3

With the Guv’nor

The comedy sketch was a staple of music halls in the early years of the twentieth century. Harry Tate’s Motoring, Golfing, Flying, Billiards and Fishing, Will Evans’s Building a Chicken House, Harnessing a Horse and Papering the Parlour, Joe Boganny’s Lunatic Bakers, Charlie Baldwin’s Bank Clerks, the Six Brothers Luck, the Boisset and Manon troupes were only some of the most celebrated acts of the kind. Fred Karno’s Speechless Comedians, though, were supreme in their class. They represented the conjuncture and zenith of several traditions of English pantomime. There was, first, the clowning of that singular British theatrical institution, the Christmas pantomime. In 1917 Chaplin recalled:

Christmas in London in the old days, when it was hard scratching for me to get sixpence so that I might see the Christmas pantomime spectacle at Drury Lane, Jack and the Beanstalk, Puss in Boots or Cinderella. I used to watch the clowns in the pantomimes breathlessly. They were clever fellows. There were Montgomery, Laffin, Feefe, Brough, Cameron – all high-class performers. Every move they made registered on my young brain like a photograph. I used to try it all over when I got home. But what I think of now is the rapt attention with which six or seven thousand boys and girls would watch the clowns work.^* It was slapstick stuff. Everybody used to say that sort of thing would be dead in another ten years. What has happened is that pantomime, through motion picture developments, has taken the lead in the world’s entertainment. My early study of the clowns in the London pantomimes has been of tremendous value to me. What I learned from them has been supplemented by original research.¹

Pantomime, in the more general sense, had been stimulated by the licensing laws of the eighteenth century which forbade dialogue except on the stages of the two Theatres Royal, in Drury Lane and Covent Garden. Hence the unlicensed theatres developed styles of wordless spectacle, with music and mime to explain the plot. These entertainments became so popular at Sadler’s Wells and the Royal Circus that the Theatres Royal were obliged to adopt the genre themselves for afterpieces. In the music halls, the prohibition of dialogue lingered much longer,² and so in consequence did the mime sketches. Perhaps the finest pantomimist of the later nineteenth century was Paul Martinetti (1851–1924), born to French parents in the United States. Making his first appearance on the British music hall stage in the late 1870s, he formed a pantomime troupe with his brother Alfred, performing melodramatic sketches like Robert Macaire, A Duel in the Snow, After the Ball, A Terrible Night, Remorse and The Village Schoolmaster right up to the First World War.

The circus also made its contribution, with a genre of spectacles which combined acrobatics, scenic effects, narrative and comedy. Out of this tradition developed troupes like the Ravels and the Hanlon-Lees. The Hanlon-Lees, who toured in Britain, France and the United States from the 1860s to the 1880s, consisted of the six Hanlon brothers and a celebrated acrobat, ‘Professor’ John Lees. The description of their entertainment, Voyage en Suisse, at the Gaiety Theatre, London, in March 1880 sounds like the prototype for Karno or Keystone chaos: ‘It included a bus smash, a chaotic scene on board a ship in a storm, an exploding Pullman car, a banquet transformed into a wholesale juggling party after one of the Hanlons had crashed through the ceiling on to the table, and one of the cleverest drunk scenes ever presented on the stage.’³

Fred Karno was heir to all these traditions; in turn he contributed his own gifts for organization, for invention, for spotting and training talent, for mise-en-scène and direction. Like most of the great figures of the English music hall, his origins were humble. He was born in Exeter on 26 March 1866. His father was a cabinet maker called Westcott, who moved around the country a good deal during the boyhood of Frederick, his eldest son. Eventually the family settled in Nottingham, where Fred started work in a lace factory when he was about fourteen, attending school in the afternoons. He moved on to work as a barber’s boy, a costermonger, a bricklayer and a chemist’s shop boy. Eventually he was apprenticed to a plumber. When this work took him to a gymnasium he was intrigued by the place, enrolled, and was soon a good enough gymnast to make his stage debut in an amateur competition at the Alhambra Theatre, Nottingham. Very soon he was partnering a professional gymnast, as the second half of Olvene and Leonardo. After a spell as a solo gymnast in north-country fairground shows, he toured for a year with Harry Manley’s Circus. As luck would have it, Manley’s was one of the last circuses still presenting pantomime sketches. Its repertory included Dick Turpin, Mazeppa, The Bear and Sentinel, Love in a Tub, The Statue Blanche, Gregory’s Blunder, The Prince and the Tinker, Black and White, or Tea for Two, The Wig Makers, Swiss Lovers, Where’s Your Ticket? and The Copper Ballet.

Karno seems to have played in a good many of these. Subsequently he had varied fortunes in fairgrounds and music halls with different partners, and was obliged for a while to abandon show business and earn his living as a glazier (he claimed to have employed a boy to go ahead breaking windows – an idea which would reappear in Chaplin’s film The Kid). In 1888 he put together an impromptu act with two other acrobats, Bob Sewell and Ted Tysall, to substitute for an act that had failed to turn up for their booking at the Metropolitan, Edgware Road. Shamelessly, the trio adopted the name of the absent act, The Three Carnos, but soon afterwards changed the spelling to Karno, as more stylish (in 1914 Karno changed his name officially, by deed poll). The new act was a modest success, and Karno augmented his earnings with a solo turn in which he demonstrated the still novel Edison phonograph, which with characteristic impudence he renamed the Karnophone. Always brash and energetic, he earned money by busking in the streets in the weeks when the act had no bookings.

The Three Karnos presented their first sketch about 1894. Again it was an impromptu turn, to fill in for the pugilist Jem Mace in Portsmouth. One of the old Manley’s Circus standbys, Love in a Tub, the act proved successful enough to give Karno the idea of creating original sketches and a company to play them. In 1895 he presented Hilarity at the Gaiety, Birmingham. It was to tour continuously for five years and to provide the prototype for the long succession of Karno pantomime comedies. In 1899 he was already touring a new sketch, Jail Birds, and pulled off the first of the extravagant publicity stunts for which he was to become famous by carrying the company around in a Black Maria, which he even took to the Derby. Early Birds was a ‘tale of slumland’, in which Karno himself played a glazier. In The New Woman’s Club, which satirized the early feminist movement, he played a lady cyclist: it was his last stage appearance. His early productions were generally launched at the Paragon, Mile End Road. Subsequently they were premièred as annual Christmas attractions at the Palace, Manchester, among them His Majesty’s Guests, Saturday to Monday, The Football Match and Skating. A contemporary advertisement for The Football Match announces:

The Pantomime Annual described it as ‘an entertainment that shall be unique in the history of amusements’, vividly depicting ‘the desperate struggle for supremacy between the Middleton Pie-Cans and the Midnight Wanderers’. The Football Match was characteristic of the elaborate scenic effects in which Karno specialized. The settings included a huge panoramic cloth with a great crowd of people painted on it. The painted figures had loose arms and hats which were activated by electric fans hidden behind a raked ground row. In front of these were ‘supers’ (the old theatrical abbreviation for supernumerary actors), with very small people arranged behind larger ones, to produce an effect of perspective. In The Wontdetainia, first presented at the Paragon, Mile End Road, on 11 April 1910, and satirizing public enthusiasm for the great new luxury liners like the recently launched Lusitania and Mauretania, the effects were even more elaborate, with a prop liner so huge that it had to be built up section by section in the wings as it was moved across the stage. For Mumming Birds, which was to be closely linked to the fate and future of Charles Chaplin, a stage was built within the theatre stage, complete with boxes, proscenium and tabs.^* Mumming Birds grew out of a quickly concocted entertainment devised for a charity performance called Entertaining the Shah at the London Pavilion in 1904. It was extended and developed, and presented at the Star, Bermondsey, as Twice Nightly, or a Stage upon a Stage. In its second week at the Canterbury, in June 1906, it was finally renamed Mumming Birds. The script – which was to be endlessly altered throughout the career of the sketch – was attributed to Karno and Charles Baldwin.

