Two Gentlemen on the Beach Read online

  Consolation, they agreed, if it was to work and to endure, had to be planned – not unlike a proposal in the House of Commons or the building of a swimming pool; not unlike shooting a film. But the quality of a plan depended on how it was drawn up. They ordered – yes, ordered! – themselves to stick to a method that would entirely eliminate pathos, sentimentality, morality, anything weepy, anything smacking of bribery or fatalism, and all useless railing against God and the world. And they managed to talk about themselves and the possibility of doing away with themselves as if these were negotiations over a third person who was not present, whose thoughts and fate did not so much provoke their sympathy as awaken an academic or aesthetic interest in them. Churchill later remarked that, looking back, their conversations had been dominated by the passive mood: he and his friend did not negotiate, “there were negotiations”; they didn’t take an academic interest, their interest “was awoken”; they didn’t feel sympathy, it was “provoked”. Chaplin summarised their attitude to these conversations with the phrase “sober all the way to enlightenment”.

  Their conversations were often funny, very funny. But the intention behind them was not. Sometimes they bore fruit: take the scene from City Lights, in which the rich man puts a rope around his neck, the end of which is attached to a heavy stone he intends to push into the water. The Tramp desperately tries to prevent him, and the whole thing ends with the Tramp falling in the water himself – this was a scene they had come up with together, when their friendship was just a few hours old.

  So Chaplin knew that Churchill had periods of gloom and hopelessness – the “black dog”, as Samuel Johnson termed this bastard child of errant impulses and contaminated brain chemistry. He knew that Churchill, the quintessential British swashbuckler, kept finding himself in the kennel of the beast without having been able to take any precautions against it. He knew that the animal attacked him from behind, and within a few hours would turn Churchill, the quintessential rhetorician, into a nervous stutterer who was soon rendered monosyllabic, with only one thing on his mind. Churchill had never spoken to anybody, not even his doctors, in more detail and with more honesty about this torment.

  Churchill, in turn, knew about the anxiety that came over the world’s greatest film artist in the days and weeks following the completion of a picture, enslaving him, crippling him, sometimes reducing him to speechlessness and leaving him feeling utterly destroyed. Neither of them had much time for philosophy, and certainly not German philosophy, but they did share Nietzsche’s opinion that the idea of suicide was a powerful consolation, which could get you through many a bad night. (Neither of them could have cited the place where that was written.)

  To prevent this most radical of consolations from ever becoming their only consolation, Churchill and Chaplin decided to keep meeting; if there was one person who could stop the other taking this path, then it was he, or he.

  4

  Their first meeting left Chaplin with a powerful feeling of gratitude; and because gratitude – like justice, freedom, courtesy and a few other abstract nouns – was one of the fundamental things associated with the Tramp, he valued it very highly.

  The encounter took place in the mansion belonging to Marion Davis, known as “The Beach House” or “Ocean House” in Santa Monica. Miss Davies was the lover of the publisher and media tycoon William Randolph Hearst, and had been for many years. She had invited two hundred people to the grand unveiling of this house with its one hundred rooms, all of them famous figures from politics, film, business and academia. Chaplin hadn’t wanted to go, but Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, his most loyal friends in Hollywood, had finally convinced him.

  This was the spring of 1927 – a terrible time for Chaplin. His second marriage was in pieces. Lita and her lawyers had instigated the dirtiest divorce battle that the American press could remember (and they were providing plenty of ammunition for it). They intended to ruin Chaplin, both financially and socially, and they had good prospects of doing so. They weren’t just suing him; they were also suing his studio and his company, United Artists. They issued restraining orders against the National Bank of Los Angeles, the Bank of Italy, and other financial institutions where they suspected Chaplin had deposited parts of his fortune, which was one of the largest in the film industry.

