The Zulus know Chaplin better than Arkansas knows Garbo.
— Will Rogers1
WRHEN HE SIGNED A ONE-YEAR CONTRACT WITH ESSANAY in 1915, Chaplin was able to cut his production schedule in half and yet raise his weekly compensation eightfold (including the signing bonus). He remained an employee but gained tighter artistic control of his productions. The Essanay comedies had heftier budgets and less-pressured deadlines, which meant he could create more polished skits with production values and narrative complexity much superior to those of the comedies he had been obliged to turn out at breakneck speed at Keystone. Chaplin wasted no time in playfully satirizing his ex-boss’s original refusal to take his pleas for artistic freedom seriously, by portraying Sennett as the hard-of-hearing chief executive of Lockstone Studio, complete with a geezer ear trumpet and a bad case of ear-wax, in His New Job, his first Essanay film.
The most invigorating feature of his new contract was the opportunity it afforded him to become more intimately acquainted with his screen character. At Essanay, “Charlie” and his creator became more complex, more mature. They would cavort before the studio lights for twenty years, but to Chaplin (and to posterity) the duality felt lifelong.
I would have to spend the rest of my life finding out more about the creature.… he was fixed, complete the moment I looked in the mirror and saw him for the first time, yet even now I don’t know all the things there are to be known about him.2
The author-character relationship was self-consciously impersonal, but clandestinely autobiographical. In conversations with friends and family, Chaplin protected his privacy, firmly maintaining his boundaries. He always discussed “Charlie” in the third person and never referred to him as “I” or “me.” By inventing a proxy mouthpiece, who allowed him to share artistically disguised and comically revised childhood memories with his audiences, he could open his heart to a public that reciprocated by falling wildly in love with the Little Fellow.
After he left Keystone, Chaplin wove his magic through thirty tramp films including four feature-length masterpieces: The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), City Lights (1931), and Modern Times (1935). Reflecting on that global Chaplin mania, it would seem that posterity’s attachment to his tramp remains much more passionate than the public’s interest in his films, despite the fact that three of them still appear regularly on the American Film Institute’s hundred-greatest-films list. Young people today recognize the image of Charlie Chaplin. But very few of them have actually seen a Chaplin movie or know very much about his career — either at the peak of his international popularity or during his final years.
Chaplin’s tramp was not the first international pop icon in entertainment history. Those laurels must go to Buffalo Bill, whose instantly recognizable character image was known throughout North America and Western Europe. But the Little Tramp was the first global'icon in entertainment history and probably the most enduring—with the possible exception of his fellow trickster Mickey Mouse who Disney claimed was inspired by Charlie. In Chaplin’s heyday, Will Rogers’s remark about his fame extending to African tribesman was no exaggeration. A New York Times reporter wrote from Ghana:
“There’s a cinema … in Accra,” said my hosts. “We’ll all go down and see what they have tonight. It’s the only cinema house on the coast, the only movie within thousands of miles of country.”
… We were whisked inside … the lights flashed on for the intermission. There was a wild burst of shouts and yells and we looked down into a sea of black faces.
Here were Fanti savages from Ashanti land, up-country Kroo boys who work along the docks, … Haussas from the north of Nigeria, with red fezzes and huge white turbans, … Gamen, natives of Accra, dressed in henna reds and dark blues and brilliant oranges of Manchester print cottons. Some had wrapped them round like a toga; others wore simply a loin cloth … naked to the waist, their black bodies shining in the gleam of the electric lamps.…
At last the lights went out. No title flashed on the screen, but a funny little man with wide wondering round eyes appeared — a strange wandering walk, a little cane and a derby hat. It was Charlie! My own recognition was no quicker than that of the wildly transported native audience. There was an immediate chorus of shouts, “Charlee! Charlee!” Few of them knew any more English than that, but they did know his funny little hat, his hobbled walk, his amazing shoes.
