My Autobiography by Charles Chaplin (find a book to read .txt) 📗

Mother wrote that she had visited the boy, explaining who she was, and that Sydney and I had lived with him and his father and mother in the Kennington Road. But he hardly remembered, as he had been only four years old at the time. He also had no recollection of his father. And now he was ten. He was registered under Louise’s maiden name, and as far as Mother could find out he had no relatives. She described him as being a handsome boy, very quiet, shy and preoccupied. She brought him a bag of sweets and some oranges and apples and promised to visit him regularly, which I believe she did, until she herself became ill again and was sent back to Cane Hill.

The news of Mother’s relapse came like a stab in the heart. We never knew the details. We received only a curt official notice that she had been found wandering and incoherent in the streets. There was nothing we could do but accept poor Mother’s fate. She never again recovered her mind completely. For several years she languished in Cane Hill asylum until we could afford to put her into a private one.

Sometimes the gods of adversity tire of their sport and show mercy, as they did with Mother. For the last seven years of her life she was to live in comfort, surrounded by flowers and sunshine, to see her grown sons endowed with fame and fortune beyond anything she had ever imagined.

*

Because of our tour with Sherlock Holmes it was many weeks before Sydney and I could again see Mother. The tour with the Frohman company ended permanently. Then Mr Harry York, proprietor of the Theatre Royal, Blackburn, bought the rights of Holmes from Frohman to play the smaller towns. Sydney and I were engaged by the new company, but at reduced salaries of thirty-five shillings each.

It was a depressing come-down, playing the small towns of the North with an inferior company. Nevertheless, it enlivened my discrimination, comparing the company with the one we had just left. This comparison I tried to conceal, but at rehearsals in my zeal to help the new director, who would ask me about stage directions, cues and business etc., I would eagerly tell him how it was done in the Frohman company. This, of course, did not make me particularly popular with the cast and I was looked upon as a precocious brat. Later, a new stage manager had it in for me and fined me ten shillings for having a button missing from my uniform, about which he had warned me several times.

William Gillette, author of Sherlock Holmes, came to London with Marie Doro in a play called Clarissa which he had written. The critics were unkind to the play and to the manner of Gillette’s speech, which led him to write a curtain-raiser, The Painful Predicament of Sherlock Holmes, in which he himself never spoke a word. There were only three in the cast, a mad-woman, Holmes and his page-boy. It was like tidings from heaven to receive a telegram from Mr Postance, Gillette’s manager, asking me if I were available to come to London to play the part of Billie with William Gillette in the curtain-raiser.

I trembled with anxiety, for it was doubtful if our company could replace Billie in the provinces on such short notice, and for several days I was left in agonizing suspense. However, they did find another Billie.

Returning to London to play in a West End theatre I can only describe as my renaissance. My brain was spinning with the thrill of every incident – arriving in the evening at the Duke of York’s Theatre and meeting Mr Postance, the stage-manager, who brought me to Mr Gillette’s dressing-room, and his words after I was introduced to him: ‘Would you like to play in Sherlock Holmes with me?’ And my burst of nervous enthusiasm: ‘Oh very much, Mr Gillette!’ And the next morning, waiting on the stage for rehearsals, and seeing Marie Doro for the first time, dressed in the loveliest white summer dress. The sudden shock of seeing someone so beautiful at that hour! She had been riding in a hansom cab and had discovered an ink spot on her dress, and wanted to know if the property man had anything that would take it out, and to his answer of doubt she made the prettiest expression of irritation: ‘Oh, isn’t that too beastly!’

She was so devastatingly beautiful that I resented her. I resented her delicate, pouting lips, her regular white teeth, her adorable chin, her raven hair and dark brown eyes. I resented her pretence of irritation and the charm she exuded through it. Through all this querying between herself and the property man she was ignorant of my presence, although I stood quite near, staring, transfixed by her beauty. I had just turned sixteen, and the propinquity of this sudden radiance evoked my determination not to be obsessed by it. But, oh God, she was beautiful! It was love at first sight.

In The Painful Predicament of Sherlock Holmes Miss Irene Vanbrugh, a remarkably gifted actress, played the madwoman and did all the talking, while Holmes just sat and listened. This was his joke on the critics. I had the opening lines, bursting into Holmes’s apartment and holding on to the doors while the mad-woman beats against them outside, and then, while I excitedly try to explain to Holmes the situation, the mad woman bursts in! For twenty minutes she never stops raving incoherently about some case she wants him to solve. Surreptitiously Holmes writes a note, rings a bell and slips it to me. Later two stalwart men lead the lady off, leaving Holmes and me alone, with me saying: ‘You were right, sir; it was the right asylum.’

The critics enjoyed the joke, but the play Clarissa, which Gillette wrote for Marie Doro, was a failure. Although they raved about Marie’s beauty,