The British press – like the American press before them – hailed City Lights as the masterpiece of film art, a tragicomedy, as if – as Timothy Bedford said in the Manchester Guardian – “the spirits of Aeschylus and Aristophanes had come together”. Had he been expecting such a reception, asked Carlyle Robinson, the press agent for United Artists. “Yes,” Chaplin replied, plainly, defiantly, and untruthfully.
For a week, the Tramp occupied the front pages of all the newspapers, his smiling face ousting the depressing announcements about the global economic crisis.
Lady Astor invited him to lunch at Cliveden, the grand seat of the British branch of her family. Her invitations were legendary; the press reported on them as if every visit was a state visit and she was the foreign minister. She represented the Tories in the House of Commons, but her views were liberal and her lifestyle eccentric, and this was reflected in her choice of guests. She was friends with the economist John Maynard Keynes, who was seen as revolutionary, the radical dramatist George Bernard Shaw, and the no less radical H.G. Wells, who sympathised with Soviet Russia and campaigned for the abolition of the monarchy. Also present were David Lloyd George, Ramsay MacDonald and Stanley Baldwin – the first was a former Liberal prime minister (and at that point, the only Liberal prime minister); the second, a member of the Labour Party and current prime minister; the third, the former Conservative prime minister and MacDonald’s predecessor. The man who went on to lead the British fascists, Oswald Mosley, was also invited. As was Winston Churchill.
Lady Astor didn’t know that Churchill and Chaplin were friends. She meant to use Chaplin to show off to everyone, and Churchill to show off to Chaplin. She didn’t place the three prime ministers, the two writers or the economist on a par with these two; only Winston, she said on another occasion, shone as bright as Chaplin.
Churchill did not shine. He stood apart from the others, spoke little, and drank nothing (as everyone noticed). He looked ill, puffy, purplish. Chaplin sought him out and they shook hands and exchanged a few words, though none about their last meeting in New York. Churchill declared he was “rather taken with” City Lights, a faint phrase that still disconcerted Chaplin even years later. The scene with the stone at one end of the rope and the neck at the other, said Chaplin, did he remember, they had come up with it together in the wilderness of the Malibu Hills. “No, no,” Church-ill muttered, “Mr Chaplin came up with it; I just had the honour of watching him do it.”
Lady Astor asked Churchill to propose a toast. He obeyed, speaking in a soft voice, searching for words, his back hunched as if he was in pain: “My lords, ladies and gentlemen,” he began, and went on to say that there had once been a lad from the other side of the Thames who had gone out into the world and won everyone’s heart. He indicated Chaplin, sitting opposite him. He tried to say his name, but his voice failed him, and the guests had to read it from his lips. It wasn’t intentional. But that’s how it was understood – he didn’t need to say who he meant.
Chaplin was in a state of high excitement, which led him to commit a faux pas. He stood up and began in the same way, with “My lords, ladies and gentlemen”, before addressing a few words to everyone, and a few to Churchill, calling him “my friend the late Chancellor of the Exchequer”. And in case anyone there had missed this embarrassing error, his embarrassment compelled him to add: “Well, it seems peculiar to say the ‘ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer’”.
Lloyd George, Baldwin and MacDonald must have been secretly delighted at Chaplin’s clumsy words – the first because Churchill had switched to join his Liberal Party to get one over on the Conservatives, and, on the party’s left wing, had given it more trouble than service as Home Secretary; under the second, once Churchill had switched sides again, he had risen to become Chancellor of the Exchequer, though he stepped down from the shadow cabinet after the Conservatives lost the election, to the party’s great relief; and the third, the incumbent Labour prime minister saw Churchill as a devourer of socialists and oppressor of workers, and party enemy number one.
Churchill invited Chaplin to Chartwell – made a point of inviting only him! At his country seat he showed him the swimmin pool, which he had excavated and walled in himself, and the duck pond and the guest house, which were both still half-finished. But he was rather distant, behaving as if Chaplin were a stranger, quickly excusing himself and leaving his wife, Clementine, to look after their guest.
17
Chaplin stayed in London for two weeks, giving parties, being invited to parties, acting first the playboy and then Till Eulen-spiegel, involving himself in romantic entanglements, giving countless interviews, and making a game out of telling the Observer the exact opposite of what he had announced to the Evening Standard a few hours previously. The rumour went around that Ramsay MacDonald had suggested knighting him, as did the rumour that Queen Mary had vetoed it. At one point Chaplin said it would be the greatest honour for him to be received by the queen, and soon afterwards he started telling witty anecdotes about having recently been offered the role of a knight, but finding the screenplay too bad. Some of the press were amused, others were indignant; they knew very well how to interpret stories of this kind, and Chaplin was practically insulting the monarchy. He apologised, and the next day made fun of himself for having apologised. He enjoyed playing Puck.
And then suddenly, he stopped enjoying himself. In London, at least.
