he: A Novel(43)
Lois is seven months pregnant.
It has been arduous for her, more difficult than it was with their first child. Lois senses that she is carrying a boy because only a male could cause her so much torment. When Lois is not being physically ill, she takes to the couch and stares out the window, or moves to her bed and attempts to sleep. She is too queasy to read, and music, however soft, sounds excessively loud to her ears. Only her daughter brings her joy.
On Monday, May 5th, 1930, he and Babe begin filming their new three-reel picture. The cast is good, but once it is finished they will have to film it three times more for the French, German and Spanish markets, painstakingly learning to speak the dialogue phonetically. Two weeks of work, made harder by the knowledge that there are not enough gags to fill three reels, which means more dialogue, which means more stumbles through unfamiliar tongues.
On Tuesday, May 6th, 1930, Lois complains of pains.
Something’s wrong, she tells him.
He tries to soothe her, but Lois will not be soothed. A doctor is called, and then an ambulance.
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.
90
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.
92
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.