At half past four in the morning he took a taxi to the studio. (Frank Kawa, the ever-cheerful chauffeur, and Harry Crocker, Chaplin’s assistant, had also been told to take some time off.) He got out two blocks from the entrance. The driver knew who he was, of course: he asked if Chaplin wanted to stretch his legs for the last few yards, and grinned, which might have been a grin of solidarity – “great idea after a night on the tiles…” – or it might not have been. He wasn’t going to the studio, he lied. And plodded off, unable to stop himself from putting a suggestion of the Tramp into his gait. The driver switched the engine off, but not the headlights. It might have been a kindly gesture. At that time of night the street lights were off, and the edge of the road was pitted with pot holes; it would have been easy to stumble. Or maybe it was gratitude, because the world’s greatest comic was giving him a private performance in the dawn light. Or it might have been malice: you’re being watched, Charlie. Don’t forget what Lincoln said: you can fool all of the people some of the time, or some of the people all of the time, but not all of the people all of the time. Well, if he already thinks I’m a liar and a cheat, I’ll give him the pleasure of being proved right, he thought; when he’s munching his French toast at Hiram’s, he can boast: I’m the one who really knows Charlie Chaplin. As he walked up the driveway to the studio building, he heard the car pull away.
The smell of the cutting room made him nauseous, and he only just managed to reach the restroom. He vomited in the wash basin. He coughed up green bile, his throat burned – he couldn’t remember when he had last eaten anything. He rinsed out his mouth, gargled, pressed the side of his face against the cool wall tiles and closed his eyes.
There were full ashtrays on the little tables in the corridors. He had asked people repeatedly to empty the ashtrays at the end of the day, rather than the next morning, when cold smoke had seeped into the walls and ceilings, the curtains and carpets. It stank like a latrine. People were forbidden from smoking in his office. He had installed a compartment for chocolate under the writing surface of his desk, dark chocolate with candied hazelnuts or almonds. He tore open a bar, broke off a row of squares and chewed quickly. Then he fetched the seven reels of film from the safe.
He loaded the final reel and spooled through until just before the end.
12
The Tramp stands alone in the empty field. The circus wagons have left.
The Tramp sits down on a crate. Close-up. He looks sad.
There is a scrap of paper on the dirty ground in front of him. He picks it up. It has a star on it.
He looks at the star.
He screws up the paper.
He stands up, kicks the paper behind him with his foot and walks away. He walks away, in the centre of the frame. He is alone.
The End.
He cut out the shot of the Tramp looking at the star. Was he begging for grace from heaven? What else could looking at the star signify? The fact that he screws up the paper and throws it away didn’t make the business any better, it just gave it a sour aspect. Does even he think himself unworthy of God’s grace?
He went back through the action to the point where the Tramp is chased out of the circus.
The Tramp in his underpants. He stumbles. He’s confused. Frightened. He’s just performed a catastrophic high wire act. Everyone is shouting at him. He doesn’t defend himself. He’s given up. He has lost everything, his job, his love. Merna doesn’t love him; she loves Rex, the tightrope walker. All is lost. He takes to his heels.
Intertitle: That Night.
The tramp is sitting by a fire. He has arrived back where he started. He has gained nothing. He is sad.
Merna turns up.
Intertitle: “I’ve run away from the circus.”
She kneels before him.
“Can’t you take me with you?”
He tries to persuade her. You’re different, he tries to say, you’re not one of life’s losers like me. How can he give her hope? He thinks.
Intertitle: “I’ve got an idea.”
He hurries back to the circus, and asks Rex to come to the woods with him and see Merna.
“I can do nothing for her.”
He gives Rex the ring that he had intended to give her. He mimes rocking a baby in his arms, shows that soon a second and a third child will follow. The future of a happy couple. Rex considers this and makes up his mind:
“Take me to her!”
The Tramp leaps into his arms and kisses him, as if Rex were the man bringing him happiness, and not the man taking happiness from him.
