18

Exile

When the Queen Elizabeth docked at Southampton, six-year-old Michael Chaplin had been mislaid (he was eventually found in the ship’s gymnasium), which gave the reporters time to interview Chaplin before he boarded the train for London. He was tactful in avoiding a direct reply to the American Government’s action, since all he possessed was still in the United States and he was terrified that they would devise some means of confiscating it. He indicated that he would return and face any charges:

The US Government does not go back on anything it says. It will not go back on my re-entry permit.

These are days of turmoil and strife and bitterness. This is not the day of great artists. This is the day of politics.

People are now only too willing to take issue about everything. But I am very philosophical about it all. I try my best.

I do not want to create any revolution. All I want to do is create a few more films. It might amuse people. I hope so …

I’ve never been political. I have no political convictions. I’m an individualist, and I believe in liberty.¹

He told them that he had had an idea for a new film about a displaced person arriving in the New World. A head wound had given the man a complaint called cryptosthenia, which caused him to speak in an ancient language. Since no one could understand him at the immigration barriers, he was allowed to pass all the language tests. Chaplin mimed the interrogation scene for the reporters. Knowing Chaplin’s extreme secrecy about his film ideas, it is unlikely he was very serious about this project: it was simply an attractive morsel for the press.

More seriously, he told them about his desire to show his wife and children London, and to explore it again himself. He recalled how ‘music first entered my soul’ (he never varied the phrase) when he heard the street musicians playing ‘The Honeysuckle and the Bee’. ‘I was seven and now I’m sixty-three, but I’ll never forget it.’ He appears to have carried with him his first cuttings book, since the newsmen reported that he displayed his first notice from 1903, for Jim, a Romance of Cockayne.

Although not quite so numerous as on his previous visits, the crowds were waiting at Southampton, and again at Waterloo, where scores of people broke through the police cordons in an effort to touch him. More people were waiting outside the Savoy. Mr and Mrs Marriott, the Festival of Britain Pearly King and Queen, brought him a basket of flowers adorned with boots, bowler and walking stick, and inscribed from the people of London. At this time Chaplin was more than usually touched by such sentimental gestures.

On the day of his arrival he gave a press conference:

In Mr Chaplin, face to face, one looks of course for signs of his tragi-comic screen creation. One sees instead a small friendly man, white-haired, his complexion pinker than usual from the lighting of the little stage from which he addresses the hungry journalists through a microphone. When he descends from his stage he is lost. The swarm slowly circles the room with him as its centre, and when someone, guided by a friendly secretary, succeeds in reaching that centre there is ludicrously little time to conduct the personal conversation which, indeed, one shrinks from forcing on him.²

The British public and press were enchanted and intrigued by their first sight of Oona. Shy and retiring though she was, a short statement was wheedled out of her: ‘I’m happy to stay in the background and help where I’m needed. Perhaps that is why I am the only one of his four wives he took to London, and I am very proud.’ She was asked what Chaplin was like as a husband: ‘Charlie is a half-and-half personality. One half is difficult – the other easy. But I find we manage very happily. He is an attentive husband and a wonderful father.’ Chaplin had told reporters when the Queen Elizabeth docked at Cherbourg, ‘I will go back.’ In London he said, ‘I expect to go back,’ and Oona commented: ‘It would come as no shock to me if he decided to stay in England.’

After ten years of coldness in America, Chaplin was gratified by the fan letters that awaited him at the Savoy, many of them imploring him to remain. In the News Chronicle, Lionel Hale, writing ‘as a Tory and a friend of America’, declared that

there is always some good in folly, and the good might be that England, and the London streets which are so greatly changed from the days of fog and gas-light and bare-foot boys, might, after so long a time, have once again as one of its gallant inhabitants one of the greatest artists of the era, Mr Charles Spencer Chaplin.³

In the House of Commons, MPs urged the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, to demand that the US Government allow Chaplin to re-enter the country without let or hindrance. Nor was all American opinion in favour of the Attorney-General. A US Congressman visiting Britain spoke of the affair as ‘persecution’. A leading article in the New York Times said that those who had followed Chaplin through the years could not easily regard him as a dangerous person:

No political situation, no international menace, can destroy the fact that he is a great artist who has given infinite pleasure to many millions, not in any one country but in all countries. Unless there is far more evidence against him than is at the moment visible, the Department of State will not dignify itself or increase the national security if it sends him into exile.⁴

Attorney-General McGranery was meanwhile engaged in the McCarthyist process of innuendo. ‘If what has been said about him is true,’ he hinted darkly, ‘he is, in my opinion, an unsavoury character.’ He claimed that when the public knew the facts on which he was basing his move to bar the comedian from re-entering the United States, it would realize that his action had been justified. McGranery alleged that Chaplin had been accused in the press of being a member of the Communist Party and also of ‘grave moral charges’. He declined to be specific about the charges, since he said that this would assist Chaplin in his defence. He would only add further that ‘He has been charged with making leering, sneering statements about the country whose gracious hospitality has enriched him.’

McGranery was forced to admit that he had taken his action without consulting any other government departments. It was believed, in fact, that the State Department and many Washington officials had been dismayed by the adverse reaction from all parts of the world. McGranery, however, had evidently been under pressure from right-wing and McCarthyist elements for some time. Senator Richard Nixon, using the notepaper of the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, had written to Hedda Hopper on 29 May 1952,⁵ four months before Chaplin’s departure:

Dear Hedda:

I agree with you that the way the Chaplin case has been handled has been a disgrace for years. Unfortunately, we aren’t able to do much about it when the top decisions are made by the likes of Acheson and McGranery. You can be sure, however, that I will keep my eye on the case and possibly after January we will be able to work with an Administration which will apply the same rules to Chaplin as they do to ordinary citizens.

The Senator signed himself cordially, ‘Dick Nixon’.

Chaplin, meanwhile, was invigorated by his explorations of London. From his balcony at the Savoy he could see the Thames and the new Waterloo Bridge, which he did not like at all, ‘only that its road led over to my boyhood’.⁶ At that time, something still remained of the Kennington he had known as a boy, and on this and subsequent visits Oona was to come to know it as well as he did himself. Alone, he preferred to make his trips on foot or by bus and tube; and he was rarely recognized. On his first evening in London he went to the Scotch House, a pub near Leicester Square, where the landlord was an old Karno colleague, Jimmy Russell, one of many interpreters of the awful boy in Mumming Birds; but Russell, to his subsequent chagrin, was not there that night. In the afternoons, while the children made their own excursions with their nannies, Chaplin and Oona would have tea at Fortnums.

Compared with their last years in California these weeks in London were a whirl of social activity. On their first night, they dined at the house of Douglas Fairbanks Junior, where the Oliviers were also guests. The following evening they went to the Old Vic to see Claire Bloom playing Juliet to Alan Badel’s Romeo. Some days later, Chaplin took Miss Bloom for a walk around Covent Garden market, and she was touched by the way the market traders all saluted him affectionately with ‘Hello, Guv’nor’. The Chaplins went to a Toscanini concert and afterwards met the great old man. They saw Emlyn Williams at his Dickens readings, and afterwards dined with him, along with Noël Coward, Alec Guinness and Binkie Beaumont. They were entertained as guests of the Variety Club at the Savoy, and at a lunch given by the Critics’ Circle. Chaplin was so much more accessible at this time than on any other London visit before or after that it was confidently predicted that he would appear in both the Royal Variety Performance and at the Royal Film Performance. He did not. He had told the Times reporter that there was no chance of his ever appearing again on stage.

‘You have to be in constant practice,’ he said. And the fact that one reminded him of the pleasure it would give and how inconceivable it was that a music-hall actor should ever lose his sense of craft could not persuade him to change his mind.

Chaplin did, however, agree to an unscripted half-hour interview on the BBC Light Programme. His interviewers were Dilys Powell, Sir Michael Balcon, Paul Holt, John Mills and Robert Mackenzie. He told them how, in his early days, he ‘used to write with a camera’ (in this he anticipated the French director Alexandre Astruc’s concept of the caméra-stylo). By that he meant that he used to go on the set in the morning without an idea. Then he would start, get excited, and in his excitement begin to invent. He explained that this was a contrast to the long, leisurely and thorough preparations he had made for his latest films. He said that he had set Limelight in London partly out of a feeling of nostalgia, partly because he wanted to say something about kindliness and humanity, and London seemed to him a fitting setting. The film was not autobiographical except in so far as, like his other work, it inevitably expressed something of its creator’s personality.

He had much to say about personality. His own conception of a film was that it served to provide a setting for a striking personality, which the story and everything else existed to display. In the days of the silent films, he believed, the personality of the actor counted for more than in the present day. So much more was left to the spectator’s imagination. The film actors then belonged, as it were, to poetry and to fairyland. ‘But we cannot go back to silent films, and perhaps I merely romanticize them.’

This was the only recorded occasion on which he said that he had learnt much about the use of music from Fred Karno, who had used music for its incongruity and to underline the satire – some stately eighteenth-century air, perhaps, to accompany the adventures of tramps.

When the word ‘genius’ kept cropping up, Chaplin laughingly said that it no longer embarrassed him. Indeed, he had become quite ‘shameless’ about hearing himself called one. ‘We have so many of them in Hollywood.’ He liked to think the word meant merely an individual stylist who did things conscientiously and sometimes perhaps remarkably well. For his own part, he said, he had never written down to the public. He had always done the very best he could.

The world première of Limelight, in aid of the Royal London Society for Teaching and Training the Blind, and attended by Princess Margaret, took place at the Odeon, Leicester Square, on 23 October. The press show was held in the theatre the same morning. Claire Bloom appeared with Chaplin at the top of the foyer stairs; when she threw her arms around him and kissed him (‘He had finally made me natural with him in life as well’) they were warmly applauded. Miss Bloom was working in the theatre in the evening and so could not attend the première, but Chaplin appeared on stage, to great enthusiasm. It was the first film première in Britain to be covered by live television.

