Charlie Chaplin

by Peter Ackroyd

  Even as he was working on A Day’s Pleasure, on 7 July 1919, Mildred gave birth to Chaplin’s son. The child was malformed, and died three days later. The death certificate recorded the “rudimentary development of the large intestine.” The chauffeur, Kono, recollected in simpler terms that the infant was born with “its stomach upside down.”

  The production report on the new film for 10 July notes “Did not shoot. Norman Spencer Chaplin passed on today—4 p.m.” On the following day the entry read “11 July. Cast all absent … Did not shoot. Norman Spencer Chaplin buried today, 3 p.m., Inglewood Cemetery.” On his gravestone was carved “The Little Mouse.” Sydney Chaplin described how the death of Norman tipped his brother into “terrible depression.” Mildred Chaplin recalled later that “Charlie took it hard … that’s the only thing I can remember about Charlie … that he cried when the baby died.”

  The period of reconciliation between husband and wife, if such it was, was brief since the essential components of their marriage remained the same. They could not remake the past. Although they lived in the same house, they rarely saw each other. Eventually he moved out and took up permanent residence at the Los Angeles Athletic Club. It may be that one or both of them blamed their incompatibility, or mutual resentment, for the sad fate of their child. The death of their son effectively marked the end of their marriage. Chaplin was for a day or two inconsolable.

  10

  The Ostrich Egg

  Eleven days after the death of his son Chaplin was rehearsing some children for a part in his newly projected film, tentatively to be called The Waif. It was eventually entitled The Kid, and is one of the central works of his career. In one of its earliest scenes Charlie finds an abandoned baby and, after some internal debate, decides to rear it himself. Chaplin, after losing one infant, encounters another in his imagination. In that process is Norman Spencer Chaplin somehow restored to life?

  Chaplin already had a young actor in mind for the central role. Immediately after finishing Sunnyside he had visited the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles where he had watched a comedy dance act by a vaudeville artist known as Jack Coogan; at the end of the performance Coogan introduced his four-year-old son, Jackie, who then went through his own brief dance routine based upon the steps of his father. Chaplin seems immediately to have been impressed and entertained by the exceedingly young performer. Jackie Coogan may have reminded him of his own youthful self on the music-hall stage.

  Chaplin then met the Coogan family quite by chance in a Los Angeles hotel, where he took advantage of the occasion to become better acquainted with the boy. He asked him what he did. “I am,” Jackie replied, “a prestidigitator in the world of legerdemain.” This was no doubt one of the lines he had learned for his short act, but it delighted Chaplin. He told Jackie’s parents that “this is the most amazing person I ever met in my life.”

  He was soon contemplating the comic possibilities of Charlie and the small boy, and soon enough the secretary of his studio visited the Coogans with an offer that could hardly be refused. “Of course,” Jack Coogan is supposed to have said, “you can have the little punk.” Chaplin used the boy briefly in A Day’s Pleasure, a film that seemed to have had an interminable long process of production, before he turned his attention to the filming of The Kid.

  He worked at white heat through the August and September of 1919. In these early scenes Edna Purviance plays the part of an unwed mother who is discharged from the charity hospital with the infant in her arms. The title of the sequence describes her as “the woman—whose only sin is motherhood.” Chaplin may have been considering here the plight of his own mother many years before.

  Other memories also intrude. When Charlie finds the abandoned child he takes him to his little room at the top of a lodging house. It is hard to be exact about the particulars, but there is a strong possibility that Chaplin here reconstructs the room he and his mother had once shared in Pownall Terrace or in Methley Street. It has a narrow bed, a table and some old chairs; the floor is made of bare boards, and the paper on the walls is peeling from damp. This is the setting for the little boy who, now grown from a baby, accompanies Charlie on his peregrinations. It is the first time that Charlie has ever been seen in any kind of home, a dwelling apparently secure from the outside world.

