Charlie Chaplin by Peter Ackroyd

Author:Peter Ackroyd [Ackroyd, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-385-53738-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-10-27T16:00:00+00:00

Chaplin was even now thinking of his next film. The Idle Class is not in the same inspired category as The Kid but his dual roles in the picture, of both tramp and rich man, are the source of some humour. Chaplin, the millionaire who played the part of the “little fellow,” was of course both. It is a very ingenious and sophisticated comedy. The rich patrician receives a letter announcing that his wife has left him; he turns away from the camera and, with his arms in front of him, begins trembling and shaking. It seems that he has become distraught but, when he turns around, the audience sees that he has been vigorously employing a cocktail shaker.

Six weeks after the beginning of filming Hannah Chaplin finally arrived in the United States. She was accompanied by Tom Harrington, but neither of her sons greeted her at Ellis Island. “So you’re the mother of the famous Charlie?” an immigration official asked her.

“Yes,” she replied. “And you are Jesus Christ.”

Chaplin had not seen her for nine years, but she recognised him at once. He had bought her a bungalow in the San Fernando Valley, near the sea, where she was in the company of a trained nurse and a married couple. She seemed to visitors to be perfectly settled for long periods; she would sing music-hall songs and reminisce about her old life in London. Like her son, she could create vivid impersonations of the people whom she had known. She enjoyed playing draughts, and kept up her old expertise in sewing. She liked to be taken in her car on shopping expeditions, on which occasions she was sometimes very extravagant; one day she came back with yards of coloured silk, of no particular use, and her son remarked that “the poor soul has been longing for such things all her life.”

There were times when she was not altogether sane. The daughter of Alf Reeves remembered an occasion when she stepped back briefly into the shadows. She recalled that “one day I was sitting beside her at lunch, and I noticed a mark on her arm. And innocently I said, ‘Nan, what’s that?’ And immediately she drew her arm away and hid it; and then started putting bits of bread all about herself, and on her head. The nurse, Mrs. Carey, said, ‘Come with me, Nan’ and took her off into another room. When Mrs. Carey came back she said that the mark was a tattoo from the workhouse. She said it brought back the days when they had not had enough to eat; and she was putting the bread away for Sydney and Charlie.”

Chaplin’s two sons recalled many stories that he and Sydney told them of their grandmother. When she went to a department store in Los Angeles she asked the clerk for “shit-brown gloves.” When a pair was brought for her perusal she complained that “No, no, that’s not shit brown.” It is reminiscent of the occasion in Chaplin’s childhood when she described a young woman as “Lady Shit.

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