He could fall, trip, stumble, somersault, slap, and make faces. These were stock-in-trade items which we could use.
— Mack Sennett1
HE HAD ONLY GLIMPSED CHAPLIN ONCE — onstage in his “Limey make-up and costume”2 — before luring him to the West Coast by doubling his salary, and when they finally met in person that December 1913, crass and brassy Mack Sennett made no attempt to hide his doubts over his new star’s apparent youthful inexperience. “What I had seen in New York was a deft, experienced, knockabout, roughneck, middle-aged comedian of the English music-hall type. In Los Angeles I met a boy.”3 Although Chaplin was now twenty-four, he still looked like that unimpressive and underfed teenage actor whom the Guv’nor had intimidated five years earlier. By Charlie’s own estimate, he “looked about eighteen. A callow youth.”4
“I thought you were a much older man,” Mack griped.
“I can make up as old as you like,” Charlie replied.5
Since Mack (on Mabel’s advice) had spent a hefty bundle to hire the “little Englisher” to replace Keystone’s departing principal comedian, a veteran ex-circus clown by the name of Ford Sterling, his tactlessly expressed concerns over Charlie’s youthfulness were understandable enough. Each man had trepidations of his own.
Mack was afraid he had trapped himself in an expensive one-year contract with a wet-behind-the-ears adolescent comedian. Those fears were aggravated when the “scared little Englishman”6 failed to report for work for several days. It took a phone call from Sennett himself, demanding to know why he had not shown up, before Charlie timidly inched his way through the Keystone gates at 1712 Alessandro Street and presented himself to “Mr. Sennett,” the formal title by which he continued to address his new employer for the next several months. Unaccustomed to such deference, Sennett was used to being called Boss or Mack by his roughneck gang of Keystone regulars, who referred to him behind his back as the Old Man.
They were a motley collection of circus clowns, steeplejacks, sign painters, trolley conductors, ex-prizefighters, vaudeville vets, and acrobats. Their snappy vernacular language, wisecracking informality, and back-slapping camaraderie stood in stark contrast to the comparatively polite expressions of good fellowship expressed in Charlie’s former Karno troupe.
Sennett took Chaplin on a brief tour of his bustling fun factory, which was producing several one- and two-reelers at the time. As they walked through the confusion and mayhem, Mack outlined his commercially successful formula for grinding out slapstick films: “We have no scenario — we get an idea, then follow the natural sequence of events until it leads up to a chase, which is the essence of our comedy.”7
Escalating the pace of a comedy sketch until it exploded in nonsensical mayhem and a wow ending was not new to Charlie. Although the cramped confines of theatrical stages did not permit full-scale chases, Keystone style, he had led the Mumming Birds cast in unruly food-throwing, clothes-ripping riots at final curtain, night after night. But the world-without-walls of an open-air silent film studio in exotically tropical Southern California bore such a remote resemblance to the tight, boxlike, proscenium arch intimacy of darkened London music halls that — as he listened to Sennett’s pet chase formula — the Cockney comedian was at a temporary loss to translate Karno into Keystone or vice versa.
Mack’s larger-than-life, wide-open-spaces, shot-on-location, high-speed vehicular version of a standard crash comedy ending felt unfamiliar to Charlie and filled him with misgivings over his new guv’nor’s lack of subtlety. Or maybe his qualms had more to do with America and Americans in general. From his first day in New York, there had been something disquieting about the hurried rhythms and throbbing urgency of life in the United States, which those highly popular Keystone comedies embodied and typified.
He had felt instantly “alien to this slick tempo” of a nation on the move and a people in a hurry. Americans’ fast-paced lives, clipped speech, and brusque manners made him “uncomfortable for fear I might stutter and waste their time.” A sensitive observer of other people’s idiosyncrasies and an astute student of tempo and movement, Charlie had been quick to notice how the lowliest shoeshine boy, soda jerk, or bartender self-importantly performed the tasks and routines of his job like a “hopped-up juggler” with “a fury of speed.”8
Coming from a tight little island whose lack of an expanding frontier and rigid class boundaries imposed more restrictive rhythms on its inhabitants, Chaplin was fascinated by the stylized manner and snappy pace with which Americans moved in their land of infinite social and geographic mobility. The manic energy of their entrepreneurial tempo reflected the national obsession with getting ahead and a Horatio Alger optimism. Or as Charlie put it, “The American is an optimist preoccupied with hustling dreams, an indefatigable tryer. He hopes to make a quick killing. Hit the jackpot! Get out from under! Sell out! Make the dough and run! Get into another racket!”9
Celebrating the modern industrial age and bidding farewell to the passing of pastoral agrarianism, twentieth-century urban America was abandoning the stately waltz of the 1890s in favor of the jerky two-step. And if the go-getter tempo of modern life in the United States ran like a Krazy Keystone Komedy, the resemblance was not accidental. The hopped-up pace at which Sennett’s fun factory churned out 140 crude slapstick films in its first year occurred even as Henry Ford’s Model T’s were beginning to roll off his Dearborn plant’s first assembly lines. The two events reflected that same Yankee ingenuity for mass production. The Rube Goldberg miracle of miles of tin lizzies or miles of near-identical celluloid one- and two-reelers was virtually the same. As Mack put it, Keystone movies sold “like gingham for girls’ dresses — at so much per yard.”10
The tightly formularized make-believe world of slapstick that Sennett slickly packaged in can after can of chase films as they rolled off his Edendale assembly line bore the unmistakable stamp of the studio-factory in which they were so rapidly shot and assembled. Burlesque-trained Sennett specialized in creating a wacky mechanical universe in which his clowns were reduced to the antlike scale and robot status of windup toys. He relied on long shots and far shots to establish this perspective cinematographically and also resorted to trick photography devices like animation, stop-motion, double exposures, and reversed film to enhance the effect. He had no time for subtle but slow-moving character comedy.
