The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [269]
A friend of Chaplin, the journalist Alistair Cooke, in his book Six Men (1977), observed that Chaplin was:
`extremely attractive to women and instantly susceptible to them, to two types more than most: the femme fatale and the child woman. The gamut is represented at its polar opposites by Pola Negri ... and his first wife, Mildred Harris. Time and again he found himself involved with lusty, earthy women. But the ones he sought were nubile adolescents. He married three of them, Mildred Harris at 16, when he was 29; Lita Grey at 17, when he was 35; Oona O'Neill at 18, when he was 55. I state this as an interesting but probably inexplicable phenomenon.'
Far from being `inexplicable, the pattern is in fact only too familiar among men who fail to achieve the full transition of their `inner feminine' between `Mother' and a mature anima; and who thus remain caught in uneasy fluctuation between the two, equally frustrating poles of the `earthy femme fatale' (Mother) and the `child woman' (inadequately developed anima). Few men, however, have had more extensive or public opportunities to display this basic symptom of arrested development than Chaplin.
No brief summary of Hollywood's innumerable variants on sentimentalising the Rags to Riches plot would be complete without a mention of that immensely popular 1960s musical My Fair Lady. Based on Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion, it is revealing to note where the two versions differ.
From the heroine's point of view, both stories unfold in many ways like a fairy tale. A dirty, coarsely-spoken little flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, used to being treated like garbage, meets a mysterious older person with apparently supernatural powers (his astonishing knowledge of phonetics, which enables him in the opening scene to place everyone in the Covent Garden crowd to within a few streets of where they live, just by the way they speak). This strange `Sorcerer' figure, Professor Higgins, offers, for a bet with his friend Colonel Pickering, to transform Eliza into a 'Princess. She arrives at his house in Wimpole Street, where she undergoes a rite of initiation (being given a hot bath to wash away all the grime which symbolises her ragamuffin outward persona). She is dressed up in fine clothes, and as the first stage of the story ends, the long business of transformation has begun, with Eliza learning from Higgins how to talk like a lady.
By the beginning of the next act, the first stage of Eliza's outward transformation is complete. She is now ready to go out into the world, where in Shaw's version she undergoes the archetypal three tests: a visit to Professor Higgins's mother's `at home' (where she is taken for a lady); an embassy ball (where she is taken for a Princess); and finally a Buckingham Palace garden party. In My Fair Lady these tests are reduced to two: Mrs Higgins receives her guests at Ascot races, and this is followed by the embassy ball. Eliza passes the tests triumphantly, but, like Cinderella, each time she has to return home, if not to rags at least to the domineering presence of Higgins, who continues to treat her coldly as a cross between her pitiful little former self and a mere scientific experiment.
In other words, as usual in the second stage of the Rags to Riches story, a split has opened up between the heroine's triumphant new outer Self, her persona, and her real, deeper self, which is in danger of being repressed altogether. But we have already caught a glimpse of her embryonic `other half', the `Prince' who loves her for herself, in the somewhat improbable guise of Freddie Eynsford-Hill, the upper-middle-class young man who, as a guest of Mrs Higgins, has been bowled over by Eliza's spirited charms.
The central crisis of the story arrives when, after her last triumphant test, Eliza finally explodes in rage at Higgins's condescending treatment of her and, after giving him a piece of her mind, storms out of the house. All might seem lost, except that she falls into the arms of the waiting