8

Escape

After finishing The Idle Class, Chaplin started directly into a new picture, which was provisionally called Come Seven and was to feature himself and Mack Swain as a pair of rich plumbers given to arriving at their work in a chauffeur-driven limousine. He spent the latter part of July at Catalina with Edward Knoblock and Carlyle Robinson, working on ideas for the scenario, and returned to the studio at the beginning of August to start work. Sets were built, locations were found and the cast was assembled: Edna, Sydney, Mack Swain, Henry Bergman, Loyal Underwood, John Rand and two bit players, Pete Griffin and Jos Kedian. On 22 August, Chaplin began to shoot, but after only 348 feet of film had been exposed he took a sudden decision to go to Europe. Carlyle Robinson was told to make the arrangements and five days later¹ Chaplin, accompanied by Robinson and Tom Harrington, was seen off at the Los Angeles railway depot by ‘most of Hollywood … and … their sisters and their cousins and their aunts’.² As the train pulled out, Sydney called to Robinson, ‘For God’s sake don’t let him get married.’ ‘It gave the crowd a laugh and me a scare,’ Chaplin commented.

A number of circumstances had led to this apparently capricious decision. A bout of influenza and the symptomatic depression had brought home to Chaplin how tired he was after seven years of almost continuous work, during which he had made seventy-one films. Growing nostalgia for England had crystallized when Montague Glass, the author of Potash and Perlmutter, had invited him to dinner and served a very English steak-and-kidney pie. He had started a correspondence with H. G. Wells after Wells had written solicitously to him on reading a much exaggerated account of the burns he had suffered while filming The Idle Class, and was curious to meet an author whom he much admired. The Kid was about to open in London, and he wanted for the first time to be present at a première of his own and enjoy the applause. ‘I wanted to grab it while it was good. Perhaps The Kid might be my last picture. Maybe there would never be another chance for me to bask in the spotlight …’ He had still the feeling that one day, like Jimmy the Fearless, he would have to wake up.

England, too, meant Hetty Kelly. The slim gazelle with the oval face and bewitching mouth still haunted his memory. He had seen her once since the parting at her home in Camberwell Road. She was then seventeen, and was just about to leave for America to join her sister. He had found her silly and coquettish, and the charm had faded, for the moment. In his new bachelorhood, however, he found his curiosity stirring. In August 1915 Hetty, then twenty-one, had married Lieutenant Alan Edgar Home, serving with the Surrey Yeomanry. His father was the MP for Guildford, subsequently Sir William Edgar Home, Bt. Hetty, by this time, called herself Henriette, and was described on the marriage certificate as ‘Spinster, of Independent means’. After the marriage the couple moved into Alan Home’s home at 5 Tilney Street, Mayfair.

One day in July 1918, out of the blue, Chaplin received a letter from Hetty. We do not know what it contained, except that it began. ‘Do you remember a silly young girl …?’ Chaplin’s reply to Hetty, however, dated 18 July 1918, has survived. It is a mixture of enthusiasm and reserve, pleasure and embarrassment:

Dear Hetty,

It is always the unexpected that happens, both in moving pictures and in real life. You can imagine what an unexpected pleasure it was for me when I discovered your letter on my desk this morning. At first, when I caught sight of the envelope, my pulse quickened, then there was the recognition of a familiar ‘E’ I had not seen for a number of years. Something in my subconscious mind said ‘Hetty’. I quickly tore open the envelope and – Lo and Behold! – it was from you. You, above all people, to hear from and after so many years! I was certainly thrilled, and yet I half expected you would write some time or other because of the interesting events that have taken place in our lives; and, after all, to hear from one’s old friends is a great pleasure.

Well, Hetty, you have not changed a particle. By that I mean your personality – it is manifest on every page of your letter. Of course, environment and association may have improved your viewpoint, but your charming personality is evident – which, to my way of thinking, is one’s biggest asset. In your letter you ask how I am, etc., etc.. Well, physically I am perfect; morally? – well, I am all that could be desired for a young man of twenty-nine years. I am still a bachelor, but that is not my fault. And now, philosophically – like yourself, my environment has given me a particular outlook on life. I suppose I have arrived at the pessimistic age of youth, but still there is hope, for I have that priceless quality of being curious about life and things which keeps up my enthusiasm.

Do you remember, Hetty, I once told you that money and success were not everything. At the time I had not had the experience of either, but I felt it was so, and now I have experienced both. I find that the pursuit of happiness can only be had from within ourselves and the interest of others.

But enough of this philosophy. How about yourself? I sincerely hope you have fully recovered by now, and are in the pink of condition. You must take greater care of yourself. Don’t forget to remember me to Sonney [sic] and give Edie my best wishes. As for yourself – I shall be anxiously counting the days until I hear from you, so please write and let me know that you are well and smiling again.

Yours ever,
Charlie³

Chaplin rarely wrote letters. Carlyle Robinson marvelled that the man who received more letters than anyone else wrote so few. He estimated that in his whole life Chaplin had written no more than a dozen. This one was obviously composed with great care; and the literary style of My Autobiography is already quite recognizable. It was evidently typed by a secretary, since it reveals none of the persistent idiosyncrasies of Chaplin’s orthography: he always wrote ‘ect’ for ‘etc’, for instance.

He seems to have received no reply. It is possible that Hetty never read it, for transatlantic mails in the last year of the war could be delayed for weeks, and on 4 November 1918, a week before the Armistice, Henriette Florence Home, née Hetty Kelly, died.

The concern for her health which Chaplin expresses in his letter suggests that she had already been ill, perhaps following the birth of her only child, a daughter. On 18 October she fell ill with the influenza which was then epidemic in Europe. On the 27th the sickness was complicated by pneumonia, and only a week afterwards, Hetty died.

Chaplin knew nothing of this when he set out on his European trip more than three years after he had written to Hetty. He, Robinson and Harrington amused themselves on the train journey with solitaire, and stopped for a night in Chicago, where Chaplin was a judge in a scenario competition and where he attempted to meet Carl Sandburg. It was there, too, that he had his first taste of the reporters who were going to dog him throughout the trip. Their questions, he found, varied little wherever he met them:

‘Mr Chaplin, why are you going to Europe?’

‘Just for a vacation!’

‘Are you going to make pictures while you are there?’

‘No.’

‘What do you do with your old moustaches?’

‘Throw them away.’

‘What do you do with your old canes?’

‘Throw them away.’

‘What do you do with your old shoes?’

‘Throw them away.’

That lad did well. He got in all those questions before he was shouldered aside and two black eyes boring through lenses surrounded by tortoise-shell frames claimed an innings. I restored the ‘prop grin’ which I had decided was effective for interviews.

‘Mr Chaplin, have you your cane and shoes with you?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t think I’ll need them.’

‘Are you going to get married while you are in Europe?’

‘No …’

‘Mr Chaplin, do you ever expect to get married?’

‘Yes.’

‘To whom?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Do you want to play Hamlet?’

‘Why, I don’t know. I haven’t thought much about it, but if you think there are any reasons why –’

But she was gone. Another district attorney had the floor.

‘Mr Chaplin, are you a Bolshevik?’

‘No.’

‘Then why are you going to Europe?’

‘For a holiday.’

‘What holiday?’

‘Pardon me, folks, but I did not sleep well on the train and I must go to bed.’

In New York he was met by Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, who were there for the première of The Three Musketeers. Before the première they screened the film for him, together with Mary’s Little Lord Fauntleroy, and solemnly asked for his criticisms and suggestions. He gave them as solemnly, knowing that they would be politely heard and ignored. The première itself was a nightmare: Fairbanks and Pickford managed to enter the theatre unscathed, but Chaplin lost his hat and tie in the crowd, had a piece cut from his trousers by a lady souvenir-hunter, and was repeatedly pummelled and punched in the face by policemen. Eventually he was passed over the heads of the crowd, and felt that his companions were shocked by his sartorial disarray.

