Charlie Chaplin

by Peter Ackroyd

  At Essanay some were dismayed that Charlie had discarded comedy for pathos. But the ending of The Tramp is not sad at all; with the sudden onrush of optimism or high spirits, he has immeasurably deepened the possible range and expression of the “little fellow.” “Say,” he asked one acquaintance, “did you see The Tramp? I know I took an awful chance. But did it get across?”

  It had certainly required much time and invention to complete; so Chaplin decided to compensate by making a short one-reeler, By the Sea, which as its title suggests is concerned with some seaside antics devised by Chaplin and fellow actors. It is all performed with vim and gusto, and demonstrates how good he is at uncomplicated pantomime. As Mark Twain writes at the beginning of Huckleberry Finn, “persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted … persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.” But Chaplin never employed the one-reel format again. He had moved beyond it.

  The next film, Work, represents a return to the more complex characterisation of The Tramp. Here Charlie becomes an abused and exploited decorating hand, a member of the proletariat rather than a tramp. Charlie never does like work. He is “late” more often than not, and he goes through the motions of labour in a completely uninterested and disorderly fashion; when forced to apply himself, he runs about like a mechanical toy that has been over-wound. In subsequent films, in fact, he portrays the horrors of work more often than he depicts the poverty and pathos of the Tramp. He becomes a janitor, a floor-walker and a fireman; he takes the role of a waiter, a baker, a dentist’s assistant, a delivery man; he plays a prospector, a policeman, an itinerant glazier, a barber, a counter assistant, a road sweeper, a mechanic on a production line, a caretaker. He even plays the role of a professional comedian. Not even the last of these satisfied him. Work is boring. Work is futile. It might be one of the lessons taught him by his London boyhood.

  In Work itself he plays a decorator’s assistant who cannot muster the elementary rules of his profession. It is a routine he had first learned in the English music-hall act of 1906, Repairs, but here it is invested with much greater art. In the opening sequences Charlie is dragging a heavy cart through the streets of Los Angeles, while being whipped and goaded by his employer; he manages to avoid the approaching trolley-cars but is then faced with the prospect of a steep hill. It was a novel form of visual wit and therefore provoked laughter. Originality often does. It is in fact one of the most visually arresting sequences that he ever attempted, and may in part have been inspired by the experimental techniques of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, released a few months before, a film that Chaplin watched again and again. It may also have been derived from a real scene he had once witnessed where, as he recalled, the laughter had been at the working man’s expense. According to the notice in the Bioscope, “the humour is designed to rise in a long crescendo of screams to a climax of roars.”

  Chaplin injured his wrist while filming, but such was the hysteria surrounding reports of him that it was widely rumoured he had been killed while engaged in a dangerous stunt.

  The pace of his work at Essanay slowed down, as testimony to the care and attention he was now bestowing upon his films. In the first four months of 1915 he had produced some seven films; in the remaining eight months he completed six. It can be surmised that Chaplin spent a little less than two months in making a film of 1,800 feet or a standard two-reeler; for this he used 36,000 feet of negative, which meant that every scene was “shot” twenty times. With all the trials and changes involved, this implied about fifty rehearsals for each of the scenes.

  In this period he embarked upon another ambitious and elaborate project, provisionally entitled Life. It was to be the portrait of the lower depths of the city, a place of disease and dosshouses and destitution. Yet it was never made, and the idea is likely to have been turned down by the management on the grounds that the figure of Charlie, in the public imagination, was incompatible with low tragedy. The scene of the dosshouse and its habitués emerged in a later Essanay film, but Chaplin’s proposal to deal with scenes of suffering and poverty in the manner of Dickens was never properly fulfilled.

