He put out a press release.
I wish to state that I have never wavered from my original determination to produce this picture. Any report, past, present or future to the effect that I have given up the idea, is deliberately false. I am not worried about intimidation, censorship or anything else.
(Signed: Charlie Chaplin)
It was his first public statement about The Great Dictator.
He was famous and popular. And he was famous and despised. Threatening letters arrived by the basketful. Most of the threats were directed towards “the Jew Chaplin”. The Hays Office, the US film industry’s censors, sent over a man who didn’t let Chaplin get a word in edgeways – which was saying something! – and explained in the style and tone of a man collecting mafia protection money that United Artists could save themselves a whole heap of dough if they called a halt to all work on this picture immediately, because under no circumstances – he could promise them this without having seen so much as thirty feet of film – would they permit it to be shown in an American cinema. The same day the message arrived that the Chilean government had decided to ban Chaplin’s latest film, in the belief that it was already finished. They heard similar things from Turkey and Japan and even France.
And finally the world also learned what the leader of the German Reich thought about all this: “The liberties taken by various organs whose mission is to poison the world’s well can only be classed as an illegal crime.” What might a legal crime look like, Sydney wondered.
A United Artists press office secretary and her boyfriend produced a catalogue of the insulting terms that German newspapers used to describe the boss: “Hanswurst stooge”, “Archetypal Jew”, “An actor aping psychopathic cretinism”, “Hebrew libertine”, “preposterous, glorified Galician nigger”, “The clown of an inferior people”, “a Jewish swine defiling the race”, “a Bolshevist outside of office hours”. And so on. The boyfriend came from a family of German-Jewish émigrés; he translated the expressions into English, she proudly presented the list to the boss, and the boss saw to it that she was fired within the hour.
Kawa wanted to prove he could do a good job, and he did too good a job. He answered the telephone and decided whether Mr Chaplin was available or not. When he heard a woman’s voice with a German accent, he decided against her. And he didn’t mention it to his boss. Since Kono had resigned, Kawa had started giving orders to all the staff he judged to be on his level or below. He too had watched Triumph of the Will. He only had a soft voice, but he could pull off the Führer’s tone pretty well. And it proved effective. He banned the maids from answering the phone. He also banned them from bothering Mr Chaplin. They should either let the phone ring or get Kawa, if he was there. One of the maids did allow herself to be intimidated by his tone, but only by his tone, and that didn’t last long. She spoke to her boss, who was actually the only person she answered to. Asked disingenuously if what Mr Kawa had said was alright with him. It wasn’t alright with him. He summoned Kawa and subjected him to an interrogation. Among the phone calls he had declined, had there been a woman with a German accent? Yes, there had. He must tell him word for word what she had said. Unfortunately, Kawa muttered, he hadn’t waited to hear what she said – he had hung up. He begged the boss’s forgiveness. But the boss didn’t forgive him. He yelled at the chauffeur in the dictatorial voice he had recently mastered (him too!) and made Kawa repeat after him that he was just a chauffeur, and he only had that job for as long as Chaplin saw fit, and just then he didn’t see fit, and he ordered Kawa to give him the keys for the Studebaker right that minute.
Chaplin drove to Carmel to see Ben and Ethel Eichengreen.
Forty years later, Dan James commented on Chaplin’s behaviour at that time: “Of course he had in himself some of the qualities that Hitler had. He dominated his world. He created his world. And Chaplin’s world was not a democracy, either. Charlie was the dictator of all those things.”
37
The German Wehrmacht had invaded Poland. Chaplin heard the news on the radio in Ben and Ethel’s kitchen. Ethel’s mother came from Lublin, and had come to America with her parents when she was a child. Ethel sank onto the sofa and wept. This annoyed her husband. Since she’d gone through the change, he said, she cried at the drop of a hat. He poured her a glass of water. Couldn’t he see, she wailed – and she drank, holding the glass with both hands – Hitler didn’t care about Poland, why should he, there was nothing there, he wouldn’t move into a country her grandparents had moved out of – it was about the Jews. Ha, Ben exclaimed, he liked that! She hadn’t cried when Hitler marched into Czechoslovakia or when he marched into Austria. What was so special about the Jews to make her to cry over them? Weren’t the Austrians people, too, and the Czechs? “I’m a Jew, and you’re a Jew,” said Ethel. “Everyone we know is Jewish, Herbert’s a Jew, Charlie’s a Jew. Hitler is marching against us!” Ben countered this with some kind of Marxist argument, and Hegel, and said anyway, Herbert Oakley was an anarchist, and an individual anarchist at that, so he was no use to anyone, he wasn’t loyal to a race or a religion.
