So the method of the clown consists of nothing more than making a person seem ridiculous to himself – with the aim of making him feel alienated from himself. All alone, it’s impossible for a person to laugh at himself, because laughter always means laughter at someone else’s expense. He has to split himself into a self that laughs, and another that is laughed at. That’s the aim of the method.
From Adorno’s biography we know that he was occasionally haunted by the black dog. His essay doesn’t mention the practical application of the method of the clown – lying face-down on a sheet of paper, turning like the hand of a clock and writing a letter to oneself in a spiral. He was ashamed. At some point, so people say, his housekeeper caught him doing it.
PART FOUR
31
In May 1939 Chaplin received a phone call from a woman who introduced herself as “Hannelore” and spoke with a pronounced, German-sounding accent (Chaplin failed to specify later whether it really was a German accent, or if he just thought it was). She said she wanted to meet him – it was purely in his own interest, not hers. Normally Chaplin managed to deflect these approaches. Normally he didn’t even answer the phone: at the studio, he left it to the telephonist, Miss Nicolaisen, or his secretary, Mrs Pryor, and at home he let Kono Toraichi decide whether a call should be put through to him or not. Women – it was always women – somehow got hold of his number on a regular basis, and he had already changed all his phone numbers twice, which involved a lot of tiresome bureaucracy.
He was on his own in the house. The chauffeur had taken Pau-lette and the children, Charles Jr. and Sydney, to the Griffith Park Zoo to see the Siberian tiger which was on loan from San Diego Zoo for a year. And, probably coincidentally, his staff all had the afternoon off or were running errands. He didn’t know why everyone was out at the same time. Half an hour previously the house had been filled with noise, like it always was when the children – who wouldn’t be children for much longer – were visiting their father: laughter, games, horseplay, the table piled far too high with nothing but their favourite foods, so Lita would have no excuse to complain to the child welfare service. Then suddenly, there was silence. Everyone had gone out – coincidentally or not – and he was alone. The telephone rang. And although he couldn’t really tell, because he had no ear for the German language, he thought he could hear that the accent was put on.
The woman gave him the name of a bistro in Westwood. She would be there in an hour, and she’d wait for him; they only spoke French there. What did she mean by that, he tried to ask, but she had already hung up.
He didn’t tell anyone where he was going. He could have called a friend, or his brother. He could have left a note on the hall table. It would have been the responsible thing to do. There had been an incident six months before, while he, Paulette and a few friends were staying near Carmel. They had gone on an excursion to Point Lobos, to admire the wild Californian coastline. There had been ten of them. They took three cars. They parked near the cliffs, looked down at the choppy waters of the Pacific Ocean and drank champagne. Suddenly a man stepped out of the bushes – a madman, as the police later tried to reassure them. He bowed to Paulette with the words, “Please, Miss Goddard, step aside,” greeted Dan James and Tim Durant, who were standing next to Paulette, with smiles and nods, then pulled a small dagger from the inside pocket of his trench coat and strode towards Chaplin with a stiff-legged gait, the weapon in his outstretched arm, pale and dark at once, a picture-book bogeyman. Everyone froze – apart from Durant, who twisted the man’s arm out of its socket, threw him to the ground, put his boot on his neck and pressed his head into the sandy soil. The man didn’t put up any resistance. He allowed himself to be tied up with his own belt and those of the men present, and even helped them do it, smiling though his face was racked with pain, and nodding again, this time through tears, to Paulette. Then Durant, James and the other men – with the exception of Chaplin – bundled him into a car and laid him face-down on the back seat. Fat David Saddik sat on him, bending his arm upwards and holding it tight, like a lever for causing pain. One of Durant’s friends transported them into town; the others followed. They handed the man over to the sheriff – amid much laughter. Chaplin asked the police officers to handle the matter discreetly, and not to pass anything on to the press. He was afraid another, less friendly madman might get the same idea and carry it out in a less amateurish fashion. He took it for granted that his friends would keep quiet about the incident. But the day after next, the Los Angeles Daily News led with the story that Mr Charles Chaplin had narrowly escaped an assassination attempt. The paper even knew the culprit’s motives (plural!). There were certain groups, it said, who had taken against the fact that Chaplin was planning to make a movie ridiculing the German Chancellor Adolf Hitler. Chaplin was put through to the paper’s editor-in-chief and bawled him out over the phone; how had he come by this absurd claim? Mr Wilson replied that a serious journalist never revealed his sources, and hung up. At that point, Chaplin had in fact begun preparations for the film he would eventually call The Great Dictator. He had personally shaken the hand of everyone involved in the project before they started work, looked into their eyes and ordered them not to breathe a word about it, to anyone at all, not their husband, their wife, their lover, their best friend. One of them must have talked. From then on, the studio was besieged by reporters, and finally Chaplin put out a press release in which he informed people that he was “entertaining the idea of producing a film about the current political situation in Europe, particularly in Germany” – Hitler and the Nazis. He didn’t mention that he was intending to speak out against their barbarism. In the New York Times, however, the film critic Louella Parsons still announced, without a question mark: “Chaplin’s next film is a burlesque on Hitler!” The Denver Post and the Detroit Times said something similar. The German consul, Dr Georg Gyssling, sent a letter of protest to the president of the United States, intimating that such a film would sorely damage the good relations between the German Reich and the USA. William Dudley Pelley, the leader of the Silver Shirt Union, the American equivalent of the Nazis’ paramilitary Sturmabteilung, wrote an article attempting to stir up