1 Denis Gifford, Chaplin (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974), 13.
2 Thomas Burke, City of Encounters (Boston: Little, Brown, 1932), 169.
3 David Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985), 194.
4 Charles Chaplin, My Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964), 34.
5 Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art, 6.
6 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 34.
1 Richard Meryman, “Ageless Master’s Anatomy of Comedy,” Life, March 10, 1967, 91.
2 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 20.
3 Ibid., 24.
4 Unpublished letter from Jan Wahl to the author, May 30, 1989.
5 Stephen M. Weissman, “Charlie Chaplin’s Film Heroines,” Film History 8:4 (1996), reprinted in The Essential Chaplin, ed. Richard Schickel (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006), 65–75.
6 Claire Bloom, Limelight and After (New York: Penguin, 1982), 88.
1 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 14.
2 Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art, 93.
3 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 21.
4 Konrad Bercovici, “Charlie Chaplin: An Authorized Interview,” Collier’s, August 15, 1925, 6.
5 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 19.
6 Beverley Nichols, The Star Spangled Manner (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928), 265–67.
7 Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art, 115.
8 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 18.
9 Ibid., 289.
1 Quoted in Charles Chaplin Jr., My Father, Charlie Chaplin, with N. Rau and M. Rau (New York: Random House, 1960), 9.
2 Harry C. Carr, “Charlie Chaplin’s Story: As Narrated by Mr. Chaplin Himself,” Photoplay 8:2 (1915).
3 His mother’s Nell Gwyn impersonations were so riveting that thirty years later Chaplin commemorated them by leaking a story to the New York Herald Tribune (September 27, 1926). The headline read: “Genealogy of Chaplin Traced to Stuart Line: Screen Comedian May Be Descended From Charles II and Nell Gwyn Actress.” As for her turns as Josephine de Beauharnais, Charlie laid symbolic claim to French ancestry as well by straight-facedly informing reporters on four separate occasions that he had been born in Fountainbleau. In her sixties, living near her son in California, Hannah Chaplin regularly referred to him as “The King.” That is, when she wasn’t shocking immigration officials at U.S. Customs by introducing herself as the mother of Jesus Christ.
4 Harry Crocker, Charlie Chaplin: Man and Mime (unpublished manuscript, Margaret Herrick Library, Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles, n.d.), ch. 1, 18.
5 Mundella Report: Report of the Departmental Committee, appointed by the Local Government Board to inquire into the existing systems for the Maintenance and Education of children under the charge of Managers of District Schools and Boards of Guardians in the Metropolis, and to advise as to any changes that may be desirable (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1896), 164.
6 Ibid., appendix 5.
7 Crocker, Charlie Chaplin, ch. 1,18.
8 Mundella Report, minutes, 23.
9 John McCabe, Charlie Chaplin (London: Robson, 1978), 61.
10 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 31.
11 Ibid., 31,32.
12 Crocker, Charlie Chaplin, ch. 1, 17.
13 Ibid.
14 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 26.
15 Quoted in “Old London Friends Mourn Mrs. Chaplin,” New York Times, August 30, 1928.
16 Lita Grey Chaplin, My Life With Chaplin, with Morton Cooper (New York: Bernard Geis Associates, 1966), 140.
1 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 303.
2 Admitting physician’s note on Hannah Chaplin, September 6, 1898, Lambeth Hospital Register of Lunatics, Hl/L/B17/16 (vol. 16: February 1898-October 1898), 364. Courtesy of David Robinson.
3 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 34.
4 Anticipating his famous Modern Times factory scene of 1935, Charlie in 1916 quoted Hannah Chaplin during one of her later psychiatric hospitalizations:
“Is —it —morning?” mother said painfully. “Three dozen more to sew. He shouldn’t keep out the money for spots, there were no spots at all. Twelve make a dozen, and that’s a half-crown, and then a dozen more, and then a dozen more, and then a dozen more —” She did not know us at all.
See Harry M. Geduld, ed., Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 49.
5 Frank Scheide, The History of Low Comedy and Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century English Music Hall as Basis for Examining the 1914–1917 Films of Charles Spencer Chaplin (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin- Madison, 1990), 101.
6 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 24–25.
7 Anita Leslie, Clare Sheridan (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977), 174.
8 Crocker, Charlie Chaplin, ch. 11, 38–39.
9 Mundella Report, 69.
10 Geduld, Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story, 157; Chaplin, My Autobiography, 57–58.
11 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 289.
12 Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art, 19.
