19
A Countess From Hong Kong and the final years
The script of A Countess From Hong Kong was a refurbishment of Stowaway, which Chaplin had written for Paulette Goddard almost thirty years before. Only random pages and notes have survived from the original Stowaway script: the rest seems to have been cannibalized in compiling the new screenplay. There were few changes to the story. In the early version the Countess came from Shanghai; now she was from Hong Kong. The hero, Ogden Mears, was changed from a big game hunter to a millionaire diplomat. Stowaway would probably not have looked out of place alongside the average situation comedy of the late 1930s. The dialogue was crisp and light and Chaplin felt able to adopt it in large part for A Countess From Hong Kong.
The new script opened in traditional Chaplin style with a subtitle: ‘As a result of two world wars, Hong Kong was crowded with refugees.’ Some of the most glamorous of these are employed as taxi-girls at ‘The Palace of Beautiful Women’ where, for a few dollars, American sailors could dance with former White Russian baronesses and countesses. (Neither Chaplin nor the critics were greatly bothered about the chronology: after two world wars, exiles from the Revolution of 1917 might well be past their dancing years …) One of these aristocratic taxi-girls, the beautiful Natascha Alexandroff, finds herself dancing with Ogden Mears, an American millionaire visiting the night-spots of Hong Kong.
After his heavy night out, Ogden returns to his suite on the luxury liner, only to discover the following morning that Natascha has stowed away there. The potential embarrassment of the situation is compounded by the news that he has just been appointed United States Ambassador to Arabia. Ogden’s heart is softened by Natascha’s recital of her sad life story, of how she fled to Shanghai from Russia and became a gangster’s mistress at the tender age of fourteen. Now all she seeks is the escape that an American passport could provide. Ogden reluctantly hides her in his suite, which results in a succession of alarms and embarrassments. To obtain the necessary American passport for Natascha, Ogden arranges a marriage of convenience with Hudson, his valet – who is all too clearly not the marrying kind. At Honolulu, Ogden’s wife comes aboard. Natascha dives over the side of the ship into the harbour. Ogden and his wife come to an amicable divorce agreement. Millionaire and pauper countess are happily reunited in a tango.
While Chaplin was preparing A Countess From Hong Kong, the last personal link with his childhood was broken. At 11 p. m. on 16 April 1965 – Chaplin’s seventy-sixth birthday – his brother Sydney died in Nice at the age of eighty. His death occurred at the Hotel Ruhl, where he and his Niçoise wife Gypsy spent each winter. The following day, Chaplin arrived in Nice for the cremation in Marseilles. Sydney’s ashes were buried in Montreux.
The two brothers had seen each other frequently during the last years of Sydney’s life and no doubt their sessions of reminiscence, as well as delighting Gypsy, Oona and the family, contributed much to My Autobiography. Sydney and Gypsy generally visited Switzerland during the summer, and both were adored by the children at Vevey. Gypsy was amusing, charming and elegant, and maintained an intriguing air of mystery: she would never discuss her life before her marriage to Sydney. Sydney, who had never had a family of his own, loved children. The young Chaplins, for their part, were enchanted by his still prodigious gift for inventing gags and jokes. From Nice he would write long letters to the older children, with page upon page of jokes. (He kept carbon copies to be sure that he did not repeat himself next time.) On visits to the Manoir he found a mischievous way of teasing his younger brother. He would tell the girls some mildly off-colour or racist joke and send them off in fits of giggles to retell it to their father. Sydney would then sit innocently by, hearing his brother raging in the distance, ‘Never let me hear jokes like that in this house!’ Geraldine and Josephine remembered, too, how in old age their cheerful and ebullient uncle would sit at the window of the Manoir, watching the beauty of the sun setting over the mountains, and cry.
During the summer of 1965 Chaplin was co-recipient with Ingmar Bergman of the Erasmus Prize. On 11 November, he gave a press conference for two hundred journalists at the Savoy Hotel to announce his plans for A Countess From Hong Kong. Sophia Loren was present. The present writer was there on that occasion:
Is it thrilling, asked a friend, to see him in the flesh? And the answer is that somehow it isn’t: more of a puzzle rather, to try to find in this spry, well-fed, lively, neatly turned-out figure in dark glasses (and not nearly as small as I had always imagined) either the old Charlie, or a man well on his way toward eighty. Bright-eyed, clear-voiced, quick-talking, he is, if not exactly youthful, fairly ageless. It is, of course, from use that he is able to remain quite untroubled by being the focus of a heavy stampede of pressmen and photographers such as was produced by his press conference at the Savoy …
There is never much to be learned from this kind of affair; anyone who is good at it, like Chaplin, knows exactly what he wants to say, and however irrelevant the questions may be, the answers will all quickly come back to the point. And the point in this instance was that Mr Chaplin was going to make a new film. For the first time in nearly half a century he would not be his own producer: ‘And it’s wonderful. I don’t have to worry. I can extend myself as I please, and it is only my fault if the picture doesn’t come off.’ No expense would be spared. The film would be in colour and have a fourteen-week shooting schedule. What was the budget? ‘I don’t think that’s anybody’s business,’ he said, but very amiably.
Mr Chaplin had, he said, two great stars, Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren. He had seen Sophia in a film and known at once that she was perfect for the part. What was the film? He really couldn’t remember; it was so long ago. Was it Marriage, Italian Style? No, no, it wasn’t that. Was it Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow? Yes. Yes – that was the film. Anyway, she was perfect for the part …
The picture would be called A Countess From Hong Kong. He had wanted to call it The Countess, but someone already had rights on that title. He had had the screenplay since the time of The Great Dictator, but he’d updated it. He would not say much about the story, except that it is set in the period just after the Second World War, and a lot of the action takes place aboard ship.
Asked to be more precise, Mr Chaplin said he was sorry but he was tired; which he clearly was not. He would only add modestly that ‘the situation is riotously funny but justified and believable … It is not slapstick, but comedy of character, taken from life.
‘I have no role myself, thank God! No, it’s not the first time I’ve directed and not played. Around 1924 [sic] I made a film called A Woman of Paris … Of course, I may walk on, like Hitchcock does …’
Chaplin said that his son Sydney would play in it. ‘He’s a very good comedian and I think he will contribute to the lift and hilarity of the screenplay.’ (Chaplin always chooses his words carefully, if sometimes curiously.) Inevitably the columnists asked if his son Michael would play. Chaplin was grave. ‘I’m not answering any personal questions …’ and when the newsman tried to insist, ‘Don’t try to get smart-alecky with me …’ He was not so solemn when asked about America. He had no plans to go there unless it happened to be in connection with the picture, but in any case he had no quarrel with Hollywood. ‘I wrote a book, and I think America came out of it pretty well. I happen to like Hollywood. Anyway I don’t think that’s pertaining much to the picture.’
