My Autobiography (34 page)

*

After we were married Mildred’s pregnancy turned out to be a false alarm. Several months had passed and I had completed only a three-reel comedy,
Sunnyside
, and that had been like pulling teeth. Without question marriage was having an effect on my creative faculties. After
Sunnyside
I was at my wits’ end for an idea.

It was a relief in this state of despair to go to the Orpheum for distraction, and in this state of mind I saw an eccentric dancer – nothing extraordinary, but at the finish of his act he brought on his little boy, an infant of four, to take a bow with him. After bowing with his father he suddenly broke into a few amusing steps, then looked knowingly at the audience, waved to them and ran off. The audience went into an uproar, so that the child was made to come on again, this time doing quite a different dance. It could have been obnoxious in another child. But Jackie Coogan was charming and the audience thoroughly enjoyed it. Whatever he did, the little fellow had an engaging personality.

I didn’t think of him again until a week later when I sat on the open stage with our stock company, still struggling to get an idea for the next picture. In those days I would often sit before them, because their presence and reactions were a stimulus. That day I was bogged down and listless and in spite of their polite smiles I knew my efforts were tame. My mind wandered, and I talked about the acts I had seen playing at the Orpheum and about the little boy, Jackie Coogan, who came on and bowed with his father.

Someone said that he had read in the morning paper that Jackie Coogan had been signed up by Roscoe Arbuckle for a film. The news struck me like fork-lightning. ‘My God! Why didn’t I think of that?’ Of course he would be marvellous in films! Then I went on to enumerate his possibilities, the gags and the stories I could do with him.

Ideas flew at me. ‘Can you imagine the tramp a window-mender, and the little kid going around the streets breaking windows, and the tramp coming by and mending them? The charm of the kid and the tramp living together, having all sorts of adventures!’

I sat and wasted a whole day elaborating on the story, describing one scene after another, while the cast looked askance, wondering why I was waxing so enthusiastic over a lost cause. For hours I went on inventing business and situations. Then I suddenly remembered: ‘But what’s the use? Arbuckle has signed him up and probably has ideas similar to mine. What an idiot I was not to have thought of it before!’

All that afternoon and all that night I could think of nothing but the possibilities of a story with that boy. The next morning, in a state of depression, I called the company for rehearsals – God knows for what reason, for I had nothing to rehearse, so I sat around with the cast on the stage in a state of mental doldrums.

Someone suggested that I should try and find another boy – perhaps a little Negro. But I shook my head dubiously. It would be hard to find a kid with as much personality as Jackie.

About eleven-thirty, Carlisle Robinson, our publicity man, came hurrying on to the stage, breathless and excited. ‘It’s not Jackie Coogan that Arbuckle’s signed up, it’s the father, Jack Coogan!’

I leaped out of my chair. ‘Quick! Get the father on the phone and tell him to come here at once; it’s very important!’

The news electrified us all. Some of the cast came up and slapped me on the back, they were so enthused. When the office staff heard about it, they came on to the stage and congratulated me. But I had not signed Jackie yet; there was still a possibility that Arbuckle might suddenly get the same notion. So I told Robinson to be cautious what he said over the phone, not to mention anything about the kid – ‘not even to the father until he gets here; just tell him it’s very urgent, that we must see him at once within the next half-hour. And if he can’t get away, then go to his studio. But tell him nothing until he gets here.’ They had difficulty finding the father – he was not at the studio – and for two hours I was in excruciating suspense.

At last, surprised and bewildered, Jackie’s father showed up. I grabbed him by the arms. ‘He’ll be a sensation – the greatest thing that ever happened! All he has to make is this one picture!’ I went on raving in this inarticulate way. He must have thought I was insane. ‘This story will give your son the opportunity of his life!’

‘My son!’

‘Yes, your son, if you will let me have him for this one picture.’

‘Why, of course you can have the little punk,’ he said.

They say babies and dogs are the best actors in movies. Put a twelve-month-old baby in a bath-tub with a tablet of soap, and when he tries to pick it up he will create a riot of laughter. All children in some form or another have genius; the trick is to bring it out in them. With Jackie it was easy. There were a few basic rules to learn in pantomime and Jackie very soon mastered them. He could apply emotion to the action and action to the emotion, and could repeat it time and time again without losing the effect of spontaneity.