Chaplin divided his time in New York between his lawyer, Nathan Burkan, and new and old friends among the East Coast intelligentsia: Alexander Woollcott, Heywood Broun, the radical Max Eastman, Edward Knoblock, Harrison Rhodes and Madame Maurice Maeterlinck. Eastman gave a party for Chaplin, who was impressed by a fellow guest, a young activist of the labour organization, Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), paroled for health reasons from a twenty-year prison sentence. Chaplin in turn gave a dinner party, at which they played games and did turns of various kinds:

I acted with Mme Maeterlinck. We played a burlesque on the great dying scene of Camille. But we gave it a touch that Dumas overlooked.

When she coughed, I got the disease immediately, and was soon taken with convulsions and died instead of Camille.

He went to see Ferenc Molnár’s Liliom⁴ and afterwards met Joseph Schildkraut and Eva Le Gallienne, who were starring in it; and suddenly had an uncharacteristic yearning to go back on the stage. Despite the crowds and the reporters, New York society was a great relief after California:

No one asked me to walk funny, no one asked me to twirl a cane. If I wanted to do a tragic bit, I did, and so did everyone else. You were a creature of the present, not a production of the past, not a promise of the future. You were accepted as is, sans ‘Who’s Who’ labels and income-tax records.

The trio left New York on the Olympic on the morning of 3 September. Edward Knoblock was also travelling to England on the ship. Many friends, including Fairbanks and Pickford, came to see them off, but

Somehow I don’t seem interested in them very much … I am trying to make a conversation, but am more interested in the people and the boat and those who are going to travel with me.

Many of the passengers on the boat are bringing their children that I may be introduced …

I find myself smiling at them graciously and pleasantly, especially the children.

I doubt if I am really sincere in this, as it is too early in the morning. Despite the fact that I love children, I find them difficult to meet. I feel rather inferior to them. Most of them have assurance, have not yet been cursed with self-consciousness.

And one has to be very much on his best behaviour with children because they detect our insincerity …

Chaplin’s account of the visit is disarmingly frank and self-critical. It is as if this unaccustomed experience of relaxation permitted him to stand back and take a detached, amused view of his reactions to every experience. The days on board ship were a mixture of excitements and annoyances. He enjoyed the luxury (‘There is nothing like money. It does make life so easy.’). He was both annoyed and flattered by the people who forced their attentions and their opinions on him. After a conversation with some of them he decided, ‘I am, indeed, a narrow-minded little pinhead.’ Inhibited about speaking to Marguerite Namara, the opera singer and wife of the dramatist Guy Bolton, he decided, ‘I just do not know how to meet people.’ He was uncertain which members of the crew he ought to tip.

There is an odd discrepancy in accounts of an incident on the voyage. Carlyle Robinson claimed that Chaplin declined to appear in a ship’s concert and was as a result insulted by the chairman, Herman Metz, who told the audience that Chaplin had refused to appear (it was in aid of a seamen’s charity) but that it hardly mattered since they could see him on the screen for a nickel any time they pleased. Guy Bolton, however, recalled that

at the ship’s concert Marguerite sang and Chaplin did a pantomime act in which he portrayed an out-of-work actor applying for a job. As the manager, played by Knoblock, described each aspect of the character, Chaplin became successively humble, aggressive, charming, ultra-aristocratic. Told he was too short for the role, he seemingly grew several inches taller. Questioned as to his romantic qualification, he hurled himself into the manager’s lap. Finally he is asked to run through a scene in which he is supposed to come home and find his wife in the arms of his best friend. In a frenzy of jealous rage he is called on to kill his betrayer. The manager shakes his head and says he fears Charlie can never be sufficiently convincing in the scene, whereupon the actor, determined to win the coveted role, seizes the manager by the throat. When he at last relaxes his grip and turns away to get his hat and stick, the manager is a corpse on the floor. Charlie, turning back with an ingratiating smile to receive his applause, was Chaplin at his best. His surprise on seeing the empty chair, his consternation on discovering the body that has slipped down under the desk were done as only Chaplin can do it. And then his famous shuffling exit, looking back over his shoulder and raising his hat to the corpse. It made a perfect finish.⁵

Daily bulletins on the ship’s notice board reported the excitement already being echoed in the British press. Long before his departure the newspapers had begun to sustain a running commentary on his progress eastwards. Now, cables from correspondents aboard the Olympic described his life in detail:

Charlie rests in his suite on the promenade deck until eleven, when he takes his breakfast, consisting of a glass of hot water with a pinch of salt. He then starts at a brisk walk round the deck in the company of one or two friends. Four laps on the deck equal one mile. His next occupation is a further spell of rest in a steamer chair, reading or watching games of volley ball, deck tennis, shuffleboard or quoits. Occasionally he joins the children in the gymnasium on the boat deck, delightedly romping with them in their games. He is a great favourite with the children, although they listen, wide-eyed with amazement, when you tell them that this

DAPPER YOUNG MAN

who so successfully plays uncle is Charlie Chaplin. Noon finds Charlie in the gymnasium beginning a bout of systematic exercise. Then to the Turkish bath and the swimming pool. Luncheon follows.

In the afternoon he watches the card games – but does not play himself – until it is time for a second turn round the deck. Towards evening he will be found on the forward deck playing cricket with the deck hands. Later he often appears in the smoke room listening to the bids at the auction pool on the ship’s daily run. The passengers have identified their unassuming young fellow voyager.⁶

The Olympic was due at Cherbourg at 1 p.m. on 9 September but fog delayed its arrival until 5 p.m. Fifty or more newsmen, cameramen and network photographers instantly invaded the ship and ran Chaplin to earth behind the navigator’s bridge. ‘This is far, far worse than New York,’ he said, and in reply to the barrage of questions – this time mostly in French – he made an impromptu speech:

This is my first holiday for years, and there is only one place to spend a holiday, long overdue, and that is at home. That is why I intend to go to London. I want to walk the streets, see all the many changes, and feel the good old London atmosphere again.

My trip across has been the result of a last-minute decision the day before the Olympic sailed [sic]. I felt I had to come home and here I am. After England I mean to go to Paris and then Russia.

‘Why Russia?’ you say. Because I am immensely interested in that great country and its efforts towards social reconstruction after chaos. After Russia I have plans for seeing Spain. There is a great desire in my heart for the romance of Seville, and besides, I want to see a bullfight.

I mean to enjoy myself thoroughly, and to go to all the old corners that I knew when I was a boy. I want to be a Londoner among Londoners, not a sort of comic hero to be stared at.⁷

To the inevitable ‘Are you a Bolshevik?’ he replied, ‘I am an artist, not a politician.’ Asked whether he thought Lenin or Lloyd George the greater man he answered mischievously and enigmatically, ‘One works, the other plays.’ Such moments created anxiety for Robinson as his press representative. After this, somewhat to the surprise of the reporters, Chaplin vanished through a handy doorway.

