We rented a house set back from the ocean half a mile. It was dank and miserable, and when we lit a fire it would fill the room with volumes of smoke. Tim knew many of the social set of Pebble Beach, and while he visited them I tried to work. For days and days I sat alone in the library and walked in the garden, trying to get an idea, but nothing would come. Eventually, I deferred worrying, joined Tim and met some of our neighbours. I often thought they were good material for short stories – typical de Maupassant. One large house, although comfortable, was slightly eerie and sad. The host, an agreeable chap, talked loudly and incessantly while his wife sat without uttering a word. Since her baby had died five years ago, she seldom spoke or smiled. Her only utterance was good-evening and good-night.
At another house built on the high cliffs overlooking the sea, a novelist had lost his wife. It appears she had been in the garden taking photographs and must have stepped backwards too far. When her husband went to look for her, he found only a tripod. She was never seen again.
Wilson Mizner’s sister disliked her neighbours, whose tennis court overlooked her house, and whenever her neighbours played tennis she would build a fire and volumes of smoke would cover the court.
The Fagans, an old couple, immensely rich, entertained elaborately on Sundays. The Nazi Consul, whom I met there, a blond, smooth-mannered young man, did his best to be engaging. But I gave him a wide-berth.
Occasionally we spent a week-end at the John Steinbecks’. They had a small house near Monterey. He was just on the threshold of fame, having written Tortilla Flat and a series of short stories. John worked in the morning and averaged about two thousand words a day. I was amazed at how neat were his pages, with hardly a correction. I envy him.
I like to know the way writers work and how much they turn out a day. Thomas Mann averaged about 400 words a day. Lion Feuchtwanger dictated 2,000 words, which averaged 600 written words a day. Somerset Maugham wrote 400 words a day just to keep in practice. H. G. Wells averaged 1,000 words a day, Hannen Swaffer, the English journalist, wrote from 4,000 to 5,000 words a day. The American critic, Alexander Woollcott, wrote a 700-word review in fifteen minutes, then joined a poker game – I was there when he did it. Hearst would write a 2,000-word editorial in an evening. Georges Simenon has written a short novel in a month – and of excellent literary quality. Georges tells me that he gets up at five in the morning, brews his own coffee, then sits at his desk and rolls a golden ball, the size of a tennis ball, and thinks. He writes with a pen and when I asked him why he wrote in such small handwriting, he said: ‘It requires less effort of the wrist.’ As for myself I dictate about 1,000 words a day, which averages me about 300 in finished dialogue for my films
The Steinbecks had no servants, his wife did all the housework. It was a wonderful ménage and I was very fond of her.
We had many a discourse and in discussing Russia John said that one thing the Communists had done was to abolish prostitution. ‘That’s about the last of private enterprise,’ I said. ‘Too bad, it’s about the only profession that gives full value for your money, and a most honest one – why not unionize it?’
An attractive married lady, whose husband was flagrantly unfaithful, arranged a pas de deux with me at her large house. I went there with every adulterous intention. But when the lady confided tearfully that she had had no sexual relations with her husband in eight years and that she still loved him, her tears dampened my ardour, and I found myself giving her philosophical advice – the whole thing became cerebral. Later it was rumoured that she had turned Lesbian.
Robinson Jeffers, the poet, lived near Pebble Beach. The first time Tim and I met him was at a friend’s house. He was aloof and silent, and in my usual glib way I started to carp about the ills and evils of the day just to make the evening go. But Jeffers never said a word. I came away rather annoyed at myself for having monopolized the conversation. I felt that he disliked me, but I was wrong, for a week later he invited Tim and me to tea.
