My Autobiography (57 page)

Paulette was to be in the picture. In the last two years she had had quite a success with Paramount. Although we were somewhat estranged we were friends and still married. But Paulette was a creature of whims. One would have been quite amusing if it had not come at an inopportune time. One day she arrived in my dressing-room at the studio with a slim, well-tailored young man, who looked poured into his clothes. I had had a difficult day with the script and was rather surprised at this interruption. But Paulette said it was very important; then she sat down and invited the young man to pull up a chair and sit down beside her.

‘This is my agent,’ said Paulette.

Then she looked at him to take over. He spoke rapidly with clipped enunciation, as though enjoying his words. ‘As you know, Mr Chaplin, since
Modern Times
you’re paying Paulette two thousand five hundred dollars a week. But what we haven’t straightened out with you, Mr Chaplin, is her billing, which should be featured seventy-five per cent on all posters –’ He got no further. ‘What the hell is this?’ I shouted. ‘Don’t tell me what billing she’s to get! I have her interests at heart more than you have! Get out, the pair of you!’

Half-way through making
The Great Dictator
I began receiving alarming messages from United Artists. They had been advised by the Hays Office that I would run into censorship trouble. Also the English office was very concerned about an anti-Hitler picture and doubted whether it could be shown in Britain. But I was determined to go ahead, for Hitler must be laughed at. Had I known of the actual horrors of the German concentration camps, I could not have made
The Great Dictator;
I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis. However, I was determined to ridicule their mystic bilge about a pure-blooded race: As though such a thing ever existed outside of the Australian Aborigines!

While I was making
The Great Dictator
, Sir Stafford Cripps came to California
en route
from Russia. He came to dinner with a young man just down from Oxford whose name escapes my memory, but not the remark he made that evening. Said he: ‘The way things are going in Germany and elsewhere, I have a small chance of living more than five years.’ Sir Stafford had been on a fact-finding tour in Russia and was profoundly impressed with what he had seen. He described their vast projects and of course their terrific problems. He seemed to think that war was inevitable.

More worrying letters came from the New York office imploring me not to make the film, declaring it would never be shown in England or America. But I was determined to make it, even if I had to hire halls myself to show it.

Before I had finished
The Dictator
England declared war on the Nazis. I was in Catalina on my boat over the week-end and heard the depressing news over the radio. In the beginning there was inaction on all fronts. ‘The Germans will never break through the Maginot Line,’ we said. Then suddenly the holocaust began: the break-through in Belgium, the collapse of the Maginot Line, the stark and ghastly fact of Dunkirk – and France was occupied. The news was growing gloomier. England was fighting with her back to the wall. Now our New York office was wiring frantically; ‘Hurry up with your film, everyone is waiting for it.’

The Great Dictator
was difficult to make; it involved miniature models and props, which took a year’s preparation. Without these devices it would have cost five times as much. However, I had spent $500,000 before I began turning the camera.

Then Hitler decided to invade Russia! This was proof that his inevitable dementia had set in. The United States had not yet entered the war, but there was a feeling of great relief both in England and America.

Near the completion of
The Dictator
, Douglas Fairbanks and his wife, Sylvia, visited us on location. Douglas had been inactive for the last five years and I had rarely seen him, for he had been travelling to and from England. I thought he had aged and grown a little stouter and seemed preoccupied. Nevertheless, he was still the same enthusiastic Douglas. He laughed uproariously during the taking of one of our scenes. ‘I can’t wait to see it,’ he said.

Doug stayed about an hour. When he left I stood gazing after him, watching him help his wife up a steep incline; and as they walked away along the footpath, the distance growing between us, I felt a sudden tinge of sadness. Doug turned and I waved, and he waved back. That was the last I ever saw of him. A month later Douglas Junior telephoned to say his father had died in the night of a heart-attack. It was a terrible shock, for he belonged so much to life.

I have missed Douglas – I have missed the warmth of his enthusiasm and charm; I have missed his friendly voice over the telephone, that used to call me up on a bleak and lonely Sunday morning: ‘Charlie, coming up for lunch – then for a swim – then for dinner – then afterwards, see a picture?’ Yes, I have missed his delightful friendship.

