Just before the war I dined at his house with his wife, the daughter of Toscanini. Rachmaninov and Barbirolli were there. Rachmaninov was a strange-looking man, with something aesthetic and cloistral about him. It was an intimate dinner, just five of us.
It seems that each time art is discussed I have a different explanation of it. Why not? That evening I said that art was an additional emotion applied to skilful technique. Someone brought the topic round to religion and I confessed I was not a believer. Rachmaninov quickly interposed: ‘But how can you have art without religion?’
I was stumped for a moment. ‘I don’t think we are talking about the same thing,’ I said. ‘My concept of religion is a belief in a dogma – and art is a feeling more than a belief.’
‘So is religion,’ he answered. After that I shut up.
*
While dining at my house, Igor Stravinsky suggested we should do a film together. I invented a story. It should be surrealistic, I said – a decadent night-club with tables around the dance floor, at each table groups and couples representing the mundane world – at one table greed, at another hypocrisy, at another ruthlessness. The floor show is the passion play, and while the crucifixion of the Saviour is going on, groups at each table watch it indifferently, some ordering meals, others talking business, others showing little interest. The mob, the High Priests and the Pharisees are shaking their fists up at the Cross, shouting: ‘If Thou be the Son of God come down and save Thyself.’ At a nearby table a group of business men are talking excitedly about a big deal. One draws nervously on his cigarette, looking up at the Saviour and blowing his smoke absent-mindedly in His direction.
At another table a business man and his wife sit studying the menu. She looks up, then nervously moves her chair back from the floor. ‘I can’t understand why people come here,’ she says uncomfortably; ‘it’s depressing.’
‘It’s good entertainment,’ says the business man. ‘The place was bankrupt until they put on this show. Now they are out of the red.’
‘I think it’s sacrilegious,’ says his wife.
‘It does a lot of good,’ says the man. ‘People who have never been inside a church come here and get the story of Christianity.’
As the show progresses, a drunk, being under the influence of alcohol, is on a different plane; he is seated alone and begins to weep and shout loudly: ‘Look, they’re crucifying Him! And nobody cares!’ He staggers to his feet and stretches his arms appealingly towards the Cross. The wife of a minister sitting nearby complains to the head waiter, and the drunk is escorted out of the place still weeping and remonstrating: ‘Look, nobody cares! A fine lot of Christians you are!’
‘You see,’ I told Stravinsky, ‘they throw him out because he is upsetting the show.’ I explained that putting a passion play on the dance floor of a night-club was to show how cynical and conventional the world has become in professing Christianity.
The maestro’s face became very grave. ‘But that’s sacrilegious!’ he said.
I was rather astonished and a little embarrassed. ‘Is it?’ I said. ‘I never intended it to be. I thought it was a criticism of the world’s attitude towards Christianity – perhaps, having made up the story as I went along, I haven’t made that very clear.’ And so the subject was dropped. But several weeks later, Stravinsky wrote, wanting to know if I still considered the idea of our doing a film together. However, my enthusiasm has cooled off and I become interested in making a film of my own.
Hanns Eisler brought Schoenberg to my studio, a frank and abrupt little man whose music I much admired, and whom I had seen regularly at the Los Angeles tennis tournaments sitting alone in the bleachers wearing a white cap and a T-shirt. After seeing my film Modern Times, he told me that he enjoyed the comedy but my music was very bad – and I had partly to agree with him. In discussing music one remark of his was indelible: ‘I like sounds, beautiful sounds.’
Hanns Eisler tells an amusing story about the great man. Hanns, studing harmony under him, would walk in the depth of winter five miles in the snow to receive a lesson from the master at eight o’clock. Schoenberg, who was inclined to baldness, would sit at the piano while Hanns looked over his shoulder, reading and whistling the music. ‘Young man,’ said the master, ‘don’t whistle. Your icy breath is very cold on my head.’
During the making of The Dictator I began receiving crank letters, and now that it was finished they started to increase. Some threatened to throw stink bombs in the theatre and shoot up the screen wherever it would be shown, others threatening to create riots. At first I thought of going to the police, but such publicity might keep the public away from the theatre. A friend of mine suggested having a talk with Harry Bridges, head of the longshoreman’s union. So I invited him to the house for dinner.
I told him frankly my reason for wanting to see him. I knew Bridges was anti-Nazi so I explained that I was making an anti-Nazi comedy and that I had been receiving threatening letters. I said: ‘If I could invite, say, twenty or thirty of your longshoremen to my opening, and have them scattered amongst the audience, then if any of these pro-Nazi fellows started a rumpus, your folks might gently stamp on their toes before anything got seriously going.’
Bridges laughed. ‘I don’t think it will come to that, Charlie. You’ll have enough defenders with your
