I Couldn't Smoke The Grass On My Father's Lawn by Michael Chaplin

| COULDN'T
SMOKE THE
® GRASS. |
ON MY
FATHER'S
LAWN
3 -—
I Couldn’t Smoke the
Grass on My
Father’s Lawn
by Michael Chaplin
This book is the story of Michael Chaplin,

son of Charlie Chaplin and the former Oona
O’Neill. It is the story of a son of a famous
father; of a teenager who could not settle
to life at home as lived by his parents—a
life of luxury, celebrity dinner parties and
clashes of temperament. It is the story of
a boy who rebelled against his environment
in an attempt to find a positive approach to
life.
He had lived in a Hollywood mansion—
“talent to the left, money to the right”—
surrounded by swimming pools and sery-
ants. He had stayed in five-star hotels on
three continents. And, after the family
reached its present home—the Manoir de
Ban at Vevey in Switzerland—he had been
submitted to Swiss education at its most
expensive.
To many sons, this would have been a
head-start in life. To Michael Chaplin—and
his decision is to be respected—it was not.
So, at the age of fifteen, he left home on
a sojourn that took him temporarily into
the twilight world of Marijuana and LSD;
on a fantastic trip through Europe; into the
Royal Academy of Dramatic Art on a brief
course of study, mutually ended; to a little
Scots village called Moniaive for his mar-
riage, pursued by convoys of reporters and
camera men; and finally to a dingy flat in
London’s Hampstead where he now lives
with his wife, Patrice.
Illustrated with photographs
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
NEW YORK
| Couldn’t Smoke
the Grass
on My
Father's Lawn
MICHAEL CHAPLIN
G. P. Putnam’s Sons New York

|Couldn't Smoke
the Grass
on My
Father's Lawn
FIRST AMERICAN EDITION 1966
Copyright © 1966 by Michael Chaplin

First published in Great Britain by Leslie Frewin (Publishers)
Limited. World Rights reserved.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 66-20304
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Photo Credits:
ASSOCIATED NEWSPAPERS
A, FAVEZ, SWITZERLAND,
KEYSTONE PRESS AGENCY
SEVEN ARTS PRODUCTIONS (PARAMOUNT)
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
page vii
1
TRAVELS IN TIME AND SPACE
pageI
2
LISTENING TO THE SILENCE
page 65
3
LONG, LOVELY, NEVER LONELY RIDE
page 127
4
DEAR FATHER, HAVE FAITH
page 151
EPILOGUE
page 169
Illustrations will be found following page 54.
PROLOGUE
This book is a story in itself. When the papers were full of

my face and the National Assistance story in April 1965,
Charles Hamblett and Tom Merrin suggested that the world
would like to hear my story. Nineteen seemed to be a little
young to be writing my memoirs, but we got together and
here they are. I don’t envy anyone the tasks of collecting the
incidents and events, the joys and sorrows that have made up
my life, and translating them into a language that the read-
ers of the world will understand and enjoy. Tom and Charles
sure put a shine on the rough surfaces of my story.
We have certainly had our ups and downs. The Court
case which I brought against the Publishers in September was
the result of one of the downs. I thought we were never going
to lick the story into a shape which would not turn the world
against me forever. So I tried to stop the whole machine,
and collected some pretty uncomplimentary remarks from
the judges for my pains.
Since then, the book has been revised and, I hope, im-
proved. The story you are about to read is not quite the one
that so horrified the judges, but I think it has gained from
the alterations and additions.
So here it is. I can only ask the reader to consider it as a
story of free-wheeling adolescence rather than an itemized
account of the facts of my life.
Travels in Time
and Space
M Y father is not like any other father. Complex, gifted,
strangely creative, his irrationalities have never been those of
the average commuter. He was, and is, to put it mildly, a bit
of a handful as a father. I first became aware of the general
impression that he is an exceptional man through the reac-
tions of other people toward him. Visitors whose names at the
time didn’t mean a thing but who, in retrospect, turned out
to be Noel Coward, Graham Greene, Jean Cocteau, ‘Truman
Capote, Ian Fleming, and sundry other types, greeted him
like a god on furlough from Olympus. There was also a
fairly constant traffic of suitably awed interviewers, photog-
taphers, intellectuals, painters, actors, socialites and name-
1
I Couldn't Smoke the Grass on My Father’s Lawn
droppers: and whenever these showed up at the Manoir de
Ban, my father’s spread in Switzerland, they cast and, in turn,
reflected the aura of greatness around the old guy.
There must have been a time when my unformed infant
instincts and undeveloped mind simply sensed and felt this
man as a kindly, volatile, moody, gay, self-absorbed, inven-
tive, funny, affectionate, stern, sad, brilliant, autocratic, irra-
tional, snobbish, splendid, silly, unjust, loving, perceptive,
indifferent, sensitive, cruel, jolly, extension-in-reverse of my
own flesh and thought and feelings. A time when I was, quite
naturally, just another limb of the father-octopus. There
must have been a time, perhaps in the big house in Beverly
Hills, California, which was our home before my father
settled in Europe, when I may have been able to take for
granted my surroundings and family and my father as head of
the household.
But I cannot remember such a time, and my memories of
the first five or six years of my life have become only a series
of shifting impressions as intangible as cloud formations on a
high April afternoon.
Fathers can be fun, I’m told. They can love and fondle and
toss you around like a softball and tell marvelous stories and
sing funny songs and do mad little dances. With a magician’s
skill they can pull rabbits and toys and goodies out of the
giant cornucopia of their consistently coming-and-going
omnipresence. Fathers can be such rare fun, until that old
debbil ego raises its ugly head. That’s when the trouble be-
gins.
It’s a matter of attitudes, of biases. It was some time be-
fore I had really dug the fact that my father had risen out of
one of the most brutal and callous social setups ever wished
on suffering man by man himself, the late-Victorian era in
that Britain of potbellied prosperity when a handful of top-
Zz
Travels in Time and Space
hatted established merchants and City financiers and feudal

overlords ritzed it at the expense of a degraded mass of
artisans, laborers, and Dickensian clerks and shopwalkers. A
time when unhealthily overfed and underexercised pooh-
bahs drove in their carriages through city streets marred by
their monstrous architecture, deliberately ignoring the stink-
ing, phthisic, visibly dying children grubbing for bones, stales,
and rotted vegetables in the gutters and trash bins. A time
when formal charity appeased the small guilts of the wealthy,
when social justice was a dirty word used only by “grubby
anarchists” and ‘“bolshie suffragettes’—the ‘long-haired
beatniks” of their day.
Well, that was in another century, and I am quite aware
that today all the world seems to know that Charlie Chaplin
had a hard time as a kid and next to no formal education. But
does that entitle him to give me a hard time because I have
found it difficult to adjust to the kind of “‘posh” education he
decided was best for me? I say it does not give him that right.
Conversely, I claim the right to differ from my father on this
or any other matter concerning my growth and development
as a human being. Is this so very wrong? Having moved
around on my own during the past three or four years, I have
found that this kind of family mishmash happens fairly
frequently.
Unfortunately, when it happens to a Chaplin it becomes
the Barretts of Wimpole Street on ice. Okay, so that’s how
the hemp hiccups. That’s how the bongo bingles.
Go.
Nobody made a big deal about my birth in the Santa
Monica Hospital at Beverly Hills on March 6, 1946. I was
one of those terrifyingly normal, uneventful arrivals, and (in
common with the rest of the children) I never got around to
being baptized or christened. Neither my father nor my
3
mother has ever put too much emphasis on the religious kick.
Perhaps this is because he is a Protestant, she a Catholic.
Once in a while, in some of the Swiss schools I’ve been to,
the monks have tried to get me hooked on the Father, Son
and Holy Ghost bit, but when they don’t make a big deal of
it back at home it doesn’t carry too much weight elsewhere.
This, and the fact that a fantastic interest in zoology set me
at an early age to reading all about Darwin’s theory, was to
turn me off religion as food for any serious thought.
From what they tell me I followed up a perfectly normal
birth with a perfectly ordinary babyhood. None of the ad-
vanced extrovert bit that a merger of the O’Neills and the
Chaplins might be expected to throw up.
Let me give you the scene, then, as I recall it. My first
home was the usual movie star’s mansion bit, complete with
swimming pool and tennis court and domestic staff. There
was always plenty of action going on around the tennis court;
my father loved the game and guys like Bill Tilden would
drop in and help sharpen up his play and talk the usual
tennis balls. We never knew quite who was going to drop in
and I suppose there were all the usual Hollywood names.
Mother was a mistress of the gentle art of making them feel
relaxed; at least it seemed that way to me whenever I saw her
listening to my father’s slightest anecdotage even when I
knew perfectly well that she’d heard it a hundred times
before. But, he always has a wonderful way of telling them.
I slept in a long narrow room leading onto a porch. My
elder sister Geraldine was next door. There was a hatchway
of some kind between our two rooms and now and then we
would communicate through it. I must have been about
three when this first clear memory of my father was planted.
He had put a standard lamp in my room and he told me
firmly: “If you break this lamp you'll get a spanking.”
4
I was always fiddling with things and breaking them and
maybe I’d broken a previous lamp and my father had had a
gutful of it. I don’t know. Sure enough, I broke the lamp.
It wouldn’t go, and I fiddled with it with some intention of
mending it. Father was told about it and he charged up to the
bedroom and, finding me standing in the room with an em-
barrassed grin across my kisser, he came over and hit me on
the ass.
I turned and smiled. “That didn’t hurt.”
He hit me again. Guess he wanted to teach me to have
respect for valuables. (Strange to say, I feel the same way—
when it happens with other people. I am not interested in
possessions, considering them just so much junk weighing
you down and hampering your freedom of movement, yet I
have a friend who is always breaking things deliberately.
This infuriates me—one of the few things that do manage to
rile me—and there are times when I’m tempted to repeat the
infantile pattern and hit him across the ass.) This second
smack from my father drew the same reaction from me as the
first.
“It didn’t hurt,” I said.
I was very defiant. I was holding back like a maniac, deter-
mined not to let him think he was bugging me. My father
knows pretty well how to make a point and soon I burst into
tears and ran out of the room.
I think I felt bad, and maybe so did he.
But it was the only time. I never went crying to anybody,
ever.
Maybe this was wrong. Now Geraldine was smart. Any-
body try to hit her and at the first tap she would howl like it
had half killed her. She would ham it up, lay it on thick. It
worked every time. Geraldine has always been smart. She’s
not as complex as me . . . she’s got brains, a good sister.
I Couldn’t Smoke the Grass on My Father’s Lawn
Our next-door neighbor in Beverly Hills was William
Wyler, the big movie director and producer . . . it was that
sort of a neighborhood, talent to the left, money to the right
and shoe polish right down the middle.
Wyler had two daughters. One of them, Judy, used to talk
to me over the garden fence, and once in a while she would
come over to swim in our pool.
The swimming pool, that Hollywood status-hole, was the
cause of another parental squall. By a sheer fluke, I pushed
my younger sister, Josephine, into the deep end and for
weeks afterwards I felt like a failed murderer. I was playing
with a flashlight which had been given me as a present, when
Josephine crept up and grabbed it: She was at the edge of
the pool; thinking she’d drop it in the water I reached out
to snatch it back from her, yelling, “Here, give it to me!”
In the struggle she fell into the water.
She couldn’t swim a stroke. So I yelled for our swimming
teacher who had gone into the changing house nearby. I was
petrified, unable to do a thing to help Josephine. The swim-
ming teacher rushed out of the changing house and dove into
the pool, still wearing her glasses. I remember them glinting
in the sun and thinking how funny she looked, but I was
stunned with horror and amazement, stunned emotionally,
and didn’t at first respond when the swimming teacher
grabbed Josephine under her armpits and held her face above
the surface, moving slowly to the side of the pool.
“Here, catch her hand,’ she yelled. “Don’t just stand
around doing nothing.”
I caught hold of Josephine’s hand and helped to get her
out of the water. She lay on the hard marble surface, gasping
and puffing, and making little coughing noises, like a puppy
choking, while her slim little body moved convulsively in a
widening pool of water. Giving me a hard, reproachful look,
6
the swimming teacher picked up my sister and carried her

into the house. I trailed in behind them, still feeling
numbed, the flashlight forgotten.
Apparently, the story got spread around that I had de-
liberately pushed my younger sister into the pool. My father
went around like an Old Testament prophet, stern and aloof,
and I had the feeling that people around the pad were
scared of what I might do next, like going for the cook with
a meat ax or burning the joint down around their ears. At
times I was probably jealous of my younger sister. Maybe
at that age I did, at times, want to push her in the pool. But
that particular accident could have happened to any pair of
kids beside a large pool.
Still, the way it turned out, I sometimes got the feeling
that I was regarded as some kind of an outcast living in a
house divided over what I’d done, some maybe giving me
the benefit of the doubt while others went around hinting
darkly that I’d end up in the electric chair. Perhaps if my
father had taken me aside and said, ‘‘Quit worrying, son, I
know it was an accident. It could have happened to anyone.”
If he had said that, maybe the rest of this story would have
been different. I don’t know, but I certainly don’t remember
hearing any such words from him.
There were pleasant days. The family was always going in
for those typically Beverly Hills children’s birthday parties
with chauffeurs and nannies bringing a slew of rich young
neighborhood kids carrying flashily gift-wrapped presents for
the lucky celebrant. Such gifts were usually ordered from the
stores to establish the status of the parents, and if my own
experience is anything to go by, nine out of ten times those
kids didn’t even know what was in the packages until they
were unwrapped on the lawn or in the rumpus room. There’d
be kid games, and inevitably some brat would fall down and
7
I Couldn‘t Smoke the Grass on My Father’s Lawn
cut a knee, or tear a dress, and be carried off to its limousine
bawling its lungs out. I’d get confused, never knowing or
really caring who had given me which presents or what to do
with them.
This confusion of toys and possessions may explain a lot
about my life, as it applies to people as well, but on the toy
kick I found that I could not accept the existence of two
playthings and enjoy myself with both of them. I always had
to sit down and figure out which one I wanted, pick out the
best one and haul that around with me all day.
Two disturbed me, upset my thinking processes.
I was more interested in pet animals than toys. Possessions
have never meant much to me, any property I happen to
accumulate I either give away or sell when I’m in need of
bread. It’s the same with.clothes. I dress the same, winter and
summer, and find this a healthy way of getting from one
season to the next without elaborate changes. If anyone mis-
guidedly tries to improve my wardrobe with gifts of socks or
shirts or sweaters, I just leave the stuff lying around till some-
one picks it up and takes it away or I make a pile of it and
take it round to a pawnbroker or old clothes dealer. I collect
books, but even these keep disappearing. I don’t need much:
a roof, a mattress, blankets, a few cans of soup and a crust of
bread and some raw carrots. Books, music, a pad in which to
sleep and gab with people who share your interests .. .
what else does a guy need?
My close friend as a child in Hollywood was Michael
Boyer, who died a little while ago. We used to argue about
whose father was the greatest. Once I went with Michael
to see a film starring his father, Charles Boyer, in which he
played a murderer, a real manly part. In the last scene he
gets killed down . . . that film really took me for a trip.
Shortly before this I had seen The Gold Rush. 1 thought
8
the Boyer film was much better. As I got home my father was
in the hallway, about to go out. He asked me if I had enjoyed
the film.
I told him, “It’s a much better film than yours.”
He laughed.
“Thanks a lot,” he said as he went out.
The Gold Rush seemed very sad to me. It depressed me a
bundle. The futile man, all this suffering he goes through—
for what? Getting kicked around, conned out of his mind.
When he smiles at a girl who, he thinks, is smiling at him,
man, great scene, but what a drag. I couldn’t make a rapport
between my father and that sad little guy in the film.
On birthdays and other times of togetherness we ran films
at home. The first film of my father’s I saw was The Great
Dictator. I saw the opening scene . . . the one with the big
cannon where the shell chases the man. I was about four years
old and thought it very funny, I really dug it.
Other films of my father’s that I’ve seen are: Modern
Times, A King in New York, The Count, Limelight, Shoul-
der Arms, A Dog’s Life and The Pilgrim. He says his best are
City Lights and Monsieur Verdoux. I want to see them.
The first non-Chaplin feature film I remember seeing was
King Kong. I saw it with Michael Boyer in a public cinema
in Hollywood and thought it was a gas.
“That movie makes monkeys out of both our dads,” Mi-
chael chortled.
It was only after we moved to Switzerland that I began
fully to realize what and who my father was. In Hollywood
every other father I met was in movies and it was no different
to us kids than a guy working down a coal mine or doing
something really glamorous like running an elevator in a
skyscraper. But to find him venerated in a foreign country
was something of a revelation. Over there they call him
9
“Charlot” and strangers would come up to me with shining
eyes and say, “So you are the son of Charlot. You must be
very proud, he is not only a very funny man but also a great
man. Un homme gros, a great humanitarian. May I shake
your hand?”
One incident stands out at a time when my father must
have been up to his neck in trouble with the forces of
enlightenment as symbolized by Senator Joe McCarthy, if
that is his right name. Geraldine and I were sitting on the
grass verge of the road which led down from the house when
a stranger came along.
“Hi,” I said, like kids do. “I am Charlie Chaplin’s son.”
“Yeah?” he said. ““Who’s Charlie Chaplin?”
He did not say this viciously or in a tormenting or kidding
way. He really wanted to know.
I couldn’t believe it.
“You really mean to say you’ve never heard of Charlie
Chaplin?”
“No, son.”
He smiled, and walked on.
Shucks, I thought, there’s Hollywood for you. They build a
guy up as a movie star, whatever that may be, and yet the
poor guy isn’t known in the next block. Crazy, man.
My American schooling was sketchy. I went to kinder-
garten for one day in Hollywood, hated it, and refused to go
anymore.
I next went to a day school called, I think, Bowens. Geral-
dine also went there. They had a little blond girl at the
school and I was crazy about her. At the school festival there
was voting for the school queen. Only two girls were in the
running, Geraldine and this little blonde. I voted for the
blonde, and that one vote made her the queen.
The biggest adventure in my young life was when we all
10
set out for Europe on what I thought was going to be a three-
month vacation. I didn’t realize the trouble my father was
involved in with the United States authorities, or that he had
to sneak us aboard the Queen Elizabeth in New York around
five in the morning, hours before sailing time, to avoid
process servers who were chasing him over a lawsuit brought
against his film company, United Artists. It was only a
technical case, but the way things stood my father couldn’t
afford to risk being delayed getting out of the country.
So-called patriotic organizations and stray busybodies and
cranks were after his blood in a big way, denouncing him as a
Communist and immoralist and no-good shmuck. The in-
vestigators of the Un-American Activities Committee were
on his tail, and the man who had been one of the best-loved
stars of silent movies was now the target of a hate campaign
stirred up by characters like Senator McCarthy. I was six
years old at the time and neither my father nor my mother
ever showed a trace of the stresses and anxieties they must
have been feeling, at least not in front of us children, but it
seems America was going through one of its periodical flurries
of mass hysteria, and Charlie Chaplin was one of its top
whipping boys. It was just a happy holiday time so far as I
was concerned and I thoroughly enjoyed the sea voyage to
England.
The Queen Elizabeth was fascinating to explore, and I
would take off on my own and wander over the ship for hours
until someone picked me up and restored me to my nanny. I
remember having my photo taken several times, and the way
the ship rolled ever so slightly once we reached open water,
and causing my father to have nervous fits whenever I was
found clambering around a lifeboat or trying to climb the
ship’s rails for a better view of the sea. Once I managed to get
down into the engine room, and was fascinated by the
11
rhythmically moving, oily-smelling pistons, wheels and tur-
bines. I must have taken to wandering off at a very early age,
because I remember that whenever I went anywhere with my
parents I would explore places and wind up by being re-
trieved by strangers and dumped back into an atmosphere of
heavy disapproval. I guess I was just curious by nature. I cer-
tainly don’t ever remember being afraid of taking off into
the unknown.
When we berthed at Southampton I was again posted as
missing. They eventually found me in the ship’s gymnasium,
swinging on parallel bars. The boat was so big I didn’t feel
any motion of waves or anything, but the delay had snarled
things up for my parents and we disembarked late, being the
last to go through Customs and getting into the London-
bound express.
I sat very quietly sseigentut the journey, staring intently
out of the window, trying not to attract too much attention.
I’d never seen such green country. Living in California I had
become accustomed to seeing burnt dry mountain scrub and
alfalfa and sage brush. The only greenery was that which we
cultivated on our lawns, and even these tended to get brittle
and faded toward the end of the summer season. But as we
pulled out beyond the suburbs of Southampton I saw every-
thing in fierce, vivid shades of green that leaped straight at
the eyeballs.
My father, feeling the emotion of returning to his home-
land, said very little as we hurtled toward London. I kept
staring through the window at this wonderful greenery, not
saying a word. I felt I had somehow loused up his arrival,
distracting him by being missing when he had to deal with a
lot of reporters and well-wishers hanging around to talk to
him as the ship’s passengers disembarked. But the English
landscape gave me an impression of stability, of sanctuary,
12
which has never quite left me. Whatever happens to me, I
shall always feel safe whenever I’m in England. Well, reason-
ably safe.
A hired limousine drove us from Waterloo Station to the
Savoy, by way of Buckingham Palace which my father
pointed out to us with a touch of native possessiveness. My
parents still didn’t give me any hint of the problems which
had driven them from California, but by now I was begin-
ning to sense some kind of difference, that this was not just a
pleasure trip. I now know that for a while my father was
contemplating setting up a permanent home in England, and
this may have communicated itself to me by the way he
“identified” with the sights and attractions of London. In an
unspoken, unnamable way, this arrival in England was a sort
of homecoming for all of us, charged with an edgy sense of
premonition.
On top of everything else, my father was going around
plugging his latest picture, Limelight, and having received a
mixed reception from the American critics (not entirely on
artistic grounds) he was anxious about the London opening.
This was a normal occupational worry of his, so I couldn’t
help tuning in to some of it. Although most of the political
heat had been taken off the old man since his arrival in
Britain, which is slightly more sophisticated about such
matters, it still meant a great deal to him to get fair com-
mentary on his brainchild from a team of critics who were
not likely to allow political bigotry to slant their reviews.
There was a constant stream of well-wishers and admirers
at the suite, but at times I’d see my father sitting, momen-
tarily alone, in a big chair, staring ahead of him just like any
other preoccupied guy looking for help. That is how I see
him most clearly now, whenever I cast my mind back to that
first time in London. It was a strange time for us all, after the
13
long, unbroken continuity of existence in California. Then,
the sun shone a great deal. Now it was all mauves and indigos
between occasional, glancing shafts of clouded light. I
didn’t think of London as a beautiful city, you discover the
beauty of its squalor later, much later. Right then it merely
matched the somberness of my father’s prevailing mood,
which in turn communicated itself to the rest of us. What
with one thing and another, the old man had plenty on his
mind—and so did we.
Like every other Hollywood kid, I suppose it was expected
of me to at least show my face somewhere or other in one of
my father’s films. Maybe the old man decided all at once
to comply with all the old tradition, for he included Geral-
dine, Josephine and myself all in one scene. We were there
for about two seconds—but we still managed to throw the
whole bit sideways.
The three of us were playing the part of some poor
children standing in the street by a barrel organ in the
opening scene. My father comes along, reeling drunk, walks
up to a door and rings a bell. At this point Geraldine was
supposed to say to him: “Mrs. Alsop’s out,” and he would
reply “What?” We stood on the set at United Artists as my
father came in. Josephine was just a toddler at the time and
didn’t understand this business at all. She put everything way
out of gear by running up to him and asking, ‘““What are you
doing here, Daddy?”
The whole thing had to be started again and we got to the
stage where my father asked “What?” when Josephine, un-
scripted, chimed in again.
“Mrs. Alsop’s out,” she said, just like kids do when adults
say that sort of thing.
“What?” said father again, thrown off balance by his crazy
kid busting in on his part. So Josephine opened up again and
14
this time she really bellowed at him: “Mrs. Alsop’s out!” just
so that he’d be sure to get the message.
They left that sequence in on the film. My father thought
it was great, and that’s how Josephine got her first speaking
part . . . by running away from the script!
Shortly after checking in at the Savoy I promptly went
missing again. I trailed a lift operator downstairs and wan-
dered out through the Embankment exit, with every inten-
tion of wandering back in again after snatching some fresh
air. But an officious porter spotted me and not only hauled
me back in but insisted on calling up to the suite to reassure
my parents, no doubt in order to claim a handsome tip.
Many years later I learned that, in addition to all this
artistic and nostalgic intensity weighing on his thoughts, my
father was also figuring out ways and means of getting his
bread out of hock, having left the bulk of his fortune in
stocks and bonds in a safety deposit of a Los Angeles bank. It
eventually took a great deal of cloak-and-dagger activity on
my mother’s part before he was able to reclaim all this bread,
without which he would have been on very short financial
rations indeed and in danger of winding up his days on some
form or other of National Assistance or, at best, being staked
on handouts from his friends. By this time he knew for sure
that if he set foot on American soil to reclaim it, the fuzz
would impound every cent of it and probably haul him off to
jail on a vagrancy charge, or any other rap they cared to slap
on him. It was a real sad scene.
Despite the initial run-in with the hotel porter, I con-
tinued to wander off at odd times during the rest of our stay
at the Savoy. I think the explanation is due to the fact that,
until we left Beverly Hills, I’d never mixed with other
people, or lived away from home. I just didn’t know the
difference between one pad and another and that there were
15
different sets of rules for different types of pads, like ships,
hotels, and the homes of others.
I just went on feeling like I was still back at our first home,
and didn’t realize it wasn’t the done thing to importune
strangers with small talk or trespass on their premises as the
jive goes. Moving around in this new environment I had
(after six years of unrestricted home life at the Beverly Hills
spread, the only life I’d known) to learn all sorts of new
rules.
I’d go up to a couple as they were unlocking the door to
their room at the Savoy, and say, “Hi! what’s your name?
Mine’s Michael.”
They didn’t seem to give me the attention I was used to at
home, and usually the guy would mutter something about
precocious American kids before pushing the chick in ahead
of him and slamming the door in my face.
I never really did get to know how to handle the scene
once I was away from home base. On the other hand, it
loused me up for home comforts because instead of getting
back to a refuge from all this outside hostility I’d be given
the silent treatment for going off on the lam without telling
anyone in the first place. What could I do? If I told them I
was planning to take off somewhere, they’d either say no, or
insist on sending a nanny along with me. Although my father
was always a busy man, he always managed to find a moment
to listen to my ideas, but he rarely had time to join me in
the fulfillment of them.
So I'd take off. I’d get wary of talking to strangers, but I
couldn’t resist nosing around from time to time. I’d walk up
and down those thick-carpeted hotel corridors, talking for
hours to the lift operators, hall porters, waiters, messenger
boys. In fact, talking to anyone who could bother to stop and
shoot the breeze for a while.
16
“What's the matter with you?” my father inquired one day.
“Why don’t you stay with your nanny?”
“I want to go home,” I said. “I don’t like this place. Please
take us all back to our old home.”
“We can’t go back,” my father said. “Not for a while.”
“Why? Why?”
His face would get sadder and longer, but this made me all
the more insistent. I’d sort of panic inside though nothing
would show on the surface. It’s like animals when you ship
them off to the slaughterhouse; you don’t know where you’re
going but you know it’s not back to your old stable, and you
panic. I didn’t know where we were heading for and, of
course, neither did my parents.
“Be patient,” my father would say. “Wait. You and your
sister are going to stay for a few weeks on a farm.”
“Will you and Mother be with us?”
“No, we have to go to France and Switzerland. Business,
you know.”
“Why can’t we come, too?’
“Sorry.”
“T hate farms.”
“You'll like this one.”
That was as far as I ever got. You don’t argue with my
father, not even when you're at the edge of panic and
wondering why the wind hasn’t blown you off the precipice
you're standing on. Weeks after our arrival in London my
father was still playing it cool. Officially he had to continue to
pretend we were all on a European vacation. On the other
side of the Atlantic they were waiting for him to make one
false move.
The quality of mercy was again barely visible in the official
American attitude to my father’s refusal to go along with the
prevailing anti-Communist hysteria of the Better Dead than
17
Red variety, and his uncompromising belief that Russians,
Chinese, Africans, Indians, and others are people with as
much right to be considered part of the human family as the
offspring of Cincinnati haberdashers. A quaint old-fashioned
sentiment, perhaps, but then my father is a quaint old-
fashioned gentleman.
For these and sundry other rational beliefs, which might
understandably not go down too well in Alabama, my father
found it expedient to pitch his camp outside U.S. territory
altogether. The fact that he had never chosen to become an
American citizen was another strike against him, though he
always paid his taxes and did not discourage his two older
sons by previous marriage—my half brothers, Charlie, Junior,
and Sydney—from serving in the U.S. forces during World
War II.
We had a nurse, a children’s nanny who had been with
the family since the arrival of my elder sister, Geraldine.
She is still with my parents, some twenty-two years later, a
Scottish nanny who, at various times, has looked after us all.
Her name is Miss Edith Mackenzie, but we all call her Kay-
Kay. She was a second mother to me and went everywhere
with us, but even this watchful paragon found it difficult to
keep me from roaming through the heathery glades of the
Savoy Grill when I should have been up in cloudsville.
After the Savoy, we lived for some months on a farm
owned by father’s friend, Sir Edward Beddington Behrens, in
Berkshire. ‘This was great; for a while, it was all strictly
sheepsville and goatsville and fresh milksville straight from
the cow. One day a school inspector came around and began
asking the people who ran the farm a number of questions,
after which a lean and hungry-looking tutor appeared on the
scene, paid for by our absentee parents. Geraldine and I
found we didn’t miss our parents once we were nicely settled
18
on the farm. We were thrown into a conspiracy against this

