He asked the bartender for another sheet of paper. Described the woman’s scent, which most likely came from her perfume, but awoke in him the memory of leather; she had smelled of leather, a sharp background note of leather. He didn’t believe she was Han-nelore. She hadn’t spoken because she wasn’t German and couldn’t put on a German accent and had a completely different voice. There had been fear in Hannelore’s voice, he thought he remembered – and he wrote that down as well – the kind of fear that shoots through you when you’ve done something momentous from which there is no way back, something that will bring about your own annihilation. She had spoken no more than four or five sentences on the phone, and from the first to the second and the third the fear had crept into her voice and gradually taken possession of it, first suppressing her initial assertiveness and then changing it into a childish, pleading anxiety; the final words had been spoken tremulously, and in the end she had been close to tears. He had been spellbound by this emotional rollercoaster, which had spanned so few syllables – that was the only reason, if he was honest with himself, that he had agreed to meet her in the bistro on Wilshire Boulevard. Had Hannelore been coerced – forced, even – to speak to him on the phone? Was somebody hiding behind her voice? Was the German accent, or the imitation of a German accent, an intentional signal? Was it supposed to hint at which way the wind was blowing? Did somebody believe the conversation would be recorded and analysed afterwards? Had they taken that into account? It was well known that the industrialist Francis W. Purkey had his phone tapped to record all his calls: it was a machine that might have come from a utopian film, which took up a large table in Purkey’s office and came on automatically as soon as the telephone rang. Purkey had bought it when one of his children was kidnapped. Chaplin had a wooden model of the machine made for Modern Times, but then decided not to place it in the office of the steel company’s boss, out of respect.
He wrote everything down: his memories, his observations, his thoughts, his associations, his speculations. He wrote and wrote and wrote. He wrote for an hour, ordering a second glass of white wine, and then a third. Without being asked, the bartender handed him another sheet of paper.
He asked the bartender if he knew the man and the woman, or had at least seen them before. He hadn’t. He asked what the two of them had looked like in his memory, which was an hour old. The bartender gave a brief description that tallied with his own. He added the observation that the man stooped a little; he had a slight suggestion of a hunchback. He’d noticed that as the man left the bar. The bartender didn’t ask why his customer wanted to know all this. Hollywood was too close by for that. Bartenders in this neigh-bourhood weren’t surprised by anything. The stoic, tired eyelids told him that, and he knew very well it would be understood. And it was understood. Chaplin noted down this observation, too.
On his way home in the taxi, he had a pleasant sense of fulfilment. The knowledge that such a feeling wasn’t appropriate when he had just been informed of his impending death – death by his own hand, at that – couldn’t drive it away.
33
During their first meeting in Los Angeles, Churchill and Chaplin had agreed to develop a story for a picture together – a picture about Napoleon. On the thorny descent through Carbon Canyon, with torn trouser legs below them, and above them the world’s white hot umbilical cord, they batted one scene after another back and forth between them. The hero should be the Emperor’s doppelganger. He turns up in Paris when the real Napoleon is far away in St Helena. He is admired and celebrated, and the people want to see him back on the throne. He doesn’t know what he’s doing; he tries to explain who he really is. Nobody listens to him. In the end, he doesn’t know who he is any more either. He takes his own life. There is an official period of state mourning. By this point the real Napoleon has managed to escape. He returns to France. But the people point and laugh at him, as if he were the Emperor’s monkey. He orders the people who mock him to be executed. Then they just laugh at him all the more. When nobody believes in him, he loses all power. He ends up as a clochard, playing the great Napoleon for the amusement of his homeless comrades under the bridges of Paris.
Nothing came of the project. But Chaplin was still preoccupied with the motif of the doppelganger. The idea of playing two roles at once in a film held a hypnotic attraction for him. The catalyst for his first thoughts about The Great Dictator, in which he finally used this motif, had been less his political concerns than the aesthetic challenge of playing against himself: using the old craft of pantomime and the first words he would ever speak on film, “to let the one annihilate the other”. Roland Totheroh, his faithful cameraman, who had worked on every film since the start of the United Artists era, said afterwards that nobody had talked about politics during the filming. “If Charlie had looked like Stalin,” he said, to disillusion people who regarded the Chaplin of this period as a political artist first and foremost, “the film would have gone up against Communism. If he’d looked like the pope, it would have become a campaign against Catholicism. But he happened to look like Hitler.”