Leaving their children happily on the farm of their friend Sir Edward Beddington-Behrens, the Chaplin parents and Harry Crocker moved on to Paris for the French première. There they were even more handsomely fêted. They were invited to lunch with the President, and at the British Embassy; Chaplin was made an officer of the Légion d’Honneur and an honorary member of the Socie tiques. The premiété des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramàre was attended by members of the cabinet and the diplomatic corps, with the American Ambassador a notable absentee. At the Comédie-Française they were guests of honour at a special gala performance of Molière’s Don Juan. Harry Crocker was anxious about the consequences for Chaplin’s political reputation of a dinner with Louis Aragon, Picasso and Jean-Paul Sartre. Later Chaplin and Oona visited Picasso’s studio, ‘the most deplorable, barnlike garret’, stacked with priceless masterpieces by Picasso’s contemporaries. Chaplin did not speak French and Picasso did not speak English. Picasso recalled:

The interpreters were doing their best but the thing was dragging. Then I had the idea of getting Chaplin alone and seeing if maybe all by ourselves we couldn’t establish some kind of communication. I took him upstairs to my painting studio and showed him the pictures I had been working on recently. When I finished, I gave him a low bow and a flourish to let him know it was his turn. He understood at once. He went into the bathroom and gave me the most wonderful pantomime of a man washing and shaving, with every one of those little involuntary reflexes like blowing the soapsuds out of his nose and digging them out of his ears. When he had finished that routine, he picked up two toothbrushes and performed that marvellous Dance of the Rolls, from the New Year’s Eve dinner sequence in The Gold Rush. It was just like the old days.

Unfortunately Picasso, violently opposed to all sentimentality, did not like Limelight. ‘When he starts reaching for the heartstrings, maybe he impresses Chagall, but it doesn’t go down with me. It’s just bad literature.’ Nor could he reconcile himself to the physical changes that time had effected in Chaplin:

The real tragedy lies in the fact that Chaplin can no longer assume the physical appearance of the clown because he’s no longer slender, no longer young, and no longer has the face and expression of his ‘little man’, but that of a man who’s grown old. His body isn’t really him any more. Time has conquered him and turned him into another person. And now he’s a lost soul – just another actor in search of his individuality, and he won’t be able to make anybody laugh.

Picasso’s young wife felt that the painter’s negative response to Limelight may have been affected by the resemblances between the film’s story and their own personal situation.

In the United States the campaign against Chaplin and Limelight continued. At a meeting of 10–12 October 1952, the American Legion adopted the following resolution:

CHARLES CHAPLIN FILM ‘LIMELIGHT’ AND HIS RE-ENTRY INTO UNITED STATES

Whereas, Charlie Chaplin has produced and played an important part in a new picture titled ‘Limelight’; which is soon to be exhibited in the United States; and

Whereas, Charlie Chaplin is now outside the confines of the United States; and

Whereas, Charlie Chaplin has never applied for or assumed responsibilities of citizenship although he has profited handsomely under the American Way of Life; and

Whereas, Charlie Chaplin has always manifested a contemptuous attitude toward American patriotism; and

Whereas, Charlie Chaplin’s views of personal morality have resulted in public censure; and

Whereas, the Justice Department has initiated an investigation pertaining to the granting of a Certificate of Re-Entry to Charlie Chaplin; therefore

Be It Resolved, That the National Executive committee, the American Legion, at its meeting in Indianapolis, Indiana, October 10–11–12, 1952, urge the distributors of the film ‘Limelight’ to withdraw its presentation until the issues are determined; and

Be It Further Resolved, That the American Legion commend the Justice Department for its decision to investigate Charlie Chaplin’s eligibility to return to the shores of the United States.

The Legion wrote to individual theatres and chains, announcing its

intention to carry our case to the public by means of picketing and other publicity measures.

Accordingly we wish to advise you that the American Legion will carry out such a program against theatres in the District … at which ‘Limelight’ is shown.⁷

The Legion were as good as their word: a United Artist representative reported to head office,

We were advised by telephone from the RKO Orpheum Theatre in Dubuque, Iowa, that the audience started rioting during the engagement of LIMELIGHT at this theatre, running up and down the aisles tearing up seats and it was necessary to call the Police Department for protection, so the picture was pulled off at the end of 2 days.

Not surprisingly, several major theatrical chains – Fox, Loew’s and RKO – were persuaded to withdraw the film within a short period after its first showings.

Meanwhile Hedda Hopper published a notorious attack in her nationally syndicated column:

No one can deny [that Chaplin] is a good actor. That doesn’t give him the right to go against our customs, to abhor everything we stand for, to throw our hospitality back in our faces … I abhor what he stands for … Good riddance to bad rubbish.

The American press was not, however, unanimous. The Nation (4 October 1952) said:

Whatever his political views may be … Charlie Chaplin can hardly be regarded as an overt threat to American institutions … Chaplin is an artist whose shining talent has for decades cast its luster upon his adopted country and brought joy to the world.

Between the picketing and press hostility, the new heads of United Artists, Robert Benjamin and Arthur Krim, wholeheartedly committed to the film as they were, had a major problem in securing favourable distribution. A report to Benjamin from the company’s publicity chief, Max E. Youngstein, dated 28 August 1952, is a valuable assessment of Chaplin’s standing with the American press on the eve of his departure from the United States. ‘Here are certain matters which have developed,’ says Youngstein, ‘which I think ought to be brought to the attention of Arthur Kelly and from him to Mr Chaplin.’

1. Denton Walker, Leonard Lyons and Earl Wilson are the only columnists who will mention Chaplin favorably. So far we have been able to get four stories in Lyons’ column, three in Walker’s column and two in Wilson’s column, with more items definitely promised.

2. Walter Winchell, Dorothy Kilgallen, Ed Sullivan, Frank Farrell and Hy Gardner are on the antagonistic side. Hy Gardner is being sued by Chaplin, and, of course, won’t do anything for the picture. He also has enough influence at the Herald Tribune, who runs his column, to make it almost impossible for us to get space on the picture. Sullivan, Kilgallen and Farrell have close working connections with the Catholic War Veterans and will refuse, absolutely, to mention Chaplin except in an unfavorable light. Winchell, in addition to being with the Hearst press, is personally peeved with Chaplin.

3. In addition to the columnists, all of the Hearst papers we have contacted are definitely turning thumbs down on Chaplin stories or favorable mention of any kind.

4. Hy Gardner, in addition to being a columnist is also a Legionnaire. He has been putting up quite a beef about Chaplin with the American Legion, and there has been scheduled at the present time, an article in the American Legion Magazine, to be written by Victor Lasky, rapping Chaplin, This article is scheduled to appear in the November issue.

5. We have also received word from a very good source that the Catholic War Veterans will picket Limelight.

6. As I advised you yesterday the Red Cross has turned down a proposed tie-up on the picture. They never once mentioned anything against Chaplin. They gave us a technical, legal reason for the turn-down.

There is no longer any doubt in my mind that we are going to run into serious boycotting, picketing and other difficulties …

I would also like to arrange for a meeting with Cardinal Spellman and try to find out just what can be done to solve the problem.

Once in Europe, Chaplin appeared remarkably insensitive to United Artists’ problems and the company’s dedicated efforts on behalf of his film. Directives and complaints hurtled from Europe to Hollywood. In November he sent instructions to cut out of Limelight the sequences involving the armless wonder, Claudius. He still expected the huge distribution percentages (60 per cent or 65 per cent for the London West End première run, for example) which he had received in the great days. He insisted on the withdrawal of the trailer United Artists had prepared (his principal objection was to the use of the word ‘genius’, which he rightly felt might be tactless for America at that moment). He threatened a law-suit when he discovered that the company had been giving private screenings of the film without his authorization. On 12 January 1954, he fiercely rejected United Artists’ request to lend a print of Limelight to President Peron of Argentina for three days. He looked more favourably on a request by Queen Elizabeth II for a screening at Sandringham.⁸ A succession of telegrams reveal the close watch he maintained on exhibition conditions:

LONDON NOV 19 1952

PLEASE GIVE INSTRUCTIONS IMPERATIVE SOUND BE AMPLIFIED ABOVE NORMAL CANADA EVERYWHERE TO GIVE NECESSARY AUTHORITY PERSONALITY TO FILM DIALOGUE MUST BE HEARD EASILY CRITICISM NEW YORK SOUND TOO LOW BOTH MUSIC DIALOGUE WHICH MAY PARTLY ACCOUNT FOR ONLY FAIR RECEPTION PLEASE WIRE CABLE RECEIVED AND REQUEST GRANTED

CHAPLIN

LAUSANNE 26 DECEMBER 1952

UNDERSTAND PRINT AT ASTOR NEW YORK IS IN BAD CONDITION OVERWORKED AND PATCHED WITH WORDS MISSING AND IS UNFIT FOR SHOWING THIS IS NEGLECT ON UNITED ARTISTE [sic] PART AND SHOULD BE IMMEDIATELY CORRECTED THIS SHOWS BAD PHYSICAL MANAGEMENT AND DOES NOT ENCOURAGE PRODUCERS TO RELEASE FIRST CLASS PRODUCT THROUGH UNITED ARTISTE [sic]

CHARLES CHAPLIN

Poor Robert Benjamin could not suppress his exasperation:

What gets me down, apart from other considerations, is the fact that although everybody, in intimate association with Arthur Kelly (and I mean everybody not excluding myself) has been working hour by hour on Limelight as a crusade, not a distribution venture, the real beneficiary fails to appreciate this cardinal point. I wish he could see, and I think you ought to tell him, how U.A. is devoting itself substantially exclusively to Limelight to the detriment of its other product … This is to say nothing of the kind of sacrifices Bill and Max have been making in their contacts with newspapers, exhibitors, etc., – old relationships which are being pressured and prejudiced with only Limelight in mind.

