“What if he said, ‘No’?” he asked.
His closest collaborators, his friends, and the rest of us who were casual acquaintances, rode with him up and down the roller coaster of vacillation. One night, I was at dinner with him and Paulette Goddard, his wife, who was urging him to go forward with his project. He stared at his uneaten food, bit his lip, and said, “I don’t know. I just don’t know. It’s such a risk. Such a
risk
.”
“Everything’s a risk,” said the beautiful Paulette.
His agitation had communicated itself to me. To calm myself, I had another glass of wine. Instead, it made me bold.
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. I hear you up and I hear you down and you’re like that guy in vaudeville. What was his name? The single—who used to wrestle with himself?”
“Charlie McGuire,” said Chaplin morosely.
“Charlie McGuire, that’s you. But I don’t see that you’ve anything to decide. You know you’re going to make the picture. Paulette knows you’re going to. So do I, and so does everyone else. Why waste all this energy talking yourself out of it again? That energy ought to be going into the picture.”
“Go away,” said Chaplin.
“No, no, don’t go away,” said Paulette. “I’m paying for dinner tonight, so sit still.”
Chaplin began to eat, unhappily. Paulette winked at me, egging me on. I took another swig. “Look,” I said, “I’m not a believer and anything even suggesting the supernatural gives me a pain, but once in a while, there’s something in circumstance or in fate that’s absolutely shattering, and this is one of those cases.”
“What do you mean?” asked Paulette.
“I mean that here is a time in the history of man when the greatest villain civilization has ever known and the greatest comedian civilization has ever known bear a physical resemblance to each other. Think of it. It’s—well, unbelievable, but we have to believe it because it’s there.” I took a deep breath and continued in an awesome tone, “Who but God himself could be capable of such an idea?”
Chaplin, a man not easily impressed, was impressed. Drama is frequently based upon a triangular structure, and one consisting of Hitler, Chaplin, and God was not bad.
“Well,” said Chaplin modestly, putting down his fork. “I don’t know—”
“Of course you do,” I said. “You don’t have to decide about this picture. It’s all been decided for you. It’s inevitable. A foregone conclusion.”
There was a long pause. We finished dinner.
“You may be right,” said Chaplin.
The following day, he called the picture off for good. The subject became taboo for several weeks.
Then one night, at his house, the evening was growing duller by the minute. Political pontification by swimming-pool intellectuals filled the air.
Suddenly, Chaplin was into it.
“We open,” he said, “in a little barbershop in the ghetto. Outside, storm troopers are patrolling.” He became two storm troopers patrolling. “Inside the shop…”
This time the performance was spellbinding. He transferred each image, each sound from inside his brain to the collective mind of his listeners. Everyone there that night saw the film, complete.
The Great Dictator
went into production and I did not see my friend for almost two years. When he worked, he worked, and had no time, no interest in such nonsense as friends.
When
The Great Dictator
was to open in New York, I contrived to be there and told Charlie so. He got me a ticket for the opening at the Capitol Theatre and invited me to the various festivities.
It was a tremendous success, but one small detail in the film troubled me.
After the opening, after the party, after the move of a dozen or more stragglers to the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel, it was getting late. But Chaplin, excited and stimulated by the events of the opening, was hardly ready for bed. He wanted to talk. He and Tim Durant and I left the Plaza and began to walk down Fifth Avenue.
Charlie reminisced movingly about his early days in New York, working in an act called, “A Night in an English Music Hall.” He described the Fifth Avenue he remembered, began to contrast it with the Fifth Avenue of now, and became increasingly annoyed by it. The buildings were too tall. The shops were too grand. It was all oppressive to the human spirit.
“Let’s get the hell away from here,” he said. “I hate it. All this ostentatious show of wealth and power. Let’s go down to the East Side, to the pushcart market. That’s where real life is.”
“It’s two-thirty in the morning, Charlie,” I reminded him. “The pushcart peddlers are all asleep.”
We were standing in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. This structure, too, offended him. We turned left and walked toward Third Avenue.
We entered P. J. Clarke’s, crossed into the back room, and sat down at a table. It was after hours but insiders, or Chaplins, could still get a drink. We ordered. Chaplin looked at me seriously.
