6

Mutual

Chaplin only became aware of the extent of his fame in February 1916, when he took a train east to join Sydney in New York. To his astonishment, when they stopped at Amarillo, Texas, the station was hung with bunting, there was a civic deputation to greet him and a huge crowd mobbed the train. In Kansas City and Chicago the crowds were even greater and before they arrived in New York the Chief of Police cabled, requesting him to alight at 125th Street station instead of Grand Central, to avoid trouble with the throng that had been assembling since early morning. News of his itinerary had been leaked to the press by the telegraphists who had relayed his telegram to Sydney announcing his time of arrival.

Sydney had gone ahead to discuss offers for Chaplin’s future services. While relations were still tolerable, Spoor had travelled from Chicago to Los Angeles with an offer of $350,000 for twelve two-reelers, but would not meet Chaplin’s demand of a bonus of $150,000 on signature. Chaplin knew his value, and Sydney was determined to get the right price. Sydney found himself wooed on all sides. Universal, Mutual, The Triangle, Famous Players, Fox and Vitagraph were all bidding optimistically; even Spoor and Anderson now followed Charlie to New York in an effort to gain a new contract. In the end, none of them could better the proposition of John R. Freuler, President of the Mutual Film Corporation, which had been incorporated only three years before by Freuler and Harry Aitken, and now set the seal on its success with the acquisition of the biggest star in motion pictures. Freuler agreed to pay Chaplin $10,000 a week, with a bonus of $150,000 on signing.

Mutual, as it happened, had just engaged the most gifted publicist in motion pictures, Terry Ramsaye (1885–1954), who a decade later was to write the first and classic history of the motion picture industry in the United States, A Million and One Nights (New York, 1926). It was Ramsaye who wrote the account of the contract in Mutual’s publicity magazine, Reel Life (4 March 1916):

Charles Chaplin has signed a contract to appear exclusively in the releases of the Mutual Film Corporation.

Chaplin will receive a salary of $670,000 for his first year’s work under the contract. The total operation in forming the Chaplin producing company involved the sum of $1,530,000. This stands as the biggest operation centered about a single star in the history of the motion picture industry.

AN EXPRESSION OF POLICY

Following close on this announcement from President John R. Freuler of the Mutual, comes his declaration that the signing of Chaplin is but the beginning of a dominating policy on the part of the corporation and the suggestion that the expiration of certain contracts held by other famous stars now working for other concerns will result in further announcements rivaling that of the Mutual’s achievement this week.

The game of ‘button, button, who’s got Chaplin?’ which had been engaging the attention of the photoplay world so long was brought to an abrupt end in President Freuler’s office late last Saturday night, at the close of the last of the weighty series of conferences and negotiations.

Next to the war in Europe Chaplin is the most expensive item in contemporaneous history.

Every hour that goes by brings Chaplin $77.55 and if he should need a nickel for a carfare it only takes two seconds to earn it.

COMPETITORS’ GUESSES ALL TOO LOW

Mr Chaplin will be twenty-seven years old the 16th of April. He is doing reasonably well for his age.

The closing of the contract ends a war of negotiations involving unending conferences and diplomatic exchanges for weeks. In this time five or six motion picture concerns and promoters have claimed Chaplin and audibly whispered figures – with every guess too low. A week ago Mr Freuler put Chaplin under a tentative contract or option, pending the completion of arrangements for the organization of a special producing company. At that time the negotiations were entirely personal between President Freuler and Chaplin.

Saturday night the final conference was held and the ceremony of signing up with the Mutual proceeded, with all due array of attorneys, notaries, etc., including, of course, a battery of arc lamps and a motion picture camera, since the motion picture does its own reporting these days.

Charles Chaplin was accompanied as usual by his brother, Sidney Chaplin, who conducts the younger comedian’s business affairs and salary negotiations.

The lawyers for everybody looked over all the papers for the last tedious time and announced that everything was correct. The ponderous seal was brought forth from a vault by a law clerk and placed with precise care on the president’s mahogany office table.

FILM SIGNING FOR MUTUAL WEEKLY

The lights flared up under the pressure of ‘more juice’ and the office shimmered with the rippling glare of a studio.

Charles Chaplin was draped over the edge of the table in one of his characteristic off-stage attitudes, eyeing the proceedings with a casual air of shocking disinterestedness.

‘What’s the action in this scene?’ he inquired of his brother, spreading the expensive [sic] Chaplin smile.

‘Sign here and here,’ explained Sid, indicating the neat and beckoning dotted lines on the last page of the ponderous twenty-thousand word contract evolved by the Mutual’s astonishingly industrious legal department.

President Freuler handed over his pet fountain pen, with which all the stars sign. Sidney Chaplin called ‘camera’ and the action started.

In five minutes the deed was done and the camera man reported ‘three hundred feet’ as President Freuler handed Chaplin a check for $150,000 bonus payment.

Chaplin looked over the check critically, then with gingery fingers passed it on. ‘Take it, Sidney, take it away from me please, my eyes hurt.’

In addition to the bonus paid Mr Chaplin on the signing of the contract, he receives a salary of $10,000 a week.

TO MAKE FILMS IN LOS ANGELES

The new Mutual Chaplins will be produced in studios now being equipped in Los Angeles, Cal., where the comedian will begin work March 20, or at an earlier date if conditions permit. One two-part comedy will be produced each month.

The Chaplin contract is one of the most ponderous and intricate documents ever evolved for the employment of a motion picture star. It contains something more than 20,000 words and provides conditions and clauses to cover anything that might happen and a lot of things that can not. An element of ‘war risk’ enters into the contract. Mr Chaplin is a British subject. It is stipulated that he shall not leave the United States within the life of the contract without the permission of the corporation. Incidentally, Mr Freuler has insured the costly comedian’s life for $250,000.

‘This contract,’ observed Mr Freuler yesterday, ‘is only a new token of the bigness of the motion picture and the motion picture industry, a combination of art, amusement and business. The figures are all business,’ he added with a dry smile.

‘We can afford to pay Mr Chaplin this large sum annually because the public wants Chaplin and will pay for him. I consider this contract a very pleasing bargain for everybody concerned – including this corporation, Mr Chaplin and the fun-loving American public.’

Chaplin himself made a skilful and disarming statement to the press:

A great many people are inclined to make wide eyes at what is called my salary. Honestly, it is a matter I do not spend much time thinking about.

Money and business are very serious matters and I have to keep my mind off of them. In fact I do not worry about money at all.

It would get in the way of my work. I do not think that life is all a joke to me, but I do enjoy working on the sunny side of it.

What this contract means is simply that I am in business with the worry left out and with the dividends guaranteed.

It means that I am left free to be just as funny as I dare, to do the best work that is in me and to spend my energies on the thing that the people want. I have felt for a long time that this would be my big year and this contract gives me my opportunity. There is inspiration in it. I am like an author with a big publisher to give him circulation.¹

The Chaplin contract was capitalized from a newly floated company, the Lone Star Film Corporation; and Mr Freuler was able to give his stockholders a rosy forecast of results from the Chaplin films. According to the President’s calculations the average cost of the twelve features would be $10,000 each, or a total of $120,000, which, when added to the comedian’s salary, made an overall outlay of $790,000. The revenue was calculated on an income of $25 a day for each copy of a two-reeler for a period of at least thirty days. The company aimed to make at least one hundred prints of each film, so that there would be a minimum daily income of $2,500, or $75,000 a month. Multiplied by twelve months, at a film per month, the total came to $900,000 – already $110,000 over the outlay. The life of the prints, however, would in fact be considerably longer than thirty days: the ‘sixties’ and ‘nineties’, as the more used prints were known, could go on earning $20 and $10 per day in smaller cinemas. Freuler told his stockholders that his estimate of the potential profits was conservative: it did not take into account the possibility of distributing many more than one hundred prints of each subject, or the foreign sales, which, even in war conditions, remained huge. Freuler was soon to discover how much even he had underestimated his prize. He would no doubt have been even more surprised to learn that films whose life expectancy he estimated at sixty days would still be entertaining millions (with no advantage to Mutual) in the next century.

The press and the public were thrilled and even sceptical at the size of Chaplin’s earnings. Annual earnings of $670,000 meant $12,884 a week, $1840 a day, $76.66 an hour, $1.27 a minute. No person in the world, other than a king or an emperor – unless perhaps Charlie Schwab of the US Steel Corporation – had ever received even half that salary. Mary Pickford was to ensure that Chaplin’s record salary did not go unchallenged for long, but for the moment it was the topic of the day. On one hand it triumphantly realized the American dream of success; on the other, it offended a puritan reverence for money. The Reverend Frederick E. Heath, preaching at the Warren Avenue Baptist Church in Boston, took as his text ‘Charlie Chaplin’s Half Million’: ‘Had Chaplin lived in the old Puritanical days they would have believed him a witch and taken his life … I believe in a good laugh … The great mistake in American life today is this wicked and immoral manner of throwing away money.’

Chaplin, as it happened, somewhat disappointed New York during his visit. For Easterners, the stars of motion pictures had already become a strange and exotic species, given to high living and reckless spending. Chaplin did not at all conform to this image. He was serious, quiet and retiring. Worse, he did not throw his money around. Memories of poverty were too close; and for some while he was to consider, quite philosophically, the possibility that one day the public would tire of him. He respected money as those who have been without it must, but he was not mean. While he was in New York he gave a cheque for $1300 to Sam Goldfish’s actors’ fund – it was half the fee he had received for a personal appearance at a Sunday show at the Hippodrome. Nevertheless, the myth of Chaplin’s tight-fistedness started at this time, notably in an interesting portrait of Chaplin at the age of twenty-six by Karl K. Kitchen:

Charlie is enjoying his riches with becoming modesty. He spent a month in New York before he signed his contract, and it was a dizzy month, up and down and across Broadway, dining, wining, playgoing and dancing and having the time of his young life, but – keeping his bankroll exclusively to himself.

For at the age of 26 and with an annual income of $670,000 Charlie Chaplin has the finance idea developed to 100 per cent efficiency. The only thing he spent on Broadway in a month of gay life was four weeks. Not since Harry Lauder astonished and then amused New York with his Scotch thrift, to use a pleasant word, has Broadway known such a frugal celebrity.²

To be fair, the writer conceded, Chaplin had had no need to spend money. He was the most sought-after man in New York. With every motion picture magnate trying to get him under contract, ‘he was feted as no actor who ever visited New York was feted before’. Innumerable dinners were given in his honour and he took back with him to California a trunk full of costly presents.

His only extravagance is a 12-cylinder automobile. He does not even allow himself the luxury of a wife. Jewelry, slow horses and fast company, country homes, objets d’art and other expensive fads of the predatory rich do not appeal to this slender young movie actor, who has risen in less than five years from obscurity to the distinction of being the highest-paid employee in the world …

His personal expenses last year were considerably less than $500 and there are no indications that his new contract has turned his head. If anything it has caused him to be even more tight-fisted. Chaplin’s theory of life may not be plain living and high thinking – he is more interested in prize fights than art or literature – but the fact remains that he lives plainly – except when someone else foots the bill.

Instead of a secretary he has his brother Sidney … to look after his social and business arrangements. He is without a valet for the reason that he has less than half a dozen suits of clothes. Unless he is specially requested to wear evening dress he appears at the theatre or even a more formal function in a tweed suit …

In flesh he is entirely different from the gelatine. He is of surprisingly small stature – he weighs less than 125 pounds – and he possesses a perfectly ordinary face – a face that would not attract attention in a crowd of five, let alone 500. To be sure, he has black eyes of more than ordinary brilliance and a mass of coal black hair inclined to curl, but all in all his appearance is absolutely undistinguished. His manner too is in striking contrast to his picture antics. For in private life he is unusually shy, quiet and reserved. When he talks, his cockney speech betrays his origin. Strangely enough, he speaks without gestures, a remarkable thing for an actor of any brand.³

Chaplin tried to explain his own position: ‘No one realizes more than I do that my services may not be worth $100 a week five years from now. I’m simply making hay while the sun shines.’⁴ Another interview statement was at once prophetic and an accurate self-analysis: ‘I have been a worker all my life. It is true that I could quit the screen today if I wished and live the rest of my life in ease and comfort. I’m still a young man – just twenty-six years old – but you will find me working just as hard fifty years from now. Money is not everything. One can find more happiness in work than in anything else I know of.’⁵ As he anticipated, exactly fifty years from that time he was working on a new film, A Countess from Hong Kong. He also gave his views on marriage: ‘When I wanted to marry I didn’t have the money. Now that I have the money I don’t care to marry. Besides, there’s plenty of time for that sort of thing when I quit work.’⁶

For all that he had not been able to forget Hetty Kelly. He recalled half a century later that when he was in New York, believing that Hetty was living with her sister on Fifth Avenue, he had loitered near the house, hoping to meet her. It was a vain hope: Hetty was in England where, six months earlier, she had married Lieutenant Alan Horne, son of the MP for Guildford.

This was the first time since they had met almost a year before that Chaplin and Edna had been apart. While Chaplin was in New York, Edna had gone home to her family in Lovelock, Nevada. Chaplin promised to write to her, but he was never a good correspondent, and Edna wrote to reproach him gently:

I really don’t know why you don’t send me some word. Just one little telegram so unsatisfactory. Even a night letter would be better than nothing. You know ‘Boodie’ you promised faithfully to write. Is your time so taken up that you can’t even think of me. Every night before I go to bed I send out little love thoughts wishing you all the success in the world and counting the minutes until you return. How much longer do you expect to stay. Please, Hon, don’t forget your ‘Modie’ and hurry back. Have been home for over a week and believe me my feet are itching to get back.

Have you seen Mable and the Bunch? I suppose so. Am so sorry that you couldn’t have taken me. Have you been true to me? I’m afraid not. Oh, well, do whatever you think is right. I really do trust you to that extent …

After ‘Lots of love and kisses’ Edna signs herself, charmingly, ‘Yours faithfully’.⁷

Chaplin, from his own account, passed a rather quiet time in New York, trying to avoid the crowds and somewhat depressed by a sense of loneliness. He went to the opera and was induced against his better judgement to go backstage and meet Caruso. Slightly confused as to whether he was seeing Carmen or Rigoletto, crassly introduced as ‘the Caruso of the moving pictures’ and aware that Caruso was not particularly interested to meet him, Chaplin was triply mortified. The conversation, according to a contemporary news report, ran: ‘Caruso: “I read you make gooda contract.” Chaplin: “Yes, I’ve made a fine contract.” Caruso: “That’s gooda. I geta gooda contract too. I am very glada to meet you.” And there the interview ended.’ Afterwards Chaplin remarked, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t call him the Chaplin of opera. I intended to, but I lost my nerve.’ He was to have happier encounters with other celebrities of the musical world. Later in the year Dame Nellie Melba visited him in his new studios during her Los Angeles season, and revealed promising gifts for comedy. Fooling for the camera, Chaplin walked down a flight of stairs with her and did a comic fall. Melba jerked him to his feet, slammed his hat on his head and said: ‘Charlie, behave yourself. This is not a place of amusement.’ Paderewski also visited the studio, watched Chaplin at work, clapped his hands in delight and exclaimed enigmatically: ‘Bravo! What a grand piano player has the motion picture lost. What a great pie thrower has the music world gained in the fine Mr Chaplin.’

On 10 March, the Chaplin brothers, in company with Henry P. Caulfield, who had been appointed by Mutual as general manager of Chaplin’s new studio, boarded the Twentieth Century express for their return journey to the West coast. The party stopped off for a couple of days in Chicago. Chaplin was induced to do his funny walk outside a cinema where one of his films was playing, but the publicity stunt fell flat. No one recognized him and the cashier, bored to death with would-be Chaplin imitators, only sniffed haughtily. In the lobby of the Sherman Hotel, Chaplin gave an interview while Sydney strove to keep the curious onlookers at bay and to deal with the excited bellboys forever bringing more letters for the comedy king. He spoke of his plans for the forthcoming films:

One can be just as artistic in shoes that flap as in a dress suit. It isn’t how one is dressed, but what one does and how. Slapstick comedy has as much artistic possibility as the best tailored efforts from the stage …

This year has a large inspiration … I’m going to make better pictures than I did last. I am doing my own scenarios and my own directing. We’re to have a little bit more legitimate plots. I like a little story, with maybe an idea in it, not too much, not to teach anything, but some effect, like in The Bank for instance. I think Police (to be released in a few weeks by Essanay) is the best thing I’ve ever done. One must consider the kiddies, not to go over their heads, and remember the grown-ups too …

I’ll keep the moustache, but won’t stick so closely to the other clothes. It’ll depend on what the circumstances demand. And it doesn’t matter what one is funny in so [long as] one is funny. That’s why I can’t take things too seriously. This salary is just figures, figures to me. It doesn’t mean anything. If I took things seriously I couldn’t make pictures.

Some time, when they don’t care about me in pictures any more, and I hope I know it in time before it happens … oh yes, some time that will happen. It won’t be my fault, it will be the public’s. It will get tired of seeing the same figure, you know. Well, then I hope to accomplish something bigger. Not that pictures aren’t big, but I want to work on the stage a little, to feel my audience.