It was a film from the remote antiquity of filmdom.…
Charlie kicked the villain in the usual place, and the villain responded by slamming the door on Charlie’s nose.…
… every time that Charlie kicked the villain and every time that the villain kicked Charlie the audience roared and shouted approval.…
There is a traveling moving picture show, equipped with films and projector and an old Ford car, which goes all over the west coast of Africa. It has been in the east, too, and right up in the jungle and the bush among savages who have never seen a white man before. In the larger towns the operator sets up boards across oil cans in a cocoa shed and the pictures are shown on a sheet stretched across one end of the shed. In smaller places the theatre is simply out of doors.
The operator has covered over 30,000 miles. What tales he must be able to tell! How did the natives first receive this white man’s juju? Were they frightened? What did the witch doctors think?… Some day, when I go back, I am going to get an interview with that man. I want to know, too, what the witch doctors think of Charlie!3
During his heyday, it has been estimated, as many as 300 million people watched the Little Tramp’s movie screen antics.4 That heyday lasted at least from 1915 through the mid-1930s. In those days, as one of the most famous and universally admired human beings in the world, Chaplin met and mingled with men like Einstein, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Gandhi. In his 1935 essay Everybody’s Language, Winston Churchill placed Chaplin on an equal artistic footing with Dickens. George Bernard Shaw —a Nobel Prize and Academy Award winner in his own right — declared him the only genius the cinema had produced. And a New York Herald Tribune reviewer wrote: “Praising one of Mr. Chaplin’s pictures is like saying that Shakespeare was a good writer.”5 Lenin described him as “the only man I ever wanted to meet.” Apart from Chaplin’s undisputed reputation as the first actor-writer-director genius of cinema, the most important reason for such glowing praise from Lenin and other world leaders was that Charlie (his screen character) was still considered an archetypal symbol of the common man.
A less famous but equally notorious visitor to the Chaplin Studio in 1921 was William Z. Foster — a former IWW “Wobbly” and leader of the 1919 steel strike, who had recently returned from the Red International of Labor Unions conference in Moscow. Clandestinely monitored by one of J. Edgar Hoover’s special agents who recorded that innocuous social visit as the very first entry in what eventually became Charlie Chaplin’s two-thousand-page FBI file, Foster later ran for the U.S. presidency as the Communist Party’s candidate in the elections of 1924, 1928, and 1932.
Chaplin’s extraordinary common touch explained his appeal to such a diverse group of political radicals, world leaders, celebrities, and intellectuals, as well as to working-class audiences throughout the Western world. Then there was his remarkable ability to communicate wordlessly with Asian coolies, Hindu natives, African tribesman, Latino peasants, and others for whom language and culture were no barrier. “I am known in parts of the world by people who have never heard of Jesus Christ,” Chaplin could (and did) matter-of-factly state without exaggeration.
His intuitive feel for the personal psychology and daily predicaments of the little guy was a direct outgrowth of his years of schooling in the proletarian theatrical traditions of British music hall, coupled with his childhood experiences with poverty and social inequality. Importing the narrative techniques of topical comedy from late-nineteenth-century music hall into early-twentieth-century American filmmaking, Chaplin’s silent film masterpieces were eloquent personal musings on contemporary issues of the day, as seen through the eyes of a social underdog.
The Immigrant (1916), for example, affectionately if comically portrayed the trials and tribulations of newcomers, whose official welcome to the promised land consists of being herded like cattle and impersonally labeled with ID tags by Ellis Island clerks under the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. Determined to preserve his dignity through nonconformity but not to risk deportation by openly challenging bureaucratic authority, trickster Charlie slyly back-kicks a shipboard immigration official in his authoritarian behind while ostensibly permitting himself to be tagged and rounded up with the rest of the herd. That two-reeler was Chaplin’s take on the immigration experience at a period in American history when fully one-third of all people in the country were either foreign born or had at least one foreign-born parent. For moviegoers around the world, the film was his comic valentine to the American Dream. There was nothing bitter in his social satire: the film ends happily with Charlie marrying a beautiful fellow immigrant whom he has met in steerage during their transatlantic crossing. (Some of the newsreel-like footage from this film is so realistic that it is still used in contemporary documentaries as a visual illustration of what the immigration experience was like.)
