Charlie Chaplin

by Peter Ackroyd

  Negri remembered the occasion very well. In her Memoirs of a Star she wrote that “a little man with a sad sensitive face fought his way up to our table. Were it not for his odd appearance, so dapper and so pathetic, I would not have noticed him. He had such a strange physiognomy, with tiny feet … and an enormous head that made him seem top-heavy … The only physically attractive thing about him were his hands, which were never without a cigarette.”

  He returned to London at the end of September, where once more he met H. G. Wells and other notables. Yet every second thought was now of Los Angeles and of his studio. He had experienced “complete satisfaction,” as he put it, at the crowds that had greeted him in London and in Paris. Work, however, was still the centre of his life.

  He sailed back to New York, where he saw his old acquaintances and no doubt vividly rehearsed the triumphs of his return. On his last day in the city he arranged to meet the English editor and journalist Frank Harris whom he accompanied on a visit to Sing Sing. Harris had come to the prison in order to see a union activist, Jim Larkin, who had been sentenced to five years on the charge of attempting to overthrow the government. Chaplin was fascinated, and appalled, by the conditions he found in the prison—the old cell blocks, the small and narrow stone dungeons, the whole architecture of inhumanity. He discussed with a prison doctor the various cures for syphilis, on which Chaplin himself appeared to be an expert, and he visited the Death House or place of execution by means of the electric chair. He was allowed to look down into a small yard where a condemned man was walking. “Did you see his face?” he whispered to Harris.When asked by some of the convicts to give them a talk, he replied “How can I talk to you? What is there to say except that we are all pals in this life, and if I can make you laugh, by God you can make me cry.” He added that “If we’re free, it’s only because we’ve not been found out. Good luck, boys!” He travelled back to Los Angeles by train, dictating on the way his recollections of the trip to a journalist.

  He had an unlikely companion in this period. Clare Sheridan was an English painter and sculptor who, after the death of her husband, had come to the United States with her small son. Chaplin had met her at a dinner party immediately on his return, and over dinner they agreed that she should make his bust. She had already made portrait busts of the most prominent Bolshevik leaders; she was also a niece of Winston Churchill and had married a descendant of the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan. So she interested him. He sat for her in a house he had rented, at Beechwood Drive in Hollywood, but he was by no means patient. He changed the colour of his pyjamas and dressing gown to suit his mood; he played his violin; he turned on the gramophone and conducted an imaginary orchestra. She finished the work in three days and, contemplating it, Chaplin said that the head might be that of a criminal. He went on a short camping holiday with her and her son, complete with cook and chauffeur, but it was abandoned when the happy party was invaded by children and reporters. The affair, if such it was, lasted only a few more days.

  By the end of November 1921, he was about to recommence Pay Day, the film he had summarily dropped before travelling to England. “I must get back to work,” he had told Clare Sheridan, “but I don’t feel like it. I don’t feel funny.” Yet he had to complete the quota of films for First National. This was the eighth out of nine, and he was close to regaining his freedom. It is a two-reeler, short by his recent standards and the last he ever made of that length, but it is inventive and entertaining with the additional benefit of some night scenes made possible by artificial lighting. The streetcars glide through the darkness with their heavy burden of passengers.

  The film opens on a building site with Charlie as a quick-witted labourer; unusually for Chaplin it uses trick photography to emphasise Charlie’s prowess at catching bricks. It moves on to scenes of nocturnal revel where Charlie spends his wages in the well-known fashion, and it closes as he tries to avoid the wrath of his morose and hatchet-faced wife. There was plenty of opportunity for somewhat familiar comedy, therefore, which he duly took. Photoplay noticed, however, that “Pay Day made even the ushers laugh in the theatre where we saw it.” This was a notable compliment.

  On the day before Pay Day was released Chaplin began work on his final film for First National. The Pilgrim seems to have been the first film in which Chaplin prepared written notes; he was ready to work more cautiously, if not more economically, and he may have feared quite unnecessarily that his comic powers were diminished. “Think—think of it,” he had told Clare Sheridan, “if I could never be funny again.”

