Part 8

When not guarding her studio rights Miss Frederick is the most delightful of women. I have told in a previous chapter of her gift of getting along with only a few hours’ sleep. This same vitality sparkles in every look of her eyes, in every sentence she utters. It leads her to a deep interest in literature--she is one of the best-read women I have ever known--and to a hundred phases of human activities outside her own province. Altogether, a magnetic and bracing and colourful human being!

_Chapter Twelve_

A MARRIAGE OF TWO MINDS

While I was having difficulties with Pauline Frederick I was not enjoying an untroubled business relationship with the star whose supposed advantage she so much resented. Earlier in my story I have told of how Geraldine Farrar’s first invasion of our field brought to our ears nothing but delighted comments on her director, her stories, and her general environment. Sadly I am now compelled to ascribe this first fine, careless rapture to her inexperience in pictures. For when she came to work for the Goldwyn Company she had acquired enough information about the screen to make her critical of stories, directorship, and various other production details.

Now, too, a personal element in her life contributed to her attitude toward pictures. For since she worked on the Lasky lot she had married Lou Tellegen.

At the same time that Pauline Frederick was discontented with any scenario not written by Willard Mack, Geraldine Farrar was discontented with any leading man who was not Lou Tellegen.

The second Summer of her engagement with us we deferred to this longing. We brought Mr. Tellegen on to play with his wife. He did more than that. He frequently played against her.

About this time, I believe Mr. Howard Dietz, the brilliant young chief of my publicity department, gave out an interview with Tellegen to the effect that he was delighted to be back in pictures, particularly when under such ideal conditions and when they afforded him the opportunity of playing with Miss Farrar, who “was as excellent an artiste as she was a wife.” This sentiment warranted a smile from those who saw how he embraced that privilege.

To be concrete: While they were playing together on a set Tellegen would frequently try to arrogate to himself the most advantageous focussing of the camera.

He was apt to become sulky if this campaign was frustrated, and, seeing this, we hit at last upon a harmless method of humouring him.

“Take him that way,” we whispered to the director, “and then we’ll throw away the negatives. The ones we’ll keep will be those where Farrar is played up.”

He was almost equally insatiable of “close-ups.” “You haven’t made a single one of me yet,” he would complain after a careful computation of his wife’s advantages in this respect.

And she, the beautiful Farrar, hitherto so much the conqueror in love--did she realise the rivalry, the antagonism back of these efforts? She certainly did. Time and again she tried to bring him into the conspicuous position he so much desired. When she failed her look was all for the pain of his hurt, not for that which she might so reasonably have felt at such an attitude on the part of a beloved human being.

Tellegen did not seem much more appreciative of her off the set. Often when they were lunching together, for example, you overheard some teasing reference on his part to the fact that she was some years older than he. She never replied angrily to such remarks. Indeed, the general criticism of her behaviour was that she was entirely too nice for him.

“Watch him! He’s as sure of her as he is of the ice-man coming around. Why doesn’t she make him wonder a little?” So remarked one of a group watching the famous pair as they sat together one day in the studio café. The objection was well taken. Geraldine was bending toward her husband with her accustomed look of rapt absorption. She was talking to him eagerly with a frequent flash of the perfect white teeth. He, on his part, was silent, absent-minded, even a little sulky. When he answered her at all it was in monosyllables.

Time and again, in fact, studio folks beheld this metamorphosis of the romantic and ardent lover of another California Summer into the indifferent husband of this. And when it came time for the great prima donna to leave, what a saddening contrast to that former day when Tellegen had run madly beside the train bearing his love toward the East! A recent Summer Miss Farrar stood beside her special train. The fourteen personal attendants she had brought with her were running hither and thither with her baggage and possessions. She, however, seemed to know nothing of what was going on around her. For Lou Tellegen stood before her, and she was looking into his eyes.

At last, just before the train started, she threw her arms about him. All her dread of separation was in that embrace. You could see what it meant to her to leave him even for a few weeks. And he? Listlessly, with hardly one responsive gesture, he stood encircled by his wife’s arms.

Yet such apparent indifference never seemed to quench the fire kindled by that first glance of Tellegen’s on the Lasky lot. It was almost unbelievable--the reckless lengths to which she, this careful, methodical business woman, was driven by one despotic emotion. I am giving now what was perhaps her most tempestuous departure from usual standards.

During her second Summer with the Goldwyn Company, she had insisted that her husband’s name appear on the bill-boards in connection with her own. For some reason, however, the requested mention of Tellegen did not appear. When Farrar became aware of this omission, what did she do but take an automobile all through Los Angeles and tear down with her own hands every offending poster. I admit that I was infuriated. She, when I called her up over the phone, was scarcely more serene, and for some time it was a case of Farrar _versus_ Goldwyn.