Karno’s publicity methods were as colourful, unconventional and ambitious as his sketches. He had his companies travel about in a bizarre collection of vehicles boldly painted with the words ‘Karno’s Speechless Comedians’. His own car was similarly inscribed with large letters and odious hues – to the grave embarrassment of his young son on parents’ days at his smart boarding school. On the death of the Duke of Cambridge, cousin to Queen Victoria, in 1904, Karno bought his state coaches; and there was some official embarrassment when the Karno comics galloped around London in them with the royal arms still blazoned. Other promotional schemes included bands, balloons, advertising leaflets bearing testimonials wrung from audiences, and stunts like fake police chases through the towns in which the companies appeared.

Among Karno’s first stars was Fred Kitchen, who had played Harlequin in the Drury Lane pantomime of 1896, Aladdin, which starred Dan Leno and Herbert Campbell. He was famous for his catch-line in Karno’s The Bailiffs: ‘Meredith – we’re in!’ Billie Reeves, who created the role of the drunk in Mumming Birds, which Chaplin was later to take over and make famous, was the brother of Alfred Reeves, who managed Karno companies for many years before becoming general manager of the Chaplin film studios. Reeves first joined Karno in 1900, and since 1905 had spent a large part of his time in the United States. At the time that Sydney Chaplin joined him, in 1906, Karno had as many as ten companies regularly on tour. They were managed and serviced from Karno’s ‘Fun Factory’, established in three houses at 26, 28a and 28 Vaughan Road, Coldharbour Lane, Camberwell. In 1906 Karno advertised a

Magnificent NEW WING just added to the above, comprising a Paint Room, Rehearsal Room and Storage Dock … The new Paint Room is furnished with Two Frames capable of carrying any Cloths. The new Rehearsal Room, splendidly lighted, ventilated, and heated, is 72 feet long, 21 feet wide, and owing to the exceptional height (28 feet 6 inches) can be used as a Practice Room for any Gymnastic or Aerial Acts. The huge Storage Dock, thoroughly ventilated and dry, covers an area of 316 square yards, and has a cubic space of 32,648 feet.⁴

Sydney’s first contract with Karno was dated 9 July 1906. He was engaged as a ‘pantomimist’ at £3 a week, with a provision that he should be paid £6 a week if called upon to tour in the United States. He clearly made a rapid impression, because less than three months later he was selected for one of the two companies sent to America for Karno’s second touring season there. Sydney played the drunk in Mumming Birds in a company managed by Arthur Forest; Billie Reeves was the star of the other company, playing Early Birds, under the management of Alf Reeves. Sydney was back in time for Christmas, to play in The Football Match in Manchester. The star role of Stiffy the Goalkeeper was played by Harry Weldon, a slow-talking Lancashire comedian. On 17 July 1907, when Charlie’s tour with Casey’s Circus was coming to an end, Sydney appeared in a brand new sketch, London Suburbia, at the Canterbury.

Sydney tried hard to persuade Karno to give Charlie, now unemployed, a job, but Karno showed no interest. In February 1908 he relented so far as to offer Charlie a two-week trial with the chance of a contract if he proved satisfactory. He thought him, however, ‘a pale, puny, sullen-looking youngster. I must say that when I first saw him, I thought he looked much too shy to do any good in the theatre, particularly in the knockabout comedies that were my speciality.’ The try-out was in the vast London Coliseum, which had reopened a few weeks before. Charlie was to play the role of the comic villain who attempts to bribe Stiffy to throw the game. Ordinarily this character’s role was simply to prepare an entrance for Harry Weldon as Stiffy, but Chaplin, schooled in Casey’s Circus, had worked out some laughs. He entered with his back to the audience, wearing a silk hat and opera cloak, and elegantly handling a cane. The first laugh came when he rounded suddenly on the audience and the svelte figure turned out to have a shocking crimson nose. He did a funny trip, got entangled with his cane and collided with a punching ball (the scene was set in the team’s training quarters). Weldon was surprised and disconcerted, particularly when Chaplin topped the laughs the star earned for improvised lines with his own quick ripostes. Chaplin had quite clearly earned his contract: it was signed on 21 February 1908, eighteen days after his first appearance with the company. The agreement provided for one year at a weekly salary of £3 10s, a second year at £4 and a third year’s option. For the first time in their lives the Chaplin brothers had security, and £7 10s a week between them, since Sydney’s salary had risen to £4. When Sydney returned to London from a provincial tour, they rented a flat in Brixton Road, at 15 Glenshaw Mansions, and furnished it from a second-hand store, comfortably and with a touch of florid luxury provided by a Moorish screen and coloured lamps.

Chaplin felt that Weldon, eight years older than himself, was jealous of his success with the audience and his favour with Karno; this seems to be confirmed by the distinctly ungenerous tone of an article Weldon contributed some years later to Pearson’s Weekly, a magazine run by Frank Harris:

Charlie had undoubtedly a flair for pantomime, but in a speaking part he was rather out of it. Fred Karno, who always had an eye to new talent, was exceedingly impressed by him, and I know that Fred used to tell all the managers what a great find he had got.

I know on one occasion when we were playing at the Olympic, Liverpool, I did Stiffy at the first house, and Chaplin, on the instructions of Karno, took on the part in the second house.

I had the unique experience of sitting in a box and seeing my understudy perform. I cannot say that either the audience or myself were very impressed with the show that Charlie made. He did his best, but his slight physique prevented him from looking the part, and the audience were so cold to his Stiffy that he never appeared in goal – at least while I was in the company.

Although Karno had such a high opinion of Chaplin, no one else in the company paid him much attention, but regarded him as one of the boys.