hatred against Hollywood’s Jews, and repeating claims from the Stürmer and other Nazi newspapers that Chaplin was a Jew whose real name was Karl Thronstein. Jesse Maugh, one of the porters at the Chaplin Studio, stood speechless at the gates one morning: somebody had emptied a load of slurry outside. There was a letter from an anonymous reader in the Chicago Tribune, which said that if Chaplin really did try playing his dirty Jewish games with the highest representative of the German Reich, it would be “his own personal downfall”. Friends urged Chaplin to press charges against the newspaper for printing this filth; the writer was obviously making a play on one of Hitler’s speeches, where he spoke of the “downfall of the Jewish race”, meaning its extermination. Chaplin declined. “This is America,” he said. “America is a free, democratic country. People are free to say what they like here, and other people are free to ignore it.” All the same, the Los Angeles Police Department put Chaplin under protection. Two plain-clothes officers followed him wherever he went. When he was at home, they sat in their Ford 35 at the bottom of Summit Drive, smoking and watching the villa’s driveway – and being watched themselves, by nosy parkers and tourists. Only when Chaplin threatened to take them to court were the officers stood down.
His friends were surprised. “Aren’t you afraid?” asked Dan James, who was helping with the screenplay.
“No,” Chaplin replied. And he was surprised at himself – surprised that working on material that was closer to reality than any of his previous pictures could lift him so far away from this reality. He felt like he was living in a fairy tale.
He called a taxi – not a car from GY Taxi Service as usual, but from another company he’d never used before; he didn’t give his name. He was phoning from a call box, he said – without having been asked – and he’d be waiting on the street. He put o
n light, loose clothes, a hat and sunglasses, went out to the street and stood a few paces down from the driveway. He had “such a feeling” – a feeling of adventure – but perhaps, he admitted in hindsight, he was reading more into it than there had actually been at the time. Perhaps he had just been curious.
He was not satisfied with his life.
Which didn’t mean he was dissatisfied with himself; he certainly wasn’t starting to doubt himself or suffering from the familiar, dreaded visions of failure and capitulation – no, he was dissatisfied because he thought himself capable of more than being funny and producing comic films. He felt he had something else to give. Not something greater – when he had finished this film, people would see that few things were greater – something different. He wanted to write a work on economics. He had a notebook full of ideas. He had been interested in issues of economics and equity for a long time. His work on Modern Times had been the fruits of his interest, not the catalyst for it, and at first, the fact that the Tramp infuriated both capitalists and communists had been a bitter pill to him. But he had united these irreconcilable camps in their outrage at the very appearance of this man on film – the weakest, the quietest, the most deserving of sympathy. And for him, that pointed to the possibility that the method of the clown could also heal the soul of society.
He had shown the world the twisted nature of an economy that makes humans into the slaves of machines; the Tramp had countered the madness with madness, he had twisted the view of reality by those few degrees necessary to show reality exactly as it was. During his visit to Berlin, which was now over ten years ago, he had discussed economics with Albert Einstein, including the fascinating and simple programme of a man called Silvio Gesell, who was against ground rent and interest, because these had an inherent tendency to redistribute wealth from the bottom to the top, and thus to perpetuate injustice and make the world ever more ugly. (He hadn’t read anything by Gesell, but he had listened very closely as the people he usually listened to, Herbert Oakley and Ben Eichengreen, one an anarchist, the other a Marxist, talked about his theories.) Einstein had given him the book he had just finished reading: The Theory of Economic Development by Joseph Schumpeter (a German edition, unfortunately), and had written a dedication in it: “For Charlie Chaplin, the economist”. That gave him something to think about. He wrote a short story. The first he had ever written. He felt like a young poet, like Keats must have felt, or Shelley, their genius sensing that they didn’t have much time left. As he closed his hand around the fountain pen, he felt his heartbeat in his fingers. The story was called “Rhythm”. In April of the same year it was translated and published in the French magazine Cinemond. It was set in the Spanish civil war. A man is to be executed. The officer in charge of the firing squad is a friend of the condemned man; until the very last he hopes for news of a reprieve. Finally he has no choice: he has to give the order, which consists of four rhythmical instructions: “Attention! … Shoulder arms! … Present arms!… Fire!” Just before the last word, he hears footsteps: it’s the messenger who will save his friend. He shouts: “Stop!” Too late. Following habit – following the rhythm – the soldiers fire. A literary critic (one of the most respected critics, as Chaplin later heard, though he couldn’t remember the name) described the story as a masterpiece, worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as the best. That gave him something to think about. Genius, he thought he remembered reading in something by Edgar Allen Poe, revealed itself in everything: if a poetic genius turned his attention to music, he would also be a musical genius; a musical genius would become an artistic genius, an artistic genius would become a political genius, et cetera. That also gave him something to think about. He was certain he possessed genius, and he was moved and humbled by this fact. The high knocking in his breast that heralded something new, big, different, made him glad and curious – and dissatisfied. Putting together the script for this film about the dictator of a fictitious country had taken more energy than any material he had developed before, but the effort had not been painful. He knew it would be his greatest film; it would be the greatest work of cinematic art there had ever been. When this film was finished, he wouldn’t make another for a long time – maybe never again. He would start a new life in a new art form – or become an academic, or a politician, a rhetorician, a tribune, a Demosthenes, a Cicero, a Dante.
