My Autobiography Read Free

man, with something aesthetic and cloistral about him’. Schoenberg was ‘a frank and abrupt little man’. Often, too, Chaplin is as shrewd about himself, humorously deriding and deflating his own vanities, aware of their deep roots in the ineradicable heritage of early deprivation and sense of inferiority. Discussing his passion for self-education, he reveals movingly, ‘I wanted to know, not for the love of knowledge but as a defence against the world’s contempt for the ignorant.’
    As it was, Chaplin’s career was still to suffer a further turn of destiny. His seemingly impregnable position as a world celebrity and universal idol was undermined by American paranoia of the Cold War era. At the start of the 1950s he came to feel ‘that I had the acrimony and hate of a whole nation upon me… My prodigious sin was being a non-conformist. Although I am not a Communist, I refused to fall in line by hating them’. His punishment was virtual exile from the United States that lasted to the end of his life.
    A more understandable source of disappointment for some critics of the time was the odd reticences of
My Autobiography
. Chaplin’s references to his films are generally cursory, and some key works –
Easy Street
or
The Circus
– are not mentioned at all. He says nothing about the process of their making. In his lifetime he would explain his reluctance to allow people on his set or to share his working secrets by saying, ‘If people know how it’s done, all the magic goes.’ Perhaps a truer reason was that he himself came more and more to feel that he was unable to unveil themysteries of his creation, simply because the essential part of the mysteries remained veiled for him also. How could he ever explain, to himself or to anyone else, the seemingly accidental creation, in the Keystone costume hut one afternoon in 1914, of the character that was to become the most universally recognized representation of a human being in the history of art? At one of the rare moments when he admits the problems of work, describing how the early shorts were often begun with not even the vaguest idea of a story, he has a simple but revealing phrase: ‘In this desperate way I started many a comedy.’
    Another explanation may be that Chaplin wrote the book in the spirit of the entertainer that, throughout his life, he was; and like most people, saw no particular glamour in his daytime job: he once told someone that his working life was no more exciting than that of a bank clerk, and probably felt that it would simply be boring to relate the slow and painful processes by which his films were made. In any case the reticence of his lifetime has been richly compensated since his death. Chaplin, intentionally or not, left behind more evidence, in the form of film out-takes and rushes, working notes and studio daily records, than any other film director of his time, to enable researchers to supply, more than amply, the lacunae of his own account.
    More puzzling is his selectivity in the record of his friends, collaborators and more intimate relationships. The four decades since he wrote have accustomed us to the tell-all autobiography. Chaplin exerts his right not to tell all. Although he is far from shy about his amorous interests, his first marriage and divorce rates only a page or so and his second barely a line, without even naming the wife in question (she was Lita Grey). Neither Stan Laurel, his companion throughout the vaudeville tours of America, nor Chaplin’s own half-brother and dedicated assistant, Wheeler Dryden, gets a mention. The loyal team of actors and technicians who worked with him in many cases throughout his Hollywood career – Henry Bergman, Mack Swain, Eric Campbell (the unforgettable beetle-browed ‘heavy’ of the early films), Albert Austin and, above all, his dedicated and resourceful cameraman and collaborator Roland Totheroh – do not figure in the book at all.
    If there is an explanation for this