My Autobiography

by Charles Chaplin

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  My Autobiography

  Charles Chaplin was born on 16 April 1889 in East Street, Walworth, London. His parents, both music hall performers, separated before he was three. His father was to die of alcoholism at 37, while his mother suffered permanent mental breakdown; and Charles and his older half-brother Sydney experienced periods in institutions for destitute children. At 10 he began his professional life as a member of a juvenile clog-dance troupe, went on to act on the legitimate stage in touring productions of Sherlock Holmes, and finally became a star of Fred Karno’s music hall sketch companies. Touring the USA with Karno, in 1913 he was recruited by the Keystone Film Company, and in his second one-reel comedy created the character of the Little Tramp which was to become universally recognized and loved. He soon began to direct as well as perform in his own films. In search of greater independence and bigger salaries he passed in turn to the Essanay, Mutual and First National companies. Among his most notable films from this period are Easy Street, The Immigrant, Shoulder Arms and The Kid. In 1919, with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D. W. Griffith, he established United Artists, through which he distributed such masterworks as A Woman of Paris, The Gold Rush, The Circus, City Lights, Modern Times, The Great Dictator, Monsieur Verdoux and Limelight. As a foreigner and suspected radical, in the late 1940s he fell victim to America’s McCarthyist witchhunts, and from 1952 made his home in Europe, where he directed two more films, A King in New York and A Countess from Hong Kong, as well as completing his autobiography. Following a chequered marital and romantic life, in 1943 he married Oona O’Neill (daughter of the playwright Eugene O’Neill), by whom he had eight children. In 1972 he briefly re-visited the United States to receive an honorary Academy Award; and in January 1975 he was appointed KBE. He died on Christmas Day 1977 at his home in Vevey, Switzerland.

  CHARLES CHAPLIN

  My Autobiography

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  First published by the Bodley Head 1964

  Published in Penguin Books 1966

  Published as a Modern Classic 2003

  6

  Copyright © Charles Chaplin, 1964

  Introduction copyright © David Robinson, 2003

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

  to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

  re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s

  prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

  which it is published and without a similar condition including this

  condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-191249-3

  illustrations

  All photographs unless otherwise specifically acknowledged are the copyright of the Roy Export Company Establishment

  1. Charles Chaplin

  2. Charles Chaplin Sr

  3. Hannah Chaplin

  4. Hannah Chaplin in her house in California

  5. Chaplin (circled) at the Hanwell Schools, 1897 (National Film and Television Archive)

  6. Sydney Chaplin

  7. Chaplin as the Inebriate – one of the roles he played for Karno

  8. Chaplin with Alf Reeves

  9. On the ship to the USA

  10. Keystone – with Mabel Normand in Mabel at the Wheel

  11. Chaplin Studios – on the building site in 1917

  12. United Artists – Douglas Fairbanks, Chaplin, D. W. Griffith and Mary Pickford

  13. Washington – Liberty Bond Tour, 1918 (AKG)

  14. Mildred Harris

  15. Chaplin c. 1918

  16. Visiting London, 1921

  17. With Lord and Lady Mountbatten, 1921

  18. With Jackie Coogan in The Kid, 1921

  19. Jackie Coogan visiting Chaplin on the set of Modern Times, 1935

  20. Clare Sheridan working on her bust of Chaplin

  21. Chaplin with Anna Pavlova

  22. Edna Purviance (centre) in A Woman of Paris, 1923

  23. City Lights with Virginia Cherrill, 1931

  24. Winston Churchill with Chaplin on the set of City Lights, 1929

  25. Chaplin with Professor and Mrs Einstein at the premiere of City Lights

  26. Chaplin with Arnold Schoenberg

  27. Modern Times, 1936

  28. Chaplin with Paulette Goddard in Modern Times

  29. The Great Dictator, 1940

  30. Chaplin with Oona, Geraldine and Michael

  31. Chaplin with his sons Charles and Sydney on the set of Monsieur Verdoux, 1947

  32. With Claire Bloom in Limelight, 1952

  33. With Dawn Addams in A King in New York, 1957

  34. With Oona in Switzerland

  35. With Michael, Josephine and Eugene

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Grateful acknowledgements are due to Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. for permission to reprint an extract from Government by Assassination by Hugh Byas; to the authors and William Heinemann Ltd for the passage from A Writer’s Notebook by W. Somerset Maugham, and for lines from ‘The Widow in the Bye Street’ from The Collected Poems of John Masefield; to Liveright Publishing Corporation for ‘White Buildings’ from The Collected Poems of Hart Crane.

  The publisher would like to thank the Association Chaplin for its help in preparing this edition.

  To Oona

  introduction

  by David Robinson

  CHAPTER One begins in forthright Victorian biographical style: ‘I was born on 16 April 1889, at eight O’clock at night, in East Lane, Walworth.’ When My Autobiography appeared in 1964, this was itself a revelation. The hundreds (quite literally) of books that had been devoted to Chaplin had vaguely placed his birth here, there and everywhere (even Fontainebleau), and no birth certificate exists to settle the question. But here for the first time we had Chaplin’s word for it, and into the bargain his credentials as a true South Londoner, since only a local would name East Street (its official name) as ‘East Lane’ – the style ‘lane’ being popularly applied to any metropolitan thoroughfare that boasts a market. And thereafter the revelations, particularly about the privations of his early life and the precocious discovery of his gifts as a performer, were prodigal. At seventy-five years old, Charles Chaplin finally told his own story, at length.

