12

City Lights

Even before the Los Angeles première of The Circus, Chaplin was at work on a new scenario – no doubt spurred on by the financial demands of the divorce and the Federal tax authorities. During the two years that The Circus had been in production, the sound film had established its presence on the scene. It is a hitherto unknown curiosity of film history that Chaplin could have been the one to effect the revolution, almost a decade earlier. On 9 December 1918, when Chaplin was working on Sunnyside, Eugène Augustin Lauste, the pioneer of sound-on-film recording, wrote to him from New York:

To Mr Charlie Chaplin
California Studio

Dear Sir,

I have just returned from England, on at my arrival I heard that you have started a new moving pictures studio on your own, for which I am very pleased to congratulate you as a wonder artist who by your cleverness and your ingenuity you have been able to conquer the whole world. I am myself one of your admirer at the time that you have been engaged with Fred. Karno. Since that time, you have rapidly progressed with enormous success, so, let me take the liberty to present to you my most hearty congratulations for the great achievement you have already done in the history of the cinematograph. My self, I am an inventor, I was first working with Mr T. A. Edison, at his private laboratory at Orange NJ for many years. Then in 1894, I had design, build, and exhibited the first projecting moving pictures machine, called the [Eidoloscope] so I claim that I was the first one who bring out this great invention, which is not my last one. However, I am very please to say that my invention has been favorable to you, and my other one, if you are interested in it, would bring to you an enormous fortune …

Referring to my invention, kindly allow me few seconds of your attention to explain the great future of it. As you know, the present machines will in a short time, come at end. For years and years, the public want to see the realism, that means the real talking pictures which up to now has never been accomplished practically and commercially. Many inventors they have already tried to synchronize the gramophone or phonograph in connection with the cinematograph, which has been a failure, and always will be. The only way which that could be done satisfactory, is my own principle on which I have working on, for over 25 years.

I do not want that you think I come to you and bring to you an invention which is an imaginary or dreaming idea which is in the air, but the truth. So before I will engage myself with a party which I have in view, I like to give you the opportunity to take in your hands this wonderful discovery which I believe you will be surprise to hear that a such machine was in existence. The fact, that I had giving in London, several demonstrations to the press, and also to scientists experts, which their opinions was very satisfactory from the reports which I will prove to you by the originals.

In few words, I will explain the principle of my invention, which after his completion will certainly revolutionize the cinematograph industry. The idea which has already accomplished, is to photograph pictures and sounds simultaneously on the same film, and in one operation, and reproduce same without any contact on the film, or the use of a gramophone or phonograph. The sounds is absolutely clear, no scratching whatever or distortion in the voice or music, I am certain that you will be very surprise to hear it.

However, if you think you will be interested, let me know as soon as possible, then I will send to you more particular regarding same, and also a copies of the reports and documents … ¹

Notwithstanding the strong French accent in Monsieur Lauste’s letter, Chaplin was clearly intrigued by the idea, and Sydney replied on his behalf: ‘Regarding your invention, it sounds very interesting to Mr Chaplin and he would be glad to receive further details concerning same if you will be so good as to send them on.’ Lauste seems never to have replied, and Chaplin was too taken up with his current productions to follow the matter up. Lauste’s claims were not exaggerated: Merritt Crawford, an authority on Lauste’s work on sound films, considers that but for war conditions and lack of capital he would have brought forward the sound era by a decade.

So, the chance slipped by in 1918. Warners presented their first Vitaphone programme, featuring John Barrymore and Mary Astor in Don Juan, on 6 August 1926: it was Hannah Chaplin’s sixty-first birthday, and Chaplin was just then flinching in the lions’ cage. The feature in the second Vitaphone show, at Christmas 1926, was The Better ’Ole. Since the star of the film was Sydney Chaplin himself, the Chaplin brothers must have been keenly aware of the new technique and its implications. A year later, on 6 October 1927, The Jazz Singer demonstrated voice synchronization; and by 8 July 1928, when Chaplin was still in the preparatory stages for City Lights, Warner Brothers showed the first all-talking picture – Lights of New York.

Hollywood for the most part was on the defensive. Like everyone else, Chaplin was very conscious of the technical shortcomings of the first sound films and – in the early stages – of the unimaginative and inartistic use of the new medium. As late as 1931 he was still declaring, ‘I’ll give the talkies three years, that’s all.’ He may not have believed this, but he knew how much he had to lose if he were forced into talking pictures. Chaplin had made the silent pantomime into an international language. He had proved that the gestures, the expressions, the quirks, the thoughts, the feelings of his little Tramp were as readily comprehensible to Japanese, Chinese, Bantu tribesmen or Uzbekhs as to the great cinema audiences of America or Europe. Speech would instantly rob the figure of this universality. In any case, how would he speak? What kind of voice and accent could be conceived to suit the Tramp? This was a conundrum that was still puzzling him more than thirty years after he parted from the character.

Chaplin had no doubt that he must continue to make silent films; even so, the decision left him in a state of anxiety which, as his unit was well aware, stayed with him throughout the new production. Chaplin and Harry Crocker started work on the story in Chaplin’s bungalow at the studio. Chaplin’s first notion was for another circus story: a clown has lost his sight in an accident but is obliged to conceal the fact from his frail and nervous little daughter. The pathos and comedy would have come from the clown’s efforts to pretend that his errors and stumbles are done for fun. He also thought of having two rich men conduct the experiment of giving a wretched tramp a night of luxury and pleasure and then dumping him back on the Embankment where they found him. He was thinking on other lines also: ‘How would people like to see me with a companion?’ he asked Crocker. ‘Would they laugh to see me, a character laughed at by the world, discover someone of even less education, someone over whom I could lord it, someone to whom I would be a great person? I can see lots of fun in that idea.’

‘Given the germ of an idea,’ commented Crocker,

from it a dozen stories will grow. Charlie does not concern himself at once with concrete action, the story merely grows as he goes along. If fifty different people were to inquire about his story, he tells fifty different stories. The underlying feeling is always the same, but he emphasizes the particular sequence which happens to be uppermost in his mind at the moment as the main theme of the current story. Thus Chaplin and I launched into the writing of City Lights and it was to bring to the screen another facet of the Chaplin genius. Our personal relationship was as close during the preparation of City Lights and its shooting [as on The Circus].²

Many years later, Chaplin was to describe the process of constructing a film as like being in a labyrinth, challenged to find the way out: ‘I’ve got into the proposition, how do I get out?’ Again his working notes illustrate the process, and how Chaplin threaded this particular labyrinth to arrive, from an unlikely starting point, at the story of City Lights. The brevity and simplicity with which the eventual plot can be told is a mark of its structural excellence. A tramp, wandering a large and hostile city, meets a fellow waif, a blind flower girl. He also makes the acquaintance of an eccentric millionaire whom he saves from suicide in a moment of alcoholic depression. When drunk the millionaire entertains and treats him lavishly. When sober he has no recollection of him and turns him out of the house.

The Tramp learns that the girl’s sight can be cured if she goes to Vienna for an operation. He tries various methods – as street cleaner and prize fighter – to earn the money for her trip; but then he chances on the millionaire, in expansive mood once more. Unfortunately the millionaire’s gift of money coincides with a burglary of his house. Sobered up, he forgets about the gift and the Tramp (having meanwhile given the money to the girl) is suspected of the theft and imprisoned. The Tramp eventually comes out of jail a sorrier creature than before, but the flower girl, now cured, has a flower shop of her own. She longs to meet the benefactor whom she never saw, and whom she imagines must be rich and handsome. The Tramp chances on her shop and gazes with joy at the cured girl. When she approaches him – to give him a coin and a flower, out of pity – he attempts to flee, ashamed and afraid to speak to her. But she touches his hand – and recognizes it. They gaze at each other. ‘You?’ she asks. He nods. ‘You can see now?’

Although Chaplin abandoned the idea of the blind clown as too sentimental, the possibilities of blindness as a theme caught his imagination, and he decided almost from the start to place the blind flower girl at the centre of his story. The city, at this stage, was to be Paris. After juggling with various ideas for scenes, characters and gags, the writers were still far from having a real story to work on. But about this time, Chaplin hit upon the ending for the film which was to prove the key to the whole:

Charlie meets blind girl trying to cross street.

