The world is not composed of heroes and villains, but of men and women with all the passions that God has given them.
The ignorant condemn, but the wise pity.
Charles Chaplin, prefatory title to A Woman of Paris, 1923
Those big shoes are buttoned with 50,000,000 eyes.
Gene Morgan, Chicago newsman, 1915
Charles Chaplin’s autobiography appeared in 1964. He was then seventy-five years old. The book ran to more than five hundred pages and represented a prodigious feat of memory, for it was in large part done without reference to documentary sources. At the time, indeed, the feat seemed too prodigious to some reviewers, who were incredulous that anyone could remember in such detail events that had taken place a long lifetime before.
Since Chaplin’s death, I have had the privilege of examining the great mass of his working papers – some of them unseen for more than half a century. In the public archives of London and in old theatrical records I have been able to uncover many long-forgotten traces of the young Chaplin and his family. In addition, a number of people in England and America have generously shared their memories and papers.
Sifting the mass of documentation has only served to heighten regard for the powers of Chaplin’s memory and the honesty of his record. An instance of the kind of detail which is constantly corroborated by the archives is the recollection, from his thirteenth year, that when his brother first went to sea he sent home thirty-five shillings from his pay packet: Sydney Chaplin’s seaman’s papers – which were not available to Chaplin when he wrote – exactly confirm the sum. Even small inaccuracies attest to his memory rather than discredit it. He remembers a childhood ogre, one of his schoolmasters, as ‘Captain Hindrum’, an old vaudeville friend of his mother’s as ‘Dashing Eva Lestocq’ and the friendly stage manager at the Duke of York’s Theatre as ‘Mr Postant’. In fact their names turn out to have been Hindom, Dashing Eva Lester and William Postance. Chaplin probably never saw any of the names written down, and no doubt he recalled them simply as he heard them as a child. In themselves, the slips clearly show that Chaplin’s record is the result of a phenomenal memory rather than the product of post facto research and reconstruction. So regularly is his memory vindicated by other evidence that, where there are discrepancies without proof one way or the other, the benefit of the doubt often seems best given to Chaplin.
The present volume, originally written twenty years after Chaplin’s own account of his life, serves in part to complement My Autobiography. Subsequent research makes it possible to add further documentation and detail to the subject’s sometimes random recollections. In their study Chaplin: Genesis of a Clown, Raoul Sobel and David Francis complained of the lack of hard facts and dates in the early chapters of My Autobiography. ‘To try to keep a running time scale while reading My Autobiography is rather like having to navigate by the stars on an overcast night. By the time one reaches the next break in the clouds, the boat may be miles off course.’ This is true, perhaps: the special charm of those first chapters of My Autobiography is the free range of memory, unrestrained by the cold collaboration of any ghostly researcher. It is hardly to be wondered at if, at six or seven years old, the infant Chaplin was a trifle confused about the order of the workhouses and charity schools into which he was thrust. The importance of the autobiography is that it recorded his feelings in the face of these misadventures. The present volume can, at the risk of pedantry, tidy up the facts and chronology.
While My Autobiography is a strikingly truthful record of things witnessed, Chaplin might sometimes have been misled in the case of things reported to him. Like any mother, Mrs Chaplin must have tried to shield her children from unpleasant facts when she was able to do so. Some critics of the autobiography doubted whether Chaplin’s childhood could really have been as awful as he described. New discoveries suggest that Mrs Chaplin kept the worst from her children. The Chaplin boys seem never to have known, for example, of the sad fate of their maternal grandmother as she declined into alcoholism and vagrancy. Charles always believed that this grandmother was a gypsy, whereas the gypsy blood came with his paternal grandmother. Again, it was a natural misunderstanding for a child. Grandma Chaplin died years before his birth. Told that his grandmother was a gypsy, he could only assume it to mean the grandmother he had known.
Chaplin was an accurate and truthful chronicler of what he had seen. He was not always a comprehensive one. There are large and deliberate areas of omission from the autobiography. His description of friends, acquaintances and affairs was selective. Some relationships are described in the autobiography with great frankness and humour, while other people who, at one time or another, were very close to him are not even mentioned. To an extent, gallantry may have played a part in the selection. Most of the people left out were still living, and Chaplin may have felt that they would have been too easily hurt or offended. As it happened, a lot were offended by being left out.