Mr Chaplin answered a few more questions. How did it feel to be at work again? ‘Marvellous. Thank God I’m still active. I can still think up two or three laughs. I’m getting on, but right now I have everything before me. The whole world is my oyster.’ (‘His what?’ the reporter who had quizzed him about his son asked a friend.) What did he think about A. J. P. Taylor’s new book, in which Taylor linked him with Shakespeare as a cultural influence? ‘I think he has damn’ good judgement,’ said Mr Chaplin merrily. (‘Linked him with who?’ asked the same reporter.)1
Shooting began on 25 January 1966. Intrepid as ever, Chaplin – who was to celebrate his seventy-seventh birthday in the course of the filming – now undertook his first film in colour and on the anamorphic wide screen which he had derided in A King in New York. This was also the first time that he had cast and directed major international stars – Sophia Loren and Marlon Brando. As in A Woman of Paris he allotted himself only a brief walk-on past. He was fortunate to have a director of photography, Arthur Ibbetson, and a designer, Don Ashton, who revered him and were responsive and sympathetic to his demands. Moreover, in terms of production the film was comparatively simple. Though the action required skilful playing, it was mostly set in interiors, particularly the adjoining rooms of Ogden’s shipboard suite. Despite an interruption when Chaplin suffered a bad bout of ’flu, shooting was completed in fourteen working weeks. Charles Chaplin directed what was to prove his last scene on Wednesday, 11 May 1966, fifty-two years and three months after his Keystone debut.
Much later, Marlon Brando spoke disparagingly of the experience of working on the film. Schooled in ‘Method’ acting, he was bewildered by Chaplin’s intuitive and pragmatic approach to performance, and not resourceful enough to submit easily to Chaplin’s requirement that his actors should reproduce his own interpretation of a part. The film critic Penelope Gilliatt visited the set and described how Brando told Chaplin one day that he did not understand the character’s motivation at a particular point in the action. Chaplin cheerfully replied that he did not understand the motivation either, but that it probably did not amount to much. He went on to explain to Brando exactly how to play the action: that way, he said, it would come off. This sort of thing must certainly have been disconcerting for the actor, but Mrs Gilliatt was impressed that on that occasion Brando conscientiously followed Chaplin’s minute instructions on every line or gag. Sophia Loren adored Chaplin and proved wonderfully responsive to his direction. Chaplin thought Patrick Cargill’s performance as Hudson the valet entirely admirable: ‘I’ve never done anything as funny,’ he told Francis Wyndham. In supporting roles he had Tippi Hedren (fresh from working with Hitchcock on The Birds and Marnie), his son Sydney and Oliver Johnston. Chaplin liked his unit and in many respects it was one of his happiest shooting periods.
Among the visitors to the set during the making of A Countess From Hong Kong was Kevin Brownlow, the historian of the silent cinema, who brought Gloria Swanson to Pinewood. It was the first time that this diva of silent cinema had been on a Chaplin set since she had appeared in His New Job in 1915 (though on this occasion she insisted that she had not played in the film).
Miss Swanson perched on a ladder to get a better view over the obstructing lights. Sophia Loren, devastating in her low-cut white dress, was joined by Marlon Brando in a blue dressing gown, looking furious. A wave of tension followed him as he shuffled from behind the camera onto the set.
Chaplin seemed oblivious. As he directed Loren, and then Brando, I scribbled down the directions verbatim. He tried to work out a way in which Loren could walk over to Brando, holding a glass. He paid no attention to dialogue. I heard him give only one dialogue direction. He may have written the words, but he could not remember them. ‘So-and-so-and-so-and-so etcetera,’ would be his delivery of an average line.
The associate producer, Jerry Epstein, paced behind him, reading the correct lines from a script. The set was a cabin of a luxury liner; at one point, Chaplin stood by the cabin door and looked across at Epstein.
‘This walk lays an egg,’ he said, and laughed. Then he stalked back to his director’s chair beneath the camera and shouted, ‘Go over there, make up your mind, take it.’
The action did not proceed smoothly. Brando, sullen, kept saying, ‘All right, all right.’ He did not seem to be listening as Chaplin instructed him again. Finally, Chaplin got up and walked back onto the set.
‘You go, open the door, “Excuse me-so-and-so-and-so.”’ He paused, and gave a classical, balletic Chaplin gesture. ‘All right, you’re here … come to the door … and say, “I’m etcetera, etcetera.”’
Brando came in and did a tolerably good, if lifeless scene, ignoring the Chaplin-esque gesture; at the end he uttered, ‘Oh, no!’
Chaplin interjected a long-drawn-out, ‘O-o-oh, n-o-o-o!’ Then he hurried in to make adjustments. ‘We’ll have to do the same choreography.’ He went through the moves, ignoring the dialogue, and then turned to the director of photography, Arthur Ibbetson.
‘I think that will be the first close-up till we get it natural and sincere,’ he said, crossing his chest with his arm to indicate the limit of the close-up.
He stood by and watched a run-through of the scene. Then he said, ‘I think that’s all right,’ and took his hat off, revealing a shock of pure white hair.
Gloria Swanson leaned forward: ‘You can see why actors find him difficult,’ she whispered. ‘This is a simple scene, and he’s making much ado about nothing …’
Having worked out a bit of business for Brando, Chaplin did it himself, combining Chaplinesque grace with the suggestive vulgarity of the music hall. He picked up an imaginary glass of Alka-Seltzer and drained the contents, leaning his head right back. Then he gave a funny belch, and laughed at his audience – the rows of technicians, who laughed back. Brando gave no visible reaction. Chaplin did it again; he took the non-existent glass, drank deeply, and burped. It didn’t quite work. ‘We’ll put that on sound,’ he said, gesturing vaguely off set.
Then, still thinking out the scene, he walked up and down, clenched fist held at forehead in classical style.2
When Brando tried the scene, he used a real glass with no contents, and took a short draught. Chaplin sprang forward.
‘No – you’re going to take longer to do that, you know.’ The old professional advising the young apprentice. And he demonstrated the whole gesture, going all the way back, swallowing the Alka-Seltzer, and belching at the end of it. Brando followed most of Chaplin’s instructions, but he then achieved two startlingly realistic belches which effectively killed the comedy.
Rumours about Brando’s temperamental behaviour were circulating widely at this stage of the production. Later, press reports indicated that all was harmonious. But at this point, it was clear that Brando was expected to imitate Chaplin rather than to develop his own performance. For such a great dramatic actor, such direction must have been bewildering.
For the onlooker, however, such direction was miraculous. It was as exciting as watching a Chaplin film no one knew existed; first he played the Brando role, then he skipped over and did the Loren part. One was aggressively masculine, the other provocative and feminine, yet both remained pure Charlie. It is a real loss to the cinema that Chaplin refused to allow a film to be made about the production.3
On the way back to London, Gloria Swanson reflected:
Well, wasn’t that a nostalgic time for me. To walk on that set and be greeted with open arms! He looked as fit as a fiddle. He was bouncing in and out of his chair. Frankly, he didn’t look a day older than when I’d last seen him, seven years ago. Did you notice that he isn’t as articulate with words as he is in pantomime, when showing people what he wants? What an artist. I suppose he is the most creative man it is possible to meet.4
A week before the end of shooting, Chaplin got into costume for his final film role. He played an elderly steward who is a victim of severe mal de mer. It was a favourite old joke, and he played his exit scene in the same silent mime as in his earliest screen appearances.
Chaplin composed seventeen musical themes, which were orchestrated by Eric James and conducted by Lambert Williamson. The theme song, ‘This is my Song’, was to become a popular hit. The film was ready for release in the New Year. Chaplin had found it ‘such fun to do, I thought the whole world was going to go mad for it’. He had his first misgivings at the London press show, when the projector kept breaking down and the image was badly focused. On the foyer steps he addressed a startled stranger. ‘They’re ruining my film,’ he wailed, and passed on. The notices confirmed his worst fears. The kindest adopted a patronizing ‘more in sorrow than in anger’ tone. In the year of Bonnie and Clyde, The Dirty Dozen, The Graduate, Weekend and Belle de Jour, a gentle romantic comedy was an almost incomprehensible anachronism.
