“One day, when I was…” – before uttering the next word, he told himself to be disciplined – “six years old, my mother took me to East Lane. To find something to eat. We met Eva Lester there. She wasn’t dashing any longer, oh no. She was wretched. She was squatting on a corner, holding out a withered, dirty hand. She had cut off her hair, and her head was covered in scabby sores. She looked like an old woman, though she was younger than my mother. She said, well, it’s nice to see you’ve made it, at least. Yes, said my mother, I’ve made it. Just imagine – my mother said that! She took Eva home to our basement. She washed her. She treated the scabs on her head. She rubbed cream into her and cooked for her. When she started to moan, my mother gave her some brandy she had inherited from my father.”
Charlie’s brother Sydney, who was older than him by four years, was working as a paper boy, and doing other odd jobs. He was out on the street all day – “the knight-errant of our welfare”, as their mother called him. She earned a few shillings as a seamstress. But to do so she had to leave the house, since they didn’t have their own sewing machine. Charlie was alone with Eva most of the time. She introduced him to life – that was what she called it.
“There is no store of happiness reserved for people like us,” she said, “You know, little cherry eye, the most beautiful gift a person can receive is God’s grace. And it’s the only gift there is. Everything else is just titbits and treats, which are polished off in no time. If people are rich, that’s proof they’ve been given God’s grace. If they’re beautiful and stay beautiful all their lives, and can buy a fancy suit every two years and go to a restaurant without squinting at the right-hand side of the menu before they order, then God’s grace is on their side. And now look and me, and look at your mum. And look at you. What do we look like? You’re as thin as a rake.
And let me tell you something else: whatever somebody can be, he is already. What do you want to be?”
He said he wanted to be an artist, like his father had been, like his mother was. And Eva explained to him what an artist was: a person who wanted to trick their way into God’s grace; a person who’d got the knack of things, who’d figured out how it all worked.
“And how does it work?” Charlie asked apprehensively.
“I’ll tell you. You, I’ll tell, little cherry eye. But it’s risky.”
An artist, she said, deceived God in heaven. That’s what art was, and nothing else. God’s grace had given the artist talent, and what did he use it for? He portrayed a man on stage, and either made him better than he was, or worse. It was always a misrepresentation of God’s work.
“And God in heaven doesn’t notice?” asked Charlie.
“Oh, He does,” said Eva. “He almost always notices.”
“And what does God do when he notices?”
“He beats the artist up, that’s what he does. Look at me. Look at your father. Look at your mum.”
His heart still reverberated with the mighty tremor that Eva Lester’s words had sent through him, the eighty-eight-year-old Chaplin confessed to Josef Melzer. All of a sudden, the world and the people in it appeared to him in a garish light – a place of misery full of miserable creatures, pushing and shoving and getting nowhere. There was nothing noble now in his father’s demise, nothing noble in his mother’s failure, nothing heroic in his brother’s penny errands, no fore-glow of better days to come emanating from the little charcoal stove in their cellar – which they were only to light in the evenings, if possible. He was six years old, and he thought: I don’t stand a chance.
“I was a smart little fellow, though, let me tell you,” Chaplin said into Josef Melzer’s microphone. “I thought I was capable of deceiving people. It would be a very difficult and a very wicked task, but I thought I could do it, and it didn’t trouble my conscience too much. My father had always claimed that acting was deception, and he enjoyed pulling the wool over people’s eyes. But he had never said that if you wanted to be a successful artist, you had to deceive God as well. He had reached the age of thirty-eight without knowing anything of this dubious honour. And I knew it at the age of six. Without having the words for it, I knew that if an artist failed, he would either end up miserable like Eva Lester, or a sly conformist, which was even worse, because there was no honour in it, because it meant you had given up trying (if not managing) to deceive God. But in most cases, artists lived and died poor and without honour, and were forgotten before a single weed had grown on their graves. This realisation sent a tremor right through me.”
