7
Penalties and Rewards of Independence
The Adventurer, released on 22 October 1917, concluded the contract with Mutual. Unlike the Essanay relationship, it ended amicably on both sides: the company had sagely remained patient through the increasingly lengthy delays between releases. In fact Mutual offered a million dollars for eight more films, but Chaplin realized that he needed still greater independence if he was to achieve the standards of which he knew he was capable. Sydney was again sent off shopping for a new contract. On the way to New York in April 1917 he stopped off in Chicago and spoke to the press:
All the big film companies are now negotiating with me for Charlie’s services, and I am just waiting for the best offer. We are in no hurry but I hope to be able to sign him up before leaving New York this time.
The best offer we have had so far is $1,000,000 for eight pictures. We are also considering forming our own producing company, but haven’t been able to arrange satisfactory releasing arrangements, so probably will not enter the field as producers for several months.
There is one thing that will be stipulated in the articles of all Charlie Chaplin contracts hereafter, and that is that Charlie be allowed all the time he needs and all the money for producing them the way he wants. No more of this sixty-mile-an-hour producing stuff will be seen in the Chaplin films from now on. Charlie has made enough money now so that he doesn’t have to worry. He is able to either dictate his own terms or sit back and bide his time.
Hereafter the Chaplin pictures will take from two to three times longer to produce than they do now. The settings and stage properties will be the finest. It is quality, not quantity that we are after. After we have made a scene and it isn’t up to the new Chaplin quality, it will be made over. And then, if the whole reel doesn’t satisfy Charlie, it will not be released, no matter what money is offered, but thrown into the discard where it belongs.
A close observer of late probably has noticed the increased quality of Chaplin pictures. Charlie has been bringing out more and more new stuff, and he has a great deal more to bring out. The new pictures will be surprises even for the most ardent Chaplin fans.
Also the films hereafter, instead of being just a series of comical stunts or humorous situations, will have a continuous story running through them, with a beginning gradually rising to a climax and winding up with the catastrophe.
We are in the field now for real scenarios. We want the best, and are now negotiating with some of the finest writers in the country to prepare them for us. We have the money to buy what we want, and will be most discriminating in selecting from what is offered.
The next Chaplin series will be wonders. They will be improved upon in every way from those that have gone before. The supporting casts will be greatly strengthened.
Either in this next series, or in those that we plan producing ourselves, I myself will play with Charlie. I have a great many things that are new and will go big, and the two of us, with a strong supporting cast, good stories and good directing and scenery, will be unbeatable.
Charlie and I talked it over before I left Los Angeles on this trip, and we concluded that it was up to us to make the name Chaplin stand for all that there is in true and wholesome comedy, no matter what some of the producing companies want. That is why I am going to take plenty of time before signing the next contract.1
Strategically, Sydney could not have chosen a better moment to go to New York. The film industry was on the point of a revolution, and Chaplin was to be a significant player in it. The most influential figure in industry politics was, and was long to remain, Adolph Zukor. Zukor had arrived in the United States as an immigrant the year before Chaplin was born. He had gone into the fur trade, made a killing by inventing a patent clip for fox furs, and then early in the century entered the nickelodeon business. In 1973, on his hundredth birthday, he was still around to pass judgement on the movies: ‘There is nothing wrong with Hollywood that good pictures will not cure.’
Zukor was the first to perceive that the key to domination of the film industry lay with the stars. Having captured the unchallenged sweetheart of the box office, Mary Pickford, by the beginning of 1917, Zukor’s Paramount Pictures Corporation was on the way to achieving a monopoly of the nation’s first-run theatrical outlets. This would enable him to raise his rental rates without restraint. A group of prominent exhibitors, led by Thomas L. Tally and John D. Williams, decided to fight Zukor by creating an organization to buy, or make, and distribute pictures of its own. The new organization, First National Exhibitors’ Circuit, had its inaugural meeting in April 1917. The timing was perfect. Nothing could have given First National a finer send-off than the announcement two months later that they had captured Chaplin and that their arrangement with him was of a kind likely to be much more attractive to other stars than any which Zukor’s Paramount-Artcraft could offer.
Chaplin was to become his own producer, contracted to make for First National eight two-reel comedies a year. First National would advance $125,000 to produce each negative, with the star’s salary included in the sum. If the films were longer than two reels, First National would advance $15,000 for each additional reel. The company was also to pay for positives, trade advertising and various other incidentals. The cost of distribution was set at 30 per cent of the total rentals, and after all costs were recouped, First National and Chaplin were to divide net profits equally.
The contract involved protracted negotiations between First National and Sydney, aided by Charlie’s lawyer, Nathan Burkan, and was completed late in June 1917. Sydney’s doggedness in fighting for Charlie’s advantage at this time was the more remarkable since he was having troubles of his own. His wife Minnie had undergone a dangerous operation in Sterns Hospital in New York: in the second month of pregnancy a growth was discovered in her stomach and its removal involved the loss of the child. She was told that she would be able to have future pregnancies, but in fact the couple were to remain childless. Moreover, Sydney was fighting to gain for Charlie an independence which privately made him nervous. Whatever he might say to the press about his brother’s perfectionism, as long as they worked together he would be uneasy at Charlie’s disregard for cost in his single-minded pursuit of quality.
On 3 July Sydney wrote:
Well Charlie, I hope you were satisfied with the contract. Burkan and I tried to think of every little thing we could to put in, and I think everything of importance has been covered. During the discussion of the terms of the contract, the subject of a second negative came up. The other side were of opinion that you should include a second negative for the sum arranged as only a limited number of prints could be obtained from the one negative, besides the risk of losing some in the event it would be necessary to ship it abroad. I tried to evade the provision of a second negative, but as they had been very lenient with all our other clauses in the contract and had raised very few objections I did not wish to appear too grabbing, so offered to provide a second negative if they would pay half the cost which they agreed to. I told them the cost of film and cameraman would be about $1000 per picture, but I very much doubt whether it will cost so much as that. Anyway they agreed to pay an extra $500 a picture, so under the circumstances, if you will take my advice, you will use three cameras on your pictures in the future. I certainly think it is worth the added cost to have a brand new negative locked away for the future, especially as the rights to the pictures revert to you after five years, and I feel sure they have a great future value.
There was one other point that was discussed strongly during the framing of the contract, and that was that instead of them paying you the $200,000 in advance, the money should be deposited in escrow until you had carried out your contract. Even Burkan agreed with them in this but I stood pat and insisted that the cash should be paid without any restrictions. I had mother’s old saying well in mind, that ‘possession is nine points of the law’ so they eventually agreed after a long discussion. How did you like the clause about the extra reel? Getting that by pleased me more than anything. I was racking my brains all the way up in the train trying to think how I could raise the price of your pictures even more than I had agreed upon, and yet not break my word with them, when the thought occurred to me, why not make them pay for extra footage. I remembered how difficult it was for you to cut your picture down to footage, and how in doing so you were often compelled to sacrifice a lot of good business and sometimes whole factions.2 Here was a chance to not only get them to accept a picture if by chance it should run over two thousand feet, but at the same time make them pay for it. Of course I did not tell them that you had great difficulty in cutting your pictures to two thousand feet. On the contrary I said that many a time you had a story that would make an excellent three-reel picture, but you were compelled to make it a mediocre two reeler, due to the restrictions of your past contracts, but I also impressed them strongly with the fact that by making a three reeler, it would naturally take a great deal more money and time, so with that I raised the price another fifteen thousand dollars per picture which should pay for the cost of your production, and if you are wise, every picture will run about 2500 feet.
Well Charlie, everyone in town here seems to be remarking about the much better class work you are turning out now. I am glad to hear it and I hope you will keep it up and above all refrain from any vulgarity. We must try and frame up a bunch of good stories for the next year and above all, decide and know exactly what you are going to do before the sets are ordered. Have you decided where you are going for your holiday? Marcus Loew I think would be glad to take a trip with you somewhere … 3
There is a hint of reproach in Sydney’s remark about Charlie’s need to make up his mind what he is going to do before building his sets, and an optimism that was quickly to be dashed in his hope that the films could be made at a cost within the supplementary advance for an extra reel. Though he never adopted Sydney’s wily but somewhat impractical advice about shooting with three cameras, Charlie profited by First National’s demand that he make two negatives. Throughout the rest of his career in silent films he always shot with two cameras. The wisdom of this precaution was proved when the second negative of The Kid was accidentally destroyed by fire in the late summer of 1938.
Marcus Loew did not have the pleasure of taking a trip with Chaplin. Having finished The Adventurer Charlie took off for Hawaii accompanied by Edna, his secretary-valet Tom Harrington, and Rob Wagner, who had become a regular member of the immediate entourage. A teacher of Greek and art, Wagner became fascinated by Chaplin and had hoped to use this trip to embark on a biography. Instead he worked for a period as press representative and wrote a number of very perceptive articles on Chaplin’s screen persona.
The party left in August and stayed five weeks. The affair with Edna seemed already to have ended, but perhaps there was some forlorn hope on one side or the other that the holiday might revive it. Chaplin, though, was eager to get back. Before he left he had approved plans for his new studio and was impatient to start construction. The site was a five-acre plot which had been the home of a Mr R. S. McClennan, on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and La Brea Avenue. At the north side of the property stood a handsome ten-roomed house in colonial style, which initially Chaplin thought of using as his own residence. Instead, Sydney and Minnie lived there for a time. The site was then a good mile away from the usual studio quarter, in one of Hollywood’s best residential districts; at first there was considerable local alarm at this encroachment by the movie folk. Film studios of that period tended to be no asset to a community: mostly they were dreadful agglomerations of tumble-down outhouses, corrugated iron, flapping canvas diffusers supported on crazy structures of girders, the whole protected by flimsy timber fences. Chaplin’s Lone Star Studio had been one of the more presentable examples.
However, Chaplin’s plans completely won over the elite of La Brea and De Longpre Avenues. The exposed elevations were designed to look like a row of English cottages. The local aesthetes were bound to admit that the irruption of an Olde English village street on Sunset ‘was not only conferring distinction on the neighborhood, but was considerably improving it’. The cottages served as offices, dressing rooms and work rooms, and the elevation that faced into the studio was more functionally designed in the style of Californian bungalows. The grounds were laid out with lawns and gardens, and there was a large swimming pool. The production facilities were the best that money could buy.
The stage will be unusually large, and for months Mr Chaplin has been studying a new diffusing system which will dispense with the old coverings and at the same time will cope with all the climatic conditions of the Pacific coast.
The site of the new studio was purchased for the sum of $30,500,4 but Mr Chaplin plans the investment of $500,000 in beautifying his property.
Charlie and Sydney broke the first sod in November, with an informal and unpublicized ceremony witnessed by the permanent cast and unit. During the three months it took to build the studio Rollie Totheroh filmed its progress. His shots of the daily growth of the cottage façades, when cut together as stop-action, provided an amusing effect of a magical mushroom growth. When everything was more or less ready, Chaplin shot more film to show off the facilities of the studio. He was filmed arriving in his car and going to his dressing room to get into his costume and make-up. Tom Harrington is seen solemnly opening a safe and taking out the studio’s ‘most priceless possessions’, Charlie’s derby and boots, and then being reprimanded for failing to treat them with the proper reverence. The dreadful boots are then delicately placed on a cushion. On the stage (at this time almost bare of sets or scenery) the company, including Henry Bergman, Albert Austin and the diminutive Loyal Underwood, hide their playing cards and take up suitably industrious attitudes. Chaplin supervises a rehearsal, and delicately and repeatedly instructs a gigantic actor how to strangle Loyal Underwood. Other scenes show Chaplin attending to the hairdressing of an actress, and fun and games at the pool.
At some point during the First National contract Chaplin seems to have had the idea of putting this material together as a two-reeler to be called How To Make Movies, but perhaps First National would not accept it as a substitute for regular comedy. Parts of the material were used by Chaplin as an introduction to a later reissue of a compilation of First National films, The Chaplin Revue. In 1982, Kevin Brownlow and David Gill edited the whole film together, using the continuity indicated by a surviving title list.
In January 1918, Alf Reeves arrived from England to join the studio staff. Since the start of the war he had been touring Britain with the Karno companies, ‘thrashing the old horse Mumming Birds to pieces still’. He had kept up a fairly regular correspondence with the Chaplin brothers, giving them news of Karno and all their old colleagues, and reporting on the reception of Chaplin’s new fame. In January 1916 he wrote to Chaplin, ‘I always, as you know, expected big things of you, but never dreamed of the extent of the popularity you would enjoy.’ In August 1917, he congratulated the brothers on Charlie’s new contract: ‘Everyone’s breath is taken away.’