Did he really look like him?
Everyone always makes reference to their little moustaches, particularly in caricatures. But apart from that? If we look at photos from the period, random street scenes, whether in Germany, Aus-tralia or America, we will notice that the men are wearing hats, most of them bowlers (like the Tramp), and a lot of them have that ominous toothbrush moustache – more often a rectangle like Hitler’s; less often a trapezium like the Tramp’s. The intense discussion that took place about whether Hitler had copied this emblem from the once-admired clown then appears absurd – millions of other men would have to be subject to the same suspicion. All the more surprising, then, that long before Chaplin himself decided to play the German dictator, the public had come up with the idea themselves.
There are two incidents I would like to mention.
The first story comes from Charlie Chaplin Jr. In his memoirs of his father (I own only the German edition: Mein Vater Charlie Chaplin, Diana Verlag, Konstanz 1961) he writes that in the mid-thirties, his father was sent an article from a French newspaper, with a translation enclosed, which said that Hitler had banned Chaplin films in Germany. And why? Because in the opinion of leading German physiognomists, the Tramp bore too much resemblance to the Führer. (Actually – and this is my own research – the German Sixth Provision on the Implementation of the Moving Picture Law of 3 July 1935 contains a paragraph on Charlie Chaplin, with the customary reference to his supposed Jewishness and the statement that henceforth his films may not be shown in German cinemas.) The French paper, I have also discovered, was the Paris-Midi; it featured a bold headline: “In his next film, Chaplin will appear without his legendary moustache, so that he is not mistaken for Hitler.” The story that follows is both entirely fabricated and clairvoyant. How the author – one Gaston Thierry – happened upon it, nobody knows. Chaplin later tried several times to get in touch with him, but to no avail. Charlie Chaplin, Thierry wrote, was currently – this was 1935! – working on an anti-Hitler propaganda film. It contained the following central scenes: the Tramp, with his little moustache as usual, enters a barber shop. He looks at pictures of famous personalities. “He stops in front of Hitler’s picture. He touches his own moustache. Filled with a sudden rage, he snatches up a razor, shaves it off with a single stroke…and leaves again”. And Thierry assures readers: “Chaplin plays the scene with such expression that the meaning of the gesture cannot be misunderstood.” He claims to have it on good authority that “even though the film may well be banned in Germany, incurring significant financial losses for Chaplin, he refuses to cut the scene at any cost”. Not a word of it true!
The whole thing is uncanny. And Chaplin found it uncanny, too. In 1935 he had not even considered making a film anything like this. But – his son remembers – from then on “the idea began to take shape within him”. Chaplin also tried to find out who had sent him the article, together with t
he English translation – but to no avail. Forty years on, thinking about it still made him feel queasy. He told Josef Melzer that in hindsight he felt like Macbeth: the witches had prophesied what would become of him, and he then put all his effort into becoming that very thing. Chaplin had put all his effort into transforming Gaston Thierry’s brazen lies into reality.
The second incident took place the following year. The idea of playing Hitler had taken hold in Chaplin, “it was multiplying within me”. He was spending most of his time outside Hollywood, avoiding his usual circle of friends – “the same voices, the same thoughts”. He wanted unfamiliar voices and unfamiliar thoughts. And he found them, as I have said, in Carmel-by-the-Sea, south of San Francisco. One of his new friends – he couldn’t remember who it was – suggested giving Hitler a twin brother, a layabout, whom the Führer locked up in a concentration camp as soon as he came to power, to get him out of the way. And this twin brother, the Tramp, who else – this was the plot they sketched out during a jolly evening together – gets taken along when the prisoners stage a breakout. They hide in a laundry room overnight, find SS uniforms there, change their clothes and march through the twilit city, where the Tramp is taken for the Führer. The people cheer him and carry him to the Reich Chancellery on their shoulders. When the real Führer gets back from his holiday, everyone laughs at him, and eventually they put him away in a madhouse. The way he talks seems mad to them – although it’s no different to what he was saying before. Chaplin improvised scenes all evening. There was a lot of laughter. He woke up in the night, certain in the knowledge that this wasn’t it. In the morning, he decided to seek out different friends once more. He went to stay with Ben and Ethel Eichengreen, both fervent Marxists and members of the Communist Party.