fount of learning in order to get as much time away from
lessons and on the farm as possible. Geraldine was still at the
tomboy stage, and we’d climb trees and play tag among the
barns and chicken runs and compete with each other to
accumulate scrumped apples or gooseberries or pears from the
rambling orchards in the surrounding countryside.
Free of our parents, we gulped down vast shots of country
air and reveled in this strangely new feeling of liberty. If
we'd received a telegram saying our parents had gone to
the moon, I don’t think we’d have taken it all that badly
as long as we were left to romp forever around that farm.
The farmhands were great guys who spoke with a rich, ripe
country accent that struck us as a great improvement on the
nasal Cockney whine we had heard around London when we
weren’t hearing the mincing, prissy sound of polite Oxford
English. The inheritors of the language of Shakespeare sure
have mangled up their pronunciation. When it’s spoken by a
Laurence Olivier it can be one of the finest vocal sounding
boards of human poetry there is, but this class bit which still
mesmerizes so many of the British can have a brutalizing
effect on English as she is spoke around the fashionable scene.
Mind you, the Beatles have done a lot to level things up, and
today even some of the hangers-on around Buckingham Pal-
ace and other establishment scenes, like the Savoy Grill, are
beginning to get a better grip on their vowel sounds.
Still, I’m talking about pre-Beatle Britain. These farm-
hands gave us a great kick, and whenever Geraldine and I
wished to avoid giving direct answers to the various squares
around the “casbah,” like the tutor, we'd slip into our
particular brand of Berkshire mummerset and completely fog
the issue in hand. But the days of our bucolic idyll were, to
coin a phrase, numbered. Just as we were succeeding in
19
reducing the tutor to a gibbering idiot word came through
that we were about to be restored to our parents.
My parents were wandering around the scene, with father
still plugging his movie in Paris and Rome and Christ knows
where else. Between times he was getting all kinds of eulogies
and laureats, like the time they made him a Chevalier of the
Legion of Honor in Paris in recognition of his humanitarian-
ism and comic genius and similar jazz. ‘They weren't
handing out any buttons for his services to the pigs on that
Berkshire farm so I didn’t know just how great a humani-
tarian he was, although Geraldine, who was born a thousand
years old, probably got some of the message and relayed it to
me in mummerset. I didn’t get the drift of any of this until
we were collected one day in the statutory limousine and
whisked onto a jet at London Airport, headed for Switzer-
land where, we were told, our parents were looking around
for a permanent pad.
Switzerland was a drag from the first touchdown. I’d ex-
pected to see snow all over the scene, and reindeer pulling
sleds up hillside snow tracks. Instead, a watery sun was
shining and the mountains around the lake were low and
rock-gray and snowless. My cherished image of Switzer-
land was totally shattered, and I never quite recovered from
the letdown of those first moments on the damp airport
tarmac.
My parents still hadn’t found a house, so Geraldine and I
joined them at the Hotel Beau Rivage, by Lausanne, and
moved into this new spread with its book of rules reminding
me of the Savoy and making me feel thin just to step out of
bed. My parents had inspected many properties, but none
suited them. It bugged me. I thought, If they’re finding it so
difficult why not get back to Beverly Hills? At least the
climate is good there. I must have thought roomy family pads
20
grew on trees and all you had to do was go out and pluck one
down and move in, along with the butler, housekeeper,
chauffeurs, nannies, tutors, housemaids, gardeners, and a
shmertz to roll your cigarettes.
“Let’s go out with a water diviner and find them a house,”
I suggested to Geraldine.
“Where are we going to find a water diviner?”’ my practical
sister asked.
“Let’s shake a fig tree.”
Even Mother seemed restive. Usually, she seemed to com-
municate with my father by special radar. However, she was
expecting her fifth baby and on one occasion I overheard her
saying:
“It would be nice to find somewhere before the next baby
arrives.”
“Of course it would be nice,” he replied. “But it’s no use
buying the first thing we see. This is important to me, it
will probably be my last home. If I’m to die in a house, I
shall want to enjoy living in it first of all.”
The Beau Rivage (I’m told) is the biggest hotel in
Switzerland. Despite this, my wandering habits soon got the
better of me and I would find myself wandering off the hotel
premises. I’d find my way to a spot beside the Lake of
Lausanne where the swans would hole up and wait to have
bread tossed to them. I’d collect as much bread as I could and
go down to the lake and feed the swans.
They were arrogant birds, always ready to bite the hand
that fed them. This didn’t bug me in the least. In fact, I liked
them for their independence and would spend hours talking
to them, trying to explain the difference of night and day to
them, of darkness and light, kid stuff like that which was also
giving me a hard time figuring it out. One afternoon there
was quite a crowd of Swiss standing around watching me feed
21
the swans, and when one particularly arrogant bird shook it-
self out of the water and flapped over to me in search of
bread it nudged me onto the mossy, pebbled strand at the
water’s edge. Losing balance, I fell into the lake.
I felt terribly humiliated. It wasn’t the swan that bugged
me but that bunch of grinning onlookers. They stood around
holding their hands to their sides and laughing like maniacs
while I floundered in the cold muddy water of that stinking
lake with the swan pecking away at me in case I’d left a few
crusts in my trouser pockets. The water was fairly shallow,
but I still thought someone would step forward and lend me
a hand. But no, it was just a big joke to these burghers.
I padded back to the hotel, dripping water over the thick-
pile carpets, and crept into my room before anyone in the
family saw me in this state. I wasn’t worried about falling
into the water, but I felt disgusted by the indifference of
these jokers who’d watched me floundering around while a
swan pecked at my ass..
“T’ve found the perfect place for us,” my father announced
one morning.
I remember my main concern was whether the property
was bigger than the one we had in America. It was, but it
took a lot to convince me. This was the Manoir de Ban in the
village of Corsier, a little above Vevey. It is a sort of castle,
but without battlements and towers, standing in thirty-seven
acres of land. It has barns, an orchard, and a large vegetable
garden which makes it unnecessary to buy from the stores.
There are fifteen main rooms and a long terrace overlooking
a five-acre lawn.
We moved in almost immediately, along with a staff of
twelve. I was always very friendly with the staff, and associ-
ated with them a lot. I suppose that young boys always look
up to the guy who drives the car or tends the garden. We had
22
a very lively domestic staff then, mostly Italian; they were
always arguing and fighting over something or other just for
laughs. My mother usually left them to it.
‘The personal staff was more sedate. Closest to my father
were Miss Rachel Ford, his business manager, and Madame
Eileen Burnier, his secretary. Kay-Kay was joined by Pinnie,
and together they nannied all the children.
Pinnie is Miss Mabel Rose Pinnegar, who came from
Canada to help Kay-Kay look after the children. Today they
are both in their fifties, both devoted to the family and they
get on marvelously well together. I always remember Kay-
Kay with particular warmth.
One of Pinnie’s favorite games with the children in their
dining room is to do her impression of a spoilt child, pawing
around at food and eating like a pig. Halfway through the
act one day she choked on a piece of cake and showered us
with crumbs. In spite of her high principles, she sure has a
sense of humor.
After a few months I got to know my way around the
spread and my memories of Beverly Hills began to grow
faint.
We were first of all sent to the village school at Corsier,
which bugged the wits out of us because nobody there spoke
anything except French. Even Kay-Kay and Pinnie had some
difficulty in adjusting to this situation at first, but children
are fairly quick to pick up a strange language and after a
while Geraldine and I were able to talk rapidly and keep our
nannies guessing if we didn’t want them to know what we
were discussing. In time, our mastery of French served us
better than our Berkshire mummerset. Not that I confided
all that much in Geraldine now for by this time she had
developed more rapidly than I had done and was not only
willing, but perfectly able, to beat the living daylights out of
23
me if I crossed her. That Geraldine can be real tough when
her mind is made up.
After a few months I was sent to a private school near
Montreaux. No doubt my Father thought I was getting the
best academic grounding that the good old Swiss franc could
buy when, in fact, through no fault of the school’s, I was
getting nowhere fast. Most of the time I just fooled around,
staring into space. If that school had a message, I didn’t get it.
A teacher there was crazy about puppets. This I really
dug. All he wanted to do was play with his puppets, and some
of us encouraged him to do just that even though he should
have been teaching us. We had only to get him to open his
puppet bag and he’d be off and running. I think he later took
off and became a professional puppeteer, touring the whole
of Switzerland with a pupet show he’d worked up in the
classroom. I liked the guy, he had crazy ideas.
But there’s always one around to give you a hard time
whatever mob you run with. At this school we had a real
martinet whose special mission, it seemed at the time, was to
needle me into a state of submission to his personal notions
of child education.
One day another boy and I were playing in the school
grounds when we spotted a swallow’s nest wedged between a
tree trunk and a bough. We climbed up and, in our efforts
to see what was in the nest, shook the tree. Suddenly it and
the baby birds spilled out on the ground and were killed.
When next morning I arrived at school, I found my fellow
pupils lined up to face me in the school yard. I wondered
what we were supposed to be celebrating, until the teacher
who was making all this effort to teach me his version of the
Golden Rule detached himself from the ranks and marched
toward me holding the shattered bird’s nest on the end of a
24
stick. The other boy who'd climbed the tree with me was no-
where in sight.
Thrusting the stick forward till the wrecked nest was a
fraction of an inch from my face, he thundered:
“There’s your previous day’s work, Chaplin. I hope you are
proud of it.”
I looked beyond the nest at the line of pupils staring at me.
I wondered where my companion of yesterday was, but I
didn’t refer to him or say anything. I backed away a few
inches and stared at the teacher. I had nothing to say to him
or anyone. ‘The teacher slung the nest at my feet and prodded
it with his stick.
“Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, you miserable boyr’’ he
yelled.
It meant nothing to me. None of it did. The military
lineup of my classmates, the anger of the teacher. I'd prodded
a nest and it had fallen to the ground. I could see no harm in
this. The intention, obviously, was to make me feel guilty,
but I don’t think I quite understood what they were trying to
say. It didn’t sink in. I couldn’t understand what all the noise
was about. In a strange way I felt as I had done when I
wandered around the corridors of the Savoy. ‘That someone
was looking after me. I felt curiously protected. I didn’t
know who. My teacher? No. My mother? I never felt the
need to confide in her, I just felt sure of her. Who, then? I
couldn’t say. But somehow I felt that if anyone touched me,
hurt me, I would have someone to protect me. Perhaps it
was a combination of my father, my mother, and Kay-Kay.
It was something I never reasoned out.
Shortly after this inspirational episode I left this place
and was sent to boarding school. Here some of this strange
feeling of being protected left me. I don’t know when this
happened, or why. I simply found I couldn’t confide in any-
25
1 Couldn’t Smoke the Grass on My Father’s Lawn
one anymore. There was no understanding. I felt there was
a limited amount I could say to a grown-up person—the rest
would not be understood. I found myself ducking out of
direct meetings with grownups, dodging them.
When I first went to boarding school I was the youngest
there. The younger pupils slept two in a room. I spent four
years at this school, Ecole Nouvelle de Paudex, the first three
as a boarder and then one as a day boy. After that I was sent
to the International School in Geneva and I was also sent to
two crammer’s courses at the St. Bernard monks’ school, first
at Champittet and on a second, brief occasion, to their
hospice at Simplon. These sin sessions with the good monks
of St. Bernard were mercifully short. I just wasn’t on their
wavelength.
The Ecole Nouvelle: was a comparatively small school
totaling around eighty pupils. After the two in a bedroom bit
we’d moved into a dormitory and finally ended up with a
study of our own. That was the best you could get. We
studied English, French, Italian, mathematics. I didn’t take
much interest in any of this.
The kinky bit about Swiss education is that the more you
pay for it the less value do you get out of it, always provided
you work these things out in terms of quid pro quo as my
father seemed to be doing. I find it hard enough to count up
to ten except when the moon is high (when I can sometimes
reel off a few billions in a split second) but I have a hunch
that my father thought he was getting something extra special
by shelling out the old bread in all directions on the Swiss
educational circuit. Maybe he did get some kind of a charge
out of doing this but all it did for me was to give me a life-
long aversion to snobs. I’m not blaming the schools, it’s just
that I had difficulty in “‘connecting.”’
That’s the really goofy bit about the Swiss education sys-
26
tem. Parents who pay a bundle to get their offspring into

the smart boarding schools take a chance on having these
same offspring bent silly for life. It doesn’t happen in the free
schools, controlled by the Swiss government, for these attract
the more formal teachers, less bizarre and snobbish.
There was one outstanding eccentric at my first boarding
school, a real funny guy. This lovable character suffered a
curious form of amnesia, which showed itself in the most
peculiar habit he had of canceling out whatever he said one
day with something else he said the next. He was constantly
contradicting himself in a way that struck us kids as hilarious,
when it wasn’t too perplexing for even our way-out pack to
understand.
He’d come into lessons and get all worked up over some-
thing he’d read in the newspapers over his breakfast yoghurt.
He’d thump his fist on the offending newspaper item, and
sound off. I remember his conscience was truly outraged by
the press stories he read about Princess Margaret, of Eng-
land, having taken a shine to the Royal Air Force war hero
Peter ‘Townsend. The daily news reports of this world-
shattering event made him so mad he would come into the
classroom literally foaming at the mouth. First time running
on the track he blasted off against the Princess.
“It’s monstrous,’ he bawled, “that a well-brought-up
young woman like this should toss away her glorious heritage
for a mess of pottage. Has she no sense of responsibility to her
people, to her mystical destiny? ‘To the future which divine
fate has assigned her? Has she not read British constitutional
law? Is she prepared to trade in a palace for a semidetached
villa in an unfashionable suburb? Does she not realize what
she is doing to people of breeding and culture everywhere?
People who are relying on her to set an example to others
27
who have not been so fortunate in their birth or their back-
ground?”
Having goofed off some more on this subject he then spent
the rest of the class period going through the gamut of his
other current love-hates. We'd love it when he got mad like
that. It meant we’d do nothing but sit back and listen all
through class.
The next day he stormed into the classroom and—still
foaming at the mouth—launched straight back into the
Margaret-Townsend controversy. Only this time his polemic
took off on precisely the opposite tack.
“What kind of woman is the Queen of England?” he
roared. “Does she show one shred of compassion for her
sister? No. Does she put forward any solution to the plight of
these lovers? No, no, no. She does not lift a finger to help.
Princess Margaret should go to her uncle, Edward, who was
made to renounce the throne before he could marry the
woman he loved. I am sure this royal gentleman would
help her to sort out her problems. If she wishes to marry
this divorced commoner, so be it. He looks a nice, handsome
man to me—I could think of better things for him to do than
rush out of the matrimonial frying pan into the matrimonial
fire—but also there’s no accounting for some people’s inclina-
tion. Still, I do wish she’d go and see her uncle, Edward, and
take the man she loves along with her. She needs help, and
he is such a personable young man.”
Other mornings he would sound off on the perfidy of the
American people and the squalid materialism of their way of
life. He would then tell us that the only people who had
come anywhere near to working out a social system which
showed some respect for human rights were the Russians.
“Would you like to live in Russia?” I once asked him.
28
“IT wouldn’t mind,” he replied. “In fact, I’m seriously

thinking of settling there when I retire from teaching.”
Yet a few days later, when someone told him he would be
spending his next vacation with an aunt on Long Island, this
cheerful maestro immediately went into raptures about the
beauty of the New York skyline. In almost Whitmanesque
words, he serenaded the free-and-easy democracy of the
American people, and their wonderful hospitality.
“T thought you hated America,” I said.
“Where on earth did you get that idea from?” he snarled.
“It’s the only country where a man can get to the top
regardless of whether he was born in a mansion or a log
cabin. It is the land of the future, the only country in which I
would wish to settle permanently when I retire from
teaching.”
“But I thought you wanted to settle down and live in
Moscow after you retire,” I said.
“You should wash your ears out, Chaplin,” the teacher
snarled. “I am seriously beginning to doubt your intelli-
gence, lad. Any civilized man who contemplated settling
down in that evil, backward, godless, totalitarian wilderness
must be half-crazy. I would rather die than so much as set
foot on its bloodstained soil.”
I used to go into a quiet corner and roll around on the
floor laughing at the thought of my old man paying over
good, hard Swiss currency to subsidize an amusing savant
like this—in the interests of higher education yet—when I
would have been far less in danger of having my brains
scrambled in a Chicago orphanage.
Few guys I know who have gone through a smart Swiss
boarding school have not, at one time or another, been
homosexually propositioned. But a kid has to learn to look
out for himself, and though I had one or two such proposi-
29
tions I didn’t get hooked to it the way some of my classmates
did. I certainly had tendencies toward it—who hasn’t?—but
I’d sublimate behind a show of aggressiveness.
I was a touchy, excitable kid. The confirmed homos prob-
ably wrote me off as a bad lay and concentrated their heavy
artillery on more amenable prospects.
Sport didn’t bug me, either way; it wasn’t compulsory. I
had judo lessons and I used to get into fights. My instincts
were fairly well tuned in to the fighting strength around the
school. I was constantly finding myself needing to feel I was
the strongest boy in my class. But I didn’t rush headlong into
fights. I picked my own times and places, and I learned to
wait till I was ready to tackle a guy.
Having always been a loner, I never got deeply involved in
any of the classroom intrigues or rivalries.
Somehow, this attitude gave me a spurious reputation for
being a mean fighter, and nobody of my age would try to put
me on the floor. Every new boy that arrived at the school was
carefully studied by me and if he looked like a tough little
fighter I would get him involved with some other boy until a
fight broke out between them and I’d stand by and study the
new kid’s action and measure his strength. If I thought he
was strong enough to lick me I’d avoid him, and this way I
was never beaten in a school fight—I had to feel sure I could
lick a guy before I’d start anything.
I’ve never fought anyone for a cause. People are always
making excuses for a punch-up, but, actually, the causes are
secondary. I always plotted my strategy most carefully in
order to win, once I was sure of the odds.
Geraldine gave me more trouble, pugilistically, than most
of the boys at school. We’d spend weekends at the Manoir,
and for the first year or two in Switzerland we remained
fiercely competitive. She was always much better than I was
30
and could climb trees higher, and run distances faster than I
could. When we fought over something she invariably gave
me a good licking.
One afternoon, however, we were horsing around on the
lawn when, suddenly, we lost our tempers and started fight-
ing real mean. I eventually got her down on her back and
held her down. She struggled like a wildcat, but it was no use.
We'd reached a balance cf strength and I won. As she went
back to the house, crying, I felt great, knowing I’d reached
the point where I was stronger than she. It made me feel
quite grown up.
Over the years I got thoroughly bored with the whole idea
of school. It got so I really hated it. I’m not a joiner, a mixer.
I didn’t rebel actively. I just didn’t join. I never mixed and
took part in things like football. I must have seemed very
antisocial, always miles away in my thoughts.
I always knocked around with older boys. Many of my
friends were about five years older than myself. When you
mix with someone older than yourself, you look up to him,
and get that slight extra attention from him in return. That is
what I wanted. With someone of your own age you are on
equal terms. I could never accept that. It’s just like I can’t
accept being one of a team.
Any friendships I had at any of my schools I kept very mild
and did not make a thing about them at home. It was a
kookie setup at home, yet I used to hang around the pad
over weekends from school and pull every trick I could
think of to stay over an extra few days. Monday mornings
would find me frantically trying to warm up a thermometer
under my arm beside an electric fire, hoping somehow to
bump up my temperature. Geraldine also tried to dream up
migraine headaches and snuffles. It reached a point where we
would try everything not to get back to school.
31
Geraldine and I would sit around plotting ways and means
of conning Mother into giving us an extra day at home. She
had the brightest ideas, though they had to be real smart to
con anyone around our spread. Though I was now stronger
than she was, Geraldine made it abundantly clear to me
that she was still my elder sister. She had always had a quicker
mind, and if I took an hour doing a drawing she’d do
something better in ten minutes. She was also a better
swimmer and could run faster. Of course, at school she was
always miles ahead of me. Intellectually, she managed to
study somehow.
So I used to make up for my scholastic deficiencies by
letting my imagination run riot and telling the most way-out
stories. They were so convincing that I think I believed them
myself. Finding that straight talk with adults was getting me
nowhere, I’d start telling them anything that came into my
head. Looking back it’s surprising how often it worked,
though what benefit I got out of such efforts escapes me. I
guess it gave me a slight edge over them whenever I saw them
wandering away, shaking their heads in bewilderment.
My father has always been a good storyteller, provided he
had an appreciative audience. Back in Beverly Hills he had
only to appear on the scene and everyone would rush to him
and listen to him like he was a god. At such times I could
have fallen in the pool and no one would have noticed.
I never directly opposed the guy. I always did it indirectly.
As far back as I can think, I was rebelling in some way or
other. Though I preferred to trail around alone in the
grounds of our spread, I’d see these Hollywood types flock-
ing in to have their ears bent by my father. So I’d mosey
over and start telling the most fantastic stories to anyone
who'd listen to me.
I remember there was a lady who used to sit in the same
32
garden chair near the tennis court and gawp in awe as she
watched my father and his buddy, Tilden, smacking the ball
around. But whenever I went up to her and started talking
straight from the top of my head, I’d see her attention
veering toward me and I’d swell up and feel real big.
“You see that tree over there?’ I’d ask. “I planted it
yesterday. No, it’s a different tree to the one you've seen there
before. I had it delivered from a special ranch, up near San
Francisco, and I pulled out the old tree and planted that one
without any help from anyone. I did it in the middle of the
night.”
“Oh, Michael, aren’t you strong,” she’d reply. “Strong and
brave.”
“T went up in the Sierras last weekend and shot me two
mountain lion.”
“Oh, yes, Michael? Wonderful.”
“One of them tried to jump me but I shot him right
between the eyes.”
“Great. Did you bring their skins back as trophies?”
“Sure, I’m having them treated right this minute by an old
trapper who lives at the far end of the canyon. When he
delivers them I'll give you one to hang in your house.”
“You will? That’s very generous of you.”
“That’s okay, I’ve arranged to go out with this old trapper
on a bear hunt. The moment I kill myself a bear I'll get it
stuffed and give it to you.”
“Why, that’s mighty kind of you, Michael.”
“Think nothing of it.”
I don’t know who was conning who, but I certainly
succeeded in drawing this lovely dame’s attention away from
the tennis court when I was doing my spiel. This made me
feel great, until my mother took me aside, later, and told me
33
I Couldn’t Smoke the Grass on My Father's Lawn
not to go too strong on the fairy tales. It wouldn’t bug me. I'd
just shrug and ask, what tales?
I was never a practical liar. I guess my imagination was
just that much more fertile than most.
Once though, I did get a cash bonus for telling a tall
story. This was shortly after we’d gone to Switzerland to live.
We were still going to the village school at Corsier, when one
day the teacher told us to bring our bikes to school for a
safety checkout by the local police constable. It’s the usual
thing at Swiss schools to have periodical checks of brakes,
tires, lights, and to ask a few code-of-the-road questions. But
this applies only to licensed bicycles. All I had was a broken-
down old wreck I’d found in an outhouse and used only to
pedal around in the grounds.
Still, on hearing of the tests I was determined to get my
bike into the act. My bike wasn’t even licensed, but the next
morning I wheeled it quietly down the hill and into the
school yard. Just as I was leaving the estate my father had
popped up and looked incredibly at the old wreck.
“Where are you going with that thing?” he asked.
“The teacher told me to bring it down to school for a
bicycle race,” I promptly lied. “Just a race for the younger
kids.”
“Oh, very well, if your teacher insists,’ my father said
and walked away. He didn’t know anything about bicycles
being licensed in Switzerland.
Now I wheeled the sorry contraption into the school yard.
There were hoots of derision and kids were rolling around
laughing. The police constable came over and told me to put
the thing away in a shed and under no circumstances be seen
riding with it on the road.
“It’s not only an eyesore,” he growled, “‘it’s a menace to
other cyclists. You’d never get a license for it.”
34
Sadly I put the bike away and watched the others do their
tests. After class, I collected the oily old machine and slowly
pushed it up the hill and into the estate. Leaning it gently
against the wall of the outhouse, I gave the saddle a little pat,
and took off for my bedroom.
Pinnie, our good Victorian nanny, was waiting for me.
“Well,” she asked, “how did the race go?”’
“What race?”
“The bicycle race, silly. Did you win?”
“Oh, that?” My chest immediately began to stick out with
pride. “Yeah, sure. Sure I won. I won easily. You should have
heard the cheers. ‘There were ten laps and I set the pace all
the time.”
“Really? How many were in the race?”
“Twenty, twenty-five. But I kept ahead of them all the
time. It was funny, part of the time I rode no-hands. It was
such hot work I had to take off most of my clothes. First my
pullover. Then my shirt. Then my vest. I just pulled them
off without stopping. I kept on peddling like mad and not
holding on to the handlebars. You should have heard them
cheering me, Pinnie. They cheered themselves hoarse when-
ever I passed the crowd gathered round the school gate.
You'd have been very proud of me.”
“But I am proud of you, my darling.”
Tears sprang to her eyes and she put her arms around
me and gave me a big hug. She was so thrilled she went over
to her dresser and pulled out her purse. She fumbled around
and fished out ten Swiss francs.
“Buy yourself something next time you’re down in the
village,” she said, handing me the money.
I felt guilty afterwards. This nice woman giving me all that
bread out of her savings, it slayed me. Bang goes her day-off
movie money, I thought, and just because you have no con-
35
trol over that imagination of yours. All I wanted to do was
look big in her eyes. Now I felt mighty small. ‘There
was always some new action starting up around the pad and I
spent a great deal of time and ingenuity keeping out of my
father’s sight. I was okay till he showed on the scene. ‘Then
I’d dummy up and look into the middle distance. I’d cut out
as fast as I could and hole up in the kitchen, telling the cook
how I’d climbed the Matterhorn or just missed being scalped
by a pack of Comanche Indians in the Rocky Mountains.
Anything, anything to keep out of sight and out of trouble.
At school I shot some way-out lines. That first bedroom
I had at the Ecole Nouvelle I shared with a Chinese kid
called Edmund. Every night when the lights went out I’d tell
him a way-out story that would send him half out of his
mind. My father’s chauffeur at the time was an Italian called
Angelo and I had this fantasy about his being an undercover
Superman who could travel through space.
Night after night I would tell Edmund stories about my
cosmic travels with Angelo, but I’d tell them as fact and the
way I told them must have half convinced him because he’d
treat me like I was a creature from another planet and
whenever Angelo came to collect me Edmund would stare at
him in awe and mutter to himself in Chinese, as if trying to
ward off a paper tiger.
I’d tell Edmund to be sure to keep awake and he would
actually see Angelo arrive through our bedroom window and
put me on his shoulder and blast off into space. The poor guy
was losing sleep like crazy and nodding all day through his
lessons, and the teacher would take him aside and tell him to
go easy on supper before he hit the sack and try not to play
with himself too much.
As soon as Edmund slumped into the cot next to mine I’d
tell him of the dinosaurs Angelo and I had seen the previous
36
night, and the squishy little balloon men we’d met up with
on Venus and how good their Coca-Cola was mixed with
stardust and bottled sunshine. I’d describe a whole zooful of
animals that only existed in my imagination and Edmund
would stretch and yawn but refuse to drop off to sleep in the
hope of seeing the arrival of Angelo.
“Where are you two going tonight?” he’d ask.
“Saturn,” I’d tell him. ‘Want to join'us? You can if you
want to. Why don’t you stick your head under the cold tap
and freshen up? I’m going to have a short nap but keep your
eyes peeled for Angelo. He wouldn’t dream of taking you
along with him unless you were awake to ask him yourself.
He says that’s the rule.”
This crazy Chinese kid must have been somewhat naive
because he never challenged me outright, he’d listen politely
and go along with whatever I told him without contradicting
me. I even told him one morning that I’d taken him on a
space trip while he was asleep. Angelo, I said, had been a bit
dubious about it until I suggested we take him to the king of
the planet and check him out. If the king said no, we'd split
the scene and take Edmund straight back to earth.
“What did the king say?” Edmund asked.
“Why, don’t you remember? He said he’d take you on just
as long as you promised not to tell anyone at school that you
were a space traveler.”
“T don’t remember any of it,’ Edmund insisted.
“That’s right, you wouldn't,” I said calmly. “I remember
now, when I first took off on these trips with Angelo he had
to tell me what happened the next day. It takes a while to
adjust to travel. But you were great, Edmund. We had a
ball.”
“We did?”
37
“You bet. I’ll take you along again soon now it’s okay with
the king.”
“How about tonight?”
I shook my head. “‘No, tonight Angelo and I are going to
visit another planet. The king there isn’t as easygoing as the
one you met last night. But don’t worry, we'll work on it. If
you play it cool we'll have you traveling around space like a
veteran. But it takes time. Meanwhile, don’t you say a word
about this to anyone.”
“No, I won’t. Promise.”
But Edmund shot off his mouth. After the Easter holiday
he was transferred to another room and for a while I slept
alone. He told his mother about our night adventures in the
cosmos and she asked the school to get her son away from the
crazy Chaplin kid. I was slightly embarrassed about the way
Edmund was whisked out of the room we shared but he never
questioned anything I’d told him and I consoled myself that
my stories must have appealed to his Chinese logic.
I'd like to meet him again and find out exactly what he did
make of these space trips of ours.
Everything got to be totally draggy. For three years I took
piano lessons, which I quite enjoyed, but I never seemed to
get deep enough into it to blast my way through the five-
finger-exercise stage. This is a pity, because I get a great boot
out of listening to music on records, especially to Oscar
Peterson, and I'd give a lot (if I had it to give) to be able to
sit down at the ivories and just let rip. I have a lot of music
in my mind, jazz-wise, and it would be fantastic just to sit
down and take a long trip on a piano.
I wasn’t interested in routine lessons, aside from mathe-
matics and biology. Math interested me to a certain extent
because I’d become fascinated by the way a set of equations
amounted to sudden revelations of fact, it was a sort of poetry
38
which J didn’t quite understand. But when my father once
told me that only a handful of people ever understood the
greatest mathematical genius of our century, Einstein, I felt
real good about math and sat back and enjoyed the little I
knew and let the rest go take a walk among the dimensions.
Why intrude on their cool, classic privacy? Every now and
then I’d understand something that was said in mathematics
class, and see for myself how something was made up out of
something else, and I’d ride on cloud nine for hours.
Then would come the letdown, two classes later, with some
academic shmuck thumping me for not paying attention. I’d
still be riding a mathematical formula like it was a Mozart
symphony, and here would be some exasperated teacher
asking me what year the Romans won that battle they fought
near Mylae.
Biology, now that was a gas. I’d always been interested in
animals, and through meeting a French boy called Guillard
Renaud my whole life was changed. I was about eleven at the
time and he was about fifteen. I got to know him through his
brother Tierry, who was a fellow student at the Ecole Nou-
velle. Tierry took me to visit at his parents’ home and there I
found his elder brother up to his eyes in animals. Guillard
had virtually taken over the entire house to run a do-it-
yourself type zoo.
Renaud really dug the animal scene. At fifteen, he was
already a recognized zoologist, and I took every opportunity
to spend weekends and holidays in his company, acting as a
sort of unofficial, unpaid assistant. In his zoo he had alli-
gators, pythons, foxes, rats, and birds of prey—the whole
thing was geared to the comfort of the animals. Infrared
lamps and incubators dotted the house, and he’d installed
roomy cages, and several aquariums with the water heated
39
under thermostatic control, to accommodate every type of
flesh, fish, or fowl, from the Arctic to the Equator.
Renaud was a genius of sorts. He was appointed to the
directorship of a zoo at the age of twenty, and he really knew
how to handle animals as well as study them for research
purposes. I hero-worshiped him. He was everything Id
wanted to be. Animals, for instance, were a passion with me.
Yet whenever I got a new animal as a pet, after a few weeks
or months it would either die off or disappear. But Guillard
Renaud could have kipped down beside a starving alligator
and slept for twelve hours without being harmed. He was as
hip to animals as St. Francis is said to have been; he knew
what to do with them. !
About a year ago he was studying in Alsace, living in digs,
and got accidentally gassed in his room. His gas fittings were
old and he’d mentioned it to someone but nothing was done
to fix them. He was found dead in his bed. I was smashed by
the news, I couldn’t believe that this guy who had taken the
most fantastic risks with really dangerous animals should, of
all things, die in his bed.
Renaud had no thought outside animals, he didn’t exist on
earth except as some kind of interpreter between his fellow
men and the world of monkeys, alligators, fish and birds. I
don’t mean this in a mystical sense, it was strictly prac-
tical. He was a scientist without any of the phony trimmings.
Outside the animal world he was not very practical. He
was clumsy, dropping things all over the scene and not
stopping to pick them up. He was a lousy driver. We would
go up into the mountains weekends looking for various types
of birds and animals, and he’d give very little thought to the
way he was driving. He always took the most fantastic risks.
We'd go adder hunting in the foothills, looking for a
variety of snake called Aesculapian which in Switzerland can
40
only be found in one small valley. We’d drive like crazy
through mountain passes to get there, and I’d have a premo-
nition that neither of us would make old bones. His driving
didn’t bug me, he was Renaud and Renaud was a law unto
himself in my book. But I didn’t ever foresee that he’d die in
bed. I figured he’d get torn to shreds by a lion or alligator.
After all, you can be St. Francis and still run smack into a
wild animal that’s suffering from a brainstorm. Renaud once
had his left leg torn to shreds by an ape in a cage, but it was a
crazy ape he’d never seen before.
One weekend when we’d gone catching snakes we were
lifting stones and looking under them when suddenly we
heard this tremendous screaming and yelling. It was a giant
crow trying to fight off a couple of Italian workmen who had.
climbed up to her nest and were helping themselves to her
young baby crows. These Italians from the south regard
young crows as a great delicacy. The stolid Swiss hate these
Italians, but they don’t stop them from eating young crows
because the authorities regard all crows as carrion and are
very happy when they are grabbed and eaten by the Italian
workmen.
Renaud, hopping mad, dropped the stone he was holding
and raced over to the tree where the workmen were bugging
the mother crow. They already had two dead babies on the
ground and one of the guys was calmly bashing the head of a
third against the trunk of the tree. I’d joined Renaud, and we
were jumping up and down, shaking our fists and yelling for
them to leave the birds alone, when on top of everything, the
father crow joined the mother crow and the pair of them
started jabbing their beaks down on the workman’s hand. It
was like a battlefield with the birds trying to save their babies,
circling up and coming down again like dive bombers. But
41
the workman up the tree wasn’t in the least bugged. He just
looked down at us with a blank face, then he shrugged.
“Here, take this one if it means so much to you,” he said.
“We've got enough to be going on with.”
He slung the half-dead bird at our feet. Deciding it was
useless to put it back in the nest, Renaud and I took it to the
car and patched it up, temporarily.
“Can I have it?” I asked.
“If you promise to look after it, yes,’ Renaud replied.
That night I took the crow home to my place and made a
nest for it in a box in a barn at the back of the house. He was
tame and friendly, and I used to get up at about six in the
morning and feed him and talk to him before setting out for
school. We got along fine, but one day he flew out of the
barn and disappeared. I hoped he would come back, if only
to visit, but he never did.
Shortly after that, Renaud gave me a pet rat to keep in the
barn. He was very tame and used to crawl up my leg so I
could take him into the house without anyone knowing. My
father has an acute sense of smell, so I had to be careful not to
go too near him. I called the rat Rodney, and used to speak of
him like he was one of my school friends.
“Where are you going?” my father would say, looking up
from a book. (He reads a great deal, it’s one of the great
pleasures of his life.)
“Out, to play with Rodney.”
“Very well. Bring him over to tea one day. I’d like to see
this Rodney.”
I couldn’t very well tell him that, earlier that day, Rodney
had been six feet away from him at the luncheon table
clinging, fast asleep, to the inside of my trouser leg.
Rodney became an obsession with me. In fact, I got him so
42
tame that he would come when I called and crawl up my leg,