Chaplin, publicly at least, adopted a bravely truculent stance in the face of the rebuffs and declared to the press that the British critics were ‘bloody idiots’. He felt this opinion vindicated when the film opened in Europe. Paris-Match said that the film was ‘a charming comedy [which] did not deserve the severity of the British Press’. Le Figaro’s headline translated as ‘In London Thorns – In Paris Roses’, and Paris Jour’s as ‘Paris makes Chaplin even with London’. In Italy, L’Unità also had a favourable headline: ‘Demolishing Critical Reviews of British and American Press are Unjustified’; and in Sweden the critic of Dagens Nyhatet said: ‘It is difficult to understand the objections raised by the English critics … His picture of the world, naively warm and generous, unveiling and disarming, uncoils again.’ Not all the English-speaking critics were without sympathy, however. In New York, William Wolf wrote in Cue Magazine,
I have returned from a second look at A Countess From Hong Kong. Again, I found it charming, funny and a welcome change of pace from our frenetic, super-sophisticated milieu. Chaplin could never be counted on to come up with the expected, and that is a mark of his genius.
Chaplin spoke at length of his reactions in a long interview with Francis Wyndham, which provides fascinating insights into his view of the world as he witnessed it in his seventies:
With my next film, I won’t open in London. I’ll open in Kalamazoo or somewhere and leave London till later. I don’t understand what’s happening there now. I think they’re swinging drunk. It’s a peculiar sort of desperation and somnambulism, a negation of art, of any sort of simplicity. When the swinging thing is over, what will they have left? I don’t believe there is such a thing as fashion. Who the hell creates the fashion anyway? Anybody can – something very facile that catches on and everybody imitates. Cynics – so what? Life is cynical if we think only in terms of birth and death. It’s too easy. How ironic that my theme song for the Countess is a big hit all over the world. They throw away the flesh of the peach …
Soon they’ll come to their senses and start having a good time. Every once in a while you see a ray of light, someone behind the camera with a sensitive hand. But more often on TV than in the cinema. I saw a TV play called The Caretaker which was very mysterious and interesting. And I was amused by Goldfinger: one scene I thought so funny, when the whole army falls down gassed during the robbery of Fort Knox! But Dr Zhivago seemed very banal to me – that ridiculous scene when he writes a poem by candlelight! And Blow-up was so slow and boring. I wouldn’t go on for hours to work up to an eventual striptease. Or pretend that this man doesn’t notice a murder.
So much has been done already. I saw a bit of a Beatle film, and it had that old, old gag, a bubble bath! We did all this stop action business in 1914: it was very dull then and nobody paid much attention. Knock ’em down, drag ’em up, all those impossible Keystone gimmicks – it’s all right, but they put it on in such a pretentious way now. There’s a quick phase for thinking it smart and swinging. It’s just what a little boy would do, the most inarticulate thing really, like dribbling. It says nothing – but the intellectuals find it very profound.
The reviews of my pictures have always been mixed. The only one everybody praised was The Kid – and then they went too far, talked about Shakespeare. Well, it wasn’t that! But what shocked me about the English reviews of the Countess was the fact that they were unanimous. And they seemed so personal, an attack on me. All they were interested in was ‘Chaplin has a flop’. In the old days, critics could slaughter quite a good play with just one quip. But there was nothing like that – these were so dull! Why couldn’t they poke fun at it? Where’s their humour, for God’s sake? They picked on such puerile things to say – ‘Brando is wooden’ – but that’s just the whole point!
I think it’s the best thing I’ve done. I can be more objective about it than the pictures I’ve acted in, which can be very irksome and give me terrible inferiority complexes. It’s full of invention, which I always like, and though it seems to be very simply constructed, it took a long time to motivate it, to work out the cause and effect. And it has great charm – what more do they want? Things like The Gold Rush – one, two, three, pantry cakey – it’s so easy. A situation comedy like the Countess is much more difficult to keep going … The humour of the Countess may not be mechanical, but the situations are excruciating. The critics now are terrified of being old-fashioned, but this picture is ten years ahead of its time.
I think it is the first time it’s ever happened – a realistic treatment of an incredible situation. That was the thing that excited me. My other films were something else entirely: caricatures of Cruikshank’s drawings are caricatures. But this is Cruikshank. The characters react realistically in impossible situations … At first Brando was frightened of a funny part, terrified of business, but I told him not to worry as the character was meant to be humourless. And he brought off the realism. Except in the belch scene, which we couldn’t get right. He thought the point was the belch – but the point was the man’s dignified behaviour. And Sophia does a little quiet clowning. She wanted to be much more facetious but I said, give the audience a treat, let them do some of it for you.
Between you and me and the gatepost, it’s a very sad story. This man who leaves his icicle of a wife for a girl who’s a whore. I think the end, where they’re dancing, is tragic. Perhaps his love for her is just a passing thing, as happens to us all.
At first, when I read the reviews, I wondered. Then I went again the next day, and regained all my confidence. Because the audience were loving it …
The visual thing in Countess is very obvious. That’s its great charm, that it is obvious. I was always having trouble with people saying, ‘Put the camera there’, or ‘You must have a close-up now’. I want to make films as I feel – there aren’t any rules. The fuss they make about continuity! You see a handkerchief in somebody’s pocket in one shot, and in the next it’s gone. Who cares? If the shot is funny, I keep it in. It’s a question of values – if the audiences are looking at the handkerchief something’s wrong with the scene anyhow! In Shoulder Arms there’s a bit where I have a gun on my back, then I get my finger caught in a mouse-trap and the gun has disappeared then it’s back again in the next shot. Glaring – but nobody has ever commented on it.
Now I’m working on another film. The trouble is that as I get older, I get more and more interested in beauty. I want things to be beautiful. I’m wondering whether this isn’t a moribund period of art. Aesthetics have gone into things like space and science – those beautiful airships: utility at its height. No artist could compete with that.5
Chaplin put a brave face on things, but those closest to him understood that he had suffered a severe blow from the criticism of his film. The year brought other irritations, too. As a result of the publicity over his claim for National Assistance benefits for himself, his wife and child, Michael Chaplin was approached by the publishers Leslie Frewin in March 1965. On 17 April, he and his wife Patrice signed contracts agreeing to write his life story in conjunction with two journalists, Charles Hamblett and Tom Merritt, who were to receive a proportion of the royalties. A book was rather rapidly produced, in which the two ‘ghosts’ attributed to young Chaplin an awful, breezy hip style and vocabulary. Michael approved the text at first, but then changed his mind and appealed to the family lawyers, the formidable Richards, Butler and Co. On 26 August, Richards, Butler wrote to Leslie Frewin, claiming to void and repudiate the agreement of 17 April on the grounds that the plaintiff was a minor. They further alleged that the text contained material seriously defamatory both of the plaintiff and of other persons. Through Richards, Butler–suing, as a minor, by Patriceas ‘his wife and next friend’ – Michael sought an interlocutory injunction to prevent publication of the book until the trial. The injunction was granted by Mr Justice Waller on 20 September, but the Court of Appeal supported the defendant’s appeal on 2 October. Michael was given leave to appeal to the House of Lords and duly lodged his petition. The appeal was withdrawn, however, after the parties got together and agreed on a revised text. Michael undertook to reimburse the publishers for the costs and expenses which his change of heart had involved them in, by making over a substantial share of the royalties due to him when the book was published.
