Two Gentlemen on the Beach

by Köhlmeier, Michael; Martin, Ruth;

  Every word a signature tune. Light is day, and darkness night. No metaphors! Film has always been interested in the remarkable. A good film transforms a thing that is merely remarkable into an enigma. It does that by showing what is. Where might an excess of reality lead? The logical answer would be: a film in colour. In Milton, Adam has hyacinth-coloured curls, and so does Homer’s Odysseus… I sat down on the sand beside Winston. But instead of fighting the black dog alongside him, which was my duty as a friend, I was sitting in my own private cinema, looking up at a screen as big as the inside of my forehead, watching and wondering and listening and saying nothing. Winston would have understood. I told him about it later, and he understood. I said to him: ‘Ever since humans have been able to speak, everything we see is different to how it really is.’ This realisation, I told him, had come to me that afternoon on the beach in Biarritz. And it’s true. That was why I wanted to remember the scene as accurately as possible. And that was why that night, in my hotel room, I took minutes from my memory. It was why I was so attentive. It was why I was so inattentive.

  Chaplin left the following morning with the bitter feeling in his breast that he had let his friend down yet again. He quickly got himself another abominable headline in the Daily Herald, which said he had bent a fork into the shape of a pistol and taken aim at a reporter who had asked him when the world would get to see the Mafia play that he and Churchill had concocted in this rarefied atmosphere.

  He travelled to England, did this and that and nothing. In November he sent a telegram to Churchill from Dover:

  Apples, peaches, pears and plums

  Tell me when your birthday comes.

  He did this and that and nothing.

  He was intending – as I mentioned – to stay in London over Christmas and visit the orphans at the Hanwell Schools; but when he heard about Churchill’s accident in Manhattan, he set off for New York at once – this time, he wanted to do it right – got past the butler and the nurse who refused to believe that he was Charlie Chaplin, and found Churchill – in the “best possible mood”, sitting up in bed, surrounded by books and manuscripts.

  “And the easel? The paints? The brushes?” he asked breathlessly.

  “They’re not mine,” Churchill replied, knowing what his friend meant. “You don’t need to worry, Charlie. This is my cousin’s house. She’s a painter. She’s allowing me to stay in her studio while I recover from my duel with a Chrysler DeSoto.”

  For a week, Chaplin visited his friend every day, staying for several hours each time. Churchill painted a portrait of him. The left-handed man painted with his right hand, as his left had been injured in the accident. Chaplin said he thought true art was made in this way, namely from a lack, and judged the result to be “terribly beautiful”. Churchill wrote to his wife that he had never laughed so heartily in all his life. If Mr Chaplin should ever find himself in trouble, “I will stage a coup if necessary and lead the Royal Navy in to get him out.” Joy was a raw material that the British Empire depended upon as much as coal, rubber and tea.

  19

  Chaplin’s Virtue. That was the title Chaplin wanted, Josef Melzer writes. As naive as it might sound, as he approached death he was keen to gather “arguments for God’s grace”.

  At one point during the interview, in the middle of another subject entirely, he asked: “Do you believe, Monsieur Melzer…and please tell me the truth now…do you believe…that God in heaven has watched any of my films?”

  Melzer relates this story in an afterword to the second edition of his book. We shouldn’t forget, he says, justifying the delay, that the first edition was published just after Chaplin’s death, and Chaplin’s reputation as an artist had suffered hugely after his last films. A lot of critics denied that silent film had any real artistic merit, seeing it merely as a kind of prehistory, in the same way Commedia dell’arte had been a kind of prehistory to Shakespeare’s plays. A few said that, when viewed at a distance, it was clear that Buster Keaton, W.C. Fields, Harold Lloyd, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy or, later, the Marx Brothers, were not only on a par with Chaplin, who had been idolised for far too long, but even ranked above him. And unlike him, they had secured themselves and their genre from the sound film with great dignity – and without embarrassments like A Countess from Hong Kong – or had made the move into sound with confidence.