Robinson Jeffers and his wife lived in a small medieval stone castle called Tor, which he had built himself on a slab of rock on the shores of the Pacific Ocean. It looked rather boyishly indulgent, I thought. The largest room was not more than twelve feet square. A few feet away from the house was a medieval-looking round stone tower, eighteen feet high and four feet in diameter. Narrow stone steps led up to a little round dungeon with slits for windows. This was his study. It was here that Roan Stallion was written. Tim maintained that this sepulchral taste was a psychological desire for death. But I saw Robinson Jeffers walking with his dog at sunset, enjoying the evening, his face set in an ineffable expression of peace as though immersed in some far-off reverie. I feel sure that no such person as Robinson Jeffers desires death.
twenty-five
WAR was in the air again. The Nazis were on the march. How soon we forgot the First World War and its torturous four years of dying. How soon we forgot the appalling human debris: the basket cases – the armless, the legless, the sightless, the jawless, the twisted spastic cripples. Those that were not killed or wounded did not escape, for many were left with deformed minds. Like a minotaur war had gobbled up the youth, leaving cynical old men to survive. But we soon forget and glamorize war with popular Tin Pan Alley ditties:
How’re you going to keep them down on the farm,
After they’ve seen Paree –
and so forth. War in many ways was a good thing, some said. It expanded industry and advanced techniques and gave people new jobs. How could we think of the millions that lay dead when millions were being made on the stock market? At the height of the market Arthur Brisbane of the Hearst Examiner said: ‘U.S. Steel will jump up to five hundred dollars a share.’ Instead it was the speculators that jumped out of windows.
And now another war was brewing and I was trying to write a story for Paulette; but I could make no progress. How could I throw myself into feminine whimsy or think of romance or the problems of love when madness was being stirred up by a hideous grotesque, Adolf Hitler?
Alexander Korda in 1937 had suggested I should do a Hitler story based on mistaken identity, Hitler having the same moustache as the tramp: I could play both characters, he said. I did not think too much about the idea then, but now it was topical, and I was desperate to get working again. Then it suddenly struck me. Of course! As Hitler I could harangue the crowds in jargon and talk all I wanted to. And as the tramp I could remain more or less silent. A Hitler story was an opportunity for burlesque and pantomime. So with this enthusiasm I went hurrying back to Hollywood and set to work writing a script. The story took two years to develop.
I thought of the opening sequence, which would start with a battle scene of the First World War, showing Big Bertha, with its shooting range of seventy-five miles, with which the Germans intended to awe the Allies. It is supposed to destroy Rheims Cathedral – instead it misses its mark and destroys an outside water-closet.
Paulette was to be in the picture. In the last two years she had had quite a success with Paramount. Although we were somewhat estranged we were friends and still married. But Paulette was a creature of whims. One would have been quite amusing if it had not come at an inopportune time. One day she arrived in my dressing-room at the studio with a slim, well-tailored young man, who looked poured into his clothes. I had had a difficult day with the script and was rather surprised at this interruption. But Paulette said it was very important; then she sat down and invited the young man to pull up a chair and sit down beside her.
‘This is my agent,’ said Paulette.
Then she looked at him to take over. He spoke rapidly with clipped enunciation, as though enjoying his words. ‘As you know, Mr Chaplin, since Modern Times you’re paying Paulette two thousand five hundred dollars a week. But what we haven’t straightened out with you, Mr Chaplin, is her billing, which should be featured seventy-five per cent on all posters –’ He got no further. ‘What the hell is this?’ I shouted. ‘Don’t tell me what billing she’s to get!
I have her interests at heart more than you have! Get out, the pair of you!’
Half-way through making The Great Dictator I began receiving alarming messages from United Artists. They had been advised by the Hays Office that I would run into censorship trouble. Also the English office was very concerned about an anti-Hitler picture and doubted whether it could be shown in Britain. But I was determined to go ahead, for Hitler must be laughed at. Had I known of the actual horrors of the German concentration camps, I could not have made The Great Dictator; I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis. However, I was determined to ridicule their mystic bilge about a pure-blooded race: As though such a thing ever existed outside of the Australian Aborigines!
