It was by no means certain that The Circus would ever be finished. The idea that this work might founder was very painful to him. He thought it his best. If he was going to order his work according to the life story of the Tramp, rather than chronologically, then this adventure would come first. The Tramp could pop up anywhere, in any randomly chosen city, in the countryside, in the Alaskan wilderness, on an ocean-going steamer, even in the Wild West – but his real home was the travelling show, the circus ring. People had always asked: where did he come from, when he arrived; where did he go to, when he went? Why didn’t he stay? Here was the answer. He felt he had never come closer to his own “poetic truth”. A journalist – from the time when journalists were still well-disposed towards him – had coined this phrase in an interview after the premiere of The Kid. Chaplin hadn’t understood what he meant by it. The Tramp had always been a puzzle to him; he didn’t know who this fellow really was. He had no backstory, and he hadn’t developed over the course of his appearances, in the way that comic characters usually do – like Harold Lloyd’s bookkeeper type, W.C. Fields’s misanthrope, the crossed-eyed smart aleck Ben Turpin and other colleagues from the Keystone Studios days; he didn’t reference any tradition, he wasn’t a Harlequin, a Pierrot, he wasn’t an Auguste, and he certainly wasn’t a whiteface; he had just appeared one day, complete, unknown, puzzling. He revealed more of himself for the first time in The Circus; he wasn’t a stranger there.
Even if he makes the audience laugh by doing everything wrong, we sense that he knows very well – better than his inventor does – that in this place, the wrong thing is the right thing. When Chaplin saw the first rushes, he went into raptures over the pantomime, which revealed so much more than he had intended while performing it, and with a shudder he had told Roland Totheroh, who was behind the camera once again, that he had finally realised something: he didn’t control the Tramp; the Tramp controlled him. And Roland had nodded reverently. Now he thought he understood what was meant by “poetic truth”.
But the break in production saw the film’s costs rise to unprofitable levels. And fiasco, debacle and screw-ups continued to dog them: the rushes were spoiled, with scratches “of a mysterious origin”, as Tim O’Donnell, the head of the laboratory, put it. Chaplin had the whole technical team replaced. A fire brought business at the studio to a halt for weeks – the cause of the catastrophe: “mysterious”. With the exception of the main supporting actors and Merna Kennedy, the female lead, the ensemble had to be dismissed. Which led to threats of legal action. And to heartrending scenes. Betty Morrissey, who was only twenty – she played the magician’s assistant – offered up her own suicide to shame their enemies and prompt a turn-around; the boss, she later said, had been the only one who could see she wasn’t joking. On top of this, Chaplin was suffering from a chronic stomach complaint, for which his physician, Dr Van Riemsdyk, had prescribed Epsom salts, leading to continual belching and diarrhoea, and dangerous weight loss. And the IRS had him in their sights. They were of the opinion that Mr Charles Chaplin owed $1,113,000 in income tax. He finally settled on a million with them, after which a lawsuit for tax evasion was dropped. (For comparison: two years previously, the filming of Ben Hur by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which at that point was the most monumental production in the history of cinema, had cost four million dollars.) At the same time the courts ruled that he had to pay Lita $600,000, plus $200,000 for their two sons. Chaplin’s legal costs ran to another million.
Sydney Chaplin, the managing director of United Artists, who at this time was living in New York and weighing up the advantages and disadvantages of moving the studios to the East Coast, wrote to his brother: “I do hate to paint GLOOM but it does seem to me that we should be prepared to go to the other side” (he meant back to England). And then he did paint GLOOM after all: “When I am feeling sort of worried, myself, I always think of the great joy, happiness and elated feeling I had when I signed on the dotted line for Fred Karno [the director of the touring company in which they played their first roles as boys] – just think, the great sum of three pounds a week – why I ran all the way to Kennington Road to send you the glad news. So it seems, after all, that happiness is a matter of comparison.” Sydney knew the company’s books like nobody else; he knew United Artists was hanging by a brittle thread over the abyss – much like the prospectors’ hut in The Gold Rush. He could hear people drawing breath for a final great laugh at their expense.
At midday, a messenger arrived with a letter. Mr Winston Churchill invited Mr Charles Chaplin to dinner at the Biltmore Hotel on Pershing Square, where he was staying with his wife and daughter. There was a P.S. on the card: “Please, don’t bring anyone else.”
Chaplin phoned his brother and reported the news.
“Go,” said Sydney. “He’s an illustrious man. He holds the British Empire’s purse strings. If we really did have to move back, he could help us. He’s obviously crazy about you, which is a good thing. Tell him you feel the call of home, or something like that. Just don’t tell him about our situation. Men like him have no time for losers.
England should be glad to have us back. That’s how it should look. Say something like that, a hint or a bit more than a hint, you’re good at that. Maybe you can also mention, just in passing of course, that we’re British citizens, we never became Americans, and we’ve still got our British passports. Will you?”
“Yes, I will.”
“Promise me!”
“Yes, I promise.”
He wouldn’t be able to explain to his brother what he and His Majesty’s Chancellor of the Exchequer had talked about the previous night on Santa Monica beach, or that it hadn’t mattered that one of them was the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the other was a film artist, or whether either of them would remain so, or for how long.
