My Autobiography

by Charles Chaplin

  ‘Well,’ I said, attempting to be humorous, ‘I’ve come to say good-bye again.’

  She didn’t answer, but I could see she was anxious to be rid of me.

  I extended my hand and smiled. ‘So good-bye again,’ I said.

  ‘Good-bye,’ she answered coldly.

  I turned and heard the street door gently closing behind me.

  Although I had met her but five times, and scarcely any of our meetings lasted longer than twenty minutes, that brief encounter affected me for a long time.

  seven

  IN 1909 I went to Paris. Monsieur Burnell of the Folies Bergère had engaged the Karno Company to play for a limited engagement of one month. How excited I was at the thought of going to a foreign country! The week before sailing we played at Woolwich, a dank, miserable week in a miserable town, and I looked forward to the change. We were to leave early Sunday morning. I almost missed the train, running down the platform and catching the last luggage van, in which I rode all the way to Dover. I had a genius for missing trains in those days.

  The rain came down in torrents over the Channel, but the first sight of France through the mist was an unforgettable thrill. ‘It isn’t England,’ I had to keep reminding myself, ‘it’s the Continent! France!’ It had always appealed to my imagination. My father was part French, in fact the Chaplin family originally came from France. They landed in England in the time of the Huguenots. Father’s uncle would say with pride that a French general established the English branch of the Chaplin family.

  It was late autumn and the journey from Calais to Paris was dreary. Nevertheless, as we neared Paris my excitement grew. We had passed through bleak, lonely country. Then gradually out of the darkened sky we saw an illumination. ‘That,’ said a Frenchman in the carriage with us, ‘is the reflection of Paris.’

  Paris was everything I expected. The drive from the Gare du Nord to the rue Geoffroy-Marie had me excited and impatient; I wanted to stop at every corner and walk. It was seven in the evening; the golden lights shone invitingly from the cafés and their outside tables spoke of an enjoyment of life. But for the innovation of a few motor-cars, it was still the Paris of Monet, Pissarro and Renoir. It was Sunday and everyone seemed pleasurebent. Gaiety and vitality were in the air. Even my room in the rue Geoffroy-Marie, with its stone floor, which I called my Bastille, could not dampen my ardour, for one lived sitting at tables outside bistros and cafés.

  Sunday night was free, so we could see the show at the Folies Bergère, where we were to open the following Monday. No theatre, I thought, ever exuded such glamour, with its gilt and plush, its mirrors and large chandeliers. In the thick-carpeted foyers and dress circle the world promenaded. Bejewelled Indian princes with pink turbans and French and Turkish officers with plumed helmets sipped cognac at liqueur bars. In the large outer foyer music played as ladies checked their wraps and fur coats, baring their white shoulders. They were the habituées who discreetly solicited and promenaded the foyers and the dress circle. In those days they were beautiful and courtly.

  The Folies Bergère also had professional linguists who strolled about the theatre with the word ‘Interpreter’ on their caps, and I made a friend of the head one, who could speak several languages fluently.

  After our performance I would wear my stage evening-dress clothes and mingle with the promenaders. One gracile creature with a swan-like neck and white skin made my heart flutter. She was a tall Gibson Girl type, extremely beautiful, with retroussé nose and long dark eye-lashes, and wore a black velvet dress with long white gloves. As she went up the dress-circle stairs, she dropped a glove. Quickly I picked it up.

  ‘Merci,’ she said.

  ‘I wish you would drop it again,’ I said mischievously.

  ‘Pardon?’

  Then I realized she did not understand English and I spoke no French. So I went to my friend the interpreter. ‘There’s a dame that arouses my concupiscence. But she looks very expensive.’

  He shrugged. ‘Not more than a louis.’

  ‘Good,’ I said, although a louis in those days was a lot, I thought – and it was.

  I had the interpreter put down a few French phrases d’amour on the back of a postcard: ‘Je vous adore’, ‘Je vous ai aimée la première fois que je vous ai vue’, etc., which I intended to use at the propitious moment. I asked him to make the preliminary arrangements and he acted as courier, going from one to the other. Eventually he came back and said: ‘It’s all settled, one louis, but you must pay her cab-fare to her apartment and back.’

