My Autobiography

by Charles Chaplin

  On this tour I carried my violin and ’cello. Since the age of sixteen I had practised from four to six hours a day in my bedroom. Each week I took lessons from the theatre conductor or from someone he recommended. As I played left-handed, my violin was strung left-handed with the bass bar and sounding post reversed. I had great ambitions to be a concert artist, or, failing that, to use it in a vaudeville act, but as time went on I realized that I could never achieve excellence, so I gave it up.

  In 1910 Chicago was attractive in its ugliness, grim and begrimed, a city that still had the spirit of frontier days, a thriving, heroic metropolis of ‘smoke and steel’, as Carl Sandburg says. The vast flat plains approaching it are, I imagine, similar to the Russian steppes. It had a fierce pioneer gaiety that enlivened the senses, yet underlying it throbbed masculine loneliness. Counteracting this somatic ailment was a national distraction known as the burlesque show, consisting of a coterie of rough-and-tumble comedians supported by twenty or more chorus girls. Some were pretty, others shopworn. Some of the comedians were funny, most of the shows were smutty harem comedies – coarse and cynical affairs. The atmosphere was ‘he-man’, charged with profane sex antagonism which, paradoxically, insulated the audience from any normal sex desire – their reaction was to snivel at it. Chicago was full of these shows; one called Watson’s Beef Trust had twenty enormously fat, middle-aged women displaying themselves in tights. Their combined weight went into tons, so it was advertised. Their photographs outside the theatre, showing them posing coyly, were sad and depressing.

  In Chicago we lived up-town on Wabash Avenue in a small hotel; although grim and seedy, it had a romantic appeal, for most of the burlesque girls lived there. In each town we always made a bee-line for the hotel where the show girls stayed, with a libidinous hope that never materialized. The elevated trains swept by at night and flickered on my bedroom wall like an old-fashioned bioscope. Yet I loved that hotel, though nothing adventurous ever happened there.

  One young girl, quiet and pretty, was for some reason always alone and walked with a self-conscious air. Occasionally I would pass her going in and out of the hotel lobby, but I never had the temerity to get acquainted, and I must say she gave me little encouragement.

  When we left Chicago for the coast she was on the same train; burlesque companies going west usually toured the same route we were travelling and played in the same towns. Passing through the train, I saw her talking to a member of our company. Later he came and took his seat beside me. ‘What sort of a girl is she?’ I asked.

  ‘Very sweet. Poor kid, I’m sorry for her.’

  ‘Why?’

  He leaned closer. ‘Remember the rumour going around that one of the girls in the show had syphilis? Well, that’s the one.’

  In Seattle she was obliged to leave the company and enter a hospital. We made a collection for her, all the travelling companies contributing. Poor girl, everyone knew what was the matter with her. Nevertheless, she was thankful and later rejoined her company, cured by injections of Salvarsan, a new drug at that time.

  In those days the red-light districts were rampant throughout America. Chicago was especially noted for the House of All Nations, run by the Everly sisters, two middle-aged spinsters; it was notorious for having women of every nationality. Rooms were furnished in every style and décor: Turkish, Japanese, Louis XVI, even an Arab tent. It was the most elaborate establishment in the world, and the most expensive. Millionaires, industrial tycoons, cabinet ministers, senators and judges alike were its customers. Members of a convention usually terminated their concord by taking over the whole establishment for the evening. One wealthy sybarite was known to take up his abode there for three weeks without seeing daylight.

  The further west we went the better I liked it. Looking out of the train at the vast stretches of wild land, though it was drear and sombre, filled me with promise. Space is good for the soul. It is broadening. My outlook was larger. Such cities as Cleveland, St Louis, Minneapolis, St Paul, Kansas City, Denver, Butte, Billings, throbbed with the dynamism of the future, and I was imbued with it.

  We made many friends with the members of other vaudeville companies. In each town we would get together in the red-light district, six or more of us. Sometimes we won the affection of the madam of a bordel and she would close up the ‘joint’ for the night and we would take over. Occasionally some of the girls fell for the actors and would follow them to the next town.