There is a scene in
The Kid
where the boy is about to throw a stone at a window. A policeman steals up behind him, and, as he brings his hand back to throw, it touches the policeman’s coat. He looks up at the policeman, then playfully tosses the stone up and catches it, then innocently throws it away and ambles off, suddenly bursting into a sprint.

Having worked out the mechanics of the scene, I told Jackie to watch me, emphasizing the points: ‘You have a stone; then you look at the window; then you prepare to throw the stone; you bring your hand back, but you feel the policeman’s coat; you feel his buttons, then you look up and discover it’s a policeman; you throw the stone playfully in the air, then throw it away, and casually walk off, suddenly bursting into a sprint.’

He rehearsed the scene three or four times. Eventually he was so sure of the mechanics that his emotion came with them. In other words, the mechanics induced the emotion. The scene was one of Jackie’s best, and was one of the high spots in the picture.

Of course, not all the scenes were as easily accomplished. The simpler ones often gave him trouble, as simple scenes do. I once wanted him to swing naturally on a door, but, having nothing
else on his mind, he became self-conscious, so we gave it up.

It is difficult to act naturally if no activity is going on in the mind. Listening on the stage is difficult; the amateur is inclined to be over-attentive. As long as Jackie’s mind was at work, he was superb.

Jackie’s father’s contract with Arbuckle soon terminated, so he was able to be at our studio with his son, and later played the pickpocket in the flophouse scene. He was very helpful at times. There was a scene in which we wanted Jackie to actually cry when two workhouse officials take him away from me. I told him all sorts of harrowing stories, but Jackie was in a very gay and mischievous mood. After waiting for an hour, the father said: ‘I’ll make him cry.’

‘Don’t frighten or hurt the boy,’ I said guiltily.

‘Oh no, no,’ said the father.

Jackie was in such a gay mood that I had not the courage to stay and watch what the father would do, so I went to my dressing-room. A few moments later I heard Jackie yelling and crying.

‘He’s all ready,’ said the father.

It was a scene where I rescue the boy from the workhouse officials and while he is weeping I hug and kiss him. When it was over I asked the father: ‘How did you get him to cry?’

‘I just told him that if he didn’t we’d take him away from the studio and really send him to the workhouse.’

I turned to Jackie and picked him up in my arms to console him. His cheeks were still wet with tears. ‘They’re not going to take you away,’ I said.

‘I knew it,’ he whispered. ‘Daddy was only fooling.’

Gouverneur Morris, author and short-story writer who had written many scripts for the cinema, often invited me to his house. ‘Guvvy,’ as we called him, was a charming, sympathetic fellow, and when I told him about
The Kid
and the form it was taking, keying slapstick with sentiment, he said: ‘It won’t work. The form must be pure, either slapstick or drama; you cannot mix them, otherwise one element of your story will fail.’

We had quite a dialectical discussion about it. I said that the transition from slapstick to sentiment was a matter of feeling and discretion in arranging sequences. I argued that form
happened after one had created it, that if the artist thought of a world and sincerely believed in it, no matter what the admixture was, it would be convincing. Of course, I had no grounds for this theory other than intuition. There had been satire, farce, realism, naturalism, melodrama and fantasy, but raw slapstick and sentiment, the premise of
The Kid
, was something of an innovation.

*

During the cutting of
The Kid
, Samuel Reshevsky, aged seven, the boy champion chess-player of the world, visited the studio. He was to give an exhibition at the Athletic Club, playing chess with twenty men at the same time, among them Dr Griffiths, the champion of California. He had a thin, pale, intense little face with large eyes that stared belligerently when he met people. I had been warned that he was temperamental and that he seldom shook hands with anybody.

After his manager had introduced us and spoken a few words, the boy stood staring at me in silence. I went on with my cutting, looking at strips of film.

A moment later I turned to him. ‘Do you like peaches?’

‘Yes,’ he answered.