Chaplin couldn’t listen. Not this time. He usually followed Ben’s speeches with devotion, even delight; Ben had given him an introduction to historical materialism and political economics, and Chaplin had nodded until his neck ached as Ben explained the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and the fetishistic nature of commodities. And he had listened spellbound when Ethel described the guys who went to the monthly meetings of the local branch of the Communist Party – obliging, sinister characters who she suspected retreated into Dostoyevsky’s Demons at night and pulled the book cover closed behind them. But this time he heard his friends’ voices as nothing more than music, and that was enough for him. With his back against the tiles of the clay stove that Ben and Ethel had built themselves (like everything else in the house), he stretched out his legs on the deep bench, and sat there like a doll. The heat made him tired and a little stupid. The two of them had always fought a running battle, but it was a battle of love between a couple wanting to keep their emotions in shape. He liked Ethel more than Ben, but only a little more. Ben was fat and his flesh sagged, while Ethel looked after herself. She kept her figure through exercise, ate plenty of vegetables, no meat, fish only if it was raw, and drank huge quantities of water. Her hair was grey, but with the vitality of a young girl’s hair. They both painted – her paintings abstract, his figurative – and that was how they made their living.
For the first time, he told them about himself. And Ben and Ethel listened, as he had listened to them. He told them everything, right from the beginning, about the telephone call from the woman with the German accent who called herself “Hannelore”; about the man and the woman in the bistro on Wilshire Boulevard; about the night-time calls; about Kono and Kawa. He also told them that someone had predicted his suicide.
To his surprise they both agreed that he needed protection. Though professional protection, by a Hollywood security firm, was not a good idea, since the liberal press had recently discovered that over sixty per cent of these companies’ employees described themselves as Nazi sympathisers, and more than a few were members of the Silver Shirts. Protection could only be guaranteed by people who shared his convictions. Without beating about the bush, there were only two organisations that could make such a guarantee and also had the necessary power: the unions, and the Kosher Nostra, the Jewish crime syndicate headed by Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky. Via Party comrades, Ethel could make contact with Harry Bridges, the head of the Longshoremen’s Union – he was a well-known anti-fascist, and he would like nothing better than an opportunity to beat up Nazis. But if tougher measures were required, it was advisable to turn to the Mobsters. Ben had it on good authority that Siegel and Lansky were already thinking about putting together an armed gang to fight American Nazis, and Bugsy Siegel made no secret of how he viewed Charlie Chaplin: he thought Chaplin was the greatest. For Mr Benjamin Hymen Siegelbaum, Mr Charles Spencer Ch
aplin was right up there with his mom and the great Yahweh.
Ben’s exaggeration made him feel better. He knew his two friends had no connections with the Union or with organised crime, nor did they know anyone who did, not even someone who knew someone who knew someone, but the fact that there might be men out there who were prepared to form a small, quick-witted army around him – that made him feel better. And it made him feel better to give his imagination free rein, and to contemplate the bloody images his mind was projecting on his inner screen with fury and pleasure and without any guilt – after all, they were images of righteous revenge, and he wouldn’t be the one in the director’s chair.
“And as regards your suicide,” said Ben, “There’s a sure-fire way of avoiding that: just don’t do it!”
That had happened in September. In December, Douglas Fairbanks died in his sleep, of a heart attack. In March of the following year, Ben Eichengreen was beaten up by three men on the beach. His wife Ethel and his friend Herbert were witnesses; they identified his attackers, but none of them were arrested. A few days later, Ben shot himself in the head.
Chaplin couldn’t – wouldn’t – go to his friend Doug’s funeral at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, or to his friend Ben’s cremation in Carmel. He didn’t have the heart to, as he confessed to Joseph Melzer. Nor did he have the heart to write to Ethel Eichengreen. He didn’t hear from her again. And he never went back to Carmel.
38
School for Clowns, Clown Town. I grew up in a town in Germany that wasn’t bombed during the Second World War. This was due – so our town chronicle says – to the number of inhabitants, which was only just over the number laid down by British Bomber Command, and so Marshall Harris showed mercy, eternal thanks be unto him. Our town is of no real historical interest, and anyone who has been to Dinkelsbühl, Rothenberg ob der Tauber, Bamberg or Wittenberg with their medieval old towns will be disappointed if they expect something similar here. But ours was the only town in Germany – no, for a long time the only town in the world – where there was a school for clowns. The school was founded in 1849, as an expression of repressed anger after the revolution had been crushed. At that time it was called the German Academy for Illusionists and Comedians. From the outset, it was a private enterprise financed by fees and donations. At some point it was granted permission to award diplomas. In the 1910s there was some thought given to dissolving the school and incorporating it into the Royal Academy of Arts in Berlin. But things never got that far; the school was sold, restructured from the ground up, and renamed the School for Clowns. The new owner, Frederic Mehring, was an American whose grandfather came from Germany. He and his family moved back to their old homeland and invested the money here that he’d earned in the steel industry over there. In the twenty years before the Nazis seized power, our town blossomed. There were four theatres – the largest of which held over a thousand people – and half a dozen small stages in basements and outhouses, and everywhere people were performing and teaching comedy, performing and teaching vaudeville. Hypnotists, snake-charmers, jugglers, speed-talkers, speed-mathematicians, conjurers and joke tellers all trod the boards here. Every night you could hear laughter in the streets and alleyways. Frederic Mehring had formed a network of close relationships over the years: he was friends with Grock, Dominic Althoff and Carl Godlewski; the escape artist Harry Houdini was godfather to his son, and he conducted the most animated debates with Erik Jan Hanussen whenever they met. He was a charming, eloquent man, who could sell the pleasures of stamp-collecting to a fire hydrant. Artists came here from all over the world. The evening in the Stadttheater with the fart-artist Joseph Pujol was unforgettable – Christian Kraft, Prince Hohenlohe-Öhringen, and the socialist Georg Ledebour sat peacefully side by side in the front row, and when the “King of Wind” parped Yankee Doodle in homage to his host, they both had tears in their eyes.