nosing in my pocket for food.
He was a real wild, black rat who used to live in the barn.
I never liked the white rats they sell you for pets. ‘They’re
so degenerate. All their cunning and cuteness has been
knocked out of them by some breeder determined to rub out
all of the repulsion you normally associate with a rat in
order to sell it as a nice, clean animal. My mother really put
me on rats. She told me how she used to keep them as a young
girl and how brainy they were.
My affection for rats had become something of a family
joke. I have always had rather pointed features and when the
dentist prescribed a brace for my teeth it caused a crazy scene.
“Unless we do something about it now you'll grow up to
look just like one of your pet rats!” laughed my father.
I guess I can’t have been convinced, for I didn’t wear the
brace more than half a dozen times. But I’m sure that didn’t
make me an exception to the rule.
Soon after Rodney took off, Renaud gave me a pet fox to
look after. I was trying to figure out ways and means of
sneaking my latest pet into the house without my father’s
knowledge, but the animal solved my problem for me. Ten
days after I’d installed him in the barn I took him for a walk
in the forest and he shot off into the bushes and disappeared
forever.
My younger brother, Eugene, was shifted into my bed-
room. We used to sleep there with Pinnie to watch over us. It
was a big room and each of us had our own bed, but I must
have resented this arrangement because it gave me less free-
dom to take off and wander around the forest in the early
hours. Even if I managed to sneak out of the bedroom before
dawn without waking Pinnie, which wasn’t too difficult, I’d
have to hurry back before she woke or get in and face a
43
ticking-off for indulging my wanderlust at the expense of
other people’s feelings. From time to time, my father would
get crank letters threatening to kidnap his children and this
made him extra touchy about my strolling off alone at odd
hours of the day and night. ;
Sometimes I would come the big brother and tease Eu-
gene, who is about seven years younger than me. One trick
I remember particularly well. He’d wake up around six
o’clock in desperate need of a pee. Although I was usually
awake long before then, I’d pretend he’d awakened me and
tell him in a fierce whisper to lie still and not disturb nanny.
For laughs, I’d pretend to drop off to sleep again. After a
while, Eugene would think he was safe and make the first
move to sneaking out of the room to the bathroom down the
corridor, without waking me again—as he thought.
His first move would be to fish out a dinky toy from his
bed and cautiously play with it on his pillow. If I didn’t say
anything, he’d push the toy out of sight and slowly push back
the blankets. Watching me like a hawk he’d slip quietly onto
the floor and tiptoe across the bedroom. I’d wait for him to
get his hand an inch from the door handle and then sit up
sharply.
“Get back into bed,’ I’d say, taking care not to wake
Pinnie.
The poor little guy would scuttle back into bed, almost
bent double with his bladder fit to burst. ’'d put my own
head back onto the pillow and wait till I knew he was on the
point of desperation.
“Okay,” I'd say, “you can go now.”
The little guy would rush out of the room with the speed
of light.
However funny my father may have been on the screen, he
never made a big thing of clowning about the home. We had
44
a sixteen-millimeter projector at home and often put on one
of his old films, but he rarely stayed to watch. They gave me
a good laugh then and I only wish now that I had the chance
to see a few more.
In fact, my father seemed curiously reluctant to be re-
minded of anything that happened in the past. There were
no Chaplin relics around the spread. People have sometimes
asked me whether he had kept any Chaplin mementos, like
the famous bowler hat, frock coat, baggy pants, big boots, and
cane. There was nothing like that on view. I’ll say this for
my father: he’s not one to waste a load of time in reminiscing.
There was one little episode that gave me a few quiet
laughs, but my father didn’t think it in the least funny. So
what’s humor, anyway? It depends largely from what angle
you're looking at it, I guess. Take that fat man and the
banana skin bit. If he immediately got up and started laugh-
ing like a drain at the shmucks who were laughing at him,
what would happen? My guess is that the shmucks would stop
laughing.
This was the scene that got me rolling around in the
butler’s pantry while it was actually happening. My father
had bought the house for peace and quiet, remember? For a
while this worked okay. He’d go around with a happy grin on
his face, patting our heads, brushing invisible dust off the
Ming vases, reading books and scripts, dictating to his secre-
tary, or conducting an invisible symphony orchestra while
some new musical composition was running through his
head.
Suddenly all hell would be let loose. There’d be a rattle of
machine guns, and rifle shots, and the first time I heard it I
was convinced war had broken out. This went on for several
days, the reason being that nobody had bothered to tell my
father before he bought the house that it was situated next to
45
a shooting range belonging to the Swiss Army. During ma-
neuvers, these chocolate soldiers would be swarming all over
the valley firing off their hardware. The fact that the Swiss
hadn’t been in a war for centuries made their army, if
anything, slightly more conscientious than those of other
countries. They’d blast off for hours on end at their unseen
targets.
Talk about trouble in paradise. It didn’t bug me any, in
fact, I found it all very exciting. But my father would march
up and down the room exasperated, one hand clasped across
his brow. There he was, the retired philosopher, the man of
peace who had never heard a shot fired in anger, being un-
mercifully blasted out of his mind by the armed forces of the
only neutral country in Europe.
He wrote letters. He grabbed the phone. He alternately
cursed and flattered the Swiss authorities. He contacted the
head man of the Army. He wrote to the squareheads who
wield the political bit in Switzerland. He appealed to the
local mayor. He complained to his doctor.
Somehow, a compromise was reached. I don’t know exactly
what happened, but apparently my father convinced the
Swiss authorities that by holding their target practice so close
to a residential area the military joes were committing a
public nuisance. So the authorities built a soundproof barn
and walled up the shooting area and it was agreed that the
Army could practice shooting only on certain days, and that
my father would be regularly notified well in advance when
these days were scheduled. The barn wasn’t exactly sound-
proof, but it’s no longer like hellzapoppin’ around the old
homestead and my father probably arranges to take part of
his holiday during the worst of the shooting season.
He came out at his best entertainment-wise from our point
of view when he told us some of his own bedtime stories: Now
46
and then he would come out with a real gasser. He'd start
off by telling us the usual corny sentimental stuff out of Hans
Andersen and similar retarded nursery apple polishers. But
then we’d get him to tell us his own stories of the Nice Old
Man, of which he had a wide repertoire.
Two I particularly liked. The first was the Nice Old Man
and the Baby. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin.
The Nice Old Man had offered to mind a baby while the
weary parents spend a day in the country. Well, the Nice Old
Man, who was so very nice, really, dressed the baby in its best
clothes and put it in its pram. He went out in the sunshine
and pushed the pram up and down the streets for miles and
miles. After a while, the baby started crying because the sun
was too hot for him. So the Nice Old Man gave the baby a
pill which made him do a somersault out of the pram. Then
the baby insisted on the old man taking a pill, which made
him do a somersault. In fact, the old man almost broke his
neck. He tried to coax the baby into taking another pill,
saying, “Here, baby, nice baby, swallow this pill.” But the
baby had got smart and said, “No, you take it.’’ So the Nice
Old Man took the baby to the end of a pier and took out two
pills. He pretended to put one in his mouth, so the baby
popped his little pill into his, the baby’s mouth. Immediately,
the baby did a somersault into the sea and the Nice Old Man
pushed the pram in after him and went off to spend the
money the parents had given him to look after the baby.
In the story of the Nice Old Man and the Dog we have the
same setup, only this time the old man has offered to help a
couple by taking their dog for a long walk. The dog had only
one failing, he would insist on peeing all over the place. So
the Nice Old Man decided not to give the dog another drink
until he’d stopped peeing everywhere. So he walked the dog
for miles under the hot sun and the dog would be gasping for
47
a drink ... gasp, gasp... and puffing its tongue out
.. . puff, puff . . . and after many hours the Nice Old Man
wageged his finger at the little dog and said, “Here, doggy,
nice doggy, promise you won’t start peeing and I'll give you
all the water you want.” So the parched little dog wagged his
tail and followed the Nice Old Man to the end of a pier,
where the Nice Old Man took out two huge house bricks.
Tying the bricks round the dog’s neck, the Nice Old Man
said, ‘“There, doggy, jump in and drink as much as you like,”
and letting him off his leash he gave him a little push and the
dog dropped like a stone to the bottom of the sea and the Nice
Old Man went off to spend the money the old couple had
given him to walk their dog.
That was the general drift of the Nice Old Man stories my
father told us at bedtime, although there were several varia-
tions of each one and any amount of different people in-
volved. Sometimes the baby, or the dog, or other victim,
would wise up to the old man in time and give him a shove
into the sea, or over a cliff, or out of an airplane. But the old
man would always bob up again, and we preferred hearing
these adventures to any other nursery story.
It’s widely known now that my father’s mother wasn’t quite
right in the head at some stages in her life, and by the time
she had got to the United States at the very height of his big-
timing it there, the old lady was way, way out on her own
little cloud.
For a treat one weekend, Father took her along to an
ostrich farm in California, where all these big birds were
running around, building up a hefty bankroll in feathers for
the farmers . . . something like an outsize hen run.
With a great flourish, as though it were the only one ever
to be laid in captivity, the guy who ran the place came round
with this big, big egg. It was obviously the pride and joy of
48
the whole setup, and he showed it to my grandmother and
asked her, ‘““Would you like to hold it, Mrs. Chaplin?”
Granny, sitting in her wheelchair, laid hold of the egg and
was giving it the once-over when the mother ostrich came up
to the fence around the compound, looking for her over-
grown hen fruit.
As soon as Granny saw the ostrich she felt really sad. “Oh,
the poor thing wants it back,” she said—and just tossed it
about eight feet into the air over the fence!
That way, another ostrich didn’t get to be born, and Father
had to wheel Granny out of that farm ... but on the
double!
I still had difficulty making outside contacts but one of the
people I became friendly with at Vevey was a boy called
‘Tony, short for Anton, who owned a motorcycle. He was a
daring rider, and I believe he now races in Switzerland.
Father disliked him, and seemed to fear his influence on
me. He rarely put such feelings into words, but they com-
municated just the same. Mother sometimes passed the mes-
sage on if she felt I hadn’t really tuned in. In the case of
Tony, all she said was, “Don’t you think Tony is a bit old for
you, Michael?”
I was twelve, Tony was eighteen. I was furious, knowing
exactly who had put my mother up to questioning me like
this and trying to fix it so I didn’t see Tony again. We would
stay up talking all night, but any fears of my father’s were
unfounded. Still, I never argued with the old man. I never
dared to. In any case, it’s useless to argue with my father. He
is too stern, too inflexible, too overpowering. He’s too much
for me even today.
In the case of Tony, I no longer had him stay at the house
but I would go out and meet him and ride on his motorcycle
and then come home and say I had been at the movies or
49
swimming, anything, anything. With Tony I used to go off
for weekends, sleeping on the shores of the Swiss lakes, doing
nothing except talking.
Then I'd say I’d been with some posh people my parents
approved of. It was the only way. My parents resented ‘Tony,
okay so he vanishes. This was not a social class thing, al-
though Tony was just an ordinary boy from an obscure
family background. My father could never knock such friend-
ships on a basis of social class. After all, he’s the great broad-
minded one, the classless man!
I can’t figure just what it was they resented. It had a touch
of the snob element. I feel that had Tony been “so and so’s”
son—one of their Swiss industrialist friends—it might have
been different. :
I’d have used any excuse, told any lie, to get away from
school. I was, as I’ve said, cool on homosexuality. I took it for
granted as part of the background of any school. Put up to a
hundred boys together under one roof anywhere in the world
and you’re bound to get a certain amount of it, so what? But
now, when my father, mostly via my mother, was mouthing
off about how idle I was despite the expensive education I
was getting, I hit back by saying the education was doing me
no good because of the homosexuals I was running into. This
shocked my mother, and I watched her go off to my father
with a thoughtful look on her face.
The ploy worked. Within a few days I was hauled out of
the school, and nobody around the Manior de Ban knocked
me for being an academic zero. Not then, at least. Not for
leaving school, although I’d not really said anything—just
hinted.
As far back as I can remember there were brothers and
sisters all around me. I liked being a member of a large
family and that indeed we were. The present lineup is:
30
Geraldine
Myself
Josephine
Victoria
Eugene
Jane
Annette
Christopher
Being the son of a father like mine has its problems, but
one of the biggest consolations of my life is that I’m not
Charlie Chaplin Junior.
There is one, though—my half brother Charlie, a sweet,
nice guy who gets all of my sympathy.
I’ve only seen him twice at Vevey, but I can imagine what
a burden that name must have been to carry through life. I
gather that he studied real hard at school and even in the
Army proved himself as a boxer. Charlie Chaplin Jr. is quite
a name to live up to. Charlie himself wrote a book about
our father, something called My Father—Charlie Chaplin,
but it’s something I’ve never heard the old man talk about.
Sydney, my other half brother, is a real cool, happy cat
with a great sense of humor, something very detached that
enables him to get a gas out of anything.
Life is a great big ball to Sydney, and he knows just how to
live it.
My father and Sydney get along beautifully together. He
often comes visiting at Vevey from Paris, where he backed a
wild, wild drummer called Moustache in a restaurant deal.
When Sydney calls in and mixes the predinner martinis,
that’s the time when Father gets a few more under his skin
than is usual, and they’ll talk and talk for hours.
Sydney is a great bon viveur, and on top of that he’s a guy
a1
who’s been successful on Broadway and in business . . . just
the combination to appeal to any father.
He has often asked me to take off to the States with him,
and pulls the wildest gags on people.
Like the time I was in London, at the Royal Academy of
Dramatic Art, and got a late night phone call from Paris,
with Sydney on the other end of the line yelling, “Mike
. . . listen, come to Paris. Now, in the morning.”
I told him: “I can’t come in the morning, I’ve got the
RADA to cope with. The exams are coming up in a few
days.” I must have sounded keen.
“Forget RADA! I love you,” yelled Sydney. “Come to
Paris. J am dying of cancer of the brain and I want to see
you.”
The cancer bit suddenly brought me down from my own
little cloud. “I’ll come. Now, if you want me,” I said.
“Wait till morning,” said Sydney. “I'll arrange a ticket for
you. But hurry. I may not have long.” In the background I
could hear my sister Geraldine and Moustache crying. Right
then I didn’t know that they were laughing, not crying, and
the whole thing was a big con to get me to Paris.
I didn’t sleep at all that night and first thing in the
morning I had another call from Paris, this time from Geral-
dine. She’d chickened out on the joke and called to tell me
that Sydney was fine and just wanted to get me over there.
I canceled the trip and waited until Sydney came to Lon-
don to see me. He took me out around the London clubs,
from the Establishment in Soho to the Les Ambassadeurs in
Park Lane, a swank pad run by a guy called John Mills.
When Mills, a huge man who towered over Sydney (and
my half brother is 6 feet 3 inches), started telling him how
to run that restaurant he operates in Paris with Moustache,
Sydney drove him crazy by complaining about everything in
52
his club . . . the food, the lighting . . . just anything that
came into his head.
Working from the cradle upwards I’ve only once seen my
youngest brother, Christopher. I’d gone home for Christmas
after living in London. He hadn’t long been born. My
mother showed him to me. I said something like, “He’s a nice-
looking baby, a nice kid.” I’ve not been back there since.
Annette: I saw her a bit as a kid, played with her occasion-
ally like I played with all the babies. I’d taken off on my
wanderings before she developed into a recognizable per-
sonality.
Jane: A weird chick. She speaks to herself. A very strange
little girl. Very much an individual, she’s the funniest one of
the whole lot. She was a very delicate little baby, insecure
maybe. She has a little fantasy world all of her own—her
dollies, all that bit.
Eugene: A kid. He has a good mind, but is very slow and
deliberate. Emotionally he is very open, not complex. He’s
very logical—if there’s something he doesn’t understand he
asks. He likes to see the bricks building, one on top of the
other, building up . . . the facts. He reminds me of a Swiss
businessman, very slow, but also very frank.
He'll probably end up an impresario of some kind or a
Swiss businessman.
Victoria: She is quite extroverted . . . lots of personality
. . a very determined little girl . . . beats up Eugene like
hell. She takes most after my father. She is very confident and
likes to have her own way and often gets it.
Josephine is a lovely, quiet, introverted girl, but not
complex. She charms everyone who comes to the house.
Geraldine: She is the one I’m closest to. We grew up to-
gether. A very independent mind. Like I said, she’s a smart
chick.
53
Geraldine, Josephine, Victoria and Annette all look alike.
Josephine is the most like mother. Jane is not like the other
girls, she’s blond.
Eugene looks most like Father, he has the same curly hair
and sudden, illuminating smile.
While we’re on this kick: Mother, she’s very quiet and
gentle. Her whole life has been rather secluded. The Manoir
de Ban is her own little world and her first preoccupation.
She runs it with dedicated concern. However, she does keep
in touch with the outside world through the eyes of ‘Truman
Capote and other authors.
The daughter of the late playwright, Eugene O’Neill, she
married my father when she was still in her teens. She is an
oversensitive woman and is therefore not unaware of the hard
knocks, but she keeps away from them. I have told earlier
how she would keep away from arguments among the staff.
She is also ultrasensitive about her children and would be the
first to spring to our defense.
Father is different. He doesn’t seem to be a complex man,
but it’s hard to give a definite picture of him. In many ways
he is a tough man, he doesn’t like to be pushed. He has
shown this time and again, often when he could have saved
himself a lot of grief if he’d taken time out to butter up the
right people. But that isn’t in his nature.
But he’s not a dumb ox. He will get an idea that someone
is doing something to annoy him and he’ll brood over it. He
has great thought patterns. He will suddenly think something
and elaborate on it, touching all sorts of subjects. He has
never had a set pattern of thought or acceptance of things.
He does not build fact upon fact. He is very open to fresh
ideas, his intuition is amazing at times, but he can’t be
pushed.
Asked to describe him physically all I can say is that he is a
54
Father
Michael, his father, mother and sister Victoria, pictured before the
premiere of Limelight, October, 1952.
x Z
On the lawn of the Chaplin home in Vevey, Switzerland: (left to right)

Annette, Jane, Eugene, Victoria, Josephine, Christopher, Oona and
Charles. By the time this photo was taken, Michael and Geraldine
had already left home.
The family relax near their villa at Cap Ferrat, on the French Riviera.
Michael is far right.
Charles Chaplin’s
immortal
“Little Man”
Geraldine and Michael at the
London Zoo, 1952
Michael is lost in thought as

the train, bearing the Chap-
lin family, pulls into London,
1952
Michael stands back as his
father slices a birthday cake
for Eugene.
Twelve-year-old Michael ex-

presses a lively interest in a
press photographer’s camera
during his first film role in
Charles Chaplin’s A King in
New York.
Victoria gives the family an impromptu concert on the guitar at the
Manoir de Ban. At the time this photograph was taken, Michael had
already left home.
Charles and Michael Chaplin pictured on arrival at London Airport,

1961.
bbe: 3
eePr2* ae :
In his film Limelight, a clown-garbed Charles Chaplin squirts an
unsuspecting policeman, played by Charles Chaplin, Jr.
Charles Chaplin receives an honorary Doctor of Letters
Oxford University, June, 1962.
Michael writes a_ signifi-
cant page in the story of
his relationship with his
father as he signs the mar-
riage certificate, February
6, 1965
Michael outside London’s .

Royal Academy of Dra-
matic Art, where he studied
for a short time in 1964
Guitar-strumming Michael auditions for recording manager Larry Page
Michael on the set of Paramount’s Promise Her Anything after his

successful film test
Leslie Caron and Warren Beatty with Michael on the set of Paramount's
Promise Her Anything
Michael with Warren Beatty in scene from Promise Her Anything

