Afterward, at the Academy Governors Ball—the annual dinner that followed the ceremony—I went over to Chaplin’s table and introduced myself to Oona, who was seated at his right. He and I had as yet had no personal contact. When he was shown the montage for approval, the only comment of his sent back was that he wanted a clip added from The Great Dictator, which I’d left out since it’s not among my favorites of his. We added a short bit of him in the Hitler caricature playing with the globe as a huge balloon. Now, Oona turned to him and got his attention, saying, “Charlie, this is the man who put your clips together.” Chaplin looked up at me. He was certainly quite frail by now, and somewhat distanced—his speech on TV had been pixieish and charming—but also overall a bit feeble. He had become an old man with a kind of childlike, somewhat dimmed manner. Chaplin looked interested, though, and gazed up at me with a sad smile, and said softly, “Oh, thank you, thank you—good job.” Then, he leaned in closer, his eyes watering; I bent lower to hear him better. “Jackie Coogan …” he said to me. Coogan was there that night—I’d seen him at the ceremony—tall, heavyset and graying. Chaplin leaned in more, repeated “Jackie Coogan …” and nodded slowly twice. His tone went up an octave as he continued, incredulously, “He used to be a little boy …” He paused, and I nodded some form of understanding, I thought, but he went on, “… and now he’s an old, fat man!”
That stopped me. I didn’t know how to react or what to say exactly, so Oona jumped in and said that the choice of The Kid sequence for the montage was terrific, and Charlie looked over at her, a little vacantly, then turned back, smiled at me slightly, and nodded. I said it had been great to meet them, and excused myself. Of course, I was about thirty-three at the time—he had fifty years on me—so the profound ache of lost youth was a trifle above my experience level. But also mingled into my reaction was his peculiar, slightly disgusted attitude, his emphasis on the “old, fat” part. Today, he still has twenty years on me, and I probably will empathize more sharply the nearer I get to Charlie’s age at that time.
Yet there was another part which no one on earth could empathize with because there was only one Charlie Chaplin; and what he had experienced by the time I met him at the Governors Ball in his eighty-third year—fifty of them as an icon—no human had ever experienced before. That sort of virtually instant world affection and adulation had not before been granted even to a religious icon. There have been many gods and goddesses, but never the same deity for the whole world. Charlie Chaplin had made people the entire globe over one in their laughter and tears for him, all achieved without a single spoken word. And, being silent, Charlie spoke in all languages; the Tramp was poor and oppressed like most people, so he was Everyman; also feminine and sensitive enough to be Everywoman, too, in some cockeyed way the movies have of transforming reality. Yes, the world thrilled to the adventures of brave Doug Fairbanks and sweet Mary Pickford (both of whom also could be funny), but laughed out loud from the belly with Charlie, yet cried as well. What did all this do to the actual human being below the hugely magnified and manipulated image? As opposed to Charlie—or the Tramp or Charlot, or any one of the score or two of nicknames the world had for him—what happened to Charles Spencer Chaplin, the person, the manipulator and manipulated in one?
Jerry Lewis had an insight. He first met Chaplin in 1951, after Lewis and Martin took Hollywood by storm, a couple of years before Chaplin was for all intents and purposes deported, and then saw him repeatedly until Charlie’s death twenty-eight years later. He said he had made Chaplin laugh by being outrageous. In 2002, I screened for Jerry my new film, The Cat’s Meow, which featured Charlie Chaplin as a character on William Randolph Hearst’s yacht for a weekend in November 1924. At that time, Chaplin had just had his first failure with A Woman of Paris (1923), also the first picture (and the only one but for his last) in which he did not star. He was embroiled in a romance with sixteen-year-old Lita Gray, whom he had unwisely cast as the lead girl opposite him in The Gold Rush. The picture was running way over budget, and he would eventually have to recast Lita, and re-shoot all her scenes with Georgia Hale; plus he had to marry Lita because she was pregnant. They had two sons, and got divorced after three years. In our film, played by the extraordinarily brilliant English comedian Eddie Izzard, Chaplin is embroiled in all this, and spends most of the picture trying to get his host’s mistress, Marion Davies, into the sack, and succeeds. Izzard, having had similar experiences to Chaplin as a child performer on the streets, did an excellent analysis of exactly where he thought Charlie was at this point in his stardom and glory: having had the biggest hit of his career and the biggest flop, and most women at his feet. When I asked Jerry after the screening how well Eddie had captured the Chaplin he had known, Jerry said, “He nailed it! You guys nailed it! Charlie was very laid-back.” Jerry paused for a moment, and then said, more quietly, “In life, Charlie didn’t give you much.”