  He followed this, curiously enough, with the last of his cross-dressing comedies where for most of the film he masquerades very successfully as a woman. You might in fact say that he is a woman; his is not a female impersonation but a female persona. Charlie becomes Charlotte. A Woman was made in the newly refurbished Majestic studios, in which Chaplin changed all the locks and introduced a new security system. He had now become so popular that competitors were more than willing to steal his material or his ideas; he also did not want to be watched when working. It is said that Essanay even built an embankment around the studio to deter competitors.

  But although A Woman is in many respects a deft and ingenious film its successor, The Bank, is a more substantial work. This was the occasion when Chaplin made a deliberate decision to extend the characterisation and behaviour of the “little fellow” whose capacity for pathos had first been shown in The Tramp. He plays a janitor of a local bank who has fallen deeply in love with the manager’s secretary, Edna, who of course is unaware of his timid advances. It is a saga of hopeless and helpless yearning punctuated by some subtle and not so subtle comedy; it also contains a dream adventure, in which Charlie rescues Edna from bank-robbers. He had first played the valiant dreamer in the stage comedy, Jimmy the Fearless, seven years before.

  One scene represents the culmination of this new aspect of the Tramp. He watches as Edna discards some flowers that he had left for her as a love token, and his expression of disbelief, bewilderment and grief is one of the most memorable moments of his career. His is a bleak and frightened face, wide-eyed and distraught. It is the moment when he reimagines what it is to be betrayed by a woman whom he adores, an instant that might indeed go back to his childhood. The pathos was in fact advertised in the posters for the film, where the image of the sorrowful face of Charlie is prominently displayed as the principal attraction for the public. It was clear to audiences now, if it had not been evident before, that Chaplin was no conventional film comedian.

  7

  Charlee!

  In this year, 1915, Chaplin became the most famous man in the world.

  It was now widely reported that, on Charlie’s first appearance on screen in any of his new films, the audience would erupt in cheers and laughter. In a theatrical revue, Watch Your Step, Lupino Lane sang “That Charlie Chaplin Walk.” Song-sheets were now rolling off the presses with titles such as “Charlie Chaplin Glide,” “The Chaplin Waddle,” “Charlie Chaplin—March Grotesque,” “Those Charlie Chaplin Feet,” “Charlie Chaplin, the Funniest of Them All” and “The Chaplin Strut.” Nursery rhymes were written about him:

  Charlie Chaplin, meek and mild,

  Took a sausage from a child.

  When the child began to cry,

  Charlie slapped him in the eye.

  The children of Puerto Rico also had a song about Chaplin, warning one another to keep their kittens indoors; otherwise “Chali Chaplin” would swat them with his cane. It is significant, perhaps, that children were the first to spot the violent aspect of the Little Tramp. A French film-maker said that Chaplin “was one of the few people a child of this century would know, straight after his parents.”

  Chaplin dolls and Chaplin toys, Chaplin hats and Chaplin ties, Chaplin socks and squirt-rings, Chaplin playing cards and Chaplin lapel pins, were soon on prominent display in most of the department stores of the country. There were Charlie Chaplin lucky charms and Charlie Chaplin coins to be used in slot machines. Plaster statuettes of the “little fellow” were everywhere. Comic strips and cartoons were devoted to him. Books were published with titles such as Charlie Chaplin’s Comic Capers and The Charlie Chaplin Scream Book. He was the inspiration for Felix the Cat. One cartoon depicted two news-boys in earnest conversation. “Chimmie, who’d you ruther be—th’president or th’kaiser?” “Aw fudge—I’d ten thousand times ruther
be CHARLIE CHAPLIN.”

  Cardboard images of the Little Tramp were placed outside the neighbourhood cinemas whenever one of his films was being shown, with the slogan “I am here today!” Chaplin imitators were now the rage and in the summer of 1915 the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that “Cleveland has been getting so full of imitations of Charlie Chaplin that the management of Luna Park decided to offer a prize to the best imitator and out they flocked.” (The winner was the twelve-year-old Bob Hope.) In New York the street vendors cried out, “Get Charlie Chaplin on a balloon!,” while other hawkers sold postcards of his image. Children would save their pennies until Saturday, when they could buy Chaplin candy and Chaplin gum. At the local cinemas, according to one reporter, the antics of Charlie “had the kids in hysterics, the kids—of all ages. Really jumping with laughter.” The craze was alternatively known as “Chaplinitis” or “Chaplinoia.” He had become much larger than film. He had become the emblem of popular culture.