Despite the objectionable period style and the title (I Couldn’t Smoke the Grass on My Father’s Lawn …) the book, which emerged at the end of the year, is often touching as an intelligent, generous and sensitive youth’s reflections on the difficulties of being son to a genius. While resentful of what he saw as heavy-handed and unsympathetic parental regulation (he instances the employment of private detectives to frighten him off ‘unsuitable’ friendships) the book still affirms real affection and admiration for both parents:
My father is not like any other father. Complex, gifted, strangely creative, his irrationalities have never been those of the average commuter. He was, and is, to put it mildly, a bit of a handful as a father. I first became aware of the general impression that he is an exceptional man through the reactions of other people towards him. Visitors whose names at the time didn’t mean a thing but who, in retrospect, turned out to be Noël Coward, Graham Greene, Jean Cocteau, Truman Capote, Ian Fleming, and sundry other types, and who greeted him like a god on furlough from Olympus. There was also a fairly constant traffic of suitably awed interviewers, photographers, intellectuals, painters, actors, socialites and name-droppers; and whenever these showed up at the Manoir de Ban, my father’s spread in Switzerland, they cast and, in turn, reflected the aura of greatness around the old guy.
There must have been a time when my unformed infant instincts and undeveloped mind simply sensed and felt this man as a kindly, volatile, moody, gay, self-absorbed, inventive, funny, affectionate, stern, sad, brilliant, autocratic, irrational, snobbish, splendid, silly, unjust, loving, perceptive, indifferent, sensitive, cruel, jolly, extension-in-reverse of my own flesh and thought and feelings; a time when I was, quite naturally, just another limb of the father-octopus. There must have been a time, perhaps in the big house in Beverly Hills, California, which was our home before my father settled in Europe, when I may have been able to take for granted my surroundings and family and my father as head of the household.
But I cannot remember such a time …
To be the son of a great man can be a disadvantage; it is like living next to a huge monument; one spends one’s life circling around it, either to remain in the shade, or to avoid its shadow. But then people brought up in an orphanage, when trying to find out where they stand in relation to the world, often spend the rest of their lives searching for such a monument.6
On 11 October 1966, while he was still editing A Countess from Hong Kong, Chaplin was walking with Jerry Epstein outside Pinewood Studios when he tripped on a piece of uneven pavement and broke his ankle. Epstein helped him into the studio first aid centre and he was taken to Slough hospital, where his foot was encased in a twelve-inch plaster. ‘This is most humiliating,’ was Chaplin’s comment. ‘It is just a nuisance. I’ll be back in a day or so.’ He was right. He was outstandingly fit for his age, and was soon about again. But it was the first time in his life that he had broken a limb, and it was the end of that phenomenal mobility that had permitted him to play tennis right up to this time. It is possible that around this time he also had the first of a series of almost imperceptible strokes. From this moment Charles Chaplin was obliged to acknowledge the onset of old age.
Not that old age could stem the phenomenal urge to create. He launched immediately into a new idea, The Freak, a dramatic comedy about a young girl who awakes one morning to find that she has sprouted wings. The role was designed for his third daughter, Victoria. Geraldine and Josephine had already embarked on acting careers (both appear briefly in A Countess from Hong Kong). Chaplin considered, however, that Victoria was the one who had inherited the gift of comedy. The talent was all the more piquant for her extraordinary, luminous beauty, concentrated in the same searching, melancholy eyes as Chaplin’s own Tramp. Over the next two years, Chaplin worked doggedly at writing and revising the script, and the wings which Victoria was to wear in the film were made and tried.
In 1969, Victoria met and fell in love with Jean-Baptiste Thierrée, a young French actor who had had a considerable success in Alain Resnais’s film Muriel, but whose heart was set on making a career as a clown and creating his own circus. Without telling her parents, Victoria left home to join him. Shortly afterwards they were married and Victoria also dedicated herself to becoming a circus performer. It was for a time a bitter blow to Chaplin, who saw it as a serious setback to his plans for The Freak. Meanwhile, Oona and Jerry Epstein, who was to have produced the film, had been forced to recognize that Chaplin’s physical strength was no longer likely to be equal to his creative will.
Since A Countess From Hong Kong, he had, too, suffered a personal bereavement which struck him hard. Charles Chaplin, his elder son by Lita Grey, died at his grandmother’s home in California on 20 March 1968. He was forty-three. Charles Chaplin Junior, as his book about his own relations with his father, My Father, Charlie Chaplin (1960), attests, was a charming, warm-hearted young man, whose life had not been fortunate. His career as an actor had not been as rewarding as his brother’s: he had developed an acute drinking problem during his army service, and he had suffered from two failed marriages. His death, precipitated by a thrombosis brought on by an injury sustained in a fall, was the result of many years of alcohol abuse.
By the start of the 1970s, Chaplin’s energies were engaged on the renewed exploitation of his old films. He had for some time considered leasing out distribution rights. In this way he could secure a very considerable advance and passon to someone else the task of maximizing the profits. Both Jerry Epstein and Sydney Chaplin Junior were interested in being involved in such an arrangement. On one occasion, Sydney was so sure that he could persuade his father to let him take on distribution that he took to Vevey a potential partner, the producer Sandy Lieberson, who was subsequently to become head of production for, successively, Twentieth Century-Fox and Goldcrest Films. Sydney and Lieberson arrived for lunch, which proceeded with great cordiality until Sydney ventured to speak of his proposition, at which Chaplin became enraged. Lieberson still recalls the dreadful embarrassment at being witness to the family row which followed, and their eventual ignominious retreat from the Manoir.
Rachel Ford recommended as a suitable candidate for the distribution deal a former United Artists executive, Moses Rothman, whose tenacity as a salesman was held in awe throughout Hollywood. Rothman formed a company punningly named Black Inc. to distribute the Chaplin films, and advanced $6,000,000 against the 50 per cent of net proceeds which would go to Chaplin’s Roy Export Company Establishment. Black Inc. was reputed to have recouped the initial advance from sales to Japan alone.
