History as such only arouses my skepticism — whereas a poetic interpretation achieves a general effect. … there are more valid facts and details in works of art than there are in history books.
— Chaplin 1
ALTHOUGH GERALDINE CHAPLIN IS RIGHT ON THE MONEY when she says I’ve had her father in analysis for years (twenty to be exact), she has no idea how much time I’ve also spent cadging second opinions from colleagues in an effort to distinguish fact from fiction in conflicting versions of Charlie’s early life story, as told by Chaplin himself on two occasions fifty years apart. In a Chaplin seminar at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute in 1988, seven doctoral candidates and I spent many long hours poring over those two autobiographies before meeting weekly to discuss our impressions of some glaring disparities in Charlie’s accounts of emotionally traumatic events in his early childhood. One of those books, Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story, was narrated by Charlie in 1915 at the age of twenty-six. The other, My Autobiography, was published in 1964 when he was seventy-five.
To seduce those budding analysts to sign up for my course and take on the talmudic exercise of doing side-by-side comparative text passage readings, I had to sweeten the deal. While we would systematically examine Charlie’s two memoirs, we would also use some of his greatest movies as texts: The Kid, The Gold Rush, City Lights, Modern Times, and Limelight. A fundamental premise of our seminar (and this biography as well) was that a filmmaker’s life can be used to read his film, and the films can be used to read his life — if he retains such extraordinary control of his films as Chaplin did. Looking back, I might have advertised my course in the Institute’s academic catalogue as “Hollywood meets Sigmund Freud.” To peddle my proposed curriculum to the Education Committee faculty as serious psychoanalytic scholarship rather than frivolous escapist entertainment, I quoted the father of psychoanalysis himself:
In the last few days, Chaplin has been in Vienna … but it was too cold for him here, and he left again quickly. He is undoubtedly a great artist; certainly he always portrays one and the same figure; only the weakly poor, helpless, clumsy youngster for whom, however, things turn out well in the end. Now do you think for this role he has to forget about his own ego? On the contrary, he always plays only himself as he was in his dismal youth. He cannot get away from those impressions and humiliations of that past period of his life. He is, so to speak, an exceptionally simple and transparent case. The idea that the achievements of artists are intimately bound up with their childhood memories, impressions, repressions and disappointments, has already brought in much enlightenment and has, for that reason, become very precious to us.2
To motivate my fellow seminar members to rise to the occasion and grapple conscientiously with that poorly written and sometimes confusing early memoir, I underscored a heated controversy that still surrounded the book’s disputed authorship. The as-told-to life story (told to journalist Rose Wilder Lane) was originally authorized by Chaplin for publication in a twenty-nine-part newspaper series that ran in the San Francisco Bulletin from July 5 to August 4, 1915. Those articles were reprinted verbatim, but not distributed as planned in book form by Bobbs Merrill in the fall of 1916. At the last minute, sales were blocked by Chaplin’s attorney.
When he saw the completed version of his as-told-to memoirs in book form, Chaplin got cold feet. Indignantly disputing its accuracy and authenticity, he behaved as if he had never before seen any one of those original twenty-nine newspaper articles, which contained so many intimate personal details and painful memories of his London childhood only he could have revealed. Four final chapters covering Chaplin’s historically unprecedented and meteoric rise to international film stardom between early 1915 and 1916 were tacked on to bring his life story up to date. How, where, and when all of the information in those final four chapters of Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story was acquired is unclear. Robinson suggests that Lane could have easily culled and embroidered historically accurate information secondhand from published Chaplin interviews by other journalists. But Robinson completely ignores a claim Lane makes that she and Chaplin met in person in Los Angeles for a follow-up interview after he had left northern California. That claim can be found in a letter from Lane to Chaplin that Robinson reprints in his biography. In it she says, “You were so very courteous in giving me a great deal of time, and all of the information on which to base the story, while I was in Los Angeles, that I have been assuming that your attitude toward me was quite friendly.”3 Ignoring this passage, which directly contradicts his own view of what transpired, Robinson asserts that Lane and Chaplin met once (and suggests that it was probably only once) in northern California between March and April of 1915. He’s right that such a meeting did take place. And the outcome of that meeting (or the several northern California meetings, I believe) was the basis for the original twenty-nine-part newspaper series. And the outcome of that subsequent Los Angeles meeting she refers to would seem to be the basis of those final four chapters. Those add-on Hollywood chapters were entirely flattering. They contained no emotionally charged, deeply personal, potentially offensive private information whose accuracy he could dispute.
