Charlie Chaplin A brief life

Peter Ackroyd, 1949-

Book - 2014

A concise portrait of the iconic film star traces his humble theatrical beginnings through his honorary Academy Award win, sharing anecdotes about his lesser-known antics and associations.

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BIOGRAPHY/Chaplin, Charlie
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Subjects
Published
New York : Nan A. Talese/Doubleday [2014]
Language
English
Main Author
Peter Ackroyd, 1949- (author)
Edition
First United States edition
Physical Description
viii, 289 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 275-277) and index.
ISBN
9780385537377
  • A London childhood
  • On stage
  • Keep it wistful
  • Making a living
  • The rhythm
  • The eternal imp
  • Charlee!
  • Mutual relations
  • The little mouse
  • The ostrich egg
  • Home again
  • Why don't you jump?
  • The edge of madness
  • The beauty of silence
  • The machine
  • The German tramp
  • Let us work and fight
  • Proceed with the butchery
  • No return
  • The shadows.
Review by New York Times Review

WHEN DID SELF-PROCLAIMED movie geekdom supplant fandom as a badge of superior commitment to cinema love? Being more fan than geek and therefore not beholden to quantifiable research, I blithely estimate that the mutation began about the time Darth Vader first started wearing his CPAP machine around the house and frightening the children. Geekdom was born under the moon of the modern Hollywood blockbuster era and nurtured by the simultaneous development of home computers and cable television - which in turn begat the Internet, TCM, Fandango and trivia-enhanced moviegoing life as we know it. Fans may be happy with publicity stills, but geeks want content, and context too. Fans may enjoy autographs, but geeks demand Reddit Ask Me Anything threads. In our time, geekdom - once popularly viewed as a social deficiency with no subterranean cachet of cool attached - has become a club to which even the popular kids clamor for membership. Entry is granted through the gates of Twitter, the IMDb forest of factoids, the Box Office Mojo vault of knowledge. Movie geeks want statistics about ticket sales and the number of takes expended for each scene of a movie directed by Stanley Kubrick or David Fincher. They want aspect ratio specs and access to multiple drafts of shooting scripts. Movie geeks thrive on argument and think in lists : Who or what was the best, the worst, the most (sadly) overrated or (criminally) underrated? Which movies before 1968 have an animal or body part in the title? And they want personal details. They are hungry not so much for gossip about sex lives of the stars (although that, too, is entered into the mental database) as for the scoop on how the affair between X and Y or the drug use of Z affected the production schedules of Projects A, B and C. Which then bumped releases back. Which sent Oscar strategists scurrying to devise new awardsseason campaigns. Which involved underdog positioning and a subtweet whisper attack maligning the political inclinations of the star of Project D. Movie geeks will thumb through ONE LUCKY BASTARD: Tales From Tinseltown (Lyons Press, $26.95), by Roger Moore with Gareth Owen, and YESTERDAY, TODAY, TOMORROW: My Life (Atria, $28), by Sophia Loren, with the kind of indulgent pat on the shoulder given to Grandma as she demonstrates her Jitterbug flip phone. This pair of slight, late-life macramé projects - a loose collection of Hollywood anecdotes from 87-year-old Moore and a gentle autobiographical sketch from 80-year-old Loren - are best bought by and for classic fans. Both authors have already delighted their respective bases with previous volumes of similar provenance. The urbanely British Moore - seven times the big-screen embodiment of Her Majesty's secret agent James Bond between 1973 and 1985, making him a record-holder for the gig - published his autobiography, "My Word Is My Bond," in 2008, as well as two books of Bondiana. The voluptuously Italian Loren - winner of the 1962 Oscar for best actress (in "Two Women") and an honorary Oscar in 1991 - collaborated with A. E. Hotchner on "Sophia. Living and Loving: Her Own Story," published in 1979, and has her byline attached to a book about beauty and one of "recipes and memories." There is no story in either of these volumes that will appreciably deepen or broaden what a fan already knows and presumably loves about each of these old-time stars. Instead, the books are valedictory extensions of personal brand. In the case of Moore, that brand is a debonair chap about town, so well connected after decades of Hollywood high life that he can now rattle off stories that didn't even happen to him, but instead were told to him by various other chaps about town. Here is a raconteur so jolly about his long career that he actually refers to show business as "the business we call 'show.'" The work, he writes, in a flourish of palaver, is "always interesting, often challenging and if Lady Luck favors us, and benevolent producers take pity on us, then it's quite possible to make a living out of doing something really enjoyable." The fellow who writes this lulling chitchat is a little cheeky, a bit droll. And for fans more tickled by Lady Luck stuff than I am, that may be enough. Published in Britain as "Last Man Standing," the book meanders through stories about old-school players including Lana Turner ("another wonderful actress and feisty lady"), John Gielgud (whose "continuing gaffs really were the stuff of legend") and Sammy Davis Jr. ("a hugely funny man"). "One Lucky Bastard" probably goes down best when read at a bar, book in one hand and something shaken-not-stirred in the other. For her part of the act, Loren works the Italian grandma angle with endearing theatricality. As a framing device, she establishes her reminiscences as memories summoned before nodding off to sleep, having spent the day cooking Christmas recipes with her grandchildren. (Attenzione, professional Italian nonna/cookbook star Lidia Bastianich, you've got competition.) Loren's stories are unfailingly sweet, modest, patient. "The ugly duckling was turning into a swan," she notes about her girlhood, with becoming understatement. "We pinched each other's cheeks to make sure we weren't dreaming," she says about arriving in Los Angeles for the first time in 1957 as an international movie star, with her younger sister, Maria, as her companion. And for