The immediate cause of Benjamin’s frustration was that United Artists had struggled long and painstakingly to get a distribution deal with Loew’s circuit, which Chaplin vetoed because he did not like the terms (which were the same as those currently applied to The African Queen and High Noon):

In the Verdoux case Loew’s refusal to play the picture was the keystone of national reluctance, that is why the Loew’s bookings could be the greatest impetus for a national play-off now, and thus avoid another Verdoux catastrophe. Chaplin is just playing into the hands of his enemies, for he is supporting their scuttlebutt that exhibitors will not play this picture. The most complete answer to this is the Loew play-off and I find it almost impossible to understand how Chaplin can so damage the picture by not going along.

There are so many temptations to give one’s frustration free rein, and reach the conclusion that if that’s the way Chaplin wants it, why should we keep fighting the inevitable. I don’t know what instinct in us keeps us fighting; perhaps it is the reluctance to let his business unfamiliarity not only ruin the picture in this market, but stamp a great artist as a failure in the U.S. For surely a failure for Limelight in the U.S. following on Verdoux will lead to that national conclusion. What gets me is how Chaplin can think we are so zealous and conscientious in the foreign field, and yet ascribe a lack of enthusiasm in the domestic. Does he think we pour a different potion for our domestic executives than for our foreign?

Chaplin and Limelight were still not without their supporters. On 30 October, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association awarded a scroll of merit for Limelight. It was accepted on behalf of his father by Charles Chaplin Junior. Nor were all veterans committed to the American Legion’s position. The Bedford–Eastern Parkway Chapter of the American Veterans Committee carried a resolution in protest at the withdrawal of the film by exhibitors:

The resolution which was passed unanimously, deplored the attitude of the Legion in bringing pressure to bear upon exhibitors and deplored the willingness of exhibitors to submit to unwarranted demands by this pressure group. This AVC Chapter felt that the action of the theatre owners carries ominous implications for the future of American democracy and the freedom of discussion upon which that democracy is based …

We are not concerned with the specific individual or the specific film. We are, however, concerned with supine surrender to naked power. We are fearful about the future of America when an otherwise desirable commercial product can be eliminated from the free market, without reason, without excuse and without question – merely because somebody shakes a threatening finger.⁹

As he became more and more certain that he would not now attempt to return to the United States, Chaplin had to face the problem of removing his fortune to Europe. Providentially, nearly all his personal assets were contained in a safe-deposit box, and immediately before departing for Europe he had made the necessary arrangements for Oona to have access to it. Since he was personally unable to return to the United States, the only solution was for Oona to travel to Hollywood alone. The ten days that she was away – practically the first time that they had been separated since their marriage nine years before – gave Chaplin grave anxiety, terrified as he was that the American authorities would discover some ruse to prevent her from leaving the country again. Oona left London by plane on 17 November 1952: at that time New York was still an overnight journey. From New York she flew to Hollywood, accompanied by Arthur Kelly. They arrived on 20 November and left again on 23 November. In just two complete days, Oona, inexperienced as she still was in business affairs, had as far as possible to wind up the Chaplin assets in the United States.

She discovered that, since their departure, the FBI had interrogated the servants in an attempt to find some evidence of moral turpitude in the household. It was clear that the Bureau was desperate to uncover something – anything – that could substantiate the Attorney-General’s innuendoes. Everyone connected with Chaplin, including Tim Durant and his lawyer, was questioned, along with all the principals in the Barry case. The details of Paulette’s Mexican divorce were re-examined. Even Lita was questioned about her marriage of more than a quarter of a century earlier. She proudly refused to give them any information that could be used to smear her one-time husband.

The most pitiable victim of the FBI harassment was Wheeler Dryden. Since he had first been taken on at the studio, Wheeler’s devotion to his illustrious half-brother had grown to a state of veneration. Even today there remain in the Chaplin archives little packages, neatly wrapped and tied and labelled in Wheeler’s writing, with notes such as ‘Script, incomplete, but with a note in Mr Chaplin’s own hand’. On the set he would follow Chaplin at a respectful distance, warding off the importunate, seeing that Chaplin’s meditations were not disturbed, bringing him dates and fruit, always ready with anything he needed. Sometimes he might attempt a helpful suggestion and bore it patiently if Chaplin’s dismissal of it was brusque. He carefully collected every discarded relic of the studio and of Chaplin. The accumulating hoard of bric-à-brac may have contributed to his estrangement from his wife, whom he had married during the making of The Great Dictator: their son, as Spencer Wheeler, was to become a well-known jazz musician. Though he retained the grand manner of an old English Shakespearean, Wheeler was a timid man. He felt himself abandoned when first Charles and then Sydney left California; and he was terrified by the FBI interrogations. He began to suspect that the FBI were poisoning his food, and refused to leave his house. Ted and Betty Tetrick would from time to time persuade him to go out for a walk, but wherever they went he carefully noted down the streets, as if he feared that the Tetricks, too, were going to abandon him. Wheeler died on 30 September 1957 aged sixty-five.

Oona arrived back in London on 27 November, and a few days later the family left for Switzerland. Since Chaplin was not to return to the United States, Swiss residence was likely to be the most advantageous from a financial point of view. While looking for a permanent home, they moved into the Beau Rivage in Lausanne – an old-style grand hotel much favoured by exiled monarchs. From Lausanne they travelled to Rome for the Italian première of Limelight. Chaplin was invested with the order Al Merito della Repubblica, although the occasion was somewhat marred by a demonstration by right-wing extremists who pelted him with vegetables. Later he said that he had been mostly struck by the comedy of the incident and laughed at it. He refused to prosecute the youthful offenders.

The Chaplins quickly found their house. In January 1953, they moved into the Manoir de Ban at Corsier sur Vevey, which they initially rented from its owner, a former American Ambassador. After one month, they bought it for a reported $100,000. The house was an elegant villa with thirty-seven acres of park, orchard and garden. It had fifteen rooms on three floors. On the ground floor was a handsome drawing room with french doors opening onto a colonnaded terrace, which was a focal spot of the household during the summer. At either end of the drawing room, double doors led respectively into the dining room and the library, where Chaplin came to spend more and more of his time when he was at home. A fine elliptical stone staircase (which had a special fascination for the children since the wife of a former owner was said to have been killed by falling down it) led to the first floor, with guest suites and the main bedrooms. Chaplin’s bedroom was simply furnished; he designed the furniture himself in pale wood, with something of the 1930s in its rational austerity, something Edwardian in its proportions, and an element of Victorian in its evident sturdiness. The style, as he was accustomed to say, was Chaplin. Oona gave much attention to enlarging and decorating her suite, with its fine views over Lake Leman to the mountains beyond. Her paintings included one by Eakins, showing the artist’s studio with a nude model who was probably Oona’s grandmother. The third floor, reached by a more modest staircase or the lift installed by the previous owner, was the realm of the children and their nannies. In the wandering catacombs beneath the house, Chaplin, though no drinker himself, established a cellar, and later built an atmospherically conditioned vault to store his films. During Oona’s lifetime, one room in the cellars was reserved for the great bulk of Chaplin archives: the scripts, studio records, cuttings books and glass negatives of still photographs. The cellar proved to be inadequately damp-proofed, and after Oona’s death the archives continued to move from place to place.

Chaplin felt some anxiety about the cost of staffing such a large estate; while the children were growing up the servants generally numbered around a dozen. In later years, the Manoir’s domestic machine depended largely on Italians: the butler and cook, Gino and Mirella Terni, who arrived in 1958 and remained for some twenty-five years, and the chauffeur Renato Govoni, a gentle man of distinguished appearance who took over the post from his brother Mario in 1965. Mario subsequently returned and, after Oona’s death, remained as general factotum of the estate.

Chaplin’s most urgent need was for a secretary. A friend suggested a Miss Rachel Ford, who had lived in Paris practically all her life, but remained very British in her appearance and her brisk, no-nonsense approach to life. During the war she had risen to the highest rank possible for a woman in the Free French Army. Afterwards she had worked for the European Movement, organizing international conferences. She was persuaded to consider a temporary job with Chaplin largely because she had inherited from her father a passion for Chaplin’s screen creations. When she arrived at the Manoir, the Chaplins were still unpacking, and Miss Ford felt that she was not at her most presentable. She was wearing a man’s boot on one foot and a woman’s shoe on the other, having suffered a scald, and was accompanied by a dog on a string – he had lost his leash. She explained in her forthright manner that she could not type, had no experience as a secretary, and was only free for a few weeks between conferences. In the end, she was to stay for more than thirty years, during which time she identified herself wholly with the interests of the Chaplins, who found in her an administrator of integrity, astuteness, skill and unwavering determination. Chaplin was delighted by her doggedness, for instance, in pursuing any infringement of his copyrights. Miss Ford seemed to find the same invigoration in dealing with legal complexities that others might find in bridge or chess. At her first meeting with the Chaplins, she was dazzled by Oona’s beauty and youth and, as someone ‘who has never even known what shyness meant’, she was struck by how shy both of them seemed. From the start it was clear that Miss Ford’s role was to be more that of manager than secretary; and a secretary with the typing skills that she disclaimed, Mme Eileen Burnier, was engaged.

Having settled in, Chaplin announced, ‘I want to have six months of peace and quietness in this house. We will not go in for big parties, and large receptions, but keep to ourselves.’ They were to hold to this resolve, though they saw themselves as part of the local community, went shopping, complained if things went wrong, and from time to time appeared at some festive event (which was always good for the receipts). One serious disadvantage of the house had been overlooked, and was to cause friction between Chaplin and the local authorities. The Chaplins had seen and bought the property in the quiet of winter, and no one apparently troubled to tell them of the proximity of the Stand de Guémont, where since 1874 the able-bodied male citizens of Vevey had done their training in marksmanship. In 1955, Chaplin lodged a formal protest against the noise nuisance. The canton authorities, eager to accommodate such a distinguished resident, made concessions about certain agreed quiet days, but were adamant that the Stand must stay:

The township of Vevey will do all in the realm of the possible to diminish the noise due to the proximity of a shooting range. But we stress that under the terms of the Federal ordinance on militia shooting, we must furnish freely a range and we intend to do so.