“What didn’t you like about it?” he asked.
I laughed loudly. Too loudly.
“Never mind the stage laugh,” he said. “Yours stinks. You’re no actor. What don’t you like about it?”
“Charlie,” I said, “I know you’re not entirely reasonable tonight. Why should you be? You’ve just had the triumph of your life and I’m sure it’s hard to take it all in, but for the past three hours or more, along with everybody else, I’ve been telling you that it’s your
greatest picture, your greatest performance—greatest
two
performances—that it’s sure to be a world-wide smash…Didn’t you hear me?”
“I heard you,” he said, “and there was something about it you didn’t like.”
“No,” I said, “you’re wrong. I liked it all. Every foot. Every frame. But it reminds me of the time Noël Coward opened in a play and everybody rushed backstage to see him afterward, dripping praise. All his friends were trying to outdo one another, the encomiums were blowing around like a snowstorm. Finally, one drunken chum spoke up and said, ‘Well,
I
loathed it. What a revolting evening. And
you
were simply inept!’ Whereupon Noël threw his arms around her and said, ‘Oh, thank you, darling. Thank you
so
much. How
sweet
of you!’ ”
Charlie smiled and said, “I’m not Noël Coward. So why don’t you tell me?”
“Tell you what?”
“What troubled you.”
I could see it was no use, so I said, “All right. If you insist. I wish you’d let me think about it for a day or two. I’d probably come up with the answer myself.”
“What’s the question?” asked Chaplin.
“Well, just this. In the picture, you do the most fantastic imitation of Hitler—no. Imitation’s the wrong word. Caricature—maybe even caricature is wrong. It’s a portrait beyond a portrait, like a Goya, where you can see the soul of the subject coming through the canvas. Your impression of Hitler makes it possible for us to understand Hitler and what he’s about. You certainly had the look of him and the sound of him and all his gestures and facial expressions and posturing and attitudes. The uniforms, the mustache. Everything.”
“Yes, yes,” said Charlie impatiently.
“Everything but the hair,” I said. “That’s what I couldn’t quite understand. You kept your own curly hair and didn’t bring that forelock brushed down against the forehead. That would have completed the reflection. Wait a minute! Even as I talk I’m getting it. Was it because you wanted a kind of blending of the Hitler image with the Chaplin image? Is that why you left out that one detail?”
“No,” he said crossly, “of course not.”
“Oh. Then why? Why didn’t you provide that one last touch?”
Chaplin was tense with anger. “Well, God damn it!” he said righteously. “Why should I? I was using that makeup before
he
was.”
The coming of sound was disastrous to the art of Charlie Chaplin. He had brought the silent film to its highest point of personal creativity. He had trained an audience to understand every subtle nuance of his pantomime, and had given more joy than any other figure in the arts of his time. Suddenly, the medium changed, and the greatest pantomimist in the world would be called upon to talk.
The problem was not his alone. Other great figures of the silent screen were similarly affected. John Gilbert, the most attractive and magnetic leading man of the day, proved to have a high, squeaky voice that ended his career almost overnight. Certain suave sophisticates sounded like Brooklyn truck drivers. Beautiful women had ugly voices or faulty speech. It was a hard time.
Chaplin, after due consideration, decided to ride out the storm by ignoring it. There were many who thought the talkies were a temporary novelty that would soon pass and that the art of the film would return to its true form—moving pictures.
Chaplin considered that his world was his own, that fashions and trends might affect others but not him.
In the midst of the talkie revolution, he made
City Lights
, one of his finest films. Daringly, audaciously thumbing his nose at progress, he made it as a silent film. Even now it seems perfect.
The soaring wonder of Charlie Chaplin is that working in a complex communal art form, filled with problems of dependence and interdependence, he was able, by the force of his genius, to use it as a means of personal expression.
Every work of art represents a single point of view. No great symphony was ever composed in collaboration. No important painting was ever achieved by a committee, no great novel ever done by two.
American films have been mainly committee-made. This explains why so few have true individuality. Some have more than others. The force of men such as Ernst Lubitsch, Preston Sturges, or John Ford frequently came through, but even these giants were, in the end, subservient to the front office, the sales department, the board of directors, the bankers.
