Charlie Chaplin

by Peter Ackroyd

  The touring continued at its usual frantic and fatiguing pace all over the country from Nottingham to Newcastle, Leeds to Bristol. A fellow comedian at Karno, Chester Courtney, recalls that they played twopenny poker, shared Woodbine cigarettes, enjoyed omnibus rides and became involved in “promiscuous flirtations.” In the course of the tour Chaplin had at last achieved his ambition in playing the leading role of The Football Match, but first-night nerves caused an attack of laryngitis that ruined his comic delivery. The same complaint had once affected his mother. Karno might have unleashed on him the full fury of his well-known temper, but Sydney persuaded him to give his younger brother a non-speaking part in another Karno production.

  Mumming Birds was a pantomime without words, in which the unconvincing acts of a low music hall are interrupted by a character known as “the inebriated swell.” Some of the humour comes from the incompetent conjurors, ballad singers and “strong men,” but most of it derives from the staggering antics of the drunk in white tie and tails. The part of course was played by Chaplin, who knew from experience how drunks behaved. They were all around him in South London. That is why he did not need to say a word. He relied upon timing, dexterity, and the ability to take a tumble without injuring himself. He had found his metier. Mime became his single most important music-hall part, and one that eventually launched him into a film career.

  In some sense the character of the drunkard took him over. In an intervew at the end of his life he revealed that “I would go on, and I absolutely was in touch with something else. It was almost a psychic sort of thing. It came, I think, with a certain boredom and tiredness that was a form of relaxation and allowed a talent or something to break through. I couldn’t do wrong. I remember it so well. An old music hall on Edgware Road. For about four nights that happened, and I really enjoyed this thing within me—so much so that other actors used to stand in the wings to see me.” The inebriate, swell or no swell, would become a staple of his later comedy.

  He then proceeded to play the star in another comic sketch, Jimmy the Fearless, in which he took on the part of a boy who escapes from the drudgery of his daily life by dreaming of heroic adventures. This was a role he would also reprise in his films. The Yorkshire Post reported that “his entrance alone in Jimmy the Fearless sets the house in a roar and stamps him as a born comedian.” At one point in his routine he absent-mindedly carves a loaf with his knife, while reading a book, and unwittingly turns it into a bread concertina. He was to use the same joke in a film of 1915, A Jitney Elopement. He also took part in a sketch entitled Skating, in which his skills on the ice were matched only by his ability in comic timing; it was remarked by a reviewer that “his tumbling and foolery” were extremely funny. His experiences here would also be redeployed in his work upon the screen.

  In the winter of 1909, he performed for three weeks with a Karno troupe in Paris. Mumming Birds was staged at the Folies Bergère, which had not then acquired the somewhat louche reputation it later enjoyed. A gentleman called for him after the performance. “You are instinctively a musician and a dancer,” he told him. When Chaplin asked later for the man’s name, he was informed that it was Claude Debussy. He had never heard of him.

  He fell in love again with a young girl, Mabelle, who was in his own words, “only ten or twelve.” He denied that their relationship was sexual but said that she was part of his spiritual quest for beauty. He just liked to hold her and to hug her, literally clasping at innocence. This yearning, or aspiration, would be the cause of much subsequent misfortune.

  4

  Making a Living

  In the early autumn of 1910 Chaplin signed a new contract with Karno. He was now a star performer and an acknowledged master of music-hall pantomime. The manager of Karno’s interests in the United States, Alfred Reeves, had at this time returned to England in search of a new company for the profitable American circuit. It seemed inevitable that Chaplin would be one of those chosen, and only a few days after signing the contract he embarked on the SS Cairnrona to cross the Atlantic. “He’s old enough and big enough,” Reeves had told Karno, “and clever enough for anything.”

  Stan Laurel recalled the journey across the ocean on a ship that was little more than a cattle-boat, and in particular he remembered the first sight of land. “We were all on deck, sitting,” he wrote, “watching the land in the mist. Suddenly Charlie ran to the railing, took off his hat, waved it and shouted, ‘America, I am coming to conquer you! Every man, woman and child shall have my name on their lips—Charles Spencer Chaplin!’ We all booed him affectionately, and he bowed to us very formally and sat down again.” These might seem the recollections of hindsight, but other members of the party have verified the scene. It is a measure of Chaplin’s inordinate ambition and self-confidence. Stan Laurel himself of course also found great fame in the United States, when he became the thin man in the partnership of Laurel and Hardy.

