Charlie Chaplin

by Peter Ackroyd

  He said in another interview that “for years I have specialised in one type of comedy—strictly pantomime. I have measured it, gauged it, studied it. I have been able to establish exact principles to govern its reactions on audiences. It has a certain pace and tempo. Dialogue, to my way of thinking, always slows actions, because action must wait on words.” He seriously believed that the talkies themselves were simply a passing phase, and that the cinema would once more embrace the purity of silence.

  In the spring of 1928 the principal performers of United Artists—Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and Chaplin himself, now joined by John Barrymore and Norma Talmadge—took part in a wireless broadcast so that the audiences could hear their voices. A journalist from Variety spoke to Chaplin immediately after the broadcast and reported “that he nearly died while doing it through mike fright, and was worried as to how he did.” Chaplin also told the studio director that he was so anxious that he had lost nine pounds in weight during the ordeal. The experience did not endear him to the new medium. At a later date he was offered more than $500,000 to make twenty-six wireless broadcasts of fifteen minutes duration. He refused on the grounds that “I have to remain a little remote and mysterious. They have to romanticise me. I would lose more than that at the box office if I made myself real and familiar over the radio.”

  He closed down the preliminary production of City Lights for some weeks, however, so that he might carefully consider the problem. He tried to imagine how the scenes would be improved with dialogue, and decided that sound would have only a deleterious effect. His mind was made up. No force on earth could have changed it. So he continued the preparations for his latest silent picture when all around him the actors were talking and the bands were playing. He put the case for silence to an English journalist. “Why have I refused to talk in City Lights? I think the question should really be: Why should I talk?” He also told him, concerning his decision, “I began to feel like the boy on the burning deck whence all but he had fled. I confess to some worry, but never to doubt.”

  He had begun making notes and creating plot lines before the premiere of The Circus in New York, but it was almost a year before he began any actual filming of City Lights. The central characters were Charlie himself, a blind flower-girl and a millionaire; when drunk the millionaire adopts the Tramp as his bosom companion but, when sober, he does not recognise him. In collusion with the drunken millionaire the Tramp becomes the girl’s benefactor, but in her blindness she believes that he is her generous patron. She falls in love with one whom she considers to be a suave and handsome stranger. The comic possibilities were evident to Chaplin from the beginning, just as the “little fellow’s” love for the blind flower-girl gave him the opportunity of mingling pathos with comedy in the familiar manner. Yet in City Lights they are lent maximum intensity. He wished to convey the fact that silent film was supreme in the art of human expressiveness.

  Even as Chaplin was preparing the film, in the summer of 1928, his mother died. She had been admitted to Glendale Hospital with an infected gall bladder. It seems that he had visited her every day and had tried to revive her flagging spirits, but she suffered a great deal of pain. On his last visit to her she had relapsed into a coma. When told of her death he went immediately to the hospital where she was still lying in her bed. He revealed to an interviewer that “I couldn’t … I couldn’t touch her. No, I couldn’t touch her.” At the funeral he was expected to step forward and say farewell to her just before the lid was placed on the coffin, but “I said no: I couldn’t.”

  The work upon City Lights continued. For the part of the blind flower-girl he chose Virginia Cherrill, a young woman whom he had seen in a ringside seat of a boxing match; she had no acting experience but that, for Chaplin, was always an advantage. He could fashion her in any shape he wished. Virginia Cherrill was a society girl, living on alimony, and agreed to take part in the film on a whim. But she also had the advantage of poor sight, and seemed effortlessly able to feign blindness. Chaplin advised her “to look inwardly and not to see me.”

