Charlie Chaplin

by Peter Ackroyd

Chaplin was even now thinking of his next film. The Idle Class is not in the same inspired category as The Kid but his dual roles in the picture, of both tramp and rich man, are the source of some humour. Chaplin, the millionaire who played the part of the “little fellow,” was of course both. It is a very ingenious and sophisticated comedy. The rich patrician receives a letter announcing that his wife has left him; he turns away from the camera and, with his arms in front of him, begins trembling and shaking. It seems that he has become distraught but, when he turns around, the audience sees that he has been vigorously employing a cocktail shaker.

  Six weeks after the beginning of filming Hannah Chaplin finally arrived in the United States. She was accompanied by Tom Harrington, but neither of her sons greeted her at Ellis Island. “So you’re the mother of the famous Charlie?” an immigration official asked her.

  “Yes,” she replied. “And you are Jesus Christ.”

  Chaplin had not seen her for nine years, but she recognised him at once. He had bought her a bungalow in the San Fernando Valley, near the sea, where she was in the company of a trained nurse and a married couple. She seemed to visitors to be perfectly settled for long periods; she would sing music-hall songs and reminisce about her old life in London. Like her son, she could create vivid impersonations of the people whom she had known. She enjoyed playing draughts, and kept up her old expertise in sewing. She liked to be taken in her car on shopping expeditions, on which occasions she was sometimes very extravagant; one day she came back with yards of coloured silk, of no particular use, and her son remarked that “the poor soul has been longing for such things all her life.”

  There were times when she was not altogether sane. The daughter of Alf Reeves remembered an occasion when she stepped back briefly into the shadows. She recalled that “one day I was sitting beside her at lunch, and I noticed a mark on her arm. And innocently I said, ‘Nan, what’s that?’ And immediately she drew her arm away and hid it; and then started putting bits of bread all about herself, and on her head. The nurse, Mrs. Carey, said, ‘Come with me, Nan’ and took her off into another room. When Mrs. Carey came back she said that the mark was a tattoo from the workhouse. She said it brought back the days when they had not had enough to eat; and she was putting the bread away for Sydney and Charlie.”

  Chaplin’s two sons recalled many stories that he and Sydney told them of their grandmother. When she went to a department store in Los Angeles she asked the clerk for “shit-brown gloves.” When a pair was brought for her perusal she complained that “No, no, that’s not shit brown.” It is reminiscent of the occasion in Chaplin’s childhood when she described a young woman as “Lady Shit.” On the rare occasions when she visited her son’s house it was said that she danced and raised her skirt so high that it became clear she was wearing no underwear.

  On one occasion, according to her younger son, she was taken to the local zoo where much to the surprise of the public an ostrich had laid an egg. Chaplin recalled to one of his then lovers, May Reeves, that “my old mother’s nurse brought her there also. An attendant placed the egg in the visitor’s hands so she could appreciate its weight but, thinking that this might be a trick, the good old lady threw the zoo’s treasure to the ground, exclaiming ‘I don’t want your egg.’ As a result the residents of Los Angeles had one young ostrich less.”

  Chaplin himself did not visit her often; she still made him weary and despondent. She reminded him of a past, and of a life, he had left behind. His oldest son revealed that “he could never see her without feeling a depression that was sometimes as acute to him as physical pain, that would last for days afterwards, preventing all concentration on his work.” No doubt he thought it enough to pay her bills and to ensure that she enjoyed a life of ease. Yet those who saw them together noted the strong resemblance between them in the eyes, the smile, and the gestures of the hands. She never seemed to be aware of his great fame. When she visited the studio and saw Chaplin in his tramp’s outfit, she is supposed to have said, “Charlie, I have to get you a new suit.” In one photograph Chaplin stands at a formal, or respectful, distance from his mother with his hands folded in front of him.

