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

and had an interview with Hitler. At that time no one knew much about Hitler’s concentration camps. The first intimation of them came from articles written by my friend Cornelius Vanderbilt, who had, on some pretext, got into one and written of the Nazi tortures there. But his stories of degenerate brutality were so fantastic that few people believed them.

Vanderbilt sent me a series of picture postcards showing Hitler making a speech. The face was obscenely comic – a bad imitation of me, with its absurd moustache, unruly, stringy hair and disgusting, thin, little mouth. I could not take Hitler seriously. Each postcard showed a different posture of him: one with his hands claw-like haranguing the crowds, another with one arm up and the other down, like a cricketer about to bowl, and another with hands clenched in front of him as though lifting an imaginary dumb-bell. The salute with the hand thrown back over the shoulder, the palm upwards, made me want to put a tray of dirty dishes on it. ‘This is a nut!’ I thought. But when Einstein and Thomas Mann were forced to leave Germany, this face of Hitler was no longer comic but sinister.

*

I first met Einstein in 1926, when he came to California to lecture. I have a theory that scientists and philosophers are sublimated romanticists who channel their passions in another direction. This theory fitted well the personality of Einstein. He looked the typical Alpine German in the nicest sense, jovial and friendly. And although his manner was calm and gentle, I felt it concealed a highly emotional temperament, and that from this source came his extraordinary intellectual energy.

Carl Laemmle of the Universal studios phoned to say that Professor Einstein would like to meet me. I was thrilled. So we met at the Universal studios for lunch, the Professor, his wife, his secretary, Helene Dukas, and his Assistant Professor, Walter Meyer. Mrs Einstein spoke English very well, in fact better than the Professor. She was a square-framed woman with abundant vitality; she frankly enjoyed being the wife of the great man and made no attempt to hide the fact; her enthusiasm was endearing.

After lunch, while Mr Laemmle showed them around the studio, Mrs Einstein drew me aside and whispered: ‘Why don’t you invite the Professor to your house? I know he would be delighted to have a nice quiet chat with just ourselves.’ As Mrs Einstein had requested it should be a small affair, I invited only two other friends. At dinner she told me the story of the morning he conceived the theory of relativity.

‘The Doctor came down in his dressing-gown as usual for breakfast but he hardly touched a thing. I thought something was wrong, so I asked what was troubling him. “Darling,” he said, “I have a wonderful idea.” And after drinking his coffee, he went to the piano and started playing. Now and again he would stop, making a few notes then repeat: “I’ve got a wonderful idea, a marvellous idea!”

‘I said: “Then for goodness’ sake tell me what it is, don’t keep me in suspense.”

‘He said: “It’s difficult, I still have to work it out.” ’

She told me he continued playing the piano and making notes for about half an hour, then went upstairs to his study, telling her that he did not wish to be disturbed, and remained there for two weeks. ‘Each day I sent him up his meals,’ she said, ‘and in the evening he would walk a little for exercise, then return to his work again.’

‘Eventually,’ she said, ‘he came down from his study looking very pale. “That’s it,” he told me, wearily putting two sheets of paper on the table. And that was his theory of relativity.’

Dr Reynolds, whom I had invited that evening because he had a smattering of physics, asked the Professor during dinner whether he had ever read Dunne’s Experiment with Time.

Einstein shook his head.

Said Reynolds airily: ‘He has an interesting theory about dimensions, a sort of a’ – here he hesitated – ‘a sort of an extension of a dimension.’

Einstein turned to me quickly and mischievously whispered ‘An extension of a dimension, was ist das?’

Reynolds got off the dimensions after that and asked Einstein if he believed in ghosts. Einstein confessed that he had never seen one, and added: ‘When twelve other persons have witnessed the same phenomenon at the same time, then I might believe.’ He smiled.

At that time psychic phenomena were rife and ectoplasm loomed over Hollywood like smog, especially in the homes of the movie stars, where spiritualist meetings and demonstrations of levitation and psychic phenomena took place. I did not attend these affairs, but Fanny Brice, the celebrated comedienne, swore that at a spiritualist meeting she had seen a table rise and float about the room. I asked the Professor if he had ever witnessed such phenomena. He smiled blandly and shook his head. I also asked him whether his theory of relativity conflicted with the Newtonian hypothesis.

‘On the contrary,’ he said, ‘it is an extension of it.’

During dinner I told Mrs Einstein that after the opening of my next picture I intended going to Europe.

‘Then you must come to Berlin and visit us,’ she said. ‘We have not a big place – the Professor is not rich although he has access to over a million dollars for his scientific work from the Rockefeller Foundation – but he has never used it.’

Later when I went to Berlin I visited them in their modest little flat. It was like something you might find in the Bronx, a sitting-room and dining-room in one, covered with old worn carpets. The most expensive piece of furniture was the black piano upon which he made those historical preliminary notes on the fourth dimension. I have often wondered what became of the piano. Possibly it is in the Smithsonian Institution or the Metropolitan Museum – possibly used as kindling wood by the Nazis.

When the Nazi terror came to Germany, the Einsteins