Michael and his wife Patrice on the steps of their Hampstead “pad”
Michael and Patr Ice 4 honeymoon-style
On somebody else’s lawn—Michael in Heaton Park, Manchester
After a turbulent beginning to their life together, Patrice and Michael
enjoy a téte-a-téte in the sun.
smallish man with white hair. He likes to be smart and tidy.
He radiates enormous vitality; even when he’s resting he
seems wound up and packed with energy. A human atom
bomb, he has a mesmeric gift of casting a spell on people
whenever it suits him. Even now, though I have not seen him
for a long time, I know that the first impact of a meeting with
him can be an electrifying experience. It’s happened to me,
and I know.
He reads a lot and plays tennis with Mother. In his prime
he was a very good tennis player indeed. He and Douglas
Fairbanks and Mary Pickford used to throw great tennis
parties in Hollywood. Once we played tennis together, he
taught me how to hold a racquet . . . but I never liked it
and only rarely played.
Mother is quite a home movie fan, and they are forever
showing her films . . . things done in the grounds with the
children, on our world tour, and the safari they took Geral-
dine and me on.
That safari gave me enough memories for a lifetime. And
all of them funny.
For twenty-one days Father, Mother, Geraldine and I
played the white hunters in the national parks of Kenya—
except that the only weapons we used on our little, well-
chaperoned forays into the bush were cameras.
I celebrated my twelfth birthday in Mombasa, and with
one of Kenya’s great white hunters, Major Mills, we went
into the bush. All the way, Mother was hanging out of the
sun-roof of the big specially converted Buick, triggering off
thousands of feet of film. And all the way, Father was play-
ing the movie man, arguing with her about the angles of her
shots, her framing, calling out: “Get this one... there
- how . . . don’t miss it.”
>>
He never gave up . . . not even when an outraged rhino
took a two-ton run at the car.
With Father beside him in the front, Mother and Geral-
dine in the middle bank of seats, and Daniel Matissa—a
Kenya tribesman who worked for him—and myself in the
back, Major Mills drove the Buick up a twisting, pitted dirt
track through the bush, searching out something for Mother
to turn her camera on.
The hunt ended when we rounded a bend and pulled up
short on a bewildered-looking rhino . . . a heap of muscle
wrapped in thick skin.
The Major immediately put the car into reverse and began
to back down the track, Mother stuck her head out of the sun-
roof and started filming, and the rhino started to walk toward
us.
They say that rhinos can’t see too well, but this one had
good enough eyesight to know he didn’t like us, and the walk
turned to a trot, the trot to a gallop. The car was bumping
and twisting its way backwards down the track, Daniel was
filling me in on the eating habits of the rhinoceros family
. and Mother was so immersed in her filming that any
moment she could have been slung out of the car as it hit a
pothole in the track.
And Father? He was in danger of becoming a widower any
second, but he sat there in his khaki shorts and bush-shirt
shouting a warning to my mother:
“For God’s sake be careful. Anyway, you’re getting the
wrong shot. Try it through the window, this way!”
The danger of the rhino had been submerged by his
determination to get only the right thing on film, making
sure it would be a film worthy of the Chaplin name—even if
its only audience was to be the family and friends back home
in Vevey.
56
On that trip we were charged three or four times by rhinos
(they’re like that) and although they never represented the
same sort of danger as that one down that little dirt road, if
the camera was out my father would carry on playing the
director and to hell with the cast!
Somewhere among the miles of film my mother has taken
there’s a Charlie Chaplin comedy sequence that came very
near to being a disaster.
We had stopped for a picnic beneath a huge bush in the
middle of a volcanic crater in one of the parks.
Mother dragged the camera out, and had Father, Major
Mills, Geraldine and me making like lions, crawling in and
out of the bush, pulling crazy faces and growling.
My mother got some of the best impromptu shots ever
taken on Charlie Chaplin, even though he was still playing
the director, and when she finished we crawled out of the
undergrowth scrub, Daniel packed up the picnic things and
we climbed into the Buick to leave.
As we drove away from the crater we passed around the
other side of that big bush—where a whole pride of ten lions
had been sunning themselves.
Just a few yards from the spot where the cream of one of
Switzerland’s highest-tax-paying families had been fooling
around in their own little parody of wildlife!
After the square Swiss and living in their overefficient
country, Kenya seemed to me to be the place where I wanted
to spend the rest of my life.
I had spent a lot of time, in between watching the animals,
talking to Daniel Matissa, a great guy with a tremendous
primitive dignity.
People like him, his country and its animals helped even
more to turn me against that cosseted life in the Manoir de
Ban.
57
After that safari the whole family of us went off on the
holiday that really gave me a chance to spread my wings.
With M. Valere, my father’s best friend and the man who
had come along on the world tour with us, we rented a house
at Cap Ferrat in the South of France. We spent two holidays
there, in a house belonging to some millionaire. The villa
had a private beach of which we were supposed to have the
exclusive use, but it seemed like the whole population of Cap
Ferrat also regarded it as their property. Apparently the
owner had collaborated with the Germans during the last
war, and he simply did not dare to turn everybody off—for
fear of disturbing the well-settled mud of his murky past.
On the first holiday there I found a little Italian motor-
cycle in the garden shed. It didn’t work, but I conned
Angelo, our chauffeur at the time, into fixing it up for me to
ride, even though it meant that I had to pull on a wire every
time I wanted to make the thing go faster.
Even though in France you can see kids of ten or less
buzzing around the coast on bikes like that, to me at twelve
it seemed like the greatest thrill on earth. It was a long time
before my parents realized that I’d been riding it for a
month; when they did, it went back to the shed.
I just couldn’t get them to understand that on that bike I
was the safest thing on the Riviera roads. I was so knocked
out by it that I wouldn’t have dreamed of taking liberties on
it.
The American Sixth Fleet was showing its Coca-Cola-
spattered flag in the Mediterranean at the time, and I soon
became friendly with a couple of brothers of my own age,
sons of one of the Fleet’s officers, who were living nearby with
their mother.
If sailors’ sons have any special claim to living dangerously,
these two had cornered the market. The holiday became a
38
long succession of “what can we do next for a kick?” For the
first time in my life I had really teamed up with other boys,
and for a month we made the most of it.
Our favorite sport at the time was creeping out at night,
taking a small boat and cutting the nets which the local
fishermen had spread during the night.
Looking back on it, it was just plain, wanton destruction
but—with the motorbike thrown in—we felt like big, big men.
Eventually my father got to hear of the net-cutting, and
soon tracked it down to the two boys and myself.
We got back to the house one afternoon after fooling
around down at the local swimming pool and ran straight
into my father.
He didn’t seem to be joking as he told us: “The police
have been here. They have told me about the nets and they
are looking for you.
“I managed to talk them out of doing anything, but the
local fishermen have also been around. They haven’t dis-
covered that it was you, but if they ever do . . . They have
told me that when they find these vandals they will cut their
ears off.”
Right there the net-cutting ended. I was terrified. I actu-
ally believed that the police and the fishermen had called. At
least, I believed it for long enough to burn any pieces of net
that were still hanging around.
After all the stories I had heard about the German generals
having their little ball in the house we were renting I started
dreaming up all sorts of fantasies.
There was a dumbwaiter that transported food from the
kitchen to the dining room, a sort of lift worked by ropes,
and I convinced myself that in the left shaft was a hidey-hole
and that Hitler had been shacked up in there since the end of
the war.
59
In my goofy way, I had told my father and mother about
my suspicions over that lift, and it gave my father the
opportunity to play a game with me that really took me for
a trip.
I came back to the house one afternoon and he was waiting
for me in the lounge. “I’ve found a secret passageway here
. behind the sofa,” he said. Boy, was I knocked out. That
crazy daydream had come true, and maybe Hitler was holed
up way behind the wall somewhere.
“Hold on. Wait here,” said my father. “I’ll just go down
the passageway to see if it’s all clear.” I stood, knocked out by
the excitement of the whole bit, as he walked around the
sofa.
I watched him disappear, like he was walking down a flight
of stars, and rushed over to the sofa, clambered on it to look
down the passageway.
All I saw was my father crouched on the ground behind it,
laughing like a crazy man. He had made like he was going
downstairs, and he had done it very effectively. Like I said,
the whole scene struck me as so wild and way out. So much
so, that it’s a gag I still pull on people who come round to
wherever I might be living—just to get them hooked up on
the old mystery bit for a while.
Sometimes I managed to take my father for a trip. I re-
member once imitating his performance in The Great Dic-
tator, which tickled him at the time and may have impressed
him more than I thought. Anyway, I ended up with a
featured part in his film called A King in New York.
This was the first Chaplin film made outside Hollywood,
the only film he has made since the American witch-hunters
forced him into a midnight flit to Switzerland.
“Michael, I might use you in this film,” he said. “It’s for
the part of a boy who is making cakes and picking his nose as
60
he puts the cherries in. It’s in a scene when I visit a school.”
The idea knocked me out. I thought it was.great and went
off to learn the part with Pinnie. But before I had it under
control Father came along with a better offer of the main
boy’s part in the film, some guy called Rupert who is one of
those very mature American kids with a high I.Q.
My father and mother took Pinnie and myself to England
for the film. For a week we stayed in the Savoy in London,
and every morning for an hour my father would coach me in
the part.
Then we moved to the Great Fosters Hotel at Egham in
Surrey—a historic place where Henry the Eighth had once
shacked up with one of his wives—so that we could be near
the studio at Shepperton.
I couldn’t remember much about my last appearance on a
film set for Limelight, and I was enjoying the scene at
Shepperton. I tried hard to do what my father wanted and we
got along fine.
Before we left for England I had heard my father reading
the script of the film over to my half brother Sydney in the
library at Vevey. It had me in tears. I was so deeply moved by
it, especially the part I had to play. I remember getting some
good laughs out of A King in New York, particularly in
one scene where my father and I were talking about The
Bomb. Something in the way he said the words “the atomic
bomb” just broke me up and I began to laugh (I laugh at the
craziest things); it smashed the whole scene up and it had to
be shot again.
I have often wondered how an actor manages to play a
funny scene, or a scene which seems funny to him, without
laughing. When I tried I just blew the whole scene.
Every day during the making of A King in New York my
father and I were picked up from the Hotel at Egham and
61
driven to the studio by a chauffeur who’d driven just about
everybody from film stars to past Presidents of the United
States—and had certificates and testimonials to prove it.
Sitting up there in the car talking to him made me think
of one of the few schoolteachers I ever had any time for, a
Californian called Mr. Murray who was my English teacher
at the Ecole Nouvelle in Switzerland.
The chauffeur was the spitting image of that man Mur-
ray, a sweet guy who made a good job of trying to teach me
the English language . . . while I filled in the time draw-
ing in my English exercise books.
Around this time I had a big thing about wanting to be an
artist when I got older and one day Mr. Murray, who prac-
ticed Yoga, Judo, ate only vegetables and was a pretty way-
out character all round, called me out and told me to bring
my books with me. The fact that they were filled with
sketches of boys in the class and faces I’d just dreamed up
didn’t seem to throw him or annoy him any.
“One thing, Chaplin,” he said, “you can always make a
living drawing,” and from then on the sketching bug really
got me. I still draw and paint today, but not for money, and
quite recently I sent my mother an abstract sketch on a meta-
physical kick. I believe she liked it.
At home at the Manoir my father paints, mainly in water-
colors, and one of the best things he has done is a portrait
of my mother.
In his direction of me in A King in New York, the only
advice my father gave me on acting was: ‘““What you have to
try to achieve is to be as natural as possible.”
After we finished filming at Shepperton I flew back to
Switzerland and my father went on to Paris to cut and edit
the film and arrange for the French dubbing. He called me
over to Paris to dub my own voice for the French version.
62
I spent every day in the studio, recording my voice in
French over my lines as I watched the film played back to me.
In the evenings I insisted on going to a movie somewhere and
would drag Pinnie out from the George V Hotel where we
were staying, looking for a Western.
Later on in the year we returned to London for the
premiere of the film at the Leicester Square Theater ...a
great big gas for me at the time. I went to the show and
afterwards danced with Dawn Addams, my father’s co-star, at
the party in the Savoy. They let me stay up late. That and all
the attention I was getting out of the film part gave me a big,
big bang.
My father had wanted to change my name for my part in
that film. My mother and he thought that with the name
Chaplin I might be overspoiled, and suggested calling me
John Bolton instead.
“I want my own name,” I insisted. “I prefer being called
Michael Chaplin. Can’t it stay?” I said. They didn’t make a
big thing about the name, and let me have my own way.
It was the beginning—or end—of something in my life.
63
en
ey AT ee
Listening to the
Silence
om OF siinetet
B5iSii<.
ss
= ~
= =.
~—~_ —
—
i] i
THINK the first break I made from my parents came
about shortly after I returned to Switzerland after accom-
panying them on a world tour. Something happened, some-
thing so stupidly callous, that I said to myself, Aw, shit, I
must split this scene or go crazy.
We'd been to Japan, Bali, Hong Kong, Singapore, flying
out by way of the North Pole and Alaska, and returning via
India and the Middle East. It should have been an exciting
trip, but much of it was spoiled for me because wherever we
went we got a red-carpet welcome and much of the rawness
and color and texture of a fresh scene, a new city, another
continent, was obscured by official receptions in smart hotels
65
which, once inside, looked the same wherever we went. A
nightmare of VIP lounges and hotel managers and photog-
raphers’ flashbulbs.
Geraldine was going to join us in Tokyo after doing an
audition at the London Royal Ballet School, and my parents
had taken along an old family friend, M. Paul-Louis Valere,
a wealthy, rather elderly industrialist. Father was quite jolly
as we jetted out of Europe and nosed over the North Pole,
but the smile was suddenly wiped off his face when we landed
to refuel at Anchorage, Alaska.
No sooner had he set foot on the tarmac than it struck him
that Alaska had recently become America’s forty-ninth state.
He was standing on U.S. territory! The realization so pan-
icked him that he did a quick about-face and tried to scuttle
back into the aircraft and sweat out the two hours’ wait
inside the cabin. No such luck, man. All passengers had to be
cleared out of the aircraft for some technical checkout.
Two hours’ wait, mind you, and we all had to get out of
the plane and go through customs and immigration before
we could reach the airport lounge and order the favorite
brand of hashish. Father stared at the distant prospect of the
immigration checkpoint and dug in his heels like a startled
stallion. He was terrified lest they take away his passport,
money, socks and braces, and toss him in the hoosegow. Mak-
ing a great effort of will, he approached the checkpoint in a
state of acute concern.
The duty officers couldn’t have been nicer.
“Welcome to Anchorage, Mister Chaplin,” one of them
said heartily. “It’s real nice to see ya.”
My father’s face lit up like a lamp. It was a shot in the arm
from an unexpected quarter, but he sure went through a
hard time for a few minutes. Now we could scarcely get him
over to our table in the lounge for a straight hubble-bubble
66
Listening to the Silence
and Coke, he was that busy yarning away about the great old
silent days of movies and how it was on Holly-and-Vine when
Sam Goldwyn was barely out of his Bar Mitzvah.
. Just the same, he breathed a noticeable sigh of relief when
he settled down in the aircraft and fastened his seat belt for
takeoff.
We spent about a week in Japan. We touched down at
Tokyo International Airport as night was falling, although
my watch indicated breakfast time in Switzerland. My stom-
ach was ready for breakfast, but all it would get was a
Japanese supper. When I said I was looking forward to a nice
breakfast of scrambled egg and coffee my father told me to
adjust my watch to Tokyo time. The mysteries of the inter-
national dateline took some figuring out, and even today I
find it hard to adjust to the time-bending that goes with jet
travel.
As soon as we stepped out of the aircraft we ran into a blast
of cheering that nearly knocked us over. I looked around
wondering who else was aboard, then realized they were
shouting friendly banzais at my father. There literally was a
red carpet and a lineup of Japanese girl scouts chanting
slogans and also a military band. A slew of military types and
gents in top hats stood around bowing and shaking hands,
and when we were finally whisked into a limousine we roared
off into downtown Tokyo flanked by a motorcade of cops,
soldiers, and Nip spacemen. Another reception committee
jammed the hotel entrance, but this time my mother whisked
me into a lift and into our suite, leaving the great man to fly
solo through his frightening admirers.
The red-carpet treatment continued throughout our stay
in Japan. Now that is a hell of a way to see any country, you
miss everything that’s worthwhile. There’s no impact, the
wonder of arrival is all shot to pieces. You don’t get the feel
67
or flavor, the experience of seeing yourself in relation to new
people. It’s all laid on and you’re cushioned from real com-
munication. If we went into a store, it was a production. If
we went into a restaurant we were on show like a pack of zoo
characters. If I spilled soup down my shirtfront it was a
catastrophe, and half a dozen waiters would leap over to wipe
me down. Those first few days I was thoroughly confused and
I can’t remember a single teahouse, temple, pagoda, or the-
atre we visited.
Cormorant fishing, now there’s something I do remember.
We'd gone south from Tokyo and found ourselves on the
coast, and we all went on to some kind of boat for night
fishing. Other boats took out over the black water, and it was
quite a sight, all these lighted junks, or what have you,
bobbing away while the fishermen prepared the scene. I
watched closely as they held these black cormorant birds and
fixed rings around their necks. They then flew them over the
sides of the boats with long strings attached to their legs. A
cormorant would spot a fish in the lamplit water and dive
straight down and catch it in its beak. They’d be starving
hungry, but they couldn’t swallow the fish because of the
rings fixed tight around their necks. Now the fishermen start
hauling them back into the boats with the string they’re
holding, and the cormorants flounder around with the fish
stuck tight in their gullets. They regurgitate the fish and are
tossed overboard to get more fish. After they’ve hauled in a
good catch, they have the rings removed and are allowed to
eat some of the fish the fishermen have been chopping up for
them. It’s a fascinating process, and I figured that if ever I got
tired of the Western civilization bit I’d be only too happy to
take off and become a cormorant fisherman in these waters.
There were some geisha girls aboard and a band started
playing some nicely weird music, but it wasn’t fun because
68
the boat was loaded up with the usual gagele of guys in top
hats and photographers popping off flashbulbs. I went to a
lonely bit of the boat and leaned over the rail, but a photog-
rapher grabbed me and tried to line me up for a shot holding
a fish.
“What were you doing there, anyway?” he asked conversa-
tionally.
“Trying to listen to the silence,’ I said. “But no such
luck.”
The innuendo escaped him.
“Never mind,” he chuckled. “Having fun, hah? Nice time
in Japan, eh?”
Nice time. We went on to Hong Kong. More receptions,
top hats, uniforms, earnest students peering up at my father
like he was the Dalai Lama. Geraldine had joined us in
Tokyo, happy about the way her audition had gone in
London. I envied her, she’d be free to study ballet hundreds
of miles away from the family pad. Free to study, that was the
kind of independence I was looking for though I wasn’t sure
of the study bit. I was much more interested in sitting up all
night in front of a fox’s den waiting for some action.
Geraldine and I managed to walk around the Chinese part
for a while without being chaperoned. Then the photog-
raphers arrived and it was back to the official bit. We hurried
back to the hotel. What little we had seen of the native
population terrified the wits out of me. They live in fantastic
misery, crowded against each other in filthy sampans. Dirty
little boats without sanitation.
I felt bad, going back to yet another swank hotel equipped
with air conditioning and iced water and push-button serv-
ice. Thousands of people were living in primitive hell, only a
short walk away. It was another world, centuries away in
time. I would have loved to have stayed with these people,
69
talked to them, got to know them. Instead, all we had were
a bunch of fools hanging on to our father’s slightest utter-
ances because he was Charlie Chaplin. The next week
these same twits would be gawping at a jet-age hot gospeler
or a champion tiddly-wink player. Give a guy a buildup, and
the twits come crawling out of their pads in their Sunday
suits. Boy, you should see them and their old ladies.
What the hell kind of world is this, anyway? I was getting
all screwed up on this world trip. The hundred-dollar ques-
tion was: There are so many million million people on this
planet. They eat, drink, see, feel, sleep and dream. Each
has the same basic needs. Yet millions rot away in sampans
(or kraals, sheilings, cold-water apartments, flophouses,
YMCAs, housing estates) while some (like myself at that
time) were whisked around in limousines, jet planes, luxury
liners, and had their strawberries flown in from Portugal and
their salmon jetted down from Aberdeen. This isn’t social-
ism. Socialism is just a lot of smorgasbord kicked around by
guys with a political stake, it’s a matter of human common
sense. Why can’t we fix up to feed and house people, and give
them enough to eat? What’s stopping us? Lack of money?
Then find something to replace money. But for God’s sake,
let’s cater for the basic needs all round before sending puppy
dogs to Mars.
This pleasure trip was doing me a whole lot of no good. I’d
been living in a dream all these years, now I was waking up. I
couldn’t articulate it, but there was a great need to break out
growing up inside me. Not simply to get away from my
parents. I would have to get closer to the sweat, smells,
hungers and real necessities of life in order to sort out my
own marbles. Yet there was no coherent way in which I could
express these feelings.
So we were once again airborne. We touched down at
70
Bangkok, but only stayed an hour or two. We didn’t get to
see anything except sizzling, oily tarmac. Our next stop was
Singapore. We stayed several days, in the most awful heat I’ve
ever known. It was hot heat, just a humid stickiness that
seemed to hang around like diluted treacle. A giant steam
bath, you could almost feel the water in the air.
I longed to take off on my own, heat or no heat. But I was
constantly reminded by my parents that I was only fifteen
and ordered to stick close to the family group. Close for what?
Blah, more blah, uniforms, top hats, literary gents and gawp-
ing students. Hotel managers and business big wheels with
their wives and daughters. I might as well have moved into a
big hotel in Geneva and had my meals sent into my room; it
would have saved the expense and monotony of air travel.
These eastern cities inflamed my imagination. I had vague
imaginings of going out and chatting up some Russian
femme fatale, head of a spy ring, and sneaking through
bamboo curtains into an opium den and puffing a blast or
two of the real stuff. Instead, Squaresville in triplicate.
My father had been to all these places before, and he kept
putting his head to his hand, deploring how everything had
changed. Bali seemed to disappoint him the most.
“It isn’t at all like it was,” he’d say. “Everything has
changed, neutralized.”
There was one outstanding excursion on Bali. I was deeply
interested in bats at the time. I’d read a great deal about
them.
“I have a treat in store for you, Michael,” my father said.
“IT know how keen you are on bats. Well, on this island
there’s a cave absolutely stuffed with bats, living and dead.
We thought you’d like to take a trip out to it and look
around.”
This was better. On the drive out my father told me the
71
cave was entirely crammed with bats, which the Balinese
called flying foxes. When we got there I was really high on
the deal. There was a wonderful smell of decayed bat excre-
tion which had piled up over the floor for thousands of
centuries. You couldn’t walk into the joint without getting
ankle deep in messy slush. The bats hung all around, upside
down, peeing on everything below.
Geraldine went out to breathe some fresh air. My father is
acutely sensitive to smells, and he didn’t trouble to hide the
fact that he was nauseated by the scene.
I insisted on hanging around as long as possible. Encour-
aged by my zoological friend Renaud, I had been digging the
bat scene up to the last sprinkling of guana. I’d read the
whole case history of how their communication system had
evolved. For centuries this had bugged zoologists, who
couldn’t bust the mystery of how these blind things got
around. ‘They knew there was a special bat radar, but how
did it work? What actually happens is they send off sounds
which are flashed back off objects (cliffs, trees, walls of caves)
but these sounds are so highly pitched they were not heard by
human ears until some guys started to follow bats around
with tape recorders. Special recorders which can slow the tape
down to certain speeds which relay the bat radar bleeps quite
clearly.
Through this method zoologists discovered that bats have
sensitive organs which register the position of objects via the
impact of sound and distance. They register a picture which
enables bats to “see” where they're going in the darkest
places. This way they get a much clearer picture of where the
hell they’re going than any human can with the limited
power of his eyesight.
My father was quite indifferent to animals and, as far as
I know, had never kept any pets of his own. However, he was
72
delighted by my enthusiasm. At last I had found an absorb-
ing interest.
- We got back to Switzerland just before the start of the

school summer holiday season of 1961. After the impressions
of the world tour I wanted only to wander around the pad,
sorting things out and maybe reading up on some of the
places I’d seen to sharpen my impressions and generally fill in
the gaps. I looked forward to many quiet hours in the library.
I also wanted to wise up about my own relationship to the
world scene, figure where I fitted in and what I was going to
do about it.
My parents had other thoughts. I’d hardly got the feel of
the earth under my feet before they sent me up to a hospice
run by a sect of monks who'd helped Napoleon cross the Alps
and never let you forget it. They’ve got these dogs running
around with little barrels of grog stuck under their necks and
are supposed to be great at finding guys who get lost in alpine
blizzards and all that two-step. These monks can point out as
many places where Napoleon slept as those characters in
England who'll show you four-poster beds in which the first
Queen Elizabeth slept when she wasn’t lopping off heads or
smashing up Spanish armadas.
Well, I'd had my share of the monks the previous year. I
begged my parents not to send me, but they were adamant. I
hated this joint. I went into a trance—a Trappist monk
would have sounded like a loudmouth compared with me. I
just didn’t care, I didn’t want to get involved with any part
of their kookie setup.
This particular religious estate was a grim, uncomfort-
able spread at Simplon. They expected me to work at
Latin, arithmetic, history, and to catch up generally on all
the shmaltz I’d failed to assimilate at school. I thought of
73
those sampans in Hong Kong and wondered what these
unworldly transvestites would have done about the stink and
squalor. Sent out one of their picture postcard dogs with a
barrel of grog strapped to its neck, I reckoned, and then
folded their hands and prayed. This wasn’t a hip setup, it was
medievalism in drag.
There was a monk up there who was about the third best
mountain climber in the world. I always like to talk to
experts, and under better circumstances I would have en-
joyed sitting around the pad shooting the breeze about the
relative snow-stresses between Mont Blanc and Everest and
similar icing sugar. But I wasn’t talking to anyone. I was
seeing stinking Asiatics in dirty sampans and the vision
bugged me. ;
Summer vacation time started. The good monks packed
their students off to the family limousines, rickshaws, canoes,
punts, bicycles and scooters, and I went back home having
literally not spoken one word to the monks in the two and a
half weeks I was shacked up in the hospice—an item of in-
telligence which was no doubt devoutly passed on to my par-
ents over the phone or by letter.
A polar reception awaited me. My only friends at the
Manoir de Ban were my father’s Italian butler and chauffeur.
They arrived about a month apart when I was twelve, and I
had recently started sneaking out with them whenever I
could, just to get out of the family playpen and mix with
grown-up people without necessarily having to ask for par-
ental permission to say hello every time I was introduced to
someone.
Gino, the butler, who must be in his thirties, is a tired-
looking, thin, world-weary sort of man with a Humphrey
Bogart face. He is still butler at my father’s house, but his
14
sidekick, Mario the chauffeur, left about a year ago to open a
restaurant in Italy.
Mario is a huge giant of a man, six feet four with a thin
moustache. He comes from Central Italy and at first sight
looks like one of Pancho Villa’s bodyguards. He is enor-
mously strong, a very imposing man, yet an amazingly calm
and gentle person.
We used to drive down to Vevey and go to the cinema and
afterwards sit around in bars and I would watch them play
cards and enjoy a carefree feeling of release, of freedom.
The Swiss look down on the Italians, and the Italians in
Vevey are considered a really wild, savage, swinging mob.
They work mainly as stonemasons, barbers, or domestic help.
The Swiss treat them a bit like certain Londoners treat the
West Indians. The Italians are so much more alive and
volatile that the Swiss despise them and are a bit afraid of
them. But then the Swiss are so square. For me, going out
with Gino and Mario was a great kick.
With them I used to go to a couple of bars which the more
solid burghers consider bad places for gently brought-up teen-
agers to be seen in. The Riviera is mostly a card place, but
Les Mouettes (The Seagulls) was a place where you drank
and met girls and could be one real heller. I’d started out
going around with Gino and Mario when I'd been at one
school in Lausanne, when the contrast between the reli-
gious guff and hip facts of life was beginning to give my
thinking a two-way split. With my eyes I could see life as it
was, with my ears I was getting it filtered through reams of
Dark Ages mysticism and dry academic pedantry. Formal
education as I was receiving it on my wave band just wasn’t
my kind of scene. Of course, I didn’t realize it as clearly as I
do now. But bits of it were breaking out all over, like an
invisible rash.
75
It Couldn‘t Smoke the Grass on My Father’s Lawn
My father is a Protestant and my mother was born a
Catholic. But this didn’t have anything to do with their
choice of a school, say, they didn’t give us any of the old-
dogma bit. My grandfather, Eugene O’Neill, did more than
his share to knock the illusions by which mankind cons and
hypnotizes itself into states of unthinking fatuity and maybe
some of his insights rubbed off on Mother. I don’t know. I’m
flying blind, working strictly out of the id. Maybe my radar’s
all wrong. I don’t know anything for sure. Words are nothing.
I don’t know, haven’t figured it out. Long way to go. Split. I
distrust words, the way they’re shifted around. None of us
children were baptized. We have never had any emphasis
put on religion by either parent. ‘They are basically uncom-
mitted. Me? Well, through getting interested in animals and
reading Darwin’s theory, religion to me carried no weight at
all. ‘They tell us stories from the Brothers Grimm. They
tell us stories from the Greek and Norse mythologies. They
tell us stories from the Indian myths. So what gives with
the stories out of the Hebrew Bible that’s so extra special?
Maybe I'll live long enough to get the Biblical message.
Christ is okay. He had some great insights. He was a
fighter. If only he could have given us the message straight,
he’d have made a great contribution. But then no one would
have listened to a word he said. These were the kinds of
fundamentals I was trying to figure out that summer.
We had three cars, a Bentley, an Alfa Romeo and a Fiat
2300 station wagon. Mostly we used the station wagon. My
father used to drive, but after a couple of accidents in the
Bentley he gave it up. He ran into the backs of drivers who
pulled up quickly. It shook him up. They could have been
bad accidents. So he left it to Mario to drive us kids around.
My two younger sisters, Josephine and Victoria, went daily to
a nun’s school, Mont Olive, and Geraldine was a boarder
76
there. Mario used to drive the three of us to school in the
morning (when I was going to school) but the girls used to
quit classes earlier than I did. So after school, I used to catch
a train from Lausanne to Vevey, and Mario would pick me
up in Vevey, collect the English papers and run me home.
But after a while time became kind of relative, and that is
how I first started going out with the staff after school. It
wasn’t a planned conspiracy against my father, it just hap-
pened.
Once in a while a kid at school would sound off to me
about how lucky I was to have the great “Charlot,” as they
call him in France and Switzerland, as my father, and about
the fantastic film star life he was sure we Chaplins were
leading up there above Corsier.
If you want to get the drift on how we lived in the Manoir
de Ban when they were letting me in by the front door, it
goes something like this. . . .
While I was at the Lausanne school the children would be
wakened up by one of the nurses with a cup of tea, then we’d
grope our way down to the children’s dining room for break-
fast, eggs and bacon, that sort of thing. Then the chauffeur
would bring the car around to the front door and we’d leave
for school.
I always sat in the front, gabbing to the chauffeur, while
the others fought out their morning repressions in the back
seat. In Lausanne I would be dropped off first.
Evenings I’d go in by the front door, get cleaned up and
then go down to the drawing room to talk with my parents.
After a while the butler would open the big double doors
to the dining room and announce: “Dinner is served’’—the
full stately homes bit—and we'd go in.
My father and mother always sat at the same places around
the big oak dining table, with her on his left. Usually there
77
would be a fight to see who sat next to Mother. I gave up
fighting after a while and sat two or three places away from
her.
Dinnertime is always the time for talk with my father, and
often the conversation would go on long after dinner. In
those days I would generally raise some topic or other, like
Caryl Chessman, the guy who had so many stays of execution
in San Quentin.
Eichmann was another regular topic while his trial was
going on and my father was choked with rage and would be
just lost for words about what he’d like to do to that cat.
I generally didn’t feel too strongly about the subjects we
discussed and most of the time it was just for the sake of a
good argument. I would take the opposite view to my father,
although often, on things like Eichmann, we would agree.
I guess we both liked talking.
After dinner, and when the gabbing dies down, my father
hides himself away behind a paper for a quiet sleep—and
generally manages to wake up and get any conversation that’s
going on around him sewn up.
But one time he was asleep after a meal while my mother
was talking about film stars to a guest. ‘They had just got on
to Jane Fonda, or maybe her father, Henry, when Father
woke up. He thought they were talking about fondu, a Swiss
cheese dish.
He cut the talk dead by butting in with, “No, no, I much
prefer raclette” (another cheese dish). This stopped our talka-
tive guest in his tracks and a little disconcerted, he struggled
to pick up the threads of his story.
Every Tuesday at the Manoir was the cook’s day off, and
my mother used to take over the kitchen. She is surprisingly
good over a cookstove. ‘Tuesday was the day when she cooked
for my father all his favorite dishes. None of the Five Star
78
Cordon Bleu routine, but things he must have had, or wished
he’d had, as a kid in South London . . . tripe and onions,
steak and kidney pie, and stews with dumplings in them.
_ But his craziest food fad is for a thing called Almond Joy.
They’re an American chocolate bar with an almond on top of
them. The Swiss, with a swinging chocolate industry, don’t
encourage outsiders, and you can’t buy Almond Joy there or
in England. So any visitor he has coming in from the States
loads up with candies for the old man.
Shortly after we moved to Vevey my father redecorated the

whole house, and one of his interests today is buying furni-
ture for the place. He bought the house at a real knockdown
price from an American guy called Morris, whose wife had
fallen down and died on the stairs.
Mrs. Morris, a wealthy chick, must have hated stairs,
because she had a lift installed in the place. Then, after all
that trouble, she starts up the stairs one day and falls down
real dead on the sixteenth.
When we heard the story of the death it made such an
impression on Geraldine and me that we would never step
on that stair. We walked carefully over it.
In one of my more imaginative moments, I used that lift to
scare the pants off two Swiss kids I’d met. I took them to the
house and told them that during the war Mrs. Morris had the
grounds mined so she would be able to blow the place up if
ever the Nazis came calling. They didn’t believe me until I
took them into the huge cellar that runs all under the house.
On the bottom of the lift shaft, with typical Swiss thor-
oughness, there’s a big red death’s head painted and a
“danger” warning.
“Just you wait here while I go upstairs and turn the time
mechanism on,” I told the two boys. “It runs for fifteen
79
minutes before blowing up; I'll let you hear the tick and
then turn it off.”
I ran up the stairs and began opening and closing the lift
gate on the ground floor at one-second intervals. Down below
in the cellar those kids could hear it really plain, and they
were terrified. They thought I would never turn it off, and
stood there thinking that at any moment they were off to the
mortuary.
When I finally came down and let them go they were
convinced. Man, they were convinced.
In a big house like the Manoir it takes a lot of bread to
keep the place ticking, and a lot of staff to wind up the works.
Besides Gino the butler and a chauffeur there was Mary,
the Swiss-German cook, three gardeners, a kitchen girl, a
maid who lived in the village and came in every day, a Span-
ish maid who looked after the middle floor, and Yvonne, the
upstairs maid.
Yvonne, a short stocky woman with a fantastic amount of
energy, was the gazette of the house. Everything that hap-
pened in Switzerland since William Tell took aim at the
apple, she knows the whole story. And she’s willing to share
it with anyone who can spare the time to listen.
Angelo, the chauffeur we had before Mario, was a hot-
blooded Italian and everybody in the house seemed to get on
his nerves at one time or another.
He must have had it in for the nurses, or maybe he thought
they had it in for him. . . . Anyway, many were the times he
would walk up and down the kitchen floor swearing to him-
self, but loud enough to let anyone in the place hear. And
anyone was usually Yvonne, who'd take it all back to Kay-
Kay and Pinnie.
‘That way Angelo worked off his repressions.
The only dog we ever had at the Manoir went off with our
80
first chauffeur, George. The dog was a big black poodle called
Confetti.
My mother adores cats, and always has them around the
place . . . Abyssinians and Siamese . . . and my father tol-
erates them.
Confetti was my mother’s dog, but George used to look
after him and got so close to him that when he left us my
father let him take the dog with him.
Dogs and cats I can take or leave, but my passions in
Switzerland were bird watching, which I used to do all over
the place, and zoology. Guillard Renaud got me hooked on
this, and the biggest bang I can remember getting out of my
schooldays was sitting in the grounds of the Manoir, alone,
and watching foxes play with their cubs.
My father still plays tennis, but the only sport I got hung
on was skiing, and with a friend Louis Morier, I’d take off to
the ski slopes with a picnic any weekend when the weather
was right.
One Sunday morning Louis and I woke at 5 a.m. to go out
skiing. We were in the kitchen getting our food ready when I
asked Louis, who had stayed the previous night, to call the
information service on the phone and find out what the
skiing conditions were like.
In Switzerland to get information you simply dial 11 and
some chick on the other end tells you about films, sports,
weather, trains. You name it, she knows it.
We have about a dozen phones at home, practically one to
each room, and if you want to make an outside call you press
a red button which links you up with the exchange.
Louis grabbed for the phone and dialed 11—without press-
ing the button. Eleven happens to be my mother’s room
extension, and at five in the morning she was wakened by the
phone ringing, picked it up, and heard Louis say, ‘““What are
81
the skiing conditions like at Pleads?” (The area in the
mountains where we were going.)
My mother was amazed, flabbergasted. She couldn’t under-
stand how some crazy insomniac had managed to get a direct
line to her room. ?
This was something that just didn’t click into place with
the system, and she didn’t understand it.
Geraldine was sleeping in her room with her for some
reason or other, and Mother just handed the phone over to
her. When Louis began to question Geraldine she volleyed
him off with some crazy answer and slammed the phone
down.
“There’s some weird American woman on the information
service,” said Louis. “She is completely mad.”
I took the phone, pressed the red button, dialed and got the
lowdown on the snow.
To this day my mother doesn’t know who made that call.
If you can get some idea of the effect the appearance of the
Marquis de Sade in a convent would have had, you can get
some idea of what happened when a real way-out German
nut strolled into the house at Vevey and into my mother’s
bedroom .. . at one o’clock in the morning. This guy was
all dressed up to look like something out of White Horse Inn,
in leather shorts, Tyrolean hat, big hunting knife, even a
piano accordion around his neck.
Somehow the butler had forgotten to bar and bolt the big
front door, and there we were, all deep asleep when this
crazy man from the mountains arrived. He poked his head
around my mother’s door, bowed, and said, in the politest
German manner, “Good morning.” Mother let out a yell,
like he’d already murdered her youngest daughter and was
getting ready to start work on the boys, and rushed past the
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guy into my father’s room next door, screaming, ““There’s

a madman in the place.”
Father rushed out onto the landing, and this screwball
handed him a big welcome. “Oh, Mr. Chaplin,” he said. “I
didn’t know it was your place. Let me play something for
you.”
My father couldn’t take his eyes off the big knife dangling
at the guy’s belt, but he evidently didn’t feel like a yodeling
serenade at that time in the morning.
“Not now, thank you,” he said, just as if the guy had
walked up to him in a restaurant and asked him if he had a
favorite tune. “It’s a little late. Perhaps you’ll come round in
the morning.”
“Then let’s talk,” said the music man. “It’s so nice to see
you here.”
“Thanks, but no,” said Father, humoring the nut and
pushing him gently toward the door. “Come tomorrow.
Goodbye.” As our visitor was edged gently outside into the
night, Father quickly pulled the door to and bolted it.
We never saw the guy again, but after that everyone made
a great scene about closing the doors at night.
One evening, after the hospice nightmare, I was alone in

