(“The best autobiography ever written by an actor. An asto...)
“The best autobiography ever written by an actor. An astonishing work.” —Chicago Tribune
Chaplin’s heartfelt and hilarious autobiography tells the story of his childhood, the challenge of identifying and perfecting his talent, his subsequent film career and worldwide celebrity. In this, one of the very first celebrity memoirs, Chaplin displays all the charms, peculiarities and deeply-held beliefs that made him such an endearing and lasting character.
Re-issued as part of Melville House’s Neversink Library, My Autobiography offers dedicated Chaplin fans and casual admirers alike an astonishing glimpse into the the heart and the mind of Hollywood’s original genius maverick.
Take this unforgettable journey with the man George Bernard Shaw called “the only genius to come out of the movie industry” as he moves from his impoverished South London childhood to the heights of Hollywood wealth and fame; from the McCarthy-era investigations to his founding of United Artists to his “reverse migration” back to Europe, My Autobiography is a reading experience not to be missed.
Charlie Chaplin was an English film actor, director, producer, writer, and composer, who rose to fame in the era of silent film. Chaplin became a worldwide icon through his screen persona "the Tramp" and is considered one of the most important figures in the history of the film industry.
Background
Charlie Chaplin was born on April 16, 1889 in London, England, the son of Charles Chaplin and Hannah Harriet Pedlingham Hill. Both of Chaplin's parents sang in English music halls, his mother under the stage name Lily Harley. Chaplin's childhood was unstable. Charles, Sr. , separated from the family in 1890 and provided only minimal and sporadic support for his son after that time. An alcoholic, he died in 1901 at the age of thirty-seven. After ending her singing career, his mother tried to support Chaplin and his half-brother Sydney through sewing. From 1895 on, she was in and out of hospitals and asylums with physical and emotional problems. For the next five years, Chaplin and his brother Sydney lived in a variety of homes and institutions, including the Lambeth workhouse.
Education
Chaplin received his only four years of (intermittent) formal education.
Career
From the time he was very young, Chaplin was a gifted mime. His first performance before an audience came in 1894, when his mother's singing voice failed on stage, and he was called upon to sing a popular ditty. By late 1898, Chaplin had his first job as a performer, touring with a group called the Eight Lancashire Lads. Between 1903 and 1907, Chaplin played roles in a number of plays, some in London and some touring the British Isles. In 1908 he was hired by Fred Karno, whose comedy troupes were popular in the English music halls. While working for Karno, Chaplin honed his skills at pantomime and twice toured the United States and Canada. On the second tour, he came to the attention of leaders in the burgeoning movie industry, and in 1913 he signed a contract to appear in comic movies made at Mack Sennett's Keystone Studios in Los Angeles. Chaplin arrived at Keystone in December 1913, a propitious moment in the development of the film industry. The "star system" was just beginning, as studios between 1910 and 1913 began featuring the names of movie actors and actresses and publicizing their lives as a method of marketing their films. Chaplin became a chief beneficiary of that system and one of the most popular and lasting stars in the history of American movies. His first film, Making a Living, was released in February 1914. Later that month, Chaplin assembled the costume that became his trademark for more than twenty years. Consisting of a tight-fitting coat, baggy pants, floppy shoes, a derby hat, a narrow moustache, and a cane, the costume looked to be that of a genteel figure fallen on hard times. The character Chaplin created wearing that costume--variously called the Tramp, the Little Fellow, or Charlie--served as his comic screen persona in nearly all his films through Modern Times (1936). Chaplin appeared in thirty-five films at Keystone in 1914, nearly all of them one-reelers and two-reelers. Beginning in April, he was also given the opportunity to direct the films he appeared in; after leaving Keystone, he always directed the films in which he starred. Near the end of his one-year contract with Keystone, his movies were already becoming vastly popular, and companies were bidding for his services. In 1915, Chaplin left Keystone for Essanay, on a one-year contract. He made fourteen films, mostly two-reelers, at Essanay in 1915 and the first months of 1916 and began to move away from pure slapstick and the sometimes crude humor of the Keystone films by blending romance and pathos with comedy in such films as The Tramp and The Bank. Chaplin's Essanay films were so successful with movie audiences that, as one contemporary journalist put it, the United States experienced a case of "Chaplinitis. " Fan magazines featured stories about Chaplin, companies marketed products using the Charlie image, Chaplin songs enjoyed popularity, Chaplin look-alike contests were held around the country, and movies featuring Chaplin imitators began to appear. The Chaplin craze of 1915 firmly established his status as a major star in the movies. That status led to greater financial security and creative independence for Chaplin under the terms of his next contract, with the Mutual Film Corporation, where he made twelve two-reel films. He slowed his working pace, completing those twelve films in 1916 and 1917. He later recalled that period as the happiest of his life. A number of his most memorable comic shorts were made at Mutual, including The Vagabond, One A. M. , The Pawnshop, The Rink, Easy Street, and The Immigrant. Film historians and critics differ on which films represent Chaplin's greatest creative achievement, some arguing for the short comic films, some favoring the features from The Gold Rush (1925) through Limelight (1952). Those who defend the short comedies find much to support their position in the Mutual films. At the end of his year with Mutual, Chaplin signed a contract with the First National