Charlie Chaplin

by Peter Ackroyd

  His oration at the end, in which Chaplin takes off his mask and speaks for himself, was perhaps an artistic mistake; he declares, for example, that “the hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people.” No film should end with a magniloquent rehearsal of what were essentially conventional sentiments.

  On one occasion Chaplin and Buster Keaton were drinking beer in Keaton’s kitchen. “What I want,” Chaplin said, “is that every child should have enough to eat, shoes on his feet and a roof over his head!”

  “But Charlie,” Keaton replied, “do you know anyone who doesn’t want that?”

  That is perhaps the best response to the closing speech of The Great Dictator.

  Chaplin received the award for Best Actor from the New York critics for his performance, but he refused to accept it. He considered that his acting was only a small part of his achievement in The Great Dictator, and his publicity agent remarked that “many hurtful things happened to Chaplin all through his life, many more than he deserved. But I doubt that any caused him more pain than to be regarded as a mere actor.” He had in the past turned down other awards; he sent back one of them with the note that “I don’t think you are qualified to judge my work.”

  It is reported that Hitler himself saw The Great Dictator. An official from the film division of the German Ministry of Culture told Chaplin, after the war, that the Führer “insisted on seeing the film—alone. The next night he saw the film again, and once more alone.”

  The American critics had not favoured the final speech, and disliked in particular Chaplin’s call to “Soldiers! Don’t give yourselves to these brutes … who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle and use you as cannon fodder.” He is supposed to be addressing German soldiers, but of course the message might be given a more general meaning. At a time of isolationism it was considered to be unnecessarily provocative and one syndicated columnist, Ed Sullivan, accused Chaplin of “pointing the finger of Communism” in order to inflame his audience. Sullivan was not necessarily mistaken in his judgement. In England the Communist Party reprinted the speech as a pamphlet. The film critic of the Daily Worker, the Communist daily newspaper, described it as “an eloquent plea for peace” and an assault upon “the Roosevelts and Churchills and all the little Hitlers of the world” who promoted war.

  Chaplin travelled to New York for the premiere of the film; he rented an apartment overlooking the East River and began contemplating his projects for the future. He was reported to be considering a picture about a refugee in New York or, alternatively, a film about a drunkard who falls in love with a chorus girl. Both of these ideas eventually emerged in very different forms.

  When he returned to Hollywood Paulette Goddard had departed. They would not divorce for another two years but this was the final separation. She had endured enough of his attempts to control her, and had decided to make a career for herself outside the range of his supervision and criticism. “Well, your stepmother and I,” Chaplin told his sons, “don’t see eye to eye any more.”

  In this period Chaplin became noticeably more morose and depressed. He confided to his sons that he had always wanted to be a concert violinist, and lamented to others that all of his pictures had failed in one sense or another. He gave an interview at the time in which the journalist noticed his smile. It seems intimate and self-deprecatory but “when you sit to one side and see it bestowed on someone else, the lips look mechanically creased, and the eyes seem absent, almost unseeing.” One of Chaplin’s worst domestic disasters would soon follow.

  Chaplin as the Jewish barber in The Great Dictator, 1940.

  17

  Let Us Work and Fight

  Chaplin did not maintain his single life for very long, and saw a number of women in the period immediately after Paulette Goddard’s departure. One of them in particular captured his attention. Joan Barry, now the age of twenty-two, had arrived in Hollywood from Brooklyn three years previously with the intention of becoming a film actress. This was not an unusual ambition for young women of more than usual good looks, but Barry had the good fortune to become acquainted—if that is the phrase—with John Paul Getty. Getty in turn introduced her to some of his friends and, by indirect means, she was somehow invited to one of Chaplin’s large tennis parties. One thing led to another, as such things do, and before long they had become lovers.

  Chaplin stated later that she had pursued him avidly and that he was in a sense an unwilling or at least innocent victim of her ambitions. Yet he was, in 1941, fifty-two years old and was no ingénue. He could have withstood her advances if he had been inclined to do so. Instead he persuaded himself that she had some talent as an actress and arranged a screen test for her. He had recently purchased the film rights for a play, Shadow and Substance, in which he now envisaged her as the heroine. Towards the end of June 1941, Joan Barry was put under contract. “I can tell that you have a great deal of talent,” he had told her, “just by speaking to you.” He arranged for her to attend classes at a school of acting.

  By her own account it was only then that she agreed to have sexual relations with him. Before that time their familiarity had been restricted to his “pawing and mauling” which she resisted. Their moment of intimacy occurred at Chaplin’s house where according to Barry his “success in this regard was due to his verbal persuasiveness”; she added that “he is very proud of his success with women along these lines.”

  On one occasion the two of them embarked upon a weekend vacation to Catalina Island, on Chaplin’s yacht, in the course of which she had decided that she loved him. Chaplin had previously made protestations of love to her. He was intent now upon writing a film script of Shadow and Substance, but his concentration was broken. In My Autobiography he describes how Barry would drive to his house in her Cadillac, drunk, at all hours of the night; he would call his chauffeur to drive her home. One night she smashed her car in his driveway. Eventually he refused to open the door to her, at which point she began breaking the windows.

