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

on a hill in the centre of what was then the scrubby, barren hills of Beverly. The alkali and the sagebrush gave off an odorous, sour tang that made the throat dry and the nostrils smart.

In those days Beverly Hills looked like an abandoned real estate development. Sidewalks ran along and disappeared into open fields and lamp-posts with white globes adorned empty streets; most of the globes were missing, shot off by passing revellers from roadhouses.

Douglas Fairbanks was the first film star to live in Beverly Hills, and often invited me to stay the week-end with him. At night from my bedroom I would listen to the coyotes howling, packs of them invading the garbage cans. Their howls were eerie, like the pealing of little bells.

He always had two or three stooges staying with him: Tom Geraghty, who wrote his scripts, Carl, an ex-Olympic athlete, and a couple of cowboys. Tom, Doug and I had a Three Musketeers relationship.

On Sunday morning Doug would organize a posse of cowponies and we would get up in the dark and ride over the hills to meet the dawn. The cowboys would stake the horses and make a camp-fire and prepare breakfast of coffee, hot cakes and ‘sowbelly’. While we watched the dawn break, Doug would wax eloquent and I would joke about loss of sleep and argue that the only dawn worth seeing was with the opposite sex. Nevertheless, those early morning sorties were romantic. Douglas was the only man who could ever get me on a horse, in spite of my complaints that the world over-sentimentalized the beast and that it was mean and cantankerous with the mind of a half-wit.

At that time he was separated from his first wife. In the evening he would have friends to dinner, including Mary Pickford, of whom he was terrifically enamoured. They both acted like frightened rabbits about it. I used to advise them not to marry but just to live together and get it out of their systems, but they could not agree with my unconventional ideas. I had spoken so strongly against their marrying that when in the end they did so all their friends were invited to the wedding but me.

In those days Douglas and I often indulged in cliché philosophizing, and I would hold forth on the futility of life. Douglas believed that our lives were ordained and that our destiny was important. When Douglas was possessed with this mystic ebullience it usually had a cynical effect on me. I remember one warm summer’s night both of us climbed to the top of a large water-tank and sat there talking in the wild grandeur of Beverly. The stars were mysteriously brilliant and the moon incandescent, and I had been saying that life was without reason.

‘Look!’ said Douglas, fervently, making an arc gesture taking in all the heavens. ‘The moon! And those myriads of stars! Surely there must be a reason for all this beauty? It must be fulfilling some destiny! It must be for some good and you and I are all part of it!’ Then he turned to me, suddenly inspired. ‘Why are you given this talent, this wonderful medium of motion pictures that reaches millions of people throughout the world?’

‘Why is it given to Louis B. Mayer and the Warner Brothers?’ I said. And Douglas laughed.

Douglas was incurably romantic. When spending week-ends with him I was sometimes awakened at three in the morning out of a sound sleep, and would see through the mist a Hawaiian orchestra playing on the lawn, serenading Mary. It was charming, but it was difficult to enter into the spirit of it when one was not personally involved. But these boyish attributes made him endearing.

Douglas was also the sportive type who had wolf-hounds and police dogs perched on the back seat of his open Cadillac. He genuinely liked that sort of thing.

*

Hollywood was fast becoming the Mecca of writers, actors and intellectuals. Celebrated authors came from all parts of the world: Sir Gilbert Parker, William J. Locke, Rex Beach, Joseph Hergesheimer, Somerset Maugham, Gouverneur Morris, Ibañez, Elinor Glyn, Edith Wharton, Kathleen Norris and many others.

Somerset Maugham never worked in Hollywood, though his stories were much in demand. He did, however, stay there a number of weeks prior to going to the South Sea islands, where he wrote those admirable short stories. At dinner he recounted one to Douglas and me, the story of Sadie Thompson, which he said was based on actual fact, and which was later dramatized as Rain. I have always considered Rain a model play. The Reverend Davidson and his wife are beautifully defined characters – more interesting than Sadie Thompson. How superb Tree would have been as the Reverend Davidson! He would have played him as gentle, ruthless, oily and terrifying.

Set in this Hollywood milieu was a fifth-rate, rambling, barnlike establishment known as the Hollywood Hotel. It had bounced into prominence like a bewildered country maiden bequeathed a fortune. Rooms were at a premium, only because the road from Los Angeles to Hollywood was almost impassable and these literary celebrities wanted to live in the vicinity of the studios. But everyone looked lost, as though they had come to the wrong address.

Elinor Glyn occupied two bedrooms there, converting one into a sitting-room by covering pillows with pastel-coloured material and spreading them over the bed to look like a sofa. Here she entertained her guests.

I first met Elinor when she gave a dinner for ten people. We were to meet in her rooms for cocktails before going into the dining-room and I was the first to arrive. ‘Ah,’ she said, cupping my face with her hands and gazing intently at me. ‘Let me have a good look at you. How extraordinary! I thought your eyes were brown, but they’re quite blue.’ Though she was a little overwhelming at first, I became very fond of her.

Elinor, though a monument of English respectability, had shocked the Edwardian world with her novel Three Weeks.