13 Charlie Chaplin Sr.’s unique stage character genre was known as the lion comique. Other famous lions comiques were Alfred Vance, George Leybourne, Arthur Lloyd, Harry Rickards, G. H. MacDermott, and Harry Anderson. Chaplin’s father was neither the first nor the foremost member of this bibulous fraternity of sartorially elegant man-about-town character actors who sang the praises of the good life and the grape both to whet the thirst and to lighten the wallets of their fans and vicarious admirers. But to his credit, Charles Chaplin Sr. had the confidence (or arrogance) to bill himself as the Lion Comique, according to his good friend and colleague George Carney. Chaplin memorialized and satirized his father’s stage character and lions comiques in general by creating the Little Tramp. By donning boots that were far too big for him and doing his signature Rummy Binks walk while impersonating a shabby but elegant would-be man-about-town, Charlie more than filled his father’s shoes while remaining a comparative teetotaler.
14 For many years, “The Miner’s Dream of Home” was a standard in British homes, traditionally sung on New Year’s Eve along with “Auld Lang Syne.”
15 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 35.
16 Ibid., 35–36.
17 Ibid., 36.
18 Ibid., 40.
19 Charlie Sr. and Louise had a four-year-old son. Charlie recalled no personal interactions with this half brother and was unable to remember his name.
20 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 39–40.
21 Ibid., 38.
22 Ibid.
23 John McCabe, Charlie Chaplin (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978), 159.
24 The park scene was shot before the stock market crash in October 1929. The title card (“Peace and Prosperity”) was inserted in December of 1930 and written to underscore the topical relevance of the park scene to the Great Depression that was taking place.
25 John Bengtson, Silent Traces: Discovering Early Hollywood Through the Films of Charlie Chaplin (Santa Monica: Santa Monica Press, 2006), 256.
26 James Agee, “Comedy’s Greatest Era,” Life, September 5, 1949, 77.
27 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 34.
28 A more precise word might be “semiautobiographical.” For example, Chaplin did not faithfully translate every single detail of his father’s alcoholism into his screen character’s alcoholism. Charlie Sr. was charming when sober. Chaplin’s millionaire is charming when drunk and icy when sober. The word “autobiographical” is not used here in its strictest sense any more than the word “Cockney” is. Technically, a Cockney was someone born within the sound of the Bow Bells of St. Mary Le Bow in Cheapside. Neither Chaplin’s nor either of his parents’ geographical origins meet that very narrow criterion. But all three of the Chaplins were as much Cockney as City Lights is autobiographical. “Cockney” is used here to refer to a London-born-and-bred member of the under class in the late nineteenth century. This is not to be confused with the twentieth-century bastardized “Estuary English” accent of today, which crosses class lines and affects a working-class “attitude.”
29 Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art, 393.
30 The chronological account of City Lights presented here is based entirely on Robinson. I was refused access to the Chaplin archive by Chaplin’s children and am therefore relying on Robinson’s version of the creative chain of events. Robinson was able to reconstruct those events by carefully reviewing the City Lights production materials in the Vevey archives with permission from Oona O’Neill Chaplin. After discovering Chaplin’s method of jotting down his creative ideas in pencil and then sanitizing any deeply personal memories and feelings they contained for privacy purposes, I approached Kate Guyonvarch, the Chaplin family’s current representative, and requested access to the six separate drafts of My Autobiography — both handwritten and typed. That request was denied without explanation. I am indebted to my friends Justin Kaplan and Jeffrey Vance for their generous help in sharing information from the Vevey archives. Unfortunately, neither Justin nor Jeff saw the earlier drafts of My Autobiography or Chaplin’s handwritten notes.
31 “Chaplin Interviewed by Richard Meryman, 1966,” in Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema, by Jeffrey Vance (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003), 362.
32 Crocker, Charlie Chaplin, ch. 1, 12.
33 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 37.
1 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 49.
2 Jim Tully, “Charlie Chaplin — His Real Life Story,” Pictorial Review, January 1927.
3 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 40.
4 Ibid.
5 Thirteen-year-old Syd Chaplin found a low-paying job as a telegram delivery boy at the Strand Post Office.
6 Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art, 71.
7 Crocker, Charlie Chaplin, 13.
8 Peter Haining, ed., The Legend of Charlie Chaplin, (Secaucus, N.J.: Castle Books, 1982), 81.
9 Chaplin suffered from dyslexia and was unable to read more than one or two words at a time. (Unpublished interview of Chaplin by Meryman, Vevey Archive, courtesy Justin Kaplan).