Rothman proved both an astute businessman and a master publicist. Part of the agreement was that Chaplin would assist in promoting the re-release of the films by discreet and undemanding personal appearances; and the acclamation which resulted from these seems to have given him much interest and satisfaction in his last years. It also provided work to compensate for the setback to The Freak, though it is unlikely that Chaplin ever gave up hope of making the film. In 1968, he worked with Eric James on a new score for The Circus. A vocalist was engaged to sing the theme song, ‘Swing Little Girl’, over the titles. Eric James noticed, however, that Chaplin himself enjoyed singing the song in private:
His voice … was anything but good, and yet it sounded quite effective when he sang this particular song. Maybe it was because he gave a performance that resembled the way a music hall or vaudeville artist would sing it, so I decided that it might be a good idea to have a set of music parts written in his key, just in case the contract vocalist didn’t give the kind of treatment that was required for this number.7
After the contract vocalist had recorded the song, James persuaded Chaplin to record it himself – ‘so that Oona and all the family could enjoy you sing “Swing High Little Girl” with the backing of this lovely orchestra’, he said. The result was so obviously better suited to the film that it was decided to use Chaplin’s rendition. Chaplin said delightedly, ‘Eric, you conned me into doing that, didn’t you?’8
In November 1971, Chaplin attested his satisfaction with the Black Inc. deal by throwing in The Kid and The Idle Class, which had been excluded from the original arrangement. Working with Eric James, he created new scores for them, and The Kid can be rated one of his finest musical achievements. It was not accomplished without difficulty. While Chaplin remained as autocratic as ever, in some respects his judgement now seemed less reliable:
Charlie insisted on sitting in the control room with the engineers and myself and virtually directing the sensitivity of the various mikes in use. He would demand that this mike or that should predominate on this or that passage, and in general he tried to carry out the whole technical process, which the engineer and I could have managed quite satisfactorily on our own. Charlie would justify himself by saying that he was a perfectionist, implying that the balance engineer and particularly myself were not. I found these sessions so irritating that I would remain silent and let him chatter on, knowing that in the end we would have to try to do what was unquestionably correct.9
In the event, the recording of The Kid proved disastrous: ‘It was realized that the film could not be presented to the public without damaging Charlie’s reputation’. Rothman ordered that the sound balancing be redone, but in total secrecy. Eric James recalled,
I was called upon by Mo Rothman to undertake this task and I was sworn to absolute secrecy. I honored that pledge throughout his [Chaplin’s] life, and in fact am revealing it now for the very first time … I used to almost break out in a cold sweat when I thought of the consequences should Charlie ever find out … no one but no one could ever make decisions concerning his films but him!10
In later years, and especially after Chaplin’s death, relations between Rachel Ford and Rothman were often volatile. The suspicious Miss Ford always feared that Mo might be outsmarting them in some way, while Oona, vulnerable to Rothman’s social charms, reassured her that she was not too bothered if he did: ‘Whichever way it goes, he’s making more money for us out of the films than ever we would have done’.
The world now competed to heap honours upon Chaplin. In 1971, the 25th Cannes Film Festival made a special award for his total œuvre, at the same time as he was invested as Commander of the Légion d’Honneur.
Now, at last, America wanted to make amends. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences decided to award him an Honorary ‘Oscar’, and proffered a joint invitation with the Lincoln Center Film Society in New York. The old McGranery prohibitions on his return had long been forgotten. Chaplin was at first hesitant about accepting the invitation: Ted Tetrick claimed that he was finally swayed by the prospect of inspecting a new camera that might facilitate process work on The Freak. The Chaplins decided to have a few days’ holiday and rest in Bermuda (where Oona was born and still owned a property inherited from her father) before travelling to the United States. They arrived in New York on 2 April 1972, to be greeted at Kennedy Airport by a hundred or so newsmen. Chaplin blew them kisses as he rather slowly descended the steps from the plane and made his way to a waiting limousine, which drove them to the Plaza. That evening, Gloria Vanderbilt Cooper, a girlhood friend of Oona’s, gave a party for them in her town house. The guests included Lillian Gish, Adolph Green, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Truman Capote and George Plimpton. The following evening the Chaplins attended a cocktail party in their hotel (they arrived late) before going on to the Philharmonic Hall for the gala concert in tribute to him and in aid of Lincoln Center Film Society. The audience consisted of 1500 people who had paid $10 and $25 admission and a further 1200 who had paid $100 and $250 for the dressy champagne reception afterwards. They cheered his entrance into the hall; they cheered the films – The Kid and The Idle Class – and at the end gave him an astonishing and moving ovation. Many of the audience, like Chaplin himself, were in tears. When the applause permitted, he spoke into a microphone: ‘This is my renaissance,’ he said. ‘I’m being born again. It’s easy for you, but it’s very difficult for me to speak tonight, because I feel very emotional. However, I’m glad to be among so many friends. Thank you.’
The champagne reception proved a greater ordeal. Chaplin had requested that his table not be cordoned off. In consequence, said Time, the crowd ‘made a surging subway jam of black ties and décolletage, pressing around the table’. Somebody produced a derby and Chaplin mugged a little for the photographers. When Congresswoman Bella Abzug leaned across his table he exclaimed to her in excitement, ‘The audience. The audience. Everybody was in the audience.’ Among those who managed to fight their way to his table were Claire Bloom and Paulette Goddard, who talked to him for a couple of minutes. Most of his life Chaplin had been used to crowds and, for all the confusion, Time noted that when he left with Oona, protected by policemen, ‘his face was alight with pleasure’.
He had initially been nervous about his reception in the United States, but this first experience gave him confidence. The following day he walked in a quiet part of Central Park and lunched at the ‘21’ Club as the guest of a Manhattan councilman, Carter Burden. When he entered the dining room there was a burst of applause, and a waiter proudly told him that he had served him the last time he lunched at the ‘21’, in 1952. ‘Well, thank you,’ said Chaplin. ‘I didn’t think I’d ever be back, you know.’ Among those who came to his table to pay their respects was George Jessel, a pillar of the right, and Jack Gilford. He did not remember Jessel and did not know Gilford: ‘I didn’t know many actors in California,’ he recalled; ‘I was mostly alone there. It was always hard for me to make friends. I was shy and inarticulate. Doug Fairbanks was my only real friend, and I was a showpiece for him at parties.’
After lunch Richard Avedon, who had photographed Chaplin when he passed through the city in 1952, came to the suite in the Plaza for a new sitting. After that the Chaplins went to Gracie Mansion, where Mayor Lindsay presented him with the Handel Medallion, New York’s highest cultural award. The photographers asked him to smile and Chaplin, now full of the old confidence, cracked back, ‘I’m afraid my teeth might fall out,’ and cupped his hand beneath his chin.
At the end of the week Chaplin flew to Hollywood with Oona to receive his special Oscar for his ‘incalculable effect in making motion pictures the art form of the century’. Candice Bergen accompanied them, on a reporting assignment for Life:
During the flight, he crossed to the other side of the plane to see the Grand Canyon. His face lit up. ‘Oh, yes, this is the place where Doug Fairbanks did a handstand on the precipice. He told me about it.’
As they got nearer Los Angeles, he grew more and more nervous, sure he shouldn’t have come. He looked fearful and trapped but made a brave attempt to fight it. ‘Oh well,’ he sighed, ‘it wasn’t so bad. After all, I met Oona there.’11
As he drove through the city he was disappointed to find it changed and unfamiliar. The new owners of his old studio, A. & M. Records, were very proud of the Chaplin connection, had voluntarily sought to have the buildings declared a national monument, protected against alteration, and had established a Chaplin museum in the reception area. They planned to welcome Chaplin back there and had decorated the place with scores of specially printed flags bearing his portrait. But Chaplin could not face it. He arranged to pass the studio on Sunday, when it was closed, and contented himself with looking through the gates.
