My Autobiography

by Charles Chaplin

  Ugly rumours began to spread that Ince had been shot and Hearst was implicated. These rumours were completely untrue. I know this because Hearst, Marion and I went to see Ince at his home two weeks before he died; he was very happy to see the three of us and believed that he would soon be well.

  Ince’s death upset Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Productions’ plans, so they were taken over by Warner Brothers. But after two years Hearst Productions moved over to M.G.M., where an elaborate bungalow dressing-room was built for Marion (I called it the Trianon).

  Here Hearst transacted most of his newspaper business. Many times I saw him seated in the centre of Marion’s reception room, with twenty or more newspapers spread all over the floor. From his chair he would scan the various headlines. ‘That’s a feeble set-up,’ he would say in his high voice, pointing to one paper. ‘And why is so-and-so featuring that story?’ He would pick up a magazine and thumb its pages, weighing it appraisingly with both hands. ‘What’s the matter with the Redbook’s advertising? – pretty light this month. Wire Ray Long to come here at once.’ In the midst of this scene, Marion would appear in all her finery, having just left the movie set, and in her moqueuse way deliberately walk over the newspapers, saying: ‘Get rid of all this junk, it’s cluttering up my dressing-room.’

  Hearst could be extremely naïve. When going to a première of one of Marion’s pictures, he would invite me to drive with them, and before arriving at the entrance of the theatre he would get out so as not to be seen arriving with Marion. Yet when the Hearst Examiner and the Los Angeles Times were embroiled in a political fight, Hearst attacking vigorously and the Times coming off second best, the Times resorted to a personal attack, accusing Hearst of leading a double life and maintaining a love-nest at Santa Monica beach and mentioning Marion. Hearst did not answer the attack in his newspaper, but came to me a day later (Marion’s mother had just died) and said: ‘Charlie, will you be a principal pall-bearer with me at Mrs Davies’s funeral?’ And, of course, I accepted.

  In 1933 or thereabouts, Hearst invited me to take a trip with him to Europe. He had engaged the whole side of one of the Cunard liners for his party. But I declined, for it meant trailing along with twenty others, lingering where Hearst wanted to linger, and hurrying where he wanted to hurry.

  I had had a taste of that experience on a trip to Mexico with him, when my second wife was pregnant. A parade of ten cars followed Hearst and Marion over bumpy roads and I was cursing the whole outfit because of it. So impassable were the roads that we had to abandon our destination and put up at a Mexican farmhouse for the night. There were only two rooms for twenty of us; one was graciously allotted to my wife, Elinor Glyn and myself. Some slept on tables and chairs, others in chicken coops and in the kitchen. It was a fantastic scene in that small room, my wife in the only bed, I propped up on two chairs, and Elinor, dressed as though going to the Ritz, sleeping on a broken-down couch, wearing her hat, her veil and gloves. She lay with her hands folded across her chest like a supine figure on a tomb, and slept undisturbed in that one position. I knew, for I did not sleep a wink all night. In the morning, from the corner of my eye, I watched her get up as she had lain down, with everything intact, not one hair out of place, her skin white and enamelled, as ebullient and spry as if she were walking through the tea-room of the Plaza Hotel.

  On the trip to Europe, Hearst took Harry Crocker, my former assistant director, with him. Harry had now become Hearst’s social secretary, and asked if I would give W.R. a letter of introduction to Sir Philip Sassoon, which I did.

  Philip gave Hearst a very good time. Knowing that Hearst had been flagrantly anti-British for many years, he arranged for him to meet the Prince of Wales. He got the two of them closeted in his library, where, according to Philip’s story, the Prince asked Hearst point-blank why he was so anti-British. They were there for two hours, he said, and Philip believed that the Prince’s interview had a salutary effect.

  I could never understand Hearst’s anti-British feeling, for he had valuable holdings in England and enjoyed large profits from them. His pro-German tendencies dated back to the First World War, at which critical time his association and friendship with Count Bernstorff – then the German Ambassador – verged on a scandal. Even Hearst’s immense power could hardly suppress it. Then, too, his American foreign correspondent, Karl von Wiegand, always wrote favourably of Germany up to the very edge of the Second World War.

