Charlie Chaplin was born in London on April 15, 1889, although no birth certificate has ever been located. We are certain of the date because his proud mother placed an announcement in a music hall newspaper.
The poverty and lack of social convention that characterized Chaplin’s childhood seem contained in this bureaucratic absence. Hannah, his mother, was then married to a man of the stage, Charles Chaplin, who was not convinced of his fatherhood but who nevertheless gave the boy his surname. For the most part, he was absent during Charlie’s childhood; Hannah, Charlie, and older brother Sydney (probably the offspring of a liaison with a bookmaker) were on their own, moving from lodging to lodging. As a child, Charlie occasionally earned a few pennies dancing outside a pub. When he was 7, his mother was hospitalized—she was exhibiting signs of syphilitic mental deterioration—and he and Sydney spent three weeks in a workhouse before being consigned to a school for destitute orphans.
We might expect that Peter Ackroyd, author of the walloping 848-page London: A Biography, would bring these early years to life. The opening sentences alert readers to settle in and have a good time:
There is plenty of color here, even without pictures. These surroundings contributed to the traits of invulnerability and detachment that would characterize the “little tramp,” at one time the world’s most iconic motion picture persona. It is not surprising that young Charlie hated poverty, but what distinguished him and allowed him to escape the vaudeville stage and become the most highly paid actor in the world by the time he was 27 was what Ackroyd calls his “indomitable energy and determination.” These, too, would seem to characterize Chaplin’s famous creation, standing athwart the blows of the world by ignoring their claims.
The Tramp was not born overnight, however, and Ackroyd describes the monomaniacal discipline and attention to detail that Chaplin brought to the task, in the process showing how spontaneity and chaos (marks of Chaplin’s earliest films, from 1914-15) were created out of relentless routine. The years of stage apprenticeship taught him timing, the importance of the characteristic gesture, and, most important, pantomime. He studied the clowns and comedians appearing on the same bills. His artistic inheritance included such characters as waiters, tramps, and men down on their luck, some of whom dressed oddly, walked comically, or made use of umbrellas, canes, and other props. The audiences were raucous and often inebriated, and it was necessary to impress them with that ineffable trait, personality, as well as with expertly directed custard pies. He perfected the “funny run” and halting in the middle of a run. The boy who began his stage career at 10 in a rough-and-tumble clog dancing troupe went on to become graceful, precise, balletic. Charlie quickly stood out in the music hall environment and, by 1914, was in Hollywood under contract with Max Sennett’s Keystone Cops Company.
Chaplin never appeared in any of the famous Sennett chase scenes. Apparently, Sennett recognized his individuality, and, as Ackroyd writes, Chaplin was training himself to be a solo performer in a collective cast. In his second film, a one-reeler called Kid Auto Races at Venice (1914), he portrays an interloper who hogs the race car scene simply by staring the camera down, as if daring it to ignore him in favor of the action behind him. It was the first appearance of his famous cigarette flick kick. In the next movie, Mabel’s Strange Predicament (1914), we see the bowler hat, the cane, the short, tight jacket, the baggy pants, the frayed tie, the huge shoes.
Enter “Charlie”: In his remaining 35 films with Sennett, he began, bit by bit, to create “the ‘little fellow’ as a living dimension of himself.” Along the way, the films portray much casual everyday brutality, as well as pathos and sentimentality: Knock a man down, then give him a kiss on the forehead. In less than four months, box office receipts showed that Chaplin was an established name, along with Mabel Normand and Fatty Arbuckle. He soon began directing Sennett films, creating more coherent narratives. After leaving Sennett, he formed his own stock company and, in 1919, joined megastars D. W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford in creating United Artists as a way of controlling their “creative product.”
Ackroyd writes that Chaplin, like Shakespeare, “had the inestimable advantage of being an instinctive artist in the preliminary years of a new art.” Judging by Ackroyd’s own telling, “instinctive” seems not quite the right word to describe either Chaplin’s or Shakespeare’s art; but he is correct about the timing. Unfortunately for Chaplin, his preeminence on the stage of cinematic history was a short one. He only made four great, full-length movies featuring the Tramp: The Gold Rush (1925), The Circus (1928), City Lights (1931), and Modern Times (1936). By the time he was directing the final two, silent films were an anachronism. Chaplin pushed on—a speaking Tramp was unfathomable—and was rewarded with success. But the Tramp was no more.
By the 1940s, America’s romance with Charlie Chaplin also began to fade. The biography now gives us more “life,” and it is not pleasant. By the time he was 54 and married the 18-year-old Oona O’Neill (while in the midst of a paternity suit filed by the actress Joan Barry), a string of sexual exploits and two disastrous marriages lay behind him. Chaplin appears to have had no common, everyday politeness or any personal loyalties—except, perhaps, toward his brother Sydney. Just as the two boys had stuck together in childhood, caring for their mother, so too they remained a partnership in fame and wealth, Sydney having become Charlie’s first “financial adviser” when Charlie was 14. Chaplin also had no loyalty to the country that made him famous and rich. Even his movie mocking Nazism, The Great Dictator (1940), was marred by its six-minute ending, in which Chaplin stared at the camera and delivered an antiwar message. His wartime activities on behalf of the Soviet Union did not help his image, while his 1946 film Monsieur Verdoux criticized capitalism and wars for profit.
As in his movies, the relentless focus of his life was himself. One has the impression that Chaplin was not very humanly complex: His self-absorption and his brilliant career were channeled into the perfection of a single character, from the outside in, by an accumulation of numerous mannerisms and props. Portrayals of driven individuals are the stuff of Ackyroyd’s many biographies, which range from his acclaimed biography of Thomas More to the unwieldy one of Charles Dickens to his praised life of Shakespeare. Charlie Chaplin is relatively modest in size, as befits its appearance in Ackroyd’s Brief Lives series, which includes such figures as Isaac Newton, Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, and J. M. W. Turner. Charlie Chaplin, who spoke of playing Jesus or Napoleon on screen, would be pleased at his inclusion in this company.
Elizabeth Powers is the editor of Freedom of Speech: The History of an Idea.
