Charlie Chaplin

by Peter Ackroyd

  The greatest of these original artists was perhaps Dan Leno, with whom Chaplin shared a bill for fifteen weeks at the Tivoli in London; it would not have taken him long to pick up the fundamentals of the comedian’s act. Max Beerbohm described Leno as “that poor little battered personage, so ‘put upon,’ yet so plucky with his squeaking voice and sweeping gestures; bent but not broken; faint, but pursuing; incarnate of the will to live in a world not at all worth living in—surely all hearts always went out to Dan Leno.” His face was painted dead white; he often wore long baggy trousers and enormously long boots. He had large eyes with arched eyebrows, and could mimic an expression of pathos at a moment’s notice. Marie Lloyd, another music-hall star with whom the young Chaplin worked, asked “Ever seen his eyes? The saddest eyes in the whole world. Because if we hadn’t laughed, we should have cried ourselves sick. I believe that’s what real comedy is, you know, it’s almost like crying.” In turn Stan Laurel would one day say of Chaplin that “he had those eyes that absolutely forced you to look at them.” And so it would be with the Little Tramp, in appearance, in attitude, and in manner.

  Leno was filled with a pulsing nervous energy; he could leap backwards six feet and land on the tip of his boots. He might be invoked as the true cockney spirit that Chaplin himself came to embody. In 1915, at the beginning of his film career, Chaplin was described by Bioscope as “the Dan Leno of the screen.” In later life he liked nothing better than to impersonate the old stars of the music-hall stage, of whose songs he had total recall.

  Chaplin said of this period that he endured his life as a clog-dancer because he believed that it would give him the opportunity for something greater and more challenging. His ambitions were unlimited. One contemporary, the young son of the manager of the Canterbury Theatre, recalled his ice-blue eyes that were the token of something intense and unbroken within him. It was the power of his will.

  In this period Hannah and Sydney Chaplin were sharing their lodgings in Methley Street with Hannah’s father. Charles Hill was then transported from there to Lambeth Infirmary, and in the following month was admitted to the workhouse. These were the familiar stages of decline for the impoverished inhabitants of South London who descended from destitution to death. Might the Chaplin family one day be among them?

  In the last months of the young Chaplin’s tour with the “Lancashire Lads” Charles Chaplin senior began to fade away. His final booking was on 31 December 1900, at the Empire in Portsmouth. At that time his adopted son was appearing in Cinderella at the London Hippodrome. Chaplin recalled working with a famous French clown, Marceline, in this production. Marceline would fish for dancing girls in a large pool, with diamonds and jewellery for bait; eventually he managed to catch, with many gyrations and paroxysms, a small poodle. The dog was a great mimic. If Marceline stood on his head, so did the poodle. It was said of this clown, or “Auguste,” who never spoke but only mimed, that “he had that terrific power of making you laugh, and at the same time of awakening your sympathy for him.” The young performer was watching.

  Chaplin played a small cat in a scene with Marceline, but he could not resist adding a little piece of “business” of his own. At one matinee he sniffed at a dog and then, in a most unfeline manner, cocked his leg against the proscenium arch; he then winked at the audience before capering off to great applause. His short routine might have amused the spectators but it angered the manager, sensitive to any hint of impropriety. It is an early indication of Chaplin’s desire to stand out and be distinctive.

  At the close of Cinderella, on 13 April 1901, Chaplin left the “Lancashire Lads.” He was suffering from asthma, and his mother believed that the strain of stage work had materially affected his health. So she called him home. As Sydney had just taken up a job as assistant steward and bandsman on the SS Norman, she may have wanted her younger son for company. His condition left him gasping for breath, close to suffocation, and may in part be related to his confined circumstances with his mother. The doctor counselled that he would eventually outgrow the affliction, which indeed he did.

  In the spring of this year, Charles Chaplin senior was close to death with the complications attendant upon cirrhosis of the liver. He had, while inebriated, been taken by his friends to St. Thomas’s Hospital. When he eventually realised where he was, he fought desperately to escape. But he was too ill to resist; his body was painfully swollen with dropsy, and the doctors tapped sixteen quarts of fluid from his knee. He had literally drunk himself to death at the age of thirty-eight. The funeral, on 9 May, was arranged by the Variety Artists’ Benevolent Fund, but he was consigned to a pauper’s grave in Tooting Cemetery. His obituary in The Stage noted that “of late he had but poor luck, and misfortune had done much to break his health.”