At this moment she was in the midst of a second picture, and she made prompt use of that advantage. “Very well,” she threatened, “if you will not feature Mr. Tellegen’s name I am going to stop work right in the middle of this new picture!”

“All right,” retorted I, “you do that and I am going to show the first part of the picture and then announce on the screen that at this point Madame Farrar would not proceed because the producer did not feature Lou Tellegen’s name.”

Lost to all consideration of business values as she then seemed, this threat succeeded. She went on with her story.

Strange is the parallel experience of those two rivals of the Goldwyn studio, Geraldine Farrar and Pauline Frederick. For each is now separated from the man for whom she once so turbulently set aside her own interests. Nor does the parallel stop there. Lou Tellegen was at the very most only a moderate film success. The good looks which first caused such a flurry among the feminine portions of his stage audiences never carried well on the screen. Likewise, in a different sphere, Willard Mack failed to live up to his stage tradition. His stories were never really good picture material, and to Pauline Frederick’s insistence upon appearing in them I ascribe the fact that her Goldwyn dramas were not so successful as those made by Mr. Zukor.

She herself slowly awoke to such realisation. In those California days when her New York romance with Mack was beginning to ebb--and it did ebb rapidly--she saw her mistake. But it was then a little too late.

My memories of the great Metropolitan opera-singer close with the year 1919 in a way that reveals the bigness, the sweep of mind and spirit that distinguish Geraldine Farrar. At this time I had a contract with her providing a salary of one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars for twelve weeks of annual service. The contract had still two more years to run when, very regretfully, I went to Miss Farrar and asked if she did not think it might be better to stay off the screen for a year. Gently as I could do so I added that very often a star’s popularity went under a temporary eclipse and that a limited absence from films did much to restore the public demand.

The reason back of this difficult approach was, of course, that lately her pictures had not been drawing. She was prompt to perceive my meaning, and with head up she took it.

“Very well!” said she promptly in her familiar tones that are both flowering and incisive. “Only don’t you think that perhaps it would be better to quit entirely? If you think so, say so, Mr. Goldwyn, and we’ll tear up the contract now and here.”

It was hard to tell her, but I did, that I thought this course might be wiser for us both. Thereupon, without another word and with the most gallant look in the world, she destroyed the contract which meant two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

Of course she saw that it was infinitely better to be remembered by the pictures of her prime than to go on to a lustreless close. Here was another evidence of that reliable business judgment which nothing but her infatuation for Tellegen ever dimmed. But even though self-interest might have pointed to this conclusion, her utter lack of resentment, her failure to voice a single reproach of me, made this an experience absolutely unique in my career.

My valedictory regarding Madame Farrar is that her word is as good as her bond. This characteristic fits in with that business morality which makes her hate to lose a single hour of her time. I never knew anybody with a keener sense of responsibility to the clock. When she first came to make pictures with the Lasky Company we provided her with a room in the studio where she could practice her music. The Goldwyn Company made the same provision for her. In this way she utilized the long waits between sets.

More than this. Every day of her time was so arranged months beforehand that not a break occurred in the links of industry. On the day that she stopped grand opera she started to make records for mechanical players; from her records she went straight to California, and the day that she returned from California she went on a concert tour. This programme went on for years.

I have already indicated that the prima donna’s last pictures were not a financial success. Fully conscious of the surprise that this later information may create in the minds of many people, I am going to add that even her first films, executed when she was in the prime of her beauty and at the height of her operatic fame, were not dazzlingly remunerative. Her “Joan the Woman,” a great artistic achievement, brought no commensurate financial returns. The fact of it is that Geraldine Farrar’s chief value to the picture-producer lay in the publicity she brought rather than in the films she sold.

Not for a moment does this fact reflect upon the great Farrar. If reflection there be at all, it is upon the small town where, as I have asserted, some obscure little motion-picture actress may have a following which the world’s greatest singer can never hope to enroll. I can not emphasise this point too strongly.

_Chapter Thirteen_

THE REAL CHAPLIN

Although I had heard much of Charlie Chaplin from various friends we shared in common I did not meet him until after I had been in the industry for two years. That first sight of him surprised me as much as it always does those who know only the familiar comedian of the black moustache and baggy trousers. A slender fellow; smooth-shaven; waves of crisp black hair; dark blue eyes that have that peculiar smoky quality of the Autumn hills--here is the catalogue of his outward self. But of course you can not compress into a catalogue the charm of his face. There is a charm there--even beauty. In this connection, indeed, I remember Chaplin’s telling me laughingly that his mother once protested indignantly at his make-up.

“Why do you want to make yourself look hideous,” said she, “you who are so beautiful?”

