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Charlie Chaplin

Richard Carr’s Charlie Chaplin places politics at the centre of the

filmmaker’s life as it looks beyond Chaplin’s role as a comedic
figure to his constant political engagement both on and off the
screen.
Drawing from a wealth of archival sources from across the
globe, Carr provides an in-depth examination of Chaplin’s life as
he made his way from Lambeth to Los Angeles. From his experi-
ences in the workhouse to his controversial romantic relationships
and his connections with some of the leading political figures of
his day, this book sheds new light on Chaplin’s private life and
introduces him as a key social commentator of the time.
Whether interested in Hollywood and Hitler or communism
and celebrity, Charlie Chaplin is essential reading for all students
of twentieth-century history.

Richard Carr is a Senior Lecturer in History and Politics at Anglia

Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK. His previous publications
include Veteran MPs and Conservative Politics in the Aftermath
of the Great War: The Memory of All That (2013). He has also
co-authored the books Alice in Westminster: The Political Life of
Alice Bacon (2016) and The Global 1920s (2016).

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Charlie Chaplin
A Political Biography
from Victorian Britain to
Modern America

Richard Carr

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First published 2017
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
© 2017 Richard Carr
The right of Richard Carr to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Carr, Richard, 1985– author.
Title: Charlie Chaplin : a political biography from Victorian Britain
to modern America.
Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon : New York, NY :
Routledge, 2017. | Series: Routledge historical biographies |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016048529 | ISBN 9781138923256 (hardback :
alk. paper) | ISBN 9781138923263 (pbk. : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781315201672 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Chaplin, Charlie, 1889–1977. | Chaplin, Charlie,
1889–1977—Political and social views. | Motion picture actors
and actresses—United States—Biography.
Classification: LCC PN2287.C5 C35 2017 | DDC 791.43092/
33092 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016048529
ISBN: 978-1-138-92325-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-92326-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-20167-2 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents

List of figures viii

List of tables ix
Acknowledgements x
Chronology xiii

Introduction: A very political life 1

1 Chaplin’s England 15
The descent 20
Chaplin’s Dickensian period 23
Hanwell and the workhouse 26
Boer War 35
The state Charlie was in 38
Charlie finds his career, and his country 43
Karno and Kelly 45
First sights of America 49

2 To shoulder arms? Charlie and the First

World War 55
Hollywood and the evolution of film 57
Charlie changes film 62
Fame 68
A shirker? 70
Mildred 79
vi Contents

3 Moscow or Manchester? Chaplin’s views on

capitalism before the Depression took hold 86
Max Eastman, Rob Wagner and Chaplin’s early
political development 88
Charlie the anarchist 93
Charlie the mogul 95
Chaplin and his money 100
Taking him seriously 104

4 Sex, morality and a tramp in 1920s America 110

Chaplin’s women 111
Censorship and the movies 122
‘Respectable’ Hollywood 127

5 Between Churchill and Gandhi: A comedian

sees the world 132
Eisenstein in Hollywood 133
The talkies 137
City Lights 139
Back to Britain 143
The German question 147
Chaplin and Empire 150
Homeward bound 152

6 Modern Times and the Great Depression 156

The Depression and Charlie 157
Social Credit 158
Upton Sinclair and taking a political stand 161
The making of Modern Times 166
The Napoleonic diversion 171

7 The Tramp and the dictators 178

Charlie and two fascists 179
Before The Great Dictator 183
 Contents vii

The Bercovici case 188

Putting America first 191
Censoring The Great Dictator 194
Content and release 198

8 Comrades and controversy 210

The House Un-American Activities Committee 211
Backing the Red Army 218
Joan Barry and the Cockney cad 222
Monsieur Verdoux 227
The pressure intensifies 233

9 A citizen of the world 243

The Tramp leaves America 244
Charlie and the Cold War 250
Later plaudits and a final reconciliation
with America 255

Conclusion 265

Select bibliography 273

Archival collections 273
Correspondence 276
Published sources 276
Other cited published works 277
Doctoral theses 279
Other important works 280

Index 281
Figures

1.1 Winston Churchill’s article analysing

Chaplin’s life, mid-1930s 16
2.1 A mascot of Charlie Chaplin made by British
soldiers during the First World War 76
5.1 Charlie pictured with Winston Churchill
and family, 1931 150
6.1 Chaplin pictured at his studio with Upton
Sinclair and Governor James Vardaman 162
7.1 On the set of 1940’s The Great Dictator 199
9.1 Charlie and Oona Chaplin take in 1950s London 251
Tables

2.1 Most successful films released 1918–31,

and the age of marriage of their star 81
7.1 Instances of ‘propaganda’ as defined by the
Production Code Administration, June 1938 193
Acknowledgements

