StarD_Bean_1910s_final

by Ellen Dawson

  (qtd. in Robinson 153)

  Insofar as the “chaotic state” of all things Charlie suggests a rather unsystematic mode of production, one that belongs to the public (or “hundreds of people”) rather than an individual person or authorizing agency, it could be seen as a “grotesque” interruption of capitalism’s rationalized efficiency and systematic coordination of production relative to profit. As a marvelously ironic correlative to such festive disorder in the marketplace, Berton Bradley, a popular writer and social commentator, argued that the surplus of “Charlie’s” presence in the public sphere devalued the icon’s affective charge. In a ditty titled “Satiety” composed for Green Book magazine in late 1915, Bradley complained:

  Go where we will, we must happen upon

  Busts of you, statuettes, photographs various,

  Cartoons and comments and posters galore.

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  Honestly, Charlie, in way multifarious

  You’re getting more of a spread than the war!

  Vaudeville is crowded with acts imitating you;

  Every old movie has you on the screen.

  We who were strong for you soon will be hating you

  Simply because you’re so constantly seen.

  (J. McCabe 80)

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  ✩ Charlie, Not Charles

  It perhaps goes without saying that the fate of being “so constantly seen” conspicuously refers to Charlie, the icon, and not to Chaplin, the man, whose face was handsome, evenly sculpted, and observably ordinary. His body was small—some would say tiny—but his feet appeared in noticeably perfect proportion to the rest. It may very well be that the striking disparity between Charlie and Charles proved useful for the comedian, insofar as it “protected his [Charles’s] identity from fans.” Or so muses Alistair Cooke while lingering over his personal experience of coming out of a movie theater with Chaplin, at which point a young fellow on the street “nudged his girl and hissed, ‘There’s Charlie Chaplin!” She made the obvious comment that it didn’t look like him, to which the young man irritably snapped,

  ‘You can’t expect anybody to look like Charlie Chaplin’” (“Fame” 132).

  Or can you? A closer look at the historical phenomenon we have been tracing reverses that young man’s terms, which is another way of saying that everybody could look like Charlie. At the very least they could try. Some succeeded quite notably, among them talented comedians such as vaudeville performer Minerva Courtney, who directed and starred in three Chaplin impersonation films in 1915, while Stan Laurel, Billie Ritchie, Billy West, and Harold Lloyd each took their turn at imitating the iconic tramp (see Bean “Art”). It would be a gross overstatement to claim that these comedians’ performances as variations of the “little fellow” trumped those of Chaplin himself. Even so, when Betty Fleet exclaimed to readers of Motion Picture Magazine in April 1918 that “the superb clown of the Silversheet side-show is, without question, Charles Spencer Chaplin,” a bit of corrosive irony shaded her praise. For what settled the matter of Chaplin’s superior status is the fact that “like his fame, Charlie’s mustache continues to grow—

  not on Mr. Chaplin’s upper lip, but on those of his imitators. Billie West, chief among these, is so very clever, in his own way, that some cannot even tell the difference” (“What Could Be Funnier Minerva?” 37).

  The inability to “tell the difference” between Charlie’s many imitators and Chaplin himself arguably began on the comedian’s trip back to Califor-

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  nia from New York in late 1915 to sign the Mutual Contract. Having boarded the Twentieth Century with his brother Sydney and Henry P.

  Caulfield, general manager of the new Mutual studios, the party stopped off for a few days in Chicago. According to David Robinson, “Chaplin was induced to do his funny walk outside a cinema where one of his films was playing, but the publicity stunt fell flat. No one recognized him and the cashier, bored to death with would-be Chaplin imitators, only sniffed haughtily” (163). Ironically, less haughty responses greeted Steve Duros, a local of Columbus, Ohio, whom theater owners hired that same year to dress like Charlie and walk the streets to advertise the Tramp’s screen presence. Duros’s remarkable likeness earned him momentary celebrity status in the mass media when the November issue of Motion Picture Magazine featured his impersonation. Although not every impersonator utilized to advertise a Chaplin film attained similar recognition, the confusion generated by the geometrical number of Tramps confused many. In August 1916

