Charlie Chaplin

by Peter Ackroyd

  Another glimpse of Chaplin’s temperament can be found in an incident at a story conference during the filming of The Gold Rush. A fly had been buzzing around him and, calling for a swatter, he made several unsuccessful attempts to kill it. After a few seconds a fly landed on the table beside him. He raised the swatter for the final blow, looked at the fly, and then lowered his weapon. When asked why he had changed his mind he replied that “It isn’t the same fly.”

  “Enjoy any Charlie Chaplin you have the good luck or chance to encounter,” one friend, Max Eastman, suggested. “But don’t try to link them up to anything you can grasp. There are too many of them.” Sam Goldwyn, a man who knew Chaplin well in the early years, deduced that he “loved power” and hated anything that interfered with his personal freedom. He would accept invitations and then not attend the party or dinner to which he had been asked; he would forget appointments, or arrive very late; once he promised to be the best man at a friend’s wedding but never turned up. He took up people only to drop them again. Toraichi Kono said of him, through an amanuensis, that “he is one not always to be depended on … he conceals disdain of individuals with an engaging charm; he cloaks his distrust of most men with a disarming smile.”

  The overwhelming impression is one of detachment or unconcern that is directly linked to the phenomenon of his self-absorption. In 1925 he told a film critic, Mordaunt Hall, that “I never get away from the notion that I am watching myself in the passing show.” He said at a later date that “I think a very great deal of myself. Everything is perfect or imperfect, according to myself. I am the perfect standard.” Even his oldest son regarded him as “egocentric.” Only his movements and his character are important upon the screen; he is always at the centre and, as he said, “I am the unusual and I do not need camera angles.”

  An employee from United Artists, Louis Berg, conceded that he found him “cold, haughty, and completely indifferent to his associates … He smiled rarely and sourly, and seemed in every way the complete opposite of his screen impersonation. His reputation was that of a tough and unyielding executive. People were unquestionably afraid of him. And his ‘no’ was the coldest and sharpest I have ever heard in my life.” The problem was, for Berg and for many others, that “Chaplin is not as amiable, as modest, as warm as the little fellow on the screen.”

  What is the relationship between Chaplin and Charlie? As Chaplin became more powerful in life, Charlie became less assertive and more subservient. As Chaplin incurred the wrath of his public for his philandering, Charlie became less libidinous. Chaplin became a millionaire, while Charlie was always impoverished. Chaplin was a dedicated and professional film-maker, whereas Charlie could settle down to no employment. Charlie was Chaplin’s shadow self or alter ego.

  Yet close resemblances between artist and character also existed. Chaplin relied upon intuition and improvisation in the same manner as the “little fellow.” Chaplin reacted strongly against poverty and social deprivation just as Charlie is always intent upon acquiring food and finding money. Chaplin was a fervent individualist who despised any attempt at social systematisation; Charlie himself became the true symbol of such an attitude. Chaplin’s self-absorption is also reproduced in the Little Tramp, abstracted from the world and yet invulnerable. Charlie has a self-regard, or self-sufficiency, so strong that nothing can challenge it. He will lean his elbow on a man’s lap, or forcibly pull a young woman towards him with his cane; in his early films other people are so many objects of his lust or displeasure. He has no sense of feelings other than his own. The rest of the world must adjust to his needs and his desires. Like Chaplin himself he is both playful and detached, unwilling to participate in the lives of other people.

  Yet mystery always surrounds the Little Tramp. Where has he come from? Where is he going? Chaplin himself said that “even now I don’t know all the things there are to be known about him.”

