My Autobiography (47 page)

When the Einsteins came again to California in 1937, they visited me. He embraced me affectionately and warned me that he
was bringing three musicians. ‘We are going to play for you after dinner.’ That evening Einstein was one of a Mozart quartet. Although his bowing was not too assured and his technique a little stiff, nevertheless he played rapturously, closing his eyes and swaying. The three musicians, who did not show too much enthusiasm for the Professor’s participation, discreetly suggested giving him a rest and playing something on their own. He acquiesced and sat with the rest of us and listened. But after they had played several pieces, he turned and whispered to me: ‘When do I play again?’ When the musicians left, Mrs Einstein, slightly indignant, assured her husband: ‘You played better than all of them!’

A few nights later the Einsteins came again for dinner and I invited Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Marion Davies, W. R. Hearst, and one or two others. Marion Davies sat next to Einstein, and Mrs Einstein sat on my right next to Hearst. Before dinner everything seemed to be going pretty well; Hearst was amiable and Einstein polite. But as dinner progressed I could feel a slow freeze-up until neither one of them exchanged a word. I did my best to enliven conversation, but nothing would make them talk. The dining-room became charged with an ominous silence and I saw Hearst looking mournfully into his dessert plate and the Professor smiling, calmly engrossed in thought.

Marion in her flippant way had been making quips and asides to everyone at the table but Einstein. Suddenly she turned to the Professor and said elfishly: ‘Hallo!’ then twiddled her middle fingers over his head, saying: ‘Why don’t you get your hair cut?’

Einstein smiled and I though it time to disperse for coffee in the drawing-room.

*

Eisenstein, the Russian film director, came to Hollywood with his staff, including Grigor Alexandrov and also a young Englishman named Ivor Montagu, a friend of Eisenstein. I saw a lot of them. They used to play very bad tennis on my court – at least Alexandrov did.

Eisenstein was to make a picture for the Paramount Company. He came with the fame of
Potemkin
and
Ten Days That Shook the World;
Paramount had thought it good business to engage him to direct and write his own script. He wrote a very fine one,
Sutter’s
Gold
, taken from an interesting document about California’s early days. There was no propaganda in it, but because Eisenstein was from Russia Paramount later grew fearful, and nothing came of it.

Discussing Communism with him one day, I asked if he thought that the educated proletarian was mentally equal to the aristocrat with his generations of cultural background. I think he was surprised at my ignorance. Eisenstein, who came from a Russian middle-class family of engineers, said: ‘If educated, the cerebral strength of the masses is like rich new soil.’

His film
Ivan the Terrible
, which I saw after the Second World War, was the acme of all historical pictures. He dealt with history poetically – an excellent way of dealing with it. When I realize how distorted even recent events have become, history as such only arouses my scepticism. Whereas a poetic interpretation achieves a general effect of the period. After all, there are more valid facts and details in works of art than there are in history books.

W
HILE
I was in New York, a friend told me that he had witnessed the synchronization of sound in films and predicted that it would shortly revolutionize the whole film industry.

I did not think of it again until months later when the Warner Brothers produced their first talking sequence. It was a costume picture, showing a very lovely actress – who shall be nameless – emoting silently over some great sorrow, her big, soulful eyes imparting anguish beyond the eloquence of Shakespeare. Then suddenly a new element entered the film – the noise that one hears when putting a sea-shell to one’s ear. Then the lovely princess spoke as if talking through sand: ‘I shall marry Gregory, even at the cost of giving up the throne.’ It was a terrible shock, for until then the princess had enthralled us. As the picture progressed the dialogue became funnier, but not as funny as the sound effects. When the handle of the boudoir door turned I thought someone had cranked up a farm tractor, and when the door closed it sounded like the collision of two lumber trucks. At the beginning they knew nothing about controlling sound: a knight-errant in armour clanged like the noise in a steel factory, a simple family dinner sounded like the rush hour in a cheap restaurant, and the pouring of water into a glass made a peculiar tone that ran up the scale to high C. I came away from the theatre believing the days of sound were numbered.