That was also my experience with him. It was as though he had used up everything of himself for the screen, and now, except maybe when he was alone with his wife (and perhaps with his children), Chaplin was very reserved, withheld. Maybe on some level, he felt that people had essentially eaten him up, and therefore he had little left except for the muse (his young wife Oona) who kept him going. To everyone else, was there some touch of resentment and distrust? Hadn’t the people betrayed him, stopped coming to see him? (Remember the deeply self-pitying finish of the aging comic Chaplin did in Limelight.) Did Charlie, on some level, still feel like that lost and lonely child of the London streets whose only salvation was to make people laugh so they’d throw him haypennies?
Charlie Chaplin as the Little Tramp, standing out among the Yukon multitudes for a scene in his memorable comedy The Gold Rush (1925), among his costliest (he had the leading lady replaced well into shooting) but greatest successes.
A day or so after the Oscars, in a hotel conference room, Chaplin gave several brief audiences, and I brought Cybill Shepherd to introduce her to him. Of course, he perked up quite a bit more than when looking at me, and was charming, though brief. Later, Cybill and I shot part of Henry James’ Daisy Miller (1974) in and around Vevey, and visited once for a short while with the Chaplins; a couple of his kids came on the set to watch. Charlie seemed out of it. A year or so earlier, Cybill and I had been in his home shooting film of Chaplin for a documentary, eventually called The Gentleman Tramp (1975). The photographer-cameraman was the legendary and lovely Nestor Almendros (who shot so many of Truffaut’s films). We started by trying to interview Chaplin in his den. I was sitting off-camera asking questions and he was looking at me pleasantly but essentially not answering them. There were strange non sequiturs; nothing seemed to really make sense. At one point, he went over and showed me this large doll he had and sort of flew it through the air, trying to explain a movie he had in mind to make. Oona watched him devotedly, and everyone else was confused but pretending as though it all was clear. None of this interview was useable.
We went outside into the partially sun-dappled backyard, high in the mountains overlooking beautiful, ancient, isolated Vevey and Lake Geneva. There we made a couple of shots of Charlie and Oona walking slowly around the picturesque landscape. As it got later, I said to Nestor that we should get them walking away from us into the sunset, and Nestor leapt at it while I asked Charlie and Oona to walk in a certain direction, explaining what we were doing. This seemed to delight them both, and we made the shot of Charlie and Oona, hand in hand on their sacred mount, walking haltingly into eternity.
Not long after Charlie died on Christmas Day in 1977, I became a witness on behalf of the Chaplin Estate in a celebrated and precedent-setting lawsuit against the CBS Television Network and CBS News. As part of their obituary reports on Chaplin’s death, CBS had run a good part of the montage I assembled for the Oscars. The Chaplin Estate sued for infringement of copyright. CBS said it was “fair use” to run clips from an actor’s films when reporting his death. But, the Chaplin case claimed, this wa
s not what they had done; they had used the montage especially assembled by Peter Bogdanovich for the Academy Awards presentation and licensed only for that one showing. CBS argued that this was nitpicking—they were still Chaplin clips—and their usage “fair” and “customary.” The Chaplin Estate was demanding something like $10 million in damages. On the witness stand, my role was to show that every single cut I had decided upon for the montage was based on years of study, learning, experience and personal vision. It was important for the jury to know that I had seen all of Chaplin’s movies more than once, made a number of prominent films myself, always involved myself intimately in the editing process, and that only I would have made those particular choices of juxtaposition. All this was to help prove that CBS was wrong in claiming fair usage of random film clips. Chaplin’s Estate won to the tune of $3 million.