  These attic scenes seem to have been shot very quickly. Jackie Coogan proved himself to be an excellent mimic as well as actor, and Chaplin had no difficulty in guiding him through his part. He did the action, or the expression, and the young boy copied it perfectly. This paradoxically rendered him a charming and subtle performer. As Chaplin noted, “the mechanics induced the emotion.” He was the performer of whom Chaplin had always dreamed, a veritable extension of Chaplin himself, who might then become once more a child, releasing all the private experiences of his younger self, while at the same time Jackie Coogan took the place of Norman Spencer Chaplin buried beneath the earth. This may account for some of the power of The Kid.

  Chaplin on the set of The Kid with Jackie Coogan, 1921.

  Courtesy of Mondadori

  There is one famous scene in which the young boy is being taken away from Charlie by a welfare worker and is thrown into the orphanage van, at which point the boy breaks down in hysterical tears. Jackie Coogan recalled that “the musicians, of course, helped a lot. We had music on the set. And Chaplin used to talk, as every director did, while the shot was in process, being silent pictures. He’d say, ‘Now you really love this man, and he’s gone, and they’re going to take you …’ It works on you.” The open van may have worked on Chaplin, too, as a reminder of the baker’s wagon that had taken him at the age of seven to the orphanage at Hanwell. When Charlie rescues the boy, the audiences were shocked by his tears; the “little fellow” had never cried before on the screen.

  Another boy actor, Raymond Lee, recalled that many takes were necessary for a fight scene between himself and Jackie Coogan. “You know,” Chaplin said in the tones of a schoolmaster, “we’ve shot this scene exactly fifty times. I’ve been keeping count!” Lee wrote that Chaplin then walked around in a circle. “Then a stop. A thought. A smile with every tooth in it. And doing his best to look simple, Charlie Chaplin closed in on us with confessional intimacy. ‘Boys,’ he told us, ‘this is a very simple scene. Very simple. Two boys fighting. All boys fight … But boys, you aren’t fighting. You’re dancing with each other.’ ” Lee concluded that Chaplin was always in search of simplicity—a smile, a half-tear or a simple look. He remarked that “have you ever realised that Chaplin always looked at you from the screen—no matter what the action—he looked at you, the audience, as if he knew you, was about to tell you a secret.”

  At the beginning of April 1920, in the course of filming, Mildred Chaplin began divorce proceedings against her husband. Her situation had not been helped by Chaplin’s frequent affairs with other women; at this time, for example, he was engaged in a relationship with a young actress called Florence Deshon which was in turn followed by a fling with another actress. Chaplin was unwilling to allow his young wife any measure of independence, and even now he was attempting to overturn her contract with Louis B. Mayer on the grounds that she was still a minor. He had also recently refused her permission to adopt a child. She had at the beginning cited only his desertion but a few days later changed the charge to one of cruelty. She wished to “tell everything. I shall let the world know how he failed to provide for me and how he sent an employee to my house and took away certain of my papers. He humiliated me before the servants. Isn’t that cruelty?” Three days later Chaplin and Louis B. Mayer started a fight in the Alexandria Hotel in which both men fell to the ground.

  In the course of the subsequent divorce proceedings Mildred Chaplin augmented her charges of cruelty.

  “QUESTION: Then what occurred?

  “ANSWER: Then the next day was Christmas Day, and he would not get up all Christmas morning, and I went downstairs and took him up his presents, and he was very angry at me for making so m
uch over Christmas …

  “QUESTION: What did he say or do with reference to your friends if he should find them in his house, what was his conduct toward them?

  “ANSWER: He was not nice to them; he wouldn’t come home if I had them.

  “QUESTION: When you had your friends he would refuse to come to the house if he found it out?

  “ANSWER: Yes, sir.

  “QUESTION: How often did that occur, Mrs. Chaplin?

  “ANSWER: All the time. He would never tell me when he would be at home; he said he had to be free to live his own life and do as he pleased …

  “QUESTION: Did he give you any reason why he stayed away?