  The details of their opening scene together, when Charlie purchases a flower before realising that she is blind, took two years and 342 takes to assemble. Chaplin said in an interview that “she’d be doing something that wasn’t right. Lines. A line. A contour hurts me if it’s not right. And she’d say, ‘Flower, sir?’ I’d say, ‘Look at that! Nobody says flower like that.’ She was an amateur … I’d know in a minute when she wasn’t there, when she’d be searching, or looking up just too much or too soon … Or she waited a second. I’d know in a minute.” When she asked why her pronunciation of words was so important in a silent film he replied, according to her own account, that “all he asked—this was said loudly and slowly, as if he were addressing someone hard of hearing—was that she should do as he asked. Was it really so difficult?” He also demanded that she achieve the perfect gesture as she offers the flower to the Tramp. “When you offer the flowers, bend your arm, make a nice movement, don’t be quite so threatening.” A short film was shot of Chaplin directing this scene; he is tense, sitting upright in a canvas chair, waving his hands; he is brusque and dissatisfied. The scene itself was filmed on a set that looked uncannily like that of the street and railings outside St. Mark’s Church on Kennington Park Road; the resemblance is not coincidental. He was once more going back to the landscape of his childhood, from which he drew his inspiration.

  He told Alistair Cooke that in this period “I was a terror to be with.” He flew into sudden and violent rages; he refused food; he called his assistants late at night and ordered them to join him for consultations. Waldo Frank, the novelist and literary critic, composed a portrait of Chaplin at this time. He wrote that “Chaplin’s eyes are a blue so darkly shadowed that they are almost purple. They are sad eyes; from them pity and bitterness look out upon the world. They are veiled; while the man moves forward with irresistible charm, his eyes hold back in a solitude fiercely forbidding. No one who sees the eyes of Chaplin would feel like laughing.” He added that “Chaplin does not wish to give himself to any emotion, to any situation, to any life.”

  In this highly charged state it was understandable that disputes and angry arguments erupted between Chaplin and Cherrill; on one occasion Cherrill interrupted a scene to announce that she had an appointment with her hairdresser. Chaplin was so furious that he abandoned shooting, and took to his bed for several days. At one point he fired her before realising that she was in fact indispensable to the film. They never really liked or understood one another and, after the filming of City Lights, went separate ways. At the age of twenty she may have been too old for him.

  At a later date Virginia Cherrill recalled her days at the studio. She recorded that “Charlie even took control of what we ate. One time, we couldn’t have anything but vegetables; another week, he wanted us living on cheese and fruit.” On his style as a director she commented that “Charlie acted out every single part, you see, every glance, every movement, just as he wanted it to be played. You found yourself thinking that he was you, and that he was also that person he wanted you to be. It wasn’t easy.” At a later date, in a television interview, she volunteered the information that “he was a dervish” and that “Charlie was always acting. He was always ‘on.’ ”

  Chaplin fell ill at the end of February with ptomaine poisoning that progressed into influenza, and he lost the whole of March in recovery; nevertheless the cast came to the studio each day in case he should suddenly reappear. His debility may also have had something to do with his generally nervous and overanxious state during the making of the film. He came back to the studio on 1 April, where he insisted on working further on the opening scene with the Tramp and the flower-girl. He was once again working six or seven days a week, from morning until night, performing and editing, directing and writing. “I did it all,” he told an interviewer, “which very few in my day did, you know. They didn’t do it all, you see … And that’s why I was so exhausted.”
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br />   Yet exhaustion did not necessarily prevent him from entertaining guests. Winston Churchill visited the set. The Spanish director Luis Buñuel used to come up to the house on Summit Drive; Buñuel later recalled that his host had tried to set up an “orgy” for him with three prostitutes. Sergei Eisenstein also stayed at the house; he wrote to a friend that “we often go to Chaplin’s house to play tennis. He’s really nice. And extremely unhappy (personally).” He made a less cryptic comment about the artist rather than the man when he wrote that “the true, the humanly inspiring ‘chosen man of God,’ of whom Wagner dreamed, is not Parsifal bowing down before the Grail in Bayreuth, but Charlie Chaplin among the trash-cans of the East Side.”

  Ivor Montagu, an Englishman who was then an assistant producer at Paramount, recalled a tea party in the garden of Summit Drive where “all was incredibly decorous and English country.” Chaplin played tennis with his guests, on his own court, with a ferocity and will to win that were unequalled. Montagu said that “Charlie was a very good tennis player. He seemed to be able to attain any skill he wanted.”