This project has almost been as global as Chaplin’s life. Along

the way its author has racked up innumerable debts. My employ-
ers at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) have been generous with
research funding as and where appropriate. Alison Ainley has
been a model of support and kindness at the top of the Humani-
ties and Sciences tree at ARU. Teaching history and politics along-
side Lucy Bland, Jon Davis, Sean Lang, Rohan McWilliam, Luke
Cooper and Susan Flavin remains a pleasure. I’ve leant on the
historical expertise of the first four to read through chapters of
this work, and particular gratitude is due for that. My apologies
to all students who have had to suffer my crowbarring Chaplin
into every subject under the Sun. I should say I’ll stop, but I won’t.
Many archivists have helped along the way with this project,
and the following is a no doubt massively incomplete list. Nev-
ertheless, Bill Davis at the National Archives, Washington, D.C.,
answered a rather hasty request for access to HUAC materials
incredibly swiftly. Allen Packwood and Katharine Thomson at
my old stomping ground of the Churchill Archives Centre (CAC),
Cambridge, UK have been as helpful as ever. Jennifer Hadley at
Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut went above and
beyond in chasing down an obscure Social Credit link. Martin
Gibbs was very welcoming in allowing this historian to wade
through the Strachey papers. To all who digitised material that
appears in this book’s archival bibliography – many thanks
indeed. Permissions to utilise the various photographs that appear
here are also gratefully received.
 Acknowledgements xi

On matters Chaplin, Kate Guyonvarch, Cecilia Cenciarelli and

Nicole Meystre-Schaeren were incredibly helpful in many ways
as I made my way through the Chaplin trail of Paris–Bologna–
Montreux, respectively. Through them, my wider gratitude is
expressed to the Chaplin Office, Cineteca di Bologna and Les
Archives de Montreux, too.
Although all errors, opinions and anything else remain
my responsibility alone, this work has been vastly improved
through the help of others. Audiences in Cambridge and Bol-
ogna who have heard my various papers and presentations
on all things Chaplin have no doubt helped sharpen some of
the arguments that appear here. Lord Robert Armstrong is
thanked in the bibliography for his recollections on the issue
of Charlie’s knighthood, but a further such acknowledgement
is deserved here. At Routledge, I must thank Catherine Aitken,
Bob Pearce and Laura Pilsworth for being unstintingly help-
ful in the production process for this book. The anonymous
reviewers for the initial proposal doubtless whipped some of
the more nonsensical claims into shape, as did the reviewer of
the manuscript itself. I should also acknowledge the comments
of Professor Steven J. Ross who, in an earlier version of the
proposal for this book, pointed the author in some very fruitful
directions. In terms of other US folks, I first discussed a Chap-
lin book with David Singerman in a Pepperpot at Churchill
College, the University of Cambridge, more than a decade ago,
so his views on this manuscript are both gratefully received
and only appropriate. Another ex-Churchillian Bradley Hart
is at least owed a further pint at Little Woodrow’s, Houston
for reading through this manuscript and offering valuable sug-
gestions. Our watching huge American flags fly over car lots
with pro-Donald Trump shock jocks on the radio while on the
drive to Liberty, Texas was certainly an eye opener. Equally,
Dominic Rustecki and Tom Shakespeare (DPR) offered use-
ful thoughts on Chaplin’s private life and his South London
background, too.
I should finally thank those who have lived with this project as it
has evolved over the years. The two felines have been lovely com-
pany during the writing process. Larry: most cats don’t bring in
xii Acknowledgements

rabbits, take note. Molly: well done for recognising that. To mum:
thanks for all the support (and Chaplin gifts) over the years. But,
as ever, I am most grateful to Sarah. I may have been working for
the past four years on a historical figure who was often a night-
mare of a husband, but I am very lucky indeed to have married
such a wonderful wife. All my love, as ever.
Chronology

Date Personal/Filmic events Political activities Global context

1889 C[harlie] C[haplin] born in London, UK

1894 First appearance on stage by CC
1896, 1898 CC enters the workhouse for a combined
total of thirty-two days
1898 CC joins the Eight Lancashire Lads CC travels around the UK,
seeing poverty throughout
the land
1899–1902 CC finds Boer War Protracted Boer War campaign
patriotism distasteful eventually won by Britain
1901 CC’s father dies, aged thirty-seven
1903 After several trips in/out of infirmaries,
asylums and workhouses, Hannah Chaplin
committed as a lunatic

1903–6 CC plays Billy in Sherlock Holmes for

H.A. Saintsbury

(continued)
(continued)
Date Personal/Filmic events Political activities Global context

