Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Charlie Chaplin

In 1943, in open court, an American lawyer described Charlie Chaplin as “a little runt of a Svengali,” a “lecherous hound who lied like a cheap cockney cad.” The lawyer went on to call upon “American mothers and wives to stop this gray-headed buzzard dead in his tracks.” The world was at war and Charlie Chaplin was being hauled through the courts in a highly publicized, bitter and vituperative paternity suit. It was a low point in the extraordinary life of the world’s most popular entertainer, arguably the most famous film star in the history of the movies, but worse was to come.

Charlie Chaplin was born in south London, probably Walworth, in 1889. Both his father, Charles Chaplin senior, and his mother, Hannah, were moderately talented minor artistes in the Victorian music hall. Charles wrote and published a few songs but his modest career soon foundered on his chronic alcoholism. Hannah’s life in the theatre was cursed too, but this time by her mental instability. Legend has it that young Charlie’s first stage appearance occurred when his mother “dried” on stage in the middle of a song and her little son — he was five years old at the time — took over to the audience’s unequivocal delight and rousing acclaim.

By then, however, the Chaplin marriage was already over and, what with Charles senior’s descent into drunkenness, and Hannah’s religious dementia, Charlie and his half-brother Sydney’s early life was one of signal poverty and hardship. The family home was now located in a couple of rooms in a foetid Lambeth tenement where Hannah took in piece work and Charlie combed the mudflats of the Thames at low tide for anything salvageable that could be sold. Hannah’s indigence meant spells in the workhouse for both her children and on occasion the entire family. And there the routine humiliations of Victorian welfare were never forgotten by Chaplin: he was beaten and bullied and his head was shaved and daubed with iodine against ringworm. Sometimes Hannah was confined to the workhouse as well but her bouts of insanity saw her more and more often incarcerated in Cane Hill asylum, where her violent hysteria was treated by periods of isolation in a padded cell.

Sydney Chaplin, four years older than Charlie, made his escape from this distressing world by joining the merchant navy as an apprentice steward. Charlie, meanwhile, at the age of nine, embarked on a stage career — clog dancing with a variety troupe called “The Eight Lancashire Lads.” From now on he was to support his mother from his earnings as an actor and performer. Charles Chaplin senior died, aged only thirty-seven, from cirrhosis of the liver, and Hannah’s intermittent periods of delusion and dementia meant ever longer spells in the bleak precincts of Cane Hill.

Chaplin’s early stage career proved reasonably successful, occupying juvenile roles in long-running touring plays, but his first real break came when Sydney left off seafaring and found a job with one of the greatest impresarios of the music hall age — Fred Karno. Before long, Charlie Chaplin was also on the Karno bill, as a comedian and mimic, and thus began a rise in his fortunes that would only terminate half a century later.

Chaplin soon moved into the elite of Fred Karno’s Army — as the travelling vaudevillians were known — where he won particular acclaim for his drunk act — playing an “inebriated swell” who pretends to interrupt the show. Chaplin worked with Karno’s troupe for eight years and it was during this period that he acquired and perfected the comic skills — the timing, the gags, the pratfalls and slapstick — that he was to put to such innovative use in the early silent movies. By the time Chaplin left for a tour of America in 1913 he was a thorough professional. He was earning £8 a week and had prominent billing on the company’s posters. He was a small man — about five feet four — but dark and handsome, and a dapper and fastidious dresser. His first serious love affair occurred about this time, with a young dancer called Hetty Kelly, but was cut short by his embarkation for the American tour. However, Chaplin invested this shortlived, unconsummated teenage romance with tremendous romanticism. The love he felt for Hetty became exalted and transcendent and Hetty substitutes were to figure in many of his movies. Whenever he was with Hetty, he said, he “was walking in paradise with inner blissful excitement.” Something about her purity and youth (she was fifteen when he met her) obsessed Chaplin—“it was but a childish infatuation to her, but to me it was the beginnings of a spiritual development, a reaching out for beauty.”—and his retrospective fascination for her and what she represented (she died of influenza in 1919) may well have influenced his own sexual tastes and nature throughout the rest of his life.

The trip to America with the Karno company proved to be the watershed in Chaplin’s life. His stage act was watched one night by Mack Sen-nett, founder and producer of the Keystone Kops, and at the end of 1913 Chaplin was offered a job in the then embryonic world of the movies, at a salary of $150 a week (a multiple of twenty will give an approximation of what Chaplin’s salary is worth in today’s terms).