  “ANSWER: No. He said I had disgraced him by going out …

  “QUESTION: Now you allege that subsequent to the time that you went to—went out some place, Mr. Chaplin employed some detectives to watch you?

  “ANSWER: Yes, sir …

  “QUESTION: Tell the court what happened at that time?

  “ANSWER: I cried and begged him to come back home and I fainted and he said that I was acting silly and I had disgraced him and he didn’t see why he should come back …

  “QUESTION: What was his method of talking to you? Was it kindly or otherwise?

  “ANSWER: No, it was not kindly …

  “QUESTION: What did he say?

  “ANSWER: Well he said that he knew he did not want to live with me any more; that he had tried to change me and make me live his way and be different, and he saw that it was impossible and that I wasn’t good and that he couldn’t trust me, and that I was—everything.”

  It occurred to Chaplin himself that, in preparation for a divorce settlement, efforts might now be made to secure his business assets against future possible payments; among those assets was the negative of the film that had already been shot for The Kid. He also believed that First National had come to an arrangement with Mildred’s lawyers so that they might legally acquire the film for which they had been waiting so long. For the first time in his career, no Chaplin film had been released that year.

  At the beginning of August the cameraman, Rollie Totheroh, was aroused at three in the morning by Alf Reeves with an urgent request to get the negative out of town. It was packed into coffee tins and then transported by rail in twelve wooden crates. Chaplin had in fact filmed more than fifty times the length of the completed picture. Reeves and Totheroh were met by Chaplin and Tom Harrington at Santa Fe from where they travelled on to Salt Lake City beyond any possible Californian jurisdiction.

  At a hotel in Salt Lake City a bedroom was transformed into an editing suite where Chaplin began cutting The Kid into improvised shape. He and his colleagues then took the train to New York and found a studio in New Jersey where they could complete their work. Chaplin booked into the Ritz in order to conceal himself from the process servers working for Mildred Chaplin’s lawyers.

  While in New York he became acquainted with a group of soi-disant socialist intellectuals who inhabited the apartments and bars of Greenwich Village. Despite their dismissal of fame and fortune as bourgeois values, they were no doubt secretly thrilled to be in his company. In turn he enjoyed the society of intellectuals largely because he was not one. So he talked politics and art and literature. Rollie Totheroh once said that “he can talk on pretty near any subject. But if a person really was educated on the subject he was talking on, they’d see the errors that he made.” Toraichi Kono can remember his employer “talking volubly on a subject about which he knows practically nothing, and leave his listeners convinced that he is amazingly intellectual.” It was really just a matter of impersonation.

  But he was also flattered by the attentions of those whom he considered to be more intelligent and knowledgeable than himself, and accepted their interpretation of his art as an affirmation of the common man. The Little Tramp could be seen as a working-class hero battling against the rich and the privileged. It was not the first time he had been taken by the perceptions of enthusiastic admirers. In later years, however, his association with the radical cause would create problems for his career.

  In the middle of November a settlement between Chaplin and his wife was made out of court, and the divorce granted. Mildred Chaplin, at the age of eighteen, was granted $100,000 and a share of family property; but damage had been done to her. The actress Marion Davies is reported to have said that “Mildred Harris was no saint, but she wasn’t really a bad kid, and Charlie, God bless him, loused her up good.”

  Robert Florey, who directed Mildred Chaplin in later days, recalled Mildred saying to him that “it is hard for a girl to be the wife of a genius. I did not always understand him, and I felt inferior to him. He was short-tempered, impatient and treated me like a cretin. Yet I still admire him. He could have taught me so much.” The public exposure of the court proceedings had wounded Chaplin himself, who was in many respects a withdrawn and secretive man. He became more nervous and more cautious; his hair had started to turn grey.

