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

equity in several million dollars’ worth of stocks which showed him over a million profit. He asked me if I were playing the market. I told him I could not believe in stocks when 14,000,000 were unemployed. When I advised him to sell his stocks and get out while he had a profit, he became indignant. We had quite an argument. ‘Why, you’re selling America short!’ he said, and accused me of being very unpatriotic. The next day the market dropped fifty points and Irving’s fortune was wiped out. A couple of days later he came round to my studio, stunned and apologetic, and wanted to know where I had got my information.

At last City Lights was finished; only the music was to be recorded. One happy thing about sound was that I could control the music, so I composed my own.

I tried to compose elegant and romantic music to frame my comedies in contrast to the tramp character, for elegant music gave my comedies an emotional dimension. Musical arrangers rarely understood this. They wanted the music to be funny. But I would explain that I wanted no competition, I wanted the music to be a counterpoint of grace and charm, to express sentiment, without which, as Hazlitt says, a work of art is incomplete. Sometimes a musician would get pompous with me and talk of the restricted intervals of the chromatic and the diatonic scale, and I would cut him short with a layman’s remark: ‘Whatever the melody is, the rest is just a vamp.’ After putting music to one or two pictures I began to look at a conductor’s score with a professional eye and to know whether a composition was over-orchestrated or not. If I saw a lot of notes in the brass and woodwind section, I would say: ‘That’s too black in the brass,’ or ‘too busy in the woodwinds.’

Nothing is more adventurous and exciting than to hear the tunes one has composed played for the first time by a fifty-piece orchestra.

When at last City Lights was synchronized, I was anxious to know its fate. So, unannounced, we had a preview in a down-town theatre.

It was a ghastly experience, because our film was thrown on the screen to a half-empty house. The audience had come to see a drama and not a comedy, and they did not recover from their bewilderment until half-way through the picture. There were laughs, but feeble ones. And before the picture was through I saw shadowy figures going up the aisle. I nudged my assistant director. ‘They’re walking out on it.’

‘Maybe they’re going to the toilet,’ he whispered.

After that I could not concentrate on the picture, but waited to see if those who had walked up the aisle would come back. After a few minutes I whispered: ‘They haven’t come back.’

‘Some have to catch trains,’ said he.

I left the theatre with a feeling of two years’ work and two million dollars having gone down the drain. As I came out of the theatre the manager was standing in the lobby and greeted me. ‘It’s very good,’ he said smilingly, and as a back-handed compliment added: ‘Now I want to see you make a talkie, Charlie – that’s what the whole world’s waiting for.’

I tried to smile. Our staff had trailed out of the theatre and were standing about the sidewalk. I joined them. Reeves, my manager, always serious, greeted me with a lilt in his voice: ‘Went over pretty well, I thought, considering –’ His last word was an ominous reservation, but I nodded confidently. ‘With a full house it’ll be great – of course it needs one or two cuts,’ I added.

Then the disquieting thought loomed up like thunder that we had not yet attempted to sell the picture. But I was not too concerned about that, for the kudos of my name was still box-office – I hoped. Joe Schenck, our United Artists president, warned me that the exhibitors were not prepared to give me the same terms as they had done for The Gold Rush, and that the big circuits were holding off and had a wait-and-see attitude. In the past exhibitors had always had a lively interest in a new film of mine; now their interest was only lukewarm. Moreover, difficulties arose about getting a New York showing. All the New York movie houses were booked up, I was told. So I would have to wait my turn.

The only one available in New York was the George M. Cohan theatre with a seating capacity of eleven hundred and fifty, and that was off the beaten path and considered a white elephant. It was not even a cinema house. I could hire the four walls for seven thousand dollars a week, guaranteeing eight weeks’ rental, and I would have to supply everything else: manager, cashier, ushers, projectionist, stage-hands and the expense of electric signs and publicity. As I was financially involved to the extent of two million dollars – and my own money at that – I might as well take the full gamble and hire the theatre.

Meanwhile Reeves had closed a deal in Los Angeles to open in a new theatre which had just been built. As the Einsteins were still there, they expressed a desire to go to the opening – but I do not think they realized what they had let themselves in for. On the eve of the première they dined at my house, then we all went down town. The main street was packed with people for several blocks. Police cars and ambulances were attempting to plough through the crowds, which had smashed in the shop windows next to the theatre. With the help of a squadron of police, we were propelled into the foyer. How I loathe first nights: the personal tension, the mixture of perfumes, musk and carbona – the effect is nauseating and nerve-racking.

The proprietor had built a beautiful theatre but, like many exhibitors in those days, he knew little