to such slanders. Part of this was explained by Chaplin’s shrewdness in portraying himself as a humanitarian, an artist above partisan politics, and part of it was due to the fact that he was obligated to no man or system. Chaplin’s great wealth not only ensured his financial independence, it also meant he could not be leaned on. He had his own studio, he paid for his own films, he could do what he liked without fear or favour. There seemed no way the FBI could bring him down. Until …

  In 1941 he had a short affair with a buxom twenty-two-year-old actress called Joan Barry. Chaplin described her as “a big handsome woman, well built, with upper regional domes immensely expansive.” Another very young girl—Chaplin was fifty-two—another colossal error of judgement. Barry was mentally unstable and began to drink heavily. After a series of incidents—a car crash, a break-in at Chaplin’s house where she threatened him with a gun—he broke off the relationship, settled Barry’s debts and provided her with a one-way ticket back to New York.

  At around this time Chaplin—with a coincidental neatness that no novelist would be permitted—met another young actress who turned out to be the great love of his life, the seventeen-year-old Oona O’Neill. While Oona’s beauty and extreme youth were as always a potent allure, there is no doubt of the sincerity of their mutual adoration—and this time, for once, he had made no mistake.

  Chaplin’s wooing of Oona and their eventual marriage took place against a turmoil of controversy that was as distressing as it was damaging. Joan Barry reappeared on the scene, six months pregnant, claiming Chaplin as the father of her unborn child. A series of court cases then took place, covertly organized by the FBI, with the sole purpose of blackening Chaplin’s reputation beyond repair. First he was arraigned under the Mann Act, legislation designed to entrap pimps and brothel-keepers, and accused of paying Joan Barry to cross state boundaries for the purpose of having sex with him. When he was acquitted of this charge the FBI encouraged Barry to bring a paternity suit against him. Chaplin submitted to a blood test which proved negative but, in the subsequent trial, it emerged that blood tests were not recognized in Californian courts. Under a barrage of vilification and contempt that makes today’s gutter press look positively restrained Chaplin was condemned in court as a vile seducer and corrupter of American womanhood. He was declared the father of Barry’s child and ordered to pay maintenance.

  And this time the character assassination seemed to work. After the war Chaplin continued to make films—Monsieur Verdoux and Limelight—but he was increasingly under attack, especially as the Mc-Carthyite anti-Communist purges were now running at full maniacal stretch, and his once indestructible popularity began to crumble and wane. A leading article in the Herald Express criticized his “complacent self-worship” and described him as “a moral nonentity.” The final move by the FBI came in 1952. Chaplin set sail from New York for Britain for the premiere of Limelight. Once he had quit territorial waters a telegram was sent: Chaplin’s re-entry permit to the United States was rescinded under legislation which permitted banning on the grounds of “morals, health or insanity, or for advocating Communism.” He was effectively persona non grata. Ahead of him stretched the long years of exile.

  And here too the dramatic story of Charlie Chaplin, his rise and fall, ends. The boy from the slums of Lambeth had triumphed beyond measure amongst the freedoms and opportunities America offered. He had achieved astounding fame, vast riches, was acknowledged as one of the abiding geniuses of the cinema but in spite of all this something in him—hubris, moral fervour, arrogance, guilt, some curious self-destructive urge?—something had contrived to bring about his downfall and his banishment from the promised land. Chaplin went to live in Switzerland with his beloved Oona where they raised a large family of eight children. Other films were made—A King in New York (1957), The Countess from Hong Kong (1967)—other milestones were passed, many honours were conferred, but the twenty years of his exile from Hollywood have a flatness about them, and, inevitably, lack the excitement and energy and passion of the ones that preceded them. In 1972 he was welcomed back to Hollywood and presented with an Academy Award (a belated apology) and in 1975 he was knighted by the Queen. In 1977, on Christmas Day, he died quietly in his sleep. He was eighty-eight years old.

  1991

  Ian Fleming

  In October 1963, Evelyn Waugh spent the weekend with Ian and Ann Fleming in their new house near Sevenhampton. Waugh wrote up the occasion in his journal: “A two day visit to see what Ann has been up to. The full horror of her edifice did not appear until the next day … Ian Fleming, near death, in a woollen sweater drinking heavily the whisky forbidden him by his doctor.” Fleming was only fifty-five and suffering from a chronic heart condition. Waugh continued in the same vein a few days later in a letter to Nancy Mitford: “[Ian Fleming] looks and speaks as though he may drop dead any minute. His medical advisors confirm the apprehension.”

