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

was hoping she would fervently deny it. Instead she acted cleverly; she asked who had been telling me all this nonsense.

‘What difference does it make who told me? But I think I should mean more to you than that you should openly make a fool of me.’

She was very calm, and insisted that I had been listening to a lot of lies.

I wanted to hurt her by a show of indifference. ‘You don’t have to make any pretence with me,’ I said. ‘You’re free to do whatever you like. You’re not married to me; so long as you’re conscientious in your work, that’s all that matters.’

To all this Edna was amiably in agreement, and wanted nothing to interfere with our working together. We could always be good friends, she said, which made me all the more desperately miserable.

I talked for an hour on the phone nervous and upset, wanting some excuse for a reconciliation. As is usual in such circumstances, I took a renewed and passionate interest in her, and the conversation tapered off by my asking her to dinner that evening on the pretext of talking over the situation.

She hesitated, but I insisted, in fact I pleaded and implored, all my pride and defences slipping away from me. Eventually she consented.… That night the two of us dined on ham and eggs, which she cooked in her apartment.

There was a reconciliation of a sort and I became less perturbed. At least I was able to work the next day. Nevertheless, there lingered a forlorn anguish and self-reproach. I blamed myself for having neglected her at times. I was cast into a dilemma. Should I completely break with her or not? Perhaps the story about Meighan was not true?

About three weeks later she called at the studio to get her cheque. As she was leaving I happened to bump into her. She was with a friend. ‘You know Tommy Meighan?’ she said blandly. I was somewhat shocked. In that brief moment Edna became a stranger as though I had just met her for the first time. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘How are you, Tommy?’ He was a little embarrassed. We shook hands, and after we had exchanged one or two pleasantries they left the studio together.

However, life is another word for conflict which gives us little surcease. If it is not the problem of love it is something else. Success was wonderful, but with it grew the strain of trying to keep pace with that inconstant nymph, popularity. Nevertheless, my consolation was in work.

But writing, acting and directing fifty-two weeks in the year was strenuous, requiring an exorbitant expenditure of nervous energy. At the completion of a picture I would be left depressed and exhausted, so that I would have to rest in bed for a day.

Towards evening I would get up and go for a quiet walk. Feeling remote and melancholy, I would wander around town, looking vacantly into shop windows. I never tried to think on these occasions; my brain was numbed. But I was quick to recuperate. Usually the following morning, driving to the studio, my excitement would return and my mind would get activated again.

With a bare notion I would order sets, and during the building of them the art director would come to me for details, and I would bluff and give him particulars about where I wanted doors and archways. In this desperate way I started many a comedy.

Sometimes my mind would tighten like a twisted cord and would need some form of loosening. At this juncture a night out was efficacious. I never cared much for alcoholic stimulus. In fact, when working, I had a superstition that the slightest stimulus of any kind affected one’s perspicacity. Nothing demanded more alertness of mind than contriving and directing comedy.

As for sex, most of it went in my work. When it did rear its delightful head, life was so inopportune that it was either a glut on the market or a serious shortage. However, I was a disciplinarian and took my work seriously. Like Balzac, who believed that a night of sex meant the loss of a good page of his novel, so I believed it meant the loss of a good day’s work at the studio.

*

A well-known lady novelist, hearing I was writing my autobiography, said: ‘I hope you have the courage to tell the truth.’ I thought she meant politically, but she was referring to my sex-life. I suppose a dissertation on one’s libido is expected in an autobiography, although I do not know why. To me it contributes little to the understanding or revealing of character. Unlike Freud, I do not believe sex is the most important element in the complexity of behaviour. Cold, hunger and the shame of poverty are more likely to affect one’s psychology.

Like everybody else’s my sex-life went in cycles. Sometimes I was potent, other times disappointing. But it was not the all-absorbing interest in my life. I had creative interests which were just as all-absorbing. However, in this book I do not intend to give a blow-by-blow description of a sex bout: I find them inartistic, clinical and unpoetic. The circumstances that lead up to sex I find more interesting.

Apropos of that subject, a delightful impromptu occurred to me at the Alexandria Hotel the first night I arrived back in Los Angeles from New York. I had retired early to my room and started undressing, humming to myself one of the latest New York songs. Occasionally I paused, lost in thought, and when I did so a feminine voice from the next room took up the tune where I had left off. Then I took up where she left off, and so it became a joke. Eventually we finished the tune this way. Should I get acquainted? It was risky. Besides, I had no idea what she looked like. I whistled the tune again, and again the same thing happened.

‘Ha, ha, ha! that’s funny!’ I laughed, tempering my