  Soon enough it was time for the young Chaplin to find work. He and his mother were once more moving from lodging to lodging; Chester Street, Paradise Street and Munton Road were among their temporary addresses. He first earned a modest living from trading on his father’s death. With black crêpe on his sleeve he sold narcissi in the local public houses, lamenting in a whispered voice the death of his father. Who could fail to be moved by the grieving boy? He was a success until Hannah caught him coming out of the public house with the bunches of flowers.

  She was adamant, however, that he should not go back into the music hall; it had been the source of all his father’s troubles. So he attempted other trades. He could be practical and businesslike when it came to material survival. He was an errand boy in a chandler’s shop. He took on Sydney’s old job as a surgeon’s assistant, acting as a receptionist in the surgery. It is recorded that he was then employed as a pageboy, but this may be a confusion with his later role as a pageboy on the stage. He became in turn a clerk, a barber’s assistant, a printer’s assistant in a stationery supply company, a glass-blower’s assistant, and a newsboy outside Clapham Common tube station. He gave dancing lessons. He even sold old clothes at the street market in Newington Butts.

  He hated, and despised, poverty. Poverty was demeaning. Poverty offered no escape. No doubt as a child he cried with frustration and self-pity and helplessness. By his own account he was often “furious” at the world. “Look at them,” a character says in his last film, A Countess from Hong Kong, “packed together like sardines. That’s what I dislike about the poor. They have no taste. They indulge in squalor. They pick the worst neighbourhoods to live in, eat the worst kind of food and dress atrociously.” The sentiment is exaggerated but on one level it reflects Chaplin’s own feelings.

  Chaplin recalled how in this period his mother encountered in the street a fellow artist fallen on evil times. A derelict woman with shaven head was being tormented by some urchins until Hannah interfered. The woman then spoke. “Lil, don’t you know me? Eva Lestock?” She had been known as “Dashing Eva Lestock,” and had been described by The Era as “one of the prettiest and most fascinating serio-comic songstresses we have.” Now, through illness and drink, she had been reduced to sleeping under the arches or spending the night in Salvation Army shelters. It is a measure of the perilous life of the stars of the music hall. Hannah took up the woman, and led her to the Chaplin home. Chaplin himself was angry and embarrassed at this turn of events, considering the woman to be little more than a filthy vagrant. Hannah sent her to the public baths and, much to Chaplin’s discontent, Eva Lestock spent three days with them in their cramped lodging. He had no sympathy with the poor or the abandoned.

  He enjoyed a somewhat happier period when he and his mother rented a room in the house of Mrs. Taylor, a church member and fellow Christian. This restful interlude came to an end when his mother became irate with Mrs. Taylor’s daughter and, according to Chaplin himself, called her “Lady Shit.” The episode throws an interesting light on his statement that his mother was the most refined woman he ever met.

  One of the last London addresses that Chaplin shared with his mother was Pownall Terrace. In a wartime broadcast, in 1943, he said that “I
shall always remember the top room at 3 Pownall Terrace, where I lived as a boy; I shall always remember climbing up and down those three flights of narrow stairs to empty those troublesome slops.” He recalled Healey’s the greengrocer, Waghorn’s the butcher, and Ash’s the grocer. The air of the house itself was “foul with stale slops and old clothes” while mother and son lived in a room a little over twelve feet square; a table against the wall was cluttered with dirty plates and teacups; a little iron bed, painted white, stood in the corner. At its foot was an armchair which unfolded to become a single bed.

  It was in this little room that some of the most climactic scenes of his boyhood were to take place. He came back one evening sometime in the spring of 1903, to be told by a little girl that his mother had gone mad. She had gone from door to door in the neighbourhood bearing little lumps of coal and explaining that they were gifts for the children. The detail of giving away coals as presents is highly pertinent. The earliest dictionary of slang tells us that, in the gypsy patois or “canting language,” “cole” was the word for money.