Other colleagues recorded impressions of the nineteen-year-old Chaplin. Karno himself said, ‘He wasn’t very likeable. I’ve known him go whole weeks without saying a word to anyone in the company. Occasionally he would be quite chatty, but on the whole he was dour and unsociable. He lived like a monk, had a horror of drink, and put most of his salary in the bank as soon as he got it.’ On the other hand, a young Karno-ite from Lancashire, called Stanley Jefferson, who was eventually to change his name to Stan Laurel, remembered:

To some of the company I know he appeared stand-offish and superior. He wasn’t, he wasn’t at all. And this is something a lot of people through the years don’t know or refuse to believe about Charlie: he is a very, very shy man. You could even say he is a desperately shy man. He was never able to mix easily unless people came to him and volunteered friendship or unless he was among people who didn’t know him. Then he wasn’t so shy.⁵

Fred Goodwins, who knew him in the vaudeville days and worked with him in a few films in 1915, said that Chaplin always struck him as a dreamer:

– a builder of castles in the air – and I used to watch him interestedly and note the way he acted in the varying conditions into which his life brought him. He was ambitious, I think, in his own peculiar way. He has told me since how he used to wonder what it was like to be at the top of things and how he scoffed at himself for ever supposing that fame and fortune would come his way.

He seemed to have some realization that a big bank balance was an invaluable aid in the battle of life and so he lived steadily and saved a goodly percentage of his salary. He was never mean or close – just thrifty. Neither was he ever an habitual drinker; in fact nothing but cheap scandal has ever held him otherwise than as the most abstemious of men. In all my experience of him I don’t think I have found him addicted to a vice of any kind. He seldom smokes or drinks and, strangely enough, he has not even the vice of vainglory. True, he loves his success, and fights hard to retain and hold it, but only because he feels it is his due. He hates ostentation, and does not want to be lionized for the mere sake of it.

Yet Charles is one of the lightest-hearted men I have ever known.

He is very highly strung and given to extravagant expressions of delight when things go aright with him and his work; yet a little incident, the merest mishap to a fellow-actor, for example, will crumple him up completely and render further work impossible for the rest of the day. Sympathy, light-heartedness and his amazing common sense are perhaps his strongest characteristics …

There is nothing stand-offish about Charlie; his preoccupied state of mind and his peculiar way of looking vaguely at his interlocutors, as he does oftentimes, have misled many casual acquaintances into thinking his success has given him a ‘swollen head’.

There never was a greater mistake in this world. Charlie is essentially ‘one of the boys’, a democrat, a staunch believer in the spirit of born camaraderie and fraternity.⁶

In his own account of himself at this time in My Autobiography, Chaplin gives the impression of a solitary, reclusive youth, but from the testimony of former Karno colleagues it cannot have always been so. In 1918, Bert Weston (by this time working as a single act, ‘The Mat Man’) wrote to him, ‘I have often thought of the time when you first came with the football match at Newcastle-on-Tyne, and we all travelled down to Blackburn together, and young Will Poluski had his 21st birthday, and we had the party.’⁷ Clifford Walton, then an officer in the Royal Air Force, just awaiting demobilization, wrote to him in March 1919:

It must be at least eight [years] since I left you outside your flat after coming back with you from the Holborn Empire. I remember my friend was very inebriated and insisted on reminding us every few minutes that he was very worried. Anyhow, the poor fellow has since died, after a short and very merry life. Well, old boy, I must first of all congratulate you upon your enormous success … You always did amuse me especially in the various digs we shared. I often go over those days in my mind again; after all we did not have such a bad time. Do you remember the week in Belfast and the little girl you were so keen on, also the incident with reference to Will Poluski and your box camera … My ideas of life have quite changed since those days although I still possess that roving spirit. Do you play poker nowadays? We used to have some very good games on Sundays, but usually rather disastrous to my financial resources, do you remember? I believe Harry Weldon was usually the lucky one. Am now going to turn into my campbed, so Cheerio Charlie. Hope to run across you somewhere again one day – Best of luck.

Your old pal
Clifford Walton⁸

These memories give the impression of a young man who was not by any means unsociable, even though

People who were with Chaplin in the old Karno days tell all sorts of stories of his self-absorption in those times. On long train journeys when the other boys in the company were playing ha’penny nap, or reading the Sunday papers, or discussing football, or racing, or the girls, Charlie would sit in a corner by himself, gazing, not at the scenery, but into space … They thought he was moonstruck.⁹

Then, in the late summer of 1908, Chaplin fell in love. For anyone else it would have been an adolescent infatuation, a temporary heartbreak forgotten in a week. But Chaplin was not like anyone else, and something in his sensibilities or rooted in the deprivations of his childhood caused this encounter to leave a deep and ineradicable impression upon him. The object of his feeling was a girl called Florence Hetty Kelly. She was born on 28 August 1893 at 30 Broad Street, Westminster, and registered at birth as Florence Etty (sic).¹⁰ Her father was Arthur Kelly, a journeyman window-frame maker. He and his wife, the former Matilda Davis, had one son and three beautiful daughters, for whom their mother evidently planned stage careers. By the time Chaplin met her, Hetty was fifteen and a dancer with Bert Coutts’s Yankee Doodle Girls. The act was on the bill with the Karno troupe at the Streatham Empire. He saw her from the wings – ‘a slim gazelle, with a shapely oval face, a bewitching full mouth, and beautiful teeth’. When she came off stage she asked him to hold a mirror for her. The following night, Wednesday, he asked her if she would meet him on Sunday afternoon. He took her to the Trocadero (he had drawn £3 from his bank), but the evening was a mild fiasco since Hetty had already eaten and Charlie had no appetite. Walking her home to Camberwell he experienced a new sense of joy – ‘I was walking in Paradise with inner blissful excitement.’

On Monday morning he was up in time to call for her at seven and walk her up Camberwell Road and Walworth Road to the Underground: she was rehearsing that week in Shaftesbury Avenue. He collected and escorted her again on Tuesday and Wednesday, but on Thursday when he mether, Hetty was cool and nervous and would not hold his hand. She told him that she was too young, and that he was asking too much of her. He was nineteen, she was fifteen. Talk of love puzzled and alarmed her.

Chaplin could not resist walking to Camberwell Road the next morning, but instead of Hetty he met her mother, who said that Hetty had come home crying. He asked to see her, but Matilda Kelly at first refused to let him. When she relented, and he went with her to the house, he found Hetty cold and unfriendly. He remembered, more than sixty years later, that she had just washed her face with Sunlight soap, and the fresh smell of it.

Chaplin did not understand what had happened, and we can never know. The answer may be that Mrs Matilda Kelly did not intend her beautiful daughter to be wasted on a little vaudeville comedian with no evident prospects. Certainly she was, within a very few years, to see her three daughters married to husbands with money and position. From first sight to farewell, the affair had lasted eleven days, and apart from the Sunday meeting they had never been together for more than twenty minutes. Chaplin never forgot; and both in his life and his art he seemed for many years to be trying to recapture the ecstasy he had felt in the company of Hetty Kelly. Thirteen years afterwards, in 1922, he wrote:

Kennington Gate. That has its memories. Sad, sweet, rapidly recurring memories.