What gave Mack’s comedy chases their distinctive flavor was his unique technique for creating the illusion that his film actors walked or ran at a high speed, by artificially causing their bodies to hop in a jerky fashion onscreen, more like krazy self-propulsion machines than real people. This special effect was accomplished by undercranking the camera intentionally. When those sequences were later projected at a normal rate, Sennett’s marionettes spilled and somersaulted higgledy-piggledy across America’s movie screens in apparent defiance of the laws of logic and gravity. Never giving spectators time to relax or to notice holes in a story, Mack believed that “once we stop to let anybody analyze us, we’re sunk.”11
The signature cutting-room rhythms that he achieved by rapidly alternating shots of pursued and pursuing comic chase figures at an ever-increasing tempo, coupled with his special trick of removing every fourth frame, came to be known as Keystone editing. Not surprisingly, almost all of this technical emphasis on speed derived its original inspiration from the breakneck pace of D. W. Griffith’s famous Biograph editing with its much more skillful portrayal of smooth-flowing, natural actions as they gracefully unfolded through the combined use of crosscutting and parallel editing in his suspenseful last-minute rescues.
Just as Marcel Duchamp’s fragmented, stop-action, co-simultaneous depiction of superimposed layers of motion in his Nude Descending a Staircase in the New York Armory Show that year reflected the increasing speed-consciousness of modern industrial European society, so D. W. Griffith had captured the hectic beat of his world and successfully translated its frenzied tempo into the cinematic time equivalent of ragtime.
Having taken the pulse of the nation, it was Griffith, not Sennett, who originally discovered the hypnotic fascination created by steadily quickening a film’s tempo until it crescendoed in a spellbinding climax. Mack’s commercial genius lay in his homespun comic transposition of his former walking companion’s dazzling artistic genius by artificially souping up film speed in a slapstick world and choreographing his clowns in those slam-bang pileup finishes for which he became famous.
A comedian’s ability to capsize convincingly was of far greater importance to Sennett than his talent as a comic actor. Walking in off the street and asking for a tryout, decked out in “white pumps, white trousers, white shirt, blue bow tie, blue coat” and straw boater, natty Fatty Arbuckle — a sylph who tipped the scales at 265 pounds — had been hired on the spot to apprentice as a Keystone Kop because he could do “a backward somersault as gracefully as a girl tumbler.”12
Nine months later, it was Chaplin’s acrobatic agility that Sennett remembered when, facing that vacancy in his troupe of loonies, he decided to lure the little limey to California. But what was so uncharacteristic about Mack’s offer of a hundred and fifty bucks a week, guaranteed, was that he was recruiting a completely unproven film talent into his organization at the starting salary of an established principal without so much as a screen test. All the other comedians on the roster — Mabel, Roscoe, Mack Swain, Chester Conklin, and Ford Sterling included — had worked their way up from the ranks in pay and status at Bio-graph or Keystone. To outsiders, it might have appeared to be a case of Mack’s well-known gambler’s instinct triumphing over his equally notorious penny-pinching ways. But as Sennett put it, he offered Chaplin such a princely sum because he had all the right moves.
Sennett understood that the financial soundness of that investment could not be tested without additional training. It took six weeks before Charlie attempted his first film. During those early days, Mack remembered him as “a shy little Britisher who was abashed and confused by everything that had anything to do with motion pictures,”13 while Chaplin recalled:
For days I wandered around the studio, wondering when I would start work. Occasionally I would meet Sennett crossing the stage, but he would look through me, preoccupied. I had an uncomfortable feeling that he thought he had made a mistake in engaging me which did little to ameliorate my nervous tension.14
Chester Conklin’s description of Chaplin during this orientation period was “a serious little fellow, very curious, always listening and observing and saying practically nothing except to ask a few pointed and professional questions. He watched everybody all the time.”15
Chaplin discovered that virtually every aspect of filmmaking required a major adjustment to his theatrical technique. Even the greasepaint was different. Dismayed to learn that the flesh tones and broad character lines of traditional stage makeup registered a garish gray on film shot in the bright glare of a California sun, Charlie was “bowled over” by his first glimpse of his image on the silver screen, exclaiming, “It caw’nt be. Is that possible? How extr’ordin’ry. Is it really me?”16
As accustomed as he was to commandeering stage space in his graceful impersonations of klutziness, it took every ounce of concentration and effort he could muster to convey with his movements an appearance of naturalness and relaxed spontaneity, while constantly reminding himself to stay at all times within the rigidly defined limits of the camera’s range in order to remain in focus.
He found Keystone’s production methods equally disorienting. Scenes were shot out of chronological sequence, piecemeal. Rushes were viewed, confusingly, in negative (black face, white moustache) rather than the more visually recognizable positive print form of ordinary photographs. And in certain scenes, Charlie was dismayed to discover, actors were expected to react convincingly to imaginary off-camera characters instead of to live fellow performers, whose partnering might enhance their performances.