  By the summer of 1921 Chaplin had begun shooting his next film for First National that would eventually be entitled Pay Day on the subject of builders and building sites. He shot the first scene, but he could get no further; in a subsequent memoir dictated to a reporter, My Trip Abroad, he recollected that “I was feeling very tired, weak, and depressed. I had just recovered from an attack of influenza. I was in one of those ‘what’s the use’ moods … all the time there was the spectre of a nervous breakdown from overwork threatening.” Then he received news that The Kid was about to open in London. This was the stimulus that he needed. He had been thinking of London, his memories no doubt stirred by the presence of his mother. He had started a correspondence with H. G. Wells and was curious to meet the famous novelist. There was, above all, the undying attraction of the city of his childhood.

  He closed down the picture and asked his press agent, Carlyle Robinson, to buy the tickets. His rapid departure surprised his friends and colleagues, let alone his studio staff. He left Los Angeles by train on 27 August, cheered on his way by a large crowd of Hollywood well-wishers, and was met at New York by Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford who were there for the premiere of The Three Musketeers. When he attended the event, his fame had already overtaken him. He recalled that “I felt a draught. I heard machinery. I looked down. A woman with a pair of scissors was snipping a piece from the seat of my trousers. Another grabbed my tie … My shirt was pulled out. The buttons torn from my vest. My feet trampled on. My face scratched.” He was then carried over the heads of the crowd into the lobby of the theatre.

  On 3 September he left New York on the Olympic en route to Cherbourg and London, accompanied by Tom Harrington and Carlyle Robinson. If he had hoped for some respite from public attention on board the vessel, he was soon disabused. A film cameraman had been hired to follow his movements, and his excursions on deck were avidly watched by his fellow passengers; he was even asked to perform at a sailors’ fund concert, which honour he declined much to the dissatisfaction of its organisers. Many of the other travellers brought up their children to be introduced to him but, without the costume of the Tramp, he felt a little fraudulent; he was like Santa Claus without the beard. In any case he was nervous with children knowing that they “detect our insincerity.”

  The Olympic docked at Cherbourg on the evening of 9 September, where reporters and cameramen invaded the ship. Confronted with questions in French he made a short impromptu speech in which he said that “this is my first holiday for years, and there is only one place to spend a holiday long overdue, and that is at home. That is why I intend to go to London. I want to walk the streets, see all the many changes, and feel the good old London atmosphere again.” He was going back to the source of his life and inspiration.

  11

  Home Again

  Charles Chaplin was on the train from Southampton to London. The crowds that greeted him at the port were smaller than he had anticipated, and he suffered what he called “a tinge of disappointment.” Nevertheless one newspaper had the headline “HOMECOMING OF COMEDIAN TO RIVAL ARMISTICE DAY.” And so it proved.

  When he arrived at Waterloo he was mobbed by thousands of Londoners. The cry came up, “There he is!” The newsreels of the day show him surrounded by policemen, reporters and cameramen. The crowd surged towards him. “Here he is. He is there, he is. That’s him.” Chaplin recollected in My Trip Abroad that “this also thrills me. Everything is beyond my expectations. I revel in it secretly.” As he makes his way with difficulty through the mob of cheering and waving people, he hears them calling out “Well done, Charlie,” or “Charlie! Charlie! There he is! Good luck to you, Charlie! God bless you!” It was a spontaneous outburst of enthusiasm from the people of the city, and for Chaplin almost overwhelming.

  When he reached the station exit, he could hear chu
rch bells ringing and could see handkerchiefs and hats being waved in the air. He was hauled and lifted into a limousine, with three policemen on the running board each side. There is a photograph of him standing up, surrounded by a sea of cloth caps and bowler hats, straw boaters and floral hats. He made a short speech to the crowd, which was of course greeted by wild applause, before his car managed to make its way to the Ritz. The hotel had been locked to prevent the crowd from storming the lobby; once he was pushed and pulled within its doors, he was raced to his room.

  The crowds were calling for him, so he went over to the window from which he waved and blew kisses. Then he grabbed a bouquet of roses and began to throw the flowers, one by one, to the people below. A police officer came into the room. “Please, Mr. Chaplin, it is very fine, but don’t throw anything. You will cause an accident. They will be crushed and killed.” Chaplin had encountered, and indeed created, a wholly new phenomenon. The crowds had come out at the funerals of Dan Leno and of Marie Lloyd but the fame now generated by the new medium of film was unprecedented in human history. No one before had experienced the amount of acclaim and even adoration that now swept over him; he had no preparation or training for it. He simply had to cope with it as well as he could for the rest of his life.

