A Chance Meeting, page 18
Chaplin’s perfect control of his face and gestures was part of how he became an English music-hall star, which led, as it did for many British actors, to a contract in the new silent film industry in Los Angeles. Impersonation remained central to Chaplin’s art: it was also his method of directing. An actor who worked with Chaplin said that, demonstrating everyone’s roles, Chaplin “became a kind of dervish.” Afterward, he “reluctantly gave us back our parts. I felt that he would much rather have played all of them himself.” In his worst moments, other people existed for Chaplin as collections of gestures that he could absorb, but sometimes he was a portraitist whose record was in moving pictures. He was never a photographer—his cameramen complained bitterly about his lack of imagination in setting up shots—though, in 1923, when he met Hart Crane, people were mostly not complaining about Chaplin’s work. He was in the midst of the Tramp series, the best movies of his career: The Kid was followed by The Gold Rush, The Circus, and Modern Times.
Hart Crane had particular cause for recognizing the emotional truth of The Kid. His own childhood circumstances, while not materially impoverished, had been, in some ways, similar to Chaplin’s. Crane, too, had a mother more attractive than reliable; her demands on him as he was growing up were constant. She was forever involving him in her battles with his father and taking him out of school to go traveling around Europe and America. In the midst of his irregular high school education, the teenage Crane had been writing very good poems. He wrote his first published lyric about Oscar Wilde and was interested in all things to do with poetry—he even managed to interview the visiting Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore, who passed through Cleveland in the years after he won the Nobel Prize. Crane’s parents were proud, but not generous—his father refused to pay for college, and his mother, though impressed by his gifts as a poet, was always jealous of any interest that did not center on her. She hoped to bind her son to her in the practice of Christian Science; she was a devout follower of Mary Baker Eddy and felt that Christian Science helped her to fight her own impulses toward suicide. When Hart Crane moved to New York, Grace Crane made it clear that she felt abandoned. The welcoming and steady mother at the end of The Kid would have appealed to Hart Crane.
Taking his courage in his hand, Crane had mailed a copy of “Chaplinesque” to its subject, who had, surprisingly, written him a nice letter about it. Chaplin’s usual response to the thousands of fan letters he received each week was to throw them away. To Crane’s immense gratification, Chaplin recalled the exchange and the poem on the evening they met. Chaplin, often a little unsure of himself with writers, remembered that he tried to say something about poetry that night. He wrote in his autobiography that when he said to Crane that poetry was a “love letter to the world,” Crane had replied, “A very small world.”
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Chaplin liked to think of himself as a solitary intellectual in Los Angeles, and, though later he knew many of the German and Austrian expatriates who passed through southern California—Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, and the composer Arnold Schoenberg—they intimidated him, and he found Los Angeles lonely. Hart Crane wrote to his mother that Chaplin had told them that “Hollywood hasn’t a dozen people he enjoys talking to or who understand his work.” Chaplin was better satisfied by the company in New York, where he was careful to premiere his movies. He often skipped the Los Angeles premieres.
In New York, he went out on the town with one woman or another. Louise Brooks remembered that she and Chaplin once dodged into a Village restaurant to escape a crowd of his admirers and spent four hours studying the movements of a Hungarian violinist who was playing inside—these later turned up in Limelight. On another visit, Chaplin went to have his photograph taken by Steichen (who made a beautiful double image of Chaplin—the man-about-town in front cast the shadow of the Tramp behind) and stayed up talking with the photographer until four in the morning.
But even in New York, Chaplin was isolated by his fame. The day after he met Hart Crane, Chaplin went to hear David Lloyd George, former prime minister of England, speak at City Hall in New York and was embarrassed when people did not listen to Lloyd George, as they were busy mobbing their favorite actor. Another day on that same visit, he walked into the lobby of his hotel, the Ritz-Carlton, where there had just been a jewel heist; the investigation came to a halt, and the newspaper headlines the next day were not about the burglary but about Chaplin. Sometimes it felt to Chaplin as if he could only really talk to people in the middle of the night. On an ocean liner, Chaplin met Jean Cocteau and stayed up with him until daybreak; Chaplin said that after that they avoided each other for the rest of the trip. Chaplin could make a deep connection with another person almost instantly, but it was as if he felt that this depleted some part of himself, so that he would immediately withdraw what he had just as immediately given.
