My Autobiography

by Charles Chaplin

  I remember an incident at a dinner Marion gave in her rented house. About fifty of us were standing about, while Hearst, looking saturnine, was seated in a high-backed chair surrounded by his editorial staff. Marion, gowned à la Madame Recamier, reclined on a settee, looking radiantly beautiful, but growing more taciturn as Hearst continued his business. Suddenly she shouted indignantly: ‘Hey! You!’

  Hearst looked up: ‘Are you referring to me?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, you! Come here!’ she answered, keeping her large blue orbs on him. His staff backed away and the room hardened into silence.

  Hearst’s eyes narrowed as he sat sphinx-like, his scowl growing darker, his lips disappearing into a thin line as his fingers tapped nervously on the arm of his throne-like chair, undecided whether to burst into fury or not. I felt like reaching for my hat. But suddenly he stood up. ‘Well, I suppose I shall have to go,’ he said, oafishly hobbling over to her. ‘And what does my lady want?’

  ‘Do your business down town,’ said Marion disdainfully, ‘not in my house. My guests are waiting for a drink, so hurry up and get them one.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ he said, clownishly hobbling off into the kitchen, and everyone smiled with relief.

  Journeying on a train once from Los Angeles to New York to attend to some urgent business, I received a wire from Hearst inviting me to go with him to Mexico. I wired back, regretting that I had business to attend to in New York. In Kansas City, however, I was met by two of Hearst’s agents. ‘We’ve come to take you off the train,’ they said, smiling, explaining that Mr Hearst would have his New York lawyers attend to all my business there. But I could not go.

  I have never known a person throw wealth around in such a dégagé manner as did Hearst. Rockefeller felt the moral burden of money, Pierpont Morgan was imbued with the power of it, but Hearst spent millions nonchalantly as though it were weekly pocket money.

  The beach-house that Hearst gave Marion at Santa Monica was a palace built, symbolically, on the sands by imported Italian artisans, a seventy-roomed Georgian structure, three hundred feet wide and three storeys high, with a gold-leaf-gilded ballroom and dining-room. Paintings by Reynolds, Lawrence and others were hung everywhere – some fakes. In the spacious oak-panelled library, when a button was pressed, a section of the floor rose up and became a screen for moving pictures.

  Marion’s dining-room could seat fifty guests comfortably. Several elaborate suites accommodated at least twenty guests. An Italian marble swimming pool, over one hundred feet long with a Venetian marble bridge across the centre of it, was set in an enclosed garden facing the ocean. Adjacent to the swimming pool was a combination bar-room and small cabaret dance floor.

  The Santa Monica authorities wanted to build a harbour for small naval craft and pleasure boats, a project supported by the Los Angeles Times. Owning a small cruiser myself, I thought it a good idea and told Hearst so at breakfast one morning. ‘It would demoralize the whole neighbourhood,’ said he indignantly, ‘having sailors peeking in these windows as though the place was a brothel!’ Nothing further was said on the subject.

  Hearst was remarkably natural. If in the mood he would do his favourite Charleston dance with charming gaucheness, regardless of what people thought of him. He was nothing of the poseur and was activated only by what interested him. He gave me the impression of being a dull man – perhaps he was, but he made no effort to be otherwise. Many people thought that the daily editorials signed by Hearst were written by Arthur Brisbane, but Brisbane himself told me that Hearst was the most brilliant editorial writer in the country.

  At times he was surprisingly childish and his feelings could be easily hurt. I remember one evening while we were choosing sides for a game of charades, he complained that he had been left out. ‘Well,’ said Jack Gilbert facetiously, ‘we’ll play a charade on our own, and act out the word “pill-box” – I’ll be the box and you can be the pill.’ But W.R. took it the wrong way; his voice quivered. ‘I don’t want to play your old charades,’ he said, and with that he left the room, slamming the door behind him.