Fortunately for us all, Chaplin’s art and its destiny remained in his own hands. No one made him a star. He made himself a star. The front office had nothing to do with it.
Black-and-white images projected on a screen are among my earliest memories.
During World War I, my father, through a complicated real-estate deal, found himself the owner of a movie theatre in Rochester, New York. It was called the Panama because it stood near a small local canal.
I was five and became a fixture of the establishment. I remember many films that I saw five and six times. Annette Kellermann in
Queen of the Sea
. Alla Nazimova in
War
Brides
. A movie called
Enlighten Thy Daughter
(which I was forbidden to see, and saw at least
ten
times). The comedy shorts with Chaplin, Harry Langdon, Charlie Chase, Buster Keaton. The serials: Pearl White in
The Black Hand
,
The Purple Mask
; Elmo C. Lincoln in
Elmo the Mighty
. The Gish Sisters in
Romola, Broken Blossoms
; Richard Barthelmess in
Tol’able David
.
The Big Parade
.
These films, among others, formed the behavior patterns of my generation, continuing on through the Rudolph Valentino days when we all doused our heads in brilliantine and hoped to be called “Sheik” by someone.
The influence of films upon manners and morals can hardly be overestimated. Clark Gable wore no undershirt in
It Happened One Night
and put a crimp in the undershirt industry. Hat manufacturers were irritated if a leading player wore no hat.
Lobbyists were constantly at work in Hollywood attempting to get stars, male and female, to smoke; sometimes to get men to smoke cigars instead of cigarettes. I was offered a handsome gift if I could induce Ginger Rogers to smoke a cigar in a scene.
I once objected to the idea that Ginger had to have a change of wardrobe for every scene.
“She’s a telephone operator f’cryin’ out loud,” I said. “And all right, girls have a lot of dresses, but does she have to have a different one in every scene?”
“Yes, she does,” said the producer.
“But why?”
“Because the front office wants it and they want it for a damn good reason.”
“I’d like to know what that reason is.”
“The reason is that girls and women go to the movies just as much to see what the stars are wearing as for any other reason, and if you bring somebody on in the same dress all the time, they’re going to be disappointed. They want to see dresses. In a way, it’s a kind of fashion show. Sure, rich dames go to Paris to see the collections. Or to New York. But the women all over the country don’t have this opportunity and they want to see what Joan Crawford is wearing, and Jean Harlow and Ginger Rogers. So shut up.”
I shut up. Ginger Rogers changed for practically every scene.
During the run of the Brackett and Wilder film about alcoholism,
The Lost Weekend
, Joe E. Lewis walked out on the floor of the Copacabana in New York and said, “Anybody here except me see that picture, that picture
The Lost Weekend
? I want to tell you something, ladies and gentlemen, it sure got to me, that picture. And I want to tell you, after seeing that picture, I have sworn off. I am
through
! I will never go see another picture again as long as I live!”
When I was first getting regularly drunk on movies, one of my favorite players was Charles Ray. His name is scarcely known today and the films in which he starred are yellowing or cracked.
But I need nothing more than the projection of memory to summon up the image he created.
The Old Swimming Hole
,
The Barnstormer
,
Sweet Adeline
, and
The Courtship
of Miles Standish
(the latter produced largely with his own money, and bankrupting him) were outstanding by any standards. Another of his films,
The Clodhopper
, was about a country boy who comes to the big city and makes good as a dancer. It gave us all hope.
He was a distinctly American type, and specialized in an American folk myth: Small Town Boy in the Big City.
In 1938, I was directing Ginger Rogers and David Niven in
Bachelor Mother
for RKO. Shooting a nightclub scene, I happened to glance over at a table of four and saw a familiar face. I stepped closer. The familiar face smiled and I was almost certain. Could it be true? I sent for the assistant director and asked the identity of the roundfaced man at the third table over.
“Charlie Ray,” he said. “You know Charlie Ray, don’t you?”
“No, I don’t,” I replied, “but I’d like to.”
We were introduced. I invited him to lunch.
He talked easily and charmingly of his beginnings in film in 1919, remembered the great successes with pleasure, and told almost humorously the story of his ruinous enterprise—
The Courtship of Miles Standish
.
