Charlie Chaplin

by Peter Ackroyd

  The tour continued until the beginning of summer when the final curtain fell on 11 June 1904, at the West London theatre on the Edgware Road. The young Chaplin was now, in the theatrical expression, “resting.” He and Sydney joined their mother in Chester Street. Their activities during this period of freedom are not documented, but Chaplin notes that he was relieved when he was able to join the second tour of Sherlock Holmes at the end of October with a new company and a new leading man. Life with Hannah was becoming ever more difficult. Sydney also took a chance at freedom and went back to sea as assistant steward and ship’s bugler. He was away for three months.

  Just after Sydney’s return to Kennington, Hannah relapsed into madness. On 16 March 1905, she was admitted once more to Lambeth Infirmary. The doctor recorded her as “very strange in manner and quite incoherent. She dances, sings and cries by turn. She is indecent in conduct and conversation at times and again at times praying and saying she had been born again.” Two days later she was taken back to Cane Hill asylum where she remained for seven years before being removed to a private institution paid for by the now rich and successful Chaplin. On a letter written from Cane Hill to her sons in 1905, she puts as the address at the top of the letter “best known to you.”

  The second tour came to an end at the beginning of May 1905, and Chaplin was for a while once more “resting.” But the public appeal of Sherlock Holmes was apparently enormous, and by the middle of August he had joined a third company touring the play around the country. He was not impressed with his colleagues. He described the company as inferior, the members of which he proceeded to antagonise by lecturing them on how such and such a scene was done and how such and such a line should be spoken. It may have been at this time that he purchased his first violin, to which he would one day add a cello; it was for him lonely and melancholy music. Since he was left-handed, he was of course compelled to string his instruments in reverse order.

  In October he was relieved to be parted from the company. William Gillette, the author of Sherlock Holmes, had written a ten-minute “curtain-raiser” for the main play of the evening. The Painful Predicament of Sherlock Holmes was to be performed only in London at the Duke of York’s theatre and its material was also, for Chaplin, very close to home. It concerned, according to The Stage, the irruption into Baker Street of “a poor crazy woman, excitable, impulsive, and tremendously voluble.” The page, Billy, played by Chaplin, is ordered to call for assistance from the asylum, whereupon “two stern-faced men in uniform appear, evidently attendants from a lunatic asylum, and the poor creature is marched off, back into captivity.” This was close to Hannah Chaplin’s fate. The Stage added that “Master Charles Chaplin was duly boisterous as the harmless, necessary page.” Billy’s last words are “You were right, sir. It was the right asylum.”

  Chaplin rarely wrote to his mother at Cane Hill, and is not known to have paid her many visits. He was troubled by her. He knew that her own mother had gone insane, and he feared for himself. His cameraman for thirty-eight years, Roland or “Rollie” Totheroh, recalled that he believed he also “would eventually go insane.” Other friends have remarked on the frequency with which he brooded on the possibility of madness. He liked to sing an old music-hall song:

  Oh ever since that fatal night

  Me wife’s gone mad,

  Awfully queer,

  Touched just here.

  At which point Chaplin would point to his own head. The fear or suspicion of impending insanity might therefore account for his dark moods and his sometimes irrational anger. One of his constant house guests in later life, Cecil Reynolds, was a neuropathologist; it might be divined that Chaplin wanted him as a consultant and a possible doctor.

  The production of Sherlock Holmes at the Duke of York’s theatre, where it had replaced The Painful Predicament, was a very great success with the stars of London mingling with the fashionable classes to attend its performances. Queen Alexandra saw the play, and sitting in her box were the king of Greece and Prince Christian. “Don’t tell me,” the king screeched at his son who was intent upon giving away the plot. “Don’t tell me!” The young Chaplin was even mentioned in The Green Room Book: or Who’s Who on the Stage where he was described as “impersonator, mimic and sand-dancer … cradled in the profession.” His reputation was high enough to be invited to the funeral of the eminent actor Sir Henry Irving at Westminster Abbey.

