1. Book Reviews

Decline of the silent tramp

Nicholas Shakespeare examines the rise and fall of Charlie Chaplin

By Nicholas Shakespeare
Last Updated: 2:29PM GMT 06 Mar 2009

The mask: Charlie Chaplin in 'City Lights', 1931 Photo: Getty Images

Charlie Chaplin, who for a period made the whole world laugh, has been likened to the 19th-century clown Joseph Grimaldi who, when old and incurably depressed, visited a doctor. The physician advised him to cheer himself up by seeing the great comedian Grimaldi – whereupon his patient told him: “Doctor, I am Grimaldi.” This was the central drama of Limelight, which Chaplin privately admitted was the greatest of his 82 films. In a line that never made it to the screen, the drunk Clavero, modelled in part on Chaplin’s absentee father, a music-hall artist who died at the age of 37 of a cirrhotic liver, says: “No one’s funny, when you know them.”

Of books on Chaplin, writes Simon Louvish, there appear to be no end. Even so, Louvish makes a plausible case for a fresh look at “the mask behind the man” – that is to say, at the only role that Chaplin ever really played on screen: the Tramp. “This character, larger than life, and perhaps more real than his creator, deserves a biography of his own.”

Chaplin was not the only Hollywood actor to adopt a protective mask. Merle Oberon, born in Bombay, to disguise her Eurasian blood started using “Fair and Lovely”, a lead-based cream that did eventually ruin her skin. As well, she had to memorise a biography concocted for her by Alexander Korda, in which she was born in Tasmania, the daughter of a dashing English major who died in a horse-riding accident (sometimes it was pneumonia) while out hunting kangaroo (sometimes it was foxes). When confronted on her sole visit to Tasmania at the end of her life by people saying that they had been at school with her in Hobart, she fainted. Likewise, Chaplin on his triumphant return to London in 1921 as “the most famous man in the world” stirred up excessive and vivid memories in a Mr T A Murch, the headmaster of a school in Kennington, who well remembered teaching young “Charlie” there between 1904 and 1909. Except that Chaplin had attended another school altogether, in Hanwell.

Louvish shows how, from the moment he landed in America in 1910, Chaplin worked to suppress his back story. Mixing movie plots with memories, Chaplin crafted a persona calculated to appeal to an American audience: an Oliver Twist with a dead mother (actually, she died in California in 1928), born in a hotel on Fontainebleau (Walworth), whose first stage role was in Rags to Riches (he never appeared in the act) and who never had a day’s schooling in his life. Onto this persona he fitted a toothbrush moustache, baggy trousers, derby hat, overlarge shoes and a cane.

The Tramp costume that Chaplin supposedly put together in a few minutes in Mack Sennett’s prop department in January 1914 had obvious antecedents in his miserable London childhood and in the hobo vagrants of depressed America, and also in vaudeville routines picked up from his parents. But as soon as he stood up before the camera, it spoke to everyone – as “an image of humanity’s response to the challenges of society, authority, the sheer orneriness of life and the material universe”. The only person Chaplin met who had never seen his films was Gandhi.

Silent, Charlie the Tramp could be all things to all men. Jolly crowds on the Gold Coast yelled out “Charlee! Charlee!” – the only English they knew. “A good Dadaist” and the embodiment of modernity, opined one of the movement’s founders. To the Italians he was descended from the Caplinettis of Bologna; to the Nazis, who banned The Gold Rush, he was Jewish (in fact, his family were Suffolk butchers); to the Americans of the McCarthy era, who in 1952 hounded him from their country for being Un-American, he was anti-Jewish.

Whoever he was, he could not go on in silence. In 1927, the father of cinema, Thomas Edison, made this prophecy: “I don’t think the talking moving picture will ever be successful in the United States.” Within three years, silent films were over and the Tramp began a slow decline.

From City Limits on, the defeated soul inside him increasingly showed through. That he initially survived, argues Louvish, was because the audience embraced – and judged – the clown before the man. But they had nailed him into his mask so firmly that when he struggled to escape, he got ripped to shreds. When he spoke to them at long last in The Great Dictator, his words, according to one critic, “do not add up”. When he gave them Monsieur Verdoux, a serial killer, they booed and hissed. When he offered them A King of New York, they did not show it in New York for 16 years. By then, the Neanderthal Boys, as Studs Terkel called his witch-hunting detractors, were vilifying him as a “moral nonentity” and a “repulsive, rotten little rake”.

Chaplin: the Tramp’s Odyssey

by Simon Louvish

432pp, Faber & Faber, £25

Buy now for £23 (plus £1.25 p&p) from Telegraph Books