  Yet his success was by no means confined to the United States. The French composed songs in his honour, and Marcel Proust for a time trimmed his moustache in the Chaplin style. At a slightly later date Chaplin became the hero of the Dadaists, and an inspiration to Léger. This was the period when the French distributors rechristened him as “Charlot” bringing him closer to the figure of Pierrot, the mute and white-faced character of the commedia dell’ arte who has no real place in the world.

  The medical wards of the wartime hospitals were showing Chaplin films as a welcome recuperative, and one critic claimed that “such a bearer of healing laughter … the world had never known.” An English postcard recorded that “everyone is Charlie mad on this side. Sing songs about him and crack jokes.” Lenin said that “Chaplin is the only man in the world I want to meet.”

  It has been estimated that from 1915 onwards some 300 million people were watching Chaplin. A correspondent of the New York Times in Ghana reported that a cinema in Accra was packed by “Fanti savages from Ashanti land, up-country Kroo boys … Haussas from the north of Nigeria.” When Chaplin appeared on the screen, “there was an immediate chorus of shouts, ‘Charlee! Charlee!’ ” It was the only English word they knew. He was soon known across the world from Africa to Asia, Australia to South America. In later years he would be imitated by the folklore performers of Cambodian theatre, by the puppet plays of Turkey and by the kabuki theatre of Japan. In Japan he was known as “Professor Alcohol” because of the popularity of his impersonation of the “funny drunk.”

  He was the first human being ever to be the object of global adulation far beyond the later cult of “celebrity.” He said himself that “I am known in parts of the world by people who have never heard of Jesus Christ.” By an instinct of genius he had created an icon or image of common humanity that was deeply congenial to people around the globe. He seemed to epitomise the human condition itself, flawed and frail and funny.

  A large number of companies asked him to endorse their products and, for an appropriate fee, he obliged. Of course Chaplin himself could not conduct all of his financial affairs while at the same time running a studio. He decided to keep the business in the family. Sydney Chaplin, at his younger brother’s urging, had already come to California in order to work for Keystone. He had been the more important comic performer in England, and Sennett now hoped that he might make as great an impact as his brother in America. So the brothers were seeing each other on occasions in Los Angeles, where it soon became apparent that Chaplin’s fame and profitability were not to be equalled but were instead to be professionally managed. Sydney’s contract with Keystone came to an end in 1915, and at once he took up the role of his younger brother’s agent.

  Chaplin was looking for opportunities elsewhere. He made four more films for Essanay and in a sense they show him marking time. He was impatient to take the next step forward, thus acquiring greater freedom as well as greater resources. Yet he still had to fulfil his contract. Shanghaied was released at the beginning of October. It is a nautical comedy in which Charlie is pressed for service aboard a boat of villains. The interior sets were rocked back and forth on rollers to give the illusion of instability, while the scenes on deck were managed by rocking the camera back and forth; these were techniques he would put to equally good use in The Immigrant. The film is notable for the display of Charlie’s graceful acrobatics in the face of overwhelming difficulties. He dances a hornpipe on a wildly swaying deck, and even manages a complete somersault while carrying a tray of plates. His Karno training was still invaluable. In the course of filming the cast and crew were marooned by bad weather somewhere off the coast of California; Chaplin sent a distress signal to the local town of Venice. It might have added to the sense of danger conveyed in the film itself. Essanay bought him a schooner for some of the scenes, and he blew it up at the end of the picture; the conspicuous consumption is evidence for the profitability of his films.

