My Autobiography

by Charles Chaplin

  A moment later I turned to him. ‘Do you like peaches?’

  ‘Yes,’ he answered.

  ‘Well, we have a tree full of them in the garden; you can climb up and get some – at the same time get one for me.’

  His face lit up. ‘Ooh good! Where’s the tree?’

  ‘Carl will show you,’ I said, referring to my publicity man.

  Fifteen minutes later he returned, elated, with several peaches. That was the beginning of our friendship.

  ‘Can you play chess?’ he asked.

  I had to admit that I could not.

  ‘I’ll teach you. Come see me play tonight, I’m playing twenty men at the same time,’ he said with braggadocio.

  I promised and said I would take him to supper afterwards.

  ‘Good, I’ll get through early.’

  It was not necessary to understand chess to appreciate the drama of that evening: twenty middle-aged men poring over their chessboards, thrown into a dilemma by an infant of seven who looked even less than his years. To watch him walking about in the centre of the ‘U’ table, going from one to another, was a drama in itself.

  There was something surrealistic about the scene as an audience of three hundred or more sat in tiers on both sides of a hall, watching in silence a child pitting his brains against serious old men. Some looked condescending, studying with set Mona Lisa smiles.

  The boy was amazing, yet he disturbed me, for I felt as I watched that concentrated little face flushing red, then draining white, that he was paying a price with his health.

  ‘Here!’ a player would call, and the child would walk over, study the board a few seconds, then abruptly make a move or call ‘Checkmate!’ And a murmur of laughter would go through the audience. I saw him checkmate eight players in rapid succession, which evoked laughter and applause.

  And now he was studying the board of Dr Griffiths. The audience were silent. Suddenly he made a move, then turned away and saw me. His face lit up and he waved, indicating that he would not be long.

  After checkmating several other players, he returned to Dr Griffiths, who was still deeply concentrating. ‘Haven’t you moved yet?’ said the boy impatiently.

  The Doctor shook his head.

  ‘Oh come on, hurry up.’

  Griffiths smiled.

  The child looked at him fiercely. ‘You can’t beat me! If you move here, I’ll move there ! And if you move this, I’ll move that!’ He named in rapid succession seven or eight moves ahead. ‘We’ll be here all night, so let’s call it a draw.’

  The Doctor acquiesced.

  *

  Although I had grown fond of Mildred, we were irreconcilably mismated. Her character was not mean, but exasperatingly feline. I could never reach her mind. It was cluttered with pink-ribboned foolishness. She seemed in a dither, looking always for other horizons. After we had been married a year, a child was born but lived only three days. This began the withering of our marriage. Although we lived in the same house, we seldom saw each other, for she was as much occupied at her studio as I was at mine. It became a sad house. I would come home to find the dinner table laid for one, and would eat alone. Occasionally she was away for a week without leaving word, and I would only know by seeing the door of her empty bedroom left open.

  Sometimes, on a Sunday, we would meet accidentally as she was leaving the house, and she would tell me perfunctorily that she was going to spend the week-end with the Gishes or with some other girl-friends, and I would go to the Fairbankses’. Then the break came. It was during the cutting of The Kid. I was spending the week-end at the Fairbankses’ (Douglas and Mary were now married). Douglas came to me with rumours concerning Mildred. ‘I think you ought to know,’ he said.

  How true these rumours were I never wanted to find out, but they depressed me. When I confronted Mildred she coldly denied them.

  ‘However, we can’t continue living this way,’ I said.

  There was a pause and she looked at me coldly. ‘What do you want to do?’ she asked.

  She spoke so dispassionately that I was a little shocked. ‘I – I think we should divorce,’ I said quietly, wondering what her reaction would be. But she did not answer, so after a silence I continued: ‘I think we’ll both be happier. You’re young, you still have your life ahead of you, and of course we can do it in a friendly way. You can have your lawyer see my lawyer, so whatever you want can be arranged.’

  ‘All I want is enough money to look after my mother,’ she said.