  Hearst’s four-hundred-thousand-acre ranch at San Simeon extended thirty miles along the Pacific Coast. The living quarters were set back on a plateau like a citadel, five hundred feet above sea level and four miles from the ocean. The main château was built from several castles shipped over in crates from Europe. The façade looked like a combination of Rheims Cathedral and a gigantic Swiss chalet. Surrounding it like vanguards were five Italian villas, set in on the edge of the plateau, each housing six guests. They were furnished in Italian style with baroque ceilings from which carved seraphs and cherubs smiled down at you. In the main château were rooms for thirty more guests. The reception room was about ninety by fifty feet, hung with Gobelin tapestries, some genuine, others faked. In this baronial atmosphere were backgammon tables and pin-ball games at each end of the room. The dining-room was a small replica of the nave of Westminster Abbey and seated comfortably eighty guests. The house personnel numbered sixty.

  Within hearing distance of the château was a zoo, containing lions, tigers, bears, apes, orang-outangs, birds and reptiles. From the lodge gates to the château was a five-mile drive flanked with notices: ‘Animals have the right of way.’ One waited in one’s car while a brace of ostriches made up their minds to get off the roads. Ewes, deer, elks and buffaloes roamed the estate in herds and impeded one’s progress.

  There were cars to meet the guests at the railway station, or, if you came by plane, there was a private landing field. If you happened to arrive between meals, you were shown your quarters and instructed that dinner was at eight and cocktails would be served in the main hall at seven-thirty.

  For amusement, there was swimming, horseback riding, tennis and games of every description, or a visit to the zoo. Hearst made a rigid rule that no one could get a cocktail until six in the evening. But Marion would gather her friends in her quarters, where cocktails were served surreptitiously.

  The dinners were elaborate; the menu read like a Charles the First banquet. There was game of the season: pheasant, wild duck, partridge and venison. Yet amidst this opulence we were served paper napkins, and it was only when Mrs Hearst was in residence that the guests were given linen ones.

  Mrs Hearst visited San Simeon annually, and nothing conflicted. The coexistence between Marion and Mrs Hearst was mutually understood: when it was nearing time for Mrs Hearst’s arrival, Marion and the rest of us would discreetly leave or return to Marion’s Santa Monica beach-house. I had known Millicent Hearst since 1916 and we were very good friends, so I had a visa to both establishments. When ensconced at the ranch with her San Francisco society friends, she would ask me for the week-end and I would show up as though it were my first visit of the season. But Millicent had no illusions. Although feigning ignorance of the recent exodus, she had a sense of humour about it. ‘If it weren’t Marion it would be someone else,’ she said. She often talked confidentially with me about the relationship of Marion and W.R., but never with bitterness. ‘He still acts as though nothing had ever happened between us and as if Marion doesn’t exist,’ she said. ‘When I arrive he is always sweet and charming, but never stays more than a few hours. And it’s always the same routine: in the middle of dinner the butler hands him a note, then he excuses himself and leaves the table. When he returns, he sheepishly mentions that some urgent business matter needs his immediate attention in Los Angeles, and we all pretend to believe him. And of course we all know he returns to join Marion.’

  One evening after dinner I accompanied Millicent on a walk about the grounds. The château was drenched in moonlight, looking wondrous and ghostly against the wild setting of the seven mountain tops; the stars pierced an intensely clear sky. We stood a moment taking in the panoramic beauty. From the zoo the occasional roar of a lion could be heard and the continual scream of an enormous orang-outang, that echoed and bounced about the mountain tops. It was eerie and terrifying, for each evening at sundown
the orang-outang would start, quietly at first, then working up to horrific screaming, which lasted on into the night.

  ‘That wretched animal must be insane,’ I said.

  ‘The whole place is crazy. Look at it!’ she said, viewing the château. ‘The creation of mad Otto… and he’ll go on building and adding to it till the day he dies. Then what use will it be? No one can afford to keep it up. As an hotel it’s useless, and if he leaves it to the State I doubt whether they could make any use of it – even as a university.’

  Millicent always spoke of Hearst in a maternal way, which made me suspect she was still emotionally involved with him. She was a kindly, understanding woman, but in later years, after I became politically de trop, she snubbed me.