“What effect did that have on you as a child?” Josef Melzer asked. He was somewhat at a loss, because he thought he could detect a trace of that tremor in Chaplin’s aged face, but he couldn’t be sure it wasn’t just an example of how an artist could deceive people – could deceive him, specifically.
Churchill asked a similar question on the beach in Santa Monica, though without the thought behind it. He was now convinced that walking in darkness had been exactly the right thing to do, the ocean drowning out the nuances of their words. He sensed his voice starting to quiver, and tears welling up in his eyes, and even if he had enough self-knowledge to judge that this was ninety per cent attributable to his own sentimental tendencies, the remaining ten per cent was enough to allow his hand to find that of the other man.
“That afternoon, I ran away,” Chaplin replied. “I ran all the way to the Thames and over Tower Bridge, climbed a wall by the Pool and went hand-over-hand up the pegs of a wooden crane until I got to the top, ninety feet above the water. I sat astride the jib and wrestled with myself. Should I jump? Or shouldn’t I? What could I become if not an artist? I couldn’t even consider any other profession, just as my father and mother could never have considered any other profession. And they didn’t even manage to deceive the few dozen visitors to the Empire on Leicester Square. So how was I supposed to deceive God, who could see into your heart?”
They had been walking for a good hour, past Pacific Palisades with its smart beach houses, most of which lay in darkness, occupied only on summer weekends. They reached the point where the beach opened out and where, further inland, Sunset Boulevard joined the Pacific Coast Highway.
“That’s enough,” said Chaplin. “I’ve said what I wanted to say. Thank you. Let’s go back.”
“In that case, it’s my turn,” said Churchill.
6
He, too, was one of those rare people who at the age of six was already seriously contemplating departing this life voluntarily.
His father – that was where he began – had not been proud of him. He’d had no reason to be proud of him.
Until his sixth year, he had been a happy child. His parents were abroad, and he was looked after by a nanny. “Brought up” would have been overstating it. The woman never asked herself what this child might become. His family was unsinkable. Added to which he owned a fleet of ships, a thousand tin soldiers, a magic lantern and a steam engine that came with a dozen working models both large and small, among them a brewery, a saw mill, a smithy, a dockyard, a cobbler’s workshop and even an electricity plant. Heating the machine up to full power took half a day, and arranging the soldiers into battle formation took a whole day. In the evenings he fell asleep with the feeling that he had done something worthwhile. He was never again praised so fulsomely and so imaginatively as he was by his nanny, Mrs Everest. Until his sixth year, he believed he was the most intelligent child on earth. He didn’t think of his activities as games, but work, no less valuable than the work his father did, about which all he knew was that it was of great significance for the British Empire.
His parents returned, and he had them all to himself for precisely two weeks before they packed him off to boarding school. And after two weeks there, he knew he wasn’t the most intelligent child on earth, but the stupidest.
He was homesick for Mrs Everest; he missed her resolute way of spreading butter on bread and plumping up the pillows, her schadenfreude when the dog chased his own tail; he longed
for her astonished face when he showed her the things he’d built, and for her martial exclamations when he told her how the British fleet under Admiral Nelson had defeated the French and the Spanish at Trafalgar. Mrs Everest would whoop and cheer as if it had only just happened. And it had only just happened; he was inside Nelson’s skin. “I unleashed a salvo which smashed the enemy’s ships and made him start to waver,” he said, reworking the words Mrs Everest had read to him from a children’s history book that he had learned off by heart. What magic, what a delight – he just had to turn “he” into “I” and he was right in the middle of things: he, Winston Leonard Churchill! He was giving the orders, he was thinking up strategies, he stood on the bridge of the HMS Victory and looked across the sea at the enemy armada; the king made him a viscount. And Mrs Everest provided an accompanying fanfare of curses so loud it could be heard out in the garden. She cursed Napoleon: “Dimwit! Know-it-all! Dunderhead!” She cursed the Spanish Admiral Pierre de Villeneuve: “Arse-licker! Filthy swine! Coward!” But her loudest and coarsest curses were reserved for the French fusilier who had fired the fatal shot at Nelson from the mizzen of the Redoutable – “Go to hell, you damned bastard!” All of these expressions, she explained to her young charge once she had cooled off a little, could be used in front of his parents with a clear conscience – if the conversation was to turn to Napoleon. In this case, he might even earn praise. Other phrases from her repertoire, such as “I’ll have your guts for garters”, he would do better to keep to himself, along with her favourite term for everything that confounded her will and her ideas: “Brewed yellow shit!”
