Charlie Chaplin

by Peter Ackroyd

  The set occupied five acres of what had once been agricultural land—still interspersed with trees of orange, peach and lemon—with two large open-air stages, dressing rooms, workshops for building the sets, a film developing laboratory, a projection room and editing suite together with a tennis court and swimming pool. An old dog kept fitful guard by the studio gates.

  Chaplin’s own office was situated in a modest bungalow. Alistair Cooke, some fifteen years later, described it as possessing “one small window, three straight-backed wooden chairs, an old table, about half a dozen books with peeling spines, and an ancient upright piano hideously out of tune.” Chaplin needed the security of a working environment not fundamentally different from that he had known in childhood. He also liked familiar faces. He employed Alf Reeves, with whom he had been acquainted since the days of Karno, to become general manager of the studio, in which post he remained for the rest of his life. A snatch of their conversation has been recorded.

  “You’re a bloody slut!”

  “You’re a bigger bloody slut!”

  “You’re a double bloody slut!”

  This was now Chaplin’s kingdom where he would remain for the rest of his time in the United States. Carlyle Robinson recalled that when Chaplin arrived at the studio each morning “instantly everybody stopped what they were doing. Actors, stagehands, electricians, everybody stood in line, at attention. Then Chaplin entered the studio gates.” The luxurious car was driven by Kono, with Harrington also sitting in the front; Harrington would then jump out and open the door for his employer. This routine did not vary, and the studio typist told Robinson that “the whole gang does that for a gag. Charlie has no illusions, but he adores it.” It is reported that the studio employees knew his mood, stormy or sunny, by the colour of the suit he wore each morning.

  He still had one favourite pastime that took him out of the environment of the studio. He liked to indulge in deep-sea fishing off the Californian coast, and one photograph shows him posed beside a great fish almost twice his size with the inscription “Merlin Swordfish Caught by Charlie Chaplin at Santa Catalina Island, 10-6-18.” It took him twenty-two minutes to land it.

  Six days before the studio was formally opened, Chaplin began work on his first film for First National. A Dog’s Life amply satisfies his concern for a clear story and precise structure to guide the action and comic business. The film opens with the Tramp sleeping in a vacant lot, all the pathos and pity of his situation captured in this depiction of the vulnerable sleeper curled upon the dusty ground like a small and gentle deer. This seems to be real dirt, in a real situation. He is more haggard and hollow-eyed than ever before. He is more fragile and more tender than the figure of the Keystone or Essanay comedies, largely because he is able to invoke the inner life of the Little Tramp who is at once tremulous and bemused. He rescues a half-starved dog, and then wins the affections of a lonely barroom singer down on her luck. The three of them join together to fight the world. Charlie himself has the indomitable energy and determination of a child, his ingenuity and inventiveness amazing.

  He had for some time been looking for comedy dogs, and brought into the studio twelve of them for the production; the star of the film, however, was a mongrel called Mut whose stage name was Scraps. An entry in the accounts of the studio, “whiskey (Mut)—60 cents,” indicates that the dog was rendered unconscious for one scene where he had to be asleep. Chaplin became dissatisfied with the production three weeks after the beginning of shooting, and for a day or two considered another comedy. Then he returned to A Dog’s Life. It was a three-reeler, Chaplin’s longest and most elaborate to date. It was received with great acclaim and the French critic Louis Delluc described it as “the first complete work of art the cinema has.” A more recent critic, Dan Kamin, has called it “arguably Chaplin’s most perfect film.”

  Before the film was released Chaplin joined two of his Hollywood friends, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, on a tour to rally support for what were known as Liberty Bonds used to finance the American war effort. It may have been his way of atoning for the fact that he played no other part in the First World War. Fairbanks and Pickford were by now considered to be the king and queen of Hollywood. Fairbanks had begun work with D. W. Griffith in 1915, and his athleticism and physical grace soon turned him into the swashbuckling hero of the silent cinema. By the time of the tour in 1918 he had become America’s most celebrated film actor, whose aura of romance travelled with him from the screen into Hollywood life.

