9

A Woman of Paris

With The Pilgrim completed, Chaplin was at last free to make his first film for United Artists. This was a considerable relief to his partners Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D. W. Griffith, who were fretting because Chaplin had not yet made any contribution to the profits of the corporation. As it turned out, his first United Artists picture was, in this respect at least, to prove a disappointment.

Chaplin decided that he would use his new independence to fulfil an old ambition: he would make a serious dramatic film. He had already moved in that direction with The Kid, of course, and the unfinished Essanay picture Work was clearly a good deal more sombre than the general run of comedy at that time. In 1917 he had made another move towards drama when he attempted to buy the film rights to Hall Caine’s play The Prodigal Son, in which he saw a strong serious role for himself.

Moreover, he was concerned to launch Edna in an independent starring role. Even though they had remained, as he put it, ‘emotionally estranged’, he retained an affectionate concern for her. She was no longer an ideal comic partner. Totheroh remembered that ‘by this time Edna was getting pretty heavy but her little face still had charm in it. And she got to drinking pretty heavy. One day we were looking at rushes and Charlie could see it.’ Chaplin tried to think of suitably mature roles. He considered an adaptation of The Trojan Women, then considered casting Edna as Josephine to his own Napoleon – a role which would continue to fascinate him. The idea for A Woman of Paris came to him as a result of his meetings with the notorious Peggy Hopkins Joyce. The term ‘gold digger’ was coined in honour of Peggy around 1920. Born Margaret Upton in Virginia, she arrived in Chicago at the time of the First World War, changed her name to Hopkins, and landed her first millionaire husband, Stanley Joyce. Divorced and with a million-dollar settlement, she became a Ziegfeld girl, from which strategic launching she went on to net four more millionaire husbands in rapid succession. In 1922, she arrived in Hollywood, bent on a film career.

Marshall Neilan found himself threatened with the prospect of directing Peggy’s first picture. Neilan was a colourful and erratic Hollywood figure. Born in 1891, he had left school at eleven, drifted into films as an actor, and seen service at Biograph Studios as D. W. Griffith’s chauffeur. He graduated to directing and by the age of twenty-six he was Mary Pickford’s favourite director. In addition, Neilan was one of Hollywood’s most dashing playboys, but his high living and marathon drinking bouts cut short his career. Temperamentally he was probably well matched to Peggy, but professionally he recognized the hazards of trying to turn her into an actress. There may well have been some ulterior motive when he brought her on a visit to the Chaplin studios one afternoon in the high summer of 1922.

Peggy was at all times a flamboyant dresser, and that afternoon she was weighed down with jewels and exuded costly and exotic perfumes. Faced with a new and highly eligible millionaire divorcé, she determined to impress, and played the lady with a fine excess of airs and graces. Chaplin was amused, not least when the noblesse oblige role collapsed rather suddenly. After an hour or so of liquid hospitality, Neilan said he thought they should be going, and emphasized the fact by playfully slapping Peggy’s bottom. Her dignity thus assaulted, Peggy turned on him with an impressive tirade of profanities. Chaplin was intrigued by this former country girl and self-made woman of the world. For a couple of weeks they were inseparable. They took a trip together to Catalina Island, and Hollywood gossip marked Chaplin as Peggy’s sixth conquest.

But Peggy was soon to recognize that Chaplin was not to be one of her more profitable ventures and moved on to more promising quarry in the shape of the young Irving Thalberg. It was Chaplin who gained from the liaison, which he was to describe as ‘bizarre but brief’. Peggy had given him the idea for his next film. During their meetings she had regaled Chaplin with her colourful reminiscences. She had described her affair with the rich and famous Parisian publisher and man-about-town, Henri Letellier, whom Chaplin had met during his European trip the previous year. She told him also about a young man who had committed suicide out of desperate love for her, giving her the excuse for some very stylish mourning outfits. He was no less amused by her protestations that she was really a simple girl at heart, and desired only a home and babies.

A story based on Peggy’s Parisian encounters had the added attraction of the setting. Paris had intrigued Chaplin since he first went there with the Karno company. Even at Mutual he had talked of a story set in the Bohemian quarter of Paris: The Immigrant was originally set there. For weeks Chaplin wrestled with the story, for which he chose the working title, Destiny. Many pages of notes survive from this stage, ranging from sketchy memoranda scribbled on the backs of Western Union telegraph forms to elaborate directions for the sets that would be required. These notes reveal the way that Chaplin built his story, elaborating and eliminating, inventing and refining, developing complex emotional situations and then analysing them in order to isolate an essence that could be expressed by visual means. A Woman of Paris was to represent a very distinct and conscious stage in his development. Through eight years of film work he had discovered and developed his ability to reveal the inner workings of the mind and heart through external signs. In his new film he wanted to explore the limits of that expressiveness – the range, subtlety and sophistication of the sentiments and motives that could be revealed in pictures.

In the earliest stages of the story development the characters are called Peggy and Letellier, and it seems likely that some incidents in the first versions of the plot are just as Peggy related them. As the characters became more and more Chaplin’s own creatures, though, they acquired fictional names – at first, Marie Arnette and Poiret; later, and definitively, Marie St Clair and Pierre Revel. It is interesting, however, that much later, as the identification of the role and the character becomes more important, the notes frequently refer to them by the players’ names, Edna and [Adolphe] Menjou.

Chaplin possessed the gift of judicious selection. Here, as always in the preparatory stages of his films, the notes show him exploring a great mass of ideas and incidents, and then eliminating and paring them away to arrive at a coherent storyline. Although at this stage the plot remained unclear, the tone of irony that was to characterize the film was already marked, as suggestions for incidents and details show:

Peggy wants marriage and kids. Let. gives her elaborate doll …

Mentions fact. ‘If we were only married.’ He laughs at it …

Girl tells Let. she is going to leave him – He laughs at it – But humours her – Tells her that she will be back – She emotional about ‘Goodbyes’ – Goes home starts to send back jewellery. Then keeps it.¹

In outline the final plot could serve any old melodrama, and in other hands it might well have been no more. Marie lives with her tyrannical father in a French village. Her boyfriend Jean helps her escape from the house for an evening, but on their return her father will not let her in. Nor will Jean’s father allow her to remain in his house. Marie and Jean decide to elope to Paris, but Jean fails to arrive for the rendezvous at the station: his father has died suddenly of a stroke. Marie sets off for Paris alone …

A year later, Marie St Clair is the glittering but disenchanted mistress of a rich man-about-town, Pierre Revel. By chance she meets Jean, who has come to Paris with his mother and is now a struggling artist. Marie commissions him to paint her portrait. They fall in love once again, and Jean proposes marriage. Marie decides to leave Pierre but then overhears the weak-willed Jean reassuring his possessive mother that his proposal of marriage is not serious. Marie returns to Pierre and refuses to see the now distraught and remorseful Jean, who, in despair, shoots himself. His mother sets out with his gun to avenge herself on Marie, but is touched when she finds the disconsolate girl weeping over the body of Jean. The two women are reconciled.

Chaplin agonized week after week before finding an ending he was happy with. It turned out to be an ironic anti-climax: Marie and the mother of Jean have together found redemption and consolation in the service of others – raising orphans in a country home. In the final shot, Marie is cheerfully riding with her charges on the back of a hay cart. A limousine flashes by. Inside it, Pierre Revel’s secretary asks him, ‘By the way, whatever happened to Marie St Clair?’ Pierre shrugs with indifference.

Chaplin’s instructions to his designer, Arthur Stibolt, for the sets show that even when this story line was worked out Chaplin had ideas for elaborations and other scenes that were not, finally, to be filmed. He asked for a race track, for an art gallery and a jewellery store. He proposed that they should rent facilities at Universal Studios for scenes of a church and church bazaar, and a poor hotel. A whole group of Canadian settings relates to one of several alternative endings considered for the film. Chaplin asked Stibolt to provide exteriors of a Canadian street, a railway station, a hospital and a preacher’s house and interiors of the same preacher’s house.