‘Well, we have a tree full of them in the garden; you can climb up and get some – at the same time get one for me.’

His face lit up. ‘Ooh good! Where’s the tree?’

‘Carl will show you,’ I said, referring to my publicity man.

Fifteen minutes later he returned, elated, with several peaches. That was the beginning of our friendship.

‘Can you play chess?’ he asked.

I had to admit that I could not.

‘I’ll teach you. Come see me play tonight, I’m playing twenty men at the same time,’ he said with braggadocio.

I promised and said I would take him to supper afterwards.

‘Good, I’ll get through early.’

It was not necessary to understand chess to appreciate the drama of that evening: twenty middle-aged men poring over their chessboards, thrown into a dilemma by an infant of seven who looked even less than his years. To watch him walking about in the centre of the ‘U’ table, going from one to another, was a drama in itself.

There was something surrealistic about the scene as an audience of three hundred or more sat in tiers on both sides of a hall, watching in silence a child pitting his brains against serious old men. Some looked condescending, studying with set Mona Lisa smiles.

The boy was amazing, yet he disturbed me, for I felt as I watched that concentrated little face flushing red, then draining white, that he was paying a price with his health.

‘Here!’ a player would call, and the child would walk over, study the board a few seconds, then abruptly make a move or call ‘Checkmate!’ And a murmur of laughter would go through the audience. I saw him checkmate eight players in rapid succession, which evoked laughter and applause.

And now he was studying the board of Dr Griffiths. The audience were silent. Suddenly he made a move, then turned away and saw me. His face lit up and he waved, indicating that he would not be long.

After checkmating several other players, he returned to Dr Griffiths, who was still deeply concentrating. ‘Haven’t you moved yet?’ said the boy impatiently.

The Doctor shook his head.

‘Oh come on, hurry up.’

Griffiths smiled.

The child looked at him fiercely. ‘You can’t beat me! If you move here, I’ll move there ! And if you move this, I’ll move that!’ He named in rapid succession seven or eight moves ahead. ‘We’ll be here all night, so let’s call it a draw.’

The Doctor acquiesced.

*

Although I had grown fond of Mildred, we were irreconcilably mismated. Her character was not mean, but exasperatingly feline. I could never reach her mind. It was cluttered with pink-ribboned foolishness. She seemed in a dither, looking always for other horizons. After we had been married a year, a child was born but lived only three days. This began the withering of our marriage. Although we lived in the same house, we seldom saw each other, for she was as much occupied at her studio as I was at mine. It became a sad house. I would come home to find the dinner table laid for one, and would eat alone. Occasionally
she was away for a week without leaving word, and I would only know by seeing the door of her empty bedroom left open.

Sometimes, on a Sunday, we would meet accidentally as she was leaving the house, and she would tell me perfunctorily that she was going to spend the week-end with the Gishes or with some other girl-friends, and I would go to the Fairbankses’. Then the break came. It was during the cutting of
The Kid
. I was spending the week-end at the Fairbankses’ (Douglas and Mary were now married). Douglas came to me with rumours concerning Mildred. ‘I think you ought to know,’ he said.

How true these rumours were I never wanted to find out, but they depressed me. When I confronted Mildred she coldly denied them.

‘However, we can’t continue living this way,’ I said.

There was a pause and she looked at me coldly. ‘What do you want to do?’ she asked.

She spoke so dispassionately that I was a little shocked. ‘I – I think we should divorce,’ I said quietly, wondering what her reaction would be. But she did not answer, so after a silence I continued: ‘I think we’ll both be happier. You’re young, you still have your life ahead of you, and of course we can do it in a friendly way. You can have your lawyer see my lawyer, so whatever you want can be arranged.’

‘All I want is enough money to look after my mother,’ she said.

‘Perhaps you’d rather discuss it between ourselves,’ I ventured.

She thought a moment, then concluded: ‘I think I’d better see my lawyers.’

‘Very well,’ I answered. ‘In the meantime you stay on at the house and I’ll go back to the Athletic Club.’

We separated in a friendly way, agreeing that she was to get the divorce on grounds of mental cruelty, and that we would say nothing about it to the Press.