Chaplin Memoirs Roll
pp. 95-97 · Read in the full issue
Back The Years
What’s in a name? When it’s Charlie Chaplin, plenty.
Old scandals, the magic of the early movies, even what has come to be regarded as Art in the motion picture business, all raise their heads.
CHAPLIN spanned an era of entertainment, from vaudeville through the Silents to the Talkies, but unlike most of the stars of his period, who are either dead or forgotten, he has managed to keep a public. This is remarkable because although he made something like 75 silent films he made only five talkies.
His long-expected memoirs, My Autobiography, spans a longer period than his film career and has had flattering attention from reviewers who must have been in diapers at the time Charlie made his last Silent; and ecstatic nostalgia from older members of the craft who, through this book, have recaptured some of their own youth.
Accident Prone As an in-between. Charlie for me merely conjures up memories of cold nights in a galvanised-iron community hall in a New Zealand village where there were “pictures on Saturday nights”, and where we stamped and clapped in order to keep the circulation going as much as to show our appreciation of the entertainment. Even as a child I never went far-out for the repetitive antics of the accident-prone, funny sad little man in the baggy pants and bowler hat. Which proves nothing other than that, even at an early age, I had no culture.
Chaplin’s autobiography is all of 528 pages long and is occasionally wearisome but, even for a non believer, most of it is vitally interest ing. In the 1920’s and 1930’s Chaplin went everywhere and met everyone who was of any import ance, but beyond this his story is a chunk out of the world’s theatrical history of the last 75 years.
He philosophises about his art and method of making films; des cribes his successes in the Lotus land of Hollywood, as it was in its hey-day, and his personal triumphs that clogged the streets of London, Paris and New York as only the Beatles can today. But best of all is his account of his early life in London towards the close of last century.
Charlie was the son of a soubrette mother and a vaudevillian father who earned £4O a week even in 1889 but drank himself to death not many years later at the age of 37, Mother and father separated a year after Charlie was born and his early family consisted of his mother and his half-brother, Sydney, who was the result of an earlier adventure when Mother had run away to Africa at 17, with someone who was alleged to be a Lord.
When Charlie was five Mrs.
Chaplin lost her voice following an illness and also her job on the stage, and for the next decade the three of them lived in utter poverty, the boys in and out of orphanages and their mother rotating between back rooms in the slums, the workhouse and mental institutions. Due to the stress and strain of their lives, for the rest of her life she was subject to periods of mental illness.
Probably one of the most touching aspects of this story is how the brothers stuck together until both were wealthy and how both were devoted to their mother, whose welfare was their first consideration right up to the time of her death.
Married Four Times Those people who remember Chaplin as a man who was married four times, was the central figure on the notorious Barry paternity suit, and who obviously took an interest in the opposite sex, will probably be disappointed that in his memoirs, as he puts it himself, “sex will be mentioned but not stressed.”
He was, he said, vulnerable only between pictures; during working periods women never interested him at all and he subscribed whole heartedly to H. G. Wells’ theories on the subject.
“There comes a moment in the day,” said Wells, “when you have
written your pages in the morning, attended to your correspondence in the afternoon, and have nothing further to do. Then comes that hour when you are bored; that’s the time for sex.”
There were many occasions when Charlie substituted sex for the :ocktail hour but while he acknow edges the fact frankly, he has a Victorian reluctance to go into further details. These episodes he jsually refers to as “the inevitable lappening” and although the in evitable occurs frequently through Rost of the book, he doesn’t dwell in the subject.
Neither is there any more than is accessary about his wives, even about his last, lasting marriage with Dona O’Neill; and he does not nention the name of his second wife at all, as this apparently is still too distasteful a subject to liscuss. Nor is the reader left, in he end, with any really clear picture of Charlie’s politics although t was his deviation from what Americans then regarded as the icceptable that forced him out of he US during that country’s acute McCarthy period.—JT (MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY. Published by Bodley Head. 55/-.