10 Peter Honri, Working the Halls (Farnborough, Hants.: Saxon House, 1973), 83.
11 Alistair Cooke, “Fame,” in Schickel, The Essential Chaplin, 136.
12 PeoplePlay UK Theatre History Online, “Pantomime Guided Tour: Dan Leno,” www.peopleplayuk.org.uk/guided_tours/pantomime_tour/pantomime_stars/leno.php.
13 Quoted in McCabe, Charlie Chaplin, 34.
14 Glenn Mitchell, The Chaplin Encyclopedia (London: B. T. Batsford, 1997), 170.
15 Chaplin Jr., My Father, Charlie Chaplin, (New York: Random House, 1960), 93–94.
16 Alistair Cooke, “Charles Chaplin: The One and Only,” in Six Men (New York: Knopf, 1977), 137–38.
17 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 46.
18 Charles Chaplin, Footlights (unpublished) and “The Story of Calvero” (unpublished); Chaplin, My Autobiography, 50, 58.
19 Ibid., 50.
20 Ibid.
21 Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art, 7.
22 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 56, 57; McCabe, Charlie Chaplin, 17.
23 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 58.
24 Raoul Sobel and David Francis, Chaplin: Genesis of a Clown (London: Quartet, 1977), 62. N.B.: The fact that Chaplin’s claim that his father’s funeral was an elegant ceremony contrasted with the provable fact that his father was buried unceremoniously in a pauper’s grave has been interpreted by Sobel and Francis as proof positive that Chaplin was a “liar” (on this and many other subjects in My Autobiography). Perhaps so. But an alternative explanation is that both statements are true. During my background research into Cockney culture, I encountered descriptions of how the outward display of colorful ceremony and pomp for a funeral was sometimes accompanied by the cost-cutting measure of dumping the corpse in a pauper’s grave. Nothing short of exhuming Charlie Chaplin Sr. and discovering whether he was buried in a plain pine box or a polished oak coffin could settle this matter definitively. And unlike Charlie himself, whose coffin actually was exhumed by an inept pair of grave-robbing “resurrection men” (who hoped to extract a hefty corpse ransom from Chaplin’s heartbroken widow), it’s not likely that any literal-minded, truth-seeking biographers will ever go that far. For further discussion of the clinical distinction between memory falsification and false memories, see the “Afterword” chapter of this book.
25 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 59.
26 Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art, 41.
27 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 13.
1 R. J. Minney, Chaplin: The Immortal Tramp (London: George Newnes, 1954), 6.
2 Employing a high-powered telescope from the window of his Hollywood home to achieve the same end, Chaplin would later relive that window-gazing game with his son Charlie Jr. and crack him up with his hilarious long-distance improv takes on neighbors and passersby in Beverly Hills.
3 Burke, City of Encounters, 163-64.
4 Chaplin, Charlie, My Trip Abroad(New York: Harper, 1922), 89.
5 Unpublished interview, Vevey Archive, courtesy Justin Kaplan.
6 McCabe, Charlie Chaplin, 91.
7 Meryman, “Ageless Master’s Anatomy of Comedy,” 83.
8 Crocker, Charlie Chaplin, ch. 1, 30–31.
9 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 62, 64.
10 Ibid., 60.
11 Ibid., 61.
12 Ibid., 61.
13 Ibid., 60.
1 Geduld, Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story, 81.
2 Ibid., 154.
3 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 12.
4 Ibid., 70.
5 Tabes dorsalis is a sensory-motor disturbance of gait coordination that could easily be mistaken for alcohol-induced clumsiness in any patient who also happened to be disoriented and incoherent for another independent reason (such as severe malnutrition). Tabes dorsalis is caused by degeneration of the posterior columns of the spinal cord and commonly occurs in advanced cases of untreated neurosyphilis.
6 Geduld, Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story, 47.
7 Ibid., 48.
8 Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art, 22.
9 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 78
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 Gifford, Chaplin, 19.
13 Geduld, Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story, xviii.
14 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 85.
15 Ibid., 86.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., 87.
20 Dana Burnet, “Garbo and Chaplin Talked to Me,” Photoplay, June 1936.
1 Geduld, Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story, 103–4.
2 Ibid., xxi.
3 The Green Room Book; or, Who’s Who on the Stage (London: T. S. Clark, 1906), 68.
4 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 88.
5 Geduld, Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story, 82.
6 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 92.
