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suddenly illuminated bosom the little man who had made, through mime and dancing, the most eloquent and brilliant after-dinner speech they had ever heard.
Exhausted, stimulated and deeply satisfied, Chaplin, after a few days more in Paris and a hasty farewell visit to London, set out for home. He had made his conquest of Europe, recovered from his period of depression, and left behind notable friends who would gladly welcome him again with the same fervour whenever he returned to Europe.
It was hard to leave Pola Negri. Later, when she announced her intention of taking up film work in Hollywood, he was able to arrange considerable advance publicity for her, which helped her in her rapid rise to fame on the American screen. When she came, they were once more inseparable, reputed engaged, said to have parted, reputed engaged again, finally going their separate ways.
As soon as Chaplin set foot on American soil again, he was beseiged with magnificent offers to write an autobiographical narrative of his visit. Chaplin the canny business man accepted the best offer, and dictated the forty-thousand word book on his train journey across America. His enthusiasm and excitement were so intense that the book was finished by the time the train reached Salt Lake City. Chaplin was paid twenty-five thousand dollars for My Wonderful Visit, a sum which helped considerably to defray the expenses of the trip.
The book is well worth reading for its revelation of Chaplin's personality, his artist's reaction to the people he met, the adventures he had, and the astonishing effects of returning to his own land as the most famous celebrity of his time.
The day of his return from Europe, he dashed straight to Goldwyn's office, and plunged into a vivid description of his triumphal tour. Goldwyn sat back comfortably to witness a one-man show of no mean order, while Chaplin acted and mimed the whole tour for his benefit, playing all parts, assuming all nationalities, using all voices, and recreating, in a Hollywood office, the total impact of his Wonderful Visit.
i©^ Public Success and Private Disaster
FOR SOME TIME AFTER HIS RETURN HE WAS RESTLESS, UNABLE TO
settle, and enduring what one of his secretaries called "the incubating period", when he was seeking and rejecting ideas, then brooding over the one that appealed to him as the theme for his next film — in this case The Pilgrim, the last film he was to make for the First National Company.