  The parish doctor had already been called by the neighbours. He immediately diagnosed insanity, as well as malnutrition, and told the young boy to take her to the local infirmary. In fact she seemed anxious to be admitted there. It was a haven. Chaplin later told a journalist that “I saw myself, a scared, undersized, skinny kid, leading my mother by the hand, dragging her through the fog and the smells and the cold.”

  When they arrived at the infirmary she was soon taken away by the nurses, but not before giving one last lingering look at her son. The records of the Lambeth Board of Guardians reveal that the young Chaplin had told the doctor that his mother had been “mentioning a lot of people who are dead,” and that she believed “she could see them looking out of the window”; he explained that she had talked to “imaginary people” and that she had in the past kept on “going into strangers’ rooms.” The doctor himself reported that “she is very noisy and incoherent, praying and swearing by turns—singing and shouting—she says the floor is the river Jordan and she cannot cross it.” He added that on occasions she was “violent and destructive.” Chaplin must have already seen much of this in his mother’s behaviour.

  The boy was questioned by the doctor, and with his usual quick instinct for survival, informed him that he was going to live with his aunt. He had no wish to return to an institution. In fact he returned to Pownall Terrace, where the landlady allowed him to stay until she had managed to rent the room. He avoided everyone; he stayed out all day, somehow contriving to steal or beg for food. He fell in with some wood-choppers, who worked in a mews behind Kennington Road; he helped them with their work, and at the end of the week was given sixpence.

  He was anxiously awaiting Sydney’s return from sea. On 9 May, a few days after his mother’s confinement, his brother’s ship docked at Southampton. “If Sydney had not returned to London,” Chaplin said later, “I might have become a thief in the London streets … I might have been buried in a pauper’s grave.” Sydney wrote ahead to signal his arrival and, when he arrived at Waterloo station from Southampton, a dirty and tattered street urchin approached him. Chaplin recalled the incident in Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story, published in 1916. “Sydney, don’t you know me? I’m Charlie.”

  Sydney, shocked by his younger brother’s appearance, took charge. He ensured that Chaplin had a hot bath and then gave him money to buy some new clothes. They had learned that their mother had just been transferred to Cane Hill lunatic asylum where they visited her. She was much changed. She was pale, and her lips were blue; she was listless and depressed, seeming vague and preoccupied as they tried to chat with her. She was to remain incarcerated, with one interval of lucidity, for the next seventeen years.

  3

  Keep It Wistful

  Even during this period of hardship and uncertainty, the young Chaplin had never lost sight of his theatrical ambitions. He had kept intermittently in contact with Blackmore’s Theatrical Agency in Bedford Street off the Strand. There had been “nothing for you” until, a month after Sydney’s return, he received a letter asking him to call. Mr. Blackmore had just been informed that the role of Billy, the pageboy in W. C. Gillette’s Sherlock Holmes, was to be cast for a national tour; he had at once recalled the vivacious and energetic boy who had contacted him before.

  Chaplin’s good fortune, one of the great strengths of his life at times of crisis, was in fact redoubled. The actor to play Holmes himself, H. A. Saintsbury, had recently written Jim, A Romance of Cockayne and, as soon as he saw the fourteen-year-old Chaplin, he realised that he would be perfect for the role of a cockney news-boy; he did not know that Chaplin had played the part in real life. Saintsbury gave him the script. Chaplin took it back with him to Pownall Terrace, where Sydney drilled him in the dialogue. There was the question of salary. He was offered £2 10s. a week by the manager of the theatre, to which he replied “I must consult my brother about the terms.” The manager burst out laughing. Yet this was the financial role that Sydney would play for most of Chaplin’s life.

  Jim opened in Kingston upon Thames on 6 July 1903, but closed only two weeks later at the Grand Theatre in Fulham. Chaplin, however, was already learning valuable lessons in the art of acting: Saintsbury taught him the importance of timing; he instructed him how to pause, to project his voice, to notice the right cues, even how to sit. He said that these matters came “naturally” to him, but he may have needed a little prompting. He had a tendency to overact and to move his head too much. His work on the play had a great effect upon him; many years afterwards he could remember its dialogue word for word. He also retained something else. In later life he would tell his actors not to move their heads too much.

