In the creation of comedy, it is paradoxical that tragedy stimulates the spirit of ridicule, because ridicule … is an attitude of defiance: we must laugh in the face of our helplessness against the forces of nature — or go insane.
— Chaplin1
UNAWARE OF HIS MOTHER’S SYPHILIS and its implications, the stunned and dismayed child would ultimately blame her breakdown on starvation and exhaustion brought on by the pace of sweatshop piecework on a rented sewing machine. But in truth she had been diagnosed as syphilitic before being transferred to the Cane Hill Lunatic Asylum in Sussex on September 15,1898. Her admission note read:
Has been very strange in manner — at one time abusive and noisy, at another using endearing terms. Has been confined in padded room repeatedly on account of sudden violence — threw a mug at another patient. Shouting, singing and talking incoherently. Complains of her head and depressed and crying this morning — dazed and unable to give any reliable information. Asks if she is dying. States she belongs to Christ Church (Congregation) which is Church of England. She was sent here on a mission by the Lord. She says she wants to get out of this world.2
Hannah Chaplin’s first psychotic episode lasted two months, after which the homeless, unemployed needleworker was discharged to recuperate. Her illness was brought on by overwork and malnutrition — and neurosyphilis.
Her nine-year-old son never witnessed the breakdown itself, but he did observe firsthand the working and living conditions leading up to it. Charlie and Sydney Chaplin lived with their struggling mother for the first six months after Charlie’s discharge from Hanwell and Syd’s return from vocational training school.
But at the precise point in time when Hannah Chaplin first became floridly psychotic, her sons had already been living in another charity institution for a full month. After two school nurses took Syd aside to gently break the news, he tried explaining it to Charlie. But Charlie kept insisting she had done it on purpose and “deliberately escaped from her mind.”3
The consoling image of his mother taking a break from reality was preferable to the terrifying thought of her experiencing a break with reality. Young Charlie tried to convince himself that her madness was an extended work break. She was not really crazy. She was only taking a much needed rest. But the sight of Syd weeping finally made him understand.
Many years later, as a grown man at the height of his artistic powers, Chaplin would try to make sense out of this senseless childhood tragedy by exploring two of the three causes of his mother’s breakdown — malnutrition and stress — in two of the most hilarious and memorable comic sequences in his canon and in motion picture history.
Examining the ludicrous but serious premise that someone could be driven crazy by starvation to the point of visual hallucinations and cannibalism or, alternately, so famished as to eat a shoe as if it were a gourmet delicacy, Chaplin left them rolling in the aisles in The Gold Rush. And having been driven mad by the frenzied pace of work on a factory assembly line,4 his homeless screen character in Modern Times would be discharged to recuperate from his nervous breakdown after a brief stint in a mental institution.
In modern life, as in Modern Times, Chaplin’s “sentimental radicalism” would later be reinterpreted as Communist radicalism by members of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) during the Cold War and Red scare of the late 1940s. While Oxford University would award him an honorary doctorate for his screen character’s subversive comic antics, the FBI would reward him with a two-thousand-page security file as a dangerous political instigator. Like his favorite author Charles Dickens, Chaplin also found the earliest roots of his twentieth-century sentimental radicalism in the events of his nineteenth-century London boyhood.
It is not known what Hannah Chaplin did or how she supported herself during the eighteen months Charlie was in Han-well. Her show business career was over. Her formerly pretty features had become so coarsened by stress, poverty, malnutrition, and illness that she would strike both of her sons as dowdy, careworn, and one or two decades older than her actual age of thirty-three at the time they were finally reunited in 1898.
By then, the former free spirit, adventuress, and would-be royal courtesan had been an upstanding member of the Church of England for three years. Her faith was such that, shortly before the family reunion, she underwent a formal baptism ceremony at Christ Church. She first became a member of that congregation in 1895; records of her original conversion by the Reverend F. B. Meyer describe her as “an actress who lives apart from her husband.”5
In view of her increasing faith and decreasing health, it seems highly unlikely that during the eighteen months she and the boys were apart she would have been capable of or interested in supplementing her income with financial contributions from lovers or patrons as she probably had done as a pretty and vivacious young woman in her midtwenties.
Looking back on his mother’s stormy life passage from actress to needleworker to madwoman, sixty-five years later in My Autobiography Chaplin assumed that she first turned to religion in hopes of regaining her singing voice. Yet her monthlong ordeal of blinding pain from syphilis-induced headaches, which started around the same time she converted to Anglicanism, suggests that she was first drawn to Christ Church as a direct result of her unremitting physical suffering, which made her think of Christ’s. Not only did Charlie’s miracle-hungry mother profess deep and abiding feelings of personal identification with that ordeal, she was also deeply moved by Christ’s compassionate forgiveness of sinners and their sins, particularly adultery.
