My Autobiography
Charles Chaplin
(The Bodley Head, 1964)
Meeting Churchill, A Life in 90 Encounters
Sinclair McKay
(Viking, 2023)
I often notice when reading two apparently unconnected books in parallel, that there is some point of intersection, that one book informs the other, and vice versa.
I picked up the handsome, hardback first edition of Chaplin’s autobiography in a second hand bookshop last week. I can’t say I ever found Charlie Chaplin on film, in his persona as the tramp, terribly amusing. Maybe humour – think of these clunky cartoon captions in nineteenth century Punch magazines – doesn’t travel well through time. I saw the Richard Attenborough biopic, Chaplin, and again it didn’t make much impression.
But Charles Chaplin, the autobiographer, is completely fascinating. You could hardly conceive of a more starkly contrasted rags-to-riches story, from a childhood of extreme poverty in late nineteenth century London, through the harsh grinding struggle in theatrical Vaudeville. This was hardly alleviated by a move to the United States. But then came the rise of the silent movies in the motion picture industry. He moved to LA, and might have continued to struggle, but for the fact that the movers and shakers of that world began to notice that Charlie Chaplin was box office. Then he was moving in a world of fantastic glamour, the world of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, and socialising with august luminaries like Melba, Paderewski, Nijinsky and Pavlova, and later Rachmaninov, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Heifetz, Shaw, Thomas Mann, Churchill… And of course, William Randolph Hearst. Hearst’s enormous pile on the west coast sounds even more surreal than the Xanadu depicted in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane.
Then of course the talkies came in, and Chaplin realised that the tramp could not be given a voice. It would change his persona. The talkies signalled the twilight of Chaplin’s career on screen, and his attention shifted more towards directing. The world was changing in the 1930s, in more ways than one. Then came the rise of the extreme right in Germany, leading eventually to the Second World War. This is where the book really takes off. Chaplin was always – hardly surprising considering his humble origins – left-leaning. When Hitler attacked Communist Russia on June 22nd 1941 in Operation Barbarossa, Chaplin had sympathies with the Russian people and was advocating the opening of a second front even before Pearl Harbour. It was from this point that the USA began to harbour the suspicion that he was a Communist. In the 1950s, during the Cold War, America fell out of love with Charlie Chaplin. Inevitably, he fell foul of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. People were out to get him, on a variety of fronts. He had to get out, hiding in his cabin on the Queen Elizabeth as it left New York for Europe, waiting until the pilot disembark, lest the Feds slap him with a court summons. He made it. He settled in Switzerland with his beautiful young wife Oona, daughter of Eugene O’Neill, and lived happily ever after.
The point of intersection with Churchill is of course that they met frequently. Churchill was a fan. Sinclair McKay’s is a clever idea, to see the biography – yet another one – of Churchill through the prism of 90 encounters with other people, 90, presumably, being one for each year of his life. In fact Charlie Chaplin is mentioned in despatches twice, in 1929, and then in 1956. He first met Churchill in Marion Davies’ beach-house when they were introduced to one another by William Randolph Hearst. They met frequently in Hollywood, and subsequently in London, and at Chartwell. Chaplin was then due to meet Gandhi. It may be said that Churchill’s and Chaplin’s political differences caused some strain.
In 1956 they met in the Savoy Grill, in London. Churchill had resigned from his second premiership the previous year. On this occasion, Chaplin was about to meet Khrushchev. There is again a sense of strain, a frigid politeness.
It seems to me there is an irony, and a paradox, in the way these two individuals expressed political views at different times, that landed them both in some hot water. Chaplin and Churchill both supported Russia in 1941, at a time when many people both in the UK and the US wished that Germany and Russia should be allowed to knock spots off one another. Chaplin espoused a second front, but Churchill, mindful of the trench warfare of the western front in the First War was more circumspect, much to Stalin’s fury. But he had rather go for the “soft underbelly”, through North Africa and Italy. That policy was also not without risk. Churchill might well have thought of a similar strategy he advocated a quarter century before when he was First Lord of the Admiralty, leading to the catastrophe of the Dardanelles, and Gallipoli.
Then in 1946 President Truman invited Churchill, now out of office, to Fulton Missouri to give a speech, not knowing what Churchill was going to say. This of course was the famous “Iron Curtain” speech which might be said to have signalled the start of the Cold War. Here, Chaplin was on the side of the US because he did not think this speech was helpful. In the US at that time, Uncle Joe was in good odour after the great patriotic victory, and people thought, again, that Churchill was a sabre-rattling war-monger. So on the one hand, Chaplin was essentially forced out of the US because he sided with Russia, and on the other, Churchill was black-balled because he did not. It’s all a question of timing.
jamescalumcampbell 