Charlie Chaplin Read online

  6

  The Eternal Imp

  Chaplin left the Keystone studios on a Saturday night in December, after cutting his last film, without bidding farewell to any of his erstwhile colleagues; he spent Sunday in his room at the Los Angeles Athletic Club and on the following day he turned up for work at the Essanay Studios in Niles, California. Of course everyone at Keystone knew about his imminent departure, but he could not bring himself to make a speech or shake hands. He just left. Sennett said later that “as for Charles Spencer Chaplin, I am not at all sure that we know him.” He had never really been part of the team; he would never become a member of any group.

  At the beginning of the negotiations for his future Chaplin had demanded $1,000 a week from Keystone; when Sennett argued that even he did not command such a salary, Chaplin pointed out that it was the name of Chaplin rather than Sennett that sold the films. He was then approached by the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company of Chicago. The “S” and the “A” were George Spoor and Max Anderson; Spoor was a cinema exhibitor and distributor, while Anderson as “Broncho Billy” had become the first cowboy star in cinematic history.

  Anderson had become acquainted with rumours about the young comedian’s very large demands. Unlike Spoor, he was an actor rather than a businessman. He was well aware of the Englishman’s enormous popularity. He may have fastened to the principle that, if he thinks he is worth that kind of money, we might as well give it to him. So through an intermediary he offered Chaplin $1,250 dollars a week with a bonus of $10,000 on signing the agreement. Unfortunately he neglected to tell his business partner of the arrangement, while Spoor did not in any case believe that Chaplin was worth that much. For his part Chaplin wanted the fresh start that Essanay could provide him. Anderson offered him larger budgets and less exacting deadlines; Chaplin would be able to cut his production by a half, and still earn more money than ever before. Every film would be designated as “Essanay–Chaplin Brand.”

  On that Monday morning Anderson brought him by car to Niles Studios, an hour’s drive from San Francisco, where the “Broncho Billy” films were made. Chaplin did not like what he saw. The studio itself was situated in a large field, with a glass roof that kept the interior unnaturally hot and stuffy. It was soon decided that Anderson and his new employee would make their way to the less cramped headquarters of Essanay in Chicago.

  On his first week in the city Chaplin was tracked down by a reporter who noted that “during his first few days in the Windy City … Charlie was wanted here and Charlie was wanted there, from the time he arrived in the morning until he left at night.” Chaplin did remain in one place for long enough, however, to grant an interview in which he stated that critics did not realise that film-makers “do things on the spur of the moment and that our minds are under a constant strain, for we must concentrate on our work from morning till night.”

  The studio itself was in the industrial area of the city, and had once been a warehouse; he soon discovered that it had taken its tone from its surroundings and was run like a business. At six o’clock, whatever the state of the proceedings, the lights were turned off. He also discovered that little had been done to prepare for his arrival. The manager told him that he would find his script in the scenario department. This was the last thing he wanted to hear. He wrote his own scripts.

  Eventually he met George Spoor who was still distinctly unenthusiastic about his new acquisition, and refrained from paying the bonus for as long as he could. So Spoor arranged an experiment to test the young comedian’s true popularity. He paid a bellboy in a Chicago hotel to “page” Chaplin. As the boy proceeded to shout out “Call for Mr. Chaplin” a large crowd gathered in anticipation. Chaplin used to tell the story, but it is not necessarily accurate. In his autobiography he also professed not to know the extent of his fame in this period. His recollections are generally unreliable. Whatever the truth of the matter, Spoor realised the worth of his investment when the first of Chaplin’s new films had an advance sale of sixty-five copies. By the time filming was completed 130 copies had been ordered. This was unprecedented.

  Chaplin made only one film in Chicago. He had left behind his old costume at Keystone, but it did not take him long to recreate the essential wardrobe of the “little fellow.” He arrived on set in full dress, bowler and cane; it is reported that he then stopped and, in front of a crowded set of stagehands and spectators, proceeded to perform a clog dance like the one he had perfected with the Lancashire Lads. One observer noted that “they didn’t know whether he was crazy or doing it just for their amusement.” And then he shouted out, “I’m ready!” So filming began.

