Happy Birthday, Charlie Chaplin - 21 April 1989

About a month, six weeks, ago I was surprised to get a call from a newspaper, and in the following weeks pursued by a flurry of calls from other papers, and television stations, all asking the same question – would I like to contribute to the coming great celebration, the centenary of the birth, of... you know who.

I knew who, but I took them off by saying, "Oh, so you are you going to do a big feature on Hitler?" Everybody then was baffled. Hitler? Why Hitler? "Because," I said, "20 April 1889 is a date that will live in infamy...". They may have changed their plans now, but none of them at the time had any plans to observe, shall we say, if not celebrate, the 100th anniversary of the arrival on the continent of Europe of the human who did more than anybody, in this century, to shatter it.

No doubt, by now, this weekend, most of the media will be making up for this omission. It would be an omission, after all. Most of us who live through the exploits of our youthful heroes and villains go into middle and old age remaining constantly amazed that the next generation, or the one after that, has never heard of them.

I will remember the envy I felt for the bliss of my daughter's ignorance, when 30-some years ago – she was about six – she had been watching the television programme, and came running into my study saying "Daddy, what’s Hitler, what’s...". Wonderful. She learned.

Of course, the man I was being solicited to talk or write about was none other than Charles Spencer Chaplin. I turned them all down on the ground that I had written in a book just about everything I should want to say about him.

Most of the telephone callers were amazed to hear this. One knowledgeable girl said, "But we understand in this office that you once worked with him on a movie script about Napoleon?" "Yeah, that's right, it’s all in the book," I said. "Thank you for thinking of me, but goodbye."

However, in, just now, reading reams of tributes, potted biographies, critiques of every film from the Essanay shorts to the final, dreadful Countess from Hong Kong, it struck me that everybody I read was picking up stories they’d heard, or read, or making a big deal out of a single meeting. Why, were they being devious, dishonest? Not at all, they were doing what I should do regularly if I am writing, say, about Disraeli or Lloyd George or Jack Hobbs or anyone else who was in his glory days, when I was a tot, or even unborn.

All the writers, even greybeards of film criticism, were, the awful truth dawned, too young to have known him. So, I thought, maybe I should here and now, and only here and now, have a last word about this extraordinary, irascible, generous, conscienceless, thoughtful, mischievous, overwhelmingly charming man, about whose work the young and the old generations I gather, now, agree to differ.

At my end of the calendar it is now established as gospel that Chaplin was the first genius of film comedy, its inventor, and there is nobody has touched him for weaving together slapstick and pathos in such artful ways. I ought to say that way back there in my 20s, I had a college friend, a sly unfooled Irishman who enjoyed Max Linder, and Buster Keaton and the Marx brothers but found Chaplin, from the beginning, arch, self-conscious and nauseatingly sentimental, but old Heb Davidson, still, I hope and believe, of Donard Demesne, County Wicklow, was always an exception, a wicked dissenter from the conventional wisdom.

Now, I gather from the young critics who have paused to celebrate the anniversary, that Buster Keaton is the new resurrected god, and that Chaplin as comedian is sorry stuff. I have not seen any writing of this kind about him in this country, but it appears to be a standard view in Britain – among that is, the intelligentsia, who were, 60 years ago, the first people to rescue the early Chaplin from the masses who adored him, and conveyed he was almost too good for them.

The new, surprising view, to me, was put crisply last week by The Economist which, remarking correctly, that Chaplin's comedy was rooted in the Victorian music hall, both in its slapstick and its maudlin sentimental songs, concluded that this is why, today, his comedy is so unfunny and manipulative.

Well, that's all that need or can be said about the comedian before, although it’s possible, indeed it happens all the time, that people can be taught to enjoy a composer, a painter, a writer. What are our art schools for? There is absolutely no way that anyone can be instructed, beguiled, persuaded to find someone funny whom they find unfunny.

I think the most useless arguments between friends are about which writer or performer is or is not funny and which food is, or is not, delicious. But how about this man who, one day in 1934, wrote to me – a miracle that he rarely wrote to anyone – asking me to go out to Hollywood and help him with the script of a projected film on Napoleon.