Having never authorized in writing the republication of the original newspaper series as part of a book, Chaplin was able to obtain a legal injunction to kill the distribution of the thousands of copies that had already been printed. Still, a few copies survived, including a copy in the Library of Congress.
When the book was republished seventy years later, after the copyright expired, the original controversy surrounding its hotly contested authorship resurfaced. Since those memoirs were an as-told-to version of Chaplin’s life story, blame for the book’s verbally unsophisticated narrative, glaring factual inaccuracies, and obviously distorted memories could easily be ascribed to the twenty-nine-year-old journalist, Rose Wilder Lane. Serving as Charlie’s “faithful transcriber” and “editor” — as she referred to herself in the foreword — Lane, whose claim was vigorously contested by Chaplin’s lawyer, was characterized in Chaplin’s complaint as an unscrupulous journalist who lacked professional standards. Whether she was unprincipled or merely a writer of limited talent becomes the pertinent question.
Apart from that quashed 1916 memoir, Lane later in her career faithfully transcribed and edited — or embroidered and willfully mistranscribed — as-told-to life stories of Henry Ford, Jack London, and Herbert Hoover. Although Hoover disliked the unflattering way his quotes from those original interviews were presented in book form, he never disputed their authenticity. He and Lane eventually became friends, and her papers reside in his presidential library. She also published articles in Harper’s, Ladies’ Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, and the Saturday Evening Post, ending her fifty-year career as a war correspondent in South Vietnam for Woman’s Day at age 78. Her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, was the author of the greatly beloved Little House on the Prairie books. Rose also helped edit that series, which is considered a classic of American children’s literature.
Whether Lane doctored the narrative and fiddled with the dialogue of Chaplin’s life story throughout her interviews, as his lawyer charged, or faithfully transcribed all or nearly all of it verbatim from hastily scribbled reporter’s notes, as she claimed, is impossible to say. All we know for certain is that she interviewed Chaplin in person.
Taking their lead from Chaplin’s repudiation of Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story, his biographers have generally given this memoir short shrift, ignored its valuable psychological contents, and categorically rejected it as a valid text or legitimate research document. David Robinson is one of Lane’s harshest critics (and Chaplin’s staunchest defenders). Expressing his exasperation with one particularly egregious passage in the 1916 original, Robinson wrote:
The book is full of such romantic and misleading nonsense, which has nevertheless continued to supply and confuse gullible Chaplin historians for seven decades.4
Robinson ended his discussion of the book by lamenting that “one or two copies had leaked out to be the bane of film historians.”5
When one of those original copies was reprinted by Indiana University Press, Robinson took up the cudgels on Chaplin’s behalf once more. The next year in a 1986 book review in the Times Literary Supplement entitled “An Imposture Revived,” he again dismissed it as “a flagrant autobiographical fake,” adding:
Is there any value to the text at all? Anyone familiar with Chaplin interviews of the period (he interviewed often and well in his early Hollywood days) will recognize passages which are undoubtedly authentic and probably recorded from the original interview.. .. some untruths may have come directly from Chaplin … . It may be good in parts: but in the end, the areas between what is Chaplin’s own story and what is pure fiction are so misty that we would probably do better to discount and discard it all.6
As for Harry Geduld, a highly respected Chaplin scholar and emeritus professor of literature at Indiana University, Robinson accused him of being “culpably gullible in the degree of trust he places in the book’s authorship.” But Geduld was nobody’s fool. Aware that he could be made to look ridiculous for publishing such a factually inaccurate book, Geduld clearly stated his reasons for doing so in the introduction to Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story. He wanted to call future scholarly attention to this previously suppressed autobiography in the hope of getting a second opinion. He wrote:
Yet for all its naiveties and its pseudo-Dickensian flavor it offers us many unique glimpses into Chaplin’s childhood. If, with caution, we choose to regard some of these glimpses as fact, they can be read as a complement to Chaplin’s later autobiography. If, on the other hand, we view them as pure fiction, they are no less significant, for, like Chaplin’s films we must regard them as the fantasies of a great artist — self-imagings that were more meaningful to their creator than the humdrum reality. As such, CCOS, whose import has been lost on virtually every biographer, must await the insights of the psychoanalyst.7
Bingo! The game was afoot. We were going to be psychoanalytic sleuths. Professor Geduld had just invited our entire seminar to use its skills as childhood memory experts, and our clinical training as life-story auditors, to add our thoughts and conclusions to this ongoing controversy between two equally qualified Chaplin scholars over the legitimacy of this previously denigrated text.