Twas here, my first appointment with Hetty (Sonny’s sister). How I was dolled up in my little tight-fitting frock coat, hat, and cane! I was quite the dude as I watched every street car until four o’clock waiting for Hetty to step off, smiling as she saw me waiting.

I get out and stand there for a few moments on Kennington Gate. My taxi driver thinks I am mad. But I am forgetting taxi drivers. I am remembering a lad of nineteen, dressed to the pink, with fluttering heart, waiting, waiting for the moment of the day when he and happiness walked along the road. The road is so alluring now. It beckons for another walk, and as I hear a street car approaching I turn eagerly, for the moment almost expecting to see the same trim Hetty step off, smiling.

The car stops. A couple of men get off. An old woman. Some children. But no Hetty.

Hetty is gone. So is the lad with the frock coat and cane.¹¹

He was to describe the encounter again, in more detail, ten years later, adding, ‘What happened was the inevitable. After all, the episode was but a childish infatuation to her, but to me it was the beginning of a spiritual development, a reaching out for beauty.’¹²

The life of a touring vaudevillian left little time for repining. In the autumn of 1909 he was sent with a Karno company to Paris, where they played at the Folies Bergère. Karno’s pantomime sketches were eminently exportable, since they presented no language problems. Off stage the performers did experience some difficulties of communication, but Chaplin was not perturbed by them and was impressed and excited by all he saw in Paris. By his own account he toyed in a boyish way with the traditional carnal pleasures of the city. In the theatre he seems to have been performing the role which was to establish his fame in America, the Inebriate Swell in Mumming Birds, which had previously been played by Billy Ritchie, Billie Reeves and Sydney Chaplin.

The setting for Mumming Birds was the stage of a small music hall, with two boxes at either side. The sketch opens with fortissimo music as a girl shows an elderly gentleman and his nephew – an objectionable boy, armed with peashooter, tin trumpet and picnic hamper – into the lower O.P. (audience left) box. The Inebriated Swell is settled into the prompt side box and instantly embarks upon some business of a very Chaplinesque character. He peels the glove from his right hand, tips the waiting attendant, and then, forgetting that he has already removed his glove, absently attempts to peel it off again. He tries to light his cigar from the electric light beside the box. The boy holds out a match for him, and in gracefully inclining to reach it, the Swell falls out of the box.

The show within the show consisted of a series of abysmal acts. Chaplin told a reporter that in some more benighted towns they visited – he instanced Lincoln – the public believed the acts were offered seriously, and received them with critical disapproval rather than laughter. The acts changed over the years, but some remained identical: a ballad singer, a male-voice quartet, and the Saucy Soubrette, delighting the Swell with her rendering of ‘You Naughty, Naughty Man!’ The finale was always ‘Marconi Ali, the Terrible Turk – the Greatest Wrestler Ever to Appear Before the British Public’. The Terrible Turk was a poor, puny little man weighed down by an enormous moustache, who would leap so voraciously upon a bun thrown to him by the Boy that the Stage Manager had to cry out, ‘Back, Ali! Back!’ The Turk’s offer to fight any challenger for a purse of £200 provided the excuse for a general scrimmage to climax the act.

There were clearly elements in the business and character which Chaplin was later to use in films; descriptions of his glare of mute distaste and the dismissive wave of the hand to indicate boredom anticipate the screen character. Chaplin played other leading roles in the Karno companies. Despite Weldon’s contempt, he eventually took on the part of Stiffy with success, even though he had another unlucky experience with it. He was excited when Karno announced that he was to do the role at the Oxford, a major London music hall – perhaps too excited, because as the night approached he lost his voice. Since The Football Match was one of the dialogue sketches which now increasingly figured alongside the mimed pieces in the Karno repertory, Chaplin, to his bitter disappointment, was replaced by an understudy. By the spring of 1909, however, he was playing Stiffy in the provinces, and on the last day of the year he was finally billed in the role at the Oxford.

Sydney was now originating material for Karno, as well as starring in leading roles in the sketches. With Karno and J. Hickory Wood, a well-known pantomime author and Dan Leno’s biographer, he was co-author of Skating, which was presented in 1909 as ‘A New and Original Pantomimical Absurdity on the Latest Craze’. Sydney himself created the role of Archibald Binks. A representative dialogue exchange between Archibald and his friend Bertie at the Olympia Rink runs:

‘There we stood with our retreat cut off.’

‘Our what cut off?’

‘Our retreat cut off.’

‘Oh stop it.’

‘There we stayed for three days without food or water, think of it, not even a drop of water. What did you do?’

‘We drank it neat …’

‘How are your brothers getting along?’

‘Do you remember my brothers?’

‘I should say so. Two of ’em are bandy and the other knock-kneed.’

‘Do you remember when they used to go out? The two bandy ones would walk on the outside and the knock-kneed one in the centre.’

‘Yes, and when they walked down the street they spelt Oxo.’

‘How’s the world been treating you?’

‘Oh, up and down.’

‘Are you working?’

‘Now and then.’

‘Where are you working?’

‘Oh, here and there.’

‘Do you like it?’

‘Well, yes and no.’

‘What do you work at?’

‘Oh, this and that.’

‘You’re always in work, I suppose?’

‘Well, in and out.’

‘Do you work hard?’

‘On and off.’

‘How much do you earn?’

‘That and half as much again.’

‘Who do you work for?’

‘Mr So-and-So.’

‘Well – are you looking for work?’

‘I’m afraid to, in case I find it.’¹³

Years later Chaplin was to commemorate this style of nonsense in the cross-talk scene in Limelight. While Sydney toured with the No.1 Skating company, with Jimmy Russell in the part of ‘Zena Flapper’, a roller-skating flirt, Charlie toured with a second company performing the same sketch, with Johnny Doyle as the lady.

In April 1910 Karno offered Chaplin the leading role in a brand new sketch, Jimmy the Fearless, or The Boy ’Ero. It was planned in four scenes, with spectacular transformations. The sketch opens in a working-class parlour where mother and father are waiting up for Jimmy, who arrives home late, brazenly explaining that he has been out ‘with a bit o’ skirt’. Mother dresses him down and leaves him to eat his supper by the light of the candle. As he eats, he takes a penny dreadful out of his pocket and reads it avidly. After supper he draws his chair up to the fire and continues to read until he nods off to sleep.

In his dreams he wanders in the Rocky Mountains, encounters desperadoes in Dead Man’s Gulch but overcomes them after a ferocious hand-to-hand struggle, and rescues the heroine. He is next seen with heroine and new-found riches in a palatial home, and is about to save his poor old parents from eviction when … he awakens in the kitchen, with Father about to lay about him with his belt. ‘It probably owes its inspiration,’ guessed one reviewer, ‘to Dickens. In A Christmas Carol, a superabundance of liquor produced the horrible nightmare which made of Scrooge a teetotaller but Jimmy’s undoing was a too substantial supper allied to an orgy of “penny dreadfuls”.’¹⁴

Chaplin for some reason turned the part down, and Karno gave it instead to a new boy, Stanley Jefferson – the future Stan Laurel.