Reviewing that especially miserable period in their lives, Chaplin vividly recalled his childhood fascination with his mother’s austere but riveting dramatizations of scenes from the Bible, which were clearly the match of those lusty Nell Gwyn impersonations they were replacing:
… she gave the most luminous and appealing interpretation of Christ I have ever heard or seen. She spoke of His tolerant understanding; of the woman who had sinned and was to be stoned by the mob, and of His words to them: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” …
As she continued tears welled up in her eyes.… And we both wept.
“Don’t you see,” said Mother, “how human He was; like all of us, He too suffered doubt.”6
Hannah’s formal baptism ceremony took place on January 10, 1898, eight days before Charlie’s discharge. Unlike infant baptism, the believer’s baptism she underwent was reserved for children and adults who wished to evince their deep and abiding faith in Christ as their saviour.
In view of his mother’s desperate religious conversion, it’s not surprising that when Chaplin released The Kid in 1921 he opened the film with a still shot of Christ on the Cross, which he intercut with shots of his film’s heroine: an unwed mother cradling her newborn (and soon to be lost/stolen) infant as she is discharged from a maternity ward into a cold, unfeeling world by passing through the gates of a charity hospital (which clearly resemble surviving photographs of the gates of the Lambeth poorhouse-infirmary). The title card introducing this sequence reads: “The woman whose sin was motherhood.”
And in the shot that follows — which Chaplin wisely omitted when he reedited this slightly flawed masterpiece fifty years later — his heroine’s head is illuminated from behind by a stained-glass window in order to create a Madonna-like halo effect. His childhood image of his mother’s self-sacrificing ordeal was such that Chaplin later said:
I loved my mother almost more when she went out of her mind. She had been so poor and so hungry — I believe it was starving herself for us that affected her brain.7
Describing one of Chaplin’s chronically psychotic mother’s post-traumatic flashbacks to her harrowing experience of near starvation, Harry Crocker wrote:
While he loved her, it was impossible for him to see her in her ill condition and not be mentally wracked. Though she was living in the most comfortable circumstances, she could never put her mind from the severe poverty of her earlier days and the fear of hunger. “Here,” she would say when with Charlie, meanwhile stuffing his pockets with little pieces of bread and cake or perhaps a bit of fruit “Take this; you never can tell when you need it.” Memories of his early London days depressed Chaplin terribly, and his mother’s visits left him in a despondent mood for several days.8
Reprising those hilarious starvation gags early in that film, the character Charlie later entertains the dance hall prostitute Georgia by playing with his food in his equally brilliant “Dance of the Rolls.”
While her religious conversion in 1895 could not prevent her from becoming psychotic in 1898, her decision to join Christ Church did protect her from a much worse fate than she would have otherwise suffered during this economically disastrous period in her life. As a result of her theatrical but heartfelt religious conversion, she and her two sons instantly became members of the “deserving poor.” That critically important designation was determined informally by the ministers, social workers, and mission Bible readers who handed out tickets for free soup, bread, and relief parcels to deserving members of their congregation who listened to their sermons with sincerity and sang their hymns with conviction. Of more lasting importance than those mission handouts, the “deserving poor” also received valuable endorsements from influential clergymen, which made a critical difference with local charity relief boards in determining how their children lived and where they went to school.
Despite his profound antipathy toward the rigid authoritarian system at Hanwell, Chaplin was well aware that selective admission into that institution was highly sought after and that the sanctuary it provided could make a crucial difference in a pauper child’s life, as the Mundella Committee pointed out.9 Instead of experiencing an unchecked free fall into the depths of poverty like the godless poor, the deserving poor and their offspring were provided with a safety net. But depending on the sanctimoniousness of their benefactors, the charity might be received at the expense of their dignity.
Though neither insincere in professing her faith nor sycophantic in petitioning for charity, Hannah Chaplin sometimes “sounded like a Cockney barmaid.” On one occasion several years later, when she felt belittled by the hoity-toity daughter of a fellow churchgoer whose mother also happened to be her landlady-benefactress, Hannah demanded: “Who do you think you are? Lady Shit?” The young woman replied: “That’s nice language coming from a Christian!” Hannah shot back: “Don’t worry. It’s in the Bible, my dear: Deuteronomy, twenty-eighth chapter, thirty-seventh verse, only there’s another word for it. However, shit will suit you.”10 She and the boys moved out the next day.
Alluding to this memory of his quick-witted, proud Cockney mother’s pungent repartee when patronized by her so-called betters, the elderly Chaplin summed her up with great affection and dignity in My Autobiography:
Although religious, she loved sinners and always identified with them. Not an atom of vulgarity was in her nature. Whatever Rabelaisian expression she used, it was always rhetorically appropriate.11
Another incident that Chaplin never forgot occurred six weeks before her first nervous breakdown. On that occasion she removed the boys from Norwood, the charity institution to which they had just been admitted one week earlier. Unable to face the pain of another extended separation from Charlie and Syd, she told the authorities that she was back on her feet and was ready, willing, and able to look after them once more.
