Charlie Chaplin

by Peter Ackroyd

  The Keystone films had a small cast of regulars who had become used to working with one another; among them were Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, Chester “Walrus” Conklin, Mack “Ambrose” Swain and Mabel Normand. The men wore too much make-up and their acting was wildly exaggerated; some of them looked like living gargoyles. They had no audience to which they might play and, in its absence, everything was overstated.

  On his first day, Chaplin arrived around lunchtime and the spectacle of the actors streaming from the bungalow was enough to unnerve him. He had never seen anything like this before. He returned to his hotel in the city and waited there for two days until he was summoned by Sennett himself, impatient to see his new comic. Sennett then took him on a tour and introduced him to some of the key players and members of the crew. Chaplin recalled that one of the first questions was “Can you do a funny sprawl off a stepladder without breaking your bones?” Of course he could. He had done that kind of work at Karno for several years.

  When Sennett first saw Chaplin out of stage make-up, he was perplexed by his youthfulness. “I thought you were a much older man,” he told him.

  “I can make up as old as you like.”

  Chaplin signing his first contract with Keystone, 1914.

  Courtesy of Gamma-Keystone

  Yet Chaplin got the distinct impression that Sennett had believed he had made a mistake in hiring the young comedian.

  Sennett later recalled “a shy little Britisher who was abashed and confused by everything that had anything to do with motion pictures.” Chaplin was not so abashed, however, that he did not look around curiously and observantly. Chester Conklin said that “he watched everybody all the time” and said little “except to ask a few pointed and professional questions.” Why were scenes shot out of chronological sequence? Why were the “rushes” viewed as negatives? How am I supposed to react to another actor who isn’t actually there?

  He wandered for some days among the actors and sets without actually being assigned a role. It seemed that no one knew quite what to do with him. Then the moment came. Henry Lehrman, one of the young Keystone directors—it was a youthful business in which all of the participants were fresh—wanted someone to play a street-smart confidence trickster. Making a Living, released on 2 February 1914, was Chaplin’s entrance on to the screen. He was not yet the Little Tramp; he was reprising the role of stage villain complete with cravat, top hat, monocle and drooping moustache; it was known as the “Desperate Desmond” costume. He had become a “dude” or seedy “toff.” In this first film he is insidious, wheedling and oddly threatening. When he kisses a girl’s hand, he then goes all the way up the arm. That is an early Chaplin touch. He was probably the first to do it on the screen. He already has a full range of facial mannerisms, twitching and smiling and scowling. He also tries out a distinctive walk, the ancestor of a more famous one.

  He was convinced that Lehrman was hostile to him and had deliberately cut out some of the comic “business” he introduced to the film. But he was also aware of his own inexperience; he was still a little stiff and overanxious. It seems that Sennett himself was unhappy with the finished product and complained to Mabel Normand that “he had hooked himself a dead one.” Yet Chaplin had no reason to be entirely disheartened. Making a Living may have been standard Keystone, but the Moving Picture World said that “the clever player who takes the part of a sharper … is a comedian of the first water.”

  There is some confusion about the identity of the second film, which saw the fitful birth of the Tramp or the “little fellow.” It is certain, however, that Kid Auto Races at Venice was released five days after Making a Living. That was the rate at which the short films were produced. It was just eleven minutes in length. Chaplin plays a weird interloper quite out of sympathy with everyone around him. He is already dressed in a distinctive fashion, with clothes that are too small for him, and might actually be viewed as a tramp; his bowler is also too small, and a large safety pin fastens his jacket. A small bristle of crêpe hair is glued under his nose. This is a tramp who demands all the attention. For the first time he executes a “flick kick” on a cigarette with the sole of his right shoe. He may be eccentric, even a little mad, but already he is an original.