I thought it was a wonderful sketch, so I jumped at the chance to play Jimmy … Charlie was out front the opening night, and right after the show he told Karno he had made a mistake. He wanted to play Jimmy and he did. No, I didn’t feel bitter about it. For me, Charlie was, is, and will be always the greatest comedian in the world. I thought he should have played it to begin with. But after that I used to kid him – always very proudly – that for once in my life Charlie Chaplin was my replacement. Charlie loved to play Jimmy, and the memory of that role and of that production stayed with him all his life, I think. You can see Jimmy the Fearless all over some of his pictures – dream sequences, for instance. He was fond of them, especially in his early pictures. And when it comes down to it, I’ve always thought that poor, brave, dreamy Jimmy one day grew up to be Charlie the Tramp.¹⁵

Jimmy the Fearless, or The Boy ’Ero was an immediate success for Karno (‘another winner – in which line of business he is as successful as Frohman’) and for Chaplin. At the start of the tour he was not billed by name but the critics noticed him: ‘A word is due to the very capable comedian who played the dreamer, but whose modesty keeps his name off the programme’; ‘The piece is capitally played by a strong company, including a comedian of original method in the role of the “Ero”.’ By the time they reached Swansea, his photograph was published in the local papers, with a brief biography:

Charles Chaplin, who plays the title role in Jimmy the Fearless at Swansea Empire this week, is only 21 years of age, and comes of an old stage stock, his father having been the late Charles Chaplin, a well-known comedian a few years back, and he started his own career when only nine years of age with the Eight Lancashire Lads. He is the youngest principal comedian in the Karno Companies, and has played ‘Perkins’ in The G.P.O. and The Bailiffs; ‘Stiffy’ in The Football Match; ‘Archibald’ in Skating; and the Inebriated Swell in Mumming Birds.¹⁶

The Yorkshire Evening Post of 3 July 1910 devoted a whole paragraph to him:

A RISING ACTOR

To assume the roles made famous by Fred Kitchen is no small task for a stripling of twenty-one, yet Mr Chas. Chaplin, who has caused so much laughter at the Leeds Empire this week as Jimmy the Fearless in Fred Karno’s latest sketch, has done so with vast credit to himself. Mr Chaplin has only been three years with Mr Karno, yet he has played all the principal parts, and he fully realizes the responsibility of following so consummate an artist as Fred Kitchen. He is ambitious and painstaking, and is bound to get on … Young as he is he has done some good work on the stage, and his entrance alone in Jimmy the Fearless sets the house in a roar and stamps him as a born comedian.

It was a sure sign of Chaplin’s versatility and standing that he could take over the role of the bumbling and middle-aged Perkins in The G.P.O and The Bailiffs which had been created by Karno’s hitherto unrivalled star Fred Kitchen. Chaplin had clearly developed his gifts in his three years with Karno. A crude, ignorant and sadistic man, Karno had a touch of genius in the creation of comedy and comedians. He had an unerring instinct for what was funny. He understood the value of tempo and rhythm (his sketches always had special musical accompaniments). He strove for finesse and for faultless ensemble work. Until a company had been playing together for half a year he reckoned them unskilled, ‘a scratch company’. Each player had to be perfect in his part, or rather in several parts, for it was necessary to be able to replace individual members of a cast like the parts of a precision machine.

Karno knew how to get the best out of his artists even if his methods of doing it sometimes lacked charm: a below-standard performance would be criticized with humiliating insults or simply a loud ‘raspberry’ blown from the wings. His treatment even of his stars could be brutish. Chaplin recalled that when he went to negotiate a new contract, Karno had arranged a plant at the other end of the telephone line to pose as the manager of a theatre and confirm his view that Chaplin had no appeal and so was not worth any more money.

Another feature of the Karno style was to remain dominant in Chaplin’s work. ‘I do not remember if he was the one who originated the idea of putting a bit of sentiment right in the middle of a funny music hall turn,’ Stan Laurel told John McCabe,

but I know he did it all the time. I recall one or two instances of that. I forget the Karno sketch, but there was one in which a chap got all beat up – deservedly. He was the villain, a terrible person, and the audience was happy to see him get his [just deserts]. Then Karno added this little bit after the man was knocked down. He had the hero – who, mind you, had rightfully beaten up this bad man – walk over to the villain and make him feel easier. Put a pig’s bladder under his head or what the hell have you. It got a laugh, and at the same time it was a bit touching. Karno encouraged that sort of thing. ‘Wistful’ for him, I think, meant putting in that serious touch once in a while. Another thing I seem to recall: you would have to look sorry, really sorry, for a few seconds after hitting someone on the head. Karno would say, ‘Wistful, please, wistful.’ It was only a bit of a look, but somehow it made the whole thing funnier. The audience didn’t expect that serious look. Karno really knew how to sharpen comedy in that way.¹⁷

Karno taught his comedians other principles of comedy: that a slow delivery can often be more effective than hectic speed, but that in any event pace must be varied to avoid monotony; that humour lies in the unexpected, so it is funnier if the man is not expecting the pie that hits him in the face. The serious absurdity and the bizarre comic transpositions of the Karno sketches must often have resembled Chaplin gags. In one of them, a man picks up a passing dog to wipe his hat. (Dogs figured in Karno sketches as they did in Chaplin films. Sydney’s scenario for Flats contains the direction, ‘This row outside wants to be a succession of shrieks, yells and noise. A dog can be obtained for the purpose or even two. It only requires their master to set them off in the first place and the shouts of the people will keep the dogs going.’)

For the sixth successive year, Karno was to send a company on an American tour, with Alf Reeves as manager. ‘The adroitness with which he [Reeves] has met the altered conditions of business,’ noted Variety, ‘so different from the methods obtaining in England, has won him the respect and friendship of the managers.’ In the winter of 1910 Reeves returned to London, and set about organizing a company for the next American season. Amy Minister, a charming soubrette in one of the Karno companies, whom Reeves was to marry in the course of the forthcoming US tour,¹⁸ told him, ‘Al, there’s a clever boy in the Karno troupe at the Holloway Empire. His name’s Charlie Chaplin. He’s a wonderful kid and a marvellous actor.’ Reeves remembered in later years that on a foggy night he took a bus to Holloway, where Chaplin was playing Jimmy the Fearless.

Just as I popped in he was putting great dramatic fire into the good old speech, ‘Another shot rang out, and another redskin bit the dust!’ …

He looked the typical London street urchin, who knows every inch of the town as he darts through hurrying throngs and dodges in and out of rushing traffic, managing by some miracle to escape with his life. He had a cap on the back of his head and wore a shabby old suit, short in the sleeves and frayed at the cuffs – a suit he had long since outgrown.