  The ship docked at Quebec and the new American company travelled by train to Jersey City. By the beginning of October they had arrived in New York. Chaplin was at first bewildered and a little frightened by this foreign metropolis that seemed to him too loud, too garish and too fast. Yet when he mingled with the crowds on Broadway, passing the lighted marquees of the vaudeville theatres, he began to feel more at home. This was his true setting. He was no longer the South London boy with an unhappy history; he had all the world before him.

  The first production of the Karno troupe in New York, The Wow-Wows, was not a success. It was too brittle, and altogether too English, for an American audience. It was, in the word of Stan Laurel, “awful.” Nevertheless they played it for the rest of the month, in the Bronx and Brooklyn as well as in New York itself, until Alfred Reeves had the happy inspiration of replacing it with Mumming Birds or A Night in an English Music Hall; this was the music-hall sketch in which Chaplin played the inebriate swell. He took up the role with enthusiasm, and the fortunes of the tour were restored.

  They went everywhere from the autumn of 1910 to the summer of 1911, taking in Winnipeg and Chicago, Portland and San Francisco, Cleveland and Kansas City. Many photographs of the tour survive. Chaplin poses in a long American greatcoat which, as he said, made him look “like a ringmaster in a circus”; he is photographed with four other players by a poster saying “Continental Divide Elevation 6,350 feet”; he is playing a violin, left-handed, with Alfred Reeves standing by his side; he poses, nattily dressed, on a road in downtown San Francisco; he stands beside some placards announcing “CHARLES CHAPLIN THE INEBRIATE.”

  He picked up some American admirers with that act. Groucho Marx recalled that the audience was “intent on Chaplin’s every move.” He added that “at the table was a large basket of oranges. Finally, he started to pick up the oranges one by one, and threw them right at the other performers. One of them knocked the pianist off his chair. People became hysterical. There never was such continuous laughter.” The Winnipeg Telegram noted that “Charles Chaplin, in theatrical parlance, ‘hogs the show.’ ”

  On the way to New York, 1910. Chaplin is inside the lifebelt.

  Stan Laurel, Chaplin’s room-mate for much of the tour, described him as “very eccentric.” He noted that “he was very moody and often very shabby in appearance,” but then he would surprise everyone by dressing up in style. Laurel would fry pork chops in defiance of the rule that no cooking was allowed in the rooms; Chaplin would cover up the noise of sizzling by playing loudly on the violin.

  He was reading all the time. He tried to learn Greek, but abandoned it quickly enough. He thought of yoga. He was, in other words, intent upon self-improvement. He bought a cello to complement his violin, and began to wear what he considered to be a musicianly outfit in fawn and green. Dress was clearly very important to him. As Thomas Carlyle remarks in Sartor Resartus, “the Spirit of Clothes” accommodates the whole soul and intelligence of man. Chaplin’s costume as the Little Tramp might be adduced as evidence here.

  Laurel recalled surprising him i
n the bathroom of their lodgings; he was posing with his cello in front of a mirror, his hair unnaturally tousled. He was pulling the bow across the strings in grand style, just like the professional musicians of the orchestra, admiring himself as he did so. He never ceased to play a part; he had to do so in order to find himself. In the words of a later acquaintance, he was always “on.” He was in essence unpredictable. He would perform in the sketches with great gusto and feeling; off the stage, however, he was often reserved and uncommunicative.

  When Chaplin returned to England in the summer of 1912, he discovered that he had no home. Glenshaw Mansions was no longer rented. Syd had married, and Chaplin was forced to find alternative accommodation in a back room off the Brixton Road. He was not idle during the four months on English soil, however; he toured with one of the Karno troupes in England, and even made short visits to the halls of Jersey and of Guernsey.