fans more tickled by cheek-pinching stuff than I am, this, too, is surely enough. Aside from a steady, controlled burn of anger at the bounder father who never did right by Loren's mother - young, unwed and miserably poor, Romilda Villani raised Sofia (as her name was then spelled) and Maria, with crucial help from her own mother - the memoirist is in a magnanimously reflective mood. When, at the age of 17, she met 39-year-old Carlo Ponti, who would become her producer, her Pygmalion and eventually her husband (after headlines had proclaimed their relationship a scandal and after popular, church and state condemnation), she explains that "I had the strange impression that he'd understood me, that behind my impetuous beauty he had read the traces of a reserved personality, my difficult past, my great longing to be successful, seriously and with passion." She is gracious about her own success, and protective about her family. She is also tender about the other men who affected her life, both personally as well as professionally - never more so than about Cary Grant, with whom she became close during the making of "The Pride and the Passion" in 1957, and who (despite being married to his third wife, Betsy Drake, at the time) proposed marriage. "I knew that my place was next to Carlo," she writes. "At the same time, it was hard to resist the magnetism of a man like Cary, who said he was willing to give up everything for me." Loren and Grant remained lifelong friends. So move right along, movie geeks, there is nothing to gawp at here. This is a story that rewards nice readers who are contented to give lovers some privacy, even if they happen to be movie stars. Geek-style collectors of stories and stats will feel much more at home with DE NIRO: A Life (Crown Archetype, $32.50), by the film critic and movie journalist Shawn Levy, or WATCH ME: A Memoir (Scribner, $27.99), the second volume of memoirs by Anjelica Huston. The two books couldn't be farther apart in tone and intention: "De Niro" is a highly researched, analytical study of the life and work of one of the greatest actors of his generation; "Watch Me" is a personal narrative by a charismatic 63-year-old woman and child of Hollywood whose own creative identity has, for much of her life, been defined by her relationship to powerful men - including but not limited to the director John Huston (her father) and to the actor Jack Nicholson (her on-and-off beau for some 17 years). Yet together, both books reflect prevailing modern approaches to writing about movies, Hollywood and, my dears, the business we call show. Levy faces a couple of challenges well: For one, his is hardly the first, nor is it very likely to be the last, biographical study of the now 71-year-old De Niro, who is as famous for his personal impenetrability and conversational reticence as for his towering public performances in American cinema masterpieces including "Mean Streets," "The Deer Hunter," "Taxi Driver," "Raging Bull," "Goodfellas" and "The Godfather II." What's more, the book is "unauthorized," in that the actor repeatedly declined to be interviewed, and as a result, so did many others who have known him over the years. "However," Levy sensibly explains, "as I often remind people, unauthorized doesn't mean salacious, and it is entirely possible to write a full and fair biography without ever speaking to the subject." "Robert De Niro: A Life" is full and fair, and in his role as critic, Levy states his operating P.O.V. clearly at the top: It is sometimes difficult "to see De Niro's early glories through what had become the muddle of his later career." Yet, Levy continues, "every time he appears before us, no matter the costume, the voice, the name, the story, there he is, stark and plain before the world." And so, armed with scholarship culled from studying De Niro's archives, along with insights gained from interviewees unconstrained by omertà, Levy (who has previously written books about challenging showbiz types including Paul Newman, Jerry Lewis and the Sinatra-era Rat Pack) has created a thorough, measured, fact-filled, 600-page, movie-by-movie, girlfriend-by-girlfriend study that is right up a movie geek's alley. The trade-off is that the thoroughness of all those facts, in all those pages, may cause a casual fan's eyes to glaze over. The steady, measured pace of "De Niro" contrasts with the page-turning trot of "Watch Me." While Levy proceeds at the deliberate tempo of an anthropologist, Huston glides around like a nightclub singer with an interesting, erratic set list, singing some blues, some power ballads, a torch song or two, and Sondheim's "I'm Still Here" as a closer. And this, too, is a phenomenon of the contemporary era of movie geekdom: A memoirist can swing a little, pull some attitude, narrate selectively, and her readers will only appreciate her more for her confidence. Huston's first volume, "A Story Lately Told," covered her childhood, her teens in London and her relationship in New York with the photographer Bob Richardson. "Watch Me" picks up with the good stuff - life in Los Angeles, Nicholson, her work in "Prizzi's Honor," her sometimes violent romance with Ryan O'Neal and her marriage to the sculptor Robert Graham, from 1992 until his death in 2008. Huston names names, rewards friends, settles scores and powers her way through sentences with a bluntness that might daunt a more tentative dame. Like this: "Even though Warren Beatty was one of his best friends, I wasn't recognizing Jack as a world-class philanderer at the time." Or this: "Everyone was getting high in my circle. Coke and grass were ubiquitous." From a lady simultaneously so real, tough, vulnerable, privileged and candid, I want to hear whatever she wants to tell me, up to and including a description of every designer dress she ever wore. Because, reading "Watch Me," I become as engrossed as a dork attending Comic Con, a film studies student at a Czech cinema series at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater or a feminist movie critic who blogs at length about the male gaze as it applies to the oeuvre of Judd Apatow and Jon Favreau. None of whom, by the way, may be hard-core enough to survive the ultra geekdom of how star wars conquered THE UNIVERSE: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise (Basic Books, $28.99), by Chris Taylor. Here, finally, is a book that, in its very title, separates the tough from the wusses when it comes to exactly the