Shortly after they returned to California, the Chaplin brothers learned that Aunt Kate, whose beauty and gaiety was one of the happiest memories of their boyhood, had died. She had died among strangers in her lodgings at 99 Gower Street; no one there even knew her real name, and her death was registered in her professional name of Kate Mowbray. Her death certificate, which gives her occupation as Actress, states that she died of cancer. She would no doubt have been delighted that they put down her age as thirty-five: in fact she was forty-one. The Hill sisters, whatever else befell them, kept their youthful looks. With Kate’s death there was no near relative left to watch over Hannah, or to take action when the fees at Peckham House fell into arrears.

The new Lone Star Studio was opened on 27 March, only a week later than Mutual had hoped. Formerly the Climax Studios, the lot stood on the corner of Lillian Way and Eleanor Avenue in the Colegrave district of Los Angeles. In the centre of the property was the stage, said to be the largest of any single producing unit in California. It was open, but surrounded by canvas side walls, with linen diffusers draped overhead. There was plenty of space for the erection of large exterior sets like the street scene for Easy Street, and it was rarely necessary for the unit to go out on location except when water was needed. There were few administration buildings: the largest was the laboratory where all the studio’s films were to be developed and printed. The offices were contained in a four-room bungalow with a projection room in an annexe. To the south and west there were twenty dressing rooms, also in bungalow style. Scene docks, property rooms and the scenic workshops adjoined the stage on the west side.

Caulfield was production manager; William C. Foster was chief cameraman, and Roland Totheroh became his assistant. Totheroh had left Essanay and was without a job when Chaplin arrived back from New York.

I went to see him. Charlie said, ‘Sure we can use you.’ He said we’d get started the next week. The cameraman was Bill Foster, later head cameraman at Universal. I met Bill and told him I’d been shooting comedies and everything else, and I knew about the speed. At that time they had no motors on the cameras and we changed the speed for chases. Foster had always shot dramas and things like that. We started together, Bill and I, as camera one and two. When it came to selecting scenes and that, pretty near all of my scenes were selected. When Charlie would do something like kick his feet, we had to be all prepared and crank.⁸

Foster left the Lone Star Studio after four films, leaving Totheroh as chief cameraman.

Bill Foster had heard about some cameraman who was going to do a film at Fox, so he left to work over there. Now I was on my own. I did all the Mutuals, the First Nationals, and all the rest.⁹

With his first film, Chaplin established his little stock company of players. Edna, naturally, remained his leading lady. From Essanay he brought Leo White (whose involvement in the Carmen affair seems not to have been held against him), Charlotte Mineau, Lloyd Bacon, John Rand, Frank J. Coleman and James T. Kelly, an elderly Irish actor with a fine line in ruinous old men. Two invaluable Essanay colleagues, Bud Jamison and Billy Armstrong, had departed to pursue independent careers; in their place Chaplin engaged two new actors who would make a significant contribution to his future films. Albert Austin, born in Birmingham in 1885, was an old Karno trouper who had played in Mumming Birds. Lean and lugubrious, with a sort of bewildered irritability, he was the only player to appear alongside Chaplin in each of the twelve Mutual comedies. In Eric Campbell, Chaplin found the ideal Goliath to his own David. Campbell looked much older than his thirty-seven years, and much more fearsome than he was in real life: he seems in fact to have been a jolly and sociable man. Six-foot-four and almost twenty stone, he made an even more striking contrast to Charlie’s slight figure than Bud Jamison or Mack Swain.

Roland Totheroh described Chaplin’s method of work at the time he moved to the Lone Star Studio:

When Charlie was working on an idea, often he would call me in. There were always a lot of his own people around. He’d hit on a certain situation where there was something he was building on, and he’d want conversation more or less. If someone came up with an idea that sounded as if he could dovetail it and it would build up his situation, it would sink back in his head and he’d chew it over …

He didn’t have a script at the time, didn’t have a script girl or anything like that, and he never checked whether the scene was in its right place or that continuity was followed. The script would develop as it went along. A lot of times after we saw the dailies the next morning, if it didn’t warrant what he thought the expectation was, he’d put in some other sort of a sequence and work on that instead of going through with what he started out to do. We never had a continuity. He’d have an idea and he’d build up. He had sort of a synopsis laid out in his mind but nothing on paper. He’d talk it over and come in and do a sequence. In a lot of his old pictures, he’d make that separation by using titles about the time: ‘next day’ or ‘the following day’ or ‘that night’ – these would cover the script gaps in between.

Every picture that he made always had one particular highlight, a good built-up spot to rock the house with it. Of course, everyone would contribute a little bit to the ideas and the script. But no one’d dare butt in and say, ‘Oh, you should do this and you should do that.’ I would never leave that camera when they were rehearsing, always right behind them, watching every move, everything that he did. When the scene was taken, if I saw something in there, I was around that camera in a wink. In a nice way I’d say, ‘Gee, Charlie, you could do this,’ or ‘Aren’t you going to do that?’ and he’d agree to it. But you couldn’t go out and say to him things like some of them did, like Albert Austin … he’d say something to Charlie, and then tell everybody all around the lot: ‘I gave Charlie that gag.’

Charlie would rehearse them. He’d rehearse everybody and even in silents, we had dialogue. It came to a little woman’s part, and he’d go out there and he’d play it. He’d change his voice and he’d be in the character that he wanted the little old woman to play. He’d build their lines up and rehearse them, even before he rehearsed himself in it. He rehearsed so many darn different ways with them that when he came in there, it’d be changed all around with what he put down. You had to be on the alert for him.

I never got away from that camera, looking through that lens. And all those rehearsals, I sat right there, watching every move he made. Then if he came along and something spontaneous hit him, you had to be ready there to take it and get it.

As a director, Mr Chaplin didn’t have anything to say as far as exposures, things like that [were concerned]. Otherwise, I used to say, ‘Take a look through here.’ The idea of that was that if he was directing, he’d have to know the field that I was taking in. Of course, in the early days, the role of the cameraman was much bigger than it is now. It was up to the cameraman to decide what angle to shoot for lighting; or outside, which is the best angle on a building or whatever it is. Then you have to figure what time of the day it would be better to shoot that shot, whether you want back-light or cross-light or whatever on your set.

On a typical day, we’d shoot from around eight or nine in the morning right straight through till lunch. Of course, this was before unions. And a lot of times he’d want to shoot two hours after dinner. After we’d break for lunch or for dinner, we’d start up again. I could always tell my set-ups because I was smoking Bull Durhams and I used so many matches. You could see all those matches all over the floor.

While Charlie was working, rehearsing or filming or whatever, lots of his people would stand around and watch. He used to use their reactions to see how his stuff was going over. But later on he got so that if they stood there gawking at him, he’d stop and say, ‘Get out of here! What are you standing there glaring at me for?’ But prior to that, anything he’d do on location or anything, the crowds around, they’d laugh their heads off at his antics.

A lot of times we’d get through a sequence and run it maybe three or four days later. And he’d figure, ‘No, that’s not it.’ So he’d go on to something else. Then if that was worthy of carrying on and adding and building to it, then he’d go and do it. He finished a lot of times a sequence and then he’d blame it on somebody else. He didn’t want people to think that he didn’t know what he was doing. He’d turn around and think overnight, ‘Jesus Criminy, this is what I should have done. I didn’t do it.’ Now he’d dismissed all the people and had sets torn down. But it was his own money, so what the devil – ‘Call the people back.’ …

Lots of times he’d start building sets before he was really set on his story. Once they double-crossed him after he pulled this once or twice. He’d have an idea but it wasn’t really set. Then for a stall, he’d say, ‘I don’t want the window in the back there or the door in this side.’ So it would take a few couple of days to make that changeover. Then they got tired of that, and they put casters on the set …

Charlie was always so proud when he was building a set. We had the lousiest looking sets I ever saw, a side wall and a back wall. He’d build something with a little balcony or something and he’d get ahold of Doug Fairbanks or somebody and say, ‘I want you to see this set I’m building.’ He’d make his little sketches for these set guys … Fairbanks had the most spectacular sets of anybody. And Doug used to say, ‘Oh, gee, that’s swell, Charlie.’ He always wanted to encourage Charlie in whatever he did.¹⁰

There is far more detailed evidence of Chaplin’s methods of work at this time than exists for any other director of the silent films. Sydney, always provident, carefully stored all the out-takes and every piece of film that Chaplin exposed in the course of making the Mutual films. Totheroh, who had the problem of accommodating all this material, was distinctly irritated:

Syd kept all the out-takes of Charlie’s early films. He held those in reserve. He thought at the time when Charlie passed away that there’d be nobody to object: he had all sorts of cuttings from Mutual, but they didn’t belong to Charlie – a lot of scenes and sequences we didn’t use. I had them there in the vault, and Syd knew it. And he’d want to cut into them, and I’d say, ‘Oh, no – that’s not our property.’ And he knew that I knew, too. I said, ‘That belongs to Mutual.’¹¹

Mutual vanished in time, but the out-takes were preserved. When Chaplin closed down his studio in 1952, Totheroh was ordered to destroy the great mass of material. He was no longer young and not well and, perhaps fortunately, did not do the job very efficiently. Several hundred reels survived and eventually came into the possession of the distributor Raymond Rohauer. In 1982, they were to provide the basis for a remarkable series of three television programmes, Unknown Chaplin, directed by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill. Brownlow and Gill demonstrated that an analysis of Chaplin’s rushes, with a comparison of the shot numbers, provided an incomparable insight into his methods.

The out-takes reveal, first of all, that Chaplin rehearsed, practised, perfected and refined his gags in front of the camera. We can see him, for example, tentatively trying out and then developing the best ways to use a wonderful new prop he had had built for his first Mutual film, The Floorwalker – a moving staircase. Terry Ramsaye described the genesis of the film:

Firstly – Chaplin comedies are not made. They occur …

The comedian had only three weeks, in which to decide upon the plot which would enable him to kick somebody in the addenda to the satisfaction of the expectant millions waiting, dime in hand, at the box office.

Two weeks and six days Mr Chaplin wandered about New York between breakfast at the Plaza and dinner all over town …

One day when time was desperately short he was walking up Sixth Avenue at Thirty-third Street when an unfortunate pedestrian slipped and skidded down the escalator serving the adjacent elevated station. Everybody but Chaplin laughed. But Mr Chaplin’s eyes lit up. Also he lit out – for the studio in Los Angeles.

Thus was The Floorwalker born. Mr Chaplin did not care a whoop about the floorwalker person as a type – what he sought were the wonderful possibilities of the escalator as a vehicle upon which to have a lot of most amusing troubles. The Floorwalker was built about the escalator not the floorwalker.

This history of The Floorwalker is in a diagnostic sense typical of the building of a Chaplin comedy. Every one of them is built around something.¹²

Around this particular something Chaplin created a whole department store. On the ground floor are toiletries, travel goods, shoes and ladies’ hosiery, all watched over by Albert Austin as a suspicious assistant. On the first floor are the offices where the manager, played by a heavily whiskered Eric Campbell, is planning large-scale embezzlement with the floorwalker (Lloyd Bacon). The store’s customers are shop-lifters to a man, or woman, and much assisted by the concentration of Austin’s baleful gaze upon the innocent Charlie. Ultimately pursued by Austin, Charlie flees upstairs and bumps into the floorwalker, who happens to be his near double. The floorwalker, having just double-crossed his accomplice, the manager, offers Charlie the chance to change places with him, to which Charlie, with innocent gratitude, agrees. When the manager comes to, his pursuit of Charlie culminates in a final, fade-out scrum.

The Floorwalker had reverted to pure physical comedy, with little of the irony and none of the romance that had become increasingly evident in the Essanay films. Edna played only a minor role as the manager’s secretary. The gag sequences were developed with virtuosity. The pursuits on the escalator were miraculously timed and choreographed. Charlie’s confrontation with the angry giant manager produced bizarre moments of comedy: Charlie suddenly breaks away, to divert him with a passage of classical ballet; later the manager picks Charlie up by his neck and carries him across the room. The elaborate mechanism to produce this effect – Chaplin was in fact suspended on a wire to make Campbell’s support of him seem effortless – is entirely effaced by the dexterity of the execution. Chaplin also provided a virtuoso performance of an old music hall routine, already done in films by earlier European comics. Entering the floorwalker’s office, he sees in front of him a figure so like himself that he can only suppose it is a mirror. The two men continue so exactly to reproduce each other’s actions that both continue in their illusion until Charlie suddenly notices that while he is holding a cane in his hand the floorwalker has a satchel (containing the embezzled funds).

An early scene in the toiletries department provided an extended sequence of character comedy. Charlie fills a mug with water from a drinking fountain and ambles with it to the counter, where he proceeds to borrow the goods on display to shave and perfume himself, all under the outraged eyes of Albert Austin. As he finishes with each of the expensive cosmetics, Charlie throws them back on the counter with the exaggerated disdain of a dissatisfied customer. In other scenes he worked new variations on favourite themes. Serving in the shoe department, he arranges an electric fan to deflect the fumes from the clients’ hot feet. The recurrent homosexual motif appears in the scene where he and the floorwalker begin to realize that they are looking at each other, and not into the mirror. The shopwalker stretches out a hand to stroke Charlie’s cheek and Charlie, misunderstanding, responds to the supposed caress with an amiable kiss. Later he also plants a kiss upon the withered brow of James Kelly, playing the oldest lift-boy in the world.

Casting around for another everyday occupation that might be food for comedy, Chaplin next hit upon The Fireman. Again the film has pretensions to little but light-hearted slapstick. It was strung together with an anecdote rather like Shanghaied or a Keystone plot. Fireman Charlie and his brutish chief (Eric Campbell) are both in love with Edna. Edna’s father promises the chief the girl, so long as he agrees not to bring the brigade when the old man burns down his house for the sake of the insurance. Unknowingly he sets fire to the house while his daughter is upstairs. In a thrilling finale Charlie climbs the ladder to rescue the girl and win her hand and heart. A subsidiary intrigue had Leo White as an excitable man who is quite unable to interest the firemen in the conflagration of his house.

Invention here was sacrificed to elaborate production. The film was shot in a real fire station and its stables where the magnificent engine-horses nervily watch the proceedings. Two condemned houses were burnt down to provide the spectacular conflagrations. The horse-drawn engine, with its inclination to strew firemen and parts of itself along the road, suggested possibilities for comic chases. Otherwise, Chaplin’s most characteristic gag constructions in this film made use of transposition (the fire engine’s boilers become a coffee urn, as Charlie draws coffee and cream from its taps) and disproportion, when Charlie, cleaning up the firehouse, sets about the horses with a dainty feather duster. There is a touch of irony when the firemen arrive at the scene of the blaze and, before setting to work, perform their drill exercises rather in the style of a musical comedy chorus.

From these uncomplicated scenarios the next film, The Vagabond, marked a huge leap forward. It was a well-turned miniature drama, in which Charlie’s adoption of a friendless girl anticipated The Circus, Modern Times, City Lights and Limelight. Gag comedy is skilfully juxtaposed with a subtler comedy of character and with a sentimental theme which, though it may seem a trifle heavy to modern tastes, is handled with a delicacy and judgement superior to most dramatic cinema of the period.

Charlie is a street musician and we are able to see, if not to hear, his accomplishment as a left-handed violinist. Out in the country, he rescues a little blonde drudge from villainous gypsies. Their life together in a stolen caravan is a (very chaste) idyll until a handsome young artist chances along and wins the heart of the girl. The artist’s portrait of her is exhibited and recognized (thanks to the inevitable birthmark) by her long-lost mother. The girl is whisked off to a new life, leaving Charlie alone and disconsolate, unable even to manage the usual recuperative flip of his heels.

For the released version of the film, Chaplin imposed an improbable happy ending, in which the girl turns back the car in which she is being driven away, to take Charlie along. The viewer is left to speculate on the little tramp’s chances of co-existence with rich Mama and handsome artist. There is a legend, unsubstantiated by any existing footage, that Chaplin shot an alternative ending, in which the despairing Charlie throws himself into a river. He is fished out by a passing maiden, but since the maiden proves to be the hatchet-faced Phyllis Allen, he plunges back into the water to face a kinder fate.

Chaplin’s sentiment was invariably saved from mawkishness by comedy and the belligerence underlying his despair. His jealousy as he watches the girl dancing with the artist is not entirely impotent: he maliciously flicks a fly in the man’s direction, and later manages to drop an egg on his shoes. After the girl’s elegant mother condescendingly shakes hands with him, he suspiciously sniffs the perfume left on his fingers. He uses his favourite trick of deflating his own dramatic despair with farce: in The Vagabond the anguish of a lover rejected is quite eclipsed by the agonies of the same man accidentally sitting on a stove.

