I once stood in front of Charlie Chaplin’s home on the banks of Lake Geneva in Switzerland for almost an hour, trying to work up the courage to knock on his door. We had never met. But we were not strangers.
Charlie had written the music for the theme and score of his extraordinary 1936 film Modern Times. John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons added lyrics to the tune in 1954, and it became the song we now know as “Smile.”
I was lucky enough to record the song in 1959. Some of my fans consider it one of my best. I loved Charlie’s smooth, swelling melody (he said it was inspired by Puccini’s Tosca) and the lyrics that fit so beautifully:
Hide every trace of sadness
Although a tear may be ever so near . . .
A few months after the song climbed up the charts, I got a package from Switzerland. Charlie Chaplin had sent me the last ten minutes of Modern Times, in which he first used the song.
I was overwhelmed. There is no artist I have admired more than Charlie Chaplin. The breadth of his contributions is just staggering—as an actor, composer, director, producer, screenwriter—and a tramp, a clown, and a prince in what can be a demanding and seamy business.
I’ve read widely and deeply about Chaplin, searching through his life for clues about what sparked his genius.
Charlie had a childhood that could have been out of a Depression-era movie. His mother and father were music hall performers, his mother a chorine and his father a singer. But Charlie’s father, Charles, Sr., left his family by the time Charlie was two and gave them no support. His mother, Hannah, had to scrounge for a living by taking on odd jobs, and Charlie and his brother, Sydney, who was four years older, were sent to the Central London District School for paupers. Charlie Chaplin was seven years old. Seven years old.
By the time Charlie was ten, Hannah had to go into a sanitarium. She had developed a mental illness that might have been aggravated by syphilis and certainly by malnutrition. Charlie and Sydney had outgrown the workhouse and were sent to live with their father. Charles, Sr., barely knew his sons and didn’t care to know them. He was usually drunk and often cruel. He thrashed his sons. It is not really unkind to say that Charles, Sr., did his sons a service by dying at the age of thirty-eight from cirrhosis of the liver.
Sydney Chaplin had joined the Royal Navy at the age of fifteen, as soon as he could lie persuasively enough to convince the recruiters that he was old enough to enlist. He wanted to see the world, but mostly he wanted to get away. Charlie dropped out of school at the age of fourteen to try to care for his mother, who was in and out of the sanitarium. He often slept on the street and scrounged for food in alleys. But he had already begun to nurse dreams of a life in show business, and the manager of a theatrical agency in the West End must have seen something in the soiled, scruffy street kid who showed up at his office. I’ve sometimes wondered if I would have seen that spark, too.
Charlie got cast as a newsboy in a show that closed after two weeks. But he left enough of an impression that he was soon picked as a page boy in a production of Sherlock Holmes that wound up touring Great Britain and returning to the West End. The man who would become world famous as Charlie Chaplin had a role in a London hit by the time he was sixteen.
Sydney Chaplin (who would later become his brother’s manager) had come out of the Royal Navy and began to tour in comedy sketches with his brother. It was Sydney Chaplin who was actually first signed for Fred Karno’s prestigious music hall revue.
I think that Fred Karno’s name is often a little overlooked in show business history. But early cinema, Charlie Chaplin, Hal Roach Studios, and Stan Laurel in particular were influenced by this great British comedy producer. Fred Karno may be the man who invented slapstick comedy, including cream pies in the face. Now, isn’t that a contribution to culture?
Fred’s broad, physical jokes reached the back of the house in the days before microphones. They were also a way of working around blue codes and censorship. How do you censor a performer who just pats his pants and rolls his eyes?
Sydney persuaded Karno to take on his younger brother for a couple of weeks. Fred was not enthusiastic. I’ve read that he thought young Charlie looked “pale, puny, and sullen-looking.” But he could also see that he blossomed under the stage lights, and by the time Charlie was nineteen, he was playing the lead in Karno’s sketch comedy revues.
Karno was preparing a troupe to tour North America. He made Charlie the headliner. Charlie blossomed under the new attention. He did a pantomime drunk act called “The Inebriate Swell,” which drew rave reviews for his skilled physical comedy and use of silence, with his penguin walk, twitching lips, and swan dives onto the stage. It’s hard for me not to think, though, that the sketch was also Charlie’s way of turning his father’s drunken flops and dives into a source of laughter, not misery. He turned painful memories into pratfalls.
The tour lasted twenty-one months and ranged all over the United States and Canada by train. By the time the Fred Karno troupe returned to the United Kingdom in the summer of 1912, neither Charlie, the United States, nor comedy would be the same. Charlie began a new US tour as soon as he could, in the fall of 1913.
Just a few months through his second American tour, Charlie was wooed to make pictures at Keystone Studios. Keystone wanted a new star. And Charlie, as he said, wanted a new life. I think that’s why he got into show business in the first place. All of us who make a life onstage can understand that.