Punctuate story with his buying flowers. Eventually she is cured and Charlie finds her in little shop. As she laughs at him, Charlie does not dare disclose identity. Girl finally recognizes him – takes him by hand and leads him into flower shop.

From the moment of this inspiration, Chaplin’s invention was liberated: pages were now covered with propositions, suggestions, plot devices, gags. Most of the ideas focus on the theme of blindness, which provided opportunities both for pathos and for gags about Charlie’s discomfiture and the scope for irony in the contrasts between what the blind girl imagines and the reality. So false would be the poor girl’s illusions about her tramp friend that she would know him as ‘the Duke’. The essence of their relationship at this time was that

the two of them are driven towards each other – she by her physical disability – he by his being ridiculed by all but her. She may fall wildly in love with him as the Duke, and refuses to believe other stories and descriptions of him.

Already Chaplin had the germ of the scene of their first meeting:

Might have first meeting with girl in helping her across the street. Might have her fixing flowers under parasol and hail him. ‘Flower, sir?’ He thinks quickly how to get coin for flower and comes back to get one. Plays he is wealthy person. ‘Nice day,’ he remarks as she puts flower in his buttonhole. Slams automobile door as taxi drives off, to make her believe that it is his.

There is also the hint of that part of the plot which involves the girl’s need of money:

On one occasion the Duke passes the girl’s stand and sees the sign ‘For Rent’ which indicates to him that the girl is in desperate straits. On another occasion the Duke makes his visit to the flower girl’s stand and finds the place in possession of an elderly woman and after his inquiry as to the whereabouts of the blind girl, he learns that she no longer has the stand because she was unable to meet the cost of her licence.

However, he had still not wholly solved the problem of integrating the story of the millionaire:

The desire [to see] the blind flower girl prosper causes him to bring her in contact with the millionaire, while the latter is having one of his orgies and it so develops that thereafter the millionaire, when under the influence of drink, craves both the companionship of the Tramp and the flower girl. The Tramp gains the knowledge of the millionaire’s devotion for the flower-girl when the two men are out on one of their sprees and it is because of this knowledge that the Tramp realizes that now that the girl has regained her sight and because of everything the millionaire is in a position to offer her, he sees that it would be futile for him to make known his identity to the girl.

The rich man calls Charlie ‘the Duke’ and sells that idea to the girl.

An ending in which the girl went off with the millionaire would, however, have interfered with the last scene, for which Chaplin now had an even clearer conception.

Ext. of Flower Shop. It is late afternoon. In front of the shop there is a mass of flowers and the flower girl with several others are trimming and watering the various plants. As they throw some of the withered flowers into the gutter the Tramp comes into view. He stops to bend down and pick up a flower and as he places it in his coat lapel, the girls laugh at him. He fixes his eyes on the flower girl and smiles at her. With a gesture of laughter, she turns to the other girls and remarks, ‘He’s flirting with us,’ and they all laugh.

She is unaware of the Tramp’s identity but he is of the knowledge that she had dreamed of the day of his return as her ideal. She suddenly plucks a beautiful rose and with extended hand offers it to him while she is still amused at his ridiculous appearance. The Tramp still continues to smile and his gaze is fixed on her and he slowly moves toward her and takes the flower from her hand without turning his gaze from her and places it in his buttonhole and slowly walks away, looking back smiling as though through tears while the flower girl and the others are shown in a hearty laugh.

1930 – Shooting record for 7 (out of 17) takes of the final shot of City Lights, ‘the greatest piece of acting and the highest moment in movies’. The record reveals the remarkable fact that the shot was taken at a speed of 18 frames a second, so that when the film is projected at the normal rate for sound films of 24 frames a second (at which the rest of the film was shot), Chaplin’s action is speeded up on screen – an effect which he must have carefully calculated.

Chaplin had rarely before this begun a film with an idea of how it would end. Certainly he had never before described a final scene in such detail, almost like a shooting script, long before he had begun to shoot. But he knew already that this scene was to be the climax, perhaps the very raison d’être of City Lights.

There was a host of ideas for additional elaborations and complications of the plot. Perhaps the Tramp could take a room in the same lodging house as the girl, and perhaps the girl and the other lodgers could take him for a rich and well-known author who is reported to be living in disguise in a poor quarter to get material for a novel. Or perhaps he could be mistaken for a kidnapper when he accidentally picks up a package of ransom money that has been thrown from a passing car. Perhaps the girl might have a ne’er-do-well brother who takes her money for crap games, and a sick little sister. Several pages are filled with possible schemes to exploit the comedy, irony and pathos in the girl’s illusions about her friend and benefactor:

When Charlie calls for girl, her friends are hiding to get a peek at him. ‘He doesn’t like to meet people,’ she confides to them, ‘but, my, he’s grand.’ When they see him they roar then one girl weeps. ‘We should tell her,’ they say. ‘Don’t laugh, it’s tragic,’ says weeping girl. ‘And don’t tell her, it would break her heart.’ Charlie overhears the friends discussing him as a comic figure and looks disconsolately at his big feet. Charlie overhears Virginia [the flower girl] inquire from her friends what he looks like. He waits tensely for the girl’s answer. ‘Oh, he’s wonderful,’ says Virginia’s friend.

Charlie relaxes and two tears come into his eyes. There is a child in neighbourhood who laughs at Charlie at every appearance. ‘Why are they laughing?’ she asks Charlie. Charlie is invariably laughed at in street scenes with girl. Girl gradually notices that people all laugh.

The girl’s blindness could also provoke gags of inappropriate reaction. The couple could go out boating: when Charlie is knocked out by a low bridge, the girl comments dreamily, ‘It’s so nice here.’ There might be a complex variation on the shame gag-nightmares: Charlie could lose his trousers, but then realize that there is no cause for embarrassment since the girl cannot see. One characteristic piece of business involving the abrupt termination of sentiment was to reach the finished film, with some variation, to provide one of the most memorable moments:

Another time Virginia comes home with Charlie. Charlie looks back and sees her watering the plants in the window – sneaks back and gets water in face. Sneaks away …

The old nightmares of thirty years before also recur:

Blind girl’s living room – The Tramp has departed on an errand for the girl. At his departure the landlady enters and confronts the girl with a demand for her back rent. When it is not forthcoming the landlady suggests that the girl give herself over to an institution for the blind and that she send her younger sister to the almshouse …

Chaplin seems at this stage to have already anticipated the addition of a synchronized track of some sort:

The blind girl shall own a phonograph which she operates at her flower stand. Her favorite record shall be ‘Bright Eyes’ or some other semi-jazzy number. The Duke becomes haunted by the melody and whistles the tune as he strolls. In a penny arcade he seeks the number and listens to it through the old-fashioned ear receivers and his mannerisms attract attention by onlookers. This means is also suggested for a love-making scene between the Duke and the girl through his answering her song with another of significance. The Duke also buys or gets in some manner new records for the girl.

Jean Cocteau recalled that when they met in the course of Chaplin’s 1936 world tour, Chaplin told him that he felt a film was like a tree: you shook it, and all that was loose and unnecessary fell away, leaving only the essential form.³ In Chaplin’s case most of this elimination took place at the story stage. Even though he might shoot fifty times the quantity of raw film that appeared in the finished picture, he rarely filmed material for any scene that was not eventually used in the final film. There would, however, be two such discarded sequences in City Lights.

By the beginning of May 1928, Chaplin was sure enough of his story to set the studio staff to work on sets and props and to order costumes. Still given to sudden enthusiasms for interesting people, he had taken up with an Australian artist, Henry Clive, and invited him to prepare sketches for the sets and costumes. Clive was working on these sketches throughout June, July and August, though eventually Charles D. (Danny) Hall was to take responsibility. Then Chaplin decided that Clive would be ideal for the role of the millionaire and he was recruited as the first member of the supporting cast.

Robert Sherwood was later to write about the mythical city which eventually became the setting for City Lights: ‘It is a weird city, with confusing resemblances to London, Los Angeles, Naples, Paris, Tangier and Council Bluffs. It is no city on earth and it is also all cities.’ Practically everything was shot within the studio. At the rear of the open stage, a high concrete wall was built, and on it the scenic men painted a cyclorama of huge buildings. A T-shaped set in front of this followed the old plan of the intersecting streets that had done service in so many of the two-reelers. On one side of the T was the entrance to a theatre and a cabaret; opposite were one or two shops, including an art store, and just round the corner from them the flower shop. The monument to ‘Peace and Prosperity’ which figures in the opening scene of the film stood at the crossing of the T. On a corner a park was planted up, with a railing surrounding it. On the outside of this stood the blind girl’s flower stand. The inside served as the garden of the millionaire’s house. The sets for the interior of the millionaire’s house were erected on the closed stage. From these elements Chaplin created his mythical city.