One A. M. was a daring display of virtuosity – so daring that Chaplin afterwards confided to his collaborators: ‘One more like that and it’s goodbye Charlie.’ It is a solo performance, played for most of its two reels in a single set. The tramp costume is abandoned for elegant evening dress, silk hat and opera cloak: this might be the inebriate returning home from Mumming Birds. An introductory scene shows the drunken swell arriving at his house in a taxi driven by Albert Austin, whose role is to sit in the cab displaying impervious lack of concern at the accidents which befall his vulnerable passenger as he endeavours to disentangle himself from the vehicle. After this, Chaplin is alone on the screen, in what might be an elaborated vaudeville solo; in fact Billie Reeves had performed a very similar stage routine called ‘The Clubman’ not many months before. Unable to find his key, Charlie, with gravity and difficulty, enters through the window. Having made his way in, falling into a goldfish bowl en route, he discovers his key with delight and solemnly makes his way back through the window in order to enter with greater decorum through the door. The succeeding battles with the furnishings of a stylishly over-dressed house of the period become a comic nightmare, a series of variations of beautifully structured escalation.

Surviving out-takes from the film reveal Chaplin’s pains to perfect some tiny and apparently simple routine like a slide on a slippery mat, and how many failures were sometimes necessary to achieve the perfect take. One A. M. is one of the best and most sustained film records of Chaplin’s inebriate, who perfectly illustrates the principle set out in an article credited to Chaplin in American Magazine of November 1918:

Even funnier than the man who has been made ridiculous … is the man who, having had something funny happen to him, refuses to admit that anything out of the way has happened, and attempts to maintain his dignity. Perhaps the best example is the intoxicated man who, though his tongue and walk will give him away, attempts in a dignified manner to convince you that he is quite sober.

He is much funnier than the man who, wildly hilarious, is frankly drunk and doesn’t care a whoop who knows it. Intoxicated characters on the stage are almost always ‘slightly tipsy’ with an attempt at dignity, because theatrical managers have learned that this attempt at dignity is funny.

A considerable quantity of out-takes from Chaplin’s next film, The Count, has survived to reveal the way he constructed and developed his stories in the course of shooting. The definitive released version of the film opens with Charlie as assistant to an ill-tempered and grotesquely bearded tailor played, inevitably, by Eric Campbell. The tailor masquerades as a Count at a party given by Miss Moneybags (Edna) and here again he encounters his troublesome former assistant, who is competing with the local police force for the cook’s affections. For a while they collaborate in imposture, but inevitably set to fighting for the favours of the lovely Miss Moneybags. The film ends in a general mêlée, a ferocious battle with shotgun and iced cake.

We know that at this time Chaplin, working without a written script, tried as nearly as possible to shoot his films in exact order of story sequence. So by examining the out-takes and comparing the shot numbers, we can make a fairly accurate guess at how his original plan for the film was modified in the course of shooting. The earliest shot numbers are all found on the kitchen scenes so it may have been that Chaplin started the film with the idea of making a comedy of below-stairs intrigue: both the butler and the policeman are promising characters who vanish after the present kitchen episode. The numbering progresses to show that Chaplin next intended to go into the fake-Count plot that had already served, in rudimentary form, for Caught in a Cabaret, Her Friend the Bandit and A Jitney Elopement. The scenes in the tailor’s shop, which establish the prior relationship of Charlie and the tailor, appear to have been shot as an afterthought, when all the other scenes of the film had been completed. The out-takes include one attractive little scene shot for this sequence but in the end abandoned: Charlie sits cross-legged, industriously sewing a garment, only to discover that he has firmly attached it to his own trousers.

The Count was one of Chaplin’s most elaborate productions to that time, with three quite ambitious settings for the shop, the kitchen and Miss Moneybags’ opulent home, complete with ballroom. Chaplin seems to have spent a considerable amount of the production time on the brilliantly choreographed dance sequence, for which he hired an entire dance orchestra. Chester Courtney, an old music hall acquaintance who had been given a job at the studio and recalled his impressions in an article in Film Weekly in 1931, remembered that most of the time they played ‘They Call it Dixieland’. Chaplin’s routine is a masterpiece of eccentric dancing, involving a lot of splits, from one of which he retrieves himself by hooking his cane to the chandelier and pulling himself to his feet. A recurrently dislocating hip joint anticipates the leg-shortening gag in the vaudeville finale of Limelight. Another detail which looks forward to later years is the star-shaped hat which Edna wears for the party. Its form clearly stuck in Chaplin’s strange memory for fifteen years, until he found a comic use for it in a party scene in City Lights in which a rather tipsy Charlie mistakes a bald head framed in exactly such a hat for a pink blancmange on a frilly plate.

Of all Chaplin’s films The Pawnshop is the richest in gag invention. The setting is a back-street pawnbroker’s establishment, and both it and its eccentric customers evoke more of Chaplin’s boyhood London than of California. Chaplin maintains constant hostilities with his fellow assistant (John Rand), asphyxiating him with dust, engulfing him in a snowstorm of feathers by absentmindedly dusting the electric fan with a feather duster, assaulting him with ladders, fists and the three balls of the shop sign. When he is dismissed by the fat old pawnbroker, Charlie pleads, in a celebrated flash of mime, the plight of his large family. He is reinstated and so is able to continue his courtship of the pawnbroker’s pretty daughter, Edna. His claim to her hand is vindicated when his prompt and ingenious action accomplishes the capture of a burglar (Eric Campbell).

It is as if in this film Chaplin were exploring every possible use of the comedy of transposition which had often appeared in his preceding work. Here every object seems to suggest some other thing and other use to his ingenious mind. In Edna’s kitchen, her freshly baked doughnuts are wielded as if they were heavy dumbbells; a roll of dough becomes a leg and a ladle a Hawaiian guitar; cups and saucers, Charlie’s own hands and eventually a wad of dough are briskly rolled through the mangle. Comic transposition is brought to its utmost refinement in the lengthy scene in which Charlie examines an alarm clock brought in by a dusty and dejected customer (Albert Austin). Charlie becomes a doctor and the clock his patient as he sounds it with a stethoscope and tests its reflexes. Suddenly it is a rare piece of porcelain as he deftly rings it with his finger tips. He drills it like a safe. He opens it up with a can-opener and then dubiously smells the contents with a look that declares them putrid. Momentarily the clock becomes a clock again as Charlie unscrews the mouthpiece of the telephone and transforms that into a jeweller’s eye-glass. Having oiled the springs, he produces a pair of forceps and becomes a dentist as he ferociously pulls out the contents. Extracting the spring, he measures it off like ribbon from nose to fingertip, in the manner of a haberdasher. He snips off lengths, then tips out the rest of the clock’s contents onto the counter. When they start wriggling like a basket of worms he squirts them with oil. Having now completely demolished the alarm clock, he sweeps the contents back into the empty case and hands it back to the dazed Austin with a shake of the head and a look of grave distaste.

The pawnbroker was played by Henry Bergman, a new recruit who was to become an indispensable member of the Chaplin entourage for the next thirty years. Bergman was born in 1868 and claimed to be a third-generation Californian. His father, he said, was a horse-breeder and his mother a former Grand Opera singer, known in Europe as Aeolia. Henry inherited his mother’s vocal talent and studied in Italy and Germany, making his operatic debut in a small role in Faust. He told an interviewer in 1931:

I got my histrionic training in Wagnerian roles. Twenty years ago I came into pictures. Before that I had been with Augustin Daly’s company for nine years in New York. I was catapulted from stage to screen by a musical comedy flop. I had been rehearsing for it for many weeks without pay, and when it closed a few days after it opened I was disgusted. ‘This is no business for me,’ I said. One day I ran into a player I had known in Germany. When I asked him what he was doing he said, ‘Shh. Don’t let anybody know. I’m working in pictures. Doing pretty well too – making five dollars a day.’ He suggested he might be able to fix me up at the studio … So I went to Pathé. There I got my first job with Pearl White in The Perils of Pauline. An introduction by Paul Panzer led to my association with Henry Lehrman, with whom I came to Hollywood with the L-Ko Company in 1914. We did a series of pictures, after which I went to Mr Chaplin to play with him. I had known Mr Chaplin personally. We used to be quite friendly at dinners etc, and when I mentioned to him that I was looking for a job he said, ‘Why don’t you come with me? You can work with me when I start a company of my own.’ That’s the way it was.¹³

A bachelor, Bergman’s single-minded, adoring dedication to Chaplin was to become his ruling passion. He assumed the role of assistant, confidant and indulgent aunt. Chaplin was happy to rely on an amanuensis, helper and foil as loyal as Henry, as well as using him as an actor in every one of his films up to Modern Times. Henry’s pride in sharing Chaplin’s confidences, and in his own ability to play any role, tended to spark jealousies among the rest of the studio staff. Totheroh, ordinarily a generous man, said: ‘Some of the make-ups were terrible, especially Henry Bergman. He always thought he was a great make-up artist. He’d put on a beard and you’d see the glue sticking through it. He thought he was the greatest make-up man in the world. He used to brag about it.’¹⁴ Edward Sutherland’s view of Henry was: ‘He was a great big fat actor who played in all of Charlie’s pictures and revered and adored Charlie, to the extent that he was a detriment at times, because Charlie, like everybody else, made mistakes from time to time, and with Henry he could make no mistakes. Everything he did was great.’¹⁵

In Behind the Screen Henry was cast as a film director. This was Chaplin’s fourth comedy set in a film studio. At Keystone he had made A Film Johnnie and The Masquerader, and at Essanay His New Job. Behind the Screen merely develops and refines the same theme. Charlie is the put-upon assistant of the idle, bullying property man (Eric Campbell), and his earnest efforts manage to disrupt all three of the productions being shot side by side. Edna plays a would-be actress who disguises herself as a boy and gets a job as a stage hand when the regular crew go on strike. (The strikers, and their plot to blow up the studio, are inherited from Dough and Dynamite.) Some of the comedy business is lifted almost directly from His New Job.

The surviving out-takes show that one gag, whose ingenuity probably exceeded its comic effectiveness, was cut out of the film altogether. It seems to have been a running joke: every time Charlie pushed his sack barrow past the set for the costume picture where a beheading was taking place, a heavy and evidently very sharp axe would crash to the ground within millimetres of his feet. Kevin Brownlow and David Gill, working on Unknown Chaplin, discovered that the effect was achieved by a camera trick: Totheroh reversed the camera, Charlie walked backwards with his barrow, and the axe was heaved out of the floor and into the air. The number of takes of the scene shows that it was only achieved with much effort, yet the effect was convincing. Nevertheless Chaplin must have estimated that it would not get the laugh that he wanted. Elsewhere, however, the out-takes show that even though he was prepared to shoot a scene innumerable times to get it right, it was very rare for him to eliminate a scene or idea entirely, as he did in this case and with the sewing scene in The Count. Film was cheap, but ideas came hard. (Chaplin often told his collaborators that ‘film is cheap’ when they marvelled at the number of times that he was prepared to shoot a scene. It was characteristic of his economic caprices, however, that he always insisted that Totheroh cut the shot exactly when told: film was not so cheap that he wanted to waste six inches at the shot-ends.)

In Behind the Screen Chaplin adds two more notable gags to his collection of comic transpositions. Doubled up beneath the weight of a dozen bentwood chairs, all looped around his person with their legs sticking into the air, he is metamorphosed into a porcupine. He becomes a coiffeur as he dresses a bearskin rug, combing it, sprinkling on tonic, applying a finger massage, parting the hair and finally applying hot towels to the face. Chaplin’s preoccupation with people with nasty eating habits and smelly food recurs in the lunch-hour scene, in which he is seated beside Albert Austin, who is devouring onions. Charlie uses a bellows to deflect the fumes, then puts on a helmet, stuffing his own food through the briefly opened visor. However, he is not too proud to steal an occasional bite from the end of Austin’s meat-bone, clamping it between his own slices of bread.

The most surprising element in the film is a sequence that was to remain the most overt representation of a homosexual situation anywhere in the Anglo-Saxon commercial cinema before the 1950s. Edna has disguised herself in workman’s overalls and a large cloth cap that conceals her hair. Charlie comes upon the ‘boy’ sitting playing a guitar (in the first takes Edna had a harp, but this was clearly discarded as being too obviously feminine). Charlie teases the ‘boy’ when he catches him powdering ‘his’ face. At that moment Bergman, who has split the seat of his trousers in a prior encounter with Charlie, enters and asks the ‘boy’ to sew them up for him. Edna promptly faints away and her cap falls off, releasing her hair. She comes to, begs Charlie not to expose her, and replaces her cap. The brutish property man (Campbell) enters just in time to catch them kissing. ‘Oh you naughty boys!’ he exclaims in a sub-title, and teases them by doing a little ‘fairy’ dance, finally turning his back and offering his huge bottom – which Charlie obligingly kicks.

The Rink must have been suggested by the old Karno sketch Skating, although the resemblance remains fairly superficial. The raison d’être of the piece is the actual rink scene and Chaplin’s spectacular and supremely graceful demonstration of his roller-skating skills. The opening sequence shows Charlie as a waiter, making up Eric Campbell’s bills by checking off the stains on his lapels, and shaking a remarkable cocktail, topped with a carnation. There is a park-style amorous quadrangle with Mr Stout (Campbell) importuning Edna while Mrs Stout (Henry Bergman in the first of several amusing female impersonations) flirts with Edna’s father (James T. Kelly). There is even an element of the bogus count theme, since Charlie makes a hit at the evening skating party by introducing himself as ‘Sir Cecil Seltzer’.

The Rink occasioned some critical stir thanks to the terms in which Heywood Broun discussed it in his review in the New York Tribune, which was headed

NIETZSCHE HAS GRIP ON CHAPLIN

‘The Rink’ Strong Plea for Acceptance of Master Morality

FERMENT AT WORK ON POPULAR FILMS

Discussion of Education To Be Derived by Visit to Rialto

After summarizing the action, Broun concluded:

This is the play, barring a few diversions of no particular importance. It is interesting to note that Chaplin falls only twice during the picture, both times of his own volition, and that not once is he kicked. Is it not obvious, then, what ferment is at work in the philosophy of the Chaplin comedies? Gone is the old comedy of submission, as emphasized in The Bank, The Tramp, Shanghaied and others, and in its place there has grown up a comedy of aggression. One cannot overlook the influence of Nietzsche and the ‘Will to Power’ here.

Was it in ‘Menschliches, Allzumenschliches’ or in ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’ that the sage declared it was comic to kick, but never to be kicked? At any rate ‘master morality’ has set its mark upon Charlie Chaplin and his comedies. The old Chaplin of whom it was said, ‘Here is the head upon which all the ends of the world are come and the eyelids are a little weary’ is done. ‘Welcome’ has been erased from his shoulder-blades. The new Chaplin is a superman, and though the hordes of fat villains may rage against him, with pie and soup and siphons they shall not prevail.

Broun, we may take it, was not wholly serious; but a lot of his readers took him to be so. A day or two later the following anonymous poem appeared:

TO CHARLIE CHAPLIN, AFTER READING THURSDAY’S TRIBUNE

Triply distilled octessence of the vulgar,

Puller of chairs from overweighty women,

Hurler of pies into aged persons’ faces,

Cinema lowbrow –

Wreaker of wrongs that rouse the careless giggle,

Skater that skateth but to lose his balance,

Walking with steps unutterably comic,

How I detest thee!

How (though in years of profitless adventure

Crowded with wasted afternoons and evenings

Not even once – no, never – have I seen thee)

Scornful I’m of thee!

Scorn and contempt have I for all thine antics,

Menace are they, say I, to little children

Yet there is that which urges me to write thee

Words of laudation.

These are the words, then, Menace of the Movies,

Thanks for thy coarse and pseudo-comic antics,

For they produce those peerless things about thee

Old Heywood Broun writes.¹⁶

Here was another detractor who boasted he had never actually seen the artist he was attacking.

The Rink was released on 4 December 1916 and was Chaplin’s last film of the year. Chaplin had kept very nearly to the schedule of one film every four weeks which he had agreed with Mutual. Only Behind the Screen had come out late, and the press reported that in this case Chaplin had telegraphed the company with the request, ‘It’s the best idea I ever had. Give me two weeks more and I will make it the funniest comedy I ever produced.’ The Rink, issued only three weeks later, caught up at least one week of the schedule. For the remaining films under the Mutual contract, however, Chaplin was to demand and take more time: he would in fact take a total of ten months to make four two-reelers.

The year that was ending had brought some irritations, not the least of which was the book called Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story. Despite Chaplin’s strenuous efforts to suppress it, this spurious publication has continued to this day to confuse and falsify the record of Chaplin’s career. It is useful to disentangle its curious story.