Les Mouettes watching some Italian workmen playing cards
when I got talking to a couple of Polish girls who said they
originally came from Vienna. This was a big kick since for
months I’d been wanting to meet a girl I could take out.
We'd had plenty of girls up at the Manoir, chicks who were
daughters of people my parents knew and approved of. Sisters
of classmates, nice girls. They were either very square or we’d
be forced into square relationships because of the setup, the
way we'd been pushed together through introductions and
83
parents and all that fettucini. Draggy, the playmate bit,
anyone for tennis? Real wild.
That night I fell madly in love with one of these girls:
Yannah. She was about twenty-one, blond, very attractive.
She looked like an air hostess. She shared a flat with the other
chick, Tondi. They were in Lausanne, doing nothing much,
working now and then.
Reluctant to lose sight of Yannah, I invited the two girls
home to the swimming pool. Mimo, a very nice guy who used
to cut my hair, also showed up that afternoon. He looked
rather like Eddie Fisher, a personable guy. My parents were
used to seeing him around, and I thought very little of
having invited the girls along. I thought it was okay. Then I
started getting the radar reactions from various quarters. My
two nurses, Kay-Kay and Pinnie, sat near the pool watching. I
read their faces and went cold. They were visibly shocked by
Yannah, as if her blond hair, her lovely figure and the fact
that she was older than me was a violent affront to them. I
didn’t swim myself, I felt cold from the sudden August wind
and shivers of premonition ran through me.
My parents sat on the terrace. They watched us come up
from the pool but they didn’t wave or say anything. So we
went to Gino’s room in the staff house without introducing
the girls to my parents. We sat around listening to records
. . - Italian and French pops, things like Charles Aznavour
. and sipping tea. We were dancing, but very sedately,
there was nothing sexual going on. I’d had no experience, I
wouldn’t have known where to begin.
In the next room one of the maids, Yvonne, was having a
midafternoon rest. She resented the noise so she went to my
mother and complained about the music playing in Gino’s
room when she was trying to have her hard-earned siesta.
“Your son is going around with the butler,” she said. “It is
84
pandemonium downstairs with young women dancing

around.”
She managed to break up the party. I left it to Gino to see
the girls off the premises, and went to my room feeling a
complete fool. My mother came to my room and looked sad
and embarrassed.
All she said was, “Don’t in the future disturb Yvonne when
she is trying to rest.”
And: “Isn’t that girl rather old for you?”
Somehow, I had been waiting for this. My parents obvi-
ously resented my choice of Yannah as a girl friend. They
didn’t even give me a chance to cool off her on my own.
When I had had small “nice” girl friends they had often
teased me, and since the girls meant nothing to me I had
given them up rather than put up with the teasing. My par-
ents had been even more touchy with Geraldine over her
early boyfriends; a guy had only to look at her and my
father would be going down to an imaginary dungeon to
sort out his invisible thumb screws.
That afternoon I sensed what my mother was getting
at—and sensed even more the powerful presence of my father
looming up in the wings, prompting her by that strange
telepathy he’d established with her—and I almost wished she
would come out with a direct attack on Yannah so I could up
and defend her or at least my right to go out with her if I so
wanted. I sensed that my mother was trying to say: “Don’t
mess around with this girl.”
But all she asked was that question, “Isn’t that girl rather
old for you?”
Feeling awkward, I said, “If I like her, I like her.”
My attitude implied: What are you complaining about?
What business is it of yours, anyway? But none of this was said,
there was always so much that was unspoken between my
85
parents and myself. I wanted to beg them: Lay off, let me
make my own mistakes. Okay, so you don’t like her. But let
me have this experience.
Nothing was said further. But my parents’ attitude turned
me all the more to Yannah. Summer warmed my blood and
burned my thoughts. I felt empty until I got close to Yannah.
Then I'd feel a strange heightening of the senses, a contained
pitch of excitement, that swung my emotional pendulum
between madness and glory. I was alive, I could hear my
blood drumming through me as though I had placed my ears
against a giant tree and could hear the sap running. For
two or three weeks I saw Yannah whenever I could. Again
and again, every corny word of every corny love song became
vividly significant and loaded with sudden meaning.
I never touched her: I was petrified. But I gave everyone
the impression that, at fifteen, I was having a mad affair with
Yannah. I would have dropped dead if people had known
how timid, how tender, how scared I really was. Everybody in
Vevey was showing an interest in my “affair” and some came
out with what they must have considered sound advice.
The Swiss are like that. Provincial and puddingy. Our
friendship, this silly little first infatuation, was a major topic
of conversation in the shops and cafés—Charlot’s son going
out with a tramp. Well, what are things coming to? This
younger generation, it’s not only the slum kids who are
beatniks. Look at this Michael, his father is one of the world’s
richest men, and here he is hanging around the card places
and bars with a Polish tart. Thank God, our children were
brought up respectably. Blah, blah, blah.
I never even kissed Yannah, but I used to spend all my
allowance on her. I did not have a fixed allowance. I used to
ask for money and get it ... small sums. Before I met
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Yannah I needed money only for movies. But with her it was
dinner, whisky, dancing.
We used to go swimming, dancing, sunbathing . . . then
we'd sit in bars and talk for hours over a few drinks. But I
was in a turmoil inside and after a while I started chasing my
beers with whisky and this would make me drunk. I’d look
drunk and act drunk and sometimes I’d be sick and the solid
Swiss would watch these performances and note them down
in their puddingy brains and notch up another strike against
“Charlot’s crazy, beatnik son.”
I tried to spin my money out. Yannah shared a small flat in
a block in Lausanne with Tondi. I used to telephone school
friends and ask them to phone my mother and tell her I was
going to spend the day at their pads. Then I’d spend a whole
day with Yannah, loafing around the flat for hours listening
to records and talking. We would go for walks and talk, talk,
talk . . . I used to rack my mind trying to figure out how I
could hold her hand. Crazy things . . . I hardly heard what
she was saying, but I’d have apocalyptic surges of power and
Mozartian glory—without ever once getting up the courage to
take her hand. All the love and affection I had for my par-
ents I released on her. Yannah was life, parents were just a
couple of people that were bugging me.
I once stole some money to take her out. It wasn’t theft
exactly, as it was my money. I took my bankbook from a
drawer in my mother’s room and withdrew 100 francs
(about £8). I was drawing from my account to take my girl
out and it gave me quite a kick.
Summer holidays over, I went back to school, but I would
see Yannah every day for ten minutes after school, before I
caught the train from Lausanne. Of course, it was well aired
as far as Vevey and my parents were hopping mad about it
when it got through to them on the bush telegraph. But they
87
didn’t say anything direct to me. They didn’t like it, but they
kept their own counsel. I began to get home late for supper
and could think of little else but the times I spent with
Yannah.
Finally, my parents went away for a few days. I don’t
remember where . . . London, Paris, somewhere . . . and
before leaving they said I could have Yannah and Tondi over
for dinner that weekend. I smelled parental brimstone in this
invitation but I thought I could handle anything that came
along. My main feeling was of heady, pleasurable excitement
at the prospect of entertaining these two lovely, sophisticated
girls—one of whom I deeply loved, was virtually her protector
—in my own home without the inhibiting presence of my
father and mother. It would be a ball.
It was one of the most embarrassing nights of my life. My
two nurses were there and they insisted on the five of us
having dinner in the big dining room rather than in the
children’s dining room or, alternatively, the staff room, where
I frequently ate. I needed an informal setting to help me get
over my own nervousness. Instead, I was given this Citizen
Kane bit and made to carry out the duties of host in my
father’s absence.
The thing became farcical. I was the only male at the table,
surrounded by as incompatible a quartet of females as the
antic gods of malice could devise: two biddies of the old
school and a pair of the hippest chicks that ever set foot this
side of the Alps. Brother . . . the Strindberg plus Keystone
Comedy bit was underscored by the service we received from
the domestic staff.
Gino, I later learned, had refused to wait on the girls. So
Mario had volunteered to serve us at table. Mario took it asa
huge joke. He’s so big and confident he could serve steaks and
chops to a convention of cardinals on a Good Friday. He
88
shambled in and out with the courses like a bear in a kinder-

garten, tittering and spluttering with barely suppressed
laughter behind his giant hands.
My nurses started quizzing Yannah. What did her parents
do? Had she enjoyed her debutante’s season? Did she attend
the festivals at Weimar, Salzburg, Oberammergau? Had she
ever attended Royal Ascot? The Venice biennial? What did
she think of Faubergé jewelry? The works of Virginia Woolf
and Balzac? The virtuosoship of Pablo Casals? I don’t know
what those two gentlewomen asked my beloved whore that
night, but I knew they were giving her the high society
treatment and I was so embarrassed I didn’t see the food that
Mario laughingly pushed before me. When finally my guests
left I went to my room in a suicidal state. Only the thought
that such an act would cut me off forever from seeing Yannah
stopped me from going through the motions of finishing
myself off, somehow.
When my parents got back they wouldn’t let me out to see
her, making her attraction stronger than ever. Mario must
have been hobbled, for even he took to driving me home at a
breakneck speed which gave me no chance to slow him down
for even a brief rendezvous. I used to sneak out when I could
and take a taxi to town and charge it to the house.
I suppose this was the first open rebellion against my
father.
One morning when I sat in the back of the car with my
younger sisters as Mario drove us to school I decided I had
had enough. I would quit home, find a job, never go back.
When we drew up outside the school I got out of the car and
pretended to enter the school, but the moment it had drawn
away I doubled back and headed for Yannah’s flat in Lau-
sanne. I would get her to help me find a job and then if we
lived together maybe I’d pluck up the nerve to live with
89
her as my woman. Such visions stormed through my mind
as I climbed the stairs to Yannah’s flat, determined never
to set foot in the Manoir de Ban again. Unfortunately,
she had just taken a job for a few weeks acting as nursemaid
to the children of an American family . . . walking them
around the park and similar jazz . . . but I didn’t know the
family and couldn’t trace her. She would take a job whenever
she needed money—from waitress to photographer’s model—
and I guess I had not contributed much toward her welfare
with the limited amount of bread I was able to lay hands
on.
I walked for hours around Lausanne. I had a few coffees in
bistros, but though I didn’t buy any food, toward nightfall I
didn’t have a cent. I decided to swallow my pride and try to
get to my sisters’ school before Mario came to pick them up,
and get a ride back. I knew my parents would be informed
that I’d skipped school for the day and hoped that at least this
little gesture would go over as a show of rebellion. I’d
postpone my escape. I had no money, nowhere to stay, it all
became vague and unrealistic. Next time I would plan things
more carefully.
As I walked up the street to my sisters’ school I saw Mario
with the Fiat. He was talking to another man. This didn’t
surprise me at first. Mario knew everybody. He was a car
dealer on the side, maybe he was setting up a sale. There was
nothing strange in his talking to somebody.
I was still about thirty yards away when the other man
spotted me and, pushing Mario aside, started walking toward
me. In a split second the harmless stranger became a menac-
ing figure. He walked straight toward me, blocking my path.
I stopped and looked at him.
“Are you Michael Chaplin?” he asked.
I nodded.
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He tipped back his slouch hat and smiled sourly. Then

pushing his hand into his raincoat he pulled out a warrant
card and pushed it in my stomach.
“Police,” he said.
- But I’d spotted his card. The man was a private detective.
Once again, in my mind’s eye, I caught a glimpse of my
father standing in the wings. The big director was at work
again. This scruffy man had been set up by my father as a
bluff to scare me.
“Okay,” I said, slipping into the Mickey Spillane act.
“What gives?”
The shamus took my sleeve and said, ““Walk this way.”
I looked down the street. My sisters must have shown up.
The Fiat was gone. I shrugged, and started walking in the
opposite direction with this hired heavy.
As we walked he said, “Do you know a girl called Yan-
nah?”
“Yes. She’s a good friend.”
The man leered. ‘“‘Are you sure she’s just a good friend?”
nes.
The man nudged me obscenely. “But your relationship
seems to suggest otherwise, that you’re more than friends.”
In a goofy way I had no intention of letting this shamus
know the truth. That I had not even held Yannah’s hand.
Hell, when I was at her flat I’d serve her coffee. I used to
polish her shoes for her. But I’d rather have been slung into
jail than admit to this sick character that I had never
touched the girl.
“People do a lot of talking,” I said. “She’s a very lovely
girl. A girl on her own attracts gossip, malice. She’s okay.”
I was doing the big protective bit. Making like I was the
big man, the strong lover.
91
The detective said, “I’ve been to see her. She has the same
story. At least you agree on your lies.”
“They’re not lies,” I said coldly.
My mind was working overtime. So he’d seen her. So that
was why no one knew where she was working. Only that she’d
gone to look after “someone’s” children. Holy cow, this hired
goon had scared her off. Maybe he’d even slipped her a cash
payoff. I hated to think of the scene between my Yannah and
this scavenger. I hoped that if he had offered her money she
would have refused it. But who knows? I felt sick, depressed.
I suddenly wanted to be rid of this man, to shake him off. I’d
go along with anything he said to get shut of him.
The detective said, “You know you are in serious trouble.”
“What trouble?”
“For one thing, you haven’t been to school.”
I wanted to laugh out loud. “And this is a police offense
yet?”
“What were you doing all day?”
“T was looking for a job.”
“That’s an offense. You’re a minor. You should be at
school.”
“Go stuff yourself.”
The man ignored this. ““You haven’t been to school,” he
repeated. ““You’ve been seeing—her.”
“I have not,” I said with a flash of anger. “You made quite
sure of that, didn’t you?”
‘The man produced his sour grin. “Come and have a coffee.”
We crossed the road to a coffee bar and went inside. The
man ordered two coffees and started talking.
“You must understand that this woman is an adult,” he
said. “She can be in serious trouble for trying to corrupt a
minor. You must never see her again—for her sake.”
He was trying a new tack, appealing to my protective
92
instinct. I was almost beginning to enjoy the scene but I
found it hard to like the man.
““What’s the deal, then?” I asked outright.
The man leaned back, relaxed. ““That’s better. I’ll give it
to you straight on the line. I have been told to scare you
badly, but I won’t. I'll just try to put you wise to a few
facts.”
As he droned on I thought: I’m not so stupid as they seem
to think. This man can’t do anything. All I’ve done is play
hooky from school. And there wasn’t a person on this earth
who could prove in a court of law that I had done anything
wrong with Yannah.
He said, “I’ve been paid to get you back home. That’s all
there is to it. Make it easy for me, will you, kid? If I buy you
a train ticket will you go straight home?”
What had I to lose by saying yes? Mario had driven back
home with my sisters long ago. I hadn’t a cent on me. I'd
already decided to go home that night, anyway, and start
figuring out a more practical way of getting out of that pad.
For good.
We walked into Lausanne station and the detective bought
me a ticket and saw me on to the next train out. At Vevey I
needed to call home to get a car to collect me. I had no bread
for a callbox so I walked into the Riviera Bar, which was
packed with Italians playing cards, and asked the patron to
let me use his phone to call the house. He knew me well, and
got the number for me before handing the receiver over to
me.
Gino answered, and as I was asking for Mario to pick me
up my father’s voice suddenly came over the line. He must
have grabbed the phone from Gino’s hand.
“You stupid little fool!” he yelled. “Who do you think you
93
are, ordering my staff to drive you around the moment it
suits you to come back? Walk home!”
It was three miles to the house, all uphill. It was pouring
rain and I had no raincoat—I never liked topcoats. I’d been
dragging around Lausanne all day and was dog tired.
Trudging up the road I did not look forward to my
homecoming. My father had sounded real mad at me on the
phone. I wondered whether he had simmered down, or
whether he was in such a rage that he’d have a physical go
at me. It wasn’t a nice prospect. . . .
I didn’t have long to wonder. I decided to go in from the
back entrance by way of the kitchen, but Gino opened the
door and barred the way.
“You had better go in through the front door,” he said
noncommittally. “Your father is waiting for you to get
home.”
I went round the side of the house to the front entrance
and rang the bell. The door is a big carved-oak double door.
Swallowing hard, I pushed the door slightly open. ‘The light
from inside the house almost blinded me. I stepped inside
from total darkness. Beyond the door there is a space about
four feet deep, then three marble steps lead up to a glass
door.
My father was standing at the top of the steps. ,
The moment I walked in he leaped down the steps and,
with a sudden movement, slapped my face hard with the
back of his hand. He must have been waiting there for hours,
the whole business of the past few months boiling up inside
him. My falling for Yannah was the last straw after all the
difficulties I’d had at school.
I ran up the steps and paused in one corner of the hallway.
My father stood at the other end glaring up at me, his fist
tightly clenched.
94
“You poor young fool,” he shouted, “letting yourself be
swept off your feet by a woman of twice your years. Why
didn’t you leave her alone when I told you to months ago?”
I turned away, unable to speak, and sensed my mother’s
presence halfway up the stairs.
“What have you done to the boy?” she asked quietly.
“I hope I have spanked him hard enough to teach him to
do as he is told,” he replied sharply, as he climbed past her
up the stairs to his bedroom. I heard the door slam behind
him and then there was silence.
My mother came over to me.
“Poor boy,” she said softly. “Poor, silly boy. What an idiot
you are.”
I went up the back stairs to my room. My head hurt. My
mother came to the door carrying a tray. She told me to have
something to eat before I went to sleep. I tried to eat some of
the food. It was no good. I was in a jumble of emotional cross-
fire and my throat and stomach were so screwed up by it that
I couldn’t even swallow an aspirin.
I lay there for a while in this state. Then, suddenly, I fell
asleep.
I was in the staff dining room, having some breakfast,
when Madame Burnier, my father’s secretary, came in and
said, “Your father wants to see you in the library.”
I went into the library, a big oak-paneled room with books
all the way up to the high ceiling. My father was not at his
desk but standing at the huge fireplace. He wore casual
clothes and seemed very calm. He had obviously thought the
whole mishmash over most carefully.
“Sit down,” he said.
I did. He paced the room.
“How’s your head?”
“That’s all right.” I made like it was nothing.
95
He was quite unemotional as he spoke. “I am sorry that
happened, but you have so persistently disregarded my ad-
vice and turned a blind eye to all the measures we have taken
to stop you from making a fool of yourself over this girl
that the only thing left to me was, quite literally, to knock
some sense into you.”
He is not normally a dogmatic man. But when he has
made up his mind, he is immovable. The kind of man who,
in other ages, would have gone stoically to the stake for a
faith or an ideal. In my father’s case, it was an inflexible
belief in the absolute rightness of his convictions.
His voice went on: “You are going back to school and you
are going to study. How you face the boys is your problem.
This episode with the girl is finished. at you see her again
. don’t come back.”
5 nodded. He had succeeded in what he had set out to
do . . . to thoroughly scare me. He believed he was doing
the right thing. In his way, he loved me very much. He
wanted education for his children. He was convinced it was
the only armament a child can be given against the world.
He said, “Stay home tomorrow.”
The next day was a Friday, there would only be morning
classes on Saturday.
I said, ‘“Yes.”
He gave me a curt nod. “You may go.”
I stood up, not saying anything, and left the library.
All that day I remained in the house, depressed and miser-
able, walking around feeling shaken and washed out. All the
time I had known Yannah I had scarcely bothered to eat or
sleep . . . life was one continual, glorious succession of lifts
and miseries. Now I had an emptiness, everything had been
smashed down. I’d gone through the wringer, felt the big
crunch. There was no emotion—actually, it’s a great feeling.
96
The next day I made an excuse to go into Lausanne. The
hell with what the old man had said, I was going to see
Yannah. As I was nearing her block of flats I saw Tondi
coming with another girl. Tondi saw me and a shocked
expression came to her face.
“Do you realize what you’re doing?” she said. “Go away,
quick. You mustn’t see her and she mustn’t see you. Go,
hurry.”
Like Yannah, Tondi spoke a mixture of French and Eng-
lish. They were in Vevey learning French. Tondi peered at
me and gave a sharp squeal.
“Allez, allez vous,” she yelped. “Please go away. You must
never speak to us again.”
She hurried away, looking anxiously over her shoulder. I
stared at the block of flats in which I had found so much
excitement, had experienced so many high moments. They
were transformed into drab neutrality, nothing. I was
drained, thin.
The circus was in Vevey. I went with my mother and
Victoria and Eugene. We didn’t go in and watch the circus,
we only visited the menagerie. I trailed around with the
others, very depressed at the sight of those animals behind
bars. Yet I felt even more caged in. I just had to break out
somehow.
I went back to school. The other students weren’t too nasty
about my comedown. They seemed to sense my desperation.
A month or so later I saw Yannah at Lausanne station. I
said “Hello,” but she looked right through me. Her long
blond hair was tied up in a bun, like it was an act of
contrition. Why the hell didn’t the goons move in and shave
it right off? I thought bitterly. Why not duck her in the lake
as a witch? I watched my summer love walk past me without
97
showing the least sign of recognition. I might have been a
ghost, a dead thing.
Yannah put the distance between us as fast as she could go
without actually running, and I wondered why the human
race had managed to keep going as long as it has managed to
do. Deep down, I thought, everyone is waiting for that Bomb
to rub everything out. They rant and campaign against it,
but deep down they’re all waiting for the big crunch. Deep
down, we all know that humanity is a rotten flaw of nature.
I saw Yannah several times after that. We never spoke, till
one day she showed up at the station as I was returning from
school to catch my usual train back to Vevey. She knew the
train time, and had been waiting for me. This time she said
“Hello” and we talked for a few minutes. My train was about
to pull out, so I arranged to go out with her that Saturday.
We went to a dance hall in Lausanne. We had a few
drinks. The Twist was just hitting Switzerland and everyone
was making like Chubby Checker—except me. Yannah could
twist like a dream, but I could just shuffle around like I had
two left legs. It was a nightmare, a drag. We tried to recap-
ture the intensities of the previous summer and it was a
complete loss. I think we were both secretly relieved when we
said good night to each other.
If only my father had been content to let the fever run its
course. Maybe he was trying to protect me from something.
Whatever it was, he killed it.
Much later, when I was commuting to the International
School in Geneva, I saw Yannah for the last time. She was
sitting in L’Escale, a bar in Lausanne to which she had often
gone in the past. She was making big eyes at her current
boyfriend, an Italian waiter in a pizzeria. I used to take her to
that pizzeria, and the waiter would bring us our orders. We
spoke for a while without saying anything worth saying. She
98
had got fatter, lost her magic, and even as I talked to her I
found myself wondering what all the heartburn had been
about.
I never saw her again. She has probably gone back to
Vienna, or maybe Poland.
After Christmas 1961 my father sent me as a boarder to the

International School in Geneva. During the first week there I
was hauled out and almost sent home as an undesirable. It
happened this way:
Four summers before in the South of France I had met a
Swedish girl called Charlotte. Like most of the other chicks
I’ve managed to meet independently in my life, she became
the Big Love.
She was the same age as I, fifteen, and the week I joined the
International School she turned up in Geneva.
Progressive as the school was, it wasn’t quite progressive
enough for what I had in mind for my Charlotte.
Within a few days of starting school I crept out one
evening and took Charlotte to a party.
The party was in a flat in the center of Geneva. Somebody
pushed the bottle around and Charlotte and I were away.
Since those days I haven’t had much time for drinking, but
it held a certain illicit glamour for me then, and before long
Charlotte and I were somewhere up on Cloud Twenty-Eight.
We were so far up that we had to pass out on a bed to get
our stability. And there we stayed until morning.
When I got back to school that morning I walked in to find
I had a ready-made reputation as a delinquent.
Charlotte’s father, worried about her night away from
home, had called the school.
He had known she was going out with me, and thought
that if they could tell him where I was she’d be there.
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When the school officials checked my room they found my
bed empty, so I walked in that morning, hung over, to find
the execution squad waiting.
The big blast came in the dining hall.
“A lot has been said about this matter involving Chaplin,”
said one of the senior masters (by this time the whole school
knew about my night out with Charlotte, and I wasn’t
missing one single chance to make like the big Lothario
. even though, booze apart, it couldn’t have been more
innocent).
The master went on: “We would like to warn you all not
to associate with Chaplin. At least don’t see too much of him
until this terrible affair is settled.”
They couldn’t have made me feel better if they had pinned
all the medals in the place on me!
The debate as to whether I would be allowed to stay at the
school, or become the shortest reigning pupil in its history
went on until I was called before three of the directors.
By this time I was getting a little worried about how my
father would take to the fact that his son was to be branded as
a reprobate. ‘The Yannah incident was still not so very far
away.
“I’m very sorry, honestly,” I told the directors. “It won’t
happen again, never again.”
On top of this act, there was the fact that many of the boys
in the place had signed a petition saying if I went they’d quit
too.
Maybe it was my pleading and promises or the fear of
being faced with a walkout . . . anyhow, they let me stay.
It was okay once I settled in. It was a mixed school and I
did not mind it so much as it was very progressive in a corny
sort of way. They were a bit coy about it all but we had a
certain amount of freedom, we could go out at night and we
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didn’t have masters breathing down our necks every hour of
the day. But I didn’t work there.
We had houses of our own where we lived. I was in the
senior house. We shared rooms, two to a room. You had beds
that broke down from the walls and a chair apiece and a desk.
We worked in our rooms.
I shared with a French boy called Jacques Tissot. I got on
fairly well with him. He was the type of guy I could give a few
laughs to. There was no close friendship between us, but I
did not object to him, nor he to me, and that was a small
mercy in any setup let alone a Swiss school. He was an
athletic, fairly intelligent, nice sort of guy.
I stayed at the school until June 1962, going home for
three weekends during the first term. My father and I got on
fairly well when I went home. The resentment had gone.
We were fairly close again, and there were no rows. The
whole Yannah thing had died down and I was playing things
cool. We did not speak to each other often, but I had not lost
my determination to plan a break as soon as I could work out
the proper route.
That Easter I flew to London alone. I was on my way to
Waterville, in Ireland, to spend the holiday with my family.
Ireland always gives my father a great boot and he had fallen
into the habit of taking us all over at this time of year.
Geraldine, who had settled nicely at the Royal Ballet
School, met me at the airport. We went to her flat off
Kensington High Street and I spent the night there. This
seemed the life: a pad of your own and freedom to come and
go any time you pleased.
The next day we flew to Shannon, a friend of my sister’s
from the school coming along with us. Her name was Janet
Hill, though later she assumed the professional name of
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Janice, and I took quite a shine to her. She was a blonde and
very spontaneous. I liked the combination.
A car picked us up at Shannon and took us to the Butler
Arms Hotel at Waterville. All the family was there. I’d barely
settled in when I started to work on my mother.
“Geraldine’s doing real good in London,” I said. “She
seems very happy there. Do you think I could spend a few
days in London on the way back from here?”
My mother bit her lower lip. “It’s too complicated,” she
said. ‘““There’s the matter of rearranging your airline ticket
.. and... andall the rest of it.”
She obviously didn’t want me to stay at my sister’s flat and
she was not keen on doing anything that would once again
rouse the wrath of God in my father. I decided to keep my
mouth shut on the subject of London, but my brief stay there
with Geraldine had given me an idea. I would stay at school
one more term and then make my way solo to London after
which I would play the concerto strictly by ear.
During the next few days I developed quite a crush on
Janet, but it never got anywhere. Not at the time, though she
was to feature prominently in my life some time later. I
sublimated like crazy tramping around the bogs with a ghilly
called Michael Moriarty, a great guy with everything that’s
nice about the Irish in his makeup.
We fished a lot. Mother and Father would fish alone and go
for walks.
When you're seventy-two and you believe that you’ve had
all the experiences and are prepared to sit back and think out
the rest of your life, it’s maybe a little tough to try to start
playing the my boy and I are just great pals type of father
. . . but just once on that Irish holiday my father tried. He
took me fishing, ready to show me just how it’s done. Like a
real regular-guy type of father.
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_ Listening to the Silence
It turned out to be something like a scene from The Kid,
except that he’d swapped the baggy pants and tight coat for a
raincoat, the bowler for a bashed-in trilby and the cane for a
fly rod.
The object of the lesson was to show me how to cast a fly
and play the trout.
For fifteen minutes I stood by him on the bank of a stream
while he talked about the theory of dropping a hooked piece
of feather just where some fish would be coming up for his
last breath.
“The touch,” he said. “You must have the touch...
here, I’ll show you. . . .”
He threw the rod back, the line went swishing through the
air, then he whipped the rod forward. . . .
A big nothing.
Father tugged, obviously thinking that he’d got the line
caught on a branch.
I took a quick glance over his shoulder, right to where he’d
just about ripped the back out of his raincoat.
“I think it’s caught on your raincoat,” I said, very tactfully.
Caught? If he’d have pulled much harder on that rod he’d
have been in there feeding the fishes.
Gratefully, but embarrassed, he unhooked himself and
wound the line in.
We plodded home at dusk with my father coyly trying to
hold together the torn halves of his raincoat.
That house at Vevey sure gives my father plenty to think

about. And when it’s not that goofy Swiss soldiery in the
backyard, it’s the sewers.
My father has an obsession about the sewers at the Manoir
de Ban and he swears he can smell them in his bedroom every
night. No one else has ever got a whiff of this, but it drives
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} Couldn’t Smoke the Grass on My Father’s Lawn
the old guy crazy. He has had the road from our house to
Corsier, the village, dug up plenty to find out what is wrong.
All the pipes right down to the edge of our property, which
adjoins the village, have been inspected. And all he gets left
with is the smell.
I think the Swiss rather like him when he’s on the sewer
kick; after all, it costs him plenty every time the road-diggers
get to work, and the rest of the family humor him.
He sits at the dinner table sounding off about the sewage,
and everybody listens, or pretends they do. But there was a
time when, for a few glorious moments in his life, he had us
all sniffing along with him . . . and believing it.
We returned from that Irish fishing holiday in 1962, and
we had hardly dropped our bags inside the door than Father
was making like a bloodhound, prowling around the pad
sniffing in every room.
But this time we could all smell it. This was the revelation.
Father had been proved right and he was knocked out by it
all.
He told his secretary, Madame Eileen Burnier, “Get the
plumbers up here right away. This minute. This time
they've got to trace it. Everyone can smell it.”
Madame Burnier called the plumbers, who arrived and
started sniffing. The smell was appalling, but my father
seemed more concerned that this time, at last, he was going to
put an end to it than with the crazy games it was playing with
everyone’s nostrils.
Madame Burnier was giving the plumbers hell as they
sniffed from room to room, following them and saying, “You
take up the roads, and we still get a smell. Call yourselves
plumbers?”
They couldn’t find a thing after snuffling along all the
pipes, and told my father so. But they agreed the smell was
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there and kept on with the nostrils until they came to a little
package on the first-floor landing.
Like most other goofy things in that house, it was traced
slap back to me. Some nut had sent this package to my father
in Ireland with a note saying: I hope you have luck with your
fishing, and to help you I am sending this special bait.
Father had forgotten all about it and when we left I had
picked it up with a load of other junk and stuffed it in my
pocket. It had come all through Ireland, London Airport,
through the heat of two plane flights, right home to Switzer-
land with me.
And it was full of rotten shrimps and garbage . . . like
weeks old!
Everyone, including the old man, fell about laughing
while these two square Swiss plumbers stood there. They
thought they were in a house of crazy people.
When my father’s in his full social swing there are so many