  Melzer was cut to the quick, he says, by Billy Wilder’s review of Chaplin’s autobiography, and by the memory of how Chaplin reacted when they talked about it: he seemed hurt by it in a way Melzer had not thought possible – after all, it had happened four years previously. It was a hatchet job, not a critique, and it was aimed at Charlie Chaplin himself, not at the book; you could sense a degree of contempt and hatred behind it against which fame, works, and even arrogance were no defence. Most of all, Chaplin was hurt to find that Wilder had sniffed out his own fears with the instinct of an inquisitor. It was as if Wilder had stepped straight out of his nightmares and tattooed the black dog’s bark onto his forehead with a red-hot needle:

  “Chaplin was a giant, as long as he played his silent little tramp. As soon as he opened his mouth, painful banalities came out…He was like a child of eight writing lyrics for Beethoven’s Ninth…With all the erudition of a Reader’s Digest subscriber, he threw big words around: socialism, citizens of the world, universal brotherhood… It’s enough to make you weep: a thoroughgoing genius leaves his familiar territory and makes a fool of himself – as if Michelangelo had climbed down from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to put on ice-skates and dance with Sonja Henie.”

  “It was not a time,” Melzer writes, “when naivety was a valued quality in an artist.” He didn’t want to compromise Chaplin, and so he’d left the story that follows out of the first edition of his book – although it is where the title, Chaplin’s Virtue, comes from. He feared his protagonist’s thoughts might come across as ridiculous, and be made more ridiculous by being merely set down in words – without looking into Chaplin’s eyes as he spoke, without following his gestures, sensing his enthusiasm, experiencing the physicality that still spoke volumes even in his old age.

  Now (this was ten years later), people had stopped trying to diminish Chaplin’s genius, and only the ever-dull cynics would mock his naivety.

  When Chaplin spoke about the feelings that governed him during his work, his words had all the fervour of a mystic who has experienced a divine revelation.

  Once he said: “Picasso didn’t believe in Him, but he was still sure there was at least one of his paintings hanging in heaven…I’m sure He won’t have seen all my films, that would be too much to ask…

  It would be enough for me if He’d watched The Kid…no, The Gold Rush, what do you think? What would you advise him, Monsieur Melzer? Einstein would tell Him to watch City Lights – that much I know. If it was Limelight, I’d want to re-cut a few scenes first, take out a few altogether, if possible…”

  The whole interview stretched over five long working days, Melzer writes; and Chaplin was never as serious as he was in this particular half-hour. As if it were the last thing he wanted to say in his life – half speaking to this world, and half to the next.

  He returned once more to the episode in the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles in February 1927, when he and Churchill had formed their alliance against the black dog and the thirteen-year-old Sarah had come to join them because she couldn’t sleep. Churchill had meant to compliment him in front of his daughter when he said Chaplin could imitate anyone in the world. At Sarah’s request, he had played her father, and played him so well that she was torn between delight and horror, and cried out, “More! More!” – loudly at first, laughing, then becoming ever more quiet and serious, until finally she put her hands over her eyes and started shaking her head.

  “Shall we ask Mr Chaplin if he can do someone else for us?” Churchill asked his daughter.

  “Who?” she said.

  “You think of someone! Someone you and Mr Chaplin both know.”
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  “I don’t know anyone, Pomp.”

  “Would you like him to do the American president?”

  “I don’t know him.”

  “The king?”

  That didn’t particularly interest her.

  “Ebenezer Scrooge?”

  That was silly, he didn’t exist, he was made up.

  “Should he play the Tramp?”

  “But he is the Tramp, Pomp.”

  “No, Sarah, he’s Mr Charles Chaplin.”

  “I really can’t think of anyone.”

  “Well, I can think of someone!” Churchill cried out. “Shall we ask him if he can play you, Sarah?”

  That made them all laugh – Sarah, her father, and Chaplin – and Sarah said: “He can’t do that, Pomp, he’s much too old.”

