My Autobiography (31 page)

The solution came when I thought of the tramp as a sort of Pierrot. With this conception I was freer to express and embellish the comedy with touches of sentiment. But logically it was difficult to get a beautiful girl interested in a tramp. This has always been a problem in my films. In
The Gold Rush
the girl’s interest in the tramp started by her playing a joke on him, which later moves her to pity, which he mistakes for love. The girl in
City Lights
is blind. In this relationship he was romantic and wonderful to her until her sight is restored.

As my skill in story construction developed, so it restricted my comedy freedom. As a fan who preferred my early Keystone
comedies to the more recent ones wrote to me: ‘Then the public was your slave; now you are the public’s slave.’

Even in those early comedies I strove for a mood; usually music created it. An old song called
Mrs Grundy
created the mood for
The Immigrant
. The tune had a wistful tenderness that suggested two lonely derelicts getting married on a doleful, rainy day.

The story shows Charlot en route to America. In the steerage he meets a girl and her mother who are as derelict as himself. When they arrive in New York they separate. Eventually he meets the girl again, but she is alone, and like himself is a failure. While they sit talking, she inadvertently uses a black-edged handkerchief, conveying the fact that her mother has passed on. And, of course, in the end they marry on a doleful, rainy day.

Simple little tunes gave me the image for other comedies. In one called
Twenty Minutes of Love
, full of rough stuff and nonsense in parks, with policemen and nursemaids, I weaved in and out of situations to the tune of
Too Much Mustard
, a popular two-step in 1914. The song
Violetera
set the mood for
City Lights
, and
Auld Lang Syne
the mood for
The Gold Rush
.

As far back as 1916 I had many ideas for feature pictures. One was a trip to the moon, a comic spectacle showing the Olympic Games there and the possibilities of playing about with the laws of gravity. It would have been a satire on progress. I thought of a feeding machine, and also a radio-electric hat that could register one’s thoughts; and the trouble I get into when I put it on my head and am introduced to the moon-man’s sexy wife. The feeding machine I eventually used in
Modern Times
.

Interviewers have asked me how I get ideas for pictures and to this day I am not able to answer satisfactorily. Over the years I have discovered that ideas come through an intense desire for them; continually desiring, the mind becomes a watch-tower on the look-out for incidents that may excite the imagination – music, a sunset, may give image to an idea.

I would say, pick a subject that will stimulate you, elaborate it and involve it, then, if you can’t develop it further, discard it and pick another. Elimination from accumulation is the process of finding what you want.

How does one get ideas? By sheer perseverance to the point of madness. One must have a capacity to suffer anguish and sustain enthusiasm over a long period of time. Perhaps it’s easier for some people than others, but I doubt it.

Of course every budding comic goes through philosophical generalizing about comedy. ‘The element of surprise and suspense’ was a phrase dropped every other day on the Keystone lot.

I will not attempt to sound the depths of psycho-analysis to explain human behaviour, which is as inexplicable as life itself. More than sex or infantile aberrations, I believe that most of our ideational compulsions stem from atavistic causes – however, I did not have to read books to know that the theme of life is conflict and pain. Instinctively, all my clowning was based on this. My means of contriving comedy plot was simple. It was the process of getting people in and out of trouble.

But humour is different and more subtle. Max Eastman analysed it in his book
A Sense of Humour
. He sums it up as being derived from playful pain. He writes that
Homo sapiens
is masochistic, enjoying pain in many forms and that the audience like to suffer vicariously – as children do when playing Indians; they enjoy being shot and going through the death throes.

With all this I agree. But it is more an analysis of drama than humour, although they are almost the same. But my own concept of humour is slightly different: it is the subtle discrepancy we discern in what appears to be normal behaviour. In other words, through humour we see in what seems rational, the irrational; in what seems important, the unimportant. It also heightens our sense of survival and preserves our sanity. Because of humour we are less overwhelmed by the vicissitudes of life. It activates our sense of proportion and reveals to us that in an over-statement of seriousness lurks the absurd.