big wheels floating around the place that it’s difficult to sift
the real crazy guys out from the phoneys.
And even my father can sometimes get his classes screwed
up. Like the time he mistook the chauffeur’s brother for
Prince Rainier. ;
We were driving away from the front of the house in the
Bentley, with Mario at the wheel. Mario’s brother had come
calling on him and was waiting around by the door. His
brother is smaller than Mario and looks exactly like the
Prince.
My father took one look and said to Mario, “Stop the carl
It’s Prince Rainier!”
Mario couldn’t understand it, but he pulled to a halt and
the old man dived out of the car and went haring over to the
105
brother making with the great big greeting . . . until he
came face to face with him.
He got back in the car, slightly shaken—but at the Manoir
de Ban, just anyone could mistake an Italian workman for a
prince. The place is just lousy with them .. . princes I
mean.
I spent most of my last term at the International School
putting the final touches to my escape plan. When my
mother asked me what I intended to do during the summer
vacation my answer was ready.
“I’d like to spend the first week or two camping with a
couple of Brazilian friends.”
“What are they like, these Brazilians?”
“Oh, they’re my age,” I said. “Just guys at school. You can
check out where they’re going through the school. We’ve
found an ideal camping spot across the border in France.”
I gave the details to my mother, although it was just a spot
we picked out at random from the map. I even brought out a
map and put my finger on the spot.
My mother seemed uneasy. It was as if she’d sensed some-
thing fishy but couldn’t pinpoint it.
But she agreed.
In the end I set out with only one of the Brazilian boys,
Edgar Lynch. I didn’t have much bread and neither did he.
At the International School we were given fifteen francs
weekly allowance. When I got home I used to get maybe
thirty or forty francs from my parents. On top of that my
mother gave me a hundred francs (about £8) to go camping
with. I sold a record player that had been given me for my
birthday for 150 francs and I was off.
With Edgar Lynch I went to Geneva station and bought a
cheap train ticket to London. I’d packed only a small suitcase
of clothes and had no idea of what I’d do when I got to
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_ Listening to the Silence
London except try and contact Geraldine and maybe see
Janet. In fact, I was determined to see Janet.
We changed trains at Basel and feigned sleep every time
somebody tried to get in. Outside, people were crushed in the
corridor, but we were left alone although we each took up a
whole seat to sleep on. Old women, nursing mothers, chil-
dren, they sweated and suffered in the corridor while we
blissfully pretended to be asleep. People are funny about
claiming their rights.
In the end we dropped off and slept till we got to Dunkirk.
We'd packed a few sandwiches and we ate them on the boat
over to England. We docked at Dover, I remember the white
cliffs.
I hadn’t dared ask my mother for Geraldine’s London
address for fear of drawing her mind toward the one place
she’d forbidden me to go. It was too late to check her out at
the Royal Ballet so the first night in London I conned a free
night’s kip out of a Brazilian hostel—the Casa de Brasil at
Lancaster Gate—by going along with Edgar and making like
I was a Brazilian. The following day I phoned the Royal
Ballet and got them to give me Geraldine’s address and
phone number. For a while they refused, and I had visions of
blowing all that was left of my cash and handing myself in at
a police station. But finally I convinced them that I was her
brother and had mislaid the address, and I spoke to her at
home by phone and arranged to meet her that evening at her
boyfriend’s place in Earl’s Court. The boy was another ballet
student called Arthur Rayburn.
That evening I took a cab to Earl’s Court after walking
around London for hours with Edgar, digging the scene. We
sat around in Wimpy bars and went into Soho, but we had to
be careful with our money.
Geraldine looked worried when I walked into the flat.
107
She’s not the sort to split on me to our parents every time I
was in a scrape, and we have always been very close in a weird
way, but she had plans of her own including spending the
weekend away with her boyfriend_and several other people.
She was all set to leave for the country with Arthur. Although
I had phoned her from Geneva a week before to say I was
coming to London, she never took me seriously, and she was
shaken to see me standing at the door.
“You'll have to go back to Switzerland,” she said.
“Never,” I told her. “I’d sooner jump in the Thames.”
“We have to leave in a few minutes,” she said. “You can
stay here at Arthur’s place over the weekend. Then we shall
have to work out a way to get you back home.”
“Don’t give me that jazz,” I said. “I’m staying. All I want is
a job and a cheap place to sleep.”
I asked her for Janet’s address. She gave me an address in
Manor House, North London. Geraldine herself had a room
in the home of some Polish princess in Kensington. She
wasn’t a friend of the family, just someone who let out rooms.
I couldn’t stay there.
Geraldine left with Arthur and a friend called Ken who
had come to collect them and drive them to his place, and I
was left alone in the flat. It was quite a comfortable pad and
feeling tired I curled up on the bed and fell asleep.
In the morning I slopped around for hours, scrambling up
a breakfast around midday. The day drifted quietly and I
dozed a while, wondering between snatches of sleep what I
could do to keep alive and independent of my parents.
Geraldine would not have phoned them, and they would not
as yet have any reason to check on my whereabouts. I had a
few days, I thought, in which to set myself up in a job before
my parents started wondering why I hadn’t sent at least a
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postcard from France saying how my camping holiday was
working out.
Arthur had a photograph of Geraldine on his desk. It made
me chuckle to think of my lifelong soul-mate, the tomboy
who had played with me in the orchards of that Berkshire
farm, now blossoming into a beautiful chick. Her photo-
graph adorned this, her guy’s pad. She always was a good kid.
She’s a very independent girl. She gets on fine with Father
and Mother. All the time she was living in London they
were not keen on the idea, but they didn’t make any open
comment as long as she did well at school. Geraldine later
chucked the ballet and took up acting, but only because she
is a perfectionist and knew after a year or two that she would
never achieve the heights in ballet. As an actress, she stands a
better chance of making the scene.
Geraldine had drawn a map showing where Janet lived
and toward evening I left Arthur’s pad and took the tube up
to Manor House in North London. Dusk was settling as I
rang the bell at a neat little terraced house. Janet’s mother
came to the door and said she had gone to the cinema.
“She would love to see you,” Mrs. Hill said. “Why don’t
you come in and wait? She’ll be back soon.”
Janet came back much later. She seemed quite pleased to
see me, and I found her friendly smile reassuring after those
two days of uncertainty. We talked for a while and as it was
so late I was invited to spend the night.
The next day I managed to make it clear to the Hills that I
didn’t have any bread, I was looking for a job and for some
place to stay. When I knocked on that door the previous
evening I put up the pretext that a friend of mine wanted
Geraldine’s phone number in the country and I had come to
get it for him. Now I put all my cards on the kitchen table
109
and was rewarded in spades—the Hills said they would put me
up and when I found a job I could stay on as a lodger.
On Sunday night, Janet and her parents took me to a
police sports ground at Chigwell in Essex. Her father was an
ex-policeman and the police club ‘had a dance hall and we
had a few drinks. I had only been in England two days, but I
felt relaxed and at home.
The next day the Hills drove me to the Casa de Brasil to
pick up my suitcase. Edgar Lynch had already left for Birch-
ington-on-Sea to study English. I collected my worldly goods
and moved into Manor House.
I stayed with the Hills till the following summer, though I
would frequently take off and sleep wherever a friend had a
couch or a cushion on the floor. Most days through that
summer I just walked around London, turning things over in
my mind. At night I’d get back to the Hills and watch TV.
Janet and I would sit up late after her parents had gone to
bed, just sitting talking. Gradually I became more and more
attracted to her but I found myself incapable of putting any
of my feelings into words.
My parents learned through an American boy who was
friendly with Geraldine that I was in London. My mother
wrote saying: “We'll send you your return ticket. You had
better be on the plane to enter the International School for
the next term.’ I wrote back to my mother saying that I
wanted to stay on in London and would find a school and
study for my “O” levels in General Certificate of Education.
Reluctantly they agreed.
After that was settled they paid the Hills for my keep and I
got ten shillings a day allowance. I had looked up various
schools in the classified telephone directory, and settled for
the Stafford House Tutorial School in Earl’s Court. It seemed
an easygoing place and that suited me fine.
110
I started there in the autumn term but didn’t do much
work. I was supposed to be studying English and English
Constitution. In fact, Iwas conning my parents.
Geraldine had gone home to Vevey during the summer
and taken Janet along with her. When they returned, I
didn’t see much of Geraldine but Janet seemed to take on a
thoughtful look at times and I wondered whether she ever
thought of trying to reform me.
Sometimes I would go around to visit Jerry Epstein, an
old family friend who had been associate producer on many
of my father’s films. He’s a great guy, always good for a laugh,
and I’d go round to his flat and we’d shoot the breeze, but
whenever the conversation veered toward my mother or father
Id stare at the ceiling and after a while take off into the Lon-
don fog and head for a jazz club in Soho or make the long
journey back to the Manor House and yarn with Janet about
the theatre mostly. Janet was getting ahead with her classes
and was on the point of becoming a great professional dancer. .
This also depressed me, she was so talented and full of the
self-discipline of a ballet dancer, and I sometimes felt I
couldn’t figure out the square root of nothing from nothing.
But I read a lot and that was a kick.
Shortly before Christmas, Mrs. Hill offered to go out and
buy Christmas presents for me to take back to Vevey and that
made it kind of official: I would have to spend the holiday at
the Swiss pad. I have developed a dislike for Christmas, it’s so
phony with people who hate each other’s guts the year round
suddenly goofing off with unwanted gifts and those atro-
ciously written greetings cards.
When I was about twelve years old I asked my father what
he thought about Christmas. He was reserved about such
things and rarely discussed them with us. But I pushed the
point.
“Dad,” I insisted, “what do you really think about
Christmas?”
He gave me a thoughtful look and then replied, “It’s the
most conceited, commercial day of the year and it’s ex-
ploited by everybody. It’s supposed to be built on the prin-
ciple that Jesus was born on that day, but it’s just a load
of pretense. When so many people in the world are suffer-
ing it’s a criminal waste to spend all those millions on fancy
gifts and unhealthy cakes and drink. It’s a big joke.”
My mother enjoyed the family part of Christmas . . . the
younger children’s excitement, the mysteriously packaged
gifts . . . and I guess my father went along with it all
because it made her happy.
At Christmas the four of us took off from London Airport
—Geraldine, Janet, Jerry Epstein and me—and I did not feel
in the least elated about the deal. Mario was at the airport at
Geneva to meet us with the Fiat, and seeing him brightened
me up a bit. I spent the drive up front talking to Mario.
Gino met us at the door and I gave him a wild greeting.
“Glad to see you, Gino,” I said brightly, but as we entered
the house he pulled me aside.
“Look, Michael,” he said quietly, “it’s great to see you, too.
But go easy, play it cool while you are here.”
My father met me in the hall and said “Hello,” nothing
else. We never seemed to get much further than this during
that Christmas visit. I suppose we both had difficulty in
finding somewhere to start.
We had a laurel wreath on the front door and a huge tree
on the landing in the hallway that almost reached the high
ceiling. It was bare, waiting to be decorated on Christmas
Eve. I had a suitcase full of the gifts Mrs. Hill had got for me.
I had no idea what the packages contained. I still don’t.
Father seemed in good form that first evening, obviously
112
prepared to play the gracious host all through the Christmas
bit provided it didn’t involve him breaking his jaw talking
to me. We went in for dinner and things began to take shape.
I was obviously still in the doghouse, it was a tremendous em-
barrassment for everyone.
After dinner I went to bed. Eugene had taken over my
room and [I shared a guest room with Jerry. I was a guest in
my own home.
Jerry and I talked in our room. He said, “Before Christ-
mas Day talk with your father. You should make the first
approach. Go to him and say you are sorry.”
But I knew I was incapable of doing this. I said, “Yeah,
yeah,” but it was something that could never be done. It
would have embarrassed me, but it would have embarrassed
my father more. It never arose.
Everything about the pad depressed me. For some reason I
wasn’t even speaking to Janet. The only person I could talk
to was Jerry. We had quite a few laughs. Otherwise, zero. I
hardly left the house, but one day I went down to Vevey and
walked about the streets that had once vibrated with summer
sunshine and the blond presence of Yannah. I went into Les
Mouettes and saw my pal Mimo, and we went into his barber-
shop and I had a haircut from him for auld lang syne. In
those days I had a very short haircut, like a cropped Beatle.
After that, I went down to Vevey several times to drink with
Mimo. I drank a lot of beer in the village and people would
come along and peer at me and grin and shake their heads. I
was considered quite a character down there.
Up at the Manoir Id sit around in the staff quarters when
I wasn’t talking to Jerry and sometimes I’d go to Mario’s
pad. He’d converted a barn on the property to live in and I
spent the evenings there. On Christmas Eve I joined the
others to trim the tree but I kept out of my father’s way. No
113
use antagonizing him while we were stringing up fairy lights
and snow dolls, it would have been out of tune with the
festive season bit.
On Christmas day a lot of the family’s Swiss friends came to
lunch and we went through that whole ordeal. I was given a
lot of books and clothes.
There must have been times during that holiday when my
father may have thought I was mocking the famous Charlie
Chaplin “Little Man” walk, with bandy legs and feet out-
splayed. In fact, I had injured an ankle shortly before leav-
ing and was suffering from a bad sprain. But it gave me
a peculiar walk which could easily have been misinterpreted.
I was almost tempted to tell Jerry to get the message through
to the old man that I was not intentionally mocking his
screen walk, but decided to lay off.
Still, there I was wandering around the Manoir with my
legs quite apart and feet strangely outsplayed and just before
I left, my mother, who had been very gentle and tactful
toward me, took me to see a local doctor about my disability
to find out exactly what was causing it. My explanation of a
sprained ankle did not satisfy her and, indeed, my walk had
become quite grotesque probably due to the strain of this
hilarious family get-together. I have always been rather reluc-
tant to face medical checkups, but Mother made it seem that
refusal to see the quack might mean confiscation of my
return ticket to London so J went to the doctor.
My mother had obviously briefed the guy to shoot me the
works, so he took a blood test and water test and gave
my reflexes the old one-two with a rubber hammer—the
full medical Christian Dior. At the end of it all his analysis
was that he thought he saw in the blood traces of gonorrhea.
I thought this highly unlikely because I hadn’t up to that
114
time slept with a woman. It was just nerves plus a sprained
ankle.
Still, it promised a few laughs back at the pad. My mother,
looking very grave, asked me if the doctor’s diagnosis could
possibly be true. I said, “Yes, it could be,” and left it at that.
Well, this news item must have shaken the place but it still
did not draw any verbal salvos from my revered father. The
only sexual discussion I ever had with my father was when he
warned me about syphilis. We were in the library. It was a
very short talk. He said something like, ““The one thing you
must be careful about with women is to be hygienic, son.”
My mother insisted that when I got back to London I
should see a specialist and have penicillin shots. She left it to
Jerry to see that her instructions were carried out.
So when we got back to London, Jerry conscientiously
arranged to take me round to the VD department of St.
George’s Hospital near Hyde Park Corner. It was very dis-
creet. You’re taken into a special section and given a number
by which youre called from the waiting room. You sit on a
bench with lots of other cases who are all eyeing each other
and pretending to be there for any reason but the real one.
It’s great fun, it would make a great scene in a movie.
Finally, my number was called and I went into a room
occupied by a Polish doctor. In strongly accented English he
asked me if I could also speak the language He couldn’t
understand my accent and I couldn’t understand his, but the
sounds that followed could be broken down to something
along these lines:
“Pull your pants down.”
“Why, what gives?”
“Ts necessary for inspection.”
“Okay.”
“Now pee in jar.”
115
“It’s your party.”
“Not funny. Why you come here?”
“Because I’ve been walking strangely.”
“You sleep with woman lately?”
“T’ve never slept with a woman.”
“Then what you doing here?”
“My mother sent me.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve got a sore leg.”
“Sore leg?”
“Yeah. But some guy took a blood check and diagnosed
gonorrhea.”
“Get out of here. There’s nothing wrong with your blood
test. You trying to make me look a fool? If ever you catch a
dose of the real thing you won’t find it so funny. Wasting
everybody’s time. Get out.”
Jerry had come in with me and heard every word. He
must have reassured my mother because it all quieted down
and I never heard another word about my supposed disease.
To this day I don’t know how this Swiss doctor found traces
of gonorrhea in my blood, but he gave me a few laughs.
Half of the Chaplin clan was on the plane that took
Geraldine, Janet, Jerry and myself from Geneva to London
after that Christmas. My father and mother had decided to
journey to England and bring Josephine and Victoria with
them.
Janet and I were going back to her home at Manor House,
but before we did we stopped over at the Savoy Hotel for a
meal. We had all trooped into the Savoy Grill and were
halfway through the dinner when Father suddenly looked up,
like he’d seen me for the first time. For some reason or other,
I didn’t have a tie on. The old man took a look and turned to
my mother.
116
“Why hasn’t he got a tie on?” hé said, as though he were
talking about somebody walking past in the street, not his
son sitting at the same table. He turned to me. “Why aren’t
you wearing a tie? Go upstairs and put one on.”
-I went up to their suite, found a tie and hung it on myself.
I had no choice. Like, he was paying the bill.
While my parents stayed over at the Savoy that winter I
called around to see my mother a few times, but never ran
into my father again.
In her suite one day I met Ella, the wife of Donald Ogden
Stewart, and a real crazy woman, but crazy in the nicest way.
She asked me to go on the Aldermaston march to protest
about The Bomb. Mother seemed to latch on to the idea, so I
fell in with it. The Bomb has never exactly bugged me, and I
thought the Aldermaston march was a Sunday stroll through
Hyde Park.
When I found out that they wanted me to walk around for
a couple of days behind some banner, I soon lost the en-
thusiasm.
Donald Ogden Stewart is one of the people who always
seem to be calling round at Vevey. Another is Ivor Montagu,
who first met my father with the Russian film director Eisen-
stein.
Ivor Montagu is a wild, crazy, lovable man. At the Manoir
he used to go in swimming in the middle of winter, still
wearing his glasses. At five in the morning he’d be charging
around the pool. Father told me that Ivor once walked
halfway across China looking for some rare mouse or some-
thing . . . a great, mad, ultra-enthusiastic Englishman.
I never exactly went out of my way to be friendly with
my father’s friends. In fact, I just got the hell out of it. Once
or twice they got me to have dinner with Truman Capote or
Noel Coward or someone else who had dropped round for a
117
spell of mutual ego-boosting, but I found the best way was
to keep quiet and unnoticed.
So maybe they are my father’s friends, but that doesn’t
mean J have to dig them, and most of the time I didn’t,
although I’d never make a point of their draggy pomposity
over the dinner table.
Things like that I’d leave for when just my father and
mother were around, and then I’d make the point as tact-
fully as possible. I used to question my father on the guest bit.
He is a great liberal; he’s a snob; he’s a man of many parts.
I found Gino the butler more interesting than Noel Cow-
ard, and although this would annoy my father I felt that he
rather liked my independent stand in some kookie way of his
own. .
But whether he tolerated my points of view or not, it still
stood that there was more interesting conversation in the
pantry than around that big, oval dining table.
One Christmas a regular guest at the place, one of my
father’s Swiss tycoon buddies, started in about the turkey.
“Everybody thinks the turkey is an American bird,” he
said. ‘““They’re wrong. It originally comes from Asia, but it’s
strange that it should be so associated with America, isn’t
it?”
He may have known his chocolate beans, but he didn’t
know a thing about turkeys. He also didn’t know that there
was an amateur ornithologist at the table.
I said nothing at the time, but the next night after dinner I
turned to my father:
“Your friend doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Tur-
keys do originally come from America.”
I went on a bit, all to the effect that this guy was a big
pompous parcel of crap who would do us all a favor if he kept
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his mouth closed, and my father’immediately came to his
friend’s defense.
“He wouldn’t have said that if it were not the case,’”’ he
said. ‘“They must come from Asia.”
- Now all this may seem a big argument bit over nothing,
but to me it was important. I was always attacking his guests
for their phony pretensions, and here was another chance.
“Look it up,” I said. “Find any book. The bird is found in
America. That’s where it originated. I would like to know
where he got his facts from.”
Geraldine was sitting back enjoying this little tussle. She
thought I was right, and to prove it she cut out, went upstairs
and brought down a volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
It said that the turkey was first discovered in America.
Father wouldn’t give in, not him. “Yes?” he countered.
“Well, it says that because that’s an American encyclo-
paedia.”’ At the time I didn’t know that the Britannica is
published in the States. “No, you’re wrong. It’s a British
book «.;..) Britannica-...-. Seer -
This had to start the argument off anew, just had to. The
old man pulled his way, I goofed off on mine. Like so many
of these things, we ended right where we started . . . No-
wheresville, with me saying, “Well, whatever the encyclo-
paedia is, they should know.”
He lost, and I think he knew it, but somehow he wasn’t
annoyed. The old guy terrifies the life out of me sometimes,
but he is not an unreasonable man, although at times he gets
riled in spite of himself. But this was a time when he took the
announced defeat without a murmur.
Shortly after settling down in London again I ran into a