Alf’s health had not been good, and he had nostalgic memories of California:
I have to be careful, and these winters here are rather trying – you know the old digs – sitting room just warm as long as you keep around the fires – cold when you leave them, and as for the bedrooms – wow. I really miss the good old steam heat in those nice hotel rooms there, where the warmth is equable and distributed all over the house … The little hotel room with its bath, its running water, its elevator, and up to date comfort of it springs to my memory …
When Sydney suggested that there might be a job for him at the new studios Alf leapt at the chance:
When you tell me there is a probability of Charlie embarking on his own account next year, and that he might think of a way to fix me up you fill me full of good hopes. There is nothing I should like more than a long sojourn in the land of Sun. Warm weather and I agree. Venice, Los Angeles, is one of my ideal spots on this earth. Your suggestion, even, of the bungalow, with its car ride to town, is far too good to be true I am afraid – especially the Automobile part of it, but then, say I, what’s the matter with the streetcar …?
So when you are again conversing with Charlie, and thoughts turn this far – if there is anything to suit me – you know about the extent of my humble qualifications – here we are all ready and willing – two of us. Amy is a good cook – Charlie knows – ask him … We used to indulge in beefsteak and kidney puddings, and used to do some scoffing … There are no bones in a beefsteak and kidney pudding. If there had been – I’m sure we would have eaten them. It was Charlie’s favourite dinner.
At the end of August 1917 Chaplin offered Reeves a job at the studio, and he at once handed his resignation to Karno and set about making arrangements for sailing. Even though he was forty-eight and so too old for military service, there was some difficulty in obtaining the necessary visas from the Foreign Office. But at last, just after Christmas 1917, Alf and Amy set sail. Apart from his managerial duties, Alf was to make brief acting appearances in A Dog’s Life and Shoulder Arms.
When the studio was completed Chaplin decided that it would be good for public relations to open it up to the public, and 2000 people signed the visitors’ book in January 1918. A disagreeable incident which resulted from this undoubtedly contributed to Chaplin’s secrecy and suspicion in later years. Two people who had represented themselves as journalists spent three days in the studio before they were detected eavesdropping outside a production meeting. When they were searched they were found to be in possession of a series of eight sketches of the completed sets for A Dog’s Life, stenograph notes of story discussions, and descriptions of characters and costumes. In view of the extent to which Chaplin’s films were improvised and altered until the very last day of production, his claim that it had cost an estimated $10,000 to scrap the material already planned must be regarded as exaggeration. However, the incident was taken seriously enough for all visitors to be banned for the future.
Everything was ready for shooting to start on 15 January 1918. The first production was provisionally titled I Should Worry; only when it was completed did Chaplin decide on an alternative title, A Dog’s Life. It remains one of his most perfect films. The great pioneer French critic Louis Delluc (1890–1924) called it ‘the cinema’s first total work of art’. It is as fast-paced and prodigal of gags as a Karno sketch; its individual scenes cohere into a purposeful structure; at the same time it has a harder core of reality than any film that Chaplin had made before. It is about street life, low life, poverty and hunger, prostitution and exploitation. Without pretension and without sacrificing anything of its comic verve, Chaplin drives home the parallel between the existence of a stray dog, Scraps, and two human unfortunates – Charlie the Tramp and Edna, the bar singer. A Dog’s Life, said Photoplay ‘though only a grimy little backyard tableau, ranks with the year’s few real achievements’.
Charlie the Tramp’s battle with other applicants for the few available jobs at the Employment Office is compared with Scraps’s furious struggle over a bone with a horde of bigger and fiercer dogs. The two strays adopt each other and prove an effective partnership in filching a meal from Syd Chaplin’s lunch-wagon. They chance into the Green Dragon, described by a critic of the day as ‘a dance hall of the character for which Coney Island, New York’s Bowery and the Tenderloin of Chicago were famous some twenty years ago, where the “celebrities” of the underworld gave and took fractured skulls as nightly souvenirs’. It is there that they meet Edna, and become rich by outwitting a couple of crooks who have stolen the wallet of a passing drunk.
A Dog’s Life has a strange and charming little coda. The last image of Charlie’s escape from the crooks ends on an iris-in. This is followed by an iris-out on a vast ploughed field. Charlie, in a big straw hat, astride a ridge between the furrows, waddles along, dibbing holes with his fore-finger and planting a seed in each. He looks up and waves happily towards the camera and to Edna, awaiting him in their idyllic little cottage, all cretonne and ‘Home Sweet Home’. A cradle stands beside the fire and the couple gaze into it with pride. The audience is permitted to jump to the obvious conclusion before the interior of the cradle is revealed: here lies a proud Scraps amongst a litter of puppies. The pride is not unjustified – in earlier scenes Scraps’s maleness has been more than evident.
Charlie had perceived the comic possibilities of dogs at least as early as The Champion – and Sydney, as we have seen, had introduced canine comedy into Karno’s Flats sketch years earlier. More than a year before he began A Dog’s Life, in December 1916, the newspapers were carrying the headline ‘Chaplin Wants A Dog with Lots of Comedy Sense’. Chaplin told the reporters:
For a long time I’ve been considering the idea that a good comedy dog would be an asset in some of my plays, and of course the first that was offered me was a dachshund. The long snaky piece of hose got on my nerves. I bought him from a fat man named Ehrmentraut, and when Sausages went back to his master I made no kick.
The second was a Pomeranian picked up by Miss Purviance, who had him clipped where he ought to have worn hair and left him with whiskers where he didn’t need ’em. I got sick of having ‘Fluffy Ruffles’ round me so I traded the ‘Pom’ for Helene Rosson’s poodle. That moon-eyed snuffling little beast lasted two days.
After this he was reported to have tried a Boston bull terrier, and in March 1917 he was said to have been seen in the company of a pedigree English bulldog called Bandy, whose grandmother, appropriately, was Brixton Bess. ‘What I really want,’ he said, ‘is a mongrel dog. The funniest “purps” I ever set eyes on were mongrels. These studio beasts are too well kept. What I want is a dog that can appreciate a bone and is hungry enough to be funny for his feed. I’m watching all the alleys and some day I’ll come home with a comedy dog that will fill the bill.’ If the news reports are to be believed, after starting work on A Dog’s Life Chaplin had taken into the studio twenty-one dogs from the Los Angeles pound. In response to complaints from the neighbours, however, the city authorities insisted that he reduce the number to twelve. The studio petty cash accounts show entries for dogs’ meat starting from the second week of production and continuing until the end of shooting. The eventual star of the film, a charming little mongrel called Mut (or Mutt), became resident and remained on the staff until his untimely death.
Even at this critical early period of his career as an independent, Chaplin was apparently always ready for extemporization or distraction. He had to be, for his studio was to become a place of pilgrimage for the famous in all walks of life who chanced to be in Los Angeles. Harry Lauder (1870–1950), the great Scottish comedian who had rocketed to stardom in the British music hall about the time that Chaplin was touring with the Eight Lancashire Lads, was playing the Empress Theatre. He came to call on 22 January 1918. All work stopped while the two comedians fraternized. Over lunch they decided to make a short film together, there and then, in aid of the Million Pound War Fund to which Lauder had dedicated his efforts following the death of his son at the front in December 1916.5
In the afternoon the two cameras were set up and 745 feet of film (approximately twelve and a half minutes) were shot while the two comedians fooled around. Lauder put on Chaplin’s derby and twirled his cane, while Chaplin adopted Lauder’s tam-o’-shanter and knobbly walking stick; each impersonated the other’s characteristic comedy walk – Chaplin a good deal more successfully than Lauder. There was more business with a bottle of whisky and a blackboard on which they drew caricatures of each other. The pièce de résistance was the old music hall ‘William Tell’ gag. Chaplin placed an apple on Lauder’s head and then prepared to shoot it with a pistol. Each time Chaplin’s back was turned, however, Lauder would take a great bite out of the apple, reducing it to an emaciated core before Chaplin had a chance to take aim. Each time Chaplin turned to throw a suspicious glance, Lauder’s face would freeze into blank, immobile innocence. The two comedians optimistically told the press that they anticipated the film would raise a million dollars for the fund. They were disappointed: it is not certain whether the public even saw the film, if, indeed, it was finished.
The T-shaped street set first seen in Easy Street, which, variously re-dressed to suit the current needs, was to remain for twenty years the central and essential location for Chaplin’s comic world, was erected in the new studio. In A Dog’s Life Chaplin fixes on this little plot of ground all the mean streets of every city in the world. Methley Street and all the other back ways of Kennington which he had wandered as a boy are clearly the inspiration, just as they were for Easy Street. Yet Chaplin discovers here something universal, in the mysterious doorways, the loitering bums, the loungers at corners, the sitters on doorsteps, the traders with their flimsy stalls only waiting for pilferers or for inevitable catastrophe which will upend them with avalanches of fruit and vegetables. The locale and atmosphere were to prove as recognizable to audiences in London as in Paris, Chicago, Rio or Manila. Yet it is not an abstraction: there is such a local reality in the setting that Chaplin was able to cut from studio shots to scenes filmed on location in the city (there was a day’s shooting of dog scenes in front of the Palace Market) without the difference being evident.
Little pre-planning was possible with the dog scenes. The animals and Charlie set off on the run, and Rollie Totheroh and Jack Wilson, the resourceful cameramen, followed them as best they could. The canine extras were fearsome brutes, and things evidently became somewhat boisterous. After one or two days of work with the dogs, the studio prop people sent out for a large syringe and sixty-five cents’ worth of ammonia to separate the dogs when they became too rough.
After a couple of weeks Chaplin suddenly became dissatisfied with the entire story. His staff had become too accustomed to these abrupt switches of mood to be unduly disconcerted by them. Returning to the studio on Monday morning, 11 February, he announced that they would start on an entirely new film to be called Wiggle and Son. He took a few shots and ordered the property department to buy ant paste, salts and half a dozen snails, for comic purposes which will never now be divined. The next day, however, Wiggle and Son was forgotten, and Chaplin returned with fresh enthusiasm to I Should Worry, as the film was still officially known. (A report in the Scottish supplement of The Bioscope claims that the final title was suggested by a remark of Harry Lauder’s, who told Chaplin, ‘It’s a dog’s life you’re leadin’ these days, Charlie.’)
For the crowd scenes in the dance hall, thirty extras were hired to supplement the stock company and, as usually happened on Chaplin productions, friends and studio staff were recruited from time to time. Alf Reeves and Rob Wagner may be glimpsed, and Sydney’s wife, Minnie Chaplin, played a role. The tough proprietor of the dance hall was played by another new acquaintance of Chaplin’s, Granville Redmond, a successful landscape painter. Redmond was a deaf-mute, but he and his director established a perfect pantomime communication, as his performances in A Dog’s Life and The Kid testify.
Grace Kingsley, a keenly observant journalist of the day, visited the studio during the filming of the dance hall sequence, and recorded her impressions:
It’s coming to be quite the fad to visit the Chaplin Studio – that is, if you can get in. Of course nobody is allowed to visit there. Nobody, that is, except picture magnates and newspaper and magazine representatives and their friends, and fellow artists – of whom there are always some thousands in the city – and all the soldiers and sailors and –
But that’s enough to show you what one of Charlie’s days must be like. And he’s the most astonishing combination of busy artist and gracious, good-natured host …
Catch Charlie in the right mood and he’ll do $10,000 worth of acting for you while you wait. So that, though following Charlie Chaplin around all day is as strenuous as following a soldier at drill, the similarity ends there.
After Charlie has drawn on his funny trousers and shoes and his old shirt, in the privacy of his luxurious dressing room, he finishes making up at a little dressing table on the stage, where he can keep an eye on the dressing of the sets. This happens around 9 o’clock, when the sun encourages photography.
‘If I don’t get this moustache on right, it’s all off,’ grinned Charlie as he carefully combed the crepe and cut it, pasting it on his lip first as a big wad. ‘Got to trim that down, or Chester Conklin will think I’m trying to steal his stuff!’
I’m only one of the many interviewers who call on Charlie, so he talks as he makes up: ‘The day of sausage pictures is over,’ he said. Then he made an important announcement. ‘I shall never again bind myself to the making of two-reel comedies. You must have a story, and it’s got to be a clear story. Otherwise quite naturally the public doesn’t get it. Also you’ve got to have the gags and the jokes and the jazz. You’ve got to grab these out of the air as it were. You don’t know just when or where the ideas come from – and sometimes they don’t!’
