Charlie Chaplin and His Times, by Kenneth S. Lynn, Aurum Press, £25.00 in UK
At first, Charlie Chaplin made audiences laugh; then, in the mid-1920s, he turned into Charles Chaplin and wanted them to weep as well. The Little Fellow, as he liked to call himself, sloughed off the skin of the David who had outwitted the bullying Goliath in "Easy Street". Simple mirth was no longer enough. In The Circus, his heart broke as the girl he adored was wooed and won by a handsome tightrope-walker. In The Kid, he was brutally parted from the adoring and adored waif, Jackie Coogan. In The Gold Rush, when he was stood up by a dancehall girl, he dreamt of amusing her with the great Dance of the Rolls - two bread rolls impaled on table-forks.
Perhaps the pinnacle of his career came in the final moments of City Lights, made in 1931 with music and effects, but without speech. The little tramp has been the secret benefactor of a blind flower-seller, and for her sake has gone to prison. He is released with his street-wise resilience gone. Walking the pavements, he espies the girl; and now, thanks to him, her sight has been restored and she owns a flower shop. On seeing the tramp's adoration, she exclaims, lightly: "I've made a conquest!" She gives him a flower, and the contact of their hands tells her that her Prince Charming is this ragged tramp. "You can see now?" he says. "Yes, I can see now," she replies, meaning it in a double sense. On his face, seen in close-up, there is a combination of both joy and a fear of either her pity or revulsion. As the screen fades to black, it is one of the most heart-rending images of cinema. It vindicates Chaplin's rejection of pictures that talked. It transcends his refusal to move with the times in other respects as well. He clung to a maudlin Victorian sentimentality, and even his feature films had a cheesy look. His camera seemed to be nailed to the studio floor; and his lighting was flat, without any nuance which might distract attention from Chaplin the performer.
Nowadays it is fashionable to regard him as not so good as Buster Keaton. The Great Stone Face was a blank page on which it was up to us to sketch in the emotions. One remembers "Seven Chances", when Buster is being chased by hundreds of women in their bridal dresses, all determined to have a share in his imminent millions. As he flees down a mountainside, he dislodges a stone, and now, as well as having the Furies at his heels, he is being pursued by an avalanche of boulders. His threshing legs and piston-like arms are a blur; his face alone is frozen, expressionless. Unlike Chaplin, Buster never led us by the nose or told us when or for whatever reason to get the handkerchiefs out.
Kenneth S. Lynn's admirable biography is surely, or at least deserves to be, the final word. In 1964, Chaplin gave the world My Autobiography (the pronoun has to be a solecism); and instead of literacy he gives us a voyage through his thesaurus. We read: ". . . a big handsome young woman of twenty-two, well-built, with upper regional domes immensely expansive". And: "Were I addicted to cacoethes scribendi I should go into pages of rhetorical rapture extolling the beauties of Vienna. Therefore I shall spare you all too suffering readers any conscious pleonasms on my part." Even worse is the smokescreen with which he obscured his beginnings in the slums of Kennington. Dr Lynn has done a Herculean job of detection.
Charlie's mother was Hannah Hill Chaplin, a music hall performer. She was living apart from her husband, Charles Chaplin, Senior, when her son was born, and he may not have been the child's natural father. He died in 1891 from cirrhosis, and by then Hannah had been adjudged insane and committed to the London County Asylum. It was not until 1921, in California, that mother and son were reunited.
Chaplin's early career is well-documented. He began by dancing in the streets for pennies. The manager of a troupe known as the Eight Lancashire Lads took him in hand, and in time he played the pageboy, Billy, in the William Gillette version of Sherlock Holmes. He visited America twice with Fred Karno's vaudeville company and was brought to Hollywood by Mack Sennett, born Mikall Sinnott. The tramp persona was devised for a six-minute piece of cinema-verite called Kid Auto Races at Venice. The auto races were real enough, and Charlie's role was to make a nuisance of himself by interfering with a bogus camera crew. That was in 1914, and within three years he had quite literally become the most famous person on earth. He was a superb mime. He was audacious; his tramp was usually down, but never out; his cunning was a match for such towering bullies as Bud Jamison, Mack Swain and Eric Campbell. Audiences reasoned that, if Charlie could emerge victorious, so could they.
