The Little Tramp
THE LITTLE Tramp really did arrive from nowhere. They’re still puzzling over where comic film legend Charlie Chaplin was born. It was supposed to have been in London in April 1889, but no record has been found.
Chaplin moved to the US in 1910, where he became a comic hit at Hollywood with his jerky silent movies in the persona of “The Little Tramp”.
He made The Great Dictator in 1940, a hilarious lampooning of Hitler.
But then in post-war America he got caught up in the Mccarthyite hysteria against communism and it was then that MI5 were asked by their American counterparts to check his origins.
To this day, MI5 and Scotland Yard have been unable to confirm details of his birth, according to this news item. There is a suggestion that he might actually have been born in France. But both MI5 and Scotland Yard said from the outset that the mystery was puzzling, though of no security significance.
Chaplin – who fell under suspicion partly for declining to take out US citizenship and partly for his liaisons with young girls barely at the age of consent – eventually left America to spend the rest of his days in Switzerland, where his marriage to Oona O’neill was a lot more happy and stable than his previous three ones.
That Mccarthy witch-hunt against communism was quite astonishing.
As Dorothy Parker remarked, the only “ism” Hollywood believed in was plagiarism.
Signed ‘Charlie’
WHATEVER his origins, Chaplin became part of the idiom both sides of the Atlantic. Novelist Evelyn Waugh had a character who would derisively sign cheques “Charlie Chaplin” when he had no intention of parting with his money.
In Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, the prison chaplain would be referred to as “the Charles”.
Who can forget Chaplin getting an itchy nose while on the motor assembly line? Who cares where he was born?