7 The term “fresh part” is used advisedly. Chaplin recalled being out of work for the next three months. Independent evidence (advertisements and notices in the Era) reveals that he again toured as Billy in Sherlock Holmes. Either way, he found his next fresh part, playing slap-stick in Repairs, three months after this encounter with Madge Kendal. While the anecdote is clearly an embellishment, I include his version of this incident from My Autobiography because it is too difficult to entirely resist the obvious pleasure he took in fabricating a good story.
8 Geduld, Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story, 98.
9 Ibid., 86.
10 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 93, 94.
11 John M. Garrett, Sixty Years of British Music Hall (London: Chappell, 1976), song 32.
12 Geduld, Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story, 51.
13 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 97.
14 Honri, Working the Halls, 139.
15 Geduld, Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story, 98.
1 Gifford, Chaplin, 21.
2 Robert Lewis Taylor, W. C. Fields: His Follies and Fortunes (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1949), 2.
3 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 45.
4 Geduld, Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story, 98–99. Charlie must have gotten a huge kick out of inventing this cock-and-bull story of his Casey’s Circus audition for Rose Wilder Lane, a young reporter for the San Francisco Bulletin. It first appeared in the Bulletin on July 24, 1915.
5 Will Murray, “How I Discovered Chaplin,” Glasgow Weekly Record, September 10, 1921, quoted in Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art, 66.
6 Murray, “How I Discovered Chaplin,” quoted in Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art, 67–68.
7 Agee, “Comedy’s Greatest Era,” 74.
8 Sandy Powell, Can You Hear Me, Mother?: Sandy Powell’s Lifetime of Music Hall, with Harry Stanley (London: Jupiter, 1975), 15.
9 Geduld, Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story, 101.
10 Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art, 67.
11 Geduld, Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story, 101.
12 Ibid., 102.
13 Gifford, Chaplin, 21.
14 Honri, Working the Halls, 6.
15 For an excellent discussion of this topic, see George Wead, Buster Keaton and the Dynamics of Visual Wit (New York: Arno, 1976), 134, 321.
16 Geduld, Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story, 103.
17 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 94.
18 Burke, City of Encounters, 137.
1 Fred Karno, “The Birth of a Star,” in The Legend of Charlie Chaplin, by Peter Haining (Secaucus, N.J.: Castle, 1982), 25–26.
2 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 115.
3 This seven-month period of irregular employment (July 1907 through February 1908) probably was that dissipated period of “whores, sluts and an occasional drinking bout” that Chaplin misremembered or purposely embellished in My Autobiography in his colorful description of the immediate aftermath of his prideful confrontation with Madge Kendal.
4 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 96.
5 Ibid., 97.
6 Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art, 68.
7 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 97.
8 Gerald Mast, The Comic Mind, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), x. See also Richard Schickel, D. W. Griffith: An American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 185.
9 David Robinson, Chaplin, the Mirror of Opinion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 119.
10 Hilarity, Jail Birds, Early Birds, His Majesty’s Guests, The Football Match, The Casuals, Moses and Sons, Mumming Birds, The Thirsty First, The Smoking Concert, The Diving Birds, New Woman’s Club, Thumbs Down, Cinderella, Saturday to Monday, Dandy Thieves. And more would follow.
11 Chaplin, quoted in McCabe, Charlie Chaplin, 28–29.
12 In My Autobiography, 100, Chaplin describes the role of the crooked gambler in The Football Match as the “trial engagement” that won him his first Karno contract. He did, however, first play a bit part in London Suburbia, a sketch Syd was starring in at the time. Evidently Chaplin considered that brief walk-on appearance as the music hall equivalent of a Hollywood screen test rather than an acting credit.
13 Chaplin, quoted in McCabe, Charlie Chaplin, 28.
14 Powell, Can You Hear Me, Mother? 13–15.
15 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 101.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid., 102.
19 Ibid.
20 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 103.
21 Ibid., 95.
22 Ibid., 104.
23 Ibid., 105–7.
24 Ibid., 102–3.
25 Ibid., 115.
26 Ibid.
27 Powell, Can You Hear Me, Mother? 108.
28 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 97.
29 Minney, Chaplin, 18.
30 Quoted in Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art, 33.
31 Lillian Ross, “A Reporter at Large: Moments From Chaplin,” New Yorker, May 22, 1978, 102.
32 Grace Simpson, interview with Groucho Marx, Motion Picture, May 1936, excerpted in Haining, Legend, 147–50.
33 Robert Payne, The Great God Pan: A Biography of the Tramp Played by Charles Chaplin (New York: Hermitage House, 1952), 144.