As long as Chaplin lived, the dispute went on, with intermittent protests and the occasional arrival of experts to measure the decibels. The noise nuisance was not helped by growing traffic on a motorway skirting the estate. In moments of irritability Chaplin would threaten to sell up and move to the Riviera.

Noise or no noise, Chaplin now felt confident about pulling up his last roots in America. Early in March 1953, while the family were on holiday on the Riviera, the studio and the house in Beverly Hills were put up for sale. The studio was sold six months later to a firm of New York real estate agents for $700,000 – considerably less than the asking price. In April, Chaplin formally handed back his United States re-entry permit, with a public statement:

I have been the object of lies and vicious propaganda by powerful reactionary groups who, by their influence and by aid of America’s yellow press, have created an unhealthy atmosphere in which liberal minded individuals can be singled out and persecuted. Under these conditions I find it virtually impossible to continue my motion picture work, and I have therefore given up my residence in the United States.¹⁰

The FBI, with tortured logic, nevertheless contemplated that handing back the permit might be ‘an effort on his part to give the impression he is not returning to the United States while actually he may attempt to return unnoticed by United States officials’. Agents were cautioned to be vigilant.

The following February, when the Chaplins arrived at Heathrow for a week’s holiday in London, Oona had a British passport: the week before she had renounced her own American citizenship. The final link with the United States would be severed in March 1955, when Chaplin sold off his remaining interests in United Artists.

Chaplin made no concessions to the opinions of the ‘yellow press’ of America, which naturally howled I-told-you-so when he lunched with Chou En-lai in July 1954 while the Chinese Premier was attending the Geneva Conference. Curiosity alone would have forced Chaplin to accept the invitation. A couple of years later, when Chaplin was in London preparing A King in New York, he met Soviet leaders Bulganin and Khrushchev at a reception at Claridges. The meeting was cordial, though Chaplin diplomatically avoided meeting the American Ambassador, Harold Stassen, who was also present. There had also been attacks in May 1954, when Chaplin accepted a £5000 Peace Prize from a Communist World Peace organization. Clearly it would have been equally invidious to accept or to refuse the prize; Chaplin dealt tactfully with the problem by giving most of the money away. In October, he arrived in Paris to present £2000 to the Abbé Pierre to build shelters for the homeless of the city. The following week he came to London and in a ceremony at Lambeth Town Hall gave a further £2000 to the Mayor, Major Herbert White, to be used for the old and poor of the borough. A lot of the Lambeth old and poor turned up for the occasion to give him a riotous local boy’s welcome.

There was no question any more of retirement. Less than six months before his death, though terribly frail, Chaplin was still reported to be saying, ‘To work is to live – and I want to live.’ A year or two before that he had said, ‘I can’t stop … ideas just keep popping into my head.’ In his mid-sixties he was exploding with the will and need to work. By the end of 1953 he was talking confidently about his new film, although he would not reveal its subject: ‘This industry is a monster which grabs at everything. Every grain of an idea I get I have to hang on to jealously.’ He was looking for a boy of twelve to play in it, so the project must already have been A King in New York, which he officially announced (as The Ex-King) in May 1954. At that time he thought it would be ‘more or less a musical’.

Throughout most of 1954 and 1955 he was working on the script, although early on he was also reconsidering Shadow and Substance, so that Isobel Deluz, who was brought in as stenographer, was at times not quite clear which of the two scripts she was supposed to be taking down, or whether it was a memorandum of some general purpose gag or line. She recalled how delighted he was one day when a particularly moving scene he had half-dictated, half-performed, so affected her that she began to cry. ‘That’s the tear-jerker attack that really wows them at the box-office,’ he observed cheerfully.

Chaplin was never fluent in his dictation, and he seldom finished a sentence. He constantly flipped backwards and forwards in the text or jumped to another sequence. It would go this way:

‘I love you – I love you,’ (He lowers his eyes bashfully). ‘That’s it, got it. Just like that. I – I love you. Just make a note of that somewhere; may need it later on. Now, got those other pages? All right (reading) good. That’s all. I won’t do any more today. The tennis pro’s arrived. Must get in some exercise or my figure will get fat …’

Chaplin would correct the transcripts of the dictation sessions in longhand: the creation of a script was a constantly revolving process of dictation, typing, correction and retyping.

By the autumn of 1955 the script was far enough advanced to begin preparing production, and Chaplin invited Jerry Epstein, assistant producer on Limelight, to be his associate producer for A King in New York. Epstein arrived in Europe and joined the household at the Manoir de Ban, where he was to become a favourite and confidant of all the Chaplin children. A new production company, Attica, was established. Studio facilities were rented at Shepperton Studios, and in November 1955 Oona arrived in London to arrange accommodation during the production period. She decided on the Great Fosters Hotel at Egham, which had the advantages of being quiet, rich in historical associations, and within easy reach of the studios.

Chaplin, naturally, was to play the main role of the exiled king who arrives in New York full of optimism for his plans for world peace, but is quickly caught up in the materialist frenzy and political paranoia of contemporary America. He needed a leading lady for the role of the go-getting but attractive young advertising agent who persuades him to submit to the lucrative humiliations of acting in television commercials. Jerry Epstein already knew Kay Kendall, who had recently had considerable success with her appearances in Genevieve, Doctor in the House and The Constant Husband. Oona shared Epstein’s admiration for the comedienne, and Chaplin was infected by their enthusiasm. No doubt his own interest was further stirred by knowing that she was the granddaughter of one of the great idols of the music halls of his youth, Marie Kendall, who had created the song ‘Just Like The Ivy’. Epstein over-hastily reported Chaplin’s interest to Miss Kendall. Unfortunately he and Oona made the mistake of arranging for Chaplin to see Genevieve, which had enjoyed critical and commercial success. Chaplin did not like the film at all and decided that on no account would he wish to work with Miss Kendall, whereupon Epstein had the uneasy task of deflating the actress’s hopes. It is surprising that Chaplin did not appreciate Kay Kendall’s elegant talent, which still sparkles today, even if other aspects of the film have faded. Eventually he decided upon Dawn Addams, whom he had met when she was filming in Hollywood, shortly before his own departure. She was attractive, and her performance in the film was to prove professional and sporty. The second female role, of the King’s estranged Queen, was given to Maxine Audley, an actress with the same aristocratic bearing and fine features as Claire Bloom, who had recently been playing principal roles at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford.

For the part of the King’s long-suffering Ambassador, Chaplin auditioned a number of stage veterans and finally chose Oliver Johnston, an actor who had played for most of his career in honourable obscurity, but provided a charming and effective comic foil. Other English character actors in the cast were Jerry Desmonde, who had partnered Sid Field and Norman Wisdom, and Sidney James, who was shortly to establish a new career for himself as a star of the Carry On comedies. In the role of the King’s lawyer, he cast the American-Jewish stage comedian Harry Green, who had, as it happened, begun his career as a real-life lawyer. Green’s performance was expert and funny, but Chaplin always had the uneasy sense that the actor was trying to upstage him.

After the King, the most important dramatic role was to be that of the small boy whose parents are victims of the McCarthyist witch-hunt, and whom the King befriends – attracting suspicion upon himself as a result of the association. In late 1953 Chaplin had already begun his search for a boy to play this part, and it seems to have been only shortly before embarking on production that he had the idea of using his own son, Michael: originally he had planned to give Michael the tiny part of the progressive school pupil who uses his forefinger impartially for making cakes and for picking his nose. Michael enjoyed the work: ‘I tried hard to do what my father wanted and we got along fine.’¹¹

Chaplin needed courage to undertake such a film at a time when most men would already have retired, in conditions which were quite new to him and far less favourable than the working situation he had known for the past forty years. He was no longer master of his own studio with familiar craftsmen, who knew his whims, on call. The only official member of the unit who had known the Hollywood studio was Epstein. There were no longer the relaxed script conferences with the opportunities they had provided to test out ideas on trusted colleagues. Certainly, there was no longer the luxury of time to stop and reflect, and try scenes over again, some different way. High studio rents, production costs and union crewing requirements necessitated a tight schedule.

The strains show in the finished film. The presence of an assistant as fearlessly critical as Eddie Sutherland or Dan James might have trimmed the script of its wordiness; and someone might have had the courage to save Chaplin from mispronouncing ‘nuclear’ as ‘nucular’. Georges Périnal was a great cinematographer who had worked with Clair and Korda and Cavalcanti, yet the London-made New York has a shabby, makeshift look quite absent from the suggestive, mythical cities of City Lights and Modern Times. Barbara Cole, who was continuity girl on the film, observed that The reason the lighting was not up to Georges’ usual quality was because Chaplin would walk onto the set shortly after Georges had commenced lighting to announce, ‘I am going to shoot now!’ Of course Périnal would protest and do his best while Chaplin was making his final rehearsals but was certainly far from happy with the results he was allowed to achieve … ¹²

Barbara Cole also recalls:

One of the reasons that I was present during the editing period was that … Chaplin was accustomed to his own studio so when he demanded a projection room ‘Now!’ it was my duty to persuade him that he must wait a couple of hours as all theatres were fully booked for the time being.¹³

As Chaplin had once taken on the tyranny of European dictators, so now he turned his attack upon the destructive paranoia that had overtaken America. Whether the attack succeeded or failed, the importance of A King in New York is that Chaplin alone was the only film-maker with the courage to attempt it at a time when McCarthyism still prevailed. He was aware before he began the film that he must entirely discount the huge American market; in fact A King in New York was not screened in the United States until 1976, almost twenty years after it was made.

The film begins, for old times’ sake, with a sub-title: ‘One of the minor annoyances of modern life is a revolution.’ The exiled King Shahdov of Estrovia seeks refuge in the United States, where he hopes to pursue his plans for the peaceful uses of atomic energy. Unfortunately his crooked Prime Minister (Jerry Desmonde) has absconded with the funds that were to have financed these plans. The King and his loyal ambassador Jaume (Oliver Johnston) are initiated into various aspects of contemporary American life – music, movie-going, television and a soirée attended by representatives of the media and intelligentsia. The King visits a progressive school where he meets a precocious child, Rupert Macabee, who reads Marx and assaults the King with a torrent of radical and libertarian oratory. He also encounters an attractive young advertising agent and supplements the rapidly diminishing royal funds by appearing in television commercials.

