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

As a change from San Simeon and Marion’s beach-house, we occasionally spent a week-end on Hearst’s yacht and cruised over to Catalina or south to San Diego. It was during one of these cruises that Thomas H. Ince, who had taken over Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Film Productions, had to be carried off the boat in San Diego. I was not present on that trip, but Elinor Glyn, who was aboard, told me that Ince had been gay and debonair, but during lunch had been suddenly stricken with paralysing pain and forced to leave the table. Everyone thought it was an attack of indigestion, but he became so ill that it seemed advisable to put him ashore and get him to a hospital. There it was discovered he had suffered a heart-attack, and he was sent to his home in Beverly Hills, where three weeks later he had a second attack and died.

Ugly rumours began to spread that Ince had been shot and Hearst was implicated. These rumours were completely untrue. I know this because Hearst, Marion and I went to see Ince at his home two weeks before he died; he was very happy to see the three of us and believed that he would soon be well.

Ince’s death upset Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Productions’ plans, so they were taken over by Warner Brothers. But after two years Hearst Productions moved over to M.G.M., where an elaborate bungalow dressing-room was built for Marion (I called it the Trianon).

Here Hearst transacted most of his newspaper business. Many times I saw him seated in the centre of Marion’s reception room, with twenty or more newspapers spread all over the floor. From his chair he would scan the various headlines. ‘That’s a feeble set-up,’ he would say in his high voice, pointing to one paper. ‘And why is so-and-so featuring that story?’ He would pick up a magazine and thumb its pages, weighing it appraisingly with both hands. ‘What’s the matter with the Redbook’s advertising? – pretty light this month. Wire Ray Long to come here at once.’ In the midst of this scene, Marion would appear in all her finery, having just left the movie set, and in her moqueuse way deliberately walk over the newspapers, saying: ‘Get rid of all this junk, it’s cluttering up my dressing-room.’

Hearst could be extremely naïve. When going to a première of one of Marion’s pictures, he would invite me to drive with them, and before arriving at the entrance of the theatre he would get out so as not to be seen arriving with Marion. Yet when the Hearst Examiner and the Los Angeles Times were embroiled in a political fight, Hearst attacking vigorously and the Times coming off second best, the Times resorted to a personal attack, accusing Hearst of leading a double life and maintaining a love-nest at Santa Monica beach and mentioning Marion. Hearst did not answer the attack in his newspaper, but came to me a day later (Marion’s mother had just died) and said: ‘Charlie, will you be a principal pall-bearer with me at Mrs Davies’s funeral?’ And, of course, I accepted.

In 1933 or thereabouts, Hearst invited me to take a trip with him to Europe. He had engaged the whole side of one of the Cunard liners for his party. But I declined, for it meant trailing along with twenty others, lingering where Hearst wanted to linger, and hurrying where he wanted to hurry.

I had had a taste of that experience on a trip to Mexico with him, when my second wife was pregnant. A parade of ten cars followed Hearst and Marion over bumpy roads and I was cursing the whole outfit because of it. So impassable were the roads that we had to abandon our destination and put up at a Mexican farmhouse for the night. There were only two rooms for twenty of us; one was graciously allotted to my wife, Elinor Glyn and myself. Some slept on tables and chairs, others in chicken coops and in the kitchen. It was a fantastic scene in that small room, my wife in the only bed, I propped up on two chairs, and Elinor, dressed as though going to the Ritz, sleeping on a broken-down couch, wearing her hat, her veil and gloves. She lay with her hands folded across her chest like a supine figure on a tomb, and slept undisturbed in that one position. I knew, for I did not sleep a wink all night. In the morning, from the corner of my eye, I watched her get up as she had lain down, with everything intact, not one hair out of place, her skin white and enamelled, as ebullient and spry as if she were walking through the tea-room of the Plaza Hotel.

On the trip to Europe, Hearst took Harry Crocker, my former assistant director, with him. Harry had now become Hearst’s social secretary, and asked if I would give W.R. a letter of introduction to Sir Philip Sassoon, which I did.

Philip gave Hearst a very good time. Knowing that Hearst had been flagrantly anti-British for many years, he arranged for him to meet the Prince of Wales. He got the two of them closeted in his library, where, according to Philip’s story, the Prince asked Hearst point-blank why he was so anti-British. They were there for two hours, he said, and Philip believed that the Prince’s interview had a salutary effect.

I could never understand Hearst’s anti-British feeling, for he had valuable holdings in England and enjoyed large profits from them. His pro-German tendencies dated back to the First World War, at which critical time his association and friendship with Count Bernstorff – then the German Ambassador – verged on a scandal. Even Hearst’s immense power could hardly suppress it. Then, too, his American foreign correspondent, Karl von Wiegand, always wrote favourably of Germany up to the very edge of the Second World War.

During Hearst’s trip to Europe, he visited Germany