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

months’ work I told them I would see hell freeze over first. Lawsuits were threatened. Legally they had little chance and they knew it. Therefore, they decided to operate through Mildred and try to attach The Kid.

As I had not finished cutting the film my instinct told me to cut it in another state. So I set out for Salt Lake City with a staff of two and over 400,000 feet of film, which consisted of five hundred rolls. We stayed at the Salt Lake City Hotel. In one of the bedrooms we laid out the film, using every piece of furniture – ledges, commodes and drawers – to put the rolls of film on. It being against the law to have anything dangerously inflammable in a hotel, we had to go about it secretly. Under these circumstances we continued cutting the picture. We had over two thousand takes to sort out, and, although they were numbered, one would occasionally get lost and we would be hours searching for it on the bed, under the bed, in the bathroom, until we found it. With such heartbreaking handicaps and without the proper facilities, by some miracle we finished the cutting.

And now I had the terrifying ordeal of previewing it before an audience. I had only seen it with a small cutting machine, through which a picture no larger than a postcard was projected on to a towel. I was thankful that I had seen the rushes at my studio on a normal-size screen, but now I had the depressing feeling that fifteen months’ work had been done in the dark.

Nobody had seen the picture except the studio staff. After running it a number of times on the cutting machine, nothing looked as funny or as interesting as we had imagined. We could only reassure ourselves by believing that our first enthusiasm had grown stale.

We decided to give it the acid test and arranged to show it at the local movie theatre without any announcement. It was a large theatre and three-quarters filled. In desperation I sat and waited for the film to come on. This particular audience seemed out of sympathy with anything I might present to them. I began to doubt my own judgement as to what an audience would like and react to in comedy. Perhaps I had made a mistake. Perhaps the whole enterprise would misfire and the audience would look upon it with bewilderment. Then the sickening thought came to me that a comedian can at times be so wrong in his ideas about comedy.

Suddenly my stomach jumped up into my throat as a slide appeared on the screen: ‘Charlie Chaplin in his latest picture, The Kid’. A scream of delight went up from the audience and scattered applause. Paradoxically enough this worried me: they might be expecting too much and be disappointed.

The first scenes were exposition, slow and solemn, and threw me into an agony of suspense. A mother deserts her baby by leaving it in a limousine, the car is stolen and the thieves eventually leave the baby near an ash-can. Then I appeared – the tramp. There was a laugh that accumulated and increased. They saw the joke! From then on I could do no wrong. I discovered the baby and adopted it. They laughed at an improvised hammock made out of old sacking and yelled when I fed the child out of a teapot with a nipple on the spout, and screamed when I cut a hole through the seat of an old cane chair, placing it over a chamber-pot – in fact they laughed hysterically throughout the picture.

*

Now that we had had a showing of the picture, we felt that the cutting was completed, and so we packed up and left Salt Lake City for the East. At the Ritz in New York I was forced to stay in my room because I was being harassed by process-servers instigated by First National, who were using Mildred’s divorce suit to attach the film. For three days the process-servers had kept a vigil around the hotel lobby, and I was getting bored by it. So that when Frank Harris invited me to dine at his house I could not resist the temptation. That evening a heavily veiled woman passed through the lobby of the Ritz and got into a taxi – it was me! I had borrowed my sister-in-law’s clothes, which I wore over my suit, shedding them in the taxi before I arrived at Frank’s house.

Frank Harris, whose books I had read and admired, was my idol. Frank was in a continual state of financial crisis; every other week his periodical, Pearson’s Magazine, was about to fold. After one of his published appeals I had sent him a contribution and in gratitude he sent me two volumes of his book on Oscar Wilde, which he wrote in as follows:

To Charlie Chaplin – one of the few who has helped me without even knowing me, one whose rare artistry in humour I have often admired, for those who make men laugh are worthier than those who make them weep – from his friend, Frank Harris, sending this his own Copy, Aug. 1919. ‘I praise and prize only that writer who tells the truth about men – with tears in his eyes ’–Pascal.

That night I met Frank for the first time. He was a short, thick-set man with a noble head, strong, well-formed features, and a handle-bar moustache which was a little disconcerting. He had a deep, resonant voice and used it with great effect. He was then sixty-seven years old and had a beautiful young wife with red hair, who was devoted to him.

Frank, although a socialist, was a great admirer of Bismarck and was rather contemptuous of the socialist, Liebknecht. His imitation of Bismarck with his German effective pauses answering Liebknecht in the Reichstag was powerful histrionics. Frank could have been a great actor. We talked until four in the morning, Frank doing