  The red-light district of Butte, Montana, consisted of a long street and several by-streets containing a hundred cribs in which young girls were installed ranging in age from sixteen up for one dollar. Butte boasted of having the prettiest women of any red-light district in the Middle West, and it was true. If one saw a pretty girl smartly dressed, one could rest assured she was from the red-light quarter doing her shopping. Off duty they looked neither right nor left and were most respectable. Years later I argued with Somerset Maugham about his Sadie Thompson character in the play Rain. Jeanne Eagels dressed her rather grotesquely, as I remember, with spring-side boots. I told him that no harlot in Butte, Montana, could make money if she dressed like that.

  In 1910 Butte, Montana, was still a ‘Nick Carter’ town, with miners wearing top-boots and two-gallon hats and red neckerchiefs. I actually saw gun-play in the street, a fat old sheriff shooting at the heels of an escaped prisoner, who was eventually cornered in a blind alley without harm, fortunately.

  My heart grew lighter as we travelled west: cities looked cleaner. Our route was Winnipeg, Tacoma, Seattle, Vancouver, Portland. In Winnipeg and Vancouver, audiences were essentially English and in spite of my pro-American leanings it was pleasant to play before them.

  At last California! – a paradise of sunshine, orange groves, vineyards and palm-trees stretching along the Pacific coast for a thousand miles. San Francisco, the gateway to the Orient, was a city of good food and cheap prices; the first to introduce me to frogs legs à la provençale, strawberry shortcake and avocado pears. We arrived in 1910, after the city had risen from the earthquake of 1906, or the fire, as they prefer to call it. There were still one or two cracks in the hilly streets, but little remnant of damage was left. Everything was new and bright, including my small hotel.

  We played at the Empress, owned by Sid Grauman and his father, friendly, gregarious people. It was the first time I was featured alone on a poster with no mention of Karno. And the audience, what a delight! In spite of The Wow-wows being a dull show, there were packed houses every performance and screams of laughter. Grauman said enthusiastically: ‘Any time you’re through with the Karno outfit, come back here and we’ll put on shows together.’ This enthusiasm was new to me. In San Francisco one felt the spirit of optimism and enterprise.

  Los Angeles, on the other hand, was an ugly city, hot and oppressive, and the people looked sallow and anaemic. It was a much warmer climate but had not the freshness of San Francisco; nature has endowed the north of California with resources that will endure and flourish when Hollywood has disappeared into the prehistoric tar-pits of Wilshire Boulevard.

  We finished our first tour in Salt Lake City, the home of the Mormons, which made me think of Moses leading the children of Israel. It is a gaping wide city, that seems to waver in the heat of the sun like a mirage, with wide streets that only a people who had traversed vast plains would conceive. Like the Mormons, the city is aloof austere – and so was the audience.

  After playing The Wow-wows on the Sullivan and Considine circuit, we came back to New York with the intention of returning directly to England, but Mr William Morris, who was fighting the other vaudeville trusts, gave us six weeks to play our whole repertoire at his theatre on Forty-second Street, New York City. We opened with A Night in an English Music Hall, which was a tremendous success.

  During the week a young man and his friend had a late date with a couple of girls, so to kill time they wandered into William Morris’s American Music Hall, where they happened to see our show. One remarked: ‘If
ever I become a big shot, there’s a guy I’ll sign up.’ He was referring to my performance as the drunk in A Night in an English Music Hall. At the time he was working for D. W. Griffith as a movie extra in the Biograph Company, getting five dollars a day. He was Mack Sennett, who later formed the Keystone Film Company.

  Having played a very successful six weeks’ engagement for William Morris in New York, we were again booked for another twenty weeks’ tour on the Sullivan and Considine circuit.

  I felt sad as we drew near to the end of our second tour. There were three weeks more, San Francisco, San Diego, then Salt Lake City and back to England.