I won’t enlarge on how I got to know him except to say that the previous year, as a graduate student cruising around United States, I had a commission from a London paper to interview him, that I went to his studio to meet him, that he took me out to his house and that the rest of the summer I was up there most days, and many evenings.

He was then 44, tiny dapper man, a graceful gollywog in an angora sweater, topped by a remarkably handsome face of almost sculptural bone structure. I was 24, lean and gabby, hipped on the movies, and certainly at first bedazzled to be taken up by the most famous man in the world. Which was an obvious title when you remember that, since his movies were silent, the natives of about 150 countries had seen and laughed at him.

The old cowboy philosopher Will Rogers put it in a nutshell, "The Zulus knew Chaplin better that Arkansas knew Garbo".

So, the second year, 1934, I drove off across the country, landed in Hollywood and reported to his funny little run-down bungalow studio. Next day we retired to a small workroom, a shabby place – he always said he was uncomfortable working in lavish surroundings.

Peeling wallpaper, worn oilcloth on the floor, the straight-backed chairs, a plain table, an upright piano – out of tune – the room was a shock, an interesting reflection of something noticed about other rich men who had been born in dire poverty – it was not there to recall the poverty, but to remind you that perhaps the new money was not there for keeps.

It explained too, I think, the habit of never carrying money, he either signed restaurant bills or got his assistant director, or other employee, to pay for him. Most days I spent the afternoons in the local library, boning up the books on Napoleon’s life in exile on Saint Helena, and next morning we would go over the stuff.

And Chaplin would start to create scenes in mime, a row with his British doctor, a complaint dictated back to Britain, daydreams about a battle, or Josephine. Or an imperial attack of indigestion. That latter bit could have come straight out of The Immigrant or The Gold Rush.

In fact, I think I knew then that the project would never work. Mostly he would stomp, or slouch, around the room, mumbling incomprehensible dialogue and look thoughtful or indignant or sombre, and he had an astonishing gift to look more like Napoleon than Napoleon, or, for that matter, more like any of the many real people he mimicked. But he instantly couldn’t help making the point, in dumb show, that an emperor with a hiccup or a burp is just as helpless as a baby.

Several times in the weeks we worked on this rough script, a serious scene – Napoleon rewriting his will – would gradually turn into a piece of comic pantomime that had us helpless. The third member brought in as the public stand-in to try things out on was the old shambling German, Henry Bergman, who had played in practically every Chaplin comedy. We’d give up and go chuckling off to lunch.

One day, I went up to the house for dinner. We sat and played, as a duet, the song Titina, which he was then going to use in Modern Times, and did. He broke off for a telephone call or something and when he came back, I remember, had a toothpick. He stretched out on a sofa, and picked away. "By the way," he said, "the Napoleon thing. It’s a beautiful idea – for somebody else."

We didn’t discuss it, nobody discussed a personal decision made by Charles Spencer Chaplin. On the way out to dinner the only thing he said was, "Nobody pays to see Chaplin do an artistic experiment, they go to see the little man...". Nothing more was said, ever.

A week later I packed and took off east. I am sure he was right, as some later impersonations proved. This is not the place to go into his exile to Switzerland, it had little to do with his politics, he was never more than what in those days, was called a "parlor pink", though he was accused of every radical crime in the book by malicious gossip columnists who resented his holding to his British citizenship.

It had much to do with paternity suits and his cavalier way of ignoring subpoenas on other womanly matters, and the instructions of the courts. The administration hounded him and found nothing indictable, but when they rescinded his re-entry permit as he was on the Atlantic off to Europe, he’d had enough and abruptly decided to stay in Switzerland for life.

It was a sad end to his long American adventure. He’d loved this country, but he never forgave the Truman administration's final, shabby treatment of him. Well, those paranoid years are long gone, and luckily the generation that doesn’t know much about him will know even less of his old age.

He remains, as WC Fields described him – better than he meant – as a ballet dancer. The universal homeless waif, over-sentimental at times certainly, endlessly inventive as Fred Astaire was inventive, often touching and to some of us, still, uniquely funny.

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