Secret Lives: Charlie Chaplin

(April 16, 1889 – December  25, 1977)

Cheering for the Little Tramp

WHO’S THE funniest person you’ve ever watched on screen? A comic actor and director who could raise belly laughs without speaking a single word? I’d pick Charlie Chaplin.  How about you?

The Little Tramp, the unforgettable character he invented, was born purely by accident in 1915. While rushing to a film shoot in California, Chaplin grabbed clothes other people had left behind in the changing room. And when he emerged, he found he had created a personality everybody loved. A little guy in a bowler hat, a close-fitting jacket, a cane, outsize shoes ~ and a brush-like moustache!

Before long, with the release of ‘The Kid,’ ‘Gold Rush,’ ‘City Lights’ and ‘Modern Times,’ Chaplin found himself a star. That puzzled him, for he saw himself essentially as a shy British music hall comedian on an American vaudeville tour. “I can’t understand all this stuff. I’m just a nickel hall comedian trying to make people laugh. They act as if I’m the king of England.” The US acknowledged him as its king of silent film comedy. Soon, so did crowds all over the world.

But life wasn’t always a laugh for Charles Spencer Chaplin, born at Walworth in England on April 16, 1889. Both his parents were music hall artists, who separated when Charlie was very young. His childhood was very sad, for his mother Hannah never earned enough to look after Charlie and his older brother, Sydney. On occasion, Chaplin had to sleep on the London streets and forage for food in the garbage.

Charlie took his first bow on stage when his mother made her last appearance. It happened when her voice broke during a song. Her son stepped onstage and sang a popular song. That’s when a star was born.

But soon Hannah was declared insane. So, her boys had to spend time at the asylum, then at an orphanage. Through all this years of success, Charlie never forgot his troubled childhood.

In 1933, while on a European tour, this is what he yearned for: “I want to capture some of the hurt and joy again. To see the orphan asylum where, as a child of five, I lived two long years. Those cold bleak days in the playground! I want to see the drill hall where on rainy days we were sheltered, sniveling around half-heated water pipes; the large dining-room with its long tables; the smell of sawdust and butter as we entered the kitchen.” Can you imagine a cold, loveless childhood like his, in the life of a cine celebrity, whose friends included Albert Einstein and George Bernard Shaw? 

Chaplin did visit that bleak workhouse school at Highgate. It made him recall a Christmas when he was denied two oranges and his bag of sweets for breaking a rule. That would have broken his heart, if the other children had not offered him a share of theirs. Spontaneously, the adult Chaplin gifted the orphanage with a motion picture machine and insisted that each child should have as many oranges and sweets as they pleased.

Chaplin’s memoirs recall an incident when he was three. He swallowed a halfpenny while trying to copy one of Sydney’s magic tricks. He was held upside down, shaken, slapped and probed under the glaring sitting room lights. Soon afterwards, he discovered his mother’s ankle bone under her skirt. Suspecting that she had swallowed a coin, the child enquired, “You must have swallowed a big one, to have it stick out like that.” Isn’t that hilarious?

The star travelled to Venice and Bali, Paris and Singapore. But the US did not appreciate Chaplin’s politics. So he died at Corsier-sur-Vevey in Switzerland on Dec. 25, 1977. 

Isn’t it amazing that out of such troubled beginnings emerged a man who still fills our lives with laughter? Through his creation of human dignity in rags, a battler against the evil in our world.