Well aware that they would actually be back in the poor-house by nightfall, the three Chaplins picnicked on ninepence worth of cherries and cake in Kennington Park and savored their final outing together before returning in time for the preadmission delousing routine and afternoon tea. For the rest of their lives, Hannah’s sons shared the memory of the fierce love that impelled their softly weeping but defiant mother to make that final symbolic protest against “the system.” (Visits to parks after that always left Chaplin with bittersweet nostalgia and low-grade depression that lingered for days.)
Three days after their Norwood discharge, the boys were forced to return there. Four weeks later, after a ten-day period of mental observation in the Lambeth Infirmary, Hannah was in Cane Hill. And twelve days after that, the Norwood bakery van rolled up to Charlie Chaplin Sr.’s two-room flat on Kennington Road and unceremoniously deposited Charlie and Sydney into the care of their father and his common-law wife, Louise.
If the civic authorities had taken the time and trouble to make a preliminary home visit before shipping the boys to Kennington Road to punish their father, they would have been forced to admit the dubious nature of the District Relief Committee’s earlier conclusion that Charlie Chaplin Sr. was an “ablebodied” parent.12 Weaving, reeling, staggering, and stumbling his way home from drinking bouts at the Queen’s Head almost every night of the week, sometimes decked out in the formal evening dress of his bibulous stage character, he was nothing if not an alcoholic.
For an evocative “long shot” of what his father was like, see One A.M., the film in which Chaplin nailed, letter perfect, a satirical imitation of a drunken swell’s attempt to get in the front door of his home and put himself to bed after a night on the town. There is every reason to believe that this two-reeler, which ends with the elegant swell curling up in a bathtub, was inspired by Chaplin’s childhood memories of his hard-drinking father’s late-night mishaps.
Not the least bit interested in the issues of paternal fitness and chronic alcoholism, however, the civic authorities were concerned only with the thirty-five-year-old actor’s refusal to provide child support. In a running series of skirmishes with the law over the previous three years — from 1895 to 1898 — Charlie Sr. had used every tactic he could to avoid paying his court-ordered fifteen shillings per week. By November 1897 he was forty-four pounds, eight shillings in arrears.
His brother Spencer, the landlord of the Queen’s Head, bailed him out after a warrant was issued for Charlie Sr.’s arrest with the added offer of a one-pound reward for information leading to his capture.
By the time Spencer stepped in, his younger brother was a fugitive from justice, yet he was neither unemployed nor impoverished. He was earning a decent living but still felt bitter about Lily’s adultery and resentful over the unfair legal judgment he felt she had managed to finagle. Moreover, he lacked the cash to come up with the child support he owed.
A few years earlier, at the peak of his fame, he would have been able to retire that entire debt with a single week’s work. If Chaplin’s account of his father’s career in My Autobiography is accurate, Charlie Sr. was then capable of earning as much as seventy-five pounds a week for a theatrical engagement.
But even if, out of filial pride, Chaplin exaggerated his father’s earning power, Charlie Sr. never set aside any portion of his income for child support. The pressures and temptations of his professional identity were such that he ostentatiously drank up and threw around his cash with reckless abandon and indifference to his own future financial security, or his two sons’ immediate welfare. He merged his professional life with his private life until the two were indistinguishable: his stage character’s lifestyle became his star image.
Young Charlie would not repeat that mistake. He would play his drunks sober. And if his impersonations brought him more lasting recognition than his briefly famous father enjoyed, it should be said on Charlie Sr.’s behalf that his eagle-eyed son had the distinct advantage of learning from a real pro.13
Estimating the peak period of Chaplin’s father’s popularity on the basis of six surviving portraits of him from the covers of sheet music for popular tunes of the day, his stardom was brief, lasting from 1890 to 1896. He never was a superstar like his romantic rival Leo Dryden, whose smash hit “The Miner’s Dream of Home”14 — that enormously successful number in which Lily had sung backup — became a classic and earned a record sum. But Charlie Chaplin Sr. was sufficiently famous that his man-about-town star image, in a variety of resplendent character costumes, was used to commercially plug “Eh! Boys?” “Everyday Life,” “As the Church Bells Chime,” “Oui! Tray Bong!” “She Must Be Witty,” and “The Girl Was Young and Pretty.” In the first of those song sheets, “Eh! Boys?” he is depicted as an affably smiling, elegant swell casually decked out in the top hat, tails, and striped pants that were the standard props of his distinctive theatrical persona.
When Charlie and Syd arrived on his doorstep, Charlie Sr. was two years past his prime. But mentions of him in the Era as late as 1899 are still sufficiently numerous to explain how he continued to afford the steep rent on his posh flat on Kennington Road. From 1896 to 1898, however, his popularity had gradually slipped. And at the time the boys showed up, his career was spiraling downward.
