Although I had heard much of Charlie Chaplin from various friends we shared in common I did not meet him until after I had been in the industry for two years. That first sight of him surprised me as much as it always does those who know only the familiar comedian of the black moustache and baggy trousers. A slender fellow; smooth-shaven; waves of crisp black hair; dark blue eyes that have that peculiar smoky quality of the Autumn hills—here is the catalogue of his outward self. But of course you can not compress into a catalogue the charm of his face. There is a charm there—even beauty. In this connection, indeed, I remember Chaplin’s telling me laughingly that his mother once protested indignantly at his make-up.

“Why do you want to make yourself look hideous,” said she, “you who are so beautiful?”

But although his contours are satisfactory and his eyes exceedingly handsome, the real interest of Chaplin’s face lies in its perpetual and sensitive absorptions. He seems always listening. Even when he is talking most animatedly he is watching you, wondering about you, quite evidently trying to fit you and your words into some pattern. When you yourself are talking, you get the full force of this vivid listening.

Mack Sennett has often spoken about this characteristic message of his face as it was revealed to him during Chaplin’s first studio days. “He’d sit there for hours,” records Mack, “just staring at people. I couldn’t make out what he was thinking about.”

Since that first meeting of ours acquaintance has developed into a friendship which I certainly count one of the privileges of my life. From that friendship it is hard to detach myself for an objective survey of the gifted pantomimist. Even had I not been so close to him I should find formidable the task of analysis. For Chaplin is a maze of contradictions, and no sooner have you affixed to him any one attribute than lo, the next moment has swept it away!

Chaplin loves power—as no one else whom I have ever met he loves it. Money contributes to this sense. Therefore he sticks out for his large contract and therefore he saves a great deal of his earnings. But it affords him just as much consciousness of power to think that he, Chaplin, can afford to walk away from those assembled actors and stage-hands. Ergo, he does that.

I have often been asked if Chaplin is amusing when away from the screen. He is—thoroughly so. His mimicry is delightful. His dancing is perhaps even more so. To see Chaplin improvising a London street scene with William de Mille; to hear him deliver the speech of a Jewish manufacturer at a banquet where he had been presented with a loving-cup; to watch his imitations of some fashionable rhythmic dancer—at one of these last performances he carried a cuspidor as a Greek vase and concluded by deftly catching it in the crook of his knee—such are the memories of Charlie treasured by those who know him.

I always like to think of the day when he got back from Europe. He came straightway to my office to see me, and I never heard anything so infectious as those descriptions of his triumphal tour. When he came to the story of his decoration with the Legion of Honour he reached a high peak in that imitative narrative of which he is such a perfect master.

Yet here again you are faced by another of those contrasts which bewilder the biographer. There are certain days when, instead of drollery and pungent narrative, he presents a well of unfathomable silence. On such days he runs away from his studio and from everybody. For hours he will sit motionless in his room. Or perhaps, starting off alone, he will wander into an orange-grove or tramp through the hills around Hollywood.

He suffers at such times—undoubtedly. But make no mistake. The blackness of the universe, the torturing puzzle of existence, which sometimes engulf so many of us, are never repudiated by Chaplin. He does not desire madly to lose himself in somebody or something apart from his own life. He would not in his most tortured moment shift places with the merriest. No, for the blackness is his blackness. And what he wants is experience, no matter whether that be happiness or pain. This hunger for a high measure of sensation is found in his horror of old age. With a kind of fierce rebellion he looks into a neighbouring glass at the streaks of grey in his hair. “Ugh!” he will shiver. “To think the time is coming when I shan’t be young any more!”

His reaction to life is, you see, intensely personal, intensely emotional. Nothing is more persuasive of this than is his interest in certain impersonal topics. Chaplin loves to talk about government and economics and religion. Mention of a new “ism” or “ology” brings him loping from the farthest corner of a room. When Rupert Hughes came out to Hollywood he and Charlie were much given to what somebody calls “topics—just topics.” Nothing could have been more illuminating. While Hughes conducted his side of the discussion in a spirit of dispassionate inquiry, the less scientifically trained mind of the comedian struck out with a poet’s frenzy at everything which he did not like. One could see it was not really abstract truth which he desired. It was the theory which most successfully represented his own prejudice.

His prejudice is against anything which interferes with his own personal freedom. The censor, the income tax, any supposed obstruction—these are hateful to him in the degree to which they infringe upon that coveted sense of power.

One day when I first came to know Chaplin well, he was with me in my apartment at a Hollywood hotel. While we were talking the telephone rang. Charlie looked terrified.

“What do they want you for?” I asked exceedingly amused.

“A guest,” he answered with a grin. “Mrs. X—— asked me for dinner to-night. I promised I’d be there and then found out she had asked a whole lot of people. So you won’t catch me going.”

This was my introduction to Charlie’s most notorious social failing. Often thereafter I witnessed his struggles against being taken into custody. Less frequently I was one of a group of indignant people waiting for a Chaplin who had promised to come and never did show up at all.

Not long ago a friend of mine asked him why he so hated to make or keep an engagement.

“I don’t know,” answered Charlie. “I suppose, though, it’s because I hate to feel that I have to do anything at a certain time. It just destroys my pleasure in doing it.”