  Mary Pickford had an earlier start, in 1909, and until the advent of sound seemed never to be off the screen. She was known as “America’s sweetheart” or “the girl with the golden curls.” By the time she toured with Fairbanks and Chaplin she was the most famous female actress in America, but her girlish beauty and whimsical manner concealed a sharp brain and a practical business sense. In 1916 Photoplay magazine described her “luminous tenderness in a steel band of gutter ferocity.” When they set off, therefore, they were the three most celebrated stars in the world of film.

  On their train journey to Washington Chaplin slept for the first two days, an indication of his exhaustion after weeks of filming; he was nervous of making public speeches but, when he had “warmed up,” he was impassioned and eloquent. He was an actor who always rose to the occasion. He became so spellbound by his own oratory in Washington that he fell off the platform and landed on the assistant secretary of the navy, then Franklin D. Roosevelt. In New York he and his fellow actors were greeted by wildly excited crowds who packed the area of the Sub-Treasury on the corner of Broad and Wall Streets. When Fairbanks hoisted Chaplin on to his shoulders, pandemonium ensued. “Now listen,” Chaplin said to cheers and laughter, “I never made a speech before in my life. But I believe I can make one now!” He demanded money for the troops “so that we can drive that old devil, the kaiser, out of France!” The sentiment was enthusiastically received, and Chaplin gained some notion of the uses of fame. There are photographs of him, bowler hat in hand, and with a megaphone at his mouth.

  His itinerary now took in Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi. In New Orleans a local politician protested that his name was beneath that of a “vulgar movie actor” on the posters; the politician drew 400 people, while the vulgarian attracted 40,000. Yet Chaplin was becoming tired of the constant travel and nervous excitement. Pleading exhaustion he returned to Hollywood by way of Texas, and was ready to start work again at the beginning of May. He had been away for almost two months. He and Fairbanks had become close friends in the interim. Both of them enjoyed huge and sometimes overwhelming popularity; like two passengers stuck at the top of a Ferris wheel, they clung to each other for support.

  He had also made another acquaintance. He met Mildred Harris at a party given by the producer Samuel Goldwyn; she was sixteen years old but had been a child actress for the last five years. Her mother was a wardrobe mistress at another film studio, and so presumably knew all the ways of Hollywood. There is no doubt that Chaplin, at the age of twenty-nine, soon became preoccupied and in the end infatuated by the girl; she had blonde hair and blue eyes, and was described by one newspaper as a “dainty screen favourite.” Chaplin himself was young, handsome, and of course one of the richest actors in Hollywood. He was, for all concerned, a tempting prospect. He sent bouquets of roses to the Cadillac Hotel in which she was staying, and sat in his car outside the Lois Weber studio as she left work. She said later that he had been “so fatherly” and “acted to me as though I had been a mere child.”

  It seems that soon enough, however, they became lovers. In his autobiography Chaplin claims that it was the girl who made the advances, but this is open to question. It is certainly true that Mildred Harris and her mother were ready to take advantage of the promising situation. By June reports of marriage began to emerge, only to be denied by the parties involved. Mildred Harris stated, in the familiar fashion, that “we’re just very dear friends.”

  He could be a
dazzling companion. Many contemporaries have recalled his routine at parties where he would imitate the manner in which the leading ladies of the day might experience orgasm. He would play the part of a bull and matador. He would dance with invisible balloons. Whenever he told a story he acted it out in mime. He had always to be at the centre of attention, even in the presence of other famous people. Yet he would soon tire of company and long for privacy; he retreated from the party in order to play the violin. On these occasions he could become nervous, withdrawn and morose. This was the side of his character that Mildred Harris had perhaps not yet seen.

