Two Gentlemen on the Beach

by Köhlmeier, Michael; Martin, Ruth;

  He put out his hand and suggested they call each other Winston and Charlie. And Churchill – who had started to weep again – agreed.

  9

  Not long after this, they took a walk together into the Malibu Hills. Once again, it was Churchill who made the suggestion. The festivities were over, he said on the telephone, and now the matter must be addressed in a sober fashion. It was time to compare methods, and perhaps to develop new ones.

  “Why the Malibu Hills?” asked Chaplin.

  “There’s something I want to show you.”

  Churchill and his chauffeur were waiting outside a Mexican restaurant on the Pacific Coast Highway. He had a rucksack packed with tacos and water bottles, and some chocolate. No alcohol. He was wearing sturdy shoes, a windproof cape and a leather hat. He had a machete in a linen bag. He wanted to carry everything himself; he didn’t hand anything over. Chaplin had envisaged a gentle stroll, and was wearing a white suit and white slip-on shoes. He had brought no provisions.

  The chauffeur drove them into the hills. Where the track became too stony for the Dodge, Churchill told him to pull over. He should wait three hours before starting to worry, he said. It was midday, and the sun was beating down, but the air was cool and the breeze blowing off the Pacific grew stronger the higher they climbed. Churchill went ahead; soon he started panting, and soon he had to rest. He was sweating, his face was blotchy, and so was his shirt. Chaplin was not sweating. As far as he was concerned, he said, they could just sit down on the sand, perhaps in the shade of a bush. It all looked exactly the same up there as it did down here; there was nothing new up ahead. Churchill shook his head and walked on. Chaplin let him lead the way. There was no track here, just a narrow path, made either by people or animals. It was hard going, overgrown in places, and deep furrows gaped beneath the branches and twigs where the rain had washed away the soil. It would be easy to slip and break an ankle. Churchill unwrapped the linen from around the machete and started hacking at the undergrowth. Had he been here before, Chaplin asked. No, not here – he had seen pictures, photographs. He stopped, unable to go on speaking.

  “Give me the machete – I’ll go first,” said Chaplin.

  Churchill refused. He was looking for a particular place. He would know when he’d found it. When he had got his breath back, he said they had to be aware that they were at the end of the West. They looked down at the semi-circle of the Pacific, its far edge merging with the sky in a blue and white haze. Could he manage another few yards, Churchill asked. Me, cried Chaplin, could I manage? He asked Churchill at least to give him the rucksack. He was looking for a particular place, Churchill repeated, shouldering the rucksack and the machete and setting off again.

  Before long, he stopped again and sat down heavily on the ground.

  “It’s not here,” he said.

  “What is this place you’re looking for?” Chaplin asked. “Everything looks the same here, believe me.”

  “A place to paint,” said Churchill. “A place where I would set up my easel if I had come here to paint.”

  He painted. That was his method. On canvas. Oil on canvas. Landscapes, mainly. Occasionally portraits. A landscape didn’t talk when it was modelling for you. Landscapes had been what they were long before he arrived, and would remain so long after he had gone. The same went for the sky. Painting people didn’t particularly interest him.

  “What colour is the sky? Everyone says it’s blue. And it is, isn’t it? Look at the sky, Charlie! Is it blue? And so the painter mixes a blue and compares it to the sky, but it’s quite different. He makes a new mixture, he adds some yellow, he tries again, puts in a dab of violet. It’s not right. He tries getting to blue via green. That doesn’t work either. He starts with white, and the sky looks dull, as if it’s made of stoneware. He tries again and again. And never pulls it off. In Milton, Adam has hyacinth-coloured locks, and so does Homer’s Odysseus. But neither Homer nor Milton was mad. That’s what I think about. It’s a wonderful distraction, believe you me. I don’t have anything more to offer. I’m afraid I have nothing better to offer. But that’s alright.”

  “That’s why you brought me up here,” said Chaplin. It wasn’t a question. It sounded like praise.

