The Bottle, 1930. The bottle drunk by Alice that causes her to shrink. From Lewis Carroll’s (1832-1898) ‘Alice in Wonderland’. After an illustration by John Tenniel (1820-1914) colour printed by Edward Evans (1826-1905). From the ‘Alice in Wonderland’ series of cigarette cards produced by Carreras Limited, 1930.
A number of questions had begun to form in my mind. I am a methodical, plodding soul, with a memory like a sieve. I took out a pencil and a scratch pad and began to write down the questions as they came into my mind.
“Honey, what will you have to drink? Say, have you ever done any hunting?”
“And what do I get for winning?”
“Do you understand why Margaret was killed?”
“The person who was blackmailing me died?”
‘What a bunch of troublemakers,’ they say. And they keep on chatting: would you pass the butter, please? How much have our stocks risen today? What is the price of tomatoes? Have you heard that Princess Di is expecting again?
Of course, he was asking the questions, him and the dicks, but the trick is to answer them in such a way that the next question, or maybe one later on, tells you something you want to know, or at least gives you a hint. That takes practice, but I had had plenty, and it makes it simpler when one guy pecks away at you for an hour or so and then backs off, and another guy starts in and goes all over it again.
Seven passages, mostly questions, from seven page seventeens from seven books, mostly science fiction and crime, found in my bedroom.
Blackmailer by George Axelrod; The Making of the African Queen by Katharine Hepburn; Unicorn Variation by Roger Zelazny from Unicorn Variations; Miss Gentilbelle by Charles Beaumont from The Magic Man; The Long Habit of Winning by Joe Haldeman; Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder; The Sweet Corn Murder by Rex Stout, from The Best of Ellery Queen 2.
I picked up Simon Louvish’s book Chaplin: The Tramp’s Odyssey, not sure what I could expect from it. David Robinson’s Chaplin is so very, very good, it didn’t seem as if Louvish could cover the same ground in an illuminating way. At least he had the decency to do it AFTER he’s written about nearly every other comic of the twenties and thirties, I thought.
But the book is EXTREMELY good. Not a replacement for the magisterial Robinson work, but a very useful companion.
It reminded me that THE CIRCUS’s sideshow opening sequence was shot in Venice, California, marking the Tramp’s return to his place of origin (in KID AUTO RACES AT VENICE back at Keystone). Which connects up in a couple of weird ways to the new presence in Hollywood of Robert Florey, Chaplin observer and future collaborator (assistant/whipping boy on MONSIEUR VERDOUX).
Florey wrote of seeing Chaplin on his way to Henry’s, the restaurant run by actor Henry Bergman, one night ~
“There was infinite sadness in the spectacle of Charlie, alone in the night. A man whom the smartest salons in the world would have fought to entertain, was quietly walking, alone in the shadows, his hands in his pockets and the brim of his hat pulled down over his eyes. It is true that the life of artists in Hollywood, especially in the evening, when the day’s work is finished, cannot be compared to existence in Paris or London, but to see Charlie Chaplin, alone on the boulevard, like some little extra without a job or a place to live, wrung my heart.”
It’s also a very dreamlike, and a very Chaplinesque image. It’s hard to not to imagine a bowler hat when Florey mentions Charlie’s hat, but of course it wouldn’t have been.
By coincidence — not even a meaningful coincidence, just a regular coincidence, I recently picked up Charles Beaumont’s The Magic Man, a short story collection which includes the little classic Perchance to Dream ~
“Right away the dream started.I was walking along Venice Pier. It was close to midnight. The place was crowded, people everywhere; you know the kind they used to get there. Sailors, dumpy looking dames, kids in leather jackets. The pitchmen were going through their routines. You could hear the roller coasters thundering along the tracks, the people inside the roller coasters, screaming; you could hear the bells and the guns cracking and the crazy songs they play on calliopes. And, far away, the ocean, moving. Everything was bright and gaudy and cheap.”
Perchance to Dream was adapted by Rod Serling for The Twilight Zone, and directed by Robert Florey. But the filmmaker who captured the exact mood of Beaumont’s dream was Curtis Harrington in NIGHT TIDE. And Harrington met Chaplin at a party, and apparently asked him about, not THE CIRCUS, but his earlier Sternberg production, A WOMAN OF THE SEA ~
“I actually asked Mr. Chaplin about it in person, when I was very, very young. I went to my first Hollywood party and there were a lot of big stars there—Charlie Chaplin and Harlan Pressburger, who produced The Shanghai Gesture, so I spoke to him about working with Von Sternberg. I was very busy at this party, you know, to be in the presence of these people I’d only read about (laughs). Anyway, you can read about The Woman of the Sea. […] Robert Florey, the French film director, he also saw it. He wrote about it in his book but it’s only available in France.”