Charlie’s make-up being on straight by now and his hat on crooked, he took a peep in his glass and descrying over his shoulders a bunch of soldiers, of course, he had to go over and say ‘Hello’. Some dear ladies of the Red Cross just then entered, and a candy company having contributed a whole shop full of chocolates for Charlie to auction off, he had to pause to be photographed before the collection with some of the Red Cross ladies.
I think Charlie gets most of his inspiration when he is ‘kidding’. He wanted some special idea for that photograph, and he took a dozen different comical poses before, grasping a broom which lay on the set, he hit upon the right idea.
‘The Chocolate Soldier!’ he grinned, as he fell into a funny attitude with the broom as a gun. Then the comedian went over to the dance hall set and called out to Miss Purviance and the other members of the company. He sat down beside the two cameras that are always ranged on the action, and he shut his eyes and put his fingers in his ears.
‘That’s the way he visualizes an idea,’ explained Brother Sid. ‘He sees it on the screen that way.’
A rehearsal – a long and careful rehearsal with Chaplin playing all the parts in turn – followed …
It was lunch time then. So we all went to lunch in Sid’s beautiful house, Charlie and Edna Purviance still in their make-up. After lunch it was discovered that there was one of those awful – what Charlie calls ‘brick walls’ – a dead stop, until a minor snarl in the story and its action was straightened out. For this, Charlie called Charles Lapworth into consultation. Then out came Charlie and kidded around a bit – he does that while he’s waiting for an idea to pop, kept everyone laughing, while in the back of his head all the while was that awful question – the brick wall. Presently it came, the longed-for idea.
He had just started once more for the stage when Carlyle Robinson, his publicity man, came forward, announcing in a fairly awe-struck whisper: ‘The Earl of Dunmore!’
Of course one cannot overlook a real Earl on the busiest day, so Mr Chaplin paused and chatted a few moments. And though the Earl was an Earl, he realized that a comedian is a hard-working person, and so insisted Charlie should go back to work. Anyhow, Earl or no Earl he was probably dying, just like everybody else, to see Charlie at work. So Charlie hopped onto the stage, and, having at last got possession of the longed-for idea, and having escaped all visitors, he set briskly to work. Half an hour, an hour, two hours passed, with no let-up to the filming of scenes. Somebody brought him some mail, which, after opening, he dropped as carelessly as the hero of a motion picture does when thickening the plot with ‘the papers’.
‘He’ll be working like this until he finishes all the scenes he has in mind,’ said Brother Sid, ‘until 6, 7, or even 8 o’clock. And when the cutting begins, he will work all night and all day too.’
You’d think to see him acting out there on the stage, that he was still kidding. Maybe he doesn’t quite know himself, you think.6
Charles Lapworth was an émigré English journalist who had arrived to interview Chaplin, and briefly found a niche in the studio. His own impressions of Chaplin in his dressing room and on the set fill out Grace Kingsley’s description:
He will permit you to sit in his dressing room, and let you do the talking while he affixes the horsehair to make up his moustache. You will notice a violin near at hand, also a cello. And it will be unusual if Charlie does not pick up the fiddle and the bow, and accompany your remarks with an obbligato from the classics, what time he will fix you with a far-away stare and keep you going with monosyllabic responses.
If you run out of remarks before the violinist has come back to earth, and you are curious enough to glance round the luxuriously furnished room, you may judge a little of Charlie’s literary tastes by observing cheek by jowl with Thomas Burke’s Limehouse Nights, Sigmund Freud’s Psychoneurosis and Lafcadio Hearn’s Life and Literature; not on the shelves, but lying around as if they are really being read. On the desk, perhaps, Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger, an allegory that sometimes Charlie will get enthusiastic about; while in the bookcase one may notice that the man who first introduced custard pie into polite argument has not failed to acquaint himself with what the philosophers from way back down to Bergson have had to say about the underlying causes of laughter …
No matter how competent any member of his company may be, he has to acknowledge that when he responds to Charlie’s direction he achieves better results. It is interesting, for instance, to watch him show the big heavy how to be ‘tough’, or a girl, obviously at the moral crossroads, how to look the part. His variety of facial gestures is amazing: he is a king of burlesque.
Sometimes, of course, he strikes a snag, and then he will just disappear off the ‘lot’. The whole works are at a standstill, and there is a hue and cry around the neighboring orange groves. Perhaps two hours afterwards the comedian steals back to the studio, and his return is made known by the soul-stirring strains from his cello. A little later work is resumed, and Charlie will confess that after much prayerful wrestling he has ironed out the kinks …
He frequently interrupts the ‘shooting’ with an impromptu clog dance. He may close his eyes, and with his hands make weird passes of a geometrical character. But nobody gets alarmed. The chief is just inwardly visualizing the camera shots and when he has got the angles worked out to his own satisfaction he gives instructions for the necessary modifications of the set. Like as not he will order it burned; he has changed his mind, and the carpenters have to tear down an elaborate and costly set, unused.
Chaplin is at once the joy and despair of all managers. If he does not feel like work, he won’t work. And he can always fall back on the public for support of his argument that the public are entitled to the best. If he does not feel he is doing his best, he quits and hang the expense. And the thousands of feet of film that he shoots go to waste. Again, that’s nobody’s business but his. He pays for it, and he will declare that if a picture costs him every penny he makes (it took him three months to make his last one), he is still determined to make it as perfect as he can. And, oh the travail of the cutting! Sometimes sixty thousand feet to get two thousand. Only a rewrite man on a newspaper knows what such a boiling down means. Yet Charlie, and Charlie alone, does the cutting. And he ruthlessly condemns to the scrap-heap miles of excellent comedy that would make the fortunes of other comedians.7
For all Chaplin’s extravagance in the pursuit of perfection, the bookkeeping of this first independent production was meticulous; and the daily record of petty cash disbursements is often as amusing as revealing. Everything is detailed, down to the last five cents for ‘beans’, seemingly used by Charlie to represent seeds in the final sequence. A wastage of thirty-five feet of film stock (with a running time of about thirty seconds) calls for detailed explanation in the accounts. There are daily entries for dog meat and for gas and oil for the studio Ford (at nineteen cents a gallon). Prop food and drink – pies, sausages, rolls, ‘tamalies’, chewing gum, beer, near-beer and ginger-ale – also figure large. Henry Bergman played several roles in the film, but his favourite was clearly that of the stout, gum-chewing old lady in the dance hall, whose tears on hearing Edna’s plaintive song drench Charlie. Entries for ‘fur for Bergman – $2.34’ and ‘elastic for Bergman – 30¢’ show that Henry started preparing his costume well ahead of time. On 26 February there is a disconcerting item: ‘Whiskey (Mut) – 60¢’. The explanation is a scene in which Charlie and the dog sleep together on their plot of waste ground. Charlie uses the suspiciously compliant animal as a pillow, energetically plumping him into shape before settling down, and then agitatedly searching the immobile dog for fleas. (‘There are strangers in our midst,’ says one of the film’s few sub-titles.) The item in the petty cash account reveals the secret of Mut’s docility: he was dead drunk.
Shooting was completed on 22 March, when Chaplin used 1792 feet of film to round off 1000 takes and 351,887 feet of film exposed on each of the two cameras. This time Chaplin was forced to accept help with the editing. From 26 to 29 March he stayed night and day in the cutting room with Bergman, the two cameramen and two assistants, Brown and Depew, to help him. Between times he had a last-minute inspiration and shot a charming little scene in which Charlie sits on the steps of a second-hand store and feeds the dog with milk from a near-empty bottle he has found there. When the dog cannot reach the milk with his tongue, Charlie obligingly dips Mut’s tail into the bottle and gives it to him to suck like a pacifier.
With a superhuman effort the cutting was completed late on 31 March, and Chaplin was ready to depart on a Liberty Bond tour the following day. The staff worked on to prepare the negatives. While Chaplin was off on the Bond tour, the staff were instructed to prepare ideas for submission on his return. Mut, sad to say, did not live to see Charlie’s return to California. He had apparently grown so attached to his master that he pined during his absence, refused to eat, and died. He was buried in the studio ground under a little memorial composed of artistically arranged garbage, and with the epitaph: ‘Mut, died April 29th – a broken heart’. His single film role had earned him his small piece of immortality.
The trip east was made in company with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and Rob Wagner. The plan was for the three stars to take part in the official launching of the Third Liberty Bond campaign in Washington, to go on together to New York, and then to split up, Doug and Mary taking on the northern states and Chaplin the southern. Chaplin slept during the first two days of the rail journey. Recovering from his exhaustion, he set to writing his speech and confided to the others his nervousness about making a serious address to a crowd. Doug suggested that he practise on the crowd that gathered around the train at a stop en route but, as the last speaker, he found the train moving off just as he got into his stride, enthusiastically addressing a rapidly receding audience.
In Washington, the party made a triumphal progress through the streets to a football field where a vast crowd had come to hear them. Marie Dressler was on the platform as well, and when Chaplin was carried away by his own eloquence and fell off the platform, he managed to take the ample Marie with him. They fell on top of the young Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Later they were formally presented to President Wilson at the White House. Chaplin felt that he and the President were mutually unimpressed by the encounter.
In New York the excitement was even greater. Crowds began to gather at the junction of Broad and Wall Streets during the morning, and by the time the party arrived around noon on 8 April 1918, it was estimated that between twenty and thirty thousand people were waiting, many clinging to the sides of the Morgan Building and the Stock Exchange and the pillars of the Sub-Treasury. Their speeches were greeted with applause, laughter and shouting; and the crowd went wild when Fairbanks lifted Chaplin onto his shoulders.
Chaplin was wearing a wasp-waisted blue suit, light-top shoes and a black derby. ‘Now listen –’ he began, only to be interrupted by cheers and laughter from the thousands of bankers, brokers, office boys and stenographers. ‘I never made a speech before in my life –’ he continued, and was interrupted again, ‘– but I believe I can make one now!’ The next few words were inaudible, then the crowd settled down, and most of the rest of his words, screamed through a megaphone, were heard:
You people out there – I want you to forget all about percentages in this third Liberty Loan. Human life is at stake, and no one ought to worry about what rate of interest the bonds are going to bring or what he can make by purchasing them.
Money is needed – money to support the great army and navy of Uncle Sam. This very minute the Germans occupy a position of advantage, and we have got to get the dollars. It ought to go over so that we can drive that old devil, the Kaiser, out of France!8
The cheers for this sentiment resounded through several blocks of the city. When the crowd were eventually quiet, Chaplin concluded: ‘How many of you men – how many of you boys, out there, have bought or are willing to buy Liberty Bonds?’ The hand-stretching that followed, said the Wall Street Journal, ‘suggested vividly the latter part of the seventh innings at the Polo Grounds during a World Series.’
The New York trip brought one personal bonus. Marie Doro, the beautiful star of the London production of Sherlock Holmes thirteen years before, was playing in Barbara at the Klaw Theatre, and Chaplin was able to arrange an intimate dinner with her. The impossible dream of the sixteen-year-old who had played Billy the pageboy had come true.
Chaplin’s tour began at Petersburg, Virginia, and took him through North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi. He arrived in New Orleans exhausted and was forced to rest for a few days before completing the tour, and returned home via Texas. In Memphis he found waiting for him a letter from his exasperated studio manager, John Jasper, resigning his post. Chaplin had departed California leaving Jasper’s drawing account for running the studio three weeks in arrears. In reply to Jasper’s protests, he had arranged by cable for a weekly payment of $2000, even though it was previously agreed that the minimum average budget was $3000. ‘I expected of course that I would have the money every week,’ wrote Jasper. ‘The only way any Manager can ever give satisfaction in this job is to have a drawing account. Why don’t you put sufficient funds in the Citizen’s National Bank and stop all this confusion? It is not as if you did not have the money like so many others.’
Chaplin appears not to have been gravely inconvenienced by the departure of Jasper. Alf Reeves was immediately appointed as his successor, and for the next twenty-eight years proved an ideal manager, seemingly never surprised or discomposed by his employer’s caprices.
Chaplin was back in Hollywood in early May and by the end of the month was ready to start his new film, tentatively recorded as ‘Production No 2. Camouflage. 2 reels’, but eventually to be called Shoulder Arms. The notion of Charlie at war was irresistible. From the time of the ‘slacker’ campaign against him, newspaper cartoonists in every country had delighted in speculating on the possibilities of a confrontation between Charlie and the Kaiser. Late in 1917, Chaplin had amused himself by drawing on a postcard – still preserved in one of his scrapbooks – an advertisement for a putative film, Private Chaplin U.S.A.: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen – Charlie in this picture lies [sic] down his cane and picks up the sword to fight for Democracy. Picture produced by Charlie Chaplin Film Corp. Released through First National Exhibitors’ Circuit.’ Chaplin’s collaborators and friends shook their heads about the wisdom of making comedy out of so dreadful an event as the war, the full impact of which Americans had recently begun to experience. Chaplin, nevertheless, always growing more aware of the proximity of comedy, drama and tragedy, was confident.