On 28 August 1928, Hannah Chaplin died. It seems that Chaplin found it too distressing to visit his mother very often in her Californian home, but when, a week or so before her death, she was taken into Glendale Hospital suffering from an infected gall-bladder, he went there every day and forced himself to joke with her: the day before she died nurses at the hospital heard them laughing together. A few hours before the end she fell into a coma and Chaplin was advised not to see her. He drove away from the hospital, but then turned back. He decided to go to her after all. She momentarily recovered consciousness and took his hand. When he tried to reassure her that she would get well, she wearily murmured ‘Perhaps,’ and lapsed into unconsciousness.

Chaplin was at work at the studio the following day when a message came that she had died. Harry Crocker went with him to the hospital and waited outside while Chaplin went into the room, with the sunlight filtering through the half-drawn curtains. It was the first time he had witnessed the death of someone close to him. Twenty-seven years before he had been taken to see his dead father but ‘I couldn’t see my father in his coffin. I shrugged, I turned away, frightened like a child …’ With his mother it was different, ‘because it was natural. She wasn’t incarcerated in a coffin. I didn’t see her in a coffin. I couldn’t. Afterwards at the burial they wanted me to see her before they put the lid on. I said no: I couldn’t … on the bed there was … relief. You see, she’d been in pain, and there was a relief. Before she had looked puzzled, as though … and then there was a release. You could see that she suffered no more … I suppose when life tortures, death is very welcome. She was still in hospital on a bed. I had seen her the day before and she was in agony. But then the following day, suddenly seeing somebody beloved and small, you think of all the events of life … It’s really moving … I couldn’t … I couldn’t touch her. No, I couldn’t touch her.’⁴ He remembered that as he looked at the little figure he thought of the battles she had fought in her life, and wept. Afterwards he drove home in silence with Crocker.

Chaplin sent telegrams to Sydney, who was ill in Europe, and to Wheeler Dryden in New York. Hannah was buried in the Hollywood Cemetery. Her simple gravestone lies in the shadow of the great mausoleum erected for Marion Davies and the rest of her family, and close to the graves of Henry Lehrman and his fiancée Virginia Rappe. Lita arrived at the funeral with the two children, but to the relief of Chaplin’s friends he was too upset to notice her. Friends said that it was several weeks before he overcame his distress at his mother’s death. Throughout her lifetime, Hannah had consistently subtracted a few years from her age. She might have been pleased that her gravestone gave the year of her birth as 1866 instead of 1865.

A note dated 10 September 1928 shows that Chaplin was then still far from the final narrative form of City Lights. A black newsboy still figured prominently in the incidents planned – apparently a character which Chaplin had discussed with Crocker: ‘someone of even less education, someone over whom I could lord it, someone to whom I would be a great person’. There were proposals for scenes in a theatre and a public library, which the two characters would reduce to comic chaos.

Since The Bank a recurrent motif in Chaplin’s films had been the dream of bliss and the subsequent awakening to cold reality. Most likely this owed more to childhood escape dreams when he was away from home in institutions than to Jimmy the Fearless. At this period of his work on City Lights Chaplin was determined to open the film with a dream, from which the Tramp would be rudely awakened. In the dream he would be a prince, wooing and winning a princess. The princess ‘seizes and kisses him madly’ but he awakes to find himself still a tramp, and being licked by a stray dog. Stills survive showing Chaplin wearing the resplendent white uniform intended for the prince role. A variant of the scene was set in Venice, so that the prince could arrive by gondola for his rendezvous with the princess.

An alternative dream opening had Charlie the Tramp being summoned into a house by a mysterious femme fatale:

Charlie enters and finds woman on settee. She holds out her arms toward him and as music sounds she says: ‘My adorable one, come to me.’ Charlie at once gives her a passionate kiss and as he kisses the woman’s hand, grasps and crushes an orange. As they stand and continue their kiss, the curtains are thrown back and the butler brings in a feast – a turkey and champagne. As Charlie continues to press the lips of the woman, he swings her around so that his hungry eyes can follow the feast to its destination. As he releases her he makes gracious gesture towards the table and says: ‘Shall we eat?’ The woman, swooning from his kiss, says: ‘One more – one more.’ Charlie kisses her beside the table and as she puts her head forward on his shoulder he picks up a drumstick from the table and eats it, then kisses her again. A conflict between his desire for love and food has put him in a quandary. As he is again kissing her passionately, we lap dissolve into the dog licking his face and the police, who chase him off the bench.

Chaplin seems to have been very much taken by this theme of the competing claims of love and hunger. Other comedy routines contemplated included the confusion of two chicken drumsticks and two roses, and a moment in which Chaplin passionately bends the woman back over the table – so that he can reach the salt.

When shooting finally began on 31 December 1928, Chaplin had been working for almost a year on the story and was still far from the eventual structure. He had found a leading lady, however. There is some disagreement over how Chaplin first encountered Virginia Cherrill. The contemporary publicity for the film said that during the summer of 1928 Virginia, then just twenty, ‘ventured to Hollywood. Her mission was to tour California and spend some time with friends.’ In fact she was recuperating from her first divorce, from Irving Adler. Chaplin, relaxing after a day of interviewing applicants for the role of the flower girl, noticed Virginia when they were both in ringside seats at a prize fight at the Hollywood American Legion Stadium. He instantly saw in her something of the young Edna Purviance. She was invited to the studios where she took a screen test the following day. In his autobiography, however, Chaplin said that he had met her previously, having noticed her when she was working with a film company on Santa Monica beach, wearing a blue bathing suit. He called her for a screen test, he said, ‘out of sheer desperation’. Virginia was beautiful, photographed well, and had no acting experience, which in the past had proved to be a considerable advantage. The decisive factor was that she was the only actress he tested who could ‘look blind without being offensive, repulsive – the others all turned their eyes up to show the whites’. Chaplin, with his gift for giving his actors the right instruction, simply advised her to look at him but ‘to look inwardly and not to see me’. Virginia’s family, who belonged to the Chicago social set, were not happy at first about a career for her in the movies. Nevertheless, her contract was signed to run from November 1928, and Mrs Cherrill moved to Los Angeles to set up house in the Hancock Park district and to watch over her daughter.

Chaplin still liked to surround himself with known and trusted people. Allan Garcia had done good work as the proprietor in The Circus. With no very clear idea for a part for him as yet, Chaplin hired him as casting director of the new film: in time Garcia was cast as a snooty butler in the picture. As Christmas passed, with the sets more or less ready, Chaplin felt forced to make some effort to start shooting, though he was aware he had not yet properly worked out the story. Work during the first three weeks was desultory, general shots establishing Charlie about the city streets. In the week of 21 January, Chaplin left with Crocker and the new favourite, Henry Clive, for San Simeon – ostensibly to do more work on the story, although Hearst’s pleasure dome can hardly have been conducive to concentration. Before he left he gave orders to call extras for 28 February. Two scenes were firmly fixed in his plans: the first meeting of Charlie and the flower girl, and the closing scene. The closing scene was too difficult to begin with an untried actress, so he decided to start on the flower stand.

As it turned out, this was to give him more trouble than any other sequence he had ever attempted. From the start he began to have doubts about Virginia. It has become legendary how Chaplin spent shot after shot, hour after hour, day after day, trying to get her to hand over a flower with the line and rhythm he wanted, and to speak to his satisfaction a line – ‘Flower, sir?’ – which was never to be heard. The fault did not lie solely with Virginia’s inexperience. One problem, undoubtedly, was that for the first time Chaplin was working with a leading lady for whom he felt no personal affection or even liking. ‘I never liked Charlie and he never liked me,’ said Virginia more than half a century later.⁵ He never met her outside the studio or invited her to his home. Many years later, when he wrote his autobiography, Chaplin admitted it was not Virginia’s fault, but ‘partly my own, for I had worked myself into a neurotic state of wanting perfection’. His state was aggravated no doubt by his anxiety over the arrival of sound films. He was bothered, too, by the necessary presence of the extras when he was working on a scene requiring such delicate handling. His friend, the artist and cartoonist Ralph Barton, recorded some moments of the work with a 16mm camera and captured a moment of sudden fearsome anger as Chaplin rounds on an assistant who is apparently responsible for the extras.