  “He could play you as you’ll be twenty-five years from now,” her father said.

  She didn’t want that.

  And then, said Chaplin fifty years later, Sarah made a remarkable suggestion.

  He should play himself, she said.

  It reminded him of Eva Lester and her theory that an artist deceived God with his art. He thought to himself: I am myself, as God made me, but the Tramp is me as I have made me, and the Tramp is better, and that is my deception. Lita’s lawyers may be scoundrels, but only because they’re exaggerating; at bottom, they’re right. I am what they say I am: vain, selfish, avaricious, domineering, brutal, reckless, spiteful, lecherous. But I created someone who is better than me. And therein lies my virtue.

  “I can’t,” he said. “I can’t play myself. And in any case it’s quite enough that I am who I am. The fewer people see me at it, the better.”

  Churchill was amused. But Sarah gave him another look, which made him believe that in his face she could read the thoughts he hadn’t put into words; that she could see him as he really was, without him playing himself; and that she had already had thoughts similar to his own.

  To Josef Melzer, he said: “A life full of vice, and only a single virtue.” That was why he wanted Melzer to call his book Chaplin’s Virtue.

  “I’m not an idiot, as Mr Wilder believes me to be, and I’m not naive, I’m not even happy. Only a happy idiot can maintain his naivety over a whole lifetime. Everyone else lays it aside eventually, or loses it. Most people grow stubborn and angry about it. Better never to have been naive. My brother Syd and I never had the opportunity to be. Happily. Or unhappily.”

  This quote ends Melzer’s afterword to the second edition of his book.

  PART THREE

  20

  Clementine Churchill’s concern was for her husband; she was “resigned to living with it”, as I read in the pages from her diary that have been preserved. It was a concern that often “took an almost detective-like attention”, though it didn’t make her “feel guilty”. She had always been aware, she said, that Winston was “driven”, and that any attempt at actively looking after him would therefore have no effect; it would merely be found tiresome. She saw her task as “sweeping the path, putting up warning signs, padding the sharp corners”, and above all, “preparing myself and the family for catastrophe”. She looked into her husband’s heart, and although she saw the lust for life that was as much admired as it was vilified, and meant every newspaper profile described him as a “Renaissance man”, she saw an aversion to life lurking alongside it, and she knew it was no less powerful than its sparkling counterpart. And in any case: who could promise that this “drive” would exert a stronger force over her husband than his destructive powers? “He doesn’t fear death,” she wrote. “Sometimes he desires it. He would swallow it like a tablet.” The thought that he might take his own life had been with her ever since they were married. She was prepared at all times to receive the news.

  Her concern for her son, however, did make her feel guilty. He clearly drank too much. He had started drinking at the age of fifteen. His parents hadn’t exactly been guiding stars. After Stan Carrick, Winston’s chauffeur, had pulled Randolph out of the gutter one night a hundred yards from their London flat, dragged him home and took a beating for his pains, Clementine had started to avoid drinking alcohol in Randolph’s company. She fell silent when he appeared; she looked to one side or up or down and arranged things so she would never be alone in a room with him. Winston didn’t see any harm in his son’s “excess”; on the contrary, he would clear his diary for a night of excess with him – Champagne, brandy, whisky, tobacco.

  A friend warned him that he had spoiled Randolph rotten as a child, and now those pigeons would come home to roost. Winston didn’t share his opinion. “Young people,” he liked to say, “do what they want. The only time a parent really has control over their children is before they are born. After that, their nature develops inexorably, one step at a time.” He encouraged – or, as the same friend put it, forced – Randolph to be his comrade, his confidant, his sidekick; when he went to meet the great and the good, he brought Randolph along. And he didn’t tell him to keep his mouth shut. Randolph was to speak up whenever he thought he had something to contribute to the conversation. And so he did, in a loud, clear voice – which sounded a little too tyrannical to some people’s ears.

