This fragile little man who has shaken the wide world with laughter looks at himself and feels he is a greater joke—a less merry and more wistful—than any he has concocted. There was, for instance, a certain night in Paris. That town’s leading theatrical producer, aware no doubt that there was nothing on the stage worth showing, took Charlie to the Cirque Médrano. When Chaplin, flanked by his friends, slipped into his seat in the first ringside row, the brothers Fratellini were cavorting in the sawdust. They held the funnel-shaped house focussed on themselves. It was hard to say if anyone had remarked Chaplin’s entrance.
But the finish of the Fratellini act was the signal for intermission. The high-tiered human monster, suddenly shouting Charlot! with a thousand throats, avalanched down upon a single spot at the arena rail, where a little man in a dapper dinner coat sat blinking. He was engulfed, and lost. A score of gendarmes broke into the delirious maze of men and women, pressing on Chaplin as if they were hungry to devour him. The police found him, formed a phalanx about the little man and he was shuttled out into the Place Pigalle.
But the cry Charlot! had got there first. The square, the boulevards that lead to it, turned into a magnetized mob; thousands came pouring, pushing, shouting. Men touched him; women tried to kiss him.
At last, with his London-tailored garments reduced to the state of a rummage sale in the Bronx, Charlie was swept into a strategic taxi. And as the car manoeuvered him into a side street and the voice of Paris shouting Charlot! dimmed, he shook himself; he smoothed his hat; and he said:
“It’s all—nothing! It’s all—a joke! It can all be explained, I tell you. It’s all—nothing.”
But this was no Olympian above the mob and the battle. Chaplin knows “it” is not nothing. But—what is “it”? Chaplin knows “it” can be explained—but who to explain it? Such questions as these have greyed the hair of this most beloved man of all the world—who is thirty-six years old. Take “it” away, for instance—this magical popularity; dim it even for an hour, and Charlie’s latest melancholy flames into hysteric rage. I recall a breakfast, one morning after a night of talk, in a small “box” of Greenwich Village. The waiters and the early guests did not recognize Charlie Chaplin. He was fretful, and then furious.
“I’m going home,” he said.
“Do you want a taxi?”
“One taxi? Call me twelve! I’ll go home in twelve taxis. The first I’ll ride in. The others will be my escort.”
And then he laughed at himself. When he got home, doubtless he fell asleep. For he’d been up all night, this popular god of the films, talking Schopenhauer and Spinoza. When he awoke that evening in time for dinner, having broken ten engagements in the way of his sleep, the first question in his mind may well have been: “What does it all mean? Why has this thing just happened to me—to Charles Spencer Chaplin? What is it?”
He thinks of the days not so long ago, when he was a $25 importation of Mack Sennett. He saw “it” coming on him, as he ate his chile con carne with the other hams in the Los Angeles lunch wagons. Eyes dwelt on him as he entered, hard with inquiry, glazed with an acceptance of apartness. Silence grew manifest in groups as he passed. “They have been talking about me!” At last he heard: the reports were coming in, from Everett, Washington; from Shreveport, Louisiana; from Mitchell, Indiana; from Bradentown, Florida; from Penobscot, Maine. “Send us another picture with that there Funny-legs. When Funny-legs—what the hell is his name?—is in the comedy, there’s a crowd and a glad hand.”
From a thousand silent towns, a misty murmur gathered and moved up on the studio city. Until there it was, in the handshake of managers, in the proffered hands of producers, holding contracts for many dollars—and for many years. The Whitechapel lad who had been a dud, singing in the music halls of England, and who knew the smell of sordid lodging rooms from Brummagem to Montmartre, shook his head, and refused to sign.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I may retire. I may study Sanskrit. I have always been interested in Sanskrit, you know.”
Was that fear—was that despair in the managerial eye?
“What is it?” he asked himself. “I must look out. There’s something they don’t even understand.”
He has not yet found out. And this is the pity of Chaplin. The gods seem to be playing a sort of serial joke on him. And he’s always behind: he’s never yet caught up. The mob . . . the fortune . . . the fame . . . the intellectuals of New York and Paris turning his stunts into logarithmic mazes as if he were Einstein . . . the great of the earth . . . mysterious, hungry women. What sort of a game is this, any way? Why do the rotten-teethed thousands of London weep and bash their fists in their faces when he comes to town? Why do the Frenchmen speak of Pan and Dionysius—and give him decorations?
“I’ll find out,” says Chaplin. He has not found out. But he has become a self-doubting, melancholy, haunted man—oscillant between gaiety and despair.
“I thought I knew what I was doing. I studied hard the technique of laughter-getting. I know now I never knew what I did. Really, I must start to learn the art of the motion picture. I must start. . . .”
But in the meanwhile (and here’s the pity), he must go on. He is caught in a vast machine which he has created and which he does not run. How can you go on, and start, at the same time?
A man with eyes met Charlie for the first time some years ago. They went to the Beaux Arts for lunch. Both of them were busy men and had a day studded with dates. They forgot. They talked, they walked, they dined, they went on talking. Finally, they breakfasted together. Here is the way the man with eyes saw Chaplin:
“The man I lunched with was the traditional comedian, shrewd and dapper. Later in the park, he was a boy—sentimental, vaguely mystical. As we walked sordid streets, he was an ironist. He was hard and ruthless. At that moment, I began to love him. I realized that he was above the common run of pity. Later when he spoke of his childhood, I knew that he was capable of compassion—a strong compassion, analytically grained. We sat in the shielded glow of a single lamp whose shadows were thick on walls of books; and I found a gentleman beside me: a strict conservator of the high place in the world that was his own. The critic disappeared by midnight; there was a gamin; there was a mad man. A mad sensualist emerged, sadistic, yet possessed of a cruel love of checking himself back into intelligence. At 3 A. M. he was a wistful, bewildered lad of the East End. If words of the Kabala had come from his hard mouth, I should not have wondered. He seemed a Jew. And then a young emperor with bacchic vine-leaves in his tumbled hair. . . . He was never a fool. . . .”
Charlie Chaplin’s secret is that he has created for himself a mask in which all this gamut lives. What a strange mask it is: a bit of a moustache, a bit of a cane, baggy trousers, flapping shoes. Yet it has satisfied the world, from China to Paris. It has failed in but a single way—a cruel one: for it has failed to satisfy its maker.
It has plunged him into a world of wonder: a world of almost grandiose elements which he confronts with his sweet childish question. It has given him no answer.
He seeks his answer wistfully. There are women, for instance. Charlie is tender and innately fine with women. This explanation of what he is—will not some woman give it with her love? It is a fact that more than one girl, who has taken from this bewildered boy the dross of his gold, had she had it in her, might have given him to himself. . . . If not there, perhaps the intellectuals can prove him to himself? Charlie’s quests equilibrate each other; and leave him as will-less as a Russian romantic, in the quicksands of Los Angeles: lost in a world of which he is the king, and which he does not love and which distrusts him, knowing him different from it.
He goes on seeking. And his quest slows his work, sicklies the pure lyrism of his art with a pale cast of thought.
Creams tarts do not fly so swift from a meditant hand; nor a body dart so agile from the pursuing officer, when the mind within is on another hunt.
Is it all a mirage—this power and this fame of Charlie Chaplin? Will there be naught at the end, but the unceasing pain of the unceasing question. ♦