  He also managed, with his brother, to visit Hannah Chaplin in the Cane Hill asylum; she had been consigned to a padded cell after a period of singing hymns very loudly. Chaplin could not bring himself actually to see her but waited for Sydney to speak to her. It seems that his mother had been given forcible ice-cold showers, as a form of shock therapy, which had turned her face quite blue; they decided at once that with their combined incomes they could afford to place her in a private institution. Chaplin had, in addition, saved $2,000 from his American tour; he was always very thrifty. So Hannah was removed to Peckham House, in Peckham Rye, where she remained for the next eight years.

  By Chaplin’s own account he no longer felt at ease in England. After the United States it seemed small and tight and dismal; he variously described his moods as those of sadness, bitterness and gloom. It was in a frame of mind very like that of liberation, therefore, that on 2 October he embarked on the SS Oceanic for his second tour of the United States. It was now for him familiar territory. The Karno troupe opened in New York, in the middle of October, and toured continually for the next fifteen months; they were doing three or four shows a day, seven days a week. But once more he found the routine “bleak and depressing”; these were always Chaplin’s favourite adjectives.

  At the beginning of April 1913, he took advantage of a rest in Philadelphia to travel back to New York; he stayed at the Astor Hotel, and indulged in the luxury of melancholy. On the first evening he wandered towards the Metropolitan Opera House, where on a whim he decided to attend a performance of Wagner’s Tannhäuser. The experience shattered him and, at the climactic moment, when Tannhäuser falls upon the bier of Elisabeth and asks her to pray for him, he wept. It seemed to him to be the story of his life.

  When he returned to Philadelphia he found a telegram waiting for him. It had been sent to Alfred Reeves. “IS THERE A MAN NAMED CHAFFIN IN YOUR COMPANY OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT IF SO WILL HE COMMUNICATE WITH KESSEL AND BAUMAN 24 LONGACRE BUILDING BROADWAY NEW YORK.” Chaplin believed that this was a firm of lawyers, perhaps ready to announce a legacy from a rich American relative, but he was quickly disabused.

  Kessel and Bauman were the owners of the New York Motion Pictures Company, of which one of the subsidiaries was the Keystone Comedy Company. One of the Keystone comics, Ford Sterling, was threatening to leave. They needed a replacement, and believed that they had found one in Charles Chaplin. Here was a young man who had gained top billing in the Karno tours and had been almost unanimously praised by the press. He could electrify an audience. He was offered $150 a week for three months, to be followed by $175 for the remaining nine. He had never earned so much money in his life. He may have quailed at the idea of an independent life, separated from the troupe, but his decision still came quickly. He would join Keystone as soon as his contract with Karno came to an end.

  The most likely instigator of this offer was Mack Sennett, the manager of Keystone. By his own account he had seen Chaplin perform in New York and had been “more than impressed. Stunned might be a good word.” He added that “I think I was so struck by him because he was everything I wasn’t: a little fellow who could move like a ballet dancer. The next week I couldn’t remember his name, but I sure as hell never forgot that wonderful easy grace of movement. I had seen nothing like it.” Sennett, a Canadian then in his early thirties, was a natural showman who had been informally trained by D. W. Griffith at the Biograph Studio, one of the earliest of its kind; he learned from Griffith how to edit a film so that it maintained its pace and its rhythm. But he also had a natural instinct of his own; he had a feeling for comedy, notably on the ground that anything which made him laugh would also appeal to the general public. With the creation of the “Keystone Cops” in 1912 he might be said to have invented American comedy.

  Chaplin himself had been entertaining vague hopes of a cinematic career. He had been growing tired of the stage. He had already discussed with Alfred Reeves the possibility of filming the Karno routines, but the idea came to nothing. Nevertheless, while on tour, he often went to the little local cinemas and stood at the back where he watched the action.