  He finished filming City Lights by the autumn of 1930, but his labours were not over. He had determined that, in the absence of sound, he would write the musical score for the picture. It is music that might have been inspired by “The Honeysuckle and the Bee,” the song that he had heard one night in South London. The score incorporates the music of the Victorian theatre in its sentimental aspect, therefore, but it is composed with an elegance and simplicity that carefully accompany the mood upon the screen. Chaplin’s music in general is sometimes lush, sometimes jaunty and sometimes lyrical; it includes stirring brass and haunting violins. It has passages derived from the waltz and the tango, as well as pleasurable intimations of seaside bands. It can be excitable, sweet, playful and melancholy.

  He said in a radio interview that the early acts of the Karno Company, in which “comedy tramps” appeared, were accompanied by “very beautiful boudoir music, something of the eighteenth century, very lush and very ‘grandioso,’ just purely as satirical and as a counterpoint; and I copied a great deal from Mr. Fred Karno in that direction.” His compositions are all the more remarkable in light of the fact that he had absolutely no musical training. He would hum or sing a tune while a notator would transcribe it. Yet music was in his being. All of his subsequent films had scores of his own devising.

  City Lights opened at the end of January 1931, in Los Angeles. Chaplin was nervous about its reception. He told Henry Bergman that “I don’t know so much about that picture. I’m not sure.” On his way to the theatre he murmured, “I don’t think it’s going to go over. I don’t think they’re going to like it … No, I just feel it.” It did indeed represent a tremendous risk; this was a silent film in the new age of sound.

  In the event it earned a standing ovation. At the opening in New York, a few days later, it was greeted with the same enthusiasm and celebration. His publicity manager came into his hotel bedroom on the morning after the premiere. “Boy you’ve done it,” he told him. “What a hit! There’s been a line running round the block ever since ten o’clock this morning and it’s stopping the traffic! There are about ten cops trying to keep order. They’re fighting to get in. And you should hear them yell!” It was widely considered to be a masterpiece of what was now an old medium, and it reminded audiences of what had been lost in the transition to sound.

  It was subtitled “A Comedy Romance in Pantomime” and is by any standard a remarkable film, breathtaking in its range and variety of feeling. Chaplin satirises pathos at the same time as he indulges in it; he introduces a number of comic scenes, such as a farcical boxing match, without at any point compromising the emotional current of the narrative. The film was released at the beginning of the Great Depression, a period of distress and destitution when the figure of the hungry and dishevelled Tramp becomes more pertinent than ever before; although Chaplin makes no allusion to the national calamity, it provides the context for the relationship between Charlie and the impoverished flower-girl. It rendered the sentiment more immediate, and more engaging.

  The closing scene is perhaps the greatest triumph of his art. The blind girl can now see but she has never known the identity of her benefactor. The Tramp, more degraded than ever, encounters her; she takes his hand, to give him a coin, and at that moment understands who he is. “You can see now?” he asks her. “Yes, I can see now.” That is where the film ends, with a look of exaltation and also of terror on the Tramp’s face. The critic James Agee concluded that “it is enough to shrivel the heart to see, and it is the greatest piece of acting and the highest moment in movies.” City Lights remained Chaplin’s own favourite among his films.

  On the day after the premiere Chaplin left Los Angeles in order to attend the film’s opening in New York. But that was just the beginning of a more extended journey. A week after the screening in New York he boarded the Mauretania for the voyage to London with Toraichi Kono and his publicist, Carlyle Robinson. He told a news reporter that “I am looking forward to seeing once more the haunts of my boyhood, and finding out if the hot saveloy and crumpet man is still going around ringing his bell.” Yet he also wanted to rest; he stayed in his cabin for most of the journey and did not mingle with the other travellers. After the success of City Lights, in fact, he fell into a depression; he asked his friends, “What am I going to do next?”

