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.
CHARLIE CHAPLIN
The foremost figure of the entertainment world. The best known of all artists.
RUPERT HUGHES
Now as ardent a screen director as he is an author.
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.