  I temporized a moment. ‘Where does she live?’ I asked.

  ‘It won’t cost more than ten fancs.’

  Ten francs was disastrous, as I had not anticipated that extra charge. ‘Couldn’t she walk?’ I said, jokingly.

  ‘Listen, this girl is first-class, you must pay her fare,’ he said.

  So I acquiesced.

  After the arrangements had been settled, I passed her on the dress-circle stairs. She smiled and I glanced back at her. ‘Ce soir!’

  ‘Enchantée, monsieur!’

  As we were on before the interval I promised to meet her after my performance. Said my friend: ‘You hail a cab while I get the girl, then you won’t waste time.’

  ‘Waste time?’

  As we drove along the Boulevard des Italiens, the lights and shadows passing over her face and long white neck, she looked ravishing. I glanced surreptitiously at my French on the postcard. ‘Je vous adore,’ I began.

  She laughed, showing her perfect white teeth. ‘You speak very well French.’

  ‘Je vous ai aimée la première fois que je vois ai vue,’ I continued emotionally.

  She laughed again and corrected my French, explaining that I should use the familiar ‘tu’. She thought about it and laughed again. She looked at her watch, but it had stopped; she indicated she wanted to know the time, explaining that at twelve o’clock she had a very important appointment.

  ‘Not this evening.’ I said coyly.

  ‘Oui, ce soir.’

  ‘But you’re fully engaged this evening, toute la nuit’!

  She suddenly looked startled. ‘Oh, non, non, non! Pas toute la nuit!’

  Then it became sordid. ‘Vingt francs pour le moment?’

  ‘C’est ça!’ she replied emphatically.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I think I’d better stop the cab.’

  And after paying the driver to take her back to the Folies Bergère, I got out, a very sad and disillusioned young man.

  We could have stayed at the Folies Bergère ten weeks, as we were a great success, but Mr Karno had other bookings. My salary was six pounds a week, and I spent every penny of it. A cousin of my brother’s, related to Sydney’s father in some way, made himself known to me. He was rich and belonged to the so-called upper class, and during his stay in Paris he showed me a very good time. He was stage-struck and even went so far as having his moustache shaved off in order to pass as a member of our company, so that he could be allowed back stage. Unfortunately, he had to return to England, where I understand he was hauled over the coals by his august parents and sent to South America.

  Before going to Paris, I had heard that Hetty’s troupe were playing at the Folies Bergère, so I was all set to meet her again. The night I arrived I went back stage and made inquiries, but I learnt from one of the ballet girls that the troupe had left a week previously for Moscow. While I was talking to the girl a harsh voice came over the stairs:

  ‘Come here at once! How dare you talk to strangers!’

  It was the girl’s mother. I tried to explain that I merely wanted information about a friend of mine, but the mother ignored me. ‘Never mind talking to that man, come up here at once.’

  I was annoyed at her crassness. Later, however, I became better acquainted with her. She lived in the same hotel as I did with her two daughters, who were members of the Folies Bergère ballet The younger, thirteen, was the première danseuse, very pretty and talented, but the ol
der one, fifteen, had neither talent nor looks. The mother was French, buxom and about forty, married to a Scotsman who was living in England. After we opened at the Folies Bergère, she came to me and apologized for being so abrupt. That was the beginning of a very friendly relationship. I was continually invited to their rooms for tea, which they made in their bedroom.

  When I think back, I was incredibly innocent. One afternoon when the children were out and Mama and I were alone her attitude became strange and she began to tremble as she poured the tea. I had been talking about my hopes and dreams, my loves and disappointments, and she became quite moved. As I got up to put my tea-cup on the table, she came over to me.