He was looking forward to the evening…
8
…which then began so disappointingly.
They were seated in a booth at the back of the dining room; only an impolite manoeuvre would afford someone a view of their table. It was unlikely that the other guests understood what Churchill, speaking in a high-pitched stage whisper, meant by his plan for a “future alliance against the black dog”; but Chaplin could hear that they were drawing everyone’s attention, because during the few pauses in his companion’s speech he could hear nothing, where normally there would be voices, laughter, the clatter of cutlery. He was certain that by now, everyone in the room knew who was dining back there – that had clearly been taken care of. Hollywood’s waiters and waitresses didn’t just earn their living by serving cocktails and steaks, but also by passing on rumours.
Chaplin said he remembered feeling very uncomfortable. He was bothered – repelled, in fact – by Churchill’s all-round ebullience, and even more repelled by his immoderate consumption of alcohol and nicotine. He had the impression that Churchill wasn’t raising his glass to give emphasis to his speech; he was speaking in order to raise his glass. And when he spoke, smoke billowed from his mouth as if his belly were a charcoal kiln. The only way he could tolerate this forced joviality was by squinting in order to obliterate the scene.
“And so, let us promise one another that, whenever one of us requires aid in this battle, the other, wherever in the world he may be, will drop everything to assist him!”
It felt, said Chaplin, like Churchill was performing for him. His voice was louder than necessary, much louder. As if he wanted people to listen. He was trying to demonstrate to the world that in spite of all its malevolence, Mr Charles Chaplin had not forgotten how to have a good time. But Mr Charles Chaplin didn’t want to demonstrate anything to anyone.
He had been offended, Josef Melzer commented. In Chaplin’s view, the significance he had attached to their night-time stroll was not something to be made into a public statement, or treated ironically. Now it seemed to him that Churchill was intent on both; above all he intended to make light of it, in that masculine fashion that was customary in English gent
lemen’s clubs, with ceremonies consisting of nonsense and drinking. It all seemed very childish to him – the “black dog”! He had never seen any animalistic quality in his depression, and it certainly wasn’t a dog – why not a teddy bear, come to that? He had owned a black dog years ago, a miniature schnauzer that had come up to him while they were filming A Woman of Paris, and waited for him every evening on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Cherokee Street. He took it to Henry’s and had the Filipino chef there chop up a rump steak for it, a very dear animal that no one had been afraid of, not even the postman.
And so he gave quite a fatuous response: “I couldn’t say what colour my mood was, if it was any colour at all, and if it really was an animal, which is an idea I find both sentimental and spine-chilling, then I would rather…”
“I’m an imperialist,” Churchill barked at him, now very serious and sober, “a John Bull. I’m like England. I force my ideas on the whole world. I admire Samuel Johnson, though I haven’t read more than five pages of him. But they were the five pages in which he described his illness, and I thought he was talking about me. That was enough to give me a good opinion of him. He called his illness ‘the black dog’. Why should we come up with a new name?”
If Chaplin had told his friends thirty years earlier that one day he would be drinking champagne with this gentleman in an upmarket hotel in Los Angeles, they’d have given him a kicking for being big-headed. Of course, Churchill was an illustrious man, but back then he had been a legend, a mythical figure. The crowds had cheered him in Trafalgar Square, and at ten years old Charlie had pushed his way through the throng to stare at him close-up. His small, undernourished frame made that easier for him than it was for the other children. There wasn’t a single person in the British Empire who didn’t know this man’s story, a heroic tale that might have been written by Walter Scott: taken prisoner in the Boer War, he had escaped in spectacular fashion, and wandered for days across the Karoo Desert with nothing more than a half-full canteen of water, a melting bar of Cadbury’s chocolate and a scrap of parachute silk. He had finally dug himself into the coal heap aboard a freight train and stayed put until he arrived in neutral Mozambique, black as a Zulu. He returned home in triumph, with a great future ahead of him. He had grown thin, and his hair was long and wavy and combed back in a dashing style.
And now he was sitting opposite this former incarnation of Ivanhoe, pretending to listen – and finding even that difficult. Churchill kept getting up out of his seat, his eyes darting about. He talked and gesticulated. And hissed. And worked himself into a pathos that made the air in their booth heavy. What am I doing here? Chaplin wondered. He had lost every trace of that night-time magic. A doppelganger? Absurd! He looked into the coarse, puffy face. A picture puzzle in which you could see a baby or an old man, not the face of an aristocratic gentleman. No matter how conscientious his grooming, Churchill would always look unkempt. His suit fitted badly. Any suit would look terrible on this man – just as any suit would look good on Chaplin.
Sometimes Chaplin would distribute flyers in the city, or put an ad in one of the newspapers to say that the Chaplin Studios were looking for an actor or an actress. People would line up outside. He’d say: Act out who you are! I don’t want to see Juliet or Othello, I’d like to see you! And with a clandestine delight he would watch one after another of them grow flustered. Then he would act out who they were. They all recognised themselves, with as little doubt as if they were looking in a mirror. And they were shaken to the core. Very few were angry; most were grateful and shook his hand, even after he had told them they weren’t needed.