The King meets the boy Rupert again, wandering homeless in the wintry streets: he has run away from school to avoid the Un-American Activities Committee, who want to interrogate him about his parents’ political loyalties and friends. The FBI take the boy away and the King himself is called before the Committee. His appearance is a fiasco: he manages to get entangled with a fire hose and to soak the Committee with water. He is cleared of any Communist taint but decides to leave America just the same. Before his departure he visits Rupert, but he finds the once spirited child cowed and ashamed. Tricked into thinking it will help his parents he has ‘named names’.

Some incidents in the film were directly based on Chaplin’s own recent experiences. On arrival at the airport, Shahdov tells reporters how moved he is to be in the United States: all the time he is being fingerprinted by immigration officials. Chaplin had not forgotten his personal humiliation during the Barry affair, when the press was invited to photograph him being fingerprinted. Another incident that can be traced to actual experience is the scene in which the King, fearing a subpoena from the Committee, takes flight at the sight of a sinister pursuer in dark glasses – only to discover, when finally cornered, that the man simply wants his autograph. In his last days in America, fearful of writ-servers, Chaplin slipped out of his hotel each day to lunch at the ‘21’ Club. Al Reuter, later a well-known autograph collector and dealer, happened to be working at the club at that time. Al came off duty at 3 p.m. – about the time that Chaplin left the club – and so, on several successive days, he put on his dark glasses and trailed Chaplin, autograph book in hand. Each day Chaplin eluded him until the last, when Al finally caught him and got an autograph from his visibly relieved quarry.¹⁴

It could be objected – and was – that fire hoses are as ineffectual against McCarthyism as slapstick against dictators. In a review of the film in the Evening Standard, for the most part highly appreciative, the playwright John Osborne wrote:

In some ways A King in New York must be his most bitter film. It is certainly the most openly personal. It is a calculated, passionate rage clenched uncomfortably into the kindness of an astonishing comic personality. Like the king in his film, he has shaken the dust of the United States from his feet, and now he has turned round to kick it carefully and deliberately in their faces. Some of it is well aimed – some is not.

In fact, for such a big, easy target, a great deal of it goes fairly wide. What makes the spectacle of misused energy continually interesting is once again the technique of a unique comic artist.

It is true that some of Chaplin’s targets – rock’n’roll, CinemaScope, sex films – seem marginal to his main theme, and hardly worthy. One part of the film has triumphantly retained its force: the drama of Rupert Macabee, the child robbed of his innate honour. Just as in The Kid, Chaplin traces the injustice of a society to its ultimate and most vulnerable victim. The difference is that while the Kid was physically deprived, it is Rupert’s conscience and soul that are abused.

Michael Chaplin’s performance was admirable: Rupert is a volatile and fiery little pup, as touching in the anger of his protest, ‘I’m sick and tired of people asking if I’m this, if I’m that,’ as in his final breakdown. Chaplin and his wife would afterwards indulge in friendly sparring as to whether Jackie Coogan or Michael was the better actor, with his mother always favouring Michael. His parents had wanted Michael to change his name to John Bolton for the role, so as not to trade upon the name of Chaplin, but the child insisted upon his own name. Much later he recalled, ‘The only advice my father gave me on acting was: “What you have to try to achieve is to be as natural as possible.”’¹⁵

Shooting lasted from 7 May to 28 July 1956: the twelve-week schedule was the shortest for any Chaplin feature. From August to October Chaplin was in Paris, working on post-production. Shortly after his arrival in Paris, on 25 August, he gave a press conference about the forthcoming film, from which American press men were banned. He told the press confidently that it would be his best and funniest film, though he was not giving much away: ‘In it I have tried to throw into relief the contrast that exists in a big city, as much in the streets as among the inhabitants.’

One day in Paris, Chaplin and Oona chanced to eat in the same restaurant as Paulette Goddard and her current husband, the German novelist Erich Maria Remarque. They joined each other and the meeting was very affable. Remarque and Paulette lived for a time in Switzerland, though the Chaplins and the Remarques never met by design. ‘We live on different mountains,’ said Paulette.

Work on the film continued throughout the first half of 1957. On 23 May, Oona gave birth to their sixth child, who was to be named Jane. The younger Chaplin brood would eventually number eight: Geraldine (1944), Michael (1946), Josephine Hannah (1949), Victoria (1951), Eugene (1953), Jane (1957), Annette (1959) and Christopher (1962).

A King in New York was released on 12 September 1957. Before that Chaplin had previewed it for friends. One of them was J. B. Priestley, who wrote:

It is always a particular pleasure to hear an artist you admire and like describe what he hopes to do, and then afterwards to see for yourself what he has done. Especially if you are not disappointed in the result.

This new film left me with no feelings of disappointment. Chaplin seems to me to have brought off something very difficult, just as he did in Modern Times and The Great Dictator.

He has turned film clowning into social satire and criticism, without losing his astonishing ability to make us laugh.

This seems to me – and my standards are high – a wonderful thing to do. Many persons, including a large number who write for a living, will not agree with me. The truth is, this post-war period of ours is rapidly turning into a sour age, in which a great many peevish little men like nothing better than to sneer at anybody of real stature.

And Charles Chaplin has stature. He is, in fact, one of the most remarkable men of our time.

To begin with, he is one of the very few men who have compelled the film industry to serve them, who have been its masters and not its slaves. Sooner or later most film men, no matter how brilliant they may be, are beaten by the front offices, the distributors, the exhibitors, the trade …

There is not to my mind a hint of Communist savagery and inhumanity in the satire, for Chaplin, like most genuine artists, is at heart a genial and gentle anarchist and the laughter he provokes only clears and sweetens the air.

Despite Priestley’s fears, the British press was largely favourable and at worst respectful. A fine critic who was himself a screenwriter, Paul Dehn, concluded in the News Chronicle:

Its narrative may be incoherent, its cutting slack, its camerawork primitive and its decor (by glossy Hollywood standards) abominably shoddy, but it says more in its brief, tragi-comic compass than all this year’s glossy Hollywood pictures laid end to end; and the more you see it, the more it will have to say – which I take to be a symptom of greatness.

The press was as friendly when the film opened in Paris on 24 September. Chaplin had the American press barred from the première at the Gaumont Palace. This had the effect of excluding one of Chaplin’s most loyal and dedicated supporters and devotees, Gene Moskowitz of Variety. One of the most generous and best-loved critics in the history of film journalism, Moskowitz commented sadly in Variety, ‘For a man demanding liberty and individual freedom of expression for himself, it is a negative action.’ Chaplin evidently deigned to communicate with one or two American correspondents. Ed Murrow for one had the opportunity to ask him why he had not shown any positive side of the United States. Chaplin replied frankly:

If you give both sides it becomes bloody dull. I’m not a highbrow – I’m an instinctive artist. Whatever I do is for effect.

The motion picture is not for preachment, and if I’ve preached here I’m wrong. I’m loading the dice for something more important than politics – the affirmation of the man.

Another American who spoke to Chaplin at this time was Ella Winter, who, with her husband Donald Ogden Stewart, had also been forced into exile in these strange times. The Ogden Stewarts remained friends of the Chaplins until their deaths; shortly before the film was released Ella Winter visited Chaplin in Vevey, Switzerland. Her interview was published in the Observer on the same day as Kenneth Tynan’s review, which was neither hostile nor admiring. Chaplin had talked incessantly to her about the film.

Chaplin was agog to know how people had liked his new film at a recent private showing. ‘Did they laugh? What did they say? Didn’t you like the part where …?’ I reported in detail and he listened avidly. ‘It’s good, my best picture, it’s entertainment, don’t you think?’ His agile, speckled hands gestured with every word. ‘They say a lot about it that’s nonsense, it’s not political, not “anti” anything.’

‘But tell me, didn’t you like …?’ He couldn’t get enough. He is always possessed by his work and this picture has given him greater anxiety than his others. It’s the first one he has made outside the United States.

‘I had to get used to a new crew, different methods of work, but there were advantages – not least that it cost 25 per cent less.’ He appreciated many things about the British technicians. ‘They’re slower, but more thorough …

‘Of course I do everything. I create the whole thing. A film isn’t just a product of mass production to me. I’m an individualist.’

‘You haven’t chosen colour or a wide screen …?’

‘No … I paint on a small canvas.’ He was pacing up and down the porch to keep up with his thought.

‘I’d rather see a man stir his teacup with a spoon than see a volcano erupting. I want my camera to be like the proscenium of a theatre, come close to the actor, not lose his contour, bring the audience to him. Economy of action has gone through all my work. People have an idea that motion pictures must be elaborate, vast, spectacular, in some ways perhaps rightly, but I prefer to intensify personality rather than feature grand canyons on a wide screen. I prefer the shadow of a train passing over a face, rather than a whole railway station …’

‘About America –’ I started.

He talked about it in snatches. ‘What are they so sore about? There was a time when they put out the red carpet, literally, on every platform when I went from Los Angeles to New York. The crowd adored me. Now all that nonsense … people who spend time disparaging me … Actually I’m a Puritan. I haven’t had the time to live the lives some of them attribute to me … or the energy. I’ve made eighty-five pictures.’ [A King in New York was in fact his eightieth film.]

We talked a while about the astonishing face of calumny. Then I asked why, when so many early films appear old-fashioned, his wear well.

‘My clowning’s realistic, that’s why it doesn’t go out of date. When I dip my fingers in a fingerbowl and wipe them on an old man’s beard, I do it as if it were normal behaviour. So they still laugh at me.’ And he laughed at himself as he thought of himself doing it.