1906 Election of interventionist

Liberal government in the UK
1908 CC joins the Fred Karno Company (until
1913); meets/falls in love with Hetty Kelly
1911, 1912, In the US with Karno Company tours
1913
1913 Signs with Keystone Film Company
($150 a week)
1914 Film career takes off – Kid Auto Races Britain enters the First World
at Venice features first appearance of War
Tramp character; signs contract to join
Essanay ($1,250 per week)
1915 Tramp character matures in films such as CC employs Rob Wagner,
The Bank; CC meets Mildred Harris for later to become something
the first time of a political mentor
1916 Signs with Mutual Film Corp. ($10,000 The Battle of the Somme
per week)
1917 CC signs ‘Million Dollar a Year’ contract The Immigrant seems Russian revolution; the US
with First National to criticise the notion of enters the First World War
America as ‘the land of the
free’; CC faces charges of
‘shirking’ military service by
right-wing British press
Date Personal/Filmic events Political activities Global context

1918 Marries Mildred Harris; their son CC takes active part in Allied victory in the First
(Norman Spencer) dies after three days Liberty Bond drives for World War
(1919) British and American
governments; The Bond
and Shoulder Arms released
backing the war effort; CC
first meets Upton Sinclair
1919 United Artists launched by CC, Douglas CC hears Max Eastman
Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and others speak on the subject of
‘Hands Off Russia’
1920 CC employs Lita Grey for the first time CC extols the virtues of Palmer Raids (1919–20) in the
communism over a beer US suggest growing climate of
with Buster Keaton anti-communism; Republicans
win the White House (to hold
until 1933)
1921 Releases The Kid, which contains CC praises Henry Ford; Arbuckle case leads to
numerous allusions to his own returns to Europe to accusations of Hollywood
impoverished childhood promote The Kid where he debauchery
makes numerous political
statements; reads C.H.
Douglas’s work on Social
Credit

(continued)
(continued)
Date Personal/Filmic events Political activities Global context

1922 MPPDA formed to self- Benito Mussolini becomes

regulate the movie industry – Italian Prime Minister
CC against; start of FBI
surveillance against CC
1924 To circumvent Californian law, CC
marries Lita Grey in Mexico (two sons
born, 1925/6); works on The Gold Rush
(1925)
1927 CC’s divorce from Lita Grey becomes IRS seeks c.$1.35 million
headline news and, later, a political of unpaid income tax
weapon; makes The Circus (1928) from CC; his wealth then
estimated at $16 million
1929 Winston Churchill visits CC Wall Street Crash
on the set of City Lights
(1931)
1930 Ivor Montagu brings Soviet Oswald Mosley resigns from
director Sergei Eisenstein to British Labour government and
Hollywood to meet CC begins his journey to fascism
1931–2 CC’s world tour to promote City Lights; Extensive political
meets Gandhi, Mosley, MacDonald, chronology in Chapter 5;
German Reichstag deputies, Einstein and includes praise for
more Mussolini’s Italy
Date Personal/Filmic events Political activities Global context

1933 Plans for Modern Times (1936) begin to CC gives radio address in Hitler becomes Chancellor
take shape; Alistair Cooke brought in to support of FDR of Germany; Roosevelt
help with the script (removed from this inaugurated as US President
role, 1934)
1934 Social Credit movement Upton Sinclair runs his
attempt to gain CC’s ‘End Poverty in California’
explicit public support; CC campaign, endorsed by CC
described as a ‘nerve killing
fidgeting Jew’ in Nazi
propaganda
1935 Soviets claim that Modern
Times will depict the
‘struggle against capitalism’;
English leftist John Strachey
drafts a script for an unused
Napoleon film
1936 Modern Times released; CC marries Hitler invades the de-
Paulette Goddard militarised Rhineland
1938 CC praises Mussolini’s Munich Agreement between UK,
Italy and Hitler’s Germany France, Italy and Germany averts
before, later in the year, war temporarily; Martin Dies
beginning work on The assumes control of the House
Great Dictator (1940) Committee on Un-American
Activities (HUAC)

(continued)
(continued)
Date Personal/Filmic events Political activities Global context

1939 British Foreign Office makes Britain and France declare war
enquiries trying to tone on Nazi Germany
down political content of
Chaplin’s film; CC pledges
that all profits from The
Great Dictator will go to
helping European Jewry
1940 The Great Dictator released; Churchill White House sources praise Hitler’s Wehrmacht sweeps
sees and enjoys the film The Great Dictator through most of Western and
Northern Europe
1942 CC’s affair with Joan Barry occurs, CC gives several speeches The murder of European Jewry
which will later lead to two court cases endorsing the Soviet war through the Holocaust is sped
over the Mann Act and a paternity suit effort and demanding the up after the German invasion
(both 1944) Western democracies launch of the Soviet Union (1941)
a ‘second front’ against Hitler
1943 CC marries Oona O’Neill, with whom
he will have eight children
1945 Allied victory in the Second
World War; President Truman
authorises dropping of atomic
bomb
Date Personal/Filmic events Political activities Global context