  He discovered in this period that she had not in fact been attending the acting classes for which he was paying and, when he confronted her, she retaliated by saying that she had no intention of becoming an actress. She just wanted $5,000 to travel back with her mother to New York. When the money was paid, she would tear up the contract. Chaplin, now believing that she was unstable to the point of being dangerous, assented. She told a quite different story. She had discovered that she was pregnant, and Chaplin had given her the name of a doctor in New York who could perform what was then a criminal abortion. That was why she had travelled to the city. Once there, however, she decided against the procedure.

  She returned to Hollywood some weeks later to be confronted by Chaplin; she confessed to him that she was still pregnant. She recalled him shouting at her that “For God’s sake, you’ve got to do something about it!” So he called on his associate, Tim Durant, to arrange an abortion in Los Angeles. She told an interviewer that “I really wanted to go ahead and have the baby, and here were Chaplin and Durant trying to high-pressure me into having an operation.” Eventually they succeeded in persuading her.

  Chaplin’s political beliefs, as intimated in The Great Dictator, now began to emerge more fully formed in public. In the spring of 1942 he was asked to speak in San Francisco on behalf of the American Committee for Russian War Relief; he had a nervous fear of speaking in front of large audiences but on this occasion his indignation seems to have conquered his apprehension. He began by addressing the 9,000 or so assembled as “Comrades!” at which unlikely greeting the audience erupted into laughter. This was the period of the Anglo-Soviet Treaty that had established a military and political alliance between the British Empire and the Soviet Union.

  When the laughter had subsided he added that “I mean comrades. I assume there are many Russians here tonight, and the way your countrymen are fighting and dying at this very moment, it is an honour and privilege to call you comrades.” He
included what seemed to be a jibe against his compatriots when he declared that “I am told that the Allies have two million soldiers languishing in the north of Ireland, while the Russians alone are facing about two hundred divisions of Nazis.” He ended by exhorting his audience to send 10,000 telegrams to President Roosevelt with the demand for a “second front” in Europe against the Germans, in the western half of that continent, thus diverting Hitler’s push against the Soviet Union.

  In another speech on behalf of the same cause, in Los Angeles, his contribution was followed by members of the audience singing a tribute to the “victorious banners of the glorious Soviet army.” He was beginning to enjoy his role as a public spokesman; it fed both his vanity and his histrionic skills.

  He was asked two months later to address by radio-telephone a rally of trade unionists in Madison Square Garden, New York. It was reported that “the great crowd, previously warned not to interrupt with applause, hushed and strained for every word.” Once more he called for a second front and declared that the Allies must aim for victory by the spring of 1943. He exhorted “You in the factories, you in the fields, you citizens of the world, let us work and fight towards that end.” He had once more summoned up the spirit of his final speech in The Great Dictator, and it is possible that he was in the public arena simply following up the consequences of his film role. He was, in other words, still acting. Douglas Fairbanks Junior believed that the speech relayed to Madison Square Garden was “a tragedy of errors and a damn shame.”

  In the autumn of the year he accepted an invitation to speak at a rally in Carnegie Hall, New York, in an “Artists’ Front to Win the War” together with such luminaries as Orson Welles and Pearl Buck. In the course of his speech he dismissed fears that, after the war, the Communist system would prevail everywhere. “I can,” he said, “live on $25,000 a year.” That was, on the face of it, unlikely.

  He wrote an address for a “Salute to our Soviet Ally” held in Chicago, and then spoke at an “Arts for Russia” dinner in New York, in the course of which he told the other guests that “the Russian purges” were “a wonderful thing” and added that “in these purges the Communists did away with their Quislings and Lavals … the only people who object to Communism and who use it as a bugaboo are the Nazi agents in this country.” His oldest son recalled that in this period he was not so welcome in some quarters as he once had been. The country-house weekends with rich and famous Americans came to an end.

  He delivered a radio speech to be broadcast in Russia, and recorded another speech for an English audience in the course of which he said that “I remember the Lambeth streets, the New Cut and the Lambeth Walk, Vauxhall Road. They were hard streets, and one couldn’t say they were paved with gold. Nevertheless the people who lived there are made of pretty good metal.”

  At the end of 1942 a syndicated columnist, Westwood Pegler, commented that “Chaplin lately has said that he was pro-Communist which means only that he is anti-American.” Pegler accused him of concealing his political opinions until he had made enough money to protect his business interests. In a remark that would find an echo in later years the journalist wrote that “in common, I am sure, with many other Americans, I would like to know why Charlie Chaplin has been allowed to stay in the United States about forty years without becoming a citizen.”

  Chaplin always claimed that he was not a Communist, even though he expressed his admiration for the Stalinist regime. In 1943 he once more exuberantly applauded the Soviet system as a “brave new world” that lent “hope and aspiration to the common man.” Its aspiration for justice and liberty “grows more glorious year by year. Now that the agony of birth is at an end, may the beauty of its growth endure forever.”