It was to this city, drunk radiant with contradictions — ‘Chicago, the jazz-baby — the reeking, cinder-ridden, joyous baptist stronghold, Chicago, the chewing gum centre of the world, the bleating, slant-headed rendezvous of half-witted newspapers, sociopaths and pants makers,’ to quote one of its more restrained self-descriptions — that Beatrice Welles brought her family. It was certainly she who brought them: her husband, though enamoured of the stage and its citizens, and partial to fine wine and good food and concomitant fleshly pleasures, showed no sign of needing to move to the source of these things, and Dr Bernstein, according to Orson, only left Kenosha to be near Beatrice. He spoke of it as ‘a paradise he’d lost … my mother used to make HEARTLESS fun of that.’ As for the boys — cosy and comfortable as they’d surely been in Kenosha, this huge and thrilling city was the biggest playground a child could imagine. This is where Orson Welles grew up, this swaggering, boastful place, which sneered at New York as a provincial cousin. Here was anything and everything they could want — provided they had the money. And, thanks to Richard Welles’ golden handshake, they did. Had they not, it might have been a harsh life; they would have shared the squalor and deprivation of a large portion of the city’s population, the immigrants in their northern ghettoes, the blacks in theirs on the South Side. For these people, undernourished, brutalised, cold, Chicago was hell. ‘For God’s sake,’ cried Margaret Anderson at the end of her first editorial for The Little Review, one of Chicago’s many little magazines, ‘why doesn’t somebody start the revolution?’ All the conditions were present, enough to make a Marxist despair at its reluctance to occur. But Chicago was still too high on itself. Even the poor were swept up in its undeniable confidence, which last till the Big Crash — ten years away, in 1929. After that, nothing would ever be quite the same again for Chicago. In Alston J. Smith’s phrase, ‘there was the manic phase. Then came the depression.’
…I was born in Chicago, Illinois, so damned long ago that I wish I had never told anybody when. Both my parents were of Quaker descent. Neither was a practising Quaker. My mother was born in Waterford, Ireland, where there was a very famous Quaker school and perhaps still is. My father came of a Pennsylvania farming family, probably one of the batch that settled with William Penn. At the age of seven I had scarlet fever in a hotel, and I understand this is a very rare accomplishment. I remember principally the ice-cream and the pleasure of pulling the loose skin off during convalescence …
Ben Hecht was always falling in love–though he never tumbled harder and faster into that ecstatic state than he did when he met Chicago. “The city of my first manhood,” he called it. The place enthralled him with its blur of rooftops and chimneys, its signage and streetcars, its windows, its water, its sky, an especially its crowds. Its crowds! Dashing through downtown, he’d stop suddenly, transfixed, as all those strangers rushed by him on the sidewalk. “I sometimes felt shy,” he’d later write of his teenage infatuation with the fact of this great human swirl, “as I stood against a building watching people pass. What if some bright pedestrian saw what I was doing–having a love affair with the faces of the city! It would be hard to explain.”
Both Hecht and Minnelli, in different ways, were keenly aware of the new sensibility — though, like most other artists in their generation, they inherited certain attitudes from the era of l’art pour l’art, which they brought into modern times. Hecht, for example, never lost his taste for the epigrammatic wit and iconoclasm of the 1890s; his early novels, Fantasius Mallare and Count Bruga, are saturated with Yellow Book affectations, and even The Front Page has a vaguely Baudelarian nostalgie de la boue. For his part, Minnelli became a more engaging blend of the aesthete and the modern entertainer, working not in words but in clothing and decor. In 1937, Esquire described him as “the incarnation of our preconceived notion of a ‘Village type’ — flat black hat with a wide brim, loose collar and no tie around his thin neck.” In publicity releases, Radio City Music Hall emphasised his vanguard taste: “Young and, confessedly, a modernist, Minnelli revels in … torch songs, music from the heart of Harlem and picturesque angular furniture.”
Ten minutes off for a tea-break in the middle of the night in that place and I couldn’t find a seat, not one. All them Greeks had it, Poles, Greeks, Blacks, the lot of them, all them aliens had it. And they had me working there… they had me working…
Henry did that counterpoint business that you’re not supposed to be able to do unless you have two right arms and four extra fingers, and he got that boiler puffing, and he got it shaking, and he screamed his Henry Walker “WoooooOOOOO!” and–he finished. I came in on the tubs and beat them up till I couldn’t see for the sweat, hit the cymbal and waited.
His assistants cluster about him. He is severe with them, demanding, punctilious, but this is for their own ultimate benefit. He devises hideously difficult problems, or complicates their work with sudden oblique comments that open up whole new areas of investigation–yawning chasms under their feet. It is as if he wishes to place them in situations where only failure is possible. But failure, too, is a part of mental life. “I will make you failure-proof,” he says, jokingly. His assistants pale.
Seven passages from seven page seventeens taken from my vast collection of page seventeens.
Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu by Simon Callow; Raymond Chandler Speaking edited by Dorothy Gardiner and Kathrine Sorley Walker; Ben Hecht: FIghting Words, Moving Pictures by Adina Hoffman; The Films of Vincente Minnelli by James Naremore; The Caretaker by Harold Pinter, from Harold Pinter Complete Works 2; Black Country by Charles Beaumont from The Playboy Book of Short Stories; The Genius from Forty Stories by Donald Barthelme.
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