Another short film, Shoulder Arms (1918), paid a similar affectionate tribute to America’s fighting men by simultaneously expressing Chaplin’s unblinking view of the gruesome realities of World War I and his profound sympathy for the little-guy doughboys who were still fighting and dying at the time of that film’s release. In that antiwar masterpiece, which Jean Cocteau aptly described as moving like a drum roll, Charlie, the klutzy-but-graceful recruit Charlie endures the hardships and perils of trench warfare before bravely volunteering to undertake a dangerous mission behind enemy lines, where he captures the Kaiser, thereby singlehandedly ending the nightmare of war. Or almost ending it. The film concludes with a reality jolt: back in boot camp, Charlie, the romantically naive and patriotic doughboy-in-training, rudely awakens on his stateside bunk bed from his heroic dreams of glory, having not yet been shipped overseas to face the horrors that await him. Not only was Shoulder Arms the inspiration for Jean Renoir’s equally nuanced antiwar classic Grand Illusion of 1937, it also was personally requisitioned by General Eisenhower and used as a morale-boosting propaganda film during World War II.
Chaplin’s ability to take the temperature of his times and to comment insightfully on the important social issues of the day was sometimes almost accidental. His first feature-length comedy, The Kid, was a remarkably intimate film which served to transform personal pain into comic artistic expression. Begun as a direct response to the tragic loss of his own infant, the film follows Chaplin’s tramp as he finds, adopts, and lovingly raises a lost child. Production of that masterpiece began only two and a half weeks after his own son died shortly after birth. Serendipitously, the film’s themes of emotional loss, displacement, and homelessness resonated with contemporary social concerns. On everyone’s mind were the displaced refugee children of World War I. Many people were still grieving for loved ones killed in that war. And among intellectuals, Charlie’s cinematic lost child spoke to an equally lost generation looking for self-expression. No moviemaker and no other film — with the exception of Griffith’s Birth of a Nation — did as much to earn worldwide recognition for the cinema as a legitimate art form. When he went abroad after making The Kid, Chaplin was mobbed in both London and Paris, the latter city declaring a public holiday for the premiere.
Modern Times, the last silent film Chaplin made, was the antithesis of The Kid: it was an entirely self-conscious meditation on the most pressing social issue of the day, the Great Depression. During the worldwide economic crisis of the 1930s, Chaplin attempted to place the grim problems of society into a comic perspective through the film’s running satiric commentary.
Stationing his Little Tramp squarely in the middle of the mess by casting him as a black-sheep factory worker, who was no more a member in good standing of the organized masses than of the ruling classes, Chaplin poked good-natured fun at both sides. Kidding profit-conscious management for its indifference to the welfare of workers, he ribbed strike-happy organized labor for its equally myopic unwillingness to let big business get back on its feet. Steering clear of collective utopian solutions, the film ended with his own signature exit, a stroll down life’s highway, Charlie shuffled off into the dawn of a new day arm in arm with an equally scruffy female companion, Paulette Goddard. “Buck up — never say die! We’ll get along” are his final, comforting words to her and his Depression-conscious audience.
His next picture, The Great Dictator (1940), got Chaplin into political hot water that ultimately forced him out of the United States permanently. While he was on a visit to England in 1952, his reentry permit was revoked as retribution for his alleged Communist sympathies and dubious moral character. It was an ironic twist that Chaplin himself had forecast such a mishap in a famous gag sequence in Modern Times.
Wandering in the street, naive Charlie sees a red danger flag fall from a passing truck and picks it up, running and waving the flag in an innocent attempt to catch the driver’s eye. He is entirely unaware that he has just been joined from the rear by an angry mob of striking workers. Rallying behind his flag, they chant the Communist “Internationale” until they are dispersed by the cops, who scoop up Charlie the Red and toss him in the clink.
Just four years later, during a remarkably rapid shift of political contexts, Chaplin the filmmaker earned the enmity of isolationist America’s political establishment for creating The Great Dictator. Abandoning traditional pantomime technique and his classic tramp character in order to play two talking parts — Adolf Hitler and a little Jewish barber — Chaplin spoke for the first time on film. His closing speech, an artistically flawed but emotionally eloquent plea for concerted international intervention against Hitler’s persecution of the Jews, earned Chaplin a subpoena to appear before a hastily formed, isolationist, antiwar Senate subcommittee on war propaganda in September of 1941. The popular, financially successful film — which helped shape American public opinion in favor of the war — also helped earn him, in the files of the FBI, the quaint political epithet “premature antifascist.” In the terminology of the day, that was a euphemism for someone with strong left-wing leanings who was not officially a member of the Communist Party.
