Fred Karno falls back on Chaplin, who retains some affection for the man who gave him his start, and is therefore happy to break bread with him. Yet, as with the great Russian director Sergei Eisenstein and his request for funds, Chaplin is wise enough not to offer Fred Karno any guarantees of employment. Even were Chaplin so inclined, Chaplin is mired in the filming of City Lights, which has been before the cameras for almost a year, and will continue to be before the cameras for more than another year. City Lights is also, sound effects and musical score apart, a silent picture, because Chaplin is fearful of dialogue. Chaplin is the greatest pantomimist the screen has ever seen, but this will no longer be the case as soon as Chaplin opens his mouth to speak, and Chaplin knows this.
So between bouts of agonizing over City Lights, and finding consolation wherever possible after his latest divorce, which costs him $600,000 in alimony and leaves him labeled a pervert, Chaplin puts out word that the great Fred Karno is in town and available for engagements.
Which is how Hal Roach comes to hire Fred Karno, because Hal Roach has been hearing about Fred Karno for so many years that Fred Karno has assumed the condition of a minor deity to Hal Roach. Fred Karno will be the solution to all Hal Roach’s problems. Fred Karno, effulgent, will arrive at Culver City, gags pouring from the wound in his side, and from the holes in his hands and feet, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.
Because Hal Roach, like Julian of Norwich, is essentially an optimist.
He enjoys seeing Fred Karno again. In certain ways, Fred Karno reminds him of A.J., whom he misses greatly, although A.J. has few of Fred Karno’s baser predilections.
Hal Roach offers Fred Karno a five-year contract to write and produce pictures.
Hal Roach pays Fred Karno a weekly salary.
Hal Roach gives Fred Karno a pleasant office.
Hal Roach introduces Fred Karno to the gagmen, and the crews, and Dad Roach, and tries to ignore the way Fred Karno looks at the young women passing through the dappled daylight of the lot.
Hal Roach gets royally fucked.
Fred Karno tells tales of his life in the music halls.
Fred Karno describes the fallen Arcadia that is the Karsino.
Fred Karno lusts after the young women passing through the dappled daylight of the lot, and also the young women passing through the soft light of evening, and finally the young women, barely observable, passing through the darkness of night.
But Fred Karno does not produce a single picture, and Fred Karno does not offer up a single gag, because this is not what Fred Karno does. Fred Karno has always hired people who are funny to write and act while Fred Karno watches the crowds pour in, and their money with them. At Hal Roach Studios, Fred Karno lusts and schemes and antagonizes, but Fred Karno creates nothing. After four months, Hal Roach fires Fred Karno. Hal Roach puts Fred Karno on a boat back to England, off to die in penury, and returns to playing the saxophone to calm his nerves.
87
At the Oceana Apartments, a breeze arises, blowing in from the Pacific. The balcony doors are open, and the salt-sweat scent of the sea is on his skin, and on his lips, and in the air that he breathes. His senses are more acute since he stopped smoking. Chesterfield, his brand of choice, provided the finance for The Stolen Jools, and he and Babe generated some income by advertising Old Gold cigarettes, although he could never smoke Old Gold himself. Either way, the tobacco companies made their money back from him a thousand times over, and now he is an old man smelling the world anew.
Lois, his daughter, calls him on the telephone. He enjoys hearing from her, and loves spending time with his grandchildren. He could, perhaps, have tried for more children of his own, but he chose not to. His daughter is to be his sole such blessing.
Ida says that she always knows when Lois is on the other end of the telephone. He does not even have to speak her name. Ida can hear it in his voice, and see it in the expression on his face.
Before I die, Ida sometimes says, I wish I could witness that expression on your face just once when I call. If your tone is anything to go by, your face won’t look like it does when you hear from Lois.
He always hushes her. If he is in a bad mood, he tells her that she sounds like Anita Garvin.
Or Vera, although he only thinks this and never utters it aloud.
He will die soon. He knows this on some animal level. He does not mind dying. He is not afraid. He will miss his daughter, and he will miss Ida, but he is now discarding days like small bills until all are spent, disposing of the hours by writing letters and waiting for strangers to call. He is excited by new deliveries of stationery with the Oceana letterhead. In another life, he might have been content to run a stationery store, with ascending grades of material from the cheapest to the finest, and even the poorest stored carefully to preserve it from damp and stains. He retains a small stock of expensive cotton paper, which he uses sparingly. He admires the randomness of the watermark it bears, so that no two sheets are alike.
He has always been ambivalent about unpredictability, about disorder. He tried to impose order upon his life, and failed. He resisted the imposition of order upon his art, and succeeded. In both spheres of his existence, he ultimately embraced chaos.
These are the subjects about which he thinks, when he is alone at the Oceana Apartments.
He is not sad about the imminence of mortality. He feels that the purposeful part of his existence ended many years ago, and the best part of it concluded with Babe’s death. He has never been a particularly religious man. He and Babe had this in common. Reincarnation appeals to him, but only if he can retain some memory of the mistakes that he has made in this life, and therefore only if he can retain some memory of Babe.