Chaplin’s instructions show his concern for the sets and their relationship to the characters. Edna’s Parisian apartment must be ‘elaborate and costly looking’. Letellier’s house ‘must be beautiful … every means must be taken to make this set very elaborate and still in good taste’. The café was ‘supposed to be the most expensive café in Paris’. Of the boy’s Parisian studio apartment, ‘while it is not a “poor” set it should get over the atmosphere of the Latin Quarter … It must be artistically furnished, so make preparations for this in your construction … this set is not elaborate but must be comfortable and suggest the home of an artist in Paris who is fairly successful.’ (In the final version, Jean was shown as being poor.) The jewellery store, Chaplin suggested, might be shot on actual location, perhaps at Nordlingers jewellery shop. At this point his idea was to match up the studio sets with locations which he would film in Paris:

FRENCH EXTERIORS

Entrance to First Café

Driving away to Theatre

Driving to Jazz Café

Driving home in front of church

In front of Edna’s Apt.

Front of Boy’s Studio

Front of Menjou Home

Front of Menjou Office

Along Seine (Boy’s Scene)

Streets for driving

Streets for driving

For A Woman of Paris, Chaplin hired four young assistants, each of whom was soon afterwards to become a capable director in his own right. Edward Sutherland already knew Chaplin socially and had just written off his chances of making good as an actor when he met Chaplin in a restaurant.

He said, ‘What are you doing, Eddie?’

I said, ‘Well, I just changed my life.’

He said, ‘What are you going to do?’

I said, ‘I’m going to be your assistant.’

He said, ‘You are?’

I said, ‘Yes, I want to be your assistant, Charlie.’

He said, ‘Why?’

I said, ‘Well, I admire you greatly, and I want to be a director, and I think the best way I can do that is to study under you.’

He said, ‘Well, we might be able to fix it. How much money are you getting?’

I told him the largest amount, $500.

He said, ‘Oh, I couldn’t pay anything like that.’

I said, ‘I don’t care what you pay me as long as I get the job.’

Charlie was very frugal. He had a great fear of poverty.²

Sutherland, who was briefly married to Louise Brooks, was later responsible for two of the best W. C. Fields comedies, It’s The Old Army Game and Poppy. A second American assistant, Monta Bell, who had helped Chaplin with his book My Trip Abroad, was to become a prolific director and supervisor of Paramount’s sound studios in New York. Among his most notable films was The Torrent, Greta Garbo’s first American picture.

Two young Frenchmen were engaged as research assistants, to ensure the correct Parisian atmosphere. Comte Jean de Limur had arrived in Hollywood after war service as a flyer to try his luck as an actor, and played in Fairbanks’s The Three Musketeers. After A Woman of Paris he worked as assistant to Cecil B. DeMille and Rex Ingram before becoming a director in his own right. Two early sound films in which he directed Jeanne Eagels, The Letter and Jealousy, were supervised by Monta Bell: there was clearly a camaraderie of Chaplin alumni. Back in France, de Limur’s work included co-direction with G. W. Pabst on Don Quixote.

The second French assistant, Henri d’Abbadie d’Arrast, was born in Argentina in 1897 and trained as an architect. For many years after A Woman of Paris he retained the friendship of Chaplin, who was attracted by his sharp intelligence and amused by his volatile and irascible temperament. Irascibility in the end limited his career as a director in Hollywood, which was a pity because he made a group of films distinguished by wit that still glitters; they include two of Adolphe Menjou’s best silent films, Service for Ladies and A Gentleman of Paris.

These two young consultants competed fiercely to assert who was the more expert on taste and other matters Parisian. They seldom agreed on anything, as Menjou recalled:

One day Chaplin decided that he wanted some rare dish to be served and discussed in a dinner scene. The technical experts racked their minds to remember some of the exotic and expensive dishes served in Parisian restaurants. Finally one of them had an inspiration – truffle soup with champagne! The second expert refused to sanction such a dish. He had eaten at the best restaurants in Paris but never once had he been served such a potage as truffle soup!

But expert number one only curled his lip. ‘You have probably failed to dine at the finest restaurant of all,’ he replied. ‘It is a very small place where a very select clientele is allowed to dine by invitation only. It is called La Truffe d’Or and it is the one place in the world where they serve truffle soup with champagne.’

Expert number two was sure he was being out-experted by sheer imagination, but despite his protests, Chaplin decided that he liked the idea of truffle soup with champagne and ordered the prop man to prepare such a dish. The prop man was slumped. He didn’t even know what a truffle was. He refused to admit his ignorance, however, and called up several chefs in the town’s best restaurants to try to get a special order of truffle soup. But there were no truffles in all Los Angeles nor was there a chef who would attempt to make imitation truffle soup.

Prop men are always ingenious, however, so we ended up with a horrible concoction that looked like clear soup with several withered objects floating in it. They might even have been truffles, but they were probably some sort of deadly fungi grown in the shade of a nux vomica tree. No one ever had nerve enough to taste the truffle soup with champagne, but it was in the picture.³

A new employee at the studio was Jim Tully, who was to become a celebrity a year later as the ‘hobo’ author of Beggars of Life (1924).⁴ Edward Sutherland remembered that:

Jim always thought of himself as kind of an American Gorki. He was an awfully nice man, but having taken an awful beating in his youth, never quite got over the inferiority that this gave him, in spite of the fact that he wrote powerfully. It has been said, I think with some degree of truth, that his subject matter was never up to his talent. He was having an awful time, and Charlie gave him fifty bucks a week so he could eat, and gave him an office at the studio, really to do nothing, just to give him a chance to write … There were always people coming in and out, on jobs. Charlie was supposed to be very tough with a buck, but he was always befriending anybody who was really in trouble.⁵

The entourage for A Woman of Paris included an artist who was kept on the payroll for most of the film simply to provide the painting of Edna which was to figure in the plot, but he never actually came up with a usable likeness.

In the end, the film did not make a great star of Edna; in fact it virtually marked the end of her career. Her role as sophisticated woman of the world destroyed her old image for the public without giving her a new one. It was, however, a milestone for Adolphe Menjou, whom Chaplin chose for the role of Pierre Revel. The son of a French-born restaurateur and his Irish wife, Menjou had been acting in films since 1912, but it was only after his return from the war that he began to establish himself as a character actor. He played Louis XIII in Fairbanks’s The Three Musketeers, the confidant of Rudolph Valentine in The Sheik, and was undergoing the colourful experience of playing alongside Pola Negri in Bella Donna when he heard rumours that Chaplin was preparing A Woman of Paris. He seemed destined for the part. During Chaplin’s brief liaison with Peggy Hopkins Joyce, Peggy had pointed Menjou out to him in a restaurant as having the Parisian style of Henri Letellier. Menjou was friendly with both Sutherland and Bell, each of whom recommended him to Chaplin. For his own part, Menjou was especially attracted to the job after Bell had told him that the character ‘goes all through the story, and you know what that means on a Chaplin picture. You will have a steady job for months and months.’

Bell warned Menjou that there were other candidates for the part but Menjou was determined to have it, and prepared his strategy with care. He discovered that Chaplin was in the habit of lunching on Hollywood Boulevard, at Armstrong-Carlton’s or at Musso and Frank’s. Menjou made a point of arriving for lunch at the same restaurant and the same time as Chaplin, always wearing an elegant outfit he reckoned would give the impression of a boulevardier – morning suit, cutaway, hunting tweeds with Alpine hat, white flannels, white tie and tails. This in itself did not surprise anyone: Hollywood restaurants at lunchtime were regularly filled with movie actors in make-up and costume. It was more conspicuous when he asked a nonplussed waiter, loud enough for Chaplin to hear, for fresh escargots in white wine sauce. Either this play-acting or a reel of a Menjou film which Sutherland showed him persuaded Chaplin to interview Menjou. This in itself was unusual: Chaplin usually hated to interview actors because he felt so bad afterwards if he could not give them the job. He found Menjou perfect for the part but was somewhat startled by his salary demands, as Sutherland recalled:

Chaplin had never paid more than $250 a week in his life, but Mr Menjou insisted on $500 or no contract, and he would not budge an inch, and Charlie finally, reluctantly, gave in. It nearly killed all of us.