But a month later M.G.M. produced
The Broadway Melody
, a full-length sound musical, and a cheap dull affair it was, but a stupendous box-office success. That started it; overnight every theatre began wiring for sound. That was the twilight of silent films. It was a pity, for they were beginning to improve. Murnau, the German director, had used the medium effectively, and some
of our American directors were beginning to do the same. A good silent picture had universal appeal both to the intellectual and the rank and file. Now it was all to be lost.

But I was determined to continue making silent films, for I believed there was room for all types of entertainment. Besides, I was a pantomimist and in that medium I was unique and, without false modesty, a master. So I continued with the production of another silent picture,
City Lights
.

It evolved from a story of a clown who, through an accident at the circus, has lost his sight. He has a little daughter, a sick, nervous child, and when he returns from the hospital the doctor warns him that he must hide his blindness from her until she is well and strong enough to understand, as the shock might be too much for her. His stumblings and bumpings into things make the little girl laugh joyously. But that was too ‘icky’. However, the blindness of the clown was transferred to the flower-girl in
City Lights
.

The sub-plot was a notion I had been toying with for years: two members of a rich man’s club, discussing the instability of human consciousness, decide to experiment with a tramp whom they find asleep on the Embankment. They take him to their palatial apartment and lavish him with wine, women and song, and when he is dead drunk and asleep they put him back where they found him and he wakes up, thinking it has all been a dream. From this idea came the story of the millionaire of
City Lights
who befriends the tramp when he is drunk and ignores him when he is sober. This theme motivates the plot and enables the tramp to keep up the pretence with the blind girl that he is rich.

After a day’s work on
City Lights
, I used to go to Doug’s studio and take a steam bath. Many of his friends – actors, producers and directors – gathered there and we would sit around sipping our gin and tonics, gossiping and discussing talking pictures. The fact that I was making another silent film surprised most of them. ‘You have a lot of courage,’ they said.

In the past my work had usually stimulated interest among producers. But now they were too preoccupied with the success of the talkies, and as time went on I began to feel outside of things; I guess I had been spoiled.

Joe Schenck, who had publicly expressed his dislike for talkies,
was now won over to them. ‘They’re here to stay, I’m afraid, Charlie,’ and he would hypothesize that only Chaplin could pull off a successful silent picture. This was complimentary but not very comforting, as I did not wish to be the only adherent of the art of silent pictures. Neither was it reassuring to read magazine articles expressing doubts and fears for the future of Charlie Chaplin’s film career.

Nevertheless,
City Lights
was an ideal silent picture, and nothing could deter me from making it. But I was up against several problems. Since the advent of talkies, which had now been established for three years, the actors had almost forgotten how to pantomime. All their timing had gone into talk and not action. Another difficulty was to find a girl who could look blind without detracting from her beauty. So many applicants looked upwards, showing the whites of their eyes, which was too distressing. Fate, however, played into my hands. One day I saw a film company at work on the Santa Monica beach. There were many pretty girls in bathing suits. One waved to me. It was Virginia Cherrill, whom I had met before.

‘When am I going to work for you?’ she said.

Her shapely form in a blue bathing suit did not inspire the thought of her playing such a spiritual part as the blind girl. But after making one or two tests with other actresses, in sheer desperation I called her up. To my surprise she had the faculty of looking blind. I instructed her to look at me but to look inwardly and not to see me, and she could do it. Miss Cherrill was beautiful and photogenic, but she had little acting experience. This is sometimes an advantage, especially in silent pictures where technique is all-important. Experienced actresses are sometimes too set in their habits, and in pantomime the technique of movement is so mechanical that it disturbs them. Those with less experience are more apt to adapt themselves to the mechanics.