kind of pop-culture consumption, digestion, regurgitation and entrail-reading that began with George Lucas's space fairy tale. The amusingly hyperbolic (but serious) title, with its cheerily fevered (but serious) assumption of agreement with the premise and delightfully blinkered (but serious) conviction in the importance of the topic, distills everything one needs to know about the kind of insanely microresearched and breezily written book this is. The British-born Taylor, the deputy editor of the website Mashable, is partial to hey bro! statements like "Do not try this at home," "R2-D2 is the man" and "As 1976 dawned, Lucas found himself the ringleader in a circus of genius, the head of one of those once-in-a-generation teams of fiery young turks eager to prove themselves." Taylor is also impressively committed to, as he calls it, his "biography of the franchise that turned Planet Earth into Planet 'Star Wars.'" Searching for somebody, somewhere, who has never seen and knows nothing about the franchise, Taylor visits a settlement of Navajo people in Arizona and unspools a print of the movie dubbed in the Navajo language. I'm not sure this proves anything, but it does allow him to take a nice trip to the Southwest, meet some elders and teach "Star Wars" readers about the Navajo code talkers of World War II. True movie geeks get a meta high from the giddy knowledge that they are being obsessive even while they are being obsessive. And they are nothing if not excited to hang out with others who share their particular subspecialty passions - whether for pre-Code films, Iranian cinema, Blaxploitation flicks, Robert De Niro or Anjelica Huston. I reckon there are millions, or at least thousands, who will be eager to go where Taylor goes, probing the secret corners of the galaxy invented by George Lucas and his fiery young turks. And if I am not among them, don't be alarmed. There is a new book out called CHARLIE CHAPLIN: A Brief Life (Doubleday, $25.95), by the award-winning British writer and biographer Peter Ackroyd, and it is quietly enthralling. It is, as advertised, concise. It assumes basic familiarity with "the first human being ever to be the object of global adulation far beyond the later cult of 'celebrity.'" (Taylor the "Star Wars" scholar might have had an even harder time finding somebody, somewhere, who has never heard of Chaplin.) Ackroyd's Chaplin is a not-very-nice man, he is hell to work with, he is an incorrigible womanizer (of very young women) with a "priapic reputation," a bad husband, self-absorbed, moody, known for his "meanness" and "stinginess" and a devastatingly effective artist. Ackroyd's coolly perceptive literary style and equally devastatingly effective observations suggest that he doesn't care a fig about pleasing geeks or fans or anyone else. I have become a groupie. LISA SCHWARZBAUM, a former critic at Entertainment Weekly, is a freelance journalist.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 30, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Born in South London in 1889, Chaplin knew deprivation. At an early age, he mastered the art of survival, often sleeping in the street and forced to beg in order to feed himself. He took up work in the music hall, where he studied the clowns and the comedians. Joining the Karno company, he toured America in 1910, eventually signing with Mack Sennett to make movies for Keystone. According to Ackroyd, Chaplin, like Shakespeare, had the inestimable advantage of being an instinctive artist in a nascent art form. Within four months, he was immensely popular, his impish, resourceful little fellow universally recognized and in great demand. Soon Chaplin was writing and directing, too. In 1914, he cranked out 36 films for Keystone before he moved on, establishing a reputation for perfectionism with extensive rehearsals and numerous takes. Chaplin's films not only broke box-office records but films like The Gold Rush, City Lights, and Modern Times are considered great works of art. This title, the fifth in Ackroyd's Brief Life series, is detailed yet breezy, full of sharp insights into Chaplin's public and private personas (onscreen, Chaplin had an inner life, but offscreen, he did not). Ackroyd includes details on Chaplin's philandering, his penchant for young girls, his controversial political views, and his denial for reentry into the States due to moral character and his political affiliations. It's been 100 years since Chaplin started making movies. Expect plenty of interest in this fine biography.--Segedin, Ben Copyright 2014 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In his typically elegant and measured prose, prize-winning biographer Ackroyd (Shakespeare: The Biography) brilliantly brings Chaplin to life. Beginning with Chaplin's birth in a poor South London neighborhood, Ackroyd traces his career, from his earliest notices in a play called Jim in 1903, where he learned the value of comic timing, to his stint with the Karno Company, which brought him, along with Stan Laurel, to America in 1910. Chaplin went on to work with Mack Sennett in Keystone films, insisted on working as his own director, made classic films such as City Lights and Modern Times, got involved in politics, and relentlessly pursued women. Ackroyd masterfully paints the colorful backdrop of the youthful film industry, in which Chaplin made a name for himself as one of the first real celebrities of his time, instantly recognizable around the world for his comic performances. Chaplin the man emerges as a protean personality who, in the words of his son, was a "priceless entertainer, a moody dreamer, and the wild man of Borneo with his flashes of volcanic temper." Ackroyd's book introduces the Little Tramp in such a charming and candid fashion that it will drive movie buffs to watch Chaplin on screen once again. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Biographer, historian, and novelist Ackroyd (London: The Biography) brazenly discloses the parts of Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977) previously left in the shadows. Chaplin's brilliant existence as a director, actor, and writer takes a backseat as we glimpse into the bedrooms, bars, and hotels of his personal world. Ackroyd brings readers through childhood travels and memories and behind the scenes to reveal what made Chaplin who he was. Filled with quotes, insights, and personal accounts, this slim book peeks into the actor's marriages and affairs, considers his fascination with Hitler, and discusses his exile to Switzerland. From his work with Mack Sennett in 1914 to obtaining a knighthood in 1975, Chaplin is depicted in alluring detail in this easy-to-read biography. For such an endeavor a more satisfying subject could not exist. The extensive facts captured in the work are sure to intrigue and lead the reader to other Chaplin studies. VERDICT Award-winning author Ackroyd exposes the hidden truths in Chaplin's life that help us to understand the artist both personally and professionally. An exceptional read for those who love Chaplin, film, history, and gossip. [See Prepub Alert, 5/4/14.]-Rochelle LeMaster, Medina Cty. Dist. Lib., OH (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