Along with his ‘neurotic state of wanting perfection’, Chaplin had a very clear idea of what he wanted from this scene, as he described, almost forty years later, to Richard Meryman:

Everything I do is a dance. I think in terms of dance. I think more so in City Lights. The blind girl – beautiful dance there. I call it a dance. Just purely pantomime. The girl extends her hand. And the Tramp doesn’t know she’s blind. And he says, ‘I’ll take this one.’ ‘Which one?’ He looks incredulous – what a stupid girl … Then the flower falls to the ground; and she goes to feel for where it is. I pick it up and hold it there for a moment. And then she says, ‘Have you found it, sir?’ And then he looks, and realizes. He holds it in front of her eyes – just makes a gesture. Not much. That is completely dancing … It took a long time. We took this day after day after day …

She’d be doing something which wasn’t right. Lines. A line. A contour hurts me if it’s not right. And she’d say, ‘Flower, sir?’ I’d say, ‘Look at that! Nobody says “flower” like that.’ She was an amateur …

I’d know in a minute when she wasn’t there, when she’d be searching, or looking up just too much or too soon … Or she waited a second. I’d know in a minute.⁶

The minutes went by, and the days, from 29 January to 14 February. On 20 February they tried again, changing the action of the scene. Then on 25 February Chaplin fell ill, apparently with ptomaine poisoning, though acute anxiety may have had something to do with it. The stomach infection turned into influenza, and Chaplin did not return to the studio, except for a couple of conferences with the staff, during the whole of March. He returned on 1 April determined to start the flower-stand scene all over again. After ten days he was still not satisfied, but decided to set it aside and start on another sequence. By this time he had decided – it was to prove a stroke of genius – to open the film with a scene which, in a single stroke of comic irony, sums up the economic and social inequalities of modern urban life. In its completed form the scene opens on a large crowd assembled for the unveiling of a monument, ‘Peace and Prosperity’. A stout civic dignitary and a hawk-like society lady make speeches, and the monument is unveiled. There, cradled in the lap of the monument’s central female figure, is the disreputable and calmly sleeping figure of the Tramp. When ordered to descend by the angry and embarrassed officials, he does his best but manages to get the sword of Peace entangled in his trousers. Thus suspended he loyally attempts to maintain a position of attention throughout the playing of the national anthem. The sequence ends with a mêlée and the Tramp’s retreat.

This elaborate scene was finished, apart from some of Chaplin’s close-ups, in a week: the presence and cost of a crowd of extras (one day 380 people were called for this sequence) was always an effective goad to Chaplin. Alf Reeves, who as manager of the studios saw his role as being to worry quietly, wrote to Sydney Chaplin with some satisfaction on 28 April:

Charlie is working on his picture as usual but of course sound effects, if required, can be added afterwards.

He is just in the midst of a sequence which looks to me as if it will be one of the greatest moments in motion picture comedy when it is finally cut. We are using four hundred extras in the scene.⁷

The scene did, indeed, benefit from one of Chaplin’s happiest aural gags, asserting right at the start of the film his hostility to sound films. The speeches of the dignitary and the lady were rendered by jabbering saxophones which burlesqued the metallic tones of early talkie voices. Adept lip-readers, however, are able to observe that Henry Bergman conscientiously mouths an actual speech:

Ladies and Gentlemen – it is with great pleasure and admiration that I introduce these charming ladies who have done so much to make this moment possible. Miss-ess Fill-ber-nut! Also Miss-ess Oscar Beedell-Bottom. And last, but not least, Miss-ess Putt. Ladies and Gentlemen, I am only too happy to be able to do anything for this occasion, but I am sure you will know who is really responsible for this great moment. It is the artist himself, Mr Hugo Frothingham-Grimthorpe-Shafe-Shaferkee …

Poor Chaplin’s already frayed nerves were not helped by major structural work that had now to be done on the studio. The city authorities had decided as part of a modernization scheme to widen La Brea Avenue, which meant that the studio buildings on that side, including office accommodation, dressing rooms and laboratories, had to be physically shifted back fifteen feet. Chaplin was at least able to move his shooting as far as possible from the building work, to the studio swimming pool, where the suicide sequence was to be filmed. He anticipated no problems with this sort of knockabout: the sequence had been fully worked out a month before. A note dated 24 May described the action:

… At midnight we find Charlie wandering along the embankment searching for a place to sleep. As he is about to curl up in the darkness, we see the drunk arriving in evening dress clothes in a taxi-cab. He gets out with a large, heavy bundle under his arm – tosses a roll of bills to the taxi-cab driver – and staggers with his parcel to the edge of the river. From the package he takes a large stone with a rope tied round it. As he commences to knot the rope around his neck, Charlie rushes out to stop him from suicide. In the argument Charlie gets the rope around his own neck and as the drunk heaves the stone into the river to take his own life, Charlie is thrown in. The drunk rescues him and takes him home where he confides to Charlie as he is feeding the latter brandy in front of a fire that he is bored with life. He points to a photograph of a beautiful woman and indicates that he is bored with her. To show how little anything means to him he throws a roll of bills into the fire …

Henry Clive, as the millionaire, did his scenes admirably; but on the third day of shooting, when it was his turn to go into the water, he demurred. He explained that he had bronchial trouble and had not been well recently, and asked if they could wait until the sun had been on the water for a while. Chaplin left the set in a fury and Carl Robinson was sent back to tell Clive that he was dismissed. The friendship ended then and there. Four days later Chaplin resumed work with a new actor, Harry Myers, in the role. Myers was a veteran who had started his career in vaudeville and joined the Biograph Company about the same time as Mack Sennett. Since then he had played leading roles in over fifty films (including Up in Mabel’s Room and Getting Gertie’s Garter), and was too much the professional to be bothered by a little cold water, or even a pool-full. After the conclusion of the water-suicide scene and a few location exteriors shot at Pasadena Bridge in the small hours of 11 July, the building operations at the studio, on top of the extreme heat of the summer of 1929, brought work to a total halt.

Not until the middle of August was the laboratory reconstructed and the other buildings that had suffered from the removal redecorated and refurnished. The enforced lay-off had at least given Chaplin leisure to work out an entirely new piece of business, which he now spent seven days shooting. This seven-minute sequence is one of the most fascinating creations of Chaplin’s œuvre, not least because it was never used. As a series of variations on a single theme, escalating in absurdity, it might have been a Karno sketch, but Chaplin makes it one of the great triumphs of his comic invention and execution.

All that happens is that the Tramp, walking past the window of a dress shop, spies a piece of wood wedged between the bars of a grating in the pavement. Idly he prods it with his stick to try to release it, but it only pivots in position and stays there. He becomes intrigued, engrossed, and involves the spectator in his mounting frustration. A crowd gathers and the inevitable cop has to disperse them, with accusatory glances at Charlie, who pretends of course that he has nothing to do with it. When he returns to the problem of the wood, innocent bystanders become involved. A messenger boy of dim and soporific mien, which gives the lie to the message ‘EXPRESS’ emblazoned on his cap, stops to gaze with contempt. He is chewing an orange and absent-mindedly spits his peel at Charlie, whose natural fastidiousness is affronted. The boy is paid back the next moment when he squirts himself in the eye with juice. When he has passed on, two women stop to look in the window. Charlie is far too engrossed to notice the interruption, and with his stick fumbles between the stouter lady’s feet, below her skirts. The ladies walk on in an understandable huff. Then a display artist in the shop window (Harry Crocker) involves himself, mouthing and signalling his increasingly testy advice through the sound-barrier of the plate-glass window. Inattention brings troubles for him too: he absently sticks a price tag not onto the dummy as intended, but onto the rear of a stout manageress. The sketch ends with a fine anti-climactic denouement when the piece of wood, unnoticed by Charlie and the entourage he has collected, simply slips away.