He set off without warning, leaving half of his entourage behind. He crossed the Channel and took the train to Berlin, in a private carriage placed at his disposal gratis by Lady Astor. He met Marlene Dietrich there for dinner at the Hotel Adlon. Prince Heinrich of Prussia showed him round the ostentatious buildings of Potsdam; he visited Albert Einstein and was impressed by his modesty, witnessed a Nazi rally, and heard a speech by one Dr Goebbels. He couldn’t believe this man was a politician and not a colleague of his – nobody could listen to him without laughing himself sick, he said. Did he speak English, this great clown? A man like that could easily start a career in sound films and earn a lot of money. Shame Sydney wasn’t there: he would have done the deal. Peter Lorre and Celia Lovsky, who had accompanied Chaplin, dragged him away, afraid that someone might recognise him – although his hair had turned white and off-screen he now looked hardly anything like the Tramp. If Chaplin had been able to speak German, they said, it would have taken him no more than a few words to realise that this man was anything but funny, and was certainly no clown. The Nazi propaganda paper Der Stürmer had printed a hate-filled article about Chaplin, the “sensuously insatiable American fidgeting Jew”.
His journey took him onward to Vienna; a crowd of thousands awaited him there as well. It was only with the help of the police, who formed a cordon around him, that he managed to get through to the Hotel Imperial. He would have liked to visit Sigmund Freud, but unfortunately Sigmund Freud could not be visited.
His next destination was Venice: gondola ride, Doge’s palace, Rialto Bridge, dinner with the writer Massimo Bontempelli, who treated him to a lecture on Mussolini and the glorious future of fascism. And finally, Paris! There were letters from Sydney waiting for him at the hotel. His brother didn’t press him to cut short his travels, he merely enclosed a collection of all the ideas Charlie had noted down or dictated over the past few years for a new film, a film full of social criticism and class warfare. Sydney knew that ultimately there was only one temptation his brother couldn’t resist: work.
But Charlie did manage to resist. In mid-April, on his brother’s birthday, he met Sydney in Nice and convinced him to let his duties rest for a little while. They travelled to North Africa together, which was funny and fascinating, and came back to France via Spain, having received a death notice: Ralph Barton had taken his own life in New York.
Ralph Barton had been a well-known caricaturist and, until the previous year, a sought-after illustrator. He had always been regarded as a difficult man, but he had finally proved too difficult for his employers and they had s
topped using him. It seemed as if this man was incapable of agreeing to anything, which made every bit of business with him into a long, drawn-out affair. But Chaplin had been fascinated by him; he didn’t know any artist but Ralph whom you could watch creating his art. “Put something in his hand, a stylus or a stone or a piece of chalk or charcoal, and say: lion! Or: T.S. Eliot! Or: the angel Gabriel! And he’ll draw whatever you want on paper or asphalt or a board or a napkin. He gets straight to work, doesn’t hesitate for a second, and doesn’t break off the line until he’s finished. His hand is guided by a higher power.” This quotation had been printed on the back cover of a book of selected drawings by Ralph Barton. The two of them had been friends ever since. When Chaplin was told that Ralph had made a suicide attempt after a woman had left him, he invited him on the spur of the moment to accompany him to England and across Europe. They had great fun in London, less in Berlin, and none in Vienna. Barton really was a difficult man. His moods became tyrannical, and his paranoia could be truly vexing. Everyone was glad when he finally left the little group in Venice. Even Chaplin. Nobody took his constant threats of suicide seriously; they thought these were pure blackmail, and nothing more. And then he really did take his own life.
The French film director Abel Gance, who accompanied Chaplin on his travels for a little while, told him that Churchill was currently staying in Biarritz; the unemployed boss-man was finally minded to take a holiday, which, as everyone knew, he’d had no opportunity to do in the last twenty years.
“He said that?”
“That is apparently what he said, yes.”
“Did you speak to him?”
No, Gance had not. His information came from the poet and actor Antonin Artaud, who had interviewed Churchill for a surrealist magazine and had, he said, been absolutely charmed by him, by his wit and his repartee; his answers had been entirely monosyllabic.
“And how did he seem otherwise? Serious? Cheerful? Absentminded? Angry? Sad?”
Gance didn’t know.
Chaplin wanted to visit his friend in Biarritz, alone. He was still feeling guilty about his faux pas during the lunch with Lady Astor (particularly as someone had told him that “the Late Chancellor of the Exchequer” had become Churchill’s nickname in the House of Commons), and he was still feeling guilty about neglecting him three years earlier in New York, when he was celebrating the premiere of The Circus. He blamed himself for the fact that relations between them had cooled. Ralph Barton’s suicide had shaken him to the core; he hadn’t wanted to see anyone for a whole day. But his thoughts were not of poor Ralph, he had to admit that to himself, and he felt guilty about that, too – they were of his lonely friend on the Atlantic coast. He had never – alas! – been seriously concerned about Ralph, but he was about Winston. He had never made a pact with Ralph, but he had with Winston.
He met a “man without a mood”.
18
At the Hotel du Palais they told him Churchill was down on the beach. He was painting.
That was how Chaplin found him: wrapped in a stained coat and wearing a straw hat fastened under his chin with a leather lace, sturdy shoes, and woollen gloves with the fingers cut off. He was sitting on a folding chair and had worked the legs of his easel into the sand; in his right hand he held the paint palette and in his left the brush; there was a cigar clamped between his teeth. He was painting the white lighthouse on Cape Hainsart and the cliffs below it and the beach and the sea with its white-capped waves. No birds. No people.