  “I would sit here like this,” said Churchill, straightening his back. “That’s how I sit when I paint. I would hold the palette in one hand, and the brush in the other. I would tie my hat under my chin. I thought if you saw it, you might understand. You’re thinking we might have spared ourselves this arduous walk. But I can’t simply say: I paint. And that’s that. I thought that if you saw it, you would understand.”

  “I understand, Winston,” said Chaplin. “When he’s there, the black dog, then…” All he could think to say was: “…then…it’s bad, Winston, am I right?” He couldn’t find any more elegant words for it, he told Josef Melzer. But he had never met anybody who could think of an elegant word on this subject.

  They sat there, side by side, for a long time. Churchill, as if he were painting. Chaplin, as if he were watching him paint. Below them were pines and blossom-speckled cacti. Joshua trees stabbed the sky, unbending in the wind, like skeletons after a fire. Birds flocked around the treetops, picking seeds from them, their cries floating up to the two men. They had moved closer to a bush, to shield themselves from the wind. They were enveloped in the sour smell of the sagebrush, which killed off everything else wherever it grew. Chaplin had let the wild sage keep growing at the back of his garden; sometimes he sawed off branches to burn in his stove.

  Finally Churchill said: “I’m hungry, and I’d like to smoke.” They unpacked the rucksack, ate the tacos, drank water from the bottles, and chatted about this and that. Churchill lit a cigar in the shelter of his jacket. He left the chocolate for Chaplin.

  After a while he asked: “And what’s your method, Charlie?”

  And Chaplin replied: “The method of the clown.”

  I am exploiting Josef Melzer’s book here to an unfair degree. But truth be told, no other source is nearly as compact nor as rich as Chaplin’s Virtue – neither Geoffrey Power’s commendable anthology of Chaplin’s statements to the press, nor Erica Southern’s Interview With the Tramp – and in any case, there is no reason to disbelieve Pierre Kessler, the maestro’s French secretary, when he claimed that Chaplin himself saw Melzer’s book as his legacy. The book went through two editions, though it has long been out of print, and the publishing house no longer exists; the central association of antiquarian booksellers on the internet, as I discovered at the start of my work, only had three copies for sale.

  Josef Melzer says that at this point in his interview, Chaplin got up from his basket chair and played out his recollections of that afternoon in the Malibu Hills. First he was Chaplin, then Churchill. First he was himself at the age of thirty-eight, seeming no less supple than he had been back then. What a masterful piece of acting! Then he was Churchill. By magic, “ancient magic”, he summoned him from beyond the grave, this man who was so wholly different from him, and brought him to the spring garden of the Manoir de Ban above Vevey. He talked like Churchill, moved like Churchill, fell silent and thought like Churchill; he hissed and stuck out his lower lip to one side; and for the duration of the performance Melzer said he was conscious that in this man, he saw before him “the prototype from which the Almighty created all possible men throughout eternity”. Chaplin began with a rhetorical question: “Why is a clown a clown? There’s nothing funny about him. The greatest clown is Buster Keaton. What’s so funny about Buster Keaton? What makes him a clown? The knowledge that the world is meschugge? Humans are as small as fleas. But the spirit of a flea, so the poets tell us, is unnaturally wicked.”

  And Churchill said: “No foreword, please! The method, Charlie! No theory! We’re only interested in practice!”

  “Alright. The practice. I write a letter to myself. Understand, Winston? A letter to myself.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Buster Keaton put me
onto the method. I should get myself a large sheet of paper, he said. And I should lay it out on the floor. See?”

  “Yes. Go on, Charlie, go on!”

  “I lie down on this sheet of paper.”

  “How?”

  “Face down.”

  “Face down, all right. Go on, go on!”

  “I lie on this paper like a meal on a tablecloth. Are you laughing at me, Winston?”

  “No, Charlie. Am I laughing? Look at me! Am I laughing? Is that laughter? That’s not laughter. That’s just how my face is.”

  “The only remedy for the thought that I might be mad is to do something mad. This is very serious, Winston. This is the method of the clown. There is no man in the world more serious than a clown.”

  “Yes, yes, I understand. I’ve read as much, a hundred times over. Go on!”