The messenger boy – a haunting figure whose malevolent, wooden-faced idiocy gives him the look of a distant and mentally retarded cousin of Buster Keaton – was played by Charles Lederer, Marion Davies’s favourite nephew, the son of her sister Reine Douras. Eighteen or thereabouts at this time, he was already a favourite – even with Hearst himself – at San Simeon, for his intelligence, wit and outrageous pranks. In later years he was to become a successful Hollywood writer and less successful director. He was also co-writer, with Luther Davis, of the stage musical Kismet. No doubt Marion Davies or Harry Crocker – often Lederer’s co-conspirator in practical jokes – had recommended him to Chaplin; or Chaplin may have met him and been taken with him, like the rest of the circle at San Simeon.

Almost forty years later, when Richard Meryman interviewed him, Chaplin recalled the sequence with enormous pleasure: ‘a beautiful sequence … It was marvellous.’ He remembered it all and could still act it out, and thought that Lederer’s messenger boy was ‘very well acted’. The decision in the end not to use it shows that however prolix Chaplin’s imagination in the process of inventing a story, his rigour in eliminating the inessential or distracting – ‘shaking the tree’ – was uncompromising. The sequence – as Chaplin said, ‘a whole story in itself’ – was not seen publicly for more than fifty years, until it was included by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill in their documentary film series, Unknown Chaplin.

Chaplin then went on to film a solo gag that does remain in the final film. The Tramp pauses in front of the window of an art store, in the centre of which is a voluptuous nude statuette. He legitimizes his interest by affecting the poses of a connoisseur, sizing up the work of art with a fine critical detachment. As he steps backwards and forwards for the sake of better perspective, he does not notice an elevator in the pavement which is moving constantly up and down, its arrival at ground level always luckily coinciding with the moment he chooses to step upon it. When, finally, he takes too sudden a step and almost falls into the hole, he upbraids the workman whose head alone is seen protruding from the hole. The elevator rises and rises, gradually revealing the full seven feet (so it seems) of the powerful figure. Charlie’s indignation is somewhat tempered by the realization of his opponent’s stature.

The trick with the elevator was simply done by having the camera in the shop window looking out, and someone behind the camera keeping watch on the elevator and signalling to Chaplin its position. He rehearsed the effect on film, wearing smart everyday clothes, and the rehearsal scene still survives (it too is included in Unknown Chaplin). The comparison between the graceful gymnastics of the handsome, elegant man in white flannels and sweater and the comical cuts of the little Tramp are perhaps the most vivid illustration we have of the way the costume and make-up wholly metamorphosed the personality of the man within.

Chaplin’s moods remained very erratic. One morning early in September 1929, when he had just begun rehearsing the scene in which the millionaire takes the Tramp to a night club, he telephoned Alf Reeves from his home and told him, ‘I will not set foot in the studio as long as Crocker stays there.’ He then hung up. Reeves found Crocker preparing the day’s schedule, and passed on the message.

‘What does that mean?’ asked Crocker.

‘I don’t know,’ replied Reeves, ‘but in your place I would hand in my resignation.’⁸

Crocker did so. The reasons for the rift must have been extremely personal, since neither Chaplin nor Crocker spoke of them, and no one else at the studio could guess at them. Henry Bergman and Carlyle Robinson were no doubt delighted to be reinstated to the roles of confidants: they had felt somewhat eclipsed by Chaplin’s friendships with Clive and Crocker.

The next month went by calmly enough, with rehearsals and the filming of the nightclub scene, in which the drunken millionaire and a tipsy Charlie introduce a touch of chaos with cigars, matches, seltzer water, and spaghetti that gets mixed up with the party streamers. Charlie has unfortunate encounters with a stout lady dancer, an overloaded waiter and an Apache floorshow act.

Chaplin now prepared to resume work with Virginia Cherrill. Although she had reported daily to the studio, she had not been required in front of the cameras for more than six months. During that time Chaplin’s feelings towards her had not improved. The other members of the unit were puzzled by his evident coolness, but perhaps it was not so surprising. Virginia was not, and could not be, a worker in the sense that Chaplin understood the term. She was not a career actress, nor dependent upon her job at the studio. She probably showed clearly that she was bored with the months of inactivity. She went to parties at night and the effects of tiredness were obvious the day after.

Chaplin, on the other hand, desperately needed collaborators who could share in his enthusiasm. Many years later, Chaplin explained to Richard Meryman how the essential impetus of his creation was zeal: ‘An idea will generate enthusiasm, and then you’re off! The enthusiasm only lasts for a little while, and then you wait for another day. It replenishes itself, and you start again. If something is right, and I think it is right, then it will generate enthusiasm.’⁹ The problem was that such enthusiasm was vulnerable to the moods of those around. ‘If I get an idea and someone tries to dampen my enthusiasm, then I’m lost. That’s what it is. It’s a fact that my enthusiasm is the thing that makes me mad and everything else.’

Virginia’s inability to reflect his enthusiasm undoubtedly infuriated him. She went before the cameras again on Monday, 4 November 1929. He worked her in with an easy scene, then he wanted to attempt the crucial final scene of the film. By Saturday they were ready to try a few close-ups and Chaplin announced that they would continue the scene on the following Monday. It is not quite certain what happened on that day: the version related by Chaplin’s son Sydney is that just when his father was keyed up for this most emotional and difficult scene, Virginia innocently if tactlessly asked if she could leave early because she had a hair appointment. Chaplin, who always needed an intermediary for such unpleasant tasks, instructed Carlyle Robinson to tell Virginia that she would not be required for work in the near future. Georgia Hale, who had not worked in films for more than a year, was called in that same day, and was overjoyed to be put on the payroll. Two days later Chaplin began to test Georgia in the role of the flower girl in the last scene of the film. Every writer on Chaplin has marvelled at the recklessness of his decision to replace his leading lady after almost a year’s shooting. In fact, during that time he had used Virginia in only two sequences, neither of which had been completed to his satisfaction. Similarly, the replacement of Henry Clive had represented only three lost shooting days. Many directors – including Chaplin himself – were often more prodigal.

Those tests of Georgia have survived. She would have been a very beautiful flower girl, and her work on The Gold Rush proved that she could be tender as well as crisply gay. She loved the part and longed to play it:

Oh, that City Lights. That’s what I would have loved to do. And I had it, you know. We went to dinner at the Double Eagle on Sunset afterwards and he told me ‘You’ve got the part. You’re going to do it. Now I’ll get what I want.’¹⁰

The following morning Chaplin ran the tests. The others in the projection room all agreed that she could do the part, but Carlyle Robinson, who appears to have liked Virginia more than the others, was highly critical. He told Chaplin that Georgia could no more do this part than Virginia could have played the dance hall girl in The Gold Rush. Chaplin was disturbed and annoyed, but Robinson followed up this attack skilfully. Knowing Chaplin’s sensitivity in this area, he warned him that Georgia would certainly sue him if he did not give her the part. It was always a weakness of the Chaplin brothers that once suspicion was planted in their minds it rapidly grew to become reality. Chaplin was persuaded. Next time he met Georgia he was chilly.

Then he told me what a terrible person I was, and he raved and raved and raved. He only calmed down when he realized I had no idea what he was talking about. Then he said, ‘But I thought you were going to sue me.’ Oh, I wanted to do that part, I loved that part so.¹¹

Chaplin, however, was not to change his mind again.

Next he tested a beautiful and clever sixteen-year-old blonde called Violet Krauth, who had taken the professional name of Marilyn Morgan, and arrived at the studio with her mother. Chaplin was enthusiastic at her tests and decided to draw up a contract there and then. Reeves and Robinson, however, were aware of his indecisive state of mind, and felt nervous at the arrival of yet another sixteen-year-old with a mother in tow. It was late in the afternoon: Reeves and Robinson tactically sent the secretary home, so that they were obliged to tell Chaplin that the contract could not be prepared that night as there was no one to type it. As they had anticipated, Chaplin’s enthusiasm had faded somewhat the next morning and Robinson was instructed to break it gently to Miss Morgan and her mother that he had changed his mind. The girl accepted the rejection with good grace, which considerably impressed the two conspirators, Robinson and Reeves. Under a new name of Marion Marsh she went on to enjoy a small but bright career as a leading lady in the 1930s; among other films she starred in Josef von Sternberg’s Crime and Punishment.