Charlie Chaplin by Edward Steichen, 1925.
At the time of A Woman of Paris, Chaplin’s closest friends were probably Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, with whom he had founded United Artists. They all wanted to make their own movies according to their own interests and keep more of the profits. A Woman of Paris was Chaplin’s first movie for United Artists—another reason he was anxious it should be a success. The fourth partner in the project was D. W. Griffith, whose racist film, The Birth of a Nation, had rallied thousands of people to the ranks of white hoods. One of the most successful early actions of the NAACP had been the nationwide protesting of the film when it was first released, in 1915. In 1923, Birth of a Nation was being rereleased, this time by United Artists, and W. E. B. Du Bois was writing blistering editorials about it for The Crisis. Chaplin, despite his left-leaning politics, seems to have liked Griffith well enough and did not criticize the film.
Chaplin had come to know Waldo Frank after Frank had praised Chaplin in his book Our America; Chaplin later said he particularly liked Frank’s essay on Mark Twain. Through and around Frank, Chaplin was introduced to a number of prominent left-wing intellectuals, who were interested in shades and schools of socialism and communism. In 1923, the Russian revolution was only six years past and still seemed to offer heady possibilities for the workingman. Chaplin, when he signed his contract with the Mutual Film Corporation in 1916, had become the man with the highest salary the American press had ever heard of. But he was also—in a complex way that seems to have mixed his memories of the workhouses and orphanages of his London childhood, his sense of the transience of wealth, and perhaps his guilt over having done so well—a political supporter of the labor movement.
Hart Crane’s own struggle with poverty was ongoing; his room was cold and his job at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency precarious. But he was never especially interested in politics—the Russian revolution had changed his world but slightly—and if he and Chaplin and Frank talked politics that night he did not report it to his mother. To know Chaplin was not, for Crane, to know another left-wing intellectual but to know a glamorous movie star. “Charlie told us,” Crane wrote to his mother with the pleasure of the insider, “the complete Pola Negri story.” Chaplin had recently been embroiled with the great Polish screen star; the press had made continual reports on their engagement and its rupture. Chaplin had a series of unsuccessful marriages and affairs, often with young women of sixteen or seventeen, to whom he was offhandedly cruel. It wasn’t until he finally, at the age of fifty-four, married the eighteen-year-old Oona O’Neill, daughter of Eugene O’Neill, that he settled into a relatively happy relationship. Had he lived to read about this in the papers, the marriage would have amused Crane, who had known the bride’s father quite well.
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That night, they talked until five. A Woman of Paris had premiered in New York three nights before—it was a great hit with the press—and Chaplin, in relief and excitement, was very nearly manic for a number of days. He was playing out scenes for his next movie, which eventually became The Gold Rush; Chaplin was always glad of whatever listeners he could round up to help him refine his scenarios.
Hart Crane was sensitive to other people’s enthusiasms, and he didn’t mind being in the audience at all. “Stories (marvelous ones he knows!) told with such subtle mimicry that you rolled on the floor.” He is “radiant and healthy, wistful, gay and young. He is 35, but half his head is already grey.” Men were often struck by Chaplin’s beauty; Hart Crane was magnetized. He mentioned to his mother with studied casualness that “we (just Charlie & I) are to have dinner together some night next week.” The meeting lifted his week up out of the ordinary and made him feel again that he was in the right place, that wonderful things would happen, that he would, in fact, be able to write. He tried to convey something of this sense of having been chosen for experience to his mother, who still urged him in nearly every letter to feel the spirit and to consider coming home. Crane felt stifled in his mother’s house but worried that separation would hurry her toward death. Still, closing his letter, he took the risk of staking out a small territory of his own: “I am very happy in the intense clarity of spirit that a man like Chaplin gives one. . . . I have that spiritual honesty, Grace, and it’s what makes me dear to the only people I care about.”