  “I have to be naked. I can’t have anything to do with the world. I have to be alone with myself. That’s very important. Even a pair of trousers is the world, and a shirt is the world, too.”

  “You’re right about that.”

  “I lie on the paper and write a letter. Please, Winston, don’t laugh. Are you laughing? No, you’re not laughing. I write a letter to myself. Dear Charlie, I write, and I write whatever comes into my head. If you try this method, don’t give into the temptation to write to a friend. To me, for example. You mustn’t write Dear Charlie. Write: Dear Winston. You’re certain to think of the right thing to say, don’t worry about that. Because at that moment everything is right and everything is important.”

  “I’ll take that to heart.”

  “But listen, I don’t write in the way one usually writes.”

  “Then how?”

  “As I write, I turn.”

  “How do you turn?”

  “Like the hand of a clock. I turn on my belly. As I write.”

  “Writing in a circle. A letter to oneself.”

  “In a spiral, to be exact. Working inwards. It’s like a maelstrom.

  That’s how it should be.”

  “That’s how it should be. Like a maelstrom. Yes. Go on!”

  “That’s all. That really is all, Winston.”

  “Has it helped?”

  “Yes.”

  After a very long silence – so Chaplin told Josef Melzer – they got up and carried on walking, up to the highest point of the hill. There, Churchill said: “You are a commander, Charlie. As clear-sighted as Wallenstein, as spirited as Nelson, as merciless as Arminius. I would like to learn from you. May I learn from you? How large is the sheet of paper? An exact measurement, please! Length? Breadth?

  “Five and a half feet. And as wide as it is long. That’s the best way; then you can turn comfortably in a circle on it.”

  “And what do you write with: a fountain pen, a pencil, chalk?”

  “Ah, I’ve never thought about that. Anything that comes to hand.”

  “You mean any weapon will do?”

  “Any weapon to strike at the beast – indeed, Winston!”

  “You are a commander, Charlie,” Churchill repeated. The pale blue Pacific was at his back, the island of Santa Catalina a silhouette on the southern horizon, as he stood with legs apart, the machete in one hand, a cigar in the other, trouser legs and cape flapping in the breeze, red-faced, sweating, panting – thus he stood, in the shadows of the late afternoon. “You’ve found a good method, Charlie. I think there is no better one for you.”

  10

  In September, Chaplin started work on The Circus again after an eight-month hiatus.

  Sydney said: “While everyone was hanging their heads and the corners of their mouths were drooping further and further with each piece of bad news, you could hear Charlie singing a mile off, and when he walked through the door, he would sashay like Bill Bojangles Robinson. Most people thought his troubles had finally driven him crazy. But they were still happy to see him.”

  In October, Alan Crosland’s The Jazz Singer, with the Broadway star Al Jolson in the title role, was shown to a select audience. It was hailed as the first sound film, and was certainly the first talkie – Chaplin would later insist doggedly on this distinction. He was invited to the premiere in New York, but he didn’t go, not wanting to interrupt his work on The Circus “even for a single hour”. He was unsettled by reports of its incredible success, but not for long. He welcomed technological innovations that enabled a director to stipulate once and for all what music should accompany his images. In this respect, United Artists was limping along behind Warner Brothers. But in Chaplin’s studio, too, people were starting to take these developments very seriously. A young freelancer, Artie G. Milford, was experimenting with something called the sound-on-disc system, and with the Vitaphone system, in which the film projector was coupled to a record player – labour-intensive and liable to fail; not very satisfactory – but Artie was also tinkering around with his own ideas. For A Woman in Paris and The Gold Rush, Chaplin had composed melodies and given them to an arranger, and at the original screenings they were played by an orchestra. He thought the director should be responsible for the music, either relying on a composer, or composing it himself. In short: music, yes; words, no. There was no future for the spoken word on screen – that was so obvious to him that he didn’t even consider taking a stand to defend pantomime (people only started talking about “silent films” long after the invention of the talkie). When the starving, desperate Tramp cooked and ate his dirty boot, serving it up with perfect table manners, first lifting off the upper to leave the sole lying there with its skeleton of nails, like the ribs of a fish from which the fillet has been removed – when, before eating the leather, he licked the nails clean like chicken bones and twirled the laces around his fork like spaghetti, he was understood just as well in Japan as he was in the Congo. He was understood by the Laplanders in Scandinavia and the Aborigines in Australia. If you wanted to translate this scene into words and explain it with words, you’d have to write a bloody long, bloody clever book.