Frederic Mehring’s idea was that each artist who performed in our town should give at least one lesson while they were there, teaching the next generation “so that laughter and wonder doesn’t die out in our age”. Most did it for free, and liked to do it: this place was unique – it was “Clown Town”.
That was the name Charlie Chaplin had given it.
The greatest of all comedians alighted here during his tour of Europe in 1931, en route from Berlin. Every clown in the world knew of our town, he said, and if he didn’t visit us and give at least one performance and show us at least one of his tricks, it would be a disgrace and he would never again be able to show his face among his fellow comedians in America.
On the stage of the Stadttheater, he improvised scenes from his films: the bread roll dance from The Gold Rush and the sequence in the lion cage from The Circus – without the lion, of course – and the final scene from City Lights, in which the flower girl realises who her benefactor is – without the flower girl, of course. In between he told stories from his life. Most people in the audience couldn’t speak any English, “but Mr Chaplin speaks a language that requires no words, and the words that he does speak are music”, as it said in our local paper. Somebody brought a cello on stage and Chaplin played melodies from his films, which he had composed himself. The evening lasted over two hours, and afterwards the audience got to their feet and applauded, “and refused to stop for a long time”.
The following day, Chaplin held a seminar for children at the School for Clowns. One of the little boys was my father. The trick he learnt that morning was something he performed all his life, for anyone who came to visit us. The “trick” was nothing more than a particular posture, which until then you could only observe in Charlie, the Tramp. Normally a stick, even if it’s only a thin cane, serves to take a person’s weight off the leg he’s standing on. When he puts his weight on his right leg, he holds the stick in his right hand. But Chaplin holds it in his left. When we look at him, we sense that something is not as it should be, but we don’t know what. His posture confuses us: this man is defying the laws of gravity. He shows us things outside their context. We are perplexed: is the world not as stable as physics and the people in charge would like us to think it is?
Not a word was spoken during the lesson. The participants had to take off their shoes. Everyone had brought a stick. The pupils were also to refrain from laughing. The clown does not laugh. His own laughter is subtracted from the audience’s. As a memento of the morning Chaplin gave everyone a photo of the Tramp, not leaning on his cane. He wrote his name across the picture.
There was also an adult at the seminar. Just one. A short, fat, rather older man with a loud snuffle, wearing a black suit with a heavy watch chain attached to his waistcoat. He proved to be the least skilled of them all. Chaplin pointed out his clumsiness by mimicking it: in truth, it was skill. This man couldn’t manage to shake things free of their context. He knew too much about them. He was too skilled. But in the clown’s world, he was too unskilled. The method of the clown consists of healing madness with madness. Be unskilled! This is what he tells us. And what he means is: don’t let them get you down! If you walk down the up escalator, do it with a sense of grandeur! If you hold your walking stick in the wrong hand, do it with absolute certainty!
Chaplin asked my father – the most skilled of the unskilled – to give the gentleman some extra tuition. The gentleman had to “stay behind” after class while the snow fell outside and the children were heading off with their toboggans. They practised in the school’s mirrored hall. The man spoke no German, so my father used his hands and feet and facial expressions to explain how to be unskilled in a skilled way. My father was just nine years old. He did a very good job.
There was a rumour in the town – which all his life my father claimed was true – that this stranger was none other than Winston Churchill. And Churchill was in Germany at the time, there is proof of that. I don’t know the reason for his trip; he was probably – as on his second trip a few months later with his family – doing research for his Marlborough book. Or
perhaps he’d just come to see his friend Charlie – even, perhaps, to study the method of the clown with him.
By way of thanks for his tutelage, the gentleman wrote my father a note on the reverse of Chaplin’s photograph:
Thank you, my friend Robert,
I will not forget you and your pretty little town God bless the clowns!
Your faithful student.
Admittedly, he didn’t sign his name.
My father had the note analysed by three different graphologists. The first didn’t believe it was Churchill’s handwriting; the second was convinced these four lines were written by none other than the former British prime minister; the third thought this was somewhere between possible and probable.
Two Gentlemen on the Beach Page 17