  He arrived in England to an even more exuberant welcome than that he had received almost ten years before; the Great Western Railway put an observation car at his disposal at Plymouth, and it was at once surrounded by admirers. His arrival at Paddington was described by a journalist from The Times, who noted that “Dickens knew something of popular enthusiasm, but could he have beheld the press of people gathered … in honour of Mr. Chaplin he might have rubbed his eyes in astonishment.” The reporter observed that Chaplin was as excited as the applauding crowd and that “he promptly scrambled on to the roof of the car and, waving his hat and returning the shouts of the crowd, he was borne in slow triumph out of the station.” The premiere of City Lights was held, a week after his return, at the Dominion Theatre in Tottenham Court Road; he had to use a side entrance in an alley, one hour before the proceedings began, in order to avoid the crowd. At the end of the performance, however, he appeared at an upstairs window where his figure was picked out by searchlights.

  Immediately on his arrival in the city he began a round of social calls that lasted a fortnight. He stayed with Winston Churchill at Chartwell, and visited H. G. Wells on several occasions. He had dinner at Chequers with the prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald; when Chaplin tried to discuss economic matters with him, MacDonald merely nodded with a quizzical expression upon his face. He discussed unemployment with David Lloyd George but, as Chaplin himself recalled, “I could not help noticing a stifled yawn.” Chaplin was full of financial plans to shrink the government, to control prices as well as interests and profits, and to abolish the gold standard; yet nobody was really interested in the economic theories of an actor.

  He also discussed politics with John Maynard Keynes and George Bernard Shaw at the house of Nancy Astor; when he entered the drawing room of Lady Astor’s mansion in St. James’s Square he said that “it was like stepping into the Hall of Fame at Madame Tussaud’s.” It was perhaps still a little unreal for him, when he noticed the newspaper placards announcing that “Charlie Is Still Their Darling.”

  He also made a more private and desolate journey when he returned to Hanwell Schools, the establishment for orphans and destitute children to which he had been consigned at the age of seven. He arrived alone and unannounced, perhaps savouring the solitariness of his approach; yet his presence soon became known to the teachers and children who were told to assemble in the dining hall. A reporter from the Daily Express, having spoken later to those who had seen him, recorded that “he entered the dining hall where four hundred boys and girls cheered their heads off at the sight of him—and he entered in style. He made to ra
ise his hat, and it jumped magically into the air! He swung his cane and hit himself in the leg! He turned out his feet and hopped along inimitably. It was Charlie! Yells! Shrieks of joy! More yells!”

  Carlyle Robinson recalled that Chaplin wept when he returned to his hotel. Chaplin himself told the writer Thomas Burke that “it had been the greatest emotional experience of his life.” He added that “being among those buildings and connecting with everything—with the misery and something that wasn’t misery … The shock of it, too. You see, I never really believed that it’d be there.” When the taxi turned off the main road, “then, all of a sudden, th-ere it was. O-o-oh it was there—just as I’d left it. I’ve never had a moment like that in my life. I was almost physically sick with emotion.” When Burke remonstrated with him for this hapless return to past misery he replied that “I like being morbid. It does me good, I thrive on it.” His salmon-like instinct for home led him to visit the old music halls of the capital, the Star at Bermondsey, the Royal at Stratford, the Paragon in Mile End Road and Seebright on the Hackney Road among them. He stopped at a coffee stall in the Elephant and Castle, a few yards from his childhood home, and ordered stewed eels.

  Yet his moods did not last for very long. He had promised the orphan children he would return in the following week with the present of a cinema projector. On the date of the planned visit, however, he was lunching with Nancy Astor and was not in a nostalgic mood. So he ordered Robinson and Karno to carry the projector to Hanwell in his place, much to the disappointment of the children and of the crowds who had assembled to see him. It is an indication, if nothing else, of Chaplin’s mercurial and unreliable character. He excused himself later by confessing that he could not bear to repeat the painful experience.