David Robinson - Chaplin: His Life and Art

The world is not composed of heroes and villains, but of men and women with all the passions that God has given them.

The ignorant condemn, but the wise pity.

Charles Chaplin, prefatory title to A Woman of Paris, 1923

Those big shoes are buttoned with 50,000,000 eyes.

Gene Morgan, Chicago newsman, 1915

Charles Chaplins autobiography appeared in 1964. He was then seventy-five years old. The book ran to more than five hundred pages and represented a prodigious feat of memory, for it was in large part done without reference to documentary sources. At the time, indeed, the feat seemed too prodigious to some reviewers, who were incredulous that anyone could remember in such detail events that had taken place a long lifetime before.

Since Chaplins death, I have had the privilege of examining the great mass of his working papers some of them unseen for more than half a century. In the public archives of London and in old theatrical records I have been able to uncover many long-forgotten traces of the young Chaplin and his family. In addition, a number of people in England and America have generously shared their memories and papers.

Sifting the mass of documentation has only served to heighten regard for the powers of Chaplins memory and the honesty of his record. An instance of the kind of detail which is constantly corroborated by the archives is the recollection, from his thirteenth year, that when his brother first went to sea he sent home thirty-five shillings from his pay packet: Sydney Chaplins seamans papers which were not available to Chaplin when he wrote exactly confirm the sum. Even small inaccuracies attest to his memory rather than discredit it. He remembers a childhood ogre, one of his schoolmasters, as Captain Hindrum, an old vaudeville friend of his mothers as Dashing Eva Lestocq and the friendly stage manager at the Duke of Yorks Theatre as Mr Postant. In fact their names turn out to have been Hindom, Dashing Eva Lester and William Postance. Chaplin probably never saw any of the names written down, and no doubt he recalled them simply as he heard them as a child. In themselves, the slips clearly show that Chaplins record is the result of a phenomenal memory rather than the product of post facto research and reconstruction. So regularly is his memory vindicated by other evidence that, where there are discrepancies without proof one way or the other, the benefit of the doubt often seems best given to Chaplin.

The present volume, originally written twenty years after Chaplins own account of his life, serves in part to complement My Autobiography. Subsequent research makes it possible to add further documentation and detail to the subjects sometimes random recollections. In their study Chaplin: Genesis of a Clown, Raoul Sobel and David Francis complained of the lack of hard facts and dates in the early chapters of My Autobiography. To try to keep a running time scale while reading My Autobiography is rather like having to navigate by the stars on an overcast night. By the time one reaches the next break in the clouds, the boat may be miles off course. This is true, perhaps: the special charm of those first chapters of My Autobiography is the free range of memory, unrestrained by the cold collaboration of any ghostly researcher. It is hardly to be wondered at if, at six or seven years old, the infant Chaplin was a trifle confused about the order of the workhouses and charity schools into which he was thrust. The importance of the autobiography is that it recorded his feelings in the face of these misadventures. The present volume can, at the risk of pedantry, tidy up the facts and chronology.

While My Autobiography is a strikingly truthful record of things witnessed, Chaplin might sometimes have been misled in the case of things reported to him. Like any mother, Mrs Chaplin must have tried to shield her children from unpleasant facts when she was able to do so. Some critics of the autobiography doubted whether Chaplins childhood could really have been as awful as he described. New discoveries suggest that Mrs Chaplin kept the worst from her children. The Chaplin boys seem never to have known, for example, of the sad fate of their maternal grandmother as she declined into alcoholism and vagrancy. Charles always believed that this grandmother was a gypsy, whereas the gypsy blood came with his paternal grandmother. Again, it was a natural misunderstanding for a child. Grandma Chaplin died years before his birth. Told that his grandmother was a gypsy, he could only assume it to mean the grandmother he had known.