But although his contours are satisfactory and his eyes exceedingly handsome, the real interest of Chaplin’s face lies in its perpetual and sensitive absorptions. He seems always listening. Even when he is talking most animatedly he is watching you, wondering about you, quite evidently trying to fit you and your words into some pattern. When you yourself are talking, you get the full force of this vivid listening.

Mack Sennett has often spoken about this characteristic message of his face as it was revealed to him during Chaplin’s first studio days. “He’d sit there for hours,” records Mack, “just staring at people. I couldn’t make out what he was thinking about.”

Since that first meeting of ours acquaintance has developed into a friendship which I certainly count one of the privileges of my life. From that friendship it is hard to detach myself for an objective survey of the gifted pantomimist. Even had I not been so close to him I should find formidable the task of analysis. For Chaplin is a maze of contradictions, and no sooner have you affixed to him any one attribute than lo, the next moment has swept it away!

Chaplin loves power--as no one else whom I have ever met he loves it. Money contributes to this sense. Therefore he sticks out for his large contract and therefore he saves a great deal of his earnings. But it affords him just as much consciousness of power to think that he, Chaplin, can afford to walk away from those assembled actors and stage-hands. Ergo, he does that.

I have often been asked if Chaplin is amusing when away from the screen. He is--thoroughly so. His mimicry is delightful. His dancing is perhaps even more so. To see Chaplin improvising a London street scene with William de Mille; to hear him deliver the speech of a Jewish manufacturer at a banquet where he had been presented with a loving-cup; to watch his imitations of some fashionable rhythmic dancer--at one of these last performances he carried a cuspidor as a Greek vase and concluded by deftly catching it in the crook of his knee--such are the memories of Charlie treasured by those who know him.

I always like to think of the day when he got back from Europe. He came straightway to my office to see me, and I never heard anything so infectious as those descriptions of his triumphal tour. When he came to the story of his decoration with the Legion of Honour he reached a high peak in that imitative narrative of which he is such a perfect master.

Yet here again you are faced by another of those contrasts which bewilder the biographer. There are certain days when, instead of drollery and pungent narrative, he presents a well of unfathomable silence. On such days he runs away from his studio and from everybody. For hours he will sit motionless in his room. Or perhaps, starting off alone, he will wander into an orange-grove or tramp through the hills around Hollywood.

He suffers at such times--undoubtedly. But make no mistake. The blackness of the universe, the torturing puzzle of existence, which sometimes engulf so many of us, are never repudiated by Chaplin. He does not desire madly to lose himself in somebody or something apart from his own life. He would not in his most tortured moment shift places with the merriest. No, for the blackness is his blackness. And what he wants is experience, no matter whether that be happiness or pain. This hunger for a high measure of sensation is found in his horror of old age. With a kind of fierce rebellion he looks into a neighbouring glass at the streaks of grey in his hair. “Ugh!” he will shiver. “To think the time is coming when I shan’t be young any more!”

His reaction to life is, you see, intensely personal, intensely emotional. Nothing is more persuasive of this than is his interest in certain impersonal topics. Chaplin loves to talk about government and economics and religion. Mention of a new “ism” or “ology” brings him loping from the farthest corner of a room. When Rupert Hughes came out to Hollywood he and Charlie were much given to what somebody calls “topics--just topics.” Nothing could have been more illuminating. While Hughes conducted his side of the discussion in a spirit of dispassionate inquiry, the less scientifically trained mind of the comedian struck out with a poet’s frenzy at everything which he did not like. One could see it was not really abstract truth which he desired. It was the theory which most successfully represented his own prejudice.

His prejudice is against anything which interferes with his own personal freedom. The censor, the income tax, any supposed obstruction--these are hateful to him in the degree to which they infringe upon that coveted sense of power.

One day when I first came to know Chaplin well, he was with me in my apartment at a Hollywood hotel. While we were talking the telephone rang. Charlie looked terrified.

“What do they want you for?” I asked exceedingly amused.

“A guest,” he answered with a grin. “Mrs. X---- asked me for dinner to-night. I promised I’d be there and then found out she had asked a whole lot of people. So you won’t catch me going.”

This was my introduction to Charlie’s most notorious social failing. Often thereafter I witnessed his struggles against being taken into custody. Less frequently I was one of a group of indignant people waiting for a Chaplin who had promised to come and never did show up at all.

Not long ago a friend of mine asked him why he so hated to make or keep an engagement.

“I don’t know,” answered Charlie. “I suppose, though, it’s because I hate to feel that I have to do anything at a certain time. It just destroys my pleasure in doing it.”

At this my friend suggested, “Ah, Mr. Chaplin, but don’t you think that is because ’way down deep you don’t feel quite free? The person who is conscious of real freedom doesn’t fret at any such superficial bondage.”