We were supposed to start this on a certain date, and time marched on. I had given Menjou a starting date three months hence – perfectly safe to my opinion or anybody’s opinion – but we didn’t start for another month after that. Menjou came around and said, ‘I’m ready,’ and I said, ‘Well, we’re not.’

He said, ‘I’ve got to have my money.’

‘Oh, no, no …’

Not an inch would he budge. He had the courage of a lion. We had to pay him, and it’s a good thing we did, because it got us started eventually.⁶

Menjou also remembered the incident vividly:

When I think of it now, my brassiness frightens me. There I was quibbling about a week’s salary and my career was hanging in the balance. But Sutherland went to Chaplin and told him what I had said. According to Eddie, Chaplin called me some very unpleasant names, but finally ordered a voucher sent through for my salary. Every week I went down and drew my pay cheque, even though I was not called to work until January 11.⁷

It was still quite usual at that time for actors to provide their own wardrobe, so Menjou spent the interim with his tailors. Chaplin was planning a scene on a racecourse, so Menjou ordered an expensive grey cutaway and topper. He was greatly irked when it was not used, and three years later had a racetrack scene written into one of his pictures just so that he could use the outfit. He also spent half of one week’s salary on an opera cloak which was not required in the end.

Shooting began on 27 November 1922, and continued for seven months. Even in this elaborate feature Chaplin worked without a script, a fact which surprised commentators at the time. In fact, by the time he came to shoot the film, the scenario, worked out over the preceding months in masses of notes, was so precise in Chaplin’s mind that a normal screenplay would have been superfluous, even a distraction. This method of working demanded a very careful documentation of the shooting continuity, and this has survived. It shows that Chaplin, once on the set, worked with confidence and precision. There was nothing tentative or improvisational about the shooting. In a few scenes he shot variants of the action, so that in editing he could select the most effective version. Though he filmed many takes to get a particular shot right, there was very little outright wastage: only three minor scenes were actually shot but not used. ‘Charlie shot pictures as we went along,’ said Sutherland.

We had a basic idea of the story, then we would do the incident every day. We’d shoot for three or four days, then lay off for two weeks and rewrite and perfect it and rehearse it and rarefy it. Charlie had the patience of Job. Nothing is too much trouble. A real perfectionist.

With this basis of working, it took us about a year to shoot the picture, because Charlie had another theory that he really believed. He said, ‘I shoot a sequence and if I’m not completely happy with it, I shoot it over the next day. That only puts me one day behind schedule.’ Well, he didn’t figure it put him one day behind schedule every day. That’s the way he worked and that’s the way he did good pictures, because he could afford to and he was a great perfectionist.⁸

On one occasion after watching the daily rushes Chaplin expressed himself satisfied with one of Menjou’s scenes but asked the actor how he liked it. ‘I think I can do better,’ Menjou replied. ‘Great!’ said Chaplin. ‘Let’s go!’ and the rest of the day was spent reshooting the scene.

Chaplin’s favoured method was to shoot his film in the exact order of the story. It was a method as singular (because so costly) in 1922 as it would be now. Thus the very first scene shot was the opening scene of the finished film: a long-shot of the house in the French village where Edna lives, and Edna herself looking out of the window of the bedroom where her stern father has locked her in to prevent her seeing her boyfriend Jean.

The brief sequence in the railway station, which has a place in film history, was filmed between 11 p. m. and 6 a. m. on the night of 29/30 November. The innovation which aroused so much admiring comment when the film appeared was in fact dictated by economy. The scene required Marie to stand on the station as the fateful train for Paris arrives. In order to save the trouble and expense of simulating a French train, Rollie Totheroh simply cut apertures to represent the windows of a train in a ten-foot piece of board, then drew it across the front of a powerful spotlight. The light cast upon Marie’s face appeared like the reflection from the lights of a moving train. The effect was done in eight takes.

In this scene Chaplin made a brief appearance as a clumsy porter, heavily disguised and muffled up. He was not listed as an actor on the credit titles of the film, and in fact he prefaced the film with a sub-title emphasizing that he did not appear. Nevertheless audiences found the scene so funny, according to Menjou, that it was necessary to abbreviate it so as not to destroy the mood of the film. Even in its cut form, one reviewer of the time picked it out:

People laugh at an incident which may occupy three seconds. A baggage smasher enters with a trunk, drops it, and goes out. It is the simplest, unexaggerated incident of a station platform. Its effectiveness is so great as to suggest that the comedian himself was the baggage smasher, although he announces that he took no part in the play. Possibly not, but he knew how to get that baggage smasher to drop a trunk, get a laugh, and be out of it in three seconds.⁹

For four more months the work went on, creating the story, scene after scene, in the exact order in which it would appear on the screen. As the plot progressed to deal with the relationship between Revel and Marie, Chaplin demanded an altogether new style of acting from his players. Adolphe Menjou was never to forget what he learnt from Chaplin at that time:

Not until we started shooting did I begin to realize that we were making a novel and exciting picture. It was Chaplin’s genius that transformed the very ordinary story. Aside from his own great talent as an actor he had the ability to inspire other actors to perform their best. Within a few days I realized that I was going to learn more about acting from Chaplin than I had ever learned from any director. He had one wonderful, unforgettable line that he kept repeating over and over throughout the picture. ‘Don’t sell it!’ he would say. ‘Remember, they’re peeking at you.’

It was a colourful and concise way to sum up the difference between the legitimate stage and the movies – a reminder that in pictures, when one has an important emotion or thought to express, the camera moves up to his face and there he is on the screen with a head that measures six feet from brow to chin. The audience is peeking at him under a microscope, so he can’t start playing to the gallery 200 feet away, because there is no gallery in a movie theatre; the audience is sitting in his lap.

From my early days in movies I had been schooled in the exaggerated gestures and reactions that were thought necessary to tell a story in pantomime. But when I, or any other actor, would give out with one of those big takes, Chaplin would just shake his head and say, ‘They’re peeking at you.’ That did it. I knew that I had just cut myself a large slice of ham and had tossed the scene out of the window.

Since then I have never played a scene before a camera without thinking to myself, ‘They’re peeking at you; don’t sock it.’

Another pet line of Chaplin’s was, ‘Think the scene! I don’t care what you do with your hands or your feet. If you think the scene, it will get over.’

And we had to keep shooting every scene until we were thinking it – until we believed it and were playing it with our brains and not just with our hands or our feet or our eyebrows.¹⁰

The novel style and the expressive restraint which Chaplin sought from his actors was not achieved without pain. Two days and ninety takes were necessary to get the right reactions in a tiny scene, in which Marie, bored, throws down her cigarette and says she will not go out.

Menjou also remembered with mixed feelings shooting a scene with Edna in which they were required to kiss. Menjou had to express passion and yet make it clear that he was not in love with Marie; Edna had to show that the kiss was not objectionable to her, but that she was unhappy and bored. ‘It was like engraving the Constitution on the head of a pin – much to be told in a very confined space. To achieve this required so many takes that affectionate proximity to Edna had lost all its charm.’ Yet ‘it was remarkable how much Chaplin made us tell with just a look, a gesture, a lifted eyebrow’.¹¹

Sometimes things went easily. Seen today, the finest moment of Edna’s impeccable performance is a scene in which her girlfriends, too gleefully, show her a magazine with an announcement that Revel is to marry a rich heiress. She laughs it off and only the nervy irregularity with which she taps her cigarette indicates the emotion she is repressing. This scene, which seems as remarkable on every re-viewing, was swiftly shot in half a dozen takes at the end of a February afternoon.