  His instinct was now in any case to go back, to return to the streets of South London where he had played and worked. With appropriate excuses to those who were with him, he went out of the Ritz by a back door. He walked quickly out into the street and hailed a cab, asking the driver to take him to Kennington; fortunately the cab-man did not recognise him. When he passed the Canterbury Music Hall, just after the bridge on Westminster Bridge Road, he recognised a token of his early youth. It was a blind man begging by a wall, who had hardly changed since Chaplin had last seen him. He was a symbol of the stony London that never changes, to put against all the hysteria of Chaplin’s welcome. Chaplin was experiencing once more the reality of the city that inspired his art.

  He then re-entered the streets of Kennington which were for him now “another world, and yet in it I recognise something, as though in a dream.” They would have seemed smaller to him now, the change of perspective exaggerated by his time in the apparently limitless spaces of America. He saw the stone trough outside a pub where he used to wash himself. He passed a barber’s shop where he used to be the lather boy. He decided to leave the taxi and walk through the lanes and thoroughfares.

  A girl came up to him in Lambeth Walk. “Charlie, don’t you know me?” She had been a small servant girl in one of the cheap lodging houses where he had lived; she was still in the same neighbourhood, as he said, “carrying on with all the odds against her.” He discovered then that a crowd of local people was following him, keeping at a respectful distance of about five yards, and he could hear them whispering “There he is,” and “That’s ’im.”

  He began to grow concerned about the number behind him. He went up to a policeman. “Do you mind?” he said. “I find I have been discovered. I am Charlie Chaplin. Would you mind seeing me to a taxi?”

  “That’s all right, Charlie. These people won’t hurt you. They are the best people in the world. I have been with them for fifteen years.”

  They had been unwilling to disturb his solitude but, now that he had company, they became bolder. “Hello, Charlie!,” “God bless you, Charlie!,” “Good luck to you, lad!” They were no doubt proud to consider themselves part of the neighbourhood from which he had sprung. He noted that “the little cockney children circle around me to get a view from all sides.” The policeman summoned a taxi, and he was driven away. On his route back to the Ritz he passed Kennington Park, where once his mother had taken him and Sydney on a day’s escape from the workhouse. He passed Kennington Gate, where he had once arranged to meet Hetty Kelly; this was for him a poignant moment, because he had been told on his return to England that she had died. He stopped the cab and revisited the Horns public house, where as a boy he used to watch the stars of the music hall. Now he in turn was being watched, as he drank a glass of ginger beer.

  “That’s ’im. I tell you ’tis.”

  “Ah, get out! And wot would ’e be a-doing ’ere?”

  He was driven back along Kennington Road towards the bridge and glimpsed Kennington Cross, where he had once heard two street musicians playing “The Honeysuckle and the Bee.” This was for him sacred ground.

  Two or three nights later, he returned to the neighbourhood with some friends who had gathered about him in the Ritz. Once more he was absorbed in his memories. It was as if he was trying to discover the source of his identity and being. He recognised an old tomato-seller whom he had first seen about twenty years before, still standing in the same pitch; the young Chaplin used to watch him as he shouted his wares, but the tomato-man had fallen silent in these later days.

  He then took his friends to Pownall Terrace, where he had shared a room with his mother on the top floor; it was also the room in which she had first succumbed to insanity, and from which he took her to the asylum. It may also have been the room, as we have observed, on which he modelled the Tramp’s attic in The Kid. Mrs. Reynolds, a war widow who lived there at the time of Chaplin’s visit, was surprised by a knock on the door one evening. Carlyle Robinson announced Chaplin’s name and with some misgivings she opened the door to reveal, according to Robinson, “a small room illuminated by an oil lamp.” It was low and narrow, with a slanting roof, and shadows gathered in its corners. Chaplin himself seems to have been embarrassed and at a loss for words; he simply looked around the room where, as he said on the pavement after they had left, “Syd and I clung on to life with our mother.” Mrs. Reynolds asked him to come again, but of course he never returned. He had seen enough.