1947 Monsieur Verdoux released Political content of his film ‘Waldorf Statement’ detaches
means that CC’s ‘loyalty’ to ‘respectable’ end of American
America is heavily questioned; cinema industry from the
CC called to testify before ‘Hollywood Ten’ of those who
HUAC, although eventually refuse to testify before HUAC
does not have to do so
1952 Limelight released Attorney General James
McGranery revokes CC’s
re-entry permit when
he leaves the country to
promote Limelight on
grounds of political affiliation
and moral turpitude
1950s Releases A King in New York (1956), Meets Nikita Khrushchev
which mocks the McCarthyite mood that and Nehru; awarded
had gripped America International Peace Prize by
the World Council of Peace
(1953)
1960s Last of CC’s children born (1962); My
Autobiography published (1964); releases
A Countess of Hong Kong (1967)
1972 Awarded temporary visa to visit the US; The Nixon White House
awarded Special Academy Award in Los refuses to meet CC
Angeles
1975 Awarded a Knighthood by Queen
Elizabeth II
1977 CC dies on Christmas Day
Introduction: A very political life

To cut a long story short, we need to view Charlie Chaplin’s

undeniably famous films as a component piece in a much more
complex puzzle: Chaplin’s real-life politics and what others made
of them. In essence, the following thereby invites the reader to
take a cinematic comedian seriously almost the entire time – no
small feat. Yet the politics-centred approach outlined in this book
merely serves to restore the creator of the Little Tramp to the
way that many saw him during his lifetime. Indeed, comments
along these lines were frequent. For his dining companion and
sometime host Winston Churchill, ‘the real Chaplin, as revealed
to those who, like myself, have had the pleasure of meeting him
in private life, is by no means funny. He is a man of character and
culture.’1 For another confidant, the 1934 left-wing Democratic
Candidate for Governor of California Upton Sinclair, Chaplin’s
work – especially those films with ‘undercurrent[s] of tragedy’ –
gave ‘tremendous meaning to everything we are witnessing’ and
‘will earn you the gratitude of millions of people whom you have
never seen’.2 Fundamentally, therefore, Chaplin was never viewed
as just a clown, but as a social commentator whose views could be
dangerous or inspirational depending on one’s own political lean-
ing. He was, as his great biographer David Robinson describes,
The Mirror of Opinion.3
Partly due to Chaplin’s own impoverished background in
Victorian South London, his later fi lmic commentary often
meant supporting the dispossessed. His most famous creation
of course was a tramp: ‘a bum with a bum’s philosophy’ to
quote his friend and sometime rival Buster Keaton.4 Indeed, the
2 Introduction: A very political life

very notion that the cane-twirling vagabond had any kind of

‘philosophy’ speaks to the near endless contemporary specula-
tion on what experience or moment in Chaplin’s early life had
driven its creation. As no less a luminary than Sigmund Freud
pointed out, Chaplin ‘cannot get away from those [childhood]
impressions and to this day he obtains for himself the compen-
sation for the frustrations and humiliations of that past period
of his life’.5 But the point was that Chaplin was about more
than the tramp, and his artistic creations were generally viewed
as symptomatic of a far more serious agenda. By way of brief
illustration, according to one British Foreign Office memoran-
dum in the late 1930s, Charlie’s ‘racial and social sympathies are
with those groups and classes which have suffered most’.6 Unlike
some of the political aspersions cast on Chaplin, this Whitehall
verdict was no doubt true – and indeed more or less summed
up the plots of The Great Dictator (1940) and Modern Times
(1936), respectively. Yet whatever the veracity of its content,
such a document is arguably odd in that it exists at all. The very
fact that British diplomats were exchanging a flurry of corre-
spondence over Chaplin in the fateful summer of 1939 suggests
that this is someone whose politics could do with further review.
That is the purpose of this book.
To view Chaplin in this new light, this work draws on a whole
host of under-utilised archival sources. Chaplin lived a global
life and has thus left behind an internationally scattered collec-
tion of material that numerous accounts of his work have over-
looked.7 This study corrects that imbalance. Since Chaplin was
a British subject his whole life, the Foreign Office and Security
Service material held at the National Archives at Kew, London
provides valuable insights into the way those in the corridors
of power of his homeland treated him. Likewise, key British
archival collections, such as those of Winston Churchill (held
in Cambridge), Oswald and Cynthia Mosley (Birmingham), the
Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (Oxford)
and the Astors (Reading) offer material related to Chaplin’s
political thoughts at various points, as well as just helping to
pinpoint his movements. The British side of Chaplin’s archival
trail has arguably been particularly overlooked, perhaps under-
standably, by an American-centric approach to his life to date.
 Introduction: A very political life 3