The ship crawled through the fog to Southampton, where they had been warned there would be a civic reception. Chaplin was unreasonably nervous at the prospect of making a speech of thanks, sat up half the night drafting it, and then left his notes behind in the confusion. In the event it was considered he gave a better performance than the flustered mayor. Chaplin confessed to slight disappointment that the crowds in Southampton were not larger. It was explained that this was because of their delayed arrival. ‘This explanation relieves me tremendously, though it is not so much for myself that I feel this, but for my companions and my friends, who expect so much. I feel that the whole thing should go off with a bang for their sake. Yes I do.’ He was relieved to find familiar faces to greet him: Tom Geraghty, Fairbanks’s sometime script writer, Donald Crisp, the Scottish-born actor who had played Battling Burrows in Griffith’s Broken Blossoms, and Abe Breman, the London representative of United Artists. There was also Chaplin’s cousin Aubrey, Uncle Spencer Chaplin’s son, who had helped care for Hannah during her stay in Peckham House. ‘I feel that Aubrey is a nice, simple soul and quite desirous of taking me in hand.’ He found himself wanting to pose a little in front of Aubrey: ‘I want to shock him; no, not exactly shock him, but surprise him … I shall have a long talk with Aubrey later and explain everything …’

Another member of the welcome party that joined Chaplin’s train to London was Arthur Kelly, Hetty’s brother, known as ‘Sonny’, who had independently found his way into the film business. Edith Kelly, sister of Hetty and Arthur, had married Frank Jay Gould, the American millionaire. When Gould added films to his many business interests, Arthur was found a post in his New York office. He was subsequently to work in United Artists as Chaplin’s representative. Later he became Vice President of the company. Arthur Kelly had some long-delayed, shocking news for Chaplin:

He looked at me strangely and seemed embarrassed. ‘Hetty died, you know.’ I was shocked, but at that moment I could not assimilate the full tragedy of it; too many events were crowding in; but I felt I had been robbed of an experience. Hetty was the one audience from the past I should have liked to meet again, especially under these fantastic circumstances.⁸

Apart from this curiously egocentric comment of having been robbed of an experience, Chaplin is elsewhere reticent about the impact of the loss of his romantically remembered first love.

On the train journey to London he found everything different and irresistibly beautiful: the girls, the countryside – despite the parched grass and the new buildings – the crowds that waited at every station to see his train go by. As they approached Waterloo, the train passed through the streets of his boyhood; he could even glimpse Uncle Spencer’s old pub, the Queen’s Head in Broad Street, Lambeth. The scenes that awaited him in London were astonishing. His homecoming was a triumph hardly paralleled in the twentieth century apart from a few great royal or national events. From Waterloo to the Ritz the streets were thronged with people all waiting for a glimpse of their idol and a chance to cheer.

I feel like doing something big. What an opportunity for a politician to say something and do something big!

Then, as we approach, the tide comes up towards the gates of the hotel. They have been kept locked to prevent the crowd from demolishing the building. I can see one intrepid motion-picture camera man at the door as the crowd starts to swarm. He begins to edge in, and starts grinding his camera frantically as he is lifted into the whirlpool of humanity. But he keeps turning, and his camera and himself are gradually turned up to the sky, and his lens is registering nothing but clouds as he goes down turning – the most honorable fall a camera man can have, to go down grinding. I wonder if he really got any pictures.

In some way my body has been pushed, carried, lifted, and projected into the hotel. I can assure you that through no action of mine was that accomplished.

The crowd insisted on his showing himself at the window of his suite, but the management of the Ritz asked him to desist from throwing flowers to the people below for fear of causing a riot.

1921 – The cartoonist David Low’s view of Chaplin’s visit to London.

Chaplin now felt a desperate urge to see the places of his youth without delay. With Geraghty and Crisp he managed to make his way out of the service entrance of the hotel; then he left his companions, to go alone in a taxi to Kennington. From his own description there seems to have been a passionate hunger in this search for the scenes and impressions remembered from his childhood. Much remained: an old, blind, Bible-reading beggar under the arches by the Canterbury Music Hall; Christ Church, where Hannah worshipped when religion took her; Baxter Hall, ‘where we used to see magic lantern shows for a penny … You could get a cup of coffee and a piece of cake there and see the Crucifixion of Christ all at the same time’; Kennington Police Station; Kennington Baths, ‘reason for many a day’s hookey’; Kennington Cross. In Chester Street he recognized the shop where he had once worked as lather boy, though the barber had gone, and an old tub where he himself once used to wash in the morning. He saw himself in the children who played in the street. He thought them lovely and was thrilled to hear them speak: ‘They seem to talk from their souls.’ Proceeding to Lambeth Walk he met a girl who had been the servant in a cheap lodging house where he had once stayed, who, he recalled, had lost her job because she had ‘fallen’.

His clothes made him conspicuous in Lambeth Walk. He was recognized and a crowd began to follow him, though at a respectful distance. He felt ashamed after he asked a policeman for help and the policeman reassured him, ‘That’s all right, Charlie. These people won’t hurt you.’ They called ‘Goodbye, Charlie. God bless you!’ as he drove off in his taxi. He drove to Kennington Gate, where he had had his rendezvous with Hetty, to the Horns, and to Kennington Cross, where as a boy he had heard the clarinettist play ‘The Honeysuckle and the Bee’, and ‘music first entered my soul’. He reflected that he was seeing all this ‘through other eyes. Age trying to look back through the eyes of youth.’ Yet, he was only thirty-two years old.

A couple of nights later he decided to return to Lambeth, this time in the company of Robinson, Geraghty, Crisp and Kelly. He noticed Sharps the photographers in Westminster Bridge Road, and went in and asked if he could buy prints of some photographs they took of him when he was with Casey’s Circus. The assistant replied that the negatives had been destroyed long ago. He pointed out that they had still a photograph of Dan Leno, who had died seventeen years before, in the window.

‘Have you destroyed Mr Leno’s negative?’ I asked him.

‘No,’ was the reply, ‘but Mr Leno is a famous comedian.’

Such is fame.

There were other landmarks he remembered: an old bottle-nosed tomato seller, ten years more decrepit; the coffee stall at Elephant and Castle which was the focus of the night life of the neighbouring streets, and where Chaplin noticed among the loungers a number of men maimed by the war. Then Chaplin took his friends to 3 Pownall Terrace. Mrs Reynolds, the ageing war widow who now lived in the Chaplins’ former garret, was astonished to be got out of bed at 10.30 p.m. by the celebrity of the moment, but not nonplussed:

The place was in darkness … and when I heard a scuffling outside, I shouted, ‘Who is there!’

‘It is Charlie Chaplin,’ I heard a voice say.

Never dreaming it was really Mr Chaplin, I shouted from the bed, ‘Oh, don’t you try and play any jokes on me. Charlie won’t come at this hour.’

But the knocking went on, so I got out of bed. I had to take a picture away before I could open the door, as it has no key and I have to wedge it up.

Then I saw four gentlemen on the stairs, and one of them, slightly built and wearing a grey lounge suit, said in a gentle voice, ‘I really am Charlie Chaplin. Were you asleep?’ he asked, and I said, ‘No’ as I had been listening to the [news] boys calling the results of the great fight.

‘Oh,’ said Charlie, ‘I was supposed to be there.’

Then he looked round the room – I was glad that the sheets on the bed were clean … and said, ‘This is my old room. I have bumped my head many times on that ceiling’ – pointing to the slope above the bed – ‘and got thrashed for it. I should like to sleep here again for a night.’

I said, ‘It’s not like your hotel,’ and he answered merrily, ‘Never you mind about my hotel. This is my old room, and I am much more interested in that than my hotel!’⁹

Having had their fill of drabness for the night (Chaplin quickly recovered from his urge to sleep in his old room), the friends went back to Park Lane to visit the American film director, George Fitzmaurice. There Chaplin quarrelled with another guest, an American actor who had gone sightseeing in Limehouse in search of the tough and highly coloured world of Thomas Burke’s Limehouse Nights, and was disappointed that nobody there wanted to pick a fight.

That was enough. It annoyed.

I told him that it was very fine for well-fed, overpaid actors flaunting toughness at these deprived people, who are gentle and nice and, if ever tough, only so because of environment. I asked him just how tough he would be if he were living the life that some of these unfortunate families must live. How easy for him with five meals a day beneath that thrust-out chest with his muscles trained and perfect, trying to start something with these people. Of course they were not tough, but when it comes to four years of war, when it comes to losing an arm or a leg, then they are tough. But they are not going around looking for fights unless there is a reason.

It rather broke up the party, but I was feeling so disgusted that I did not care.