The life of a great filmmaker and lousy human being. Ackroyd (Three Brothers, 2014, etc.) delivers a thorough if ultimately unsatisfying portrait of Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977) in this dispiriting chronicle of an artistic genius and thoroughly unpleasant man. The author's account of Chaplin's difficult early life in the slums of London is evocative and moving, detailing the many deprivations suffered by the young Charlie, which included chronic malnutrition and stints in workhouses; more troubling still was the condition of his mother, a failed singer whose devolution into madness ensured a lifelong lack of emotional stability for her gifted son. Surprisingly, the narrative becomes less interesting as Chaplin achieves success and renown, as his background in mime, dance and acrobatic clowning coincided with the nascent demands of early film comedy. Chaplin's physical gifts and iconic visual presence as his signature "Little Tramp" character quickly established him as Hollywood's biggest attraction, and his subsequent total control over his projects resulted in phenomenally successful movies (including City Lights, Modern Times and The Great Dictator) that made him the most famous man in the world. Ackroyd's analysis of Chaplin's evolving screen persona and obsessive attention to details provides some intriguing insights into his many classic works, but the author neglects to place these films in a wider context. The man himself emerges as a bitter, hateful presence: cruel, sadistic, bullying, a sexual predator fixated on very young teenage girls and monomaniacal to the point of monstrosity. Readers are left with an understanding of Chaplin's background, the biographical details of his long and troubled life, and some idea of the hellish conditions on the exacting filmmaker's sets, but conclusions about his significance as an artist, his work's relationship to the culture at large, and the internal forces that engendered such personal misery and creative transcendence fail to cohere. A comprehensive look at Chaplin the man but lacking as a portrait of the artist and his legacy. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

1 A London Childhood Welcome to the world of South London in the last decade of the nineteenth century. It was frowsy; it was shabby; the shops were small and generally dirty. It had none of the power or the energy of the more important part of the city on the other side of the Thames. It moved at a slower pace. All the accounts of it, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, describe it as a distinct and alien place. It was in a sense cut off from the life of the greater London; this may account for the air of exhaustion, and of torpor, which could hit the unwary. It was the site of small and noisome trades such as hat-making and leather-tanning. Factories abounded for the manufacture of biscuits, jam and pickles. Glue factories stood adjacent to timber warehouses and slaughterhouses. The predominant smells were those of vinegar, and of dog dung, and of smoke, and of beer, compounded of course by the stink of poverty. By the end of the nineteenth century Kennington, the earliest home of Charles Chaplin, had all the characteristics of a slum. The areas south of the river had for centuries also been the place of somewhat suspect pleasures, such as brothels and pleasure gardens. That tradition was continued in the nineteenth century with the public houses, gin palaces and music halls of the area. One of the first music halls, the Winchester, opened in South London in 1840. The Surrey followed eight years later. Two of the great halls, the Canterbury and Gattis-in-the-Road, were in the vicinity along the Westminster Bridge Road; smaller halls were to be found everywhere. The stars of the music hall would congregate on Sunday mornings at the White Horse, the Queen's Head, the Horns or the Tankard, public houses which the young Chaplin knew well. The music-hall booking agents were located in Lambeth. Since South London was separated from the rest of the capital, it acquired its own communal atmosphere; the houses and tenements were bursting with people, so the women and children spent much of their time on the streets close to their dwellings. They sat outside on chairs, or leaned from the windowsills. As a result the neighbourhood itself, rather than the individual household, was the true family; wives looked out for each other, and the children played together. One of those children was Charles Chaplin. "They are my people, these cockneys," he wrote in a magazine article in 1933. "I am one of them." South London would remain the source and centre of his inspiration. The origins of Charles Chaplin are mysterious. No certificate of his birth has ever been found, and no entry in a baptismal register exists. He once travelled to Somerset House in search of his birth certificate, but there was nothing there. He sought himself here, he sought himself there, but he could not find himself anywhere. He might have come out of nowhere. The place of his birth is equally mysterious. He believed that he had been born in "East Lane," off the Walworth Road; the narrow thoroughfare is called East Street, but it was locally known as a "Lane" because it boasted a loud and vigorous Sunday morning street market with its costermongers, old-clothes sellers and various hawkers or traders. ("Lane" was the nomenclature generally given to a street market.) He may or may not have first seen the world there. Another difficulty arises. He confided on occasions to his friends that he was not sure of the identity of his biological father; nevertheless he took the name of a successful music-hall