We started the seminar by discussing the pitfall of oversimplification and arbitrary true-false distinctions that failed to leave room for shades of interpretation. We explored the parallel tacit assumptions and psychological rules of evidence in the way psychoanalysts listen to their patients and read other people’s life-story narratives.
We touched on some fundamental issues in psychobiography without, of course, coming up with definitive answers. Truthfulness, accuracy, and witness reliability can be assessed from equally valid but entirely different perspectives in the courtroom, the consulting room, and the biographer’s study.
What is a provable fact? What is a psychological truth? How are they different? Are they both legitimate?
What about the question of Chaplin’s personal myth that Geduld raised in his introduction? Can a childhood fantasy ever become a historical fact? Can the life that a grown man leads dramatize or actualize self-myths that he invented, or that other family members bestowed on him, as a child? Why do kids invent self-myths? What role do their parents’ dreams and life examples play in inspiring them?
What is a lie? Can a lie reveal a truth? What’s the difference between free-associating, fibbing, conning, fantasizing, daydreaming, bullshitting, inventing, imagining, exaggerating, embroidering, and outright prevaricating, to name but a few overlapping forms of fact-distorting storytelling and self-reporting.
How are falsehoods, false memories, and screen memories connected? Can a drastic change in childhood memory occur spontaneously at different stages of life? In a previous published monograph on multiple autobiographies written by the same person at different ages, I described how Frederick Douglass’s memories of his father shifted dramatically at different stages in his life.8
What about Chaplin’s father? How could we reconcile Chaplin, at twenty-six, vividly describing his father to Rose Wilder Lane as a drunken brute who cursed and mistreated his mother, with the same Chaplin, fifty years later, recalling with equal certainty, and independently verifiable accuracy, that he had never even seen his parents live together, his parents having permanently separated when he was one.
It was that demonstrably false characterization of Charlie Chaplin Sr. as a mean-spirited brute that originally prompted Chaplin’s lawyer and subsequently motivated David Robinson to assert confidently that Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story was a fake. Both men sincerely believed that Lane’s irresponsibly written book was packed with false stories that she invented in order to plug holes in a flimsy narrative based on scanty personal information casually supplied by Charlie Chaplin in passing.
The final answer to that particular piece of the psychoanalytic puzzle did not become clear until twenty years after our seminar when I came across a 1915 article written by Sydney Chaplin in a film magazine discussing a man Syd referred to as “my father at the time.”9 That unnamed father, whom Syd described as a music hall star with the signature song “The Miner’s Dream of Home,” turned out to be a mean-spirited brute by the name of Leo Dryden. He had indeed lived with and drunkenly abused Charlie’s mother before stealing their infant son, Charlie’s younger half-brother Wheeler, and running off to Canada.
And so Rose Lane’s allegedly invented story turned out to be Charlie’s false memory: a screen memory combining Leo Dryden and Charlie Chaplin Sr. into one father figure, the description of whom Lane “faithfully” transcribed. Faithfully, that is, apart from the difficulties she and every other interviewer in 1915 experienced in understanding Charlie’s nasal twang, Cockney slang, and aitches — an embarrassing speech pattern that the upwardly mobile actor became determined to shed as part of his drive toward self-improvement, coupled with informal elocution coaching from his actress friend Constance Collier, whose later pupils included Katharine Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe.