While I was making The Great Dictator, Sir Stafford Cripps came to California en route from Russia. He came to dinner with a young man just down from Oxford whose name escapes my memory, but not the remark he made that evening. Said he: ‘The way things are going in Germany and elsewhere, I have a small chance of living more than five years.’ Sir Stafford had been on a fact-finding tour in Russia and was profoundly impressed with what he had seen. He described their vast projects and of course their terrific problems. He seemed to think that war was inevitable.
More worrying letters came from the New York office imploring me not to make the film, declaring it would never be shown in England or America. But I was determined to make it, even if I had to hire halls myself to show it.
Before I had finished The Dictator England declared war on the Nazis. I was in Catalina on my boat over the week-end and heard the depressing news over the radio. In the beginning there was inaction on all fronts. ‘The Germans will never break through the Maginot Line,’ we said. Then suddenly the holocaust began: the break-through in Belgium, the collapse of the Maginot Line, the stark and ghastly fact of Dunkirk – and France was occupied. The news was growing gloomier. England was fighting with her back to the wall. Now our New York office was wiring frantically; ‘Hurry up with your film, everyone is waiting for it.’
The Great Dictator was difficult to make; it involved miniature models and props, which took a year’s preparation. Without these devices it would have cost five times as much. However, I had spent $500,000 before I began turning the camera.
Then Hitler decided to invade Russia! This was proof that his inevitable dementia had set in. The United States had not yet entered the war, but there was a feeling of great relief both in England and America.
Near the completion of The Dictator, Douglas Fairbanks and his wife, Sylvia, visited us on location. Douglas had been inactive for the last five years and I had rarely seen him, for he had been travelling to and from England. I thought he had aged and grown a little stouter and seemed preoccupied. Nevertheless, he was still the same enthusiastic Douglas. He laughed uproariously during the taking of one of our scenes. ‘I can’t wait to see it,’ he said.
Doug stayed about an hour. When he left I stood gazing after him, watching him help his wife up a steep incline; and as they walked away along the footpath, the distance growing between us, I felt a sudden tinge of sadness. Doug turned and I waved, and he waved back. That was the last I ever saw of him. A month later Douglas Junior telephoned to say his father had died in the night of a heart-attack. It was a terrible shock, for he belonged so much to life.
I have missed Douglas – I have missed the warmth of his enthusiasm and charm; I have missed his friendly voice over the telephone, that used to call me up on a bleak and lonely Sunday morning: ‘Charlie, coming up for lunch – then for a swim – then for dinner – then afterwards, see a picture?’ Yes, I have missed his delightful friendship.
In what society of men would I prefer to associate? I suppose my own profession should be my choice. Yet Douglas was the only actor of whom I ever made a friend. Meeting the stars at various Hollywood parties, I have come away sceptical – maybe there were too many of us. The atmosphere was more challenging than friendly, and one ran many gauntlets to and from the buffet in vying for special attention. No, stars amongst stars gave little light – or warmth.
Writers are nice people but not very giving; whatever they know they seldom impart to others; most of them keep it between the covers of their books. Scientists might be excellent company, but their mere appearance in a drawing-room mentally paralyses the rest of us. Painters are a bore because most of them would have you believe they are philosophers more than painters. Poets are undoubtedly the superior class and as individuals are pleasant, tolerant and excellent companions. But I think musicians in the aggregate are more cooperative than any other class. There is nothing so warm and moving as the sight of a symphony orchestra. The romantic lights of their music stands, the tuning up and the sudden silence as the conductor makes his entrance, affirms the social, cooperative feeling. I remember Horowitz, the pianist, dining at my house, and the guests discussing the state of the world, saying that the Depression and unemployment would bring about a spiritual renaissance. Suddenly he got up and said: ‘This conversation makes me want to play the piano.’ Of course nobody objected and he played Schumann’s Sonata No. 2. I doubted if it would ever be played as well again.
Just before the war I dined at his house with his wife, the daughter of Toscanini. Rachmaninov and Barbirolli were there. Rachmaninov was a strange-looking man, with something aesthetic and cloistral about him. It was an intimate dinner, just five of us.