By the end of September 1900 he would be out of work. Shortly after that, his eleven-year-old son Charles Chaplin would be one of the many music hall professionals who performed gratis at his father’s farewell benefit: a benevolent tradition among members of the music hall fraternity. No longer living in the limelight — or Kennington Road, for that matter — Charles Sr. was entering the sad twilight of his life, dodging creditors by moving from one shabby hovel to another in the back streets. One year later, he would be dead from cirrhosis of the liver.
But back in 1898, in nine-year-old Charlie Chaplin’s impressionable eyes, his father’s flush life must have seemed like a millionaire’s compared to the grubby lifestyle and cramped quarters he and Syd had recently experienced with his malnourished, bedraggled mother. Although Charlie sorely missed his mother, he was thrilled to have the opportunity to finally meet this debonair music hall star whose name he bore and whose elegant mannerisms he immediately began to cultivate with an expert eye and hero-worshipping intensity:
He fascinated me. At meals I watched every move he made, the way he ate and the way he held his knife as though it were a pen when cutting his meat. And for years I copied him.15
Chaplin’s father must have been aware of his stagestruck son’s hunger for affection and approval, but he was never demonstrative with the boy until the last time they ever saw each other, three years later and only three weeks before his death, in the barroom of the Three Stags pub. Both inebriated and air hungry as he drowned in his own secretions from liver failure, Charlie Sr. would hug and kiss his twelve-year-old son for the first and only time in their lives.
His common-law wife, Louise, openly resented the fact that the offspring of Charlie Sr.’s estranged wife had turned up on her doorstep, unannounced and uninvited. An alcoholic herself, she was frequently “morose and disagreeable.” When drunk, she would grumble “quite audibly … of the injustice imposed upon her” by “having to look after Sydney and me.” She never hit Charlie. But her hostility toward Syd “held me in fear and dread,” Chaplin recalled.16
Thirteen-year-old Syd dealt with her hostility by giving her a wide berth. He left the flat early in the morning and stayed away till midnight, when he returned famished, raided the larder, and went straight to bed if he was lucky enough to avoid running into her. Syd’s absence intensified Charlie’s loneliness and left him feeling emotionally vulnerable and apprehensive: “This reviling of Sydney frightened and depressed me and I would go unhappily to bed and lie fretfully awake.… those days were the longest and saddest of my life.”17
His unpredictable father’s increasingly frequent absences made things worse for everyone in what amounted to a vicious alcohol-fueled cycle. The more hurt and rejected Louise felt by his neglect, the more unpleasant she became, and the more he stayed away.
Charlie Sr.’s most self-destructive moods and their heaviest drinking and ugliest rows as a codependent alcoholic couple were triggered, or aggravated, by the increasing frequency with which he was experiencing holes in his bookings. Based on Chaplin’s insightful portrayal of the painful relationship between Calvero’s slipping popularity and self-medicating alcoholism in Limelight, it’s likely that a similar scene was taking place with his father during this two-month period when they lived together in close quarters and young Charlie studied him “like a hawk.”18
If so, Charlie Sr.’s downwardly spiraling career ran in tandem with his on-again, off-again relationship with Louise. The more worthless and rejected Chaplin’s father felt by his formerly adoring public, the more he rejected Louise, whose love he undoubtedly felt he did not deserve. As Calvero puts it in Limelight: “that’s the trouble with the world, we all despise ourselves.” Understandably, he was most affectionate with her on nights when he still had a booking. To fortify himself on those occasions, he would swallow six raw eggs in a glass of port before leaving for the theater. And the blackout-prone actor could be equally charming and tender on the day after a successful theatrical performance, provided he was not suffering from one of those groggy hungover amnesias of the morning after:
She loved Father. Even though very young I could see it in her glance.… And I am sure he loved her. I saw many occasions of it. There were times when he was charming and tender and would kiss her good night before leaving for the theatre. And on a Sunday morning, when he had not been drinking, he would breakfast with us and tell Louise about the vaudeville acts that were working with him, and have us all enthralled. I would watch him like a hawk, absorbing every action. In a playful mood, he once wrapped a towel round his head and chased his little son19 around the table, saying, “I’m King Turkey Rhubarb.”20
Resentfully dependent on this impaired alcoholic with whom she was still deeply in love, Louise would revenge herself, whenever she felt neglected by their father, by locking one or both boys out of the house in a tipsy fit of spiteful pique.
