Charlie Chaplin: A Centenary Celebration: Silent Clowns, #1

By Brian J. Robb

A century after his film debut, Charlie Chaplin is a movie icon. Chaplin's first two years in movies, during 1914 and 1915, were spent developing his craft and character at Keystone and Essanay studios. CHARLIE CHAPLIN: A CENTENARY CELEBRATION reviews and rates every Chaplin movie released during 1914 [Keystone] and 1915 [Essanay], with introductory biographical essays and an afterword on Chaplin's development as an artist.

The author is New York Times and Sunday Times best-selling writer BRIAN J. ROBB, whose other books include SILENT CINEMA (Kamera) and LAUREL & HARDY (Pocket Essentials).

Material in this revised ebook first appeared on the author's web site CHAPLIN: FILM BY FILM during 2014 and 2015, but has been updated and revised with 20,000 additional words for this edition. Total wordage is approx. 80,000 words.

[Previously published in two separate volumes as Chaplin At Keystone: A Centenary Celebration (2014) and Chaplin At Essanay: A Centenary Celebration (2015), which are no longer available.]

• Language: English
• Publisher: Glencairn Press
• Release date: Aug 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9781536578621

Book preview

NOTE: Previously published in two separate volumes as

Chaplin at Keystone: A Centenary Celebration [2014]

& Chaplin at Essanay: A Centenary Celebration [2015]

and in an earlier form on the Chaplin: Film by Film blog.

Copyright © 2016 Brian J. Robb

Brian J. Robb has asserted his right

under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

to be identified as the author of this work.

Published by Glencairn Press, Edinburgh [v. 1.0], August 2016.

Volume One

Chaplin at Keystone: A Centenary Celebration

Brian J. Robb

Every 1914 Chaplin Keystone film reviewed and rated.

With a biographical introduction covering Charlie Chaplin's early life.

Copyright © 2014 Brian J. Robb

Brian J. Robb has asserted his right under the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

to be identified as the author of this work.

Published by Glencairn Press, Edinburgh [v. 1.0]

Chaplin at Keystone: A Centenary Celebration Contents

Introduction: Chaplin: Film-by-Film

Charlie Chaplin: The Road to Keystone

Making a Living

Kid Auto Races at Venice

Mabel's Strange Predicament

Between Showers

A Film Johnnie

Tango Tangles

His Favourite Pastime

Cruel, Cruel Love

The Star Boarder

Mabel at the Wheel

Twenty Minutes of Love

Caught in a Cabaret

Caught in the Rain

A Busy Day

The Fatal Mallet

The Knockout

Mabel's Busy Day

Mabel's Married Life

Laughing Gas

The Property Man

The Face on the Barroom Floor

Recreation

The Masquerader

His New Profession

The New Janitor

Those Love Pangs

Dough and Dynamite

Gentlemen of Nerve

His Musical Career

His Trysting Places

Getting Acquainted

His Prehistoric Past

Tillie's Punctured Romance

Afterword: Chaplin's Rise to Fame

Works Consulted/Thanks

Volume Two: Chaplin at Essanay

About the Author

Contact the Author

Introduction

The year 1914 saw the birth of Charlie Chaplin's Tramp, one of cinema's most iconic figures and one of the few from the earliest days of the medium that is still widely celebrated over a century later.

It seemed too good an opportunity to miss in 2014 to chronicle Chaplin's first year in the movies in real time, with blog postings at the web site Charlie Chaplin: Film-by-Film critically reviewing each film on the same day 100 years later after it was released.

The essays presented here are best enjoyed in conjunction with a recent viewing of the relevant shorts. This is a revised compilation of those blog entries, complete with an additional 10,000 words of biographical essays covering Chaplin's life story up to 1914 and the impact of his fame as the movies' first worldwide icon of comedy.

Charlie Chaplin: The Road to Keystone

If there seemed to be something of the gypsy about Charles Chaplin, he perhaps owes it to his grandmother, Ellen Elizabeth Smith, a 17-year-old woman of gypsy stock who married Chaplin's grandfather, Spencer Chaplin, in 1854. Shortly after the birth of their first son, Spencer William Tunstill, the Chaplins moved to London where Spencer senior worked as a butcher and, later, as a publican. The couple's second son, Charles, was born in 1863. This Chaplin was to be father to cinema's greatest ever clown.

