The smallest room you could live in was the kitchen. It was functional, displaying hardly any signs of the architect’s creative drive. Here he could cope with things, to some degree.
He lay awake, felt his heart stumble, and turned onto his right side, because he remembered a prophet saying you could extend your life if you didn’t sleep on the side where your heart was. He could hear his own breathing. He tried to list the things he was afraid of, so he could dismiss the ones he was just imagining. He couldn’t think of anything. He was frightened without being frightened. A single fear came to him: a prank he had played on Pola. They went to bed, put out the light, arranged the bedclothes around them, and he used the noise and the darkness to slip across to the end of the bed and sit silently on the mattress. Pola reached into his half of the bed and didn’t find him there. “Sharlie?” she whispered. He said nothing. Gradually, she was able to make out the silhouette of the figure sitting on the end of the bed. “Sharlie, I know you’re playing a joke on me.” He didn’t move. “Please, Sharlie, I’m frightened.” He didn’t move. “Sharlie, I’ll scream, I’m really frightened.” He was usually more afraid of himself than she was of him. They shrieked and turned the light on and embraced each other and laughed happily and rolled around. He thought he had been happiest with Pola. He hadn’t loved her. And it took some effort to bring her features to mind, even though he’d studied them a thousand times on the cutting-room table.
He got up and groped his way out onto the staircase and down into the small lounge. He didn’t dare switch a light on. Thinking about things repulsed him. He sat in the green velvet wingback chair by the fire and nodded off. Woke up freezing. He sensed a kind of futility rising like vapour from the armchair, misty, as if it had drifted into the house from far away.
He slept in small doses. And it was the same on the nights that followed. He switched from one room to another. He finally went back to the kitchen and lay down on the blankets and pillows in front of the range. He left the light on. The shiny, polished steel of the oven reflected his face. Its lower half showed signs of age. That’s what he was: a young old man. This face didn’t have the cut of a protagonist, but the ape-like expression of a stock character. The foolish face of a creature who feeds off applause. His hair had turned white. After the long break in filming, he had had to start dying it for continuity. He studied his reflection and couldn’t find the Tramp.
Later he would try to explain to a reporter from a French newspaper that he had always suspected everything he did carried a deep meaning within it, but it had not been clear to him what this meaning was. The reporter would smile and nod and wouldn’t understand; he wouldn’t understand that Chaplin was talking about the Tramp, not himself. The same reporter would ask him if the Tramp’s pale face didn’t remind him of a skull. And Chaplin would answer, again, as if he was talking about someone else: “I’ve always been aware that the Tramp was playing with death. He plays with it, mocks it too, thumbs his nose at it, but every second of his life he’s conscious of death, and that’s why he is so frighteningly clear about the fact that he’s alive.”
He reached behind the bureau and pulled out the remains of the roll of paper that Buster Keaton had sent him the previous year; there wasn’t as much left as he had hoped, though he still had enough to lie on. But then he left it there.
He would tell the same reporter: “The clown is so close to death that only a knife’s edge separates them, and sometimes he crosses even this final line, but he keeps coming back. That’s why he’s not quite real – in a certain sense, he’s a spirit.” That night, he recalled, this certain sense had been turned inside out; it had become senseless.
On his third night alone at 1085 Summit Drive, the big house in Beverly Hills, he called Dr Van Riemsdyk. Asked him to come over and bring an “analgesic” with him. Complained of pains in his pelvis and leg.
“Severe pains?”
Yes, they were severe.
“In your pelvis and leg, you say?”
Yes, that was right.
“Which leg?”
He didn’t reply.
After a long pause, Dr Van Riemsdyk said: “Mr Chaplin, I can’t give you morphine. Are you listening? Did you hear me? And I know that’s what you want. I can’t. This is just nervous tension, and it will pass, believe me. I’ll send you over a little bottle of a reliable household remedy, a mixture of valerian and passion flower.”
He hung up. Without saying goodbye.
And then he called Raphael Brooks - the “bringer of consolation” as Mary Pickford called him.