  He “hogs” the scene, serenely self-confident of his own image and aggressive to those who hinder his presentation of himself. He is bristling with the desire to perform. He gets in the way of the camera filming the races, and resists every attempt of the director to exclude him. He wants to commune with that camera but, more significantly, with the vast and unknown audience that is assembled behind the lens. He sets up a direct relationship with those who are watching him, both mocking and conspiratorial. He does not care that the auto-races are a public and communal occasion; he is absurdly solipsistic, as if to say that only he matters. Only he is worth watching. Chaplin would maintain these sentiments for the rest of his film career.

  Two days later, on 9 February, Mabel’s Strange Predicament was released. This “short” represented the birth of Chaplin’s unique style of cinematic comedy, and of the tramp universally known as Charlie. The cameraman on this occasion recalled that “I can still see the little shack where he came out of the dressing room. He’d come out and he’d kind of rehearse himself—that walk, the cane, the hat … Did it look funny there and then? Yes, it did. Well it was, because it was fresh … And his movements, too. Wiggle the mouth and that moustache would kinda work. And the cane flapping around, swinging on his arm … and going around on one leg like he was skating.” He was drunk, a reminiscence of his Karno days. He stumbled over a lady, raised his bowler to apologise; then he staggered upon a spittoon, and again raised his hat in awkward apology. He shuffled, with his feet turned outwards. He twirled his cane and knocked off his own hat. He even began to perfect his expression of leering concupiscence. The technicians and performers, standing around, started to laugh. Sennett laughed. Chaplin knew that he had done it.

  Mabel’s Strange Predicament was the film, therefore, in which he first donned the Tramp’s distinctive costume. Like all sacred relics, however, the origin and provenance of the dress are unclear. He had almost as many explanations as he gave interviews. He said once that “I thought of all those little Englishmen I had seen with their little black moustaches, their tight clothes, and their bamboo canes, and I fixed on these as my model.” Yet he may also have recalled the large shoes and baggy trousers of many music-hall acts in England. On another occasion he suggested that he had taken pieces of other actors’ costumes while waiting on set; it had been a matter of chance. But, in contrast, he also explained that his appearance had come “by degrees.” Then he told one of his sons that he had been asked, as a juvenile, to take the place of a performer who had fallen ill; the man’s clothes were too big for him but, when he appeared on stage, he raised laughter and applause. Sometimes he attempted a metaphysical explanation, with the little moustache as “a symbol of vanity” and the baggy trousers as a “caricature of our eccentricity, our stupidities, our clumsiness.” He may also have had in mind the “shabby genteel” of London life whom he knew very well. Any and every explanation is possible.

  The fact that he hit upon the rudiments of the costume so swiftly, however, suggests that in some obscure recess of his creative mind he had already imagined something like it. It was the epitome of all the comic tramps he had seen upon the English stage, the quintessence of the “poor and put upon” little fellow whom artists like Dan Leno had portrayed. The costume then created the performer. In a form of intimate communion with the bowler hat, the cane, the short and tight jacket, the frayed tie, the gaping shoes, he became Charlie. He followed the lead of the character, discovering aspects of its personality all the time. In the sequence of Keystone films he completed, some thirty-five in all, he began to create the “little fellow” as a living dimension of himself.

  The movements came with the clothes. He once said that he had learned his shuffling walk, or “duck waddle,” or “ea
st and west feet,” by imitating the gait of “Rummy” Binks who used to hold the horses of the customers outside a public house in South London. But he could equally have taken it from a performer, Fred Kitchen, in the Karno Fun Factory.

  Two or three days after finishing Mabel’s Strange Predicament he began work on Between Showers in which he played against Ford Sterling, still with the company, who had already attained fame as the chief of the Keystone Cops; he was known as a “Dutch comedian,” essentially a parody of the German immigrant, and he specialised in what might be called the first wave of American film comedy with florid gestures, exaggerated expressions and a general tendency to be over-theatrical in every scene. He gave the impression that film was theatre for stupid people. Chaplin was in contrast more contained and much stiller, even though in this film he does indulge in what is known as “cocking a snook” by putting the fingers of one hand up to the nose; this was a wholly English gesture that the young Chaplin had used constantly. It came from his training with Karno and also from his familiar acquaintance with the street urchins of South London. Yet the impression remains that Sterling had only an outer, while Chaplin possessed an inner, life.