Attempting to do his funniest business in front of an impassive recording device was unnerving for an actor whose years of live performance experience had trained him to instinctively play to a house. Instead of the familiar feedback of the audience’s laughter to help time gags, and an intuitive sense of the mood of the crowd to gauge the pace and build of his material, Chaplin found himself confronted with the impersonal click and whir of the camera gearbox and the cyclopean fish-eye stare of its distracting “round black lens,” which “seemed like a great eye watching me.”17 (After he got the hang of it, he would, of course, be enormously relieved never to have to face a live audience again.)
Instead of providing Chaplin with the benefit of his own personal tutelage, or at least giving him a sympathetic director who could teach him the ropes and encourage him to improvise, Sennett threw Charlie to the wolves. Going off on location to supervise Keystone’s first unit, which was shooting a Mabel Normand comedy at the time, Mack assigned Chaplin to Henry Lehrman, the departing director of his second unit.
Lehrman’s inherent tendency to browbeat actors was aggravated by the fact that he was then in a hurry to wind up his commitment to Keystone. He had an offer from Universal to become a producer like Sennett, with the prospect of eventually establishing his own film company, and his vanity was at a peak. Filled with self-important dreams of becoming a movie mogul, the arrogant, ambitious director was in no mood to answer questions or take suggestions from a newcomer.
Around the Keystone lot, and throughout the industry, the former trolley conductor and self-styled impresario was better known as Pathé Lehrman. It was a nickname that D. W. Griffith had personally bestowed in recognition of the brashness with which he had attempted to bluff his way onto a Biograph set with a phony French accent and equally false claim that he’d worked in Europe for prestigious Pathé Frères. But with less irony and much more resentment, the actors and stuntmen at Lehrman-KO (Knock Out) Studio would later redub him Suicide Lehrman, a nickname that testified to the reckless indifference he consistently displayed for their physical safety. A technically competent but second-rate disciple of the Mack Sennett school of highspeed slapstick, Pathé considered film actors dispensable commodities and liked to brag about the fact that “he got all his laughs from mechanical effects and film cutting.”18
Apart from enjoying the historical distinction of directing Charlie Chaplin in his first movie, Making a Living, a film that he later admitted to spitefully butchering in order to teach Chaplin a lesson because he “knew too much,”19 Henry Lehrman is best remembered for the equally malicious delight he took in helping to wreck Roscoe Arbuckle’s career. Roscoe had suddenly fallen from grace and was being accused unjustly of drunkenly raping and accidentally killing an aspiring starlet by rupturing her bladder during a wild Labor Day gin blast and sex spree in a suite at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. Publicity-seeking Lehrman was more than happy to oblige sensation-hungry Hearst journalists in their scathing pretrial indictment of Arbuckle in the tabloids of the day.
He furnished them with false denunciations of his old pal’s moral character. For flabbergasted Fatty fans, who found it hard to imagine their boyishly innocent, chubby comic hero as physically or temperamentally capable of behaving in such an obscene manner, Lehrman would lend considerable credibility to that image by depicting Roscoe as a lecherous swine whose infamous Sabine forays into the actresses’ dressing room had been a regular occurrence at Keystone.
Before starting to shoot Making a Living, Chaplin had been instructed to select his own character costume. He chose a standard man-about-town getup which he fashioned out of an old Karno outfit. It consisted of a tall silk hat, a frock coat with matching trousers, starched cuffs with an equally stiff bib dickey and formal batwing collar, around which was fastidiously knotted a fashionably billowing cravat. To heighten the effect, Charlie selected a flowing moustache and those twin insignias of every strutting and peering gentleman on the Strand who is — or aspires to be — a member of the upper class: a walking stick and a monocle on a chain.
When the shooting began, Chaplin even managed to squeeze in a highly condensed but thoroughly polished pantomime vignette of the particular type of elegant swell he had in mind. Since his portrayal occurred in the film’s opening sequence, at a point when his screen character is first being introduced to the audience, it would have been next to impossible, even for scissor-happy Henry Lehrman, to completely extirpate our first glimpse of the considerable skills as a comic character actor that Charlie Chaplin had already developed at this earliest point in his film career.
But after those revealing opening moments, the production plunged headlong into a typically fast-paced chain of slapstick events, Keystone-style. With the exception of one other brief bit of retained but badly mangled funny business that Charlie managed to squeeze in (see below), a very impatient Lehrman allotted Chaplin no time for character comedy. The entire film was shot in three days. And in what amounted to a curious case of art mirroring life, or vice versa, the film’s contrived plot, such as it was, bore an uncanny resemblance to the real-life drama unfolding on the Keystone set.
Taking the other principal role in Making a Living—in addition to directing it — Henry Lehrman played the part of Chaplin’s rival in a competition that was as hard fought offscreen as on. Cast as the villain in the piece, Charlie played an impoverished English swell who succeeds in stealing Henry’s girl by impressing her with his phony urbane manners and elegant dress. Aware that Chaplin is actually broke and therefore no gentleman at all, at least in his eyes, Henry attempts to win back his girl by denouncing Charlie. But the young lady, already smitten, refuses to listen and sends Henry packing.