What surprised me was the tone of his account. Here was a man who had been one of the most successful, affluent stars in Hollywood. Now, he was working as an extra, but there was not a single note of bitterness in any of his recitals.
“All a question of the hazards of the profession,” he said. “Every profession has its pitfalls. It was grand, though, while it was going on.”
“But why an extra?” I asked. “You’re an actor. Why not parts?”
He laughed. “No, no, no. They’re too much trouble. Strain. I’ve had my share of strain. All I ask of this business now is to provide a living and it does that.”
“But what if a part came up?” I asked. “What if I offered you a good part?”
He looked at me evenly and said, “I wouldn’t play it.”
Over coffee, we talked of his contemporaries: Wallace Reid, Mabel Normand, Betty Bronson, May McAvoy.
A few minutes later, I felt close enough to him to ask, “I heard an unbelievable story about you. I wonder if you’d verify it for me.”
“If I can.”
“Well, I heard—from Anita Loos, I think—that when you were a star you used to go to a dentist every day and have your teeth polished.”
“That’s perfectly true,” he said. “Why is that unbelievable?”
“Well, holy smoke!” I said. “I should think it would wear your teeth out.”
“Oh, no. It only took a few minutes each day.”
“But what was the point?”
“Well,” he said, “in those days, the camera used to come in close quite a lot and a stock in trade of mine was my smile. One day, I was watching the rushes and I smiled one of those wide smiles and my teeth didn’t look right. And I thought, what could it be? Then, I figured out that they just weren’t sparkling. So the next day, I went over to the dentist and he polished them up and then I watched the rushes again, and the teeth were fine. So after that—yes, it’s true—I
did
stop at the dentist’s every day to have my teeth cleaned and polished. Anita’s got it a little wrong, though. It wasn’t
every
day—not three hundred and sixty-five days a year—just on those days when I was
shooting
.”
We returned to the set. I saw Charlie Ray often after that. He was always an extra in any film I had anything to do with.
What shakes me now is the realization that I thought him then a charming old has-been. Actually, when I met him, he was
forty-seven years old
!
His case was by no means singular. Many former stars worked as extras or bit players. Mae Marsh, Mae Clarke, Maurice Costello.
Almost without exception, they took it well, did their work, and did not complain.
Needless to say, not all stars or important players ended at Central Casting. Corinne Griffith became a Beverly Hills real-estate tycoon. William Haines, a notable interior decorator. Others were content to make room for the new and live out pleasant lives.
In the early 1930s, Hollywood became a haven for Mrs. Patrick Campbell. The redoubtable Stella had used up her resources and possibilities in London, whereupon she traveled to New York. Although she was respectfully received there, she was not able to stage a comeback.
Mrs. Campbell added greatly to the gaiety of New York as she did wherever she went. But money was running out. She accepted a gift of a certain amount from Gerald
Murphy, saying, “Thank you, Gerald. I accept this because I have always believed that money is for those who
need
it!”
She moved to smaller and smaller hotels, and finally across the river to New Jersey because it was cheaper.
Mrs. Patrick Campbell decided to try Hollywood.
It proved to be a revelation. She found a number of old friends and admirers. She was as entertained as she was entertaining, and for a time, was much in evidence on the Hollywood scene.
Acting in a movie at M-G-M with Norma Shearer, who was then married to Irving Thalberg, the head of the studio, she noticed that in almost every shot Miss Shearer was brightly lighted while the other actors or actresses in the scene were dim or dark in shadow.
When someone asked Mrs. Campbell what she was doing, she replied, “I’m over at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. I’m one of Norma Shearer’s Nubian slaves.”
A Warner Brothers unit publicity man handed her the customary mimeographed form to fill out. She dutifully wrote out her name, the color of her hair and eyes, her height. Her debut, her hobbies, her favorite roles, and so on. Then, turning to a sheet headed “Experience,” she wrote, “Edward VII.”
George Cukor gave a dinner party for her. Thornton Wilder was her escort.
Wilder called for her at her apartment. She invited him in for sherry. They exchanged talk about mutual friends. She showed him some of her letters from George Bernard Shaw, which Shaw had forbidden her to sell or publish.
“No, Stella,” he had said, in the famous turndown. “I will not play the horse to your Lady Godiva.”