  He began work on his next film, Shoulder Arms, soon after his return to Hollywood. It was perhaps for him a natural consequence of his Liberty Bond tour, during which he had also visited army training camps. He had decided now to play the part of a soldier in battle on the Western Front. This might be considered sensitive material, if it were believed that Charlie was about to caricature the private soldiers known to Americans as “dough boys.” Yet Chaplin resisted the objections. He knew well enough that the “little fellow” had the ability to create a plucky, resourceful and sympathetic hero. He could become once more an Everyman, a cinematic version of the good soldier Schweik.

  The first reel was to be devoted to Charlie’s civilian life before being conscripted, but the scenes did not meet Chaplin’s standards and were rejected. The film begins in medias res, with Charlie being drilled in preparation for conflict; he cannot of course get his legs and feet to combine together or to point in the right direction. Scenes at the front follow, with all the boredom and horrors of trench warfare nicely exaggerated without at any time turning them into parody. His bunker is flooded, and he can only sleep with the horn of a phonograph as a snorkel. When asked how he managed to capture unaided thirteen German soldiers, he replies that “I surrounded them.” Behind enemy lines he puts on the costume of a tree, and in effect becomes a tree to the extent that he is hard to spot in a forest scene.

  He had completed the film by the middle of September but, anxious and dispirited, he could see no comedy in it. He was about to consign it to oblivion when Douglas Fairbanks, having asked to see the picture, laughed all the way through. It occurred to Chaplin that it might perhaps be humorous after all. In fact Shoulder Arms became an instant success and, in the language of the time, was “the talk of the town” with individual scenes being discussed and anatomised by critics and audiences alike. It was released in October 1918, a month before the armistice was signed; the returning soldiers appreciated it as much as the civilians they had left behind.

  In the course of filming the last scenes of Shoulder Arms Mildred Harris informed him that she was pregnant with his child. This of course threw him into a panic; the last thing he wished for, at this stage in his life, was domestic responsibility. Of all things, he required liberty. His first thoughts were of escape. But if he refused marriage, he might expect terrible scandal to follow; he had, after all, impregnated a young girl. He asked Tom Harrington to arrange a closeted marriage at the home of the local registrar on 23 October, after the studio had closed for the day. The reaction of Edna Purviance was stoical enough. She encountered him at the studio, having read of the wedding in the newspapers. “Congratulations,” she said. He wrote later that “Edna made me feel embarrassed.”

  He leased a house on DeMille Drive for himself and his new bride, which was described by one of her friends as a “symphony in lavender and ivory, exquisite in every detail.” Soon after they had moved into this paradise, however, it became clear that Mildred was not pregnant at all. She had either misread her symptoms or, perhaps with the connivance of her mother, she had tricked him into matrimony. The suspicion could not have made married life any easier to bear. He knew that he was not in love with her, and very soon he was beginning to regret the union. Her presence sometimes became an irritation and he confided to Douglas Fairbanks the unremarkable news that “she was no mental heavyweight.”

  He was also distinctly unimpressed by her wish to become a film actress, no doubt trading on the name of Chaplin, but two days after the marriage she began negotiations with Louis B. Mayer of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. This led to an angry quarrel between husband and wife. Harris wrote in an article later that “I think he was right. But he ought to have had a little more patience and consideration of youth.” Patience and consideration were, with Chaplin, always in short supply. She had wanted the glamour and excitement of the film colony; he needed space and time to work for himself. She was given her own chauffeur, servants and unlimited credit at the shops or department stores she frequented. He could not give anything of himself. He walked out of the house early each morning. He became irritable and moody in her company. By November, however, the new Mrs. Chaplin was indeed carrying his child.

  Chaplin and Edna Purviance in 1918.

  His matrimonial difficulties actively impeded his work on the next film for First National, Sunnyside. He agonised and despaired over the process of filming. There were occasions when he closed down the studios and went on excursions with favoured friends, but not with his wife; he might be away for a day or two at a time without informing her.