Describing what Charlie was like around the time of his interview(s) with Rose Wilder Lane, Jeffrey Vance wrote:
Perhaps the most touching discoveries made were the images documenting Chaplin’s early life. Many of these photographs, including shots from his music-hall days and a handful of candid pictures from his early career in films, are inscribed with Chaplin’s own writing and remembrances. It is somewhat jarring to see how unsure his writing and spelling were during this period. The inscriptions stand in stark contrast to the urbane and sophisticated personal image that Chaplin perpetuated … during his many years of self-education. These photographs, highlighted by his wayward spelling, are a testament to his phenomenonal effort and ambition to rise above his impoverished Cockney beginnings.10
A typical example of Chaplin’s Cockney dialect translation problems was Lane’s misspelling Pownall Terrace as “Palermo Terrace.”11
It would be a gross error to infer strictly on a literary or linguistic basis that Chaplin’s primitively expressed, factually inaccurate, and mawkishly told early-life memoir is an invalid research document because it is poorly written. Conversely, it would be wrong to assume that all of the personal information contained in his polished and seamlessly flowing late-life autobiography is also factually accurate because it is persuasively written. By way of example, let us take a look at the profoundly moving opening pages of My Autobiography.
Unconsciously condensing two crucial life events that actually occurred two years apart into one memory, Chaplin begins his life story by evocatively limning an incident that was the turning (or termination) point of his childhood. Describing himself as a twelve-year-old spending a melancholy Sunday morning wistfully hanging around a theatrical pub where the famous music hall stars of South London congregated, Charlie recalls returning home to the garret at 3 Pownall Terrace where he lived with his mother, only to discover that she was in the process of becoming quietly psychotic. Actually, the psychotic episode he writes about took place when he was fourteen, not twelve. While it is tempting to dismiss his error as one of those randomly generated fact failings of a seventy-five-year-old, certain questions nag the mind of a trained psychoanalytic investigator. Why twelve? Why not ten or thirteen? And why all the nostalgia about spending that sad Sunday morning at a theatrical pub like the one his departed vaudevillian father frequented until his untimely death when Charlie was twelve?
Age twelve! So that’s it: Chaplin confounded the date of one personal tragedy — the final loss of his father to alcoholism when he was twelve — with the date of another tragedy, the final loss of his mother to psychosis when he was fourteen. An interesting psychological connection, but so what?
The psychoanalytic wheels begin to spin. Are there any deeper emotional reasons why Chaplin telescoped the two events by fusing his two ages into one? Why not go back and check some dates: when did his father die and when did his mother go mad? Answer: Charlie Chaplin Sr. died on May 9, 1901, and his estranged wife was committed to the asylum on May 9, 1903.
Yet common sense and psychoanalysis would seem to agree that no woman would be driven mad with depressive grief on the anniversary of her ex-husband’s death if their emotional attachment had in fact been thoroughly severed thirteen years earlier. And so, what emerges in the narration of Chaplin’s boyhood story is evidence of strong residual threads connecting Charlie Chaplin Sr. and Lily Harley, who lived in the same Kennington neighborhoods, no more than a few streets apart from one another, in the 1890s.
Of course their paths crossed. And their relationship was ongoing — not some piece of ancient history that ground to a halt and atrophied in 1890. No wonder their son Charlie romantically idealized their stormy teenage love story as a boy growing up, yearning for a complete family. And it was only fitting that those boyhood idealizations of his parents’ adolescent romance would later play such an influential if unconscious role both in the plots of Charlie’s films and in his private life inspiring a lifelong romantic nostalgia for pure and innocent adolescent girls.
Returning to that Chaplin seminar and our classroom attempt to resolve the thorny question of whether or not the personal information recorded in Lane’s book was narrated sufficiently by Charlie to consider it a legitimate research document — it is important to clarify the issue of who Chaplin was when Lane interviewed him. The internationally renowned and understandably image-conscious celebrity who ordered his high-priced New York attorney to kill Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story in 1916 was not the same fellow who had spilled the beans a year earlier.
Lane’s interview(s) took place early in 1915. Chaplin was well aware that Charlie the screen character was already becoming famous and his films were earning record sums at the box office. But Chaplin had no idea of precisely what his own current level of career success as a professional actor meant, except for the money involved, about which he was streetwise and Cockney-shrewd. When Chaplin hopped a Pullman from L.A. to Chicago that winter to sign a lucrative contract with the Essanay Film Company, nobody recognized him or pestered him for autographs. He traveled incognito and enjoyed an ordinary citizen’s sense of personal privacy on that four-day trip to Chicago. He was riding high professionally, but he could come and go as he pleased. Chaplin’s traveling companion on that 1915 journey was a cowboy movie star by the name of Broncho Billy Anderson. It was Billy, not Charlie, over whom their fellow passengers fawned. But on Chaplin’s next trip East one year later, huge crowds with brass bands greeted him at every stop along the way and the NYPD actually found it necessary to disembark him from the train at 125th Street in order to avoid the mass mayhem that awaited his arrival at Grand Central Station.