  ‘Perhaps you’d rather discuss it between ourselves,’ I ventured.

  She thought a moment, then concluded: ‘I think I’d better see my lawyers.’

  ‘Very well,’ I answered. ‘In the meantime you stay on at the house and I’ll go back to the Athletic Club.’

  We separated in a friendly way, agreeing that she was to get the divorce on grounds of mental cruelty, and that we would say nothing about it to the Press.

  The following morning Tom Harrington moved my things to the Athletic Club. This was a mistake, for the rumour that we had separated quickly spread and the Press began telephoning Mildred. They also called at the Club, but I would neither see them nor make a statement. But she came out with a blast on the front page, saying that I had deserted her and that she was seeking a divorce on the grounds of mental cruelty. Compared to modern standards the attack was mild. However, I called her up to know why she had seen the Press. She explained that at first she had refused, but they had told her that I had given out a strong statement. Of course, they had lied in an attempt to build up an antagonism between us and I told her so. She promised not to give out any more statements – but she did.

  The Community Property Law in California legally entitled her to $25,000 and I offered her $100,000, which she agreed to accept as a complete settlement. But when the day came for signing the final papers she suddenly reneged without giving any reason.

  My lawyer was surprised– ‘there’s something in the wind,’ he said – and there was. I had been having disagreements with First National over The Kid; it was a seven-reel feature picture and they wanted to release it on a basis of three two-reel comedies. In this way they would have only paid me $405,000 for The Kid. As it had cost me almost half a million besides eighteen months’ work I told them I would see hell freeze over first. Lawsuits were threatened. Legally they had little chance and they knew it. Therefore, they decided to operate through Mildred and try to attach The Kid.

  As I had not finished cutting the film my instinct told me to cut it in another state. So I set out for Salt Lake City with a staff of two and over 400,000 feet of film, which consisted of five hundred rolls. We stayed at the Salt Lake City Hotel. In one of the bedrooms we laid out the film, using every piece of furniture – ledges, commodes and drawers – to put the rolls of film on. It being against the law to have anything dangerously inflammable in a hotel, we had to go about it secretly. Under these circumstances we continued cutting the picture. We had over two thousand takes to sort out, and, although they were numbered, one would occasionally get lost and we would be hours searching for it on the bed, under the bed, in the bathroom, until we found it. With such heartbreaking handicaps and without the proper facilities, by some miracle we finished the cutting.

  And now I had the terrifying ordeal of previewing it before an audience. I had only seen it with a small cutting machine, through which a picture no larger than a postcard was projected on to a towel. I was thankful that I had seen the rushes at my studio on a normal-size screen, but now I had the depressing feeling that fifteen months’ work had been done in the dark.

  Nobody had seen the picture except the studio staff. After running it a number of times on the cutting machine, nothing looked as funny or as interesting as we had imagined. We could only reassure ourselves by believing that our first enthusiasm had grown stale.

  We decided to give it the acid test and arranged to show it at the local movie theatre without any announcement. It was a large theatre and
three-quarters filled. In desperation I sat and waited for the film to come on. This particular audience seemed out of sympathy with anything I might present to them. I began to doubt my own judgement as to what an audience would like and react to in comedy. Perhaps I had made a mistake. Perhaps the whole enterprise would misfire and the audience would look upon it with bewilderment. Then the sickening thought came to me that a comedian can at times be so wrong in his ideas about comedy.

  Suddenly my stomach jumped up into my throat as a slide appeared on the screen: ‘Charlie Chaplin in his latest picture, The Kid’. A scream of delight went up from the audience and scattered applause. Paradoxically enough this worried me: they might be expecting too much and be disappointed.

  The first scenes were exposition, slow and solemn, and threw me into an agony of suspense. A mother deserts her baby by leaving it in a limousine, the car is stolen and the thieves eventually leave the baby near an ash-can. Then I appeared – the tramp. There was a laugh that accumulated and increased. They saw the joke! From then on I could do no wrong. I discovered the baby and adopted it. They laughed at an improvised hammock made out of old sacking and yelled when I fed the child out of a teapot with a nipple on the spout, and screamed when I cut a hole through the seat of an old cane chair, placing it over a chamber-pot – in fact they laughed hysterically throughout the picture.