A week after she had left, Virginia was asked to return to the studio. As she recalled the events, she had in the meantime discussed the business with Marion Davies. On Marion’s advice, she now told Chaplin that she would not come back unless he doubled her previous salary of $75 a week. Chaplin protested, but she pointed out that their agreement had been signed when she was under age and so had never been legally valid. Chaplin, says Virginia, gave in. While he probably felt that insult was added to injury, it may be that this show of spirit, or even spite, on Virginia’s part actually raised her in his estimation. According to Carlyle Robinson, when Virginia returned to the studio Chaplin asked her to come to his dressing room, from which she emerged after an hour’s interview chastened and tearful. From this time on, Chaplin seems to have had no serious difficulties in working with her. Perhaps he began to realize that a professional Hollywood actress could not have done the part better. Perhaps, precisely because she was so phlegmatic about her work, her interpretation wholly resists all the obvious pitfalls of sentimentality. After fifty years, the performance that resulted from the eventual mutual patience (or forbearance) of director and actress remains pure and charming.

For the role of the girl’s mother (when the film was finished the role was changed to her grandmother) Chaplin hired an experienced old character actress, Florence D. Lee, who gave none of the problems of the stage-trained matriarch, Lydia Knott, in A Woman of Paris. For five weeks Chaplin worked with Virginia and Mrs Lee on the uncomplicated scenes in their home. In the final days of 1929 he took the plunge and started out again on the flower-stand sequence. None of the material he had previously shot satisfied him: for the new takes he even decided on a different costume for Virginia. This time, in only six days’ shooting he seems to have achieved his ‘dance’: except for one or two minor retakes, this troublesome, marvellous scene was done at last. After all the agonies, it would, as Alistair Cooke remarked of it, flow as easily as water over pebbles.

The reinstatement of Virginia Cherrill and the successful completion of the flower stand scene were a turning point in the film. The shooting had gone on for over a year and there were still nine months to go, but after this – though Chaplin must often have been exhausted – his anxieties had dissipated. There is no further record of quarrels and sackings. Virginia had three more months of idleness while Chaplin went back to work with Harry Myers on the millionaire scenes. Allan Garcia was cast as the millionaire’s butler and required to act, straight-faced, according to the whims of his master as he clutches the Tramp to his bosom, then orders him to be thrown out. The ‘whoopee party’ in the millionaire’s house at which a tipsy Charlie commits various faux pas, like mistaking an old gentleman’s bald head for a blancmange and swallowing a whistle which chirps as he hiccups, involved thirty extras and an orchestra which cost $80 a day. On occasion Chaplin did indulge in extravagance. The singer whose soulful ballad is constantly interrupted by the cheeps of Charlie’s whistle was not just another extra, but a real singer, whose fee was $50 a day, even though his voice would not be heard from the screen. No doubt Chaplin felt that an extra could not convincingly mime the style of the professional performer.

Throughout most of March and April 1930, Chaplin was working on the various sequences that take place in the millionaire’s house. When he needed an exterior for this he found it on location, at Town House, Wilshire Boulevard. In the roles of the burglars who break into the house he cast Joe Van Meter and Albert Austin – the last time that an old Karno colleague would appear in a Chaplin film.

Only one major comedy sequence now remained to be shot. Chaplin had left the prize-fight scenes to the end. The speed and concentration with which they were filmed reveals that they represented one of Chaplin’s greatest bursts of ‘enthusiasm’. To the end of his life the sequence continued to give him immense pleasure and satisfaction. For his opponent he engaged the hang-dog giant Hank Mann, with whom he had worked in his third Keystone film and often afterwards, and who had since made a considerable career in Hollywood. The dignified referee was Eddie Baker, an actor who had been seen in only one or two small parts. A dozen extras had sufficed for a previous Chaplin bout in The Champion. For the fight scenes in City Lights more than a hundred extras were hired for the audience. The fight was rehearsed in four days and shot in six, and proved the apogee of Chaplin’s ‘dance’ in slapstick mode.

By the end of July, the shooting of City Lights was all but finished, but for six weeks more Chaplin continued nervously with innumerable retakes before the various artists’ contracts came to an end. On 25 August, he shot some scenes in which two cheeky newsboys on a street corner mock the Tramp. They were to appear twice: once at the beginning of the film, where the Tramp affects a contemptuous insouciance in response to their mockery; the second time immediately before the final scene, where, in his wretchedness after a jail sentence, he is as miserably vulnerable as a mangy stray. Chaplin seems to have worked easily with children, perhaps because they were simply required to copy his own actions, and the shots required only half a day. One of the newsboys, a pretty, round-faced, insolent child, was Robert Parrish, who in time would become a prominent Hollywood editor and director. In his memoirs he recalled:

He would blow a pea [from Parrish’s peashooter] and then run over and pretend to be hit by it, then back to blow another pea. He became a kind of dervish, playing all the parts, using all the props, seeing and cane-twisting as the Tramp, not seeing and grateful as the blind girl, peashooting as the newsboys. Austin [the other boy actor] and I and Miss Cherrill watched while Charlie did his show. Finally, he had it all worked out and reluctantly gave us back our parts. I felt that he would much rather have played all of them himself.¹²

Chaplin had left the retakes on the final scene to the end. He spent six days on the general action inside and outside the flower shop, then on 22 September 1930 once more attempted the critical final close-ups with Virginia. This time there were no problems, no anxieties, no hair appointments. They worked from 2.30 to 5.30 that afternoon, and made seventeen takes. Whatever it was – enthusiasm, inspiration, magic – this time it worked, as Chaplin remembered four decades later:

Sometimes it comes through with a great deal of that magic. I’ve had that once or twice … I had one close-up once, in City Lights, just the last scene. One could have gone overboard … I was looking more at her and interested in her, and I detached myself in a way that gives a beautiful sensation. I’m not acting … almost apologetic, standing outside myself and looking, studying her reactions and being slightly embarrassed about it. And it came off. It’s a beautiful scene, beautiful; and because it isn’t over-acted.¹³

Richard Meryman said to Chaplin that he thought the ending of City Lights was one of the greatest moments in films ever. Chaplin replied simply: ‘Well, I know it was right.’ James Agee, less restrained, wrote that ‘It is enough to shrivel the heart to see, and it is the greatest piece of acting and the highest moment in movies.’¹⁴

Among the pick-up shots that were all that now remained to be done Chaplin had a pleasant afterthought, and devised a piece of slapstick nonsense to play with Albert Austin, a nostalgic tribute to their many adventures together with Karno, Essanay and Mutual. A corner of the public market at Vine and Melrose did service as the public street-cleaners’ yard, and Chaplin and Austin, as sweepers, sit down to one of the odorous and onion-scented packed lunches that had so often figured in the early shorts. In this case Charlie, blinded by suds as he is washing his face, seizes poor Austin’s cheese in mistake for the soap, while myopic Austin takes a hearty bite from a soap sandwich. The sequence ends with Austin attempting to bawl out Charlie, but only managing to erupt in clouds of soap bubbles. It was the last appearance before the cameras of this loyal old collaborator.

The cutting and titling of City Lights took from mid-October to mid-December. The film was finished, but it was a silent film. By this date, after Broadway Melody, All Quiet on the Western Front, Hallelujah!, Sous les Toits de Paris and The Blue Angel, the silent cinema was already an anachronism. Chaplin, though he may still have hoped, had evidently foreseen the development: such gags as the swallowed whistle and the incidents that ensue from it must have been conceived in anticipation of sound synchronization. In April 1929, as we have seen, Alf Reeves had written to Sydney that ‘sound effects, if required, can be added afterwards’. On 16 May 1930 he wrote again, confirming: ‘… he intends to synchronize it for sound and music … no dialogue.’

Chaplin was to surprise his collaborators, and all Hollywood into the bargain. Other directors, having completed their films, simply handed them over to the musical arrangers who had been descending upon Hollywood since 1927 – many of them former directors of cinema orchestras whose jobs had been taken from them by the advent of synchronized films. Chaplin who, since A Woman of Paris, had taken a keen interest in the musical accompaniments for his silent films, determined that he would create his own musical score for the film. He had little or no musical training, but he had an irrepressible musical gift. In 1915 his Aunt Kate had considered that

If Charles Chaplin remains a picture actor, the musical world will be a genius less … As a baby, he would stop playing with his toys the instant he heard music of any description, and would beat time with his tiny hand and nod his head until the music ceased. In later years I have seen him sit for hours at the piano, composing as he went along.

The ’cello was the instrument I think he loved best, ‘because it was so plaintive’, he said. I took a delight in watching his changing expression and his small hand quivering as he touched the chords. It was almost a caress.