It seems that each time art is discussed I have a different explanation of it. Why not? That evening I said that art was an additional emotion applied to skilful technique. Someone brought the topic round to religion and I confessed I was not a believer. Rachmaninov quickly interposed: ‘But how can you have art without religion?’
I was stumped for a moment. ‘I don’t think we are talking about the same thing,’ I said. ‘My concept of religion is a belief in a dogma – and art is a feeling more than a belief.’
‘So is religion,’ he answered. After that I shut up.
*
While dining at my house, Igor Stravinsky suggested we should do a film together. I invented a story. It should be surrealistic, I said – a decadent night-club with tables around the dance floor, at each table groups and couples representing the mundane world – at one table greed, at another hypocrisy, at another ruthlessness. The floor show is the passion play, and while the crucifixion of the Saviour is going on, groups at each table watch it indifferently, some ordering meals, others talking business, others showing little interest. The mob, the High Priests and the Pharisees are shaking their fists up at the Cross, shouting: ‘If Thou be the Son of God come down and save Thyself.’ At a nearby table a group of business men are talking excitedly about a big deal. One draws nervously on his cigarette, looking up at the Saviour and blowing his smoke absent-mindedly in His direction.
At another table a business man and his wife sit studying the menu. She looks up, then nervously moves her chair back from the floor. ‘I can’t understand why people come here,’ she says uncomfortably; ‘it’s depressing.’
‘It’s good entertainment,’ says the business man. ‘The place was bankrupt until they put on this show. Now they are out of the red.’
‘I think it’s sacrilegious,’ says his wife.
‘It does a lot of good,’ says the man. ‘People who have never been inside a church come here and get the story of Christianity.’
As the show progresses, a drunk, being under the influence of alcohol, is on a different plane; he is seated alone and begins to weep and shout loudly: ‘Look, they’re crucifying Him! And nobody cares!’ He staggers to his feet and stretches his arms appealingly towards the Cross. The wife of a minister sitting nearby complains to the head waiter, and the drunk is escorted out of the place still weeping and remonstrating: ‘Look, nobody cares! A fine lot of Christians you are!’
‘You see,’ I told Stravinsky, ‘they throw him out because he is upsetting the show.’ I explained that putting a passion play on the dance floor of a night-cl
ub was to show how cynical and conventional the world has become in professing Christianity.
The maestro’s face became very grave. ‘But that’s sacrilegious!’ he said.
I was rather astonished and a little embarrassed. ‘Is it?’ I said. ‘I never intended it to be. I thought it was a criticism of the world’s attitude towards Christianity – perhaps, having made up the story as I went along, I haven’t made that very clear.’ And so the subject was dropped. But several weeks later, Stravinsky wrote, wanting to know if I still considered the idea of our doing a film together. However, my enthusiasm has cooled off and I become interested in making a film of my own.
Hanns Eisler brought Schoenberg to my studio, a frank and abrupt little man whose music I much admired, and whom I had seen regularly at the Los Angeles tennis tournaments sitting alone in the bleachers wearing a white cap and a T-shirt. After seeing my film Modern Times, he told me that he enjoyed the comedy but my music was very bad – and I had partly to agree with him. In discussing music one remark of his was indelible: ‘I like sounds, beautiful sounds.’
Hanns Eisler tells an amusing story about the great man. Hanns, studing harmony under him, would walk in the depth of winter five miles in the snow to receive a lesson from the master at eight o’clock. Schoenberg, who was inclined to baldness, would sit at the piano while Hanns looked over his shoulder, reading and whistling the music. ‘Young man,’ said the master, ‘don’t whistle. Your icy breath is very cold on my head.’
During the making of The Dictator I began receiving crank letters, and now that it was finished they started to increase. Some threatened to throw stink bombs in the theatre and shoot up the screen wherever it would be shown, others threatening to create riots. At first I thought of going to the police, but such publicity might keep the public away from the theatre. A friend of mine suggested having a talk with Harry Bridges, head of the longshoreman’s union. So I invited him to the house for dinner.
My Autobiography Page 44