But it was not until he did something strikingly characteristic that I realized he was a real find. His father in the skit was ordering him to drop his novel and eat his supper. ‘Get on with it now, m’lad,’ and jabbing a loaf of bread at him. Charlie, I noticed, cut the bread without once taking his eyes off his book. But what particularly attracted my attention was that while he absentmindedly kept cutting the bread, he held the knife in his left hand. Charlie’s left-handed, but I didn’t know it then. The next thing I knew, he had carved that loaf into the shape of a concertina.¹⁹

A few years later, Chaplin would use the same gag in his film, A Jitney Elopement. Reeves went around to the dressing room after the act and asked Chaplin if he would like to go to America. ‘Only too gladly, if you’ll take me on,’ he replied.

I told him I’d have a talk with Karno. At hearing this he wiped the smudge of make-up off his face to give his smile full play, and I saw he was a very good-looking boy. I had made up my mind about him before leaving his dressing room.

‘Well,’ considered Karno, ‘you can have him for the American company if you think he’s old enough for the parts.’ We were then giving A Night in an English Music Hall, A Night in a London Club and A Night in a London Secret Society.

‘He’s old enough,’ I told Karno, ‘and big enough and clever enough for anything.’²⁰

Karno appears to have been happy to send Charlie in preference to Sydney because previous tours had resulted in a number of defections to the American vaudeville stage, and Sydney was too valuable to risk losing. Before he left, Chaplin solemnly assured the guv’nor that there was no fear of his not returning. His contract was not due for renewal until March 1911, but a new one was drawn up and signed on 19 September 1910, just before the company set sail on the SS Cairnrona. The new agreement was to take effect from 6 March 1911 and provided for three years’ engagement at £6 a week in the first year, £8 in the second and £10 in the third. After that there would be an option for a further three years.

The American company that year also included Stan Jefferson, Fred and Muriel Palmer, George Seaman, who doubled as stage carpenter, and his wife Emily, Albert Austin, who in later years worked in many Chaplin films, Fred Westcott, Karno’s nineteen-year-old-son, and Mike Asher, who played the Awful Boy in Mumming Birds.

The Cairnrona docked at Quebec and the troupe travelled by train via Toronto to New York, where they were to open on 3 October at the Colonial Theatre. Karno had insisted that they present a new sketch, The Wow-Wows, or A Night in a London Secret Society, written by Karno and Herbert Sydney, and first produced at the Palace, Tottenham, in the week of 8 August 1910. The first scene was set in a summer camp, where the campers resolve to get even with the tight-wadded Archie by creating a phoney secret society. The second scene satirized the absurd initiation ceremonies of such arcane organizations. The cast were dismayed to open with a piece which they all regarded as silly and ineffective. As we can judge from the notices, only Chaplin’s performance saved it from total disaster. Variety prophetically wrote that ‘Chaplin will do all right for America, but it is too bad that he didn’t first appear in New York with something with more in it than this piece.’ Another reviewer wrote:

Now Charles Chaplin is so arriving a comedian that Mr Karno will be forgiven for whatever else the act may lack. The most enthusiastic Karno-ite will surely admit, too, the act lacks a great deal that might help to make it vastly more entertaining. Still, Mr Chaplin heads the cast, so the people laughed and were content.

He plays Archibald, a chappie with one end of his moustache turned up and the other turned down, a chappie with spots on his face betokening many a bad night, a chappie who declared himself in on everything though never paying his or any share.

His first appearance is made from a tent, one of several occupied by a camping party. He looks more than seedy, despite his dress being immaculate.

‘How are you, Archie?’ inquires a woman visitor, decidedly attractive, and of whom Archie appears to be enamoured.

‘Not well,’ he responds. ‘I just had a terrible dream.’

‘Very terrible?’ she asks solicitously.

‘Oh, frightful!’ says Archie. ‘I dreamed I was being chased by a caterpillar.’

Archie makes such remarks as this in an exceedingly droll, ludicrous fashion. Outside Archie the company is composed of the most remarkable collection of blithering, blathering Englishmen New York has seen in many a day.²¹

After a month or two on tour, Chaplin and the company evidently built up the comedy business until the sketch was tolerable. A rather later review noted that ‘Nothing funnier has been seen in some time than the scene when Charles Chaplin, the fancy “souse”, is initiated into the mysteries of the Wow-Wows. Chaplin is a real comedian. He is actually funny and The Wow-Wows might have been made to order for him.’²²

During their three months around the New York circuit, the company dutifully played The Wow-Wows, but despite the improvement they wrought, they were eager to be rid of it. At the American Music Hall, Chicago, in the week of 30 January 1911 they offered a seventeen-minute sketch, in a single set, entitled A Night in a London Club. Some mystery surrounds this presentation, since it was apparently not repeated, and only briefly figured in Karno publicity. The most likely explanation was that, with the resourcefulness in which Karno players were trained, they had simply improvised a completely new act, using the club set from The Wow-Wows. It was related to an old Karno sketch, The Smoking Concert, but with elements taken from Mumming Birds and The Wow-Wows:

The offering somehow suggests Dickens. Seeing it one is reminded of the gatherings of the Pickwick club. The caricatures of the individual members of the club are performed with a graveness which makes the comedy stand out. The comedy is rough but the characters are well drawn. Various members of the club are called upon to entertain. There is a woman singer who gets her key repeatedly but cannot strike it when she begins to sing, a precious daughter of one of them, who offers a childish selection to the plaudits of admiring friends, and among others an ambitious tragedian who, after reminding the master of ceremonies several times, is at length permitted to start a scene of a play, only to be interrupted by the ‘drunk’ (played by Charles Chaplin) which has come to be recognized as the leading comedy character of the Karno offerings. As seen Monday afternoon the only shortcoming of the farce was the lack of a big laugh at the finish.²³

1910 – Karno advertisement.

It is reasonable to suppose that, as the leading comedian, Chaplin would have played a major role in devising a new act of this sort, as he must also have done in an intriguing entertainment which the company put on as an extra turn at the American Music Hall in New York for their six-week Christmas season. It was billed as A Harlequinade in Black and White: An Old Style Christmas Pantomime. It was entirely played as a shadow show, behind a large white screen.

It brought forth our old friends, the Clown, Pantaloon, Harlequin and Columbine. The pantomime was much more interesting than one would imagine it to be by merely hearing about it, for the pantomimists were funny in their extravagant make-up and actions. There was plenty of action to it, a diversity of ideas shown, and much pleasure derived by the audience, judging by the way they received it

First the characters indulged in a little general knockabout fooling, then they had fun with a stolen bottle, after which the policeman was relieved of his clothes, and another ‘cop’ was knocked out and laid upon a table to be dissected, his internal organs being brought forth one by one. The baby was stolen from the carriage of the nurse-maid, and all the characters had a ‘rough house’ experience while seeking lodgings. A droll duel brought forth two characters who grew and diminished in size rapidly as they fought, the phantom army appeared and paraded, and all the characters leaped ‘up to the moon’, the silhouettes showing them apparently jumping away up into the air and out of sight. They all jumped back again, and the act closed. It was quite a happy little idea for the holiday season, occupying about eleven minutes.²⁴

1911 – Chaplin in A Night in a London Club, during US tour.