  *

  Now that we had had a showing of the picture, we felt that the cutting was completed, and so we packed up and left Salt Lake City for the East. At the Ritz in New York I was forced to stay in my room because I was being harassed by process-servers instigated by First National, who were using Mildred’s divorce suit to attach the film. For three days the process-servers had kept a vigil around the hotel lobby, and I was getting bored by it. So that when Frank Harris invited me to dine at his house I could not resist the temptation. That evening a heavily veiled woman passed through the lobby of the Ritz and got into a taxi – it was me! I had borrowed my sister-in-law’s clothes, which I wore over my suit, shedding them in the taxi before I arrived at Frank’s house.

  Frank Harris, whose books I had read and admired, was my idol. Frank was in a continual state of financial crisis; every other week his periodical, Pearson’s Magazine, was about to fold. After one of his published appeals I had sent him a contribution and in gratitude he sent me two volumes of his book on Oscar Wilde, which he wrote in as follows:

  To Charlie Chaplin – one of the few who has helped me without even knowing me, one whose rare artistry in humour I have often admired, for those who make men laugh are worthier than those who make them weep – from his friend, Frank Harris, sending this his own Copy, Aug. 1919. ‘I praise and prize only that writer who tells the truth about men – with tears in his eyes ’–Pascal.

  That night I met Frank for the first time. He was a short, thick-set man with a noble head, strong, well-formed features, and a handle-bar moustache which was a little disconcerting. He had a deep, resonant voice and used it with great effect. He was then sixty-seven years old and had a beautiful young wife with red hair, who was devoted to him.

  Frank, although a socialist, was a great admirer of Bismarck and was rather contemptuous of the socialist, Liebknecht. His imitation of Bismarck with his German effective pauses answering Liebknecht in the Reichstag was powerful histrionics. Frank could have been a great actor. We talked until four in the morning, Frank doing most of it.

  That evening, I decided to stay at another hotel, in case, even at that hour, process-servers were hanging about, but every hotel in New York was filled. After driving round for over an hour, the taxi-driver, a rough-looking fellow about forty, turned and said: ‘Listen, you ain’t going to get into any hotel at this hour. You’d better come home to my place and sleep there until the morning.’

  At first I had qualms, but when he mentioned his wife and family I knew it would be all right; besides, I would be safe from the process-servers.

  ‘That’s very kind of you,’ I said and introduced myself.

  He was surprised and laughed. ‘My wife will get a kick out of this.’

  We arrived somewhere in the Bronx in a congested neigh-bourhood. There were rows of brownstone houses. We entered one which was sparsely furnished but spotlessly clean. He led me to a back room where there was a large bed, in it a boy of twelve, his son, fast asleep. ‘Wait,’ he said, then lifted the boy and flopped him over to the edge of the bed, the boy sleeping soundly throughout. Then he turned to me. ‘Get in there.’

  I was about to reconsider, but this hospitality was so touching that I could not refuse. He gave me a clean night-shirt and gingerly I crept into bed, terrified of waking the boy.

  I never slept a wink. When eventually he awoke, he got up and dressed, and through my half-closed eyes I saw him give me a casual look and without further reaction leave the room. A few minutes later he and a young lady of eight, evidently his sister, crept into the room. Still pretending to be asleep, I saw them peering at me, wide-eyed and excited. Then the little girl put her hands to her mouth to muffle a giggle, and the two of them left.

  It wasn’t long before audible murmurings were going on in the passage; then I heard the hushed whisper of the taxi-driver, who gently opened the door to see if I was awake. I assured him that I was.

  ‘We’ve got yer bath ready,’ he said. ‘It’s at the end of the landing.’ He had brought in a dressing-gown and some slippers and a towel. ‘What would you like for yer breakfast?’

  ‘Anything,’ I said apologetically.

