Words Don’t Fail Him

It’s a crisp, sunny Manhattan morning and Marcel Marceau is telling of the time he met Charlie Chaplin. Central Park beckons outside the picture windows of his hotel suite, but for the moment Marceau is back in Orly Airport outside Paris and it’s 1967.

“At first I’m timid, like a child, for Chaplin is my idol, my inspiration,” he says, drawing his compact body into a ball on the couch. “But I go over.” He rises and walks toward the windows. “I start to mime Chaplin,” he says, waddling forward, feet splayed and his whole body tottering in time. “And there is Chaplin beside me: Chaplin miming Marceau miming Chaplin.”

Literally shifting back and forth between the two, Marceau continues to act out this chance and only rendezvous between the two icons of the art of silence.

“As we say goodbye, I think: ‘How can I thank him for all he has done?’ So I grab his hand,” he says, grasping his own as though it’s Chaplin’s. “He tries to pull it away, but I pull harder and then I kiss it.” Marceau, acting as himself, the acolyte, kisses the hand, and then he becomes Chaplin, receiving the kiss and responding with his signature cocked head, quivering, misty-eyed, wistful.

There is something remarkable about having a conversation with Marceau, and the novelty of hearing his voice--soft, thin, melodic--accompanying this little display of his virtuosity captures but a part of it. In the U.S. for a solo tour coming to Escondido’s California Center for the Arts on Tuesday and L.A.’s Wiltern Theatre on Saturday, Marceau is celebrating the 50th birthday of his stage character, Bip, that white-faced, sailor-suited, whimsical, quixotic and, of course, Chaplinesque Everyman.

On this day, it is clear that Marceau not only loves to talk but also has much he wants to say. For a man who has devoted his life and his talents to silence, Marceau, now 74, has acquired an eloquence about his obsession with mime, what it has been like to take his character Bip through five decades and around the world, how he is both comfortable with his fame and insecure about being taken as a serious artist, and, most poignantly, his debt to Chaplin and a mime tradition he hopes will long outlive him.

Yet he is also an incorrigible pantomimist. To talk with Marceau is to both listen and watch, for he acts out just about everything. Without that well-known white makeup and his squished opera hat with its dangling flower, he is almost elfin, with green eyes, a wiry mess of hair speckled with gray and graceful, constantly gesturing hands.

At one point, exhibiting his peculiar mix of being both boyish and a gray eminence, he jumps up as he tries to explain his allure.

“Why am I popular? Because I brought silence to the stage, because I make the invisible visible. I create abstract worlds and make them concrete.”

Sometimes, that world simply makes you laugh, he says as he pretends to ride a bicycle. But other times, he insists, he is able to convey longing, lost love and even death in a way words never can. He turns his hand into a fluttering butterfly that slowly ceases to move. “I have spent more than half a lifetime trying to capture the tragic moment.”

It is hard to imagine that in 1955, when he first came to the U.S., virtually no one had heard of him and the theater of mime was a little-known art form. Through the years, Marceau has not only sparked a revival of mime but also become one of the most recognized and most imitated performers of our time.

In fact, outside in Central Park and over in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, mimes have become commonplace--climbing imaginary stairs or playing invisible violins in vintage Marceau style.

“Yes, yes, street mimes are nice, I have nothing against them. To entertain people is wonderful. And if they have been influenced by me, that’s very nice too,” Marceau says. “But it can also hurt. Mime goes much deeper. It is theater; it is not just street entertainment.”

This touches one of Marceau’s central themes: his desire to be considered a serious artist. He loves to quote actor Anthony Hopkins, who credits Marceau and Laurence Olivier as having the most influence on his acting. But still Marceau worries: “Even now, I don’t know if mime is accepted as an art form by other actors,” he says.

It was this quest for recognition that led him to start an international mime school in Paris to train performers steeped in his ideas. It is why he has created a company that performs full-scale mime dramas ranging from a version of Gogol’s “The Overcoat” to Marceau’s most recent mime play, “The Bowler Hat,” his homage to Chaplin. And it is part of the reason Marceau likes to keep touring in the U.S.

“Americans have a way of accepting something new without jealousy,” he says.

He remembers fondly his first U.S. tour, when he became an instant sensation and played to packed houses across the country.

“I was only 30, and it was wonderful to get so much attention,” he says. “Everyone came to see me: the Marx Brothers, Danny Kaye, Jerry Lewis, Red Skelton.”

Marceau has committed to memory what the critics wrote. The New York Times left him elated by saying he was to the stage what Chaplin was to film. And all these years later, he mimics an expression of ecstasy recounting how critic Walter Kerr described Marceau’s mime as the essence of theater and the reason why theater will last a long time.