  During Hearst’s trip to Europe, he visited Germany and had an interview with Hitler. At that time no one knew much about Hitler’s concentration camps. The first intimation of them came from articles written by my friend Cornelius Vanderbilt, who had, on some pretext, got into one and written of the Nazi tortures there. But his stories of degenerate brutality were so fantastic that few people believed them.

  Vanderbilt sent me a series of picture postcards showing Hitler making a speech. The face was obscenely comic – a bad imitation of me, with its absurd moustache, unruly, stringy hair and disgusting, thin, little mouth. I could not take Hitler seriously. Each postcard showed a different posture of him: one with his hands claw-like haranguing the crowds, another with one arm up and the other down, like a cricketer about to bowl, and another with hands clenched in front of him as though lifting an imaginary dumb-bell. The salute with the hand thrown back over the shoulder, the palm upwards, made me want to put a tray of dirty dishes on it. ‘This is a nut!’ I thought. But when Einstein and Thomas Mann were forced to leave Germany, this face of Hitler was no longer comic but sinister.

  *

  I first met Einstein in 1926, when he came to California to lecture. I have a theory that scientists and philosophers are sublimated romanticists who channel their passions in another direction. This theory fitted well the personality of Einstein. He looked the typical Alpine German in the nicest sense, jovial and friendly. And although his manner was calm and gentle, I felt it concealed a highly emotional temperament, and that from this source came his extraordinary intellectual energy.

  Carl Laemmle of the Universal studios phoned to say that Professor Einstein would like to meet me. I was thrilled. So we met at the Universal studios for lunch, the Professor, his wife, his secretary, Helene Dukas, and his Assistant Professor, Walter Meyer. Mrs Einstein spoke English very well, in fact better than the Professor. She was a square-framed woman with abundant vitality; she frankly enjoyed being the wife of the great man and made no attempt to hide the fact; her enthusiasm was endearing.

  After lunch, while Mr Laemmle showed them around the studio, Mrs Einstein drew me aside and whispered: ‘Why don’t you invite the Professor to your house? I know he would be delighted to have a nice quiet chat with just ourselves.’ As Mrs Einstein had requested it should be a small affair, I invited only two other friends. At dinner she told me the story of the morning he conceived the theory of relativity.

  ‘The Doctor came down in his dressing-gown as usual for breakfast but he hardly touched a thing. I thought something was wrong, so I asked what was troubling him. “Darling,” he said, “I have a wonderful idea.” And after drinking his coffee, he went to the piano and started playing. Now and again he would stop, making a few notes then repeat: “I’ve got a wonderful idea, a marvellous idea!”

  ‘I said: “Then for goodness’ sake tell me what it is, don’t keep me in suspense.”

  ‘He said: “It’s difficult, I still have to work it out.” ’

  She told me he continued playing the piano and making notes for about half an hour, then went upstairs to his study, telling her that he did not wish to be disturbed, and remained there for two weeks. ‘Each day I sent him up his meals,’ she said, ‘and in the evening he would walk a little for exercise, then return to his work again.’

  ‘Eventually,’ she said, ‘he came down from his study looking very pale. “That’s it,” he told me, wearily putting two sheets of paper on the table. And that was his theory of relativity.’

  Dr Reynolds, whom I had invited that evening becau
se he had a smattering of physics, asked the Professor during dinner whether he had ever read Dunne’s Experiment with Time.

  Einstein shook his head.

  Said Reynolds airily: ‘He has an interesting theory about dimensions, a sort of a’ – here he hesitated – ‘a sort of an extension of a dimension.’

  Einstein turned to me quickly and mischievously whispered ‘An extension of a dimension, was ist das?’

  Reynolds got off the dimensions after that and asked Einstein if he believed in ghosts. Einstein confessed that he had never seen one, and added: ‘When twelve other persons have witnessed the same phenomenon at the same time, then I might believe.’ He smiled.