Coincidences multiply. Henry and Charlie next end up competing for the same job as a newspaper reporter. Once again Henry attempts to denounce his rival: “He is a bum!” a subtitle informs their prospective employer. Affecting gentlemanly outrage at such heinous slander, Charlie strikes an elegant pose of righteous indignation by dashing his walking stick to the ground — only to discover that he is holding it wrong side up (shades of his Bodie impersonation).
Choosing this inopportune moment, a loose cuff from Charlie’s shirt lazily tumbles down the full length of his cane. Undaunted, Charlie prepares to defend his sullied honor by challenging Henry to a fisticuff duel.
Stripping for action, Charlie begins to remove his frock coat only to reveal the true extent of his poverty: he doesn’t even own a shirt. The cuff tumbled because it was unattached. Disgracefully exposed as a false swell whose surface pretensions to gentility rest on a sartorial understructure as weak and artificial as the moral foundations of his character, Charlie makes a hasty exit from the newspaper office.
After that deflating departure, Charlie manages to steal Henry’s reporter’s camera and run off with his rival’s exclusive photos of a news scoop, which he peddles as his own. The rest of the story — at least half the film’s footage — is spent running. Henry chases Charlie. An irate husband of an innocent woman bystander chases Henry. A comic policeman chases Charlie. A highspeed Pacific Electric Line trolley chases Charlie and Henry as they chase and fight one another. As far as Henry Lehrman was concerned, the film’s plot was only ever intended as a vehicle for comic chase scenes.
While repeated, slower viewings (on a hand-turned Steen-beck flatbed editing machine at the Library of Congress) permit more considered analysis of the specific type of British music hall pantomime and social class comedy that Chaplin was attempting to insert, a single normal-speed viewing reveals the film Henry Lehrman succeeded in making: a fast-paced, typically American slapstick tale of two rival go-getters struggling for a fast buck and fighting over a pretty girl. As to their equally hard-fought offscreen competition, what provoked Pathé’s ire and his resolve to take vengeance in the cutting room was the way the earnest little Englishman innocently kept offering Lehrman help, by suggesting bits of funny business for other members of the cast.
“When I saw the finished film it broke my heart,” Charlie ruefully recalled, “for the cutter had butchered it beyond recognition, cutting into the middle of all my funny business.”20 And after Mack saw the film, Mabel recalled, he “screamed that he had hooked himself a dead one.”21 But attempting to calm down his even more nervous business partners back in New York after they previewed Chaplin’s first outing, Sennett reassured them that it was the same old problem they encountered with each new Keystone comedian: “We haven’t got his character right yet.… Or his make-up and costume.”22
Equally filled with misgivings over his disappointing first effort, Charlie confided to Chester Conklin: “I’m going to get out of this business. It’s too much for me. I’ll never catch on. It’s too fast. I can’t tell what I’m doing.” Then, shifting part of the blame onto the crudeness of the medium itself, Charlie rationalized, “I’m not sure any real actor should get caught posing for the flickahs.” Taking pity, Chester recalled,
I told him to stick it out. I told him he was going to be something very big in motion pictures. I lied like hell. I didn’t think any such thing. I can’t claim I had the foresight to see Chaplin’s future. But I have as tender a heart as the next roughneck and I couldn’t help trying to cheer up that doleful Englishman. His criticisms of movies were nothing but whistling in the dark. Charlie was humiliated and needed encouragement. I talked him out of quitting.23
As Sennett reminded the management at Keystone financial headquarters, it was standard procedure at the California studio for each new comedian to experiment until he developed an identity, which then became a stock character he would play in film after film. Ford Sterling specialized in a comic Dutchman, Mack Swain was Ambrose, Chester Conklin was best known as Walrus, and of course Roscoe Arbuckle, with his glowing face and winning grin, played boyishly lovable Fatty. In a sense, Senassigned him to Lehrman again and dispatchednett’s operation was not unlike a commedia dell’arte company with its Harlequin, Pantaloon, Pierrot, Columbine, and other familiar figures. But the crucial difference was that instead of narrowly prescribed stock characters based entirely upon strictly defined, time-honored theatrical traditions, each Keystone performer was free to invent himself.
On a rainy February afternoon about a week after his debut debacle in Making a Living, Charlie Chaplin did just that. Unable to work because of the downpour, some of the boys (Chester, Roscoe, Mack, Ford) were holed up in the male actors’ dressing room, playing a friendly game of penny pinochle for beers, while Charlie “ambled about the room looking pale and worried.”24 Borrowing something from almost all of the assemblage — a pair of Fatty’s baggy trousers, Ford’s equally capacious clodhoppers, Charlie Avery’s skimpy formal cutaway jacket, Roscoe’s father-in-law’s tight-fitting derby, and a trimmed-down version of Mack Swain’s moustache — Charlie fashioned himself a set of comic “moes” and instantly began to improvise the character for which he would become famous.