At this my friend suggested, “Ah, Mr. Chaplin, but don’t you think that is because ’way down deep you don’t feel quite free? The person who is conscious of real freedom doesn’t fret at any such superficial bondage.”

He looked at her eagerly, delightedly—just as he always does when confronted by a new theory. “Why, I never thought of that, but I believe it’s true,” he assented. “You see,” he added, “when I was a young boy I never was free. I was always the one who had to stay at home. My brother Sydney didn’t hang around as I did. He went off to Australia.”

Then for the first time I suspected what was responsible for Charlie’s love of power. Those early years of his in London when, the son of poor vaudeville artists, he experienced hunger and tragedy and the constant terror of the next day, have driven far into his brain. No prosperity can quite rid him of fear. That is why he wants to assure himself in every way of his present strength. For what is it but fear which makes a man conscious always of the thickness of his armour, the sharpness of his weapons?

There was one engagement of his which Charlie did keep. When Claire Sheridan, the English sculptress, came to California she expressed immediately a desire to meet Chaplin. My friend Abram Lehr thereupon invited the comedian to a dinner given for the handsome author of “From Mayfair to Moscow.”

“And don’t you dare fail me this time!” admonished Mr. Lehr as he proffered the invitation.

Charlie not only obeyed; he obeyed in a dinner-coat. From the first, so Lehr reports, the two seemed entirely satisfied with each other, and that occasion led to the friendship upon which Mrs. Sheridan dwells so glowingly in her “American Diary.”

Charlie is well liked by the average woman. Indeed, most people are attracted to him. Why should they not be? His drollery, his quick and vivid response to the moment, his friendly, boyish smile, the manner which makes you feel at first meeting as if you had known him all your life—these would lead the usual person to pick him out in a roomful of distinguished people. And all this quite apart from the glamour of his reputation. He makes another appeal. The first time I ever met him I felt sorry for him. The humour of it, that I should want to help him—this young charming Fortunatus—struck me almost at once. But I could not help it. Afterwards I found that nearly every one else shares this feeling.

Of course exactly the same thing is operative on the screen. For Chaplin owes his supremacy as much to the tears as to the laughter of the multitude.

This pathos of his comes from an enduring isolation. He is, and I think always will be, a lonely figure. Beloved by many, applauded by all, he is merely with—never of—the crowd—not though he gives it back gesture for gesture and laugh for laugh. Not misleading, the look of listening which so much impressed me the first time I met him! For early in life Chaplin took his seat in the parquet of life and ever since he has been watching the rest of us actors unfolding our drama. Do not be deceived because sometimes he vaults over the footlights and behaves just like the performers. Even when he is at his merriest pranks, even when he is talking most confidentially and affectionately to his friends, he is still the onlooker, detached from the rest of us by I know not what fastnesses of spirit.

The most intimate of Charlie’s friends in Hollywood are Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. He goes over to their house frequently, and the three talk pictures hard and fast. Chaplin, of course, frequently sees in the creations of the other two an opportunity for characteristic suggestions.

When, for instance, he saw the moated castle in “Robin Hood” he said to Fairbanks: “Wonderful, Doug! Just think what I would do with that drawbridge on Sunday morning! I’d let it down so I could take in the Sunday papers and the milk-bottles and then draw it up tight so that nobody could get at me all the rest of the day.”

One time I asked Charlie who was his favourite screen actress. “I think Mary Pickford,” he answered unhesitatingly. “You see there’s a wonderful quality about her—it’s that more than her acting.”

Unlike almost every other screen actor, Charlie does not work from a script. When he starts a new story he is apt to come into his studio and say, “Build me a kitchen and a dining-room.” He has at this moment perhaps only the germ of an idea. But day by day he develops it, and as he does so his scenario-writer puts down each scene. This method has often been described, and I touch upon it here only for its value in revealing his psychology. A scenario would undoubtedly irk him as much as would a social engagement. Always, always, Chaplin must be assured that he is free, that his individuality has scope for its spontaneous play.

His emotionality is never more apparent than when he is at work. Often he becomes exhausted in his efforts to inspire one of his company with the desired emotion. “Heavens!” he will cry, “It’s enough to break your heart—such stupidity!” When he sees the rushes, anger and despair are apt to break from their leashes and run away with the projection-room. Often, however, these emotions are directed quite as much toward his own part in the performance as toward that of others. Charlie has, in fact, that capacity for being dissatisfied with his own work which is a part of every great artist.

The world at large does not seem to know much about Charlie’s brother Sydney. Yet he is a very real brother and Charlie has a very real affection for him. He himself is an excellent comedian with only one disadvantage—he is the near relative of a great comedian. This relationship, I may add, could never be detected from a casual glance at the two, for Syd Chaplin is rather tall and rather blond and his features are much more sharply cut than are those of his brother.

Syd, by the way, possesses a very ready wit. Once when dining with Mary and Doug he listened to the latter’s statement that the costumes for “Robin Hood” had cost a hundred and sixty-two thousand dollars.

“Hmph!” commented Syd, “I should call that ‘Robbin’ Doug.’”

It was after completing his $670,000 contract with the Mutual Film Company that Charlie made with the First National Company a million-dollar deal calling for eight two-reel pictures. This did not sound difficult. The comedian expected to complete the order in a year. Instead, he has only just recently finished the last of the National Film pictures.