He does not trust in reincarnation alone to reunite him with Babe. Fate, perhaps, but not reincarnation, because it was fate that brought them together, these lives entwined like lovers’ limbs.
88
He and Babe work hard. They have always worked hard, but now there is a new impetus.
They are, for the first time in their lives, true stars.
It does not matter that they finish each day tired and bruised (it is no easy thing to fall, and they are no longer such young men), nor does it matter that shooting sometimes goes on into the night, and so they must doze in their dressing rooms between set-ups in order to be able to function. They have achieved a level of fame previously unimaginable to them. They can make $5,000 each for one week at the Fox Theater in San Francisco, as long as they are willing to smile along at the antics of the host, Rube Wolf, America’s Comic Valentine, a man even his own publicity machine describes as homely.
Rube Wolf can play the clown, and the cornet, and conduct an orchestra.
All at once.
Rube Wolf can be exhausting.
In 1929 they release thirteen pictures, and cameo in The Rogue Song and The Hollywood Revue of 1929. In 1930, they release eight pictures, but mostly longer three-reelers, as they are drawn inexorably toward features.
Although he knows that he is dragging his heels.
Sitting in the commissary, eating soup, Richard Currier tells him that there is more money in features.
More money for Hal, he says.
—If Hal makes it, you’ll see some too.
—How much? I need a nickel for a soda.
Richard Currier laughs and says, Well, maybe not that much.
He tries to keep his head down while he eats. He no longer enjoys coming to the commissary. The lot is too close to the street, and the Audience gathers each day in the hope of catching sight of the stars. The more brazen peer in the windows. Some even knock on the glass. He remains grateful for their support, and always will, but a man has to eat, and it is hard to eat in front of spectators.
Hal Roach is also conflicted. The short pictures work. They make money, although the market has calmed and the exhibitors no longer invite Hal Roach to name his price. Features will make more money, but features require a
plot.
Not everyone on Hal Roach’s lot understands plot. The first that most of the gagmen will know of a plot is when they’re buried in one. But the three-reel pictures are also unsatisfactory: too long for the gag structure, too short to allow dialogue to develop enough to help with the lifting. So, whether they wish it or not, Hal Roach’s two biggest stars will have to extend themselves. Hal Roach will talk with them, just as soon as they have finished writing the action script for their next picture, a murder spoof.
Hal Roach is reserved, but not insensitive.
Hal Roach is tight, but not mean.
Hal Roach wishes that his two biggest stars were happier men.
89
He tries to stay away from Alyce Ardell.
Tries, but rarely succeeds.
He is concerned about alerting Lois to Alyce Ardell’s existence, although he believes that Lois already suspects, even if she has not yet guessed the identity of the other party. He picks up the accusatory note in Lois’s voice when she asks how the day’s extended filming has gone, or about the script conference that ran over, or whatever excuse he has lately manufactured to be with his lover. Sometimes Lois flinches at his answer, as though he has raised a hand to her and she is steeling herself for the blow. Only as the situation worsens does he comprehend that she is reacting not to a hurt to come, but to one already inflicted.
Lois knows that he is lying, but wants to believe he is not.
Lois is seven months pregnant.
It has been arduous for her, more difficult than it was with their first child. Lois senses that she is carrying a boy because only a male could cause her so much torment. When Lois is not being physically ill, she takes to the couch and stares out the window, or moves to her bed and attempts to sleep. She is too queasy to read, and music, however soft, sounds excessively loud to her ears. Only her daughter brings her joy.
On Monday, May 5th, 1930, he and Babe begin filming their new three-reel picture. The cast is good, but once it is finished they will have to film it three times more for the French, German and Spanish markets, painstakingly learning to speak the dialogue phonetically. Two weeks of work, made harder by the knowledge that there are not enough gags to fill three reels, which means more dialogue, which means more stumbles through unfamiliar tongues.
On Tuesday, May 6th, 1930, Lois complains of pains.
Something’s wrong, she tells him.
He tries to soothe her, but Lois will not be soothed. A doctor is called, and then an ambulance.
On Wednesday, May 7th, 1930, his son is born prematurely. They name the boy Stanley.
The publicity department issues a press release. He would prefer that it had not done so, but the publicists are a law unto themselves, and someone at the Hollywood Hospital has already alerted the newspapers. The reporters even get the weight of the baby right—five-and-a-half pounds—but none remarks on how this is at the lower end of the scale for a newborn. A joke is added, something about Babe having to be nice to him for a while now that he’s a father again.
“You mustn’t abuse a papa!” he is quoted as saying.
He wonders how many acres of newsprint have been filled by words he has not said, forming an entire alternative history of his life in which nothing has meaning or substance unless it forms the punch line to a gag.
His son is placed in an incubator. He is informed that the birth weight, although troubling, is well within the limits of viability. The first twenty-four hours will be crucial.
Lois rests, but he does not. He counts the minutes into hours, and the hours into a day, and only when evening drifts into night, and twenty-four hours have safely elapsed, does he sleep.