  On its first appearance the book attracted enormous and worldwide attention (it has been translated into upwards of twenty-five languages) – as well as scepticism on various counts. It must, some said, have been written in collaboration with a ‘ghost’, because that is how Hollywood biographies are made. All the evidence, though, is that the book was a solo authorial effort. His family remembered how Chaplin would kiss his wife Oona goodbye and retire to his library for three concentrated sessions every day, just like going to the office. Chaplin himself complained
to Ian Fleming that his secretary was forever trying to improve his English: ‘He said he was not surprised, as he had taught himself the language and suspected that his secretary knew it far better than he did but, even so, he liked his own version and hoped that some of what he had actually written would survive the process of editing.’ Leonard Russell, anticipating serial publication of the book in the Sunday Times, was rebuked by the original publisher, Max Reinhardt of The Bodley Head, when he enquired discreetly if the author had a collaborator: ‘Mr Reinhardt looked shocked, offended even. Surely we couldn’t think that Chaplin, a man who wrote his own scripts, directed his own films, composed his own music, would seek outside help with his own memoirs: every word would be written by Chaplin – he would swear an affidavit on that.’

  Reinhardt was right. Chaplin had a lifelong compulsion to do everything himself, even down to wanting to play every role in each of his films (his ideal was to find actors and actresses who would faithfully imitate and reproduce his own interpretation of their parts). In writing for films, he had developed his own routine. He would begin by dictating to a secretary or scribbling a draft, usually in pencil, in his own rapid script and often doubtful orthography. This would be neatly typed, with discreet corrections of the spelling, after which Chaplin would revise and correct and scribble and return it for a re-type. The process was repeated until he was satisfied. This seems to have been the method with My Autobiography. The style, in any case, is too distinctive and too consistent with earlier memoirs (My Wonderful Visit in 1922 and A Comedian Sees the World in 1933) to be anything but his own work. There are the appealing idiosyncracies of the self-educated writer. Chaplin had little formal schooling, and painstakingly and late acquired the skills of reading and writing. In the process he was fascinated by words and the desire to discover new ones. He described how he kept a dictionary beside him, and endeavoured to learn one new word every day. Thus at any point throughout his life he would be preoccupied with his most recent verbal finds: at the time of My Autobiography they included ‘ineffable’, ‘levitous’, ‘aposiopesis’, ‘esurient’, while he joyfully writes, ‘I was not frantically ebullient about his prognostications.’ Yet alongside this self-conscious verbalizing, he has a natural expressive gift that constantly results in striking, even poetic, phrases. A vibrant, expressionist recollection of the sights and scents of late Victorian Lambeth concludes, ‘From such trivia I believe my soul was born.’ The new Waterloo Bridge, ‘although beautiful… meant little to me now, only that its road led over to my boyhood’. Kennington Park ‘still bloomed green with sadness’. Returning to the scenes of boyhood, ‘I had a feeling of uneasiness that perhaps those gentle streets of poverty still had the power to trap me in the quicksands of their hopelessness’.

  A few critics of the time were sceptical of the childhood hardships Chaplin recounted, and sought to dismiss them as Dickensian fiction. Even recently one or two American revisionist biographers have resumed the attack on his veracity; but hard documentary evidence consistently confirms Chaplin’s account. The book was a prodigious feat of memory. He had no help from researchers. When he wrote, the studio archives, kept in his home in Vevey, constituted a vast, virtually inaccessible mass. From the early theatrical years, there was little besides one small scrap book. No doubt many memories were retrieved in conversation with his half-brother Sidney, who seems to have visited Switzerland a number of times during the six years that Chaplin was preparing his memoirs. The accuracy of his memory was to be amply attested twenty years after he wrote. In the 1980s a mass of documentary evidence re-emerged, from researches in the London civic archives and from two large trunks of early memorabilia that Chaplin’s brother Sidney had kept in store for many years, and which were rediscovered and given by Sidney’s widow to Oona Chaplin. Apart from providing odd dates and details that had eluded Chaplin, the new documentation contradicted nothing in his account.

  Sometimes his few mistakes actually serve to vindicate Chaplin’s memory. Thus he remembers the ogre who meted out school punishments as ‘Captain Hindrum’; an old vaudeville friend of his mothers, fallen on evil times, as ‘Dashing Eva Lestocq’; and the kindly stage manager at the Prince of Wales Theatre, where Chaplin was a boy actor, as ‘Mr Postant’. Their names turn out in fact to have been Hindom, Dashing Eva Lester and William Postance. Chaplin, it appears, was indeed remembering, from sixty or seventy years before, names he had heard but perhaps never seen written down, rather than reclaiming them from post facto research.