The new style of acting which Chaplin demanded was easier for the younger artists than for older and more seasoned performers. For the role of Jean’s mother Chaplin cast Lydia Knott, who, though she was at the time only forty-eight years old, had made a speciality of playing sweet old ladies ever since her entry into films in 1917. She remained a very busy character player into the 1930s. Sutherland recalled:

She was a beautiful Madonna-faced old lady with a will of steel. We had a scene where she found out that Carl Miller, her son, was killed, and the Sûreté was asking her the normal questions: ‘What was his name?’, ‘Age?’ etc. We wanted a complete, dead, no-reaction from her – wanted the audience to supply the emotion, not the actress. I can’t tell you how many times we shot it, and she would always do it feeling sorry for herself and smiling sweetly. I don’t know how many times we shot it, then finally Charlie determined to get it the way he wanted it – and we were all with him – and he shot it 110 times, and then said ‘You shoot it for a while’ so I shot it about 100 times, and finally the old lady got so angry that she swore at us and just went through this scene in such a temper that we got it. And I venture to say we shot that scene 500 times. I don’t know how many days it took us, about a week, to get that one reaction. I would think that took the record for retakes. In dollars and cents I don’t know whether that pays off, but certainly in quality it did.¹²

Sutherland somewhat exaggerated the number of takes; in fact Chaplin shot the scene thirty-nine times on Friday, 4 May, then brought Miss Knott back on Saturday morning for forty-one more takes. For a single brief shot, however, eighty takes is a lot. And Chaplin was not satisfied even then: fifty years later he still shuddered at Lydia Knott’s over-acting whenever he saw A Woman of Paris.

Non-professional actors could be much more malleable. One of the most memorable figures in A Woman of Paris is the stony-faced lady who gives Edna a massage, as Edna’s demi-mondaine friends (played by Betty Morrissey and Malvina Polo) discuss the latest gossip with her. The camera rises to the face and upper half of the masseuse. From the movement of her arms we can sense which portion of Edna’s voluptuous body is receiving attention; her face is set in perpetual disapproval, impassive yet all too evidently soaking in the gossip like blotting paper. The lady was not an actress at all but the studio secretary, Nellie Bly Baker, yet the set of her features and every move is exactly Chaplin; he had schooled her to a perfect imitation. Like little Jackie Coogan, Nellie Bly Baker provided Chaplin with the material most ideal for his purposes: actors through whom he could convey his own performance vicariously. Nellie’s performance made such an impression that she left her work at the studio to become a character actress in a few films for other directors.

Chaplin’s comedy had always been built upon visual suggestion, metaphor, simile. In the comedies an alarm clock could become a can of rancid fish, a cow’s tail a pump handle, or a man a bird. Adolphe Menjou described how he extended his range of visual symbolism to meet the needs of drama.

Because of the censorship boards in various states Chaplin had to indicate [the relationship between Pierre Revel and Marie] in a way that would not be obvious or offensive. He accomplished it in a manner that was, at that time, amazingly subtle.

This is the way the scene was developed: Revel came to the girl’s luxurious apartment and was admitted by a maid. The audience had no idea who or what this man was in her life. Apparently he was just an admirer calling to take her out to dinner. Chaplin wanted to find some casual piece of business that would suddenly reveal that Revel was a frequent and privileged caller. A good many devices were discussed. First Chaplin had me pick up a pipe from the table and light it, but that was no good because Revel was not the pipe-smoking type. Then he considered having the maid bring me a pair of slippers, but that was out of key because I had called to take Marie out to dinner.

Finally Chaplin thought of the handkerchief business, which solved the problem. I went to a liquor cabinet, took out a bottle of sherry and poured a drink, then sipped it. But when I started to take a handkerchief from my pocket I discovered that I had none, so I turned casually and walked into the bedroom. Edna was at her dressing table, fully dressed but still fussing with her coiffure. I didn’t look at her and she paid no attention to me as I crossed to a chiffonier. There I opened a top drawer and took out a large gentleman’s handkerchief, put it in my pocket, and walked out. Immediately the relationship was established: we were living together and had been for some time.

It happened that when Chaplin thought of this piece of business, the property man had not dressed the drawers of the chiffonier because he didn’t know that they would be used. So I went to my dressing room and brought back several handkerchiefs and one of my dress collars and it fell out of the drawer. This gave Charlie an idea for a later scene in which the maid accidentally dropped a collar and thus disclosed to the girl’s former sweetheart that she was living with Revel.

Little touches like this gave the picture a flavour that was new to picture making.¹³

Right up until the beginning of June 1923 Chaplin was still puzzling over how to end the film. He considered letting Marie marry Revel, or alternatively having her return to the village to nurse her now widowed and failing mother. There are notes for a version in which she emigrates to America, and for another where she goes to Canada and devotes herself to Christian works. He considered a railway accident which would give Marie the opportunity to redeem herself by heroism. Both Sutherland and Menjou remembered with unseemly glee a day when Chaplin arrived at the studio with a new solution: Marie should give up Revel to consecrate herself to a life of penance as a nurse in a leper colony. Chaplin all too accurately sensed the adverse reactions of Bell, Sutherland, Menjou and others of his entourage. Huffily he left the studio and stayed away for several days. When he returned the leper colony was forgotten.

Even without the mute distaste of his collaborators, Chaplin, with his gift for selection, rejection and simplification, would undoubtedly have seen the faults of his solution fairly quickly. It is illuminating to see how the eventual swift, ironic ending of the film was refined out of a much more elaborate sequence in which Revel was to seek out Marie in her country retreat. Revel was to propose marriage; Marie was to refuse:

‘You know where you can find me. I shall always love you. Goodbye.’ They shake hands and look into each other’s eyes and the souls of both of them are in that look. Menjou then gets into the car and drives off in the direction he had come, passing on the way a rustic looking farm cart carrying several workers from the fields, one of them playing an accordion and the rest singing a homely folk song to the accompaniment.

Edna looks after Menjou’s car and as the farm cart comes abreast the kiddie begs to ride back to the picnic grounds. The workers also urge it and Edna, lifting the kid on the cart, gets on it herself and they drive down the road to the tune of the worker’s song as Menjou and his fancy car pass out of the picture in the other direction.¹⁴

By avoiding a sentimental reunion of Marie and Pierre in favour of a scene in which two very different vehicles carry the pair to their separate destinies, Chaplin encapsulated the essence of the scene.

Unusually intelligent and perceptive men themselves, both Sutherland and Menjou were impressed by Chaplin’s talent for selection:

Chaplin listened to everybody’s ideas and evaluated them with an unerring instinct for those that were good. He had no academic knowledge of proper dramatic structure, only an innate comprehension of good theatre and how to portray either simple or complex ideas in pantomime without the aid of dialogue or subtitles. I remember hearing him say in an argument about a certain scene, ‘I don’t know why I’m right about the scene. I just know I’m right.’ And it was true.¹⁵

‘While Chaplin is supposed to be a great intellectual,’ said Sutherland, ‘(this will make him furious if he ever hears it) I think that Charlie’s intellect is mostly emotion. I think his instincts are magnificent, and I think his knowledge is perception, feeling, rather than anything else …’¹⁶

The daily studio staff conferences, with their interchange of ideas, were important to Chaplin’s creative activity, but they were not always fruitful. On one occasion they sat for hours trying to decide whether the better sub-title for the gigolo scene would be ‘Who is it?’ or ‘Who is he?’ When everyone was beginning to think that perfectionism could be taken too far, the conference was brought to an end by appearance of an Airedale dog which Chaplin kept at the studio. It listened for a while with its head cocked on one side, and then vomited on the floor.