He couldn’t imitate absolutely anyone – his friends and his enemies all claimed he could, but that wasn’t true – though some he could do without a second thought, simply letting his muscles and tendons take over. Others, however, were completely foreign to him and remained so. It would be easy to imitate Mr Churchill. He would play him so true to life that anyone in the viewing room or looking up at the screen would be able to see past the thick, dark, curly hair and imagine a bald head with a sparse, reddish-blonde combover. His svelte, lithe body would show plumpness more convincingly than plumpness itself, and, if he wanted, the interplay of nose and mouth, frown lines and Adam’s apple, eyebrows and chin would yield an insight into the depths of his heart – which he would not model on any preconception, but would only discover himself in the course of his performance.
“What do you think?” Churchill said, interrupting his train of thought. “Say something! This isn’t just about me. It’s about you, too. That’s the essence of an alliance!”
He didn’t know what to think, or what he was supposed to be thinking about. He hadn’t been listening.
Churchill’s drunken state fuelled the pathos in his speech, but it didn’t dampen his perceptiveness or dull his sensitivity. He stood motionless, looking past Chaplin. He had not been listened to. He had been proselytising into the smoke from his own cigar. He stood motionless, staring at the silk wallpaper above Chaplin’s parting. He might have flown into a rage; he might have made the error of reflecting on the differences between his guest’s background and his own; he might have struck a certain tone and chosen certain words – it hadn’t happened often, but the few times it had, it had destroyed his relationship with certain people forever. (In his memoirs Brendan Bracken, a good friend of the Churchills’, mentions an awful outburst from Winston after a speech during which members of his own faction had done crossword puzzles, filed their nails and made paper boats. “Had they criticised him and torn his speech apart, had they mocked him, even, he would have forgiven them, but he could not forgive their inattention.”) Perhaps the newly germinated friendship between Charlie Chaplin and Winston Churchill would have died again – if at that moment the head waiter hadn’t appeared, holding a young girl by the hand: Sarah, Churchill’s daughter, thirteen years old.
She couldn’t sleep, she said, resting her head of coppery hair against her father’s arm. She was barefoot and wearing a turquoise nightdress; she had a long, narrow face and very white teeth. Could she sit with them, she asked. She called her father “Pomp”. She greeted Chaplin with a nod. She knew who he was, she said. He was the most famous man in the world. She had seen all his films.
Churchill changed in an instant. The rest of the evening he drank no more alcohol. The colour in his face settled into an even pink. His voice became deep and soft, his gestures generous. He smiled and held their gaze. Never in his life had he encountered a more affectionate father, Chaplin said. And never a more affectionate daughter.
“Mr Chaplin can mimic anyone in the world,” said Churchill.
“Mimic how?”
“So that you would recognise him straight away.”
“Absolutely anyone?”
“Absolutely.”
“I don’t believe it.”
He had found it uncanny, Chaplin said, and his laughter could be heard for a long time on Josef Melzer’s tape, until Melzer started laughing as well. As if, he said, growing serious again – as if his thoughts had remained hanging in the air, visible only to this girl. Sarah said: “Has he ever done you, Pomp? I’m sure he couldn’t do you – not you.”
“Don’t you think so?” Churchill said. “Shall we ask him to try?”
“Yes,” she cried. “Let’s ask him!”
“I believe she saw through us,” Chaplin said fifty years later. “When she looked at me, which she did without any embarrassment, I felt she knew about both of us. About us cripples.” (Another long laugh) – “She was afraid for her father. And I think she was a little afraid for me, too, because I was the only one who could help her father.”
This fearfulness in her eyes had brought her father back into his heart.
Chaplin was ashamed of his rebelliousness and his inattention. And of his plebeian arrogance. He was ashamed to have placed so little trust in his friend. People could say what they liked about Chaplin – it wouldn’t matter to Churchill. If h
e really was the abominable cad that Lita and her lawyers and the conniving journalists kept telling the world he was, it wouldn’t matter to Churchill. Politically, they were diametrically opposed: one of them saw Ghandi as an insignificant naked Fakir, while the other saw him as a great politician who could do a great deal for the British Empire; one of them trusted in Communism to abolish injustice, while the other described it as a machine for the equal sharing of miseries; one of them had, just a year previously, called for the British workers’ general strike to be crushed by force, while the other sent a telegram from the US to express his solidarity with the unions; one of them was His Majesty’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the other the most famous actor in the history of acting – but none of this mattered. They had a common enemy within them. Their enemy wasn’t lurking in the chic, gold and vanilla dining room of the Biltmore Hotel, or in scandal-hungry Hollywood, or in the brains of a bunch of sleazy writers, or in the lawyers’ offices or behind the judges’ benches. He wasn’t lurking in some party headquarters, or in the trenches beyond the barbed wire – he was within them, and this enemy was the reason for their alliance. Everything else was off limits, and would never be discussed.
When they bade each other farewell, he said to Churchill: “Let us promise each other that, whenever one of us is in need of aid, the other, no matter where in the world he is, will drop everything to assist him!”
Two Gentlemen on the Beach Page 4