  13

  The Edge of Madness

  After his triumph in New York he returned to Los Angeles in the middle of October 1925, to be greeted by the news that his wife was once again pregnant. This was a cause of dismay rather than of delight, since it seemed to tie him further to a doomed marriage. He became even more distant towards her, and he began to act in an erratic manner. Lita Chaplin wrote later that her husband was taking seven or eight showers a day. This may have been under the suspicion that he had contracted some kind of venereal disease in New York. He had become an insomniac, and at night would patrol the grounds of the house with his pistol. He arranged for some of the technicians at his studio to install a listening device, channelled through a dictaphone, into his wife’s bedroom. He was having an affair with his wife’s erstwhile best friend, Merna Kennedy, whom he had recently hired as the leading lady of the new film that he was contemplating. He spent all day, and much of the evening, at the studio.

  One evening Chaplin came home unexpectedly and found his wife had arranged an impromptu party for some of her friends. His reaction, recalled by Lita Chaplin, was perhaps predictable. “Get that crowd of bloody drunks out of my house at once! At once!” He then addressed the gathering. “You pack of whores and pimps would’ve all been at one another all over my furniture. Not her home. My home!” Then he added to his wife, “Get this filth out of here! You can get out with them, too, if you think you’re too high class to waste your time milking me any more!”

  Their second child, Sydney, was born on 31 March 1926, but Chaplin professed not to know if he was really the father. She said that in this period his threats and rants against her became ever more violent. He said that she began to smoke and to drink. Chaplin also claimed that she began to spread slanderous stories about him to whomever would listen. At the end of November Lita Chaplin left the house on Summit Drive, and took the two children with her.

  Throughout this period of marital disaffection Chaplin had been engaged on the film that would follow The Gold Rush. He had begun work on it soon after his return from New York but he had been preparing for it a great deal longer; four years before, he had said that “my greatest ambition is to make a film about a clown.” The Circus was to become that film. He had hired a new assistant, Harry Crocker, whom he took on what might be called a working holiday to Del Monte, a luxury resort in the eastern part of Monterey, where they could discuss the project. In fact Chaplin talked at Crocker for twenty-eight hours without interruption.

  He no doubt discussed with his young colleague the projects he had shared with other acquaintances in this period. He had a desire to play Jesus Christ or Napoleon. He was obsessed with Napoleon all of his life, perhaps as the paradigm of the small man who obtains mastery over the world; many photographs show him in Napoleonic pose, one hand tucked into his jacket. Yet he wished to present the French general in a unique light as “a sickly being, taciturn, almost morose, continually harassed by the members of his family.” He would similarly wish to portray Christ as one always surrounded by crowds that “would throng around him in order to feel his magnetism. Not at all a sad, pious and stiff person, but a lonely man who has been the most misunderstood of all time.” Where did Christ end and Chaplin begin?

  Crocker had been told, on first arriving at the studio, that “If you’re smart you enter Chaplin on your books as a son of a bitch. He isn’t always one but he can be one on occasion.” Another employee told him that “Charlie has a sadistic streak in him.” For reason or reasons unknown he had already discharged his previous leading lady, Georgia Hale, and had hired Merna Kennedy in her place; Kennedy had no real dramatic talent, but she had been a close friend of Lita Chaplin. This may have added spice to their subsequent romance.

  Chaplin began as always with little notion of the story, or the characters, of The Circus; these would develop naturally as he went along. Charlie is the “little fellow” who by accident becomes a circus clown; he is naturally funny and inventive, but fails miserably when asked to perform the standard routines of the circus. This may be an allusion to Chaplin’s ow
n career as a film comedian, in which he had defied the conventional repertoire. The Tramp can never yield to order or regimentation; he must always be free to express his own quixotic and mercurial nature. Charlie then falls in love with the ringmaster’s daughter, but is supplanted by a young and handsome trapeze artist whose routine he attempts to imitate. The ringmaster is played as a ruthless and autocratic bully, whose behaviour is perhaps modelled on that of Chaplin himself.