Years later Chaplin was to use the same shadow technique for a wonderful scene which he in the end discarded from Shoulder Arms. In A Harlequinade an antiquated form of entertainment was given such vitality that ‘in a programme that embraces the best of every branch of vaudeville an astonishing hit was made by an act that may set the managers constantly striving …’²⁵ Chaplin carefully preserved a number of press cuttings about the shadow show, and this particular interest in it may well confirm that he made at the least a significant creative contribution to the presentation. Within a few weeks the idea was borrowed by Gus Hill’s Vanity Fair, for a number with shadow show-girls wearing strip tights and nighties.

During the months in New York, Chaplin lived in a brownstone house off 43rd Street, over a dry cleaner’s. At first he found the city unfriendly and intimidating; in time he was stimulated by the energy of American life and the apparent classlessness of the country. After New York came a twenty-week tour, doing three shows a day on the Sullivan and Considine circuit. It provided a thrilling revelation of the continent, from East to West – Chicago, St Louis, Minneapolis, St Paul, Kansas City, Denver, Butte, Billings, Tacoma, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and Los Angeles, which Chaplin did not like. In Canada they played in Winnipeg and Vancouver, where they felt they were back among English audiences.

Stan Laurel told John McCabe:

We were thrilled at the excitement of New York, but seeing the whole country, mile and mile, was really the way to see America. I was Charlie’s roommate on that tour and he was fascinating to watch. People through the years have talked about how eccentric he became. He was a very eccentric person then. He was very moody and often very shabby in appearance. Then suddenly he would astonish us all by getting dressed to kill. It seemed that every once in a while he would get an urge to look very smart. At these times he would wear a derby hat (an expensive one), gloves, smart suit, fancy vest, two-tone side button shoes, and carry a cane. I have a lot of quick little memories of him like that. For instance, I remember that he drank only once in a while, and then it was always port.

He read books incessantly. One time he was trying to study Greek, but he gave it up after a few days and started to study yoga. A part of this yoga business was what was called the ‘water cure’ – so for a few days after that he ate nothing, just drank water for his meals. He carried his violin wherever he could. Had the strings reversed so he could play left-handed, and he would practise for hours. He bought a cello once and used to carry it around with him. At these times he would always dress like a musician, a long fawn-coloured overcoat with green velvet cuffs and collar and a slouch hat. And he’d let his hair grow long at the back. We never knew what he was going to do next. He was unpredictable.²⁶

Other members of the Karno companies confirmed Laurel’s account of Chaplin’s sartorial unpredictability. An anonymous columnist noted that ‘the world’s greatest impersonator of inebriates and the biggest laughmaker on the vaudeville stage’ (a striking encomium in 1911)

is one of the quietest and most non-committal of men – except just before, during and just after each performance. On these thrice-daily occasions he seems to enter heart and soul into the spirit of the impersonation and he’s the most genial fellow one could meet. Then he lapses into a reserved state of mind during which he either sits quite still and thinks – thinks – thinks, or delves into the pages of the heaviest kind of literature he can find – philosophy preferred. It is said of him that, when in a small town where he could not secure a book to his liking, he purchased a Latin grammar and satisfied his peculiar mood for a time by devouring the dry contents as though it was a modern novel.²⁷

Even so, he was not unsociable. A gymnastic act called Lohse and Sterling was on the tour with them, and Chaplin struck up a warm friendship with Ralph Lohse, a big, handsome young Texan with ambitions to become a prize-fighter. They used to spar together and became enthusiastic about a plan to quit show business and raise hogs in a big way. Chaplin lost his enthusiasm after reading up on techniques for castrating hogs, but Ralph Lohse was more dogged, and four years later wrote to Chaplin that though he was still in vaudeville – now with his wife in the act – he had a flourishing farm in Arkansas:

I sold my first one and bought a second one and I have it running in great shape. I have in the neighbourhood of 600 hogs on it now and if conditions get better this fall I am going to put home-sugar-cured hams and bacon on the market, also pure pork farm sausage in little pound cartons. There is a great demand for such goods. My grandfather was considered one of the best sausage makers in the country and I know his process. And you was the durn fool that put all these notions in my head.

Charlie I am glad to see you doing so well in pictures. We never go to a picture show unless you are in them and we manage to see nearly all of the pictures you are in. You will remember that all those Englishmen used to say that you would never amount to much if you ever lost out with Karno. Losing Karno was the best thing you ever done.²⁸

Charlie, meanwhile, still had the opportunity to go into business raising hogs and making sausages: Ralph volunteered that if ever he wanted ‘to go in at round about $1800, let me know …’

Once out on the tour, the company thankfully revived the old faithful Mumming Birds, retitled for America A Night in an English Music Hall. Audiences had seen it before but welcomed it back joyously. Chaplin won his usual praise at every theatre. In Butte, Montana, he was said to prove himself ‘one of the best pantomime artists ever seen here’. ‘Charles Chaplin as the inebriated swell is a revelation and is given a big hand many times during the act.’ ‘Charles Chaplin, as the polite drunk, is an artist and even though doing the broadest burlesque, never gets out of the part for an instant. His falls in and out of the boxes are wonderful, and were he not a skilled acrobat, he would break his neck.’²⁹

1910 – Cartoon of Chaplin as the Inebriate in A Night in an English Music Hall in the USA.

After the Sullivan and Considine tour, the company was booked for another six-week New York season by the William Morris Agency and then embarked on a further twenty-week Sullivan and Considine tour, which finally ended in May 1912 in Salt Lake City.

When the company arrived back in England in June 1912 they had been away for twenty-one months. For Charlie, the homecoming was not particularly happy. He was met at the station by Sydney, who told him that he had married Minnie Constance, a Karno actress, and had given up the flat in Glenshaw Mansions. To be suddenly deprived of the first place he had recognized as his own home was a sharp blow to Charlie; for the first time in their lives there was a distance between the brothers. Hannah was still in Cane Hill, and not in any way improved. Now that they could afford it, Sydney and Charlie arranged for her to be moved to a private nursing home, Peckham House in Peckham Road. It was the place where Dan Leno had been cared for after his mental collapse.

1910 – A Night in an English Music Hall: The Inebriate meets the Terrible Turk.

Karno put the American company on the road in suburban halls. Their year and a half together had polished them and sharpened their comedy, and they were very successful with the English audiences, but England seemed flat after the excitements of America and Chaplin was glad to leave again for a new American tour. The company sailed from Southampton on 2 October 1912 on the SS Oceanic. (In his autobiography Chaplin refers to the ship as the Olympic, but the Olympic was laid up at this time, undergoing modifications following the sinking of the Titanic.) The only members of the last American company to remain with him were Alf and Amy Reeves, Stan Jefferson and Edgar and Ethel Hurley. One new member of the troupe was ‘Whimsical Walker’, the famous Drury Lane clown, who at this time was sixty-one years old. According to Walker³⁰ he was engaged the night before sailing, to fill a vacancy in the company, having met Alf Reeves and some members of the company by accident in a bar. He complained that he had not worked for such a low salary for years, but he was out of work and glad to take it.