With the start of the great Chaplin mania in 1915 there was keen competition between publishers of books and periodicals to secure the biography of Charlie Chaplin. Unauthorized versions appeared in many less reputable journals. On 15 November 1915, the dismayed editor of the Detroit News telegraphed Chaplin at Essanay:

WE ARE RUNNING YOUR LIFE STORY PURCHASED FROM THE DAVID SWING RICHES SYNDICATE. THE DETROIT JOURNAL HAS STARTED ANOTHER STORY VARYING GREATLY IN CHARACTER AND CLAIMING TO BE AUTHORIZED BY YOURSELF CAN YOU WIRE US OUR EXPENSE WHICH IS THE AUTHORIZED STORY OF YOUR LIFE.¹⁷

In March or April 1915 Chaplin had given an interview to a representative of the San Francisco Bulletin, Rose Wilder Lane, at the Niles Essanay studio. After publication in the newspaper, Mrs Lane’s manuscript was acquired by an entrepreneur called Guy Mayston, who augmented the original story with colourful but invented detail. Mayston’s agent interested the New York publishers Bobbs Merrill in the book and they went ahead with publication. The only notification that reached Chaplin was a telegram so casual in tone that little note was taken of it in the studio office, although the photographs requested in it were duly supplied. The telegram was dated 10 July 1916:

WE HAVE ACCEPTED AND SHALL PUBLISH AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE THE STORY OF YOUR LIFE CAN YOU SEND US PHOTOGRAPHS OF YOURSELVES AS A BOY YOUR FATHER MOTHER AND BROTHER ALSO OF THE STUDIO IN WHICH YOU ARE NOW WORKING ANY ASSISTANCE YOU WILL GIVE WILL BE APPRECIATED.

Within two months of this, and without any further word passing between publisher and alleged ‘author’, Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story was printed and ready for publication. As early as 20 September, it became clear that Bobbs Merrill were girding themselves for some kind of trouble. An official of the company called D. L. Chambers telegraphed a colleague, Samuel Dorsey, in Los Angeles:

CONTRACT FOR CHARLIE CHAPLIN’S STORY WAS SIGNED BY GUY MAYSTON OF SAN FRANCISCO AS OWNER OF THE MANUSCRIPT IT GUARANTEES US AGAINST ALL CLAIMS CURTIS BROWN MAYSTONE’S AGENT IN NEW YORK SAYS WE ARE FULLY PROTECTED IN OUR RIGHTS NOTICE OF AN ACCEPTANCE OF THE STORY AND INTENTION TO PUBLISH WAS WIRED CHARLIE CHAPLIN JULY 10TH.

This might be thought a rather broad interpretation of the July telegram. Towards the end of September, Chaplin came across a copy of the book, and both he and Sydney were outraged, not least by the plain untruths of the title page: ‘The faithful recital of a romantic career, beginning with early recollections of boyhood in London and closing with the signing of his latest motion picture contract … The subject of this biography takes great pleasure in expressing his obligations and his thanks to Mrs Rose Wilder Lane for invaluable editorial assistance.’ The subject was anything but grateful, in fact. The book began with an account of Chaplin’s birth in a small town in France. (It may be that in his early days in the movies Chaplin himself had laid claim to a French birthplace to satisfy reporters who wanted something more romantic for their public than the hard realities of Kennington.) Mrs Chaplin was described kindly, but Charles Chaplin Senior was depicted as a drunken brute. Chaplin’s early employers were as unjustly dealt with. The eminently respectable John William Jackson was transformed into a kind of Fagin, who pursued little Charlie with dogs when he ran away to London. Casey’s Circus became ‘fifteen ragged, hungry-looking, sallow-faced boys desperately being funny under the direction of a fat greasy-looking manager who smelt strongly of ale’. Presumably intended to represent poor Will Murray, he was named ‘Mr Casey’ (who, of course, had never existed). Inevitably the Casey’s Circus company rehearsed in ‘a very dirty dark room’, and dressed in ‘a dirty makeshift dressing room in a cheap East End music hall’ where the audience threw vegetables. So much for the Moss and Thornton tour.

Karno, in his turn, became Carno; and Dr Walford Bodie, the toast of the halls, became

Doctor Body, a patent-medicine faker, who was drawing big crowds on the London street corners and selling a specific for all the ills of man and beast at a shilling a bottle. Watching him one afternoon I was seized with the great idea – I would let the manager rehearse me all he jolly well liked, but when the opening night came I would play Doctor Body as he really was – I would put on such a marvellous character delineation that even the lowest music-hall audience would recognize it as great acting and I would be rescued by some good manager and brought back to a West End theater …

The book is full of such romantic and misleading nonsense, which has nevertheless continued to supply and confuse gullible Chaplin historians for seven decades.

On 1 October, Chaplin’s New York lawyer, Nathan Burkan, wrote to Bobbs Merrill’s lawyers, Lockwood and Jeffery, informing them that Chaplin had instructed him to institute proceedings

to prevent the publication and sale of this work on the grounds that it is not his autobiography, as the work is advertised, that it is purely a work of fiction, holding him to public ridicule and contempt, and that it reflects upon the memory of his late lamented father and is libel on several men of excellent reputation.

Mr Chaplin informs me that he has never authorized or consented to the use of his name, picture or portrait in connexion with this work and that he never acknowledged the publication thereof.

The same day Burkan wrote in a similar vein to Bobbs Merrill themselves, adding, ‘Mr Chaplin’s father, who was a lovable character and devoted husband and kind father, is depicted in the work as a drunken sot who brutalized and neglected his wife and family. Several characters represented as being employers of Mr Chaplin in his early days are purely fictitious and are not known to Mr Chaplin.’ Burkan perhaps exaggerated the domestic virtues of the elder Charles Chaplin. He threatened an injunction to prevent publication but was evidently cautious, for he wrote to Sydney, also on 1 October:

Please ask Charlie to communicate to the best of his recollections what he told to the lady who called upon him in Niles for an interview.

Will you please get me a copy of the article that appeared in the San Francisco Bulletin purporting to be a biography of Charlie. You say this biography was syndicated to a number of papers as an autobiography of Charlie Chaplin. Will you get me a copy of this biography as it appeared in the Harmsworth papers?

On 6 October Mrs Lane herself reappeared in the affair, addressing a lengthy letter to Chaplin in a vein which suggests remarkable ingenuousness:

It won’t require any effort on your part to imagine that the news fell upon me like a thunderbolt, in one way at least … You were so very courteous in giving me a great deal of time, and all the information on which to base the story, while I was in Los Angeles, that I have been assuming that your attitude toward me was quite friendly …

I’m sure you will feel, in recalling the information you gave me, that this is true, and that I made the best possible use of it in writing the story. Its appeal to the public was tremendous. It not only disposed of any number of wild rumors which, as you know, were afloat about you, but in addition the sympathetic interest of the public in the little boy who had such a hard time to get started in London was greater than that of any of the other successful men whose life stories I have written. Not even excepting Henry Ford or Art Smith, who was the idol of San Francisco during the Exposition.

Your mother, too, made a wonderful appeal, as well as your brother. Truly, I don’t believe you realize how very well that story was written, how real you and she and your brother were for the people who read it, and how much it increased your own interest in the eyes of the public here …

Your present attitude of course puts me in a perfectly frightful position with the Bobbs Merrill people. I suppose I deserve it for not making sure that the arrangement would be all right with you …

I suppose that your feeling is simply that you should have some money from the book if it should appear. It is natural enough to want money, but I wonder if you are not exaggerating the possible profits to be made from book publication? My own profits from it, even if it sold up to the very limit of our expectations, would be only a few hundred dollars – perhaps worth half a day of your time. As matters now stand, it appears that your action will result merely in my losing the amount – which I need not say would make much more of an impression on my bank account than on yours – and also in your losing publicity value of the book, a publicity which even Theodore Roosevelt in his palmiest days was glad to utilize.

Having, however unwittingly, added insult to the injuries committed, Mrs Lane goes on to a rather endearing assessment of her work:

You’ve lived a life which makes a corking book. I have written the book – and really, it is no more than true to say that it is a book whose popular appeal is greater than that of a book any other hack writer is apt to write …

It is in the interest of both of us to have the book published. I admit it’s more to my interest than yours … But it is to the interest of neither of us to stop the publication of the book. And if the situation is allowed to develop into a real scrap, we’ll both be in the position of the two men who fought over a nut and brought the matter to a judge who ate the nut and divided the shell. I don’t see a bit of use in the world in letting the lawyers have the nut, do you?

Yours very sincerely,
Rose Wilder Lane.

Chaplin, not surprisingly, was unmoved by Mrs Lane’s appeal. Burkan had meanwhile received a reply from John L. Lockwood of Lockwood and Jeffery, saying that he was waiting for documentation but considered that since Bobbs Merrill had acted in good faith, believing that Chaplin had authorized what Mrs Lane wrote, the rights as sold by Mayston were good. It was Lockwood’s view that the remarks about Charles Chaplin Senior were ‘quite respectful’.

By the end of November, Bobbs Merrill were seeking a compromise. Burkan telegraphed to Sydney on the 29th:

BOBBS MERRILL WILL NOT PUBLISH CHARLIE CHAPLIN’S OWN STORY WITHOUT HIS WRITTEN CONSENT THEY ARE WILLING TO ELIMINATE HAWKINS AND [MARCUS] LOEW’S NAME AND PAY CHARLIE FIVE PER CENT OF THE RETAIL SELLING PRICE OF BOOK TO BE RAISED TO ONE DOLLAR FIFTY I PERSONALLY THINK IT BAD FORM FOR CHARLIE TO GIVE HIS PERMISSION TO PUBLISH BOOK ON ACCOUNT OF REFLECTION ON YOUR FATHER HOWEVER YOU AND CHARLIE ARE THE BEST JUDGES OF THAT PLEASE WIRE ME WHETHER I SHOULD GO AHEAD AND POSTPONE CONTRACT BOBBS MERRILL UNWILLING TO ACCEPT YOUR PROPOSITION FOR CHARLIE AND MISS WILDER [sic] TO COLLABORATE ON WRITING A NEW BOOK REGARDS TO CHARLIE.

The entrepreneur Mayston now attempted to act as go-between, but was as unsuccessful in his attempts to persuade Bobbs Merrill to undertake the cost of a completely new book as he was in persuading Chaplin to allow publication and split the royalties with himself. The matter was settled quite precipitately in mid-December. A New York police magistrate was awarded damages of $35,000 in a libel action against Bobbs Merrill. The firm saw no merit in risking trouble on other fronts, and Lockwood forthwith gave Burkan an undertaking that the book would not be sold without the prior consent of Chaplin.

Valueless as its content is, the book is now rated the greatest rarity in the Chaplin bibliography. The stock was suppressed but not before one or two copies had leaked out to be the bane of film historians. Stan Laurel possessed a copy, which he annotated with corrections and subsequently gave to a Chaplin biographer, John McCabe.

The troubles wrought by Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story continued to bother Chaplin. As Burkan mentioned in his letter, syndication rights in Mrs Lane’s original articles had been acquired by the Harmsworth Press; plans for English newspaper publication were already advanced when Burkan stepped in to prevent it. The campaign which now began, to discredit Chaplin for failure to enlist in the British services, appears to have been stimulated by Lord Northcliffe’s consequent personal pique. It is true that as early as March 1916 there had been adverse comment in the Daily Mail about the war risks clause in the Mutual contract, which specified that Chaplin should not return to Britain for the duration of hostilities, to avoid the risk of being mobilized in the British armed forces: ‘We have received several letters protesting against the idea of Freuler or any other American making a profit on the exhibition in this country of a man who binds himself not to come home to fight for his native land.’ In June 1917 Northcliffe went onto the offensive, with an editorial in the Weekly Despatch:

Charles Chaplin, although slightly built, is very firm on his feet, as is evidenced by his screen acrobatics. The way he is able to mount stairs suggests the alacrity with which he would go over the top when the whistle blew.

During the thirty-four months of the war it is estimated by Charlie’s friends that he has earned well over £125,000. He is contracted for next year’s pictures for a sum exceeding £1,000,000 with the First National Exhibitors, a newly formed and wealthy syndicate. Under the contract, Charlie will produce his own pictures and have his own company.

Cable messages have sought to show that Chaplin has invested £25,000 of his earnings in the British war loan, but this has not been confirmed. Chaplin can hardly refuse the British Nation both his money and his services.

If Charlie joined up, as is his duty, if he is fit, at least thirty other British cinema performers of military age who are now performing in the United States would have no excuse for withholding from the British Army …

Nobody would want Charlie Chaplin to join up if the Army doctors pronounced him unfit, but until he has undergone medical examination he is under the suspicion of regarding himself as specially privileged to escape the common responsibilities of British citizenship. This thought may not have occurred to the much-boomed film performer, and he will no doubt be thankful that an opportunity for reminding him has been presented by the course of events.

Charlie in khaki would be one of the most popular figures in the Army. He would compete in popularity even with Bairnsfather’s ‘Old Bill’. If his condition did not warrant him going into the trenches he could do admirable work by amusing troops in billets.

In any case, it is Charlie’s duty to offer himself as a recruit and thus show himself proud of his British origin. It is his example which will count so very much, rather than the difference to the war that his joining up will make. We shall win without Charlie, but (his millions of admirers will say) we would rather win with him.

A Daily Express article in the same vein was headed:

FIGHTING – FOR MILLIONS

Charlie Chaplin Still Faces the Deadly Films.

Chaplin then issued a statement to the press:

I am ready and willing to answer the call of my country to serve in any branch of the military service at whatever post the national authorities may consider I might do the most good. But, like thousands of other Britishers, I am awaiting word from the British Embassy in Washington. Meanwhile I have invested a quarter of a million dollars in the war activities of America and England …

I registered for the draft here, and asked no exemption or favours. Had I been drawn I would have gone to the front like any other patriotic citizen. As it is I shall wait for orders from the British Government through its Ambassador in Washington.

The British Embassy confirmed:

We would not consider Chaplin a slacker unless we received instructions to put the compulsory service law into effect in the United States and unless after that he refused to join the colours …

Chaplin could volunteer any day he wanted to, but he is of as much use to Great Britain now making big money and subscribing to war loans as he would be in the trenches, especially when the need for individual men is not extremely pressing.

There are various ways for one to do one’s bit. Certainly the man who subscribes liberally to war loans and the Red Cross could not be said to be a slacker, especially when he follows his subscriptions with an announcement that he will serve in the trenches when called. Obviously, when the compulsory law is not in operation here, where Chaplin has made his home for a number of years, he could not be considered a slacker.

Such statements did not immediately put a stop to the ‘slacker’ charges. The Draft Board received anonymous reports that Sydney had falsified his age and was eligible for the draft. Sydney was in consequence called before the Board to satisfy them that he was, in fact, over thirty-one. The campaign finally abated when it was reported that Charlie had actually gone to a recruiting office but been turned down by the doctors because he was underweight. Yet years afterwards Chaplin continued to receive white feathers and anonymous invective for his failure to fight.

These attacks certainly did not come from servicemen. When Chaplin visited England in 1921, one ex-soldier wanted to give him his medals, because of all he had done for the men at war. ‘Charlie is a prime favourite with our gallant soldiers and sailors,’ wrote Essanay’s English publicist, Langford Reed, ‘who feel that the brightness and joy he has brought into their lives outweighs, a million times, any services he might have been able to render as an asthenic little castigator of Huns.’¹⁸ In military hospitals special projectors were fitted up so that Chaplin’s films could be projected onto the ceilings for patients unable to sit up. Dr Lewis Coleman Hall, attached to a US Army neurological unit in France, appealed to Chaplin for autographed pictures of himself: ‘Please write your name on the photos, the idea being that nearly everyone has seen you in pictures. I will show your picture to a poor fellow and it may arrest his mind for a second. He may say, “Do you know Charlie?” and then begins the first ray of hope that the boy’s mind can be saved.’¹⁹ Miracle cures were attributed to the effect of Chaplin’s image on the screen. Sam Leonard, General Manager of the United Picture Company of St Helens, Lancashire, wrote:

Since the war it has been my greatest pleasure to entertain wounded soldiers at my hall. Last week I was showing a ‘Charlie Chaplin’, and a wounded soldier laughed so much he got up and walked to the end of the hall, and quite forgot he had left his crutches behind. My assistant went after him, and he said, ‘That fellow Chaplin would make anyone forget his head. I never laughed so much in my life.’²⁰

‘If Chaplin had done what was expected of him and answered his country’s call to the colours in August 1914, the chances of his surviving the war would have been slight. Chaplin would have been a footnote in film history,’ commented Kevin Brownlow, sixty years after the end of the First World War.²¹ The smears of Northcliffe and his followers in no way affected Chaplin’s popularity with his audience, but they were to hurt him deeply and for many years afterwards.

Towards the end of 1916 Chaplin began to change his way of life. He hired a valet-secretary, Tom Harrington, who became, he said, ‘the sine qua non of my existence’. Harrington was a New Yorker, and had been dresser and handyman to an English comedian, Bert Clark, who worked for a while at Keystone. In 1915 Clark became a partner in the short-lived Chaplin Music Company, and brought Harrington with him to take charge of the office. When the office was closed and Clark returned east, Harrington offered to stay on and work for Chaplin. Harrington is glimpsed once or twice in Chaplin films: he was a lean, solemn, ascetic-looking man, who proved not only the ideal gentleman’s gentleman but also helped Chaplin with his choice of reading. It was Harrington who introduced him, as he remembered, to Lafcadio Hearn, Frank Harris and James Boswell.