I should place a large question mark over the following story; it is fed by only one source, and, as I have mentioned, most exegetes of Chaplin’s work and life regard this source as dubious: I am referring to the Interview With the Tramp by Erica Southern, alias Lilian Bosshart.
One evening Chaplin was at Ben and Ethel Eichengreen’s, in their quaint, book-lined little house between Carmel and Monterey. While the two of them prepared dinner, he walked down to the shore in the last of the light, where there was a group of redwoods – “the watchmen at the end of the West,” as Ethel called them. And there he saw a figure walking along the waterline, a long way off, dressed in black – a long coat, a hat. It was a man, a rabbi who looked like he’d come from the film Die Stadt ohne Juden; he walked towards him across the pebbly beach, spread his arms wide and called out: “Mr Chaplin, Mr Chaplin, what luck, meeting you here! They say you come here every evening to bid the sun goodnight. I’ve been waiting for you.” He had a long, dark beard, ear-locks, and glasses with thick lenses, his eyes unreal behind them. He grasped Chaplin’s hands and kissed them and said: “I thank you, Mr Chaplin, and all my friends thank you as well, for making a film about that fiend, and showing him to the world as he really is: evil.” Chaplin asked how the man knew he wanted to make such a film. Everyone knew, the man replied, every decent person in the world. And there was something else everyone knew: he would be wonderful as a Jew who vanquished the great enemy, the evil Haman. “So I’m going to play a Jew, am I? Well, I didn’t know that,” he said. “But of course you do, of course you know that!” the man cried out. “What sort of Jew will I play then?” “A little man, a simple man, a weak man, the weakest of them all.” “And he will vanquish the fiend?” “Because in his heart he is a Golem.” And then the man walked back down to the water’s edge. His nephew was waiting, he called out, and he couldn’t keep him waiting any longer. But there was nobody there. The sun had gone down, and Chaplin was standing under the gigantic trees. He expected to wake up. But he hadn’t been dreaming. He walked back to Ben and Ethel’s low, thatched house. Up on the coast road, the cold evening air made him quicken his pace. And again he had the feeling that he must put all his effort into transforming a prophecy into the truth – the prophecy of a rabbi on the shore of the Pacific Ocean. He told his friends about the encounter, and Ben said it was a serviceable idea for a story. “That business with Hitler’s twin brother was always nonsense!” And Ethel agreed with her husband: “The Tramp is a Jew, that’s what everyone thinks anyway. Play Hitler, and a Jew who looks like Hitler! It’ll be a hoot!”
From that moment on, he worked on the story as we know it, first as a hazy notion, then as an idea, and later as the script he wrote with Dan James (he took particular delight in this work; the young, gifted James managed to awaken in him a desire to write dialogue, and he had already been prepared to throw out all his theories about silent film). Then he worked on it behind the camera and in front of the camera, with the largest team he would ever command. And finally he worked on it by day with Willard Nico at the cutting table, and by night with the composer Meredith Willson at the cello and piano. He was possessed by this work. As Charlie Chaplin Jr. tells us: the film was both a blessing and a heavy burden for his father. It was all so easy for him, and so hard at the same time. Day after day, he looked forward to nothing more than the work, but also to nothing more than finally, finally being finished with it. “What must be must be,” he said every morning and every evening. When Charlie Jr. once asked him what he meant by that, his gruff reply to the twelve-year-old was that he didn’t know himself; something in his head was speaking this sentence to him, some days a hundred times, others a thousand times.
Charlie, doubled – that was the fundamental stroke of genius behind the film: Charlie as a ludicrous dictator and as a Jewish barber. That was a slap in the face for the fiend. Only one other person hit him as hard: Winston Churchill – though he didn’t use the weapons of the clown.
