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

presently our steps took us into the poorest quarter of the city. There were sordid tenement houses and the shabby, gaudy shops in which are sold the various goods that the poor buy from day to day. His face lit up and a buoyant tone came into his voice as he exclaimed: ‘Say, this is the real life, isn’t it? All the rest is just sham.’*

This attitude of wanting to make poverty attractive for the other person is annoying. I have yet to know a poor man who has nostalgia for poverty, or who finds freedom in it. Nor could Mr Maugham convince any poor man that celebrity and extreme wealth mean constraint. I find no constraint in wealth – on the contrary I find much freedom in it. I do not think Maugham would ascribe such false notions to any character in his novels – even in the least of them. Such glibness as ‘the streets of southern London are the scene of frolic, gaiety and extravagant adventure’ has a tinge of Marie-Antoinette’s airy persiflage.

I found poverty neither attractive nor edifying. It taught me nothing but a distortion of values, an over-rating of the virtues and graces of the rich and the so-called better classes.

Wealth and celebrity, on the contrary, taught me to view the world in proper perspective, to discover that men of eminence, when I came close to them, were as deficient in their way as the rest of us. Wealth and celebrity also taught me to spurn the insignia of the sword, the walking-stick and the riding whip as something synonymous with snobbery, to know the fallacy of the college accent in estimating the merit and intelligence of a man, and the paralysing influence this myth has wrought on the minds of the English middle classes, to know that intelligence is not necessarily a result of education or a knowledge of the classics.

In spite of Maugham’s assumptions, like everyone else I am what I am: an individual, unique and different, with a lineal history of ancestral promptings and urgings; a history of dreams, desires, and of special experiences, all of which I am the sum total.

*

After my arrival in London, I found myself constantly in the company of Hollywood friends. I wanted change, new experiences, new faces; I wanted to cash in on this business of being a celebrity. I had just one date, and that was with H. G. Wells. After that, I was free-lancing, with the dubious hope of meeting other people.

‘I have arranged a dinner for you at the Garrick Club,’ said Eddie Knoblock.

‘Actors, artists and authors,’ I said jokingly. ‘But where is this exclusive English set, these country homes and house parties that I’m not invited to?’ I wanted that rarer sphere of ducal living. Not that I was a snob, but I was a tourist sight-seeing.

The Garrick Club had a chiaroscuro atmosphere of dark oak walls and oil paintings – a sombre haven, in which I met Sir James Barrie, E. V. Lucas, Walter Hackett, George Frampton, Edwin Lutyens, Squire Bancroft and other illustrious gentlemen. Although it was a dull affair, I was extremely moved by the touching tribute of the presence of these distinguished gentlemen.

But I felt the evening did not quite come off. When the illustrious forgather, the occasion calls for an easy congeniality, and this was rather difficult to achieve when the guest of honour was a celebrated parvenu who had insisted on no after-dinner speeches; perhaps that was what was lacking. During dinner, Frampton, the sculptor, attempted levity and was charming; but he had difficulty in scintillating in the gloom of the Garrick Club, as the rest of us sat eating boiled ham and treacle pudding.

In my first interview with the English Press, I had inadvertently said I had come back to revisit the environs of my English boyhood, to savour again stewed eels and treacle pudding. As a consequence, they gave my treacle pudding at the Garrick Club, at the Ritz, at H. G. Wells’s; even at Sir Philip Sassoon’s opulent dinner the dessert was treacle pudding.

The party soon dispersed, and Eddie Knoblock whispered that Sir James Barrie would like us to come to his apartment in Adelphi Terrace for a cup of tea.

Barrie’s apartment was like an atelier, a large room with a beautiful view of the river Thames. In the centre of the room was a round stove with a chimney-pipe ascending to the ceiling. He took us to a window that looked out on a narrow side-street with a window directly opposite. ‘That’s Shaw’s bedroom,’ he said mischievously with his Scotch accent. ‘When I see a light on, I flip cherry-stones or plum-stones at the window. If he wants to chat, he opens it and we do a little back-yard gossiping, and, if he doesn’t, then he pays no attention or turns out the light. Usually I flip about three times, then give up.’

Paramount was going to film Peter Pan in Hollywood. ‘Peter Pan,’ I told Barrie, ‘has even greater possibilities as a film than a play,’ and he agreed. He expressly desired a scene showing Wendy sweeping up some fairies into the bark of a tree. Said Barrie also that evening: ‘Why did you interpose a dream sequence in The Kid? It interrupted the flow of the story.’

‘Because I was influenced by A Kiss for Cinderella,’ I answered frankly.

The following day, Eddie Knoblock and I went shopping, and afterwards he suggested that we call on Bernard Shaw. No appointment had been made. ‘We could just drop in on him,’ said Eddie. At four o’clock Eddie pressed the doorbell at Adelphi Terrace. While we waited I suddenly developed a blue funk. ‘Some other time,’ I said, and ran up the street with Eddie running after me, vainly assuring me that everything would be all right. It was not until 1931 that I had the pleasure of meeting Shaw.

The next morning I was awakened by the telephone ringing in the sitting-room, and then heard