Nor was Chaplin always right, particularly towards the end of shooting when nerves became frayed. One day the unit was filming exteriors near Westlake Park (of Keystone days) when it was recognized that in shooting a scene of two actors walking past a building Chaplin was breaking the basic, practical rule that you must never cut to a reverse shot of an actor or group of actors crossing the screen, since it reverses the direction of the action, changes the background and generally confuses the viewer. Sutherland pointed out the error to Chaplin, who was embarrassed to be corrected in front of bystanders and rebuked his critic so forcefully that Sutherland instantly threatened to quit. Next day the rushes revealed the mistake all too clearly, and the chastened Chaplin had to go out and shoot the scenes again. On another occasion, even the gentle Rollie rebelled when Chaplin, in a mood of irritation, insisted that some shots were out of focus when they were quite clearly not. ‘Well, if you can say that is lousy, you’d better get yourself another boy,’ Rollie told him. ‘I will,’ replied Chaplin, and Rollie stormed off.

The next morning I was sitting on the bench and instead of Charlie driving in through the gates the way he always did, he came into his office through the screen door and I was sitting on the bench outside. He motioned me to come down to him and he turned around and put his behind up in the air and said, ‘Kick me in the ass, Rollie.’ And I did. And he said, ‘You know, I wanted to take that shot over anyhow.’¹⁷

His moods were legendary. The regular studio staff insisted that they knew his mood at once from the colour of the suit he was wearing, and would telephone his home to find out from the valet what clothes he had put on that morning. His green suit was notorious. ‘Every time he wore it all hell broke loose,’ said Sutherland. The blue suit with pin stripes portended a jovial, productive day. The grey suit was in between, ‘so we would feel our way for a while until a definite mood developed’. As Menjou recalled,

One or two of the staff had this suit-to-match-the-mood theory developed to a very fine degree. I think they were exaggerating; the only thing I noticed about Charlie’s wardrobe was that it was deplorable. His clothes did not fit properly and there was no style to the way he wore them. I inquired one day who his tailor was, thinking that I would take great pains to avoid the fellow. To my horror Charlie confessed that he had no tailor, that he hated tailors. He had never had a tailored suit in his life!¹⁸

Chaplin explained that he could not bear to waste time being fitted, so just walked into a good men’s store and ordered half a dozen ready-made suits for convenience. ‘I believe him. He looked terrible in his clothes. That was a long time ago. Since then he has outgrown this attitude.’¹⁹

The final scene of the film, with Revel and his secretary speeding down the country road, was shot on Monday, 25 June. The editing was completed one year, one month and fourteen days after Chaplin had first begun work on the scenario. He had shot a total of 3,862 takes, amounting to 130,115 feet, which were reduced in the finished film to 7,557 feet. The total cost of the production was $351,853.

In the course of production, the title had changed from Destiny to Public Opinion. Alternative titles considered before the choice eventually fell on A Woman of Paris included Melody of Life, The Joy Route, Social Customs, Human Nature, Love, Ladies and Life and The Stars Incline. Chaplin prefaced the film with a sub-title which might have been the motto of many of his films: ‘The world is not composed of heroes and villains, but of men and women with all the passions that God has given them. The ignorant condemn but the wise pity.’

The première on 26 September 1923 was the opening attraction of the Criterion Theatre on Grand Avenue and 7th Street in Hollywood. ‘The most aristocratic showplace in Hollywood’, the theatre had been decorated and furnished without regard to cost. ‘The inside resembles a Byzantine jewel box. Walls of antique stone in colours of gray and silver, with bolder hues like mellow sunlight caught without.’²⁰ The première was one of the most glittering occasions of the era. The guests included Fairbanks, Pickford, Irving Thalberg, the DeMilles, Will Rogers and most of the other ruling stars of Hollywood as well as the Mayor, fire chief and civic dignitaries of Los Angeles. Old acquaintances of the star included Mack Sennett, Mabel Normand, Jackie Coogan and Mildred Harris. The musical accompaniment was conducted by Adolf Tandler, former director of the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra; and Chaplin had himself devised a special live mimed prologue entitled Nocturne. Menjou was convinced of the film’s success when he heard loud stage whispers of ‘Wonderful! Terrific!’ from the Irish-born director Herbert Brenon, and when outside the theatre Harold Lloyd, whom he had never met, clasped his hands above his head in a congratulatory handshake and grinned his compliments across the heads of the crowd that separated them.

Chaplin and Edna did not attend the première: they were already on the train for New York, where the film was to be premièred at the Lyric Theatre on 1 October. For that show Chaplin had written a special programme note which revealed his growing anxiety about the public’s reaction to the film: it was certainly not his usual style to ask for comments from his audiences:

No doubt while you are waiting I can have a little heart to heart talk with you. I’ve been thinking that the public wants a little more realism in pictures, whereby a story is pursued to the logical ending. I would like to get your ideas on the subject, for I am sure that those of us who are producing pictures do not know – we only guess.

In my first serious drama, A Woman of Paris, I’ve striven for realism, true to life. What you will see is life as I personally see it – the beauty – the sadness – the touches – the gaiety, all of which are necessary to make life interesting. However, it is not for me to say that I am right. My first thoughts have been to entertain you. The story is intimate, simple and human, presenting a problem as old as the ages – showing it with as much truth as I am allowed to put into it – giving it a treatment as near realism as I have been able to devise.

I do not wish that A Woman of Paris should appear as a preachment, nor am I expounding a sort of philosophy, unless it be an appeal for a better understanding of human frailties.

After all, you are the judge, and your taste must be served. To some it may look as though I have not taken full advantage of dramatic possibilities, while others may see good taste in the strength of repression, and by your reception will I guide myself in the future.

I was over seven months making A Woman of Paris and I enjoyed every moment of the time. However, if I have failed in my effort to entertain you, I feel it will be my loss. Nevertheless I enjoyed making it, and sincerely hope you will enjoy seeing it.

Sincerely,
Charles Chaplin²¹

Few films have ever enjoyed such unanimous enthusiasm from critics. Chaplin was freely compared to Hardy, to de Maupassant and to Ibsen, though generally they thought him a good deal better than Ibsen because, having long demonstrated that comedy is never far removed from tragedy, Chaplin now showed that tragedy could have its share of gaiety. Robert Sherwood wrote in the New York Herald:

There is more real genius in Charles Chaplin’s A Woman of Paris than in any picture I have ever seen … Charles Chaplin has proved many times that he understands humanity; he has leavened his hilariously broad comedy with elements of poignant tragedy. He has caught and conveyed the contrast between joy and sorrow which makes existence on this terrestrial ball as interesting as it is.

The critic of Exceptional Photoplays wrote that

Mr Chaplin … has not done anything radical or anything esoteric. He has merely used his intelligence in the highest degree, an act which has ceased to be expected of motion picture people for many years. He has written and directed a story in which all the characters act upon motives which the spectator immediately recognizes as natural and sincere, and therefore A Woman of Paris breathes an atmosphere of reality, and thereby holds the attention of any perceptive audience in thrall …

A Woman of Paris has the one quality almost every other motion picture that has been made to date lacks – restraint. The acting is moving without ever being fierce, the story is simple and realistic without ever being inane, the settings are pleasing and adequate without ever being colossally stupid. The result is a picture of dignity and intelligence and the effect is startling because it is so unusual.

When the film reached Britain, the critic of the Manchester Guardian called it ‘the greatest modern story that the screen has yet seen … He has had the courage to throw the sum total of screen convention on the scrap heap.’

As most critics pointed out, there was nothing very new about the plot: when Chaplin first recounted it to Menjou, he thought it ‘a trite bit of schmaltz’. What made it so startling for audiences of its own time was the novelty of its characters, who observed none of the rules of screen drama. The heroine was no better than she should be; the villain was likeable, charming, generous and considerate; the hero was a mother-dominated weakling; and all the tragedy was precipitated by the folly, blindness and selfishness of parents – who as a class the screen had hitherto held in superstitious reverence.