34
Then Kono resigned.
One morning there was an envelope on Chaplin’s breakfast plate. It contained a card with a hand-written message on it:
Dear Mr Chaplin,
I request release from your service, and your friendship.
Kono Toraichi
It was half past four. At this hour, everyone in the house was usually asleep: Paulette and her maid, the cook, the butler, Frank Kawa and Kono. Chaplin would breakfast alone, noting down the day’s agenda on a sheet of paper. Filming was to begin in a month’s time. At six, Kawa and Kono would fetch him from the kitchen. This time Kawa came alone.
At first, according to Chaplin’s son Charlie Jr., his father took the letter for a joke. His first thought was that somebody had crept into the house overnight and laid the card on his plate. His second thought was that Kono had learned how to be funny. This message is real was only his third thought. Kono was humourless. It was a characteristic that Chaplin particularly valued in his major-domo. Kono never laughed. Even when he laughed, he never laughed. They never laughed when they were discussing a new gag. If the gag was good, Kono would say: “People will laugh.” Nothing more was to be expected, not from Kono and not from the gag.
Kono had been in Chaplin’s service for eighteen years. He was as much a part of his life as Syd was. The advantage of Kono over Syd was that Chaplin worried very often and very deeply about the latter’s state of mind, but never about the former’s. He knew nothing about Kono’s private life, if there even was such a thing. And he felt no regret about that. And he knew – he thought he knew – that Kono didn’t expect it, either. Kono was married. When and where and how this marriage had taken place, nobody could imagine. Kono was always there. Sometimes Chaplin didn’t need him, and then he wasn’t there. He had entered his service at the age of seventeen, as a chauffeur. A Japanese immigrant, he had learned English in a remarkably short space of time, first fluently, then flawlessly, and finally with absolute mastery, commanding an unparalleled wealth of words and imagery. He had a Shakespeare quotation for every trick life played on you; he could recite long passages from Moby Dick and dictate letters in Chaplin’s style. He was promoted to private secretary, and nominated himself as a bodyguard. (On certain occasio
ns, about which his boss did not wish to be more precisely informed, he carried a gun, and when asked whether he would ever use it, he nodded, in his incomparably succinct manner). Long afterwards, Chaplin would say in a radio interview: “He was my Man Friday”. He was ashamed of having said it – he called the broadcaster and asked them to edit out the passage. The producer promised, but didn’t keep his word. Kono was also Chaplin’s muse, “the only ideal muse”, as he recalled. He listened without speaking a word; nothing could be gleaned from his expression. He was another very private private secretary. And he was his friend. Or rather: he had been his friend for a single night – in May 1931, in Juan-les-Pins, when the master looked after the servant, who had been struck down with ptomaine poisoning. The master pressed his servant’s hands and turned his eyeballs upwards and prayed aloud: “Let my friend live, please, please, let my friend live!” When the servant woke from a long, deep sleep, and the worst was over, he found the master still sitting at his bedside. He clutched his master’s hands and said it had been the word “friend” that had given him the strength to survive. Later the two of them crafted a scene out of this moment. For a talking picture. Some words do not diminish a creation. Three pages of dialogue. They were waiting in the safe, to be used at some point.
Paulette liked Kono. But he didn’t like her. He hadn’t liked Lita, either. But she had given him good reason for that. She had slandered him, claiming he was a spy from a Japanese film company. She tried to ban Chaplin from discussing any ideas with Kono. “After all, any financial damage would affect me, too!” Paulette, by contrast, took every opportunity to say how much she valued Kono. And she meant it. She had never met a better organised person. It was just that she wanted to run the household herself. Kono seldom took an active role in managing the house, the kitchen, garden or garage, but whenever questions arose – whether the lobby should be repainted or modern steel pans bought, or a different company used to clean the carpets, or a new car or a new tennis net purchased – then he had the final say. But Paulette did what she did and didn’t ask him. And for Kono, that was reason enough to resign.
Two Gentlemen on the Beach Page 15