On Wednesday, May 7th, 1930, his son is born prematurely. They name the boy Stanley.
The publicity department issues a press release. He would prefer that it had not done so, but the publicists are a law unto themselves, and someone at the Hollywood Hospital has already alerted the newspapers. The reporters even get the weight of the baby right – five-and-a-half pounds – but none remarks on how this is at the lower end of the scale for a newborn. A joke is added, something about Babe having to be nice to him for a while now that he’s a father again.
‘You mustn’t abuse a papa!’ he is quoted as saying.
He wonders how many acres of newsprint have been filled by words he has not said, forming an entire alternative history of his life in which nothing has meaning or substance unless it forms the punchline to a gag.
His son is placed in an incubator. He is informed that the birth weight, although troubling, is well within the limits of viability. The first twenty-four hours will be crucial.
Lois rests, but he does not. He counts the minutes into hours, and the hours into a day, and only when evening drifts into night, and twenty-four hours have safely elapsed, does he sleep.
Each morning thereafter he travels to the studio and works. Well-wishers inquire after his son. It is known that the child is sickly, but he was a sickly child himself, and he survived.
Each evening thereafter he travels to the hospital to be with Lois.
On the ninth day, his son dies.
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At the Oceana Apartments, he puts names to absence, and gives life to half-formed things.
91
He cannot speak. He is rendered mute by grief. Only his daughter draws words from him, and only for her sake does he simulate animation. He does not wish her to see his pain, because to see it will be to share it.
And just as only his daughter can bring him to speak, so only with Babe does he cry for his dead child.
His son is cremated. He does not want a funeral. He hates funerals.
He accepts the condolences of all who offer them.
He returns to work.
He returns, on silent sets, to the business of being funny.
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He and Lois are ghosts, trapped under one roof but alone in their anguish, each haunting the empty chambers of the other’s heart. He knows that he does not love Lois any longer, or not as he once did. He does not wish to hurt Lois, but he has, and he does, and he will again.
They cannot separate. It is too soon. So they step around each other, and they sleep beside each other but do not touch, and were it not for the chatter of their daughter the house would be entirely untroubled by the speech of intimates.
He can work, and so he does.
He and Babe spend a month from June to July filming Pardon Us, follow it with two weeks of concurrent filming for four foreign versions, and return for reshoots in October on all five films. Pardon Us will cost almost $250,000 to make, or six times as much as a short feature, but will gross nearly a million dollars, making Hal Roach a profit of nearly $200,000.
Did you get your nickel? Richard Currier will ask him.
– I did not. I got a dime. I bought two sodas.
– Well, there you are.
Before the year ends, he and Babe make Another Fine Mess, and Be Big, and Chickens Come Home. In between pictures, he edits, and plans, and grins for publicity shots, and drinks with the gagmen, and fucks Alyce Ardell, fucks his pain into her while his marriage drifts away.
And he will look back on this time, and he will think that Lois deserved better than to be left to mourn their dead child alone.
93
In 1931, they release Pardon Us as their first full-length feature.
In 1931, Chaplin releases City Lights.
The premiere is held at the Los Angeles Theatre, the first time such a screening has taken place downtown instead of in Hollywood. Dr and Frau Albert Einstein, and Dr and Mrs Robert A. Millikan, accompany Chaplin.
Two Nobel prize-winning physicists and their wives.
These are the circles in which Chaplin now moves.
On his arm Chaplin has Georgia Hale, who almost starred in The Circus, and almost starred in City Lights too. Chaplin has been fucking Georgia Hale since The Gold Rush, and makes her alternately happy and miserable according to the cycles of the moon and the ebb and flow of his humors.
He wonders how Georgia Hale feels as she watches Chaplin’s camera venerate Virginia Cherrill in City Lights, as she rues that this role was once, however briefly, hers, until Chaplin realized that Virginia Cherrill was more worthy of it than she.
At least, he thinks, Georgia Hale can console herself with the knowledge that Chaplin did not fuck Virginia Cherrill, however beautiful she may be. This lapse on Chaplin’s part is common knowledge around town. The reasons for Chaplin’s failure remain unclear, although they probably boil down to a simple absence of sexual attraction on both sides.
Even Chaplin needs to feel something.
But he believes that the fact Chaplin did not sleep with Virginia Cherrill may have contributed to the genius of City Lights. He finds in it a beauty, a purity. It is, be believes, Chaplin’s masterpiece, and he sheds tears at the end because it is so gentle, so perfect, so true.
Yet even as he leaves the theater, head low, he thinks:
I could not have made City Lights, but nor would I want to have made City Lights.
It is art, but it is not comedy.
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The half-life of his marriage persists, flirting with farce as it fades.
On August 7th, 1931, he legally changes his name. A.J.’s son ceases to be. He is now the man the titles of his pictures declare him to be; the fiction created with Mae has become the reality. And as he alters his name, so, too, must Lois alter hers, even though she barely wishes to know him by any name.
Never mind. She will not have to suffer under it for long.
And meanwhile, he thinks, his dead boy bears the patronymic of one who no longer exists at all.
95
At the Oceana Apartments, he wakes in his chair. He had not intended to doze, and now the best of the day is gone.
This is his world, his lot, his stage. He haunts its three rooms, knowing his every mark: here for his correspondence, there for his meals, a turn for his bed. It is life as a vaudeville routine.
He takes up his pen and his yellow legal pad. He has an idea: a prison escape, except the prisoner is a woman. She has murdered her husband’s lover in an act of jealous rage, and remains infatuated with him. She hears that her ex-husband is about to marry again, and so breaks out of jail to prevent the wedding from going ahead.
Hal Roach always claimed that he had a macabre side.
The light dims ever so faintly: a momentary darkening, as of a cloud drifting, or a shadow briefly cast, or a figure seated just beyond the periphery of his vision shifting its position, signaling its unease.
He does not write this idea down. Better to let it go.
Babe would not like it.
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