An hour later Mr Brooks was at the door, waving up at him, a well-groomed man in a dark suit and a trench coat. He had brought everything with him. He advised Chaplin to undergo a three-day cure; the crisis would be over in twenty to forty hours. He just had to break the vicious circle of sleeplessness and senselessness. That was all. It was no big deal. The earlier the treatment was carried out, the faster the crisis would be over. He didn’t know anyone who had become addicted because of a three-day cure. (Some people – and of course, he didn’t say this – had stretched those three days out into three years, and Barbara La Marr never came back from her cure.)
The consolation consisted of eight ampules of heroin and a needle. Douglas had survived many crises in this manner. Mary, too, had found it beneficial. Neither of them had a bad word to say about Raphael Brooks. His name featured in all their friends’ address books. He was unsentimental, they said, he didn’t mor-alise, but he provided more precise information and had a better understanding of medicine than a dozen doctors put together. If Barbara had put herself in his hands, she would still be alive. At the time, heroin was all the rage in Hollywood: at every party there was a locked room, where it was laid out in thin lines on mirrors. The guest would ask the host with a wink: may I have the key to the refreshment room? Or: how do you get to paradise from here? The powder was snorted through rolled-up dollar bills. Raphael Brooks condemned this fad. Firstly, the stuff you got at parties was usually cut with something dreadful, and secondly, taking it in this manner damaged the lining of the nose. And only a very few people were aware of the correct dosage. He, on the other hand, guaranteed clean stuff and clean needles and information. True, the dose he recommended was a high one, but that made it more effective. A little heroin taken more often was many times more dangerous – that way, the body grew accustomed to it. This had two unfa-vourable outcomes: the depression didn’t go away – in fact it got worse – and the patient became addicted. A short-term cure using a relatively high dosage blew away the depression without giving the body any chance to develop an addiction. Brooks likened depression to a burning oil well, and heroin to nitroglycerin.
Mr Brooks was a responsible man. With someone like Mr Chaplin, who was taking this cure for the first time, he insisted on a low-dose trial injection, the effect of which would not last long. Everyone’s reaction was different. A small number of people couldn’t tolerate heroin at all. They had to be helped in other ways. It was child’s play, he said, to inject the heroin oneself, but still he saw it as his duty to stay with the patient on the first occasion. He would stay for two hours – that was included in the service.
Chaplin rolled up his shirt sleeve and allowed Mr Brooks to pull a rubber strap tight around his upper arm. He clenched his fist and stretched his fingers until the veins stood out in the crook of his arm. Mr Brooks rubbed a patch of skin there with alcohol and gave him the jab.
“You’ll feel it in a second,” he said, removing the strap.
A breath, and the heroin reached his brain. He felt as though his eyes were rolling back, and a warm wave rolled over his spine. He was sitting on a hard kitchen chair, with only his toes touching the ground, but he felt as though he were about to flow over the earth like melting wax. Before long he lost all self-awareness. He was at one with everything.
The effect lasted a little under an hour, then it grew flatter, and after another hour he landed.
&nbs
p; “You should get some sleep now,” said Raphael Brooks. “You’ll sleep soundly. And when you wake up, you’ll feel a lot better. But don’t be tempted to stop the treatment because of that. On the contrary. If you feel good, that just means it’s working. You’ll be over the crisis in three days.”
He nodded. He didn’t want to talk. He could have, but he didn’t want to.
Brooks handed him a neat, velvet-lined wooden box containing a fresh needle and seven ampules, and took his payment. The box was included, he said; Chaplin could keep it. It could be refilled at any time during future crises. He should have another injection before going to sleep, then one in the morning and one in the evening. If he had any problems injecting himself, he just had to call. Although further house-calls would incur a charge.