Some familiar faces from long ago appeared among the worshipping crowds. One was Tim Durant:
When Charlie arrived, I got a call from a Mrs Walter Matthau. She was a great friend of Oona’s and she said, ‘I’m giving a lunch for Charlie and would you come next Sunday?’ I said, ‘Yes, I’ll come up right after church. It’ll be great to see him.’ … Greer Garson was here in the church, and I asked her to go up with me … As I came in, I saw this small table. They were waiting for us: we were a little bit late. I think Lewis Milestone and his wife were there, and one or two others … Charlie was across and as I sat down I looked over at him and he seemed to be preoccupied with the people coming up there. He hardly recognized me, you know. We were there about half an hour, and still he didn’t respond at all. I tried to catch his eye a few times, and he’d go to move away. He was talking rather aimlessly to people as they came up, not remembering their names, I’m sure. I know how he used to fake that – call them dear friend and so forth. I’d done it myself. I felt, well, Charlie’s forgotten about me. I felt rather badly about it, but strangely enough, when the lunch was over he got up on his feet and he came over to me and looked me right in the eye and said, ‘Tim, you and I were buddies once.’ Well, tears came to my eyes – I couldn’t help it. I sort of grasped him and hugged him and I said, ‘Listen, we still are, Charlie.’ So I said goodbye to him, and I thought, this is it … But then his English secretary called and asked me to come over – they had a cottage at the Beverly Hills Hotel. So I went over there, and as I came in, Charlie opened the front door.
He was talking to a very good-looking young girl, which was typical. She looked about seventeen or eighteen – remember he married all those girls, you know, and they all wanted careers and they didn’t want Charlie after a while. They weren’t as good an audience as I was. Anyway he was talking to her, and the first thing he said to her as he saw me, he said, ‘Look at that man there,’ he said; ‘Now you keep away from him. He’s a dangerous man. Don’t have anything to do with him, remember that now.’
He was kidding, you know; and I walked in and he introduced me to his granddaughter; and I had a lovely visit with him there.12
On another occasion Chaplin met Georgia Hale. Georgia had kept her figure and had blonde shoulder-length hair and long eyelashes – as she was to continue to do into her eighties. Chaplin affected indignation that she should seem so young while he was suffering the infirmities of age. ‘Perhaps, after all, it is your faith,’ he told her. ‘You should have shared it with me.’ It was an ironic joke: in the days of their friendship he had always forbidden her even to speak about religion in his presence.13
There was a still more touching reunion. At one of the Hollywood functions which Chaplin attended, Jackie Coogan and his wife were present. They attempted to approach Chaplin’s table but Walter Matthau, aiming to protect Chaplin from harassment, fiercely barred their way. ‘Either he didn’t recognize Jackie,’ Coogan’s son Anthony speculated, ‘or he did recognize him and remembered that there was a time when Jackie could be quite a trouble-maker.’ Somehow the Coogans were got past the bodyguard. Jackie was now the bald, stout, fifty-seven-year-old man who played Uncle Fester in The Addams Family. Chaplin had hardly seen him since he was the Kid, yet he took one look at him and burst into tears. They threw their arms around each other and Chaplin said, ‘What a pleasure to see you … little boy.’ Then, while Jackie and Oona were talking, he gripped Mrs Coogan’s arm and pulled her till her face was close to his, and murmured emphatically: ‘You must never forget. Your husband is a genius.’14
The Oscar show was another great emotional occasion. Before his appearance, Chaplin and Oona had watched the show on a television monitor in the dressing room, delightedly recognizing friends in the audience. Chaplin had had an irrational fear that nobody would turn up. When he accepted his presentation, he was too overcome to stammer out more than a tearful ‘Thank you’, but he managed a bit of business with a derby, making it spring up from his head as he had done in the old silents.
Afterward, as he talked about the ceremony, his eyes were bright and childlike, wide with wonder, round with glee. ‘It almost made me cry – and this one,’ he cocked his head at a beaming Oona, ‘this one kept saying, “Oh, don’t snivel.”
‘It was so emotional and the audience – their emotion. I thought some of them might hiss, but they were so sweet – all those famous people, all those artists. You know, they haven’t done this to me before. It surpasses everything.’
He looked around for his Oscar and couldn’t see it. ‘Oh, no,’ he wailed, ‘all those sweet people and I’ve lost it.’ It was retrieved and put back serenely.
More and more he began to look like an English schoolboy, grinning impishly, rolling his eyes up innocently, pointing a freckled hand to himself, announcing playfully, ‘The genius …’
Suddenly summoning that old agility, he flew from his chair. Eyes twinkling, he said, with mock impatience, ‘Let’s go and celebrate, for God’s sake!’
And happily humming his song ‘Smile!’ he took Oona’s arm and stepped out grandly through the door.15
Two years later, away from the euphoria, Chaplin commented in his book My Life in Pictures, ‘I was touched by the gesture, but there was a certain irony about it somehow.’
In September 1972, he was given a special award of the Golden Lion of the Venice Film Festival. On the final day of the Festival, the Piazza San Marco was converted into a huge open-air cinema for a showing of City Lights. It was arranged that Chaplin would appear on a balcony overlooking the square for the beginning of the screening, and would then be taken to receive his presentation from the wife of the President of Italy. The schedule was tight, and to avoid delay the police cleared the route on the Grand Canal between San Marco and the Palace. Chaplin’s appearance in the Piazza was the signal for overwhelming enthusiasm. At last the projection began and Chaplin sat down to enjoy the film along with the vast audience. Oona, Rachel Ford and the rest of his entourage began to be agitated about the timing and urged that they should leave. ‘I’ll wait until I’ve seen the fight scene,’ he said amiably but firmly. And so he did.
Back in Switzerland, he set to work on a new book, My Life in Pictures. Max Reinhardt of the Bodley Head had had the idea of a book to supplement My Autobiography, with a greater emphasis on Chaplin’s work. This sumptuous collection of private and studio photographs – many never reproduced before – seemed a happy solution. Chaplin evidently enjoyed revisiting the past again, although Rachel Ford was often justifiably nervous for the safety of the precious archives as she watched Chaplin and Reinhardt on their knees in a sea of fragile photographs that washed about the floor. Chaplin’s brief caption comments provided some new insights, though occasionally now his phenomenal memory seemed to fail him. Clare Sheridan’s son is inexplicably mixed up with his own children, for example, while (never too good on names) he adopted the long-standing error of filmographers, who credited Phyllis Allen with an appearance in The Kid. Not the least merit of this fine production was Francis Wyndham’s introduction, with its sensitive appreciation and moving portrait of Chaplin in old age. In October 1974, Chaplin was in London for the launch of the book. He told journalists that he would never be able to retire ‘because ideas just keep popping into my head’.
He was in London again in March 1975, with most of the family, to receive a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II. The investiture was unquestionably his occasion. During the long wait for the Queen, the string orchestra of the Welsh Guards introduced the theme from A Countess From Hong Kong into their selections from light opera, and just before Her Majesty arrived, a solo pianist played ‘Smile’. When it was time for his investiture and the name ‘Sir Charles Chaplin’ was called out, the orchestra went into the theme from Limelight.
Chaplin had hoped to be able to walk the ten-yard distance to the Queen, but his legs were too uncertain and a palace steward wheeled him in a chair. Chaplin said that he was ‘dumbfounded’ by the Queen’s smile. ‘She thanked me for all that I had done. She said my films had helped her a great deal.’ As he waited with the other guests through the rest of the ceremony, his untiring eye for a gag was caught by the sudden collapse of the bandmaster’s music stand. As he left the Palace he had the director’s presence of mind in asking the television cameramen not to shoot the now laborious process of climbing into his car.