Mrs Everest was very proud of her darling boy. The idea that he would become the stupidest pupil the venerable St James’s School had ever admitted – well, she would have bet her life against such a prophecy.
The headmaster couldn’t believe what his teachers were telling him, either. He refused to believe that a boy of this pedigree didn’t know the answer to a single question. He couldn’t believe that after nine months of instruction the boy was still drawing lines on his slate where letters and numbers should have been.
At the start of the new school year, he summoned the boy and placed a piece of paper in front of him. On it was written:
Mensa: a table
Mensa: O table
Mensam: a table
Mensae: of a table
Mensae: to or for a table
Mensa: by, with or from a table
He was to learn this by heart and think up some examples. He had half an hour.
Winston considered the task, and wrote:
There is a table in the room.
A plate is on top of a table
I take a vase to a table
With a table I barricade the door.
He didn’t know what O table meant.
“It’s the vocative case,” the headmaster explained. “Don’t you know what the vocative is?”
“No.”
“You would use the vocative in conversation with a table. If you were talking to a table, or addressing it, for example: O table, stay where you are! Then you would have to use the vocative.”
“But I don’t talk to tables,” he said, “especially not if they’re moving about.”
“On the contrary,” the headmaster insisted. “If you want to learn Latin declensions, you will have to bring yourself to talk to tables, even if they move about.”
“But I don’t want to.”
“You must! In this school, you must.”
The anecdote is well known. Churchill recounted it in his book My Early Life; there is no biography of the statesman that fails to quote it.
The incident is depicted in the book as something truly British and absurdly humorous, but in truth it robbed the six-year-old Winston of his peace of mind. He thought: I’m not in school. This isn’t a school. This is a madhouse. They speak to walking tables here.
His longing for Mrs Everest burned inside him. He longed for her praise, her enthusiasm, and her curses; he saw her in his mind’s eye, running alongside the hansom cab with her skirts hitched up, begging his father not to do this to her darling boy, and he saw his father laughing under his handlebar moustache and calling out to her through the window of the cab that for pity’s sake, St James’s School wasn’t the Tower, and his son wasn’t Edward V. And now finally he felt certain that the headmaster and the teachers of this school weren’t the only lunatics; his father and, who knew, maybe even his mother (who had merely smiled) were also among them. In truth, the whole Empire, with the exception of himself and Mrs Everest, was mad. How else could his father be such an important person, and St James’s such a renowned school?
What happened next was something Churchill omitted from his memoir. He had never spoken of it to anyone: not to Mrs Everest, or his parents, and not to his wife. But he wanted to tell the stranger on the beach in Santa Monica.
He was still standing in the headmaster’s office, he said. The walls were clad in a dark-coloured wood, and at the centre of the room stood the desk that all the boys were afraid of: nothing good had ever come of having to stand before this desk. The headmaster was already at the door, with his hand on the handle, meaning the interview was at an end and he, the pupil, was now permitted to go back to class. But he didn’t budge an inch. In his mind’s eye, Churchill told the stranger, he had seen Mrs Everest, running alongside the cab and pleading with his father until she could run no further. And suddenly he felt as though someone else was rising up inside him, someone much bigger, a scoundrel, a drinker, a master of the cutting remark, a hero of disrepute with a laugh like the man who sometimes visited Mrs Everest at night, and whom he had heard, but never seen. And then it came bursting out. He had taken note of Mrs Everest’s curses, the bad ones in particular, he had forgotten none of them – this was vocabulary he had learned. A voice he didn’t recognise, which sounded to his ears like an adult’s voice, an unhurried, unflustered voice, almost without passion, pronounced one curse after another to the headmaster’s face.