  Film was in any case the coming thing. With the advent of small storefront theatres, known as nickelodeons, motion pictures of ten or fifteen minutes’ duration were becoming increasingly popular. The theatres may have been unsavoury and unhygienic, smelling of sweat and tobacco, as malodorous and dirty as the “penny gaffs” of a previous era, but the power of the medium overcame all obstacles. Even the vaudeville theatres showed “flickers” as part of their programme. The poor and the illiterate flocked to these silent shows, to be seen at the price of a nickel or five cents. For immigrants, who could not yet read English, they provided immediate access to American life. They were filled with action and with movement, never before captured by any other medium. They offered what seemed at the time to be spellbinding realism, except that the actors moved at a speed faster than that of real life. It was part of the attraction. The members of the audience sat on hard wooden seats, and brought their own refreshments with them. Sometimes the screen was little more than a bedsheet tacked against the back wall.

  Chaplin’s final performance on stage was at Kansas City on 28 November 1913. He brought the cast drinks after the curtain and, although he tried to make a joke of the “farewell,” he was trembling when he shook hands with all of them. He then hurried off backstage; one of his colleagues followed him, curious, and saw him crying.

  Less than three weeks later he arrived at the Keystone studio on Allessandro Street in Edendale, California. He was always to say that 1913 was his lucky year. And so it proved. He, like Shakespeare, had the inestimable advantage of being an instinctive artist in the preliminary years of a new art.

  The life of the film studio was, at first, a bewildering and wholly alien experience for Chaplin. It had the ramshackle and improvised quality of all original things. The complex itself was built in the farm fields of the San Fernando Valley, beside warehouses and workshops, wooden shacks and stores, set among cacti and coarse sagebrush, palm and eucalyptus; it was essentially a noisome suburb, some five miles from Los Angeles. A four-room bungalow was used as the headquarters of the operation and a barn had been converted into dressing rooms, with a rickety green fence surrounding the complex. The long sign outside the studios read “KEYSTONE MACK SENNETT KEYSTONE,” with a row of cars in front ready to be used as comedy props.

  A number of sets were created on a large wooden platform, veiled from the elements by yards of white linen; the diffused sun in the bright Californian sky was the only means of lighting. Since the films had no sound, the studio was filled with noises—of directors shouting instructions to the actors, of the cranking sound of the rolling cameras, of the performers talking to one another, of whistling and hammering, of music played by a live band or a phonograph to lend rhythm to the action. Three or four films were made at the same time. One set might be a prison interior, while another might be a fashionable drawing room. The facade of a three-storey tenement, complete with windows and a fire escape, was supported by nothing more than wooden scaffold
ing.

  No scripts were used; the essential art was that of improvisation. If a fire were reported in the neighbourhood, the director and crew might rush to the scene in order to film the actors in front of it. An initial scenario, or idea, was followed by an extemporised sequence of absurd events that always ended in a chase. The chase was the essence of Keystone, and the ultimate in chases was known as “the zigzag rally” in which, for example, a wild posse of policemen will never run in a straight line but rebound off invisible walls. The camera was “under-cranked” so that the action, when projected, became much faster; Sennett also took out every fourth frame so that the characters seemed to hop or jerk, thus increasing the mechanical tension of the comedy.

  The actors were toys or puppets who simply ran and ran and ran until they met an immoveable object or dropped with exhaustion. They inhabited an artificial comic universe in which anything was possible; despite the violence and destruction all around, no one was ever really hurt. They were not supposed to experience emotions other than the typical manifestations of fear or greed or passion. Everything had to go as fast as possible; the audience were not to be given the time to think. Sennett’s films therefore possessed enormous pace and energy that have rarely been equalled. The comedies were either “one reelers” or “two reelers,” a “reel” lasting for approximately thirteen minutes. The essence of the early cinema was constant motion.

  Sennett turned out short and ebullient films filled with car chases and riotous pursuits; bricks were hurled, mallets were deployed, and much pleasure was derived from what Chaplin always called “arse-kicking.” The actions may have come out of vaudeville but the setting was largely that of contemporary America; this was essentially an urban world of saloon bars and cheap hotels, hardware stores and pawnshops, banks and barbers’ shops, dirty restaurants and dusty streets in which cars competed with horse-drawn transport and where the whole drama of the burgeoning nation might be found. The films give the impression of wide open spaces somewhere around the next corner. And, like everything else in America, they were manufactured at high speed. Three films were completed each week and, in the previous year, some 140 of them came out of Edendale.