1995
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.”