  These words may ring hollow at the beginning of the twenty-first century but, at the time, the sentiments were shared by many. Chaplin had friends and acquaintances in Hollywood who were avowed radicals, among them the writers Donald Ogden Stewart and Clifford Odets; he had also formed friendships with left-wing exiles from Europe, such as Bertolt Brecht and Fritz Lang, who formed an angry and sometimes bitter émigré community. Hollywood itself became a refuge for many Jewish artists and writers fleeing from Hitler’s persecution. Chaplin was in particular well acquainted with Hanns Eisler, a composer who was later suspected of being a Soviet agent; his friendship with Eisler would eventually be held against him.

  It is difficult to believe, however, that Chaplin had either the rigour or the commitment to become a Communist. He made, and continued to make, a great deal of money out of the stock market; to many he seemed to be the epitome of the successful self-made man. His friends considered him, in the phrases of the time, to be a “parlour pink” or a “limousine liberal” ready to assume socialist convictions without any attempt to carry them out in practice.

  Yet he did possess an angry instinct against injustice and oppression; all his life he fought against authoritarian control and domination. He said once that “I’ve known humiliation. And humiliation is a thing you never forget.” That was the lesson of his childhood. It would be better to say that he was a libertarian with tendencies towards anarchism. He had demanded, and gained, freedom for himself. He refused to be told what day of the week it was, for example, and never wore a watch. That passionate individualism was the foundation of his political sentiments.

  There may be of course an even simpler explanation since, as Tim Durant said, “He is a ham at heart—he admits that. He wants to startle people and interest people.”

  At the end of 1942 Joan Barry re-entered Chaplin’s life, although in truth she had never really gone away. Various and diverse reports can be found on the nature and course of their mercurial relationship. She had been in New York when Chaplin addressed the rally in Carnegie Hall, and it is likely that he paid for her to travel there by train from California; she gave evidence later that the two had then engaged in sexual intercourse. There may have been another abortion. There may have been more drunken scenes inside, and outside, the house on Summit Drive. Yet the complicated and in some ways mysterious saga serves only to emphasise the erratic, whimsical and imperious way in which Chaplin conducted his private life.

  On the night of 23 December 1942, Barry arrived unexpectedly at Summit Drive. Chaplin either refused to see her or told her to wait. She then climbed a ladder and entered the house; she brought out a gun and, while pointing it at him, threatened to commit suicide. At this moment Chaplin’s two sons arrived, at about 2:30 in the morning, and found the ladder propped up against their father’s bedroom window. On the grass were a pair of women’s shoes, a purse, and a pair of silk stockings. Something was wrong.

  When they rushed into the house, Chaplin intercepted them and asked them what they were doing. It seems to have slipped his mind that they lived there. He told them to go to their rooms. He then returned to Barry, who still held the gun; she and he talked for an hour and a half before going to bed together. She had placed the weapon on a bedside table, and Chaplin later joked that he had never before had sex with a loaded gun at his head. “Well,” he said, according to Barry, “this is a new twist.”

  Barry returned a week later, and remained with Chaplin for an hour or so. He then offered to drive her home, but on the journey they argued once more; Chaplin took her to the local police station and left her there. Once more she was becoming a serious problem for him. On the following night a guard found her wandering through the garden of Summit Drive with a gun in her hand; he confiscated the weapon but, on the excuse of wanting to use the lavatory, she escaped through a downstairs window.

  She made her way to the house of a friend who telephoned the Beverly Hills police, and the offices of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, with the news that Barry was threatening to commit suicide after being “dumped” by Charles Chaplin. A few hours later Barry was found in the front seat of a car, wearing pyjamas, with her lips smeared with iodine. Another report suggests that she had taken a large dose of barbiturates. A doctor was called.
When he diagnosed a “simulated suicide attempt,” she was charged with vagrancy. On the following day she was sentenced to ninety days in prison, suspended on condition that she left Los Angeles for a period of two years.

  She returned sooner than expected, however, and in early May 1943 she drove back to Summit Drive in order to confront Chaplin with the news that she was once more pregnant. She got into the house by the back door and mounted the stairs to his bedroom; throwing open the door, she discovered a naked woman in his bed, while he sat fully clothed at the end of it.

  Barry’s reaction to the unexpected sight of the young woman was one of hysterics. She ran downstairs. Chaplin followed her, asking her to wait by the swimming pool until he could talk to her. She waited for twenty minutes and, dismayed by his long absence, broke an ashtray and tried unsuccessfully to slash her wrists. Chaplin’s butler than drove her back to her hotel.

  She now began to attack Chaplin by other means. On the following morning she went to the house of Hedda Hopper, a notorious columnist who specialised in gossip about the film industry and its stars. She informed Hopper that she had been signed up by Chaplin to become a film actress before he seduced her. She was now pregnant with his child, and Chaplin would have nothing whatever to do with her. Hopper sent her to her own physician, who confirmed the fact that she was pregnant. This had all the makings of a sensational story. But Hopper needed time to verify and confirm the details.