  Diana, two years older than her brother, was the “settling-in child”. When I read this expression and saw what it meant, a shudder ran through me, and I skipped to the end of her story: “Puppy Kitten”, as she called herself in her childhood, took her own life at the age of fifty-four, having worked for the Samaritans and devoted a great deal of time to people contemplating suicide. But then her backache returned, and one night it became unbearable. What her father called the “black dog”, she called her “backache”. “Puppy Kitten hurts here, and here, and all the way up here!” she had cried as a child when she wanted someone to rub her back, and when she was sad her father would ask: “Does Puppy Kitten have backache?”, and he would rub her back. When she departed this world, the sun still had to rotate twice more around the earth before he followed her. From that day on, he kept his eyes on the ground, and murmured to himself over and over: “Not any more. Not any more.” When asked what he meant by this, he replied: “I’m too old to do that now. It’s too late. It’s too late even for that. One should not put it off so long.”

  The settling-in child received little attention. Diana wasn’t difficult like Randolph, or artistic and ambitious like Sarah, her father’s favourite. She was a long way from being as pretty as Sarah, whose titian-red hair made her stand out in any company. She wasn’t as clever as Mary, the youngest, nor did she have her essentially likeable personality. She drank. But unlike Sarah and Randolph, she was ashamed of it and suffered for it. She was the first in the family to use the word “addiction” in connection with alcohol. She didn’t make jokes about it like her father did – “I’m not an alcoholic: no alcoholic could drink as much as I do”. She didn’t speak in public, and avoided interviews, no matter what the subject. She doesn’t seem to have had many friends. She liked being alone – and was afraid of it at the same time. When she was alone, she drank. She would sometimes have an “attack of nerves”. These were sudden breakdowns, with no prior warning, which couldn’t be interpreted as the symptoms of any illness. She is seldom mentioned in biographies of her father, and she is the only one of Churchill’s children who doesn’t appear in his autobiographical account of the Second World War.

  William Knott, by contrast, wrote about her frequently in his letters to my father. The two of them didn’t meet very often – during the war, Diana was with the Women’s Royal Naval Service, and Knott was at her father’s side, wherever he happened to be – but a few encounters sufficed to establish a mutual sympathy. Like Mary, whom Knott only came to know later, there was nothing haughty about Diana, but unlike her she was serious and overly cautious. Still, she wasn’t a closed book, or at least she hadn’t appeared so to Knott; on the contrary, she spoke candidly to him about her parents and siblings. Diana was also the only Churchill who stayed in touch when his service c
ame to an end. Mary only made contact with him again two years after her father’s death.

  Clementine didn’t worry about her daughter Diana. In another context, she once said – and Churchill’s biographer Virginia Cowles remembers the exact wording – “One doesn’t worry about those one loves most, but about those who pose the greatest threat to one’s own wellbeing.” Worry was nothing more than “selfishness in disguise”. Diana obviously posed no such threat.

  21

  At the time of the incident I am preparing to recount, which forms the first high point in my story – Munich, April 1932 – Diana was engaged to John Milner Bailey, the son of Sir Abe Bailey, a rich South African friend of her father’s. The wedding was to take place in December. Diana was twenty-three, and John thirty-two. It wasn’t that the two of them had had no choice in the matter – there had been no agreements made behind their backs; they had been spoken to quite openly, individually as well as together – the families had merely “suggested” the match. Diana and John hardly knew each other; she had not impressed him, nor he her. They said as much in the first words they exchanged in front of their parents, having taken a walk together in the park at Chartwell at the latter’s request. On their return, they both described the atmosphere between them as neutral. Winston argued that this was the ideal basis for a fruitful marriage: if a husband and wife had a long, intense relationship, and were passionately in love before their marriage, then the cooling-off period would begin with the wedding. All their lives, the marriage would have a stale aspect, a sense of dissatisfaction provoked by the memory of the time before. But for them, love and passion would flourish in the same ground at the same time.