There is little biographical information about Chaplin's father's life, until his marriage at the age of 22 to Chaplin's mother, Hannah Hill, the daughter of a shoemaker. The Hill family resided in South London, specifically Lambeth and Southwark, areas that would become familiar to the young Charles Chaplin. Before marrying into the Chaplin clan, Hannah had already had a son, named Sydney (Chaplin's half-brother) by another man. She and Charles Chaplin Senior met when he moved into the same lodging house where she lived—they were married a mere fourteen weeks after Sydney's birth, with Chaplin taking on responsibility for the boy.

Within two years, both Charles and Hannah would be working in vaudeville across Britain's burgeoning music halls, with Sydney in tow. South London itself was packed with music halls and pubs that regularly hosted new performers, many of whom also lived in the area. Vaudeville seems to have been a natural arena for the pair to have gravitated towards, especially as they both boasted good looks and a modicum of talent. Although she was the first of the pair to take to the music hall stage, Hannah's career was to be short-lived. She was a 'professional' by the beginning of 1886, advertising her 'grand success nightly' under her stage name of 'Lily Harley'. By early summer she'd built up enough of a reputation to appear on the bill of a benefit concert at the South London Palace (she was low on the bill, but as Chaplin biographer David Robinson points out, she was still higher billed than Marie Lloyd, later one of music hall's greatest stars). That autumn, she performed across Scotland, but by the end of 1886 bookings appear to have dried up.

The performing baton was passed to her husband, with Charles Chaplin's first recorded performance taking place during Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee in June 1887. He began as a mimic, but soon moved onto 'dramatic' singing. He adopted the persona of a put-upon ordinary man, the kind of character his son would later adopt in the movies, taking on life's vicissitudes. So successful was he that several of his songs were published, complete with his portrait on the cover, by music publishers Francis, Day and Hunter between 1890 and 1896, suggesting his name was well-known enough to help sell the songs. Chaplin's father was never a big music hall name, but he prospered well enough to provide for his growing family.

Charles Chaplin, the future funny man of American cinema, was born at the height of his father's music hall success, on 16 April 1889 (just four days before Adolf Hitler, whom he would lampoon in The Great Dictator in 1940). At the time, Chaplin senior was performing with 'Professor Leotard Bosco's Empire Palace of Varieties'—Chaplin would use the name 'Professor Bosco' for two of his future film characters. The fact that there is no official surviving record of Chaplin's birth has led to speculation regarding his real lineage. To further confuse matters, for a time Chaplin himself claimed to have been born in Fontainbleau, France; East Lane (actually 'East Street', but known as 'East Lane' to locals), Walworth seems much more likely.

The romantic story that Chaplin may have been born in a gypsy caravan somewhere in the West Midlands was fuelled in 2014 by an episode of the BBC period gangster drama Peaky Blinders. A letter Chaplin supposedly kept in a locked drawer was discovered in 1991 by his daughter, Victoria. It was written in the 1970s by one Jack Hill from Tamworth and claimed that Chaplin had been born in the 'Black Patch' in Smethwick near Birmingham, in a gypsy caravan belonging to Hill's aunt, who was a 'Gypsy Queen' (Chaplin's mother's maiden name was Hill). Jack Hill further claimed his father, 'Captain' J. J. Hill, had been a lion tamer who'd worked alongside Chaplin's real father in the Pat Collins circus which toured the West Midlands. Soon after Chaplin's birth, the family moved to London, according to Hill. His claim to be 'the only man alive' to know the truth of Chaplin's birth, and the film star's worry about the gypsy connection, was said to be behind his keeping it a secret his entire life.

Chaplin's later political views saw him come under investigation by both the British security service MI5 as well as the American FBI and the CIA in the 1950s due to his supposed Communist sympathies. Both organisations were intrigued by the absence of his birth certificate, believing it indicated a secret, hidden past, but neither was able—despite their considerable resources—to throw any conclusive light on the subject of Chaplin's true birthplace (for a while they bizarrely believed him to be a French-Russian Jew called 'Israel Thronstein'). John Marriott, then head of MI5's counter-subversion branch, noted: 'It is curious that we can find no record of Chaplin's birth, but I scarcely think that this is of any security significance.' The Hill letter was only made public by Chaplin's son Michael in a 2012 radio documentary.