  ‘You are sweet,’ she said, cupping my face with her hands and looking intensely into my eyes. ‘Such a nice boy as you should not be hurt.’ Her gaze became inverse, strange and hypnotic, and her voice trembled. ‘Do you know, I love you like a son,’ she said, still holding my face in her hands. Then slowly her face came to mine, and she kissed me.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, sincerely – and innocently kissed her back. She continued transfixing me with her gaze, her lips trembling and her eyes glazed, then, suddenly checking herself, she went about pouring a fresh cup of tea. Her manner had changed and a certain humour played about her mouth. ‘You are very sweet,’ she said, ‘I like you very much.’

  She confided in me about her daughters. ‘The young one is a very good girl,’ she said, ‘but the older must be watched; she is becoming a problem.’

  After the show she would invite me to supper in her large bedroom in which she and her younger daughter slept, and before returning to my room I would kiss the mother and her younger daughter good-night; I would then have to go through a small room where the elder daughter slept. One night as I was passing through the room, she beckoned to me and whispered: ‘Leave your door open and I will come up when the family is asleep.’ Believe it or not, I threw her back on her bed indignantly and stalked out of the room. At the end of their engagement at the Folies Bergère, I heard that the elder daughter, still in her fifteenth year, had run off with a dog-trainer, a heavy-set German of sixty.

  But I was not as innocent as I appeared. Members of the troupe and I occasionally spent a night carousing through the bordels and doing all the hoydenish things that youth will do. One night, after drinking several absinthes, I got into a fight with an ex-lightweight prize-fighter named Ernie Stone. It started in a restaurant, and after the waiters and the police had separated us he said: ‘I’ll see you at the hotel,’ where we were both staying. He had the room above me, and at four in the morning I rolled home and knocked at his door.

  ‘Come in,’ he said briskly, ‘and take off your shoes so we won’t make a noise.’

  Quietly we stripped to the waist, then faced each other. We hit and ducked for what seemed an interminable length of time. Several times he hit me square on the chin, but to no effect. ‘I thought you could punch,’ I sneered. He made a lunge, missed and smashed his head against the wall, almost knocking himself out. I tried to finish him off, but my punches were weak. I could hit him with impunity, but I had no strength behind my punch. Suddenly, I received a blow full in the mouth which shook my front teeth, and that sobered me up. ‘Enough,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to lose my teeth.’ He came over and embraced me, then looked in the mirror: I had cut his face to ribbons. My hands were swollen like boxing gloves, and blood was on the ceiling, on the curtains and on the walls. How it got there, I do not know.

  During the night the blood trickled down the side of my mouth and across my neck. The little première danseuse, who used to bring me up a cup of tea in the morning, screamed, thinking I had committed suicide. And I have never fought anyone since.

  One night the interpreter came to me saying that a celebrated musician wanted to meet me, and would I go to his box? The invitation was mildly interesting, for in the box with him was a most beautiful, exotic lady, a member of the Russian Ballet. The interpreter introduced me. The gentleman said that he had enjoyed my performance and was surprised to see how young I was. At these compliments I bowed politely, occasionally taking a furtive glance at his friend. ‘You are instinctively a musician and a dancer,’ said he.

  Feeling there was no reply to this compliment other than to smile sweetly, I glanced at the interpreter and bowed politely. The musician stood up and extended his hand and I stood up. ‘Yes,’ he said, shaking my hand, ‘you are a true artist.’ After we left I turned to the interpreter: ‘Who was the lady with him?’

  ‘She is a Russian ballet dancer, Mademoiselle —’ It was a very long and difficult name.

  ‘And what was the gentleman’s name?’ I asked.

  ‘Debussy,’ he answered, ‘the celebrated composer.’

  ‘Never heard of him,’ I remarked.

  It was the year of the famous scandal and trial of Madame Steinheil, who was tried and found not guilty of murdering her husband; the year of the sensational ‘pom-pom’ dance that showed couples indecently rotating together in a libidinous display; the year incredible tax laws were passed of sixpence in the pound on personal income; the year Debussy introduced his Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune to England, where it was booed and the audience walked out.