  His presence behind the camera soon became as prominent as his performance itself. He was always shouting encouragement, or whispering instructions. As one of the actresses, Gloria Swanson, recalled, “he kept laughing and making his eyes twinkle, and talking in a light, gentle voice, and encouraging me to let myself go and be silly.” Ben Turpin, the Essanay veteran with the famously crossed eyes, remembered Chaplin’s instructions rather differently. “Do this, do not do that, look that way, walk like this, now do it over.” Turpin and Chaplin only worked together in three films.

  His New Job is set in the film studio of “Lockstone,” very much like that of Keystone, where he plays the role of a stagehand unexpectedly promoted to the part of the “leading man” with predictable results. It does not represent any noticeable advance on his previous work, although one reviewer came to the conclusion that Charlie was somehow a little “nicer” than before. It is hard to see any evidence for this. He is still the mischief-maker and eternal imp of the perverse, complete with kicks and punches; instinctively he hits, bites and slaps everyone and everything in sight. For inexplicable reasons Charlie wants to take revenge on the whole world. Chaplin himself said soon after its release that “it is the very best comedy I have ever produced … the greatest comedy of my life. I couldn’t help laughing when I saw it on the screen.”

  His popularity could not in any case be assailed, and in February 1915 Photoplay concluded that “the art of Charles Chaplin defies analysis, and disarms the critic”; the journalist noticed one element in the growing subtlety or complexity of his performance, however, in the observation that he “remains emotionless, and even absent-minded, in the very midst of his maddest escapades.” The same reporter interviewed the young man about his past, and stated that he had tried to reproduce “exactly what he said in the way he said it.”

  Among other comments Chaplin spoke of his “highly cultivated” mother. “That was in England,” he said, “she died there.” He added that, after her death, “I was apprentice to a company of travelling acrobats, jugglers and show-people” and that “I have never had a home worth the name.” This was perhaps less than fair to his mother, who was still very much alive in Peckham House hospital, but perhaps it suited his mood at the time. The two brothers had neglected to pay the costs of her care, however, and three months after the interview the Peckham hospital threatened to return Hannah Chaplin to Cane Hill asylum; it seems that another relation came to her rescue, and was eventually reimbursed by the Chaplin brothers.

  Chaplin did not like the headquarters of Essanay. It had the atmosphere of a bank. The staff were not to his liking, and he was still not happy with Spoor. He completed His New Job on 12 January 1915, and six days later returned to Niles Studios for the more congenial company of Max Anderson, who had implicit faith in his art. He breathed more easily, and his invention grew more rapidly, in California; it was still for him the land of the future, the furthest extension of the western world, a place of infinite promise where anything could be achieved. He was established in the state for almost forty years. Niles itself was a junction point of the Southern Pacific Railroad, with twenty-four passenger trains stopping each day to disgorge businessmen and commercial travellers; the photographs of the period show it to be a town of wide and dusty streets lined with two-storey wooden shops and dwellings. The studio itself stood at the
western mouth of the Niles Canyon, in which setting many of the “Broncho Billy” items were filmed.

  Niles Studios offered Chaplin only an austere welcome. He was given one room in a bungalow that he shared with Anderson; it consisted of an iron bed, together with a rickety table and chair, and a filthy bathroom. It was noticed, by those who greeted him at the studio, that he brought with him in a cheap canvas bag “a pair of socks with the heels worn out and an old couple of dirty undershirts,” together with a worn-down toothbrush. He was still in part a child of South London.

  Under the terms of his new contract Chaplin could complete a film in three weeks rather than three days, without the manager of the studio endlessly hurrying him on, and for the first time he had the luxury of allowing his comic ideas to develop. Chaplin still needed to find a leading lady, on the model of Mabel Normand at Keystone. So on the day after his arrival he placed an advertisement in the San Francisco Chronicle that read “WANTED—THE PRETTIEST GIRL IN CALIFORNIA to take part in a moving picture.” Three girls arrived at the Niles Belvoir Hotel some days later, among them Miss Edna Purviance (to be pronounced as in “reliance”). That is one story of her discovery. Another anecdote suggests that one of the cowboys in the “Broncho Billy” series remembered a blonde secretary from San Francisco; Chaplin duly interviewed her. It is also possible that he met her at a reception in Los Angeles in 1914. In any event she was pretty and blonde; she was about Chaplin’s height, at five feet four inches, and she had a full figure; he soon realised that she also had a sense of fun, and a natural warmth that might project itself upon the screen. And so he asked her to join him.