  ‘Whatever you want – bacon and eggs, toast and coffee?’

  ‘Wonderful.’

  They timed it perfectly. With the completion of my dressing, his wife came into the front room with a hot breakfast.

  There was little furniture but a centre table, an armchair, and a couch; several framed photographs of family groups hung over the mantelpiece and upon the wall over the couch. While eating my breakfast alone I could hear a milling crowd of children and grown-ups outside the house.

  ‘They’re beginning to know you’re here,’ smiled his wife, bringing in the coffee. Then the taxi-driver entered, all excited. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘there’s a big crowd outside and it’s getting bigger. If you let those kids get a peek at you, they’ll go away, otherwise the Press’ll get on to it and you’re sunk!’

  ‘By all means let them come in,’ I replied.

  And so the children came in, giggling, and filed around the table while I sipped my coffee. The taxi-driver outside was saying: ‘All right, don’t get excited, line up, two at a time.’

  A young woman entered the room, her face tense and serious. She looked searchingly at me, then burst into weeping. ‘No, it’s not him, I thought it was him,’ she sobbed.

  It seems a friend had told her cryptically: ‘Who do you think is here? You’ll never believe it.’ Then she had been led into my presence, expecting to see her brother who was reported missing in the war.

  I decided to return to the Ritz whether served with papers or not. However, I encountered no process-servers. But a telegram awaited me from my lawyer in California stating that everything had been settled and Mildred had applied for her divorce.

  The next day the taxi-driver and his wife, all dressed up, came to visit me. He said the Press had been bothering him to write a feature story for the Sunday papers about my staying at his house. ‘But,’ he said resolutely, ‘I wouldn’t tell them a thing unless I had your permission.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ I said.

  *

  And now the gentlemen of First National came to me metaphorically with their hats in their hands. Said one of the vice-presidents, Mr Gordon, a large owner of theatres in the eastern states: ‘You want a million and a half dollars and we haven’t even seen the picture.’ I confessed they had something there, so a showing was arranged.

  It was a grim evening. Twenty-five exhibitors of First National filed into the projection-room as though going to a coroner’s inquest, an aggregation o
f graceless men, sceptical and unsympathetic.

  Then the picture started. The opening title was: ‘A picture with a smile and perhaps a tear.’ ‘Not bad,’ said Mr Gordon by way of showing his magnanimity.

  Since the preview in Salt Lake City I had become a little more confident, but before the showing was half through that confidence had collapsed: where the picture had got screams at the preview there were only one or two sniggers. When it was over and the lights went up, there was a momentary silence. Then they began to stretch and blink and talk about other matters.

  ‘What are you doing tonight for dinner, Harry?’

  ‘I’m taking the wife to the Plaza, then we’re going on to the Ziegfeld show.’

  ‘It’s pretty good, I hear.’

  ‘Do you want to come along?’

  ‘No, I’m leaving New York tonight. I want to be back for my boy’s graduation.’

  All through this chatter, my nerves were on razor edge. Eventually I snapped: ‘Well, what’s the verdict, gentlemen?’

  Some stirred self-consciously, others looked down at the ground. Mr Gordon, who evidently was their mouthpiece, began slowly walking up and down. He was a thick-set, heavy man with a round, owlish face and thick-lensed glasses. ‘Well, Charlie,’ he said, ‘I’ll have to get together with my associates.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ I quickly interposed, ‘but how do you like the picture?’

  He hesitated, then grinned. ‘Charlie, we’re here to buy it, not to say how much we like it.’ This remark evoked one or two loud guffaws.

  ‘I won’t charge you extra for liking it,’ I said.

  He hesitated. ‘Frankly, I expected something else.’

  ‘What did you expect?’

  He spoke slowly. ‘Well, Charlie, for a million and a half dollars – well, it hasn’t got that big punch.’

  ‘What do you want – London Bridge to fall down?’

  ‘No. But for a million and a half.…’ His voice cracked into a falsetto.

  ‘Well, gentlemen, that’s the price. You can take it or leave it,’ I said impatiently.