artist, Charles Chaplin, who was for a while married to his mother. He once said to an assistant, Eddie Sutherland, that "I don't know, actually, who my father was." He may have been, in the phrase of the period, a love child. There is less difficulty about the identity of his mother. Hannah Chaplin gave birth to a boy in the middle of April 1889, at eight o'clock in the evening. An announcement was placed in a music-hall paper, The Magnet, in the following month. "On the 15th, the wife of Mr Charles Chaplin (nee Miss Lily Harley) of a beautiful boy. Mother and son both doing well. Papers please copy." The Magnet was out by a day: Chaplin was born on April 16. Hannah came from a somewhat rackety family, the Hills, many of whose members lived in the immediate vicinity of East Street; toil and poverty had left their mark on some of them, compounded by a streak of madness in the female line. Lily Harley was her stage name. She went on the boards as a singer at the beginning of 1884, and her musical career earned some success before entering a decline. There is no doubt that she met Mr. Chaplin when he found lodgings with the Hill family in Brandon Street, Walworth; she was nineteen years old, and already pregnant, but the baby was not Chaplin's. The child, Sydney, was said by Hannah herself to be the result of an elopement to South Africa with a rich bookmaker named Sydney Hawkes. Whatever the truth of the matter Charles Chaplin married her in June 1885, and gave the infant his surname. He also gave Hannah's second son his surname. This child bore his first name, too, but he walked out on Hannah a year after the birth. It must be suspected that the fault was her infidelity. He may have guessed, or suspected, that the infant son was not his. Chaplin later confessed that his mother had enjoyed many affairs; it is also more likely than not that, in moments of distress and poverty, she took to the streets. In My Autobiography Chaplin states that "to gauge the morals of our family by commonplace standards would be as erroneous as putting a thermometer in boiling water." In his subsequent films he is preoccupied by the role of the prostitute. It is a complex and bewildering saga, but perhaps not an unusual one in working-class South London, where husband and wife were often parted and where women drifted in and out of prostitution to save their families. Drink played its part, too, in the dissolution of family ties. Alcohol was, in a sense, the ruin of the Chaplins. Charles Chaplin senior's first recorded performance took place in 1887. His image, complete with topper and dress coat, is to be found on the cover of a music sheet for a song entitled "Pals Time Cannot Alter"; he also achieved success with songs such as "Eh, Boys?," "As the Church Bells Chime" and "Oui! Tray Bong!" He had a pleasant baritone voice and an easy stage presence; he played the "swell," the man about town, whose debonair attitude is matched by his elegant dress of top hat, cravat and morning suit. Champagne, however, may have been his drink of choice off as well as on the stage; in the manner of so many music-hall artistes, he descended into alcoholism. It was often surmised that Chaplin possessed Jewish blood; he denied it, saying that "I have not that good fortune." Yet on other occasions he hinted, or meditated upon, a possible Jewish identity. Since he did not know who his father was, there was some room for speculation. Yet it seems certain that he had Romany ancestors; he claimed that his maternal grandmother was "half-gypsy." In a letter, found after his death, he was informed that he had been born in a gypsy caravan at Smethwick, near Birmingham; since the informant was named Jack Hill, there may be some truth to the story. Chaplin's adult friends accepted his mother as a gypsy; it is reported that he himself was familiar with the English variant of Romany, and in particular was fluent in the patois among gypsies and street entertainers of London. Chaplin's eldest son Charles Junior wrote, in his memoirs, that "my father has always been inordinately proud of that wild Romany blood." Towards the end of his life Sydney Chaplin, Charles Junior's older half-brother, married a Romany woman known as "Gypsy." Hannah and her two small sons did not remain long in East Street. Sydney's school records indicate that they moved from address to address in the same neighbourhood; this pattern would continue throughout Chaplin's childhood. Hannah had embarked on yet another affair when Chaplin was two or three years old; she bestowed her affections on a successful variety star, Leo Dryden, who composed music-hall songs on the theme of queen and country. One of his most successful ballads is the still remembered "The Miner's Dream of Home." His prosperity may have marked the moment when mother and children moved from the rowdy and populous neighbourhood of East Street to the relative quiet and salubriety of West Square. It was only half a mile away, but it was a move to another country. The newly established family now had a housemaid, and Chaplin remembered the Sunday excursions they made down the Kennington Road. He wore a blue velvet suit, and blue gloves to match it. He recalled the elegance of the Westminster Bridge Road, with its fruit shops, restaurants and music halls; he remembered sitting on top of a horse-drawn bus and putting up his little hands to touch the flowers of the lilac trees. He never forgot those moments of pure delight. He also recalled the odour of freshly watered roses, sold by the flower-girls on the corner of Westminster Bridge. In his subsequent films, flowers are often a token of fragile or doomed love. These are descriptions quite different from the more sordid realities of his South London childhood. Nevertheless they can be considered true memories of the past and, as such, the first stirrings of his imagination. It is clear enough that there was a short period, perhaps of two or three years, in which he and his family were not in poverty; this is perhaps significant since the "little fellow," as Chaplin often referred to his character on screen, the tramp by the name of Charlie, gives the impression of having come down in the world from a presumed state of greater affluence. In this happy period Hannah Chaplin had a child by her lover, Leo Dryden; Wheeler Dryden was born at the end of August 1892, and had no discernible place in his half-brother's childhood. Hannah's relationship with Dryden in any case