After the investiture there was a family party at the Savoy. Chaplin now found it tiring to do much talking and spent most of the time sitting quietly, simply watching the others. In the course of the party, however, there was a telephone call from the Prime Minister, who said he wished to pay his respects. In due course Harold Wilson arrived with Marcia Williams. At once Chaplin was on his feet, straight-backed and sprightly, the old ‘prop smile’ as brilliant and charming as sixty years before. An actor’s resources are mysterious.
The ideas were still popping into his head: the next one was to compose a musical score for the only one of his great silent features that remained without synchronized sound. After half a century he at last felt able to return to A Woman of Paris, which had remained a rather sensitive memory for him since its rejection by the audiences of 1923. Seeing it again, his original enthusiasm for the film was revived. He was persuaded to make some cuts where it was feared the film would be too sentimental for a modern audience. Again, the decision now seems an error: the great scene between Marie and Jean’s mother over Jean’s body was certainly stronger in the original form, with Chaplin’s sentiment unrestrained.
The sympathetic Eric James arrived in Vevey to work with Chaplin on the music and was distressed to see his evident deterioration:
As the years went by, Charlie found it more and more difficult to think of ideas for the music and he would leave a great deal of it to me. I would suggest what I thought he would like, and then play it over to him for his approval, which was usually forthcoming. When I arrived to work with Charlie on A Woman of Paris, the last film on which I worked with him, he looked quite weak and ill. His very first words to me were ‘Eric, I haven’t got an idea in my head for the music of this film.’
I was very distressed to find him in such a state and I could see that he found even talking quite an effort. I therefore told him not to worry but that when I had finished each piece and played it over to him, he need only nod or shake his head to indicate his judgement of it. Thus it was that the very last music that I was to work on at the Manoir was completed in a few weeks and accepted by the employer and friend who, when I left the Manoir, I thought I was destined never to see again.16
James subsequently wrote to Rachel Ford in Paris suggesting that the credits on the film might acknowledge that in this case ‘the majority of the music stemmed from my brain’, but received no reply. He recollected later, ‘I was equally disappointed that no ex gratia payment was forthcoming in appreciation of the efforts I had made’:17 he was still paid the same fixed fee of £200 a week for his work.
Reviews of the refurbished Woman of Paris were to be ecstatic about the rediscovery of the film, but inclined to be dismissive of the score. In fact, like all Chaplin’s film scores, the music successfully recaptures the method and style of Victorian theatre music – an idiom which seems wholly appropriate to this fine melodrama, outside time, but at least as closely linked to the nineteenth century as to the twentieth.
Chaplin attended the recording sessions at Anvil Studios at Denham. I sat with him through one of these sessions, and it was here that the idea for the present book was first discussed with him. I had taken him some of the photographs of the Karno fun factory which appear in this book, and he was particularly fascinated by one of Karno himself – the autocrat at his desk in a cluttered Edwardian office. I asked him if preparing the score for A Woman of Paris had been a lengthy job, to which he answered, ‘Not long – inspiration mostly.’ Although he was still quite chubby, he seemed by this time extremely frail. He could no longer walk unaided. It was clear that his mind was still active, but he was constantly frustrated by the breakdown between the thought and the realization or expression of it. He was terribly sensitive. In a break in the recording some of the musicians pretended to quarrel; this pretence of aggression distressed him so acutely that he had to leave the studio.
The score was the last completed work of a creative life that had spanned three quarters of a century. After this he did not often leave his home. His son Eugene, who had remained in Vevey, described his father’s life in his last years in an interview given to the National Enquirer. He said that gout prevented him from walking and that he no longer cared to have visitors to the house. He read and reread his favourite Dickens novel, Oliver Twist. Sometimes he would tinker a little with the script of The Freak. (The final words of My Life in Pictures were ‘I mean to make it some day.’) Sometimes in the evening the family would watch his old films on their 16mm projector. When the others laughed, said Eugene, he would sit up straight and grin happily, ‘with a whimsical smile’. While the children were growing up he had stood out against allowing television into the Manoir, but now he grew to appreciate it. He enjoyed watching the news programmes, and even though he did not speak French, seemed to have no problem at all in understanding them. He liked to see American films; and with French shows would entertain himself with wicked mimicry of the performers. He did not like to talk about old friends. He had no religion and never went to church, but he had no fear of death: ‘When I go, I go,’ he would say. He would sit for hours with Oona, holding hands and hardly exchanging a word. ‘She is able to share that strange solitude of his,’ said his son.
When the weather was fine, Renato the chauffeur or Gino the butler would drive Chaplin and Oona to a quiet spot by the lake, where they would sit together for an hour or two until the car collected them again. They bought an electric runabout so that he could still inspect his park.
On 15 October 1977, Chaplin made his last trip outside the Manoir. With Oona, Victoria, her husband Jean-Baptiste and their children, he attended a performance of the Circus Knie in Vevey. The visits of the circus had been occasions for the Chaplin family since their arrival in Switzerland. Generally they gave a party at the house for the artists.
Now his strength began to ebb very fast. He needed constant nursing. For weeks Oona insisted on attending him herself, until the family and staff began seriously to fear for her own health and she was persuaded to share the duties with a South African nurse. Eric James noted,
His deteriorating condition brought increasing problems for Oona, for he could not bear her to be out of his sight. He was then, as always, a very demanding person and she became at times completely exhausted, especially during frequent bouts of illness, when she nursed him both night and day. She never knew what it was to have an unbroken night’s rest, and yet she never grumbled or displayed any impatience.
I used to marvel at her attentiveness and her love and tenderness, which was as deep as at any time during their long marriage. When I told her how I admired her she merely said, ‘Charlie looked after me when I was young and needed looking after. It is now my turn to look after him. If love means anything at all, it must prevail in the bad times as well as the good.’18
At Christmas, the family, with the exception of Geraldine, who was working in Spain, assembled at the Manoir for the traditional celebration. Chaplin himself had no love for Christmas, it seems. The children recall that he would regularly grumble how lucky they were and that when he was a child his Christmas treat was a single orange. Eric James, too, recalled:
Charlie hated Christmas. He would put on a show for the sake of his family, but he was always glad when it was over. His excuse was that Christmas reminded him of his workhouse days and general poverty. I feel, however, that the truth probably is that like a well-known Dickensian character he regarded Christmas as an expensive annual event that he would rather do without.19
There was now a tribe of grandchildren. On Christmas Eve, Monsieur Inmoos came up from the village dressed as Santa Claus, as he had done for the past twenty years, to distribute the presents from the tree. (Monsieur Inmoos said that Chaplin saw him many times, but never in any other garb but this.) The children’s presents to him were delivered to Chaplin’s bedroom, and the door was left open so that he might hear the younger ones’ reactions to Santa Claus.
During that night, in the small hours of Christmas Day 1977, Charles Chaplin died peacefully in his sleep.
In Hollywood, the young painter Mark Stock, who idolized Chaplin and had made a fine series of lithograph portraits, heard the news on the radio early in the morning of Christmas Day. Somewhere in the deserted city he found fresh flowers. He drove to the gates of Chaplin’s old house and left a rose there. He placed another on the gate of the studio. He found that by climbing up the gate he could draw down the studio flag to half-mast: it stayed like that for many days. Finally he went to the Hollywood Cemetery intending to place a rose on Hannah’s grave; but a spray of fresh blooms already lay there.