In what society of men would I prefer to associate? I suppose my own profession should be my choice. Yet Douglas was the only actor of whom I ever made a friend. Meeting the stars at various Hollywood parties, I have come away sceptical – maybe there were too many of us. The atmosphere was more challenging than friendly, and one ran many gauntlets to and from the buffet in vying for special attention. No, stars amongst stars gave little light – or warmth.

Writers are nice people but not very giving; whatever they know they seldom impart to others; most of them keep it between the covers of their books. Scientists might be excellent company, but their mere appearance in a drawing-room mentally paralyses the rest of us. Painters are a bore because most of them would have you believe they are philosophers more than painters. Poets are undoubtedly the superior class and as individuals are pleasant, tolerant and excellent companions. But I think musicians in the aggregate are more cooperative than any other class. There is nothing so warm and moving as the sight of a symphony orchestra. The romantic lights of their music stands, the tuning up and the sudden silence as the conductor makes his entrance,
affirms the social, cooperative feeling. I remember Horowitz, the pianist, dining at my house, and the guests discussing the state of the world, saying that the Depression and unemployment would bring about a spiritual renaissance. Suddenly he got up and said: ‘This conversation makes me want to play the piano.’ Of course nobody objected and he played Schumann’s Sonata No. 2. I doubted if it would ever be played as well again.

Just before the war I dined at his house with his wife, the daughter of Toscanini. Rachmaninov and Barbirolli were there. Rachmaninov was a strange-looking man, with something aesthetic and cloistral about him. It was an intimate dinner, just five of us.

It seems that each time art is discussed I have a different explanation of it. Why not? That evening I said that art was an additional emotion applied to skilful technique. Someone brought the topic round to religion and I confessed I was not a believer. Rachmaninov quickly interposed: ‘But how can you have art without religion?’

I was stumped for a moment. ‘I don’t think we are talking about the same thing,’ I said. ‘My concept of religion is a belief in a dogma – and art is a feeling more than a belief.’

‘So is religion,’ he answered. After that I shut up.

*

While dining at my house, Igor Stravinsky suggested we should do a film together. I invented a story. It should be surrealistic, I said – a decadent night-club with tables around the dance floor, at each table groups and couples representing the mundane world – at one table greed, at another hypocrisy, at another ruthlessness. The floor show is the passion play, and while the crucifixion of the Saviour is going on, groups at each table watch it indifferently, some ordering meals, others talking business, others showing little interest. The mob, the High Priests and the Pharisees are shaking their fists up at the Cross, shouting: ‘If Thou be the Son of God come down and save Thyself.’ At a nearby table a group of business men are talking excitedly about a big deal. One draws nervously on his cigarette, looking up at the Saviour and blowing his smoke absent-mindedly in His direction.

At another table a business man and his wife sit studying the menu. She looks up, then nervously moves her chair back from the floor. ‘I can’t understand why people come here,’ she says uncomfortably; ‘it’s depressing.’

‘It’s good entertainment,’ says the business man. ‘The place was bankrupt until they put on this show. Now they are out of the red.’

‘I think it’s sacrilegious,’ says his wife.

‘It does a lot of good,’ says the man. ‘People who have never been inside a church come here and get the story of Christianity.’

As the show progresses, a drunk, being under the influence of alcohol, is on a different plane; he is seated alone and begins to weep and shout loudly: ‘Look, they’re crucifying Him! And nobody cares!’ He staggers to his feet and stretches his arms appealingly towards the Cross. The wife of a minister sitting nearby complains to the head waiter, and the drunk is escorted out of the place still weeping and remonstrating: ‘Look, nobody cares! A fine lot of Christians you are!’

‘You see,’ I told Stravinsky, ‘they throw him out because he is upsetting the show.’ I explained that putting a passion play on the dance floor of a night-club was to show how cynical and conventional the world has become in professing Christianity.

The maestro’s face became very grave. ‘But that’s sacrilegious!’ he said.