A typical example of their dysfunctional alcoholic relationship began early one Saturday afternoon with Louise abandoning young Charlie in order to get back at Charlie Sr. for abandoning her earlier that day. Returning to the flat after his customary Saturday morning half-day at the Kennington Road School, Charlie found it deserted, the larder empty and no note telling him where to go or what to do. He waited and waited until he could wait no more. “I could stand the gaping emptiness no longer, so in desolation I went out, spending the afternoon visiting nearby marketplaces. I wandered through Lambeth Walk.… The distraction soothed me and for a while I forgot my plight and hunger. When I returned it was night.”21
Lambeth Walk, a two-hundred-yard strip of roadway hemmed in on both sides by barrows with costers hawking carrots and turnips to haggling customers, meat stalls with leather-lunged Cockney butchers shouting the price of prime joints for Sunday afternoon dinner to passersby, and gaming stalls with roll-or-bowl a-ball-a-penny pitchmen offering tempting prizes to lucky winners; Lambeth Walk, with the London railway arches framing it from behind, softly illuminated from end to end with the comforting glow of naptha flares and oil lamps; Lambeth Walk, main market street and social hub of the district, teeming with humanity on a Saturday night — it was the logical place for Charlie to go to cheer himself up.
Charlie also recalled one particular melody whose haunting refrain soothed his soul while waiting for his father or Syd to come to the rescue:
Suddenly there was music. Rapturous! It came from the vestibule of the White Hart corner pub, and resounded brilliantly in the empty square. The tune was “The Honeysuckle and the Bee,” played with radiant virtuousity on a harmonium and clarinet. I had never been conscious of melody before, but this one was beautiful and lyrical, so blithe and gay, so warm and reassuring. I forgot my despair and crossed the road to where the musicians were. The harmonium player was blind, with scarred sockets where the eyes had been; and a besotted, embittered face played the clarinet.22
Charlie returned home and saw lopsided Louise, three sheets to the wind, fumbling with the front door. When he tried to sneak in after waiting for her to go to bed, she confronted him and demanded: “Where the hell do you think you’re going? This is not your home.” Charlie then wandered the streets until in the wee hours he finally found his father, who took him back to the house and, after a boozy row, slugged Louise on the side of the head with a clothes brush and knocked her out cold.
Living together in close quarters for two barely endurable months as a court-mandated family inevitably led to more nocturnal evictions for the boys. The more Charlie Sr. stayed away, the more Louise threw his two sons out on the street, until the civic authorities finally put a stop to it. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children stepped in after a policeman, returning Charlie and Syd to their drunken stepmother, reported that she was reluctant to readmit them at three o’clock in the morning after they had been found sleeping on the street by a watchman’s fire.
There were even times, Syd later recalled, when he and Charlie “actually had to eat from garbage pails.”23 Chaplin would later depict those foraging experiences in comic long shot by transposing them into his Little Tramp’s habit of picking up castoff cigar butts with fastidious elegance. A true connoisseur of other people’s leavings, his debonair Little Fellow picks up discarded stogies and panatelas from the street, genteelly rolls them between his shabbily gloved fingers, delicately sniffs them as if they were fresh from his own personal humidor, and lights up with all the expansive self-satisfaction of a J. P. Morgan, before shuffling off with his Rummy Binks gait to his next comic adventure.
What in real life was the two-month childhood ordeal of being inappropriately placed in the custody of his father by bungling civic officials during his mother’s psychiatric hospitalization became, in art, a sustained comic long shot in the masterpiece City Lights.
The film opens with an establishing shot that instantly pegs Charlie as a social outsider and consummate urban outdoorsman. A disruptive nuisance and offensive eyesore, he is peacefully snoozing on a statue of Peace and Prosperity which is being unveiled in a public ceremony in a park, much to the annoyance of pompous civic officials and an irate policeman, who shake their fists and try to oust him from his snug perch with the stated intention of tossing him in jail.
While scrambling down from the statue, which he has defiled accidentally, he tries to beat a hasty retreat. In the act of escaping from the authorities, he compounds the insult. Inadvertently hoisted on the sword of Peace, he responds by thumbing his nose at authority in a brilliant slapstick sequence in which Chaplin the filmmaker cleverly employs different elements of the statue to question the dubious virtues of civic pride and progress with ironic visual wit worthy of the sardonic verbal wit of his fellow sentimental radical Charles Dickens.
In this opening scene of City Lights, the hypocritical manner in which a windbag politician and a sanctimonious ladies’ club officer take offense at this unsightly spectacle of homelessness is as relevant to Chaplin’s late-nineteenth-century London boyhood as it is to the modern 1930s era of the Great Depression in which this film is ostensibly taking place.24
In fact, the Los Angeles shooting location for the statue scene in City Lights bears a striking resemblance to a photograph of St. Mark’s on Kennington Park Road, which was not very far from Charlie Sr.’s flat.25 It would not be surprising if St. Mark’s was one of the places where Charlie bedded down for the night when booted out of the house by Louise.
As a holdover silent-era film with a state-of-the-art soundtrack, City Lights substitutes kazoos for human voices in order to satirize the bloviating insincerity of those would-be do-gooders deeply offended by the sight of this penniless, homeless street person, who clearly fails to make the grade as a member of the “deserving poor.”