In his poem for Chaplin, Crane had written: “More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane” what endeared the Tramp to those who watched him was that which drew him even closer to the poet’s own name—the Tramp’s heart. Crane made an assertion and an apology to his mother in the line “What blame to us if the heart live on.”
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The dinner between Crane and Chaplin didn’t come off; the two men never met again. Chaplin avoided Crane—or at least didn’t respond when Crane attempted to see him in California some years later. Crane sent Chaplin his first book of poems, White Buildings, which included “Chaplinesque,” and, writing his memoirs thirty years after Crane’s death, Chaplin mentioned being glad to receive it. Chaplin was always gracious about the dead.
But that evening, when he and Crane took their leave of Frank at five in the morning, got into a taxi, and went around to Crane’s lodgings, perhaps Chaplin did think it would be nice to see the young poet with the dreamy eyes and square, intense face again. They shook hands warmly. Crane heard Chaplin say, “It’s been so nice.” Chaplin studied Crane as he walked up to his door and fit the key in the lock. He had watched the young man’s gestures all evening. Crane flailed a little bit, he flung his arms about, and he threw his head back to laugh, but there was strength in him, something there to be pared down and used. Crane turned to wave; perhaps Chaplin tipped his hat. The door closed. Chaplin leaned forward to tell the cabdriver, who had the light of thrilled recognition in his eyes, that he would like to go back to the Ritz. The car accelerated and turned the corner. Chaplin leaned back in the seat, looked out the window at the city in its darkest moment, smiled again at the thought of the scene he was planning, and then sighed.
20. LANGSTON HUGHES AND ZORA NEALE HURSTON
LANGSTON Hughes always said that Zora Neale Hurston was the only person he knew who could stand on the corner of 135th Street and Lenox Avenue with a large pair of calipers in her hand and persuade strangers passing by to stop so that she could measure their heads. She was studying at Columbia at the time, with the anthropologists Franz Boas and Melville Herskovits, who were gathering evidence to assert that, contrary to current anthropological belief, the shapes of people’s heads and the racial characteristics of those shapes were not correlated with their owners’ intelligence. Though some of the people on 135th Street said they were too busy for experiments—it was 1926, and there was a lot going on—Zora Neale Hurston was a force, and she made you laugh somehow right away, and there was something about the way she asked.
Hughes and Hurston had met the previous year at the banquet for Harlem’s newest literary magazine, Opportunity. They had each received more than one prize, with particular attention given to Hughes for his poem “The Weary Blues,” and to Hurston for her story “Spunk.” Hughes was just back from Europe and was surprised to find himself a celebrated author, though he was still planning to go down to Washington, D.C., where he hoped to find a job. Hurston and Hughes were glad to be included in the new Opportunity set, which, under the editorship of Charles Johnson and his close advisor Alain Locke, was staking out its place as an arts magazine, in contradistinction to W. E. B. Du Bois’s Crisis.
Literature at The Crisis was sustained by the careful hand of Jessie Fauset, Du Bois’s second in command. Fauset was a novelist with an eye for new work and Langston Hughes had been very grateful to her for publishing his first poems. Du Bois and Fauset both believed in the arts as instruments of social progress. In 1925, Hurston had joined Du Bois’s Krigwa Players, which would become, in 1926, his Little Negro Theater. Du Bois, still attentive to contact, said this theater should be for us, by us, about us, and near us, “in a Negro neighborhood near the mass of ordinary Negro people.” Hurston thought this a good idea, but she could be a little mean about the man whom it amused her to call “Dr. Dubious,” and Hughes and Hurston thought of The Crisis not as an arts magazine but as a political forum. The artistic energy of the Harlem Renaissance was intensifying around Opportunity, and Opportunity clearly knew how to throw a party.