  Rumours were spread that before and during his marriage, Chaplin had often had sex with underage girls. There were screaming headlines about a certain Lillita Louise MacMurray, who had fallen into the fiend’s clutches at the age of fifteen. It soon emerged that this person was none other than Chaplin’s wife herself – the one who was taking him to court. Her stage name was Lita Grey, and in her day-to-day business she proudly and brazenly called herself Lita Grey Chaplin. The newspapers didn’t bother to mention this embarrassing blunder, and of course they made no apology – they were already onto the next scandal. During Lita’s first pregnancy, they said, Chaplin had dismissed her abruptly from the cast of The Gold Rush, where she had been the female lead, and replaced her with Georgia Hale, a sixteen-year-old beauty queen from Chicago. He had also forced Lita to keep the birth of their son a secret, to make sure this event didn’t take away from a “much more important one”, namely the film’s premiere. He had bribed a doctor, the papers said, to record Charles Junior’s date of birth as a few days later. The youngest of Chaplin’s lovers, they said, had been not yet thirteen, a girl from a God-fearing family who had run away from home after fighting with her father. Chaplin had picked the weeping girl up off the kerb, taken her home with him and played the kind uncle, which he doubtless had the talent to do. The girl, now a woman, was quoted in the paper as saying he had lied to her, telling her everything was ok: he’d been in touch with her father, who Chaplin said had made a point of asking him to “take good care of her”. And so he did – though the newspaper refused to say how, out of consideration for the sensibilities of its female readership. Chaplin complained, and the paper was ordered to print a retraction. And so it did – in tiny lettering, on page 5, a year later.

  In their crusade against him, Lita’s lawyers and the reporters had soon explored every possible level of tastelessness and chicanery. The indictment – which was leaked to the press – mentioned Chaplin’s mental cruelty towards his wife, and then described in detail, with no consideration for the “sensibilities of the female readership”, certain sexual practices outlawed in the USA, which he had apparently demanded from her on a nightly basis. The Fatty Arbuckle scandal was fresh in the public’s minds – he was a friend of Chaplin’s from the early days, whom the court had acquitted of the manslaughter of an actress during an orgy. Even so, his career was over, and he was a wreck. Lita and her lawyers were clearly trying to force Chaplin into the same corner: not only calling him a child molester, but a pervert to boot. Women’s associations demanded a national boycott of Chaplin’s films; there were demonstrations outside the studios; guards were placed on the buildings by the administrators; every coat hanger that a boy carried from A to B had to be registered; two of his Tramp costumes were confiscated.

  Chaplin suffered a nervous breakdown, and couldn’t speak for days. He interrupted work on The Circus for an indefinite period, every day of which cost United Artists a fortune. He withdrew from public life and moved into a hotel, abandoning his house on Summit Drive. The only people he had any contact with were the Fairbanks. The fact that Marion Davies invited Mr Charles Chaplin to the grand unveiling of her house was a statement. Douglas and Mary told him he mustn’t reject such a declaration of sympathy.

  Churchill had been invited by Hearst, not by Marion Davies; however, Hearst wasn’t there – he and his mistress had argued that day. Churchill didn’t know anyone personally, though he knew several of them by sight. He spent most of the party standing outside on the beach terrace by one of the pillars, his coat over his arm as if he was about to leave. Chaplin, worried that people would avoid him, also withdrew before they had a chance to, and came to stand by the next pillar alo
ng. A cold wind was blowing up from the Pacific. In the salon Edythe Baker, who was famous that season and was said to be unpredictably extravagant, started playing the piano, singing and dancing, and Chaplin and Churchill were soon the only ones left outside.

  Churchill asked if Chaplin would care to accompany him on a walk along the beach. Chaplin pointed out that their smart party shoes would sink into the sand and get ruined, and they would end up with wet feet. Did that bother him, Churchill asked. It didn’t bother him. On the contrary, said Chaplin, the very question lightened his heart.

  They walked across the sand with their trousers rolled up, and came to the firm, damp strip at the water’s edge, and as they headed north, parallel to the brightly-lit houses of Santa Monica Beach, Churchill asked: “Are you sick?”