It was early September, and the wind from the Atlantic brought salty air with it and drove knots of cloud in front of the sun, changing the light suddenly from bright to dull and dismal. But in the picture on the easel, Chaplin recalled, an eternally blue summer sky stretched out over land and sea. The picture – this was his first impression – told a different story to his friend’s expression. His face was half hidden by the scarf he was wearing under the hat, a fragment of a face; it spoke of sorrow and anger, more anger than sorrow. If the camera had shown his face first, everyone in the theatre would have believed the painter was working on some kind of lampoon, a caricature, each stroke of his brush made with disappointment and contempt, with the intent to avenge and insult. But the picture showed a peace that didn’t exist in reality, and could only be interpreted as a symbolic reflection of inner happiness. How wrong that interpretation would have been! And how wrong was the interpretation of the expression on the artist’s face!
He laid a hand on his friend’s shoulder, Chaplin said, gently, so as not to alarm him, and in a soft voice, but articulating the words clearly – something he had felt was missing from the sound films he’d seen – he said:
“It’s me, Charlie.”
He meant to bridge the distance between them from the very start – something he’d failed to do in New York and at Lady Astor’s house.
“It’s me, Charlie,” he said again straight away – this time a little more theatrically. On the one hand, if you took the pathos seriously, it was intended to suggest: I came to help you; or on the other hand, if you took it as being ironic, it could have meant something like: you’re Don Quixote; I’m Sancho Panza. Together we’ll be defeat the windmills – something like that.
Churchill laid down another two, three, four brushstrokes and then turned to him.
“Oh,” he said, and carried on painting.
I am quoting from Josef Melzer’s book where he, in turn, gives a three-page-long quote from Chaplin:
“I know –” (Melzer mentions that Chaplin kept interrupting his story and his thoughts and falling silent for long periods, though whenever Melzer tried to ask a question, he would fend him off with a wave of his hand)
–I know that most people on earth will regard it as unseemly or even malign: exploiting a friend’s suffering for one’s own artistic ambitions, observing it meticulously in order to be able to reproduce it later. From a mean-spirited viewpoint, artists are indeed unseemly and malign. The black dog was visiting my friend. And he had him by the throat. Choking off his words. This French writer and actor who interviewed him for his magazine must have been blind if he thought Winston was giving him witty repartee – or maybe he only saw what he wanted to see. He really was monosyllabic. The second syllable, and the third and the fourth, were snatched away and devoured by the dog. I’d come at the right time. Later he told me that was the worst bout of depression he’d ever had, and the longest – and, at least until its peripeteia, he had only been able to get through the day because he knew his Browning was waiting for him in his suitcase, under his shirts. I asked him why he hadn’t called on me, as we’d agreed. He said he didn’t have the strength for it. I believe he didn’t trust me any more. And he had every reason not to. I had let him down in New York, and at Lady Astor’s. And I’d let him down this time as well. I’d come even though he hadn’t called me. And that, too, would count against me. Now I was here. I was with him. But I was no better than this actor and writer with his interview. I wasn’t blind, but I too saw only what I wanted to see. This ineffable picture! An old man, older than he really is, a great deal older, sitting on the beach slumped in his chair, holding onto his hat and his easel by turns to stop the storm blowing them away, struggling against the dog at his throat and in his soul by conjuring an idyll onto his canvas. A man without a mood, filled to bursting with nothing, a life spent playing catchup. In the hour we spent on the beach, all I could think was: this could be a scene in a film. And for the first time in my life I thought: it could be a scene in a sound film. Not just a scene, it could be a whole film! And not a studio production! I’d shoot it in Biarritz, on that exact spot, not one foot to the right, not one foot to the left. Winston had fixed on the only correct spot. Two men meet on the beach, and everything you see is different from how it really is. Such a thing had never been represented in an artwork before. At least not with the potency of what I could see in my mind’s eye. Only film can do that. No, I thought – and I was surprised at myself – I thought:
only sound film can do that! I could have danced down the beach! At that moment, I had invented the sound film! What were the pictures that had been shown in cinemas before – The Jazz Singer, or Lights of New York, which I had liked more – they were nothing but theatre on film! Documentary films. Documenting theatre. But what I could see before me, as a finished artwork, was a true sound film, a talking picture. The first talking picture! You couldn’t convey the words that were spoken there in pantomime. The philosopher says: he who speaks incurs debts. I had tattooed this maxim on the inside of my forehead. But the only way to pay off your debts is to go on speaking. He who speaks must go on speaking. Chaplin’s first talkie! And it goes without saying that only actors in our club would be capable of acting in this, the first real sound film. A two-hander. Title: Two Gentlemen on the Beach. Cast: Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. Who else? I mean, really, who else! Nobody would have seen that coming. Chaplin as anti-Chaplin. Life, as it is! Life doesn’t consist of three acts or five acts, it’s not a drama. Life is a revue: one scene after another, with no order to them. Speech as sprechgesang. The eternal recurrence of the same.
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