Selecting a flexible bamboo cane in place of the stiff one he had used in Making a Living, Chaplin brought his Little Tramp to life. His character actions felt more spontaneous and would register with less rigidity than they had in his stereotypical English dude get up. A supple series of trademark movements, gestural inflections, and facial expressions soon began to appear as well. Some could be traced back to their origins: the Rummy Binks shuffle from his Methley Street days with Lily and Syd; that old standby one-legged corner turn from the Dick Turpin sketch in Casey’s Court Circus; Fred Kitchen’s ashtray kick. But for the most part, as if by some miracle, mannerisms materialized from sources Chaplin could not explain. He realized it immediately, and the boys in the backroom also sensed a breakthrough. He had no conscious preconception of his tramp character,
But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the make-up made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked onto the stage he was fully born. When I confronted Sennett I assumed the character and strutted about, swinging my cane and parading before him. Gags and comedy ideas went racing through my mind.25
Deciding that Chaplin’s new character looked promising, Sennett assigned him to Lehrman again and dispatched the ill-matched pair with a camera crew to the nearby beach town of Venice where a children’s soapbox derby would be taking place a few days later. It was Mack’s custom to film all photographically interesting public events — parades, dance contests, international expositions, fires, accidents, building demolitions, reservoir drainings, ship launchings — and use them as backdrops for his low-budget comedies, in order to economize on production costs.
Shot in forty-five minutes, the split-reeler was conceived as an improvisationally plotless film, whose primary purpose was to serve as an informal screen test. For Chaplin and Sennett, it was a chance to see how Charlie’s new character registered and played. But ever loath to waste a penny or a foot of film, Mack undoubtedly told Pathé to take his shots in such a way that they could also be assembled and vended as a ten-minute “quickie,” which they were. An educational documentary titled Olives and Their Oil occupied the other half of the reel.
Like the olive-oil opus, Lehrman’s Kid Auto Races at Venice begins documentary style in a newsreel format. The only catch is that film coverage of the real-life event is constantly disrupted by an eccentrically dressed, unidentified wise guy and show-off in the racetrack audience who inserts himself in front of the filmed action. Only after the opening few minutes is that original narrative premise broken and the picture-show audience presented with shots taken from the fresh perspective of a second camera. It now becomes clear that all along we have been watching a professional actor playing the role of camera hog and disruptive nuisance, and that this is a comedy film about making a documentary movie.
Directing the film as well as acting the part of the newsreel director in the film-within-a-film, Henry Lehrman delights in giving Charlie the bum’s rush. Heaving, shoving, pushing, collaring, and booting an ever-persistent Charlie out of the frame time and again, Pathé puts passion into his performance. Behind-the-scenes undertones from the real-life drama of Charlie’s earnest attempt to break into the movies and ill-natured Henry’s equally energetic determination to keep him from succeeding add life and vitality to this otherwise limited slapstick situation.
Theater critic and silent film historian Walter Kerr’s verdict on the Little Tramp’s maiden voyage is:
He is elbowing his way into immortality, both as a “character” in the film and as a professional comedian to be remembered. And he is doing it by calling attention to the camera as camera.
He would do this throughout his career, using the instrument as a means of establishing a direct and openly acknowledged relationship between himself and his audience.… The seeds of his subsequent hold on the public, the mysterious and almost inexplicable bond between this performer and everyman, were there.26
Kid Auto Races at Venice did not make Chaplin an overnight star. Nor would his next several pictures, for that matter. But he had made a major breakthrough. After attempting, in Making a Living, to project a standard music hall comedy swell whose impeccable exterior hides his impecunious interior, Charlie had gone on to create his own much more original and deeply personal version of a down-and-out dandy. Through a complex molting process, whose most easily observable external manifestation was an improvisational shedding of one set of togs for another, the Little Tramp was born. Chaplin later recalled that a psychological transformation of his character occurred as a direct result of his costume change:
I hadn’t the slightest idea what to do. I went to the dress department and on the way I thought, well, I’ll have them make everything in contradiction — baggy trousers, tight coat, large head, small hat —raggedy but at the same time a gentleman.… Making an entrance, I felt dressed; I had an attitude. It felt good, and the character came to me.27
A definitive verdict on this new screen character’s mass appeal would have to await the film’s release. But Chaplin was able to sense from the atmosphere in the male actors’ dressing room that he had made a promising start with his new character moes. On a streetcar ride home from the studio a few days later, one of the bit players confirmed that impression with an enthusiastic “Boy, you’ve started something; nobody ever got those kind of laughs on the set before, not even Ford Sterling.”28
Charlie’s pinochle-playing colleagues had never seen anything like his Little Tramp. As a matter of fact, neither had Charlie. “My character was different and unfamiliar to the American, and even unfamiliar to myself.”29 Although this disclaimer was not strictly true, Chaplin’s remark was not meant to be coy or shroud the character in mystery. He knew the Little Tramp’s cultural heritage and psychology could be traced back to his own Cockney roots. He never hid that fact:
The idea of being fastidious, very delicate about everything was something I enjoyed. Made me feel funny There is that gentle poverty quiet poverty about all the Cockneys who ape their betters. Every little draper, soda clerk wants to be a swell, dress up. So when I stumbled over some dog’s leash, got my hand stuck in a cuspidor, I knew instinctively what to do. I tried to hide it. They yelled — the mere fact that I didn’t want anybody to see it.
I never thought of the tramp in terms of appeal. He was myself, a comic spirit, something within me that said I must express this. I felt so free.… That was the thrill.30
If Chaplin ever was fully aware that his comic screen character had emerged from his tragic childhood, he never recorded the insights in print or dictated typescript (as opposed, possibly, to handwritten private notes or off-the-record conversations). Skeptical about the value of so-called method acting technique, he also believed that introspection had the power to destroy an actor’s performance by robbing it of all spontaneity:
I think you’re liable to kill your enthusiasm if you delve too deeply into the psychology of the characters you are creating. I don’t want to know about the depths; I don’t think they’re interesting.31
But for students of the creative process, the cultural and personal forerunners of Chaplin’s Little Tramp are of more than passing interest. His second screen character, the tramp in Kid Auto Races at Venice, was unfamiliar to American audiences. But his previous one, the impecunious swell in Making a Living, was well known to his countrymen.