In 1914 Hollywood was nothing more than farmland — miles of orange and lemon groves — far from the outskirts of Los Angeles. The first studios were reconstituted farms and barns where short films were churned out at the rate of one every three days or so. The medium was not highly regarded and was seen as a modern “fad” being exploited by a bunch of get-rich-quick entrepreneurs. Chaplin went to work for the doyen of comedy film-makers and just as he had cut his music hall teeth with Fred Karno so Chaplin learned the film business from the loudmouthed, tobacco-chewing braggart that was Mack Sennett. In 1914 thirty-five films starring Charlie Chaplin were released. By the end of the year Chaplin signed a new contract with a new company, Essanay. His salary had climbed to $1,250 a week.

In one year everything had changed; in one year the nature of film comedy had been irrevocably altered and the twentieth century had acquired a new icon. And all because of the Tramp. No one really knows how the Tramp was created, and Chaplin himself provided several contradictory versions over the years, but the fact remains that at some stage in February 1914, during the shooting of a Sennett one-reeler called Mabel’s Strange Predicament, Chaplin went down to the wardrobe shed at Keystone and emerged carrying a cane walking stick and wearing a bowler hat, a toothbrush moustache, a tight jacket, baggy trousers and oversized shoes. The Little Tramp was born.

And was an almost immediate and enormous success. Chaplin began to write and direct his own films as well as star in them. He moved into an apartment in the fashionable Athletic Club and acquired a valet as well as opened several bank accounts. He wrote to his brother Sydney, in his inimitable style, urging him to come over. “I have made a heap of good friends hear and go to all the partys etc … I am still saving my money and I have 4000 dollars in one bank, 1200 in another, 1500 in London not so bad for 25 and still going strong thank God. Sid, we will be millionaires before long.”

And he was. At the age of twenty-five, while Europe was embarking on the long agony of World War One, Charlie Chaplin from the slums of Lambeth set about mining one of the most lucrative seams in show business. Given the privations and suffering of his early life the money Chaplin made was always of vital importance to him and he was never in any doubt about what he was worth. Sydney duly came over and became his manager, and between the two of them they negotiated some of the shrewdest and most remunerative contracts in Hollywood’s history. One New York journalist observed, after Chaplin had spent a month in the city, that he “kept his bankroll exclusively to himself …never has Broadway known a more frugal celebrity.”

Chaplin could have contented himself with cranking out Keystone-style comedies, amassing his personal fortune and living the good life in the lotusland that was Hollywood, but his artistic ambitions were there from the start and always drove him on to greater challenges. He saw the huge potential of the movies at once, both as a means of mass entertainment on an international scale and also as an art form in their own right. Very soon after his initial success with the short comedies he tried his hand at a film of greater length and polemical heft—The Immigrant—the first of the series of comedies with a marked social comment that was to establish him as one of the founding geniuses of the movie industry.

Coexistent with the inexorable rise of his fame and fortune (his salary in 1918 was over a million dollars a year) his emotional life by contrast proved a far rockier business. After an affair with his leading lady in The Immigrant—Edna Purviance — Chaplin became infatuated with a smalltime teenage actress called Mildred Harris (she was sixteen years old and, as Chaplin put it, “no mental heavyweight”). This was the first of a series of disastrous liaisons with very young girls, a sexual obsession that was to dog Chaplin well into middle age, and was to provide his enemies with powerful ammunition.

Mildred became pregnant and to avoid the prospective scandal Chaplin married her. It was hardly a grand amour and what little affection Chaplin had for his bride evaporated when the pregnancy turned out to be a false alarm. As always, when his emotional life distressed him, Chaplin turned to his work. Shoulder Arms was made to boost the war effort and, in association with his old friends Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, United Artists was formed — the novel idea of a film studio controlled and run by actors that gave rise to the phrase, spoken by a disenchanted producer, that “the lunatics have taken over the asylum.” United Artists was to be another phenomenal money-spinner for Chaplin, but in the meantime the war was ending and his marriage was in ruins. Chaplin was editing his next film, The Kid, when Mildred Harris sued for divorce on the grounds of mental cruelty. It was finally granted in 1920.