  Sherlock Holmes ended its run on 2 December, after the sudden and unexpected departure of William Gillette. Chaplin had hoped to remain with Gillette, learning his trade in the “legitimate” theatre. Instead he was for a short period out of work as he idled around pool-rooms, indulging in wine and women as the mood took him. He always had a powerful sexual instinct, and those whom he called “whores and sluts” were readily available to a handsome young man. But he was not one meant to be indolent. Work was at the centre of his being. At the beginning of 1906 he joined his fourth tour of Sherlock Holmes which performed at venues close to hand, such as Peckham and Greenwich, together with some of the northern cities. By now he might justifiably have become tired both of the part and of the play.

  Sydney Chaplin probably had little difficulty in persuading him to leave the tour and to join him in a company, “Wal Pink’s Workmen,” that specialised in slapstick routines. For three months he performed in a sketch, Repairs, in which he played a particularly incompetent carpenter from the firm of Spoiler and Messit. In a scenario close to one of his later short films, decorators fall upon “Muddleton Villa” like a whirlwind wrecking everything in sight. Paste buckets are upset; carpenters’ ladders swing wildly around; paint flies everywhere.

  This was where Chaplin really belonged. He had hoped to become a serious actor but he now returned to the music-hall world he knew so well from the experiences of Hannah Chaplin. Sherlock Holmes was one of the last stage plays in which he would ever perform. Ahead of him lay sketches, skits, stunts, spoofs and send-ups with all the general “business” of the popular stage. Repairs was also the first occasion when he performed in mime.

  While on tour he saw an advertisement in The Era asking for male comedians between the ages of fourteen and nineteen. Chaplin, now seventeen, decided to attend the auditions. Casey’s Circus was a kind of variety show in which the young inhabitants of a slum court mimic the most popular music-hall acts and circus performers of the day. It was an opportunity for broad satire, smutty songs, quick routines, comic impersonations and general frenzy. This was work at which the young Chaplin excelled and he joined the new company in the spring of 1906.

  He said in later life that it was an “awful” show, but he confessed that it helped him to learn the trade of the comedian. There was, first of all, the funny run. In one sketch he had to play the part of Dick Turpin, highwayman, being pursued around and across the stage by the police. The principal comedian of the cast, Will Murray, said that “I think I can justly say that I am the man who taught Charlie how to turn corners.”

  This was the manoeuvre that Chaplin used in so many films that it became something of a trademark. He would raise one foot in the air and hop a little way on the other in order to get around a “bend”; it could be described as a one-legged skid, and he achieved the precarious move only after many hours of rehearsal with Murray. He also had to learn how to halt in the middle of a run; he would stop suddenly on one foot and balance himself; he then had to throw out his chest in order to preserve the balance and prevent himself from falling forward on his face. He always held his head and body upright. Whenever he took a fall he took care not to land on his posterior but to roll further over so that he ended up on his back.

  The next great lesson was that of impersonation. Walford Bodie was a popular music-hall hypnotist and conjuror of arresting appearance; he had a long waxed moustache, with its ends pointing upwards, and large penetrating eyes. Chaplin was chosen to parody him, a task to which he applied himself with alacrity. He studied the performer’s photograph in The Era. Will Murra
y showed him Bodie’s mannerisms and for hours he would rehearse them in front of a mirror. He assumed the Bodie manner with instinctive skill. It was said many times of Chaplin that he became the person, or even the object, he imitated; so it was on this first occasion.

  Some other comic touches completed the part. He tried to hang his cane on a peg but he was holding it at the wrong end, and it clattered upon the stage. He picked it up, but his silk top hat fell off. He attempted to put the hat back on his head but its thick paper wadding fell out and the hat engulfed his face. The audience burst into laughter. He was playing the part of an earnest and serious-minded man who cannot help but behave in a ludicrous manner. It struck him that the more serious he became, the funnier he seemed to be.