  The day before leaving San Francisco, I took a stroll down Market Street and came upon a small shop with a curtained window and a sign reading: ‘Your fortune told by hands and cards – one dollar.’ I went in, slightly embarrassed, and was confronted by a plump woman of about forty who came from an inner room still chewing an interrupted meal. Perfunctorily she pointed to a small table against the wall facing the door, and without looking at me said: ‘Sit down, please,’ then she sat opposite. Her manner was abrupt. ‘Shuffle these cards and cut them three times towards me, then lay the palms of your hands upwards on the table, please.’ She turned the cards over and spread them, studied them, then looked at my hands. ‘You’re thinking about a long journey, which means you’ll be leaving the States. But you return again shortly, and will enter a new business – something different from what you’re doing at present.’ Here she hesitated and became confused. ‘Well, it’s almost the same but it’s different. I see tremendous success in this new venture; there’s an extraordinary career ahead of you, but I don’t know what it is.’ For the first time she looked up at me, then took my hand. ‘Oh yes, there’s three marriages: the first two are not successful, but you end your life happily married with three children.’ (She was wrong there!) Then she studied my hand again. ‘Yes, you will make a tremendous fortune, it’s a money-making hand.’ Then she studied my face. ‘You will die of bronchial pneumonia, at the age of eighty-two. A dollar, please. Is there any question you’d like to ask?’

  ‘No,’ I laughed, ‘I think I’ll leave well enough alone.’

  In Salt Lake City, the newspapers were full of hold-ups and bank robberies. Customers in night-clubs and cafés were being lined up against the wall and robbed by masked bandits with stockings over their faces. There were three robberies in one night and they were terrorizing the whole city.

  After the show we usually went to a nearby saloon for a drink, occasionally getting acquainted with the customers. One evening a fat, jovial round-faced man came in with two other men. The fat one, the oldest of the three, came over. ‘Aren’t you fellows playing the Empress in that English act?’

  We nodded smilingly.

  ‘I thought I recognized you! Hey, fellows! Come on over.’ He hailed his two companions and after introducing them asked us to have a drink.

  The fat one was an Englishman, although little trace of the accent was left; a man about fifty, good-natured, with small twinkling eyes and a florid face.

  As the night wore on his two friends and members of our company drifted away from us towards the bar, and I found myself alone with ‘Fat’, as his young friends called him.

  He became confidential. ‘I was back in the old country three years ago,’ he said, ‘but it ain’t the same – this here’s the place. Came here thirty years ago, a sucker, working my arse off in them Montana copperfields – then I got wise to myself. “That’s a mug’s game,” I says. Now I’ve got chumps working for me.’ He pulled out an enormous wad of bills. ‘Let’s have another drink.’

  ‘Be careful,’ I said, jokingly. ‘You might get held up!’

  He looked at me with a most evil, knowing smile, then winked. ‘Not this baby!’

  A terrifying feeling came over me after that wink. It had implied a great deal. He continued smiling, without taking his eyes from me. ‘Catch on?’ he said.

  I nodded wisely.

  Then he spoke confidentially, bringing his face close to my ear. ‘See those two guys?’ he whispered, referring to his friends. ‘That’s my outfit, two dumb clucks – no brains but plenty O’ guts.’

  I put a finger to my lips cautiously, indicating that he might be overheard.

  ‘We’re O.K., brother, we’re shipping out tonight.’ He continued: ‘Listen, we’re limeys, ain’t we – from the old smoke? I seen you at the Islington Empire many a time, falling in and out of that box.’ He grimaced. ‘That’s a tough racket, brother.’

  I laughed.

  As he grew more confidential, he wanted to make a lifelong friend of me and to know my address in New York. ‘I’ll drop you a line just for old times’ sake,’ he said. Fortunately, I never heard from him again.

  nine

  I WAS not too upset at leaving the States, for I had made up my mind to return; how or when I did not know. Nevertheless, I looked forward to returning to London and our comfortable little flat. Since I had toured the States it had become a sort of shrine.

  I had not heard from Sydney in a long time. His last letter stated that Grandfather was living in the flat. But on my arrival in London, Sydney met me at the station and told me that he had given up the flat, that he had married and was living in furnished rooms along the Brixton Road. This was a severe blow to me – to think that that cheerful little haven that had given substance to my sense of living, a pride in a home, was no more.… I was homeless. I rented a back room in the Brixton Road. It was so dismal that I resolved to return to the United States as soon as possible. That first night, London seemed as indifferent to my return as an empty slot machine when one had put a coin in it.