As Talleyrand remarked, “treason is a matter of dates.” Chaplin’s passionately anti-Nazi views, about which he was outspoken from the late 1930s to war’s end, never changed. But America’s relationship to Russia and Germany did. During the years of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, America’s official position was isolationist, and Chaplin’s speech in The Great Dictator was seen as inciting to war. But by the time the United States was involved in World War II, alliances were shifting. Politics during this period made for strange bedfellows. Before the war, the American Communist Party and the right-wing America First Committee were united in their adamant opposition to this country fighting against Germany. It was precisely during this period that Chaplin filmed and released The Great Dictator, which openly urged Americans to wage war against the Nazis regardless of whether that war harmed or benefited the Soviet Union. When, a few years later, the Soviet Union and America became allies in a life-and-death struggle against the Axis powers, Chaplin continued voicing his vehement anti-Nazi attitudes. But now he also championed Soviet interests as identical with our own. Throughout 1942 he campaigned vigorously on behalf of Russian War Relief and a Second Front.
Because of Chaplin’s worldwide stature as an artist, and the ability of a Chaplin satire to tickle funny bones on such a mass scale, those who disliked and distrusted the Soviet Union viewed him as a formidable adversary. But if his ability to influence were to be effectively neutralized, Chaplin’s popular image had to be taken down several notches.
The backlash against Chaplin gathered momentum in late 1942. Westbrook Pegler, a conservative journalist whose syndicated column ran in hundreds of newspapers, kicked off the campaign with two scathing diatribes. Characterizing Chaplin’s activities in support of our military alliance with the Soviets as pro-Communist and therefore anti-American, he recommended deportation. And with even more vehemence, Pegler also suggested that the actor’s three previous divorces were clear proof of his unpatriotic contempt “for the standard American relationship of marriage, family and home.”
The last charge proved to be the one that stuck most easily. When he was younger, Chaplin had a reputation as a libidinous ladies’ man, who frequently indulged his weakness for teenage girls. And a juicy sex scandal involving a famous movie star made good reading.
In June of 1943 an unmarried twenty-two-year-old woman with whom Chaplin had been intimate filed a paternity suit, claiming he was the father of her unborn child. Independently administered blood tests would conclusively prove that he was not the child’s father. But before those results were made known, Chaplin was well on his way to being publicly branded a “moral leper.”
Daily front-page coverage of a sensational trial on lurid charges of white slavery, unflattering photos of him being fingerprinted like a common criminal, and a running series of hostile articles by politically conservative Hollywood columnists, led by Hedda Hopper, contributed to the precipitous decline in Chaplin’s public image, as did the behind-the-scenes activities of the FBI. Careful analysis of that agency’s security files on Chaplin suggests he was frivolously charged under the antiquated Mann Act in spite of abundant evidence of his innocence — which was eventually proved. It also suggests that the FBI supplied gossip columnists with information from those files and that the bureau even suppressed, and physically hid, indications of judicial impropriety that, if known, would have forced the federal judge hearing the case to disqualify himself on ethical grounds.
Since the widely publicized and unduly protracted series of paternity hearings and trials did not end until a month after Germany’s surrender, Chaplin’s political influence was effectively curtailed. But he remained fervently committed to an idealistic postwar crusade against all forms of domestic political repression. Like many American liberals in those days, he was quicker to identify and protest the encroachments on civil liberties in the United States than the excesses of Stalinism.
With his image tarnished, the government’s political strategy for containing Chaplin became the reverse of what it earlier had been. Keeping Chaplin off the witness stand was now the single most effective way to further damage his reputation and impugn his loyalties. He was, in effect, labeled a Communist in a campaign of rumors and innuendoes. For as the House Un-American Activities Committee and the FBI well knew (and the files of the latter indicate), he never had been a member of the Communist Party. Had he been allowed to testify under oath, he could have set the record straight. HUAC subpoenaed him in 1947, but his hearing was postponed three times, and finally canceled.