  Even though Jim had not been a success Chaplin earned his first notices. The Era described him as “a broth of a boy as Sam the newspaper boy, giving a most realistic picture of the cheeky, honest, loyal, self-reliant, philosophical street Arab who haunts the regions of Cockayne.” It is no wonder that he was “realistic” since he knew the world, and the type, at first hand.

  Soon enough it was time to begin the tour of Sherlock Holmes. The cast rehearsed throughout July and on the 27th the play opened at the Pavilion Theatre along the Mile End Road. When they travelled north to Burton upon Trent and Newcastle the wardrobe mistress, Edith Scales, was appointed as his unofficial guardian. She recalled that with his first week’s income he bought a box-camera and set himself up as a part-time street photographer, taking pictures for threepence or sixpence a time. He was always intent upon making money. When the cast was staying at the Market Hotel in Blackburn Chaplin marched into the sitting room, where the farmers were drinking, and sang to his improvised audience. He then performed a clog dance, to general satisfaction. At the end of the show he went round with his hat.

  Miss Scales provides other glimpses of the boy of fourteen and fifteen years. He kept two tame rabbits. While staying in Ashton-under-Lyne he witnessed his landlady’s altercation with a drunken chimney sweep; Miss Scales recalled that, when he stood in the witness box during the subsequent hearing, “no one could understand his cockney accent.” He would later take pains to erase the inflection. Miss Scales also revealed that Chaplin “used to check every item on the bills rendered him by landladies when we were on the road”; he would then remove the costs of items he had not received.

  By his own account he suffered from melancholy and loneliness in these northern towns. He was also very shy. He fell half in love with the leading lady, Greta Hahn, but on seeing her in the street he would quickly walk down a side alley to avoid any meeting. “I began to neglect myself,” he wrote, “and became desultory in my habits.” He received letters from Sydney, who informed him that with the failure of his theatrical ambitions he had taken work as a bartender at the Coal Hole along the Strand. “Since Mother’s illness,” Sydney said in one letter, “all we have in the world is each other. So you must write regularly, and let me know that I have a brother.�
�� Chaplin was always a bad correspondent.

  He was playing Billy, the pageboy of the great Sherlock Holmes, and he was soon receiving good notices. The part might have been made for him. The Era wrote that he “succeeds in making the smart pageboy a prime favourite with the audience.” His secretary at a later date came upon his earliest collection of press cuttings. On its opening page were two reviews of Billy in Sherlock Holmes. One stated that “Mr Charles Chaplin is unusually bright and natural as Billy,” while the other agreed that “the brightest bit of acting in the play was given by Mr Charles Chaplin who, as Billy, displayed immense activity as well as dramatic appreciation.” The reviews were underscored at the time by Chaplin himself, and he kept them with him all his life.

  At the end of 1903 Chaplin was able to persuade the management to allow Sydney to enter the company of Sherlock Holmes; he played the role of an elderly aristocrat, but was no doubt employed partly to look after his younger brother. It was on this tour that the first caricature of Chaplin was executed by an artist named George Cooke; Chaplin was apparently delighted by the novel likeness of him, and paid seven shillings and sixpence for it.

  The two boys were joined a few weeks later by their mother, who had been released from Cane Hill asylum. It is not at all clear when the family were reunited; it may have been as early as the beginning of January, when the players were at Wakefield, but Chaplin himself recalls that it was towards the end of the tour, when indeed they were closer to London at Aldershot or Eastbourne. The precise location is not of great importance.

  With a combined income of more than £4 a week they were able to rent a “special apartment de luxe” complete with two bedrooms and a sitting room. For the brief period that she shared the tour with them, Hannah Chaplin shopped and cleaned the flat. It might have seemed that the old domestic world had been restored, except that Hannah was oddly uncommunicative and detached; she seems to have acted more like a guest than a mother. It was agreed, therefore, that she should move to a lodging in Chester Street, Kennington, where she would feel more at home.