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

‘Yes, I know,’ I quickly interposed, ‘but how do you like the picture?’

He hesitated, then grinned. ‘Charlie, we’re here to buy it, not to say how much we like it.’ This remark evoked one or two loud guffaws.

‘I won’t charge you extra for liking it,’ I said.

He hesitated. ‘Frankly, I expected something else.’

‘What did you expect?’

He spoke slowly. ‘Well, Charlie, for a million and a half dollars – well, it hasn’t got that big punch.’

‘What do you want – London Bridge to fall down?’

‘No. But for a million and a half.…’ His voice cracked into a falsetto.

‘Well, gentlemen, that’s the price. You can take it or leave it,’ I said impatiently.

J. D. Williams, the president, came over and got the drift and started to butter me up. ‘Charlie, I think it’s wonderful. It’s human, different –’ (I didn’t like the ‘different’). ‘Just be patient and we’ll iron this thing out.’

‘There’s nothing to iron out,’ I said sharply. ‘I’ll give you a week to make up your minds.’ After the way they had treated me, I had no respect for them. However, they quickly made up their minds and my lawyer drew up an agreement to the effect that I was to receive fifty per cent of the profits after they had recouped their million and a half. It was to be on a rental basis of five years, after which the film reverted to me, as did the rest of my films.

*

Having rid myself of the burden of domestic and business affairs, I felt I was stepping on air. Like a recluse I had lived in hiding for weeks, seeing nothing but the four walls of my room at the hotel. Having read the article about my adventure with the taxi-driver, my friends began to call up, and now a free and unencumbered, wonderful life began again.

New York’s hospitality serenaded me. Frank Crowninshield, editor of Vogue and Vanity Fair, shepherded me through the glittering life of New York, and Condé Nast, owner and publisher of those magazines, gave the most glamorous parties. He lived in a large penthouse on Madison Avenue where the élite of the arts and wealth gathered, decorated with the pick of the Ziegfeld Follies Girls, including the lovely Olive Thomas and the beautiful Dolores.

At the Ritz, where I was staying, I rode on the crest of exciting events. All day long the telephone rang with invitations. Would I spend a week-end here, attend a horseshow there? It was all very town and countryish, but I loved it. New York was full of romantic intrigues, midnight suppers, luncheons, dinners crowding every moment – even to keeping breakfast engagements; Having skimmed over the surface of New York society, I now desired to penetrate the intellectual subcutaneous tissue of Greenwich Village.

Many comedians, clowns and crooners in capering through success arrive at a point of wanting to improve their minds; they hunger for intellectual manna. The student shows up among the unexpected: tailors, cigar-makers, prize-fighters, waiters, truck-drivers.

At a friend’s house in Greenwich Village I remember talking of the frustration of trying to find the precise word for one’s thoughts, saying that the ordinary dictionary was inadequate. ‘Surely a system could be devised,’ I said, ‘of lexicographically charting ideas, from abstract words to concrete ones, and by deductive and inductive processes arriving at the right word for one’s thought.’ ‘There is such a book,’ said a Negro truck-driver: ‘Roget’s Thesaurus’

A waiter working at the Alexandria Hotel used to quote his Karl Marx and William Blake with every course he served me.

A comedy acrobat with a Brooklyn ‘dis’, ‘dem’ and ‘dose’ accent recommended Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, saying that Shakespeare was influenced by him and so was Sam Johnson. ‘But you can skip the Latin.’

With the rest of them I was intellectually a fellow-traveller. Since my vaudeville days I have done a considerable amount of reading, but not thoroughly. Being a slow reader, I browse. Once I am familiar with the thesis and the style of an author, I invariably lose interest. I have read every word of five volumes of Plutarch’s Lives; but I found them less edifying than the effort was worth. I read judiciously; some books over and over again. Over the years I have browsed through Plato, Locke, Kant, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, and in this piecemeal fashion I have gleaned as much as I have wanted.

In the village I met Waldo Frank, essayist, historian and novelist, Hart Crane, the poet, Max Eastman, editor of The Masses, Dudley Field Malone, brilliant lawyer and controller of the Port of New York, and his wife Margaret Foster, the suffragette. I also lunched at Christine’s Restaurant, where I met several members of the Provincetown Players, who regularly lunched there during rehearsals of Emperor Jones, a drama written by a young playwright, Eugene O’Neill (later my father-in-law). I was shown over their theatre, a barnlike affair no bigger than a six-horse stable.

I came to know Waldo Frank through his book of essays, Our America, published in 1919. One essay about Mark Twain is a profound, penetrating analysis of the man; incidentally, Waldo was the first to write seriously about me. So, naturally, we became very good friends. Waldo is a combination of mystic and historian and his insight has penetrated deeply into the soul of the Americas, North and South.

In the Village we had interesting evenings together. Through Waldo I met Hart Crane, and we dined at Waldo’s small flat in the Village, talking until breakfast-time the next morning. They were enthralling symposiums, the three of us reaching out mentally for the subtle definition of our thoughts.

Hart Crane was desperately poor. His father, a millionaire candy-manufacturer, wanted him to enter his business and tried to discourage his poetry by cutting him off financially. I have neither ear nor taste for modern poetry, but while writing this book I read Hart Crane’s The Bridge, an emotional out-pouring, strange and dramatic, full of piercing anguish and a sharp diamond-cut imagery,