came to an end in the spring of 1893 when he left her, removing his son with him. She was not considered by him to be a fit mother. This was the time when all her troubles started. Her mother, Mary Ann Hill, had been committed to an asylum a few weeks before. The doctors recorded that Mrs. Hill "is incoherent. She says that she sees beetles, rats, mice and other things about the place." Hannah, with two sons in her care, was therefore forced to shift for herself as her family could offer her no support. It is not certain how she lived. She may have found another lover or a succession of casual lovers. Chaplin later related a story in My Autobiography that she had, at some point in 1894, found a singing engagement at the Canteen in Aldershot. This was a military venue, with a correspondingly rough and vocal audience. Hannah's voice failed during her performance and she was booed off the stage, whereupon the theatrical manager put on the young Chaplin in her place. He sang a popular song of the period, " 'E Dunno Where 'E Are." The public threw coins at the stage whereupon he decided to pick up the money before resuming his performance. This provoked more laughter and the young boy continued a routine of song and impersonation; at one point he imitated the cracked voice that had curtailed Hannah's act. Eventually to much applause she appeared once again before the audience, and carried off her child. Chaplin said that she never regained her voice, although she did in fact manage one last engagement at the Hatcham Liberal Club where she was billed as "Miss Lily Chaplin, Serio and Dancer." It is an interesting story and may indeed be true, although the exhaustive music-hall listings of the trade paper, The Era, have no record of the event at the Canteen. In another version of the story he claimed that his "father" had propelled him on to the stage; in this version, too, his mother was drunk rather than incapacitated by laryngitis. It would be too pedantic to state that he lied about his childhood; let us say that he was inspired to tell different stories about his past as the mood or the moment took him. In the official version he is his mother's protector and saviour, which is also the role the Little Tramp would assume towards young women in Chaplin's later films. Hannah Chaplin must have still visited the booking agents, and for a while she obtained work as a dancer with the Katti Lanner ballet at the Empire in Leicester Square. Another dancer at the Empire recalled how the young Chaplin "would stop there in the wings, singing my choruses half a line ahead of me . . . The harder I frowned at him, the wider he grinned." She added that "he had a wonderful ear for music even then, and picked up almost everything I sang." A schoolmistress from the Victory Place Board School in Walworth, which he briefly attended, remembered "his large eyes, his mass of dark, curly hair, and his beautiful hands . . . very sweet and shy." Hannah Chaplin's career, however, was effectively over. She found occasional employment as a mender of old clothes, and then as a seamstress, but it was laborious and underpaid work. In this period she turned to the church for comfort in her distress. In 1895 she became a member of the congregation of Christ Church, on Westminster Bridge Road, where in the record of her enrolment she is described as "an actress who lives apart from her husband." She also added to her precarious income by making dresses for some of the congregation, but her health began to suffer from the strain. She was admitted to Lambeth Infirmary on 29 June 1895, where she remained for a month; she was suffering from severe stress that seems to have taken the form of migraine headaches. Sydney Chaplin was sent to the local workhouse from which after a few days he was transferred to a school for indigent children in West Norwood. Chaplin was taken in by a relative of his grandmother, John George Hodges, who lived in the neighbourhood. The Chaplin boys were reunited with their mother in the early spring of 1896, but their address is not certain. They moved from cheap rented room to rented room, and in the space of three months they found themselves in six different garrets or basements. Chaplin's memories of this London period are generally unhappy. Sydney had outgrown his only coat, and so Hannah made him one out of an old velvet jacket she owned; Sydney was also forced to wear a pair of his mother's high-heeled shoes cut down to size. The boys pilfered goods from street stalls. The family relied upon parish charity, with relief parcels and visits to the soup kitchens of the mission houses. Chaplin never tasted butter or cream as a child and, as a prosperous adult, he could never get enough of them. The sculptor who in 1981 fashioned his statue in Leicester Square, John Doubleday, has stated that, according to Chaplin's exact measurements, the adult still possessed "the undeveloped thorax of an underfed child." There were happier moments. The young Chaplin earned a few pennies by dancing outside the doors of public houses to the melody of a passing accordion. One day Sydney found a purse of gold coins on a bus while selling newspapers. It may be, however, that he had stolen it. On the proceeds the Chaplins went down to Southend for their first sight of the sea. They swam, when they could afford it, at the Kennington Baths. They attended magic-lantern shows at the Baxter Hall, where admission cost a penny. Hannah, in moments of health and vitality, also managed to entertain them by imitating the expressions and movements of the people in the street below. Her youngest son may have inherited her pantomimic skills. In an essay for Photoplay magazine in 1915 Chaplin wrote that "it seems to me that my mother was the most splendid woman I ever knew. I can remember how charming and well mannered she was. She spoke four languages fluently and had a good education . . . I have never met a more thoroughly refined woman than my mother." Yet he may have overestimated her skills and virtues. A neighbour recalled that "he thought no one who ever lived was like his mother. The lad thought she was the cleverest player in the world, a great lady and his ideal." Her nickname for her second son was "the King." Such love, perhaps, is doomed to be disappointed. Separation from her was soon to follow. In the spring of 1896 Hannah's sewing machine was repossessed for lack of payment, and there was now no way of continuing her