He was not satisfied. In an expectant way, like a man about to marry, he was not satisfied. Maybe the phone call was the first push towards this new, great, different future – and maybe later he would say: it all started with a phone call in May 1939…
He was right.
32
It was unlikely that anyone recognised him. Nothing about his head looked like the Tramp. His hair was white, and without make-up his cheeks were starting to look a little slack. The sunglasses didn’t suggest the wearer was trying to hide behind them; May afternoons in Los Angeles were very bright. And most men wore hats. In any case, he had discovered that people are easier to recognise by the way they move than by their faces. Nothing about his gait looked like the Tramp. When he entered the bistro on Wilshire Boulevard, he pursed his lips slightly, as the Tramp had never done, and mimicked the gait of Douglas Fairbanks, as he had got into the habit of doing recently, both consciously and unconsciously – he missed Doug. He hadn’t seen him since his divorce three years previously. He no longer lived at Pickfair, and people said he wasn’t doing too well, that all he did these days was drink. Mary had stopped coming to visit as well. Everything had changed. He kept meaning to invite Doug over for an afternoon of tennis.
The bistro was dimly lit, and he couldn’t see anything. He took off the sunglasses. The L-shaped bar left just enough room to squeeze past the bar stools. Two men were standing together, talking to the bartender. They glanced at him, without interest, and went on talking. He took a seat at the bar, as far away from them as possible. The bartender walked over slowly, wiping the brass plate with his cloth as he went, and asked what he could get him, in English with a broad Californian accent – so much for only French being spoken here. He ordered a white wine. The bartender slid the customary glass of water over to him. It smelled of chlorine. Some people didn’t like the smell, but he did, though he’d never seen anyone actually drink it. Could he have a sandwich with his wine? Yes he could. Swiss cheese? Swiss cheese.
He waited. Ate his sandwich, drank his wine. Smelled the chlorine. One of the men said goodbye, and nodded to Chaplin as well. Not because he had recognised him. Because he had manners. The other flicked through the sports pages of the newspaper, the cigarette jutting from his lower jaw at a sharp angle, then he said goodbye and left as well. The bartender could read the signs; the fact that this customer had taken a seat so far back meant he didn’t want to talk. Now and then he glanced over, in case the customer wanted anything.
Chaplin waited. Waited for three quarters of an hour.
A man and a woman came into the bar. She was tall, brunette and very slender; she had put up her hair in a French roll, her face shimmered white, and she was wearing a dusky pink dress and a broad white belt with a three-pin buckle. The two of them walked over to him. The man gave him a friendly smile, held out his hand – without introducing himself – and said that unfortunately Hannelore had an urgent appointment, and she had to leave. Her lips and fingernails were the same shade of red. Avoiding his eye, she turned and left the bistro, without having said anything, without having shaken his hand. The man watched her go until she had vanished in the shimmer of the street. He said he was afraid he couldn’t stay for long, either. He was wearing a light suit with a hint of pink in it and a Stetson of the same colour, with a deep blue band. His tie was deep blue as well. His right ring finger boasted a gold ring set with an oval onyx stone. His sunglasses were pale-coloured, light enough to see the room, but dark enough to hide the characteristics of his eyes.
The man ordered an Apollinaris. Once the bartender had moved away, he said that if Chaplin didn’t ta
ke care, he would be dead in a year at most. He mustn’t interrupt – as he had mentioned, he didn’t have much time. He just had to listen. If Chaplin didn’t take care, he would commit suicide in a year at most; he would believe it was his own decision, but in truth, without realising, he would be driven to it. He had to be aware that he was dealing with people who had mastered the most subtle methods of warfare. Eliminating him was an act of warfare. That was all he had to say. He meant well. He said Chaplin could have the mineral water.
With that, the man turned and was gone. Maybe he heard the question at his back: “But why?” But probably not. It had been spoken very quietly.
Chaplin asked the bartender for a pencil and paper, and wrote down what the man had said. He could remember every word. He described the woman’s appearance, her face, her clothes, the way she walked; he did the same for the man. He described the sound of his voice: neither particularly soft, nor particularly penetrating, nor was there any discernible accent; what had struck him was the inappropriately matter-of-fact tone.
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