Chaplin fought back with the tenacity of a true childhood “invulnerable” — someone who is accustomed to routinely overcoming any and all obstacles, no matter how great.6 He obliged his attackers by responding to their inflammatory rhetoric with passionate indignation. Goaded into defending himself, he rapidly made himself a convenient symbol of dangerous leftist leanings.
He was determined, no matter the personal cost, not to be intimidated. That deep and abiding faith in his ability to prevail in the face of adversity had always been his personal credo:
Even when I was in the orphanage, when I was roaming the streets trying to find enough to eat to keep alive, even then I thought of myself as the greatest actor in the world. I had to feel that exuberance that comes from utter confidence in yourself. Without it you go down to defeat.7
That very survival characteristic had endeared his Little Tramp to moviegoers around the world for more than forty years. It was natural that the invulnerable child in Charlie automatically assumed that the same coping strategy would serve him equally well in his struggles with HUAC and the FBI.
“Proceed with the butchery … fire ahead at this old gray head” were his opening words to the reporters who gathered at the press conference after the opening of Monsieur Verdoux in 1947. Not the least bit interested in discussing his film, they were there to report on his politics. They bombarded him with questions about his patriotism. The Cold War was heating up. His good-natured attempt to deflect their hostility by describing himself as a “peace monger” did not go over.8
Afterward, when conservative political pressure groups demonstrated their ability to induce Americans to boycott his film as an act of patriotism, Chaplin began to appreciate the extent to which he had underestimated his opponents.
Limelight, the last film he made before leaving the United States in the fall of 1952, suffered an even more drastic fate. Right-wing lobbyists were able to bring so much political pressure to bear on major exhibitors that bookings were canceled at hundreds of theaters. By the following spring, Chaplin was living in permanent political exile in Switzerland — a decision he announced symbolically by turning in his American reentry permit.
Although he would not set foot in the country again for another twenty years, daily reminders of his absence were present in the subliminal consciousness of millions of Americans during that summer of 1953. Chaplin’s theme song from Limelight, which he composed, became a hit. The haunting refrain of his sentimental swan song drifted over America’s airwaves.
Through an odd twist of fate and a technicality in the rules of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, his theme song would also win Chaplin and his arrangers an Oscar when Limelight was rereleased. Back in 1952, to have been considered for an Oscar, the film would have had to play for a minimum of one week in Los Angeles. So successful had the Limelight boycott been that year, the film had never lasted that long in one single theater.
Times had changed when Chaplin returned to receive a Special Academy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1972. The former firebrand was in his declining years. And the thirty-seventh president of the United States, Richard Nixon — a former HUAC member and one of the most outspoken anticommunists at the time of Charlie’s unceremonious departure — was too busy with his own political problems to comment on Chaplin’s return. Within a few months he would be attempting to explain a break-in that had recently taken place at Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate.
Eighty-two-year-old Chaplin was so choked up that he could barely speak when Jack Lemmon presented him with his honorary Oscar. The physically fragile and emotionally labile actor was genuinely afraid that his former stardom and lifetime professional achievements were fast fading to oblivion. Despite these fears, he received what remains the longest standing ovation in the history of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences.
It was a lovefest made all the more poignant by the fact that Chaplin was returning to a Hollywood he had helped shape when it was still a backwater. He was being applauded by an industry he had elevated from its lowly social origins as a cheap novelty amusement that cost only a nickel into the culturally and intellectually prestigious art form known as cinema. Many of the actors in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion that night considered him the greatest actor in film history. And none of the actors present would dispute the fact that Chaplin pioneered the fundamentals of film acting technique at a time when stage acting techniques were still being crudely imported and adapted wholesale into the new medium. And they were congratulating him, too, for leaving his indelible stamp on twentieth-century culture itself.
Three years later, the former Cockney urchin from the slums of London would be knighted by the Queen of England. Two years after that, he would die peacefully in his sleep at the age of eighty-eight, surrounded by his wife of thirty-four years and seven of their eight children.