I had a scene of the tramp avoiding a traffic jam by walking through a limousine and getting out the other side. When he slams the door, the blind flower-girl hears it and offers her flowers, thinking he is the owner of the car. With his last half-crown he buys a button-hole. Accidentally he knocks the flower from her hand and it falls to the pavement. On one knee she gropes around to pick it up. He points to where it is. But she
continues groping. Impatiently he picks it up himself and looks at her incredulously. But suddenly it dawns on him that she cannot see, and, passing the flower before her eyes, he realizes she is blind and apologetically helps her to her feet.

The whole scene lasted seventy seconds, but it took five days of retaking to get it right. This was not the girl’s fault, but partly my own, for I had worked myself into a neurotic state of wanting perfection.
City Lights
took more than a year to make.

During the filming of it the stock market crashed. Fortunately, I was not involved because I had read Major H. Douglas’s
Social Credit
, which analysed and diagrammed our economic system, stating that basically all profit came out of wages. Therefore, unemployment meant loss of profit and a diminishing of capital. I was so impressed with his theory that in 1928, when unemployment in the United States reached 14,000,000,1 sold all my stocks and bonds and kept my capital fluid.

The day before the crash I dined with Irving Berlin, who was full of optimism about the stock market. He said a waitress where he dined had made $40,000 in less than a year by doubling up her investments. He himself had an equity in several million dollars’ worth of stocks which showed him over a million profit. He asked me if I were playing the market. I told him I could not believe in stocks when 14,000,000 were unemployed. When I advised him to sell his stocks and get out while he had a profit, he became indignant. We had quite an argument. ‘Why, you’re selling America short!’ he said, and accused me of being very unpatriotic. The next day the market dropped fifty points and Irving’s fortune was wiped out. A couple of days later he came round to my studio, stunned and apologetic, and wanted to know where I had got my information.

At last
City Lights
was finished; only the music was to be recorded. One happy thing about sound was that I could control the music, so I composed my own.

I tried to compose elegant and romantic music to frame my comedies in contrast to the tramp character, for elegant music gave my comedies an emotional dimension. Musical arrangers rarely understood this. They wanted the music to be funny. But I would explain that I wanted no competition, I wanted the music to be a counterpoint of grace and charm, to express sentiment,
without which, as Hazlitt says, a work of art is incomplete. Sometimes a musician would get pompous with me and talk of the restricted intervals of the chromatic and the diatonic scale, and I would cut him short with a layman’s remark: ‘Whatever the melody is, the rest is just a vamp.’ After putting music to one or two pictures I began to look at a conductor’s score with a professional eye and to know whether a composition was over-orchestrated or not. If I saw a lot of notes in the brass and woodwind section, I would say: ‘That’s too black in the brass,’ or ‘too busy in the woodwinds.’

Nothing is more adventurous and exciting than to hear the tunes one has composed played for the first time by a fifty-piece orchestra.

When at last
City Lights
was synchronized, I was anxious to know its fate. So, unannounced, we had a preview in a down-town theatre.

It was a ghastly experience, because our film was thrown on the screen to a half-empty house. The audience had come to see a drama and not a comedy, and they did not recover from their bewilderment until half-way through the picture. There were laughs, but feeble ones. And before the picture was through I saw shadowy figures going up the aisle. I nudged my assistant director. ‘They’re walking out on it.’

‘Maybe they’re going to the toilet,’ he whispered.

After that I could not concentrate on the picture, but waited to see if those who had walked up the aisle would come back. After a few minutes I whispered: ‘They haven’t come back.’

‘Some have to catch trains,’ said he.

I left the theatre with a feeling of two years’ work and two million dollars having gone down the drain. As I came out of the theatre the manager was standing in the lobby and greeted me. ‘It’s very good,’ he said smilingly, and as a back-handed compliment added: ‘Now I want to see you make a talkie, Charlie – that’s what the whole world’s waiting for.’

I tried to smile. Our staff had trailed out of the theatre and were standing about the sidewalk. I joined them. Reeves, my manager, always serious, greeted me with a lilt in his voice: ‘Went over pretty well, I thought, considering –’ His last word was an ominous reservation, but I nodded confidently. ‘With a full house
it’ll be great – of course it needs one or two cuts,’ I added.