On the way back to the Ritz they fell into conversation with three very young prostitutes; Chaplin was rather sad that having gaily hailed them, ‘Hello, boys’, as soon as they recognized him the girls became solemn and respectful and called him ‘Mr Chaplin’. They helped a driver, on his way to Covent Garden with a load of apples, to push his wagon up a slippery street, and Chaplin was touched that the man ‘did not belay the tired animal with a whip and curse and swear at him in his helplessness. He saw the animal was up against it, and instead of beating him he got out and put his shoulder to the wheel, never for the moment doubting that the horse was doing his best.’

The derelicts huddled at night under the arches of the Ritz, the newest and most glamorous hotel in London at that time, seemed to symbolize the two poles of Chaplin’s life: the privations of boyhood and the triumph of this homecoming. Chaplin woke the sleepers to give them money. He never ceased observing behaviour: ‘There was an old woman about seventy. I gave her something. She woke up, or stirred in her sleep, took the money without a word of thanks – took it as though it was her ration from the bread line and no thanks were expected, huddled herself up in a tighter knot than before, and continued her slumber. The inertia of poverty had long since claimed her.’

Chaplin’s search for his past, at first so urgent, seemed now to have been satisfied – though to the end of his life he was to return to Kennington and Lambeth and regret the disappearance of the places he had known. For the moment he was quite content to be a celebrity, an immortal among (as he called them) the immortals. Knoblock took him to meet Bernard Shaw, but at Shaw’s flat at 10 Adelphi Terrace Chaplin held back. Every visiting movie actor called upon Shaw and he did not want to be like the rest, so a further ten years was to elapse before he met the great man. E. V. Lucas gave a dinner in his honour at the Garrick Club, where he sat between Sir James Barrie, who told him he would like him to play Peter Pan, and Sir Squire Bancroft. Sir Squire, then in his eightieth year, had broken his rule that day and gone to the pictures to see Shoulder Arms. Chaplin was overjoyed when Barrie praised the letter-reading scene and disputed Barrie’s criticism that the Heaven scene in The Kid was ‘entirely unnecessary’, but generally felt that he was not making sufficient contribution to the conversation of the party, which also included the extrovert Edwin Lutyens (whom Chaplin thought rather common), George Frampton, Harry Graham and Knoblock. Afterwards Chaplin and Knoblock went with Barrie to his flat in Robert Street, Adelphi, close to Shaw’s, and there met Gerald du Maurier, who had come from playing in Bulldog Drummond at Wyndham’s Theatre.

The most significant encounters in London were H. G. Wells and Thomas Burke. Chaplin had come to London with the intention of meeting Wells, but their first meeting was engineered by the publicists of the Stoll Picture Corporation, who got each man to a screening of a new film of Kipps by telling him that the other wished to meet him there. George K. Arthur, who made his film debut in the title role, was at the showing, and Chaplin was touched that the kindly Wells should whisper to him, ‘Say something nice to the boy’, even though he knew Wells was not impressed by the film. (Some years later Arthur would be instrumental in bringing together Chaplin and Josef von Sternberg – a meeting which resulted in the ill-fated Sea Gulls.) Afterwards they had a pleasant dinner at which Rebecca West was present. Wells complimented him on his turn of phrase when, for the sake of effect, Chaplin apostrophized ‘The indecent moon!’ He was obliged to confess that the phrase was not original, but was Knoblock’s. A quarter of a century later he used it again, in Monsieur Verdoux, this time without acknowledgement to the originator.

Later in the trip, after his return from Paris and Berlin, Chaplin spent a weekend at Wells’s house in the country. It was a carefree visit. Chaplin relaxed and slept a lot and they talked and played games with Wells’s two young sons. St John Ervine came to visit and talked about the possibility of talking pictures. Chaplin told him that he didn’t think the voice was necessary, that it would spoil the art as much as painting statuary. ‘I would as soon rouge marble cheeks. Pictures are pantomimic art. We might as well have the stage. There would be nothing left to the imagination.’ Even when he was most comfortable with people, Chaplin still questioned his relationship with them: ‘As I speed into town I am wondering if Wells wants to know me or whether he wants me to know him.’

Chaplin found an immediate empathy with Thomas Burke, who had had a great success with his stories of the darker aspects of East London. A small, silent man, Burke took Chaplin on a tour of the places that provided the settings for his books, speaking little but pointing things out with his walking stick. Burke was later to write perhaps the most perceptive analysis of Chaplin’s character. The source of their understanding came from their similar backgrounds, as Burke described it:

He didn’t know then, nor did I, that when he was young, and I was young, we were walking the same side-streets of Kennington, living a similar shabby, makeshift kind of life, and loathing it with equal intensity. He was mixed up with red-nose comedians of the minor music halls; I was mixed up with futile clerks. But our backgrounds were much the same. We grew and played in the same streets; we knew the same experiences in the same settings, and took them through a common temperament. In our teens each of us was recoiling from the drab, draggled Kennington in which we lived; each of us, in a crude, undirected way, was yearning towards the things of decency and the things of the mind, and each of us was hopeless of ever attaining them. I discovered literature by picking up a copy of T.P.’s Weekly in a tea-shop; he discovered the inwardness of music on hearing a man playing a clarinet outside a Kennington pub – playing The Honeysuckle and the Bee!¹⁰

1921 – The cartoonist Will Owen’s view of Chaplin’s visit to London.

On an impulse Chaplin now decided to go to France, taking Robinson with him. The boat trip realized one of his own mal de mer gags rather too realistically: just at the moment when he had decided to take advantage of the offer of a charming young woman to teach him French he was immobilized by seasickness. On the train to Paris he was impressed by the service and the cheapness of the lunch, but on arrival, finding rain and reporters awaiting him, nausea struck again.

He was eager to meet the caricaturist Cami, with whom he had been in a correspondence – or rather an exchange of drawings and photographs – since Cami had written him a fan letter in 1914. It came as a shock to find that the two, reckoning themselves friends, had no common language. Cami’s account is charming, though perhaps over-coloured; Chaplin’s own account in part confirms it. When they met they chattered to each other in their own languages at first, not troubling too much that the other could not understand. Then, when they were having lunch together in Chaplin’s hotel, Chaplin suddenly became depressed and left the table with tears in his eyes. The English hotel manager explained to Cami, ‘He is overcome by the thought that there is a greater barrier than the ocean between you – the barrier of language.’ Later, Cami said, they developed a deaf-mute pantomime, and got on well enough. They went together to the Folies Bergère, which Chaplin found grubbier and less glamorous than when he had played there with the Karno troupe. He dealt with the French-speaking reporters as best he could, and among the Americans and British in Paris he met Dudley Field Malone, Waldo Frank, Lady Astor and Sir Philip Sassoon, Lloyd George’s private secretary, who invited him for the weekend when he returned to England, and was to become and remain a friend for many years. Of the local celebrities he met the pugilist Georges Carpentier and the theatre director Jacques Copeau, and had supper with the Copeau Company. He was excited by the ambience and the performers of the Quartier Latin, and was clearly storing up impressions which would later be useful when he came to make A Woman of Paris.

Chaplin and Robinson next took the train to Berlin. Chaplin’s films had not been shown in Germany, so his face was unknown. At first he enjoyed the relief from the crowds and the reporters; later he began to feel mildly resentful, missing the celebrity treatment and finding himself placed at the worst tables in restaurants. Things looked up when he met the spectacular star Pola Negri, who showed an immediate and lively interest in him. Negri was born Apollonia Chalupiec in Yanowa, near Lipnia in Poland. She had been a dancer at the Imperial Theatre in St Petersburg, and had acted on stage and screen in Poland before being invited to Berlin by Max Reinhardt to play in Sumurun.

Pola Negri is really beautiful. She is Polish and really true to the type. Beautiful jet-black hair, white, even teeth and wonderful coloring. I think it such a pity that such coloring does not register on the screen.

She is the centre of attraction here. I am introduced. What a voice she has! Her mouth speaks so prettily the German language. Her voice has a soft, mellow quality, with charming inflection. Offered a drink, she clinks my glass and offers her only English words, ‘Jazz boy Charlie.’