  *

  With sadness I returned to England and began a tour of the provinces. What a contrast to Paris! Those mournful Sunday evenings in northern towns: everything closed, and the doleful clang of reprimanding bells that accompanied carousing youths and giggling wenches parading the darkened high streets and back alleys. It was their only Sunday evening diversion.

  Six months had drifted by in England and I had settled down to my usual routine, when news came from the London office that made life more exciting. Mr Karno informed me that I was to take the place of Harry Weldon in the second season of The Football Match. Now I felt that my star was in the ascendant. This was my chance. Although I had made a success in Mumming Birds and other sketches in our repertoire, those were minor achievements compared to playing the lead in The Football Match. Moreover, we were to open at the Oxford, the most important music hall in London. We were to be the main attraction and I was to have my name featured for the first time at the top of the bill. This was a considerable step up. If I were a success at the Oxford it would establish a kudos that would enable me to demand a large salary and eventually branch out with my own sketches, in fact it would lead to all sorts of wonderful schemes. As practically the same cast was engaged for The Football Match, we needed only a week’s rehearsal. I had thought a great deal about how to play the part. Harry Weldon had a Lancashire accent. I decided to play it as a cockney.

  But at the first rehearsal I had an attack of laryngitis. I did everything to save my voice, speaking in whispers, inhaling vapours and spraying my throat, until anxiety robbed me of all unctuousness and comedy for the part.

  On the opening night, every vein and cord in my throat was strained to the utmost with a vengeance. But I could not be heard. Karno came round afterwards with an expression of mingled disappointment and contempt. ‘No one could hear you,’ he said reprovingly. I assured him that my voice would be better the next night, but it was not. In fact it was worse, for it had been forced to such a degree that I was in danger of losing it completely. The next night my understudy went on. As a consequence the engagement finished after the first week. All my hopes and dreams of that Oxford engagement had collapsed, and the disappointment of it laid me low with influenza.

  *

  I had not seen Hetty in over a year. In a state of weakness and melancholy after the flu, I thought of her again and wandered late one night towards her home in Camberwell. But the house was empty with a sign: ‘To Let’.

  I continued wandering the streets with no special objective. Suddenly out of the night a figure appeared, crossing the road and coming towards me.

  ‘Charlie! What are you doing up this way?’ It was Hetty. She was dressed in a black sealskin coat with a round sealskin hat.

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bsp; ‘I came to meet you,’ I said jokingly.

  She smiled. ‘You’re very thin.’

  I told her I had just recovered from flu. She was seventeen now, quite pretty and smartly dressed.

  ‘But the thing is, what are you doing up this way?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve been visiting a friend and now I’m going to my brother’s house. Would you like to come along?’ she answered.

  On the way, she told me that her sister had married an American millionaire, Frank J. Gould, and that they lived in Nice, and that she was leaving London in the morning to join them.

  That evening I stood watching her dancing coquettishly with her brother. She was acting silly and siren-like with him, and in spite of myself I could not preclude a feeling that my ardour for her had slightly diminished. Had she become commonplace like any other girl? The thought saddened me, and I found myself looking at her objectively.

  Her figure had developed, and I noticed the contours of her breasts and thought their protuberance small and not very alluring. Would I marry her even if I could afford to? No, I did not want to marry anyone.

  As I walked home with her on that cold and brilliant night, I must have been sadly objective as I spoke about the possibility of her having a very wonderful and happy life. ‘You sound so wistful, I could almost weep,’ she said.

  That night I went home feeling triumphant, for I had touched her with my sadness and had made my personality felt.

  Karno put me back into Mumming Birds and, ironically, it was not more than a month before I completely recovered my voice. Great as my disappointment was about The Football Match, I tried not to dwell on it. But I was haunted by a thought that perhaps I was not equal to taking Weldon’s place. And behind it all was the ghost of my failure at the Foresters’. As I had not fully retrieved my confidence, every new sketch in which I played the leading comedy part was a trial of fear. And now the alarming and a most resolute day came to notify Mr Karno that my contract had run out and that I wanted a raise.