old trade. She succumbed once more to sickness and was taken to the infirmary. There was now no recourse for the Chaplin children but the local workhouse, the place that poor families most feared. "You'll end up in the work'us!" was a familiar expression. So in May they were despatched to Southwark Workhouse, according to its register, "owing to the absence of their father and the destitution and illness of their mother." Their bewilderment may be imagined. Nevertheless in the same article for Photoplay Chaplin declared that "English people have a great horror of the poorhouse; but I don't remember it as a very dreadful place." His strongest memory was "of creeping off by myself at the poorhouse and pretending I was a very rich and grand person . . . I was of a dreamy, imaginative disposition. I was always pretending I was somebody else . . ." They remained in this institution for approximately three weeks while the Lambeth Board of Guardians pursued the supposed father, Charles Chaplin senior. He was eventually found and brought before the board; he agreed to take in Charles but not Sydney, on the grounds that the older child was clearly illegitimate. But the board believed it best that the boys should stay together, and Chaplin agreed to pay the sum of fifteen shillings a week to maintain them at Hanwell Schools, an institution twelve miles out of London. He never kept his promise of regular payment. In the middle of June the two boys were taken in a horse-drawn baker's wagon to Hanwell Schools for Orphans and Destitute Children. Here they were separated, Sydney at the age of eleven being taken to the upper division of the boys' school while Charles at the age of seven was placed in the infant division. He later told a reporter that "my childhood ended at the age of seven." Hanwell was a thoroughly Victorian institution, based upon a regimen of formal instruction, carefully arranged days and strong discipline. In that respect it did not differ very much from the great public schools of the period. The young inmates marched from class to class, and from dormitory to dining hall. Chaplin's number was 151. In material respects, however, the children were much better cared for than their contemporaries consigned to the streets or slum dwellings. They were given warm clothes, good shoes, and a nourishing if plain diet. But for the young Chaplin it was a place of suffering and humiliation. In later life he referred to it as "my incarceration." He was separated from his mother and, after Sydney was sent to a naval training ship, from his brother. He had no one else in the world. He was small, and helpless, and hopeless. He contracted ringworm, and fell into what he called "paroxysms of weeping" when his head was shaved. He was detected in some piece of misbehaviour, the details of which are unclear. He may have peeked at a girl through her keyhole; he may have started a fire in the boys' lavatory. The stories differ. Whatever the crime, the punishment was determined in advance: he received a slash or two with a birch cane. A little while afterwards he was prescribed a laxative and consequently soiled his bed. He was punished two days later by being denied the orange and boiled sweets handed out on Christmas Day. Yet despite his distress this was the only period of his life when he received any continuous education. He learned to write his own name and to read a little. Hannah did not visit him for almost a year, and it seems that he felt a profound sense of betrayal. When she eventually came to him in the summer of 1897, the young Chaplin was horrified and humiliated. He told a good friend, Harry Crocker, that "she caused me anguished embarrassment." She may already have borne the marks of insanity that afflicted her family and had brought down her mother. He told Crocker that for some reason she was carrying an oilcan. "Why do you come with that, Mother?" he asked her. "Why do you come at all? They'll all see you. They'll all see you!" In My Autobiography he tells a different story of a fresh and fragrant woman coming to visit her lonely child. The reader must judge. In later life he conceived a scene in which an old lady trudges up a staircase carrying a bucket of water; on the fourth or fifth landing a door suddenly opens, and a man punches her in the face. "Oh," he says in horror, "I thought you were my mother." "You have a mother?" "Yes," he replies, weeping, "I have a mother." Chaplin never really trusted women. He always feared loss and abandonment, slight and injury, indulging in paroxysms of jealousy on the smallest provocation. With his lovers he was suspicious and difficult and angry. Yet he survived Hanwell by making himself invulnerable. "Even when I was in the orphanage," he told his eldest son, ". . . even then I thought of myself as the greatest actor in the world. I had to feel the exuberance that comes from utter confidence in yourself. Without it you go down to defeat." This invulnerability later became part of his screen persona. The Little Tramp, Charlie, is often detached and invincible. He always picks himself up and walks jauntily into the distance; in that respect, he shows indomitable energy and determination. He rarely becomes an object of pity. So in the life of the small child we can see the seeds of the Little Tramp. In the earliest films he is often angry or cruel, wishing at all costs to take revenge on life and especially on those figures of authority who threaten him. He craves food and security. He desperately seeks love but never finds it. He has learned to cope with the vicissitudes of existence by affecting indifference. He is rootless, with no discernible home. Most of Chaplin's later films, too, concern the art of survival in a hostile or unsympathetic world. At the age of eight the young boy was discharged from Hanwell on 18 January 1898, and returned to his mother. Sydney came home from the training ship, Exmouth, two days later. The family were once more together. The nature of their life now is not known, although it could hardly have been a secure one. He may have been recollecting this period when he said to a companion, May Reeves, that "every four weeks we were evicted because we couldn't pay the rent. Each time we had to pack up and carry our mattresses and chairs on our backs to a new house." He and Reeves were walking around Kennington on one of his nostalgic visits to his old neighbourhood. He showed her a dilapidated grocery store. "How