He began his career in a new medium with a mostly forgettable little 1914 film called Kid Auto Races at Venice (California, not Italy). Charlie plays a spectator at a kiddie auto race who keeps getting in the way of the race and fans. It’s not a great movie when you see it now (if someone named Charlie Smith had made it, no one would be interested in it today) but a great experiment. Charlie unveiled the character that became known as “the Tramp,” a sad sack of a soul in baggy pants, a too-small hat, and a stubby brush mustache that Charlie could twitch for laughs or droop for tears without concealing his expression.
His character looked, all at once, like no one else and Everyman.
“A tramp,” Charlie said of his character, “a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always hopeful of romance and adventure.”
Charlie Chaplin was one of the form’s foremost creators. He built his own studios in southern California, where he produced, directed, and usually cowrote each film. He had not only what today we’d call total artistic control but total responsibility, which, as I learned the hard way, is even more difficult to acquire. Charlie was responsible for virtually every single aspect of his films, from the directions in a script to a burned-out bulb on his set. I think his films grew along with his artistic ambitions.
Charlie saw photographs of the Klondike Gold Rush from 1898 (it hadn’t been a big story when he was growing up in London) and became fascinated with it. Then he heard about and began to explore the tragic tale of the Donner Party of 1847, frontier pioneers who’d had to resort to eating the deceased members of their party when they got trapped by heavy snow and food ran out. The film The Gold Rush that Charlie wrote, produced, starred in, and directed in 1925 was nothing less than a modern masterpiece, funny, touching, tragic, and romantic.
The Tramp (named the Lone Prospector for this film) gets lost in a blizzard while prospecting for gold and stumbles into the cabin of a criminal named Black Larsen. They are joined by a prospector named Big Jim. The three work out an uneasy truce in the cabin while they wait out the blizzard, but hunger soon stalks them. They cook one of the Prospector’s shoes on Thanksgiving.
Charlie fishes the shoe from the stewpot, one bare foot revealed, and spools the shoelaces like spaghetti strings. He separates the sole from the upper leather as if deboning a fish, then takes a bite and makes a face, as if trying to figure out what wine would go best. I think the genius of that scene is that the men are so hungry that, in their minds, the Tramp makes the shoe taste like a dish at Maxim’s de Paris. As Charlie put it, “To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain and play with it.”
Charlie actually welcomed the addition of sound to movies. But not to make characters talk. I love that. He thought that nothing improved on pantomime to tell a story. But I think he welcomed the chance to use music, artfully added, to propel a story and give it feeling (besides, he thought the Tramp’s Everyman quality would be diminished by his British accent, although every American character, from Superman to Hank Williams, is portrayed these days by a British actor).
By the time he made Modern Times in 1936, Chaplin knew how important the Tramp had become to millions of people. He made his character into a stand-in for Everyman on a factory assembly line, who is pressured to work harder and harder and faster and faster until he is made to feel like a cog in a vast machine and breaks down (and, rather like Charlie in real life, is mistaken for a Communist instigator); ultimately he finds love with a woman he helps and who helps him. Those last ten minutes of film that Charlie sent me are gorgeous and touching, with the Tramp and Ellen (beautifully played by Paulette Goddard), the hungry, resourceful girl he met after she stole a loaf of bread, finally walk into a sunrise and, we all hope, a new and better day.
It was his last film as the Tramp, by the way—until that signature moustache reappeared in 1940, with much more sinister tones, over the mouth of Adenoid Hynkel, the dictator of Tomainia, in The Great Dictator. Charlie and Adolf Hitler had been born just four days apart in 1889, both into poverty. I think Charlie had been struck by how one wanted to make the world laugh, the other to make the world bleed. Charlie had told his son, Charles, Jr., “He’s the madman, I’m the comic. But it could have been the other way around.”
Over the years, in all my reading about his life and studying his films and, in many ways, Charlie’s life and creativity, what I’ve come to admire most about him was how he never stopped trying to undertake new and greater projects. He kept going forward as an artist, even as he became a controversial figure for his politics and his romantic life, which became the subject of seamy press coverage and even a couple of senseless trials.
“It takes courage to make a fool of yourself,” he used to say.
By the time I stood outside his house, Charlie had been shut out of the United States, had sold his home in Beverly Hills and stake in United Artists, and was living with his wife Oona O’Neill Chaplin (Charlie was fifty-four and Oona eighteen when they met and married) in an estate overlooking Lake Geneva.
It must have been in the early 1960s. Charlie had been kind enough to send me the ten minutes of his film footage. But it was years before the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences would welcome him back to the United States to receive an Honorary Oscar in 1972.
I guess I wondered how he would receive an uninvited visitor from the United States. I guess I worried that he wouldn’t recognize my name at first. I guess I felt that his privacy had already been picked apart by all the relentless publicity and I should just leave him alone. I guess that I just didn’t want to disturb a great artist in his peace overlooking a splendid lake. So I just stared at his estate for a long time.
I’ll always regret not knocking on Charlie Chaplin’s door. I’ve met some of his friends and family members over the years who’ve said that he would have loved to meet me and my family. But I’ll always have the great gift he gave me of his film, and the gift he gave all of us in an art form that he did so much to invent and elevate.
Gondola, Venice