My Autobiography

by Charles Chaplin

  *

  Mr H. A. Saintsbury, who played Holmes on tour, was a living replica of the illustrations in the Strand Magazine. He had a long, sensitive face and an inspired forehead. Of all those who played Holmes he was considered the best, even better than William Gillette, the original Holmes and author of the play.

  On my first tour, the management decided that I should live with Mr and Mrs Green, the carpenter of the company, and his wife, the wardrobe lady. This was not very glamorous. Besides, Mr and Mrs Green drank occasionally. Moreover, I did not always want to eat when they did, or eat what they ate. I am sure my living with the Greens was more irksome to them than to me. So after three weeks we mutually agreed to part, and being too young to live with other members of the cast, I lived alone. I was alone in strange towns, alone in back rooms, rarely meeting anyone until the evening performance, only hearing my own voice when I talked to myself. Occasionally, I would go to the saloons where members of the company gathered, and watch them play billiards; but I always felt that my presence cramped their conversation, and they were quite obvious in making me feel so. I could not smile at their levity without being frowned upon.

  I began to grow melancholy. Arriving in northern towns on a Sunday night, hearing the doleful clanging of church bells as I walked the darkened main street, added little comfort to my loneliness. On week-day I would scan the local markets and do my shopping, buying groceries and meat for the landlady to cook. Sometimes I would get board and lodging, and eat in the kitchen with the family. I liked this, for north-country kitchens were clean and wholesome, with polished fire-grates and blue hearths. When the landlady baked bread, it was cheerful to come out of a cold dark day into the red glow of a Lancashire kitchen fire, and see tins of unbaked loaves around the hearth, and sit down to tea with the family – the taste of hot bread just out of the oven with fresh butter was relished with grave solemnity.

  I had been in the provinces for six months. Meanwhile Sydney had had little success in getting a job in the theatre, so he was obliged to descend from his Thespian ambition and apply for a job as a bartender at the Coal Hole in the Strand. Out of one hundred and fifty applicants he got the job. But he had fallen ignominiously from his own graces, as it were.

  He wrote to me regularly and kept me posted about Mother, but I seldom answered his letters; for one reason, I could not spell very well. One letter touched me deeply and drew me very close to him; he reproached me for not answering his letters and recalled the misery we had endured together which should unite us even closer. ‘Since Mother’s illness,’ wrote Sydney, ‘all we have in the world is each other. So you must write regularly and let me know that I have a brother.’ His letter was so moving that I replied immediately. Now I saw Sydney in another light. His letter cemented a brotherly love that has lasted throughout my life.

  I got accustomed to living alone. But I got so much out of the habit of talking that when I suddenly met a member of the company I suffered intense embarrassment. I could not collect myself quickly enough to answer questions intelligently and they would leave me, I am sure, with alarm and concern for my reason. Miss Greta Hahn, for instance, our leading lady, was beautiful, charming and most kindly; yet when I saw her crossing the road to-towards me, I would quickly turn and look into a shop window or go down another street in order to avoid her.

  I began to neglect myself and became desultory in my habits. When travelling with the company, I was always late at the railway station, arriving at the last moment, dishevelled and without a collar, and was continually reprimanded for it.

  For company, I bought a rabbit and wherever I stayed I would smuggle it into my room unknown to the landlady. It was an endearing little thing, though not house-broken. Its fur looked so white and clean that it belied its pungent odour. I kept it in a wooden cage hidden under the bed. The landlady would cheerfully enter the room with my breakfast, until she contacted the odour, then she would leave, looking worried and confused. The moment she was gone I would release the rabbit and it would lope about the room.

  Before long I had it trained to run to its box every time there was a knock at the door. If the landlady discovered my secret I would have the rabbit perform this trick, which usually won her heart, and she would put up with us for the week.

  But in Tonypandy, Wales, after I showed my trick, the landlady smiled cryptically and made no comment; but when I returned from the theatre that night my pet had gone. When I inquired about it, the landlady merely shook her head. ‘It must have run away or someone must have stolen it.’ She had in her own way handled the problem efficaciously.