  In an interview he gave at this time he remarked that “solitude is the only relief. The dream-world is then the great reality, the real world an illusion. I go to my library and live with the great abstract thinkers—Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Walter Pater.” An element of posturing is plainly to be seen, together with the influence of the Greenwich Village intellectuals. He no longer wanted to be known as just a comedian. He added that he would like to “retire to some Italian lake with my beloved violin, my Shelley and Keats, and live under an assumed name a life purely imaginative and intellectual.” His desire for seclusion may at least have been genuine. The interviewer concluded that “I have never met an unhappier or shyer human being than this Charles Spencer Chaplin.”

  Mildred Harris, 1923.

  Courtesy of Edward Gooch, Hulton Archive

  His emotional temperature had been further raised, in the later stages of filming The Kid, by his meeting with a twelve-year-old actress. Lillita MacMurray had been hired to play a street urchin, but she seems at once to have caught Chaplin’s attention. He asked a studio artist to paint her and, according to her own later account, he told her that “I’ve been peeking at you, my dear, when you haven’t been looking. I’ve been more and more drawn to those fascinating eyes of yours.” It may have been for her sake that he added what has always been a controversial dream sequence towards the end of The Kid. It is a puzzling intervention in the film, when Charlie sleeps and has a vision of his neighbourhood populated by angels. The young girl is cast as “Sin” and, in Chaplin’s fantasy of paradise, sin and jealousy always take over. It was an apt prophecy.

  The Kid opened in New York on 6 February 1921, to great acclaim. It was Chaplin’s longest, and best received, film to date. It marked a leap in the public and critical awareness of his art, so that now he was being openly compared with Dickens; he had in fact created a pure urban fable, like that of Oliver Twist. It has been said that it announced the coming of age of the cinema; film had become a world art form. In the process Charlie himself had become a fabulous creature outside the ordinary dimensions of human life. The world of the “Chaplinesque” had been created. An English critic, James Agate, wrote that “I do not laugh at Charlie till I cry. I laugh lest I cry, which is a very different matter.” The sensation was perhaps best expressed in a letter by Laurence Sterne, almost two centuries before, in which he wrote that “I laugh till I cry, and in some tender moments cry till I laugh.”

  An affinity has often been found between Charles Chaplin and Charles Dickens. Both experienced childhood neglect and suffering; both of them implicitly or explicitly blamed their mothers for their state. But they also owed an enormous debt to their mothers. Elizabeth Dickens, like Hannah Chaplin, was described as having “an extraordinary sense of the ludicrous, and her power of imitation was something quite astonishing.” The two men came from the lower middle class; they were ambitious and energetic. They both had an experience of unfortunate first love that left them bereft and wounded for many years. Both
men achieved uncommon fame at an extraordinarily young age—Dickens at the age of twenty-four, with The Pickwick Papers, and Chaplin at the age of twenty-five with the Keystone comedies.

  Dickens drew much of his strength from the theatrical traditions of London; he haunted the minor theatres or “penny gaffs” which were the immediate predecessors of the music halls in which the young Chaplin performed. They both loved the pantomimes of their respective eras. Both men had imbibed with what might be called a London vision in which farce and sentiment, melodrama and pantomime, are conflated. Chaplin’s oldest son has recalled his father’s love for Oliver Twist, which Chaplin read again and again. It was as if in that novel he had found the key to his own past. This in turn led to his film of threatened childhood, The Kid, just as Modern Times is a distant successor to Hard Times. City Lights, the story of a blind flower-seller rescued by the Little Tramp, is altogether Dickensian in sentiment and expression. Just as Dickens clothed London in a veil of comedy, pathos and poetry, so did Chaplin in the haunted city of his films.

  Chaplin, like Dickens, was driven, relentless, overwhelming. Both men had always to be in control of the world around them; they had an almost military manner in relationship to their families, and were often accused of being dictatorial and domineering. They seemed to be convivial and gregarious in company but they were invaded by sudden terrors and inexplicable fears; they were both very wealthy men who feared that their riches might be stripped away. So there is a strong affinity. It might even be suggested that Chaplin was Dickens’s true successor.