  Since The Pilgrim was the final film of the contract, it was perhaps no accident that Charlie is first shown as an escapee from prison. The convict then poses as a minister, having stolen the clothes of an unfortunate cleric who has gone swimming, and must convince a local congregation of his piety. It all goes horribly wrong, of course, with Charlie treating the church as a combination of barroom and courtroom; he performs with histrionic energy a sermon on David and Goliath in front of the congregation, before giving a bow and twirl at the end of his act. It is all genuinely funny, with Chaplin giving one of his most memorable performances as the counterfeit minister.

  Women, meanwhile, were never far off. They were plentiful, and almost too ready to be seduced by the most famous man in the world. He himself was willing and eager to take up all offers. The hired house in Hollywood might as well have had a revolving door. It was about this time that he began to wear a perfume, Mitsouko, largely compounded of benzoin and musk.

  While working on The Pilgrim he was engaged in what he himself described as a “bizarre” relationship with a rich and much married lady. Peggy Hopkins Joyce might be described as the queen of alimony; she had married five millionaires, and it is believed that the word “gold-digger” was invented in her honour. She refused to allow one of her husbands into the bedroom until he had signed her a cheque for $500,000; on a later occasion she hit the same man over the head with a champagne bottle and, as she recalled, “he seemed to like it.”

  It is reported that on first meeting Chaplin she asked “Charlie, is it true what all the girls say, that you’re hung like a horse?” She was rough, vulgar and energetic or, in other words, a bit of a handful; she was blessed, however, with a sense of humour. She had pursued her men in Europe as well as in America, and in the course of their two-week affair she told Chaplin many stories about her adventures in Paris. She would thereby become the indirect inspiration for his next film.

  And then came Pola Negri, the Polish actress whom he had encountered in Berlin the year before. He met her once more at a charity event in the Hollywood Bowl, where he remembered her as saying “Chaarlee! Why haven’t I heard from you? You never called me up. Don’t you realise I have come all the way from Germany to see you?” Her command of English had obviously much improved since their last meeting. Since she was about to begin a Hollywood film career, devotion to Chaplin cannot have been her only reason for crossing the Atlantic.

  Pola Negri was woken at three the following morning by the sound of a Hawaiian band hired by Chaplin to serenade her. She invited him to a lavish party a few nights later where they began what he described as an “exotic relationship.” In her memoirs she described him as a patient listener ready to advise her on her burgeoning career; she even appreciated his occasional withdrawals from the world into silence or reticence. He was, after all, an artist. It is also possible that she appreciated his fame and wealth as well as the many film “contacts” he could pass on. When he presented her with a bracelet of diamond and onyx, “I was told there could be no greater indication of the seriousness of his intentions, for he was notoriously miserly.”

  He had recently purchased six and a half acres of land in Beverly Hills, close to the estate of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. He began to build a two-storey mansion that he designed himself in a Spanish style which he described as “California Gothic”; it comprised some forty rooms, together with a small cinema and steam-room witho
ut which no Hollywood house would be complete. The outside swimming pool was created in the shape of a bowler hat, just like the one worn by the Little Tramp, and a vestibule off the hall contained a large pipe organ on which he often played. It was reported that he used some of his studio workmen in the construction, but they were more accustomed to temporary sets; as a result some parts of the house were more fragile than others, and the neighbours named it “Breakaway House.” Nevertheless he was happy here, and lived at 1085 Summit Drive for the rest of his time in Hollywood.