Each morning thereafter he travels to the studio and works. Well-wishers inquire after his son. It is known that the child is sickly, but he was a sickly child himself, and he survived.
Each evening thereafter he travels to the hospital to be with Lois.
On the ninth day, his son dies.
90
At the Oceana Apartments, he puts names to absence, and gives life to half-formed things.
91
He cannot speak. He is rendered mute by grief. Only his daughter draws words from him, and only for her sake does he simulate animation. He does not wish her to see his pain, because to see it will be to share it.
And just as only his daughter can bring him to speak, so only with Babe does he cry for his dead child.
His son is cremated. He does not want a funeral. He hates funerals.
He accepts the condolences of all who offer them.
He returns to work.
He returns, on silent sets, to the business of being funny.
92
He and Lois are ghosts, trapped under one roof but alone in their anguish, each haunting the empty chambers of the other’s heart. He knows that he does not love Lois any longer, or not as he once did. He does not wish to hurt Lois, but he has, and he does, and he will again.
They cannot separate. It is too soon. So they step around each other, and they sleep beside each other but do not touch, and were it not for the chatter of their daughter the house would be entirely untroubled by the speech of intimates.
He can work, and so he does.
He and Babe spend a month from June to July filming Pardon Us, follow it with two weeks of concurrent filming for four foreign versions, and return for reshoots in October on all five films. Pardon Us will cost almost $250,000 to make, or six times as much as a short feature, but will gross nearly a million dollars, making Hal Roach a profit of nearly $200,000.
Did you get your nickel? Richard Currier will ask him.
—I did not. I got a dime. I bought two sodas.
—Well, there you are.
Before the year ends, he and Babe make Another Fine Mess, and Be Big, and Chickens Come Home. In between pictures, he edits, and plans, and grins for publicity shots, and drinks with the gagmen, and fucks Alyce Ardell, fucks his pain into her while his marriage drifts away.
And he will look back on this time, and he will think that Lois deserved better than to be left to mourn their dead child alone.
93
In 1931, they release Pardon Us as their first full-length feature.
In 1931, Chaplin releases City Lights.
The premiere is held at the Los Angeles Theater, the first time such a screening has taken place downtown instead of in Hollywood. Dr. and Frau Albert Einstein, and Dr. and Mrs. Robert A. Millikan, accompany Chaplin.
Two Nobel prize-winning physicists and their wives.
These are the circles in which Chaplin now moves.
On his arm Chaplin has Georgia Hale, who almost starred in The Circus, and almost starred in City Lights too. Chaplin has been fucking Georgia Hale since The Gold Rush, and makes her alternately happy and miserable according to the cycles of the moon and the ebb and flow of his humors.
He wonders how Georgia Hale feels as she watches Chaplin’s camera venerate Virginia Cherrill in City Lights, as she rues that this role was once, however briefly, hers, until Chaplin realized that Virginia Cherrill was more worthy of it than she.
At least, he thinks, Georgia Hale can console herself with the knowledge that Chaplin did not fuck Virginia Cherrill, however beautiful she may be. This lapse on Chaplin’s part is common knowledge around town. The reasons for Chaplin’s failure remain unclear, although they probably boil down to a simple absence of sexual attraction on both sides.
Even Chaplin needs to feel something.
But he believes that the fact Chaplin did not sleep with Virginia Cherrill may have contributed to the genius of City Lights. He finds in it a beauty, a purity. It is, be believes, Chaplin’s masterpiece, and he sheds tears at the end because it is so gentle, so perfect, so true.
Yet even as he leaves the theater, head low, he thinks:
I could not have made City Lights, but nor would I want to have made City Lights.
It is art, but it is not comedy.
94
The half-life of his marriage persists, flirting with farce as it fades.
On August 7th, 1931, he legally changes his name. A.J.’s son ceases to be. He is now the man the titles of his pictures declare him to be; the fiction created with Mae has become the reality. And as he alters his name, so, too, must Lois alter hers, even though she barely wishes to know him by any name.
Never mind. She will not have to suffer under it for long.
And meanwhile, he thinks, his dead boy bears the patronymic of one who no longer exists at all.
95
At the Oceana Apartments, he wakes in his chair. He had not intended to doze, and now the best of the day is gone.
This is his world, his lot, his stage. He haunts its three rooms, knowing his every mark: here for his correspondence, there for his meals, a turn for his bed. It is life as a vaudeville routine.
He takes up his pen and his yellow legal pad. He has an idea: a prison escape, except the prisoner is a woman. She has murdered her husband’s lover in an act of jealous rage, and remains infatuated with him. She hears that her ex-husband is about to marry again, and so breaks out of jail to prevent the wedding from going ahead.
Hal Roach always claimed that he had a macabre side.
The light dims ever so faintly: a momentary darkening, as of a cloud drifting, or a shadow briefly cast, or a figure seated just beyond the periphery of his vision shifting its position, signaling its unease.
He does not write this idea down. Better to let it go.
Babe would not like it.
He Page 14