  Chaplin was eager to meet some of the more famous inhabitants of the city. He met J. M. Barrie at a lunch in the Garrick Club where, as he put it in My Trip Abroad, “I laugh at anything and dare not speak.” Yet he then spent a convivial evening in Barrie’s apartment. Chaplin had come to England with the ambition of meeting H. G. Wells, and soon enough had also made his acquaintance. It is not at all clear what one made of the other, and Chaplin himself seemed not to know; he wondered “if Wells wants to know me or whether he wants me to know him.” Wells also introduced him to his mistress, Rebecca West, who commented that he was “a darling … a very serious little cockney” with “a serious little soul.” Chaplin later boasted of having seduced her.

  He had also determined on meeting the author Thomas Burke, whose collection of stories Limehouse Nights seemed to him to be close to his own vision of dark London. The two men, starting off at eleven o’clock one night, spent six hours exploring the streets of East London; on two occasions, at Mile End and at Hoxton, he was recognised and a crowd surrounded him calling out “our Charlie.” Yet it seemed to Burke that Chaplin was not so much delighted at the adulation but frightened and bewildered by it. He was not Charlie at all; he had not a trace or movement of the “little fellow” about him.

  Burke was a quiet and inscrutable man, but one with great powers of observation. He believed that Chaplin “was not much interested in people, either individually or as humanity … There is nothing, I think, that he deeply cares about.” He noticed Chaplin’s extraordinary vitality and vivacity but “catch him in repose, and you will catch a drawn, weary mouth and those eyes of steel.” He compared him to a “brilliant” or gem, and added that “the bulk of him is ice.” At no point did “the metallic artist” sitting before him resemble the forlorn and futile figure of Charlie. That may have been the reason for Chaplin always referring impersonally to the Little Tramp as “he.” Burke also observed that “he is first and last an actor. He lives only in a role, and without it he is lost. As he cannot find the inner Chaplin, there is nothing for him, at grievous moments, to retire into.” Millions of words have been written on Chaplin, but perhaps none as pertinent as these.

  His wayward habits surprised some of the socialites and famous people whom he encountered
in London. One of his English friends, Edward Knoblock, who had written the screenplay of The Three Musketeers for Douglas Fairbanks, later wrote that in England “where the whole social system is run on punctuality and sense of obligation to others, his neglect of all such rules caused offence. I fear he hurt himself a great deal with many of his admirers by turning up late when he was expected, or at times not even turning up at all.”

  After spending ten days in London he took a ship to Paris where he received another tumultuous welcome. The figure of “Charlot,” as he was known, was perhaps more revered in France where the art of the mime had become a national tradition. When Chaplin visited a circus the audience became aware of his presence, and an acquaintance recalled “a high-tiered human monster, suddenly shouting Charlot! with a thousand throats.” He noted that “the police formed a phalanx about him and he was shuffled out into the Place Pigalle. But the cry Charlot! had got there first. The square, the boulevards that lead to it, turned into a magnetised mob; thousands came pouring, pushing, shouting. Men touched him; women tried to kiss him.” Eventually he and his friends made an escape in a taxi. “It’s all nothing! It’s all a joke,” he said. “It can all be explained, I tell you. It’s all—nothing.” Yet the evidence suggests that he craved the adulation of the crowd, even when he knew that it was hollow, and grew fretful when it was absent.

  From Paris he travelled by train to Berlin, a city that he found somewhat depressing. This may have in part been due to the fact that, as he put it in My Trip Abroad, “they don’t know me here. I have never been heard of. It interests me and I believe I resent it just a bit.” At the Palais Heinroth, however, he encountered Pola Negri. Negri was a Polish screen actress who played, in art and in life, the part of a femme fatale. Unfortunately she knew no English, and could say only “jazz boy Charlie.”