Returning briefly to Paris, Chaplin was impressed by a young Russian émigrée called Moussia Sodskaya whom he saw singing in a Montmartre restaurant, and talked of putting her in the movies. The following day he flew from Le Bourget. In those less formal days of passenger transport, the pilot obligingly put him off at Lympne in Kent, where he was invited to Sir Philip Sassoon’s garden party. The next day they attended the unveiling of a war memorial in the local school, and Chaplin was embarrassed and upset to find that he, rather than the ceremony, was the centre of attention. ‘I wished I hadn’t come.’ Sassoon also took him to a hospital for the war wounded, and he was greatly shocked and depressed by what he saw. ‘What is to become of them?’ Chaplin asked. ‘That is up to you and me.’

A weekend with Wells followed, after which he intrepidly flew back to Paris for a charity première of The Kid at the Trocadero. He had been persuaded to attend by the daughter of J. P. Morgan, with the promise of an award. In fact the award itself was not very impressive – Officier de I’lnstruction Publique – but the event was. The audience included Prince George of Greece and Princess Xenia, an assortment of dukes, duchesses, marquis, marquises, Stuyvesants and Vanderbilts. There was also Elsa Maxwell, Georges Carpentier, Cecile Sorel and Henri Letellier, a prominent Parisian publisher who was to provide the original for the character of Pierre Revel in A Woman of Paris. Chaplin dined with Carpentier and Letellier the following evening.

With an appointment for lunch with Sassoon to meet Lloyd George and other celebrities, Chaplin decided to fly back to London, but the plane got lost in the fog and the cross-channel journey took seven hours. He missed Lloyd George and was disappointed. ‘I love to meet interesting personages. I would love to meet Lenin, Trotsky and the Kaiser.’

Despite this, Chaplin refused Wells’s invitation to dinner with Chaliapin, since he had promised to spend his last evening in England with cousin Aubrey. Uncharacteristically, and despite Aubrey’s own objections, Chaplin insisted on visiting Aubrey’s pub and behaving flamboyantly because ‘I must get him more custom.’ He stayed with Aubrey until four in the morning, learning about his Chaplin forebears, then hitched a lift back to the Ritz in a Ford truck driven by an ex-officer who was now in the grocery business and on his way from Bayswater to Covent Garden.

It was now the second week in October and Chaplin set off for Southampton ‘dejected and sad’. He felt that he was going to miss the crowds more than the friends who had come to see him off, like Arthur Kelly, who brought him a picture of Hetty. He even forgave the reporters: ‘After all, it’s their job to ask questions and they have been merely doing their job with me.’ On the boat back to America he struck up a pleasant friendship with an eight-year-old girl. He describes a fragment of their conversation:

‘You like smashing windows? You must be Spanish,’ I tell her.

‘Oh! no, not Spanish; I’m Jewish,’ she answers.

‘That accounts for your genius.’

‘Oh, do you think Jewish people are clever?’ she asks eagerly.

‘Of course. All great geniuses have Jewish blood in them. No, I am not Jewish,’ as she is about to put that question, ‘but I am sure there must be some somewhere in me. I hope so.’

On the boat he also befriended the English producer-director Cecil Hepworth and his star Alma Taylor, who were making their first visit to the States. On their arrival he took them to dinner with Sam Goldwyn, and they were invited to his home if they ever came to California.

In New York he met Claude McKay, the black poet, and the educationalist Marguerite Naumberg. Frank Harris took him to New York’s famous prison, Sing Sing, where he met the Irish nationalist and labour leader Jim Larkin, was appalled by the death chamber, and made an impromptu speech which went down well:

Brother criminals and fellow sinners: Christ said, ‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.’ I cannot cast the stone, though. I have compromised and thrown many a pie. But I cannot cast the first stone.

‘Some got it,’ he remarked, ‘others never will.’

Chaplin’s record of the trip was mostly written in the course of the train journey back to California, and was taken down at his dictation by a young newspaperman, Monta Bell, who was subsequently to be an assistant on A Woman of Paris and to go on to become a very competent director in his own right. Some Chaplin biographers have suggested that the text was ‘ghosted’ by Bell, but the style is too distinctive and the analysis of Chaplin’s reactions and sensations far too personal for that. The account originally appeared as a series of articles in Photoplay before publication in book form as My Trip Abroad (My Wonderful Visit, for the English edition). It was translated into numerous foreign languages. ‘Going over it all,’ Chaplin’s account concluded,

it has all been worth while and the job ahead of me looks worth while. If I can bring smiles to the tired eyes in Kennington and Whitechapel, if I have absorbed and understood the virtues and problems of those simpler people I have met, and if I have gathered the least bit of inspiration from those greater personages who were kind to me, then this has been a wonderful trip, and somehow I am eager to get back to work and begin paying for it.

He was not to return to work immediately, however. He arrived back in Los Angeles at noon on 31 October, and that evening dined with some friends, Mr and Mrs Abraham Lehr. There was only one other guest, Clare Sheridan, the sculptor, painter, traveller and writer. She and Chaplin struck up an instant friendship. Mrs Sheridan was a niece of Winston Churchill. Her husband had been killed in France, leaving her with a daughter and a small son, Dick, who was in California with her. She had been commissioned by the Soviet Government to make portrait busts of Lenin, Trotsky, Dzerzhinsky and other Bolshevik leaders, and her subsequent articles and interviews had created a furore. Americans, Chaplin pointed out in his autobiography, were confused by the phenomenon of an English aristocrat writing pro-Bolshevik articles. Chaplin was fascinated by all she had to tell him about the Soviet Union; she was, in turn, interested in his impressions of Britain. ‘A good country to belong to, we agreed, but not a country to live in – not for the creative artist, and he advised me to remain where I am.’¹¹

Mrs Sheridan said that in the United States she was becoming a writer rather than a sculptor because American men were self-conscious about being portrayed in sculpture. ‘I’m vain, thank goodness,’ said Chaplin; and there and then they decided that she would make his bust. As he accompanied her back to the Hollywood Hotel they had an argument about marriage and Chaplin reminded her of Francis Thompson’s essay on Shelley in which he said that Shelley tired not so much of a woman’s arms as of her mind. ‘It seemed to me that it is more spiritual than a physical companionship that Charlie is subconsciously searching for in his heart.’¹²

Two days later, on Monday 2 November, they met again, this time with little Dick. At noon they went to the studio, where Chaplin showed them The Kid. In the pathetic parts he would tiptoe to the harmonium in the screening room and play an accompaniment. Dick sobbed so hysterically that Chaplin was alarmed and kept reassuring him, ‘It’s only a play, Dick! It will come right in the end.’ They lunched at Chaplin’s home afterwards. He was somewhat apologetic about his rented house on Beechwood Drive and Argyle, ‘the tortuous unsimplicity’ of whose Moorish architecture greatly disturbed him though he liked the panoramic view of the city below. After lunch they went for a walk and talked about art and the satisfaction it gave, about suicide and immortality. Chaplin became quite carried away:

There is nothing so beautiful that it will make people forget their eggs and bacon for breakfast – as for admiration of the world – it’s not worth anything – there is in the end but oneself to please: – you make something because it means something to you. You work – because you have a superabundance of vital energy. You find that not only can you make children but you can express yourself in other ways. In the end it is you – all you – your work, your thought, your conception of the beautiful, yours the happiness, yours the satisfaction. Be brave enough to face the veil and lift it, and see and know the void it hides, and stand before that void and know that within yourself is your world … ¹³

Then they laughed at themselves for being so serious. After tea they took Dick home and then Chaplin and Mrs Sheridan dined and danced at the Ambassador Hotel, where most of the other guests knew Chaplin and hurried to welcome him back and to speculate about Mrs Sheridan.