‘They call me old-fashioned,’ he said, a bit wistfully. ‘I don’t know why, I suppose I ignore the “modern techniques”, whatever that is. I don’t like camera trickery – that’s for technicians or track layers. All it leaves for the actor is to make Magnavox eyes or a CinemaScope mouth. It’s too simple to shoot through a nostril or the fireplace. It can hurt an actor’s talent, too. I don’t like actors to be so swamped. Anyway, that’s my preference,’ he finished aggressively. ‘Others may do it differently; that’s my personal taste and my style.

‘… As for politics, I’m an anarchist. I hate governments and rules and fetters … Can’t stand caged animals … People must be free.’

Suddenly he put a thumb in each armhole. ‘Greatest little comedian in the world,’ he smiled, and he sat down. Then he was on his feet again. ‘My picture isn’t political. I’m anxious only that people laugh. The film is a satire; a clown must satirize; I’ve never made a picture that didn’t.’ After a moment he added, ‘This is my most rebellious picture. I refuse to be part of that dying civilization they talk about.’

In the United States the campaign against Chaplin still persisted. In March 1958, objections by local citizens forced the Hicksville Public Library to cancel a programme of four Chaplin pictures. When Hollywood Boulevard’s ‘Walk of Fame’ – one thousand bronze stars set into the pavement, each in honour of a different film actor or actress – was laid down, Chaplin’s name was omitted because of protests from property owners in the area. In 1956, the American Internal Revenue Service announced that they would seek to claim $1.1 million in back taxes due for the last three years of operation in the United States. By 1958 the estimate had been revised to $542,000, with interest bringing the total to $700,000. In December 1958, however, the claim was definitively settled for $330,000 (with interest, $425,000). So Chaplin paid off the United States.

The FBI was still maintaining its file, fed with information from the Geneva Embassy. In 1954, the Army Censorship intercepted and passed on to the FBI a letter from Mrs Eisler in Vienna to Oona in Switzerland, in which she expressed a hope that Limelight could be shown not only in Austria but also in the Soviet Union and China. In 1955, Charles Chaplin Junior acted in a German film with the export title of Yankee Business, which persuaded the Bureau that subversive views might be inherited. In 1957, the Bureau analysed the European press reaction to A King in New York and concluded that

the State Department could be put on the spot. Either a move by State to prevent importation of the film or a hands-off policy could subject it to criticism. Any criticism of State would inure to Communist benefit as a discrediting of the United States Government.¹⁶

During these years Chaplin seems to have become more accessible to interviewers – though he had always braced himself to the necessity of facing up to newsmen when there was a new film to be publicized. In one of these interviews, with Frederick Sands,¹⁷ he voiced his satisfaction at being back at work, with no prospect of retirement:

The credit for that goes to Oona. She urged me on, because she found me restive doing nothing.

After taking the decision to go back to work I became a much happier man.

Now I put in a regular six to eight hours of work every day. Usually I finish about five and take a steam bath to keep me fit. In the summer I play lots of tennis …

I have no intention of ever retiring again.

I am putting every ounce of energy into writing my memoirs. They will be very long. I have much to tell and at my age I must hurry to complete them.

Every time I think, so much comes back to my mind which I had long forgotten. Seventy years IS a long time.

And then there is my new film, with the little man in the bowler hat back again – in colour.

Asked why he had abandoned the Tramp character in the first place, Chaplin replied:

It’s personal. Old friends are like old shoes, you know. All very fine, but we discard them.

Little fellow just didn’t fit in … there were periods in the atomic age during which I couldn’t see room for him.

I was no longer stimulated by him due to the changing of time. You cannot go on composing in one key …

But now I shall bring him back – same as he was, yes, the same as he was … of course, a little older.

He talked a good deal at this time about bringing back the Tramp. To another interviewer in 1959 he said, ‘I was wrong to kill him. There was room for the Little Man in the atomic age.’ His interest in the character had been reawakened by working on A Dog’s Life, Shoulder Arms and The Pilgrim, which, with the assistance of Jerry Epstein, he edited and re-assembled as The Chaplin Revue. As severe as ever in the cutting room, he took out moments which he thought no longer worked well. As a prologue to the omnibus he cut together some of the How to Make Movies material, showing the old Chaplin Studios. This was the first time the public had seen these scenes of the young Chaplin out of costume. As an introduction to Shoulder Arms he included some actuality footage of the First World War; and his own reconstruction of the landscapes of battle were not diminished by this juxtaposition. Throughout the work Oona sat beside him, sewing, and he complained humorously that whenever he wanted to throw out some scene, she pleaded for its retention. Chaplin wrote and recorded a new score for the assembly, and for The Pilgrim composed a country pastiche, ‘Bound for Texas’, which was recorded by a then popular singer, Matt Munro. The Chaplin Revue was released in September 1959.

In April 1959, Chaplin celebrated his seventieth birthday. ‘I don’t feel a day over sixty-nine,’ he said. ‘If only I could live long enough to do all the things I want to do!’ He received over a thousand letters of congratulation from every part of the world. The guests at his birthday dinner included the dancer Noelle Adam, who was soon to become the wife of his son Sydney, and Sidney Bernstein, the British cinema and television magnate, who presented Chaplin with a telescope. Another gift gave him some pleasure: thanks to the determined efforts of Miss Ford, the day before his birthday Roy Export and Lopert Films were granted a writ to seize prints of Modern Times that were being illegally distributed in the United States.

Chaplin’s birthday was reported in newspapers across the world; and he was asked for his views on the future of mankind. ‘I hope,’ he said, ‘we shall abolish war and settle all differences at the conference table … I hope we shall abolish all hydrogen and atom bombs before they abolish us first.’ In more intimate interviews he never tired of sharing his wonder at the idyllic personal life he had achieved. Two years earlier, at the time of Jane’s birth, he had declared, touchingly, ‘With Oona to look after me and the children to inspire me, I cannot grow old, and nothing can hurt me.’ In a 1959 interview he enlarged upon the secret of his happiness:

I love my wife and she loves me. That is why we are so happy.

If you don’t demand too much from each other – that, I think, comes nearest to being a formula for happiness in marriage. The rest takes care of itself through tolerance. In the sixteen years of our marriage, we have been separated only once – for five days [sic] when Oona went on a business trip to America.

She is my inspiration, and she is a good critic. She has a natural talent, and her criticism is constructive. To get her reactions to anything I do, I let her see my day’s output of work. She never discusses anything or proffers an opinion unless I ask her. Sometimes I disagree with her opinion, only to find a week later that she was right.

We have a profound respect for each other’s taste and views, and this makes for a most agreeable atmosphere in the home … Wecanbe thoroughly relaxed with each other and enjoy our own company without having to indulge in conversation … Oona feels that she has no talents except as a wife and mother.

She is a very busy woman and leaves me at ten o’clock every morning. I just dally over breakfast which I enjoy. I like my coffee and orange juice and bacon and eggs. Frightfully English, I know. When I’ve finished, I try to detain Oona with conversation, but she always runs out on me. At ten on the dot she gets up from the table and tells me: ‘No, you get to work …’

We like to invite friends on Sundays when most of the staff are off, and Oona and I potter about the kitchen preparing our own meal. Oona is a wonderful cook and there is never a mess of dishes in sight …

The children? They have a place in our life and we enjoy them. They are very amusing, and they can be very irritating too. We see to it that their lives are fully occupied.

Oona told the interviewer: ‘We encourage the children to become independent. We keep them busy with ballet lessons, music, even writing. It’s working wonders developing their personalities.’ Chaplin added, ‘I never get impatient having children around. Far from disturbing me in my work they are an asset. You know, I thrive on youth and merriness. But get this [here he prodded a finger at the interviewer], our happiness is not governed by the children. We would be just as happy – just Oona and I.’

Oona, notoriously reticent in face of the press, made her own contribution to the interview:

I am married to a young man.

People think of Charlie as my father, but age counts for nothing in this house. To me he seems younger every day. There is certainly no father fixation about my feeling for Charlie. He has made me mature and I keep him young.

I never consciously think about Charlie’s age for 364 days of the year. Only his birthday is the annual shock for me. But I can feel the way some people stare at me with puzzlement and then look back at him, wondering how we have kept it up; whether it’s just a façade.

My security and stability with Charlie stem, not from his wealth, but from the very difference in years between us. Only young women who have married mature men will know what I mean.¹⁸

About this time Noël Coward took the writer Ian Fleming to dinner at the Manoir. He found it ‘wonderful to see two people bask unaffectedly in each other’s love’. Shy and reticent as they could be in other ways, the Chaplins would kiss and embrace quite unselfconsciously, whoever was present. On the occasion of this visit, Fleming found Chaplin wearing a plum-coloured smoking jacket: it ‘made him feel like a millionaire’, he explained. At dinner he entertained his guests with a vivid description, illustrated by mime, of an imaginary film he would make, to be called Around Romance in Eighty Days. (This was the time of Mike Todd’s much-publicized adaptation of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days.) The film, he said, would be a mixture of half a dozen spectaculars – Ben Hur, South Pacific and Anna Karenina among them. It would include a chariot race. The villain, with huge knives on his chariot wheels, would overtake the hero (‘a chap called Gulliver or Don Quixote or one of those’). The hero would respond by leaning out of his own chariot to slice a side of ham on the knives. He would then eat the meat to renew his strength to win the race. Chaplin was still talking of reviving the Little Fellow: Mrs Fleming suggested that the theme might be ‘the Little Man who never had it so good’ (it was also the Macmillan period), and Chaplin seemed to like the idea.¹⁹

Chaplin and Oona would make occasional trips to London or Paris; and there were also family holidays. In July and August 1961 Chaplin took his family to the Far East, and in spring 1962 they made their first trip to Ireland, where Chaplin acquired a taste for salmon fishing. Michael Chaplin recalled a charming comedy scene from the trip:

When you’re seventy-two and you believe that you’ve had all the experiences and are prepared to sit back and think out the rest of your life, it’s maybe a little tough to try to start playing the ‘my boy and I are just great pals’ type of father … but on that Irish holiday my father tried. He took me fishing, ready to show me just how it’s done …

The object of the lesson was to show me how to cast a fly and play the trout. For fifteen minutes I stood by him on the bank of a stream while he talked about the theory of dropping a hooked piece of feather just where some fish would be coming up for his last breath.