It was only when he caught my eyes glistening that he would laugh, and suddenly do some funny little movement or dash off a gay air. This would immediately change my sad mood to one scream of laughter … ¹⁵

In 1921, seeing Kennington Cross again had awakened special memories for Charlie:

It was here that I first discovered music, or where I first learned its rare beauty, a beauty that has gladdened and haunted me from that moment. It all happened one night when I was there, about midnight. I recall the whole thing so distinctly.

I was just a boy, and its beauty was like some sweet mystery. I did not understand. I only knew that I loved it and I became reverent as the sounds carried themselves through my brain via my heart.

I suddenly became aware of a harmonica and a clarinet playing a weird, harmonious message. I learned later that it was ‘The Honeysuckle and the Bee’. It was played with such feeling that I became conscious for the first time of what melody really was. My first awakening to music.

I remembered how thrilled I was as the sweet sounds pealed into the night. I learned the words the next day. How I … would love to hear it now, that same tune, that same way!

Kennington Cross, where music first entered my soul. Trivial, perhaps, but it was the first time.¹⁶

Chaplin acquired his ’cello and violin when he was about sixteen, and painstakingly heaved them about on his various tours, taking lessons from the musical directors of the theatres where he played and practising from four to six hours a day. He played left-handed, which meant that his violin had to be strung with the bass bar and sounding post reversed from normal mode. He would improvise for hours on the piano, and when he built his own home, installed a costly pipe organ. In 1916 he started the Charles Chaplin Music Company, which was short-lived but published three of his compositions, ‘There’s Always One You Can’t Forget’, ‘Oh, That ’Cello’ and ‘The Peace Patrol’. He conducted Sousa’s Band in a performance of the last of these, along with the ‘Poet and Peasant’ overture, at a benefit concert at the New York Hippodrome on 20 February 1916. In 1921 he published two more compositions, ‘Sing a Song’ and ‘With You Dear in Bombay’, of which he also made a recording with Abe Lyman’s orchestra.

Something of the universal appeal of Chaplin’s screen character also emerged in his composition: the themes of Modern Times and Limelight were to win a place among perennial favourites of popular music. In method (the use of recurrent leitmotifs and strong emotional themes) and power, Chaplin’s film scores were akin to the musical accompaniments of nineteenth-century drama which still occasionally lingered in his boyhood. It cannot be without significance that among Chaplin’s working papers for the score to accompany A Woman of Paris was a copy of André Wormser’s music for L’Enfant Prodigue, the most famous nineteenth-century mime play. It was revived several times during Chaplin’s youth, and it seems likely, with his already conscious interest in pantomime, that he would have seen it.

After the première of City Lights, Chaplin told a reporter from the New York Telegram: ‘I really didn’t write it down. I la-laed and Arthur Johnston wrote it down, and I wish you would give him credit, because he did a very good job. It is all simple music, you know, in keeping with my character.’ Chaplin’s work on the score with Arthur Johnston took six weeks. The score had almost a hundred musical cues: the principal original themes created by Chaplin included a trumpet fanfare, a kind of ‘fate’ theme which introduced the film and various subsequent sequences, a ’cello theme for the Tramp, a mixture of operatic burlesque and Al Jolson-style laughing-through-tears melodies for the suicide scenes, a jazz motif for the nightclub, and a combination of comic tango and ‘hurry’ music for the boxing match. The blind girl had several variant themes, although the principal motif was Padilla’s ‘La Violetera’, which had made a great impression on Chaplin when he had first heard it sung by Raquel Meller in 1926. Other musical quotations used for comic effect included a snatch of Scheherezade, ‘I Hear You Calling Me’ and ‘How Dry Am I’. Chaplin always had difficulties with arrangers who wanted to make the music funny. ‘I wanted no competition. I wanted the music to be a counterpoint of grace and charm … I tried to compose elegant and romantic music to frame my comedies …’ In the same way he disliked the ‘Mickey-Mousing’ technique of directly pointing gags with sound effects and snare drums. In City Lights the effects are sparingly used: mainly for the whistle gag, for the saxophone voices of the officials at the unveiling, for pistol shots and the bells in the boxing ring.

The music was recorded over a period of five days under the direction of Alfred Newman, United Artists’ musical director, and Ted Reed, who was in charge of sound and recording. Only Henry Bergman, with his musical background, was deeply disappointed in the results: ‘It is interesting, the terrible deficiencies of the medium are too apparent. I don’t think they will ever overcome them. Thirty-five of the very finest artists played the score for City Lights so beautifully on the set. Through the mechanics of the microphone it became something else.’¹⁷ The quality of the music and the subtlety of the orchestration only became fully apparent in 1989, when the score was restored by Carl Davis and performed as a live orchestral accompaniment to the film at performances in commemoration of the centenary of Chaplin’s birth.

Needless to say, Chaplin was deeply depressed by the preview at the Tower Theatre, Los Angeles. The theatre was only half full and the audience, who had gone expecting to see the adventure drama which had been billed, was apathetic. As a result of the reactions he trimmed the film a little, though recutting, which had been a regular practice in silent films, was not so cheap or easy with sound. The notices which appeared on the day of the première, following the previous day’s press show, were distinctly more heartening. A veteran critic on the Los Angeles Examiner recalled happily that ‘not since I reviewed the first Chaplin comedy way back in the two-reel days has Charlie given us such an orgy of laughs’. The Record said:

Nobody in the world but Charlie Chaplin could have done it. He is the only person that has that peculiar something called ‘audience appeal’ in sufficient quantity to defy the popular penchant for pictures that talk. City Lights, though it was received with whole-hearted delight and punctuated with innumerable bursts of applause from the audience, is no menace for the talkies. It is the exception that proves the rule. It is sure to be an immense box-office attraction. He has made a picture that the world will want to see. Charlie Chaplin is an institution.

Even institutions have first-night nerves. Henry Bergman remembered that on the afternoon of the première, ‘I was just leaving the studio in my car when Charlie drove up. At once he came to me and said in all seriousness, “Henry, I don’t know so much about that picture. I’m not sure.” And I said to him, “I’m telling you, Charlie, I’ve never failed you yet, have I? If this isn’t right, you’ll quit the business and go to live abroad on what you’ve got. Nobody could do what you’ve done.”’

The première, on 30 January 1931, went down in cinema history as the greatest Hollywood had ever seen – though it was not in fact held in Hollywood. Until this time premières had always been held in the handful of Hollywood picture palaces, but Chaplin decided to show City Lights in the brand new Los Angeles Theatre on Broadway, between 6th and 7th Streets. It was equipped with restaurant, soda fountain, art gallery, ‘crying-room’ for mothers with babies, ballroom, shoeshine parlour, broadcasting room, playroom, French cosmetics room and practically anything else the Californian heart might yearn for. From early afternoon the Los Angeles police were out to try to control the crowds that congested the city centre in the hope of glimpsing some small flash of the evening’s glamour. The traffic was halted, and department store windows broken by the sheer pressure of the crowds. At one point the police threatened to use tear gas. The guests who made their slow progress through the crush included the aristocracy of Hollywood: the Vidors, the DeMilles, the Zanucks, the Schencks, the John Barrymores, the Jack Warners, Hedda Hopper, Gloria Swanson. The press were also pleased to point out the presence of Marion Davies, Claire Windsor, Merna Kennedy and Georgia Hale. Chaplin’s personal guests were Professor and Mrs Albert Einstein, in whose honour the entire house rose. The Einsteins were rather too overcome from battling their way through the crowds fully to appreciate the gesture.

Chaplin was accompanied to the première by Georgia Hale. ‘Going down in the car, all the way he was like a little mouse. “I don’t think it’s going to go over,” he said. “I don’t think they’re going to like it … No, I just feel it.” He was like a shy little kid. He was always that way about his work.’

From the first shot the audience were delighted. All went well until the end of the third reel, when the film was stopped, the houselights turned on, and a bland voice announced that the show would be interrupted so that the audience could admire the beautiful features of the new theatre. The glittering audience forgot decorum and started to boo and whistle. Their indignation was as nothing compared to Chaplin’s fury as he charged off in search of the management. The film was resumed; the audience was instantly recaptured. The ovation at the end vindicated all the months of work and anxiety.