  “Do I look it?” Chaplin asked him in return.

  “Yes.”

  “How do I look?”

  “Like a man who is contemplating suicide,” Churchill replied.

  “You can’t tell a thing like that in the dark.”

  “Is that so?”

  On another occasion, one of them told the other he had decided at that moment not to introduce himself. Both found the prospect of an anonymous confession in the shadows of night more tempting than the idea of making the acquaintance of some celebrity or other. They admitted that although they may not have recognised the person they were talking to, they certainly recognised his personality, meaning that each recognised his own tribulations. Chaplin – who undoubtedly had an affinity with romantic archetypes – said that a shudder had run down his back at the thought of meeting a doppelganger (though admittedly this was a doppelganger who didn’t resemble him in the slightest): a second self, clothed in the flesh of another, so to speak. Churchill – he too was deeply influenced by the 19th century’s seductive flights of fancy (Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, was a friend of his father’s, and his very first speech, for an English exam at Harrow when he was fifteen, had been about Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) – confirmed that similar thoughts had passed through his mind. The fact that he and Mr Chaplin differed so much – firstly in their appearance, secondly in their backgrounds, and thirdly and most importantly in their political views – made the whole business even more uncanny, but at the same time it also awoke in him a sense of familiarity he had never felt before.

  “Is that so?” Churchill asked again.

  “Yes, it is so,” Chaplin replied.

  5

  A few months before his death, in summer 1977, Chaplin – who was now Sir Charles Chaplin – gave a long interview, the last he would give, to Josef Melzer, a journalist who had been commissioned by a German news magazine “to reveal the mystery of the silver screen’s leading light, before he dissolved into light himself,” as Melzer put it in the introduction to his book (Chaplins Tugend (Chaplin’s Virtue), published by ‘Amis’ Verlag, Bern 1979). Alongside the correspondence between my father and William Knott, this book is the principal source for my own account. Melzer visited Chaplin at the Manoir de Ban, his villa in the vineyards above Vevey, which looked out onto Lake Geneva. Churchill had been dead for twelve years. Chaplin no longer felt bound by his scout’s-honour oath, and granted Melzer an insight into the closely-guarded subject of this friendship, which all the world regarded as curious. He also spoke of their first encounter on Santa Monica Beach.

  At first, he recalled, he had been afraid that the other man, whoever he might be, would recognise him and either turn away from him in disgust or offer his sympathy and solidarity, depending on which camp he fell into and which newspapers he read. His thoughts of suicide, as the stranger had correctly surmised, had become dangerously acute during the media witch-hunt of the preceding weeks, though the possibility had been with him ever since childhood. Under the starry sky of this Californian February night, he was once again faced with the appalling fact: though he’d had so many friends in his life, he had never once met somebody with whom he could have discussed this subject.

  The stranger pointed at his wound. “Tell me about it,” he said, “and I will listen.”

  “I was at a loss as to how and where to begin,” Chaplin said into Josef Melzer’s tape recorder. “A torrent of recollections flooded over me. Which is to say: certain recollections. It was as though there was a filter built into my memory, which let through only the recollections of my suicidal thoughts. I saw myself as a man who had now been floundering his way through life for thirty-eight years, doing everything he could to avoid hanging himself from the nearest tree or throwing himself off the nearest bridge or buying a pistol – which at that time would have been the easiest thing in the world – and putting a bullet in his head.”

  But, Melzer objected, even at such a moment he surely couldn’t have forgotten that at that point, without any exaggeration, he was not only the most popular actor, but the most popular person in the world.

