Charley Chaplin didn’t register very heavily—except in the newspapers. The truth is painful, but must be told. Charles was lost in the shuffle. It wasn’t “his stuff” as the newspaper men say.
The night the show opened, Douglas, finding it hard to make a way through the crowd, picked Mary Pickford up on his shoulder and bucked his way through like a football half back. Charley couldn’t very well pick up Jack Dempsey on his shoulder so he played second fiddle.
I don’t know what’s the matter with Charley. His divorce suit must have been a shattering experience. His hair is growing gray around the edges, and his nerves seem on the raw edge. One day he was being interviewed by a gang of reporters in his suite at his New York hotel, and nearly chewed off the head of one of the newspaper men who asked him with what American he compared Lenin, the Bolshevist.
Without warning, Charles tore into the reporter and handed him a cutting rebuke for his stupidity. He talked scornfully about “you Americans”—which is poor stuff for Charley.
To tell the truth, I thought he was going to cry. And I guess he wasn’t far from it. Charley told me afterward that his nerves are in such a condition that he weeps at the slightest excuse.
He should have taken a lesson from his former bride, Mildred Harris.
One of the actors told me about the weeps of the former Mrs. Chaplin. Not long ago she was working in a picture under one of the De Milles. Finding her exasperating, the director lost his temper and fairly lashed her with his tongue. Through the tirade, Miss Harris calmly kept on “making up.” While he was generally going over her sins of omission and commission, she was carefully penciling her eyebrows, looking sidewise into the mirror, the way they do. When he got down to purple-faced bellows of rage, she was going over her lips with the lip stick. When he was generally giving an explosive review of the ground he had already covered, the lady was giving a final dab just over her eye lids. Having given herself a final and critical survey in her pocket mirror and finding the job was worthy of her O.K., she proceeded softly to cry at the director’s remarks. She believes in taking up things in their systematic and proper rotation.
Chaplin speaks bitterly of his married life and at the same time glares with melancholy rage and dismay at his first gray hairs. The first time the newspaper photographers took his picture on his arrival in New York, he asked them with alarmed solicitude to retouch the plates so his gray hairs would not show.
The movie people in New York feel somewhat dismayed because of Charley’s interview with a British newspaper man regarding Fatty Arbuckle and the killing of Virginia Rappe in San Francisco.