Waddling away from his close encounter with official representatives of “the system” and taking his daily constitutional as an elegant if shabby man-about-town, Charlie encounters an equally marginal flower girl, whom he promptly falls in love with, a blind young woman who inspires feelings of chivalry in him without the slightest hint of erotic interest. Gazing at Charlie but obviously unable to see him, she envisions him instead as a wealthy, debonair millionaire capable of rescuing her from blindness and homelessness (she could not pay the rent). For his part, Charlie becomes so caught up in love for this beautiful, blind young woman that she effortlessly winds him around her little finger, in a running series of metaphorical sight gags, to the point that he willingly gives her the shirt off his back. He sets out to raise money to cover her overdue rent and to finance a trip to Europe where, a newspaper article has announced, a Viennese surgeon has just invented a free miracle cure for blindness for anyone with the price of a ticket. Personally lacking the funds to rescue this damsel in distress, Charlie finds a wealthy patron to sponsor his philanthropy, an elegantly dressed man-about-town in formal evening clothes who, whenever he is blind drunk, carelessly throws around large sums of money that could easily save the girl. Charlie is preparing to bed down for the night on a park bench when they meet by chance at a visually familiar quayside, which Chaplin, while shooting this film, kept referring to as the Thames Embankment. Interrupting his customary bedtime routine, Charlie, the good Samaritan, prevents this stewed-to-the gills playboy from committing suicide by throwing himself into the river and, later, by attempting to blow his brains out, not once but twice.
It rapidly becomes clear that, when drunk, this blackout-prone millionaire alternates between states of free-spending generosity and suicidal depression. When cold sober, on the mornings after the night before, he suffers from hungover amnesia, which prevents him from recognizing anyone he has met or remembering anything he has done during his boozy nights on the town.
Unaware of the drowning man’s wealth or social status at the time he first risks his own life, Charlie ends up in the “Thames” while rescuing him. He and the drunken swell instantly bond. Grateful to this altruistic Little Tramp for saving his life and giving him a reason to live, the elegant swell hugs and kisses his rescuer profusely before bringing him back to his mansion to dry off and share a nightcap.
Later in the film, as their on-again drunk, off-again sober attachment progresses, Charlie will be the one to hug and kiss his benefactor profusely for generously providing him with a thousand dollars to rescue the blind girl, whom the millionaire has never met. Unfortunately for Charlie, the Jekyll-Hyde disconnect between his friend’s states of sobriety and inebriation is so complete that Charlie will eventually end up in the clink, unfairly accused by his amnesic benefactor of stealing the dough he was freely given. But not before he bestows his buddy’s bounty on the blind girl, altering her life. As Charlie gives her the gift that will restore her sight, it’s likely he recognizes but then immediately dismisses the thought that this sightless young woman would reject him in a heartbeat if she could see who he really is.
The film ends with the formerly blind flower girl and the Little Tramp encountering each other by chance after her Viennese miracle cure and his discharge from prison. No longer a street person, she is now managing a prosperous flower shop while expectantly waiting for her former benefactor to return. Her sight restored, her eyes now glaze over only when she wistfully daydreams of finally meeting the handsome millionaire once more.
More threadbare and penniless than ever, Charlie passes the flower shop window and the moment of truth arrives. They gaze at each other. Unaware of this derelict’s identity but touched by his shy attention and shabby appearance, she offers him first a rose, then a coin.
Afraid of being recognized, Charlie starts to scurry away. Coaxing him back by extending the rose and then pressing the coin into the palm of his hand, her eyes glaze over as she instantly realizes, through her highly developed sense of touch memory, that the Little Tramp is her benefactor.
“It is enough to shrivel the heart to see, and it is the greatest piece of acting and the highest moment in movies,” the film critic James Agee wrote about the final scene that follows.26
Chaplin chose someone with no previous acting experience to play the part of the flower girl: Virginia Cherrill. He saw her at a prize fight and immediately asked her to audition for the part. What struck him at once was the fact that this very nearsighted but beautiful young woman was so vain that she refused to wear glasses, and because she was so myopic she appeared to be gazing into space when she tried to focus. As her screen test confirmed, her ability to project effortlessly that out-of-focus look made her a natural to play the part.
Blindness was in some sense an intuitive substitute for madness in Chaplin’s creative imagination. Losing contact with reality by staring into space and going out of focus was how nine-year-old Charlie had imagined Lily when Syd came off the soccer field at Norwood and tried to explain what a nervous breakdown meant in terms his kid brother could understand. “In my despair I had visions of her looking pathetically at me, drifting away into a void,” was how he understood why she could no longer look after him.27
Restoring his mother’s sanity was as important to Charlie the child as restoring the blind girl’s vision was to Charlie the screen character in City Lights. Needleworking and flower selling were equivalently marginal trades in late-nineteenth-century London. And Charlie’s feelings of umbilical attachment to the girl were very much like Charlie’s feelings of attachment to his mother. Despite the fact that Charlie was painfully aware of his mother’s drastically altered looks in the six months leading up to her first psychotic episode, he undoubtedly continued to think of her as the divine Lily whenever he yearned for her during the Cane Hill separation, just as he had done earlier during their Hanwell separation.