At the awards dinner, Hughes was immediately taken with Hurston. She told the stories she knew from her hometown, Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated Black town in America and the first to have a Black mayor. Zora Neale Hurston used to hang around the front porch of Joe Clarke’s store, listening to the men (and the women, but mostly the men) telling how the different races got their colors or why Sis Snail quit her husband; Hurston’s father, who was moderator of the South Florida Baptist Association, told wicked tales of pastors and congregations. After Hurston moved to Harlem, she told Hughes stories about traveling all over the south with a Gilbert and Sullivan light-opera company, and about Washington, D.C., where she’d first met Alain Locke, of distinguished scholarship and snobbish taste, at Howard University, and about the women she was meeting at Barnard, and her new friend the famous novelist Fannie Hurst. Hurston seemed inexhaustible. In his autobiography, The Big Sea, Hughes wrote of Hurston, “Only to reach a wider audience, need she ever write books—because she is a perfect book of entertainment in herself.” Among their literary circle, which she christened “the Niggerati,” one of the most popular genres was Zora stories.
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Once Hughes moved up from Washington, D.C., he and Hurston were often at the same parties. They would go up to A’Lelia Walker’s on 136th Street, where the parties were so crowded—Hughes remembered it being like “the New York subway at the rush hour”—that if you got there late you literally couldn’t get in the door. Harlem’s favorite hostess, about whom Hurston would later attempt a novel, had her money from her mother, who made a fortune in hair-straightening products. Sometimes instead, Hughes and Hurston went to the soirees of Jessie Fauset; these were formal and less fun, as, in her own house, Fauset’s nurturing support of many of the Harlem talents took the form of encouraging people to recite their poetry and to speak French, and besides there was never much to drink. Hughes and Hurston more often ran into each other at Carl Van Vechten’s—his apartment on West Fifty-fifth Street was sometimes referred to by people in the know as “the midtown branch of the NAACP.” Van Vechten had been at the 1925 Opportunity dinner, too, and had been reintroduced to Hughes—they had met once before in the middle of the dance floor at Happy Rhone’s nightclub, but Van Vechten thought he had met someone named “Kingston.” After the Opportunity dinner, they had gone to various Harlem clubs and Van Vechten, as was his way, had been further converted and was throwing himself into the Harlem Renaissance with brio. Within six months, he had arranged for the acceptance of Hughes’s first book of poems, The Weary Blues, by his own publishers, Alfred and Blanche Knopf, and had begun writing reviews of blues singers for Vanity Fair and hosting parties for his new friends.
Langston Hughes by Carl Van Vechten, 1936.
Van Vechten’s were the only parties outside of Harlem to be reported on regularly in the gossip column of Harlem’s Inter-State Tattler. Hughes later described these parties as mixed, really mixed, half Black, half white, everyone talking to everyone, with plenty to drink. At one such party the well-known opera singer Marguerite D’Alvarez sang an aria and afterward Bessie Smith, not knowing who D’Alvarez was but liking what she heard, went up to her and encouraged her not to give up singing. Hughes loved this story and, wanting to tell it correctly in his autobiography, wrote to Van Vechten for the precise details. Van Vechten replied with enjoyment:
Bessie Smith’s exact and baleful words after d’Alvarez had finished singing were, “Don’t let nobody tell you you can’t sing.” Bessie arrived dead drunk at that party and had a FULL pint glass of straight gin when she got there. She sang with a cigarette in the corner of her mouth and she didn’t hold it there with her fingers. Nor did she drop it. But she was in magnificent form and sang the Blues like a low-down Black Angel. I LOVED Bessie.
After a little while, Langston Hughes got used to these parties, but when he first started coming in 1925, twenty-three years old and working as a busboy in a hotel in Washington, D.C., he found it a little overwhelming to meet Alfred Knopf and Nora Holt, Theodore Dreiser, H. L. Mencken, and James Weldon Johnson all at once. Zora Neale Hurston took to Van Vechten’s living room as to her natural element, recognizing right away what it had in common with the front porch of Joe Clarke’s store.