  “Me?” Chaplin cried out, “Me? Do you mean that? Do you really mean that? What do you mean by that? I was nobody! It was all the Tramp! Everyone who recognised me in the street (and who not long before that would have been cheering me on), everyone saw me as the Tramp. The Tramp was loved. As if he and I were separate. As if he were someone else. A commentator wrote that there had to be a way of stopping me from playing the Tramp; I was no longer worthy of the role. Lita’s lawyers checked whether they could apply for a restraining order on the character of the Tramp. Now that everyone was cursing me, they thought they could see my true self behind Charlie. They had invested in me, their love, their hopes, their schadenfreude, and now they felt betrayed. This stranger on Santa Monica beach, so I imagined, didn’t care who I was. I thought he didn’t know. I thought he saw in me neither Charlie the Tramp, nor Charles Spencer Chaplin the monster. I thought he had been sent to me from somewhere, and I wanted to tell him everything. But I didn’t know how and where to begin without giving away my identity. We hadn’t revealed much more than that we were both Englishmen.”

  And so he decided not to provide an account of his current tribulations, but to talk about their very beginnings – though that took no less effort.

  “I…” he said, stopping and folding his arms tightly across his chest, and rocking back and forth to an imaginary rhythm, which was his custom when dictating the intertitles of a film to his secretary, “I am one of those rare people who at the age of six was already seriously contemplating departing this life voluntarily.”

  Churchill, who was afraid he’d catch cold if he didn’t keep moving – as he told his private secretary William Knott fifteen years later – laid a hand on Chaplin’s shoulder and gently pushed him forwards, a gesture that could also have been taken as sympathetic. Beyond the last houses, the world was black, and you couldn’t see where the land ended and the water began. He thought that in the dark, his new friend would find it easier “to speak of the cliffs from which, as a child, he had gazed into that evil maw”. He had decided his turn would come on the way back. He, too, wanted to tell his story. This was the dramatic structure he wanted to give their walk.

  “I’m listening,” he said, “and if you wish me to give my opinion, don’t be ashamed to ask.”

  From Chaplin’s account of this evening we know that he spoke about his mother, who had been a music hall soubrette and an occasional actress – “with a light complexion and violet eyes, and hair down to the backs of her knees”.

  He asked Churchill whether names like the London Pavilion meant anything in the circles he moved in – or the Alhambra, or the Poly Variety Theatre? Or the Canterbury Music Hall, or the Gatti Music Halls? He must surely know the Empire on Leicester Square?

  “I’m sorry,” Churchill replied.

  “That’s a shame. I thought perhaps your father might have visited one of these establishments at some point and told you about it.

  Who knows, maybe it would have been one of my mother’s performances. Or perhaps you might have been there yourself.
That would have been a nice coincidence.”

  His father, he said, had also performed as a singer and an occasional impressionist. His parents had had a career before them that gave them something to boast about. His father used to inform anyone who would listen, and everyone else as well, that the only thing art was good for was to give the artist something to boast about. Because otherwise, he had nothing. Except brandy. And his father had too much of that in the end. The only wreath laid on his grave read “He died for his art”.

  His mother, Chaplin said, had brought him and his brother up on her own. Well, it wasn’t so much a case of bringing them up than of bringing them along, from one rat-infested hole to the next, depositing them in orphanages in between.

  And there was a colleague of his mother’s, Eva Lester, known as “dashing Eva Lester”, who had joined the troop in the Empire one day. She was beautiful, ruthless, ambitious. Chaplin’s mother was moved to the second row, then the third, until she was just a reserve. Eventually she got out of show-business altogether. She felt the end of her career had been a disgrace, and thus would continually assure everyone that it was her own decision; from now on, she just wanted to take care of her two sons. They had no money. They were evicted, and ended up sub-letting a dank basement.

  “But!” cried Chaplin. “But!”

  “But?” said Churchill.

  “But there is justice in the world!”

  “Is that so?” He spoke with a hiss, making the words run into one another.

  “Yes, that is so,” said Chaplin.

  Chaplin admitted that the way Churchill spoke had roused his urge to mimic him from the outset. This urge was an addiction he had now become conscious of. It had caused enough calamity in his life already; no matter what face he put on while he was being questioned by the divorce judge, the latter always felt he was being mimicked and mocked.