  At that time psychic phenomena were rife and ectoplasm loomed over Hollywood like smog, especially in the homes of the movie stars, where spiritualist meetings and demonstrations of levitation and psychic phenomena took place. I did not attend these affairs, but Fanny Brice, the celebrated comedienne, swore that at a spiritualist meeting she had seen a table rise and float about the room. I asked the Professor if he had ever witnessed such phenomena. He smiled blandly and shook his head. I also asked him whether his theory of relativity conflicted with the Newtonian hypothesis.

  ‘On the contrary,’ he said, ‘it is an extension of it.’

  During dinner I told Mrs Einstein that after the opening of my next picture I intended going to Europe.

  ‘Then you must come to Berlin and visit us,’ she said. ‘We have not a big place – the Professor is not rich although he has access to over a million dollars for his scientific work from the Rockefeller Foundation – but he has never used it.’

  Later when I went to Berlin I visited them in their modest little flat. It was like something you might find in the Bronx, a sitting-room and dining-room in one, covered with old worn carpets. The most expensive piece of furniture was the black piano upon which he made those historical preliminary notes on the fourth dimension. I have often wondered what became of the piano. Possibly it is in the Smithsonian Institution or the Metropolitan Museum – possibly used as kindling wood by the Nazis.

  When the Nazi terror came to Germany, the Einsteins took refuge in the United States. Mrs Einstein tells an interesting story of the Professor’s ignorance of money matters. Princeton University wanted him to join their faculty and wrote about terms; the Professor submitted such a modest figure that the heads of Princeton replied that the terms he asked would not be adequate for living in the United States, and that he would require at least three times the amount.

  When the Einsteins came again to California in 1937, they visited me. He embraced me affectionately and warned me that he was bringing three musicians. ‘We are going to play for you after dinner.’ That evening Einstein was one of a Mozart quartet. Although his bowing was not too assured and his technique a little stiff, nevertheless he played rapturously, closing his eyes and swaying. The three musicians, who did not show too much enthusiasm for the Professor’s participation, discreetly suggested giving him a rest and playing something on their own. He acquiesced and sat with the rest of us and listened. But after they had played several pieces, he turned and whispered to me: ‘When do I play again?’ When the musicians left, Mrs Einstein, slightly indignant, assured her husband: ‘You played better than all of them!’

  A few nights later the Einsteins came again for dinner and I invited Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Marion Davies, W. R. Hearst, and one or two others. Marion Davies sat next to Einstein, and Mrs Einstein sat on my right next to Hearst. Before dinner everything seemed to be going pretty well; Hearst was amiable and Einstein polite. But as dinner progressed I could feel a slow freeze-up until neither one of them exchanged a word. I did my best to enliven conversation, but nothing would make them talk. The dining-room became charged with an ominous silence and I saw Hearst looking mournfully into his dessert plate and the Professor smiling, calmly engrossed in thought.

  Marion in her flippant way had been making quips and asides to everyone at the table but Einstein. Suddenly she turned to the Professor and said elfishly: ‘Hallo!’ then twiddled her middle fingers over his head, saying: ‘Why don’t you get your hair cut?’

  Einstein smiled and I though it time to disperse for coffee in the drawing-room.

  *

  Eisenstein, the Russian film director, came to Hollywood with his staff, including Grigor Alexandrov and also a young Englishman named Ivor Montagu, a friend of Eisenstein. I saw a lot of them. They used to play very bad tennis on my court – at least Alexandrov did.

  Eisenstein was to make a picture for the Paramount Company. He came with the fame of Potemkin and Ten Days That Shook the World; Paramount had thought it good business to engage him to direct and write his own script. He wrote a very fine one, Sutter’s Gold, taken from an interesting document about California’s early days. There was no propaganda in it, but because Eisenstein was from Russia Paramount later grew fearful, and nothing came of it.

  Discussing Communism with him one day, I asked if he thought that the educated proletarian was mentally equal to the aristocrat with his generations of cultural background. I think he was surprised at my ignorance. Eisenstein, who came from a Russian middle-class family of engineers, said: ‘If educated, the cerebral strength of the masses is like rich new soil.’

  His film Ivan the Terrible, which I saw after the Second World War, was the acme of all historical pictures. He dealt with history poetically – an excellent way of dealing with it. When I realize how distorted even recent events have become, history as such only arouses my scepticism. Whereas a poetic interpretation achieves a general effect of the period. After all, there are more valid facts and details in works of art than there are in history books.

  twenty-One

  WHILE I was in New York, a friend told me that he had witnessed the synchronization of sound in films and predicted that it would shortly revolutionize the whole film industry.

  I did not think of it again until months later when the Warner Brothers produced their first talking sequence. It was a costume picture, showing a very lovely actress – who shall be nameless – emoting silently over some great sorrow, her big, soulful eyes imparting anguish beyond the eloquence of Shakespeare. Then suddenly a new element entered the film – the noise that one hears when putting a sea-shell to one’s ear. Then the lovely princess spoke as if talking through sand: ‘I shall marry Gregory, even at the cost of giving up the throne.’ It was a terrible shock, for until then the princess had enthralled us. As the picture progressed the dialogue became funnier, but not as funny as the sound effects. When the handle of the boudoir door turned I thought someone had cranked up a farm tractor, and when the door closed it sounded like the collision of two lumber trucks. At the beginning they knew nothing about controlling sound: a knight-errant in armour clanged like the noise in a steel factory, a simple family dinner sounded like the rush hour in a cheap restaurant, and the pouring of water into a glass made a peculiar tone that ran up the scale to high C. I came away from the theatre believing the days of sound were numbered.

  But a month later M.G.M. produced The Broadway Melody, a full-length sound musical, and a cheap dull affair it was, but a stupendous box-office success. That started it; overnight every theatre began wiring for sound. That was the twilight of silent films. It was a pity, for they were beginning to improve. Murnau, the German director, had used the medium effectively, and some of our American directors were beginning to do the same. A good silent picture had universal appeal both to the intellectual and the rank and file. Now it was all to be lost.

  But I was determined to continue making silent films, for I believed there was room for all types of entertainment. Besides, I was a pantomimist and in that medium I was unique and, without false modesty, a master. So I continued with the production of another silent picture, City Lights.

  It evolved from a story of a clown who, through an accident at the circus, has lost his sight. He has a little daughter, a sick, nervous child, and when he
returns from the hospital the doctor warns him that he must hide his blindness from her until she is well and strong enough to understand, as the shock might be too much for her. His stumblings and bumpings into things make the little girl laugh joyously. But that was too ‘icky’. However, the blindness of the clown was transferred to the flower-girl in City Lights.

  The sub-plot was a notion I had been toying with for years: two members of a rich man’s club, discussing the instability of human consciousness, decide to experiment with a tramp whom they find asleep on the Embankment. They take him to their palatial apartment and lavish him with wine, women and song, and when he is dead drunk and asleep they put him back where they found him and he wakes up, thinking it has all been a dream. From this idea came the story of the millionaire of City Lights who befriends the tramp when he is drunk and ignores him when he is sober. This theme motivates the plot and enables the tramp to keep up the pretence with the blind girl that he is rich.

  After a day’s work on City Lights, I used to go to Doug’s studio and take a steam bath. Many of his friends – actors, producers and directors – gathered there and we would sit around sipping our gin and tonics, gossiping and discussing talking pictures. The fact that I was making another silent film surprised most of them. ‘You have a lot of courage,’ they said.

  In the past my work had usually stimulated interest among producers. But now they were too preoccupied with the success of the talkies, and as time went on I began to feel outside of things; I guess I had been spoiled.

  Joe Schenck, who had publicly expressed his dislike for talkies, was now won over to them. ‘They’re here to stay, I’m afraid, Charlie,’ and he would hypothesize that only Chaplin could pull off a successful silent picture. This was complimentary but not very comforting, as I did not wish to be the only adherent of the art of silent pictures. Neither was it reassuring to read magazine articles expressing doubts and fears for the future of Charlie Chaplin’s film career.