  5

  The Rhythm

  The product at Keystone was despatched quickly. In March 1914, for example, Chaplin completed four short films. Each one lasted between twelve and sixteen minutes. In A Film Johnnie he plays a vagrant who stumbles upon the Keystone studio in action, with all the accidents and misunderstandings that may be supposed to follow. Charlie seems utterly bemused by his first sight and experience of the studio, just as Chaplin had been when he first arrived on Allessandro Street.

  His director was now George Nichols, a veteran of fast and furious production. Chaplin would suggest various scenes or devices to Nichols, who would then invariably reply “We have no time! No time.” The other players took Nichols’s part and complained that the young Englishman was “a son of a bitch” and impossible to work with. He was always moaning—about the director, the actors, the stage sets, the plots.

  He was hardly a favourite, therefore, with cast or crew. Mack Sennett recalled that in the early days he was considered to be an “oddball” who “liked to be lonely”; Chaplin walked the streets “peering at things and people” and despite earning a more than respectable salary he preferred to live in a shabby hotel. But his appetite for work was undiminished. Chaplin, according to Sennett, “was the most interested person where he himself, his future, the kind of thing he was trying to do, was concerned, I ever knew.” He came to work at the studio an hour before the others, and stayed after they had left; he would question Sennett about his day’s performance, and run over the rushes with a keen eye for his mistakes. He thoroughly learned the art of cutting and splicing.

  Tango Tangles followed A Film Johnnie one week later. Chaplin is not dressed as a tramp but as a smart young swell. It would perhaps have been something of a shock to audiences, if they had known that Chaplin and the Tramp were the same person, to have seen how young and handsome the actor was. In truth he was still only twenty-four years old, but he seemed younger; he had the looks of a matinee idol, as well as the skills of a professional dancer. In this film he is meant to be inebriated but he plays the drunk with as much grace and fluidity as he plays the dancer; in all of his routines he relied upon perfect pacing as well as precision.

  His Favorite Pastime puts Chaplin with “Fatty” Arbuckle as two drunks who are involved in an endless struggle with a recalcitrant world of swing doors, waiters, other barflies, and steep stairs. This is the kind of routine that Chaplin could now perform in his sleep but the Kinematograph Weekly observed that he “indulges in escapades which are side-splitting in their weird absurdity and their amazing suddenness.” It is confirmation of the fact that the young Chaplin represented something quite novel and unfamiliar on the screen. He was already essentially a solo performer. “Fatty” Arbuckle himself was as his name suggests the quintessential fat man, although he was extraordinarily athletic and graceful, with a marvellous sense of comic timing. In these respects only Chaplin could equal him.

  Chaplin on the set of Kid Auto Races at Venice, 1914.

  Courtesy of Archive Photos

  In this period Chaplin enjoyed his first Hollywood romance. Peggy Pearce played opposite him in His Favorite Pastime, as the object of his drunken desires, and soon enough they were close in another sense. But it came to nothing; Miss Pearce lived with her parents, and was conventional enough to insist upon marriage. This was not a state to which the young Chaplin aspired. He did manage to flirt with Mabel Normand, however, until she gave him the refusal absolute after a charity function in San Francisco. Mabel had been with Keystone since 1912. She had been discovered by Mack Sennett and quickly became his lover as well as his principal comedienne; she had a naturally expressive face, and a puckish humour, which endeared her to audiences and to her colleagues. However her rejection did not greatly affect Chaplin, who was incorrigible in making advances to other female film stars. By his mid-twenties he had in fact acquired something of a priapic reputation. He often boasted about his sexual conquests, and once confessed to having had sexual relations with more than 2,000 women. That does not seem a very high number for a rich, handsome and famous man, but it does suggest something of an incurable itch.