Intertitle: The Next Morning.
Merna and Rex are getting married. The Tramp throws rice over the bridal pair. His face is a mask of panic and hysteria. It says: I’ve given everything. Now forgive me!
He cuts out the whole scene, six hundred feet of horrible self- abasement, six hundred feet of shame, six hundred feet of ass-kissing.
Now the empty field and the loneliness follow on from the scene where the Tramp is ejected in his underpants. The Tramp is thrown out of the circus. Cut. The circus leaves town. The Tramp sits alone. The Tramp leaves. The End.
But nobody was going to understand that ending. The cut had to be made earlier.
The Tramp is thrown out as a result of the high wire act he performs, in the belief that he will be held up by a strap around his waist. The strap comes off, as expected, and the Tramp has to walk the tightrope without a harness. Then, a troop of monkeys starts getting in his way, biting his nose, pulling his trousers down. The audience shrieks in fright as the Tramp fights objects and animals – fights for his life. As he was lying awake at night, the film playing in his imagination, this was the only sequence he was completely satisfied with. He had spent six months learning to walk a tightrope for this performance. The crew had been bent double with laughter. He believed he’d opened up a new region of clown heaven, believed he could finally formulate the axiom of comedy: the funniest a man can be is when he is staring death in the face. Only when we know death can we be funny. That’s why animals don’t laugh. In the cold light of the early morning, the scene was good. But not good enough. It was without question the best scene in the film, but it wasn’t as good as an average scene from his previous big pictures. That was the truth. And it was also the label that spelled destruction.
He cut out the whole section. Took the scissors to the reel further back, where the circus manager tells the Tramp he’s giving him one last opportunity to make people laugh.
“I’ve had enough of this: you get one more chance.”
The enraged manager pushes Merna to the ground; the Tramp wants to protest, he wants to stand up to the despot, but like a coward he runs away. He has missed his chance. The manager doesn’t know that. The Tramp himself doesn’t know it. Merna doesn’t know it. Only the audience knows. – At least, the audience should know.
The circus leaves town. The Tramp sits alone. The Tramp leaves. The End.
That was dull. Or absurd. Or both. Not funny. Not clear. It might be right. But it had no poetry. But it was honest.
At around nine o’clock the first employees arrived: Olav Kamin-ski and Barry Goodell. These two were always first to arrive, because they came from the same bed and didn’t want the others to know – though they were true enough to their orientation, themselves and each other not to make separate journeys from their shared home to the studio. They looked at him aghast, and crept away. Half an hour later, Sydney was standing in the cutting room. The film had already been cut by a third.
Sydney held his nerve. Nothing had been lost. Copies had already been made. The majority of the city’s copying facilities had been booked out for The Circus, and they were working day and night.
“Do you need some pick-up shots?” he asked.
“No.”
“What do you need?”
“A sound studio. Two sound technicians, no, make it three. And Merna, Harry, Allan, and if possible, Henry Bergman.”
Sydney nodded a
nd left.
By about midday, the film had been cut together at about half its original length. The sound studio had been booked, and the actors were waiting.
“Do you want to show me?” Sydney asked.
He watched the thirty-six minutes that remained of The Circus without saying a word.
Afterwards, he said: “The plot doesn’t make sense any more. You’ll have to write an awful lot of intertitles for people to be able to follow the story. Are we to have the intertitles spoken? Not write them and cut them in, but speak them? Is that why you wanted the studio?”
“No intertitles. Spoken or written. The intertitles have been liquidated. We’ll recite poems over it. It’s a lyrical film. A talking picture with images. An illustrated poem. It won’t be a film, or a poem. It will be something new. Nobody is expecting this. Chaplin has exceeded all expectations, by fulfilling none of them.”
“Who’s going to recite the poems?”
“Merna, Harry, Allan, Henry…me.”
“And what kind of poems?”
“I’ll write them.”
“When?”
“Today.”
