Charlie Chaplin Became Hollywood’s Biggest Star, Then Lost It All

Charlie Chaplin was born in Lambeth, South London, in April of 1889, the son of two music hall entertainers: his mother, Hannah Chaplin, also known as Lily Harley, and his father, Charles Chaplin Sr., a drinking baritone. Within two years, Charles Sr. abandoned the family and barely contributed to their support. His mother struggled to keep them going with sewing and stage work, but her health declined, and she, Charlie, and his older half-brother, Sydney Chaplin, went from rented room to rented room in dire straits.

Hannah, Charlie’s mother, collapsed in body and mind by May 1896. Too sick to buy food, she also couldn’t pay the rent, so in that month, she and her sons, Charlie, then seven, and his older half-brother, Sydney, went into the workhouse. The workhouses were Victorian institutions for destitute people; children were separated from their mothers and issued uniforms as “paupers.” Weeks after entering the workhouse, Charlie was placed in a boarding school for paupers, where he was caned for small offenses. He continued being shuffled in and out of schools for paupers over the next several years as his mother’s health fluctuated.

Chaplin became a member of a clog dancing group in late 1898, where he learned rhythm and how to stay precisely on time. In 1908, his older brother, Sydney, secured Chaplin a contract with Fred Karno, owner of a famous British sketch comedy company. There, at 18, Chaplin perfected the role of the drunkard. From 1910, Chaplin toured North America with Karno’s vaudeville company, which featured a young comedian named Stan Laurel as Chaplin’s understudy and roommate.

Mack Sennett, boss of the Hollywood comedy outfit Keystone, had once watched Chaplin perform in California, and was looking for a new star following the departure of one of his biggest draws. In May 1913, a Keystone telegram addressed to an actor whose name was misspelled “Chaffin” reached the manager of Karno’s tour. At the end of the year, aged 24, Chaplin signed a one-year contract with Keystone, for $150 a week, which was nearly triple what he had been paid as a stage performer, and relocated to Los Angeles to begin making films.

Mack Sennett, a producer, ordered Chaplin to wear funny makeup for a short movie. In early January of 1914, Chaplin entered the wardrobe room that all the actors at Keystone used. He grabbed a pair of pants from another actor named Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. These were too big for him, but perfect. He also took a tight coat and giant shoes from other actors, a small bowler hat from an actress’s father, and a small mustache. It was never planned, and he put it together on the spot in minutes.

Chaplin’s new Tramp costume was filmed earlier in Mabel’s Strange Predicament, but audiences did not see it there first. Director Henry Lehrman shot Kid Auto Races at Venice at a real pushmobile children’s race a few days later, with Chaplin freestyling by walking in front of a mock news camera and annoying the crowd. It was released on February 7, 1914, two days prior to Mabel’s, and the six-minute film was an immediate success, making this film the Tramp’s actual public debut.

In late 1914, Chaplin went to Essanay Studios, where he was offered a much larger salary and began directing his own pictures. In them, he slowed down the pace and infused the slapstick with genuine emotion (his 1915 film “The Tramp” closed with the title character walking away by himself down an open road). By the middle of 1915, “Chaplinmania” had swept the world, producing Tramp toys, sheet music, and competitions for best Chaplin impersonator.

In 1916, Chaplin signed a lucrative contract with Mutual Film Corporation, whose studio president was John R. Freuler. The contract was valued at around $670,000 a year, which made Chaplin the highest-paid entertainer in the world. He was granted full artistic control over his films, including the ability to write and direct 12 comedies that would include “Easy Street” and “The Immigrant.”

In June 1917, Chaplin signed a $1 million-plus contract to make eight films for a distributor. Wanting to become completely independent, he purchased a site at Sunset Boulevard and La Brea Avenue in Hollywood, where he built his own studio in January 1918. It was designed to resemble an English country house.

On February 5, 1919, Chaplin, with fellow film stars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks and director D.W. Griffith, formed United Artists. The new company allowed them to produce and distribute their own work without a studio handling distribution. According to some accounts, Richard Rowland, head of a rival studio, commented at the time, “The lunatics have taken over the asylum.” Chaplin still had to deliver six pictures to First National, the distributor he was still contracted to, however, and it was several more years before he began releasing through the company he had just founded.