  “Why not?” she replied. “I’ll try anything once.” She was nineteen years old and had no experience of making films, but that was for Chaplin no disadvantage. Rollie Totheroh, one of the cameramen at Niles, recalled that he preferred working with actresses “who didn’t know their ass from their elbow.” Chaplin liked to mould the clay into the shape he most desired. Soon enough he and Edna Purviance played more than screen partners. She moved into a hotel close to his bungalow and they dined together most evenings. She seems to have been as undemanding as she was unpretentious, much better than any other of his lovers at coping with his anxieties and unpredictable moods. He said later that they were inseparable companions and for a while they even contemplated marriage but hesitated on the brink.

  Edna Purviance took a part in his second film for Essanay, A Night Out. “After the first day in front of the camera,” she recalled, “I came to the conclusion that I was the biggest boob on earth.” Yet she added that “Charlie was very patient with me.” It was soon clear that she possessed a more innocent and less boisterous presence than Mabel Normand, and so her role as Charlie’s heroine was a more subtle and delicate one. She was his leading lady for the next eight years in some thirty-four films.

  In A Night Out Chaplin used Ben Turpin in the routine known as “the funny drunks.” It is reported that they were so successful, while filming at the Hotel Oakland in Oakland, California, that they were almost arrested and charged with public intoxication. Chaplin swayed and staggered through a pantomime of inebriation that was always an instant success with the cinema audience.

  He had already made a career out of drunkenness, perhaps in imitation of his supposed father or of the many inebriates of South London. On some occasions his simple needs and desires are thwarted by an apparently malicious world. Objects become animate. Nothing works. Nothing fits. Doors close suddenly. This is a world of brutality, lust and violence. Chaplin manages a lecherous grin, or puts on a false smile. He is the spirit of London.

  On other occasions the drunk inhabits a liquid and unstable world where fantasy and reality are wholly mingled, and where a pleasant state of security or unawareness promotes the atmosphere of dream. It is the perfect context for the way in which Chaplin manipulates real objects for his own ends—by turning a cigarette into a key, for example, or a ladle into a ukelele—while at the same time violating all laws of social intercourse. Chaplin is engaged in wholly irrational behaviour in a wholly reasonable way.

  He had gone for the weekend to San Francisco on completing A Night Out but, on his unexpected return, he came upon Anderson and one of the cameramen busily cutting and editing the negative. He told them to take their hands off his film. The cameraman at Niles, who had incurred Chaplin’s wrath, was Rollie Totheroh. The confrontation was soon over, and amity prevailed. Rollie and Chaplin in fact soon understood each other so well that Totheroh became his principal cameraman for thirty-eight years.

  At the beginning of March 1915, Chaplin addressed a letter to “My Own Darling Edna” in which he praised her as the sum and source of his happiness. In The Champion, the Essanay picture he was then making, Charlie is about to kiss Edna on camera for the first time; at the salient moment, however, he holds up a large mug of beer to mask their embrace. The public must be kept away. Yet his real partner in this film is a bulldog, Spike, with whom at the beginning he shares a hot dog; he is shown, in the words of the storyboard of the title, “meditating on the world’s ingratitude.” The offer of the hot dog is the first act of altruism to be seen from Charlie; the dog, after all, can give nothing back except a training in kindness. Thus were created the traces of the lovable tramp who would one day come to dominate the films. Love my dog, and therefore love me. He was experimenting with the depth and complexity of his characterisation while at the same time he was refining the subtlety and development of the comedy itself.

  The Champion concerns an amateur boxing championship that Charlie wins by sheer bravado and balletic skill. The choreography of the fight was of course devised and rehearsed in exquisite detail. He seems to embody pure athleticism, despite the spareness of his build; in the world of oversized and overactive cartoon characters that populate this boxing ambience, he is a miracle of understatement.