Exhibitors' Circuit to make eight short films with complete creative control. He also began to build his own studio on La Brea Avenue at Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, which ensured him a degree of financial and creative control almost unheard-of in Hollywood before or since. In 1918, Chaplin began making and releasing his First National films, including A Dog's Life and Shoulder Arms. The latter film, in which Charlie plays a soldier who dreams of capturing Kaiser Wilhelm II, constitutes part of Chaplin's effort to support American and British involvement in World War I; that same year, Chaplin also helped sell Liberty Bonds by touring the East and South on a fund-raising drive and making a short Liberty Loan film called The Bond. In January 1919, fearing the growing consolidation of the film industry, Chaplin joined with film stars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks and director D. W. Griffith to found United Artists, a company formed to distribute the films that each of the founders independently produced. All of Chaplin's films from A Woman of Paris (1923), his first film after fulfilling the First National contract, to Limelight were released through United Artists. Chaplin had difficulty completing his First National contract. In 1919, only the relatively unsuccessful Sunnyside and A Day's Pleasure were released. The next year, Chaplin's most acclaimed First National film, an ambitious six-reeler called The Kid, was released. After completing The Idle Class that same year, Chaplin took a two-month trip to New York and Europe. Upon his return, he fulfilled his First National obligations with Pay Day (1922) and The Pilgrim (1923). The United Artists period began with A Woman of Paris and included seven more feature films through 1952. A serious melodrama set in France and starring Edna Purviance and Adolphe Menjou, A Woman of Paris seemed calculated to establish Chaplin as a serious filmmaker. Although the film did not do particularly well at the box office, it did garner critical acclaim and won favor among the intelligentsia. Throughout the 1920's and much of the 1930's, in fact, Chaplin enjoyed an unusually high public reputation, both among the mass moviegoing audience and among intellectuals, many of whom felt that Chaplin's work represented an artistry far superior to that of the typical commercial products of Hollywood. His personal magnetism and charm also contributed to his broad popularity. Chaplin's next film was The Gold Rush, a comic feature he later said was the film for which he most hoped to be remembered. Made as Chaplin was reaching the height of his powers, it portrays the Charlie character trying to survive hunger, isolation, frigid cold, and human brutality during the Klondike gold rush of 1898 and includes a number of his most famous scenes of comedy and pathos: eating a shoe for Thanksgiving dinner, doing a dance with forks and rolls ("the Oceana Roll"), standing alone outside the dance hall on New Year's Eve while the townspeople celebrate. Chaplin, who had suspended production for six months during the divorce proceedings, then resumed work on The Circus, in which Charlie has comic misadventures while working with a traveling circus. The film was released to strong critical reviews in January 1928. While Chaplin was finishing that film, Hollywood was rocked by the introduction of talking motion pictures, a technological advance that eventually contributed to the erosion of Chaplin's stardom. Because his comic persona depended for much of his appeal on pantomime, Chaplin decided to make his next film, City Lights, a sound film that included only a recorded musical score and sound effects, with no dialogue. After a long and troubled production schedule he released the successful City Lights in early 1931 and then immediately embarked on a world tour, lasting until June 1932, during which he drew huge appreciative crowds and met with famous artists and political figures around the world. The tour probably represented the apogee of Chaplin's stardom and popularity in the United States. During the trip Chaplin became aware of the distress wrought by the worldwide depression and interested in formulating possible solutions to the crisis. These experiences, as well as the calls by critics in the early 1930's for a socially conscious art, influenced Chaplin as he began his next film, Modern Times, which introduced a more specific topicality and social criticism into his comedies, a trend he continued in his next two films. In this comedy set in the Great Depression, workers struck, factories closed, people were homeless and hungry, and police shot to kill while breaking up groups of rioting strikers. Despite this sobering focus, the film contains some of Chaplin's most hilarious routines, from the hysteria induced by an assemblyline speedup and a feeding machine that goes berserk to a gibberish song that Charlie sings near the film's conclusion. The film's sound track, like that of City Lights, contains almost no dialogue, relying nearly exclusively on image, music, sound effects, and the comic antics of Charlie--in his last incarnation--to achieve its aims. In 1938, Chaplin began work on his next film, a satirical attack on Adolf Hitler and the Nazi dictatorship. As his first film with dialogue, The Great Dictator required a more finished script than Chaplin customarily prepared for his films. In it he played two roles, a dictator named Adenoid Hynkel (the Phooey of Tomania) and a quiet Jewish barber. The movie concludes with the barber, disguised as Hynkel, making a six-minute speech pleading for human understanding and opposition to the dictators. Although critics were divided about the final speech when the film was released in 1940, it proved to be Chaplin's greatest box office success in its American run. Chaplin's public reputation in the United States declined seriously during the 1940's, owing in part to publicity surrounding a paternity suit filed against him by the actress Joan Barry. In 1942 he gave six public addresses in support of opening a second front in Europe that would force the Nazis to split their troops between the Soviet Union and a western or southern front. In the speeches Chaplin also praised