  The film was beset by mistakes and misfortunes. Just as filming was about to begin, in December 1925, a violent storm tore down the circus tent which had been erected. So work had to be postponed. Chaplin had decided that he would learn how to walk the tightrope for the climactic scene in the film; he had previously dreamed that he was walking a tightrope when he was attacked by two monkeys. This may have been some muddled image of his domestic situation. He persevered in this self-imposed and difficult task until, in the Chaplin manner, he had attained perfection on the wire. Within three weeks the scene had been completed; but then the daily rushes were discovered to be marred by scratching. The material was abandoned, and in his rage Chaplin fired all of the laboratory technicians. Filming began once more, but some of the initial verve and energy had necessarily disappeared.

  In the autumn of 1926 a large fire broke out on the set, destroying the circus tent and most of the props. Chaplin was becoming more morose and depressed than ever, a situation made infinitely worse with the news that the Internal Revenue Service were investigating him for underpayment of taxes and for possible criminal fraud. He suspended work on the film and retreated to the house he had built on the north side of the studio lot where he refused to see anyone but a few intimates. It is reported that he was paralysed with fear and indecision, fearing a possible jail sentence as well as the seizure of his assets.

  On 9 January 1927, he was smuggled aboard a train to New York. On the following day Lita Chaplin filed for divorce in a statement that covered fifty-two pages. She charged him with calling her a “gold-digger” and a “blackmailer”; he had told her that “if she had not been selfish and had loved him, she would have ‘gotten rid’ of said baby—as many other women had done for him.” In particular Chaplin had told her that one actress had undergone two abortions for his sake; the woman was not named, but it was widely assumed to be Edna Purviance. Lita Chaplin also accused her husband of having pulled a gun on her and threatened her, of having changed the locks while she was out of the house, and of having insisted that she accompany him to the house of “a certain motion picture actress.” This might have been the residence of Marion Davies; his motive being to provoke jealousy on his young wife’s part.

  More salacious and dangerous material was to come. Lita Chaplin stated that “throughout the entire married life of said parties and at times too numerous for plaintiff to more particularly specify, defendant has solicited, urged and demanded that plaintiff submit to, perform and commit such acts and things for the gratification of defendant’s said abnormal, unnatural, perverted and degenerate sexual desires as to be too revolting, indecent and immoral to set forth in detail in this complaint.” Specific allusion was made to Section 288a of the California penal code that outlawed, even within marriage, the practices of sodomy and oral sex. He had said to her that “all married people do those kinds of things. You are my wife and you have to do what I want you to do.”

  The fifty-two pages were instantly seized upon by a voyeuristic and sensation-hungry public, and The Complaint of Lita was within a few days being sold on the street corners of Los Angeles at twenty-five cents a copy. While on the train to New York, Chaplin issued a statement that “I realise that I am temporarily under a cloud, but those who know me and love me will not pay any attention to the charges, as they will know they are untrue.”

  On 16 January his doctor issued a statement that his patient was “suffering from a serious nervous breakdown.” A short sequence of film taken at this time shows him ill at ease, his face twitching. His Japanese chauffeur, Toraichi Kono, told Rollie Totheroh that Chaplin had tried to jump out of the window of his hotel bedroom in New York. So Kono kept watch by his bedside for four days and nights. The doctor had forbidden newspapers from reaching his patient, but Chaplin insisted on seeing the headlines concerning his unfortunate case. Kono believed that he derived some melancholy pleasure from being attacked, just as Pola Negri had observed that he found some satisfaction in being violently criticised by her. Chaplin always believed that he was under threat from certain enemies who were plotting to destroy him, but in truth his own actions were largely responsible for his troubles.

  He managed somehow to overcome his mental crisis, and made brief expeditions from the security of his hotel. Through the agency of his lawyers he came to a tentative and temporary agreement with the IRS. Eventually, too, a settlement for the divorce was proposed. Lita Chaplin’s lawyers had threatened to reveal the names of the six actresses with whom Chaplin had slept after his marriage. One of these was Marion Davies. Such an exposure was unthinkable. Chaplin at once accepted his lawyer’s advice to settle as quickly as possible. Thus, on 22 August, Lita Chaplin was awarded $625,000 and her sons were protected by a $200,000 trust fund. It was the largest divorce settlement in American history, but the only damaged reputation was that of Chaplin himself. The humorist Will Rogers complained on the radio that “I left Hollywood to keep from being named in the Chaplin trial, and now they go and name nobody.”