He looked at her eagerly, delightedly--just as he always does when confronted by a new theory. “Why, I never thought of that, but I believe it’s true,” he assented. “You see,” he added, “when I was a young boy I never was free. I was always the one who had to stay at home. My brother Sydney didn’t hang around as I did. He went off to Australia.”

Then for the first time I suspected what was responsible for Charlie’s love of power. Those early years of his in London when, the son of poor vaudeville artists, he experienced hunger and tragedy and the constant terror of the next day, have driven far into his brain. No prosperity can quite rid him of fear. That is why he wants to assure himself in every way of his present strength. For what is it but fear which makes a man conscious always of the thickness of his armour, the sharpness of his weapons?

There was one engagement of his which Charlie did keep. When Claire Sheridan, the English sculptress, came to California she expressed immediately a desire to meet Chaplin. My friend Abram Lehr thereupon invited the comedian to a dinner given for the handsome author of “From Mayfair to Moscow.”

“And don’t you dare fail me this time!” admonished Mr. Lehr as he proffered the invitation.

Charlie not only obeyed; he obeyed in a dinner-coat. From the first, so Lehr reports, the two seemed entirely satisfied with each other, and that occasion led to the friendship upon which Mrs. Sheridan dwells so glowingly in her “American Diary.”

Charlie is well liked by the average woman. Indeed, most people are attracted to him. Why should they not be? His drollery, his quick and vivid response to the moment, his friendly, boyish smile, the manner which makes you feel at first meeting as if you had known him all your life--these would lead the usual person to pick him out in a roomful of distinguished people. And all this quite apart from the glamour of his reputation.

He makes another appeal. The first time I ever met him I felt sorry for him. The humour of it, that I should want to help him--this young charming Fortunatus--struck me almost at once. But I could not help it. Afterwards I found that nearly every one else shares this feeling.

Of course exactly the same thing is operative on the screen. For Chaplin owes his supremacy as much to the tears as to the laughter of the multitude.

This pathos of his comes from an enduring isolation. He is, and I think always will be, a lonely figure. Beloved by many, applauded by all, he is merely with--never of--the crowd--not though he gives it back gesture for gesture and laugh for laugh. Not misleading, the look of listening which so much impressed me the first time I met him! For early in life Chaplin took his seat in the parquet of life and ever since he has been watching the rest of us actors unfolding our drama. Do not be deceived because sometimes he vaults over the footlights and behaves just like the performers. Even when he is at his merriest pranks, even when he is talking most confidentially and affectionately to his friends, he is still the onlooker, detached from the rest of us by I know not what fastnesses of spirit.

The most intimate of Charlie’s friends in Hollywood are Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. He goes over to their house frequently, and the three talk pictures hard and fast. Chaplin, of course, frequently sees in the creations of the other two an opportunity for characteristic suggestions.

When, for instance, he saw the moated castle in “Robin Hood” he said to Fairbanks: “Wonderful, Doug! Just think what I would do with that drawbridge on Sunday morning! I’d let it down so I could take in the Sunday papers and the milk-bottles and then draw it up tight so that nobody could get at me all the rest of the day.”

One time I asked Charlie who was his favourite screen actress. “I think Mary Pickford,” he answered unhesitatingly. “You see there’s a wonderful quality about her--it’s that more than her acting.”

Unlike almost every other screen actor, Charlie does not work from a script. When he starts a new story he is apt to come into his studio and say, “Build me a kitchen and a dining-room.” He has at this moment perhaps only the germ of an idea. But day by day he develops it, and as he does so his scenario-writer puts down each scene. This method has often been described, and I touch upon it here only for its value in revealing his psychology. A scenario would undoubtedly irk him as much as would a social engagement. Always, always, Chaplin must be assured that he is free, that his individuality has scope for its spontaneous play.

His emotionality is never more apparent than when he is at work. Often he becomes exhausted in his efforts to inspire one of his company with the desired emotion. “Heavens!” he will cry, “It’s enough to break your heart--such stupidity!” When he sees the rushes, anger and despair are apt to break from their leashes and run away with the projection-room. Often, however, these emotions are directed quite as much toward his own part in the performance as toward that of others. Charlie has, in fact, that capacity for being dissatisfied with his own work which is a part of every great artist.

The world at large does not seem to know much about Charlie’s brother Sydney. Yet he is a very real brother and Charlie has a very real affection for him. He himself is an excellent comedian with only one disadvantage--he is the near relative of a great comedian. This relationship, I may add, could never be detected from a casual glance at the two, for Syd Chaplin is rather tall and rather blond and his features are much more sharply cut than are those of his brother.

Syd, by the way, possesses a very ready wit. Once when dining with Mary and Doug he listened to the latter’s statement that the costumes for “Robin Hood” had cost a hundred and sixty-two thousand dollars.

“Hmph!” commented Syd, “I should call that ‘Robbin’ Doug.’”