‘The touch,’ he said. ‘You must have the touch … here, I’ll show you …’

He threw the rod back, the line went swishing through the air, then he whipped the rod forward …

A big nothing.

Father tugged, obviously thinking that he’d got the line caught on a branch.

I took a quick glance over his shoulder, right to where he’d just about ripped the back out of his raincoat.

‘I think it’s caught on your raincoat,’ I said, very tactfully …

Gratefully, but embarrassed, he unhooked himself and wound the line in.

We plodded home at dusk, with my father coyly trying to hold together the torn halves of his raincoat.²⁰

The 1962 holiday – the last on which all the children would accompany their parents – also included visits to Venice, London and Paris. It was widely reported that Chaplin would visit the Soviet Union in the near future. The only foundation for this story was that when he had met a delegation of Soviet writers they had courteously suggested that he might visit Russia and he had as courteously replied, ‘With pleasure’.

In June of that year, Chaplin was invested by the University of Oxford with the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters. The only disagreeable note to the occasion was the publicity given to the objections of the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who declared that the value of honorary degrees would be degraded by this award to a mere film comedian. This had no effect, however, and on 27 June Chaplin arrived at the Sheldonian Theatre, dressed in a dark suit and academic robes of scarlet and grey, to receive his degree. Others honoured at the same time were Dean Rusk, the American Secretary of State, Yehudi Menuhin and Graham Sutherland. The crowds, though, were for Chaplin. Geraldine, who had come from London, where she was studying at the Royal Ballet School, had to battle her way to the door and even then had great difficulty in proving her identity. The Vice-Chancellor greeted Chaplin with the words (in Latin), ‘Illustrious man, without doubt star of the first magnitude, you who have been a source of the greatest pleasure to so many people for so many years …’

The Public Orator, A. N. Bryan-Brown, introduced Chaplin with a quotation from Juvenal:

Nil habet infelix paupertas durius in se

Quam quod ridicules homines facit.

[The hardest blow poverty yields is that the poor are laughed at.]

Chaplin, he continued, invited laughter,

per bracas illas fluitantes, calceos divaricatos, petasum orbiculatum constantem simul at instabilem, bacillum flexibile, exiguum denique labri superioris ornamentum.

[with his baggy trousers, his turned-out boots, his bowler hat, at once constant and insecure, cane and toothbrush moustache.]

In all his films, said the Public Orator, ‘are to be found the humour and generosity of one who sympathizes with the underdog’. Beauty, said Chaplin, in his speech of acceptance, is in the eye of the beholder: ‘There are those who can see either art or beauty in a rose lying in the gutter, or the sudden slant of sunlight across an ash-can, or even in the tumbling of a clown.’ When it was over, Chaplin said that he would have ‘needed a heart of stone’ not to be moved by the reception. Sir Maurice Bowra introduced Chaplin to Dean Rusk. ‘There was no bitterness between us, no bitterness at all,’ Chaplin said later.

A note of bitterness was, nevertheless, introduced by some elements of the American press. The reactionary Philadelphia Inquirer had a report headed ‘Buffoonery at Oxford’,²¹ and found the event ‘a snide attempt to place Chaplin on the same plane with Dean Rusk in its distribution of honours that most Americans will find unpalatable’. The New York Times, however, took advantage of the occasion to declare:

We do not believe the Republic would be in danger if the present Administration lifted the ban that was imposed in 1952 and if yesterday’s unforgotten little tramp were allowed to amble down the gangplank of an American port.

The comment provoked former Attorney-General James McGranery to call for the old files once again, and to grumble to the FBI liaison officer that the Times had alleged that as Attorney-General he had blocked Chaplin’s return to the United States. This was simply not true, he said; ‘he had insisted that Chaplin be subject to the same hearing procedures as anyone else, and should not be given preferential treatment because of his wealth and notoriety’.

Nine days later, the University of Durham followed Oxford’s lead and awarded Chaplin an honorary degree of D. Litt. The Durham Public Orator, Karl Britton, was something of a film critic, it seemed. Chaplin, he said, had produced some of the great comic art of the age – comedy ‘often enriched and sometimes endangered by sentiment’, and with a political message ‘that arose out of a deep view of man’s small situation in the world’.

Durham invested Chaplin with his degree on 6 July, after which Chaplin had to hurry back to Switzerland in time for the birth of his eighth child. He arrived home on Sunday 7 July, went to bed that night, but had to get up again around 3 a. m. to rush Oona to the Clinique Montchoisi in Lausanne. At 5.30 a. m. on the morning of 8 July she gave birth to a boy, who was named Christopher James. The family was now complete.

Chaplin was fifty-five when Geraldine, his first child by Oona, was born, and seventy-three when their last child, Christopher, arrived. It was a remarkable and challenging undertaking to bring up a young family at an age when most men are relaxing into the sinecure role of grandfather. Ordinary considerations of age and declining energy seemed irrelevant to Chaplin, but problems still remained in rearing this large brood. Chaplin’s dreams had been formed in his youth. It would be natural for him to want to provide for his children the paternal discipline and protection that he had been denied in his own youth, yet for children of the 1960s this ideal could appear somewhat archaic and restrictive. Even though to Oona he remained a young man, the generation gap was undoubtedly exaggerated in their household. Despite his lifelong dream of domesticity, Chaplin was still dedicated to work, and that work continued, as it had always done, to take precedence over everything and everyone else. The children learned that above all they must never intrude upon Daddy’s work; to make sure that they did not was a heavy part of the nurses’ charge. Francis Wyndham, a wise and sympathetic observer who knew the Chaplins, remarked on another obstacle to ideal domesticity:

The only flaw in their domestic harmony – occasional misunderstandings with their children as each in turn ceases to be a child – springs from the very intensity and completeness of their mutual happiness. The delight which Charlie and Oona take in each other’s company tends to isolate them in a self-sufficient world of love. This atmosphere is utterly charming for their friends, but its effect on a nearer relationship might be unintentionally exclusive. If Chaplin has failed to achieve a wholly unselfish sympathy with his children, he has triumphantly succeeded in eliminating any dichotomy between ‘love’ and ‘admiration’ in his attitude towards the woman in his life.²²

Chaplin may have had problems in being a father; at the same time it is never easy to be the child of a great man. All the Chaplin children to some degree found themselves isolated from their school contemporaries. They lived in a grand house in a park, with servants and money; and the great men of the world paid homage to their parents. With success and fortune, and through bitter experience, Chaplin had learned to mistrust, in the first instance, any proffered friendship or intimacy; in their turn the children had to learn this unchildlike lesson. Friends were rigorously vetted and rarely encouraged.

Throughout his life Chaplin had been subject to sudden outbursts of temper which were generally soon forgotten. At other times, though, the difficulty he had in delivering a reprimand had been well known at the studio, where someone else was always deputed to perform such unpleasant tasks on Chaplin’s behalf. As the children grew up, he experienced the same difficulty in telling them off when it was necessary. Gentle and shy even in the face of her own children, Oona was no better equipped for the task, and much of the time the onus of delivering reproaches and reprimands was deputed to Kay-Kay or Miss Ford, neither of whom felt any inhibitions in the matter. A certain reticence and evasion became characteristic of the relationship between the Chaplin parents and children.

Chaplin tended to be less severe with the younger children than with the older ones, born in the United States. If there was any slight resentment of this discrimination among the children, it came from the younger ones, who felt deprived of the discipline they saw doled out to their elders. When Chaplin did get angry with them, the older girls were more adept than Michael at deflecting their father’s displeasure. Kay-Kay recalled how effectively Geraldine, then aged five, dealt with a prolonged harangue from her father. Fixing him with a baleful stare, she yanked her baby sister Josephine to her feet, exhorting her, ‘C’mon. Let’s get out of here.’ Chaplin’s wrath could not withstand an exit line like that.

Geraldine was to be the first rebel, when she left home to study at the Royal Ballet School. Michael soon followed. He became particularly irked by parental intervention in his friendships and eventually left home. His adventures provided a field-day for the press and acute embarrassment and annoyance to his parents. He became (briefly) a junkie, enrolled in RADA, acted in pictures, recorded pop songs, married, and provided Chaplin and Oona with their first grandchild. At one point in 1965 he claimed National Assistance. Chaplin and the rest of the family happened to be passing through London at the time on their way to the annual Easter holiday in Ireland, and Oona was obliged to give the press an uncharacteristically severe statement in which she said,

the young man is a problem, and I am sorry he was given National Assistance. He has stubbornly refused an education for three years and therefore he should get a job and go to work. If I do not wish to indulge him as a beatnik, that is my privilege – sincerely, Oona Chaplin.²³

Despite his aberrations, Michael Chaplin was clearly a young man of individuality, charm and warmth; and before his father’s death he was to be fully reconciled with the family. During the periods of estrangement from Geraldine and Michael, Oona, when she and Chaplin were in London, would make the excuse of shopping expeditions to slip away and visit them. Chaplin was supposed to know nothing of these trips, but there were no real secrets between them and it is pretty certain that he was tacitly aware that she was keeping a maternal eye on their children. They were both grateful, too, for the fatherly concern of Jerry Epstein, by this time permanently resident in London.²⁴

Chaplin had begun to write his memoirs after finishing A King in New York. In 1960, he told Ian Fleming that he had finished 500 pages and had only some twenty more to go. Fleming may have misunderstood, because three more years of work remained to be done. Chaplin also complained to Fleming that his secretary was forever trying to improve his English.

