Read Online City of Nets by Otto Friedrich - Free Book Online Page B

Nadia Boulanger’s country home until the sailing of the S.S. Manhattan. “He takes a dozen suitcases—for only two weeks!” Miss Sudeikina marveled. “. . . We have had an alarm every night, and already the stores are advertising ‘pajama styles for the basement,’ which is very French.”
    In Hollywood, these events all seemed far away, as indeed they were. Aldous Huxley had just been assigned to write an M-G-M screenplay for Pride and Prejudice, and his wife, Maria, stayed up late by herself to hear Neville Chamberlain go before Parliament to call for war. “I heard Chamberlain here in the middle of the night as he addressed you in London . . .” she wrote to Edward Sackville-West. “It still seems unbelievable. Certainly unimaginable.” Just a month earlier, she had given her husband a birthday party, and Orson Welles had come, and Lillian Gish and Helen Hayes, and Paulette Goddard had brought an eight-pound birthday cake inscribed Mon Coeur, and Charlie Chaplin “gave an exquisite performance, among other things a dance he is going to do with a balloon.”
    The origins of The Great Dictator, like many of Chaplin’s creations, are somewhat obscure. Chaplin himself credited Alexander Korda with having suggested in 1937 that he “should do a Hitler story based on mistaken identity,” but he added that he “did not think too much of the idea then.” (Some years later, a pudgy and walrus-mustached writer named Konrad Bercovicci sued Chaplin for more than six million dollars, claiming that he had suggested not only the basic idea of Chaplin as Hitler but even such details as “a ballet dance with a globe.” When the suit finally came to trial in New York, Bercovicci testified that he and Chaplin had discussed his five-page outline for several hours but that Chaplin was worried “because the State Department says we cannot ridicule the heads of two states with which we are at peace.” Chaplin in turn testified that he had never seen Bercovicci’s outline, and the two then settled out of court for a payment of $95,000 to Bercovicci.)
    Chaplin’s political doubts and misgivings about The Great Dictator seem strange today, but they apparently caused him a lot of anxiety during his preparations in the summer of 1939. “United Artists . . . had been advised by the Hays Office that I would run into censorship troubles,” Chaplin wrote rather vaguely in his memoirs. “Also the English office was very concerned about an anti-Hitler picture and doubted whether it could be shown in Britain.” When Hitler actually invaded Poland that September, Chaplin was even more worried, not about official objections now but about how audiences would react to a slapstick comedy about the aggressor. Having already spent more than $500,000 before any filming began, Chaplin stopped all work for a week of conferences and soul-searching, then, with even more secrecy than usual, decided to go ahead. What he had started as a comedy would end with his impassioned appeal for brotherhood: “The clouds are lifting! The sun is breaking through!”
    Less rhetorical men confronted the simple question of enlisting. When David Niven finished filming Raffles on September 1, he told one of the film’s writers, Scott Fitzgerald, that he was returning to London to join the armed forces. Fitzgerald declared that he wanted to go too. “I missed out last time,” he said. “I left it too late. I didn’t join up until 1917—I never got to go overseas.” Fitzgerald “became very maudlin,” Niven recalled, “with his mind firmly focused on Agincourt and white chargers.” Shortly thereafter, Fitzgerald was once again fired. “It always happens,” he told Niven as he returned to work on The Last Tycoon. (He was to die of a heart attack the following year.)
    On Sunday morning, September 3,