  Chaplin went back to work on The Circus at the end of August, after a delay of eight months. It was remarked by the workers of the studio that, as a result of the troubles with Lita, his greying hair had now turned completely white. It was a tribute to his stamina and his vision, however, that he was still determined to finish the picture and to maintain the same scrupulous attention to detail. The final scene, in which Charlie is seen to be alone in the ring where the circus had once stood, was filmed on location in what was then the Los Angeles suburb of Sawtelle. He shot the scene again and again. At three o’clock in the morning of 10 October he watched himself in the rushes. “He should do that much better.” “He doesn’t ring true.” “He has his derby down too far over his eyes.” “They have burned his face up with those silver reflectors.” It was all to be done again. He had always said that his way of working was “sheer perseverance to the edge of madness.” The film was released three months later.

  He rarely discussed The Circus, no doubt as a result of the personal misfortunes that accompanied it, but it is one of the most animated and engaging of his films. The early sequences, in which the “little fellow” enters the circus and unwittingly entertains its audience, are as inventive as anything he had ever achieved before. He is trapped in a house of mirrors while being chased by the police; he inadvertently sabotages a magician’s act; he enters a lion’s cage and cannot get out. All of these scenes are in themselves little triumphs of the comic art, masterpieces proving that the most hilarious comedy can spring out of the most distressing private circumstances.

  In the final scene of The Circus Charlie is somewhere outside the world; he does not accept the invitation to return to the company of the other performers, and therefore remains essentially aloof and inviolate. He is intrigued and sometimes affected by the passions of others, but he refuses to participate in them. The scene was deliberately shot in the early morning light so that the lines on Chaplin’s face could more clearly be seen. He remains alone as the circus moves on. In the end, he has no need for anybody.

  14

  The Beauty of Silence

  Even before the premiere of The Circus, at the beginning of 1928, he set to work on his next film. He was so eager to begin City Lights that he might have been trying to make up for time lost in the previous year. Yet, in the interim, the cinema had altogether changed. In the autumn of 1927 The Jazz Singer had proved the possibilities of synchronised sound, and in the following year Lights of New York became the first all-talking picture. By the end of 1929, 8,000 cinemas had been wired
for sound, and the audiences for what was essentially the new medium of the talkies multiplied.

  Chaplin opposed the introduction of sound from the beginning. He believed that it would mean the end of his art. In an interview at the beginning of 1929 he complained that “they are spoiling the oldest art in the world—the art of pantomime. They are ruining the great beauty of silence. They are defeating the meaning of the screen.” As far as his comedy was concerned, “it would be fatal.” He was a mime of genius and, by definition, a mime did not speak.

  The advent of sound dealt him a double blow since the audiences might now find Chaplin outmoded and his great art a temporary or passing phenomenon. Yet how could the “little fellow” speak? What kind of voice could he be given? The Tramp had become Everyman, an emblem of the human world, and Everyman can have no language. If he spoke English it would affect his reception by foreign audiences who would no longer have the direct and unmediated contact with the figure on the screen. Chaplin explained that “the Chinese children, the Japanese children, the Hindu, the Hottentot, all understand me. I doubt whether they would understand my Chinese or my Hindustani.”

  It was a financial as well as an aesthetic consideration. His film rights in Japan alone covered the cost of his productions. The use of sound equipment on set would in any case require a complete change in the nature of the performance and the style of production; it would also be highly expensive. Chaplin was, in terms of his art, a traditionalist and never became used to developments in cinematic art or in filmic technique.