He lay down in front of the kitchen range, slept until late that night, and awoke with a feeling of total failure. From the filth of London to the filth of Hollywood – that’s what they’d say about him. He was the most ordinary creature in the world and the uncanny spectre at the feast, united in one person. He no longer believed anything could help him, or that this was a crisis. He sat and stared. Then he drew the contents of all seven ampules into the syringe until the glass cylinder was full. He sat on the kitchen chair, his sleeve rolled up, the rubber strap around his arm. He pulled it tight, loosened it again, tightened it again, loosened it again. The point of the needle touched the greenish vein. Just like Raphael Brooks had showed him.
He slept and tried again. And slept and tried again.
At lunchtime on New Year’s Eve he sent a telegram: “Charlie needs Winston.”
The prompt reply: “Winston is coming.”
15
Two days before the premiere, which was taking place in New York at Chaplin’s request, The Circus was screened for a select audience. There were three dozen interested parties there: friends, critics, artists in other lines of work (among them the writers Sherwood Anderson and Dorothy Parker, and the painter William Glack-ens), scientists (including the later Nobel laureate Arthur Holly Compton), business people (not W.R. Hearst!), politicians (Joseph P. Tumulty, the former private secretary to President Woodrow Wilson, and Al Smith, Governor of New York and the Democrats’ presidential candidate), and Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pick-ford, of course, and Marion Davies, of course. The matinée was a tremendous success. The stand-out incident: Marti Hobson, a features writer for Cosmopolitan who had made it clear he was no friend to Chaplin, came up to him afterwards and – without taking the hand that was held out to him – said: “I would dearly love to slate your film, Mr Chaplin, and if it was good, I’d do it anyway, that’s how unfair I am. But unfortunately it’s very good, more than very good, and so I am compelled to praise it. And for that, I will never forgive you.” The delicious thing about this, Chaplin remembered, was that Hobson’s rage had been quite genuine. This homme de lettres left the lunch party, red-faced, to closet himself away and write a hymn of praise such as he would never write again. “That trickle-pisser” – to quote Sydney.
And with that, the black dog was driven away, or slunk off of his own accord – and with him went the memory of what he had been like. Yes, yes, said Chaplin in an interview, he would admit that in the last few weeks he had been “a little out of sorts, at times”.
Sydney was already busy with preparations for the filming of City Lights. He didn’t want to see his brother unoccupied for a single day.
On January 5th, the day before the official premiere in the Strand Theatre, Churchill arrived in New York. He took a car straight to Chaplin’s hotel and instructed the driver to wait outside the entrance. It was late afternoon, and there was still time for them to walk side by side through Central Park, as they had done a year before on Santa Monica Beach, and fight the black dog together. But the Mr Chaplin whom Churchill met was “hale and hearty, splendid-looking, in a truly buoyant mood”.
Churchill described the following scene in a letter to Brendan Bracken. The detail-obsessed style of human observation here was typical of him – Charles de Gaulle once compared it, both admiringly and disparagingly, to Jean-Henri Fabre’s method of studying insects.
He entered the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria, he wrote, “in civvies” (his way of saying incognito) and saw Chaplin standing at its centre, surrounded by photographers and various others: the curious, the important and the self-important. He was wearing a dinner jacket. Since their last meeting his hair had turned white at the temples, and there were a few white strands at the crown of his head as well. He was holding one of the bowls that usually stood filled with sweets on the lobby tables, and people were applauding as he balanced it on his forefinger like a circus plate-spinner. Then he held it upside down over his head with his right hand and placed the first two fingers of his left under his nose; everyone present instantly knew, without a doubt, that this was the Tramp – bowler hat and moustache. And then, as he jutted a hip into the off-kilter posture characteristic of the Tramp, which would make everyone think of the cane, without a doubt, his gaze travelled down the corridor of admirers and writers, and fell on Churchill. He hesitated for half a moment, then handed the bowl and the moustache – the moustache too – to one of the ladies, windmilled his arms to create some space, and ran laughing towards him. But he had gone barely two steps before he seemed to realise why Churchill had crossed the Atlantic, probably striking precious time from his official diary and creating confusion among secretaries and ministers, and certainly being in a state of high anxiety about him, and he realised that it wasn’t appropriate to be cheerful or funny, because these things demonstrated that the reason for the anxiety no longer existed. So he raised his arms abruptly and turned the joy into a lament, which was exaggerated and implausible, so he lowered his arms again immediately, probably intending to indicate someone at the mercy of his moods: on top of the world; in the depths of despair – technically speaking, manic-depressive. Was it feigned or real? Churchill looked at his friend, seeing how unpleasant, how embarrassing he was finding it to be in good health. He had forgotten to cancel the distress call! Churchill had gone to great trouble to support his friend in his hour of need, and the friend hadn’t even gone to the small trouble of letting him know that he no longer required support. Charlie was ashamed: ashamed that he had abused their oath, and ashamed of his ill-advised pantomime.