In the celebrated dream sequence in The Kid a twelve-year-old child actress called Lita Grey played the part of an angel. Something about her fascinated Chaplin and he put her under contract. However, a more celebrated dalliance with the spectacularly beautiful actress Pola Negri dominated the gossip columns and there was a farcical series of on-off engagements that had more to do with enlarging Pola Negri’s public profile than any great infatuation. Chaplin was deeply embarrassed by this public speculation about his private life, and in fact Pola was not his type. It is hard to say exactly when his affair with Lita Grey began but by 1924, when she was fifteen, she had been signed up — to the dismay of his colleagues — as leading lady on Chaplin’s next big film The Gold Rush. When she signed the contract it was reported that she jumped up and down clapping her hands and crying “Goody, goody!” Lita was no star, and not much of a beauty — she was described by one journalist as a “peculiarly shy, reticent and far from loquacious girl. She seemed phlegmatic.” Chaplin’s folly was compounded in September of that year when Lita announced she was pregnant. Sexual relations with an under-age girl were regarded as de facto rape in California, a crime that carried up to thirty years’ imprisonment. The arranged marriage that followed took place covertly in Mexico. Press releases gave Lita’s age as nineteen.

Chaplin’s marriage to Lita Grey brought him two sons and a degree of misery and personal torment that almost drove him insane. In his autobiography he devotes no more than a couple of lines to the whole episode: “For two years we were married and tried to make a go of it, but it was hopeless and ended in a great deal of bitterness.” In typical consolation he concentrated on his work with demonic intensity. As soon as he finished the arduous shoot of The Gold Rush he embarked on The Circus and shortly after the completion of that film, Lita walked out with her two children. The acrimony and publicity of the subsequent divorce action — its sexual innuendo and scurrility — drove Chaplin to a nervous breakdown. His hair turned grey overnight, he would bathe repeatedly and compulsively wash his hands dozens of times a day, and at night, paranoid and suspicious, he would patrol his empty house with a shotgun. As Lita prepared to announce to the world the names of five prominent women she alleged Chaplin had slept with during their short marriage (they included Marion Davies, newspaper magnate Randolph Hearst’s mistress) Chaplin agreed to a cash settlement of $600,000. It was the largest such settlement in American legal history.

While Chaplin’s personal life reached its nadir his films and popularity seemed ever on the ascendant. After the acrimonious divorce one headline read simply: “CHARLIE IS A REAL HERO.” But at about this time, unknown to him, a new factor had entered his life that was to have profound consequences later. The FBI, under its director J. Edgar Hoover, had, since its inception, been convinced that Hollywood and the film community were a nest of vipers, of corrupt and seditious Communist degenerates who were undermining the moral fabric of the United States. The first file the FBI opened on Chaplin was in 1922, recording the fact that Chaplin had hosted a reception for a prominent labour leader. At the end of his life the full dossier was discovered to be 1,900 pages long. One report was titled “Affiliation of Charles Chaplin with Groups Declared to be Communist Subversive Groups.” Chaplin’s politics were broadly, if idiosyncratically, left wing, and he made no secret of them. But something about the FBI’s diligence in singling him out from the other “parlor Bolshevists” of Hollywood suggests a more malign vendetta, one probably inspired by Hoover himself. Chaplin and Hoover had met at a dinner early in Hoover’s career and whatever took place that night initiated a dislike and distrust that were corrosive. Chaplin, moreover, did his cause no favour, in the eyes of the righteous, by never taking up American citizenship, by being regularly engaged in tax disputes with the IRS, and in making films with a pointed humanist-socialist message. They were also convinced he was Jewish (which he was not: faced with the accusation once Chaplin replied, “I’m afraid I do not have that honour.” This did not stop the FBI from labelling his files: “Charlie Chaplin alias Israel Thon-stein.”) His Achilles heel, however, proved to be the sexual scandals he became embroiled in. Lita Grey’s bitter muck-raking set a tone of derogation and abuse that was finally to bring him down.

In the thirties, during the Depression and beyond, the crescendo of redbaiting and witch-hunting provided a hysterical and shrill backdrop to Chaplin’s film career. After The Circus came City Lights (1931) — a remarkable silent movie success in the first heyday of the talkies — and then Modern Times (1936), that brilliant satire on the machine age and its complementary dehumanization of the worker. Chaplin’s fame was worldwide and he fraternized with the Great and the Good — Winston Churchill, Gandhi, H. G. Wells and the Mountbattens among others — on many continents. In the thirties too, perhaps the most adult and emotionally fulfilling of his relationships thus far occurred. He had a long affair with Paulette Goddard (whom he persuaded to change her peroxide blonde hair back to her natural brunette) and to whom he was briefly married. The rise of fascism in Europe pushed Chaplin further to the left and was responsible for his reluctant conversion to sound. His trenchant satire of Adolf Hitler in The Great Dictator (1940) was courageously prescient, as well as being the last appearance on film of the Little Tramp.

