The Thief of Time Read Online Free PDF Page B

refreshment – I had made up my mind.
    I would go to Hollywood and work in pictures.
    It was a three-day train journey across the country but it afforded me an opportunity to plan my assault on what I had already perceived would be a fast-growing art form. There would be money to be made in it – already the newspapers were starting to carry features on the enormous riches and playboy lifestyles of Keaton, Sennett, Fairbanks and others. Their tanned visages, so different from their pale, often impoverished
alter egos
that we saw fooling around on screen, shone out from the front pages of the dailies as they pranced about in tennis gear on the lawns of some lavish estate, or in black tie at the latest birthday party for Mary Pickford, Mabel Normand or Edna Purviance. It would not be hard to find a route into this society, I assumed, as I was wealthy and handsome and a recently demobbed Frenchman to boot. With such credentials, how could I fail? Already I had phoned ahead to a real estate agency and rented a house in Beverly Hills for six months and knew that simply by attending a few select parties I could meet all the right people and perhaps spend a year or two enjoying myself. The war was behind me; I needed entertainment. And where better to go in order to find it than the emerging wonderland that was Hollywood, California?
    But I was also interested in the idea of working within the industry, at a production level of course, as I am no actor. My first thought was that I should involve myself with the financing of motion pictures, or possibly their distribution, which was still in the process of evolving and creating a network efficiency. While stuck in my railway carriage during those three hot days, I read an interview with Chaplin who at the time was working at First National, and while he came across as a man obsessed with his work, an artist who wanted nothing more than to produce feature after feature after feature without breaking for so much as a weekend in the sun, I felt that there was some hidden meaning in his carefully phrased comments about his relationship with FN. It was a decent place to work, he seemed to be suggesting, but there was no overall control for the artist. He wanted to own the place, he said, or at least run his own studio. In the meantime I believed I could be of some use to him and wrote him a letter suggesting a meeting, implying that I wanted to invest in the motion-picture industry and saw him as its most reliable asset. If my money was to go anywhere, I pointed out, I wanted to take his advice on where I should put it. Perhaps, I suggested, I should even invest it in Chaplin himself.
    To my great delight, he telephoned me one evening while I was sitting at home alone, bored with my own company, weary of solitaire, and invited me to lunch the next day at his house, an offer which I gladly accepted. And it was there that I met Constance Delaney.
    At the time, Chaplin was living in a rented house only a few streets away from my own. He had just come through a messy divorce with Mildred Harris and the papers had only recently let the scandal die away. He was not the man I expected, so used was I to seeing his tramp incarnation on the screen and in photographs, and when I was led out to the pool area and saw a short, handsome man sitting alone reading Sinclair Lewis, I wondered at first whether he was simply an acquaintance or a family friend of the film star. I had heard that Chaplin’s brother Sydney also worked in Hollywood and wondered whether it might not be him. Of course, once he rose and came towards me, his face broad with a white-toothed smile, I knew immediately who he was but somehow failed to engage that strange sensation one develops upon meeting a person one has only previously seen on a cinema screen, enlarged beyond all reality, a sequence of lines and dots bouncing across canvas. As we talked, I examined his face for elements of the familiar screen persona but the