  The mansion was surrounded on three sides by woods, and on the fourth side a lawn sloped down to the swimming pool and a tennis court. A two-storey hall ran the length of the house, and a winding staircase led to the second floor. His oldest son noted that his father kept a full-sized suit of oriental armour and a brass gong in the hallway. In the living room was a Steinway grand piano, and a copy of Webster’s Dictionary which he often consulted; he had a habit of memorising the meaning of difficult words which he would then introduce into conversations. In the same room was a large fireplace in which Chaplin burned coal, in the English fashion, rather than wood. In the nightstand by his bed he kept a .38 calibre automatic weapon, complete with bullets. His son recalled that Chaplin also possessed a powerful telescope mounted on a tripod, but he generally trained it on the houses of his neighbours rather than on more celestial regions.

  Pola Negri herself made suggestions about the interior of the mansion, as it was being completed, and even paid $7,000 for oak and eucalyptus trees to be transplanted so that she might hear the wind among their leaves. It was clear enough that she already imagined herself as mistress of the house in a union that would eclipse that of Pickford and Fairbanks, the queen and king of Hollywood.

  On Christmas Eve 1922, Chaplin bought her a large diamond that he had not had the time to set within a ring; nevertheless it was a token of their engagement. A week later, on New Year’s Eve, he invited her to an intimate dinner at his own mansion. This was the night, according to the actress, when their relationship was fully consummated. She described how “he started moving towards me, moving in a gait that was a parody of seductiveness”; his passion was expressed in “an uproarious dumbshow of rolling eyes and waving hands.” Yet he prevailed. It was only then that serious rifts began to appear between them. They argued, with Chaplin accusing her of unfaithfulness; this was his standard complaint against the women closest to him. He was himself, of course, pursuing other young women at the time.

  The engagement itself was largely played out in the headlines and gossip columns of the newspapers. In March 1923, he declared that he was too poor to get married. Pola Negri then announced that the engagement was cancelled. The Los Angeles Herald Examiner summoned up the affair with “POLA NEGRI JILTS CHAPLIN.” “I end!” she was reported to have said, “Just like that! I am very extreme.” In an interview with the Examiner she complained that “he is too temperamental—as changing as the wind—he dramatises everything—he experiments in love.” Chaplin pleaded, and Pola Negri prevaricated, but the Hollywood romance had nowhere to go. It began, and ended, in illusions. Their affair had been conducted in a house of mirrors.

  Chaplin and Pola Negri announce their engagement, 1923.

  Courtesy of New York Daily News

  Soon after seeing Negri at the Hollywood Bowl he began work on his first picture for United Artists, the association between Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, D. W. Griffith and Chaplin himself. Their association had begun with the “Liberty Bond” tour, but they began to seriously consider a formal association in 1919 when studio demands on artist’s salaries and schedules seemed to represent intolerable interference. The four of them held 20% each of the stock, with a further 20% going to a lawyer, since they had decided that it would be more profitable to invest their own money, produce their own films and distribute the finished product themselves. They would then become truly free of managerial control, and their independence represented a major episode in film history.

  His colleagues at United Artists no doubt anticipated another comic masterpiece like The Pilgrim that would considerably help the finances of the new company. Yet Chaplin never followed anyone’s wishes or instructions. His business partners were soon informed that he was making a serious drama about a kept woman, and that he himself would not be appearing in the film. There was to be no Charlie and precious little comedy. He was restless and disenchanted with the figure of the Little Tramp, and wanted to escape him for a while.

  He had hit upon the title of Destiny, and for some weeks he relied upon notes and details to fashion the work. He had worked out the scenario in his mind and did not need a script. A Woman of Paris, as it was eventually titled, is the story of a woman who, apparently abandoned by her young lover, travels to Paris where she becomes the mistress of a rich gentleman; the young lover providentially arrives in the capital and, after a series of misadventures, shoots himself at the prospect of losing her. It is the merest melodrama, in terms of plot, but out of the story Chaplin creates a memorable and in some respects magnificent film.