To Hoover and the FBI Chaplin’s films and his support of the Soviet Union were nothing short of an arrogant betrayal of American values, and although more and more voices were orchestrated to speak out against him Chaplin’s popularity appeared impervious to such slanders. Part of this was explained by Chaplin’s shrewdness in portraying himself as a humanitarian, an artist above partisan politics, and part of it was due to the fact that he was obligated to no man or system. Chaplin’s great wealth not only ensured his financial independence, it also meant he could not be leaned on. He had his own studio, he paid for his own films, he could do what he liked without fear or favour. There seemed no way the FBI could bring him down. Until …

In 1941 he had a short affair with a buxom twenty-two-year-old actress called Joan Barry. Chaplin described her as “a big handsome woman, well built, with upper regional domes immensely expansive.” Another very young girl — Chaplin was fifty-two — another colossal error of judgement. Barry was mentally unstable and began to drink heavily. After a series of incidents — a car crash, a break-in at Chaplin’s house where she threatened him with a gun — he broke off the relationship, settled Barry’s debts and provided her with a one-way ticket back to New York.

At around this time Chaplin — with a coincidental neatness that no novelist would be permitted — met another young actress who turned out to be the great love of his life, the seventeen-year-old Oona O’Neill. While Oona’s beauty and extreme youth were as always a potent allure, there is no doubt of the sincerity of their mutual adoration — and this time, for once, he had made no mistake.

Chaplin’s wooing of Oona and their eventual marriage took place against a turmoil of controversy that was as distressing as it was damaging. Joan Barry reappeared on the scene, six months pregnant, claiming Chaplin as the father of her unborn child. A series of court cases then took place, covertly organized by the FBI, with the sole purpose of blackening Chaplin’s reputation beyond repair. First he was arraigned under the Mann Act, legislation designed to entrap pimps and brothel-keepers, and accused of paying Joan Barry to cross state boundaries for the purpose of having sex with him. When he was acquitted of this charge the FBI encouraged Barry to bring a paternity suit against him. Chaplin submitted to a blood test which proved negative but, in the subsequent trial, it emerged that blood tests were not recognized in Californian courts. Under a barrage of vilification and contempt that makes today’s gutter press look positively restrained Chaplin was condemned in court as a vile seducer and corrupter of American womanhood. He was declared the father of Barry’s child and ordered to pay maintenance.

And this time the character assassination seemed to work. After the war Chaplin continued to make films—Monsieur Verdoux and Limelight—but he was increasingly under attack, especially as the Mc-Carthyite anti-Communist purges were now running at full maniacal stretch, and his once indestructible popularity began to crumble and wane. A leading article in the Herald Express criticized his “complacent self-worship” and described him as “a moral nonentity.” The final move by the FBI came in 1952. Chaplin set sail from New York for Britain for the premiere of Limelight. Once he had quit territorial waters a telegram was sent: Chaplin’s re-entry permit to the United States was rescinded under legislation which permitted banning on the grounds of “morals, health or insanity, or for advocating Communism.” He was effectively persona non grata. Ahead of him stretched the long years of exile.

And here too the dramatic story of Charlie Chaplin, his rise and fall, ends. The boy from the slums of Lambeth had triumphed beyond measure amongst the freedoms and opportunities America offered. He had achieved astounding fame, vast riches, was acknowledged as one of the abiding geniuses of the cinema but in spite of all this something in him — hubris, moral fervour, arrogance, guilt, some curious self-destructive urge? — something had contrived to bring about his downfall and his banishment from the promised land. Chaplin went to live in Switzerland with his beloved Oona where they raised a large family of eight children. Other films were made—A King in New York (1957), The Countess from Hong Kong (1967) — other milestones were passed, many honours were conferred, but the twenty years of his exile from Hollywood have a flatness about them, and, inevitably, lack the excitement and energy and passion of the ones that preceded them. In 1972 he was welcomed back to Hollywood and presented with an Academy Award (a belated apology) and in 1975 he was knighted by the Queen. In 1977, on Christmas Day, he died quietly in his sleep. He was eighty-eight years old.

1991