  From Tonypandy we went to the mining town of Ebbw Vale, a three-night stand, and I was thankful it was not longer, for Ebbw Vale was a dank, ugly town in those days, with row upon row of hideous, uniform houses, each house consisting of four small rooms lit by oil-lamps. Most of the company put up at a small hotel. Fortunately I found a front room in a miner’s house, and, though small, it was comfortable and clean. At night after the play my supper was left in front of the fire to keep warm.

  The landlady, a tall, handsome, middle-aged woman, had an aura of tragedy about her. She came in, in the morning, with my breakfast and hardly spoke a word. I noticed that the kitchen door was always shut; whenever I wanted anything I had to knock, and the door opened only a few inches.

  The second night, while I was having my supper, her husband came in, a man about the same age as his wife. He had been to the theatre that evening and had enjoyed the play. He stood a while conversing, holding a lighted candle, ready for bed. He came to a pause and seemed to think of what he wanted to say. ‘Listen, I’ve got something that might fit your kind of business. Ever seen a human frog? Here, hold the candle and I’ll take the lamp.’

  He led the way into the kitchen and rested the lamp on the dresser, which had a curtain strung across the bottom of it in place of cupboard doors. ‘Hey, Gilbert, come on out of there!’ he said, parting the curtains.

  A half a man with no legs, an oversized, blond, flat-shaped head, a sickening white face, a sunken nose, a large mouth and powerful muscular shoulders and arms, crawled from underneath the dresser. He wore flannel underwear with the legs of the garment cut off to the thighs, from which ten thick, stubby toes stuck out. The grisly creature could have been twenty or forty. He looked up and grinned, showing a set of yellow, widely spaced teeth.

  ‘Hey, Gilbert, jump!’ said the father and the wretched man lowered himself slowly, then shot up by his arms almost to the height of my head.

  ‘How do you think he’d fit in with a circus? The human frog!’

  I was so horrified I could hardly answer. However, I suggested the names of several circuses that he might write to.

  He insisted on the wretched creature going through further tricks, hopping, climbing and standing on his hands on the arms of a rocking chair. When at last he had finished I pretended to be most enthusiastic and complimented him on his tricks.

  ‘Good night, Gilbert,’ I said before leaving, and in a hollow voice, and tongue-tied, the poor fellow answered: ‘Good night.’

  Several times during the night I woke up and tried my locked door. The next morning the landlady seemed pleasant and communicative. ‘I understand you saw Gilbert last night,’ she said. ‘Of course, he only sleeps under the dresser when we take in people from the theatre.’

  Then the awful thought came to me that I had been sleeping in Gilbert’s bed. ‘Yes,’ I answered, and talked with measured enthusiasm of the possibilities of his joining a circus.

  She nodded. ‘We have often thought of it.’

  My enthusiasm – or whatever it was – seemed to please the landlady, and before leaving I went into the kitchen to say goodbye to Gilbert. With an effort to be casual I shook his large calloused hand, and he gently shook mine.

  *

  After forty weeks in the provinces, we returned to play eight weeks around the suburbs of London. Sherlock Holmes, being a phenomenal success, was to start a s
econd tour, three weeks after the finish of the first one.

  Now Sydney and I decided to give up our quarters in Pownall Terrace and take up more respectable ones in the Kennington Road; like snakes we wanted to slough our skins, shedding every vestige of the past.

  I spoke to the management about Sydney for a small part in the next tour of Holmes, and he got it – thirty-five shillings a week! Now we were on tour together.

  Sydney wrote to Mother every week and towards the end of our second tour we received a letter from Cane Hill asylum stating that she had fully recovered her health. This was indeed good news. Quickly we made arrangements for her discharge, and made preparations for her to join us in Reading. To celebrate the occasion we took a special apartment de luxe, consisting of two bedrooms and a sitting-room with a piano, fixed up her bedroom with flowers, and arranged an elaborate dinner to boot.