I was rather astonished and a little embarrassed. ‘Is it?’ I said. ‘I never intended it to be. I thought it was a criticism of the world’s attitude towards Christianity – perhaps, having made up the story as I went along, I haven’t made that very clear.’ And so the subject was dropped. But several weeks later, Stravinsky wrote, wanting to know if I still considered the idea of our doing a film together. However, my enthusiasm has cooled off and I become interested in making a film of my own.

Hanns Eisler brought Schoenberg to my studio, a frank and abrupt little man whose music I much admired, and whom I had seen regularly at the Los Angeles tennis tournaments sitting alone in the bleachers wearing a white cap and a T-shirt. After seeing my film
Modern Times
, he told me that he enjoyed the comedy but my music was very bad – and I had partly to agree
with him. In discussing music one remark of his was indelible: ‘I like sounds, beautiful sounds.’

Hanns Eisler tells an amusing story about the great man. Hanns, studing harmony under him, would walk in the depth of winter five miles in the snow to receive a lesson from the master at eight o’clock. Schoenberg, who was inclined to baldness, would sit at the piano while Hanns looked over his shoulder, reading and whistling the music. ‘Young man,’ said the master, ‘don’t whistle. Your icy breath is very cold on my head.’

During the making of
The Dictator
I began receiving crank letters, and now that it was finished they started to increase. Some threatened to throw stink bombs in the theatre and shoot up the screen wherever it would be shown, others threatening to create riots. At first I thought of going to the police, but such publicity might keep the public away from the theatre. A friend of mine suggested having a talk with Harry Bridges, head of the longshoreman’s union. So I invited him to the house for dinner.

I told him frankly my reason for wanting to see him. I knew Bridges was anti-Nazi so I explained that I was making an anti-Nazi comedy and that I had been receiving threatening letters. I said: ‘If I could invite, say, twenty or thirty of your longshoremen to my opening, and have them scattered amongst the audience, then if any of these pro-Nazi fellows started a rumpus, your folks might gently stamp on their toes before anything got seriously going.’

Bridges laughed. ‘I don’t think it will come to that, Charlie. You’ll have enough defenders with your own public to take care of any cranks. And if these letters are from Nazis, they’ll be afraid to show up in the daylight anyway.’

That night Harry told an interesting story of the San Francisco strike. At that time he had practically commanded the whole city, controlling all its supplies. But he never interfered with the necessary supplies for hospitals and for children. In telling me about the strike he said: ‘When the cause is justified, you don’t have to persuade people; all you do is to tell them the facts, they they decide for themselves. I told my men that if they decided to strike there’d be plenty of trouble; some might never know the results. But whatever they decided, I would abide by their decision. If it’s to strike, I’ll be there on the front line,
I said – and the five thousand voted unanimously to strike.’

The Great Dictator
was booked to play two theatres in New York, the Astor and the Capitol. At the Astor we previewed it for the Press. Harry Hopkins, Franklin Roosevelt’s chief adviser, dined with me that night. Afterwards we went to the Press showing and arrived half-way through the picture.

A Press preview of a comedy has a very definite characteristic – the laughter sounds in spite of itself. At that preview, what laughter there was sounded the same.

‘It’s a great picture,’ said Harry as we left the theatre, ‘a very worth-while thing to do, but it hasn’t a chance. It will lose money.’ Since $2,000,000 of my own money and two years’ work were involved, I was not frantically ebullient about his prognostications. However, I nodded soberly. Thank God Hopkins was wrong.
The Great Dictator
opened at the Capital to a glamorous audience who were elated and enthused. It stayed fifteen weeks in New York, playing two theatres, and turned out to be the biggest grosser of all my pictures up to that time.

But the reviews were mixed. Most of the critics objected to the last speech. The New York
Daily News
said I pointed a finger of Communism at the audience. Although the majority of the critics objected to the speech and said it was not in character, the public as a whole loved it, and I had many wonderful letters eulogizing it.

Archie L. Mayo, one of Hollywood’s important directors, asked permission to print the speech on his Christmas card. What follows is his introduction to it and the speech: