My Autobiography Charles Chaplin (best books to read ever TXT) 📖

John Drew was undoubtedly the epitome of this. He was debonair, humorous, subtle and had great charm. It is easy to be emotional – that is expected of a good actor – and of course diction and voice are necessary. Although David Warfield had a magnificent voice and ability to express emotion, somehow one felt that the Ten Commandments were in everything he said.

I have often been asked who were my favourite actors and actresses on the American stage. This is difficult to answer, for a choice implies that the rest were inferior, which was not so. My favourites were not all serious actors. Some were comedians, others even entertainers.

Al Jolson, for instance, was a great instinctive artist with magic and vitality. He was the most impressive entertainer on the American stage, a black-faced minstrel with a loud baritone voice, telling banal jokes and singing sentimental songs. Whatever he sang, he brought you up or down to his level; even his ridiculous song ‘Mammy’ enthralled everyone. Only a shadow of himself appeared in films, but in 1918 he was at the height of his fame and electrified an audience. He had a strange appeal, with his lithe body, large head and sunken piercing eyes. When he sang such songs as ‘There’s a Rainbow Round My Shoulder’ and ‘When I Leave the World Behind’, he lifted the audience by unadulterated compulsion. He personified the poetry of Broadway, its vitality and vulgarity, its aims and dreams.

Sam Bernard, the Dutch comedian, another fine artist, was exasperated about everything. ‘Eggs! Sixty cents a dozen – and rotten ones! And the price of corned beef! Two dollars you pay! Two dollars – for a tiny, little bit of corned beef!’ Here he would exaggerate the tininess of it, as though threading a needle, then explode, expostulating and throwing himself in all directions: ‘I remember the time when you COULDN’T CARRY TWO DOLLARS WORTH OF CORNED BEEF!’

Off-stage he was a philosopher. When Ford Sterling went to him weeping about his wife having double-crossed him, said Sam: ‘So what? They double-crossed Napoleon!’

Frank Tinney I saw when I first came to New York. He was a great favourite at the Winter Garden, and had a gregarious intimacy with his audience. He would lean over the footlights and whisper: ‘The leading lady’s kind of stuck on me,’ then surreptitiously look off-stage to see that no one was listening, then back at the audience and confide: ‘It’s pathetic; as she was coming through the stage door tonight I said “good-evening”, but she’s so stuck on me she couldn’t answer.’

At this point the leading lady crosses the stage, and Tinney quickly puts his finger on his lips, warning the audience not to betray him. Cheerily he hails her: ‘Hi, kiddo!’ She turns indignantly and in a huff struts off the stage, dropping her haircomb.

Then he whispers to the audience: ‘What did I tell you? But in private we are just like that.’ He crosses his two fingers. Picking up her comb, he calls to the stage-manager: ‘Harry, put this in our dressing-room, will you, please?’

I saw him again on the stage a few years later and was shocked, for the comic Muse had left him. He was so self-conscious that I could not believe it was the same man. It was this change in him that gave me the idea years later for my film Limelight. I wanted to know why he had lost his spirit and his assurance. In Limelight the case was age; Calvero grew old and introspective and acquired a feeling of dignity, and this divorced him from all intimacy with the audience.

Among the American actresses I most admired were Mrs Fiske, ebullient, humorous and intelligent, and her niece, Emily Stevens, a gifted actress with style and lightness of touch. Jane Cowl had projection and intensity, and Mrs Leslie Carter was equally arresting. Among the comediennes, I enjoyed Trixie Friganza and, of course, Fanny Brice, whose great talent for burlesque was enriched by her sense of histrionics. We English had our great actresses: Ellen Terry, Ada Reeve, Irene Vanbrugh, Sybil Thorndike and the sagacious Mrs Pat Campbell – all of whom I saw except Mrs Pat.

John Barrymore stood out as having the true tradition of the theatre, but John had the vulgarity of wearing his talent like silk socks without garters – a nonchalance that treated everything rather contemptuously; whether it was a performance of Hamlet or sleeping with a duchess, it was all a joke to him.

In his biography by Gene Fowler there is a story about him getting out of a warm bed after a terrific champagne binge and being pushed on to play Hamlet, which he did between sporadic vomitings at the side of the wings and alcoholic restoratives. The English critics were supposed to have hailed his performance that night as the greatest Hamlet of the age. Such a ridiculous story insults everyone’s intelligence.

I first met John at the height of his success sitting broodingly in an office in the United Artists building. After being introduced, we were left alone and I began to talk about his triumph as Hamlet. I said that Hamlet gave a greater account of himself than any other character of Shakespeare.

He mused a moment. ‘The King is not a bad part either. In fact, I prefer it to Hamlet.’

I thought this odd and wondered how sincere he was. Had he been less vain and more simple he could have been in line with the greatest actors: Booth, Irving, Mansfield and Tree. But they had the noble spirit and the sensitive outlook. The trouble with Jack was that he had a naïve, romantic conception of himself as a genius doomed to self-destruction – which he eventually achieved in a vulgar, boisterous way by drinking himself to death.

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Although The Kid was a great success my problems were not yet over: I still had four pictures to deliver to First National. In a state of quiet desperation, I wandered through the property