His reticence about his own work was more disappointing. He discussed very few of his films, and then had little to say about the way he made them. Later in his career, visitors to his sets were discouraged, and he would explain his reluctance to let people into his working secrets by saying, ‘If people know how it’s done, all the magic goes.’ This, though, was probably only a small factor in Chaplin’s secretiveness. It may be that he came to feel more and more that he was unable to unveil the mysteries, simply because the essential part of the mysteries remained veiled for him, too. How could he ever explain, to himself or to anyone else, how it was that he was able, one afternoon in 1914, to walk into the Keystone wardrobe hut, pick out a costume, and on the spot create a character which was so soon to become the most universally recognized representation of a human being in the history of mankind? In later years, Chaplin and his apologists would try to rationalize the appeal of the Tramp; but no one could ever figure why it was he, and that moment, that were chosen for the mystical birth of Charlie.
There were more practical reasons for leaving his work out of the autobiography. Chaplin wrote the book in the spirit of the entertainer that, his whole life, he was. Like most people, he saw no particular glamour in his job: he once told someone that his working life was no more exciting than that of a bank clerk. He probably felt that it would simply be boring to tell people how his films were made. If genius is generally computed at 10 per cent inspiration and 90 per cent perspiration, that 90 per cent should be reckoned much higher in Chaplin’s case. No one was ever more dogged in the pursuit of the best of which he was capable.
Ironically, considering his legendary secrecy during his lifetime, Chaplin has left a more comprehensive record of the processes of his creativity than any other film-maker of his generation (or generations, for Chaplin’s working life spanned eight decades). For this reason alone, it has seemed important to explore these at length in this book. The reader must judge if Chaplin was justified in his fears that the daily work even of a comic genius was too humdrum to be interesting. The worknotes, the studio records and the out-takes and rushes that have survived tell us what Chaplin was reluctant to reveal about his methods and his indefatigable application to the quest for perfection. Much of this book is devoted to reconstructing the way that Chaplin created his comic visions – the long and painful processes of refining and polishing plots and gags; the mechanical problems involving resources, studios, apparatus, sets; the choice of collaborators and working relations with them; the endless repetitions, trials, rehearsals, shooting, reshooting, rejection, revision; and finally the months of editing until the finished product should betray nothing of the labour, but seem as simple and natural (in the phrase of Alistair Cooke) ‘as water running over a pebble’.
This book sets out, above all, to be a portrait of a man – an artist – at work. When I began the portrait, it seemed that the private biography had been recorded more than enough times. At first sight, too, the two elements of his life appeared clearly distinguishable. Chaplin himself described the way he divided his life: when he was at work on a film, his creative concentration left him no time for other pursuits. It quickly appeared, however, that life and creation could not be so cleanly separated. Chaplin’s mind, said one collaborator, was like an attic, in which everything that might one day come in handy was stored away for future use. He might have forgotten about his private life when he was at work; but he never forgot work at the other times. Again and again we can recognize the people and incidents and feelings of his personal life transposed into incidents in the films.
Readers who like biographers to supply post-Freudian interpretations for every action and incident may be frustrated. I have no personal liking for that genre of biography (the guesses so often seem wrong); I am not qualified for psychoanalysis; and finally I think that Chaplin’s singular life story would defy the process. The childhood, for a start, made up of experiences that few people can even comprehend, let alone share, and felt through a sensibility that was already out of the ordinary, had to leave its impression upon his attitudes to people, work, money, wives, families, politics, himself. Then he was an actor, with the actor’s ability to stay ahead, to adapt his personality to suit the occasion and the company. His protean quality was often puzzling. People who knew him well enough to record their impressions have described him as modest, vain, prodigal, mean, generous, shy, show-off, ruthless, timid, kind, patient, impatient … Most likely he was all these things, since he was human. Perhaps the most remarkable achievement of his life, in fact, was to stay fallibly, recognizably human, despite the adulation amounting to apotheosis at the peak of his fame; despite experiencing public revilement as passionate as the affection he had known; despite having lived the most dramatic of all the rags-to-riches stories ever told. It is no wonder if he was a complex creature. For all we can learn about Chaplin’s life and thought, it will still not be easy to explain him. But we can try to understand.