  *

  One evening when I arrived at San Simeon for a week-end, Marion met me, nervous and excited. One of the guests had been attacked with a razor as he was crossing the grounds.

  Marion stuttered whenever excited, which added to her charm and gave her a lady-in-distress quality. ‘We d-d-don’t know yet who did it,’ she whispered, ‘but W.R. has several detectives searching the grounds, and we’re trying to keep the news away from the other guests. Some think that the attacker was a Filipino, so W.R. has had every Filipino put off the ranch until a proper investigation is made.’

  ‘Who is the man that’s been attacked?’ I asked.

  ‘You’ll see him this evening at dinner,’ she said.

  At dinner I sat opposite a young man whose face was swathed in bandages; all that could be seen were his gleaming eyes and white teeth, which he bared in a perpetual smile.

  Marion nudged me under the table. ‘That’s him,’ she whispered.

  He seemed none the worse for the attack and had a very good appetite. To all inquiries about the matter he just shrugged and grinned.

  After dinner Marion showed me where the assault had taken place. ‘It was behind that statue,’ she said, pointing to a marble replica of ‘Winged Victory’. ‘Here are the blood-stains.’

  ‘What was he doing behind the statue?’ I asked.

  ‘T-t-trying to get away from the a-t-t-tacker,’ she answered.

  Suddenly out of the night our guest appeared again, his face dripping with blood, as he staggered past us. Marion screamed and I jumped three feet. In a moment twenty men from nowhere surrounded him. ‘I’ve been attacked again,’ he moaned. He was borne on the arms of two detectives and taken back to his room, where they questioned him. Marion disappeared, but I saw her in the main hall an hour later. ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  She looked sceptical. ‘They say he did it himself. He’s a nut and just wants attention.’ Without further compunction the eccentric was bundled off the hill that night and the poor Filipinos returned to their work in the morning.

  Sir Thomas Lipton was a guest at San Simeon and Marion’s beach-house, a delightful, verbose old Scotsman with a charming brogue. He talked interminably and reminisced.

  Said he: ‘Charlie, you came to America and made good – so did I. The first time I arrived was in a cattle boat. And I said to myself: “The next time, I’ll arrive on my own yacht” – and I did.’ He complained to me that he was being robbed of millions of pounds in his Lipton tea business. Alexander Moore, Ambassador to Spain, Sir Thomas Lipton and I often dined together in Los Angeles, and Alex and Sir Thomas would reminisce, each in turn dropping royal names like cigarette butts, leaving me with the impression that royalty uttered nothing but epigrams.

  At this time I saw a great deal of Hearst and Marion as I enjoyed the extravagant life they lived, and having an open invitation to spend every week-end at Marion’s beach-house I often took advantage of it, especially as Doug and Mary were in Europe. One morning, at breakfast, with several others, Marion asked my advice about her script, but what I said was not to W.R.’s liking. The theme of the story was feminism, and I mentioned that women chose their men and that men had little to do about it.

  W.R. thought otherwise. ‘Oh, no,’ said he, ‘it is always the man who makes the choice.’

  ‘We think we do,’ I replied, ‘but some little damsel points her finger at you and says: “I’ll take that one” and you’re taken.’

  ‘You’re entirely wrong,’ said Hearst confidently.

  ‘The trouble is,’ I went on, ‘their technique is so well hidden that we are made to believe we do the choosing.’

  Hearst suddenly slammed the table with the palm of his hand, making all the breakfast things jump. ‘If I say a thing is white, you say it’s black!’ he shouted.

  I believed I paled slightly. The butler happened to be serving my coffee. I looked up and said: ‘Will you please have someone pack my things and order me a taxi?’ Then without a word I got up and went into the ballroom and began strutting up and down, speechless with rage. A moment later Marion appeared. ‘What’s wrong, Charlie?’

  My voice quivered. ‘No man can shout at me like that. Who does he think he is? Nero? Napoleon?’

  Without answering she turned and hurriedly left the room. A moment later W.R. appeared, pretending nothing had happened. ‘What’s the matter, Charlie?’

