My Autobiography by Charles Chaplin

Author:Charles Chaplin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2003-03-23T05:00:00+00:00

seventeen

THE night before sailing from New York, I gave a party at the Élysée Café for about forty guests, among them Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and Madame Maeterlinck. We played charades. Douglas and Mary acted the first one. Douglas, a street-car conductor, punched a ticket and gave it to Mary. For the second syllable they pantomimed a rescue, Mary screaming for help and Douglas swimming to her and bringing her safely to the side of the river. Of course, all of us yelled: ‘Fairbanks!’

As the evening grew merry Madame Maeterlinck and I did the death scene from Camille, Madame Maeterlinck playing Camille and I playing Armand. As she was dying in my arms, she started coughing, slightly at first, then with increasing momentum. Her coughing became so infectious that I caught it from her. Then it became a coughing contest between us. Eventually it was I who did the dying in Camille’s arms.

The day of sailing I was painfully awakened at eight-thirty in the morning. After a bath, I was rid of all dissipation and filled with excitement, leaving for England. Edward Knoblock, my friend, author of Kismet and other plays, was leaving on the Olympic with me.

A crowd of newspaper men came aboard and I had a depressing feeling that they were going to remain with us throughout the voyage – two of them did, but the others got off with the pilot.

At last I was alone in my cabin which was stocked with flowers and baskets of fruit from my friends.… It had been ten years since I had left England, and on this very boat with the Karno Company; then we had travelled second class. I remember the steward taking us on a hurried tour through the first class, to give us a glimpse of how the other half lived. He had talked of the luxury of the private suites and their prohibitive price, and now I was occupying one of them, and was on my way to England. I had known London as a struggling young nondescript from Lambeth; now as a man celebrated and rich I would be seeing London as though for the first time.

A few hours out and the atmosphere was already English. Each night Eddie Knoblock and I would dine in the Ritz restaurant instead of the main dining-room. The Ritz was à la carte, with champagne, caviar, duck à la presse, grouse and pheasant, wines, sauces, and crêpes suzette. With time on my hands I enjoyed the nonsense of dressing each evening in black tie. Such luxury and indulgence brought home to me the delights of money.

I thought I would be able to relax. But there were bulletins on the Olympic notice board about my anticipated arrival in London. Half-way across the Atlantic an avalanche of telegrams with invitations and requests began piling up. Hysteria gathered like a storm. The Olympic bulletin quoted articles from the United News and the Morning Telegraph. One read: ‘Chaplin returns like a Conqueror! Progress from Southampton to London will resemble a Roman triumph.

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