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declamation, had been opposed to the whole idea: "I don't find the voice necessary, it spoils the art as much as painting statuary. I would as soon rouge marble cheeks. Pictures are pantomimic art. We might as well have the stage. There would be nothing left to the imagination."
The intervening years, the growth of general interest in sound synchronization, and the release of talkies, had not caused him to change his mind. For in 1929 he was saying to a Motion Pictures reporter, "Talkies? You can say I detest them! They come to ruin the world's most ancient art, the art of pantomime. They annihilate the great beauty of silence."
At a moment then when all other studios in Hollywood were installing new apparatus, studying new technique, and dismissing certain of the stars, Chaplin on La Brea Avenue doggedly went on with the making of a silent film.
Virginia Cherrill was chosen for the lead in this film, largely because, in Chaplin's eyes, she bore a strange resemblance to Edna Purviance. She was also short-sighted and, without her spectacles, looked like a blind girl. She had never made a film before or been on the stage; and Chaplin began the task he most enjoyed — that of taking raw living material, and moulding and shaping it into an artist. Edna, Jackie Coogan and now Virginia Cherrill. It seemed as though, after the recent unheavals both in his private and his public life, he had come out into the sun again. His old vitality returned, his absorption in his work. The neurotic small man disappeared, and in his place his studio found a dynamic and amusing director, who kept them moving until they dropped from exhaustion.
Then, before City Lights was more than well begun, he was called upon to face more suffering. His mother had suddenly been taken so ill that she had had to be removed to a nursing home. Her doctors at first had been able to reassure Chaplin, but later it became clear that she would not recover. Chaplin was summoned urgently, and went to the nursing home, where he stayed talking for over an hour with his mother's companion, and her doctor.
When he returned to the car where Carl Robinson was waiting for him, his face was pinched and drawn, and he sat down as though strength had suddenly gone from him. He had decided that he would not go to see his mother, who was in a coma; but would keep untouched his memory of her before her last illness changed her. It was clear to Robinson, who knew him extremely well, that in an understandable revulsion of feeling, he would afterwards despise himself for his decision, and all his life regret that he had not seen her at the end.