Sydney persuaded Chaplin that he should have another car, and at the beginning of December Chaplin bought a standard Locomobile tourer, with blue body and white wire wheels. Harrington engaged as chauffeur a twenty-eight-year-old Japanese, Toraichi Kono. Kono came from a well-off, middle-class family in Hiroshima, but had emigrated to the United States to avoid a career in the family business after several commercial ventures of his own failed. In the United States he had been dissuaded from a career as an aviator by his young wife, so reconciled himself to working as a chauffeur. Kono’s efficiency and discretion impressed Chaplin and gave him a preference for Japanese servants: there was to be a succession of them until the outbreak of hostilities with Japan in the Second World War, when the Chaplin domestic staff was interned. Kono himself remained with Chaplin for eighteen years and assumed the role of special confidant and emissary.

Along with the acquisition of a ménage, Chaplin’s social life was changing. He had continued to be regarded as something of a solitary figure in Hollywood. Most evenings he would dine with Edna at the Los Angeles Athletic Club, where he had set up a permanent residence. Occasionally everyone from the studio would go off to a fight after work was done, but Totheroh remarked that the unit began to feel him growing away from them socially:

In the evenings he’d go maybe to Levy’s café or some of those places. He always attended the prize fights, every Tuesday night at Doyle’s out in Vernon. All the bunch got together and we used to meet there and afterwards we’d go some place for a glass of beer and a sandwich. He more or less mingled, went to the baseball games; he had the spirit of everybody around him and they did, too. But as soon as he got out of that character of the tramp, making these features, a big change came over him. He didn’t mingle around with the bunch any more. He more or less entertained up at his house. And the people that he had associated with no doubt were people of reputation – authors and writers and maybe actors. But he had well-known columnists and different ones up at his house. He’d throw these parties up at his house because he was the center of attraction. He was a great entertainer and he had the floor. He’d entertain them and he just drifted away from the old bunch.

When he went to fights, he had tickets set up. I didn’t sit right with the bunch, but I sat a lot of times a couple of rows behind him. It was set up for three tickets: it was Albert Austin, Eric Campbell and Charlie; there might have been a fourth one, but Charlie was the center of attraction there, too. Especially among the fighters; he got to think the world of a bunch of these fighters. Before the fight would start, the first thing they’d go over there – they knew where he sat – and they’d reach out and shake hands with him. They all got to know who he was. Even at baseball games, they’d spot him and you’d see everybody looking down in the box seat – Charlie’s there. He was one of the bunch, meeting down at Barney Oldfield’s or any place where they all hung out after. Charlie coined a phrase, he’d say, ‘How’s the light, Rollie?’ And I would say, ‘Well, maybe we can shoot another scene, couple of scenes. I think the light is better down at Barney Oldfield’s.’ Meaning that the light beer is better. Maybe he might have been tired or he ran out of ideas, then he’d dismiss the crew.²²

Dining one evening at Levy’s café, Chaplin was thrilled to be invited to her table by Constance Collier (1878–1955), who had arrived in the United States to appear opposite Sir Herbert Tree in Triangle’s film of Macbeth. Miss Collier had been one of Chaplin’s boyhood heroines when she was Tree’s leading lady at His Majesty’s Theatre; in his early teens he had watched them from the gallery between his own modest theatrical engagements. They took to each other at once and were to remain friends until Constance’s death. It is possible that it was she who helped him improve his elocution during these early years in Hollywood. She recalled in her own memoirs that he dined with her very often,

and we would talk about London, and the Lambeth Road, and Kennington, and all the places we had known in our youth. He was a strange, morbid, romantic creature, seemingly totally unconscious of the greatness that was in him. How he loved England! And yet the years he had spent there had been so bitter and full of poverty and sorrow. America had given him all, and his allegiance belonged to her, but in our talks one felt his longing, sometimes, to see the twisted streets and misty days and hear Big Ben chiming over London …

Sometimes we would steal down to Los Angeles and have a meal at a caféteria, and Charlie would wait on me, fetch my coffee and thick sandwiches, or bread and cheese, and we would talk for hours. He was happier this way. It was impossible to go to the big restaurants, as the minute he appeared he was mobbed. Besides, he said he couldn’t bear the masses of knives and forks on the table, and the magnificence of the head waiters gave him a feeling of inferiority.

He didn’t like luxury in those days. He hated to drive in a car – he said it made him feel nervous – but I expect he has got used to it by this time.

He remembered all the plays and every actor he had seen in England, and described to me how he used to sit in the gallery at His Majesty’s whenever he could spare a shilling or two, and would give up his meal for his seat.

He worshipped the theatre and had the same reverence for it as had that other great comedian I had once met – Dan Leno.

One would never have thought of Charlie Chaplin as funny in those long, serious talks we had.

Then – some nights – his mood would quite change, and he would be ridiculous and make me laugh until I was ill. He would pretend to be a German or a Frenchman or an Italian and invent an imaginary language, and keep it up so wonderfully that he really looked like the part he was assuming. He would keep up this mood for hours and insist on answering serious questions with that same absurd accent.²³

Constance Collier took the young Chaplin’s social life in hand, and introduced him to Tree and his young daughter Iris, both of whom initially awed him somewhat, though later they would all go off together on jaunts to Venice Beach. Chaplin, noted Constance, ‘had the greatest admiration for Herbert Tree, whose eccentricities in the unusual environment of the picture world were more marked than ever’. It was Constance, too, who insisted that he should meet another Triangle player, Douglas Fairbanks, who had just arrived in pictures after some success on the stage. ‘They had never met, and one night I took Charles to dinner at Douglas Fairbanks’ house. They were a bit shy and self-conscious during the early part of the evening, but from that day on their friendship never wavered.’ Near the end of his life, Chaplin said that Fairbanks had been perhaps the only really close friend he had ever known. He was to be an intimate witness to the romance between Fairbanks and Mary Pickford – both at this time in the process of divorcing their previous partners – which resulted in the most celebrated of all Hollywood marriages in 1920.

Another friendship at this time was with Julian Eltinge (1884–1941), who had come to stardom as a female impersonator and arrived in Hollywood in early 1917 to make three films for Jesse Lasky. Eltinge was amusing, cultured and five years older than Chaplin, and seems also to have had some influence in broadening his social circle.²⁴

Chaplin’s last four films for Mutual, all made in 1917, remain among his finest. Two, certainly, were masterworks. The first of these was Easy Street – ‘an exquisite short comedy,’ wrote Walter Kerr, ‘humor encapsulated in the regular rhythms of light verse’.²⁵ At the impressive cost of $10,000 Chaplin built the first of those T-junction street sets that were to prove his ideal theatre; the setting had the unmistakable look of South London. Even today, Methley Street, where Hannah Chaplin and her younger son lodged, between Hayward’s pickle factory and the slaughterhouse, presents the same arrested vista, the cross-bar of the ‘T’ leading to the grimier mysteries on either side.

The story of Easy Street is a comic parody of Victorian ‘reformation’ melodramas. The vagrant Charlie wanders into a mission, where he is moved – less by the hymn-singing than by the charms of missionary Edna – to turn over a new leaf. Joining the police force, he is at once posted to the perilous beat of Easy Street, terrorized by the Herculean Eric Campbell. The most effective of Charlie’s ploys to conquer the bully and restore peace to Easy Street results when Campbell proves his strength by bending a street lamp in two. Charlie seizes the opportunity thus offered to fit the lamp over the man’s head, and operates the gas tap with the expertise of a dentist’s anaesthetist.

The production was not without its troubles, however. On 16 December 1916, the prop lamp-post prepared for Campbell’s strong-man act buckled of its own accord and injured Chaplin’s nose, preventing him from wearing make-up for several days. The least of the problems to be coped with was that the baby which Charlie nurses in the mission scene – played by the son of Erich von Stroheim, also Erich – stole his moustache. The Californian rains were particularly persistent that year and by 1 February, Mutual were obliged to issue a statement explaining the postponed release:

Owing to the unusual character of the latest Charlie Chaplin production, Easy Street, involving so many big scenes which, while they appear to be ‘interiors’ are ‘exteriors’, necessitating sun for their success, Mr Chaplin has been compelled to announce the postponement of release of No 9 of the Chaplin series from January 22 to February 5, preferring to delay completion of the comedy until conditions for its successful filming are perfect.

With this announcement of the postponement, Mr Chaplin, while expressing regret at the delay, points out that it is his determination to permit nothing but the best to be released, and he would prefer producing nothing at all to assuming responsibility for poor photography. He remarks incidentally that 30,000 feet of negative have already been used in the effort to perfect 2000 feet of laughs.²⁶

Just before its release, Chaplin published his reflections upon the film:

If there is one human type more than any other that the whole wide world has it in for, it is the policeman type. Of course the policeman isn’t really to blame for the public prejudice against his uniform – it’s just the natural human revulsion against any sort of authority – but just the same everybody loves to see the ‘copper’ get it where the chicken got the axe.

So, to begin with, I make myself solid by letting my friends understand that I am not a real policeman except in the sense that I’ve been put on for a special job – that of manhandling a big bully. Of course I have my work cut out tackling a contract like that and the sympathy of the audience is with me, but I have also the element of suspense which is invaluable in a motion picture plot. The natural supposition is that the policeman is going to get the worst of it and there is an intense interest in how I am to come out of my apparently unequal combat with ‘Bully’ Campbell.

There is further contrast between my comedy walk and general funny business and the popular conception of dignity that is supposed to hedge a uniformed police officer.²⁷

For his next subject Chaplin settled on The Cure, for which he chose a setting similar to Sydney’s old Karno hit, The Hydro. Chaplin warned the Mutual office, in the same terms as the press release for Easy Street, ‘Owing to the incessant rains on the coast and because I do not care to risk the chance of a single Chaplin release being in any way below quality, it is impossible to complete The Cure according to schedule.’²⁸

We can learn more about the genesis of The Cure, thanks to the survival of most of the rushes and out-takes, which were first analysed by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill in their Unknown Chaplin. Take 1 shows Chaplin’s first conception of the hydro. The forecourt is full of patients; in the centre is a fountain, all ready for future fun. The staff of this ‘health’ resort are a crumbling bunch, so decrepit that it takes four of them to lift a cane chair. The proprietor of the hydro, played by the diminutive Loyal Underwood, is a pathetic wreck with a hacking cough. By Take 17 or earlier Chaplin has made his appearance, at this stage of the game dressed as a bellboy and pushing with difficulty a wheelchair containing Eric Campbell, his gouty foot bound up in a monstrous bandage.

By Take 23 Chaplin has decided to shift the action originally planned for the forecourt of the hydro to the lobby. Fourteen takes later he has changed his own costume from a bellboy to that of a spa attendant in a white jacket; and the patient in the wheelchair from the volcanic Eric Campbell to a comatose Albert Austin. At this stage, too, Chaplin introduced a wonderful gag. Despairing at the confusion of wheelchairs being pushed all over the place, he sets himself up as a traffic cop and imposes order on the chaos. At one moment he stops both streams of traffic to permit an excruciatingly decrepit bellhop (played by James T. Kelly, a specialist in such roles) to cross the ‘road’.

By Take 77 the whole set has been changed. The fountain in the forecourt has been replaced by a well, which clearly provides more comic perils for unwary walkers and in particular for a drunk, played by John Rand with very evident instruction from Chaplin himself. Only seven takes later, Chaplin has been unable to resist the drunk’s part, and has taken over Rand’s role and costume himself. By this time he has discovered one of those props which always stimulated his inventiveness – a revolving door. One take in particular shows the part that chance could play in his comic creation. The take is spoiled when he inadvertently catches his cane in the revolving door and jams it. Soon afterwards he begins to introduce the caught cane as a deliberate comic routine.

After the first hundred or so takes Chaplin is into his narrative stride and the shooting follows very much the progression of the finished film. Charlie, the inebriate, arrives at the hydro and in no time at all has made an enemy of the gouty-legged Eric Campbell, following an encounter in the revolving door, and a friend of Edna, Eric’s companion. While the staff interest themselves in Charlie’s luggage, which consists of a cabin trunk exclusively stocked with liquor, Charlie unenthusiastically samples the amenities of the place – the massage parlour, the swimming pool and the sauna. Meanwhile the director has ordered his staff to get rid of Charlie’s liquor store. It is emptied by accident into the pool, which considerably raises the spirits of the entire establishment.

The highest slate number on the surviving out-takes is 677 and since this shot, though it was never used, was evidently an intended fade-out for the film – Charlie falls into the pool and sinks amid a flurry of bubbles – it is most likely one of the final takes for the film. We can consequently assume that Take 622 was made quite late in the shooting period, yet at this stage we find Chaplin once more trying the traffic cop gag. As one of his collaborators said, ‘Chaplin had a mind like an attic. Everything was stored away in case it ever came in handy.’²⁹ Clearly this was too good a gag to waste. This time he filmed it wearing his costume of white blazer, slacks and boater. As it survives in the out-takes it is a scene of great comic brilliance, but again it was rejected. As Brownlow and Gill speculate in their commentary to Unknown Chaplin, he must have recognized that it could never be in character for Charlie to create, rather than disrupt, order.

The production was held up when Chaplin caught a chill after shooting the swimming pool scenes, but was eventually ready for release on 16 April 1917. The following day’s issue of Photoplay News declared,

As the Chaplin specials are unfolded to the public gaze it becomes increasingly apparent that the great comedian is a master of innumerable arts. For instance it was not known until he produced The Rink that Charlie could skate like a professional, and it was not until he devised the swimming bath scene in The Cure that anyone realized what an expert swimmer he is. In that scene Chaplin dives under the vast bulk of Campbell with the speed and agility of an otter, circles him in the water, sits on his head and nearly drowns him and in other ways disports himself as an expert waterman.

Altogether The Cure is certain to enhance Chaplin’s popularity for he has never produced anything funnier.

On 24 April Chaplin received a telegram:

CHARLES CHAPLIN,

LOS ANGELES ATHLETIC CLUB.

WE THE UNDER SIGNED BRING SUIT AGAINST YOU FOR SORE RIBS WE SAW THE CURE.

MARY PICKFORD

DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS

MRS CHARLOTTE PICKFORD

TED HAMMER

In the case of his next film, The Immigrant, the surviving out-takes enable us to follow in even greater detail the progression in Chaplin’s ideas. This comic masterpiece, whose qualities of irony and satire and pity survive intact into the next century, took a bare two months to make from start to finish. The Cure had been released on Chaplin’s twenty-eighth birthday and he began his new film immediately in an effort to catch up on his production schedule. He had probably already begun production when he told an interviewer,

I have also long been ambitious to produce a serio-comedy, the action of which is set in the Parisian Quartier Latin.

This theme offers unbounded scope for the sentimental touch which somehow always creeps into my stories. But the trouble is to prevent that touch from smothering the comedy end. There’s so much pathos back of the lives of all true bohemians that it is hard to lose sight of it even for a moment and the real spirit of that community is far too human and deeply respected by the world at large for me to even think of burlesquing it.³⁰

The Immigrant clearly started out to be this film. Among the first few takes are some establishing scenes representing an artists’ café populated by bizarre and extravagant types – men in cloaks and broad-brimmed hats, aquiline women in mannish suits. In a corner of the café, beside the arch that leads to the kitchens, is an unlikely guest, Charlie. He is sitting beside Albert Austin, who was always to be his favourite partner for eating scenes. In this case Austin is a well-dressed diner who is having some trouble with a plate of hot beans. Every time he puts the fork to his mouth he burns himself and starts violently, to the distress of the fastidious Charlie. By Take 46, Edna has been introduced into the film and the bean-eating business. At this time Chaplin averaged around twenty shots a day, so that we can assume that this was at the start of the third day of shooting. Edna was shot sitting alone and disconsolate at a table across the other side of the archway, then side by side with Charlie, having supplanted Albert Austin. The principal routines on which they worked at this time involved Charlie’s sharing his plate of beans with the apparently impecunious Edna. Edna was still eating beans more than a hundred takes later, and this was reckoned good for a publicity story, which appeared in the newspapers towards the end of production:

CONTINUOUS DIET OF BEANS CAUSES A REAL GAGGING

Edna Purviance Forced to Consume

This Viand in Latest Chaplin Comedy

Edna Purviance, Charlie Chaplin’s vis-à-vis running mate, hopes something happens to the bean crop this year. The reason is this: the play on which they are now working opens in a cheap restaurant and shows her a famished orphan whom Charlie is regaling with copious plates of beans.

So far so good, but there were so many trying gags to be worked out that retake after retake was necessary and, as the days followed close upon each other without a cessation of the eternal bean diet, Miss Purviance began to experience difficulty in even getting the succulent Boston viand up to her mouth.

‘It’s no use, Charlie,’ she announced. ‘I simply can’t swallow another one.’

‘Great Scott!’ exclaimed Charlie. ‘How am I going to get my gagging over, then?’