  Dan Lipton, a comic songwriter of the period, recalled that “the way that boy burlesqued Doctor Bodie was wonderful. I tell you he had never seen the man.” Lipton added that “he always had the most remarkable nerve, but at the same time like all real artists he was sensitive and temperamental.” A fellow performer recalled that Chaplin was “a very earnest lad who went through his paces as though his life was dependent on it.”

  He left the tour of Casey’s Circus in the summer of 1907. Many years later, in a speech at a show-business dinner, Chaplin began to speak of Will Murray. A heckler called out “Ask him for a pay rise!,” to which Chaplin replied “He gave me the sack.” He may indeed have asked for more money and been shown the door. He stayed in a lodging house along Kennington Road, and waited for the next opportunity. He bought lanterns and carpets for his room; he also began to read Schopenhauer, with all the enthusiasm of an autodidact. He read the philosopher, with varying degrees of concentration, for the next forty years. The young man might have been drawn to his theory of the pre-eminence of the human will but, equally, he might have agreed with Schopenhauer’s claim that sexual passion is “the strongest and most active of all motives.” How well, and how quickly, Chaplin could read is an open question.

  His was still a very uncertain life and profession. At one stage in this period of enforced rest, by his own account, he took on the role of a semi-juvenile lead in a comedy entitled The Merry Major. The leading lady, who played his wife, was an actress of fifty who was always something the worse for gin. He then wrote and played the principal role in a slapstick comedy entitled Twelve Just Men; it was abandoned after three days of rehearsal. Perhaps in desperation he now decided to play the part of a Jewish comedian. He was given a week’s booking at the Foresters’ Music Hall in Bethnal Green, but his routine was not considered to be a success by his largely Jewish audience; they even construed some of the jokes as anti-Semitic, and he was booed off the stage to the accompaniment of orange peel and catcalls.

  His older brother was rather more successful. Sydney had joined Fred Karno’s performers in the summer of 1906, while Chaplin was touring with Casey’s Circus, and had already gained plaudits and promotion. He was always willing to help his brother, however, and persuaded his employer to take a chance on the young man out of employ.

  Fred Karno, a former gymnast and acrobat, had perfected a show in which various mimes and acrobats performed in silent burlesque with romantic ballet music as an ironic accompaniment; the sketches were fast and furious, complicated routines that required swift movement, split-second timing and instant reactions. Karno had built his headquarters in Vaughan Road, Camberwell, where three houses had been knocked together to create the “Fun Factory” where all the sets, costumes and props were manufactured. From here Karno’s buses set out, transporting the various acts to the many music halls of the capital. Custard pies and buckets of whitewash, trick cyclists and spinning plates, high wires and wooden stilts, spinning clubs and fire-torches were always on the bill. The sketches included bicycle thieves and boxers and drunks. It was cruel, and boisterous, and funny.

  At Sydney’s urging Karno agreed to meet Chaplin. The manager thought him too shy, and too frail, to excel in slapstick; but, out of deference to Sydney’s urgent appeals, he agreed to try him. Chaplin was eighteen, but he looked even younger. When Karno mentioned this, Chaplin simply shrugged. It was, he said, a question of make-up. He later professed to believe that this nonchalant response got him the job.

  Karno rehearsed the players endlessly, day after day, so that the confusion and mayhem could be almost militarily controlled; it was inspired chaos. It worked to an insistent rhythm, with every element measured and concentrated. Stan Laurel, another of the Karno troupe, recalled that their manager “didn’t teach Charlie and me all we know about comedy. He just taught us most of it.” In particular, “he taught us to be precise.” Chaplin himself said in Variety in January 1942 that “each man working for Karno had to have perfect timing and had to know the peculiarities of everyone else in the cast so that we could, collectively, achieve a cast tempo.” This was the speed and timing that Chaplin applied in all of his films. Karno also taught his players that humour came from the unexpected or from a sudden change in pace. He instructed them to “keep it wistful”; when you knock down a man, kiss him on the head. If you hit someone hard, just look sorry for a few seconds. That makes the action funnier. Chaplin would never forget these early instructions in the art of comedy.