The following day they began work on the bust. Chaplin insisted it must be finished by Saturday because he wanted to go to Catalina to fish. Mrs Sheridan found it an amusing and productive day. Chaplin started the morning in a brown silk dressing gown and was serious. After a while he seized his violin and walked about the room playing it. Then, clearly in a gayer mood, he disappeared to change into an orange and primrose robe. Occasionally they would stop for tea. Chaplin ‘would either philosophise or impersonate’; or he might put on a gramophone record and conduct an imaginary band. Between times he confided that when he was a young man in London he longed to know people, but that now he knew many, he felt lonelier than ever.

The bust was finished in three days. Friends were amazed that Chaplin had remained patient so long; and Mrs Sheridan congratulated herself on her foresight in making it in his own home and specifying that he should be bare-throated. ‘A man in his dressing gown does not suddenly get a notion to order his motor car and go off to some place. I had him fairly anchored. Nevertheless he has been difficult to do. There is so much subtlety in the face, and sensitiveness, and varying personality.’¹⁴

Chaplin was pleased with the bust, said it might be the head of a criminal, and at once concocted a theory that criminals and artists were psychologically akin, that ‘on reflection we all have a flame, a burning flame of impulse, a vision, a side-tracked mind, a deep sense of unlawfulness’. Comte Jean de Limur, a young French aristocrat who was later to be Chaplin’s assistant on A Woman of Paris, arrived as the bust was finished and commented slyly: ‘I see it is Pan … on ne peut jamais tromper une femme.’¹⁵

Chaplin changed his mind about Catalina, since he had discovered that the fishing season had closed on 1 November. He decided instead that he and the Sheridans would go camping on Sunday morning. They set off in Chaplin’s car, followed by a van with the tents and paraphernalia and a Ford containing the chef. The Sunday roads were thick with cars and exhaust fumes and they began to despair of finding a camping site. Eventually they struck off across country and found an idyllic seaside spot, designated with a sign ‘Private Property. No trespassing. No camping. No hunting’. For Charlie Chaplin, however, the owner made an exception.

Late into the night I sat with him over the camp fire. A sea mist rose and little veils of sea mist swept like gossamer over the dunes and the naked, shiny eucalyptus stems cast black shadows. Mingling with the nightbird cries, the rhythmical sound of the sea and the shore.

One by one the lanterns in the camp flickered and went out. Charlie sat huddled up before the flame, an elfin, elemental creature with gleaming eyes and tousled hair, his little nervous hands raking the embers with a stick. His voice was very deep, the voice of a much bigger man. He ruminated moodily. He said it was ‘Too much – too great – too beautiful – there are no words –’¹⁶

They stayed at the camp the whole week. Chaplin played with Dick and entertained them with imitations of Nijinsky and Pavlova, which he did so well and so gracefully that Mrs Sheridan did not know whether to ‘laugh or silently appreciate’. On Friday the seaside idyll was broken with the arrival of five motor cars full of children wanting to see him, and two reporters. They returned to Hollywood. Back at the house, taking tea, Mrs Sheridan wrote,

We found ourselves making conversation to one another with difficulty. He looked at me as strangely as I looked at him, and then he said:

‘You know what’s the matter – we don’t know each other.’

And it was true. I was talking not with the elemental, wild-haired Charlie of the camp fire, nor yet with Charlie Chaplin of the films, but with a neatly dressed, smooth-haired young man I didn’t even know by sight. Civilization and its trappings had changed us both. The past seemed tinged with unreality. ‘I think it has all been a dream,’ I said.¹⁷

This short, stimulating friendship ended rather abruptly. The newspapers were eager to sniff out a love affair, and Carlyle Robinson emphasized his denial by adding rather tactlessly, ‘Mrs Sheridan is old enough to be Mr Chaplin’s mother.’ The Sheridans thereupon returned to New York. Dick Sheridan was to die at the age of nineteen, and his mother spent her later years in North Africa. Her powerful bust portrait of Chaplin still stood in his last home, the Manoir de Ban at Corsier sur Vevey, Switzerland, after his death.

Since Chaplin’s divorce the Hollywood gossip columns had eagerly monitored every social liaison with members of the opposite sex. The names of Thelma Morgan Converse, Lila Lee and Anna Q. Nilsson were from time to time linked with Chaplin’s. Rumours of an engagement to a New York actress, May Collins, were admitted, then denied. Enthusiasm for a beautiful film actress, Claire Windsor, waned after she pulled the kind of stunt which always offended Chaplin’s sense of dignity and propriety: she staged a ‘disappearance’. Chaplin joined in the search in the nearby hills and offered a reward for the discovery of Miss Windsor, whom the headlines now described as his ‘fiancée’. She was apparently found unconscious, though Robinson was the first to notice how clean her riding boots were. When a young couple claimed the reward, there was closer investigation into the ‘disappearance’, and the hoax was exposed.

His picnic over, Chaplin was soon back in the studio and working with a will to finish the two films still due under the First National contract. Pay Day and The Pilgrim were completed in eight months. Pay Day took thirty working days; The Pilgrim, in four reels, took forty-two and was by far the most economically made of all Chaplin’s feature productions. Pay Day was to be the last Chaplin two-reeler released. Visually it marks a considerable advance. During Chaplin’s absence, Totheroh seems to have been experimenting with the new lights installed in the studio, and the night scenes with rain are lit with sophistication.

Chaplin is cast as a working man and hen-pecked husband, and the comedy is derived from the ordinary frustrations of daily life. The opening section of the film has Charlie at work as a labourer on a building site; the middle section shows the effects of an inebriate night out, as Charlie endeavours to make his way home – eventually strap-hanging in a lunch-wagon under the mistaken impression that it is a moving bus. In the last sequence he returns home, oiling his boots in a vain hope of creeping to bed unobserved by his virago wife, who sleeps with a rolling pin at her side. He ends the night seeking repose in the bath – as he had done in A Night Out and One A.M. Too late he finds the bath is full of cold water. There is a notably articulate piece of mime in the pay-day scene. Charlie is seen arguing with some person offscreen, pleading that he has been underpaid. As he calculates on his fingers, his mime betrays the gradual realization that he has in fact been paid too much.

There was only one pause during shooting for story preparation, which indicates that Chaplin had begun the film with a more fully developed scenario than was his usual habit. This degree of pre-planning was no doubt the reason why he was able to depart from his normal practice up to this time of shooting in narrative continuity. The second part of Pay Day, filmed in the studio, was shot first, during the last five days of November and most of December. Chaplin was ill with a cold in the first week of the New Year; when he returned, in the space of four working weeks, he shot the first part of the film, on the building site. Material filmed on location at La Brea and De Longpre, where a large new building was in construction, was matched with studio material shot ‘by natural light’, as the studio records by this time specify, indicating the growing adoption of artificial lighting.

Pay Day was despatched to First National on 23 February 1922, and Chaplin began to prepare the story that was to be The Pilgrim. By the time shooting began on 10 April, the narrative continuity seems to have been largely worked out. Monta Bell, having finished his work on My Trip Abroad, was taken on as a general assistant and bit player. It is possible that his advent initiated a new method for the preparation of Chaplin pictures. The Pilgrim is the first film for which there survives a quantity of written scenario and gag notes. It is possible, though not likely, that this kind of preparatory writing did take place on earlier films but has simply not survived. The shortening of the periods during which production was halted for ‘working on story’, and the extent of these notes, would seem rather to indicate that Chaplin was moving away from his earlier method of creating and improvising on the set and even on film, towards a greater degree of advance planning on paper.

The film was originally intended as a Western comedy – it would have had some similarities to The Gold Rush – and for a first working title was simply designated ‘Western’ (though when shooting began this was changed to The Tail End, a jocular reference to the conclusion of the First National contract). The first concept was apparently modified as being, for that time, too sophisticated and ironic for a comic subject; aspects of it look directly forward to Monsieur Verdoux.