  Chaplin recited for the Los Angeles Times a series of “funny experiences with my imitators,” including his encounter with one man who thought he had seen Chaplin performing in front of a theater an hour ago, and asked: “Why do you do it? I think you lose prestige that way—cheapen yourself.” Chaplin retorted: “Oh . . . I hardly know myself why I do it. It just helps keep me busy that’s all—helps pass the time away” (20 August 1916, 2:10). Two years later, while working with a cast of children on the set of Shoulder Arms, Chaplin sounded a bit more plaintive when recalling how “one little boy walked up to me and told me timidly that he ‘liked me better than he did any of the others Charlies’” (Grace Kingsley, “Chaplin’s Funny Feet Walk into War Comedy,” Los Angeles Times, 30 June 1918, 3:1).

  Regardless of preferences, the implication that there are many Charlies, rather than one, raises questions peculiar to Chaplin’s status as a mass cultural icon. What differentiates one incarnation of “Charlie” from another?

  How small or large must the differences between the “authentic” and the

  “copy” be for us to categorize and identify a unique entity known as “Charlie Chaplin”? One way is to distinguish between “Charles” and “Charlie,” to reveal the offscreen artist as a comic genius whose rich inner reflections, spontaneous bursts of inspiration, and laborious work ethic give life to the capering fool onscreen. Such journalistic patter began in 1915 when a flurry of reports touted the comedian’s ambitions, his interest in perfecting the art of comedy, his attentiveness to every detail on the set, and his obsessive work ethic. Such strategies, however, could also backfire, annihilating the promise of difference, nowhere more viciously than when reporter Epson Bowes observed that Chaplin’s determination to be “the whole

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  show,” to function as “scenario writer,” “director,” “cameraman,” “scene-shifter,” and “leading man,” meant that the comedian’s investment in the originality of his productions encouraged a certain type of “sameness.”

  “Charlie practically does the acting for all the other members of the company,” Bowes explains, “for he always goes through their parts for them and shows them how he does it and they try to copy after him.” Such mimicry means “he is getting together a whole bunch of imitation Charlie Chaplins on his staff” (“Chaplin as the Whole Show,” Los Angeles Times, 8 June 1915, 3:1).

  Bowes’s barbed critique may have troubled Chaplin, especially if we believe the many reports accentuating the comedian’s acute sensitivity to criticism. Chaplin’s alleged inability to even watch his films in the company of others, and his altogether “serious” demeanor, appeared quite “strange”

  to reporter Grace Kingsley, who dryly observed that the “famous comedian”

  has “created a guffaw that is heard around the world, a ripple of laughter that ceaselessly encircles the globe” (“Witty, Wistful, Serious Is the Real Charlie Chaplin,” Los Angeles Times, 20 August 1916, 2:10). However strange, both “sensitivity” and “seriousness” assumed familiar status in most every interview with the comedian in the course of the decade.

  These combined features may be why Chaplin granted relatively few interviews in these years, relative at least to those offered by his friend Douglas Fairbanks, who functioned as a sort of spokesperson for the industry an
d for an “all American” spirit more generally. While the “real” Chaplin attained some prominence in the press and in the public eye when he traveled across the country with Fairbanks and Mary Pickford in a series of Liberty Loan Bond tours in 1917 and 1918, and while the three stars had been linked in the press by virtue of their enormous celebrity status, Chaplin was different. Strange, even. In part this was because his British citizenship means he was not American, a striking contrast to Fairbanks’s enthrone-ment as an all-American “Mr. Pep,” or Pickford’s iconic status as “America’s Sweetheart.” Moreover, rumors that Chaplin utilized his celebrity status to dodge the draft questioned even his allegiance to Britain. In March 1916, a special cable from London circulating in U.S. newspapers targeted the Mutual Film Company for incorporating a clause in Chaplin’s contract that prohibited him from visiting Great Britain, where he might “run the risk of being conscripted” (“They’ll Go to See Him Just the Same,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 23 March 1916, 14). The following year London’s Weekly Dispatch more specifically targeted Chaplin’s patriotism, a bit of personal slander that enraged the comedian. He hotly retorted that he had invested “a quarter of a million dollars in the war activities of America and England,” that he was

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  “ready for military service under the Union Jack the minute England . . .

  officially calls him,” and also that he had “registered for the U.S. draft”

  without requesting any “exemptions or favors” (“Chaplin Angry over Criticism in London Paper,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 29 July 1917, 12).