the fighting spirit of the Russian people, then under attack by the Nazis. Although polls in 1942 indicated that his Second Front position was supported by a majority of Americans, Chaplin's positive comments about the Russians came back to haunt him when the Cold War began. He was branded by conservative groups and veterans' organizations as a radical. The fact that he had retained his British citizenship while living in the United States for more than thirty years also made him a target of attack. This conservative critique led to protests and boycotts against Chaplin's next two films, Monsieur Verdoux (1947), in which he played a bluebeard who marries and then murders rich widows to support his wife and child, and the more personal and autobiographical Limelight, in which he played Calvero, an aging music-hall comedian in pre-World War I England who has lost his ability to make audiences laugh. Picketing and threats of boycotts at movie theaters canceled some shows and hurt attendance at others. Both films failed at the box office in the United States, particularly Monsieur Verdoux, yet both did quite well in European releases, especially Limelight, which also won the Foreign Film Critics' Best Film Award for 1952. These attacks on Chaplin culminated in 1952 in what might best be called his banishment from the United States. To obtain permission to travel abroad for the London and Paris premieres of Limelight, Chaplin, as a resident alien, applied for and received a reentry permit from the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Two days after he and his family set sail for England, United States Attorney General James P. McGranery revoked Chaplin's reentry permit and announced that Chaplin would have to go before an INS board to prove his moral and political worth if he wished to return to the country. Frustrated by this treatment and gratified by the welcome he received in England and France, Chaplin made sure his assets in the United States were secure and in April 1953 turned in his reentry permit to the American embassy in Switzerland. For the rest of his life, Chaplin lived at Manoir de Ban in Vevey, Switzerland, where he and his wife raised their eight children, one of whom, Geraldine, became an actress. After selling his studio in 1953 and his remaining interest in United Artists in 1955, Chaplin directed two more films. The first was A King in New York (1957), a satire on various aspects of American culture, including advertising, wide-screen movies, progressive education, and McCarthyism, with Chaplin playing the role of a deposed king visiting New York. The second, The Countess from Hong Kong (1967), starred Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren, with Chaplin in a brief cameo appearance as a ship steward. As the political climate in the United States shifted in the 1960's, Chaplin and his films began to return to public favor. A limited rerelease of his films in New York in 1963 and 1964 and the publication of My Autobiography in 1964 generated renewed interest in Chaplin's life and films. A more general release of his earlier films began in 1971, leading in April 1972 to Chaplin's first and only visit to the United States after his departure twenty years earlier. After being feted by the Lincoln Center Film Society in New York, he was given a special Oscar in Los Angeles for his "incalculable effect in making motion pictures the art form of the century. " Returning to Switzerland, he completed a new book, My Life in Pictures (1974), and, despite failing health, collaborated on composing a musical score for A Woman of Paris. In 1975 he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth of England. He died in Vevey. Although Chaplin was never an innovator in film style and although his public reputation suffered in the United States during the late 1940's and 1950's, he was one of the key creative figures in American film history, owing particularly to his creation of the mythic comic persona Charlie. Most agree that Chaplin and Buster Keaton were the most brilliant silent film comedians of the 1920's. Chaplin surpassed Keaton in the longevity of his career and the rich variety of his films, thanks in no small part to the financial and creative control he enjoyed through most of his career. Filmmaker Rene Clair expressed a widely shared sentiment when he said that through his comic persona Charlie, Chaplin "was a monument of the cinema in all countries and all times. "
(“The best autobiography ever written by an actor. An asto...)
Connections
Chaplin's first marriage, to Mildred Harris on October 23, 1918, began to break up after their only child died three days after its birth in July 1919. A divorce was granted in November 1920.
During the production of his next feature, The Circus (1928), Chaplin's second marriage began to fail. He and Lita Grey had married on November 26, 1924; they had two children.
Chaplin had secretly married actress Paulette Goddard (the female lead of both Modern Times and The Great Dictator) in 1936, and he met Barry in 1941, the same year he and Goddard decided to divorce amicably for professional reasons. In June 1943, Barry charged that Chaplin was the father of the child she expected in October. Shortly before blood tests proved in February 1944 that Chaplin was not the father of Barry's child, a federal grand jury in Los Angeles indicted Chaplin on four counts, including the Mann Act (which prohibited transporting a woman across state lines for sexual purposes) and violations of Barry's civil rights. Chaplin pleaded not guilty on all counts and was found not guilty on the Mann Act charges. The other federal charges were dropped. After the first paternity suit ended in a hung jury, Chaplin was found guilty in the second trial, despite the blood tests, which were then inadmissible evidence in California state courts. Press coverage of the charges and the trials was extensive, helping to portray Chaplin as a womanizer, an image reinforced when the fifty-four-year-old Chaplin, shortly after the charges were first filed, married eighteen-year-old Oona O'Neill, the daughter of playwright Eugene O'Neill, on June 16, 1943. Chaplin's public reputation also suffered because of his public political activities.