They were again stuck with The Wow-Wows for much of the tour, which was dogged by bad luck, one way and another. Walker’s diction proved to be very bad. When they reached Butte, Montana, they found that the theatre had burnt down since their last visit and they had to play in a public hall. A number of the cast fell ill, and poor old Walker developed erysipelas and had to be hospitalized in Seattle. He did not rejoin the company. The third time around the Sullivan and Considine circuit, the sight-seeing had lost its novelty. Chaplin was growing tired of audiences, who could be remarkably unsophisticated in the American sticks, as he discovered:

… we had been heavily billed as vaudeville, because vaudeville was a new thing there at the time. That fact was evident the first night, for the people did not seem to understand that our work was merely burlesque. This was plainly brought home to us after the show. We were playing A Night in an English Music Hall during which a quartette renders a song in the most awful manner possible – the worse it is sung, the greater the fun produced.

Well, we had returned to the hotel and were compelled to listen to many uncomplimentary remarks. ‘What do you think of the big act?’ one Pennsylvania man asked another Pennsylvania man. ‘Which big act?’ was the reply. ‘The Karno act,’ responded the first speaker. ‘Absolutely rotten,’ snapped the other. ‘Why,’ he added, ‘that quartette couldn’t sing for sour apples. In fact, our local quartette could beat them in seven different ways.’³¹

Still, success brought economic consolations. On 8 October 1913 Chaplin was able to acquire $200 worth of shares in the Vancouver Island Oil Company: he was always preparing for a rainy day. It was time to be moving on, too. The week of 4 August, when the Karno company were playing in Winnipeg, Chaplin wrote one of his infrequent letters to his brother, from the La Claire Hotel:³²

My Dear Sid,

I hope you received my letter all right I know there wasn’t much news in it – ‘they say no news is good news’ but not in this case. I have quite a lot of good news to tell you this time. Did I tell you I met Sonny Kelly in New York? Yes, I met him and had a grand time – he took me all over the place. He has a lovely apartment on Madison Avenue which you know is the swell part of New York. Hetty was away at the time – so I never saw her but still I am keeping correspondence with Sonny and he tells me I am always welcome to his place when in New York. I do nothing else but meet people and old friends – right here in Winnipeg I met one of the old boys who use to be in the Eight Lancashire Lads. I dont know wether you would know him or not – Tommy Bristol – he use to be my bigest pal – now he’s working the Orpheum turns with a partner getting about 300 dollars per – I tell you they are all doing well, even me. I have just to sign a contract for 150 Dollars a week. ‘Now comes the glad news.’ Oh’ Sid I can see you!! beaming now as you read this, those sparkling eyes of yours scanning this scrible and wondering what coming next. I’ll tell you how the land lyes. I have had an offer from a moving picture company for quite a long time but I did not want to tell you untill the whole thing was confirmed and it practically is settled now – all I have to do is to mail them my address and they will forward contract. It is for the New York Motion Picture Co., a most reliable firm in the States – they have about four companies, the ‘Kay Bee’ and ‘Broncho’ [and] ‘Keystone’ which I am to joyne, the Keystone is the Comedy Co. I am to take Fred Mace place. He is a big man in the movies. So you bet they think a lot of me – it appears they saw me in Los Angeles, Cal. playing the Wow-Wows then they wrote to me in Philadelphia which was a long time after. I could have told you before but I wanted the thing settled. We had a week’s lay-of in Phili so I went over to New York and saw them personaly. I had no idea they would pay any money but a pal of mine told me that Fred Mace was getting four hundred a week well I ask them for two hundred. They said they would have to put it before the board of Directors (‘dam this pen!’) Well we hagled for quite a long time and then I had to do all my business by writing them and you bet I put a good business letter together with the help of the dictionary. Finaly we came to this arrangement i.e. A year’s contract. Salary for the first three months 150 per week and if I make good after three months 175 per week with no expences at all and in Los Angeles the whole time. I don’t know whether you have seen any Keystone pictures but they are very funny, they also have some nice girls ect. Well that’s the whole strength, so now you know. Of course I told them I would not leave this company until we finished the SC [Smith and Considine] circuit, so I will join them by about the beginning of Dec that will be about the time we get through. I have told Alf and of course he doesn’t want me to leave but he says I am certainly bettering myself and he can’t say otherwise. Mr Kessel tells me there is no end of advancement for me if I make good. Just think Sid £35 per week is not to be laugh at and I only want to work about five years at that and then we are independent for life. I shall save like a son of a gun. Well I am getting tired now so will draw to a close. Don’t tell anybody about what Alf said because it may get to the Guvnor’s ears and he will think Alf had been advising me. And if you know of any little Ideas in the way of synaros ect. don’t forget to let me have them. Hoping you are in good health and Mother improving also I would love her and you to be over hear. Well we may some day when I get in right.

Love to Minnie and yourself
Your loving Brother,
Charlie.³³

Chaplin left the Karno company in Kansas City on 28 November 1913. ‘I missed him, I must say,’ Stan Laurel told John McCabe.

Arthur Dandoe, a chap in the Karno company with whom I teamed one time in a vaudeville act, didn’t like Charlie. Arthur didn’t like him because he considered him haughty and cold. So in Kansas City on our last night with Charlie, Arthur announced to everybody that he was going to present a special goodbye present. He told me what it was – about five pieces of old brown Leichner grease paint, looking just like turds, all wrapped up in a very fancy box. ‘Some shit for a shit,’ is the way Arthur put it. This was Arthur’s idea of a joke.

I tried to argue him out of it but all Arthur said was, ‘It’ll serve the superior bastard right.’

The so-called presentation never took place however and later Arthur told me why. First of all, Charlie stood the entire company drinks after the show. That fazed Arthur a bit but the thing that really shamed him into not going through with the so-called gag was this: just after his final curtain with us, Charlie hurried off to a deserted spot backstage. Curious, Arthur followed, and he saw haughty, cold, unsentimental Charlie crying.³⁴

This story has a sad footnote. When Chaplin made his triumphal return to his native city in 1921 Arthur Dandoe, down on his luck, was working as a pavement artist in Trafalgar Square.³⁵

Alf Reeves saw Charlie off at the Kansas City railroad depot. As he stepped into the train he handed Alf a small package and said, ‘Merry Christmas, Alf.’ When the train had carried Charlie off, Alf opened the package and found a handsome pocket book, and inside it a $100 bill, with a note: ‘A little tribute to our friendship. To Alf, from Charlie.’ Not wanting to waste good money on something he might not like, Charlie wanted Alf to choose something for himself; but Alf kept the pocket book with the banknote intact for many years.

1913 – Charles Chaplin’s letter to Sydney, announcing he is going into films.