  Sydney and I waited for her at the railroad station, tense and happy, yet I could not help feeling anxious as to how she would fit into our lives again, knowing that the close ties of other days could never be recaptured.

  At last the train arrived. With excitement and uncertainty we scanned the faces of the passengers as they left the carriages. Then at last there she was, smiling and walking sedately toward us. She displayed no great emotion as we went to meet her, but greeted us with affectionate decorum. She evidently was also undergoing an adjustment.

  In that short ride in a cab to our rooms, we talked of a hundred different things, relevant and irrelevant.

  After the first flush of enthusiasm of showing her the apartment and the flowers in the bedroom, we found ourselves in the sitting-room looking breathlessly at each other. It was a sunny day, and our apartment was on a quiet street, but now the silence of it was uncomfortable and in spite of my wanting to be happy I found myself fighting back a depression. Poor Mother, who wanted so little out of life to make her gay and cheerful, reminded me of my unhappy past – the last person in the world who should have affected me this way. But I did my best to hide the fact. She had aged a little and gained weight. I had always been proud of the way Mother looked and dressed and wanted to show her off to the company at her best, but now she appeared rather dowdy. She must have sensed my misgivings, for she turned inquiringly.

  Coyly I adjusted a strand of her hair. ‘Before you meet the company,’ I smiled, ‘I want you to be at your best.’

  She looked at me, then took out her powder-puff and rubbed it over her face. ‘I’m just happy to be alive,’ she said cheerfully.

  It was not long before we were fully adjusted to one another and my dejection passed. That we had outgrown the intimacy she had known when we were children, she understood better than we did, which made her all the more endearing to us. On tour she did the shopping and catering, bringing home fruits and delicacies and always a few flowers. For no matter how poor we had been in the past, when shopping on Saturday nights she had always been able to buy a pennyworth of wallflowers. Occasionally she was quiet and reserved, and her detachment saddened me. She acted more like a guest than our mother.

  After a month she wanted to return to London, because she was anxious to get settled down so that she would have a home for us after our tour; besides, as she said, it would be less costly than travelling over the country and having to pay an extra fare.

  She rented the flat over the barber’s shop in Chester Street where we had once lived, and with ten pounds bought furniture on the instalment plan. The rooms had not the spaciousness of Versailles, or its elegance; but she did wonders in the bedrooms by covering orange-crates with cretonne to make them look like commodes. Between us Sydney and I were earning four pounds five shillings a week and sending one pound five shillings of it to Mother.

  Sydney and I returned home after our second tour and spent a few weeks with her. Although we were happy to be with Mother, we were secretly glad to get away on tour again, for Chester Street had not the requisite comforts that provincial apartments had – those little amenities to which Sydney and I were now accustomed. And Mother no doubt realized this. When she saw us off at the station she seemed cheerful enough, but we both thought she looked wistful as she stood on the platform smiling and waving her handkerchief as the train pulled away.

  During our third tour Mother wrote to us that Louise, with whom Sydney and I had lived in the Kennington Road, had died, ironically enough, in the Lambeth workhouse, the same place in which we had been confined. She survived Father only by four years, leaving her little son an orphan, and he also had been sent to the same Hanwell Schools that Sydney and I had been sent to.

  Mother wrote that she had visited the boy, explaining who she was, and that Sydney and I had lived with him and his father and mother in the Kennington Road. But he hardly remembered, as he had been only four years old at the time. He also had no recollection of his father. And now he was ten. He was registered under Louise’s maiden name, and as far as Mother could find out he had no relatives. She described him as being a handsome boy, very quiet, shy and preoccupied. She brought him a bag of sweets and some oranges and apples and promised to visit him regularly, which I believe she did, until she herself became ill again and was sent back to Cane Hill.

  The news of Mother’s relapse came like a stab in the heart. We never knew the details. We received only a curt official notice that she had been found wandering and incoherent in the streets. There was nothing we could do but accept poor Mother’s fate. She never again recovered her mind completely. For several years she languished in Cane Hill asylum until we could afford to put her into a private one.