After so many decades it is difficult to appreciate the novelty and surprise felt at Chaplin’s new methods of story-telling, new style of acting and new sophistication of the expressive means of pantomime; his innovations were all rapidly assimilated to become part of the common practice of film craft. Chaplin’s own approach to his discoveries, too, had been so simple in its logic: ‘As I have noticed life in its dramatic climaxes,’ he told an interviewer in New York, ‘men and women try to hide their emotions rather than seek to express them. And that is the method I have pursued in an endeavour to become as realistic as possible.’

Inaugurating a whole new style of comedy of manners, A Woman of Paris opened the way for the director Ernst Lubitsch, who confessed himself overwhelmed by the film, which he saw just as he was embarking on his own satirical masterpiece, The Marriage Circle. Moreover, every film-maker studied Chaplin’s discoveries: the future work of Sutherland, Bell, de Limur and d’Arrast all bears the clear mark of their experience with him. Menjou summed up his own impressions:

To him motion pictures were a new art form and required the painstaking care that any art requires. Of course he happened also to be an artist. Everyone who has worked with Chaplin the actor or with Chaplin the director seems to agree on that point, regardless of what he may think of him personally.

The word ‘genius’ is used very carelessly in Hollywood, but when it is said of Chaplin, it is always with a special note of sincerity. If Hollywood has ever produced a genius, Chaplin is certainly first choice.²²

The éclat of the New York première made up for missing the Hollywood gala. Two days afterwards Chaplin made his first radio broadcast, from L. Bamberger’s WOR Studio in Newark, under the sponsorship of the Morning Telegraph. ‘My friends,’ he began, ‘this is all way beyond me. I’m glad you can’t see me – I am nervous as a witch.’ In the course of the broadcast, which lasted half an hour, he told the listeners that he was experimenting with the possibilities of voice on the air. He then played the violin and saxophone and did some impersonations.

On 5 October 1923 he went to hear Lloyd George, the former British Prime Minister, speak at City Hall and was deeply embarrassed when his own presence completely stole the audience’s attention from the great British politician. He even stole the thunder of three bandits who had robbed the jewellery store at the Ritz Carlton, where he was staying: just because he happened to walk through the lobby a few minutes after the crime, it was Chaplin who made the headlines in all the newspapers. On the way back he stopped at Detroit. Here, poor Herbert Hoover, Secretary of Commerce and future President of the United States, who was on the same train, was upstaged and even found difficulty getting someone to carry his bags, so taken up was everyone with the excitement of seeing Chaplin.

Later Chaplin went on the platform with Hoover and the President of the Rockefeller Foundation at the first Annual General Meeting of the American Child Health Association, and gave a message to the children of the nation: ‘Brush your teeth every day so that you’ll always be proud to laugh. And remember that as long as you can laugh you’re happy and happiness means much towards good health.’ The 200 children in the audience needed some convincing that he really was Charlie Chaplin, since they did not recognize him without his moustache and big boots. On another occasion, he received a visit from Henry and Edsel Ford. ‘I have come twenty miles from Dearborn to see you,’ grunted Ford. ‘That’s nothing,’ Chaplin told him, ‘I came all the way from Los Angeles to see you.’²³

The euphoria of the premières, the press and this royal progress was soon to evaporate: the Hollywood run of A Woman of Paris ended after only four weeks. After only a few days, Chaplin’s film was proving to be a failure at the box office and the New York run actually lost money. In Hollywood and London the film barely covered its guarantee. Such a thing had never happened to a Chaplin film before. Ironically, it was probably the enthusiasm of the press that had killed the film. The critics told the public that the picture was great art, but Chaplin’s audience were not interested in him as a great artist: they liked him because he was funny. Moreover, they were clearly not disposed to pay money to see a Chaplin film in which he didn’t appear, except heavily disguised in a walk-on part of two or three seconds. Chaplin’s disappointment was intense and long-lasting. For more than forty years after the arrival of sound films, Chaplin ensured that the film was not distributed at all. He loved A Woman of Paris and was proud of it, and was not inclined to expose himself again to such a snub from his public.

1923 – Programme for first Hollywood run of A Woman of Paris, illustrating the elaborate musical and stage production which characterized the presentation of major films of the period.

To exacerbate the pain there was the activity of the official guardians of the nation’s morals. New York’s Board of Censors approved the film without changes, but in Kansas, where cigarette smoking was regarded with the same horror as Dreiser’s novels²⁴ and bootleg liquor, all scenes that showed people smoking were excised. The Pennsylvania censors, who had a not unreasonable aversion to firearms, cut out the scene of Jean’s suicide, thus confusing the plot somewhat. Ohio achieved most notoriety, as a result of the action taken by the State Director of Education and Head of the Board of Censors, one Vernon M. Riegel. Mr Riegel admitted the artistic merits of the film but regretted that the leading characters behaved in an unacceptable fashion. He therefore set about making them conduct themselves ‘as a lady and gentleman should conduct themselves toward one another’, by cutting out a number of scenes and adding a sub-title to explain that Marie’s opulent style of living in Paris was made possible only by a bequest from a wealthy aunt. Maryland took up the idea, restoring Marie’s respectability by attributing her luxurious accessories to her earnings as a popular actress.

Work on a film ordinarily left Chaplin no time for private life, but the period during the making of A Woman of Paris was exceptional, thanks to the irruption into Hollywood of Pola Negri. Her screen career had flourished in Germany thanks to her association with the director Ernst Lubitsch. Lubitsch’s Madame Dubarry – retitled Passion for America – brought international celebrity and offers from Hollywood. Paramount won her and she arrived in September 1922 to begin work. Immediately she informed the press of her eagerness to be reunited with ‘Sharlee’, whom she had met briefly in Berlin the previous year. As Negri was to recall:

We spent four delightful days together in Berlin on the occasion of his first visit to Germany. I was completely captivated by his gaiety, but as he did not speak more than three words of German and at that time I did not speak more than three words of English, our conversation was rather limited. In fact, I don’t think we thought of love.

But now, as I look back on our meeting, I know that my love for him began on that fateful night at the Palais Heinroth.²⁵

Chaplin, too, admitted:

It began in Berlin, a year and a half ago. I fell in love with Pola the instant I met her and the only reason I didn’t tell her so was because I was too bashful to confess it. I did tell her she was the loveliest lady I had ever met and I’m sure she must have guessed the secret of my heart.

But for nearly a year an ocean separated us – and an ocean is an awful bar to a successful love affair.²⁶

Despite such touching protestations, Chaplin managed to avoid meeting Pola during her first weeks in Hollywood. Later he explained gallantly: ‘I have purposely avoided her when she first arrived in Hollywood for I felt that it would result exactly as it has. Isn’t it strange how we instinctively feel the fate that is about to overtake us!’²⁷

The fateful meeting eventually could be postponed no longer: it took place at the Actors’ Fund Pageant at the Hollywood Ball in October 1922. Pola was playing Cleopatra and Chaplin was conducting the orchestra. Even at this stage he must have been putting off the moment, because, as Pola recalled,

Strangely enough we missed each other at rehearsals – it was not until the actual performance that I saw him wielding his baton. And as I walked toward him I looked into his face.

It was then that I realized that I had been in love with him for more than a year – without being aware of it. I could hardly wait until the pageant was over to see him. And later he confided to me that he had experienced the same feeling at exactly the same time.

Of course, after the performance we met. The following day he called at my home and since then, except when business or social duties prevented, we have been inseparable.