He said he was not surprised, as he had taught himself the language and suspected that his secretary knew it far better than he did but, even so, he liked his own version and hoped that some of what he had actually written would survive the process of editing by his publishers.²⁵

Chaplin’s daily routine while writing the book was to rise at seven, to take a dip in his swimming pool, whatever the weather, to eat his breakfast, and afterwards kiss Oona goodbye as if he was going off to his office. He would then work until midday and lunch. The older children took turns to lunch with their parents. After a siesta, Chaplin would return to work until five, when he had tea and, in fine weather, played a little tennis. Dinner at the Manoir was always at seven. When it was over Chaplin would continue to work in the library until ten. My Autobiography went through the same cycles of dictation, typing, correction and retyping as the scripts. Chaplin took great delight in reading aloud to visitors the sections he had written most recently. Lillian Ross was privileged in this way and remembered how on an autumn afternoon in 1962

I sat with him on his terrace as he read parts of his book manuscript to me, the tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses a bit down on his nose, his reading dramatic to the point of melodrama, his devotion to his subject unselfconscious and complete.²⁶

Since Chaplin had never co-operated with any biographer (at least since his early misfortunes with Rose Wilder Lane in 1916), the autobiography was a major publishing prize. The lucky winner was the Bodley Head: the managing director Max Reinhardt had been introduced to the Chaplins in 1958, and undoubtedly his urging and encouragement were important. Reinhardt was admirably patient. As early as 1958 he had sounded out the Sunday Times about serial rights. Leonard Russell, the Literary Editor, recalled delicately asking if Chaplin would be using a ‘ghost’:

Mr Reinhardt looked shocked, offended even. Surely we couldn’t think that Chaplin, a man who wrote his own scripts, directed his own films, composed his own music, would seek outside help with his own memoirs: every word would be written by Chaplin – he would swear an affidavit on that. ‘Never mind,’ said Mr Reinhardt, looking for the waiter, ‘I hope to have something to show you before very long.’

But years passed, and nothing happened – we thought that Chaplin must have given up. Then early in 1962 Mr Reinhardt produced an uncorrected draft of the first third of the book. We read it. It was magnificent – splendid serial in itself.

Chaplin, however, wasn’t ready to negotiate the newspaper rights: first he must finish the book. There was nothing to do but wait. And while we were waiting, the word got round that Chaplin was writing his autobiography, with the result that frenzied and fantastic offers for the serial rights came from the United Kingdom, from the United States, from most of the countries of Europe. Chaplin ignored them and Mr Reinhardt, presumably, exercised his customary diplomacy.

Mr Chaplin went on writing and rewriting [in point of fact his actual and uninterrupted time on the book was a mere two years] and our frustration deepened.

It was later revealed that when Ian Fleming visited Vevey it was as an undercover agent for the Sunday Times, with the assignment of wringing an agreement from Chaplin. The mission was bungled since Fleming became far too interested in the author’s view of things and in urging Chaplin to permit no editorial interventions in his work. In the end, however, the Sunday Times managed to secure exclusive serialization of the book.

As a trailer, the Sunday Times published in their magazine section a profile of Chaplin, by the distinguished American theatre critic, Harold Clurman, which had already appeared in Esquire (November 1962). Clurman had been a guest at the Manoir and was permitted to read the manuscript of My Autobiography. Before he began reading, Chaplin told him, ‘I’m really surprised how well America comes off!’ ‘I had supposed when I read a press report to this effect,’ Clurman wrote afterwards,

that his benign attitude might be a matter of tactics (though Chaplin has never been notably tactful), but face-to-face with him I felt sure his moderation was genuine, a mellowness which is not the sign of any weakening, but rather a growth in breadth and wisdom. For the first time in my long acquaintance with Chaplin, I had the feeling that he was not only an artist of genius, but a man who might be considered – or had become – wise.

When I speak of ‘wisdom’, I do not mean correct in opinion or even reliable in judgement. I mean that Chaplin’s whole personality has become integrated and has attained the finest balance that his talents and nature could achieve – and these are sufficiently rich and human enough to make a man to be cherished.

So when Charlie began to let fly with statements which might be added up to a sort of credo, I had no inclination to contradict him, or to test their objective validity. Everything he said – even when paradoxical or perhaps wildly ‘wrong’ – seemed right for him and could be so interpreted that some basic truth, some corrective to his exaggerations might be distilled from his sallies.

I could not quarrel with his concern about the armaments race. I smiled in comprehension of his anarchistically aesthetic declaration, ‘I can’t stand Communists with their system and systems … I hate systems.’ Again and again he exclaimed, ‘Life is full of poetry’, and though this is not exactly a ‘scientific’ statement, his person made his meaning entirely clear.

He went on to discuss matters of acting craft. He had learned much, he said, from his first director. ‘I believe in theatricalism. (His word, not mine.) Theatricalism is poetry … I don’t believe in The Method.’ (I did not tell him that I had heard Stanislavsky say to an actress: ‘If my system’ – which is also known as The Method – ‘troubles you, forget it.’) ‘I believe in theatricalism,’ Charlie continued, ‘even in “tricks” – actors’ tricks … I don’t like Shakespeare on the stage; he interferes with the actor’s freedom, with his virtuosity.’ And as his spirit almost lifted him from his seat, so that I feared that he might become airborne at any moment, I could see that in his way he was more Shakespearean than many professional Shakespeareans …

What struck me … was that, though I was not at all tempted to interrupt his outbursts, I might easily have done so without offence. In former years I had the impression that, though he was sharply observant, he hardly listened to anyone. He was always ‘on’ – telling stories, doing imitations, recitations, pantomimes, delivering himself of fire-cracker pronouncements – providing himself and others with a constant spectacle of irrepressible energy and imagination. No one got a chance to speak in his presence. (Hardly anyone desired to.) But now Charlie was also ready to listen.²⁷

As Clurman left the Manoir, he asked Chaplin how his book would end: ‘What’s the conclusion?’

‘That I am content to look out at the lake and at the mountains and feel that, with my family around me, there is nothing more and nothing better,’ he answered. He pointed toward the sky and the open space around – in a gesture which pleaded to say more than his words might convey, while his expression was one of naïve bafflement at his inability to define the ineffable.

While the book was in the last stages of production, Chaplin celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday. This time his message to the world combined melancholy and optimism: ‘Where is all the fun, the gaiety, the laughter? Everyone is much too serious these days.’ He was still gravely troubled by the existence of nuclear weapons, but ‘now I am a humanitarian and therefore I believe in humanity and its ability to survive … I think, like the British, we will all muddle through somehow.’ During the summer he attended a gala performance by Maria Callas at the Paris Opera, and was observed by the press greeting Princess Grace of Monaco on the steps of the theatre. He considered writing an opera himself, and thought Tess of the D’Urbervilles a likely subject. He also spoke of writing a slapstick comedy for his son Sydney.

My Autobiography was published in September 1964. The first printing was 80,000 copies, and the book was selected by the Book of the Month Club in America and by the largest Italian and German book clubs. Chaplin was reputed to have received an advance of $500,000 for British and American rights, not to mention the nine pounds of caviare given him by the USSR in consideration of the right to reprint a thousand words in Izvestia.

The reviews were almost unanimous about the book, which finally ran to more than 500 printed pages. The first eleven of its thirty-one chapters, ending at the moment that he signed with the Mutual Company, can stand comparison with any autobiography for their colour and vitality. Chaplin’s writing is energetic, and his pleasure in words infectious. Words he particularly likes, like ‘ineffable’ and ‘concupiscence’, may have been used too often, but even the occasional slight misapplication of some word can endow it with something new and arresting. His phrasing is vivid. The chronicle of his childhood is such a Dickensian mixture of colour and tragedy that some reviewers were sceptical of its truth. However, documentary research constantly vindicates Chaplin’s record.

From the twelfth chapter onwards, however, some disappointment is inevitable. Chaplin is much more concerned to describe his social life and the celebrities he has known than to reveal anything about his films, the way he made them, life in his studio and his collaborators. Artlessly he exposed himself to charges of snobbery:

If we were not so preoccupied with our family, we could have quite a social life in Switzerland, for we live relatively near the Queen of Spain and the Count and the Countess Chevreau d’Antraigues who have been most cordial to us, and there are a number of film stars and writers who live near.²⁸

The preface of the present book has already speculated on possible reasons for Chaplin’s reticence about his work: his declared belief that ‘if people know how it’s done, all the magic goes’; the possibility that the ultimate secret of his creation was frustratingly mysterious even to himself; the possibility that he genuinely felt that the daily routines of his working life would be simply boring to readers. Even then it was hard to understand how he could devote pages to William Randolph Hearst or H. G. Wells, yet not make even a passing reference to loyal collaborators who gave so much to the films, people like Totheroh, Bergman, Mack Swain, Eric Campbell or Georgia Hale. The reluctance to acknowledge collaborators, which seemed to increase with the years, may have had deep roots. The perceptive Francis Wyndham wrote that ‘the rich and famous and fulfilled man whom the world sees still considers himself a victim maimed for life by the early catastrophic shock’.²⁹ Perhaps it was a necessary part of the therapy, essential to his confidence, always to tell himself that he had conquered the world and raised himself from poverty and nonentity to universal fame and affection unaided. No other film-maker ever strove so completely to dominate every aspect of the work, to do every job. If he could have done so, Chaplin would have played every role and (as his son Sydney humorously but shrewdly observed) sewn every costume. Chaplin had both the compulsion to do everything and the deep need to know that he had done everything.

Whatever the reasons, many were hurt by these omissions from My Autobiography. Most vocally offended was Robert Florey, who had begun to write about Chaplin more than forty years before, had published an affectionate biography in 1927, and had maintained his loyalty until this time. His review in Paris-Match was very largely an appreciation of those dozens of people left out of the autobiography, including Georgia Hale, Wheeler Dryden, Henry Bergman, Albert Austin, Stan Laurel and Mabel Smith, ‘who regularly (if not infallibly) predicted the future for him’.

For all its lacunae, the autobiography was a very considerable achievement – wonderfully readable, amiably opinionated, disarmingly frank, sometimes pompous but the next moment self-deprecatory and poking fun at the author’s too human vanities and affectations. It was widely translated and the warmth of the reception across the world seemed to give new energy to Chaplin. As soon as the book was finished he set about preparing a new film. Jerry Epstein was to be producer and Universal provided distribution backing. The film was A Countess From Hong Kong.