Charlie’s increasingly miserable ordeal of being caught in the alcoholic crossfire between his father and Louise prompted an increasingly desperate wish to be reunited with Lily. As everyday life deteriorated for everyone living in that Kennington Road flat, Charlie’s double-edged fantasy —of rescuing his mother from madness and being rescued by her from the daily abuse he was experiencing — became more and more urgent. Doubtless there were nights when Charlie soothed himself to sleep, both indoors and out, by dreaming wistfully of being reunited with his miraculously recovered and once more beautiful actress-mother — assuming, that is, she would still find him lovable despite his own increasing unkempt physical appearance as a result of the gross neglect he was experiencing from his father and Louise. Thirty years later, Chaplin’s childhood rescue fantasies helped shape the plot of City Lights and supplied the emotions for that final reunion scene between his down-and-out screen character and the delicate flower girl.
Dostoyevsky once said that the best things you write come out of a place you don’t understand; the way Chaplin arrived at the plot for City Lights supports that observation. But as Dostoyevsky’s remark also suggests, there is no reason to assume automatically that Chaplin thought of this highly autobiographical film as autobiographical just because it turned out to be.28
Did Chaplin connect the flower girl’s blindness with Lily’s madness? Did the alcoholic millionaire remind him of hard-drinking, self-destructive Charlie Sr. as he threaded his way through his plot labyrinth, filming this autobiographical story in a free-associative fashion over a three-year period from 1928 to 1930? Was he aware of how he inched his way forward in the comic love story with a bittersweet ending by tunneling his way backward into his own tragic life story?
Surviving production records, story conference notes, and gag session notes (recorded and typed by studio secretaries) make it possible to reconstruct chronologically some of the salient points in the circuitous creative route leading to the final version of City Lights. Chaplin did not begin at the beginning or find his way to the end of this tale in linear fashion.
The climax of the film, the bittersweet reunion scene, was actually the starting point for his love story. As Robinson put it, that final scene was “the very raison d’être of City Lights.”29 Typed studio records indicate Chaplin the storyteller relied on this original germ of an idea to launch his narrative and then worked backward by trial and error.30
This said, any handwritten notes he jotted down containing personal insights and painful references to the highly autobiographical experiences disguised in City Lights are apparently missing or unavailable. We know, from an interview with Richard Meryman in 1966, how Chaplin dealt with autobiographical material:
if I have a scene that’s poetic and has emotional content I have to do that alone. And write in pencil.… If it’s something too personal that I have to do in long hand, it’s not very much, maybe a couple hundred words at most.… Anything very personal, poetic, which I think is emotional, I write myself and then I dictate it, because I’m the only one who can decipher what I’ve written. I dictate in the very cold language, and that’s done.31
The “very cold language” he employed for privacy purposes resulted in sanitized typewritten records containing a disguised backstory completely stripped of any emotionally charged imagery. That transcription process let Chaplin collaborate on City Lights with assistant directors like Harry Crocker in story conferences and brainstorming gag sessions, secure in the knowledge his privacy was protected. At the same time, the cryptic wording of those typescripts obliquely referred to highly charged personal memories whose encrypted significance only he could understand. Crocker wrote:
The comedian was extremely reticent about his early youth. There were two major reasons for this. Most of his memories of his extreme youth were extremely unpleasant and he resolutely kept from dwelling on them. The more important reason was a professional one. In the great majority of his early screen appearances, Charlie, as the little waif, drifted into the scene, an anonymous character from nowhere, going nowhere… he made audiences laugh, he made them cry; then he walked away into the sunset. Charlie felt that it would be a great mistake to give out to the public his personal history.… let the public see only the vague, shadowy figure on the screen: let that figure give them amusement and pathos: let them see only Charlie Chaplin the mime.32
From a creative perspective, embedding his life story in his film story was like doing a striptease in public, which no one else but Sydney Chaplin could recognize. As Chaplin once said about acting and filmmaking in general, if the audience can see how it’s done, it loses all its magic. And he of course would have lost his privacy.
Chaplin was so confident in the final scene for City Lights that almost exclusively on the strength of that scene he began launching extremely expensive, time-consuming preproduction studio preparations months in advance of knowing where the story was going. As an established filmmaker with fifteen years’ experience and a proven track record, Chaplin had good reason to put his own checkbook at risk by placing his faith in this germ of an idea for what would eventually become his crowning artistic achievement.
While by no means an identical ending, that final scene was very much like a bittersweet comic ending he had debuted in the past to universal acclaim. Ten years earlier, there had scarcely been a dry eye in the house during the final scene of The Kid. It was an equally autobiographical “rescue” film, which Chaplin himself described as “a picture with a smile, perhaps a tear.”
