Charlie Chaplin

• 1. Introduction

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  Charlie Chaplin was sent to a workhouse twice before the age of nine. By 14, he had taken his own mother to an infirmary, watched her return to a mental asylum, and slept rough in the streets of London while searching for food. Within a few short years, the same boy would be earning $670,000 a year and standing among the highest-paid people on earth. His authorised biographer David Robinson called his rise the most dramatic of all the rags to riches stories ever told. The figure at the centre of it was Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin Jr., born on the 16th of April 1889, an English comic actor, filmmaker, singer, editor and composer. How did a child of Victorian poverty invent a little man in a baggy suit who became familiar in almost every country? Why did the United States, which made him rich, eventually force him out? And what kind of man sat alone in a studio for fifteen months chasing a single film? These questions run through a career that spanned more than 75 years, from his childhood until a year before his death in 1977.

• 2. A Child Of The Workhouse

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  Hannah Chaplin had no income beyond occasional nursing and dressmaking, and Charles Sr. gave the family no support. When the situation collapsed, the seven-year-old Charlie was sent to Lambeth Workhouse, then housed at the Central London District School for paupers, a place he remembered as a forlorn existence. In July 1898, Hannah was forced to readmit the family to the workhouse, and the boys were moved on to Norwood Schools, another institution for destitute children. In September 1898, Hannah was committed to Cane Hill mental asylum, suffering psychosis seemingly brought on by an infection of syphilis and malnutrition. During her two-month stay, Charlie and his brother Sydney were sent to live with a father they scarcely knew. Charles Sr. was by then severely alcoholic, and conditions were poor enough to bring a visit from the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Two years later, the father died, aged 38, from cirrhosis of the liver. Hannah's illness recurred in March 1905 and became permanent. There was nothing we could do but accept poor mother's fate, Chaplin later wrote. She remained in care until her death in 1928, the same span of years in which her son would build an empire.

• 3. From Music Hall To America

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  At the age of five, Charlie made his first amateur appearance, taking over one night in Aldershot from his mother. She imbued me with the feeling that I had some sort of talent, he later wrote of her encouragement. Through his father's connections, he joined the Eight Lancashire Lads clog-dancing troupe and toured English music halls through 1899 and 1900. By 13 he had abandoned school. At 14 he registered with a theatrical agency in London's West End and won his first role as a newsboy in Harry Arthur Saintsbury's Jim, a Romance of Cockayne. The show closed after two weeks, but his comic performance was singled out for praise. Saintsbury then secured him the part of Billy the pageboy in Charles Frohman's production of Sherlock Holmes, which he played alongside William Gillette, the original Holmes. It was like tidings from heaven, Chaplin recalled. The decisive turn came through his brother. Sydney had joined Fred Karno's prestigious comedy company and, in February 1908, secured a two-week trial for his younger brother. Karno first judged the teenager a pale, puny, sullen-looking youngster who looked much too shy to do any good in the theatre. Within a year Chaplin was taking starring roles, and Karno sent him to tour North America's vaudeville circuit in a company that also included Stan Laurel. His most successful turn was a drunk called the Inebriate Swell. While six months into a second American tour, an invitation arrived that would carry him into films.

• 4. The Birth Of The Tramp

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  The Keystone comedies struck Chaplin as a crude mélange of rough and rumble, yet he signed a $150-per-week contract in September 1913 and began work at the studio on the 5th of January 1914. His boss, Mack Sennett, worried that the 24-year-old looked too young. For his second film, Chaplin chose the costume that would define him. I wanted everything to be a contradiction, he wrote: the pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small and the shoes large. He added a small moustache to add age without hiding his expression. The moment I was dressed, the clothes and the makeup made me feel the person he was, he recalled. The character debuted to audiences in Kid Auto Races at Venice, released on the 7th of February 1914. He credited the hobo comic strip Weary Willie and Tired Tim, from the London magazine Illustrated Chips, as a childhood influence. When his directors dismissed his ideas, Chaplin promised to pay $1,500 if his own directorial effort failed. Caught in the Rain, issued on the 4th of May 1914, succeeded, and thereafter he directed almost every short he appeared in, at roughly one per week. By 1915 he was a cultural phenomenon. A journalist for Motion Picture wrote that Chaplinitis had spread across America, and a poll in Pictures and the Picturegoer crowned him with 142,920 votes as the greatest British film actor.