1918 – Daily production reports on A Dog’s Life, at first called I Should Worry.
1917 – Spanish cartoon depicting Chaplin with the Kaiser.
He seems to have begun the film with a more determined idea of its structure than was customary, though in the event this idea was to be modified. Originally he planned three acts. The first would show Charlie in civilian life, at the mercy of a virago wife, and the father of several children. After a bridging sequence in the recruiting office, the film would show his adventures at the front. The third part was to be ‘the banquet’, with the crowned heads of Europe gratefully toasting Charlie for his gallant capture of the Kaiser. At the end, like Jimmy the Fearless or Charlie in The Bank, he would wake up to the cold reality of the training camp.
When his plans were as certain as this, Chaplin liked to shoot his stories in sequence. He began with the scenes of civilian life, using three child actors, True Boardman Jr, Frankie Lee and Marion Feducha. The angry wife was to remain off screen, her presence indicated only by the occasional flying plate, frying-pan or other missile. As finally assembled, the sequence shows Charlie coming along the street with his three sons. Without any indication he turns into the door of a saloon, leaving them to wait patiently outside. When he rejoins them they all troop home, where he docilely sets about making soup for lunch amidst the bombardments of his unseen spouse. The arrival of the postman with his draft papers comes as a happy release.
The next sequence, which took two weeks to prepare and shoot, shows Charlie’s arrival at the recruiting office for his medical examination. He is told to enter the office and disrobe. Partially stripped, he opens the wrong door and finds himself trapped in a maze of glass-partitioned offices occupied by lady clerks. After much trouble Charlie evades the women. He reads on a door, ‘Dr Francis Maud’. The name makes him still more apprehensive; the doctor turns out to be no lady, however, but the lugubrious Albert Austin, heavily bearded. The examination is seen only in silhouette through the frosted glass panel of the office door. The doctor appears and sticks a gigantic probe into Charlie’s throat, only to have it repeatedly and violently shot back at him. Eventually Charlie swallows the thing entirely and the doctor is obliged to resort to a line and hook to retrieve it. No doubt suggested by memories of the Karno Harlequinade of Christmas 1910, in essence it is a hoary old routine of the vaudeville ‘shadowgraphist’. Chaplin was a master at giving new life to old jokes, though, and when, sixty-five years on, the rediscovered sequence was included in the Unknown Chaplin television series, it proved to have lost none of its verve.
Yet Chaplin was to discard all that he had shot in this first month of work. Such rigorous self-censorship would seem remarkable at any time in the history of the cinema. In 1918, when a month was reckoned time enough to shoot a first-class feature film, it was astounding. Moreover, under the contract with First National, Chaplin personally bore all the production costs. It was his own money that he was prepared to throw away in the cause of perfection. Rightly, though, he knew that he could do better.
The first week of July was devoted to revising the story and building new sets. When shooting was resumed, Chaplin filmed from beginning to end, practically without the breaks to talk over and revise the story which had become and were to remain customary. The most substantial interruption to shooting came on 11 July when Marie Dressler visited the studio, accompanied by the actress Ina Claire. As usual, Chaplin abandoned work with surprising cheerfulness to entertain his old co-star. They posed together for photographs, which show the formidable Marie in Hun-scaring mood in the trench set.
The trench and dug-out are a remarkable abstraction of the reality of the Western Front. When Chaplin reissued Shoulder Arms more than half a century later, he proudly prefaced it with actuality shots of the war, to show how well his set-builders had done. The trench scenes, showing Charlie, Sydney and their companions adapting to front-line conditions – vermin, bad food, homesickness, snipers, rain, mud, floods and fear – took four weeks to shoot. By this time it was high summer. One day the heat was so great that it was impossible to film at all. Chaplin spent four days of this heatwave sweating inside a camouflage tree. His discomfort was rewarded by one of the most deliriously surreal episodes of his career. Charlie scuttles around no-man’s-land in his tree disguise, freezing into arboreal immobility at the approach of a German patrol, and coping ingeniously with a great German soldier with an axe who is bent on chopping him down for firewood. In our last memorable vision of the Charlie-tree it is skipping and hopping off towards a distant horizon. The expanses of no-man’s-land were provided, in those days of a still-rural Hollywood, by the outskirts of Beverly Hills, while Wilshire Boulevard and the back of Sherman provided the forest. Behind Sherman, too, they found a half-buried pipe which suggested a piece of comic business. Charlie bolts, rabbit-like into the pipe; his German pursuers grab his legs, but capture only his boots and his disguise which he has shed like a snake-skin. Following this, rotund Henry Bergman, playing a German officer, gets stuck in the pipe as he goes after Charlie, and has to be broken out. It is not recorded if the Los Angeles sewage authorities ever discovered how their property came to be shattered.
Dedicated to his patriotic role, Chaplin had agreed to donate a short film to the Liberty Bond drive, and now realized that to deliver it on time he would have to interrupt production of Camouflage, which had inevitably overrun its anticipated schedule. On 14 August the unit worked on until 1 a.m., to complete the scenes of Private Charlie’s encounter with Edna, playing a French peasant, in her ruined home. The next day the studio was turned over to making what was identified only as ‘propaganda film’. Eventually titled The Bond, it ran 685 feet (about ten minutes) and was completed in six working days. Sydney appeared as the Kaiser in the costume and make-up he used for Camouflage. Besides Chaplin, the rest of the cast was made up of Edna, Albert Austin and a child called Dorothy Rosher – the future actress Joan Marsh. The film had four episodes, introduced by the sub-title, ‘There are different kind of Bonds: the Bond of Friendship; the Bond of Love; the Marriage Bond; and most important of all – the Liberty Bond.’ The use of simple, stylized white properties against a plain black backdrop gave this curious little film a proto-Expressionist look. It was donated to the government, and distributed without charge to all theatres in the United States in the autumn of 1918. With The Bond out of the way, Chaplin rapidly finished off Camouflage. By 16 September the film was cut, and retitled Shoulder Arms.
Chaplin, now feeling tired, dispirited and depressed by personal troubles, suddenly lost confidence in the film and later claimed that he had seriously thought of scrapping it. He was incredulous when Douglas Fairbanks, having demanded to see it, laughed till the tears ran down his cheeks. Better than any other clown in history, Chaplin was able to prove that comedy is never so rich as when it is poised on the edge of tragedy. He had metamorphosed the real-life horrors of war into a cause for laughter; in the event there was no audience more appreciative of Shoulder Arms than the men who had seen and suffered the reality. Soldier Charlie includes in his kit a mousetrap and a grater which serves as a back-scratcher when the lice grow too assertive. His food parcel from home includes biscuits as hard as ration issue, and a Limburger cheese so high that he uses it like a grenade to bomb and gas the enemy. He takes advantage of passing bullets to open a bottle and light a cigarette. As a sniper, he chalks up his hits – then rubs out the last mark in acknowledgement of a return shot that clips his tin helmet. Even the nightmare of the flooded trenches of the Somme is turned into laughter: Charlie fishes out his submerged pillow to plump it up ineffectually before settling down for the night, and blows out the candle as it floats by on the flood water. One sub-title became a classic joke of the First World War. Asked how he has captured thirteen Germans single-handed, Charlie replies simply and mystifyingly: ‘I surrounded them.’
Just as memorable is the scene where Charlie is the only soldier to receive no letter or parcel in the mail delivery. With misplaced pride he refuses an offer of cake from a luckier comrade and wanders from the dug-out into the trench. There a soldier on guard duty is reading a letter from home. Charlie reads over his shoulder and echoes all the emotions that are passing over the soldier’s face. Though he might make comedy from it, the folly and tragedy and waste of war were always to bewilder and torment Chaplin. One apparently light-hearted scene in Shoulder Arms already hints at a more serious drift of thought. Charlie, having ‘surrounded’ and captured his German prisoners, offers them cigarettes. The common soldiers accept them gratefully, but the diminutive Prussian officer takes a cigarette only to throw it away with contempt. Charlie instantly seizes the little man, lays him across his knee and spanks him soundly. The German soldiers delightedly gather around and applaud. There is a comradeship of ordinary men that transcends the warring of governments and armies.
Shoulder Arms was one of the greatest successes of Chaplin’s career. Around this time, his personal life and marriage to Mildred Harris were less successful. When he met Mildred at a party given by Samuel Goldwyn, probably in the early part of 1918, she was sixteen. Already established as a child actress before she was ten, she was at this time employed at Paramount under the direction of Lois Weber. She still radiated a child-like quality which charmed Chaplin: his feminine ideal had been definitively fixed, it seemed, by his first infatuation with the fifteen-year-old Hetty Kelly. For her part, Mildred seems to have made knowing use of her golden hair, blue eyes and flirtatious prattle. She was presumably not discouraged by her mother, who as wardrobe mistress at the Ince Studios could not but be aware of Chaplin as the most eligible and the most handsome bachelor in Hollywood. Harriette Underhill described his appearance at this time: ‘He talks humorously, he thinks seriously, he dresses quietly and he looks handsome. He has the whitest teeth we ever saw, the bluest eyes and the blackest eye-lashes …’
Soon both Chaplin and the Harrises were coyly fending off enquiries from the press, who were not to be easily put off. On 25 June, the Los Angeles Times reported rumours of an engagement, and the subsequent denials. The following day the Los Angeles Examiner had a fuller and more circumstantial report:
CHAPLIN MARRIAGE RUMOR IS DENIED
Despite rumors that will not die down to the effect that Mildred Harris, the dainty screen favorite, has won the heart of Charlie Chaplin and soon is to be his bride, both the petite actress and her mother Mrs A. F. Harris denied last night the last half of the double-barrelled allegation.
‘No, Mr Chaplin and I are not engaged,’ Miss Harris said last night when she returned to her quarters in the Wilshire Apartments after an evening at his studio. ‘We’re just very dear friends. Why, we’ve only known each other two months and we’ve only been going together a month or so. I’m sure, too, Mr Chaplin will deny the report. We have not discussed the rumor as we have not seen each other for about a week.’
Mrs Harris was much surprised by the report, she said, and added that her daughter was only seventeen years of age and too young to think of marrying.
According to the circulated report in motion picture circles, Chaplin recently conferred with Philip Smalley [i.e. Phillips Smalley, Weber’s husband] of the Lois Weber Studio, where Miss Harris is employed, and asked how her contract would be affected if they should be married. It was said, according to the report, that the marriage would not affect the contract.
Philip [sic] Smalley denied that this reported conference took place.
Mrs Harris stopped her denials shortly after the completion of Shoulder Arms, when Mildred announced that she was pregnant. Chaplin was trapped: he could not possibly risk the scandal of this kind of involvement with a minor. Tom Harrington, his valet, secretary, confidant and general factotum, was told to arrange a registry office marriage for 23 September 1918, after studio working hours. Harrington arranged the affair with the discretion for which Chaplin valued him, and Chaplin now found himself, without any pleasure, a married man. Leaving the Los Angeles Athletic Club, which had been his home practically since he arrived in Hollywood, he rented a house at 2000 De Mille Drive. The lease was only for six months, but long tenancies were hardly appropriate to this marriage. His reaction on seeing the bride-to-be awaiting his arrival at the registry office was, to say the least, not promising: ‘I felt a little sorry for her.’
Edna only knew about the marriage when she read the newspapers the following day, but she accepted the fact with dignity and outward calm. Chaplin recalled that when he went to the studio the morning after, she appeared at the door of her dressing room. ‘Congratulations,’ she said softly. ‘Thank you,’ he replied, and went on his way to his dressing room. ‘Edna made me feel embarrassed.’ Edna did not see Shoulder Arms in the studio projection room with Chaplin, but when he was about to embark for a week of honeymoon on Catalina Island,9 she wrote to him:
To her other qualities Edna added that of being a noble loser. Poor Mildred was, as Chaplin gently put it, ‘no mental heavyweight’. She bored him, and in turn she resented the exclusive single-mindedness of his concentration when he was working. She was annoyed because he would not concern himself with her career, which enjoyed a brief stimulus from the celebrity of being Mildred Harris Chaplin. The worst irony for Chaplin was that the pregnancy which had shot-gunned him into marriage turned out to be a false alarm.