The next day Chaplin left to make preparations for the New York opening. This resulted in a major row with United Artists. Chaplin found that pre-publicity in the East was negligible, while United Artists questioned his policy of raising seat prices to $1.50 (15 cents over the normal top price) for a film which they no doubt now regarded as outdated. Moreover they were outraged by his demand for 50 per cent of the gross. Chaplin decided to exhibit his picture independently, and took whole-page advertisements in the trade press to announce the fact. The première took place in the old George M. Cohan Theatre, somewhat off the beaten track of major moving picture theatres. Chaplin’s gamble paid off well: in its twelve weeks at the Cohan, the film grossed $400,000. Two months later, while Chaplin was in Europe, Alf Reeves was despatched to New York to inform Arthur Kelly, who had represented Chaplin’s interests in United Artists, that his services were no longer needed.

The years making City Lights had left Chaplin with little time or inclination for social life. When shooting he worked a six- and sometimes seven-day week; evenings and Sundays were for rest and recuperation. In 1968 he recalled, with feeling, ‘I had to direct and act and write and produce a film, cut it … and I did it all, which very few in my day did, you know. They didn’t do it all, you see … And that’s why I was so exhausted.’ He told Richard Meryman: ‘The evening is rather a lonesome place, you know, in California, especially Hollywood.’¹⁸

It was a measure of the quiet social life that Chaplin was leading at this time that during the entire production of City Lights, and indeed since the divorce, the gossip columnists had failed to sniff out or invent any romantic liaisons for him. At this period his most constant companion was Georgia Hale, loyal, worshipping and undemanding. Sometimes in the evening he would still stop in at Henry’s restaurant, where he liked the lentil soup and coleslaw. Ivor Montagu, who met Chaplin about this time, greatly admired Georgia’s qualities of character:

She was a fine person, and, I firmly believe, one of the few women in Charlie’s early life who cared for him frankly and unselfishly.

One evening, returning from the Hollywood Bowl with a girlfriend she went for a late bite to Henry’s … Henry Bergman came over to their table and they grew sentimental together.

‘Ah,’ said Georgia, ‘three hearts that beat as one – yours, mine and Charlie’s.’

‘Yes,’ replied Henry, ‘and they’re all thinking of the same thing, Charlie.’

When we retold the tale to Charlie in Georgia’s presence, Charlie considered, then admitted:

‘Yes, it’s true.’¹⁹

Montagu was in Hollywood with Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Alexandrov, who were there studying American sound techniques and hoping to set up productions of their own. When finally they reached Chaplin, thanks to Montagu’s letters of introduction from Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, he was warm in his hospitality. ‘Charlie’s house and garden became our second home. We would always ring up and ask Kono before dropping in, but Kono who, when he wished, could be an impenetrable wall, treated inquiry from us as a polite formality. Sometimes we would be rung up and asked over.’²⁰ The party was especially welcome because they played tennis – Montagu well, Alexandrov conscientiously.

Even Sergei Mikhailovich [Eisenstein] bought ducks and tried pursuing the ball with a sort of savage spite. He spoiled all by wearing braces and scarlet ones at that, as well as a belt for security. When I told him this was improper he was downcast, but reassured when I added that braces for tennis were a practice of the late Lord Birkenhead.²¹

Since Georgia had introduced Chaplin to tennis in the late 1920s, the game had become a passion. He developed unusual skill and always liked to challenge professionals. He told Konrad Bercovici – who was astonished at the rejuvenation it had produced in Chaplin – that he played tennis for several hours every day, and found that it exorcised his prime fears. He loved its form and grace; it was not important, he said, if you hit the ball or not, provided that you moved gracefully and ‘in form’. (This was not strictly true: he was distinctly displeased to lose at any time.) It was for him not only recreation but an aesthetic experience. Other friends also remarked on the therapeutic value the game had for him. He continued to play with pleasure and skill until late in his life. As soon as the Chaplins had settled down in their Swiss home in 1953, a tennis court was built.

Sunday tennis parties broadened Chaplin’s social life. In the ordinary way he had never much cared for big parties: he preferred the intimacy of small dinners. The absence of an official hostess at the Summit Drive house gave him the excuse to do little formal entertaining. ‘It wasn’t that he was stingy,’ Georgia recalls, ‘but it wasn’t easy for him. He wasn’t at ease. Sometimes though he would do a big party, to pay back all the people who had entertained him.’ The Montagu–Eisenstein troupe’s first visit was to a rather formal, English-style garden party at the house:

Chaplin afterwards confessed to us that this was an ‘occasional garden party’ when enough people had piled up to whom he owed hospitality. From time to time he would nerve himself to hold one and rid himself of all the accumulated obligations in one fell swoop.²²

Generally he allowed Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks to organize his social life. He was an indispensable guest when there were distinguished visitors at their mansion, Pickfair, next to his own home. Fairbanks’s fondness for fellow celebrities, particularly if they had a European title, was well known. One day Chaplin asked him, ‘How’s the Duke, Doug?’ ‘What Duke?’ asked Fairbanks, puzzled. ‘Oh, any Duke,’ replied Chaplin.

There were other foreign visitors to the Chaplin home in the summer of 1930. One day, when Eisenstein and Ivor Montagu were at the house, two young Spaniards, Luis Buñuel and the writer Eduardo Ugarte, were deposited there by a mutual friend. Buñuel, having achieved notoriety with his Surrealist masterpieces Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or, had been whimsically offered a kind of traineeship by Metro Goldwyn Mayer, and just as whimsically had accepted it. The conversation when they arrived at the house was an embarrassed struggle in sign language: too late did Montagu and Eisenstein discover that Buñuel’s French was faultless. Thereafter, Buñuel became a frequent visitor at the house and related in his autobiography how Chaplin had obligingly arranged an ‘orgy’ for him and two of his compatriots. Alas, ‘when the three ravishing young women arrived from Pasadena, they immediately got into a tremendous argument over which one was going to get Chaplin, and in the end all three left in a huff.’²³

At Christmas 1930, Chaplin and Georgia were invited to a dinner party given by some of the Spanish contingent. Buñuel, Ugarte and an actor named Peña decided to liven things up with a Surrealist incident, and leapt up from the dinner table to set about hacking down the Christmas tree. Buñuel admitted that ‘it’s not easy to dismember a Christmas tree. In fact, we got a great many scratches for some rather pathetic results, so we resigned ourselves to throwing the presents on the floor and stomping on them.’²⁴ The other guests were shocked. In spite of this Chaplin (‘a forgiving man’) invited the Spaniards to his New Year’s Eve party. They arrived to find an enormous Christmas tree. Chaplin took Buñuel aside before dinner and said, ‘Since you’re so fond of tearing up trees, Buñuel, why don’t you get it over with now, so we won’t be disturbed during dinner?’ ‘I replied,’ said Buñuel, ‘that I really had nothing against trees …’²⁵ Buñuel remembered other visits to Chaplin’s home. Several times he screened Un Chien Andalou: the first time Kono, who was running the projector, fainted away when he saw the opening scene of a razor blade slicing an eye. Years later Buñuel was delighted to learn from Carlos Saura that according to Geraldine Chaplin her father used to frighten the children by describing scenes from Buñuel’s films.²⁶ One day Buñuel was invited to see some rushes from City Lights with the writer Edgar Neville, who seems to have been officially attached to the unit for a while. Buñuel was too timid to declare his opinion, but Neville suggested that the scene with the swallowed whistle went on too long. Chaplin later cut it. ‘Curiously, he seemed to lack self-confidence and had a good deal of trouble making decisions.’ Georgia remarked the same when she watched rushes with Chaplin. ‘He was real humble about some things. At rushes he’d ask, “Which one did you like?” And I’d tell him; and he would consider it. Then I got that I didn’t want to see the rushes. It disturbed me seeing it out of continuity. When he directed you the continuity was there, because he would tell you before all that had happened up to that moment.’²⁷

One of Buñuel’s stories is engaging but inaccurate in detail: ‘He also had strange work habits, which included composing the music for his films while sleeping. He’d set up a complicated recording device at his bedside and used to wake up partway, hum a few bars, and go back to sleep. He composed the entire score of “La Violetera” that way, a plagiarism that earned him a very costly trial.’²⁸ Although Chaplin may have recomposed the piece in his dreams, he was never in any doubt about its origins in his waking hours. Although there was some costly wrangling over copyright fees,²⁹ there was certainly no plagiarism suit.