Mrs. Pat and Wilder proceeded to George Cukor’s new home. There, they were shown about. Special attention was called to the formal garden that had been planned and built by George Hoyningen-Huené. Pressing a button, Cukor showed them how the lighting effect in the garden could be changed from amber to purple to white.
On the way home, Wilder made a deprecatory remark about Hollywood’s efforts to improve upon nature.
“Stop it!” said Mrs. Campbell. “Stop it at once. I won’t hear a word against this place, do you hear? Not a word against Hollywood. I have spent years in London, subsisting on a sandwich and a cup of tea a day, and no one would give me a job. Around the corner sat Ellen Terry, subsisting on a sandwich and a cup of tea a day, and no one would give
her
a job. I go to New York, they make much of me, but no one gives me a job. I come here, I am given work, and am paid well for it—and my self-respect is restored. So I won’t hear a word against Hollywood. Hollywood to me means cash, courage, and climate.”
It was magnanimous of her. She had learned to settle for less. Surely, in the course of her years in Hollywood, better use of her remarkable talents could have been made. She appeared unimportantly and fleetingly in
The Dancers
,
Riptide
,
One More River
,
Outcast Lady
,
Crime and Punishment
.
It was through Charles Ray that I met a number of other old-timers. Some of them had been in on virtually the beginnings of filmmaking in America.
Eddie Sutherland (A. Edward Sutherland) arrived in Hollywood in 1913. He loved films and the life of the movie community. He went from silent shorts to silent features, into the talkies, through color and the coming of the wide screen, and ended his days in television.
The transitions were not always clear. I recall visiting his set one afternoon. There were a number of animals in the scene, a full-stage exterior.
I reflected upon the curious circumstance. Moviemakers had originally come to Southern California mainly because sunlight was needed to achieve effective photography. Every set was an exterior interior. The early Chaplin shorts were shot out-of-doors in ceiling-less rooms. As time went by, lighting improved. The powerful klieg lights were invented, and artificially lighted sets could be used independently of the vagaries of the sun.
Here, on Eddie Sutherland’s set, an enormous exterior was being shot indoors. The animals were restless and noisy. The chickens and horses and pigs and dogs did not respond to the assistant director’s, “Quiet!”
I could barely hear the dialogue, and wondered how the players were able to hear their cues.
When the scene ended, I said, “You know, Eddie, I'm trying to learn, so don’t get mad if I ask you a question.”
“Shoot,” he said.
“Well, with all that ungodly noise going on, what kind of sound recording were you getting?”
“Oh, I never worry about that,” he replied. “We put the titles in later.”
To Eddie, the titles of the silent and the spoken dialogue of the talkies were interchangeable.
Among other things, Eddie was known for his prowess with women. He was a diminutive man, not particularly handsome, yet had developed a considerable reputation around town as a ladies’ man.
“How do you explain it?” I asked him one dawn at the weary end of a pub crawl.
“How?” he echoed, and winked a broad wink. “I’m going to tell you—because you’re a beginner, see—and I’m an old master. I don’t usually give away my trade secrets, but you’ve gotten me pretty plastered tonight. I guess that was your scheme, huh? To get me plastered and to get all my secrets, huh?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“Okay, it worked. You’re gonna get ’em. Get us another double and I’ll spill everything.”
Another double was ordered, served, and shortly thereafter, Eddie began.
“It’s taken me years,” he said. “A lotta years. But I built up this reputation. Like you say. And the way I did it—now don’t go around tellin’ everybody around. This is for
your
pearly ears alone. The way I did it was—I worked on it, see?”
“No, I don’t.”
“I mean I
talked
about it. Myself. For years. I keep tellin’ everybody how terrific I am and so, naturally, it gets around. In fact, when it started gettin’ around too much I started denyin’ it and that’s even better, see? The more you deny something, the more everybody believes it. Like once I started tellin’ everybody how I never had any affair
with Jean Harlow. I would say, ‘How did all that talk get started about me and Jean Harlow? I never had anything to do with Jean Harlow. I know her, sure. She was a good pal of mine but that’s all.’ I just kept sayin’ that, see? And the more I said it, the more they believed I
did
have. But I never did. See how it works?”