To be fair, living as he did in America from 1914 until 1952,

a plethora of archives across the continental United States also
help highlight the recollections of Chaplin insiders, such as Harry
Crocker (Los Angeles, CA) and Upton Sinclair (Bloomington, IN),
as well as the outpourings of direct opponents like Martin Dies
(Liberty, TX). These are utilised here. Above and beyond these
accounts, the American establishment’s views on Chaplin will be
outlined through material held not only by various Presidential
Libraries, but also by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI),
the Library of Congress and National Archives (all Washington,
D.C.). And, finally, there is the ‘Chaplin trail’ of material run-
ning from the office of his estate in Paris to the reams of newspa-
per material in Montreux, Switzerland (near his final residence)
to the digitised Chaplin archive currently held in Bologna, Italy.
In utilising British, continental European and American archival
leads (and more), this study is able to connect political dots that
other studies have overlooked. In doing so, it arguably forms a
more overtly political companion text to Chuck Maland’s won-
derful work on Chaplin’s Star Image and the cult of celebrity that
followed him.8
And yet for all the new combination of sources presented here,
it would be disingenuous to claim that this is the first work to
discuss Chaplin’s politics. Filmic accounts, including Walter Kerr’s
The Silent Clowns, contain the odd flash of political insight, as
does Kyp Harness’s work on The Art of Charlie Chaplin.9 The
notion of the Little Tramp as a working-class hero bravely resist-
ing the forces of capitalism has been touched on by Eric L. Flom’s
survey of Chaplin’s talkies, while the literature on Hollywood’s
collaboration with Nazi Germany has swelled over the last decade –
with accounts by Thomas Doherty and Ben Urwand igniting a
controversial debate that has obvious ramifications for a biogra-
phy of the creator of The Great Dictator, Adenoid Hynkel.10 On
a wider scale, Steven J. Ross’s accounts of Working Class Hol-
lywood and Hollywood Left and Right deserve all the praise they
have received for their intertwining of Hollywood and American
politics, and the latter includes an insightful chapter on Chap-
lin.11 Moreover, Owen Hatherley has recently explored the con-
nections between Chaplin and the USSR to much acclaim, and
Libby Murphy has provided an important and rigorous discussion
4 Introduction: A very political life

of Chaplin’s reception in France, too.12 No book is an island, and

this work undeniably builds on a substantial body of work. The
British end could do with some buttressing, but there is little doubt
that Chaplin has been a well-studied figure.13
For all that, two gaps in the literature emerge. The above works
notwithstanding, many accounts of the politics of film still under-
play both the relatively developed nature of Chaplin’s ideology
and his overall place in the story. In Larry Ceplair and Steven
Englund’s studious 1983 work on The Inquisition in Hollywood
Chaplin is an incidental character mostly reduced to the margins
of a broader red-baiting story.14 More recently, Urwand’s study of
the late 1930s alludes to The Great Dictator but, given its remit,
naturally extends beyond the Tramp, treating the issue as an epi-
sodic debate about Hollywood, rather than exploring its rami-
fications for Chaplin the man.15 Chaplin is thus parcelled off as
one of Hollywood’s nobler lights. In this specific context, this was
no doubt true, but things were neither so completely black and
white when it came to fascism for Charlie, nor was officialdom
completely out of line for being suspicious of him. If academics
and commentators have paid attention to, for example, Benjamin
Disraeli’s literary career or the extra-political writings of a Boris
Johnson or a Winston Churchill, then the process deserves to be
run in reverse. Culture can bleed into politics, but the opposite is
also true.
Second, there is also a tendency among film scholars, under-
standably enough, to prioritise interpreting possible political
‘meanings’ of Chaplin’s cinematic output at the expense of looking
at the people he was definitely meeting and the things he was actu-
ally saying. This account is not a shot-by-shot reading of Charlie’s
films. It would be difficult to write a biography of the man without
mentioning his films at all, but in large part they are not the focus
here. Instead, this book restores Chaplin to what he was for
many – a political operator turned lobbyist who happened to be
in the business of making world-class cinema. The volume of FBI
files on Chaplin, for example, were almost exclusively concerned
with Charlie Chaplin the living, breathing man and the supposed
‘radicals’ he was associating with – not the meanderings of the
Little Tramp or if and when Charlie should move from making
silent cinema to the talkies. J. Edgar Hoover had other, and, for
 Introduction: A very political life 5