The headmaster was so shocked he couldn’t think. He could think of nothing to say, he could think of nothing to do. So he said and did nothing.
That same night, Churchill continued, he had slipped out of the dormitory, climbed out of a window in the corridor and shinned down a drainpipe from the first floor into the schoolyard. The school was surrounded by a wall which the headmaster made a point of showing the boys on their first day, to quash all hopes of escape. The wall was five metres high and topped with iron spikes, which looked decorative but were actually razor sharp, as the headmaster had told them with a smug little smile. He didn’t know what to do. But he didn’t want to go back to the dormitory. He didn’t want to talk to anyone. He never wanted to speak to another person again. He crept along the side of the school building, so he couldn’t be seen from inside. He was barefoot and wearing nothing but a nightshirt. He fell down the coal hole, banged his head and thought he had died. It took him a while to orient himself. The window of the cellar was no bigger than his satchel. There was a piece of cloth hanging across it. He squeezed through and rolled down a ramp onto a heap of coal. He felt for a way out of the coal cellar and found a light switch. Somewhere, a bulb came on. He went from one cellar room to the next, through larders and wine stores, past lumber rooms and detention rooms. Eventually he found himself in front of a locked iron door, although the key was still in the lock. He opened the door and entered a narrow room that housed the main switch and the fuse box for the school’s electricity supply. This was something he knew about. A similar system in miniature had come with his steam engine, along with a small turbine that turned the steam pressure into electricity. The main switch was a Y-shaped lever. The current flowed through the two arms. The cables underneath were exposed. Giving in to an impulse, he placed his hand on the copper wire. He was thrown back through the door. The electricity was cut off throughout the building.
He was discovered unconscious, with burns on his hand and forea
rm. The school decided not to inform his parents. The headmaster and the teachers were confident that Winston wouldn’t say anything about it himself. They knew the children were more afraid of their parents than of their teachers. He spent two weeks in the infirmary, being served meals from the teachers’ table. The other boys were told he had a sort of flu that produced a rash on the arms, and was very infectious.
When they got back to Marion Davies’s beach house, it was long past midnight. Most of the guests had slipped away, not wanting to have their names connected with the mysterious disappearance of a prominent film star and a no less prominent politician. The decent types, among them the Fairbanks, of course, had begun to search for them, phoning friends and looking in nearby bars and restaurants. Everyone refused to believe that the pair would have left the party without saying goodbye to the hostess. And nobody had hit upon the idea that they might just have gone for a walk on the beach. Miss Davies had wanted to call the police, but was prevented by “Mr Brown”, one of Hearst’s henchmen.
“William Randolph would stop at nothing to prevent his name being linked to a scandal,” she said, adding twice as loudly: “Even if that meant Winston and Charlie perished as a result.” She was known for her savage way of embellishing the truth.
But neither savagery nor truth could daunt the pair. They had told one another of the times they had been bowed by powers that were not of this world. And the troubles that had weighed heavy at the start of their walk now felt a little lighter.
7
That night, Chaplin slept in his office at the studio. He took a long shower, and at nine o’clock he asked Miss Nicolaisen to fry him a steak, before facing his correspondence, the newspapers, the day. The articles in the press had become less hate-filled, and had slipped from the front page to the second and then the third; the hate mail and threatening letters could now be brought to the office in Mrs Pryor’s hands, rather than in baskets – but there was still enough to despair over.
Two Gentlemen on the Beach Page 3