For him.
I heard them, says A.J., although he has not yet spoken to A.J. of the laughter. I was there. I witnessed all.
He starts to cry.
He signs on with A.J.’s company for ￡1.5/- a week.
A.J. says that he still owes him a top hat.
4
At the Oceana Apartments, he is with Babe.
Babe is dead.
But Babe is always with him.
It is long before the dead days, and he and Babe are walking together in New York. Babe stops to speak with the son of a shoeshine man, Babe’s face a beacon of delight. Now Babe can run his routine.
Babe tells the boy that Babe also was born in Harlem, and the boy, already in thrall to this man familiar from the screens of the black-only theaters, can do no more than gaze in further wonder as Babe feeds the punchline.
– Harlem, Georgia!
How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice.
Babe laughs, and the boy laughs with him, and Babe tips the father a dollar and gives the son a dollar too, because the gag was worth it.
But then, Babe has always been a soft touch.
He and Babe walk on.
Would the shoeshine man and his son have laughed as hard or as loud, he wonders, if they knew that Oliver Hardy – Babe’s father, his progenitor – lies buried down in Harlem, Georgia alongside his second wife, the sister of the Magruder plantation heirs, and therefore slave owners also; or that Babe’s father was an overseer, a middleman, employed to keep the darkies subdued and their masters satisfied, and a former soldier who served willingly in the Confederate army under Captain Joshua Boyd as part of Ramsey’s Volunteers, only to be wounded for his trouble in the Battle of Antietam?
Oliver Hardy died in the year of Babe’s birth, so Babe never knew him, but every man lives his life touched by intimations of his father, and none more so than Babe, because in form and demeanor Babe is his father’s son. He has been shown by Babe the photograph of the patriarch, is aware of the resemblance. He has read the treasured cutting from the Columbia paper describing Babe’s father: ‘open, jolly, funful … covered all over with smiles … lives to eat, or eats to live … this Falstaffian figure.’
Babe should have played Falstaff, he thinks. No matter.
So Babe laughs heartily, and tips every man well regardless of his color, all in order that Babe may not be mistaken for someone of the Confederate stripe, even as Babe assumes his father’s first name while his own – Norvell – is reduced to a letter in his signature, a half-forgotten N.
An afterthought.
So much about Babe is hidden behind that N, because Babe – like all comics
like Chaplin
like himself
– does not really exist. Babe acquiesces in the myths peddled by a succession of motion picture studios, just as Babe, under examination, will relegate his status from actor to that of gagman, golfer, and good fellow. Babe will speak of a father who was a lawyer, and of ancestors who knew Lord Nelson, and will not blush at these falsehoods. Babe will permit himself to be acclaimed as a law graduate of the University of Georgia, even if Babe no more studied law than his father did, all to add mantles to his being. Babe will be fat, because Babe must be, and jolly, because Babe must be, and Babe will spin fantasies like cotton candy and feed them to the masses.
But here is another Babe, a younger Babe: the fat boy, already Oliver after his parent, two hundred pounds of slow-moving quarry, trudging the streets of Milledgeville, Georgia, like Christ to the crucifixion, bearing a sandwich board advertising the meal specials at the Baldwin Hotel run by his mother, Miss Emmie. When Babe speaks of this time, as Babe rarely does, day becomes night, and Babe’s eyelids drop like hoods to conceal the brightness beneath.
I might just as well, says Babe, have been wearing a target.
5
Fred Karno, Fred Karno, what manner of beast are you?
An anarchist on the stage, a purveyor of farce and mummery; but an authoritarian off it, an enforcer of rules. The greatest impresario of the British music halls, and a genius in the business of pantomime burlesque, but too blinded by his own legend to see that the Karsino, his Tagg’s Island resort folly in the River Thames, will die with those same music halls, and The House That Karno Built, his great lair on Southwark’s Camberwell Road, will lead him into bankruptcy. A husband with an eye for other women, around whom rumors of domestic brutality swirl like a London Particular.
But he loves Fred Karno, the Guv’nor. When he wishes to leave A.J.’s employ, it is Fred Karno to whom he turns. A.J. is disapproving – Fred Karno is not A.J.’s kind of man – but A.J. does not stop him.
So you’re funny? Fred Karno remarks. Says who?
– They laugh at what I do.
– Who laughs?
– The Audience.
– And what does the Audience know? The Audience will laugh at a cat being burned. The Audience will laugh because others are laughing. Never trust the Audience.
– The Audience laughs because I’m funny.
If Fred Karno permits, he will show Fred Karno, even here in this cluttered theater office, more grim than grand, and smaller than A.J.’s. He will show Fred Karno, and he will make Fred Karno laugh like the rest.
Do you think so? Fred Karno says.
– I do.
Fred Karno considers. Fred Karno regards the slow accretion of sand upon the shore, and the rise and fall of mountains. The clock in the corner marks the seconds of Fred Karno’s life, and Fred Karno’s life alone.
Well, a man that knows his own mind is good enough for me, says Fred Karno, at last. Find Mr O’Neill. Ask him to explain what’s required of you.
What is required is slapstick. What is required is falling down and getting up again. What is required is not choking on paint and custard. Up to Manchester with Mumming Birds, ￡2 a week, a foot soldier in Fred Karno’s Army, solely on his word to Fred Karno that he is funny.
Fred Karno knows, though. Fred Karno has eyes and ears: his own, and those of others.
And Fred Karno has Chaplin.
Already it is clear to Fred Karno, clear to all, that Chaplin is different: touched by god, but which god? There is discipline to Chaplin’s anarchy, just as there is to Fred Karno’s, but Fred Karno is human, in his gifts as much as in his failings, while Chaplin is beyond human in both. Chaplin believes in himself, but nothing else. Chaplin will not stay with Fred Karno. Chaplin is simply passing through, and will always be so.
Chaplin is the best that he has ever seen.
And Chaplin is the worst.
There is no joy in Chaplin, or none beyond what Chaplin can generate in others.
Chaplin feeds and feeds, but Chaplin remains forever hungry.
Chaplin, as an artist, must be perfect because Chaplin, as a man, is so flawed.
6