‘I give it up,’ replied Edna. ‘If you’d been gagging as much as I have for the past five days you wouldn’t want to gag any more.’³¹

The out-takes reveal that Chaplin began shooting these scenes with James T. Kelly playing the decrepit waiter who serves Charlie and Edna. By around the fourth day, however, he had devised some new comedy business which required a heavyweight, so he recast Henry Bergman in the role of waiter. The sequence involves Charlie’s inability to pay his bill. He and Edna look on in alarm as a tipsy diner who has failed to pay his bill is set upon and mercilessly pummelled by the restaurant staff, led by Bergman. Charlie nervously fumbles in his own pocket and discovers in mounting panic that his one and only coin has slipped through a hole. By the time he spies it on the floor, the waiter has firmly planted his foot on it and is already writing out the bill. Charlie succeeds in retrieving his coin from the floor and grandly hands it to the waiter, who promptly bends it between his teeth to establish that it is a particularly pliable counterfeit.

Chaplin continued to shoot, reshoot and vary these scenes for more than a week before he discovered what was wrong with them. Bergman clearly lacked the menace necessary to give the dramatic-comic motive for Charlie’s fear. Chaplin scrapped all the previous material and recast Eric Campbell in the role, wearing his most diabolic false eyebrows. According to conventional standards and economics of film production in 1917 this kind of decision, the courage to scrap a week’s work (when many producers were making entire two-reel comedies in that time), was without precedent. Indeed, Chaplin’s whole approach of filming take after take until he was totally satisfied with the result was something new in Hollywood. For most directors, shots were only retaken if something had gone noticeably wrong. More than two years after The Immigrant, D.W. Griffith made his ambitious Broken Blossoms practically without taking any shot more than once, which for a director like Griffith would have been an admission of inadequate rehearsal and error. For Chaplin it was an assertion that it was always possible to do better.

Having cast Campbell as the waiter Chaplin discovered a new role for Bergman, as a flamboyant artist. This new character offered a perfect denouement to Charlie’s drama of paying the bill. The artist notices Edna, is instantly taken by her beauty, and joins the couple at their table to ask if he may paint her portrait. Magnanimously he attempts to pay their bill along with his own, but Charlie declines the offer – politely and too insistently, since the artist takes him at his word and contents himself with paying his own bill. Charlie deftly solves the problem. The waiter brings a plate with the change, which the artist disdainfully pushes aside as a tip. Charlie niftily slips his bill under the coins and airily pushes it to the waiter, who is baffled to see his tip thus diminished to pennies. The scene neatly wrapped up the sequence, but the artists’ café had not provided enough material for a full two-reeler.

Chaplin needed something else for his story, and evidently found it by asking himself where Edna had come from, and how it is that she and Charlie recognized each other in the restaurant. He found his answer: they are both migrants and have met on an immigrant ship. The ship immediately set his comic imagination whirling. He revived the rocker idea he had used for Shanghaied, and created a convincing rolling deck and steerage-class mess room. For some scenes shot on a boat at sea, Rollie Totheroh used a device like that employed by Harry Ensign for Shanghaied: a camera pivoted on a tripod was controlled by a heavy pendulum. The storm-tossed vessel was peopled by a weird and sorry lot of migrants: Albert Austin as a sea-sick Russian, Henry Bergman as a stout peasant woman and Loyal Underwood as her diminutive spouse, whom she dandles like a child and sticks over the side of the ship when he, too, is sick. Charlie also falls in with a murderous bunch of card-sharpers; the out-takes show that he originally intended a dice game, but changed his mind since the card game offers the opportunity for an amusing gag of high-speed shuffling which anticipates Monsieur Verdoux’s dexterity in counting banknotes.

Among the passengers, Charlie meets Edna and her aged mother, played by Kitty Bradbury, a sweet-faced old character actress. Mother is robbed of all their savings while she is sleeping, but Charlie consoles the weeping Edna by stuffing into her purse all the money he has won at cards – all, that is, except for one note which he providently retrieves for his own needs. A passing purser, inevitably, sees him taking the note back and threatens to put him in irons. Edna, however, intercedes and explains.

The café scenes represent takes numbers 1 to 384; the boat scenes, numbers 385 to approximately 730. Knowing Chaplin’s method of work in subsequent films, we can safely assume that there would have been a pause of a week or two between the two stages of the shooting, while he edited together the first sequence or ‘faction’, as it was known on the Chaplin unit. There would have been a comparable break for editing after the complexity of the boat shooting. A final group of some thirty takes reveals Chaplin dexterously tying up his narrative into the beautifully structured two-act whole that The Immigrant was to become.

First (Takes 737 et seq.) he films the exterior of the café, with Charlie finding a coin on the pavement. This provides an ideal transition between the ship and the city scenes, and motivates the hitherto broke Charlie’s entrance into the café. Next (743 et seq.) he reshoots the scene inside the café, where he first sees and recognizes Edna at the opposite table. He adds one detail: Charlie now observes that Edna’s handkerchief is edged with black. Nothing more is needed to tell us that since the voyage Edna’s mother has died. Chaplin also took the opportunity to temper sentiment with comedy: as Charlie gazes rapt and blissful into Edna’s eyes, his beans fall from his knife into his coffee cup.

In a few takes around number 763 Chaplin invented a scene which was outrageous in its irony, and to this day remains astounding. As the sequence appears in the finished film, we see a distant view of the Statue of Liberty. A title announces ‘Arrival in the Land of Liberty’. On the deck of the boat the huddled masses stand – and the immigration authorities suddenly arrive to throw a rope around them, as if they were so many cattle. (One of the out-takes for this last shot contains an unrehearsed moment: the extras are clearly not acting to order, and Charlie the tramp is suddenly transformed into Chaplin the tyrant director, turning on them in sudden rage.)

After this there remained only a couple more shots to be made. In a charming little scene, Charlie drags the bashful Edna to the registry office. On the doorstep Charlie’s ebullience provokes the unspoken rebuke of a solemn clerk, played by Chaplin’s new valet, Tom Harrington.

At this time, at the beginning of June 1917, there were some changes at the Lone Star Studio. John Jasper succeeded Henry Caulfield as general manager, and in turn Jasper recruited as publicity director Carlyle T. Robinson, whom he had known when they both worked at the Horsley Studios in 1915. Originally a journalist, Robinson was one of the first generation of Hollywood publicists. He was to remain with Chaplin for the next fourteen years. Before Robinson’s appointment any publicity stories had been written by Fred Goodwins, an old English vaudeville acquaintance of Chaplin’s who had some newspaper experience and appeared in several Essanay and Mutual films.

When Robinson reported for work at the Lone Star Studio he found that Chaplin was away for a few days while a new set was being built.

This allowed me to familiarize myself meanwhile with my new job. One of the first things I discovered was that Chaplin was a very difficult person to meet, even within his own studio. I learned also that it was absolutely forbidden for strangers to penetrate into the studio, that the star did not like journalists, and did not at all wish to be bothered by old friends, even those who had known Charlie Chaplin when he played in the English music halls.

I discovered that he liked to be called Charlie and hated to hear himself called ‘Mr’. I discovered that his hours were very irregular, and most of his demands impossible to satisfy, that he had very strong likings and even stronger hatreds, that anyone whom he seemed to prefer among the studio employees was always the most disliked by the rest, that he had not the least idea of time, that although he was theoretically an employee his prestige was such that he had the real right to decide ultimately who would work or who would not work at the studio.³²

Robinson was struck, like others, by the jealousies among the male members of the unit, and was surprised that Chaplin himself appeared unaware of them. He was also astounded by the daily ceremonial attending Chaplin’s arrival at the studio, which began with the cry, ‘He’s here!’

Instantly everyone stopped whatever he was doing. Actors, stage-hands, electricians, everybody stood in line, at attention. Then Chaplin entered the studio gates.

All this comedy seemed to me quite absurd. They might just as well have blown a trumpet or fired a cannon, I thought

He arrived in a big sports car with black coachwork, very luxurious. Two men were seated in front: one, tall and thin, jumped out of the car first. The other was a Japanese. The tall thin man ran round the car and opened the door. Chaplin stepped out, dressed in a long overcoat with an astrakhan collar. He was hatless. He slowly crossed the studio yard, with the tall man at his heels, while the Japanese chauffeur put the car away.³³

Robinson asked the studio typist, Miss Roberts, if the same ceremony happened every day. ‘Oh yes,’ she told him, ‘the whole gang does that for a gag. Charlie has no illusions, but he adores it!’³⁴

The first day that Chaplin was back at the studio, Robinson was asked to join a screening of the ‘Land of Liberty’ sequence from The Immigrant in the studio projection room.

I had a curious impression when I entered the room. From the people scattered around the screening room there emanated such an absence of friendliness that it verged on hostility. I was instantly aware of their dislike. There were two rows, each of half a dozen chairs. In one corner a man stood at a table with a pencil and paper.

I chose a chair near the door. No one introduced me to my new boss. I felt very embarrassed …

When the lights went on again, Charlie addressed me:

‘What do you think of all that?’ he asked me, with a pronounced Cockney accent.

‘Very funny and very realistic,’ I answered.

‘Do you find anything shocking in it?’

‘Not that I can recall.’

Chaplin thereupon turned to the man on his left, who spoke with a strong accent similar to his own. From his remarks I understood that he was the one who had criticized the scene. Charlie pointed to me: ‘So you see, he didn’t find anything wrong with it. It shocks you because you see too much in it. But I’m sure there will not be any difficulties with the public.’

Of course I had no idea what they were talking about. Later I learned that the one who had criticized Chaplin had claimed that the public would not like his showing the Statue of Liberty in this way. The scene was kept in the final version of the film, and there was never the least complaint.³⁵

Robinson was to be embarrassed in the early days of his employment by his new boss’s quirks. The same night as this screening, Robinson saw Chaplin with Edna in a restaurant and greeted him amiably, only to be cut dead – much to his embarrassment since he had been boasting to his table companions of his prestigious new job. Some days later some English trade unionists were guests at the studio. One of them was whistling while Chaplin was trying to work, whereupon Chaplin turned angrily on Robinson, accusing him of being the whistler. Afterwards Robinson asked him if he really believed him to be the culprit. ‘Oh, of course not. But I had to use that little trick. I couldn’t tell off my guest myself, and that’s why I made it your responsibility!’

Robinson hardened himself against such embarrassments, and at the same time developed a high regard for his employer’s dedication:

I was only really able fully to appreciate the little man’s energy after the final scene of The Immigrant had been shot. It was then a matter of eliminating the thousands of metres of excess film that had been exposed.

The Immigrant had to be reduced to a length of 1800 feet before being handed over to the distributors. Now he had shot more than 40,000 feet of film! For four days and four nights, without taking any rest, Chaplin cut the film. He would view the same scene fifty times in succession, cutting four inches here, a foot there! One collaborator assisted him, another simply watched. Rollie Totheroh, his cameraman, was the assistant, and I was the ‘observer’.

By the time the film had been definitively brought to the requisite length, and was wholly approved by Chaplin, the great comedian’s best friends would certainly not have recognized him. His beard had grown several centimetres. His hair was tangled. He was dirty, haggard and collarless. But his film was finished.³⁶

The Immigrant was released on 17 June. Four months were to elapse before the next Chaplin release – the longest interval between pictures since the start of his film career. After completing The Immigrant, Chaplin and Sydney went to San Francisco for a holiday. On their return the unit moved to location on the Sierra Madre coast, where most of the first 200 takes of The Adventurer were made. Shooting there must have extended into August, since it was reported in the press that on 11 August Chaplin dived into the rough seas off Topanga Canyon to save a seven-year-old girl from drowning. The child, Mildred Morrison, daughter of a stockbroker, had been swept off a rock by a wave whilst watching the Chaplin company at work. There was a more serious interruption to production a week or so later, when Edna was admitted to the Good Samaritan Hospital with an unspecified illness.

The scenes shot on the coast, which were to provide the opening sequence of the film, were of inspired comic virtuosity: a series of complex and beautiful variations as Charlie, in prison stripes, attempts to elude the pursuit of a troupe of prison warders. After this, and after Edna’s recovery, Chaplin spent some weeks and more than 300 takes on a sequence of a party in a rich house where Charlie, now in elegant evening dress, flirts with the daughter of the house, Edna, under the angry eyes of her jealous suitor, Eric Campbell. The surviving out-takes, revealing unfruitful efforts to work out a gag involving a seductive Spanish dancer, and another with a hot steam radiator (neither of which remains, except as hints in the finished film), indicate that Chaplin was going through a period of comparative creative block.

One gag in this sequence is of particular interest since Chaplin himself analysed it in detail in an article in American Magazine (most likely, to judge from the style, transcribed by his friend Rob Wagner from Chaplin’s ideas):

… all my pictures are built around the idea of getting me into trouble and so giving me the chance to be desperately serious in my attempt to appear as a normal little gentleman. That is why, no matter how desperate the predicament is, I am always very much in earnest about clutching my cane, straightening my derby hat and fixing my tie, even though I have just landed on my head.

I am so sure of this point that I not only try to get myself into embarrassing situations, but I also incriminate the other characters in the picture. When I do this, I always aim for economy of means. By this I mean that when one incident can get two big, separate laughs, it is much better than two individual incidents. In The Adventurer I accomplished this by first placing myself on a balcony, eating ice cream with a girl. On the floor directly underneath the balcony, I put a stout, dignified, well-dressed woman at a table. Then, while eating the ice cream, I let a piece drop off my spoon, slip through my baggy trousers, and drop from the balcony onto this woman’s neck.

The first laugh came at my embarrassment over my own predicament. The second, and the much greater one, came when the ice cream landed on the woman’s neck and she shrieked and started to dance around. Only one incident had been used, but it had got two people into trouble and had also got two big laughs.

Simple as this trick seems, there were two real points of human nature involved in it. One was the delight the average person takes in seeing wealth and luxury in trouble. The other was the tendency of the human being to experience within himself the emotions he sees on the stage or screen.

One of the things most quickly learned in theatrical work is that people as a whole get satisfaction from seeing the rich get the worst of things. The reason for this, of course, lies in the fact that nine tenths of the people in the world are poor, and secretly resent the wealth of the other tenth.

If I had dropped the ice cream, for example, on a scrubwoman’s neck, instead of getting laughs sympathy would have been aroused for the woman. Also, because a scrubwoman has no dignity to lose, that point would not have been funny. Dropping ice cream down a rich woman’s neck, however, is, in the minds of the audience, just giving the rich what they deserve.

By saying that human beings experience the same emotions as the people in the incidents they witness, I mean that – taking ice cream as an example – when the rich woman shivered the audience shivered with her. A thing that puts a person in an embarrassing predicament must always be perfectly familiar to an audience, or else the people will miss the point entirely. Knowing that the ice cream is cold, the audience shivers. If something was used that the audience did not recognize at once, it would not be able to appreciate the point as well. On this same fact was based the throwing of custard pies in the early pictures. Everyone knew that custard pie is squashy and so was able to appreciate how the actor felt when one landed on him.³⁷

Chaplin completed shooting the material for his party sequence by Take 550, and devoted the next 150 takes to filming a sequence in which, his imposture having been discovered, he is chased around the house by prison warders and eventually makes his escape. The sequence provided an exciting climactic finish to the film. As with The Immigrant, Chaplin left to the end the problem of tying up the separate parts of the film – the opening chase and escape of Charlie the convict, and Charlie’s subsequent appearance as an imposter in a grand house. His solution was a sequence in which Charlie, having swum around the coast to safety, comes upon a catastrophe at a jetty. Edna’s mother has fallen into the sea. When the cowardly Campbell refuses to go in after her, Edna dives in. Charlie arrives at the opportune moment to rescue Edna and, with rather less enthusiasm, her mother. Meanwhile Campbell has tumbled into the water himself, but when Charlie far too gallantly rescues him too, he brutally pushes Charlie under the water. Unconscious, Charlie is fished from under the jetty by Edna’s Japanese chauffeur, who drives him back to Edna’s house. Charlie wakes next morning in a luxurious bed, though he is momentarily alarmed to find himself wearing striped pyjamas and gazing through the bars of an iron bedstead.

The car used in the sequence was Chaplin’s own new Locomobile, and the handsome young chauffeur was Kono. This was to be Kono’s only appearance on the screen. When his wife saw the film she protested; to work as a chauffeur was one thing but to play the movie actor was altogether too demeaning for a Japanese of respectable family.

The out-takes from The Adventurer provide a lively glimpse of the way that, even on the Chaplin set, there were unforeseen hazards. A gag in the jetty scene involves the unconscious Campbell being placed on a stretcher laid with one end to the edge of the jetty. Charlie busily takes up the other end of the stretcher, unaware that he is precipitating Campbell over the edge and back into the sea. One take, however, goes badly wrong, rendering Chaplin and Campbell helpless with laughter. Instead of sliding smoothly into the sea, the big-bellied Campbell gets firmly stuck under the rail surrounding the jetty.