When Charlie had first arrived at that rural studio in northern California where Lane would interview him two months later, his new cameraman, Rollie Totheroh, was astounded by the already wealthy actor’s scuffed valise and threadbare belongings. Unaccustomed to fame or luxury, twenty-six-year-old Chaplin lacked pretension. And it was that unsophisticated and poorly educated Cockney actor whose interviews Lane tried to transcribe.
The Chaplin craze was about to start. But at the time Lane and Charlie met, he still thought of himself as “a little nickel comedian,”12 not the artist in slapshoes he later described. He felt slightly bewildered by the journalistic attention and studio-generated publicity he was beginning to receive.
Chaplin’s way of dealing with social insecurity and interview anxiety would always be to do what he knew best — to act. Whenever he felt afraid, he put on a show and charmed his audience by razzle-dazzling them. A much more insightful reporter than Lane, who observed Chaplin thoughtfully while interviewing him several years later, offered this description:
“I’m an awful chump at being interviewed,” he said. “I can talk a bit when it’s all informal… but when any one starts an interview I lose my head and choke up.”
… Outside of myself, I have never met any one who has as much fear of meeting people under formal circumstances as Charlie Chaplin.…
Then to protect himself he acted. Whenever he gets nervous he acts, and so forgets himself in his outlay of energy.13
Extrapolating from this thumbnail description of how Chaplin responded to interviews and interviewers, it is safe to assume that he relaxed himself and tried to win Lane’s sympathy by putting on a vivid improv performance of his life story, colorfully dramatizing and spontaneously reenacting scenes from his Dickensian boyhood on the streets of London.
Either by inclination or by intellectual limitation, Rose Lane functioned more like an archivist than a portraitist. She tried to transcribe Chaplin verbatim insofar as she was able to keep up with his rapid-fire delivery and understand his Sam Weller-like Dickensian speech, which he undoubtedly exaggerated from time to time for dramatic effect during the course of his narrative.
And what about the influence of Dickens himself? Apart from his stylistic influence on Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story, what were his unacknowledged contributions to its story line and plot contents? David Robinson suspects that Lane was the culprit who lifted and transposed whole scenes from Oliver Twist and used them as filler to plug holes in her story. Every informed Chaplin scholar concurs that someone cribbed from that novel. It also happened to be Charlie’s favorite novel, from youth to old age. In fact, we recall, one of his earliest character monologues was his portrayal as a ten-year-old of Little Nell’s grandfather in Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop.14
Either Chaplin or Lane was technically guilty of “plagiarizing” from Dickens. Given the fact that Chaplin was a consummate sketch artist, and the son of two sketch artists, I believe he was the one who consciously snatched, or unconsciously snitched, those scenes from Oliver Twist, commingled them with his own life story, and delivered them in the form of another Bransby Williams-style monologue for his own amusement and Lane’s edification.
The question of who seduced whom during those interviews is intriguing. Was Lane gullible? Or did she play along with Charlie and act credulous because he was giving her good copy? Were the interviewer and interviewee on the make? Regardless of whether their encounter was a mutual seduction, it seems obvious that Chaplin was the one who controlled the interview process itself. Throughout his career, from stage to screen, he fought for, gained, and maintained ironfisted control over every aspect of his art. The only thing he couldn’t control in this instance was the way Rose Lane wrote her serialized newspaper accounts of their interviews. But he could and did regain control, by killing the book and completely disavowing any responsibility for its authorship.
On the debatable question of Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story’s authorship, then, take your choice. Neither Robinson’s theory nor mine is provable. But what I have tried to suggest here is that Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story — warts and all — is a legitimate text and a previously overlooked research document that justifies a new Chaplin biography. I hasten to add that this new biography was written, of course, on the shoulders of Robinson’s superbly researched work. Without his meticulous, comprehensive scholarship, my own book would not have been possible.