  His next film, A Night in the Show, was essentially a reprise of his standard act for Karno in Mumming Birds. Once again he plays the role of a louche drunk who cannot help but intervene in the variously mediocre acts of a vaudeville stage. He is not Charlie here but a young aristocrat who cannot hold his drink; no rich character in his films is ever sober, suggesting perhaps his anger and resentment at the class differences that had bedevilled him in England. He intimated that this was one of the reasons he left for the United States. A Night in the Show is, if nothing else, a reminder of the act that impressed Mack Sennett and thereby introduced Chaplin to the world.

  His penultimate film for Essanay was more ambitious. Burlesque on “Carmen” was loosely based on the novel by Prosper Mérimée and the opera by Bizet, yet in fact it was more closely modelled on two film versions of the same story that had been released earlier in the year. Chaplin always enjoyed parodying the conventions of melodrama and adventure; he delighted in unnatural action and exaggerated gesture. The resigned look, the yearning look, the puzzled look, the desperate look, were all material for his wild caricatures. He could not see a person or thing without becoming it; he could not see a person or thing without spoofing it. No one could play the lover more movingly or genuinely, but the authenticity can be abandoned in a moment. In Carmen he is pure expression without emotion.

  He was a wonderful parodist or impersonator because he believed passionately and instinctively in his performance, even though he sensed it to be unreal. For him there was no distinction between acting and living. He plays any part intensely, even though he knows that nobody is really there. The American critic Walter Kerr put it best in The Silent Clowns in his remark that “we shall often see him collapse inwardly with regret the moment an imposture has ended, or is about to end; there is no way of sustaining it, of committing himself to it indefinitely; and he must now return to his nothingness. The coming nothingness haunts him even as he is being his most brilliantly accomplished.”

  Chaplin finished working on Carmen even as Sydney was engaged in negotiations on his behalf with the various film producers of New York. He received an unwelcome surprise when Essanay eventually released the finished film in the spring of 1916. After his departure from that studio, the managers tampered with the finished product; they reinstated all the scenes that Chaplin had edited out and extended the film to four reels with some added material from Ben Turpin. By turning two reels into four, they damaged the quality and coherence of the original production. Chaplin was devastated; their intervention in his work left him so depressed that he took to his bed for two days. It is an indication of how protective he was of his vision. In future contracts he insisted that no one be allowed to interfere with, or mutilate, his finished work.

  In that same spring Essanay released Police, the last comedy that Chaplin had made for the studio. He felt, immediately on completing it, that it was the finest film he had ever created. This is in fact an accurate assessment. Charlie is here given an instinct for life, an irrepressible optimism and jauntiness in “the cruel, cruel world.” He is infi
nitely expressive, with almost every conceivable human emotion passing over his face in quicksilver rapidity. He can be both coy and malevolent, for example, at the same time. He is shabby and plaintive, but unbowed; he is endlessly resourceful and adaptable; he is always being impeded but never defeated; he is bowed but not broken. In the final scene he walks away from the camera with his arms stretched out in a Christlike gesture of joy or exaltation. It is as if he is saying—look, I have come through.

  He had finished with Essanay. He was now resting in Santa Monica, in a house facing the sea, where he contemplated what he called “the future, the future—the wonderful future!” He did not yet know where it might lead him. In February 1916, Sydney called him to New York where the offers for his services were beginning to multiply. When his train eastward stopped at Amarillo, Texas, he was astonished to be greeted by a deputation from the town; he was equally surprised by the large crowd that gathered around, and by the bunting and flags that decorated the station.

  This was his first real taste of the fame that had accrued while, as it were, he was busy working. As the train travelled further east, he saw people in the fields and at the railway junctions waving towards him; it became “the Chaplin Train.” The crowds were large at Kansas City and Chicago; by the time the train reached New York, the commissioner of the police asked him to get off at 125th Street instead of Grand Central where they could no longer control the traffic and the press of people waiting to see “Charlie.”