him, more important interests. There is a strong literature on such

cinematic topics, and other accounts do it better than here.
Instead, this study rather borrows from political science theory
and the work of scholars such as John Street. For Street, the very
notion of a celebrity politician can and must be cut two ways.
While scholars have written much on what Street calls ‘Celebrity
Politician (CP) 1’ – elected legislators such as Tony Blair, Barack
Obama or Justin Trudeau who use the cult of celebrity to aid their
room for political manoeuvre – less attention has been given to ‘CP
2’ – ‘the entertainer who pronounces on politics and claims the
right to represent peoples and causes’.16 Partially as a by-product
of celebrity activists such as Russell Brand, George Clooney and
Angelina Jolie, and the politicalisation of comedy (including Jon
Stewart, John Oliver and Matt Forde), the scholarly CP1–CP2 gap
has narrowed of late, but a study that explicitly addresses this with
reference to Chaplin has much to add.
There are specific areas of advocacy that can be expanded upon.
For example, Kenneth Lynn’s Chaplin and His Times allows just
over a page for discussion of Chaplin’s decision not to enlist in the
British or American armies during the Great War.17 David Robinson
discusses his belief in the related causes of Social Credit and a ver-
sion of quantitative easing at a similar length in his classic Chap-
lin: His Life and Art.18 More recently, Peter Ackroyd gets through
his entire trenchant biography without mentioning Henry Ford,
Oswald Mosley or John Strachey at all.19 That is not necessarily
a criticism – they are different types of books to this. But it does
suggest that a monograph-length consideration of Chaplin’s politics
may have something to bring to the table. At just over 100,000
words this work constitutes less than half the size of either Robin-
son’s magisterial tome or Lynn’s incisive analysis, and the trade-offs
with regard to comprehensiveness versus a punchy account are read-
ily acknowledged. There will be more work for scholars to do on
his politics in years to come, but this book can certainly help nudge
that debate on.
Throughout, we will not adopt a universally linear structure but
rather jump back and forth between periods of time. Our goal is
to draw out different themes of Chaplin’s life, not chronicle his
every waking moment. Through nine main chapters the goal of
this book is to tease out aspects of the political Chaplin, and this
6 Introduction: A very political life

can be best done through a thematic approach. To begin with then,

while his impoverished origins provided much of the inspiration
for the feel, look and motivations of his Little Tramp character
they also, as Chapter 1 makes clear, imbued within him an initial
antipathy to the idea of the state as a force for good. Partly due
to timing and the broader political climate in which he grew up,
these early years also meant that Chaplin’s politics were always
rather idiosyncratic, and not easily reduced to one particular
label. Although he was never a communist, he cannot always be
completely pigeon-holed as, for instance, an interventionist Euro-
pean social-democrat either. In many ways Charlie would flip-flop
between positions – not unlike many a politician in his or any other
day. But this does not diminish his political seriousness. If Britain’s
Ramsay MacDonald could move from the Labour Party’s first ever
Prime Minister to leading a de facto Conservative administration
in a matter of weeks in the autumn of 1931, we perhaps should
not be too harsh if Charlie occasionally jumped from socialist to
anarchist sympathies.
The First World War shook Charlie’s political kaleidoscope
some more, as it did so many. Here, as our second chapter makes
clear, the fact that he did not perform active military service during
the defining moment of his generation would bring a whole series
of political consequences for the man in the coming years. Equally,
the fact that this period saw him make a staggering amount of
money on the one hand and marry his first ‘child bride’ on the
other set up two further sources of opprobrium for any would-be
political opponents. In not fighting from 1914 to 1918, Charlie
would thereby pave the way for several fights that would dog his
career for decades to come. As Republican Senator Harry Cain
put it in 1949, ‘Chaplin has sat out in luxurious comfort in two
wars in which his native Britain and his hospitable United States
were involved, in the defense of those freedoms which he perverts
so glibly.’20 This would be a continual refrain from those who
opposed his progressive politics.
Once Allied victory in the war had been secured, however, Chap-
lin considered the type of world he wished to build. Chapter 4
will make clear how his political reach was already coming under
fire due to his controversial relationships with several very young
women, but, prior to it, the third chapter shows he was having his
 Introduction: A very political life 7

world view shaped by interactions with several left-wing thinkers –

not least the radical pamphleteer Max Eastman and Chaplin’s own
employee, Rob Wagner. Together with Upton Sinclair, these figures
shaped Chaplin’s vague sympathies for the American (and British)
working man into a more positive line on the recent communist
takeover in Russia. Indeed, according to a letter from the US
Department of Justice to J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI, by
1922 Chaplin stood as ‘an active part of the Red movement in this
country’.21 Except it was a good deal more complicated than the
anti-Chaplin forces in D.C. would have it. At the same time that
Charlie was breaking bread with those praising Vladimir Lenin or,
over a cold beer, trying to convince Buster Keaton that commu-
nism was the future, he was one of the most successful capitalists
of his era, and praised other such innovators – most starkly Henry
Ford – to the hilt. After all, ultimately, he would form United Art-
ists to make money, not to constitute the cinematic wing of The
Daily Worker. If in the 1920s the ‘business of America was busi-
ness’ – to paraphrase Republican President Calvin Coolidge – than
Charlie was not averse to taking advantage of this atmosphere.
Precisely because he had grown up with so little money, Charlie
was always more about his own capital than he was Das Kapital.
We then turn to what Chaplin did in the aftermath of the Wall
Street Crash of 1929. In Chapter 5 we look not only at Chap-
lin’s world tour of 1931–2 but how it served important politi-
cal purposes above and beyond promoting the majesty of City
Lights. Touring through a Britain on the verge of seeing its Labour
government fall from office unable to address the slump, an Italy
seemingly revitalised under Mussolini and a Berlin soon to fall to
Nazi takeover, Chaplin would not only be a satirist of the major
events of the 1930s, but a key witness to them. Along the way he
would not only avariciously read economy theorists from John
Maynard Keynes to C.H. Douglas, but he sat down and wrote his
own concrete schemes to address the world’s ills. Chapter 6 then
shows how he brought these political ideas home. Looking at the
road to what became Modern Times, we chart Charlie’s support
for Roosevelt’s New Deal, as well as the Upton Sinclair inspired
‘E.P.I.C.’ programme that sat well to the left of a very intervention-
ist White House. His political activities would certainly extend to
the big screen, but this was simply the tip of the iceberg.
8 Introduction: A very political life