  Chaplin himself was devoted to boxing, at least as a spectator sport. He enjoyed the company of famous boxers, and was filmed theatrically sparring with them in the grounds of his studio. He would go to local matches with his colleagues, and was well known to the amateur boxers in the ring who would call out to him. It is also reported that he sometimes acted as a “second” at the fights.

  For his next two films at Essanay, In the Park and A Jitney Elopement, he took advantage of the Californian landscape. The first of them is more or less what its name implies, a quickly completed one-reeler concerning lovers, policemen, thieves and the “little fellow.” He had spent so much time rehearsing and supervising the fight sequences in The Champion that he was obliged to return to the efficient formulas of Keystone for the subsequent picture.

  Picture postcard showing Chaplin with the bulldog from The Champion, 1915.

  Charlie has more poise and dash than in the Keystone comedies, however, and it is easy to understand his immense and growing popularity. Did you see what he did? What is he going to do next? His was a completely different kind of character, and the early audiences were mesmerised by his originality. They had never seen anything like it before. One reviewer of the film wrote that “there seem to be no grey patches in his work. It is all one long scarlet scream.”

  At the beginning of A Jitney Elopement Charlie is seen clutching a flower; this would become one of his favourite images, worked up over and over again in various situations, in which the blossom represents beauty and transience, sweetness and loss. In this film he impersonates Count Chloride de Lime in order to rescue Edna from the attentions of the real count; it ends in a motor-car chase along the Californian roads. The “jitney” was a slang term for the Model T Ford.

  It caters to the taste of the early audiences for speed and motion, but it neatly supplements a story of drama and character as well as broad comedy. Charlie’s assumption of the part of the count is very dexterous; he commits many notable social gaffes without betraying any embarrassment. He is the master of the situation until the real count arrives unexpectedly; it is an exercise in subtle
ty rather than in slapstick. It might even be said that from this time forward Charlie himself, the “little fellow,” always possesses an aristocratic air; he is sometimes aloof, sometimes condescending; he can be haughty with those who trample on his dignity. He is fastidious, even persnickety. He is decidedly superior to those around him.

  Chaplin had been monopolising the studio facilities at Niles Studios, already overstretched by his constant demands and recriminations; he disliked what he called its “backwoods atmosphere.” So it was eventually agreed that he should rent his own space. By the beginning of April 1915, he had taken over the converted Bradbury Mansion on North Hill Street in San Francisco with his crew and cast, from where eventually he moved to the Majestic studios in Los Angeles.

  A farm in California became the setting for the film that has been described as the apotheosis of Chaplin’s early style. In The Tramp Charlie becomes the “little fellow” with a heart made to be broken, the tramp with impossibly romantic pretensions. Having saved Edna from the attentions of a gang of thieves, he is taken by her to her father’s farm where he is offered work. He is injured by an attack on the farm by the same thieves, and is wounded in the subsequent fight. He is now a small-time hero, but he mistakes Edna’s admiration for love. This proves to be the source of his distress.

  Chaplin knew or sensed that this film would be a defining moment in his career, and he wanted to bring it as close to perfection as he could manage. Some sequences were repeated forty or fifty times. One of the performers told Stan Laurel at a later date that “they repeated some gags until the actors felt that if they did it one more time they’d blow their corks.” But Chaplin was relentless until he got it right.

  The Tramp ends with what would become the most famous exit in cinematic history; he walks dejectedly away from the camera down a dusty country road. Then happiness suddenly breaks through: he perks up and shakes himself before jauntily going on his way. His little dance upon the road is a form of self-definition. He is free. He is essentially alone but he will never truly be lonely because he is infinitely resourceful. He is self-defined, self-aware and perhaps self-absorbed. He has the will to live in a world that may not be worth living in. The open road is an important conclusion to him; it implies an endless journey, with the Tramp implicitly in the role of Everyman. That is why Charlie was compared to Don Quixote or Sir Galahad, Huckleberry Finn or Hamlet.