34 Mack Sennett, King of Comedy, with Cameron Shipp (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1954), 97.
1 Quoted in McCabe, Charlie Chaplin, 38–39.
2 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 118.
3 McCabe, Charlie Chaplin, 27.
4 Ibid., 28–29.
5 Joyce Milton, Tramp: The Life of Charlie Chaplin (New York: Harper-Collins, 1996), 46.
6 Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art, 87–88.
7 Richard Findlater, Joe Grimaldi: His Life and Theatre, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 59.
8 McCabe, Charlie Chaplin, 28.
9 Benny Green, ed., The Last Empires: A Music Hall Companion (London: Pavilion, Michael Joseph, 1986), 137, 142.
10 Buster Keaton, “My Friend Charlie Chaplin,” reprinted in Haining, Legend, 187–89.
11 Dan Kamin, Charlie Chaplin’s One-Man Show (Metuchen, N.J.: Scare-crow Press, 1984), xiii.
12 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 119, 120.
13 McCabe, Charlie Chaplin, 41.
14 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 134.
15 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Essays and English Traits, vol. 5 of Harvard Classics (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1909), 79–80.
16 Karno, “Birth of a Star,” 25–26.
17 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 128.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., 132.
20 Ibid., 120.
21 Ibid., 134.
22 Haining, Legend, 15.
1 Which explains why, more than half a century later, IBM would pay twenty-five million dollars in fees to the Chaplin estate for the commercial use of his effigy in their worldwide sales campaign for user-friendly personal computers aimed at the so-called common man that the Charlie Chaplin character’s iconic image still epitomizes to this day, even for people who have never even seen a Chaplin film in its entirety.
2 Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art, 383.
3 Geduld, Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story, 138.
4 Burke, City of Encounters, 149–50.
5 Chaplin, My Trip Abroad, 11.
6 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 141.
7 Ibid., 139.
8 Sennett, King of Comedy, 148.
9 Gary Carey, Doug & Mary: A Biography of Douglas Fairbanks & Mary Pickford (New York: Dutton, 1977), 18.
10 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 138.
11 Geduld, Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story, 117.
12 Ibid., 118.
13 Sennett, King of Comedy, 50.
14 Schickel, D. W. Griffith, 116.
15 Sennett, King of Comedy, 51, 54, 55.
16 Ibid., 51.
17 Schickel, D. W. Griffith, 352.
18 David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 121.
19 Schickel, D. W. Griffith, 23.
20 Ibid., 24.
21 Ibid., 31.
22 Edward Wagenknecht, The Movies in the Age of Innocence (Norman: University of Oaklahoma Press, 1962), 101.
23 Schickel, D. W. Griffith, 270.
1 Sennett, King of Comedy, 156.
2 Ibid., 148.
3 Ibid., 152.
4 Meryman, “Ageless Master’s Anatomy of Comedy,” 90.
5 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 140.
6 Sennett, King of Comedy, 153.
7 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 141.
8 Ibid., 120–21.
9 Ibid., 123.
10 Sennett, King of Comedy, 99.
11 Walter Kerr, The Silent Clowns (New York: Knopf, 1975), 64.
12 David A. Yallop, The Day the Laughter Stopped: The True Story of Fatty Arbuckle (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976), 38.
13 Sennett, King of Comedy, 94.
14 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 142.
15 Sennett, King of Comedy, 152.
16 Ibid., 153.
17 Geduld, Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story, 124.
18 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 143.
19 Ibid., 144.
20 Ibid.
21 Betty Harper Fussel, Mabel(New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1982), 71.
22 Sennett, King of Comedy, 154.
23 Ibid., 157.
24 Ibid., 157–58.
25 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 144.
26 Kerr, The Silent Clowns, 22.
27 “Chaplin Interviewed by Richard Meryman, 1966,” in Vance, Chaplin, 360.
28 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 146.
29 Ibid., 146–47.
30 Meryman, “Ageless Master’s Anatomy of Comedy,” 90.
31 Ibid., 84.
32 Frederick Martin, “An Evening with Charlie Chaplin.” A photocopy of this article was kindly provided by Frank Scheide. The periodical and publication date are unidentified, but the author is described as the advertising manager for Great Britain of Paramount-Artcraft. He was an old friend of Charlie Chaplin Sr. who visited with Chaplin while on a business trip in Los Angeles. They talked about old times, and apparently Charlie let his hair down.