friend from Switzerland. He had come over to the Manoir
119
sometimes with Renaud and I’d thought of him as something -
of an idealist on the square side.
Time had transformed him, and now Red was a swinging
cat who knew areas of subterranean London better than a
Beefeater knows his way round the Bloody Tower. He had
come over on an artist’s grant to paint, but he seemed to
spend most of his time gambling and sitting around in beat
joints.
I saw Red as often as possible. We used to hang around
Soho, and the moment his allowance came over from his
family he would gamble it in the Mississippi Room of the
Soho Discothéque. He had a theory about the roulette wheel
that never paid off, but he was pretty obstinate about it and
stuck it out for months even though it meant losing most of
his allowance within a few hours of its reaching him. I liked
his company so much I eventually moved in with him in a
flat in Harley Street for a while.
At Stafford House I met another congenial guy, Jippo,
who’d gone there to study. Although his parents were
wealthy types, anxious for him to be educated, he had no
particular ambition to do anything. Jippo was a great help to
me and I got rid of a lot of my complexes through him.
Jippo helped me to simmer down. Though he’s quite a sick
guy in his own right, and incapable of doing a consistent
day’s work, he has a tremendous presence and can snub an
obstreperous football fan with one withering look at his
rosette. He has the sort of sophisticated, slightly superior face
that brings out the worst in people.
We used to hang around a lot at a beat café in Chelsea.
Guys high on heroin would loom over us and pick on Jippo,
challenging him to wipe the superior smirk off his face.
“Oh, is it bothering you?” he would ask. “I’m terribly
sorry.”
120
“I’ve a good mind to sock you in the teeth.”
“Tf I’ve done anything to upset you I apologize.”
“Aw, you stink.”
“I do? Please forgive me.”’
’ “And your father stinks.”
“Really?”
“And your mother.”
“Oh, dear. I do apologize.”
The guy would give up, but I’d round on Jippo and say, “I
can’t understand you, why didn’t you sock him on the jaw
instead of just sitting there, smiling?”
“The man’s a fool,” Jippo would say. “I don’t care what he
thinks. Listen, Michael, you’ve got to be smart, cool. Let
them insult you. They only make fools of themselves.”
I used to be a bit touchy, but Jippo, he had a whole atti-
tude that was really splendid.
One night we were driving to the café when a car in front
of us tried to make a race of it. When Jippo pulled ahead of
him the other driver sounded his horn furiously. We pulled
up at the curb outside the café and the other car drew up
just ahead. The driver got out and peered angrily into the
window.
“The next time you do that, you ugly-nosed, pinheaded
nothing, I'll not warn you, I’1l smash you to pieces.”
“T’m sorry,” Jippo said.
“‘You’re a menace on the road.”
“T do apologize.”
“You should be barred from driving for life.”
“Perhaps you're right.”
“You're a shifty-eyed ponce. You nearly had me killed.”
“T’m terribly sorry.”
“That was a lousy way to behave on the road.”
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“Yes, I realize it completely. It was very stupid of me. I’m
awfully sorry. Too, too stupid of me.”
The guy went away, still grumbling. As he was about to get
into the car Jippo gave me a half-smile. The guy rushed back.
“You think I’m funny?” he yelled.
“No, sorry. I didn’t mean anything, really.”
As the guy left, muttering, I began to realize the total
wisdom of this kind of action. I had been fighting—what?
Other people’s disapproval. Other people’s attempt to brain-
wash me by love or by force. It had been a surface fight, a
squall over superficialities. Learning the futility of this kind
of surface, token infighting made me a happier person. This
doesn’t mean you have to become a vegetable, a cabbage, an
unthinking reed. It’s a matter of conserving your energies for
the real struggle: the defense of your own self. The world is
full of people telling you to do things their way. The knack is
to learn to do things your way.
Running around London with Jippo and Red occupied
most of my time, and I was doing absolutely nothing at
school. So when the time came to take exams I didn’t even
bother to sign up for sittings, I just stopped going to the
school. My mother sent me a letter saying she’d heard I’d
chucked classes and was showing no interest whatever in my
studies. Now you will definitely not receive another cent
from us, the letter ended.
Red suggested I get a job with Adam Polloc, the party
designer, so from the beginning of June for about six weeks I
helped design parties for debutantes and society hostesses
determined to wind up the summer season in a blaze of social
glory. We designed a party for the Heinz beans people and
functions which Princess Margaret and other social figures
attended. Then we did a deb’s party at the Ritz, all cham-
pagne and chichi and madly gay. I didn’t attend any of these
122
parties, of course, but I made about £15 a week which en-
abled me to keep eating.
I also managed to put a little aside, and so when I was
invited to spend a couple of weeks in Scotland it was possible
for me to accept.
Jippo was friendly with Judith Stone, daughter of David
Stone, who edits a London Sunday newspaper, and we were
all invited to stay at the Stone mansion on their private
island in Scotland. I had known Judith at the International
School and found her a delightfully way-out kid, the sort who
would leave you in the middle of a conversation and show up
at your pad four months later at four in the morning and
resume at the exact point where she’d left off as if there had
been no time lapse at all. I dig that kind of chick, the kind
that doesn’t bother to ask you stupid questions and accepts you
just as you are. Judith was a friend of Josephine’s, and we
had originally met at the Manoir where her visits helped
brighten up the place enormously.
In Scotland we did a lot of shooting. This was a new kick
for me, having previously restricted my activities in this field
to bird watching with Renaud. That dedicated zoologist
would have had ten fits if he’d seen me up there on that Scot-
tish island stalking birds like a crazy man with a .22 rifle. I
bagged a rock pigeon, some curlews, and an adder. The last, I
know, isn’t a bird but by the time I’d stumbled on it the
blood lust was strong in me and I would have shot anything in
sight that menaced me. I used to shoot any bird I could sneak
up to. This is the real kick of shooting: getting close up to the
quarry without being spotted. It’s a great game, rather one-
sided but once you do it for a while you get hooked. I’d spend
hours watching a curlew. They’re smart. They see you from a
mile off, they’ve got eyes like binoculars. So you spend hours
crawling on a beach behind sand dunes, then when you get
123
within shooting distance you feel you want to get ten feet
closer. Then maybe another ten feet, just to be sure you
won’t miss him. You’re there, and you can’t resist trying to
get just a bit closer. You aim, prepare to fire—and the bloody
bird has suddenly gotten wise and flies off laughing like crazy.
It’s like gambling, a real sick thing.
Of course, if you’re not careful, you shoot yourself—mil-
lions of “crack shots” have plastered themselves on the moors,
hunting birds.
The Stones had a big house on the main island, and from
there you take off to another, smaller island where you take
your own food and live rough. David, Judith, Jippo and I
spent days on the smaller island, with nothing but sky and
wind and northern summer sunshine blowing up around
us. And wild life. I think her father, a highly civilized
man, was probably shocked by the way I took to shooting
birds. But it was a great time, and I was very relaxed up
there, with all the time in the world to think, and dig the
bare island windscapes, and goof off looking for birds to kill.
After Scotland, I went back to the Hills and lived off the
money I’d made designing parties. I saw my sister Geraldine
now and then. We talked but I didn’t try to embarrass her
by going too deeply into the way I was living or what I was
thinking. Much of the time I was just digging the London
scene and trying very hard to feel nothing in particular.
For a while I stayed with Red in his flat on Harley Street.
We both shaved our heads. There was nothing else we could
think of to do for kicks. We had very little bread and
nowhere to go so we tried all sorts of experiments with our
hair. First we cut one side off, leaving the other side un-
touched. Red is sort of a fanatic artist, he tries to see every-
thing a million different ways. As we shaved more and more
hair, we not only looked different but we acted different. We
124
worked out a system of shaving off every hair on our heads,
first cutting it down to stubble with scissors and then soaking
it in hot water and lathering it with soap. Then we shaved it.
I cut mine first. ‘Two days later he followed suit. We'd look
at each other and laugh. Jippo, who had been away on
vacation, came back and saw what we had done and went off
and did the same thing. He tried to bluff it out that he’d
fallen asleep at the barbers and been shaven bald by mistake,
but he’d actually done it himself. By this time our hair was
growing back to normal and for two or three weeks Jippo was
on his own, bald while we were merely looking crewcut. It
bugged him, but it would have bugged him even more if he’d
missed out on a kick like that. My father, who has always
hated it when my hair has grown long, would have had fits in
reverse if he’d seen me shaved bald. During our bald stage we
got shouted at in the streets and had trash thrown at us, but
it’s a very healthy thing to do once in a while. Some clown
once asked me why I did it and I said I was tired of seeing
myself with hair on my head. Hell, it was something to
cste Sea
125
7
| Fh " ete 2 -
“ "eee ot La - parearereny se i
iia chi jae pall a
‘poten Prove wie
t.2e } ») ‘enh \lewtre he
a: “my 2.ey ala va
Long, Lovely, Never
Lonely Ride
FOR a year, in London, I was on pot.
Things had got fairly desperate after my parents cut off my
allowance, and days passed when I didn’t have the bread for a
bus fare. The Hills were kind and sympathetic, but I was
finding it more and more difficult to communicate with them
and Janet was too busy starting up her career for me to bug
her with my intensities and complexities. Days passed with-
out my ever going anywhere near Manor House and I began
to run with a pretty wild crowd and, with them, concentrated
on the fine art of conning squares for bread and living in
Kicksville.
I got to know a pretty interesting bunch of artists, stu-
127
dents, ponces, fast car drivers, wild chicks and pushers of
heroin. I flopped in any pad that would give me floor room
and sometimes I did odd jobs. In the late autumn I started
working in a grocery store in St. John’s Wood. This was in
the fruit department in Pinzer’s Delicatessen, and I worked
there right through the Christmas rush and then quit. Three
weeks before Christmas I moved into a flat with Red on Eton
Avenue, Hampstead. The move helped me to get through
the drag of Christmas. Janet was away dancing in pantomime
in Southsea and the job in the delicatessen was getting me
down. My friends Red and Jippo were doing no work, just
goofing around listening to jazz and stuff, and it seemed kind
of ridiculous me standing around waiting while some old bag
was feeling the lettuces, by which time I’d. forgotten to put
the apples in the sack, and I kind of lost interest in the whole
grocery bit.
Working among all that fruit I started to go a bit nutty
myself. I have always been a detached sort of cat, but by now
I was really goofed up. _
This was well before I got myself hooked up on marijuana
and the other sweet mysteries of life, and my condition was
getting worse and worse.
One evening in late 1963 I was sitting talking to David
Stone at his home. He had been worried about me for some
time, and with all the tact this ultrasophisticated man could
muster he said to me, “Michael, I think that for your own
good you ought to go along to see a psychoanalyst. Spend a
good course of long regular sessions with him and I’ll give
you a £10-a-week allowance as well as paying his fees. You
don’t have to pay me back until you get the money. Just try it
out. See if it will help you.”
I have been going to Dr. Cox ever since. He is a brilliant
man, and the help he has given me has proved invaluable.
128
Long, Lovely, Never Lonely Ride
Psychoanalysis is an extraordinary thing to go through.
You never feel that you are doing anything. You have a man
sitting behind you and you just reflect and reflect.
It is a lengthy business and only now, more than two years
later, can I see what it has done for me.
Shortly before I left the delicatessen Red went off to
France to ski with his parents, and Jippo and I would drive
around all night in his car talking and wandering around
Soho and Chelsea and taking in as much of the scene as our
bread would allow. Sometimes we’d drive down to Richmond
and climb into a girls’ school. Jippo had a German girl friend
who worked there, and this chick would help us over the wall
and we'd go into the girls’ dormitory and shoot the breeze.
We never touched any of the girls, but they all got a big boot
out of having two guys coming in like that and shooting the
breeze with them.
I got depressed at Christmas. I went to stay at the Hills’
and on Christmas day they showed The Gold Rush on TV
and watching it depressed me even more. Janet stayed in
Southsea and after a while I drifted back to the flat on Eton
Avenue the moment Red got back from his skiing trip which
was mostly a con to get extra bread from his parents. It
depressed me to think that Janet was in pantomime doing
something for herself and using her talent and getting on
while I was doing nothing and getting nowhere.
On New Year’s Eve, Red and I went to a French club in
Soho called Le Skirt. After an hour or two I noticed Red had
disappeared. I got up and walked around the block. I hate
sitting alone in clubs where everybody is drinking and forc-
ing themselves to have a ball, and I was wondering where to
go next when I thought I'd go back to the club a while longer
and maybe Red would show up.
Suddenly I saw Red walk in. He’d been rather depressed
129
when I’d last seen him. Now he was laughing and happy as
hell, He’d stare at a chick at a nearby table and laugh to
himself like he’d found the secret of making bread out of
potatoes. He was almost on the floor in hysterics.
‘What gives?” I asked. ‘‘Let me in.on the joke.”
Red gave me a funny look. “‘You really want to come in on
ate
I said, “Sure.”
He said, “I’ve been to my car for a smoke.”
“A smoke?”
“Yah. Marijuana.”
I said, ‘““For God’s sake.”
“It’s great. Fantastic.”
“That so?” I didn’t give it a moment’s hesitation. “Okay,
turn me on.”
We went back to where Red had parked his car and when
we were inside, Red gave me an ordinary Camel and told me
to inhale. I tried, and broke into a fit of coughing.
“You'll have to do better with marijuana,” he said. “Wait,
I'll roll you one.”
He rolled me one and told me to be sure to inhale. It went
down smoothly. Each puff I’d hold my breath and keep the
smoke in my lungs. Great. Red was out of his mind laughing
at my first efforts. But after ’'d smoked two cigarettes he told
me I hadn’t done too badly for a starter and said, okay, we’d
ditch the heap and walk around a bit to clear the fumes.
So we locked the car doors and walked around Soho and
across Regent Street. We were into Bond Street when it hit
me. I suddenly felt light and above it all. Everything was a
laugh. My troubles at school. My home life. My calf love for
Yannah, even Janet. My mother, my sisters and brothers. My
father. All of it a big laugh, what the hell? I felt great.
Nothing like this had ever happened before. It was better
130
than anything I’d felt for a chick, better than listening to
Mozart. I looked at Red and we both started laughing.
“Feeling okay?” he asked.
“Out of this world.”
““T told you it was fantastic.”
Red had been on pot for a long time. He’d kept telling me
about it, how great it was.
“Yeah,” I said happily. “It’s great, great.”
We were standing outside the Time-Life building in Bond
Street. The entrance hall was brightly lit and through the
doorway from the street we could see the uniformed night
guard sitting at a desk, his face blank and tired. The sight of
him suddenly struck me as incredibly funny and when I
turned to look at Red I noticed he’d caught my reaction and
together we shared this mutual joke—the night guard.
Don’t ask me now what’s so funny about this but at that
moment it was without doubt the funniest thing on earth. I
almost had a convulsion. That’s the first effect on you when
you smoke the pot and it “takes”: a sudden lift of the senses,
a dropping away of all tensions, a wonderful sense of light-
ness, and a conviction that certain things which normally
wouldn’t raise a smile are great, glorious jokes.
Things suddenly seem funny, the most casual things drive
you out of your mind. That night I looked at this guy and
laughed and laughed. It seemed as though I could see the
whole of his life clearly. He seemed quite disturbed.
Red and I went back to the club and sat down. I was
surprised by the change in everything I saw. Earlier that
evening I had been confused, depressed, numbed by doubts
and repressions. Now life was exciting, a long unending
corridor of pleasure and power and accomplishment lay
ahead. Success without effort. I was high, I had it made.
I just couldn’t speak to Red, there was no need. We looked
131
at each other and laughed, it was just too funny. You try to
make contact with someone. It’s hilarious.
We left the club and went back to the flat, stoned out of
our minds. We were laughing all the way. As soon as we got
inside the pad, Red rolled two more sticks and we lit up.
Floating, man, everything great from there on.
Hours became days, and with curtains drawn time took a
holiday. Daynight, nightday. Jippo joined us but didn’t go
the ride all the way. He would never take it. He’d spend
about four days with us, then go home. What did we care,
me and Red? Afterwards he’d taken to shots, that was toward
the end of the ride. Long, lovely, never-lonely ride. ‘Toward
the end everyone went mad, but it was great all that year.
We'd walk around London, laughing. Regent’s Park was a
great hangout. Green, and all that weed. Green and dry. All
that jazz we listened to. Charlie Mingus played down to
sixteen and two-thirds and Junior Mance and Baby Face
Willett.
Later on we spent our days in the London Zoo, high on
hashish. Spent daze. We dug the animals. People wouldn’t
understand them but me and Red would go watch the lineup
on the monkey cage and laugh our brains out watching the
monks watching the people watching them. Each new
monkey that was fed into the zoo, we’d get to know him and
make him feel happy. They would take only one look at us
and go into fits.
People looking at monkeys. The monks didn’t like it. I
think they resented being visited by all that mob. They were
not too happy about it. Kids with peanuts, old bags with
buns. There was a fascinating gorilla there, still is. He sits
in the outside cage all summer. He just sits there. I spent
a whole day once just watching this guy, and he was watching
back. Great rapport between us.
132
Sort of sick, the way people gawp at the animals. This
gorilla was alert, sensitive. He was never bored, not like the
lions. The lions couldn’t care less, but this gorilla was very
much alive. There he is watching these women with Easter
bonnets, trying desperately to figure out what’s going on.
He’s really interested in people.
He killed a child, some seven years earlier. You can see
where the cage has been moved back and they’ve built a new
expanded rail around it. A woman had picked up a child to
give him peanuts. The kid got in too close and bugged the
guy, who lashed out and clawed him. That’s the story they
told me around the zoo, the old aficionados who hung around
and knew the animals on a personalized basis.
I hope he lives forever. He’ll sleep for a couple of hours,
then wake up to eat. Chomping down on a nut, he’s preoccu-
pied with eating. Then suddenly he’ll look up and become
totally interested in the people watching him, curious about
their curiosity. Maybe even recognizing some of the old
customers. Maybe even recognizing me. That would be great,
watching this guy and suddenly his gorilla’s eyes light up.
“Got the stuff with you? What-say we break a few bamboo
sticks?” Nice guy, he probably thinks these people are
brought to the zoo for him to look at.
A month after I took my first smoke we went back to Le
Skirt with a French boy, a friend of Red’s, and the squarest of
squares: very university, stiff-collared, a pipe smoker who
carries his tobacco around in a prim leather pouch.
The man at the door must have remembered us and maybe
we'd left the club that night laughing louder than we
thought.
“No, you can’t come in,” he said. “You’re junkies.”
Other guys came out of the club, asking what the trouble
was about. The doorman said we were junkies, One of the
133
I Couldn‘t Smoke the Grass on My Father’s Lawn
club guys said we’d have to searched for grass and goof-balls.
We said, okay. When the French boy was searched they found
his pouch of pipe tobacco.
“That’s pot,” one guy said.
The French boy was indignant. The guys insisted on
opening the pouch and examining the tobacco. It was a
French blending. One of the club boys tested it on the
tongue, sniffed it, rolled it between his thumb and finger.
“Yeah,” he said. ““That’s pot.”
The French guy was panicked with visions of being tossed
into jail as a junkie. He imagined newspaper reports. He’d be
ruined, his reputation shot to pieces, his academic career
busted.
Big-shot know-it-all of the Le Skirt Club was convinced.
“That’s the pot, I tell you,” he said. “I’ve seen a lot of it.
Yes, that’s definitely marijuana.”
Red and I let our respectable friend have a few more hard
moments of this jazz, and then we got him off the hook
(though it scared him at the time) by flagging down a
passing cop and asking his opinion. It was chancy, but a kick.
The fuzzbuzz examined it.
“That’s pipe tobacco,” he growled. “Don’t any of you try
and get funny with me.”
Our square got his pouch back and we cut out for a
healthier climate. But it ruined his evening. Have you ever
seen a square going round in circles? It’s great.
Living on pot becomes a way of life. You build up the
kookiest relationships. When you are speaking to someone
who’s taking pot with you you're in depth-rapport, what an
analyst would call a third year.
When you're high you lose all that reflex reaction to what
someone tells you. Everything that’s said by other people is a
direct conversation between him/her and you. You under-
134
stand what the words say, but they express a feeling between
him/her and you. It’s terrifying, unreal, or rather supra-real.
You find exactly the motive of a word that’s directed at you.
You almost feel it coming toward you, feel the feeling behind
it: smack.
Just a movement—taking up a milk bottle from the table
and putting it in the icebox—is a terrifying production. It
becomes terrifying because your normal reflex action is gone.
You walk on baby’s legs, you’re sweating, your heart pounds
and thumps. And these sounds become scenes, visual dis-
tortions.
With pot, if someone says anything to you you know
exactly what his motives are behind the words. You get this
tremendous clarity of insight. Even now, when I’ve been off
pot for quite a while, I retain this clarity at times. All be-
comes reduced to basic things. The way someone lights a
cigarette, you develop a sensitivity with the person.
When I was living in Red’s flat we’d take ride after ride as
far as we could go. It becomes terrifying. It all adds down to
the basic motives between the people with whom you're
involved. You can’t play up a friend, can’t hide anything
from him.
Red went onto LSD. I’d be on hashish, stoned out of my
skull. I'd wake around five in the afternoon, and it would
take several light years for me to figure out where I was. We'd
have been up all hours of the night and morning, talking. I’d
hear a voice somewhere and roll and crawl around to find out
from where it was coming. Many more light years later I’d
look through the open bathroom door and find Red on his
knees, talking to the taps. Having a conversation with
himself because I was no longer listening to him.
Once Red had spent three days on LSD, and then went
straight out of the house and into his car. The landlady was
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bedridden, but in his high state he collected her and drove
her from Hampstead to a place near King’s Cross station. He
then went on to visit a friend. Two hours later he returned to
the place near King’s Cross, but couldn’t find the landlady.
He got back to the pad and looked into the landlady’s
bedroom. She swore she hadn’t left her bed all day. It took
Red some time to convince himself that he had never driven
the landlady anywhere.
In April 1964 I made a headline here and there by split-
ting from the Irish scene just as my father arrived at Shannon
Airport for a holiday with the rest of the family at Water-
ville.
As he flew in, I sat with Janet Hill in the airport lounge
waiting to go out. Through the window I saw all these cats
with cameras doing their bit, and after he’d left, a few of
them latched on to me.
‘““Why didn’t you see your father?” they said.
“I was in the gents’. What do you expect me to do, break
off in the middle and rush down to say Hello?”
Then I goofed off about wanting to marry Janet, who was
traveling under her professional name of Janine Cordell, and
said that the old man didn’t like the idea. Janet just sat there,
she wasn’t tuned-in to this crazy talk and looked at me like I
had gone out of my mind for good.
The truth behind my departure from Ireland is that my
mother had told me that in view of my state of mind at the
time, things would be a lot easier if I were to leave before the
old boy came on the scene.
She had written to me at Red’s place, where I was then
living, suggesting that it might be a nice idea to come to
Ireland and see the family for Easter. She was going there
with the children, and although Geraldine couldn’t make it,
she had called up Janet and asked her along.
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I was doing nothing at the time, so I just took off and spent
a week bumming around fishing with Michael Moriarty.
After a week my father flew in. My flight back home with
Janet left an hour after his arrival. I still do not know
whether he knows I was in Ireland, but I halfway suspect he
must. My mother sent my air ticket over to me, and in her
life there are no secrets from the old man.
Back in London one night I was at a party. I had become
friendly with Jimmy Benton, son of a jazz pianist. Jimmy was
there with a fifteen-year-old girl called Samantha. Sam was
a dish, a really beautiful girl.
The night before someone had mentioned the fountains at
the pond near Marble Arch, where the old Tyburn Gallows
used to stand to hang guys out of Newgate Prison. This night
I said, “Okay, let’s go to the fountains.”
When we got there, Sam and Jimmy seemed a little scared.
They seemed to have cooled off. I got into the fountain, shoes
off, and started splashing around, picking up bread tourists
had tossed in for luck. The coins were just lying around in
the water and I thought they were there for anyone to pick
up so I picked them up. Sam and Jimmy joined me in the
fountain and we had a ball picking up all this loose bread.
In the distance I saw two tiny blue specks growing larger
and becoming policemen. I said to the others, ““Keep playing
around. We’re doing nothing really wrong. If we run away it
will look as though we are criminals.”
I was sitting on the big bowl in the pond, the bowl of
water from which the fountains spurt up. Suddenly the water
went down, stopped. There was no more fountain playing. I
kept throwing water and pennies around as the fuzz watched.
“All right, kids,” one of the fuzz said. ‘““Time to come along
with us. You’ve had your fun.”
We were taken to Marylebone Lane police station, where
137
we were charged. The magistrate’s name was Robey, son of
a popular comedian of the old days, a guy who toured the
halls wearing a flat derby hat and parson’s collar and leering
at audiences while he told suggestive funnies. The old comic’s
great payoff line, I’m told, was: “Naughty, naughty, I don’t
mean what you think I mean.”
The question Robey had to sort out was whether we
were stealing bread. I told him I didn’t think I had the
right to go into the fountain, but I thought I could help
myself to the bread. Jimmy said he didn’t think he was steal-
ing. Sam said she had planned to keep the coins and spend
them.
Altogether 150 coins were collected—123 pennies, 24 half-
pennies, a French franc, a Belgian two-cent piece, and a U.S.
cent. Our defense guy said we had only been acting in high
spirits. A Westminster Council guy said about thirty shillings
was collected each month from the fountain. The money was
handed over to the General Rate fund.
Robey told us we must have known we were trespassing
and that the coins did not belong to us. I didn’t think it
would help to explain that money was for spending not for
tossing into a pool of water. I kept quiet, and Robey pon-
dered a moment and then ruled that the coins belonged
to the Council and we were found guilty of taking this bread
which didn’t belong to us but were given absolute discharges.
London became a drag after that. With Red and Benny
Nieman—another of my way-out buddies—I took off for
Paris with the idea of goofing over to Greece hazily in our
minds. With the exception of Benny most of my friends
were getting into pretty bad shape through pot and even
stronger stuff. Benny said he didn’t need pot to get high: he
was high all the time. Red was in a shaky condition and had
sudden flurries of panic at the prospect of seeing his parents
138
in France: thought they might clap him in a madhouse. Still,
we said he must face them because they were likely to be our
only source of bread supply. We persuaded him to leave
England after he’d had two heroin fixes the day before we
went on the boat.
Red was getting on the whole junkie bit. It never got that -
bad with me because I never went over to heroin, I never
took the needle. I stayed with pot and goof-balls and all that
elementary dreamy gear. But now our group had reached the
peak where we could hardly speak together for days on end.
All told, we were all a little insecure when we landed in
France.
We went straight to Paris. I hadn’t been there for nearly
two years and it was a great excitement. We'd had a little
smoke of tea before we went on the boat and we had another
spliff down in the hull before landing. We also smoked in the
train corridor, and after that Paris was a great letdown. ‘The
place got smaller and meaner and prices had gone up again
and everybody was fixated on De Gaulle.
Blocked or unblocked, I found the French people not very
easy to communicate with. You know how they are in Paris:
they’re very rude. They say the French are bon vivants, but
there’s a lot of viciousness. Paris is a city of ugly men, they’re
all so tensed up chasing the fast franc. It’s the most agitated
city in the world. They live on their nerves, have nervous
tempers. The French don’t care about other people. You ask
someone where there’s a street and they tell you as if you
should have known it. It’s the dregs of civilization. They’ve
been brainwashed by De Gaulle.
Geraldine was in town but I don’t know where she was.
Red goofed off to his parents, shaky as hell. Benny and I slept
in the car. Benny is a marvelous jazz player on saxophone,
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piano ‘‘bass” harmonica and classical cello. He’ll pick up a
flute and rave off on it.
Next morning we woke in the car both feeling sick. Benny
had a stomachache and threw up. We thought it might be
appendicitis. There was only one_hospital open that day and
the guy there said, yeah, it might be appendicitis, try the
American Hospital tomorrow. Next day we went to the
American Hospital. They said an operation was not necessary
and the guy at the French hospital had been talking a load of
crap. Benny had just had some kind of crisis.
Then I felt ill. I managed to find where Geraldine was
living and almost fell in the flat with a burning fever. Benny
helped me in and they put me to bed. Janet was there, too,
and for the next three days she and Geraldine nursed me.
‘There wasn’t anything between me and Janet anymore but I
couldn’t have been better cared for by professional nurses.
A doctor came to see me. He said it was a mixture of food
poisoning and intestinal flu. For a while I was so weak I
couldn’t move. Geraldine has a colossal package of records
she takes around with her so I would lie on the bed playing
records while my temperature hovered between forty-one
and forty-two on the French thermometer.
It was great, I enjoyed myself very much. Fever is like
being high. You get a thought in your mind and you can’t
leave it. You get a block on something and your mind stays
with it and it goes on and on and on. Lying in Geraldine’s
flat ’'d been dipping into Chateaubriand. There was a pas-
sage of his that hung itself on me like a pot-block. He’d been
walking in the countryside on an autumn day and he de-
scribes how everything changes, leaves falling, hedges thin-
ning out, the clouds running faster.
I was obsessed by this. Taking off from autumn I thought
about the dying down, everything dying down. I was near a
140
high peak of fever and stoned though'I hadn’t smoked since I
got into Geraldine’s flat, but I was always a bit hashished that
year even when I didn’t have any pot. If for weeks and
months on end you smoke a tremendous block of hashish you
think in terms of hashish for weeks, maybe months, after-
wards, I’d get a picture: see my father, say, as something else,
a tree or camel. Then you laugh. People say why are you
laughing and you can’t explain. Whatever had made you
laugh hasn’t any humor for others.
Geraldine was great to have around. She was sensitive to
the way I was then and didn’t make a big production of it.
She was closer to me than anyone else I knew. My friendship
with Red and Jippo was close, I guess, and for that time on
pot we were barely separated. But it was the friendship of
hell-mates. We didn’t take any problem seriously. If any
single one of us was in trouble the other two would just
laugh. We’d spend days in that flat on Eton Avenue, huddled
in the companionship of pot, and if any one of us had fallen
down the stairs and broken a leg or arm the other two would
have looked at him and laughed themselves out of their
senses.
A week passed. I was still very weak but the others were
getting impatient to go on with our journey to Greece. So I
told Geraldine I was okay and told her thanks for everything
and cut out. ‘The others came round to collect me and we set
out early in the morning to make an important purchase.
Red had been staying with his parents in Switzerland and
conned them out of a car. He now whisked us to a department
store to find a boy working there who was our connection.
We found him and he gave us a big supply of hashish in a
shoe box. Back in the car we put the shoe box under the seat
and headed out of Paris on the road to the south.
We drove for three or four hours and then stopped in a
141
country road off the main highway and started rolling spliffs.
We sat in the car getting high, except for Benny who curled
up in his seat and played a flute. Soon we got to arguing.
We'd developed a total paranoia about smoking. You’d light
up one cigarette and pass it around. Whoever was smoking,
the others would concentrate on him and register how much
he inhaled. We’d see who'd take the most puffs. A smoker
pretends he doesn’t care, yet with everyone watching it kind
of pushes you in deeper and deeper. It’s a game you don’t
crap out of till you’re stoned out of your mind. Then you go
on rolling your own.
At last, Benny got bored.
“Come on, you junkies,” he said. “Let’s get down to St.
Tropez.”
We yelled to him to shut his dirty square’s mouth. When
we were ready to drive on we were really walking the clouds.
Red started off driving but Jippo yelled he was scared with
him at the wheel and took over. Then it was Red’s turn.
“Get this nut off the wheel,” he yelled. “He'll get us all
killed.”
We’d stop and go all the time. Finally, Jippo went com-
pletely crazy. Taking over the wheel as we approached the
Mediterranean coast he just jammed down the accelerator and
went like a lunatic. It only lasted ten minutes. A lot of traffic
was coming up toward us from the coast and we grazed the
side of a car—had we hit it head-on we'd all have been killed.
A mob came rushing at us waving their arms and cursing us.
I was the first one to step out of the car.
Taking me by the clothes a guy yelled, “Stupid imbecile.
We'll cut your hair off so you’ll be able to see.”
“Tl est fou,” they said. “He’s mad.”
They thought I was the driver. I was stoned and there’s no
loyalty among junkies.
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“T wasn’t driving,” I said. “He was.”
I pointed at Jippo. Confusion continued to screw things
up, maddening the mob. We all refused to have anything to
do with it. Red, French-born, pretended he couldn’t speak
the language and goofed off at his fellow countrymen in a
rapid gibberish. We even pretended we didn’t know each
other.
Someone went over to a phone booth near a filling station
and called the police. Another solid citizen took our car key.
They stood around us chanting and jeering at us. They were
dying for us to get aggressive so they could have had a
physical go at us.
Two cops roared up on motorcycles. They were a stolid
pair, Marseillais blasés, with droopy eyes and thin mous-
taches. Cool and relaxed but tired-looking. We were shaken.
This shoe box under the seat, if the fuzz got their hands on it
we'd be in the Bastille for the next thousand years. But in
France they’re not that hip to hashish, it’s not so much a
problem as it is in Britain. The London fuzz would suspect
us as junkies and make a thorough search of the car. ‘These
cops were not that wise.
“Anybody injured?” one asked.
Nobody was injured.
“Sort it out amongst yourselves then,” the cop said. “Ex-
change license numbers, it’s not our concern.”
They drove off. Boy, that was a real break. The violence
frittered out, there were shrugs and muttered insults. Then
everyone drifted away and we drove into St. Tropez and
parked the car.
It was boiling hot, we didn’t really know where we were
going. A lot of money had gone on the pot and we hadn’t
enough to get to Greece. We'd had a vague idea of shipping
out for Marseilles. Now we decided to goof off to Corsica.
143
St. Tropez was packed with shit-tourists so we drove on to
St. Raphael where Benny knew an old guy, the father of a girl
he’d known at his school at Dartington Hall, who had a yacht
moored there. Red went off to see his father, who happened
to be staying there, and Benny and I slept on the yacht. Jippo
looked such a wreck we hid him away before asking to go
aboard the yacht and we had to smuggle him on after night-
fall. By this time Jippo is in a total panic, crazy-high. I left
him to his raving and fell alseep on my bunk, rocked by the
gentle black Mediterranean. Like the man says, “the only
sea.”
When we woke up the next day the others went swimming
from off the yacht, but I refused and just walked up and
down the beach being shouted at because of my long hair.
Through the day we sat around drinking coffee or taking pot
with anise. That night we slept on the beach, the yacht
skipper having decided against our coming aboard no matter
how friendly we might be with the owner’s daughter.
Next morning we decided to get a boat to Corsica. We
spent most of our bread on tickets for the night boat to
Corsica, and on the trip I got into a deck chair and listened to
passengers sounding off. They were Scouts talking about
tents, reef-knots, campfires. Then everyone stopped talking.
High on hemp, I had the sensation of being the one guy
living in a world of unbuttoned sleepers.
We disembarked at the port of Ajaccio. We decided to
spend our return boat fares on renting motorbikes, but we
must have looked a bit too beat and the renting people made
like they didn’t have any bikes left. So we took a bus and
found an isolated camping village with a restaurant and night-
club and settled down for a few days. It was a far-out atmos-
phere, and there being still plenty in the shoe box, we had a
wild time. Jippo, Red and Benny would spend the day swim-
144
ming. I’d walk about the beach or sit reading Celline’s Death
on the Instalment Plan, a swinging book. He’s quite a guy, he
knew the scene and carried no illusions.
At nightfall, we’d have a strong recharge and get real high.
I’d reached a point of sustained hallucination, and would see
beautiful things as I listened to the Voice of America on my
transistor.
One night I got completely stoned and watched the stars in
the silence. I would pick on one star—as far out a star as I
could find—and watch it grow bigger and bigger until it
became a round golden ball rushing straight toward me to
smash me. Then Id fix on the next, a tiny one far up, and
suddenly it drops down on you, and you close your eyes
because you think it’s going to smash you. Then I’d do it
again, go on and fix another star till it drops at tremendous
speed and becomes a menacing sun. You can make yourself
mad that way, it’s a game that can easily drive you out of
your mind.
Altogether, we stayed in Corsica a week and a half. By that
time Jippo couldn’t take any more and I decided to leave
with him. Red and Benny stayed on. Jippo and I took the
boat to Marseilles where we collected a postal order which
Jippo had sent from Corsica out of the last of our bread.
We took a train up to Paris. There was no more stuff, and
we didn’t smoke anymore. Jippo was all shot to pieces and
was going to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art to study
acting. Before we left London I’d done an audition and
they'd said okay and I felt vaguely excited about what was
ahead. Not in terms of making a career of acting but as the
end of a wild time and the beginning of a new scene to go
and explore.
In Paris we went to see Moustache, Sydney’s partner. I went
into a restaurant but it was the wrong place, very posh, and
145
everyone started laughing when I said I was looking for Mous-
tache. A bouncer eased me out, saying, “Okay, you made us
all laugh. Now beat it.’’ He pushed me out into the street
where Jippo was waiting with a hungry look on his ravished
mug. If we hadn’t found Moustache a few minutes later he’d
have started eating his boots, I guess, like that scene in The
Gold Rush.
Moustache put us up at his house, which he and Madame
Moustache share with my half brother Sydney. I got some
money, enough to fly us back to London the following
evening. We touched down shortly after midnight and there
were no buses. We had left Red’s flat owing rent, and could
think of nowhere to go. I went into the men’s room where a
Texan-looking guy was having a wash, and as I settled in the
toilet I suddenly heard this jarring Texas voice saying, “Some
friends of mine back in the States said you are leaving for
England just as the Beatles are coming over here. I said,
‘Yeah, that’s precisely why I’m leaving.’ Now I have to walk
into this.”
As I went out to wash my hands, Ole Alamo was still
goofing off for the benefit of the bored washroom attendant.
“We have a few people like that back home walking around
with long hair. We feel sorry for them. Somebody cain’t
afford shoes or a tie is to be pitied, I guess. But you gotta
keep them down on their side of the track and never lose
track of the fact that they’re Commy fodder. Dirty Reds
attract these beatniks like flies, and before you can say hot
dang you got yourself a world of goddamn Castros.”
Jippo and I stayed at the airport till dawn and left on the
first bus into the London terminal. I went back to the Hills
and waited for the term to start at the Royal Academy of
Dramatic Art. ‘The wild time was almost over.
My first day at RADA was crazy. I’d decided to simmer
146
down on the hashish and maybe get’off the stuff for good.
The works, the scene. I’d find other kicks. Within minutes I
ran into a boy called Slim and was laughing again.
This was a Friday, a day of initiation before the term
proper began. We took a tour of the spread, were shown our
lockers by the doorman, and the principal made a speech.
The whole real corny scene of what he expected from the
actor. Advice on how to make it in the big curtain scene.
During all this, I got to speaking to this boy Slim. Now a
junkie always spots another. You speak with a guy, and if he’s
regularly taking pot you can tell by the whole attitude. After
we left the joint I said to him, “I’ll be waiting Monday
lunchtime with a big fat spliff.”
The first subject we had on Monday was fencing. We then
had to go over our auditions all over again, and then our
main tutor spoke to us and told us what was good, or lacking,
in our readings. Finally, Slim and I goofed off over to a
doorway next to the main building and I produced a tre-
mendous spliff of hashish which we shared. We were both
loaded when we went back to classes.
The next lesson was miming. Man, was that a laugh. We
waited for the mime teacher to begin, and when she did we
couldn’t stop laughing. I did everything possible not to
laugh, trying like crazy to control my mouth muscles. Then I
turned around and found Slim doing the same. It was a gas,
and we both burst out laughing. We pretended to be cough-
ing, but every slight crack of humor she made struck us as
hilarious. She looked puzzled but never said anything. She
couldn’t quite figure us out, but every few minutes her eyes
looked strangely at us as she gave her instructions.
Every day after that Slim and I had a turn with spliffs and
the whole RADA thing became a continuous laugh. We
made a point of sitting in the back row of class, especially
147
during improvisation class in which you had a slew of young
people trying to be madly creative. It was regarded as a
terrible thing to laugh during these undoubtedly instructive
classes, but in my then deplorably high state I found them far
more hilarious than anything I’d.seen at the zoo.
If they pickled me in adrenalin for a thousand years and
then asked me to make with the RADA entrance, I’d still fall
on my ass trying to do it. Doubtless, to my discredit, I could
never take that stuff seriously. For determined students of
acting, RADA has much to offer. But at that time I was too
high on the junkie kick, and that sort of stuff was apt to seem
a bit of a drag.
I felt at the start that I could detach myself from all that
crap and have fun in the canteen, but they make you in-
volved and tell you to walk thisaway and cut your hair. The
psychology they’ve got is designed to drag you into their way
of looking at things, and they try to make you this type of
person or that according to their preconceived ideas about
you.
One day, one of my teachers said she wanted to speak to me
privately.
“I want you to be sincere with me,” she said when she’d
taken me aside. “I know about people and I’ve been watch-
ing you. You’re hooked on drugs, aren’t you? Now don’t try
to deny it.”
I did the Jippo-Gandhi bit. “I’m sorry to say you’re right.
I’m terribly worried about it and hope this won’t prejudice
my staying here. I’m trying, trying desperately to get off the
hook. But I just can’t stop.”
I was laughing inside but for once I think I looked typi-
cally Chaplinesque.
“Poor boy,” the good lady said. ““Your legs are shaking.”
148
“Yes,” I said contritely, “all summer I’ve been trying to
stop my legs from shaking. It’s impossible.”
“What is your attitude to sex?” she went on. “Have you
found any girl friends here? Or are you strictly on the other
side of the fence?”
This coyness was nearly killing me, but I played up to it.
“I’m bisexual,” I said, “but I prefer men.”
The there-I-knew-it expression in that conscientious .
teacher’s eyes made me want to roll on the floor laughing.
But I walked away, hanging my head, the classical prodigal.
This was probably the best bit of acting I did during my term
at RADA.
After that, Slim and I were bracketed together. He was
getting a grant and wanted to stay, so I tried to give him a
clear run. He got a letter from the Principal to the effect that
his performances were good and he was doing okay, but that
he had this compulsive destructiveness of mind and body. It
was suggested that he seek medical advice. Never once was the
word drug used, but that was the general drift of things. Me,
they just suggested I get medical advice but quick.
One day I arrived at RADA and Slim had a bottle of cough
mixture in his briefcase. But it was a cough cure with the
kick of a mule if you took it in big doses, like swallowing a
whole bottleful. We split the bottle between us and then
went into a class taken by Hugh Morrison, who was our main
teacher.
He started off commenting on our performances. I was
sitting next to Slim when suddenly I went up—I watched the
lift happening to both of us. Slim got smaller and smaller as
we both got higher and higher till we were both literally
bouncing against the ceiling like a couple of balloons. We
were up there on the ceiling together and I thought: Christ,
the teacher must know we're there.
149
But I didn’t care. I have never felt so beautiful in my life.
Sweat was pouring from me but I felt great, just bouncing
softly up there on the ceiling. Sex is nothing beside this
feeling. Every piece of frustration and nervous tension is
gone from you. First, there’s a feeling of strangeness border-
ing on panic. Then you feel marvelous. Then you slowly
come down again.
I was back on my chair. I felt great. I was still out of my
mind. Slim was sitting beside me, grinning. He knew exactly
what I had gone through, having taken this stuff many times
before, and knowing it he was grinning like mad. I smiled
back at him.
“Thanks for the ride,” I said.
150
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©)< night I was at a party in Kilburn, high out of my
mind as usual, and I found myself talking to a girl called
Patrice Johns. I’d seen her around, liked her, and dug her
style. Now she was sitting close beside me and I was listening
to her voice coming at me from a thousand miles away. I told
her I’d spent nights climbing into the London Zoo for a
smoke and to talk to the animals. She seemed to like the
idea.
“Let’s go to the zoo tonight,” she said. “Right now.”
“Honey,” I said, “Pll be lucky if I get as far as that door
tonight. Ring me tomorrow.”
She promised to do that, and that’s how I had my first date
with the girl who became my wife. We went to the zoo with
an American boy and girl, and afterwards the four of us went
151
round to the girl’s pad in Kensington and the American boy
and I smoked a couple of spliffs and then went out with the
girls to a joint in Bayswater.
Between the time of making the zoo date at the party and
our actual meeting in Regent’s-Park the following night I
sorted out my values and realized this was a girl I’d been
wanting to know better for quite some time.
I first met her in 1963 as she arrived at the home of her
agent Cy Franks. Patrice was making her way as an actress;
I was swinging down to my own form of oblivion with a little
help from some gear they don’t sell in every chemist’s shop.
Through friends at RADA I had got to know the Franks,
who in turn became friendly with my family. Patrice was
stepping out of the lift at the Franks’ flat. I had seen her
around before, but this time we got talking and eventually
made a casual date. We met up, but always in the company of
others, and we’d barely said hello when we parted . . . each
to our separate, private hells.
By the time I next met up with her at that party, it was
some ten months after that first meeting at the Franks’. I
was on my way out of RADA-—right out, way out, never to go
back. Jippo, Red and I were together all the time. Patrice
was busy writing. She and I met when we could.
Until now, my mother had written to me now and again
from Vevey. All that Father had given out with was a cool
silence.
Just before Christmas 1964 my mother called me up at the
Hills’ home in Manor House. Most of the time I was with
Patrice. I guess she was just lucky to phone when I'd called in
to pick up some clothing or something I could sell.
Mother had a good reason to phone. Cy Franks’ wife,
Mollie, had called her and frightened her out of her mind by
telling her: “Michael’s dying. Come over here at once and
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Dear Father, Have Faith
see him. There’s been trouble at RADA, he’s hooked to