  Sometimes the gods of adversity tire of their sport and show mercy, as they did with Mother. For the last seven years of her life she was to live in comfort, surrounded by flowers and sunshine, to see her grown sons endowed with fame and fortune beyond anything she had ever imagined.

  *

  Because of our tour with Sherlock Holmes it was many weeks before Sydney and I could again see Mother. The tour with the Frohman company ended permanently. Then Mr Harry York, proprietor of the Theatre Royal, Blackburn, bought the rights of Holmes from Frohman to play the smaller towns. Sydney and I were engaged by the new company, but at reduced salaries of thirty-five shillings each.

  It was a depressing come-down, playing the small towns of the North with an inferior company. Nevertheless, it enlivened my discrimination, comparing the company with the one we had just left. This comparison I tried to conceal, but at rehearsals in my zeal to help the new director, who would ask me about stage directions, cues and business etc., I would eagerly tell him how it was done in the Frohman company. This, of course, did not make me particularly popular with the cast and I was looked upon as a precocious brat. Later, a new stage manager had it in for me and fined me ten shillings for having a button missing from my uniform, about which he had warned me several times.

  William Gillette, author of Sherlock Holmes, came to London with Marie Doro in a play called Clarissa which he had written. The critics were unkind to the play and to the manner of Gillette’s speech, which led him to write a curtain-raiser, The Painful Predicament of Sherlock Holmes, in which he himself never spoke a word. There were only three in the cast, a mad-woman, Holmes and his page-boy. It was like tidings from heaven to receive a telegram from Mr Postance, Gillette’s manager, asking me if I were available to come to London to play the part of Billie with William Gillette in the curtain-raiser.

  I trembled with anxiety, for it was doubtful if our company could replace Billie in the provinces on such short notice, and for several days I was left in agonizing suspense. However, they did find another Billie.

  Returning to London to play in a West End theatre I can only describe as my renaissance. My brain was spinning with the thrill of every incident – arriving in the evening at the Duke of York’s Theatre and meeting Mr Postance, the stage-manager, who brought me to Mr Gillette’s dressing-room, and his words after I was introduced to him: ‘Would you like to play in Sherlock Holmes wit
h me?’ And my burst of nervous enthusiasm: ‘Oh very much, Mr Gillette!’ And the next morning, waiting on the stage for rehearsals, and seeing Marie Doro for the first time, dressed in the loveliest white summer dress. The sudden shock of seeing someone so beautiful at that hour! She had been riding in a hansom cab and had discovered an ink spot on her dress, and wanted to know if the property man had anything that would take it out, and to his answer of doubt she made the prettiest expression of irritation: ‘Oh, isn’t that too beastly!’

  She was so devastatingly beautiful that I resented her. I resented her delicate, pouting lips, her regular white teeth, her adorable chin, her raven hair and dark brown eyes. I resented her pretence of irritation and the charm she exuded through it. Through all this querying between herself and the property man she was ignorant of my presence, although I stood quite near, staring, transfixed by her beauty. I had just turned sixteen, and the propinquity of this sudden radiance evoked my determination not to be obsessed by it. But, oh God, she was beautiful! It was love at first sight.

  In The Painful Predicament of Sherlock Holmes Miss Irene Vanbrugh, a remarkably gifted actress, played the madwoman and did all the talking, while Holmes just sat and listened. This was his joke on the critics. I had the opening lines, bursting into Holmes’s apartment and holding on to the doors while the mad-woman beats against them outside, and then, while I excitedly try to explain to Holmes the situation, the mad woman bursts in! For twenty minutes she never stops raving incoherently about some case she wants him to solve. Surreptitiously Holmes writes a note, rings a bell and slips it to me. Later two stalwart men lead the lady off, leaving Holmes and me alone, with me saying: ‘You were right, sir; it was the right asylum.’

  The critics enjoyed the joke, but the play Clarissa, which Gillette wrote for Marie Doro, was a failure. Although they raved about Marie’s beauty, they said it was not enough to hold a maudlin play together, so he completed the rest of his season with the revival of Sherlock Holmes, in which I was retained for the part of Billie.