Chaplin was convinced that the marriage debilitated his creative ability, and the acute difficulties he experienced with his next film, Sunnyside, begun under the working title Jack of All Trades, appeared to confirm his fears. Chaplin’s ideas seemed much less clear than usual. He had decided on a rural subject, had turned the studio’s regular street setting into the main thoroughfare of an old-world village and built a set for the lobby of a seedy hotel, in which he was to play the man of all work who gave the film its (provisional) title. The first few days of shooting were spent on location at the Phelps ranch, and the petty cash disbursements that survive from this period are evocative of that far-off, rustic California. Mrs Phelps was paid $3 a day for the use of her ranch, a dollar a day for the hire of a cow, a dollar for repairs to a fence, and thirty cents a head for lunch for the unit in the ranch cook-house. Cowboys and horses were hired from a neighbouring rancher, Joe Floris.
Production began on 4 November, five weeks behind the scheduled starting date, but Chaplin’s desperate lack of a guiding idea was evident from the number of days he took off to ‘talk the story’ with Bergman and the others, and his readiness to seize on any distraction which offered itself. Work was abandoned so that Charlie, Sydney and Minnie Chaplin could lunch with the Bishop of Birmingham, whose visit to the studio was duly filmed. Another day Chaplin reported to the studio but then went off motoring with Carter De Haven in a ‘juvenile racer’. Later in the production the whole company took three days off to go to the air circus in San Diego, vaguely justifying the trip by shooting 2000 feet of film of the event, which was never used. In mid-December, Chaplin cut together what he had already shot, but was so dispirited that he absented himself from the studio altogether. Christmas came but Chaplin did not. Neither he nor Edna was seen at the studio in the first weeks of the New Year, and on 19 January 1919 the studio closed down altogether. In all, Chaplin stayed away from the studio for six weeks. None of his colleagues had ever witnessed him in such severe creative crisis.
Chaplin returned to the studio on 29 January, and announced that the 21,053 feet of film that had been exposed for Jack of All Trades was to be abandoned, and that he intended embarking on a new production to be called Putting It Over. This new project fared no better, however, and the situation was aggravated by a series of rainy days that prevented shooting. Chaplin tested some new actresses, hired a couple of cowboys and horses, a cow, a bull and a stunt man; then, after a few more days, he announced that they would after all resume work on Jack of All Trades, now called Sunnyside.
The studio daily reports tell their own story:
February 21 Did not shoot. Mr Chaplin cutting
February 22 Did not shoot. Mr Chaplin cutting
February 23 Did not shoot. Mr Chaplin cutting
February 25 Did not shoot. Looking for locations
February 26 Did not shoot. Mr Chaplin not feeling well
February 27 Did not shoot. Mr Chaplin cutting
February 28 Did not shoot.
March 1 Did not shoot. Filmed sunset, 100 feet.
March 2 Did not shoot. Talked story
March 4 Did not shoot. Talked story
March 5 Did not shoot. Mr Chaplin sick
March 6 Did not shoot. Mr Chaplin absent
March 7 Shot 376 feet
March 8 Did not shoot. Talked story
Suddenly, in the middle of March, Chaplin was seized either by desperation or by inspiration. By this time he had spent 150 days on the production, two thirds of them idle. Now, however, for three weeks he shot day in and day out, filming well over 1000 feet of film most days, and putting together the elements of a rough and ready but cohesive story. He developed a love interest between Edna and himself, with a rival in the shape of a dashing city slicker who arrives to turn her head with his natty clothes and gallant manners. (Was he turning life into art?)
Sunnyside betrays the strain that went into its completion, and Chaplin and his contemporaries regarded it as one of his least successful pictures. Certainly the comedy is neither so tightly structured nor so firmly motivated as in his other films of this period, but there are interesting departures from Chaplin’s usual manner, quite apart from the experiment of showing Charlie in a bucolic setting. He indulges in a peculiarly macabre device to get rid of the village idiot, while he is courting Edna. Blindfolding the youth under the pretext of a game of hide-and-seek, he gently guides him to the middle of the road, where the wretched creature stays for the rest of the film, threatened by oncoming traffic.
There is, too, a strange homage to L’après-midi d’un faune. The sequence begins with a cattle chase through the village after cowherd Charlie has allowed his charges to stray. He is tossed by the most ferocious of the beasts, lands on her back and is borne out of the village to be thrown, unconscious, into a ditch beside a little bridge. He dreams that he is awakened by four nymphs, who draw him to join them in an Arcadian dance. Charlie’s ballet becomes decidedly more animated after he has fallen backwards on a cactus. A brilliant if eccentric dancer, as he was often to demonstrate, Chaplin had been fascinated by the Ballets Russes on their recent appearances in Los Angeles, and flattered by the dancers’ admiration of his own mimetic gifts. Nijinsky and his company visited the studios, and when Chaplin went to see them in the theatre, the great dancer – who had recently left Diaghilev and was himself experiencing the problems of independence – kept the audience waiting for half an hour while he chatted to Chaplin in the interval.
The ending is more enigmatic than any other in Chaplin’s films. Seeing that he has lost Edna to the city slicker, he places himself deliberately in the path of an oncoming car. Abruptly the scene cuts to a swift and happy denouement, in which a truculent Charlie sends the city slicker packing in his automobile and wins back his Edna. To this day, critics have failed to agree whether it is the suicide which is the dream, or whether the happy ending is itself the wish-dream of the dying suicide. Sunnyside was finished, to Chaplin’s intense relief, on 15 April 1919, and premièred two months later.
There were other causes for Chaplin’s anxiety besides his cheerless marriage. As early as 1917 Sydney had been making efforts to bring their mother to California. Since Aunt Kate’s death, Aubrey Chaplin, Charlie’s cousin, had kept an eye on Hannah in Peckham House. It seemed an ideal opportunity to bring her to America when Alf Reeves came over in the autumn of 1917, and Sydney cabled him:
HAVE OBTAINED AMERICAN GOVERNMENT PERMISSION FOR MY MOTHER’S ADMISSION HERE FOR SPECIAL TREATMENT. CAN YOU BRING HER OVER WITH TWO SPECIAL NURSES? SEE AUBREY CHAPLIN 47 HEREFORD ROAD BAYSWATER HE HAS FULL PARTICULARS. IF SATISFACTORY WILL CABLE MONEY FOR FARE, CLOTHES.
At this time, Aubrey found that the necessary permits were not forthcoming from England, and Hannah remained in the home. By March 1919, however, Aubrey was able to write to Chaplin that he hoped that arrangements for Hannah’s journey would be completed by mid-May. Plagued by his marriage and his creative crisis, Chaplin suddenly realized that he could not face the pain of seeing his mother in her current condition on top of his other troubles. On 21 April he cabled Sydney, who was at the Claridge Hotel, New York:
SECOND THOUGHTS CONSIDER WILL BE BEST MOTHER REMAIN IN ENGLAND SOME GOOD SEASIDE RESORT. AFRAID PRESENCE HERE MIGHT DEPRESS AND AFFECT MY WORK. GOOD MAY COME ALONE.
Loyal Aubrey then set about finding a suitable haven on the English coast, and suggested she might be settled, preferably under an assumed name, at Margate, with a nurse and a companion. But for the time being she continued at Peckham House, her dull days varied by occasional rides out and visits from an old friend, Marie Thorne.
After a month’s break, Chaplin started on a new production – and his problems began all over again. The title, Charlie’s Picnic, suggested all sorts of comic possibilities. Chaplin tried out a number of children and chose five, True Boardman Jr, Marion Feducha, Raymond Lee, Bob Kelly and Dixie Doll, who were kept on the payroll for the next four weeks. During this whole period Chaplin managed to shoot only a few desultory scenes on two days. A sweltering summer was not conducive to inspiration. One day the studio clerk recorded ‘Hot as the devil’. On 16 June Chaplin gave up, dismissed the children and went out riding with Clement Shorter. A fortnight later he tried again. For four days at the beginning of July he struggled to film something – anything. He dragged in Kono, his chauffeur, to drive his car, and put Alf Reeves and a friend, Elmer Ellsworth, into a scene. Then the studio relapsed into inactivity. One day all the studio clerk could find to enter on his daily report sheet was ‘Note: Willard took a nap today’. History has left no clue to the identity of Willard – perhaps he was the studio cat – but the comment indicates the general desperation at the level of inactivity at Sunset and La Brea.
Not the least of Chaplin’s problems were domestic worries. Mildred was now really pregnant, and on 7 July gave birth to a malformed boy. Three days later, on 10 July 1919, the studio report laconically records: ‘Norman Spencer Chaplin passed on today – 4 p.m.’ and the next day: ‘11 July. Cast all absent … Did not shoot. Norman Spencer Chaplin buried today 3 p.m. Inglewood Cemetery.’ It was Mildred’s idea to inscribe on his gravestone ‘The Little Mouse’. Many years later Mildred recalled, ‘Charlie took it hard … that’s the only thing I can remember about Charlie … that he cried when the baby died.’ Chaplin told a friend bitterly that the undertakers had manipulated a prop smile on the tiny dead face, though the baby had never smiled in life.
It would be presumptuous to trace connections between this emotional shock and the sudden startling resurgence of creativity in Chaplin that followed it; or between the death of his first child and the subject of the film he was about to make, and which for many remains his greatest work. However, ten days after Norman Chaplin’s death, Chaplin was auditioning babies at the studio. He had meanwhile already found a co-star. In the depressed period which followed the completion of Sunny-side he had gone to the Orpheum and seen there an eccentric dance act, Jack Coogan. For the finish of his act Coogan brought on his four-year-old son, who took a bow, gave an impersonation of his father’s dancing, and made his exit with an energetic shimmy. Chaplin was delighted – perhaps it reminded him of his own first appearance on the stage when he was not much older than Jackie Coogan.
A night or two later, Chaplin met Jackie for the first time.10 He entered the dining room of the Alexandria Hotel with Sid Grauman, just as Jackie and his parents were leaving. They stopped and spoke: Grauman had known both Coogan parents in vaudeville, when he was managing theatres for his father; Mrs Coogan had toured the circuit as a child performer known as Baby Lillian. While Grauman and the Coogans were talking, Chaplin sat down beside Jackie so that he was on his level, and began to talk to him. Then he asked Mrs Coogan if he could borrow him for a few moments. Mrs Coogan was surprised, but Charlie Chaplin was Charlie Chaplin. As she later remembered, for an hour and forty-five minutes Chaplin and Coogan played together in the corner of the lobby on the Alexandria’s famous ‘million-dollar carpet’ (so called because of all the movie deals that had been made on it).
Eventually Chaplin brought the child back and said, ‘This is the most amazing person I ever met in my life.’ The moment of enchantment for Chaplin, it appeared, was when he asked Jackie what he did, and Jackie serenely replied: ‘I am a prestidigitator who works in a world of legerde-main.’ The phrase must have been one of the brilliant little mimic’s show pieces, but it could not fail to touch Chaplin with his own keen delight in words. Charmed as he was, Chaplin had still no thought of using Jackie in a picture, at this stage.
During the period of sitting around in the studio, waiting for inspiration for Charlie’s Picnic, Chaplin began to talk about the Coogan act. Somebody in the unit said that he had heard that Roscoe Arbuckle had just signed up Coogan. At once Chaplin kicked himself for not having had the idea of putting the boy into films himself. Wretchedly he began to think of all the gags he might have done with the child. The publicity man, Carlyle Robinson, made the happy discovery that it was the father and not the son who had been signed up by Arbuckle. The studio secretary, Mr Biby, was sent to see Jack Coogan, who agreed to let his son work for Chaplin. ‘Of course you can have the little punk,’ he said.
On 30 July Chaplin happily laid aside the 6570 feet of film he had already shot for Charlie’s Picnic, decided that the best of the infant aspirants he had auditioned was Baby Hathaway, and started to work on The Waif. Now his inspiration seemed to have returned: throughout August and September he worked in a fury of enthusiasm; there were no absences from the studio, no days off to ‘talk the story’ or to make outings to San Diego. Some days the unit would shoot more than 4000 feet of film, the footage of two two-reelers.
As usual Chaplin filmed the story in continuity; and the scenes he shot during these prolific weeks were to appear almost without revision in the definitive version of The Kid. Edna is seen leaving the charity hospital, a child in her arms, under the scornful gaze of a nurse and a gateman: in the completed film a sub-title succinctly explains her situation: ‘The woman – whose sin was motherhood’. Edna – probably intending suicide – leaves the baby in the back of an opulent car, with a note asking the finder to protect and care for him. (The car used for the scene belonged to D. W. Griffith.) The car is thereupon stolen by two murderous-looking crooks. Finding the baby in the back, they dump him roughly in an alley.