drugs, his nervous system is shot, he’s thin, smashed.”
So Mother grabbed for the telephone.
“We are coming to London to see you,” she told me. “We
have heard reports that you are missing time at RADA, that
your health is ruined and you look terrible.”
I thought, play it c-o-o-l. “It will be nice seeing you,
Mother,” I said, “but I’d hate to think you were making this
trip because you have heard a lot of rumors. Come over and -
see me. But I’m in perfect health.”
Mother didn’t seem to get the message. “I am coming over
in a few days,” she said.
For the next couple of days I sweated it out until my
analyst, Dr. Cox, told me that my mother had called him
after talking to me. He said that as far as he knew my health
was fine; maybe Mrs. Franks was dramatizing things a touch,
and Mother’s arrival on that count would be a waste of time.
It seemed to reassure her, for shortly afterwards Mother
called me up again to say she would not be coming.
It was three weeks before Christmas. Although I’ve never
dug the Santa Claus bit, I couldn’t face another Christmas
in London. The prospect of going back to the Manoir with
all the tensions was equally bleak. Patrice and I decided to
go to Spain, but first there was the problem of bread.
As she’d been making such a great thing out of saving my
health, Mollie Franks seemed the soul to turn to for a little
help on the financial side. Calling my mother and asking for
money meant resorting to a string of old tricks we had both
outgrown, particularly Mother. I went to Mrs. Franks and told
her I wanted to get away. She called my mother, said it
would be a good thing and handed over £50.
That afternoon I left Patrice’s in Hampstead and took the
tube to Manor House. Clothes I didn’t need. What I had on
153
at the time were enough. But I had to find my passport. When
I arrived at Manor House, Mrs. Hill did not greet me with
her usual warm welcome.
“I’m planning a trip to Spain and I seem to have lost my
passport,” I told her. “Do you think I left it here?”
“Surely, you've got it yourself,”’ she said.
“I distinctly remember leaving it here,’ I told her. “It
must be somewhere around.”
“T haven’t seen it,” said Mrs. Hill.
I guessed she was playing for time, having been taken
aback by the prospect of my sudden departure.
“Mollie Franks’ number is in the book,” I said. “Ring up
and ask her if she is worried about my going. But please give
me my passport.”
She didn’t budge.
“Maybe I left it in Janet’s room,” I said. “I’ll go up there
and have a look.”
I didn’t find the passport, but I gave her plenty of time to
make the necessary phone call, and soon after she called up
the stairs, “Michael, I’ve found it.”
Over the years of help Mrs. Hill gave me it was sometimes
necessary to play this sort of superficial word game. Under-
neath we were really speaking the same language.
By boat and train, Patrice and I got to Paris and shacked
up in a little hotel opposite the Gare du Nord. Just to start
the trip off on the right cloud, I took along a bottle of
Anadate. It soon went, and the four days we stayed in Paris
Patrice and I spent every day in bed, only going out in the
evenings to call on Moustache.
We even spent Christmas Day in bed, completely cut off
from London, Vevey and my family. Geraldine had been
filming in Paris before we arrived but had split a few days
earlier to go home for Christmas. Sydney wasn’t around, and
154
on the family scene there was complete isolation, which I

was too happy to care about.
After Christmas, Patrice and I took a train to the Spanish
border, then a taxi the one and a half miles to Cadaqués,
where we were to hole up with Lorna Moffat, a friend of
Patrice’s.
Lorna is the daughter of Ivan Moffat, a Hollywood script-
writer, a beautiful blond girl whose great-grandfather was Sir
Beerbohm Tree, the old Victorian actor. For about three-
eighths of nothing a week she had rented a one-room,
kitchen and bathroom flat in Cadaqués. There was just
enough space in a corner somewhere for Patrice and myself.
Cadaqués is a great place, completely isolated during the
winter but with high mountains on three sides and the blue
Mediterranean on the other.
It’s supposed to be full of pot, and before I got there I had
visions of spending the whole time there about twenty-seven
miles out of my mind. Instead I found that everybody gabbed
about what a hip teabag they were, but never laid their hands
on the stuff.
They live a big hemp-crazy myth, walking around accusing
everyone else for the fact that they can’t get a smoke.
We found that there was nothing to do in Cadaqués,
except walk around, talking and looking and going for coffees
and beers in the bars. One bar we seemed to keep going back
to was run by a Spanish guy called Militon. He dug us and
our crazy story so we made him Business Manager and let
him handle our muddled dealings with the press.
Militon is about sixty, a guy with long gray hair and a
dignified sort of look.
Patrice and I were sitting around Militon’s one afternoon
when we decided to marry. For some time now we had been
on a similar wavelength. I have no strong views either way on
155
I] Couldn’t Smoke the Grass on My Father’s Lawn
marriage. To me it was never the gateway to a cloud with a
silver-plated lining. Some people make a big thing out of a
piece of paper, but in my book, marriage is purely a social
formality.
First we went to see the local priest in Cadaqués. He
explained that in Spain you can’t marry in a Church unless
you are a Catholic. We thought of playing the big Catholic
bit—after all, Patrice is a Catholic—and I’d go along with
making like a Buddhist for ten minutes if it made life easier.
Then the priest explained that it would be weeks before
they could check me out. He’d have to contact all sorts of
clergy, all the way up to the bishop. When the priest found
out who my old man was he got a big kick out of it . . . big
joke ... and he started to laugh. We had this laughing
thing together, Patrice, the priest and myself, but it didn’t
bring us any nearer to getting married.
The priest suggested that we see the local mayor. From
him we got the advice: ““Go down to Barcelona. If you go to
the British Consul he’ll have the answers.”
We went to Barcelona, determined to marry that day, and
got the big letdown from the British Consul who told us it
would take a little longer, something like three weeks in fact.
While we were figuring that out I suggested to Patrice that
we should do the full romantic bit and try to get a ship’s
captain to marry us. We spent the afternoon touring the
docks, but at every ship we tried a guy with gold braid told
us, “No dice. On ship you have to have special circumstances
to permit the captain marrying you.”
We went back to the Consulate and told the guy there it
would have to be his way. What we didn’t know was that the
Consul had to post notice of any forthcoming marriage. The
moment this was done a correspondent from a London daily
156
newspaper got hip to the name Chaplin, checked around and

blew the story.
It took just twenty-four hours before the international
press moved in on Cadaqués. We got pushed around some in
the rush for pictures and stories. Our plans for a secret mar-
riage were torn to shreds by these gossip eager beavers . . .
but at least we ate in better restaurants.
Life was real mad for a while, but there was one big prob-
lem: Being under twenty-one, I could not get married with-
out my father’s permission. I overcame this simply by alter-
ing the birthdate in my passport. For Patrice, at twenty-four,
there was no problem.
Then some fly guy in a London newspaper office checked
the files and found I was only eighteen.
To make it worse he called up the old man in Vevey and
put him wise. All sorts of people, including Patrice, were
pressuring me to call my father and get his formal per-
mission.
I knew it would be useless, but I had to try for permission
from my father out of courtesy to Patrice.
I made the call one evening from a nearby restaurant
where a woman reporter from Paris-Soir had taken us to eat
paella. The man behind the bar put the call through for me
and a few minutes later pushed the receiver at me and said,
“You're through, sefior.”
Rachel Ford was on the line. I asked for my mother, but
before Rachel could answer, my father’s voice came on:
“Hello,” he said.
“Who's this?” I asked. I knew it was my father, but I
needed time to work out my pitch.
“Tt’s your father.”
“Well, I’m phoning you to ask your permission to marry
Patrice.”
157
I Couldn't Smoke the Grass on My Father's Lawn
The answer I’d expected all along came back: “I won't
give it.”
“Why?”
I heard him turn around, away from the mouthpiece, and
cough. Even from that distance and over that cranky phone
line I could feel his whole tenseness. I fancied that I could
almost hear his heartbeats. He may have sounded calm and
methodical, but I could feel his anxiety.
“How are you going to support her?”
“Tl get a job and support her somehow. I want you to
understand that I love the girl and I want to marry her.”
“You do that, then marry her.”
“I can’t unless I have your permission.”
I think it was getting too much for both of us, so he said,
“Put it down on paper.”
“Okay,” and then I hung up. The phone call had been a
waste of money.
Patrice had sat at the table and heard the drift of the
conversation, as I’d used the telephone on the bar. When I
walked over to her it was clear that I didn’t have to tell her
the news.
We went back to Lorna’s pad and borrowed a pen and
some paper from her. I wrote a short direct letter to my
father which read:
Dear Father, Iam sorry about all the publicity that arose. I
hope you understand that this is not my fault. I want to
marry Patrice. I love her very much and I hope you will have
enough faith in me. You must believe that I will get a
JOU Sarees
I signed it “Love, Michael.”
I guess I didn’t have much faith in the success of this
letter, but at least I had made the effort. Now all I wanted to
158
do was to get back to England. At least I knew the language

there and I felt good in that country.
Among the horde of reporters who arrived at Cadaqués was
Daniel Cande, a French free-lance photographer who had
come to take pictures of our wedding. He’s a guy with that
lean underfed look, a great sense of humor and a way of
getting his job done without any of the pushing and shoving
that generally seems to go with letting off a few flashes and
exposing a roll of film.
Daniel came to me and said he had the answer to the
problem that was bugging us: “You can get married in
Scotland, in Gretna Green.”
It seemed a wild idea and I mentioned it to Patrice and
Lorna. They seemed discouraged with all the failures and
didn’t hook on to the scheme.
There was another problem too. Bread. “Who,” I asked
Daniel, “is going to pay for it all? You know, the getting to
Scotland bit, the getting married bit, the whole bit.”
“Don’t worry about that,” said Daniel. “I’ll take care of
the cash if you will let me do an exclusive coverage on your
wedding. I promise you that I’ll do a good job of it and get it
into some decent paper, like Paris Match, not a cheap scan-
dal rag.” We fixed for a taxi to drive us out of Cadaqués at
six in the morning, and told Lorna not to tell anyone.
Three days after my talk with my father, Patrice and I
woke very early in the morning and waited for Daniel to
show with the taxi. We had packed very quietly and dis-
creetly the night before, and when the taxi drew up we dived
in and headed for a border town.
From there we took a bus to the border and did the customs
bit. With the Spaniards this went off fine, but as we arrived at
the French checkpoint I knew there was trouble. A big fat
159
French customs officer loomed up. Looking like I did, with
the long hair, beard and everything, he had to pick on me.
“Any luggage?’’—like I was trying to smuggle Franco’s own
personal supply of joy pills into France.
I was in a cold sweat as I showed him our one bag. The fat
guy took my passport and bellowed, “Oh! You’re Michael
Chaplin.”
Everyone who had been on the bus looked around. All the
way they had been giving me looks, and when Fatso swooped
they split their faces with those know-all “we knew he was no
good”’ grins.
“How are things going?” said Fatso, completely forgetting
about luggage and passports as he crept in on the act.
“Fine,” I said. “Just great.”
Minutes later we were cleared through customs and on our
way to Perpignan. From there we took a train to Paris, where
Daniel pulled the first of a dozen slick moves to keep other
reporters off our trail. _
He borrowed a suit for me, took me along to a bookstore
owned by a friend and took pictures of me there. These he
handed out to the French daily papers along with a story that
I had settled in Paris and had taken a job.
While France was catching up on the latest in the Chaplin
saga, we were on our way by car to Calais . . . and the boat
to Dover.
That night we stayed at a hotel outside London and left at
noon the next day for Scotland. Daniel had a Simca car which
he drove like a crazy man. Nothing passed us on the roads all
day, and Patrice slept in the car.
We made Scotland by that evening and spent the night at a
bed-and-breakfast joint run by some old woman who, I am
sure, recognized us but never dared ask outright, while all the
time she was busting a gut with curiosity.
160
We told her we were French photographers, and left for

Gretna Green the next morning. Halfway there, Daniel
decided against Gretna Green. So many screwed-up adoles-
cents give Poppa the slip to marry there that someone is
always on the lookout for a likely couple who'll earn them
some bread from the papers.
As we drove farther north Patrice made us stop at one
village while she called in on the local priest to see about his
marrying us. He turned out to be a stern old Scot with one
piece of advice for young lovers: “Go back where you came
from,” and to Patrice he added: “You don’t want to get
married to a boy of eighteen.”
That night Daniel pulled into a little out-of-the-way place
called Moniaive in Dumfriesshire, fixed some sleeping space
in Hillhead Farm, and Patrice and he started looking for
someone to marry us.
We told the farmer, Bob Hislop, and his wife that we were
photographers. Patrice and Daniel went out with their cam-
eras every day, while I sat round the fire reading just about
every book Mickey Spillane ever wrote. Patrice hates staying
in, but it must have looked crazy to Mr. and Mrs. Hislop to
see her going out with another man every day, when I was
supposed to be her husband. But the press was tracking us
down. I couldn’t go out.
Every day when they went out, Mrs. Hislop, a stout,
motherly woman in her fifties, would ask me, “Where’s your
wife off to with that other man?”
I shot one of my more ambitious lines with: “They’re
working together. I’m studying these books. You see, I’m a
law student.”
A law student . . . some gas!
While we were establishing residential qualifications in
161
Scotland, Patrice was taken ill with low blood pressure. She
saw a doctor and had to be moved from Hillhead Farm, a big
solid old stone pad with thousands of chickens around, to a
hospital in Dumfries.
While she was there, Daniel and.I went to a judge for a
special license. As a result, the press found out where we were
but we refused interviews. Pat was away for a week. One
afternoon I was in the farmhouse talking to Daniel when two
people came in, saying they were from a London Sunday
newspaper.
One was a big Scotsman.
“Be reasonable, Mike,” he said threateningly. “We've
smoked you out. If you play along with us, we can help you.
If you don’t cooperate we can be pretty nasty.”
I didn’t say anything, but was highly aware of Daniel
glowering at this rival press guy. The man was so proud of
the way he’d put himself across he sat down and lit up a
cigarette. Daniel stood up:
“Who’s this guy?” the newsman asked.
“He’s my bodyguard,” I said.
The newsman sized Daniel up and went back into his
pitch. Same deal, you play ball with us and we'll play ball
with you. I then pretended to tell it all over again in French
to Daniel. In fact, we were planning how to get these people
out of the pad. We’d been reading these Mickey Spillanes
and were up to our eyes in his world. We’d been doing
imitations of Mickey Spillane tough bits for laughs. Now
we'd make like we were doing it for real.
“Okay,” I snarled at Daniel through clenched teeth, “get
him. Get them both and get them real good.”
Daniel got up and leaned over the newsman and said in a
broken accent, “Look, Mack, that’s blackmail.”
162
He put one hand on the newsman’s shoulder. “Scram,

Mack. Out.”
Newsman: “Take your hands off me. What you’re doing is
against the law.”
- “So is what you’re doing, Mack,” Daniel grated. ‘‘So if you
don’t want us to slap blackmail and menace charges against
you, git.”
Daniel looked good and mad. He raised his hand in the
style of a Karate chop he’d read about in Spillane the previ-
ous day.
“Git,” I said. “Don’t you hear too good?”
‘The newsman turned to his partner and shrugged.
“It’s a pity that the advice of a Frenchman can ruin the
lives of two people,” he said bitingly.
And left.
Daniel and I nearly died laughing.
Patrice returned from the hospital and we spent the rest of
the waiting time with Daniel playing Sevens, a card game
which Patrice always won. She’d played it before and had it
all figured out and beat us all the time. It used to drive
Daniel and me crazy, but it made Patrice feel good and that
was all that mattered.
The special license was okayed and Daniel drove us
straight down to the register office at Moniaive and we got
married that day. Daniel was one witness and the registrar
had already provided the other.
We didn’t have a ring and the whole thing took over an
hour when it could have taken five minutes. Daniel was
flashing his bulb as the woman registrar asked us would we
say “yes” to this and “yes” to that. The woman was nervous
enough about marrying Charlie Chaplin’s son without the
added distraction of Daniel’s camera.
163
We tried to rush her before some cat poked his head round
the door with a ward of court writ . . . and suddenly she
was saying “Congratulations—now kiss the bride” and it was
over.
I think my first feeling was one of profound relief, after
our crazy dash from Spain and the enervating period of
waiting. Secondly, gratitude to the motherly figure of the
registrar for having done the thing which had seemed so im-
possible only a fortnight earlier at Cadaqués.
Some old woman outside threw confetti as Daniel rushed
us through his rival photographers into the car. We drove to
the farm like it was the last lap of the race to the moon and
spent three days there. It was impossible for us to go out.
There were reporters and photographers hanging around
everywhere.
A rumor had spread that my father was coming up to see
me and do the reconciliation bit and this brought swarms of
extra pressmen along to-swell their numbers. They were
waiting round the clock, either for Patrice and me to make a
bolt for it or for my father to materialize out of the Scottish
mist. ‘hey would go to the pub and then, in the middle of
the night, come back tipsily singing and shouting and bang-
ing at the door.
To make matters worse we were being offered fantastic
bread to talk to some of the reporters.
Daniel and I spent hours figuring out how we’d make
our break out. Finally we decided upon a plan: Daniel piled
all our suitcases in his car and drove off fast early in the
morning. The press guys thought we were ducking down
inside the car.
A crazy caravan set off after Daniel, scaring the hell out of
the sheep on those highland hills. He led those cars on a fifty-
164
mile chase through Dumfriesshire, while Patrice and I crept

out of a side door of Hillhead Farm and walked a couple of
miles across the fields with Bob Hislop’s nephew as our guide.
When we reached his farm he drove us in a big Jaguar toa
village next to Gretna Green, where we waited for Daniel to
join us after his early-morning drive. The other reporters and
photographers had followed him for about three hours .. .
and landed back at the Hislops’ farm. ‘They walked around,
shaking their heads and saying, “That Frenchman’s crazy.”
The next time he left alone in his car they thought it was
another wild trick and didn’t bother to follow him. Daniel
picked us up at our rendezvous point near Gretna Green and
drove us all the way to London.
So we started our married life: with no ring, nowhere to
live. And no bread.
Patrice and I moved into a top-floor pad in Belsize
Park, Hampstead, a far cry from the Manoir de Ban; but at
least it had a roof to keep off the April showers.
Then I was told about the National Assistance. . . . The
bread situation was chronic, so I went to the Assistance
Board’s office in Euston Road, where they told me I had to
register as an out-of-work.
The guy behind the counter asked: “What is your pro-
fession?”’
‘Actor.:
He looked kind of puzzled, but said nothing. I filled in the
form and he told me to go up to the National Assistance
people in Hampstead. They gave me £10. That little bit of
bread turned out to be an exploding loaf.
The newspapers had kept their ever-open eyes on me since
my marriage, and here was news indeed. When they heard
that my family was coming to London, en route for the usual
165
Easter break in Ireland, they talked to my mother and she
gave them a statement:
Concerning my son Michael Chaplin: The young man

is a problem and I am sorry he was given National
Assistance. He has stubbornly refused an education for
three years and therefore he should get a job and go to
work. If I do not wish to indulge him as a beatnik, that is
my privilege—sincerely, Oona Chaplin.
This time there was no invitation to dinner from the fam-

ily. With my long hair and way-out clothes I don’t think I
would have got past the porters.
The story ran for a few days in all the papers, and ques-
tions were even asked in Parliament. However, like all the
others, it died pretty quickly. But I didn’t draw any more
bread from the Assistance Board.
While it lasted, though, I must have seemed like valuable
property. All sorts of cats with contracts were knocking on
the door at Lawn Road, Belsize Park. Everybody wanted a
percentage . . . films, songs, theatre, some crazy man even
wanted to sign up the baby!
Patrice and I talked late into the nights, and eventually
settled for a recording contract with a pop-singer-turned-agent
and manager, one Larry Page. Early in April I went into a
London studio and cut my first record entitled, appropriately
enough, J Am What I Am.
While Larry pushed the record, if I wasn’t signing some-
where I sat around at home, discussing this book or just
talking things over with Patrice and Barry Jones, our flat-
mate, friend and prop. Crazy, happy, accident-prone Barry is
an old friend of Patrice’s. She met him years ago when he was
earning a living as a travel representative in Spain, shepherd-
166
ing tourists in and out of bars on those Night Life of the

Costa Brava tours, and taking a cut on the booze they drank.
As soon as we got settled in Belsize Park we called up
Barry in Manchester and told him to come down. His family
wasn't sorry to see him go, as he’d already managed to set the
place on fire when the kitchen stove took over from him
while he was cooking supper.
Barry hadn’t been with us long before he nearly killed me
in the kitchen. He wandered out of the pad, and after two
hours we began to smell gas. I went in the kitchen and nearly
choked, as the gas was hissing out of an unlit jet. I opened the
window and turned it off, but while I was there I passed
out.
Like I said, Barry is accident prone. He hadn’t left one jet
on—but two!
As a pop singer I seemed to be making out. Little chicks
clawed at me in the street, like the one who came up to me
and said, “Please sign this here for me. My parents hate your
guts. That’s why I want your autograph.”
167
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EPILOGUE
Today I look back and wonder what was the tremendous

strength I found in pot. At its worst, assisted by Oscar Peter-
son or someone, it would take me far away on a trip across
bridges into a world of fantastic shapes and color; it would
bring me right back to the nursery, to the time when, from
my pram, dogs did not have masters and clouds were not
associated with rain. My body would loosen itself into a state
of total well-being and I would lie or sit motionless deep in-
side myself and yet so far away from myself.
But there were the moments through smoking together
when one of us would be seen as blown into a giant or maybe
he would feel himself shrink into the carpet. We would try
to communicate to each other. We would tell stories, half-
acting them out, or laugh at someone; it was then in the
abstract that one of us might feel he was saying something.
We were freed from ourselves and that made it possible in
those rare moments to communicate to oneself, and I suppose
that was the only real strength I got out of pot.
I rolled my last spliff in mid-December 1964 about the
same day I left RADA, never to return.
It may have been that when the great dream that was be-
hind my going to the Academy had died, so did the in-
gredient that had helped nourish it.
169
How I gave it all up I don’t know. Marijuana has no physi-
cal holds and I cannot recall any conscious effort to stop
smoking it.
It is important to say that all the time I was taking pot I
was under analysis. This was probably why it was possible,
in the first place, for me to indulge in getting high in the
same way as someone who is on an extensive diet often com-
pensates by biting his nails. Analysis may have had something
to do with why I was smoking the stuff in the first place.
There are three stages in pot smoking: you start at normal,
build up to a peak of sensation and then gradually enroll
back to normal again.
I had my first turn-on in the first few hours of 1964, a few
days before I was fired from my job as a greengrocer. One
could say I was at the beginning of a long and well-packed
spliff.
A year later I had worked my way up to the peak of sen-
sation; that was the day I left RADA, the day I gave it all up.
I have cut my hair and shaved my beard. I try to identify
with all the other white shirts and ties in the rush hour; I
must be at the end of my comedown, back at starting point,
and maybe somewhere along the line I have learned some-
thing.
There has been a lot of space given to me in the daily
press over the last year. I followed my own story with interest
but never felt that what I was reading was about a person.
It was more like a caricature of someone, a sort of real-life
pop version, a Charlot, except this time the “little man”
didn’t have the upper hand.
To be the son of a great man can be a disadvantage; it is
like living next to a huge monument; one spends one’s life
circling around it, either to remain in the shade, or to avoid
170
Epilogue
its shadow. But then people brought up in an orphanage,

when trying to find out where they stand in relation to the
world, often spend the rest of their lives searching for such a
monument.
171
: piratesapie pee ia etater
a
oa a ae © e . , ~~ i ipa A. .
: Se gore . ep
a ees
Photo
by
1966
Bauer
Jerry
©
MICHAEL CHAPLIN
Michael Chaplin, third son of Charlie
Chaplin, was born in Beverly Hills, Cali-
fornia, in March 1946, The Chaplin family
lived for a time in Hollywood before mov-
ing to Britain and finally to their present
home in Vevey, Switzerland.
In 1956, Michael played a lead role in
the Chaplin production, A King in New
York, but it was not until 1961 that he
became news when he left home to live on
his own. He was news again when the in-
ternational Press found him in Spain with
Patrice Johns, the actress who was to be-
come his wife. He continued to figure in
the headlines when the Press chased him
throughout his flight from Spain to Moni-
aive in Scotland where he finally married
Miss Johns. As a married man living in a
flat in Hampstead, he once more found
newspaper men on his doorstep when it was
revealed that he was living on £10-a-week
National Assistance.
He is still living in Hampstead, but the
beatnik-length hair, the anonymous clothes
and the down-at-heel shoes are gone. In
their place, creased trousers and a tie, and
a steady job.
$.
08-D¢!
AQ-809
‘ Ill. MHITT
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I Couldn't Smoke The Grass On My Father's Lawn by Michael Chaplin

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I Couldn't Smoke The Grass On My Father's Lawn by Michael Chaplin

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This book is the story of Michael Chaplin,

Illustrated with photographs

G. P. Putnam’s Sons New York

Copyright © 1966 by Michael Chaplin

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 66-20304

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

This book is a story in itself. When the papers were full of

hatted established merchants and City financiers and feudal

the swimming teacher picked up my sister and carried her

on the farm. We were thrown into a conspiracy against this

tem. Parents who pay a bundle to get their offspring into

“IT wouldn’t mind,” he replied. “In fact, I’m seriously

tame that he would come when I called and crawl up my leg,

On the lawn of the Chaplin home in Vevey, Switzerland: (left to right)

Michael is lost in thought as

Twelve-year-old Michael ex-

Charles and Michael Chaplin pictured on arrival at London Airport,

Michael outside London’s .

Michael on the set of Paramount’s Promise Her Anything after his

Michael with Warren Beatty in scene from Promise Her Anything

- We got back to Switzerland just before the start of the

Shortly after we moved to Vevey my father redecorated the

guy into my father’s room next door, screaming, ““There’s

One evening, after the hospice nightmare, I was alone in

pandemonium downstairs with young women dancing

shambled in and out with the courses like a bear in a kinder-

He tipped back his slouch hat and smiled sourly. Then

After Christmas 1961 my father sent me as a boarder to the

That house at Vevey sure gives my father plenty to think

When my father’s in his full social swing there are so many

Shortly after settling down in London again I ran into a

see him. There’s been trouble at RADA, he’s hooked to

on the family scene there was complete isolation, which I

newspaper got hip to the name Chaplin, checked around and

do was to get back to England. At least I knew the language

We told her we were French photographers, and left for

He put one hand on the newsman’s shoulder. “Scram,

mile chase through Dumfriesshire, while Patrice and I crept

Concerning my son Michael Chaplin: The young man

This time there was no invitation to dinner from the fam-

ing tourists in and out of bars on those Night Life of the

se oni te case awit Rh eT Ee

pres) tatverre — aii

Today I look back and wonder what was the tremendous

its shadow. But then people brought up in an orphanage,

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