We understand each other perfectly, and I am sure we will be happy. For my Charlie is not only the dearest boy in the world, but the cleverest. He is a genius.²⁸

Chaplin, without much alternative, corroborated Pola’s declarations:

… when I saw Pola in all her glorious beauty as she swept toward me that fateful day of the great pageant I could not resist her any longer. Something I can’t describe surged all over inside of me. I felt like a drowning man – yet excited as I had never been before.

And it was not long before I confessed my love, and, to my happiness and surprise, I learned that Pola felt the same way about me.²⁹

From this time the two stars were indeed inseparable and for the next nine months news and rumours of the on-and-off romance were to delight American newspaper readers and embarrass Chaplin. By the end of November the press were asking him to confirm whether they were going to marry. ‘I can’t say yes,’ he replied cagily; ‘any such announcement must of necessity come from her. Neither can I say no: think of the position that would put her in.’ On 25 January 1923, Jesse Lasky, on behalf of Paramount Studios, announced that there was nothing in Pola’s contract which presented any obstacle to her marrying Chaplin. He did not add that such a marriage would be exceedingly advantageous for the star’s publicity. Three days later, on 28 January, Chaplin and Pola invited the press to the Del Monte Lodge suite of the Countess Domaska (Pola’s title by a marriage just ended by special Vatican dispensation). Chaplin was reported to be looking rather ill when he arrived by train, but Pola was pronounced ‘exquisite … exotic … Her paleness, comparable only to the creamy texture of the leaf of a camellia blossom, contrasted sharply with the vivid crimson of her lips. Happiness burned in her expressive eyes of greenish gray. She was clad in a simple black velvet suit with a vestee of old lace and a black velvet tam.’³⁰

When the press were admitted to Pola’s drawing room, they found her snuggling on the shoulder of Chaplin, whom they described as ‘squirming’ with embarrassment and confusion. He was tongue-tied, but Pola’s volubility made up for that:

‘I am a European woman. I do not understand zee custom but I am – we are – what you say? – Mr Chaplin and I are engaged. We are to be married.’

In these words, Pola, in hesitant and dulcet words, for the first time officially announced the engagement.

Charlie blushed, swallowed hard and affirmed the marriage compact in answer to a little shake and Pola’s question:

‘Eez zat not so, Sharlie?’

‘Sharlie’ gulped. A bridegroom blush swept up to his gray temples. He opened his lips. He was speechless. Another gulp.

‘Yes,’ was his sole historical utterance.

Then Pola buried her face on his shoulder. ‘Sharlie’s’ arm stole protectively about her. The gorgeous diamond on Pola’s ring finger sparkled happily … ³¹

Pola kept on talking. When the press men asked Chaplin when the happy event would take place, he referred the question to his fiancée:

We are to marry – when I do not know. Perhaps after my contract has feenished. Perhaps before. We do not know and have not decided …

We have been engaged for a long time, but we decided to say nossing about it. We felt it was our affair and not zee world’s. But newspaper men have been so-o-o persistent, and since we wanted this one day together without being haunted we decided to tell you so that you could all tell zee people.³²

In fact rumour and speculation were fuelled by the announcement. It was said that the couple had actually married a year before in Europe, and that Pola had signed a telegram ‘Pola Negri Chaplin’. The rumours were denied. Five weeks later ‘zee people’ read that the engagement was broken off and that Pola was prostrate with grief. A newspaper had reported that Chaplin had said that he was ‘too poor to marry just now. This is a workaday world and we’ve all got to stay busy and keep away from the climaxes of sentiment’³³ – which seemed a rather apt description of Pola. Pola countered with much-photographed tears and a typewritten statement declaring that she was ‘too poor to marry Charles Chaplin; he needs a wealthy woman’. In a verbal statement she added, ‘There were a thousand things. It was another experience. I have learned. Now I will live only for my work. As for the rest, the happy days are dead for me. It is all over.’³⁴

Six hours afterwards it was all on again. Chaplin denied that he had said anything of the sort and drove to Pola for a conference of reconciliation. Afterwards, in the small hours of 2 March, Pola told newsmen that she was ‘too happy to sleep’ and that Chaplin had told her ‘he loved me and could not live without me’.

Chaplin corroborated his repentance in an interview with one of the best Hollywood reporters, Karl K. Kitchen. Chaplin’s assessment of Pola’s matrimonial assets and likely domestic virtues might seem, given all the evidence, a trifle exaggerated. His statement is more interesting for his very realistic view of his own ambitions and potential shortcomings as a husband:

I have always wanted to be married, to have a real home, with children. I have wanted this more than anything in the world. And for years I had hoped that I would meet the right woman – a woman with sympathy, understanding, affection and at the same time possessed of beauty, charm and intelligence.

Until I met Pola this ideal woman remained a dream. Today she is a reality.

I can understand my love for Pola, for she is everything I have ever dreamed of. But why she should love me is something I will never understand. I lack the physique, the physical strength that a beautiful woman admires. However, perhaps it is best that I do not question the gifts of the gods.

I will be a difficult husband to live with – for when I am at work I give every ounce of myself to my task. My wife will have to show great understanding – great sympathy. And my wife must trust me – there must be mutual trust, mutual freedom from suspicion, or there can be no happiness. Understanding – that’s the great thing in married life. And that is what Pola and I have in common.³⁵

Chaplin’s assessment of the desiderata and difficulties of marriage was in fact more appropriate to his last and most successful union. It is fascinating, however, to find it stated at this period of his life and strange to find it applied to Pola, who seems not to have been the marrying kind, as Chaplin was to recognize in the course of the succeeding months.

The first disruption in their relationship came with the Marina Varga affair. Marina was a somewhat disturbed young Mexican woman with a desire to go into pictures and an excessive hero-worship of Chaplin. Having run away from her husband in Vera Cruz and crossed the border without papers, disguised as a boy, she presented herself at the studio, where she was sent off by Kono. The same night, however, she managed somehow to make her way to Chaplin’s bedroom and to get into not only his bed but also his pyjamas. She was discovered by Kono while Chaplin and Pola were dining downstairs with Chaplin’s friends and neighbours, Dr and Mrs Reynolds. (Dr Reynolds was a good conversationalist, a poor amateur actor and a brain surgeon. It was a standing joke that there was not much material in Hollywood for him to work on in this professional capacity.) Kono persuaded Marina to dress, with the promise that Chaplin would then speak to her. After Chaplin had talked kindly to her under the unfriendly gaze of Pola, Marina was at last persuaded to leave the house.

Next day, Marina was again seen around the Chaplin grounds. By her own account, she subsequently despaired of winning over her idol, went to a neighbouring drug store, asked for arsenic, and swallowed whatever it was the store clerk gave her. She then took herself to Chaplin’s garden to lie down and die, having first scattered an offering of roses around the front steps. She was discovered and carried into a laundry room where Dr Reynolds examined her and concluded that her distressed state was due to hysteria rather than poison. Chaplin and Pola met her again. This time, the two women – volatile Mexican and temperamental Pole – started an altercation. It became so ferocious that Chaplin (so it was said) had to cool them down with a pail of cold water. Marina was removed to the Receiving Hospital, where the physicians could discover no symptoms of poisoning. At the Alexandria Hotel, where she was staying, her luggage was found to consist of little more than copies of telegrams to the Mexican Secretary of War and the Inspector General of Police, asking them for financial aid. On being discharged from the hospital, Marina went directly to the offices of the Los Angeles Examiner, where she co-operatively posed for photographs. She was rewarded next day with front-page headlines: ‘GIRL TRIES TO DIE FOR LOVE IN CHARLIE CHAPLIN’S HOUSE’.

Pola was highly displeased with the whole incident, but there were clearly other rifts in the liaison. As Rodney Ackland wrote years later, ‘She had a blind and uncritical admiration of her own genius in the blaze of which her sense of humour evaporated like a dew-drop on a million-watt arc lamp.’³⁶ Chaplin’s own sense of humour, on the other hand, was not to be quenched. Menjou, a generally reliable witness, described an incident which cannot have furthered the romance, given the temperaments involved. At a party, Pola, overcome by some passing emotion, swooned decorously. The rest of the guests ran for water to revive her but Chaplin, not to be upstaged, lay down on the hearth-rug and calmly swooned beside her. Pola, reviving swiftly, did not appreciate the gag.

