In the American Jungle by Waldo David Frank

For fifteen years these eyes have looked out on Hollywood. Much nonsense has been written about this suburb of Los Angeles, which is itself a suburb of the country. America reviles it as an indecent stranger somehow lodged in its midst, or romanticizes it into a scene from the "Arabian Nights. " But, of course, Hollywood is no worse a place than any provincial city of our land; nor better. Hollywood's producers are typical money men; its directors are typical professional men; its actresses and actors are typical girls and boys. Its army of mechanics, craftsmen, engineers, are the usual American sort: grime them up a bit, lower their wages, and they would fit in to your town garage. Hollywood's swarm of aspirants buzzing about the lots are typical floating seed of the American jungle: the wastrel seed that finds no soil to root in, whether it rots near home or blows away. Only in one respect is Hollywood unusual: its girls are really as fair as all girls would like to be.

Hollywood is the perfect mirror of banal American success. Ordinary souls dream extraordinary dreams-in the way of ordinary souls. And in Hollywood the dreams come true. Here is uncounted money, here is glamour, here is the exact mechanical production of that ideal to which success means a show. And Chaplin, with those frightening eyes of his, which almost no one ever sees, looks out upon this world, his home since he was twenty-four. There is another world which he looks in upon: the grey, grinding London of his childhood. He loves the London slums; for these slums were his and they are in his heart. But on his mother's side the blood of Chaplin is half gypsy. Through her, whom he brought from England to live near him on the Coast, yet another world lives in him: a world of meadows and irresponsible laughter.