• 5. The Price Of A Genius

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  When the Essanay contract ended in December 1915, Chaplin demanded a $150,000 signing bonus. The Mutual Film Corporation offered $10,000 a week, a deal that amounted to $670,000 a year and made him, at 26, one of the highest-paid people in the world. Studio president John R. Freuler explained the figure plainly: we can afford to pay Mr. Chaplin this large sum annually because the public wants Chaplin and will pay for him. The desire for independence drove him further. In June 1917 he signed to make eight films for First National in return for $1 million, and built his own studio on five acres off Sunset Boulevard. In January 1919, frustrated with the studio's lack of concern for quality, he joined Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D. W. Griffith to form United Artists, an arrangement that let four creative artists fund their pictures and keep complete control. That independence shaped how he worked. He shot 53 takes for every finished take in The Kid, and for the 20-minute short The Immigrant he exposed 40,000 feet of film, enough for a feature. His friend Ivor Montagu said nothing but perfection would be right for him. The film historian Andrew Sarris identified Chaplin as one of the first auteur filmmakers, a man who personally wrote, directed, produced, edited and scored his pictures, even acting out every role for his cast and expecting them to imitate him exactly.

• 6. Defying The Talkies

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  By the time The Circus was released in January 1928, Hollywood had embraced sound, and Chaplin was cynical about it. He feared that giving the Tramp a voice would limit his international appeal, and believed talkies lacked the artistry of silent film. So he made City Lights without dialogue, following the Tramp's love for a blind flower girl and his efforts to fund her sight-saving operation. The production lasted 21 months, with Chaplin confessing he had worked himself into a neurotic state of wanting perfection. Released in January 1931, it grossed over $3 million and became his personal favourite, the film the critic James Agee praised for the greatest piece of acting and the highest moment in movies. The fear of being old-fashioned drove his next stand. Modern Times, announced as a satire on certain phases of our industrial life, again used sound effects but almost no speaking. Only a gibberish song gave the Tramp a voice on film. The earlier Gold Rush had shown how far his ambition reached. Inspired by a photograph of the 1898 Klondike Gold Rush and the story of the Donner Party, he filmed for 15 months, costing almost $1 million, with location shooting in the Truckee mountains and 600 extras. It earned a U.S. box-office of $5 million. This is the picture that I want to be remembered by, he said.

• 7. Scandal And Exile

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  The 1940s brought a series of controversies that severely affected Chaplin's popularity in the United States. His resemblance to Adolf Hitler supplied the plot for The Great Dictator. The two men were born four days apart, both had risen from poverty, and Hitler wore the same moustache style. Hitler must be laughed at, Chaplin wrote. Released in October 1940, the film closed with a five-minute speech in which he abandoned his character and pleaded directly against war and fascism. Charles J. Maland identified that overt preaching as the trigger for a decline, after which no movie fan could separate politics from his star image. Personal trouble deepened the fall. An affair with the aspiring actress Joan Barry led to a paternity suit, and J. Edgar Hoover, long suspicious of Chaplin's politics, named him in four indictments, including an alleged violation of the Mann Act that carried a possible 23-year sentence. He was acquitted in April 1944, yet a later court declared him the father of Barry's child despite blood tests indicating otherwise. Two weeks after the suit was filed, he married 18-year-old Oona O'Neill, daughter of playwright Eugene O'Neill, calling it the happiest event of his life. Accused of communist sympathies and unwilling to stay quiet, Chaplin sailed for the London premiere of Limelight on the 18th of September 1952. The next day, Attorney General James P. McGranery revoked his re-entry permit. He chose to cut his ties with the United States and settled at Manoir de Ban, an estate overlooking Lake Geneva.

• 8. America Makes Amends

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  In July 1962, the New York Times argued in an editorial that the Republic would not be in danger if yesterday's unforgotten little tramp were allowed to amble down the gangplank of a steamer in an American port. The same month, Oxford and Durham invested Chaplin with the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters. In November 1963, the Plaza Theater in New York ran a year-long series of his films to excellent reviews. His 500-page memoir, My Autobiography, became a worldwide best-seller in September 1964. The reconciliation reached its height in 1972. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences offered him an Honorary Award, which Robinson saw as a sign that America wanted to make amends. Hesitant at first, Chaplin returned to the United States for the first time in 20 years and received a 12-minute standing ovation, the longest in the academy's history, for the incalculable effect he has had in making motion pictures the art form of this century. In the 1975 New Year Honours, Queen Elizabeth II awarded him a knighthood, which he received in his wheelchair because he was too weak to kneel. He died at home in the early morning of Christmas Day 1977, aged 88, after a stroke in his sleep. The private Anglican funeral came two days later. Yet his story did not quite end there. On the 1st of March 1978, Roman Wardas and Gantcho Ganev dug up and stole his coffin, holding the body for ransom from his widow until police recovered it from a field in the village of Noville and re-interred it in a reinforced concrete vault.