The Adventurer was to be the last screen appearance of Eric Campbell, who has taken his place in screen history as Chaplin’s ideal heavyweight opponent. Campbell’s life during the period of production had been eventful: on 9 July his wife died; while travelling to make arrangements for the funeral, the actor and his daughter Una were injured in a car accident (Campbell had a weakness for fast cars). On or about 1 August, Carlyle Robinson introduced him to a young woman called Pearl Gilman, whose sister Mabelle was a Floradora Sextet girl and married to a millionaire steel magnate, W. E. Corey. After a five-day courtship, Campbell and Pearl were married at the home of Mrs Elsie Hardy.

The couple planned a honeymoon in Honolulu in December, following the completion of The Adventurer, but just a few weeks after the wedding Pearl was suing her husband for separation maintenance. On 20 December Campbell was driving with two girls in his car, allegedly at sixty miles an hour, when it collided with another vehicle at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Vermont Avenue; Campbell was killed instantly. Belying his looks, this massive, kindly, child-like Scot was only thirty-seven.³⁸

We have a revealing glimpse of Chaplin’s personal life at this period in an article that was syndicated in the press at the time he was at work on The Vagabond. The article is unsigned, but it reveals a fairly privileged insight and was probably the work of Terry Ramsaye in his role as Mutual’s press chief:

What are his diversions, his hobbies, his amusements when he leaves the studio? If you were to drop into Chaplin’s home in Los Angeles some evening, you might be surprised to find him playing a selection from Carmen or La Bohème on his violin. Not only is Chaplin an exceptionally good violinist, but he is a composer of music as well. A number of his pieces have already found favor with the music loving public, particularly the march song he composed especially for the benefit performance held some time ago at the Hippodrome in New York City.

Off the screen Chaplin is a serious-minded young fellow, whose entire time is spent in seeking to better himself in other lines. He doesn’t want to remain a funny man in the cinema all his life. He wants to make a name for himself in some other field that will win him just as much fame – and money – as he has earned on the screen. Chaplin is, to some extent, a dreamer.

‘No man or woman,’ said the Mutual comedian recently, ‘should be satisfied with having won a fortune or fame in one particular line of endeavor. The field is large, and there are opportunities everywhere for the young man of today. But he must work if he expects to climb to the top. Otherwise I am afraid there is not much hope.’

DAY BEGINS AT 6.30

Chaplin is just as busy a young man away from the studio as he is in it. He is what may be classed as a systematic worker and a systematic liver. His day begins promptly at 6.30 o’clock every morning. And every night at 10 o’clock, with an exception here and there, he turns off the electric light and gives himself into the hands of Morpheus.

While Chaplin’s salary received from the Mutual Film Corporation aggregates $670,000 and his income from various other investments totals many additional thousands a year, he is by no means what may be termed a spender. He lives well but quietly, dresses well, owns several automobiles,³⁹ employs a chauffeur, valet and several secretaries. Chaplin believes in [getting] the best and most out of life.

As previously stated, Chaplin’s day begins at 6.30 o’clock. At that hour his valet wakes him. Five minutes later he is in his bath. This over with, he places himself in the hands of his barber, sits down to breakfast, spends a half hour with the morning papers and then – a visit to his chiropodist!

HIS OWN CHIROPODIST

It is not generally known that Chaplin employs the service of a chiropodist. Nevertheless such is a fact. Violinists, pianists and others of similar professions have experts who care for their fingers and hands, so why shouldn’t Chaplin, whose feet help earn him a princely income each year, have the services of a chiropodist?

This visit over, Chaplin takes a whirl through the Los Angeles park in his car, provided, of course, he has the time. He reaches the studio every morning when he is working, which is practically every day of the year, at 10 o’clock. Once in the studio, Chaplin confers with his studio manager, members of his company and other officials and then doffs his street clothes for his make-up.

A PROLIFIC WORKER

In the studio Chaplin is a prolific worker, for he directs as well as acts. Every set, regardless of its size, is placed under his personal direction. He is an expert in lighting effects and sees to it that everything in this respect is in proper shape before starting work. This completed, he summons his company, rehearses the scenes about to be staged and then becomes the busiest young man imaginable.

Chaplin’s day at the studio comprises anywhere from eight to ten hours, depending on the importance of the production he is working on. In many respects Chaplin is a hard taskmaster. He is a great believer in details and sees to it that every member of his company, from himself all the way down the line, do their parts and do them well.

His day at the studio generally ends about 4 o’clock. A half hour later he is again in his street clothes. But this does not mean that he rushes away from the studio to seek some amusement. Far from it. When the day has closed, so far as the actual work is concerned, Chaplin enters a little private office and lays out the routine for the following day.

Then he leaves for a short spin in his car, generally with his studio manager or some other intimate, and winds up at the Los Angeles Athletic Club, where he is domiciled during his stay in Los Angeles. Until time to dine, Chaplin lounges about the corridors, talking with friends or reading the afternoon papers. Dinner over, Chaplin goes immediately to his room, where he dons his ‘gym’ suit and repairs to the club’s gymnasium. Here he spends an hour each evening boxing, wrestling, tussling with the weight machines and bag punching, followed by a plunge in the pool.

HUNDREDS OF LETTERS

Following this, unless he has an engagement to spend the evening with friends, at a theater, Chaplin remains in his suite, answering the mass of correspondence that reaches him every day from admirers in every section of the universe. Chaplin does not pay much attention to business for most of that is handled by one of his secretaries, whose duties consist of nothing else. Although the letters run into the hundreds on some occasions, Chaplin replies each day to as many as he possibly can.

A letter from a little boy far off in Australia, or from a little girl in equally far off Scotland, receives just as much consideration as does one from his personal representative in New York. If the writer asks for his photograph, Chaplin invariably sends it.⁴⁰

Chaplin devotes almost two hours every night to his correspondence and the business affairs he must personally take care of, aside from those handled by one of his secretaries. Ten o’clock finds him ready for bed. His valet prepares his bath again and after a cold shower, Chaplin ducks in between the sheets. Within the space of a very few minutes he is fast asleep.

OUTDOOR RECREATIONS

Chaplin does not smoke nor drink. To be exact, he smoked but one time in his life. He never cared to make another attempt.

The comedian is an expert tennis player and an exceedingly clever dancer.

Of late he has taken up golf and is mastering the intricate points of the game. Motoring is one of his hobbies, but he prefers to let his chauffeur do the driving. Chaplin does not believe in speed – while motoring, of course – rather preferring to move along at a fair rate and drinking in plenty of fresh air. When opportunity permits, Chaplin likes nothing better than to steal off for an hour or so for a little walk by himself in the park.

Like all red-blooded young men, Chaplin delights in the latest of light fiction. He is not what one might call a heavy reader, rather preferring to read slowly and thoughtfully. He has read Shakespeare from beginning to end, is familiar with the works of George Eliot and other noted writers and is a stickler for poetry.

His chief hobby, however, is found in his violin. Every spare moment away from the studio is devoted to this instrument. He does not play from notes excepting in a very few instances. He can run through selections of popular operas by ear and if in the humor, can rattle off the famous Irish jig or some negro selection with the ease of a vaudeville entertainer.

Chaplin admits that as a violinist he is no Kubelik or Elman but he hopes, nevertheless, to play in concerts some day before very long.

The comments on Chaplin’s sleeping habits conflict with reports that at this period he tended to suffer from insomnia. At the time he began producing for Mutual, he had already installed a Dictaphone by his bed at the Athletic Club so that he could record any sudden inspiration he had during the night. He seems to have retained the Dictaphone for many years.

The delicacy in omitting any mention of Chaplin’s leading lady perhaps confirms that this account originated in Mutual’s publicity department. Throughout the Mutual years the affair with Edna was conducted with the utmost discretion. While Chaplin lived at the Athletic Club, Edna stayed at the Engstrom Hotel. They were seen dining together most nights, and most mornings Chaplin would drive past her hotel and pick her up to take her to the studio. The relationship with Edna was the happiest of his early life. Although she was younger, she supplied a protective, encouraging and maternal presence. Years afterwards he remembered with affection how, when he was about to go in front of the camera for a scene, she would say to him, ‘Go on. Be cute!’ Partly out of total confidence in Edna’s devotion and partly out of the constant need to test it, Chaplin often treated her in an inconsiderate manner. He later told a friend that she only rebelled once, but that the occasion was alarming. He had been rude to her on the set in some way, and she suddenly flew at him with such fury that he fled to his dressing room and locked himself in. Only after some time did he emerge and make his way apologetically to Edna’s dressing room. She had forgotten her anger and merely laughed.

During this period Chaplin would still go to boxing matches or ball games with Totheroh, Bergman and others from the studio. Reporting the excitement of the crowd at the bout between Little Eddie Miller and Young Kitchell at Jack Doyle’s on 19 November 1916, one newspaper observed, ‘Even Charlie Chaplin rose on top of his chair and advised the pugilists to “get together”.’

In March 1917, too, he was a participant in a memorable all-star ball game played in Washington Park, Los Angeles, between the Tragics and the Comics. The Tragics were Wallace Reid, William Desmond, George Walsh, ‘Gene’ (Eugene) Pallette, Antonio Moreno, Franklyn Farnum, Jack Pickford, Hobart Bosworth and George Behan; the Comics, apart from Chaplin, were Eric Campbell, Charlie Murray, Slim Summerville, Bobby Dunn, Hank Mann, Lonesome Luke (better known in later years as Harold Lloyd), Ben Turpin and Chester Conklin. The umpires were two famous sportsmen of the period, the motor racer Barney Oldfield and the boxer James J. Jeffries.

The medium which Chaplin had made his own was still regarded at this time as a pretty common and low-class thing. True, a few prestigious European works like La Reine Elisabeth, with Bernhardt, Cabiria and Quo Vadis, and more recently the D. W. Griffith epics Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, had turned the attention of a more serious-minded audience to the moving pictures, but comedy was still for the people. On 6 May 1916, however, Harper’s Weekly published an article that was to have a far-reaching influence. Entitled ‘The Art of Charles Chaplin’, it was written by one of the most distinguished stage actresses of the day, Minnie Maddern Fiske:

It will surprise numbers of well-meaning Americans to learn that a constantly increasing body of cultured, artistic people are beginning to regard the young English buffoon, Charles Chaplin, as an extraordinary artist, as well as a comic genius. To these Americans one may dare only to whisper that it is dangerous to condemn a great national figure thoughtlessly. First, let us realize that at the age of twenty-six Charles Chaplin (a boy with a serious, wistful face) has made the whole world laugh. This proves that his work possesses a quality more vital than mere clowning. Doubtless, before he came upon the scene there were many ‘comedians’ who expressed themselves in grotesque antics and grimaces, but where among them was there one who at twenty-six made his name a part of the common language of almost every country, and whose little, baggy-trousered figure became universally familiar? To the writer Charles Chaplin appears as a great comic artist, possessing inspirational powers and a technique as unfaltering as Réjane’s. If it be treason to Art to say this, then let those exalted persons who allow culture to be defined only upon their own terms make the most of it.

Apart from the qualified critics, many thoughtful persons are beginning to analyze the Chaplin performances with a serious desire to discover his secret for making irresistible entertainment out of more or less worthless material. They seek the elusive quality that leavens the lump of the usually pointless burlesques in which he takes part. The critic knows his secret. It is the old, familiar secret of inexhaustible imagination, governed by the unfailing precision of a perfect technique.

Chaplin is vulgar. At the present stage of his career he is frankly a buffoon, and buffoonery is and always has been tinctured with the vulgar. Broad comedy all the way through history has never been able to keep entirely free from vulgarity. There is vulgarity in the comedies of Aristophanes, and in those of Plautus and Terence and the Elizabethans, not excluding Shakespeare. Rabelais is vulgar, Fielding and Smollett and Swift are vulgar. Among the great comedians there is vulgarity without end. Vulgarity and distinguished art can exist together …

Mrs Fiske returned some months later to the subject of Chaplin’s art, when she rebuked a drama critic for speaking slightingly of the comedian. Not as well known as her earlier essay, her letter is no less eloquent:

Until I read your article in Sunday’s paper I was unaware of the existence of anyone who failed to appreciate the art of Charlie Chaplin. Your passing depreciation is difficult to answer on account of its vagueness. And, of course, I feel the absurdity of my taking up cudgels in defense of an artist whose name and mannerisms are familiar to, and whose art is appreciated by, the people of every nation where moving pictures are shown. If it is true that the test of an artist’s greatness is the width of his human appeal, then Charlie Chaplin must be entitled to a place amongst the foremost of all living artists. It is almost unprecedented that a comedian can appeal to the widely different senses of humor possessed by the Anglo-Saxon, Latin, Teutonic, Slavonic and Mongolian races.

Like all true artists, he is a master of light and shade, merriment and pathos, smiles and tears. The manner in which he approaches the object of his affections, realizing the futility of his devotion, is very pathetic. It reminds one of a mongrel who, half boldly, half diffidently, licks one’s hand, hoping for a caress but fearing a kick. Nevertheless, Charlie Chaplin’s is a brave, dauntless philosophy, for no matter what vicissitudes he may have undergone, he squares his shoulders and walks bravely into the future, ignoring his past troubles. Surely he serves a worthy cause who makes the world brighter and preaches optimism, and I am a unit of the vast multitude grateful for Charlie Chaplin.

In conclusion, let me beg you to reinstate yourself in the estimation of the playgoing public, which I trust you enjoyed before the publication of last Sunday’s article. I would suggest, as a preliminary step, a speedy visit to the nearest picture house where a Chaplin picture is being shown. For, obviously, you have never seen him!⁴¹

Hard on the heels of Mrs Fiske came the playwright Harvey O’Higgins with an article in The New Republic of 3 February 1917, entitled ‘Charlie Chaplin’s Art’. O’Higgins compared Chaplin to a great, though little-known, circus clown, Slivers, a comedian of ‘a penetrating imagination’:

He would see the shoelace as anything from an angleworm to a string of spaghetti, and see it and relate himself to it so convincingly that he made you see it as he did. Chaplin performs the same miracle with a walking stick. He will see it – outrageously – as a toothpick, but he will use it exactly as you see toothpicks used at a lunch counter, looking at you with an air of sad repletion, with a glazed eye from which all intelligence has withdrawn, inwardly, to brood over the internal satisfaction of the digestive process – absurdly, but with unimpeachable realism. Or he is a clerk in a pawnshop, and a man brings in an alarm clock to pledge it. Chaplin has to decide how much it is worth. He sees it first as a patient to be examined diagnostically. He taps it, percusses it, puts his ear to its chest, listens to its heartbeat with a stethoscope, and, while he listens, fixes a thoughtful medical eye on space, looking inscrutably wise and professionally self-confident. He begins to operate on it – with a can-opener. And immediately the round tin clock becomes a round tin can whose contents are under suspicion. He cuts around the circular top of the can, bends back the flap of tin with a kitchen thumb gingerly, scrutinizes the contents gingerly, and then, gingerly approaching his nose to it, sniffs with the melancholy expression of an experienced housekeeper who believes the worst of the packing-houses. The imagination is accurate. The acting is restrained and naturalistic. The result is a scream.

And do not believe that such acting is a matter of crude and simple means. It is as subtle in its naturalness as the shades of intonation in a really tragic speech.

Chaplin, concluded O’Higgins,

is on a stage where the slapstick, the ‘knockabout’, the gutta-percha hammer and the ‘rough-house’ are accepted as the necessary ingredients of comedy, and these things fight against the finer qualities of his art, yet he overcomes them. In his burlesque of Carmen he commits suicide with a collapsible dagger, and the moment of his death is as tragic as any of Bernhardt’s. His work has become more and more delicate and finished as the medium of its reproduction has improved to admit of delicate and finished work. There is no doubt, as Mrs Fiske has said, that he is a great artist. And he is a great lesson and encouragement to anyone who loves an art or practises it, for he is an example of how the best can be the most successful, and of how a real talent can triumph over the most appalling limitations put upon its expression, and of how the popular eye can recognize such a talent without the aid of the pundits of culture and even in spite of their anathemas.

Chaplin had become and was to remain a name among the intelligentsia. Reviewing Dukas’s L’Apprenti Sorcier, Edwin Stone, music critic of the Los Angeles Times, drew a comparison with Chaplin, as did Heywood Broun in a review of a production of Gammer Gurton’s Needle in the New York Tribune. Robert Benchley, already a widely syndicated journalist, devoted a humorous column to comparing Chaplin’s tramp with Falstaff. A writer in the Kansas City Star, in an article headed ‘Have you the Chaplinitis? – Kansas City in the Throes of a Movie Mania Epidemic’, made a serious attempt to analyse Chaplin’s appeal:

Why should a comedian, whose work is of the broadest slapstick variety, attain such a vogue? Why should a film actor, without the aid of the comedian’s chief asset, humorous lines, be able to send his audiences into near hysterics and draw those to the picture houses who will not look at other films? Why is Charlie Chaplin so funny to the great majority of the public?

To which it must be answered first of all that he is a master of pantomime. Seldom, if ever, does he utter a word in the picture. Emotions, thoughts and lines are expressed by his universal power of facial and bodily expression. His feet are most eloquent of all.