In the studio Charles D. Hall had created the attic setting which indelibly defines our vision of The Kid. It could be an illustration for Oliver Twist, with its sloping ceiling under the eaves, its peeling walls, bare boards, battered furniture and a door giving onto a precipice of stairs. It might – indeed must – be a recollection of the attic at 3 Pownall Terrace, where Charlie had bumped his head on the ceiling when he sat up in bed.
Here, in four days of shooting, Chaplin created the memorable sequence with Baby Hathaway, in which the Tramp, having unwillingly become the guardian of Edna’s mislaid child, teaches himself the crafts of childcare. He improvises a hammock-cradle, a feeding bottle made from an old coffee pot and (when with some concern he feels the moist underside of the hammock) a handy device consisting of a chair with a hole cut in the seat and a cuspidor placed beneath it. These homely details caused offence to a few more puritanical spectators at the time, but the audience at large loved them.
Chaplin moved on to the scenes in the same attic supposed to take place some five years later, when the baby has grown into Jackie Coogan. Jackie proved such a natural actor and apt pupil that most of this sequence was shot within a week. One or other of the Coogan parents was always on the set: Mrs Coogan during the early period while Jack Senior was still under contract to Arbuckle; later Jack Senior himself. They watched with delighted fascination Chaplin’s developing relationship with their son. It was a very real and close friendship. The two of them would disappear together to walk and play in the orange groves. They might spend hours watching ants at work, and Chaplin would enjoy explaining to Jackie the marvels of nature. For his part, Jackie was not really aware of Chaplin’s importance: he simply regarded him as the most remarkable man he had ever met.
Mrs Coogan, as she explained much later to her grandson, Anthony Coogan, felt that the relationship was one of great complexity. On one level Chaplin, in Jackie’s company, became a child. A large part of his gift, and that of the character of the Tramp, was his ability to see life from a childlike viewpoint. In his association with Jackie he was able to exhibit and extend this childlike behaviour. On another level Chaplin, off screen as well as on, adopted a paternal role with Jackie. It was impossible for people at the studio to resist the feeling that Jackie had replaced the child that he had just lost.
Above all, Jackie provided Chaplin with the most perfect actor he ever worked with. For the protean Chaplin, actors were necessary tools. Ideally he would have played every part in his films himself. Because he could not, he needed actors who could simulate his own performances. What he looked for in his actors was a perfect imitation of the looks and gestures and, later, intonations he would demonstrate. This was why more independently creative players were often irked; and why in some of the best performances we seem to be seeing Chaplin himself in someone else’s skin – man or woman.
Jackie’s genius was as a mimic. When Chaplin showed him something, he could do it. Three or four rehearsals were usually enough; and Chaplin said he was a one-take player. He could undertake scenes of complexity that might defeat grown-ups. ‘The mechanics,’ Chaplin noted, ‘induced the emotion.’ It cannot have always gone so easily but, as Lita Grey remembered, ‘his patience was limitless with the child, even when Jackie muffed one take after another. “We’ve plenty of time,” he said, soothing the confused child. “The most difficult scenes are the simplest to do. The simplest bits of business are usually the hardest …”’11 No child actor, whether in silent or in sound pictures, has ever surpassed Jackie Coogan’s performance as The Kid in its truthfulness and range of sentiment.
Little could stem Chaplin’s tremendous creative surge, though there were interruptions. One day, in that very different Hollywood, the smoke from a nearby forest fire spoilt the pictures. There was a day of rain; and another day Jackie disgraced himself by going missing. The incident is tersely recorded in the daily report for 17 September: ‘Jackie Coogan – lost and licked’. Jackie had fallen asleep behind some scenery; when he woke up he stayed in his hiding place watching with detached curiosity the hue and cry for him, as a nearby lake was dragged. It was Jack Coogan Senior who administered the ultimate ‘licking’.
At the end of September, however, the surge ended. Chaplin moved into a new set – and a dead end. The scene was a dosshouse, and for the moment he was evidently unclear how best to use it. He spent three days and upwards of 7000 feet of film for an elaborate gag about a flea circus and the inconveniences attendant on the escape of its artistes. This footage was later to play a part in one of the more intriguing mysteries of Chaplin’s creative life. For the moment it was abandoned, and work on The Waif came to a halt.
One reason was that Chaplin had realized that The Waif was going to prove much bigger than anything he had previously attempted, and was likely to take many months to complete. First National, however, were impatient for a new release. The only way to gain the breathing space necessary to work at his own pace on The Waif was to knock out another film as fast as possible. He had, after all, made two-reelers in a month for Mutual and in a week at Keystone.
With such a strong incentive to produce a film, Chaplin had little trouble with his ‘quickie’. The material with the cars and the children already shot for Charlie’s Picnic was reconsidered. It cut together well enough, and the title was changed to The Ford Story. Chaplin hired a featured comedienne, ample Babe London (enthusiastically described on the daily studio reports as ‘great’), along with fifteen extras and four black musicians. The whole unit was bussed to San Pedro, where a pleasure boat, the Ace, was rented from the San Pedro Transportation Company for $5 an hour. The boat was the kind of prop that had never failed to ignite Chaplin’s imagination in the old Mutual days, and he set to inventing variations on the themes of dancing, sea-sickness, collapsing deck chairs, jealous husbands and the perils of storm-tossed boats. In seven consecutive working days he shot some 25,000 feet of film. The editing was finished in a fortnight and the film, now called A Day’s Pleasure, was shipped to First National on 3 November.
The film was a cheerful throwback to Mutual days and earlier. As Chaplin originally planned the editing, it would have been even more like the old style of Essanay and Mutual two-act two-reeler than in the event it turned out. His first idea was simply to precede the boat sequence with the motor car material, involving Charlie’s efforts to start his temperamental Ford and his encounters on the road with angry fellow -motorists, hostile speed cops and newly-spread tar. In the end, however, the car material was divided to provide neat framing sequences for the central boat material. The film now ends with the sub-title, ‘The end of a perfect day’, as Charlie’s car shimmies off towards the horizon amidst clouds of smoke.
Chaplin was quite aware that the film was a makeshift, and neither audiences nor reviewers of the time concealed their disappointment with A Day’s Pleasure, as with Sunnyside. Still, Chaplin was confident enough in his current project to ignore such criticisms. On 14 November he resumed work on the film which was now definitively retitled The Kid. The next sequence he shot was designed to follow the scene of Edna’s discharge from the charity hospital and a brief sequence introducing the father of her child, an artist. Edna arrives at a church where a marriage is being celebrated. As she pauses by a window to watch, the bride’s corsage falls to the ground and is accidentally crushed under the feet of the elderly bridegroom. A reflection in the window appears momentarily like a halo around Edna’s head. Sadly, fifty years later, when Chaplin re-edited the film and added a musical accompaniment, he was persuaded to remove this beautiful scene on the grounds that it was too ‘sentimental’ for audiences of the 1970s.
One incident during the filming of this sequence is a reminder that these were still very much the infant days of the film industry. One of the extras hired was a man called Edgar Sherrod, so much a specialist in playing priests that he brought along his own vestments. This provoked an ugly scene, however. The studio paysheet records:
Edgar Sherrod and vestments. Paid $25. Paid under protest. Note: After being established in picture at rate of $11.50, Edgar Sherrod held out for $25.00. Reported to M.P.P.S for Black List.
For Christmas 1919 Chaplin asked Jackie what he would like as a present. The boy told him that most of all he would like to visit his grandmother in San Francisco. To make this possible, Chaplin closed the studio for a week – perhaps the most singular mark of his feeling for his small co-star. With only this interruption, the whole of December and the first week of the New Year were spent on the sequence which remains the most extraordinary in the film, and indeed one of the most memorable in the whole history of the cinema. The Kid falls sick, and the Tramp calls in a curmudgeonly old physician. When the doctor asks if he is the boy’s father, the Tramp inadvisedly shows him the note that was attached to the foundling, and which he now keeps carefully preserved between the pages of a worn and dusty copy of the Police Gazette. The doctor says that the child needs proper care and attention. Proper care and attention soon arrive – in the form of a self-important representative of the orphan asylum and his toadying aide. Despite the heroic struggles of the Tramp and the Kid – armed with a hammer as big as himself – the child is carried off and thrown, like a stray dog, into the back of a wagon. With a fierce cop in hot pursuit, the Tramp blunders across the slum roof-tops to intercept the wagon, hurls the orphanage official into the road, and rescues the Kid. This astonishing scene never loses its impact, however often it is seen. There is passion, despair, madness in the Tramp’s desperate trajectory across the roofs, and the absurd, waddling little figure is elevated to heroic pathos. Few screen embraces are as affecting as the kiss which the Tramp plants on the quivering lips of the terrified child.
1919 – Record of employment and payment of actors during the seven days of shooting the boat scenes of A Day’s Pleasure.
The ebullient Jackie was not easily subdued to the emotional temper of the scene. Chaplin could not bear to make Jackie cry himself and so the direction of Jackie in this scene was left to his father. Jack Senior quite simply whispered to Jackie that if he did not cry to order he would be taken off the film and sent to a real workhouse. Jackie was no fool. He cried so hard that Chaplin was alarmed and anxiously reassured him that nobody would take him away. ‘I knew Daddy was fooling,’ he replied, conspiratorially. Jack Coogan Senior was a useful man to have about the set. He played several roles in the film: the skid-row bum who picks the Tramp’s pocket, the Devil, and a guest at the artists’ party at which Edna, now a famous opera star, meets again the father of her child. Chaplin also removed this scene from his 1970 reissue of The Kid, out of misguided deference to the tastes of a new era.
At this stage of production, Chaplin’s domestic troubles began to obtrude once more. After the lease on their first home expired, Chaplin had moved the household – now including Mildred’s mother, which did not help matters – to 674 South Oxford Drive, Beverly Hills. In the months of creative exaltation Chaplin had been able to forget the frustrations and irritations of his marriage, but Mildred did not relish being forgotten. The estrangement which now occurred was inevitable. Chaplin moved back to the Los Angeles Athletic Club; Mildred retained the house.
At first the separation was fairly amicable and dignified. Then the press latched on to the story and provoked the talkative Mildred into attacks on her estranged husband. Irritation and anxiety made it more and more difficult for Chaplin to concentrate. Towards the end of February 1920 the pace of work at the studio began to slow down and Chaplin was increasingly absent. From 15 March filming stopped completely, and two days later newspapers across the country published the news that Mrs Chaplin was filing a suit for divorce. The announcement followed very soon after the news that Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, Chaplin’s friends and peers as million-dollar stars, were divorcing their respective partners. At first Mildred merely accused her husband of desertion, saying that she still ‘loved him to death’ and did not want a divorce or money. A day or two later, on 22 March 1920, her lawyers had changed the charges to cruelty, and Mildred now announced that she proposed to ‘tell everything. I shall let the world know how he failed to provide for me and how he sent an employee to my house and took away certain of my private papers. He humiliated me before the servants. Isn’t that cruelty?’ Chaplin replied with a brief press statement:
On account of my reputation, which I have spent eighteen years in building up, I am compelled to refute Mrs Chaplin’s statement as to non-support, for I have over $50,000 in cancelled cheques which have been paid out during our short married life on her behalf. And this has been spent in addition to her own salary which is $1000 a week. Until this outbreak of hers I have not refused payment of one solitary request or bill which she has presented to me. With reference to legal proceedings I wish to remain absolutely silent. I have tried to be gentlemanly and to act with dignity under the unfortunate circumstances, and have nothing further to say.
The circumstances of Hollywood made it hard to remain dignified, however, and on 7 April 1920 Chaplin became involved in a minor scandal which thrilled the motion picture fans but was deeply repugnant to his own natural reserve. He was dining at the Alexandria Hotel with some friends. The producer Louis B. Mayer, who had Mildred Harris under contract, was with a party at a neighbouring table. Notes were exchanged – though Roland Totheroh later alleged that Mayer’s supposed note, which sparked the affair, was in fact fabricated as a prank by one of Chaplin’s own party, Jack Pickford. Chaplin was still resentful of Mayer for having rushed Mildred into a contract immediately following the marriage and the attendant publicity, against Chaplin’s advice. Now Chaplin told Mayer to take off his glasses and aimed a punch at him. Mayer, after a youth spent in the scrap metal business, was no weakling and hit back. Both men fell, the hotel staff intervened, Chaplin was escorted to his room and Mayer left the hotel.
