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

‘Why, of course you can have the little punk,’ he said.

They say babies and dogs are the best actors in movies. Put a twelve-month-old baby in a bath-tub with a tablet of soap, and when he tries to pick it up he will create a riot of laughter. All children in some form or another have genius; the trick is to bring it out in them. With Jackie it was easy. There were a few basic rules to learn in pantomime and Jackie very soon mastered them. He could apply emotion to the action and action to the emotion, and could repeat it time and time again without losing the effect of spontaneity.

There is a scene in The Kid where the boy is about to throw a stone at a window. A policeman steals up behind him, and, as he brings his hand back to throw, it touches the policeman’s coat. He looks up at the policeman, then playfully tosses the stone up and catches it, then innocently throws it away and ambles off, suddenly bursting into a sprint.

Having worked out the mechanics of the scene, I told Jackie to watch me, emphasizing the points: ‘You have a stone; then you look at the window; then you prepare to throw the stone; you bring your hand back, but you feel the policeman’s coat; you feel his buttons, then you look up and discover it’s a policeman; you throw the stone playfully in the air, then throw it away, and casually walk off, suddenly bursting into a sprint.’

He rehearsed the scene three or four times. Eventually he was so sure of the mechanics that his emotion came with them. In other words, the mechanics induced the emotion. The scene was one of Jackie’s best, and was one of the high spots in the picture.

Of course, not all the scenes were as easily accomplished. The simpler ones often gave him trouble, as simple scenes do. I once wanted him to swing naturally on a door, but, having nothing else on his mind, he became self-conscious, so we gave it up.

It is difficult to act naturally if no activity is going on in the mind. Listening on the stage is difficult; the amateur is inclined to be over-attentive. As long as Jackie’s mind was at work, he was superb.

Jackie’s father’s contract with Arbuckle soon terminated, so he was able to be at our studio with his son, and later played the pickpocket in the flophouse scene. He was very helpful at times. There was a scene in which we wanted Jackie to actually cry when two workhouse officials take him away from me. I told him all sorts of harrowing stories, but Jackie was in a very gay and mischievous mood. After waiting for an hour, the father said: ‘I’ll make him cry.’

‘Don’t frighten or hurt the boy,’ I said guiltily.

‘Oh no, no,’ said the father.

Jackie was in such a gay mood that I had not the courage to stay and watch what the father would do, so I went to my dressing-room. A few moments later I heard Jackie yelling and crying.

‘He’s all ready,’ said the father.

It was a scene where I rescue the boy from the workhouse officials and while he is weeping I hug and kiss him. When it was over I asked the father: ‘How did you get him to cry?’

‘I just told him that if he didn’t we’d take him away from the studio and really send him to the workhouse.’

I turned to Jackie and picked him up in my arms to console him. His cheeks were still wet with tears. ‘They’re not going to take you away,’ I said.

‘I knew it,’ he whispered. ‘Daddy was only fooling.’

Gouverneur Morris, author and short-story writer who had written many scripts for the cinema, often invited me to his house. ‘Guvvy,’ as we called him, was a charming, sympathetic fellow, and when I told him about The Kid and the form it was taking, keying slapstick with sentiment, he said: ‘It won’t work. The form must be pure, either slapstick or drama; you cannot mix them, otherwise one element of your story will fail.’

We had quite a dialectical discussion about it. I said that the transition from slapstick to sentiment was a matter of feeling and discretion in arranging sequences. I argued that form happened after one had created it, that if the artist thought of a world and sincerely believed in it, no matter what the admixture was, it would be convincing. Of course, I had no grounds for this theory other than intuition. There had been satire, farce, realism, naturalism, melodrama and fantasy, but raw slapstick and sentiment, the premise of The Kid, was something of an innovation.

*

During the cutting of The Kid, Samuel Reshevsky, aged seven, the boy champion chess-player of the world, visited the studio. He was to give an exhibition at the Athletic Club, playing chess with twenty men at the same time, among them Dr Griffiths, the champion of California. He had a thin, pale, intense little face with large eyes that stared belligerently when he met people. I had been warned that he was temperamental and that he seldom shook hands with anybody.

After his manager had introduced us and spoken a few words, the boy stood staring at me in silence. I went on with my cutting, looking at strips of film.

A moment later I turned to him. ‘Do you like peaches?’

‘Yes,’ he answered.

‘Well, we have a tree full of them in the garden; you can climb up and get some – at the same time get one for me.’

His face lit up. ‘Ooh good! Where’s the tree?’

‘Carl will show you,’ I said, referring to my publicity man.

Fifteen minutes later he returned, elated, with several peaches. That was the beginning of our friendship.

‘Can you play chess?’ he asked.

I had to admit that I could not.

‘I’ll teach you. Come see me play tonight, I’m playing twenty men at the same time,’ he