“I knew,” Churchill wrote, “that the truth was seldom to be seen in his face. But what does that mean? And: what truth? I could see the truth of the clown. It told me how things were with the person he was currently imitating. How I was, for example, when he imitated me. It didn’t tell me how things were with him. He knew how to hide that truth. And if somebody succeeds in wringing that truth out of him, he will not have done a good thing.”
The letter to Brendan Bracken ends: “But I am sorry beyond measure to have given this unique friend the feeling he had disappointed me. When a little lift of his eyebrow could do more for the health of my soul than could two handfuls of tablets.”
Virginia Cowles, who had more time and opportunity to gain an insight into Churchill’s heart than Charles de Gaulle did, said in one of her reflections that over the years, she had noticed that, for Churchill, close attention, microscopic observation and a detail-obsessed frenzy of description had been signs of an approaching bout of depression; as if he were mustering these faculties for a last look at the world, which would soon retreat and leave him in a dark, bleak place, sometimes for a long period. This remark occurred to me as I was reading Churchill’s letter to Brendan Bracken. (A copy of the letter was among the documents that William Knott left to my father. Where the hand-written version is, I do not know. I would be interested to compare Churchill’s handwriting at that time with his handwriting in other moods, to see whether the dog has left his pawprints there.)
In the days before and after the premiere of The Circus, Chaplin genuinely had very little time for Churchill. Marti Hobson’s glowing review in Cosmopolitan heralded a change in p
ublic opinion. Alex-ander Woollcott of The New Yorker wrote: “…thanks to the witless clumsiness of the machinery of our civilization, someone […] was actually permitted to have the law on Chaplin as though he were a mere person and not such a bearer of healing laughter as the world had never known”. Manfred van der Laan, chief columnist of the Chicago Tribune, railed against the double standards which, he wrote, “nearly silenced one of America’s greatest artists”. Sydney pointed out van der Laan’s imperialistic and unintentionally comic phrasing to Charlie, and in the hollow voice of the castle ghost, he scoffed: “Woe to America, when a British silent film star is silenced!” They laughed long and heartily, like they used to.
Chaplin, who for the past eighteen months had been first attacked and then shunned by the press, was handed from one interviewer to the next. He genuinely had very little time. But Churchill thought he was avoiding him.
It was three years before they saw each other again.
16
In February 1931 – three years after The Circus – City Lights was screened in London, at the Dominion Theatre. The city was overcome with a Chaplin hysteria that took everyone by surprise: the police, the hotel staff, Chaplin’s entourage and, above all, Chaplin himself. He was swept away by it, quite literally: when the limousine was forced to stop two streets away from the hotel because of the crowd that had gathered outside, and Chaplin, who had no idea that he was the cause of all the excitement, got out to see what was going on, he was lifted by two gallant bodyguards and carried to the hotel, pushed along by the shrieking masses. Hundreds of hands reached out to him as people fought each other just to touch him, as if he were some kind of miracle worker. He found this enthusiasm bizarre, but he also enjoyed the fuss around him, particularly here in London, which he had once left as poor as a church mouse, on the shabby lower deck of the shabby SS Cairnrona – every child knew that story now. A crowd had gathered then, as well; the thirteen-year-old Princess Maria Viktoria, the darling of the British Empire, had just returned from Australia. But there had been fewer people on the quayside then than were now gathered outside the Carlton Hotel.
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