I was glad to have helped Oona, who seemed blasted the one or two times I saw her after Chaplin died. She didn’t live that much longer. Truman Capote had told me that Oona used to buy clothes all the time in Paris or London, and never wore them. “She’d hang them in the closet,” Truman said, “and that’s where they’d stay. She and Charlie hardly ever went out.” After Chaplin’s death, she stopped even buying them.
Naturally, I can’t say I really knew Charlie Chaplin at all. I just met very briefly a part of what was left of him toward the end of his reign. Belatedly, the Queen knighted Chaplin a year or so before he died; as though he hadn’t long ago been exalted far beyond knighthood by an adoring multitude. Sir Charlie. I wonder how it felt on his lips, bitter or sweet, or both, or neither. There were those I knew and admired who loved him, like Jean Renoir, who adored both the man and his work; and those like Orson Welles, who didn’t find him funny and couldn’t stand him personally. Charles Lederer, the brilliant screenwriter, and Marion Davies’ nephew, used to tell about having been in the dressing room as a child when Chaplin was introduced to the great Russian opera singer Fyodor Chaliapin. Supposedly, the fabled and famous bass, noted also as a superb actor of opera, had gushed over Charlie in a thick Russian accent: “Graaate arrteest! Chaarles Chaapleen!” Chaplin didn’t even get up. He just sat on the sofa, looking up timidly, modestly smiling, and quietly saying “Thank you,” and nodding. A towering, massive man, Chaliapin evidently tried a couple of times to get some further rise out of the diminutive Chaplin but to no avail. Eventually, repeating “Graaate arrteest …” he retreated, a trifle bewildered. From the other room, Lederer watched Chaplin sit there for a while, then rise and cross to a full-length mirror. He stood for a moment, taking himself in, then put one hand to his breast, and, opening his mouth wide, sang one pure but very quiet operatic note.
Chaplin and his last wife, Oona O’Neill, as he returned to America in 1972 for the first time in two decades to receive a Special Academy Award. This is how they looked when I met them.
This perhaps apocryphal anecdote nevertheless speaks to an amazing insecurity and fear under the surface, and a blinding self-absorption that often comes as a by-product of extraordinary fame and power. If everyone is that interested in you, how can you not be equally interested, both in maintaining and contemplating? One way or the other, a life and career like Charlie’s will never happen again. And, as the twenty-first century begins, the icon’s work is being brought back on DVD for another welcome pass our way. That’s the only Chaplin anyone will ever know, just as in The Kid, of course, Charlie and Jackie are still and forever young—the “old, fat man” forgotten—and the frail, jangled old man, too.
Born Charles Spencer Chaplin, April 16, 1889, London, England; died December 25, 1977, Vevey, Switzerland.
Selected starring shorts and features (all directed by Chaplin):
1914: The Masquerader; His Trysting Place
1915: His New Job; A Night Out; The Tramp; A Woman; The Bank
1916: The Floorwalker; The Fireman; The Vagabond; One A.M.; The Count; The Pawnshop; The Rink
1917: Easy Street; The Cure; The Immigrant; The Adventurer
1918: A Dog’s Life; Shoulder Arms
1919: Sunnyside; A Day’s Pleasure
1921: The Kid; The Idle Class
1922: Pay Day
1923: The Pilgrim
1925: The Gold Rush
1928: The Circus
1931: City Lights
1936: Modern Times
1940: The Great Dictator
1947: Monsieur Verdoux
1952: Limelight
17
JAMES CAGNEY
Early in 1972, I met the real James Cagney. Right at that time there had been a bearded guy going around passing himself off as the actor. I was in Miami when this fellow was there—they made him honorary mayor of Hollywood, Florida—and a paper printed pictures of him; he didn’t look like Cagney to me. When Barbra Streisand was singing in Las Vegas around Christmas 1971, they told her Cagney was in the audience so she introduced him from the stage and when this same bearded chap stood up, she thought he didn’t look like Cagney to her. Cagney himself seemed rather amused by all this the one time I got to meet him, at a small dinner party in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles. He was six months older than the century, so he was already seventy-two, and lived to be eighty-six. There were four couples, including Cagney and his wife, nicknamed Billie, and Cybill and me. He told us several similar imposter incidents that had occurred over the years—people pretending to be him, or his son or his daughter. By then, Cagney hadn’t made a new movie in more than a decade and was rarely if ever seen in public, so the pretenders must’ve assumed no one would know the difference.
