My Autobiography by Charles Chaplin (most read book in the world TXT) 📕

from the guests. During our confab, coffee was served in very light lacquer cups and mine was placed too near my sleeve, so that when I slightly moved my hand I upset my coffee over the table-cloth. I was mortified! In the middle of my profuse apologies to my hostess, Gertrude did exactly the same thing, upsetting her coffee. I was inwardly relieved, for now I was not alone in my embarrassment. But Gertrude never dropped a spangle. Said she: ‘It’s all right, it didn’t spill on my dress.’

John Masefield visited the studio; he was a tall, handsome, gentle man, kindly and understanding. But for some reason these qualities made me extremely shy. Fortunately I had just read The Widow in the Bye Street which I admired, so I was not entirely mum and quoted some of my favourite lines from it:

There was a group outside the prison gate,

Waiting to hear them ring the passing bell,

Waiting as empty people always wait,

For the strong toxic of another’s hell.

*

During the production of The Gold Rush, I received a telephone call from Elinor Glyn: ‘My dear Charlie, you must meet Marion Davies; she is really a dear, and would adore meeting you, so will you dine with us at the Ambassador Hotel and afterwards come with us to Pasadena to see your picture, The Idle Class?’

I had never met Marion, but had encountered her bizarre publicity. It was in every Hearst newspaper and magazine and hit one full in the face ad nauseam. It was so overdone that the name Marion Davies became the target of many jokes. There was Beatrice Lillie’s remark when someone showed her the clustered lights of Los Angeles. ‘How wonderful!’ said Beatrice. ‘I suppose later they all merge and spell “Marion Davies”!’ One could not open a Hearst magazine or newspaper without a large picture of Marion. All this only kept the public away from the box office.

But one evening at the Fairbankses’ they ran a Marion Davies film, When Knighthood Was in Flower. To my surprise she was quite a comedienne, with charm and appeal, and would have been a star in her own right without the Hearst cyclonic publicity. At Elinor Glyn’s dinner I found her simple and charming and from that moment we struck up a great friendship.

The relationship between Hearst and Marion is legendary in the United States, and throughout the world for that matter. It was an association of over thirty years, lasting until the day he died.

If I were asked what personality in my life has made the deepest impression on me, I would say the late William Randolph Hearst. I should explain that the impression was not always a pleasant one – although he had commendable qualities. It was the enigma of his personality that fascinated me, his boyishness, his shrewdness, his kindness, his ruthlessness, his immense power and wealth, and above all his genuine naturalness. In worldly values, he was the freest man I have ever known. His business empire was fabulous and diversified, consisting of hundreds of publications, large holdings in New York real estate, mining, and vast tracts of land in Mexico. His secretary told me that Hearst’s enterprises were worth $400,000,000 – a lot of money in those days.

There are conflicting opinions about Hearst. Some maintain that he was a sincere American patriot, others that he was an opportunist merely interested in the circulation of his newspapers and enlarging his fortune. But as a young man he was adventurous and liberal. Moreover, the parental exchequer was always at hand. The story goes that Russell Sage, the financier, met Hearst’s mother, Phoebe Hearst, on Fifth Avenue. Said he: ‘If your son persists in attacking Wall Street his newspaper will lose a million dollars a year.’

‘At that rate, Mr Sage, he can stay in business for another eighty years,’ said his mother.

The first time I met Hearst I committed a faux pas. Sime Silverman, editor and publisher of Variety, took me up to Hearst’s apartment on Riverside Drive for lunch. It was the conventional rich man’s home, a duplex affair, with rare paintings, high ceilings, mahogany panelling and built-in cases displaying porcelain. After I had been introduced to the Hearst family, we all sat down to lunch.

Mrs Hearst was an attractive woman with a kindly, easy manner. Hearst, on the other hand, was wide-eyed and let me do the talking.

‘The first time I saw you, Mr Hearst,’ I said, ‘was at the Beaux Arts Restaurant, sitting with two ladies. You were pointed out to me by a friend.’

From under the table I felt a pressure on my foot. I gathered it was Sime Silverman.

‘Oh!’ said Hearst with a humorous expression.

I began to falter. ‘Well, if it wasn’t you, it was someone very much like you – of course my friend was not quite sure,’ I said naïvely.

‘Well,’ said Hearst with a twinkle, ‘it’s very convenient to have a double.’

‘Yes,’ I laughed, perhaps a little too loudly.

Mrs Hearst rescued me. ‘Yes,’ she emphasized humorously, ‘it’s very convenient.’

However, it passed off lightly and I thought the lunch went very well.

Marion Davies came to Hollywood to star in Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Productions. She rented a house in Beverly Hills and Hearst brought his two-hundred-and-eighty-foot cruiser through the Panama Canal into Californian waters. From then on the film colony enjoyed an era of Arabian Nights. Two or three times a week, Marion gave stupendous dinner parties with as many as a hundred guests, a mélange of actors, actresses, senators, polo-players, chorus boys, foreign potentates and Hearst’s executives and editorial staff to boot. It was a curious atmosphere of tension and frivolity, for no one could predict the mercurial temper of the powerful Hearst, which was the barometer of whether the evening would go or not.

I remember an incident at a dinner Marion gave in her rented house. About fifty of us were standing about, while Hearst, looking saturnine, was seated in a high-backed chair surrounded by his editorial staff. Marion, gowned à la Madame