  A month after the premier of the first sound film, The Circus – Chaplin’s last “pure” silent film – was complete. It was 19 November 1927. That night the producer, director, screenwriter, cutter, principal actor – and later the composer of the film music and singer of the theme song Swing, Little Girl – woke up. The black dog was there, robbing him of his peace.

  PART TWO

  11

  The Circus contains nothing that goes beyond his previous pictures. The movie is an infusion; unlovely things float to its surface. The Tramp has become bourgeois, his romantic existence a mere sham. In The Gold Rush he woos four women at the same time; here he contents himself with just one, and at the end, when he finally realises she doesn’t love him, he generously gives her over to another man. He plays the selfless matchmaker, who sees others’ happiness as more important than his own. On top of all the humiliation he suffers, he humbles himself as well, by playing the angel of happiness for others. This is him kneeling pathetically before those members of the audience who are reluctant to forgive him for his divorce from Lita, making a submissive plea: take me up again! Can’t you see: I want to be the way you want me to be! He has betrayed the Tramp. He has used him for his own ends. He has betrayed art. The Tramp was his sole contribution to art. He didn’t invent film, he didn’t invent slapstick, the comedy chase, fighting with inanimate objects, the pie in the face, or the silent interplay of gesture and expression; Asta Nielsen was the best mime, Douglas Fairbanks the more versatile character actor. But he and he alone invented the character of the Tramp. He made it into an icon, which could proudly have taken a place alongside Don Quixote. Could have! – if the Tramp’s final appearance had been in The Gold Rush. There could have been a glorious future in which his inventor would have got away with any escapade, any embarrassment, any flop, any drop in his artistic standards, because three words would have put the critics and mockers back in their place: But the Tramp! And in The Circus he has torn the mask of uniqueness from the Tramp’s f
ace; for the first time, he has made the world aware that he was wearing a mask. Underneath, you can see the philistine. Don’t you see? I’m just like you. He has cut magical, anarchic scenes, like the Tramp acting as a “hand-shake facilitator” between a giant and a dwarf. The two of them are too far apart to give each other their hands. The audience wouldn’t have got to see either the giant or the dwarf, just their hands, one from below, one from above. The Tramp provides the contact between them. – Out with it! – In The Circus, there are no big, bad, villains who bend gas lamps over to light their cigarettes, but who, at the same time, are doting fathers, and would set the whole world alight to prove it. Before, the Tramp was humiliated by objects, as if objects were gods. And people loved him for it. Where is the Tramp now? His charm has become a cowardly parody. I’m just like you. He has become a dull hysteric. The chase in the hall of mirrors is old vaudeville farce, made no more original by kicking policemen in the pants. The donkey is a relic from The Gold Rush, where it eats the Christmas decorations – here, it’s just plagiarism, stretched out into a running joke which falls flat the second time around. Plagiarism comes from the Latin and means selling one’s soul. There’s nothing to add there.

  This was what the howling and gnashing of the black dog sounded like.

  First, he pulled the blankets over his head, just leaving a gap for his nose. That had always given him a gleeful sense of safety in the midst of an adventure: enemies were everywhere, but they couldn’t see him, they would ride right over him. After a few minutes, he sat up in bed. There was nobody else in the house. He had even asked Kono Toraichi to leave – the butler, his right-hand man. Now he didn’t want to be alone. This dog might be right, he told himself, but he was just barking in the dark, and he might only be right in the dark. He switched the light on. The black dog carried on howling and gnashing its teeth. It had already chewed its way through to his heart. Even so, Chaplin “felt certain” that the film contained no more than a few tiny errors which could easily be rectified.