happy I was to be able to run there and buy something for tuppence." Then he pointed to a shed. "I often spent the night in there when we were chased from our lodgings. But I preferred to sleep on park benches." It was perhaps inevitable that on 22 July the Chaplin family arrived at Lambeth Workhouse. They had not managed to survive the outer world. The two boys were after a week transferred to the poor-school in West Norwood to which Sydney had once been consigned. A strange episode followed. On 12 August Hannah Chaplin managed to persuade the authorities that she was fit and able to look after her children. So they were released from the school into her care. Mother and children spent their day of freedom in Kennington Park, where they ate cherries on a bench and played catch-ball with a crumpled newspaper. It was a brief respite from the world that enclosed them. Hannah said brightly, at the end of the day, that they would just be in time for tea. She meant tea at the Lambeth Workhouse where they duly presented themselves, much to the annoyance of the officials who had to fill in once more all the appropriate forms. Three days later the boys were back in West Norwood. The world closed in again. Chaplin, in later life, said that parks always induced in him the sensation of sadness. He wrote, in a magazine article of 1931, "how depressing Kennington Park is." At the beginning of September Hannah Chaplin was taken from the workhouse to Lambeth Infirmary, with her body badly bruised. The authorities here attested that she was suffering from syphilis, which in its third stage may attack the brain. The diagnosis was never repeated by later physicians, but it is perhaps significant that it could be made in her case. Nine days later she was moved again; she was consigned to Cane Hill asylum in Surrey, where a doctor recorded her behaviour. "Has been very strange in manner--at one time abusive & noisy, at another using endearing terms. Has been confined in PR [padded room] repeatedly on a/c of sudden violence--threw a mug at another patient. Shouting, singing, and talking incoherently. Complains of her head and depressed and crying this morning--dazed and unable to give any reliable information." She asked the doctors if she were dying. She told them that she was on a mission from the Lord. Then she stated that she wished to get out of the world. Two nurses went to West Norwood to acquaint the boys with their mother's condition. Sydney finished a soccer game and then burst into tears. Charles did not cry, but began to blame his mother for betraying him. In truth she had succumbed to hereditary madness which she was too ill and weary to withstand. It was now determined that Charles Chaplin senior had to take responsibility for the two boys. So they were driven in a van from Lambeth Workhouse, where they had once more been assigned, to an unprepossessing house at 287 Kennington Road where Chaplin lived on the first floor with his mistress, Louise, who did not welcome the arrival of unwanted children. On the frequent occasions when she was drunk, she complained bitterly of the imposition laid upon her by the presence of the boys. She conceived a particular dislike for Sydney, who avoided her company by staying away from morning to midnight. Chaplin senior himself was in the last stages of his career; his popularity had waned and, as the bookings grew less frequent, he consoled himself with drink. On the nights when he did perform, he could be charming and expansive; he had six raw eggs in a glass of port before leaving for the hall. But he often spent all day and all evening in some of the many public houses of the neighbourhood, trying to drown his anxiety and frustration. His youngest son watched him closely; he would one day make a speciality of "drunk routines." Chaplin senior's drunkenness gave rise to more bitterness in Louise, which she vented on the boys. Charles returned one Saturday morning after school to find the flat deserted and the larder empty. He waited, but nobody came. In desperation he walked into the street, and spent the afternoon visiting the various markets of the neighbourhood. He had no money, and no food. He wandered until nightfall, and then returned to Kennington Park Road; but the flat was in darkness. He walked the few yards to Kennington Cross where he sat on the kerb and waited. Two musicians, one with harmonium and the other with clarinet, were playing an old-fashioned tune outside the White Hart public house; it was called "The Honeysuckle and the Bee" and it so enchanted Chaplin that he crossed the road to get closer to the melody. He would remember the song all his life. When he went back to the house, he saw Louise making her way down the garden path. She was staggering drunkenly, and he waited until she had closed the door. Then he slipped in with the landlady of the house who had suddenly returned. He went up to the darkened landing. Louise came out, and ordered him to leave. He did not belong there. On another occasion a policeman reported seeing Sydney and his young brother, at three in the morning, sleeping by a night watchman's fire. This was the life which the young Chaplin was obliged to lead. On 12 November, Hannah Chaplin knocked on the door. She had been discharged from Cane Hill, and had come to take them away. She took them round the corner to a small lodging in Methley Street, where she earned a bare income by sewing together blouses. The odours of Hayward's pickle factory behind them competed with the stench of a slaughterhouse beside them. Yet South London people were inured to smells. The Chaplins' landlady at Methley Street recalled that "Charles was rather a frail child with his mop of dark hair, his pale face and bright blue eyes. He was what I call 'a little limb'--out in the streets from morning to night. I remember he was a regular one for finding a man with a barrel organ, and dancing to the music. He got a lot of extra money for the organ grinder and a few coppers for himself. I suppose that's how he started becoming an entertainer. Charlie was supposed to go to school in Kennington, but he was an awful truant." His days at school were in fact coming to an end. His last recorded attendance there was on Friday 25 November 1898, after which date he was to be found upon the music-hall stage. He had become a professional dancer. Excerpted from Charlie Chaplin by Peter Ackroyd All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.