He and Babe could have controlled all aspects of their work.
As Chaplin did.
He and Babe could have owned their own pictures.
As Chaplin does.
But he is not Chaplin, and Babe never wished to be. Again and again it comes back to him. It will be the refrain that carries him from the clamor of this world to the oblivion of the next. They will carve it on his gravestone.
Not Chaplin.
Chaplin understood money. From the start, Chaplin was careful with it.
But he never understood money, no more than he understood women. He married unwisely, and too often. This is no one’s fault but his.
What can be done? he asks.
– About television? Nothing, unless we crawl to Hal Roach’s door and beg for a share.
He will not do this, not even if he were living rough under a bridge. He knows a dog that goes to Hal Roach’s door seeking scraps will leave hungrier than when it arrived.
You could go back to England, says Ben Shipman. Then: – Why are you smiling?
193
At the Oceana Apartments, he reflects on circularity.
A.J. would have laughed.
A.J.’s son, the big Hollywood star, returned once more to the stages that birthed him.
A.J.’s son, forced to grub for shillings in these father-haunted halls.
A.J.’s son, back to England with his tail between his legs.
194
No London this time, no Palladium, no Coliseum.
They play provincial theaters.
They play Dublin.
They play Belfast.
A year later, they are back, and the cathedral bells at Cobh sound a song of greeting for them, but the Audience is sparser now, and no television cameras record their presence in blighted towns. A summer season in Blackpool fails to materialize. The tour is to be cut short.
Even here, he thinks, we are not as we once were. Even here, we are being forgotten.
We are witnesses to our own evanescence.
Babe is slower. Babe sleeps. Babe struggles for breath. Babe is short-tempered. On stage, Babe labors.
Ben Shipman joins them in England. Together, they watch Babe scale the hotel stairs, helped by Lucille.
And Ben Shipman says:
– Maybe it’s good that Blackpool didn’t work out.
195
Babe stands at the window of his hotel room. Babe stares out at the rain driving hard upon the gray Humber estuary.
What place is this? Babe asks.
Cleethorpes, he says.
– How did we end up here?
– It’s on the schedule.
– No, how did we end up here?
And he knows that they will not be coming back.
On May 17th, 1954, they give their last performance together.
On May 18th, 1954, Babe has a heart attack.
196
They arrive in Europe with more than a thousand fellow travelers on board the America, the most beautiful liner yet built in the United States, their appearance heralded by bells.
They depart Europe on the Manchuria, a merchant ship bound for Vancouver with ten passengers on board, their departure unnoticed.
This is how it goes.
This is how it ends.
197
At the Oceana Apartments, after the evening meal, Ida touches his hands.
Your fingers are cold, she says. You’re shivering. What have you been doing?
– Remembering.
– You should go to bed. You’ll be warmer there.
– I will, in a moment.
I am almost done.
198
The heart attack makes him fear for Babe.
I am like a lost soul without him, he tells the newspapers after the retreat from England.
I am completely lost without him, he repeats.
I am lost.
He has grown to need Babe more than he ever did when they were making pictures together on Hal Roach’s lot. In those years, he was distracted by his capacities, by his appetites. He had a career, and a future. He had women. He would direct. He would create until the end. He would mature as an artist, like Chaplin.
But that is the past. Now he has only Ida, and Lois, his daughter.
Now he has only Babe.
He wants to tell Babe so much. He wants to say that he is sorry for using him as a pawn in his battles with Hal Roach.
For manipulating their partnership.
For threatening its termination to suit his own ends.
For besmirching his own reputation with foolishness and infidelity, and sullying Babe’s in the process.
For not making them both wealthier men.
Most of all, he wants to say: Stay.
Ben Shipman understands this, Ben Shipman who loves them both above all other men, Ben Shipman with his shock of white hair, and his thick glasses, and his inability to be as good a lawyer to them as Ben Shipman is a friend.
Babe knows, says Ben Shipman.
– How can you be sure?
– Because Babe sits in that chair, just as you do, and Babe talks to me, just as you do, and Babe is sorry, just as you are.
– What has Babe to be sorry for?
– For being unable to hold on to money any better than you could. For his impatience with you. For sometimes preferring the golf course and Santa Anita to the set of a picture. And for not being better. Isn’t that what it all comes down to, in the end? You both wish that you’d been better men. Maybe you could have, if only because that’s true of each of us. But I’ve been by your side longer than anyone, and I do not believe that I have ever been privileged to call two better men my friends. You have frustrated me; you have anguished me; you have infuriated me; you have ignored me; but you have never disappointed me. I have never known either of you to commit a base act, and in the wrongs that you have done, you have hurt yourselves more than anyone. You are beloved men, and beloved by none more than each other. Allow yourself some forgiveness.
But still he frets about Babe, and so busy is he fretting that when he suffers a stroke he can only express surprise, like a corner man urging on his fighter only to be caught by a mistimed punch. Now it is Babe who is calling him, and Babe who is by his side, and Babe who is making him laugh. The stroke leaves him with a limp, and slurred speech.
He has been working on scripts for a television show. He puts the scripts aside.
And Death begins its binding.
199
At the Oceana Apartments, he takes down from the shelf, for the final time, his copy of Chaplin’s memoir. He tells himself that he does so to reread the sections about Chaplin’s early life, and this is true, in part. He remains astonished by the obstacles Chaplin has overcome. He has never disputed Chaplin’s greatness.
He reads a little, but listlessly. He realizes he cannot deny the hurt he feels, because he can only conclude that Chaplin sought to cause him pain.
Not to be mentioned by Chaplin, not to be mentioned at all.
He wants no praise from Chaplin for his work or his acting, or even a testimonial to their former friendship. But to be denied the fact of his existence by this man whom he adored, to be excised entirely from the history of Chaplin’s life, is incomprehensible to him in the scale of its callousness.
He wishes, as he so often does, that Babe were here, so that he might ask of him:
How can a great man be so small?
200