The following year, the issue of Chaplin's birth date was further confused by a discovery made by genealogy researcher Roy Stockdill. In a notice published in theatrical newspaper The Era, Stockdill discovered a contemporary announcement of Chaplin's birth giving the birth date as 15 April 1889, a day earlier than is generally accepted. This is perhaps the only formal record ever made of Chaplin's birth: theatrical folk were never particularly renowned for their record keeping or for abiding by official rules and regulations. Their general tendency to move around the country, from booking to booking, didn't help matters in this regard. Unfortunately, the piece in The Era gives no location for the announced birth.

While they make for an entertaining mystery, the specifics of Chaplin's birthplace don't really matter. It was Chaplin's childhood in South London that provided the specific experience that would feed into his earliest movies. Within a year or two of his birth, Chaplin found himself fatherless as Charles Chaplin senior walked out on Hannah, possibly due to her continued unfaithfulness. This family history also fed into questions raised by Chaplin and others about his actual parentage. Hannah did what she could, with two children to look after, but it was a doomed enterprise (Chaplin's father would enjoy some success over the next few years, but alcohol and poor judgement would lead to his early death in the spring of 1901 at the age of just 38).

Chaplin's childhood was one of continual displacement, moving from temporary lodging to temporary lodging, across not just London but the country as a whole while Hannah pursued her entertainment career. Her success led to a short-lived relationship in 1892 with Leo Dryden, a singer and comic. Sydney and Charlie would have another half-brother as a result, George Dryden Wheeler. As 'Wheeler Dryden', he'd go on to become a film actor and director who'd work with Stan Laurel and Sydney Chaplin, eventually becoming Charlie's assistant on The Great Dictator (1940) and Monsieur Verdoux (1947), as well as appearing in Limelight (1951). In some accounts, it was Hannah's dalliance with Dryden that formally ended her marriage to Charles Chaplin.

During the time his mother was with Dryden, however, Chaplin enjoyed a somewhat better existence than he'd been used to. The ad-hoc family moved into better accommodations, and in later life Chaplin would recall this period as the one time he was genuinely happy and not constantly in need of food or shelter. Fresh flowers, fruit, and travel by handsome cab became the norm. It wouldn't last, and this 'fall from grace', the loss of his good fortune, would play a large part in the establishment of his film character, the 'little tramp' who'd also fallen on hard times.

By the spring of 1893, Hannah was on her own once more, with Leo Dryden having left her taking his son with him. Chaplin was only four years old, and it's be the last he'd see of half-brother Wheeler Dryden until he helped him come to America in 1918, almost 25 years later. So began Hannah Chaplin's real troubles. Her mental decline, something she'd feared since her own mother 'went mad' and had been taken to the asylum, began in earnest (Wheeler Dryden would suffer this inherited malady, but while he feared it all his life, Chaplin seemed to escape this ill-fortune).

Over the next few years Hannah Chaplin would be in and out of hospitals and asylums, regularly separated from her children who, when they weren't incarcerated in the workhouse (Chaplin went in twice before the age of nine), had to fend for themselves on the streets of London. It was during this period that the young Chaplin followed in the footsteps of both his father and mother and turned to performing, often as a way to survive or raise a small amount of cash for food or a roof over his head.

The myth of Charlie Chaplin's 1894 stage debut is well-known, as he recounted himself in My Autobiography, his often fanciful later account of his life before fame. His sick mother has secured one of her final bookings at a military venue in Aldershot known as The Canteen (although comprehensive theatrical magazine The Era has no record of this). During her turn, Hannah's voice gave out causing young Charlie to take her place on stage dancing, singing, and doing impersonations. The hard-to-please audience were so taken by the seemingly unrehearsed antics of the five-year-old that they began throwing coins. At that point, the boy paused in his performance to collect up the money before resuming. Finally, Hannah recovered and retrieved her errant child from the stage. The story varies in its detail, depending on who is recalling it and when. In some versions, it was Chaplin's estranged father who apparently thrust his young son on stage to entertain a hostile audience. However, Chaplin's course on life was now set—he would become a performer.

Even at a young age, Charlie Chaplin was a keen observer and during his time trailing Hannah around the music halls of the United Kingdom he'd absorbed much stage craft and clowning, perhaps even without realising it. As his mother could not secure any further theatrical bookings, the young Chaplin's life took a dramatic downturn. She took in piece work, sewing and mending clothes, but even this lowly paid occupation came to an end when her sewing machine was repossessed. By June 1895, Hannah had been admitted to Lambeth Infirmary.