  It is certainly possible that insinuations such as these contributed to Chaplin’s later profile as a radical leftist socialist, the likes of which accelerated through the Second World War, culminating in his active sponsorship of the “World Peace” movement in 1949 and subsequently his banishment/

  exile from an increasingly paranoid United States in 1952 (Maland 258–78). In the 1910s, however, the media’s noisy defense of the comedian emerged somewhat circuitously, insofar as commentators lauded “Charlie”—the fictional persona—as “the greatest single lightener of the iron burden” in “a shrapnel-smashed world” (Julian Johnson, “The Immigrant,”

  Photoplay, September 1917, 99). In August 1917, a writer for the Chicago Daily Tribune recounted the story of a young “American in the Canadian forces” who found himself in Boulogne, “waiting to be embarked for England” but miserably “homesick, deadly homesick.” “He wanted something from home,” which he found when arriving in England: “The first thing that met his eye was a figure of Charlie Chaplin, smoking a big cigar with an electric light at the tip.” Thus, the writer merrily concludes: “The American’s heart was made glad” (“English Become Movie Fans,” 5 August 1917, C3). Exemplifying this type of acclaim, cartoonist E. Gale sketched a caricature of the tramp in early 1918, hyperbolizing even further the figure’s notoriously gigantic shoes. Here those brogans flop upward, miniaturizing the tramp’s Lilliputian stature and the grotesquely irregular body which a caption trumpets as “one of our best little anchors during these stormy days” ( Los Angeles Times, 20 January 1918, 3:1). More than a figure of speech, and far from tongue-in-cheek, the sketch literalizes the little fellow’s capacity to enable “our grip on sanity”: hog-tied several times over and strung to an image of a hovering globe covered with smoking cannons (over which the acronym SOS spells out “Sick Of Slaughter”), the capri-cious tramp with his big shoes sways. But those feet hold him firm.

  Charlie’s capacity to generate laughter (the antidote to s-laughter) amounted to quite serious stuff. Indeed, the appearance of the Tramp on the screen, his imitators in the camps, or the silhouette cutouts of the iconic figure that soldiers would steal from theater marquees and stage in the trenches suggested itself to Blaise Cendrars as the decisive victory of the war. “Charlot was born on the front,” he wrote. “The Germans lost the war because they didn’t get to know Charlot in time” (Hoberman 40). In contrast, Chaplin’s “serious” and “sensitive” backstage persona made relatively

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  The little fellow whose gargantuan feet anchor the public’s “grip on sanity” in a war-torn world. Cartoon sketch by E. Gale, Los Angeles Times, 20 January 1918.

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  little impact, in part because the “Sad Business of Being Funny,” to follow the title of Emma Squier’s 1919 interview with the comedian, gravely effaced any semblance of humor. Tracking Chaplin behind the set of Sunnyside (1919), where he “had changed from his dusty clothes, had removed the make-up and the little mustache, and was wearing, in addition to his civilian’s togs, a philosophical expression,” Squier sighed to her readers: the

  “real” Chaplin was remarkably “un-Chaplinesque” ( Motion Picture Magazine, April 1919, 45).

  Reporter Julian Johnson put the matter quite simply in 1918 when he wrote two declarative lines:

  Charlie Chaplin is the best-known man in the world.

  Charles Chaplin is perhaps the least-known man in the world.

  (“Charles, Not Charlie,” Photoplay, May 1918, 81)

  While it would be possible to read this statement at face value—a reiteration of the oft-cited disparity between the Tramp’s enormous public presence and Chaplin’s notorious privacy—the rhetorical slip intrigues.

