My Autobiography (2 page)

On the book’s appearance, reviews of
My Autobiography
were almost unanimous in their mixture of enthusiasm and disappointment.
The opening chapters represent the last great Victorian autobiography, a first-hand account, rich in colour and chiaroscuro, of life in the poor streets of a nineteenth-century London that was still not far from Dickens and Mayhew. The young Chaplin’s fortunes change when he becomes a professional in the English music hall at the height of its Edwardian glory. Vaudeville tours bring the discovery of America: ‘At last California – a paradise of sunshine, orange groves, vineyards and palm-trees stretching along the Pacific coast for a thousand miles.’ From vaudeville he risks a leap into the dark to go into pictures, still in their infancy and in process of finding their ultimate home on the West Coast: ‘In those days Beverly Hills looked like an abandoned real estate development. Sidewalks ran along and disappeared into open fields and lampposts with white globes adorned empty streets; most of the globes were missing, shot off by passing revellers from roadhouses.’

In this virgin land, and the new medium of movies, still striving to discover its rules (largely under the lead of the great D. W. Griffith, whom Chaplin somewhat patronizingly credits with ‘an original touch’), Chaplin finds his destiny. The chapters on his first contracts with the Keystone and Essanay Companies give a vivid if cursory account of his struggles – personal and economic – to win creative autonomy, to bring to the coarse popular show of slapstick movies the subtler skills he had developed in the music halls, and to ‘add another dimension to my films besides that of comedy’.

His success in this and the speed of it were breathtaking. In little more than two years he had achieved world fame, opened up new markets for Hollywood films, and begun to attract the cachet of ‘artist’ from people who before him would never have deigned to look at the movies. ‘The prospects were dazzling. Like an avalanche, money and success came with increasing momentum; it was all bewildering, frightening, but wonderful.’

At this juncture, the eleventh chapter of
My Autobiography
closes with the words: ‘So much had happened to me, my emotions were spent.’ After this, the style and tone change, in a way that disconcerted and disappointed the book’s first critics and readers. Till now, we have followed the adventures of a young man, struggling, striving, experimenting and finally rocketed to success by his talents. Now we are presented with the self-portrait of a world
celebrity, contentedly courted by princes and presidents. When Chaplin drops names he does it resoundingly: ‘Many illustrious visitors came to the studio at this time: Melba, Leopold Godowsky and Paderewski, Nijinsky and Pavlova.’ ‘A cousin of the Kaiser kindly conducted me around Potsdam and Sans Souci.’ ‘If we were not so preoccupied with our family, we could have quite a social life in Switzerland, for we live relatively near the Queen of Spain and the Count and the Countess Chevreau d’Antraigues, who have been most cordial to us, and there are a number of film stars and writers who live near.’

The name-dropping is compensated by Chaplin’s sharp one-line portraits. Paderewski ‘had great charm, but there was something bourgeois about him, an over-emphasis of dignity’. Rachmaninov was ‘a strange-looking man, with something aesthetic and cloistral about him’. Schoenberg was ‘a frank and abrupt little man’. Often, too, Chaplin is as shrewd about himself, humorously deriding and deflating his own vanities, aware of their deep roots in the ineradicable heritage of early deprivation and sense of inferiority. Discussing his passion for self-education, he reveals movingly, ‘I wanted to know, not for the love of knowledge but as a defence against the world’s contempt for the ignorant.’

As it was, Chaplin’s career was still to suffer a further turn of destiny. His seemingly impregnable position as a world celebrity and universal idol was undermined by American paranoia of the Cold War era. At the start of the 1950s he came to feel ‘that I had the acrimony and hate of a whole nation upon me… My prodigious sin was being a non-conformist. Although I am not a Communist, I refused to fall in line by hating them’. His punishment was virtual exile from the United States that lasted to the end of his life.