  It was not a happy time for anyone concerned with Chaplin. At one stage Mildred entered the Good Samaritan Hospital where she remained for three weeks; it was reported that she had suffered a nervous breakdown. Towards the end of the year she was ordered, for the sake of her baby, to take a complete rest cure at a sanatorium north of the city, to which place Chaplin did not accompany her. When she eventually returned to Los Angeles, Chaplin spent very little time with her. She once complained that “Charlie married me and then he forgot all about me.” A photograph of him at the time shows him to be weary and unshaven. “I hate this picture of me,” he commented. “I look bleary-eyed, like a murderer. No wonder!” In Sunnyside itself he also looks noticeably gaunter.

  There was talk of his mother leaving her asylum in England and travelling to the United States to be with her sons, but Chaplin did not approve of the idea. He cabled his brother, who was then staying at a hotel in New York, with the message “SECOND THOUGHTS WILL BE BEST MOTHER REMAIN IN ENGLAND SOME GOOD SEASIDE RESORT. AFRAID PRESENCE HERE MIGHT DEPRESS AND AFFECT MY WORK.”

  His problems were compounded by his growing unease with First National. He said later that “the company was inconsiderate, unsympathetic and short-sighted,” by which he meant that they refused to comply with all of his demands. He was already supposed to have delivered eight new films, but had in fact finished only three and embarked upon a fourth. It meant nothing to First National that A Dog’s Life and Shoulder Arms had been instantly popular and profitable; they knew only that Chaplin had not fulfilled the terms of his contract. He asked for larger advances to maintain the quality of his work, but his appeal was rebuffed. He threatened to turn over five short comedies to meet his contractual demands, but he could not guarantee their quality. His threat did not work. They no doubt surmised that the name of Chaplin would be enough to sell anything.

  It was in this period, therefore, that he opened negotiations with D. W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford to open their own studio without the demands of an overweening management. They had decided that it would be more profitable to invest their own money, produce their own films and distribute the finished product themselves. They would then become truly independent. Eventually their association was named United Artists. Yet, before he could begin work on this new enterprise, Chaplin still had to complete five films for First National.

  Sunnyside was released in June 1919, and was not greeted warmly by the critics. An article in Theatre was entitled “Is the Chaplin Vogue Passing?” It is in truth an unremarkable comedy that makes some attempt at satirising the pastoral idyll which was one of the constituents of the American dream. Charlie is the overworked and presumably underpaid hired hand in a rural farm that also acts as a hotel, local store and barber’s shop. The setting makes room for some of his familiar comic business
. He is in love with Edna Purviance once more, and the presence of a threatening rival accommodates moments of farce and pathos. Yet they seem somehow forced.

  Chaplin signing the United Artists contract with Mary Pickford,

  Douglas Fairbanks and D. W. Griffith, 1919.

  It contains one remarkable dream sequence in which Charlie dances a pastiche version of Nijinsky’s performance in L’aprèsmidi d’un faune. Some critics have suggested that this was a serious attempt to represent Chaplin’s skills as a dancer, but it is clearly nothing of the sort; it is a parody of the gestures and attitudes of the ballet dancer in his more overwrought moments. There is no real reason for the sequence to be part of the film, however, thus violating Chaplin’s own strict laws of comic relevance and continuity. It is symptomatic of a film that is essentially aimless and insubstantial.

  As soon as Sunnyside was completed he began serious work on A Day’s Pleasure. He had worked on it before, in a sporadic fashion, but now he wanted to reduce the number of remaining pictures for First National. It is an uneven and unconvincing film concerning a boat excursion made by Charlie and family, in which he returns to one of his favourite themes of seasickness. This is combined with the antics of an unruly Ford car that is closer to Keystone than to genuine Chaplin. In the unusual role of paterfamilias Charlie has a stern and implacable quality; it is as if he had put on the mask of an idol. The actor who played Charlie’s youngest son, Jackie Coogan, recalled that Chaplin “kind of sloughed that picture off. You will notice if you see it, that it gets very jumpy. He lost interest in it.” Under the circumstances this loss of enthusiasm is understandable.