At the time Mildred was dancing foxtrots with the Prince of Wales and Lord Louis Mountbatten at a dance given by the Mayor of San Diego at Coronado Beach, 800 miles from Hollywood. When told by eager reporters what had occurred, she showed only mild concern and was keener to tell them that ‘The Prince is a nice, clean-cut boy, and he is certainly a clever dancer. I enjoyed every minute of our dance together.’
Work at the studio briefly resumed soon after this, on 17 April, but only to pose some stills of Christ bearing the cross (they were shot on Eagle Rock Hill) which were eventually to be inserted in the opening scenes of the film as a commentary upon the sufferings of the unwed mother. An additional factor in the breakdown of production may have been difficulties with Edna. During the shooting of the film, she had begun to drink, ‘not heavily,’ said Lita Grey, who worked on the film, ‘but enough to displease Chaplin, who viewed drinking during working hours as unprofessional and therefore intolerable’. The difficulties, whatever they were, were soon smoothed over, and Edna remained in the film.
Eventually Chaplin sought distraction from private annoyances in a return to work. He made tests for the last sequence of the film, reshot some of the attic material and in May had the dosshouse set rebuilt. Now he had a narrative purpose for it: Tramp and Kid seek refuge there from the orphanage officials but are betrayed by the housekeeper (Henry Bergman). The dosshouse scenes were finished by the end of May, and the next two months were spent on the last major sequence of the film, one of the most elaborate and certainly the strangest of the many dream sequences in Chaplin’s films. Alone, wretched and locked out, the Tramp falls asleep on the doorstep and dreams that the alley is transformed into Paradise. All the characters of the film – even the Bully, the Cop and the orphanage officials – become genial, winged angels. He is reunited with the Kid, but when all seems bliss, Sin creeps in. The Devil tempts the Tramp with a pretty girl, which arouses the jealousy of her boyfriend, the Bully. He takes out a gun and shoots the Tramp. The Kid cries over his bleeding and lifeless body … at which point the Tramp is wakened by the Cop.
The dream puzzled contemporary spectators and critics; Chaplin was disappointed when Sir James Barrie, king of whimsy, accused him of being too whimsical and said the sequence was a mistake. Francis Hackett in The New Republic was more perceptive:
The dream of Heaven I thought highly amusing. What amused me was its limitedness, its meagreness. It was like a simple man’s version of the Big Change, made up from the few properties with which a simple man would be likely to be acquainted. The lack of inventiveness seemed to me to be its best point. Others tell me that it was a failure of inventiveness. Mayhap. But after suffering the success of movie-inventiveness so many times, with the whole apparatus of the factory employed to turn out some sort of slick statement or other, I rejoice over this bit of thin and faltering fantasy. And I venture to believe that it represents exactly what Chaplin intended. It was the simplified Heaven of the antic sprite whom Chaplin has created and whose inner whimsicality is here so amusingly indulged.
Not the least intriguing aspect of the dream sequence in The Kid is the casting. One of the children who appears in it is Esther Ralston, who was to become a major star in the later 1920s. The minx who vamps and tempts the Tramp was a twelve-year-old called Lillita MacMurray, who had been introduced to the studio by Chaplin’s assistant, Chuck Riesner, a neighbour of the child’s mother and grandparents. Her prettiness intrigued Chaplin, and he put her under contract. Lillita believed that the dream sequence in the film was actually inspired by her arrival at the studio. Four years later Lillita, as Lita Grey, was to become the second Mrs Chaplin, a marriage that was to bring even more bitterness to Chaplin’s life than his time with Mildred.
Mildred, meanwhile, was giving her husband a great deal of trouble, spurred on, rather unexpectedly, by Chaplin’s business associates at First National. Chaplin was in dispute with the company over the way they intended to deal with him over The Kid. They were determined to pay him for its seven reels on the basis of three two-reelers. Having expended $500,000 and eighteen months of his life on the film, he was asking for a special arrangement which would give him something more than the $405,000 this would have produced. When Mildred suddenly reneged on her previous agreement to a divorce settlement of $100,000, Chaplin realized that First National was behind her, meaning to make use of her divorce suit to attach his business assets – which included the negative of The Kid.
Chaplin had in fact been aware of such a danger for several months. As early as 9 April he had telegraphed to Sydney in New York: ‘IMPENDING TROUBLE WILL I SHIP NEGATIVE TO YOU FOR SAFETY WIRE ADVISE IMMEDIATELY.’ For the moment, however, no such precaution had seemed necessary. At the beginning of August 1920 Totheroh was awakened at three o’clock one morning by Alf Reeves, who told him that they had to get out of town. In turn, Totheroh got hold of his assistant, Jack Wilson, and the studio carpenter and together they worked to pack the negative – it amounted to some 400,000 feet – in twelve crates. Inside the crates the film was in 100-foot rolls, enclosed for safety in coffee tins. At Santa Fe railroad depot they were met by Chaplin and his secretary Tom Harrington, with the tickets. There was a moment of thoroughly Chaplinesque comedy: Chaplin was confident that no one would recognize him behind his dark glasses, but no sooner had they entered the station restaurant than a small boy began to shriek ‘Charlie Chaplin! Charlie Chaplin!’12
The conspirators arrived at Salt Lake City and put up at a hotel, where they turned a bedroom into an improvised cutting room. Handling the highly inflammable nitrate film in a public place of this sort was against all regulations, but somehow they managed to keep their operations and the vast quantities of film secret. When the editing was completed, they risked a trial preview in a local cinema. Chaplin was greatly reassured by the enthusiasm of the audience. With the cut negative, they took the train to New York and found a vacant studio in New Jersey to complete the editing and laboratory work. To evade awkward enquiries they erected a notice outside the place saying ‘Blue Moon Film Company’.
Chaplin moved into the Ritz, where he stayed in hiding for fear of being handed a writ. He was bored, however, and badly wanted to meet the writer Frank Harris, so borrowed a dress, hat and veil from Minnie Chaplin and swept out through the Ritz lobby in drag. He was rewarded: the two men got on famously, and Chaplin stayed with Harris until the small hours after which, having dressed again in his own clothes, he did not dare to return to the Ritz. Unable to find another hotel, he was obliged to stay in the home of a sympathetic taxi driver. During the evening Chaplin acted out for Harris his own version of the divorce settlement negotiations, as Harris later described:
Every morning in the paper a fresh appeal appeared from Mildred Chaplin: the injured lady wept, protested, cajoled, threatened all in a breath. One morning a change: she published the following:
‘My final statement: Mr Chaplin is not a Socialist. He is a great artist, a very serious personality, and a real intellectual.’ Yes, those are her very words; and she continues: ‘The world will be amazed at the intensity of his mind.’ What can have happened? I ask myself. Has Charlie weakened and paid without counting?
I read on: ‘I have no desire to obtain half of his fortune. (No?) I will not hinder the sale of his latest moving picture.’ (Whew, the wind sets in that quarter, does it?)
And then: ‘I am entitled to a settlement. (Eh?) I am too ill, physically and mentally, to work at present, and this notoriety and exposition of my personal affairs is very disagreeable to me.’ (Really? You needn’t indulge in it, Madame, unless you want to.)
Finally: ‘He is a great artist, a brilliant man, plays the violin, ’cello, piano, and so forth … I have already filed papers against him.’ Well, well, and again well.
Here is Charlie’s story of talks with his wife on the ’phone about their divorce.
‘Is that you, Charlie? It’s me. Mildred. I’m ill and have no money. Won’t you give me fifty thousand dollars, and settle all this disagreeable law business? You will? You’re a dear; I knew a great artist like you couldn’t be mean. If you knew how I hate to quarrel and dispute. Let us meet at my lawyer’s in an hour, eh? Goodbye till then.’
Quarter of an hour later:
‘Is that you, Charlie? Oh, I’m so sorry, but my lawyer won’t let me take fifty thousand; he says it’s ridiculous. Won’t you give me a hundred thousand, and I can satisfy him? Please; I’m so nervous and ill. You will? Oh you –! Well, you’re just you – the one man in the world. I can’t say more. Now for that dreadful lawyer, and then we’ll meet and just sign. How are you? Well! Oh, I’m so glad. In half an hour, dear.’
Quarter of an hour later:
‘Charlie! What can I say? I’m just heart-broken, and I’ve such a headache. That lawyer says I mustn’t settle for a hundred thousand. His fee is goodness knows how much. I must have at least a hundred and fifty thousand. What am I to do? Mamma says – You will? Oh, my! I’m so glad. I don’t know how to thank you. It’s the last word, you say? All right, Charlie, I’m satisfied. In half an hour, then.’
Ten minutes later:
‘It’s no good, Charlie. I can’t settle for that; it’s really too little. You see, Charlie! Charlie! Did you ring off? Or is it the filthy exchange? Oh, dear! Damn!’
Charlie Chaplin is a master of comedy in life, as he is on the stage; an artist in refined humour, he can laugh even at himself and his own emotions. On the point of leaving Pasadena for a trip to New York, he rang his wife up.
‘Mildred, it’s me, Charlie. Will you take half a million dollars, and settle this ridiculous claim? You will? No, I’m not a darling; but meet me at my lawyer’s in an hour, and we can sign.’
A quarter of an hour later:
‘Mildred, dear. I’m sorry, but my lawyer won’t let me give half a million; he says a year’s earnings for a week’s marriage is too much. He says a hundred thousand is more than generous. Will I listen to you? Of course I will. Talk away …’
A woman’s voice, high pitched: ‘You’re no man. Again you’ve let me down, and made a fool of me. You’ve no character. I’ll teach you …’ (Left talking).
Charlie Chaplin strolls away from the ’phone with a smile on his lips and a little sub-acid contempt for human, and especially for feminine, nature.13
The divorce suit began in August. Chaplin’s lawyer announced that he would not contest it provided that Mildred’s lawyers withdrew an order restraining him from selling The Kid. The divorce was granted on 19 November: Mildred was awarded $100,000 and a share of community property.
Chaplin was now free to negotiate The Kid with First National. Emboldened by the enthusiasm at the first showing in Salt Lake City, he asked them for an advance of $1,500,000, and 50 per cent of the net after the company had recovered the advance. The company demurred and affected an insulting lack of enthusiasm when Chaplin showed them the film, but he stuck it out until even the executives of First National recognized that in The Kid he had an untrumpable card. The film finally opened in New York on 6 February 1921 to instant and huge success. Within the next three years The Kid was distributed in some fifty countries across the world from Norway to Malaya, Egypt to Australia. By 1924, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Colombia were practically the only places where it had not been shown. Everywhere its reception was enthusiastic.
The Kid made little Jackie Coogan into a world figure. Chaplin himself was among those who felt that the vast, universal response to Jackie’s character was in part due to his function as a representative of all the orphans of the recent war. Jackie provided something that the world needed, as he himself had done. He also saw that they could not continue to work together. He told the Coogans, ‘I am not going to hold him back,’ and gave them the option he held on Jackie’s services.
Jackie went on to make a score of feature films for First National and Metro. One or two, like Peck’s Bad Boy and Oliver Twist, caught something of the great child actor of The Kid, but for the most part the rest suffered from sentimental scripts and insensitive direction. By 1927 Jackie’s film career had virtually finished. ‘Senility,’ it was said in Hollywood, ‘hit him at thirteen.’ In the half dozen years of his fame, however, he mixed with all the great celebrities of the world. In 1924 he undertook a World Crusade in aid of Near East Relief. It raised more than a million dollars’ worth of food and clothing; the Coogan family would accept no fees or expenses. The crusade became a royal progress. Jackie met Mussolini and was decorated by the Pope at a special audience. Only Clemenceau declined to meet him, cabling his regret to Jackie’s father that ‘I am not celebrity enough to meet your illustrious son.’ Jackie received the adoration of the public everywhere he went, and somehow managed to stay natural and unspoilt – the perfect child.
Meanwhile his parents had become estranged, though their Catholicism and concern for their son’s career kept them from making the matter public. Jack Coogan Senior devoted himself to the management of Jackie’s business affairs, and Jackie confidently believed that the $4 million he had earned in the good years were held in trust for him and would be his when he reached his majority. Five months before Jackie’s twenty-first birthday in 1934, however, his father was killed when the car in which they were driving crashed. His father’s estate was left to his mother, who subsequently denied the existence of a trust fund and asserted the legal right of parents to all moneys earned by their children while minors. In 1938 Jackie brought a suit against his mother and his former business manager, Arthur L. Bernstein, whom she had married.