The Chaplin brothers, aged 11 and seven, struggled as best they could to survive, repeatedly reuniting with their mother before she was taken back once more to either hospital or asylum. In 1896, Chaplin was briefly rescued from the workhouse by his father, but as he had no interest in taking Sydney too, the boys were instead sent to a school for 'orphans and destitute children'. Chaplin would later tell a reporter that 'My childhood ended at the age of seven'. Sydney was sent off on a naval training ship, leaving young Charlie truly alone for the first time. He misbehaved and fought authority, notably aspects he would use for his later Tramp character.

The family were briefly reunited early in 1898 when Chaplin was released from the orphanage into his mother's care (she was going through one of her more lucid periods), and Sydney returned from his time at sea. However, his situation was little better than before, with the old round of switching lodgings and attempting to survive on no money revived. Towards the end of 1898, Hannah Chaplin was finally committed to Cane Hill Asylum. The boys were forced upon their father, much to the annoyance of his new partner, Louise. By this stage, Charles Chaplin Senior's career had also taken a downturn and his interest in the children was negligible.

Chaplin had performed in the street and danced outside pubs, wherever there was an accordion player to be found, grateful for the pennies he could raise. Before the end of 1898, he'd become a professional performer recruited to join clog-dancing troupe The Eight Lancashire Lads. The contact may have come about through his father's agent, with the deal offering the youngster board and lodgings and simultaneously getting him off his father's hands. His older brother Sydney would eventually return to sea to pursue a career.

Six weeks of strenuous rehearsal preceded Chaplin's debut with the troupe in Portsmouth. They toured the country often playing to indifferent audiences, but Chaplin was happy for the apprenticeship. In conversation with a journalist, he later said: 'Every move they made registered on my young brain like a photograph. My earliest study of the clowns in the London pantomimes has been of tremendous value to me.' As well as performing, Chaplin would watch the rest of the variety bill, from magicians and mesmerists to song-and-dance men and acrobats. He took it all in, learning their techniques, storing them up for the time he'd get to put them into practice himself. The sketches and skits Chaplin witnessed would stay with him and provide the basis for many of his earliest short films made at Keystone Studios.

Chaplin's father died towards the end of his time with the clog dancers, by which point he'd become something of a star turn in the troupe, adding bits of unscripted comic business to his appearances, much to the chagrin of his fellow performers. When the tour finished, the young man found himself having to pursue a variety of jobs—including as assistants to printers and barbers, a 'newsboy' selling papers by Clapham Common station, or selling clothes on a street market stall. No doubt, his recent performing experience came in handy in at least some of these roles.

Sometime in early 1903, Chaplin's 38-year-old mother was once more held in an asylum, but he only discovered this when he returned home after a day's work when a neighbour bluntly told him she'd 'gone mad' and been taken away. Chaplin, then 14, narrowly escaped the workhouse himself by claiming he was going to live with an unnamed auntie, only to take up life on the streets. He worked where he could and stole food or money when he had to. He survived on his own for weeks, waiting for his brother Sydney to return from sea. When Sydney was greeted at Waterloo Station by a filthy street urchin, he almost failed to recognise his younger brother. Together again, the older Chaplin had his younger sibling cleaned up. They visited Hannah in Cane Hill Asylum, but she didn't seem to recognise them. She would remain there for most of the next 20 years (with occasional periods of lucidity when she was free to leave), until Chaplin was able to bring her to America after he found fame in the movies.

'If it had not been for my mother, I doubt if I could have made a success of pantomime,' recalled Chaplin in 1918, at the height of his early fame. 'She was one of the greatest pantomime artists I have ever seen. It was through watching and listening to her that I learned not only how to express my emotions with my hands and face, but also how to observe and study people.' It would be a legacy that Chaplin would put to very good use.

Although his clog dancing days were long behind him, the young Chaplin had kept up his interest in the theatrical profession via a contact with the Blackmore Agency. They put him up for the role of the pageboy Billy in a touring production of W. C. Gillette's play Sherlock Holmes. The actor playing Holmes, H. A. Saintsbury, first put Chaplin in a two week run in Kingston-upon-Thames of his own play Jim, A Romance of Cockayne, before the Sherlock Holmes tour kicked off at the end of July at the Pavilion Theatre on Mile End Road.

