He could belittle Chaplin. He could be more stinting in his praise – even calling Chaplin good instead of great pains him, because to declare the truth, that Chaplin is the best there is, and the best there ever was, would infuriate Larry Semon – but he will not lie, not even for Larry Semon.
Not even for a job.
He’s better than good, says Larry Semon. But over in Europe, my pictures are making as much as his. You know that?
He tells Larry Semon that he did not know this.
– Soon they’ll make more. Here, too.
He nods, because there is nothing more to be said. If money can buy success, then Larry Semon will succeed.
As long as the money does not run out.
Larry Semon decides.
You start next week, Larry Semon says. Three pictures. We’ll see how you go.
30
Larry Semon is as good as his word, but no better. Three pictures are all he gets.
At the Oceana Apartments, he can remember their names: Huns and Hyphens
Bears and Bad Men
Frauds and Frenzies
Larry Semon has a formula, and Larry Semon does not deviate from it, except to make the explosions bigger, the chases longer, the stunts more dangerous.
He is given a bit of business with eggs and chicks in the first picture, but less to work with in the second. For the third picture, he is promoted. Larry Semon makes him his co-star. They are to be convicts on a chain gang who escape to the city. Larry Semon informs him of this storyline the week before filming commences, and they spend days rehearsing their scenes together. He returns each evening to Mae bruised and exhausted. He might conclude that Larry Semon is torturing him were it not for the fact that Larry Semon is more bruised and exhausted than he is. And when he is back in his rooms, back with Mae, he practices in front of a mirror, just as he once practiced in the dusty attic rooms of lodgings procured by A.J. He feels this is his last, best chance, and he wants to be as good as he has ever been.
They begin work on Frauds and Frenzies. The crew laughs, and laughs hard, but the crew is not always laughing at Larry Semon.
This Larry Semon notices.
He learns a lot from observing Larry Semon, who agonizes over every shot; who dreams up gags when not behind, or in front of, the camera; who works through these gags when alone, pacing them out, counting steps, timing every movement; who, when not agonizing or dreaming or practicing, is drawing, sketching characters and scenes and stunts.
And who does not laugh, not unless a camera is pointed at him, and only when the scene requires a simulation of mirth.
Larry Semon lets him go. There is no explanation.
It is over.
Later, Babe will speak of his own time with Larry Semon, of playing the heavy to this relentless man, and they will express their gratitude for the chance given to them, even as they acknowledge that it was all to serve the myth of Larry Semon.
And Larry Semon believes this myth, even though Larry Semon has fashioned it himself. Larry Semon spends too long brooding on Chaplin. The money is not sufficient recompense, because Larry Semon also wants the Audience to adore him as the Audience adores Chaplin. What Larry Semon does not understand is that Chaplin started out already believing the Audience was waiting to adore him; the Audience had just not yet encountered Chaplin, and so had no name to put to this nebulous presence at the margins of perception.
Chaplin knew. Larry Semon only desires.
Larry Semon spends and spends. If Chaplin’s genius cannot be matched, then Chaplin’s budgets can be exceeded, and in this way the Audience will bow before Larry Semon. But Larry Semon forgets the cardinal rule: Never set a match to your own money.
Larry Semon blazes through his fortune. Larry Semon’s career goes up in smoke.
He remembers Larry Semon.
Babe remembered Larry Semon.
They are among the few.
31
At the Oceana Apartments, on his balcony, he smokes a cigarette, his eyes concealed by sunglasses. He has removed his jacket because the morning is warm, even in the shade of the building.
How often he comes back to Chaplin. Babe is always with him, even if only as a sensed absence, like the ticking of a clock now silenced. But Chaplin is different. Chaplin was always different.
Chaplin reads dictionaries while shaving.
Chaplin has sex with fifteen-year-old girls.
Chaplin rehearses scenes fifty times.
Chaplin takes Paulette Goddard to bed, believing her to be only seventeen, and is disappointed when she reveals that she is twenty-two.
Chaplin has the strings of a violin reversed so Chaplin can play it left-handed.
Chaplin watches him practice and rehearse in their shared rooms, then steals his gags.
Chaplin carries a gun, and patrols the grounds of his home hunting for men who might seek to sleep with his child bride.
Chaplin promises him work, and reneges on that promise.
Chaplin’s hair turns white in the 1920s.
Chaplin bears the name of a man who was not his father.
Chaplin’s mother is a prostitute.
Chaplin endures squalor and deprivation.
Chaplin is abandoned.
Chaplin is an exile.
Chaplin marries a woman thirty-six years his junior.
Chaplin is the greatest comedian he has ever seen, and the greatest he will ever see.
Chaplin is a monster.
32
And Babe?
Babe deals with his own vexations: twenty-six pictures as a stooge for Jimmy Aubrey, who never likes a frame of film that does not feature Jimmy Aubrey, although Babe does not hold a grudge, and will later put in a word for Jimmy Aubrey when Jimmy Aubrey needs work. They both will: Jimmy Aubrey is from Lancashire, just as he is, and serves time with Fred Karno, just as he does, and is a former understudy to Chaplin, just as he is, and works on pictures with Chaplin, just – Never mind.
And Jimmy Aubrey also serves Larry Semon, but lasts longer than three pictures.
Because I didn’t want his laughs, Jimmy Aubrey tells him.
– I didn’t want his laughs, either. I just wanted my own.
– Well, with Larry Semon there weren’t enough laughs for two. There weren’t that many laughs in the whole wide world.
He should be more like Jimmy Aubrey. He should remain silent and cash the checks, but he doesn’t have Jimmy Aubrey’s patience, and he doesn’t have Jimmy Aubrey’s common sense.
And he desires it all too much.
It could be that he is more like Chaplin than he wishes to believe.
33
At the Oceana Apartments he dreams alternate histories. He compiles indices of possibilities.
He might have been less ambitious.
He might have been less foolish.
He might have lived a happier life.
But not in this business and not in this town.
So each day he wakes.
Each day he remembers.
And each day Babe is taken from him.
Over, and over, and over again.
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