  He began touring with the Karno Company, at the beginning of 1908, with The Football Match. In this he was meant only to have a minor role but, by means of additional business, he managed to catch the audience’s eye; he tripped over a dumb-bell; he hooked his cane on a punchbag; he lost a button and his trousers fell down. The audience reacted with laughter, and soon enough they were greeting his initial entrance with applause. After the success of the first evening, he went out dazed into the night. He had done it. He walked out of the Empire in New Cross and somehow made his way to Westminster Bridge where he looked down into the water; then he began walking home and stopped at the Elephant and Castle for a cup of tea at a coffee stall. He was exultant. He would never be out of work again.

  Chaplin’s contract with Fred Karno’s company, 1908.

  His new-found popularity was not to the taste of his fellow comedians, who reacted with natural jealousy. “I have more talent in my arse than you have in your whole body,” one fellow player told him.

  “That,” Chaplin replied, “is where your talent lies.”

  Karno himself recalled that “he could also be very unlikeable. I’ve known him go whole weeks without saying a word to anyone in the company. Occasionally he would be quite chatty, but on the whole he was dour and unsociable. He had a horror of drink, and put most of his salary in the bank as soon as he got it.”

  Stan Laurel, however, believed that he was too shy to mingle comfortably with other people. Another Karno contemporary recalled that “he was very highly strung and given to extravagant expressions of delight when things went aright with him and his work; yet a little incident, the merest mishap to a fellow actor, for example, would crumple him completely and render further work impossible for the rest of the day.” Others noticed his “self-absorption.”

  From the early summer of 1908 Chaplin and his older brother were sharing a bill together; in a period of what was for them unprecedented prosperity they decided to rent a four-room flat at 15 Glenshaw Mansions in Brixton. Brixton was one of the areas favoured by music-hall stars, and they decided to create a suitably exotic background for their lives. The brothers carpeted the main room and put up a Moorish screen; they had a suite of furniture and a pastel representation of a female nude. As a final touch they purchased an upright piano. It resembled nothing so much as a brothel without any women. The routine of touring generally required a visit to three music halls each night, and so in this period they went from the Streatham Empire to the Canterbury Music Hall before finishing at the Tivoli.

  Some of their rehearsals took place in the Montpelier Assembly Hall, in Walworth. Here in early August Chaplin met a young girl who was training to become a dancer. Hetty Kelly was fifteen years old, and seems to have been in turn thrilled and bewilder
ed by the attentions of a passionate young man. It is the familiar tale of first love. He was melancholy and dissatisfied with life; she was innocent and beautiful. They agreed to meet at Kennington Gate on the following Sunday afternoon, from where they drove by taxi to the West End. The intensity of his emotion was already apparent but, when he called her “my nemesis,” she did not know what he meant. They walked back to Camberwell, after an evening at the Trocadero restaurant, and as they strolled along the Embankment Chaplin was “ecstatic.” For three mornings he met her outside her house in Camberwell Road and escorted her to the Underground in Westminster Bridge Road. On the fourth morning he sensed her coldness or uncertainty and rebuked her for not loving him. There then followed scenes typical of those between immature and inexperienced youth. Were they in love? How much do you love me? What was love? We must part and never see each other again. Goodbye.

  The difference is that Chaplin, more than fifty years later, seems to have remembered their fraught dialogues with precision and transcribed them in his autobiography. It is not clear how much sprang from wishful thinking or a melodramatic imagination but it is certainly true that his infatuation with the young girl stayed with him for a long time and may have informed his attitude towards other women. It had been for him a spiritual experience, all the more potent for being unfulfilled. Here was a girl who remained untouched and out of reach, invulnerable, all that could be desired, so to be hoped for and yet never to be attained. She stood out in explicit contrast to the women he had picked up in the pool-rooms three years before.