By 28 July, the relationship had run its course. A night or two before, at the reopening of the Ambassador’s Coconut Grove restaurant, Chaplin and Pola sat at separate tables. He was with the young actress, Lenore Ulric; she was with the tennis star, William Tilden. Chaplin and Pola did not even acknowledge each other. The loyal Examiner interviewed Pola:

‘I realized five weeks ago that it was an impossibility. He’s a charming fellow. We’re still friends. I say “hello” to him but I realize now I could never have married him – he is too temperamental – as changing as the wind – he dramatizes everything – he experiments in love.

‘In my opinion Mr Chaplin should never marry. He has not any quality for matrimony. I am glad it is over for it was interfering with my life, my work. I have great ambitions and I am sure that I could not be a great actress as Mrs Chaplin.

‘I am glad it is over and I have profited by the experience.’

Here she wrote ‘finis’ on Mr Chaplin, her ‘Sharlie’ of other days, by assailing a peach. It takes perfect self-control for a screen star to attack a juicy peach when she has her make-up on, but she did it daintily. Actresses, especially Europeans, are great two-handed eaters, but here Pola excels them as well. She disposed of each peach as surely, as completely as she had disposed of Charlie Chaplin.

For the newspapers and their readers the Chaplin–Negri romance had been a delectable farce. The statements of the principals, however, seemed at moments to have intimated genuine feeling and genuine pain. We can never know how much love there was between these two exceptional and certainly irreconcilable artists. They were, after all, the King of Comedy and the Tragedy Queen. In later years both tended to disclaim their own roles in the affair. Negri, in her memoirs, said that the persistence was all on Chaplin’s side: she was not really attracted to him, though she enjoyed his conversation. Chaplin said that the party most interested in the match was the Paramount publicity department, who pressed him to marry her because the bad publicity of broken engagements might be injurious to the company’s investment in her. Chaplin drily replied that since he held no Paramount stock, he saw no reason why he should marry her. Pola’s subsequent marriage to Prince Serge Mdivani was one of the great social events of 1920s Hollywood. She returned to Europe in the 1930s but was back in the United States in 1943. After retiring to San Antonio, Texas, she made only one further screen appearance, in Walt Disney’s The Moonspinners (1964).

The colourful and comic Negri affair was a singular episode in Chaplin’s life. It was the only time that he was voluntarily involved in a relationship that attracted to his private life the kind of publicity he ordinarily abhorred; and it was the only time in his career that he permitted himself to be simultaneously engaged in the production of a film and the entanglements of a dramatic romance. Since there is no doubt about Chaplin’s concern with and concentration on A Woman of Paris during this period, a possibility suggests itself to explain Chaplin’s susceptibility to the distractions of Pola. Perhaps they were not in fact distractions: whether Chaplin was conscious of it or not, Pola may have served to provide the atmosphere of ‘continental’ sophistication which he needed for his film, which he certainly achieved in it and which could not have been supplied by Peggy Hopkins Joyce, the country girl from Virginia. It would not have been the only time an artist combined or confused romance and research.

During the period of their romance, Pola had taken a keen interest in the preparations of Chaplin’s new house on Cove Way, no doubt anticipating the day when she would be its mistress. Chaplin had finally yielded to the pleas of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford that he should build a permanent home after eight years of living in hotels and rented houses. The site he chose, with their help, was a six-and-a-half-acre plot on the hillside immediately below Pickfair, at the intersection of Cove Way and Summit Drive. The address at first was 1103 Cove Way; later, with the development of Beverly Hills, it was redesignated 1085 Summit Drive. Below it lay Harold Lloyd’s house. Compared to neighbouring mansions, the fourteen-room house which Chaplin built was modest, though it shared their view of the Pacific Ocean, with Catalina Island just visible on a clear day. On the lower side, the lawns sloped away to a tennis court and swimming pool. Behind the house were the green slopes of the Santa Monica Mountains. Pola made one lasting contribution by supervising the planting of fir, cedar, pine, spruce and hemlock on three sides of the house. Today these trees, a memorial to a long-ago and short-lived Hollywood sensation, hide the house from the road. Pola’s interest tended to complicate the construction of the house somewhat. Chaplin had designed it himself in what he jokingly called ‘Californian Gothic’. He had originally planned huge windows looking towards the ocean but Pola persuaded him to reduce their size. After Pola’s reign was over, Mary Pickford persuaded him to revert to the large windows.

Inside, a large hall extended the full length and height of the house, with a balustraded balcony at first-floor level. In a high arched vestibule to the left of the hall, Chaplin installed a massive pipe organ. The vestibule also served as a projection room, with a screen which dropped down in front of the organ. Down the hall was the living room, which, until a study was added in the corner of the house, gave onto terraced lawns at the back. In the 1920s, the living room was cosy, cluttered with books and mementoes and containing a rather heterogeneous collection of furniture, mostly in the English style, which Chaplin had gradually accumulated in his previous residences. It had an open fire, a Steinway grand and, as Charles Chaplin Junior remembered, ‘close by was the big Webster dictionary, which Dad consulted so often, and the table he used when he worked downstairs’. Across the hall was the dining room, which also gave on to the lawns and which made greater concessions to modernity and design in its planning. Beyond it lay the kitchen and staff quarters.

The stairs were at the front of the hall. Some years later, Charles Chaplin Junior remembered that an oriental gong stood on the bend. ‘There seemed to be a secret rapport between Dad and that gong. Sometimes when he was passing by deep in thought he would turn and lightly tap it with one finger and then wait quietly to hear the muted tone come softly back to him as though in reply to some question he had asked.’³⁷

Upstairs were three bedrooms, each with its own bathroom. Chaplin’s son remembered that his father’s bathroom seemed ‘always permeated with the odor of Mitsouko, my father’s favourite Cologne’. (This was in the 1930s. Chaplin was evidently already using the perfume in 1922, since it was one of Peggy Hopkins Joyce’s more annoying quirks, during her friendship with him, to sprinkle his Mitsouko around the house on Beechwood Drive to improve the atmosphere. Kono was outraged both by the extravagance and by the resulting spots on the upholstery.) His bedroom was a large, bright room with a fine fireplace that was never used, but it was simply furnished with a writing table and chair, twin beds and night stands, and another Webster dictionary. However worn and disreputable it became Chaplin would never part with the Persian rug on the floor, which he was sure brought him luck.

My father usually slept in the far bed, the one by the windows. I recall the pulp detective magazines that were always stacked by this bed. My father might read Spengler and Schopenhauer and Kant for edification, but for sheer relaxation he chose murder mysteries. Tired from a hard day’s work, he liked to read them in bed for they put him to sleep.

In the drawer of the night stand beside his bed, my father kept a thirty-eight caliber automatic with its bullets. He would sometimes show it to Syd and me, though we never saw him fire it.³⁸

Two more things in their father’s room were to delight and intrigue his sons in their boyhood. One was the little closet that led off the bedroom and which contained the pipes of the organ below: ‘It took a lot of work to get them all in there. A lot of work,’ Chaplin would tell them proudly. The other was a powerful telescope which he had installed to study the heavens. His sons noticed, though, that he was far more interested in watching what went on on the earth below. It is hard to know whether he was consciously passing on the childhood lessons in observation he had learned from Hannah, looking out at the Kennington streets, when he would train a telescope on some far-off pedestrian and say to his sons, ‘You see that man? He must be going home after a day’s work. Look at his gait, so slow, so tired. His head’s bent. Something’s on his mind. What could it be!’³⁹