1 Quoted in Gilbert Seldes, “I Am Here To-day,” in Schickel, The Essential Chaplin, 104.
2 Meryman, “Ageless Master’s Anatomy of Comedy,” 90.
3 Harry C. Carr, “Mack Sennett — Laugh Tester,” Photoplay, May 1915,71.
4 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 149.
5 Ibid., 148.
6 Sennett, King of Comedy, 181.
7 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 149.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid., 151.
10 Ibid., 150.
11 Sennett, King of Comedy, 163.
12 Gerald D. McDonald, Michael Conway, and Mark Ricci, The Films of Charlie Chaplin (New York: Bonanza, 1965), 28, 32, 42.
13 In Sherlock Jr. the same characters go back and forth between the movie-within-the-movie story and the “real life” screen story as doubles of themselves.
14 McDonald, The Films of Charlie Chaplin, 13.
15 Sennett, King of Comedy, 180.
16 Crocker, Charlie Chaplin, ch. 6, 14.
17 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 152–53.
18 Sennett, King of Comedy, 152.
19 Carr, “Charlie Chaplin’s Story.”
20 Chaplin’s $200/week Keystone salary was equivalent to more than $4,000/week in 2008 (using the Consumer Price Index). As to the earning power of his films: the CPI translation of the $160,000 rental earnings Dough and Dynamite generated in 1914 would have exceeded $3.4 million in 2008 (according to measuringworth.com). Chaplin made thirty-five Keystones. Although it had not yet dawned on Charlie at the time of that showdown with Mack, he was big business.
21 Theodore Dreiser, “The Best Motion Picture Interview Ever Written,” Photoplay, August 1928.
22 Sennett, King of Comedy, 187.
23 Kalton Lahue and Terry Brewer, Kops and Kustard: The Legend of Key stone Films (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968), 67.
24 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 159.
25 Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art, 132.
26 Crocker, Charlie Chaplin, ch. 6, 18.
1 Alistair Cook, Fun & Games with Alistair Cooke (New York: Arcade, 1996), 220.
2 Edward Wagenknecht, Stars of the Silents (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1987), 92.
3 Erick Berry, “Charlie Captures Africa’s Gold Coast,” New York Times, July 5, 1925.
4 Wagenknecht, Stars of the Silents, 92.
5 Haining, Legend, 132.
6 Lives like Chaplin’s are now being systematically studied by social scientists. They are finding that children subjected to homelessness and other forms of emotional stress and abuse don’t all turn out the same way. While the vast majority become severely impaired or socially disadvantaged adults, a small handful, like Charlie Chaplin or the equally world-famous Oprah Winfrey, surprisingly turn into smart, resourceful, streetwise superkids; the psychological shorthand term to describe them is “invulnerables.” These resilient children go on to lead high-achieving and remarkable lives as valued members of society. Chaplin was such a person, and his famous film character and alter ego “Charlie” was as well.
7 Chaplin Jr., My Father, Charlie Chaplin, 9.
8 Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art, 538.
1 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 323.
2 Sigmund Freud to Yvette Guilbert, quoted in Crocker, Charlie Chaplin, ch. 14, 2–3.
3 Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art, 183.
4 Ibid., 182.
5 Ibid., 185.
6 David Robinson, “An Imposture Revived,” review of Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story, ed. Geduld, Times Literary Supplement, June 27, 1986, 716.
7 Geduld, Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story, ix.
8 Stephen M. Weissman, “Frederick Douglass, Portrait of a Black Militant—A Study in the Family Romance,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 30 (1975): 725-51.
9 Syd Chaplin, “A Few Reminiscences,” Bioscope, March 11, 1915, 957.
10 Vance, Chaplin, 17.
11 Geduld, Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story, 26.
12 Carr, “Charlie Chaplin’s Story.”
13 Walter Vogdes, “Charlie Chaplin: Rather a Quiet Little Guy Who Takes His Pantomimic Art Seriously,” New York Tribune, December 30, 1917, quoted in Charlie Chaplin: Interviews, ed. Kevin J. Hayes (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 28–29.
14 One year after those interviews with Rose Wilder Lane, in the early winter of 1916, Chaplin played the role of the Artful Dodger in a one-night benefit performance of a stage version of Oliver Twist at the Mason Opera House for the Los Angeles News Boy Fund. Constance Collier played Bill Sykes’s Nancy and Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree played Fagin.