An incredible impudence, I thought, since Cagney was one of the most inimitable actors who ever appeared on the screen. Though, of course, everyone did the standard Cagney impersonation, hiking up their pants with their wrists while saying, “Aaall riiight, yoou diiirty raat …” But I don’t think anyone in pictures ever had his energy or his theatricality. The year before, I had run for Orson Welles a 16mm print of Raoul Walsh’s devastating gangster film starring Cagney, White Heat (1949); Welles had never seen it and was a very enthusiastic admirer of both Cagney’s and Walsh’s, so we looked at it one night. Afterward, Orson got to musing on the absurdity of all those theoretical writings about the supposedly huge difference between movie acting and stage acting. “Look at Cagney!” Orson exclaimed. “Everything he does is big—and yet it’s never for a moment unbelievable—because it’s real, it’s true! He’s a great movie actor and his performances are in no way modulated for the camera—he never scaled anything down.”
James Cagney with platinum bombshell Jean Harlow in the Warner Bros. gangster picture that made him a star, The Public Enemy (1931), directed by William A. (“Wild Bill”) Wellman.
Even in a likeable early programmer like Mervyn LeRoy’s Hard to Handle (1933), with a plot that spins dizzily from one maniacally contrived situation to another, Cagney’s breakneck delivery and elaborately embroidered gestures never for a moment seem labored or unconvincing. The portrayals he gave were always like that—walking a dangerously narrow line between gimmicky caricature and unique eccentricity with the sureness of a ballet dancer—he never fell to the wrong side.
There were many superb Cagney performances—not always in the best films. He said they’d shoot three pictures at the same time in his early Warner days, and told of director Lloyd Bacon asking him to quickly rehearse a phone-call scene for one picture while he was actually finishing another movie. He ran from one stage to another, did the speech and then heard Bacon yell out, “Cut. Print.” Cagney said, “Hey! I thought we were rehearsing.” And Bacon said, “No, it’s OK, Jimmy, we got it!” I remember with special fondness his reckless race-car driver in Howard Hawks’ The Crowd Roars (1932), and his vulnerable daredevil flyer in Hawks’ Ceiling Zero (1936); the ebullient, love-struck dentist in Walsh’s nostalgic The Strawberry Blonde (1941); his doomed “big-shot” gangster in Walsh’s The Roaring Twenties (1939), and that psychopathic mama’s-boy killer in White Heat, whic
h also features two of my favorite Cagney scenes. In the first, set in a prison mess hall, he is told that his beloved mother has died, and Cagney slowly builds an astonishing reaction from disbelief through sorrow, grief and, finally, complete hysteria—among the most chilling sequences in movies. At the end of the picture, fatally wounded and trapped by the law on top of a huge globular gas tank, he grins malevolently, laughs, then fires his pistol into the tank itself and, as flames shoot up around him just before the blinding explosions begin, he screams, maniacally happy, “Top of the world, Ma! Top of the world!”
One critic wrote of White Heat that only a hard-boiled director like Raoul Walsh could get away with having Cagney—during a terrible migraine attack—sit on his mother’s lap, a moment of startling intimacy. But I think Cagney could probably have got away with almost anything, because he had as a performer such amazing intensity and conviction. Whether it was shoving a grapefruit in his girlfriend’s face—in William Wellman’s highly prized if a bit overrated The Public Enemy, the 1931 gangster film that made him a star overnight—or doing a little dance step down the stairs of the White House after meeting F.D.R. (in 1942’s Yankee Doodle Dandy), Cagney’s indisputable authority as a film personality and his flawless sense of honesty as an actor could transform even the most improbable material into something totally believable. His one-sentence advice on movie acting was profoundly succinct: “Look in the other actor’s camera eye”—meaning the eye closest to the lens for more direct contact with the camera and therefore the audience—“and tell the truth!”
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