In addition to this, he uses every clown trick in the calendar. Every device developed by the funny men of the sawdust ring in the years since circuses began is employed by Chaplin at some time or other on the screen. This in connexion with the agility of an acrobat is another great help to his art of laugh creating.

Another reason may be psychological. Chaplin is such a nonchalant, happy-go-lucky fellow. His are the same sort of deeds, grotesque and somewhat distorted, maybe, that endear D’Artagnan and his fellow musketeers to the reader, that cause the tales of swashbuckling heroes to stir the blood; and that have fired the imagination and the sympathies since knights errant went forth in search of adventures with lances instead of a bamboo cane and plumed helmets instead of a battered derby.

Commentators of the time were not unanimous in enthusiasm. The Yale Magazine was inclined to blame Chaplin for the dearth of good men on the athletic field: ‘It is in the upper classes that the lapses begin to occur and students equipped for serious competition for varsity teams are too often lured by that growing indoor sport, the motion-picture show. We find them lingering with Mr Chaplin in Easy Street.’ Mrs Lillian W. Betts, executive secretary of the Brooklyn Parks and Playgrounds Committee, went further when she told the members of the Women’s Alliance of the Fourth Unitarian Church at Beverley Road, East 19th Street, that Charlie Chaplin was ‘a moral menace. His is the low type of humor that appeals only to the lowest type of intellect. I cannot understand how any resident of Flatbush can go to see [him].’ (Mrs Betts was at that time crusading for a municipal bath in Flatbush, ‘not only for the health of those who need washing, but for the health of those who must necessarily at one time or another come in contact with them’.)

The efforts of such zealots could not stop the spread of Chaplinitis. Costume balls were in great vogue in 1917 but magazine writers constantly complained that they were spoiled because most of the girls came as Annette Kellerman, the swimming star, and nine out of ten men came as Charlie Chaplin. In February 1917 Charlie Chaplin costume was used as a disguise by a hold-up man in Cincinnati.⁴² About the same time the Boston Society for Psychical Research was investigating ‘certain phenomena connected with the simultaneous paging of Mr Charles Chaplin, motion picture comedian, in more than 800 large hotels of the United States’. This surprising psycho-pathological phenomenon was supposed to have been observed on 12 November 1916 across the country from the Atlantic to the Pacific coasts, and from the Canadian boundary to the Gulf. Professor Bamfylde More Carew, a member of the society and author of the paper on the phenomenon, pointed out that Chaplin with his ‘singular brand of humor’ had become an American obsession, and that among young and active minds of the country, Chaplin was a subject of constantly recurrent thought – in fact,

the inspiration of widely registered impulse waves plainly to be noted on charts of the society which are perfected from local charts submitted from widely separated localities.

We find beyond peradventure that on the date mentioned, November 12, there existed for some inexplicable reason a Chaplin impulse, which extended through the length and breadth of the continent. In more than 800 of the principal hotels Mr Chaplin was being paged at the same hour. In hundreds of smaller towns people were waiting at stations to see him disembark from trains upon which he was supposed to arrive.

There is no reason to doubt the correctness of scientific proof that constant reiteration of a certain fact or idea will or may precipitate precisely such a phenomenon as that which has resulted from the wide display of Chaplin absurdities in motion picture theatres – a sudden mental impulse manifesting itself simultaneously practically throughout the length and breadth of the land. It is therefore important, though the incident in itself appears trivial, to establish the exact extent of the Chaplin wave and, so far as it may be traced, local causerie [sic].⁴³

We have two revealing glimpses of how audiences of the time received Chaplin’s films. At Christmas 1916, an unprecedented experiment was undertaken at the New Jersey State Prison. A film – inevitably a Charlie Chaplin comedy – was shown to 1200 prisoners in the prison chapel.

Of course there were some among the more recent arrivals at the prison who were more or less familiar with Charlie and his movements and those who knew him only by reputation. There was a great number, however, to whom he was entirely an unknown personage, and for these the film held the largest measure of delight.

It is doubtful if merriment was ever before in the institution’s history unloosed in such abundant stores within its grim walls. Men whose faces had become set and hardened through constant contact with the harsh phases of life gave way to smiles when Charlie and his million dollar feet and funny hat and cane ambled into their visions, and they made no effort to subdue their mirth … ⁴⁴

The Memphis Tennessee Appeal (17 June 1917) reported:

The boy or girl who has not picked his or her favorite of the film world is lost forever in the estimation of his friends. Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin are household companions. Boys speak to Charlie like he had for years been a companion in arms. It is interesting to hear the conversation carried on with Charlie at some of the suburban picture theatres. The boys call to him and express their approval over certain things that he does and their disapproval of the things that he does not do. They bid him goodnight as though he was present in person. His astral body does the same work on the screen that his physical personality is expected to do.

There was more concrete evidence of Chaplin’s unique appeal in Photo-play News on 3 March 1917: several cinema managements reported that after two weeks’ run of Chaplin comedies it had been necessary to tighten up the bolts in the theatre seats, since the audience had laughed so hard that the vibration had loosened them.

A more irksome kind of flattery was the surge of Chaplin imitators, even including Chaplin’s old Karno colleague Stan Jefferson (later Stan Laurel), who was touring the vaudeville circuits with an act called ‘The Keystone Trio’, in which he imitated Chaplin while two other old Karnoites impersonated Mabel Normand and Chester Conklin. Counterfeit Charlies in films were more damaging, however. The most persistent Chaplin imitator was the Russian-born Billy West (1893–1975, born Roy Weissberg), who made some fifty one- and two-reelers of quite competent quality in 1917–18. West’s dedication to his impersonation was said to extend to sleeping with his hair in curlers and to emulating Chaplin’s left-handed violin technique. Supporting players in West’s ‘King Bee’ films included the former Chaplin collaborators Charley Chase and Leo White, while Oliver Hardy provided the ‘heavy’ – the equivalent of Eric Campbell.

Billy Ritchie (1874–1921) was an old Karno colleague who had originated the part of the drunk in Mumming Birds in 1903. Arriving in America in 1905, he continued to specialize in comedy drunk roles, and had a successful stage career for eight years. In July 1914, he had the ill fortune to fall in with Chaplin’s old Keystone enemy, Henry Lehrman, who had just seceded from Sennett to set up the L-Ko Motion Picture Company. Lehrman engaged Ritchie as principal comedian, and persuaded him to adopt a character which, though not an exact imitation of Chaplin, was undeniably Chaplinesque. Ritchie defended his prior right to this character; a letter from his lawyers dated 2 January 1915 states: ‘Ritchie in his statement says that he first used the present make-up (of which he affirms “I am the originator; also of this kind of comedy”) in the year 1887.’⁴⁵

The association with Lehrman was certainly ill-fated. Twice Ritchie received severe injuries while working on the L-Ko lot (the second time he was attacked by an ostrich) and died as a result in 1921. He had entrusted his financial affairs to Lehrman and had told his widow Winifred and his young daughter Wyn that they would be provided for when he died. In fact they found themselves penniless. Chaplin seems to have had no lasting animus against Ritchie as he had against his other imitators, and the comedian’s dependants found a helpful friend in Alfred Reeves, who by the time of Ritchie’s death was Chaplin’s general manager. Winifred Ritchie supported herself by her skill in making costumes and was to work from time to time at the Chaplin Studio.

In November 1917, Chaplin found himself obliged to file a suit against a number of his imitators. His suit was described as ‘the most sweeping known to motion picture circles’. Against the Otis Lithograph Company, the Motion Picture Film Company, the Big A Film Company and several individuals he sought a permanent injunction against Chaplin imitations, the suppression of pictures in which he had supposedly appeared, and damages amounting to $250,000. Another action against the F. F. F. Amusement Corporation sought the suppression of a spurious Chaplin picture called The Fall of the Rummy-Nuffs. A third was directed against the New Apollo Feature Film Company and sought to restrain them from releasing Charlie in a Harem and Charlie Chaplin in a Son of the Gods. The injunctions were granted in all three cases.

Chaplin’s managers have found a new way to insure the authenticity of his pictures. He will be the first screen artist to sign his plays and his signature will appear at the start of each one.

If Charlie gets his damages, and he certainly appears to deserve them, it will be rather a good thing for the motion picture industry. For where is the incentive for an actor to work and establish a type, if imitators can wait until the type is perfected and appropriate it for their own?⁴⁶

While Chaplin was still at Mutual, there was a startling reminder of his boyhood. In the autumn of 1917, Edna received a letter from Hannah Chaplin’s long-lost son by Leo Dryden:

Royal Opera House,
Bombay, INDIA.

September 8th 1917

Dear Miss Purviance,

Kindly excuse the liberty I take in writing to you, but I am sending you this letter in the hope that you will assist me in my hitherto futile attempts to obtain recognition and acknowledgement from my half-brother, Charles Chaplin, for whose Company I believe you are Leading Lady. Now do not throw this letter aside, but kindly read every word very carefully and pay attention to my story, which I will tell you as shortly as possible.

My father is Leo Dryden, the famous British Music Hall Star. I came out to India in January 1912 with his Vaudeville Company, and on his return to England I stayed in India and have been here, in Burma, China, Japan, Straits Settlements, Philippine Islands, Federated Malay States, etc. ever since, touring with various travelling theatrical companies. I am at present the Principal Comedian of the Charles Howitt and A. Phillips Dramatic and Comedy Repertoire Company, which position I have occupied for the last three years or thereabouts. When the Company was in Singapore (Straits Settlements) in September 1915, that is to say, two years ago, I heard from my father for the first time since his return to England from India, and in his letter he mentioned that my half-brother, Charlie Chaplin, had been making a great name for himself in Cinema work in America. Well, when I read this you can imagine my surprise, for my father had always kept the secret of my birth unknown to me, and had always evaded any questions on the subject that I had put to him when a boy. I immediately wrote to my Dad and asked him for further particulars of my birth and of my relationship to Charlie Chaplin, which he sent me in a letter received at Calcutta a few months later. He explained how my mother was a certain Lily Harley, an impersonator of Variety Artistes in her day, with whom he had lived as man and wife, and to whom I had been born, an illegitimate child! He told me how she had been the wife of Charles Chaplin (Senior) who was the father of the present Charlie Chaplin, and how she had lived with another man previously, a certain Sidney Hawke, who was the father of her other son, the eldest, who now calls himself Sid Chaplin! In this way you will see, Miss Purviance, Charlie Chaplin is my mother’s only legitimate son, and that Sid and myself are both illegitimate. All this I have since had corroborated by my Aunts Jessie, Ada and Louie, and my Grandfather, who is still alive. They all remember my mother, and Charlie and Sid, so you see I am no imposter, Miss Purviance.

On receipt of Dad’s letter I wrote a nice long letter to Charlie (he was with the Essanay Company in Chicago at the time) and sent him my photograph, and told him all about myself and what I was doing in India and the Far East, and of my work with the Howitt-Phillips Company, and congratulated him on his great success in America, and told him that it was not my fault that I had not acknowledged him years ago when he was a poorly paid Comedian in Fred Karno’s Company in England, but that I had always been kept in ignorance of the circumstances of my birth, and that I hoped he would be glad to hear from me, but judge my surprise when I didn’t get a reply from Charlie. I wrote again, and again, and again, from various places in the Far East when the Company was touring, but still failed to get any acknowledgement from him. Then I wrote to Sid and told him to explain to Charlie, what I had already explained to him time after time, and that was, that it was not my fault that I had not acknowledged him in the old days, and that I did not write to him now that he had made such a success because I wanted any of his money, but because I wanted his FRIENDSHIP and brotherly interest in my work. Sid did not reply either! This was curious, for I had previously heard from a friend of mine in London that when Sid had been playing at the Empress Theatre, Brixton, London, in one of Fred Karno’s Companies, he had particularly asked after me, and had wondered where I was.

And so, Miss Purviance, this ridiculous farce has continued for two solid years! Neither Charlie or Sid will acknowledge me as their own flesh and blood! For Charlie there might be some excuse, for LEGALLY I am nothing to him, except an illegitimate half-brother. But I am surprised at Sid’s conduct, for HE IS IN THE SAME POSITION AS REGARDS HIS RELATIONSHIP TO CHARLIE AS MYSELF! If Charlie has seen it fit to publicly acknowledge Sid as not only his half-brother, but his BROTHER, and allowed him to use his name too, then surely he can at least ACKNOWLEDGE me, his other half-brother? I don’t want his money, I only want his friendship and brotherly interest and encouragement. Surely I am not asking much?

And so, Miss Purviance, I am asking you to intercede with Charlie on my behalf, and let me know what he says. I am sure that I have acted in a perfectly honourable and straightforward manner throughout the whole proceedings, and I am only asking for a little courteous treatment. I am enclosing you a couple of photographs of myself impersonating Charlie, in which you will see the striking family resemblance, although on account of my nose being rather longer than Charlie’s, I am more like Sid in features, though not so stout, for I gauge that he is stout by some of his ‘Keystone’ pictures that I have seen. I also send you one of my private photos, which I hope you will accept with my very best wishes and sincere regards. All three of us have good teeth, you will notice, though Charlie’s are better than Sid’s and mine.

I celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of my birthday last month (August the thirty-first – last day) and begin to feel quite old and responsible. I am like my father in disposition, very ambitious and determined, and like him have made what little reputation I have amongst the theatrical world in India and the East, entirely on my own merits. My Dad is not ashamed to acknowledge that he started as a singer in the streets, and has had to work his way up to the top. Of course he is getting on in years now (fifty-four or thereabouts) and cannot command the high salary he once used to. No doubt you have heard some of his famous songs: The Miner’s Dream of Home, which all Britishers sing on New Year’s Eve throughout the world where the English language is spoken: India’s Reply: Bravo! Dublin Fusiliers (written at the time of the Boer War); Josephine (written on the famous Napoleonic play ‘A Royal Divorce’); The Skipper’s Daughter; Mercia (written on the famous play ‘The Sign of the Cross’) and a host of others, most of his own writing and composition.

Well, My Dear Miss Purviance, I will not bore you further with my letter but leave myself entirely in your hands. Please do your best for me in your chat with Charlie. Explain things as I have explained them to you, and then write and tell me what he has to say on the matter.

Trusting to be favoured with your friendship,
Believe me,
Very Sincerely Yours,
Wheeler Dryden

(Son of the famous Leo Dryden and half-brother of Charlie Chaplin).

P.S. Send your reply to:- c/o Thos. Cook & Son, Calcutta, India. It will be re-directed to where I am at the time.⁴⁷

It is unlikely that the gentle and generous Edna failed to respond to so touching an appeal. Certainly Chaplin and Sydney were eventually to recognize their long-lost half-brother. In the mid-1920s Wheeler Dryden visited Hollywood and was reunited with the mother from whom he had been snatched more than thirty years before, and who had by this time been resettled in California. Subsequently he assisted Sydney on an abortive project to establish a production organization in England. In 1939, he was to become a regular member of the staff of the Chaplin Studio, where he remained until Chaplin’s final departure from the USA.

It was about this time that Chaplin and Edna began to drift apart. They had been so close and dependent on each other that it is hard to see what led Edna, apparently so loyal and loving, to be unfaithful. Was it perhaps that, like other women after her, she eventually succumbed to jealousy over the one insuperable rival, the ruling passion in Chaplin’s life – his work – and wanted to retaliate? Reflecting on the matter in his autobiography, nearly half a century after the event, Chaplin recalled, ‘I blamed myself for having neglected her at times.’

The autobiography makes clear the pain he felt at the break, and his forlorn hope of a reconciliation – difficult as that was with his need for exclusive and undivided love. Even so he could see an element of comedy in the circumstances in which he discovered Edna’s infidelity. In 1917 they had begun to enter more into the social life of Hollywood, with the unavoidable dinners and galas in aid of the Red Cross and other war charities. Unused to this kind of gathering, Edna tended to become jealous when other women monopolized Chaplin, and devised an innocent if eventually rather irritating ruse. She would disappear, stage a faint and on coming round ask for Chaplin. One night, however, at a party given by the beautiful actress Fanny Ward, she asked instead for Thomas Meighan, a Hollywood actor just coming into vogue at that moment. Ten years older than Chaplin and married, Meighan had initially trained as a doctor, but then embarked on a long stage career before ending up in the movies. Chaplin was not unreasonably suspicious and jealous. There was a showdown (during which Edna hurt him by saying there was nothing that need prevent them from being ‘good friends’) and a reconciliation, but subsequently Chaplin found that Edna was still seeing Meighan. From this time, the most fulfilling love of Chaplin’s early life was at an end.

The loss was no less to Edna herself. The affair with Meighan, such as it was, was brief. Afterwards, though their working relationship apparently continued as cordial and fruitful as before, Edna never again sought to play a part in Chaplin’s private life. Her devotion, though, revived and continued to the end of her life.⁴⁸ She continued painstakingly to collect every newspaper item about Chaplin’s activities. This touching archive and testimony of affection, which also includes Wheeler’s letter, survives in the collection of the late Inman Hunter, now housed in the British Film Institute.

‘Alphabeticature’ self-portrait by Wheeler Dryden.