  “Charlie” is not simply a recognizable icon, a constructed fiction or persona; he is more pointedly a real being, a presence manifest as the world’s “best known man.” Emphatically, Charles Spencer Chaplin may be the agent provocateur of the tramp’s triumphant personification at the expense of the comedian’s own, unique shimmer of being. “I—I get horribly embarrassed,”

  he allegedly stuttered when Picture-Play reporter Mabel Condon sought out the reluctant comedian for an interview in December 1916, before attempting again: “I—I’m very ordinary. So ordinary that there isn’t a thing for me to talk about concerning myself. If you want a story about my success, and all that, you don’t want an interview with me—you should be introduced to my flexible bamboo cane and my little mustache. They are in their dressing room now, resting, and I’m perfectly sure that they wouldn’t mind having you consult them” (“In Chaplin’s House of Glass,” Picture-Play Magazine, December 1916, 181).

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  ✩ What’s Time to a Tramp?

  I have lingered on “Charlie’s” capacity to eclipse “Charles” in part because any attempt to understand the unique appeal of the fictional persona that Chaplin created on the screen means jettisoning a critical approach driven by biography. It means approaching the sixty-plus films in which Chaplin performed during the 1910s in terms other than those of

  “evolution”—of growth, maturity, and character development—that domi-

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  nate most every account of Chaplin’s rise to stardom (see Mast; Maland; Kimber; Kerr; Vance; J. McCabe; Huff). The most common story goes something like this: in 1914, Chaplin performed in thirty-two Keystone shorts under the supervision of Mack Sennett, a control that stymied his individual creativity but taught him important lessons about screen comedy and the workings of the camera. In 1915, he signed a contract with the Essanay Company, achieving directorial control that allowed him to experiment as an artist in the thirteen films he made that year and “evolve” the Tramp character to a noticeably less vulgar variation of the Keystone masher.

  These experimentations “matured” in the twelve two-reel films he made for the Mutual Company (1916–1917) that demonstrate an “integration” of irony and social commentary, and finally “blossomed” into his triumphant million-dollar contract with First National (1918–1922) and the growth of Charlie’s fleshier, even quirkily sentimental, “humanism.”

  The linearity that drives this story, replete with its correlative of a maturi
ng artist, is not entirely wrong. But it is enormously misguiding. A shift in critical emphasis from dates of production to the context of reception, for instance, brings into focus a pattern of repetition and recursion, a less organic and evolutionary model, much like that emblematized by the Tramp. In April 1916, for instance, shortly after Chaplin signed with Mutual, one reporter for the Chicago Daily Tribune prophesied “new laurels”

  for the comedian, but could not “restrain a sigh over the golden days” when Chaplin and “Keystone Mabel were young and riotous.” “Why should not some producer, convinced of the early genius of the great comedian, conduct a revival of Charlie?” (“For a Chaplin Revival,” 13 April 1916, 6).

  Whether or not prints of Chaplin’s Keystone performances with Mabel Normand (or with Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, among others) circulated in the latter parts of the decade remains open to speculation. But on 21 October 1916, just as Chaplin’s contract with the Mutual Company began, Essanay released a five-reel Chaplin Revue—a reedited combination of The Tramp, His New Job, and A Night Out—with a running time of one hour and seventeen minutes, a “feature-length” revue approximately seventeen minutes longer than Chase Me Charlie, a “British version” of Chaplin’s “funniest” Essanay comedies, distributed in the United States by George Klein in the spring of 1918 ( Motography, 13 April 1918, 692). Along with revues, revivals screened with remarkable regularly. In Chicago in July 1917, the recently released The Immigrant (1917) played at the Bandbox on Madison, but by angling across the Loop to State Street you could catch a Night in the Show (Essanay, 1915) at the U.S. Music Hall or even watch The Bank (Essanay, 1915) at The World on West Randolph. Then again, in New York in May

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  “Charlie” on the set of Kid Auto Races in Venice (1914), Chaplin’s second Keystone film and the first screen appearance of the tramp’s iconic costume. From the author’s collection.

  1919, fans could take in a revival of Shoulder Arms (First National, 1918) at the Plaza, or head over to the Rialto where The Cure (Essanay, 1917) featured as part of the evening’s entertainment.