The funeral was held on 27 December 1977 at 11 a. m. at the Anglican Church in Vevey. As Chaplin had wished, it was an unpretentious family affair. The service was conducted by the Revd Robert Thomson and the Revd David Miller, in the presence of the British Ambassador, Allen Keir Rothnie. The coffin was covered with a black and silver pall. Immediately after the ceremony Oona left for Crans-sur-Sierre.
Chaplin, with his taste for the macabre, might have found an ideal scenario in the bizarre events that followed barely two months later. On 1 March 1978, the superintendent of the Vevey Cemetery, Etienne Buenzod, reported for work to find Chaplin’s grave opened up and the coffin gone. The world’s press competed in fantastic explanations for this crime. Was it the belated revenge of a neo-Nazi group for The Great Dictator? An anti-Semitic protest against the burial of a Jew (sic) in a Christian cemetery? Or simply fanatical enthusiasts determined to possess the mortal remains of their idol? Within a few days it became clear that it was a case of posthumous kidnapping, as the first telephone call from a mysterious ‘M. Cohat’ (or ‘Rochat’) demanded 600,000 Swiss francs for the return of the body.
The culprits eventually proved to be a pathetic pair of Keystone incompetents. Roman Wardas was a twenty-four-year-old unemployed Polish automobile mechanic. Gantcho Ganev, aged thirty-eight, was a Bulgarian defector employed as a mechanic in Lausanne. They had been inspired by a news item about the theft of the body of an Italian industrialist, Salvatore Mataressa, and hoped to raise enough money in this way to set themselves up in a garage. Their first mishap was to choose an exceedingly wet night for the exhumation. In the rain it took two hours to dig up the grave and then the ground was much too muddy for them to carry out their original intention of hiding the coffin deeper in the same hole. As it was, they were obliged to struggle through the cemetery with the lead-lined casket, load it on their car and find some other hiding place.
Oona, from the start, refused to have any dealings with body-snatchers. The family lawyer, Jean-Felix Paschoud, quoted her as saying, ‘My husband is in heaven and in my heart.’ Perhaps, too, she remembered the firm line that Chaplin himself had always advocated with kidnappers. The matter had to be treated with delicacy, however, since when the ransom money proved not to be immediately forthcoming, the body-snatchers began to threaten violence against the younger children. After Christopher was threatened with having his legs shot up, he was given an unseen police escort to and from school each day.
From the start, Monsieur Paschoud had decided that they were dealing with amateurs: ‘If we had parleyed we would eventually have got the coffin back for fifty francs,’ he said. The Chaplins and the police simply had to sit it out. In all, the kidnappers were to make twenty-seven telephone calls. Geraldine undertook to deal with them and maintained a fine performance as the weeks went by, keeping the body-snatchers dangling with her vocal representations of grief and concern. A practice ‘drop’ went farcically wrong. Bit by bit, Wardas and Ganev grew lazy. At first they had moved around and far afield to make their calls but eventually they simply used Lausanne call-boxes. When the police realized this, they waited for a call that was fixed for an appointed time, and then kept watch on every call-box in Lausanne. A number of innocent callers received nasty shocks, but Wardas and Ganev were apprehended.
The coffin was found buried in a cornfield just outside the village of Noville on the eastern end of Lake Geneva, some twenty kilometres from Vevey. It was a place where Wardas was accustomed to go fishing. Oona was touched that they had chosen so peaceful a spot for Chaplin to rest in; and after the coffin was removed, the farmer who owned the land erected a simple wooden cross, ornamented with a cane, in memory.
Wardas and Ganev were put on trial at Vevey in December. The principal witness was Geraldine. Wardas was sentenced to four and a half years’ imprisonment and Ganev received a suspended sentence of eighteen months, for ‘disturbing the peace of the dead and attempted extortion’.
The grave-robbing stirred the FBI’s interest in Chaplin one last time. The final documents are speculation on the theft of his body. Somehow it seemed appropriate that the FBI’s contribution to the investigation was a series of interviews with psychics.
In the days following Chaplin’s death, all the great men of his profession delivered their eulogies. René Clair, doyen of French cinema, wrote:
He was a monument of the cinema of all countries and all times. He inspired practically every film maker. I was myself especially sensitive to that extraordinary mixture of comedy and sentiment. It was said that Modern Times found its themes in A Nous la Liberté. I am happy and proud if I, whom he had so much influenced, was able for once in turn to influence him.
Charles Chaplin, who has given us so many gifts with each of his films, took from us, this Christmas Day, the most beautiful gift the cinema made to us.
Laurence Olivier said, ‘He was, perhaps, the greatest actor of all time’; and Jean-Louis Barrault called him
the supreme example of the perfection of the actor and the creative genius: whether it comes from the theatre or is expressed by the cinema. He is above all an extraordinary mime, and what he teaches, in mime, is that he attains the maximum by immobility, an immobility full and entire. In sum, he has shown us the peak of the art of mime.
The great French film comedian Jacques Tati said:
Without him I would never have made a film. With Keaton he was the master of us all. His work is always contemporary, yet eternal, and what he brought to the cinema and to his time is irreplaceable.
For Federico Fellini he was
a sort of Adam, from whom we are all descended … There were two aspects of his personality: the vagabond, but also the solitary aristocrat, the prophet, the priest and the poet.
The simplest tribute – yet perhaps also the most touching, because it intimated atonement by the very section of America which, so long ago, had abused and rejected Charles Chaplin – was spoken by Bob Hope:
We were fortunate to have lived in his time.
Chaplin’s presence had dominated Oona’s entire adult life. After his death she tried bravely to create a new social existence for herself, but her natural shyness and Charlie’s commanding memory made it hard. She bought an apartment in New York and renewed old friendships there, but after a year or two sold it again (thrilled by her profit on the price). She was amused and flattered when the tabloid press tried to make romances out of friendships with Ryan O’Neal and David Bowie, her neighbour in Switzerland. For a while in the mid-1980s there seemed to be a serious affair with the scriptwriter Walter Bernstein, but the relationship came to an end.
As the children left home, life at the Manoir became more isolated for Oona. For a while she amused herself redecorating the house and buying pictures, but the fun of spending was always overshadowed by the memory of Charlie’s respect for money. As she became lonelier, she retreated more and more into herself, staying in her rooms, watching videos for hours, numbing her senses with alcohol. She became more and more unpredictable, and often careless about her personal appearance – though her most unpredictable quality was her capacity for recovery when an occasion or a person seemed to inspire the effort. Latterly, such occasions became rarer. She met few people and her only outings were trips to the hairdresser in Vevey. Even at this late stage, however, she received and was charmed by Richard Attenborough, and surprised everyone by giving her unqualified approval to his biographical film about Chaplin.
It was just when production of his film had begun, in August 1991, that an operation revealed that Oona had incurable pancreatic cancer. She returned from hospital to the Manoir, where her daughters came to care for her in the last days. She died around midnight on 27 September 1991 and was buried alongside Charlie in the big grave in the churchyard in Corsier. It is marked by two massive cubes of granite, respectively engraved ‘Charles Chaplin 1889–1977’ and ‘Oona Chaplin 1925–1991’.