A more understandable source of disappointment for some critics of the time was the odd reticences of
My Autobiography
. Chaplin’s references to his films are generally cursory, and some key works –
Easy Street
or
The Circus
– are not mentioned at all. He says nothing about the process of their making. In his lifetime he would explain his reluctance to allow people on his set or to share his working secrets by saying, ‘If people know how it’s done, all the magic goes.’ Perhaps a truer reason was that he himself came more and more to feel that he was unable to unveil the
mysteries of his creation, simply because the essential part of the mysteries remained veiled for him also. How could he ever explain, to himself or to anyone else, the seemingly accidental creation, in the Keystone costume hut one afternoon in 1914, of the character that was to become the most universally recognized representation of a human being in the history of art? At one of the rare moments when he admits the problems of work, describing how the early shorts were often begun with not even the vaguest idea of a story, he has a simple but revealing phrase: ‘In this desperate way I started many a comedy.’

Another explanation may be that Chaplin wrote the book in the spirit of the entertainer that, throughout his life, he was; and like most people, saw no particular glamour in his daytime job: he once told someone that his working life was no more exciting than that of a bank clerk, and probably felt that it would simply be boring to relate the slow and painful processes by which his films were made. In any case the reticence of his lifetime has been richly compensated since his death. Chaplin, intentionally or not, left behind more evidence, in the form of film out-takes and rushes, working notes and studio daily records, than any other film director of his time, to enable researchers to supply, more than amply, the lacunae of his own account.

More puzzling is his selectivity in the record of his friends, collaborators and more intimate relationships. The four decades since he wrote have accustomed us to the tell-all autobiography. Chaplin exerts his right not to tell all. Although he is far from shy about his amorous interests, his first marriage and divorce rates only a page or so and his second barely a line, without even naming the wife in question (she was Lita Grey). Neither Stan Laurel, his companion throughout the vaudeville tours of America, nor Chaplin’s own half-brother and dedicated assistant, Wheeler Dryden, gets a mention. The loyal team of actors and technicians who worked with him in many cases throughout his Hollywood career – Henry Bergman, Mack Swain, Eric Campbell (the unforgettable beetle-browed ‘heavy’ of the early films), Albert Austin and, above all, his dedicated and resourceful cameraman and collaborator Roland Totheroh – do not figure in the book at all.

If there is an explanation for this apparent forgetfulness or
ingratitude it may lie in the deep-hidden psychological scars identified by Chaplin’s most perceptive commentator, Francis Wyndham: ‘The rich and famous and fulfilled man whom the world sees still considers himself a victim maimed for life by the early catastrophic shock.’ Was it necessary therapy, essential to his confidence, always to tell himself that he had conquered the world and raised himself from poverty and nonentity to universal fame and affection (and now composed his autobiography) unaided?

We can be sure that what puzzles us puzzled him also, leaving him to conclude with gentle defiance, ‘I am what I am: an individual, unique and different, with a lineal history of ancestral promptings and urgings; a history of dreams, desires, and of special experiences, of all of which I am the sum total.’

B
EFORE
Westminster Bridge was open, Kennington Road was only a bridle path. After 1750, a new road was laid down from the Bridge forming a direct link to Brighton. As a consequence Kennington Road, where I spent most of my boyhood, boasted some fine houses of architectural merit, fronted with iron grill balconies from which occupants could once have seen George IV coaching on his way to Brighton.

By the middle of the nineteenth century most of the homes had deteriorated into rooming houses and apartments. Some, however, remained inviolate and were occupied by doctors, successful merchants and vaudeville stars. On Sunday morning, along the Kennington Road one could see a smart pony and trap outside a house, ready to take a vaudevillian for a ten-mile drive as far as Norwood or Merton, stopping on the way back at the various pubs, the White Horse, the Horns and the Tankard in the Kennington Road.

As a boy of twelve, I often stood outside the Tankard watching these illustrious gentlemen alight from their equestrian outfits to enter the lounge bar, where the élite of vaudeville met, as was their custom on a Sunday to take a final ‘one’ before going home to the midday meal. How glamorous they were, dressed in chequered suits and grey bowlers, flashing their diamond rings and tie-pins! At two O’clock on Sunday afternoon, the pub closed and its occupants filed outside and dallied awhile before bidding each other adieu; and I would gaze fascinated and amused, for some of them swaggered with a ridiculous air.