  Fleming carried on disobeying doctors’ orders for another ten months, enduring ever-increasing ill-health. In his drawn-out demise Fleming managed to sum up much of the character of his life: contrary, foolhardy, perverse and—somehow—very English. He was looking forward to dying and didn’t see why, until that moment arrived, he should be denied his booze, cigarettes and games of golf. Interestingly enough, Fleming’s key companions in his last months were other writers: William Plomer, Alan Ross and Cyril Connolly. He and Waugh were cordial but one senses that they didn’t much like each other. Waugh—another eccentric Englishman who drank, smoked and drugged himself to an early grave—was much friendlier with Fleming’s wife, Ann, a vivacious and somewhat terrifying society hostess. I once met a female contemporary of hers and asked what Ann Fleming had been like: “One of those women who didn’t much like women,” came the reply.

  Ann Fleming was the great love of Fleming’s life but by the 1960s the passion had long gone. Fleming was having an affair with a divorcée in Jamaica and Ann was dallying indiscreetly with the Leader of the Opposition, Hugh Gaitskell, but in their brittle, wealthy, worldly way she and Fleming kept up appearances. But Waugh and Ann Fleming were disdainful of Fleming in their letters and conversation, referring to him as “Thunderbird,” Waugh, as ever, choosing to mock someone he probably would naturally envy.

  For, on paper, Fleming seemed to possess everything that Waugh felt he lacked. Fleming was born (in 1908) into a rich and famous Scottish banking family. He went to Eton where he excelled as a sportsman, and then Sandhurst. He was tall, dark and vaguely handsome. After Sandhurst he followed family tradition and went into the City, becoming, in his terms, “the world’s worst stockbroker” and led a stereotypical playboy life—pretty girls, fast cars, foreign holidays. He then had a “good war” in the celebrated Naval Intelligence Division, where he was perhaps at his happiest, at the centre of a highly efficient espionage network, with the power to plot and scheme, to travel on clandestine business, to flirt with genuine danger (he accompanied the Canadians on the disastrous Dieppe raid in 1942, for example). The war ended and he became a senior executive and occasional journalist on the Sunday Times. And finally came the invention of James Bond, the huge sales, the money and the movies.

  Like most people, I first encountered Fleming throug
h his famous creation. I remember, aged eleven or twelve, reading From Russia with Love with a real illicit thrill. The book was passed around my pre-adolescent coevals as if it were some form of rare samizdat pornography. So this was what the adult world was like, we remarked to each other, utterly captivated by the now familiar blend of snobbery, sex, ludicrous violence, exotic travel and superior consumer goods.

  The scales fall from your eyes pretty quickly but the allure of Bond and Bondiana is potent while it lasts. Bond’s world was Fleming’s fantasy: a comic strip version of a life he almost lived. But when, after his death, Fleming the man began to crop up in the memoirs and biographies of his contemporaries I found my attention began to focus more on the author himself than his works. As a case study he provided rich material. To such an extent, in fact, that I have now inserted him as a minor character in my latest novel.

  It’s hard to say what fascinates and intrigues about Ian Fleming. My own hunch is that it has something to do with his torments, his personal demons. At first glance he appears to be the man who has everything but who, in some way, is simultaneously fundamentally unhappy. The Fleming I write about is the Fleming of the late thirties and the war years, when the useless stockbroker turned into the avid spymaster. Notwithstanding his business ineptitude, Fleming, thanks to his inherited wealth, was able to live in some style before the war: with his specially decorated apartment, his red sportscar, his regular orders of 1,000 custom-made mono-grammed Morland cigarettes (he was a dogged sixty-a-day man). When he joined the Naval Intelligence Division in 1939 he became the assistant to its chief, Admiral John Godfrey. He was awarded an honorary rank in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve and had a uniform made by his tailor. Yet when he was teased by his raffish friends about being a “chocolate sailor” he took real offence and sulked. It’s a telling anecdote, and it testifies to his insecurities, his vanity and childishness. His behaviour displays the very opposite of Bondian cool self-esteem.