Charlie was to have been one of four desperate escaped convicts who waylay a minister and steal his clothes. Disguised as a man of the cloth, Charlie arrives in the Wild West town of Hell’s Hinges, a sink of immorality. He is taken for the new young reformer sent to replace the town’s old minister, helpless in face of the immorality of the place:

Show a Chinaman or two shot down by the rough element in casual fashion … Show scene in saloon which is also combination gambling house, lunchroom and dance hall. Men rough with women. Gold dust for dance hall girls. Card game that ends in a fight and there is gun play.¹⁸

With the same kind of fortuity that made him master of Easy Street, Charlie overcomes the town bullies and falls in love with Edna, the minister’s beautiful daughter. His programme for reform is to replace the church organ with a jazz band, to perform the hymns in ragtime, and to introduce other attractions such as motion pictures and dice games for the collection. As a result the saloon empties while the church fills up.

Charlie begins to preach a peculiar sort of preaching based on common sense rather than religion. He goes through all sorts of gestures. He is a lousy talker and they go to sleep on him in spots. But when they do he waves for the band and with the jazz they awaken and listen as Charlie goes on … ¹⁹

At the end of the service, Charlie amiably shakes hands with his congregation, finally holding out his hands absently to a sheriff, who immediately claps a pair of handcuffs on him. The congregation

demand that Charlie be released and threaten sheriff. With eloquent gesture Charlie bids them do no violence. Tells them to stick by the church and the old man. He shakes old man’s hand and bids him build new church. There are tears in girl’s eyes as he bids her goodbye and with the crowd shouting his praise he goes up the aisle and out with the sheriff into fadeout.²⁰

This curious moral fable was never made: the eventual film was in the more conventional comedy style, with the Wild West element replaced by lightly satirical treatment of the manners and hypocrisies of small-town religion. Charlie is still an escaped convict. Stealing the clothes of a bathing parson, he arrives thus disguised in the town of Dead Man’s Gulch, where he is mistaken for the new minister. Called upon to deliver a sermon, he pantomimes the story of David and Goliath. He experiences such hazards of the clerical life as a parochial tea party where he is tormented by a horrid spoilt child. Having fallen in love with his landlady’s beautiful daughter, he foils the attempt of a former cell-mate to rob the women.

The local sheriff realizes his identity and reluctantly arrests him. Touched by his gallantry and the girl’s pleas, he takes him to the Mexican border to give him a chance to escape. He orders Charlie to pick some flowers on the other side of the border and – unable to take the hint – Charlie obediently returns with a bouquet. The exasperated sheriff is finally obliged to kick him over the border to freedom. On the Mexican side, however, a bunch of bandits spring out of the bushes, wildly shooting at one another. Caught between two hostile countries, Charlie waddles off into the distance with one foot in Mexico and one in the United States. It is an image open to any number of symbolic interpretations.

One of the most polished and charming of the films of Chaplin’s middle period, and with admirable scenes of sustained comedy such as the tea party, The Pilgrim seems to have been shot with few problems. Chaplin made extensive use of locations for the shooting and there are evocative scenes of still-rural Saugus, Sawtelle, Newhall, Roscoe, South Pasadena, Ventura Road and Eagle Rock.

Dinky Dean, who played the horrid little boy in the tea party scene, was in real life not at all horrid. He was the son of Chuck Riesner; more than three quarters of a century later, as Dean Riesner, a prominent Hollywood scriptwriter, he recalled how difficult it had been for him to pummel two men whom he knew as Uncle Sydney and Uncle Charlie. He was finally persuaded to do it only when Charles and Sydney spent some time slapping each other and laughing wildly to prove to the sceptical child that it really was fun after all.²¹

In some quarters, The Pilgrim ran into trouble with censors and church authorities. In Atlanta, the Evangelical Ministers’ Association demanded its withdrawal as ‘an insult to the Gospel’. In South Carolina, the Daniel Morgan Klan of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan protested at the showing of the film on the grounds that it held the Protestant ministry up to ridicule. The Pennsylvania Board of Censors eliminated so many scenes that it virtually constituted a ban on the film. Elsewhere, however, churchmen as well as laity agreed with Paul Gallico, writing in the New York Daily News:

Now Mr Chaplin’s picture is not without satire. But the shaft is not directed at the clergy. It is aimed at the narrow mind, the bigot, the person who can see no farther than the written word. In fact it seems to travel on dead line and smite the very people who in this case had the power to condemn, to shut off from others, laughter which might be directed at them.

Arrangements for the distribution of The Pilgrim were the source of much acrimony between Chaplin and First National. Chaplin had already been roused to fury at the beginning of September, when he was still cutting the film, by an article in the Exhibitor’s Herald which quoted Harry Schwalbe of First National accusing him of not fulfilling his contracts over The Kid. ‘I INTEND SUING SCHWALBE AND FIRST NATIONAL FOR TEN MILLION DOLLARS,’ Chaplin cabled Sydney; but the affair was soon smoothed over. Chaplin had no intention of letting First National have The Pilgrim under the terms applying to a normal two-reeler supplied under the contract. Like The Kid it was a feature of altogether more ambitious scope than had been anticipated by the original agreement with the distributors. Sydney was sent to New York to negotiate with Schwalbe, and was given a memorandum on the matter by Alf Reeves:

IDEA

The idea is, Chief wishes to deliver No. 8 ‘Pilgrim’ as a feature four reeler to terminate the contract. He thinks to let them have it on a 70–30 basis same as ‘Kid’. This for U.S., Canada and all Foreign Countries, with a guarantee from them of $400,000.00 in advance of his share, payable $200,000.00 on delivery of the two negatives and one Positive print, and a note for $200,000.00 due in three or six months, at their convenience …

Failing their acceptance of these terms, it is proposed you will deliver picture No. 8 as per contract, a two-reeler entitled ‘The Professor’ for which he has received full contract price.

Before delivery to First National of either, Mr Burkan and yourself will see that his interests are protected in regard to any question that may arise in the future.

Before exhibiting ‘Pilgrim’ or ‘Professor’ to First National (there being no compulsion on our part to give them a preview) they should agree that if they do not come to terms for ‘Pilgrim’ as a feature, they are to accept ‘The Professor’ as picture No. 8 in full termination of all Chief’s obligations to them under the Contract.²²

The remarkable aspect of this document is its discussion of ‘The Professor’. No Chaplin film of this title was ever shown or released, and nowhere in the comprehensive daily records of the Chaplin studio is there any reference to its production. Yet the subsequent correspondence between Chaplin in Los Angeles and Sydney in New York seems to establish beyond doubt that such a film actually existed in 1922. On 13 November Sydney sent a long telegram to Chaplin reporting the results of a meeting with Harry Schwalbe. Schwalbe, he said, was very friendly, sympathetic to the Chaplin proposition and eager to conclude the contract amicably. However, Schwalbe felt that it would be easier to negotiate if his executive committee could see the films. He further suggested that Chaplin should offer First National both films: The Professor could conclude the contract, and The Pilgrim could be handled as an independent production, though he insisted that Chaplin’s 70–30 proposition left no profit for the company. Sydney recommended that Chaplin permit him to show both pictures to First National without getting a written release in advance; and that he increase the distribution allowance to the distributors for release of The Pilgrim.