  He wanted Edna Purviance to play the leading part. Her career as a comic heroine seemed to be coming to a close; she was drinking, and had become too heavy for the ingénue. But he believed that in the title role of the film he could turn her into a serious actress. Her rich lover was played by Adolphe Menjou, who from that time forward made a career out of playing wealthy and quizzical Frenchmen. He said later that he had learned more from Chaplin than from any other director. “Don’t sell it,” Chaplin told him. “Remember, they’re peeking at you.” He did not want his performers to act in any conventional sense; he wanted them to remain as unforced and natural as if they were in a real situation. The audience was very close to them, only a hair’s breadth away, and any exaggeration would be instantly recognised. In this realisation Chaplin was ahead of his contemporaries, many of whom still favoured the more theatrical actions of the earliest film stars. “Think the scene,” he told Menjou. “I don’t care what you do with your hands or feet. If you think the scene, it will get over.” This was also of course his own method. He praised an actor’s simplicity and restraint above all else. Silent film itself is best at conveying simplified feeling in a look, a gesture or the simple act of lighting a cigarette. In one scene the whole action is conveyed through the expressions of a masseuse pummelling the back of a customer; Chaplin would have rehearsed for her the precise manner in which she raised an eyebrow or pursed her lips.

  He sometimes goaded an actor or actress into a good performance. In one scene the mother of the young man is given the news of her son’s death by a policeman. Chaplin wanted no expression from her at all, but the actress, Lydia Knott, could not oblige. So he shot and reshot the brief scene eighty times until Knott, in the words of an assistant director, “got so angry that she swore at us and just went through this scene in such a temper that we got it.” Another short scene, in which Edna Purviance throws down a cigarette and refuses to go out, consumed two days and ninety takes. He wanted to reach a purity of expression. Chaplin had great patience in unfolding his vision. “I don’t know why I’m right about the scene,” he said during the making of the film. “I just know I’m right.”

  The naturalism of the performers was allied in A Woman of Paris with an overall economy of movement and gesture. He had noticed that in the more dramatic moments of life men and women attempt to conceal rather than to express emotion; it is a mechanism of self-defence. This was the technique that he used in the film itself to create an unusually realistic style; much of the action was casual and informal. It came as a profound shock to the audiences of the time, who did not quite know what to make of it. Yet other directors took the point immediately. Ernst Lubitsch and Michael Powell reported themselves to be overwhelmed by the experience, and began to imitate it in their own ways; Powell remarked that “suddenly there was a grown-up film with people behaving as they do in real life.” It might be said, therefore, that Chaplin
established a new cinema of social manners as well as a novel style of acting. Menjou himself noted that “the word ‘genius’ is used very carelessly in Hollywood, but when it is said of Chaplin, it is always with a special note of sincerity. If Hollywood has ever produced a genius, Chaplin is certainly first choice.”

  The novelty of the film, and the absence of Chaplin from the cast, ensured that A Woman of Paris did not match the commercial success of his earlier comedies. Its subtlety and ingenuity were lost upon contemporary audiences. He was immensely hurt by its lack of popularity and, as soon as possible, withdrew it and buried it in his private vaults. Edna Purviance made only two more films before retiring from the screen. In an interview a week after the film’s release he revealed that “unless my feelings undergo a marked change, I am going right back to comedy.”

  12

  Why Don’t You Jump?

  In the autumn of 1923 Fairbanks and Pickford invited Chaplin for breakfast partly to discuss his next film for United Artists after the relative failure of A Woman of Paris. After the meal was over he began to leaf through a number of stereographic views, one of which pictured a long line of gold prospectors climbing in single file the Chilkoot Trail in Klondike during the gold rush of 1898.

  His imagination was excited by the image and very soon afterwards he picked up a book on the plight of some immigrants to America in the middle of the nineteenth century. They had found themselves stranded in the snowbound wastes of the Sierra Nevada where, in conditions of famine and death, the survivors resorted to cannibalism in order to stay alive. They had also eaten dogs and saddles, as well as their own shoes.

  So the germ of The Gold Rush was planted. He worked on the first rough draft of the scenario for approximately two months and by the beginning of December 1923, he had applied for copyright on “a play in two scenes” set in the ice and tentatively entitled The Lucky Strike.