Incidentally, Tuttle took us out to visit Charlie Chaplin last Sunday. Quelle disappointment! Charlie is now a fattish, ageing man, and he insists on being the life of the party. He was bounding around all afternoon, clowning, grimacing, putting on native Balinese and Hindu phonograph records & dancing madly to them. This sounds charming, I know, & had you been there we might have had some fun with it – but somehow Chaplin was a little more frightening than amusing, mainly I think because there was more of an air of desperation than joie de vivre in his cutting up. The guy just didn’t look cute and I kept thinking, “Who does this mincing, fat-necked little fellow think he is, imitating Charlie Chaplin?”

Adolph Green, letter to Leonard Bernstein, September 1943. “The Leonard Bernstein Letters”.