The Tramp’s alter ego

Charlie CHAPLIN was born into a collapsing theatrical family in South London in 1889. His early life was an uneasy mix of hopeful stage performances and stretches in orphanages and even the workhouse. His absent father was dead of alcoholism at 37. His mother went crazy, as her mother had, and was in and out of institutions. At 9, Charlie toured with a troupe of child performers; he got regular board and lodging and occasional schooling, which was more than he had had in London.

An enormous amount has been written about Chaplin, with more appearing all the time. His own “My Autobiography” (1964) is at its best when he evokes his harrowing childhood and the Victorian music halls where his sensibility was formed. The standard reference is David Robinson’s “Chaplin: His Life & Art” (1985).

Jeffrey Vance, in “Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema,” has produced a volume with 500 photographs, some previously unpublished, from Chaplin’s archives. The photos illuminate Vance’s conventional biographical essay, making a parallel visual biography. In all, this is a significant addition to our knowledge of Chaplin. Vance has enlisted Robinson to write the introduction, in which he makes the point that other silent stars, such as Buster Keaton, may be in greater favor now, but they’ve been rediscovered; Charlie has never been away.

As a young man, Chaplin toured America and hooked up with Mack Sennett and his Keystone studio, where the character of the Tramp was born -- “the little fellow,” as Chaplin often called him. Chaplin always said he concocted the costume when Sennett told him to go to wardrobe and put on comedy makeup (“Anything will do”). He chose the tight coat, baggy trousers, large shoes, cane, derby and a small mustache. The wobbly, splay-footed walk came with the shoes. The Tramp was first seen in “Kid Auto Races at Venice” (1914). A camera crew is filming the races. The Tramp keeps disrupting things, walking into the shot. Charlie just couldn’t stay off-camera.

Keystone typically did not identify its actors in its advertisements. A cardboard figure of the Tramp outside the theater, with the legend “I am here to-day” was enough to draw crowds. Vance includes three posed pictures of Chaplin taken in 1915 by the portrait photographer Witzel. These modern-appearing images illustrate why the crowds gathered. They were advertisements, certainly, but they also seemed to show Charlie’s soul. The Tramp was tattered but plucky; his perseverance would surely see him through. He was, in short, an American.

Chaplin soon moved to Essanay, a studio part-owned by the cowboy star “Broncho Billy” Anderson. As Vance puts it, “the early slapstick of the Keystone comedies represents Chaplin’s cinematic infancy, the films he made for Essanay ... are his adolescence.” At Essanay, Edna Purviance was Chaplin’s leading lady. Like many who came later, she was also his mistress. Edna was young, but so was Charlie and so were the movies. Later, he and the movies matured; the women didn’t. Mildred Harris was 16 when he met her. They married because of a false pregnancy, then had a child that died in infancy. The inevitable divorce made a mess of Charlie’s reputation.

Chaplin’s legacy rests not only on the popular masterpieces -- “The Kid” (1921), “The Gold Rush” (1925), “City Lights” (1931) and “Modern Times” (1936) -- but also on a style of performance and filmmaking derived from the music hall. It was a blend of farcical humor and sentimental romance that featured drunks, orphans and the blind. Individually, the two strands were not unusual for the period; together, they created something that was at once broad and still exquisite -- what the world has come to call Chaplinesque. In silent films, the acting is often exaggerated; actors call it “indicating” -- rolling your eyes to show fear, for instance. Chaplin did his share of it, but at his best he added another layer, one that a viewer has to tease out. You can see it in some of the photos more readily than you can on the screen. In “The Kid,” Charlie’s face fairly says, “Don’t tread on me -- or mine.” His fierce eyes contrast with Jackie Coogan’s innocence. There’s a transparency that allows you to feel that you’re seeing right to the man’s DNA.

“The Kid” was shot at Chaplin’s own studio, at La Brea and Sunset, now the offices of A&M; Records. The Tramp is raising a foundling, who grows into little Jackie, a boy born to play opposite Charlie Chaplin. Jackie breaks windows; the Tramp conveniently turns up, offering to make repairs. Chaplin was casting this story of filial love at the time he suffered the death of his infant son. When Chaplin and Coogan are on-screen, they seem mystically bound. When they’re separated by loutish authorities, the viewer feels unsettled. Today, 80-odd years after it was made, the core story of the Tramp and the boy remains affecting in a way that never fails to amaze me.

Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith were the founders of United Artists. A studio executive said, “The lunatics have taken charge of the asylum.” It took Chaplin a while, but he eventually delivered a bit of lunacy to UA: “The Gold Rush” -- the Tramp in the Klondike. Everyone knows the famous set piece of Charlie eating his shoe. (It was made of licorice.) The scene is one of the iconic images of the cinema. Lita Grey, at 12, had played a small part as a vamping angel in “The Kid.” Now, at 15, she was cast by Chaplin as his love interest in “The Gold Rush.” She didn’t get to play the part, although she did get to be the second Mrs. Chaplin. The marriage was a calamity. It wound up in court, and Lita’s complaints, some of them sexual, were published in a pamphlet and sold in the street. She made off with a bundle, got custody of their two sons and left him shaken.

Charlie’s fame by the mid-1920s is hard to gauge in the light of today’s world of omnipresent celebrities. Chaplin imitators popped up all over, like today’s Elvis impersonators. One goofy character billed himself as Charlie Aplin and seemed to be everywhere. Today, there’s usually an optimistic soul walking along Hollywood Boulevard in a derby, twirling a cane -- surely a promotion for one of the street’s entertainment museums.

Manoah Bowman, the book’s photographic editor, has assembled a trove of portraits and miscellaneous pictures of Chaplin by Baron de Meyer, Edward Steichen, W. Eugene Smith and others. I’ve seen some of them before, but taken together, they make a revealing album. Let Witzel’s 1914 portrait stand for them all. No toothy grin, and at first glance he could be a businessman. Then you realize you can’t look away from him.

Early in the sound era, Chaplin made a silent, “City Lights,” arguably his greatest film. A blind flower girl thinks the Tramp is a millionaire. He devotes himself to arranging for an operation that restores her sight. Among his fundraising schemes is prizefighting. It’s a movie of extended gags and enormous delicacy, despite the bathetic story line (you couldn’t call Chaplin tough-minded); selfless love just rolls out of the Tramp. The closing shot is of Charlie, a flower at his mouth, looking like a mythological creature -- Pan, perhaps, in a derby and in love.

The sound era was Chaplin’s undoing. He resisted it, making movies that were at their heart silent, even though they had dialogue scenes. “Modern Times,” nominally a talkie, contains one of the most famous of all silent sequences: Charlie caught in the gears of an industrial machine, a photo that has been reproduced countless times. The implication of a little man caught in the cogs of modern life is clear; everyone responds to the eloquence of the image. Unlike other directors who began in silent films, Chaplin never grew comfortable with sound. There’s a telling sequence in “Modern Times” of Charlie as a singing waiter who forgets his lyrics and substitutes Italianate gibberish. This pretty much sums up his view of the importance of words in movies.

Soon, his pictures began to look dated, and his corny plots became annoying. “Limelight” (1952) featured Buster Keaton, the only time the great men were in a film together. There’s a fascinating Hommel photograph of the two of them in a dressing room. Vance says of it, “Notice how the stone-faced Keaton is drawn to Chaplin, while Chaplin is drawn to himself.” That photograph is more revealing than the movie, which is directed awkwardly and strains for meaning. At his best, Chaplin embodied emotion, and the meaning grew naturally from the action.

In the 1950s, Charlie’s leftish politics ran afoul of a McCarthyite U.S. government. Effectively barred from the United States, he lived in Switzerland with his last wife, Oona, the daughter of Eugene O’Neill, and eventually their eight children. Oona was 17 when he met her. He was 53. In the silent era, Chaplin was sublime, a man who believed only in personal freedom. With the advent of sound, he was overwhelmed as an artist, and his engagement with the politics of a wider world brought him unhappiness. He died at home on Christmas day in 1977, his family at hand. He was 88.

David Robinson, who is not given to hyperbole, has written that the Tramp was the most universally recognized human figure in history, and perhaps it is so. What is indisputable is that Charlie Chaplin has always been the greatest star the cinema has ever known. *