I just re-watched Charlie Chaplin’s film Limelight and was reminded of his relationship to Gertrude Stein. In 1934 Stein and Chaplin met at a dinner party, and both recorded their versions of the experience in their respective autobiographies. Stein’s account may have even influenced Chaplin’s rendering.
When Stein went to Hollywood, the two people she most wanted to meet were Dashiell Hammett and Charlie Chaplin. In My Autobiography, Chaplin notes that Stein “looked like Van Gogh’s portrait of Madame Roulin.” He found her comments on how the imitation is often more beautiful than the natural thing to be “derivative,” but they were more in sync on the subject of circular logic in cinema. “She would like to see me in a movie,” he writes, “just walking up the street and turning a corner, then another corner, and another. I thought of saying that her idea was a paraphrase of that mystic emphasis of hers: ‘Rose is a rose is a rose.’”
Stein may have been referring to Fernand Leger’s Ballet Mecanique in her Chaplin corner-turning fantasy, however the resemblance to her own concept of a continuous present is clearly included in this looping vision. Her desire to see Chaplin taking one turn after another also resonates with her theory that links her own writing to cinema in that, “it is in a way if you like one portrait of anything not a number of them.”
Moreover, Chaplin would use Stein’s very same “mystic” phrase himself in these lines from his 1952 film Limelight: “The meaning of anything is merely other words for the same thing. After all, a rose is a rose is a rose. That’s not bad. It should be quoted.” Chaplin’s rose did not smell quite as sweet by 1952, and the film plays on this, telling the story of a once-popular clown currently out of favor and down on his luck.
Chaplin made the film while in exile from the United States because of alleged Communist leanings. Chaplin ends his account of his night with Stein with a scene that typifies both their personas, in which both he and she tipped over their coffee cups; he was “mortified,” but “Gertrude never dropped a spangle. Said she: ‘It’s all right, it didn’t spill on my dress.’”
From Stein’s perspective, on the other hand, in her Everybody’s Autobiography, Charlie was “like a Spanish gypsy bull-fighter.” She reports that he proclaimed “silent films…could do something that the theater had not done they could change the rhythm but if you had a voice accompanying naturally after that you could never change the rhythm you were always held by the rhythm that the voice gave them.”
But their differences really set in when, “he wanted the sentiment of movement invented by himself and I wanted the sentiment of doing nothing invented by myself, and we both like talking but each one had to stop to be polite and let the other one say something.”