“How many poems?”
“I don’t know, Syd. Free poems. Nothing to do with the circus.”
“Then what will they be about?”
“Life. Poems about life, about death, about God, fate, joy, sadness, about everything except the circus. The circus is silent – it stands for life. Everything that exists is a metaphor. Nobody else is going to say I’m trying to capitalise on the success of Dupont’s Varieté film.”
“And the movie – or whatever we want to call it – won’t be any longer than thirty-six minutes?”
“No…no…of course not…That’s too short…Of course it will be longer than that.”
“So you are going to shoot some pick-ups?”
“No. Some images can be stills. Like photographs…The world is moving, and then suddenly it stands still. Like Sleeping Beauty. That’s new. That’s poetry. Nobody’s ever done that.”
“That is new…”
“That’s how we’ll do it. We’ll have single frames photographed.
Get me a photographer – Leonard C. Wales, ideally. Esther can tell you where to get hold of him. And if he can’t do it, ask Donald Saxon. And then we’ll film the photographs. No experiments, I don’t want any cameraman but Roland! And then I’ll cut in the strips with the still images on them. Moving stills. That’s the right thing to do. That’s how we’ll do it. And I’ll compose all the music. It’ll be wonderful – it’s never been done before. It’s not a movie, or pantomime, or a talkie, and it’s not poetry. It’s something new. The sound film has only just been born, and already it’s been superseded. It’s an art form that will bear my name. The audience will find a name for it. This is the birth of something entirely new, Syd! Can you feel it? You’re the first witness. It’s like…when Homer invented the epic.”
“And how long do you want the film to be in the end, Charlie?”
“Sixty to seventy minutes. Like it was before. An evening’s entertainment, as usual.”
“So, twice as long as it is now.”
“About that…yes…”
“So the audience is going to spend about half an hour looking at still images?”
At that, Chaplin broke down. Sydney closed the door to the cutting room, turned the key in the lock, put his arms around his brother and absorbed the convulsive sobs with his breast.
13
Sydney reminded him that the world couldn’t hurt the Chaplin brothers; it had always been this way: people had always profited from them, not the other way round. Family came first, and art second, and their specific art form was really just a bit of fun that had started in the family to distract them from the hunger and the cold; he mustn’t forget that. Everything that went beyond getting enough to eat, not freezing, a bed, not too soft and not too hard, was luxury – a marvellous thing, without a doubt, but not a necessity. He had worked out, he said, that the two of them would have laughed no less without luxury than they had with it.
“How do you work that out?” Charlie asked, taken aback.
“Inner statistics,” said Syd in a bass voice. He dropped his lower jaw, his eyes staring and his mouth closed: he was imitating Buster Keaton, which was a running joke between him and his brother.
Charlie said what he always said in these situations: Syd would have been the better actor, and he was sorry to have taken that away from him. Syd replied as he always did in such situations: so what if that was true, it didn’t matter, they’d still kept it in the family.
“The world doesn’t matter all that much to us,” he whispered in his little brother’s ear, “not all that much, Carletto! Let’s fleece it good and proper and stop worrying about it! It let us starve and freeze. It killed Dad and made Mum suffer. Now it has to pay. And if it doesn’t cough up – bene. We’ll kick it in the pants! People think a kick in the pants is a bit of fun. It isn’t, we both know that! We can be different from the rest of the world. Do you think I’d hesitate to steal? If we needed to, I’d do it, you know that. And you’d do it too. You’d do it for me; I’d do it for you. We don’t owe the world anything.”
And so on…It helped.
It helped until after Christmas.
Charlie spent the holidays with Sydney and his wife Minnie in the San Gabriel Mountains. Syd advised him to travel without an entourage: he didn’t need a secretary up there, or a butler, a chauffeur or a cook – life could go on without Kono Toraichi and Frank Kawa. Sydney hired a car and a driver and arranged a date for the return trip.
