Sometimes, if you write biographies, people expect you to be an expert on the subject. Well in a way, you do become an expert, but when you start you don’t know very much and for example, with the Charlie Chaplin biography, as well known as he was and at one time
he was the most famous man in the world.
I mean he was as famous as anybody and he’s still quite famous. I didn’t know an awful lot about him, I knew a certain amount. But when you read about someone, you find out that there are certain things that don’t quite add up. And as a biographer, it’s not your job just to repeat what everybody else said.
But if you find holes in the story, you have to think about them and see why
try to figure it out. An example, he was a very tiny man, he was only about five-two, maybe five-three, he says five-four, but they always exaggerate, he was very tiny.
He had a rather dark complexion, it was kind of Mediterranean complexion, dark curly hair, that’s not what his father looked like or his mother. He looked like either one of them. And he looked at his
and his father skipped out when he was very young which is why he had this childhood.
And then his mother went mad so that’s why he had this tragedy in his life. But he looks at this man who is presumably his father and realized, he can’t be my father, I don’t look anything like him. I’m not built like him and that haunted him for the rest of his life, he was never too sure.
So who was his father? Now he got tired of this, he would say that in one interview that he was that his father was Jewish. Another one he would say, no, there’s not an ounce of Jewish blood in him. Another he’d say, he was, he wasn’t, so he didn’t know. But to put an end to it, when he was in his 30s he announced that his mother
his grandmother was half gypsy to explain the dark hair and the curly hair and the short stature.
I have figured out who his father was, it’s deductive reasoning, but I’ve eliminated this, I’ve eliminated that and I think it is obvious, in a way, who his father was, it fits all the elements. So you have to come up with some things, you should come up with some observations.
I’m not saying absolutely, but I think I have a more interesting and convincing case of who his father was then any of the other biographers and he has a couple of very good ones. But they took the easy path out, the gypsy path out which to me is just baloney.