  On the book’s appearance, reviews of My Autobiography were almost unanimous in their mixture of enthusiasm and disappointment. The opening chapters represent the last great Victorian autobiography, a first-hand account, rich in colour and chiaroscuro, of life in the poor streets of a nineteenth-century London that was still not far from Dickens and Mayhew. The young Chaplin’s fortunes change when he becomes a professional in the English music hall at the height of its Edwardian glory. Vaudeville tours bring the discovery of America: ‘At last California – a paradise of sunshine, orange groves, vineyards and palm-trees stretching along the Pacific coast for a thousand miles.’ From vaudeville he risks a leap into the dark to go into pictures, still in their infancy and in process of finding their ultimate home on the West Coast: ‘In those days Beverly Hills looked like an abandoned real estate development. Sidewalks ran along and disappeared into open fields and lampposts with white globes adorned empty streets; most of the globes were missing, shot off by passing revellers from roadhouses.’

  In this virgin land, and the new medium of movies, still striving to discover its rules (largely under the lead of the great D. W. Griffith, whom Chaplin somewhat patronizingly credits with ‘an original touch’), Chaplin finds his destiny. The chapters on his first contracts with the Keystone and Essanay Companies give a vivid if cursory account of his struggles – personal and economic – to win creative autonomy, to bring to the coarse popular show of slapstick movies the subtler skills he had developed in the music halls, and to ‘add another dimension to my films besides that of comedy’.

  His success in this and the speed of it were breathtaking. In little more than two years he had achieved world fame, opened up new markets for Hollywood films, and begun to attract the cachet of ‘artist’ from people who before him would never have deigned to look at the movies. ‘The prospects were dazzling. Like an avalanche, money and success came with increasing momentum; it was all bewildering, frightening, but wonderful.’

  At this juncture, the eleventh chapter of My Autobiography closes with the words: ‘So much had happened to me, my emotions were spent.’ After this, the style and tone change, in a way that disconcerted and disappointed the book’s first critics and readers. Till now, we have followed the adventures of a young man, struggling, striving, experimenting and finally rocketed to success by his talents. Now we are presented with the self-portrait of a world celebrity, contentedly courted by princes and presidents. When Chaplin drops names he does it resoundingly: ‘Many illustrious visitors came to the studio at this time: Melba, Leopold Godowsky and Paderewski, Nijinsky and Pavlova.’ ‘A cousin of the Kaiser kindly conducted me around Potsdam and Sans Souci.’ ‘If we were not so preoccupied with our family, we could have quite a social life in Switzerland, for we live relatively near the Queen of Spain and the Count and the Countess Chevreau d’Antraigues, who have been most cordial to us, and there are a number of film stars and writers who live near.’

  The name-dropping is compensated by Chaplin’s sharp one-line portraits. Paderewski ‘had great charm, but there was something bourgeois about him, an over-emphasis of dignity’. Rachmaninov was ‘a strange-looking man, with something aesthetic and cloistral about him’. Schoenberg was ‘a frank and abrupt little man’. Often, too, Chaplin is as shrewd about himself, humorously deriding and deflating his own vanities, aware of their deep roots in the ineradicable heritage of early deprivation and sense of inferiority. Discussing his passion for self-education, he reveals movingly,
‘I wanted to know, not for the love of knowledge but as a defence against the world’s contempt for the ignorant.’

  As it was, Chaplin’s career was still to suffer a further turn of destiny. His seemingly impregnable position as a world celebrity and universal idol was undermined by American paranoia of the Cold War era. At the start of the 1950s he came to feel ‘that I had the acrimony and hate of a whole nation upon me… My prodigious sin was being a non-conformist. Although I am not a Communist, I refused to fall in line by hating them’. His punishment was virtual exile from the United States that lasted to the end of his life.

  A more understandable source of disappointment for some critics of the time was the odd reticences of My Autobiography. Chaplin’s references to his films are generally cursory, and some key works – Easy Street or The Circus – are not mentioned at all. He says nothing about the process of their making. In his lifetime he would explain his reluctance to allow people on his set or to share his working secrets by saying, ‘If people know how it’s done, all the magic goes.’ Perhaps a truer reason was that he himself came more and more to feel that he was unable to unveil the mysteries of his creation, simply because the essential part of the mysteries remained veiled for him also. How could he ever explain, to himself or to anyone else, the seemingly accidental creation, in the Keystone costume hut one afternoon in 1914, of the character that was to become the most universally recognized representation of a human being in the history of art? At one of the rare moments when he admits the problems of work, describing how the early shorts were often begun with not even the vaguest idea of a story, he has a simple but revealing phrase: ‘In this desperate way I started many a comedy.’

  Another explanation may be that Chaplin wrote the book in the spirit of the entertainer that, throughout his life, he was; and like most people, saw no particular glamour in his daytime job: he once told someone that his working life was no more exciting than that of a bank clerk, and probably felt that it would simply be boring to relate the slow and painful processes by which his films were made. In any case the reticence of his lifetime has been richly compensated since his death. Chaplin, intentionally or not, left behind more evidence, in the form of film out-takes and rushes, working notes and studio daily records, than any other film director of his time, to enable researchers to supply, more than amply, the lacunae of his own account.