“He understood; he didn’t put me in the category of being a mime. He knew that I am an actor and that mime is theater.”

Marceau was born Marcel Mangel in 1923 in Strasbourg, near the French-German border. He was the second son of a butcher and brought up to savor his Jewish roots and his father’s Socialist leanings. The stage and silent films captivated him from an early age.

“I’ll never forget the first time my aunt took me to see a Chaplin film. I was 5. I started imitating him and dreamed of going on stage,” he says. “In the summertime, I was part of a children’s theater and I always wanted to play the Little Tramp.”

His childhood, though, was defined by the rise of Hitler across the border. By the time German troops invaded France, Marcel’s elder brother Alain became a leader of the underground in Limoges, and he became a helper. His job was to alter birth dates on identity cards, using crayons and ink, so that young men could avoid German labor camps. In 1944, his father was captured and sent to Auschwitz. His mother escaped and survived the war. Marcel went to Paris, changed his last name to Marceau and enrolled in the Charles Dullin School of Dramatic Art.

By this time, mime was passe in France, and few of the students aspired to make their names through pantomime. Marceau says that the school’s mime teacher, Etienne Decroux, convinced him to take a second look: “He told me I was a born mime and taught me about its rich tradition and grammar.”

Decroux relished the classical roots of mime: its origins in the bawdy Dionysian festivals of ancient Greece; its use in medieval morality plays; and most especially its 19th century renaissance in France through the character of Pierrot, a romantic, dreamy wanderer. Pierrot fired the imagination of Parisian audiences and poets such as Baudelaire by turning the stage into a world of fantasy and desire.

For Marceau, however, the character of Pierrot no longer matched the times. Marceau studied with Decroux for four years and mastered the tradition, yet he also set out to infuse that tradition with a modern sensibility. Partly it was because of silent films and Chaplin, he says, but it was also because of Isadora Duncan and Expressionist painters and his intoxication with the idea of modernity and the avant-garde. Among Marceau’s many talents has been his ability to bridge tradition and innovation. For instance, one of his first original mimes was based on a Japanese Noh story.

In 1947, he started his own company. It was there that the character of Bip was born. He started out as a whimsy, loosely based on the character Pip from Dickens’ “Great Expectations.” But Bip, a bumbling innocent adrift in the modern world, also owes much to the dreamy, romantic Pierrot and Chaplin’s bowlered waif.

“I am humble in the face of the long tradition: Harlequin, Pierrot, Chaplin. That is why I wear a white face. It is my metaphor of respect for the tradition.”

Through the years, Marceau has created scores of little sketches of modern life with Bip. Some are slapstick, others starkly philosophical. For his U.S. tour, which started early this month in the Midwest, Marceau says, he is performing some sketches that have become classics, such as “The Mask Maker” and “The Cage,” but also more experimental works such as “Bip in Modern and Future Life,” which revolves around the dropping of a nuclear bomb. Each of them offers a sort of window on the vocabulary of mime that Marceau has created through five decades.

“I’m always adding, always changing. I want Bip to evolve with the times. I try to look at contemporary issues,” Marceau says.

“Audiences really don’t change--they have the same emotions and react in the same ways. What has changed is what you have to do to get them to come. There is so much more competition for people’s attention: TV, films, video games, the Internet. But once you get them into the theater, it’s the same.”

Although Marceau wanders away from the stage now and then--he’s been in movies such as William Castle’s 1974 “Shanks,” he is a painter, and he has published children’s books and a novel--he says he always returns, for the silent stage is his home.

“I stayed with mime because I was good at it. I could be the best. There are so many actors, but I am the only Marceau,” he says. Retirement hasn’t occurred to him. Instead, he’s hoping to take his company and “The Bowler Hat” on tour soon.

By now, the morning sun has moved directly overheard. Marceau pulls out an oversize picture book of his life that has just been published in France.

He lingers over a photograph taken of him at 15, dressed up as Chaplin’s tramp. Then he turns to the pages filled with reproductions of his paintings: colorful, naif-style renderings of his mime dramas and Bip adventures. In many of them, somewhere in the crowd or even flying through the sky, the figure of Chaplin appears. “See, Chaplin is always there,” he says as he closes the book.

* Marcel Marceau, California Center for the Arts, 340 N. Escondido Blvd., Escondido, Tuesday, 8 p.m. $23-$38. (800) 988-4253. Also at the Wiltern Theatre, 3790 Wilshire Blvd., Saturday, 8 p.m. $30-$50. Ticketmaster: (213) 365-3500; (714) 380-5005.