The final three chapters then look at Chaplin on the world

stage. Beginning with The Great Dictator in Chapter 7, we
explore Charlie’s complicated and changing relationship to fas-
cism. Given his early hatred of state power (a position he would
return to in the 1940s) and the hard evidence of The Great Dic-
tator, it is understandable why Charlie should have been judged
as a total and unwavering anti-fascist. Rather like Churchill, he
ended up on the right side of history by 1939–40, and all else is
forgotten. And, certainly, the Nazi regime’s anti-Semitism was
always completely anathema to him, partially due to familial
and romantic connections. Yet there are two factors we also
need to build into this picture – factors that do not override this
ingrained perception, but should nuance it somewhat. On the
one hand, once he decided to make the picture, Charlie faced
down significant pressure from major governments and his own
industry to stop production. It was a brave move to resist it,
not least commercially. This remains to his eternal credit. Yet,
equally, before he decided to make The Great Dictator, the man
who would go on to play Adenoid Hynkel was not without a
kind word for elements of the Italian fascist regime, or indeed
other fascists such as Oswald Mosley. In many ways this chapter
therefore desanctifies the way that Chaplin is viewed vis-à-vis
fascism, but makes him all the more human (and arguably, there-
fore, all the more impressive).
Having taken on Hitler, Chapter 8 then deals with how Charlie
viewed Stalin and the Red Army, and how this stance was received
in America. As we will see, words designed to encourage America
and Britain’s ally the Soviet Union in 1942 would go on to become
Exhibit A for those who wanted to rid the country of an allegedly
‘un-American’ actor. This chapter therefore considers how Chap-
lin’s sex life and his politics intertwined once more. It details how
this ‘cockney cad’ – a double insult, taking in both his refusal to
become an American citizen on the one hand and his nefarious
activities in the bedroom on the other – faced a trial under the
Mann Act (for sexual impropriety) before being hit by the terms
of the McCarran Act (for alleged communist sympathy) six years
later. Chapter 9 ends our story on Charlie’s years in Swiss exile,
his final political views, as well as an eventual reconciliation – of
sorts – with America.
 Introduction: A very political life 9

Before beginning, it must be said that many limitations dog any

analysis of Chaplin. The first is that for much of his early life there
is scant contemporary source for either his whereabouts or his
opinions. Much is retrospectively claimed about his Dickensian
childhood – including here – but pinpointing where he even was at
various points remains a difficulty. David Robinson commendably
includes a chronology of Chaplin’s known addresses in the appen-
dix of his Life and Art but there remain gaps in Charlie’s backstory
that inevitably involve a degree of supposition on behalf of any
biographer. This is exacerbated by Chaplin’s own half-truth and
bare-faced lies during interviews in the early years of his career.
Such chicanery was partly designed to lend himself greater intrigue,
but was no doubt also a product of mere boredom at the regular-
ity of such promotional fluff. Even Chaplin himself spun versions
of, for example, the death of his father and his first appearance
on stage. His birth is likewise shrouded in mystery. Although later
taken in anti-Semitic directions by political opponents in Germany,
America and beyond, the confusion as to where Charlie entered
the world in part arose from Chaplin’s own reluctance to pin down
a location. Given the more recent furore over the birthplace of the
forty-fourth President of the United States Barack Obama, having
the political right jump on such issues is a notion hardly limited
to Chaplin’s time. But at least Obama was able to eventually, and
understandably grudgingly, produce a birth certificate. No such
document existed for Charlie. We must rely heavily on his auto-
biography, and given it was written in Chaplin’s early seventies,
this brings its own issues of memory and reinvention.
In any event, the adult Charlie was also an utter hypocrite at
times. As his friend Harry Crocker noted, ‘In this world there
were to be two sets of laws: those which controlled all other men,
and those with concern to Chaplin.’22 Therefore, what Charlie
said – for example, urging politicians to help the poor – was often
at odds with what he did (in this instance, avoiding paying the
taxes to fund the social programmes that could do just that). Yet
this in a sense again humanises the man. Charlie the liberal politi-
cal saint who was persecuted by the American right and yet still
had the bravery to make The Great Dictator is a construction
not without foundation, but does not tell the whole story. The
man was complex, and his opponents’ claims against him may
10 Introduction: A very political life

