How Charlie Chaplin got CANCELLED
He was the world’s biggest star, boasting 2,000 notches on his bed post. But when British-born Chaplin refused to become an American citizen, it was taken as proof of his communism and he was told never to come back
Charlie Chaplin Vs America: When Art, Sex, and Politics Collided Scott Eyman
Simon & Schuster, €24
In the spring of 1931, after more than 20 years in Hollywood, Charlie Chaplin holidayed in London. Back in his home town, he met up with various members of the great and good. He lunched at Lady Astor’s, argued politics with Bernard Shaw, argued them some more with HG Wells, lunched with former prime minister Lloyd George, and dined with future prime minister Winston Churchill at Chartwell.
Chaplin wasn’t just being milked for his fame. To be sure, the dozens of silent films he had written, directed, produced and starred in, had made him one of the most well-known people in the world. But Chaplin was loved for more than just his pratfalls.
Churchill thought him a genius, as adept at tragedy as comedy. The eminent literary critic Edmund Wilson thought him the only American movie director ‘comparable artistically to the best German or Russian film[maker]s’. Scott Eyman, the author of an eyeopening new biography, goes further than that, calling Chaplin ‘the single most important figure in motion picture history’. As for Chaplin himself, he modestly suggested that his work was a ‘bridge’ between Shakespeare and Dickens.
He had a point. Certainly both Falstaff and the Artful Dodger would have recognised the gin-soaked Walworth slums where Charles Spencer Chaplin was born in 1889. His mother sewed blouses at a penny a pop. His father was a drunken actor who soon enough abandoned his family to penury. Charlie and his brother Sydney spent their earliest years in and out of the workhouse. Their clothes were tattered and torn, and they frequently went to bed hungry – on the nights they didn’t sleep on a park bench.
All this poverty was pointed up for Chaplin by the fact that his estranged father was making a fat living treading the boards. Before long, Chaplin followed him on to the stage – and soon became the biggest star in music hall. But though Chaplin would leave London for New York and then Los Angeles, earning untold riches along the way, the memory of his childhood poverty never left him. The figure of the Tramp, the baggy-trousered, walking-stick waving comic creation that made Chaplin instantly recognisable the world over, grew out of his impoverished background.
Chaplin used the power that came with fame well. Not content with starring in movies, he soon let it be known that he would be producing, writing and directing all his features. Soon enough, he built his own movie studio, where he was in charge of even the smallest aspect
of every film. Since he financed his pictures with his own money, he was free to make them as he wanted. Long after other comedians had moved over to sound, he insisted silents were golden.
It was only in in 1940, more than a decade after the advent of the talkies, that he was to be heard speaking. In The Great Dictator, Chaplin – whose squared off moustache had often been compared with Hitler’s – played an Adolf lookaike bent on world domination.
The film was another huge hit, but within months of its release Chaplin was persona non grata in his adopted homeland. Part of the reason was that he hadn’t actually been adopted. Though he had spent the bulk of his life in America, he had never taken out citizenship. When asked why, Chaplin poured scorn on nationalism and insisted that ‘I am a citizen of the world’.
Ribbing Hitler hadn’t helped his cause either. Chaplin had conceived of The Great Dictator as a pacifist satire, but America’s isolationists, who wanted to stay out of the war, were none too happy with a movie they saw as a call to arms.
And when America did join in the war, Chaplin further blotted his copybook by calling for a second front to defend the beleaguered Soviet Union against Nazism. You see, howled his critics – he’s a lefty! Even though Chaplin the moviemaker could be a tyrannical taskmaster, and even though Lenin had once said Chaplin was the only man he wanted to meet, Eyman calls this nonsense out. To be sure, Chaplin was always on the side of the working man, but he hadn’t a communist bone in his body. He’d always been upfront about making money, and would always declare himself an instinctive anarchist.
Adding grist to the critics’ mill was Chaplin’s sex life. The Tramp loved the ladies – so much so that he once claimed to have 2,000 notches on his bedpost. Nor did it help that as he got older, the girls got younger. Chaplin was 29 when he married his first wife, the 17-year-old Mildred Harris. When he was 35 he married the 16-year-old Lita Grey (whose name is said to have inspired Nabokov’s Lolita). And when he was 54, he married Eugene O’Neill’s daughter Oona – who at 18 was precisely a third of his age. You see, the critics howled even louder, the lefty is a libertine! In 1952, the year he made his last American picture, Chaplin, who was holidaying in Europe, was told he could not re-enter the country he had for more than 40 years lived, worked, and paid tax in. He spent the rest of his life in Switzerland. Though there was a kind of rapprochement, with the issuing of an Oscar for ‘the incalculable effect he has had in making motion pictures the art of this century’ in 1973, the 88year-old Chaplin died in exile.
Scott Eyman tells this sorry tale with a sense of propriety that belies his anger and shame. He cannot believe that his country ‘cancelled’ one of its greatest stars. By zooming in on the torture and torment of Chaplin’s later days, Eyman’s book stays vital all the way through. Even better, it helps right one of America’s biggest wrongs.