"When you make a star," the producer Sam Spiegel declared after working with a certain Leeds-born Irishman in Lawrence of Arabia, "you make a monster." The world's great and near-great came to worship at Chaplin's altar, and his egomania was awesome. Merely to find himself unrecognised in public was enough to evoke a paroxysm of rage. His frequent cruelty did not wane with age. When a cat scratched him during the shooting of Monsieur Verdoux, he did not have the animal replaced; instead, he had it killed and stuffed and played the scene with the corpse on his lap.
Sexually, he was a Svengali, drawn to partners who were young and virginal, and he became entrapped in two shotgun weddings, to Mildred Harris and Lita Grey, both in their mid-teens. He made a star of his mistress Paulette Goddard in Modern Times, which was the Tramp's last appearance. Still, he did not speak, but at one point sang in a kind of wonderful gibberish that might have passed for Esperanto. At the end, homeless once again, he and the "gamin" - which was how he insisted on describing his heroine, in spite of being told that the word was masculine - went walking hand in hand into the sunset. If there was a falling off after City Lights, the public's idolatry was unabated. He espoused communism and, in the belief that propaganda could be art as well, made The Great Dictator, which attacked Hitler, but carefully made no mention of Stalin. Chaplin was now talking at last, and it was diarrhoeal. In a prim, hectoring, pontificating voice, he put the world to rights. His Jewish barber, mistaken for the dictator, Adenoid Hynkel, does not urge that tyranny should be met and overthrown; instead, he drivels on about the soul of man "flying into the rainbow - into the light of hope - into the future, into the glorious future that belongs to you - to me - and to all of us." The speech became Chaplin's party piece, and in January 1941 the Daughters of the America Revolution invited him to deliver it during the presidential inaugural celebrations. He had never been so popular. Then, to use the title of one of his greatest two-reelers, he discovered that Easy Street was littered with banana skins.
The good news was that he had wooed and won the 17-year-old Oona O'Neill, whose estranged playwright father looked upon Chaplin, who was more than thrice his daughter's age, as the latest manifestation of the Curse of the O'Neills. The bad news was a paternity suit brought by an ex-protegee named Joan Barry. A blood test, had it been admissible as evidence, would have cleared him - of fatherhood at any rate - but it hardly mattered. A mountain of dirty linen had been publicly laundered, and to the world at large, it was as if the loveable, tatterdemalion tramp had vanished, to be replaced by a smug, middle-aged voluptuary, who had strutted naked in front of his young victim, saying "I look something like Peter Pan, don't you think?"
His troubles came not single spies. The hero of his new film, Monsieur Verdoux, went to the guillotine arguing that if a million deaths in wars are acceptable to society, it was illogical to blame a fellow for disposing of a mere score of wealthy widows. It was his first outright flop, and a subsequent press conference, nailing him as a fellow traveller, was more like a HUAC interrogation. Politically, as well as morally, Chaplin was a villain. Later, he made Limelight, and when he went to the London premiere with his wife Oona and their young family, he was barred from re-entering the US on the grounds of "moral turpitude".
The rest is twilight. He settled in Switzerland and made two final and quite dreadful films, A King in New York and A Countess from Hong Kong. In old age, he received a double coup de grace, as if he were a dying horse being put out of its misery. The British gave him a knighthood, and the Americans gave him an Oscar.
During a dinner at the Chaplin's Vevey home many years ago, this reviewer listened to the near-gaga Sir Charles rambling on, and silently recalled a story which does not appear in this careful, literate and always absorbing biography. It concerns a fan who wrote to Charlie once a week, every week, for more than ten years. There was never a whisper of a reply, and so, discouraged, the fan eventually gave up. Another decade passed, and one evening at a Hollywood premiere he saw Chaplin in the flesh. He came forward and introduced himself. The comedian's face lit up.
"You?" he said. "I've often thought about you. Why did you stop writing.?"
Hugh Leonard is a playwright