In July 1919, Chaplin’s first wife, 16-year-old Mildred Harris, gave birth to a son, Norman Spencer Chaplin, who was born with severe malformations and died three days later. Chaplin poured his grief into “The Kid,” starring 4-year-old vaudeville prodigy Jackie Coogan, and recalling his own experience of being torn away from his mother in Lambeth. It was released in February 1921 and became an international hit.

During the final weeks of shooting “The Kid” in late 1920, the lawyers of Chaplin’s soon-to-be ex-wife, Mildred Harris, attempted to claim the film’s negative as part of their divorce settlement. To keep it safe, Chaplin and his staff wrapped about 400,000 feet of raw film in coffee cans and shipped it out of California by rail. They edited the movie in secret in Salt Lake City hotels and in a New Jersey laboratory.

In “The Gold Rush,” Chaplin’s Tramp, stuck in a snowbound cabin in the Klondike, boils a boot to have as a hearty dinner. The boot was actually made from licorice, and it took three days to shoot the scene due to retakes. Chaplin and his co-star Mack Swain consumed enough of it that both got sick. The film, which cost $923,000, was released in 1925 and grossed more than $6 million globally.

Production of “The Circus” was plagued by ruined negatives, a fire that destroyed the studio, a storm that demolished the sets, and a tax problem. A divorce suit from Chaplin’s second wife, Lita Grey, also halted production for eight months. Despite all of this, the film was still a success upon its opening in January 1928. At the inaugural Academy Awards the following year, the Academy removed Chaplin from the regular competitive categories and presented him with a special award for writing, acting, directing, and producing the picture himself.

Chaplin was reluctant to take his Tramp into talkies after the switch from silent pictures took place in Hollywood beginning in 1928, fearing that a speaking Tramp with an English or American accent would destroy the character’s universal appeal. He spent $1.5 million of his own money on “City Lights,” which had an orchestra and sound effects but no dialogue, and the first scene satirizes talkies by substituting the sound of a kazoo for a politician’s blustering speech. The movie opened in January 1931 and grossed more than $4.25 million.

Following “City Lights,” Chaplin went on an 18-month world tour. In September 1931, in London, he met the Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi, who informed the actor that he didn’t watch movies but was willing to meet him anyway. Gandhi explained that he opposed modern machines because they dehumanized workers and put them out of a job. This became the inspiration for Chaplin’s next picture.

“Modern Times,” released in February 1936, turned Depression-era factory life into comedy, depicting Chaplin’s Tramp driven half-mad while working on an assembly line, being force-fed by a malfunctioning food-dispensing machine, and pulled bodily into a set of enormous gears. After years of audience demand to hear Chaplin talk without destroying the Tramp’s silent, universal persona, the character finally sings when he is a waiter who forgets his lyrics and substitutes nonsense syllables in fake Italian and French. The Little Tramp would appear onscreen no more.

In October of 1940, “The Great Dictator,” Chaplin’s first talkie, was released. In it, he plays two characters: a Jewish barber and Adenoid Hynkel, dictator of a fictional nation based on Hitler, a man whose toothbrush mustache and April birth month Chaplin shared. The movie ends with six minutes of Chaplin talking about peace and democracy. Chaplin made over $5 million from the film, but it outraged isolationists in the United States. Postwar accounts say Hitler obtained a print of the film through a neutral country, but no official Nazi records survive to confirm whether he actually watched it or how he reacted.

In 1943, Joan Barry, Chaplin’s former mistress, sued him, and federal prosecutors, urged on by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, charged him with paying for her train travel across state lines. The jury found Chaplin not guilty a year later. Another paternity trial revealed that three doctors concluded Chaplin couldn’t be the father based on blood tests, but outdated California law let jurors disregard the science. The court ordered him to pay support anyway. At about the same time, Chaplin married the much younger Oona O’Neill, the daughter of the playwright Eugene O’Neill, in a marriage that lasted 34 years.

J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI had been after Charlie Chaplin for years, in part because of his left-wing sympathies, and partly because he had retained his British citizenship. In September of 1952, he left on the Queen Elizabeth from New York for the London premiere of Limelight. While he was at sea, the U.S. attorney general, James P. McGranery, rescinded his re-entry permit. Rather than come back and contest the decision, Chaplin simply went into exile. He moved to Switzerland the following year.

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