Had they given it much thought, thousands of English music hall patrons could have identified Chaplin’s first screen character in Making a Living as a near ringer for Burlington Bertie from Bow, a famous stage character from the song of the same name. The song had just become popular in British music hall around the time Charlie was departing on his second American tour. It is impossible to establish with certainty where and when “Burlington Bertie from Bow” was first performed. After it became a great hit, it was copyrighted in 1915, but that followed its reception by at least a year. In those days, songs were protected by copyright after their popularity was established, if at all. To identify a few of the song’s references: Tom Lipton was the tea importer, Lord Rosebery the former prime minister, and Lady Diana Manners the reigning beauty of the day. The earliest identified date of performance is 1914, but that date does not mean it wasn’t performed before that. The lyrics ran:
I’m Bert
P’raps you’ve heard of me
Bert
You’ve had word of me,
Jogging along
Hearty and strong
Living on plates of fresh air
I dress up in fashion
And when I am feeling depressed
I shave from my cuff all the whiskers and fluff
Stick my hat on and toddle up West
I’m Burlington Bertie I rise at ten thirty
And saunter along like a toff
I walk down the Strand with my gloves on my hand
Then I walk down again with them off
I’m all airs and graces, correct easy paces
Without food so long I’ve forgot where my face is
I’m Bert, Bert, I haven’t a shirt
But my people are well off you know
Nearly everyone knows me from Smith to Lord Rosebr’y,
I’m Burlington Bertie from Bow.
I stroll
With Lord Hurlington,
Roll
In The Burlington
Call for Champagne
Walk out again
Come back and borrow the ink
I live most expensive
Like Tom Lipton I’m in the swim
He’s got so much “oof” he sleeps on the roof
And I live in the room over him.
I’m Burlington Bertie I rise at ten thirty
And saunter along Temple Bar
As round there I skip
I keep shouting “Pip Pip!”
And the darn’d fools think I’m in my car
At Rothschilds I swank it
My body I plank it
On his front door step with “The Mail” for a blanket
I’m Bert, Bert, and Rothschild was hurt
He said “You can’t sleep there” I said “Oh”
He said “I’m Rothschild sonny!” I said “That’s damn’d funny
I’m Burlington Bertie from Bow.”
My pose,
Tho’ ironical Shows
That my monocle
Holds up my face, keeps it in place,
Stops it from slipping away.
Cigars,
I smoke thousands,
I usually deal in The Strand
But you’ve got to take care when you’re getting them there
Or some idiot might stand on your hand.
I’m Burlington Bertie I rise at ten thirty
And Buckingham Palace I view.
I stand in the yard while they’re changing the guard
And the queen shouts across “Toodle oo”!
The Prince of Wales’ brother along with some other
Slaps me on the back and says “Come and see Mother”
But I’m Bert, Bert, and royalty’s hurt,
When they ask me to dine I say no.
I’ve just had a banana with Lady Diana
I’m Burlington Bertie from Bow.
Chaplin’s impecunious swell in Making a Living was the very embodiment of Bert: monocle, walking stick, empty belly, flashy sartorial exterior, swollen false pride, ironic pretensions toward gentility. It is in the opening sequence of that film that Chaplin the actor mimes his man. He accosts Lehrman with one of those bluff, hail-fellow-well-met greetings that men-about-town customarily exchange upon casually encountering one another. Then, after flattering Henry and establishing their mutual good taste by admiring Lehrman’s pinky ring, Charlie shifts gears. Swallowing his pride with a visible gulp and leaning forward to whisper into a cupped hand, Chaplin skillfully pantomimes, with lowered eyes, the portrait of a gentleman of leisure who, having forgotten his wallet, has just made the deucedly embarrassing discovery that he is short of cash. Charlie attempts to negotiate a loan from Henry, one gentleman to another.
Upon being refused, Chaplin again shifts gears and confesses the true nature and urgency of his immediate needs. Pleading his belly, which he pathetically demonstrates to be as empty as his pocket, he readjusts the scope of his request for assistance. Offered a small coin whose meanness (on closer inspection) precludes accepting, Chaplin proudly turns away the proffered sum. Then, thinking better of it, he gratefully snatches the pittance. Parting with Henry, he immediately resumes his pose.
Sauntering along “like a toff,” he flourishes his cane as if it were a field marshal’s swagger stick or country squire’s riding crop, and resubmerges his secret hunger and pennilessness beneath the glitzy exterior of a false swell who is “all airs and graces, correct easy paces.”
Only later, in the screen character’s final mortifying comic denouement, does he accidentally reveal the full extent of his shabby gentility by losing his temper (and his cuff) while starting to strip for battle. At this point we discover: he’s Bert, Bert — and he hasn’t a shirt (though his people are well off, you know!).