For instance, at a funeral where friends and relatives are gathered in hushed reverence around the bier of the departed, a late arrival enters just as the service is about to begin and hurriedly tiptoes to his seat, where one of the mourners has left his top hat. In his hurry, the late arrival accidentally sits on it,
then with a solemn look of mute apology, he hands it crushed to its owner, who takes it with mute annoyance and continues listening to the service. And the solemnity of the moment becomes ridiculous.

A
T
the beginning of the First World War, popular opinion was that it would not last more than four months, that the science of modern warfare would take such a ghastly toll of human life that mankind would demand cessation of such barbarism. But we were mistaken. We were caught in an avalanche of mad destruction and brutal slaughter that went on for four years to the bewilderment of humanity. We had started a haemorrhage of world proportion, and we could not stop it. Hundreds of thousands of human beings were fighting and dying and the people began wanting to know the reason why, and how the war started. Explanations were not too clear. Some said it was due to the assassination of an archduke; but this was hardly a reason for such a world conflagration. People needed a more realistic explanation. Then they said it was a war to make the world safe for democracy. Though some had less to fight for than others, the casualties were grimly democratic. As millions were mowed down the word ‘democracy’ loomed up. Consequently thrones toppled, republics were formed, and the whole face of Europe was changed.

But in 1915 the United States alleged that it was ‘too proud to fight’. This gave the nation its cue for the song
I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier
. This song went down very well with the public, until the
Lusitania
went down – which was the cue for a different song,
Over There
, and many other beguiling ditties. Until the sinking of the
Lusitania
, the burden of the European war had hardly been felt in California. There were no shortages, nothing was rationed. Garden fêtes and parties for the Red Cross were organized and were an excuse for social gatherings. At one gala a lady donated $20,000 to the Red Cross
in order to sit next to me at a very posh dinner. But as time went on, the grim reality of war was brought home to everyone.

By 1918 America had already launched two Liberty Bond Drives, and now Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and I were requested to open officially the Third Liberty Bond campaign in Washington.

I had almost completed my first picture,
A Dog’s Life
, for the First National. And as I had a commitment to release it at the same time as the Bond Drive, I stayed up three days and nights cutting the film. When it was finished I got on the train exhausted and slept for two days. When I came to, the three of us began to write our speeches. Never having made a serious one before, I was nervous about it, so Doug suggested that I should try it on the crowds who waited for us at the railroad stations. We had a stop somewhere and quite a crowd had gathered at the back of the observation car. And from there Doug introduced Mary who made a little speech, then introduced me, but no sooner had I started speaking than the train began to move; and as it drew away from the crowd, I became more eloquent and dramatic, my confidence growing as the crowd grew smaller and smaller.

In Washington we paraded through the streets like potentates, arriving at the football field where we were to give our initial address.

The speakers’ platform was made of crude boards with flags and bunting around it. Among the representatives of the Army and Navy standing about was one tall, handsome young man who stood beside me, and we made conversation. I told him that I had never spoken before and was very anxious about it. ‘There’s nothing to be scared about,’ he said confidently. ‘Just give it to them from the shoulder; tell them to buy their Liberty Bonds; don’t try to be funny.’

‘Don’t worry!’ I said ironically.

Very soon I heard my introduction, so I bounded on to the platform in Fairbanksian style and without a pause let fly a verbal machine-gun barrage, hardly taking a breath: ‘The Germans are at your door! We’ve got to stop them! And we
will
stop them if you buy Liberty Bonds! Remember, each bond you buy will save a soldier’s life – a mother’s son! – will
bring this war to an early victory!’ I spoke so rapidly and excitedly that I slipped off the platform, grabbed Marie Dressler and fell with her on top of my handsome young friend, who happened to be the then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

After the official ceremony, we were scheduled to meet President Wilson at the White House. Thrilled and excited, we were ushered into the Green Room. Suddenly the door opened and a secretary appeared and said briskly: ‘Stand in a line, please, and all come one pace forward.’ Then the President entered.