  ‘I am not used to being shouted at, especially when I am a guest in the house. So I’m leaving. I –’ My voice disappeared into my throat and I could not finish my sentence.

  W.R. thought a moment, then he too began pacing the floor. ‘Let’s talk it over,’ he said, his voice also tremulous.

  I followed him into the hall to a recess where there was an antique Chippendale double chair. Hearst was six foot four and quite large. He sat in it and pointed to what space was left. ‘Sit down, Charlie, and we’ll talk it over.’ I sat beside him, but it was a tight squeeze. Without a word he suddenly extended his hand which, although unable to move in my seat, I managed to shake. Then he began to explain, his voice still tremulous. ‘You see, Charlie, I really don’t want Marion to do this script – and she respects your opinion. And when you approved of it – well, that’s probably why I was a little short with you.’

  Immediately I melted and was all placating, insisting that it was all my fault; as a final gesture we managed to shake hands again, then started to rise, but found ourselves wedged in the Chippendale, which began to creak alarmingly. After several efforts, we eventually released ourselves with the chair intact.

  It appears that after Marion left me she had gone straight to Hearst and upbraided him for being so rude and told him to go and apologize. Marion knew when to choose her moment and when to keep silent, as she sometimes did. ‘In his ugly mood,’ said Marion, ‘the storm comes up like th-th-thunder.’

  Marion was gay and charming; and when W.R.’s business called him to New York, she would gather all her friends at her house in Beverly Hills (this was before the beach-house was built), and we would have parties and play charades into the small hours. Then Rudolph Valentino would reciprocate at his house and I would do the same at mine. Sometimes we hired a public omnibus and stacked it with victuals and hired a concertina-player, and ten or twenty of us would go to Malibu Beach, where we built a bonfire and had midnight picnics and caught grunnion.

  Invariably Louella Parsons, the Hearst columnist, would come along, escorted by Harry Crocker, who eventually became one of my assistant directors. After such expeditions we would not get home until four or five in the morning. Marion would say to Louella: ‘If W.R. hears about this, one of us is going to lose his job, an-an-and it won’t be me.’

  During our merry dinner party at Marion’s house, W.R. telephoned from New York. When Marion returned from the phone she was furious. ‘Can you imagine?’ she said indignantly. ‘W.R. has had me watched!’

  Over the phone Hearst read her a detective’s report of what she had been doing since he had been away, saying that she had been seen leaving subject A’s house at four in the morning and subject B’s house at five, and so forth. She told me later that he was returning immediately to Los Angeles to settle up all his affairs with her and that they would part. Of cou
rse Marion was indignant, because she had done nothing but enjoy herself among friends. The detective’s report was true in effect, but distorted to give the wrong impression. At Kansas City W.R. sent a wire: ‘I have changed my mind and will not return to California because I cannot face going back to those places where I have had so much happiness in the past, so I am returning to New York’. But soon after he sent another wire saying that he was arriving in Los Angeles.

  It was a tense moment for all concerned when W.R. returned. However, Marion’s interview with him had a salutary effect which resulted in an enormous banquet to welcome W.R. back to Beverly Hills. Marion built a temporary dining-room on to her rented house to seat one hundred and sixty guests. It was completed in two days – decorated, electrically lit, including the building of a dance floor. Marion had only to rub the magic lamp and it was done. That evening she appeared with a new $75,000 emerald ring – a present from W.R. – and, incidentally, nobody lost his job.

  As a change from San Simeon and Marion’s beach-house, we occasionally spent a week-end on Hearst’s yacht and cruised over to Catalina or south to San Diego. It was during one of these cruises that Thomas H. Ince, who had taken over Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Film Productions, had to be carried off the boat in San Diego. I was not present on that trip, but Elinor Glyn, who was aboard, told me that Ince had been gay and debonair, but during lunch had been suddenly stricken with paralysing pain and forced to leave the table. Everyone thought it was an attack of indigestion, but he became so ill that it seemed advisable to put him ashore and get him to a hospital. There it was discovered he had suffered a heart-attack, and he was sent to his home in Beverly Hills, where three weeks later he had a second attack and died.