That Chaplin knew this famous song, which was first introduced in the halls with immense success by an American-born vocalist and male impersonator by the name of Ella Shields, there is little doubt. Apart from the internal evidence of the striking resemblance between Charlie’s elegant swell in Making a Living and Shields’s equally illustrious member of the shabby genteel, residual traces of Bert are to be found in Chaplin’s principal character, the Little Tramp, throughout his screen life. On three separate filmmaking occasions, the Little Tramp resorted to his first cousin Bertie’s practice of hand-selecting his Havanas on the Strand (see Chaplin’s smoking-case gag in The Kid and his cigar-butt routines in The Gold Rush and City Lights). And like Bertie — who can be played either as a well-born gentleman who has fallen from society’s upper ranks or a daydreaming Cockney who is attempting to escape its lower depths — his cousin Charlie also embodies the ambiguous amalgam of the has-been gent and would-be dandy.
But if Bertie the seedy stage character and Charlie the shabby screen character are relatives, it was their common cultural heritage with its complex comic traditions that Chaplin the actor drew upon for the depth, power, and universality of his personal creation. Down-at-the-heels gentlemen shambled across the stage throughout the history of stage comedy. But the most immediate limb of the long English branch of Charlie and Bertie’s family tree grew from the music halls of the 1860s.
It was a tall, handsome day laborer by the name of Joe Saunders, who earned his bread as a construction worker in the Westminster Bridge Road just a stone’s throw from the Canterbury Music Hall, who had been their progenitor. Setting his sights on the finer things in life, Joe adopted the more dignified stage name George Leybourne and exchanged his workman garments for an elegant swell’s clobber, which he wore with the ease of someone to the manner born.
Shedding his working-class dialect — except when he occasionally sang Cockney character songs like “The Mousetrap Man” — Leybourne played the part, onstage and off, of an impeccably groomed and stylishly mannered man-about-town. Singing of his fondness for champagne, which he drank by the tankard, and his fondness for the ladies, who flocked to him by the score, George became an overnight superstar and folk hero to members of the working class. It was the chairman (emcee) at the Canterbury who first declared Leybourne a regular lion of a comic, and it was the elegant gallicized version of that term, lion comique, that stuck and finally came to describe both George and his rivals.
While the issue of originality was hotly contested in its day, particularly between Leybourne and that equally popular lion comique the Great Vance (a middle-class actor by the name of Alfred Peck Stevens), the issue of priority is moot from a contemporary perspective, since there is good reason to suspect that Saunders and Stevens originally invented themselves in recognition of a far more prominent gentleman of the time.
Born one year apart from their illustrious and better-bred contemporary Albert Edward of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, the Prince of Wales, known to his intimates as Bertie, both Leybourne and Vance adopted their prospective ruler as their role model. An urbane and relaxed, sartorially elegant, trendsetting man-of-the-world, England’s crown prince was renowned for the connoisseur’s delight he took in fine champagne, thoroughbred horseflesh, good cigars, and pretty women. His loyal subjects — including the lowborn Cockneys — took pride in the fact that the heir apparent and royal lion was a sporting man. When Coronation Day rolled around many years later in 1902, they would look forward in music hall song to the good times to come “On the Day King Edward Gets His Crown On.”
Even as early as the mid-1860s, when Bertie, Alf Stevens, and Joe Saunders were coming of age and beginning to polish their performance skills, admiration between commoner and prince already ran high in both directions. Not only would the fun-loving and democratic heir apparent frequent the halls, he would invite Leybourne to perform for him in private. Ley-bourne’s rival lion, the Great Vance, could and did boast that he was nicknamed the Beau Brummel of the Halls, a reference to the equally well-groomed boon companion of that other playboy prince, the regent of days gone by, George Augustus Frederick. While it isn’t likely that Vance ever dared to address his monarch as Bertie — unlike Brummel, who tweaked his “fat friend” by dubbing him Prinny — the Prince of Wales’s personal but casual friendship with Alfred Peck Stevens is a matter of historical record. Their mutual interest in fashion was sufficient to cement ties between the two dandies. Offstage, Bertie set the style for the gentlemen of his class while Vance, who was considered the best-groomed singer among the lions comiques, served up an onstage version for the lower orders to imitate vicariously during such snappy music hall numbers as “Strolling in the Burlington,” invoking the West End shopping arcade still renowned today for its elegant men’s shops.
Courtesy of the competing managements of their respective halls — the Canterbury and the Oxford — Leybourne and Vance were both able to adopt lifestyles fit for a king. Not only were they lavishly paid, but their employers also furnished each man with a handsomely appointed horse-drawn carriage complete with liveried footmen and coachmen as part of a highly visible rivalry encouraged for publicity purposes. Both men also received much of their lion comique wardrobes gratis from rival tailor shops, in an equally intense publicity campaign waged by enterprising merchants.
Unfortunately, the darker side of this felicitous mixture of commerce and class culture lay in the music hall owners’ intent to turn a handsome profit by vending wines and spirits to their patrons. As well known by his theme song “Champagne Charlie” as his stage name, it was George Leybourne’s responsibility at the Canterbury to stimulate his audience’s thirst by song and example. The Great Vance was expected by his management to keep the fizz flowing at the Oxford. Onstage, this rivalry took the quaint but thirst-provoking form of a duel between the two lions as they gaily sang, quaffed, and tippled their way down the beverage lists of their respective establishments with a series of convivial drinking songs like “Cool Burgundy Ben,” “Moet & Chandon,” “Sparkling Moselle,” and “Cliquot.” Quick to capitalize on the prospect of promoting those costly luxury items, which they were hoping to introduce as staples into the daily diets of the status-seeking but beer-drinking Cockneys from Bow, importers for the wine and spirits industry lost no time in following the example of their colleagues in the haberdashery trade, by furnishing the lions comiques with cases of their favorite beverages of the moment in exchange for their endorsements.