Chaplin spent his first weeks wages buying a fancy new camera, beginning a life-long love of photography. Fearing that such good fortune could vanish just as suddenly as it had begun, Chaplin made a point of saving every penny of his pay from the Sherlock Holmes tour and even charged for photographic services he offered in whichever town the play stopped in. He'd even occasionally perform his clog dance routine in the streets between Sherlock Holmes shows and pass the hat to raise a little extra cash. By the end of 1903, Sydney had joined the company both to look after Charlie and to play the role of an aged aristocrat. For a short while in 1904 the brothers were even joined by their mother, Hannah, on the tour during one of her short and infrequent periods of remission from her mental troubles.

The first run of Sherlock Holmes ended in June 1904, but further tours kept Chaplin in the company through until 1906 providing the young man with a thorough grounding in legitimate stagecraft. However, the lure of the musical hall and pantomime kept tugging at him, so when Sydney returned from another period at sea and asked him to join in his new slapstick company, Charlie jumped at the chance. For three months they performed together as a pair of incompetent workmen in a sketch called 'Repairs', a routine that would form the basis of several later slapstick shorts. The years featuring in Sherlock Holmes would be Chaplin's only experience of the 'legitimate' stage: he was much more at home in slapstick and pantomime.

At the age of 17, in the spring of 1906, Chaplin joined Casey's Circus, a combined variety show and circus act that taught him the importance of precise timing to the success of slapstick comedy. Although it appeared to the audience to be a spontaneous series of ramshackle happenings, the routines performed by Casey's Circus were very carefully worked out and tightly rehearsed until every performer was perfect in their respective roles. A lot of work went into the appearance of spontaneity. It was during these performances that Chaplin first adopted his distinctive trademark one-legged sliding skid for navigating corners which would feature in many of his earliest movies.

Chaplin left Casey's Circus in the summer of 1907 to once more join his brother Sydney who for the past year had been attached to Fred Karno's vaudeville troupe. For Chaplin, joining Karno was the big time. A one-time acrobat and gymnast, Fred Karno (whose real name was Frederick John Westcott) had become a music hall empire builder whose claim to fame was the invention of the custard-pie-in-the-face gag. Karno's 'fun factory' (a name later also attached to Mack Sennett's Keystone Studios where Chaplin's film career would begin in 1914) produced a variety of acts serving the music halls nationwide, including a series of silent burlesques in which his comics performed fast-paced slapstick sketches to the accompaniment of ballet music.

From the start of 1908 Chaplin toured with the Karno company, feeling he'd finally found his theatrical home at last. He displayed a natural aptitude for the slapstick antics Karno was known for, having assimilated everything he'd learned from his parents and his previous stage experiences. He quickly developed bits of personal business to use on stage, particularly in the inventive use of props like a cane or by 'accidentally' tripping over other items littering the area. During this time, the Chaplin brothers roomed together and the comedian would later look back upon the summer of 1908 as one of the most contented periods of his life.

Always shy, despite his penchant for performance, touring with Karno allowed the young man to come out of his shell a bit more in a social context. He was also to find romance in the various towns the troupe appeared in, although due to the peripatetic nature of his work none of these 'on the road' romances lasted long. He performed in various sketches, like The Football Match and Jimmy the Fearless, but it was in Mumming Birds that he excelled. This staple pantomime of the vaudeville world saw a series of deliberately bad acts interrupted by a drunk from the audience (really a performer planted there as part of the troupe). Chaplin, drawing upon his experiences with his alcoholic father and upon scenes he'd witnessed during his London childhood, was able to pull off the drunk act perfectly. Everything in the sketch was done through pantomime, perfect timing, and physical resilience that saw the young man able to take tumble after tumble, night after night. In the winter of 1909 Chaplin was performing his drunk act in Mumming Birds in Paris, France when the Karno troupe appeared at the Folies Bergère, his first trip abroad.

Karno initially harboured doubts about the young-looking, small and slight Chaplin, but they were quickly dispelled as the new performer went on to become one of the stars of the Karno 'fun factory'. It made Chaplin the obvious choice to join an elite group Karno was putting together for a tour of vaudeville houses in