How Chaplin became the Tramp
TOO-TIGHT JACKET and oversized shoes became one of cinema’s most instantly recognizable images
LONDON — Charlie Chaplin’s costume as “the Tramp” is a bundle of contradictions: The jacket is buttoned too tightly, the trousers are too baggy, the bowler hat too small and the Size 14 shoes much too big, as well as being worn on the wrong feet. These disparate elements combined to help define his screen personality and its place in the world, including his social pretensions.
In silhouette form, the costume became, in the eyes and minds of early film-going audiences, one of the bestknown, most instantly recognizable screen images in the world — up there with Mickey Mouse’s ears, Boris Karloff ’s cranium, Humphrey Bogart’s trench coat, Judy Garland’s ruby shoes and Alfred Hitchcock’s line drawing of his own portly shape.
Chaplin designed the costume himself. It lasted on the screen, in numerous shorts and features, for 22 years.
There are several versions of how the Tramp costume came to be invented. One, put out by the Keystone Comedy Studio, where Chaplin worked from December 1913, was that he was passing the time one afternoon in the male dressing room (a converted farm shed) — while waiting for the rain to stop — by trying on various articles belonging to other contracted comedians: Fatty Arbuckle’s trousers, star performer Ford Sterling’s shoes, and so on. The stick-on moustache was intended for a villain, but he cut it down to the dimensions of a toothbrush. And it all seemed to work.
Another was that the costume was a collage of elements dating back to lateVictorian music-hall routines — Dan Leno’s ill-fitting jacket, Little Tich’s boots, George Robey’s small hat and umbrella maybe — and that Chaplin could have been more generous in acknowledging this.
Chaplin had been “discovered” while appearing in an anthology show of the British music hall, on 42nd Street in New York. Chaplin, in his 1964 autobiography, recalls the key moment as happening when studio head Mack Sennett asked him to get into a funny outfit in a hurry — everything at Keystone was done in a hurry.
“I had no idea what makeup to put on. … However, on the way to the wardrobe, I thought I would dress in baggy pants, big shoes, a cane and a derby hat. … I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the makeup made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked on to the stage he was fully born. … Gags and comedy ideas went racing through my mind.”
Allowing for poetic licence over the intervening years — the character in fact took quite a time to be “fully born” — this rings true. It is confirmed by the cameraman on the first film to be made featuring the Tramp, Mabel’s Strange Predicament, who in 1984 clearly recalled Chaplin coming out of the shed to “rehearse himself — that walk, the cane, the hat and things like that, you know.”
But this wasn’t the film that introduced audiences to the Tramp. Two days earlier, on Feb. 7, 1914, Kid Auto Races in Venice, Calif., was released, a largely improvised short of just 20 shots, 572 feet, which was filmed in 45 minutes flat against the backdrop of a real-life rally of boys hurtling down a slope in soapbox cars: Sennett liked sometimes to use ready-made parades and sporting events as cheap settings. Chaplin plays a tramp who keeps ruining the setups of a long-suffering film director (played by the actual director, Henry Lehrman) by elbowing his way into shot and self-consciously playing up to the camera by doing little comedy routines.
At first, the spectators at the rally do not know what to make of this, but they soon begin to roar with laughter. Just like audiences who watched the film. The costume, the character, the knowing relationship with the camera, the emotional contact with the audience were all already there, in prototype form.
Just six months later, Chaplin could write to his half-brother Sydney: “I am a big box-office attraction. It is wonderful how popular I am in such a short time.” He had been directing his own films since the end of April, and was well on the way to becoming the best-known screen star in the world.
Charlie Chaplin’s memory of “the clothes and the makeup” making him feel his way into the Tramp’s character and helping “to know him” from the inside as “a tramp, a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow always hopeful of romance and adventure” has been echoed by many film actors since the silent era.
They have confirmed that an essential way into a character can be through wearing the clothes that, when the film is released, can make a strong emotional connection with the audience and reveal a lot of extra information about that character, even when the talkies made mime and bodily movement and visually distinctive clothing do less work.
Bette Davis said: “If we’re not comfortable in those clothes, if they don’t project the character, the costume designer has failed us.” Meryl Streep reckons that “the clothes are half the battle in creating the character”—they help to create the feeling that the actor is not him or herself but a character in a film.
Which is why, in the opening section of the Victoria & Albert Museum exhibition Hollywood Costume, about how the clothes define character, Chaplin’s costume was a must-have. (It is the one he wore in The Circus, which he started filming in November 1925.) Clowns had worn distinctive costumes in film before, especially in France and Italy. But this one was a key element in a much-loved, long-running cinematic character as well.
It also has a unique distinction: It is the only costume in the show to have been designed by the actor who wore it.