Chaplin replied the following day that he would on no account allow First National to have both films. He waived his objection to showing them The Pilgrim but not in the case of the two-reeler. He was willing to modify the distribution arrangement to 65–35, but in other respects the contract had to be the same as for The Kid. ‘IN THE EVENT FIRST NATIONAL DO NOT WANT PILGRIM AFTER VIEWING SAME, THEN DELIVER TWO-REELER AS PER CONTRACT.’ First National, via Sydney, made a counter-proposal of 50 per cent of the gross over $280,000 for The Pilgrim. Chaplin wired back on November 21st: ‘PROPOSITION RIDICULOUS STOP DELIVER TWO REELER AND MAKE IMMEDIATE ARRANGEMENTS WITH ABRAMS [of United Artists] TO DISTRIBUTE PILGRIM.’ He confirmed these instructions in a further telegram sent both to Sydney and to Burkan on 7 December:

FIRST NATIONAL EXECUTIVES HAVING FAILED TO OFFER SUITABLE CONDITIONS FOR PRODUCTION OF SPECIAL FOUR REEL FEATURE PILGRIM IT NOW OK COURSE FOR YOU AND MR BURKAN TO DELIVER TWO REELS PROFESSOR IN ACCORDANCE WITH CONTRACTS AND THEIR ACCEPTANCE OF THIS AS NUMBER EIGHT TERMINATES THE SERIES STOP REGARDS.

On 15 December Chaplin cabled Sydney:

WILL ACCEPT THEIR PROPOSITIONS AS OUTLINED IN YOUR TELEGRAM OF DECEMBER THIRTEEN PROVIDING THEIR GUARANTEE FURTHER SEVENTY-FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS CASH IN SIX MONTHS STOP USE YOUR JUDGEMENT IF YOU CAN GET ANY BETTER TERMS BY JUDICIOUS APPROACH STOP HAVING NEGATIVE PILGRIM HERE WILL DELIVER WHEN FIRST CASH PAYMENT IS MADE STOP ON NO ACCOUNT RELEASE TWO REEL PROFESSOR STOP REGARDS.²³

After a few more telegrams of indignation, conciliation and threats to let United Artists distribute The Pilgrim after all, amicable arrangements were finally concluded with First National. The Professor was never mentioned again and for the moment remains the major mystery in the Chaplin canon. The film must have existed, unless we predicate some outlandish bluff between the two brothers to convince the telegraph operators between California and New York of the existence of a purely imaginary film. A partial solution was suggested when Kevin Brownlow and David Gill, preparing their Unknown Chaplin television series, found in the Chaplin archives a complete and cut five-minute sequence in a can labelled The Professor. The sequence begins in a slum street, down which waddles Chaplin in a quite unfamiliar costume and make-up. He wears a heavy and dejected moustache and is dressed in a long coat and battered silk hat. He carries a suitcase labelled ‘PROFESSOR BOSCO FLEA CIRCUS’. Bosco enters a dosshouse, and before retiring to sleep inspects his fleas. Chaplin’s mime creates a whole world of the busy but invisible creatures (he evidently had a particular affection for this flea circus gag, which he tried to work into The Circus and The Great Dictator before finally putting it on screen in Limelight, almost thirty years after this first attempt). While Bosco sleeps, a dog of disgustingly mangy appearance wanders into the dormitory and knocks over the box of fleas. The dog starts to scratch desperately. So, very shortly, do the other inmates of the dormitory. Bosco wakes up and frantically runs about the place, retrieving his pets from the whiskers of his neighbours. He takes his case and leaves the dosshouse; the sequence ends with him trotting down the road where we first saw him.

The sequence gives all the appearance of a section cut out of a completed film. Among the unidentified out-takes which Brownlow and Gill examined is a series of shots taken in the same dosshouse set, but with Chaplin costumed as a very shabby bellboy who goes about the now empty dormitory, preparing the beds with all the aplomb and dexterity of an employee of the Ritz. The dosshouse set is the same in both the edited sequence and the out-takes, but is quite different from the dosshouse scenes in either Police or The Kid. Three years earlier, however, when he reached a block with The Kid, Chaplin spent three days, 30 September and 1–2 October 1919, shooting some 7500 feet of film merely described in the daily shooting reports as ‘Flophouse set – Flea bus.’ or ‘Trained fleas – bunkhouse bus.’ Two snapshots taken at the time by Jack Wilson and rediscovered in 1984 (see plate 65) confirm that this is the material found by Brownlow and Gill. But of what did the rest of The Professor consist, if a two-reel version really existed? Had Chaplin or his cutter in fact assembled a new film out of rejected scenes, perhaps from the Mutual as well as the First National series? There is no one living who can give us the answer, and unless the film itself one day comes to light, the mystery of The Professor will remain unsolved.

At this time, Chaplin seems already to have attracted the attention of an enemy who was to dog him for the next half century. The only thing that the comedian and J. Edgar Hoover had in common was that both were short of stature: but while Chaplin immortalized himself as ‘The Little Fellow’, the vain and overweening Chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation insisted that official biographical press releases declared that he was ‘a shade under 6ft tall’.

While Charlie was battling his way out of a childhood of poverty, Hoover, six years his junior, was growing up in a middle-class Washington family, with an adoring and possessive mother. Having put himself through law school, at twenty-two he became a clerk in the Department of Justice. In 1919 he was appointed special assistant to the Attorney-General, A. Mitchell Palmer, notorious for instigating the first American ‘Red Scare’ and the first witch-hunts against communists – ably abetted by his young acolyte.

Promoted to head the General Intelligence Division, Hoover began his notorious filing system. Within three months he had amassed 150,000 names of suspected radicals; in time these files would number in the millions. Sniffing out and recording the deepest secrets of every major public figure, from the President down, Hoover built up the biggest blackmail racket in history. The files were to become the heart of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Justice’s own detective agency, of which Hoover was director from 1924 until his death in 1972.

Chaplin, whose FBI file eventually comprised more than 1900 pages, clearly held a personal fascination for Hoover. No doubt at the root of his suspicion was the fact that Chaplin’s films were about the homeless, the unemployed and the slum-dwellers – the underbelly of society. For Hoover this spelt danger in a period when capitalist America was haunted by the spectre of smouldering labour unrest, the result of falling wages, rising prices and growing unemployment.

Hoover was still only assistant director of the Bureau in 1922 when he first opened his files on Chaplin, sending an agent called A. A. Hopkins to infiltrate a party at the Chaplin studios given in honour of a prominent labour leader, William Z. Foster. Hopkins reported that the event was attended by many ‘Parlor Bolsheviki’ and such Hollywood radicals as William De Mille and Rob Wagner. Will Hays had arrived in Hollywood a few months before this to set up the office of Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc., a self-regulatory industry body. Chaplin was alleged to have told Foster in the course of the evening that he had no use for Hays: ‘We are against any kind of censorship, and particularly against presbyterian censorship.’ He also pointed out to his guests a pennant bearing the words ‘Welcome Will Hays’, pinned over the men’s lavatory at the studio.

Hoover and his associates were so impressed by Agent Hopkins’s report on this and other evidence of the infiltration of Communist ideas into the film industry that they instituted further investigation. Meanwhile Hopkins’s information was passed on to Will Hays himself, who reflected broodingly that Chaplin had not participated in the welcoming activities when he arrived in Hollywood, which led him to think that ‘the party mentioned is really a little odd in his mental processes to say the least, in the direction which you mention. I did not know he had gone so far, however, as the report indicates.’ Hays added a pledge to discuss ‘ways and means of making certain that there is no seditious propaganda allowed to get into anything’.

Subsequent reports dealt with the alleged visit to Chaplin of a Communist organizer of the Garment Workers’ Union, bearing the sinister name of Plotkin, to appeal for funds for striking railroad workers; and a rumour that Chaplin was the anonymous Hollywood donor of $1000 to the Communist Party of America, at Christmas 1922. The report initiated the FBI’s tireless but vain effort to try to prove that Chaplin made contributions to the Communist Party. Periodically over the next thirty years the Bureau would re-examine their growing file of reports (invariably unsubstantiated) of donations by Chaplin to Communist causes. These early reports coincided with America’s most rabid ‘Red Scare’ before the 1940s: after this there is a twenty-year gap in the files. During that period Hoover’s principal task was to fight the gangsters of the Prohibition era, and he may have lost interest in movie stars; alternatively a batch of files may have been lost or destroyed. However, the campaign was resumed with a vengeance in 1942.