But those complimentary wine samples were a trickle compared to the torrent of alcohol that poured nightly down the throats of men like Joe Saunders and Alfred Stevens, who managed to drink themselves to death while still in their forties. Lions comiques died young and penniless, and alcoholism was endemic to their peculiar profession.
The chronic alcohol abuse that also destroyed the lives of hard-drinking working-class worshippers of the lions comiques eventually became the subject of clever satires by a group of music hall seriocomediennes who ironically served as unintentional social critics. With good-natured charm, their droll stage characters cautioned of the folly and tragedy of following in the footsteps of lions comiques by holding an uncompromisingly frank but funny mirror up to them. These female entertainers donned the garb and regalia of the dandies of the day to drive their point home. Working in realistic drag, skillful male impersonators like Nellie Power in the 1880s and Vesta Tilley in the 1890s created telling psychological portraits that poked fun in song at the self-deluding pretentiousness of the swells in the music hall audience. On one occasion, a young and presumably drunken swell in the audience heaved a heavy soda syphon at Nellie as a token of his esteem. Her best-known lion comique satire — “The City Toff” doing the la-di-da — was directed at the blokes in the balcony, while Vesta Tilley aimed her salvos at the sports in the stalls with her equally famous “Burlington Bertie.”
Not to be confused with Ella Shields’s “Burlington Bertie from Bow” who orders champagne but sleeps under a newspaper on Rothschild’s doorstep, Vesta Tilley’s “Bertie” is a flighty creature of real financial but no personal substance. In addition to “renting a flat somewhere Kensington way,” he “spends the good ‘oof his Pater has made, along with the Brandy and Soda Brigade.” Both characters have drinking problems, but they belong to different social classes.
As is the case when a few fragmentary anecdotes survive describing the quirks and eccentricities of a real-life individual’s distant relations, it is possible to cobble together a miscellaneous genealogy tracing the Little Tramp’s habits and mannerisms back to these theatrical ancestors. Ella Shields’s secretly shirtless Bertie begat the false swell in Making a Living who then begat the Little Tramp.
“Cradled in the profession,” Chaplin was steeped in the lore and traditions of the music hall comedy swell. He was as familiar with character gags tracing all the way back to the original lions comiques of the 1860s (such as the cuff routine of George Leybourne) as he was conversant with the comedy material of contemporary male impersonators like Vesta Tilley and Ella Shields. But far more persuasive than these spotty conjectural identifications of the elegant swell ancestry and the rich theatrical pedigree of the screen character Charlie, as reflected in Chaplin the actor’s costume and gag selection as he experimented with props and moes in the actors’ dressing room at Keystone in 1914, is the genealogical evidence — written and cinematographic — we have from the Little Tramp himself when he looked back over his entire life and thoughtfully summed up the comic influences on his career half a century later.
Nothing revealed Chaplin’s conscious identification with the lions comiques more conspicuously than the death scene he chose for his alter ego Calvero in Limelight. Like the Great Vance, who collapsed onstage at the Sun Music Hall in Knightsbridge after his final number — to immense applause from the audience, who mistook his prostration as part of his act — and then died in the wings of a heart attack, so Calvero would make his exit by falling into a drum onstage and then dying offstage, going out in a similar burst of glory to equally deafening applause.
Chaplin was undoubtedly aware of that connection between Vance, Calvero, Charlie Sr., and himself when he made Limelight in 1952. Twelve years later he elaborated some of the factual details of his father’s professional career as a lion comique in My Autobiography without connecting it directly to his screen character’s identity. Where Chaplin’s Little Tramp had condensed the double identities of a down-and-out dandy and a would-be swell into one persona, Chaplin’s father had traversed a similiar but more protracted course from elegance and celebrity to decadence and obscurity over a ten-year period from 1890 to 1900. Charlie had witnessed his father’s descent. His screen character commemorated it symbolically.
Like ten-year-old David Wark Griffith, who never forgot his formerly glorious military father’s sad alcoholic descent into marginal poverty and untimely departure from a world that had long since passed him by, so amid the pomp and ceremony of an elaborately fancy, rented funeral procession for his once immaculately glamorous but now seedy fallen lion comique father, twelve-year-old Charlie Chaplin had tossed a handful of earth on a polished oak coffin as it was lowered into a pauper’s grave, and perhaps silently vowed to remember.
Both of these loving sons commemorated and evoked the legacies of their fallible fathers with nostalgic brilliance as they labored passionately, so many years later, in the make-believe, Arabian Nights film world of props, costumes, and sets, where time could be magically reversed by the creative imagination in order to bring fallen idols back from the dead. And so, in that momentous turning-point year in the life of a film industry that was just starting to emerge from its own infancy, D. W. Griffith absorbed himself mightily in recreating and redirecting his warrior father’s glorious battles, while Charlie Chaplin began with equal power and poignancy to restage and relive long-buried memories and images of his own fallen father by begetting a screen character who memorialized his image. To an English visitor who had known Charlie Sr. and met Chaplin in Los Angeles in the winter of 1919, Charlie confided: “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t trying to follow in my father’s footsteps.”32