The suit dragged on until most of the fortune was eaten away. Finally, in March 1939, a settlement was agreed. The single positive outcome of the Coogan case was that it led to the passage of the Child Actor’s Bill (4 May 1939), which has been known ever since as the Coogan Act. It provides that the guardian of a child artist shall set aside half the earnings for a trust fund or equivalent form of savings for the child’s benefit, and account to the court for the remainder of the earnings. Not long after the case was concluded, Jackie was reconciled with his mother, who had clearly exerted a dominating influence over him and would continue to do so until her death. At the time of the suit, Jackie was married to Betty Grable: it was the first of a number of somewhat turbulent marriages. He served in the United States forces during the war and afterwards had an uneven career as entertainer and actor. There was a special irony in the most celebrated role of his later career – as Uncle Fester in the television series The Addams Family. The most wonderful child in the world had become the nastiest of all old men. The older Coogan took pleasure in this kind of irony: at the end of his life he drove a car whose registration plate carried the letters K-I-D, but with the order reversed.
Chaplin had little contact with his child friend in later years: he appears not even to have included him on his Christmas card list. When in a moment of particular financial crisis Jackie asked him for assistance, however, Chaplin gave him $1,000 without hesitation.
After his disillusionment with First National over The Kid, Chaplin was eager to be done with the contract as quickly as possible. His partners in a new distribution venture were also impatient. In January 1919, United Artists had been incorporated with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, D. W. Griffith and Chaplin as partners. The seeds of the plan had been sown in the course of the Liberty Bond tours, when Chaplin, Fairbanks and Pickford had met Oscar Price, press agent of William Gibbs McAdoo, Secretary of the Treasury, in Washington. ‘Why,’ Price asked them, ‘don’t you folks get together and distribute your own pictures?’ They began to consider the idea more seriously at the end of 1918, when their suspicions were aroused by the behaviour of their various employers. First National were adamant in their refusal to better Chaplin’s existing contract; Paramount showed no interest at all in renewing the contracts of Pickford and Fairbanks, which were due to expire. The three stars got together with Griffith and William S. Hart, the stone-faced Western hero, and speculated that the film companies were planning a strategy to put a stop to the astronomical salaries that the major stars were able to command. The idea, they rightly guessed, was to organize a great merger of the producing companies and a monopoly of distribution outlets, and in this way bring the stars to heel once more. The producers’ move was imminent: during the first week in January the heads of the industry met for a convention in the Alexandria Hotel, Los Angeles.
Fairbanks and Chaplin decided to hire private detectives to spy on the delegates to the convention. The reports of Pinkertons’ Operator 5 and Operator 8 read like operetta, as they describe their ruses of paging and shadowing Adolph Zukor, Sam Goldfish (later Goldwyn) and the rest of the boardroom dramatis personae. Operator 8 was an attractive young woman, and used her charms to advantage:
While gentleman was waiting for ‘Jim’ to return he looked at me and smiled. I did not return the smile but looked at said gentleman at different times.
Later, after this gentleman had left Parlor A. and went downstairs, he sent me a card asking me to call him at 8 p.m. in Room 1157. Later, at 4.30 p.m. gentleman met me on the mezzanine and asked me my room number, which I gave him. At 5 p.m. this gentleman knocked on my door. I answered door and was rather surprised to find said gentleman. He stated his name was Mr Harry, and that he would try and see me later in the p.m. Within five hours, 10 p.m., this gentleman came to my door, stating he had to go up to the twelfth floor to see Mr Zukor and that Clara Kimball Young was up there, but that he would be back in a few minutes. At 10.35 he returned and sat in a chair and smoked. He asked if my home was in Los Angeles. I told him no, that I was from Kentucky, but that I came from San Francisco here. He then asked me if I was interested in the pictures. I said no, but that I always enjoyed looking at a good picture. He then stated he was here from Detroit, Mich., and that they were holding a meeting in regard to the releasing of pictures. He then asked me who my favourite actress was. I told him Clara Kimball Young and Norma Talmadge. He asked me if I liked Mary Pickford. I told him yes and I liked Clara [Bow]. He asked me if I knew how much Mary made. I told him no. He said that she got the biggest salary of any moving picture actress or actor. I remarked that I had heard that Charlie Chaplin received the highest salary, and he said no indeed. I then said that I did not think it right for Mary and Charlie to receive such salary when there were others that are just as good. He said, ‘That’s so, too, and their salary will have to be cut for we picture men cannot pay the price that is being asked for the releasing of their pictures.’ I then asked if that was the reason he came to Los Angeles and he said yes. I asked if he thought they would succeed and he said, ‘Surely they will have to come to our terms.’ About this time the House Officer came to my door. I went to door and he stated he was sorry but that the house would not allow any lady that’s alone to have company in her room. Officer said he realized there was no harm done but that it was the rules of the house. I told the officer that I was sorry. Gentleman assured Officer that there was no harm meant. Officer said that he could see that, but it was merely the rules of the house. Gentleman left, saying he would call me the next day in the p.m.14
Despite this frustrating interruption at the most exciting moment of her Mata Hari effort, Operator 8 managed more meetings with ‘Mr Harry’, and used her charms (precisely how we shall never know) to extract from him the information that Fairbanks and Chaplin needed. Fairbanks, Pickford, Hart and Chaplin made sure that the moguls were aware of their presence around the Alexandria Hotel, and on 15 January 1919 called a press conference to announce their intention of setting up a company to distribute their own independent productions, which they would call United Artists. Now committed to their idea, they drew up contracts of incorporation for the company on 5 February (by this time Hart had withdrawn from the scheme).
Certificates of incorporation were filed in Delaware on 17 April. At once they were besieged by offers from prominent producers – including Zukor himself – who wanted to resign their jobs to run United Artists. The Artists, however, invited McAdoo to be President. He declined, but said that if they appointed Oscar Price, the first begetter of the idea, he would help them organize and act as general counsel. Hiram Abrams, a former President of Paramount who had seceded from Zukor after disagreements, became General Manager. (Benjamin B. Hampton’s authoritative History of the American Film Industry credits Abrams and his colleague Benjamin P. Schulberg with the original concept of United Artists. Abrams remained General Manager until his death in 1928.)
The corporation operated as a distributor for films which the four partners – and other film-makers who wished to join in the plan – produced independently. The arrangement was revolutionary. Until this time producers and distributors, with the exception of First National, had been employers, and the stars salaried employees. Now the stars became their own employers. They were their own financiers and they received the profits that had hitherto gone to their employers. In addition, each received his or her share of the profits of the distributing organization.
Fairbanks and Pickford built a fine modern studio on Santa Monica Boulevard to make their pictures for United Artists release. By 1922 Fairbanks had already released five films through United Artists, including the spectacular Robin Hood. Griffith brought Broken Blossoms (which he bought back from Paramount for $250,000) and Way Down East. Pickford’s Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall was less successful with the public. Chaplin, meanwhile, was stuck with First National: at the time of the formation of United Artists he was still entangled with Sunnyside, with four films to go after that.
After The Kid, at the start of 1921, Chaplin still had three films to deliver, and his partners were understandably impatient. The Idle Class, though it took five months to complete, gave him few problems. Although much more opulent in its production, it was a story simple enough for an Essanay or early Mutual film: some elements recall the early ‘bogus Count’ stories. Ironically, the story centres upon an unhappy marriage. Chaplin plays a dual role: as Edna’s inebriate and neglectful husband, and as Charlie the Tramp, his double, who is mistaken for her husband by Edna, her father and friends. Completed at the end of June, The Idle Class was not released until 25 September.
Chaplin now felt that he could face the strain of having his mother near him, and fresh application for a visa was made to the State Department. On 3 March 1921, the State Department informed the Justice Department, ‘Referring to your desire to have Mrs Hannah Chaplin, mother of Charles Chaplin, come to this country from England, you are informed that telegraphic authorization is now being sent to the American Consul General at London to grant a visa to the above-mentioned person.’ Mr Hughes of the Solicitor General’s office passed on the message to Charles and Sydney, expressing his hope that ‘the matter has been satisfactorily adjusted and that the old lady will soon be on her way over’.
1920 – Bill from Peckham House for Hannah Chaplin’s clothing.
Tom Harrington was sent to England to bring her back to California. Hannah was astonished and delighted when Harrington, with the help of Aubrey Chaplin and his wife, spent more than £100 on a new wardrobe for her, including hats, coats, a dressing gown and a toilet case. On the journey she behaved quite normally, but on arrival in New York there was a slight contretemps when she mistook an immigration official for Jesus Christ. Harrington smoothed over the incident. Hannah was settled in a rented home at 4217 Arch Drive, South Hollywood (the present Studio City) with a Mr and Mrs William Cary to look after her.15 Chaplin found it painful to visit her too often, but Sydney and Minnie, Amy Reeves and (during the period of her marriage with Chaplin) Lita Grey were among her visitors. They remembered that she would seem perfectly normal for long periods, and entertain them with stories and songs from the music hall days. Sometimes she would talk affectionately about her husband, and would discuss the Zeppelin raids on London. (The Chaplin publicity office announced that her health had been affected by the air raids.) People noticed that she was more subdued and quiet when she was with her son; and Chaplin was sometimes startled by enigmatic insights. ‘If you weren’t so diffident, I might be able to give you a little advice,’ she told him at the time of his marital problems, and then said no more.
She enjoyed sewing, and playing draughts – which she always won. She also liked to go out in her car on shopping expeditions. Konrad Bercovici recounted how, on one such spree, she came back with hundreds of yards of coloured silk, costing some thousands of dollars. Chaplin was about to send the silk back, but suddenly said, ‘Let her have all that and more, and all that she wants of the frippery. The poor soul has been longing for such things all her life.’ Only occasionally did her whims, like handing ice-cream to startled passers-by, result in embarrassment.
Sometimes she seemed indifferent to her sons’ prosperity; at other times she was puzzled and embarrassed by it. Once or twice Chaplin brought her to the studio to try to make her understand what his work consisted of. Edward Sutherland was there on one such occasion.
I remember we were making tests one day, I think for The Gold Rush, and we were shooting indoors. In the old days, we had Cooper-Hewitt lighting, the grandfather of the neon light. This was a kind of ghastly blue which washed all the colour out of one’s face – the lips were green or purplish. Klieg lights were carbon arc lights … These were hard lights encased. Mrs Chaplin, Charlie’s mother, came in to the lot. Charlie was made up in character. She said, ‘Charlie, I have to get you a new suit.’
He said, ‘Now look, Mother. You’ve seen me in character a million times. You’ve seen me in pictures. I don’t need a new suit.’
She said, ‘I’ve got to get you a new suit – and you have a ghastly colour. You ought to go out in the sunlight.’
He took her out in the sunlight and said, ‘Now look, Mother, this is the part I play. This is the character I play.’ But he couldn’t get it through to her; this day, it wouldn’t penetrate to her intelligence. I don’t know that he was particularly devoted to her: he felt under obligation to her. I don’t think Charlie is what I would call devoted to anybody.16
The people chosen to visit Mrs Chaplin in her house in the valley were family friends whose discretion could be relied upon. Winifred Ritchie often went with Alf or Amy Reeves, and sometimes took young Wyn, their daughter.
I was only a schoolgirl, but they knew I wouldn’t talk about such things. I never did speak of my visits to Nan till after she died and after Charlie died. She had a very nice house in the valley, with a companion and a nurse. We would go out with Amy and have lunch or dinner with Nan. Sometimes she was brilliant. She would do old songs and sketches. She was like Charlie. She would do wonderful imitations. She could do whole plays from beginning to end. And then all of a sudden, she wouldn’t be right.
One day I was sitting beside her at lunch, and I noticed a mark on her arm. And innocently I said, ‘Nan, what’s that?’ And immediately she drew her arm away and hid it; and then started putting bits of bread all about herself, and on her head. The nurse, Mrs Carey, said ‘Come with me, Nan,’ and took her off into another room. When Mrs Carey came back she said that the mark was a tattoo from the workhouse. She said it brought back the days when they had not had enough to eat; and she was putting the bread away for Sydney and Charlie.17
During her days in Hollywood, Hannah was at last reunited with her youngest son, Wheeler Dryden, whom she had not seen since he was snatched away by his father, Leo Dryden, at the age of six months. Wheeler, given to histrionic postures, staged his entrance and asked her dramatically, ‘Do you know who I am?’ ‘Of course I do,’ Hannah replied pleasantly. ‘You’re my son. Sit down and have a cup of tea.’