When the last had gone his way, it was as though the sun had gone under a cloud. And I would return to a row of old derelict houses that sat back off the Kennington Road, to 3 Pownall
Terrace, and mount the rickety stairs that led to our small garret. The house was depressing and the air was foul with stale slops and old clothes. This particular Sunday, Mother was seated gazing out of the window. She turned and smiled weakly. The room was stifling, a little over twelve feet square, and seemed smaller and the slanting ceiling seemed lower. The table against the wall was crowded with dirty plates and tea-cups; and in the corner, snug against the lower wall, was an old iron bed which Mother had painted white. Between the bed and the window was a small fire-grate, and at the foot of the bed an old armchair that unfolded and became a single bed upon which my brother Sydney slept. But now Sydney was away at sea.

The room was more depressing this Sunday because Mother had for some reason neglected to tidy it up. Usually she kept it clean, for she was bright, cheerful and still young, not yet thirty-seven, and could make that miserable garret glow with golden comfort. Especially on a wintry Sunday morning when she would give me my breakfast in bed and I would awaken to a tidy little room with a small fire glowing and see the steaming kettle on the hob and a haddock or a bloater by the fender being kept warm while she made toast. Mother’s cheery presence, the cosiness of the room, the soft padded sound of boiling water pouring into our earthenware tea-pot while I read my weekly comic, were the pleasures of a serene Sunday morning.

But this Sunday she sat listlessly looking out of the window. For the past three days she had been sitting at that window, strangely quiet and preoccupied. I knew she was worried. Sydney was at sea and we had not heard from him in two months, and Mother’s hired sewing machine with which she struggled to support us had been taken away for owing back instalments (a procedure that was not unusual). And my own contribution of five shillings weekly which I earned giving dancing lessons had suddenly ended.

I was hardly aware of a crisis because we lived in a continual crisis; and, being a boy, I dismissed our troubles with gracious forgetfulness. As usual I would run home to Mother after school and do errands, empty the slops and bring up a pail of fresh water, then hurry on to the McCarthys’ and spend the evening there – anything to get away from our depressing garret.

The McCarthys were old friends of Mother’s whom she had known in her vaudeville days. They lived in a comfortable flat in the better part of Kennington Road, and were relatively well off by our standards. The McCarthys had a son, Wally, with whom I would play until dusk, and invariably I was invited to stay for tea. By lingering this way I had many a meal there. Occasionally Mrs McCarthy would inquire after Mother, why she had not seen her of late. And I would make some sort of excuse, for since Mother had met with adversity she seldom saw any of her theatrical friends.

Of course there were times when I would stay home, and Mother would make tea and fry bread in beef dripping, which I relished, and for an hour she would read to me, for she was an excellent reader, and I would discover the delight of Mother’s company and would realize I had a better time staying home than going to the McCarthys’.

And now as I entered the room, she turned and looked reproachfully at me. I was shocked at her appearance; she was thin and haggard and her eyes had the look of someone in torment. An ineffable sadness came over me, and I was torn between an urge to stay home and keep her company, and a desire to get away from the wretchedness of it all. She looked at me apathetically. ‘Why don’t you run along to the McCarthys’?’ she said.

I was on the verge of tears. ‘Because I want to stay with you.’

She turned and looked vacantly out of the window. ‘You run along to the McCarthys’ and get your dinner – there’s nothing here for you.’

I felt a reproach in her tone, but I closed my mind to it. ‘I’ll go if you want me to,’ I said weakly.

She smiled wanly and stroked my head. ‘Yes, yes, you run along.’ And although I pleaded with her to let me stay, she insisted on my going. So I went with a feeling of guilt, leaving her sitting in that miserable garret alone, little realizing that within the next few days a terrible fate awaited her.

I
WAS
born on 16 April 1889, at eight O’clock at night, in East Lane, Walworth. Soon after, we moved to West Square, St George’s Road, Lambeth. According to Mother my world was a happy one. Our circumstances were moderately comfortable; we lived in three tastefully furnished rooms. One of my early recollections was that each night before Mother went to the theatre Sydney and I were lovingly tucked up in a comfortable bed and left in the care of the housemaid. In my world of three and a half years, all things were possible; if Sydney, who was four years older than I, could perform legerdemain and swallow a coin and make it come out through the back of his head, I could do the same; so I swallowed a halfpenny and Mother was obliged to send for a doctor.