They took three rooms in a bed and breakfast. Simple, cosy, warm, light. Scents: baking, roasted meat, candles, floor polish. The only other guests were an older married couple. They both had white hair and smiled whenever they turned their faces to you, and they were discreet. Nobody showed any curiosity. Sydney had telephoned the proprietor and let her know that any curiosity would result in their immediate departure.
On Christmas Eve, they decorated the Christmas tree in the dining room. Charlie said his first words to Mrs Taylor, their hostess: she shouldn’t go to any trouble on his account. At which she lowered her eyes and whispered that on the contrary, she was delighted to be able to go to some trouble on his account. Sydney raised his eyebrows, and she fell silent. That evening Charlie played a children’s spinet. Dinner was a German roast with German side-dishes, calorific and delicious, with a crème caramel for dessert.
On Christmas Day, there was a tour of the Mount Wilson Observatory – an organisational master-stroke from Syd, as the station wasn’t usually staffed over the holidays. A young scientist (he had passed up Christmas lunch with his wife and children for the privilege of shaking Charlie Chaplin’s hand) gave a lecture, showed them the reflecting telescope, the largest in the world, explained how it worked, and said he was proud that Mount Wilson was the world centre for research into the galaxies. The weather was fitting, with clouds like swellings in a colicky sky. An ice-cold wind blew down from space and made patterns on the lake below the station.
Charlie was in high spirits that evening. Over dinner he told Minnie, Syd, the old couple and Mrs Taylor that in an instant, a film had come to him in its entirety: the Tramp on the moon, sprawling deserts beneath black skies, the man in the moon enters, characters from fairy tales and legends join him, even God makes an appearance, or maybe not, no, he does, the moon could be God’s beach house on the sea of the universe…Sydney instructed Minnie to write down every word his brother uttered.
It was an enjoyable evening. Charlie acted out the Tramp’s next adventure in space for the little audience in the snow-bound guesthouse, and Mrs Taylor said she had never laughed so much in her life – she couldn’t even feel her sciatica.
Sydney was very relieved. The spark in his brother’s eyes was a reassuring sign. He was in no doubt that Charlie had come through the crisis.
The day after Christmas, they drove back to Beverly Hi
lls. Singing. First in three parts and then, after they had left the hairpin bends behind them, in four. The chauffeur, it turned out, was a more than passable tenor. He should drop by the studio in the next few days, Charlie said as they pulled into Summit Drive; only a good singer could sing in pantomime. Syd helped him carry the suitcases upstairs. Would he be alright alone in the house, he asked, was he sure, was he quite sure. Yes, of course, Charlie laughed.
But that night, the black dog returned. He didn’t bark scorn and malice. He didn’t bark at all. He sat in front of Charlie and stared him down.
14
The house was situated below Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pick-ford’s villa. They called their home “Pickfair”. “You’re invited to Pickfair, not to Doug and Mary’s”, as they always told their guests. With its forty rooms, the building was the most magnificent in the Hills. The park ran to fourteen acres; Doug liked to joke that some parts of it were still unknown to civilisation. By comparison, Chap-lin’s property looked modest. His house had fourteen bedrooms, three terraces and several balconies; from the lounge you could step out onto the marble slabs that surrounded the oval swimming pool, and a shady path led up to the tennis court through a little copse of fir trees. The house wasn’t the largest, but it was the most beautiful in Beverly Hills – everyone said so. It was too big for him. It had been too big for him even when he was living there with Lita and the boys and Kono Toraichi and Frank Kawa and the rest of the staff. The house had always been full of people, coming and going, full of laughter, discussions, contests, tantrums, card games – and yet it was empty, false, hollow. It was hollow. It couldn’t be filled. He had designed the house himself, with just as many rooms, only a third smaller than it was now. That had been at the start of the Twenties. A little later, Pola Negri had thrust herself into his life. “Sharlie, do you want our friends to say Chaplin’s home is the gatehouse to Pickfair? I don’t want that. Not I!”
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