Mary Pickford took the initiative. ‘The public’s interest was most gratifying, Mr President, and I am sure the bond drive will go over the top.’

‘It certainly was and will…’ I butted in, completely confused.

The President glanced at me incredulously, then told a senatorial joke about a Cabinet Minister who liked his whisky. We all laughed politely, then left.

Douglas and Mary chose the northern states for their bond-selling tour and I the southern, as I had never been there. I invited a friend of mine from Los Angeles, Rob Wagner, a portrait painter and writer, to come along as my guest. The ballyhoo was enterprising and handled expertly and I sold millions of dollars’ worth of bonds.

In one North Carolina city, the head of the reception committee was the big business man of the town. He confessed that he had had ten boys at the station with custard pies ready to throw at me, but seeing our serious entourage as we got off the train, he had thought better of it.

The same gentleman invited us to dinner, and several United States generals were there, including General Scott, who evidently disliked him. Said he during dinner: ‘What’s the difference between our host and a banana?’ There was a slight tension. ‘Well, you can skin a banana.’

As for the legend of the Southern gentleman, I met the perfect one in Augusta, Georgia – Judge Henshaw, head of the Bond Committee. We received a letter from him stating that, as we were to be in Augusta on my birthday, he had arranged a party for me at the country club. I had visions of being the
centre of a large gathering with a lot of small talk, and, as I was exhausted, I made up my mind to refuse and to go straight to the hotel.

Usually when we arrived at a station there was an enormous crowd to greet us with the local brass-bands playing. But in Augusta there was no one but Judge Henshaw dressed in a black pongee coat and an old, sun-tanned panama hat. He was quiet and courteous, and after introducing himself he drove with Rob and me to the hotel in an old horse-drawn landau.

For a while we drove in silence. Suddenly the Judge broke it: ‘What I like about your comedy is your knowledge of fundamentals – you know that the most undignified part of a man’s anatomy is his arse, and your comedies prove it. When you kick a portly gentleman there, you strip him of all his dignity. Even the impressiveness of a presidential inauguration would collapse if you came up behind the President and kicked him in the rear.’ As we drove along in the sunlight, he tilted his head whimsically, soliloquizing to himself, ‘There’s no doubt about it; the arse is the seat of self-consciousness.’

I nudged Rob and whispered: ‘The birthday party’s on.’

It took place on the same day as the meeting. Henshaw had invited only three other friends, and he apologized for the smallness of the party, saying that he was selfish and wanted to enjoy us exclusively.

The golf club was in a beautiful setting. Shadows of tall trees across the green lawn gave the scene a quiet elegance as we sat on the terrace, six of us, at a round table surrounding a candle-lit birthday cake.

As the Judge nibbled at a piece of celery, his eyes twinkling, he cast a look at Rob and me. ‘I don’t know whether you’ll sell many bonds in Augusta… I’m not very good at arranging things. However, I think the townsfolk know you’re here.’

I began extolling the beauty of the surroundings. ‘Yes,’ he said,’there’s only one thing missing – a mint julep.’

This brought us to the subject of the possibility of Prohibition, its evils and its benefits. ‘According to medical reports,’ said Rob, ‘Prohibition will have a salutary effect on the public’s health. The medical journals state that there will be fewer ulcerated stomachs if we stop drinking whisky.’

The Judge assumed a hurt expression. ‘You don’t talk of whisky in terms of the stomach; whisky is food for the soul!’ Then he turned to me. ‘Charlie, this is your twenty-ninth birthday and you’re not married yet?’

‘No,’ I laughed. ‘Are you?’

‘No,’ he sighed wistfully. ‘I’ve listened to too many divorce cases. Nevertheless, if I were young again I’d marry; it’s lonely being a bachelor. However, I believe in divorce. I suppose I’m the most criticized judge in Georgia. If people don’t want to live together, I won’t make them.’

After a while Rob looked at his watch. ‘If the meeting starts at eight-thirty,’ he said, ‘we’ll have to hurry.’