  He could use, and discard, his partners at will. When asked by Vanity Fair in 1926 to describe his ideal woman, he replied that “I am not exactly in love with her, but she is entirely in love with me.” In his films Charlie can be bashful and diffident with females whom he can only tentatively approach, but vulgar and aggressive towards what might then have been described as “loose” women. He tips his bowler upwards from every angle when he sees a likely catch; he uses his cane to drag her nearer by the neck or by the legs. One critic noted that “I have seen Mr. Chaplin blithely performing functions in the moving pictures that even I would decline to report.” Whether life followed art, or art followed life, is an open question. It is clear, however, that he funnelled all his sexual energies into his character.

  The two short films that followed His Favorite Pastime—Cruel, Cruel Love and The Star Boarder—do not show Chaplin at his best or most original. In the first he parodies stage melodrama, with an exhibition of histrionics in the false belief he has swallowed poison; in the second he gives what may be his first direct look into the camera, with the expectation of sympathy and complicity from his audience. In The Star Boarder, too, his cane and shoes are shown before he is; this would suggest that his costume was already well known enough to provoke laughter. At the time of the film’s release Keystone also sold a set of four photographs of their stars; they were Mabel Normand, Mack Sennett, “Fatty” Arbuckle and Chaplin himself. In less than four months he had become an established name.

  Yet his character was not set firmly in the imagination of his colleagues. In the next film, Mabel at the Wheel, he reverts to the part of stage villain with drooping moustache and histrionic tendencies. His dissatisfaction at the role may have helped to inspire his sudden revolt against Keystone. Mabel Normand herself was the director, as well as the titular star, of the film. When Chaplin suggested an extra piece of comic business, she rejected his advice on the familiar ground that there was “no time.” At which point Chaplin sat down at the side of the road and refused to carry on with the filming. “I don’t think,” he told her, “that you’re competent to tell me what to do.” The crew predictably took Mabel’s part, but he refused to budge. After all, as he said, “this was my work.”

  Mack Sennett was predictably furious at the young Englishman’s insubordination. It seemed likely that Chaplin’s contract would be torn up and that his days in the silent cinema had come to an abrupt end. Yet on the following morning Sennett approached him in a friendly and obliging way. He had in fact heard from Kessel and Bauman that the Chaplin films were outperforming any others from Keystone, and that more orders were being placed every day.

  Chaplin himself may
have sensed something of this, because he took the opportunity of suddenly amicable relations to announce that he wished to direct as well as to act. He even offered to finance his first film with his own money. It proved to be an unnecessary precaution. The subsequent Chaplin films at Keystone, all of which he directed except the last, were the most successful in the studio’s history.

  Twenty Minutes of Love, his first attempt at direction under the supervision of Sennett, was completed in the space of one afternoon. It was scripted, as well as acted and directed, by Chaplin. It is a “park comedy” in which an assorted array of lovers, policemen, thieves and Charlie engage in a balletic performance of feint and counter-feint before a natural landscape of trees and lawns and bushes and park benches. Of his films it is one of the purest in action, with a series of encounters that recapitulate one another in what could be an endless pattern of meetings and chases. Yet Charlie, as always, stands apart. A look of malice comes across his face when he sees two lovers embracing, and then he sets out to do everything possible to break them up. He is both thief and “peeping Tom.” The ensuing action has all the intricacy, variety and energy of a thoroughly successful farce.

  Caught in a Cabaret, his next film, is a fresh and engaging short picture in which a waiter in a “low” tavern passes himself off in society as the prime minister of Greenland; in other copies of the film, his card reads “O. T. Axle, Ambassador for Grease.” The New York Dramatic Mirror noted that it may be “unwise to call this the funniest picture that has ever been produced, but it comes mighty close to it.” It was the first comedy of two reels that Chaplin wrote and directed, with a playing time of thirty-two minutes.