  As Sydney was married and working every evening, I saw little of him; but on Sunday we both went to see Mother. It was a depressing day, for she was not well. She had just got over an obstreperous phase of singing hymns, and had been confined to a padded room. The nurse had warned us of this beforehand. Sydney saw her, but I had not the courage, so I waited. He came back upset, and said that she had been given shock treatment of icy cold showers and that her face was quite blue. This made us decide to put her into a private institution – we could afford it now – so we had her transferred to the same institution in which England’s great comedian, the late Dan Leno, had been confined.

  Each day I felt more of a nondescript and completely uprooted. I suppose had I returned to our little flat, my feelings might have been different. Naturally, gloom did not completely take over. Familiarity, custom and my kinship with England were deeply moving to me after arriving from the States. It was an ideal English summer and its romantic loveliness was unlike anything I had known elsewhere.

  Mr Karno, the boss, invited me down to Tagg’s Island for a week-end on his house-boat. It was rather an elaborate affair, with mahogany panelling and state-rooms for guests. At night it was lit up with festoons of coloured lights all round the boat, gay and charming, I thought. It was a beautiful warm evening, and after dinner we sat out on the upper deck under the coloured lights with our coffee and cigarettes. This was the England that could wean me away from any country.

  Suddenly, a falsetto, foppish voice began screaming hysterically: ‘Oh, look at my lovely boat, everyone! Look at my lovely boat! And the lights! Ha! ha! ha!’ The voice went into hysterics of derisive laughter. We looked to see where the effusion came from, and saw a man in a rowing-boat, dressed in white flannels, with a lady reclining in the back seat. The ensemble was like a comic illustration from Punch. Karno leaned over the rail and gave him a very loud raspberry, but nothing deterred his hysterical laughter. ‘There is only one thing to do,’ I said: ‘to be as vulgar as he thinks we are.’ So I let out a violent flow of Rabelaisian invective, which was so embarrassing for his lady that he quickly rowed away.

  The idiot’s ridiculous outburst was not a criticism of taste, but a snobbish prejudice against what he considered lower-class ostentatiousness. He would never laugh hysterically at Buckingham Pal
ace and scream: ‘Oh, look what a big house I live in!’ or laugh at the Coronation coach. This ever-present class tabulating I felt keenly while in England. It seems that this type of Englishman is only too quick to measure the other fellow’s social inferiorities.

  Our American troupe was put to work and for fourteen weeks we played the halls around London. The show was received well and the audiences were wonderful, but all the time I was wondering if we’d ever get back to the States again. I loved England, but it was impossible for me to live there; because of my background I had a disquieting feeling of sinking back into a depressing commonplaceness. So that when news came that we were booked for another tour in the States I was elated.

  On Sunday Sydney and I saw Mother and she seemed in better health, and before Sydney left for the provinces we had supper together. On my last night in London, emotionally confused, sad, and embittered, I again walked about the West End, thinking to myself: ‘This is the last time I shall ever see these streets.’

  *

  This time we arrived via New York on the Olympic second-class. The throb of the engines slowed down, signifying that we were approaching our destiny. This time I felt at home in the States – a foreigner among foreigners, allied with the rest.

  As much as I like New York I also looked forward to the West, to greeting again those acquaintances whom I now looked upon as warm friends: the Irish bar-tender in Butte, Montana, the cordial and hospitable real estate millionaire of Minneapolis, the beautiful girl in St Paul with whom I had spent a romantic week, MacAbee, the Scottish mine-owner of Salt Lake City, the friendly dentist in Tacoma, and in San Francisco, the Graumans.

  Before going to the Pacific Coast we played around the ‘smalls’ – the small theatres around the outlying suburbs of Chicago and Philadelphia and industrial towns such as Fall River and Duluth, etc.

  As usual I lived alone. But it had its advantages, because it gave me an opportunity to improve my mind, a resolution I had held for many months but never fulfilled.