As Agee’s remark about the final scene between the tramp and the flower girl implies, Chaplin outdid himself and every other filmmaker when he made City Lights. The immediate artistic impetus for The Kid had been the death of his three-day-old firstborn son; with City Lights it was Chaplin’s mother, who had died four months before he began shooting the picture.
As a writer working backward from the climax and trying to flesh out the rest of his story, Chaplin’s next major plot problem was to create a plausible and sympathetic character who could provide his penniless tramp character with the necessary funds to restore the blind girl’s vision and thus set the stage for the final scene he had envisioned. He didn’t have far to go:
I remember one Saturday night when Louise and Father had been drinking, and for some reason we were all sitting with the landlady and her husband in their front-room parlor on the ground floor. Under the incandescent light Father looked ghastly pale, and in an ugly mood was mumbling to himself. Suddenly he reached into his pocket, pulled out a handful of money and threw it violently to the floor, scattering gold and silver coins in all directions. The effect was surrealistic. No one moved. The landlady sat glum, but I caught her roving eye following a golden sovereign rolling to a far corner under a chair; my eye also followed it. Still no one moved, so I thought I’d better start picking it up; the landlady and the others followed suit, picking up the rest of the money, careful to make their actions overt before Father’s menacing eyes.33
If that wide-eyed little child had dared to act on his feelings, Charlie’s borrowing or stealing some of that carelessly strewn money from his well-off actor father in order to provide his seamstress mother with the food, shelter, and medical care she so sorely needed would have been a thoroughly understandable impulse. Had he attempted to do so, it would have been very much like Charlie’s fund-raising experiences with the flower girl and the eccentric millionaire in City Lights.
More generally, the Little Tramp’s heroic efforts to save the blind girl and rescue the suicidal millionaire undoubtedly expressed Chaplin’s original childhood wish to come to the aid of each of his parents — both for their benefit and for his. Alternating between rescuing the flower girl from blindness and preventing the depressed millionaire from destroying himself was the fictional counterpart of Chaplin’s original childhood wish to restore his beautiful young mother’s sanity and to stop his debonair lion comique father from drinking himself to death.
While those two parental rescue fantasies can be viewed and understood as entirely separate from one another, they also were interdependent, in life and art.
In life, Chaplin’s childhood rescue fantasy of helping his father overcome his self-destructive behavior seemed also a way to help his mentally ill mother. His father had the means to help his mother but lacked the inclination. He still held a grudge against her for betraying and abandoning him not once but twice. His bitterness aggravated his depression and worsened his alcoholism. In theory, Charlie’s reconciling his parents could have given them the opportunity to deal more effectively with their emotional problems by helping each other.
In art, Charlie’s selfless rescue of the angrily depressed man-about-town from drowning, and later from blowing his brains out, ultimately does facilitate the tramp’s subsequent rescue of the blind flower girl. “I’m cured. You’re my friend for life!” is the alcoholic millionaire’s overly optimistic and premature conclusion as he and Charlie pull each other out of the “Thames.”
When the two return to the millionaire’s mansion for a nightcap (and a relapse), Charlie and the audience discover the source of his depression: obviously, his wife has threatened to leave him. Enquiring about her now, he is told by the butler that she has just had her bags picked up and has left, presumably forever. Feigning supreme indifference, the millionaire immediately heads for the liquor cabinet to get a drink for himself and his diminutive boon companion. On top of the cabinet sits a glamorously posed photograph of a strikingly beautiful woman. The millionaire casually tosses it away and proceeds to pour the drinks for himself and his guest. A few minutes later, and further into his cups, he suddenly experiences a delayed emotional reaction and impulsively puts a pistol to his head. Charlie rushes to his rescue and saves his life a second time. At one point in the film, this allegorical father-son duo even end up bedding down for the night together as Charlie provides his buddy with comic substitute companionship, metaphorically replacing the missing wife.
City Lights allowed forty-year-old Chaplin the storyteller a second chance to accomplish in celluloid what he had been unable to accomplish in real life as a nine-year-old. With unprecedented artistic success, he set out to make whole the image of a family sundered long before.
In accordance with the loss-restitution hypothesis of creativity, the death of Chaplin’s mother on August 28, 1928, was the stimulus for City Lights. While hard evidence cannot be found in studio notes, it was the mourning and grieving process triggered by his mother’s death that was, to borrow the words of David Robinson, “the very raison d’être of City Lights.”
If we employ the psychoanalytic tactic of using a life to read a film and a film to read a life, City Lights enriches our understanding of Charlie Chaplin’s childhood. The picture ends with the momentous question that nine-year-old Charlie posed to himself with great trepidation: what would it be like to be finally reunited with his mother after her two-month stay in Cane Hill?