have been caricatures, but they were often broadly true. Charlie
was a nightmare to be married to and a person with questionable
sexual ethics across the board; thus, those who had a beef with his
morality were more or less kicking against an open door. To con-
demn officialdom as unthinking and unfeeling while being a mil-
lionaire sleeping with fifteen-year-old girls was not a particularly
tenable pose. Today, he would have been issuing press-gagging
injunctions on a weekly basis. Unpicking the world of claim and
counter-claim about Chaplin is therefore not easy and, certainly,
mud was slung both at him and from him. But in documenting
his views ‘warts and all’, we may at least understand where he
was trying to get to, and how worried his political opponents
need have been.
Third, on something of a technical note, we must also concede
that our task is made more difficult by the fact that Charlie never
voted in any election for a British Member of Parliament or an
American President. We deal with why this was so in our first
chapter – in essence it boiled down to ineligibility rather than
abstention. But it meant that Charlie never had to assume any
degree of personal responsibility for his political views until the
tide of public opinion began to turn against him. He was not
grounded in democracy per se and was not aligned to any party
(much as the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)
would try to pin communist affiliation on him). On the one hand,
this must have made his life easier – he could hobnob with the
Churchills and the Viscount Astors while being able to jovially
parry away any uncomfortable discussions with jokes about not
being able to vote or vagaries about being a ‘citizen of the world’.
But it also meant that he would never assume much of a tribal
identity, either in Britain or America. This gave him the freedom to
say what he wanted, but it also meant that when the heat was on,
people whom he had previously enjoyed convivial discussions with
could slink back into the mist and leave the lecherous Englishman
to take the heat of a morally righteous America.
A final comment must be added. Fundamentally, Charlie was
a man of power. Although estimates of cinema audiences in a
non-digital age are by nature ballpark, even on a very conserva-
tive reading we can say that up to ten million Americans saw
the class divide of 1931’s City Lights, perhaps twelve and a half
 Introduction: A very political life 11

million 1921’s autobiographical The Kid and more than twenty

million witnessed the pathos and snow of The Gold Rush.23 In
an America with a population of about 116 million in 1925 these
were significant numbers. It is highly likely therefore that more
people saw Charlie perform the famous roll dance of 1925 than
voted for any Republican Presidential Candidate up to Dwight D.
Eisenhower in 1952. For politicians seeking to tap into the newly
democratised masses, film had a particular utility and potentially
a very strong effect – positive or negative. Charlie himself would
famously lampoon this through the ludicrously stage-managed
theatrics seen in Hynkel’s Germany of The Great Dictator. But
as millions of Americans took to the cinemas to stare at screens
for hours a week, what was projected on them began to take on
greater and greater significance. Figures like Chaplin had the
potential to assume a Weberian charismatic authority that could
sway the masses for or against a particular political position, and
were readily seen in this light.
Academically, this notion of film as a political and ideologi-
cal weapon was outlined most famously by Theodor Adorno and
Max Horkheimer in their Dialectic of Enlightenment of the early
1940s. There the two Frankfurt School theorists wrote of a ‘cul-
ture industry’ that was providing ‘mass deception’ to the masses.
Rather than being served an enlightening and wholesome diet of
progressive cinema, audiences were being fed bland gruel. In this
view, although films may differ in terms of their individual plot,
the overall message would always remain the same. As Hork-
heimer and Adorno wrote in 1944, ‘What [movie] connoisseurs
discuss as good or bad points serve only to perpetuate the sem-
blance of competition and range of choice [between] . . . Warner
Brothers and Metro Goldwyn Mayer productions.’24 On the one
hand, this could result in some pretty turgid structuring. Today’s
audiences bored of Judd Apatow ‘Bromances’ or Jason Statham
firing a gun at some bad guys may well recognise the contention
that ‘no independent thinking must be expected from the audience:
the product prescribes every reaction . . . any logical connection
calling for mental effort is painstakingly avoided’.25 But the prob-
lem was deeper than just a boring product. For Horkheimer and
Adorno the overall consequence of all cinema, up to and including
‘Donald Duck in the cartoons’, was that ‘the unfortunate in real
12 Introduction: A very political life

life get their thrashing so that the audience can learn to take their
own punishment’.26 The seeming ‘choice’ of Warner Brothers ver-
sus MGM was really just one form of conformity versus another.
The massification of film after its anarchic early days (more on this
in Chapter 2) had produced a politically anodyne Hollywood: ‘In
front of the appetite stimulated by all those brilliant names and
images there is finally set no more than a commendation of the
depressing everyday world [people] sought to escape.’27
Chaplin himself was referenced in this regard by Horkheimer
and Adorno. Having condemned movie writers for seeking to
ensure that ‘developments must follow from the immediately
preceding situation’ (and ‘never from the idea of the whole’), the
pair lambasted the ‘tendency mischievously to fall back on pure
nonsense . . . right up to Chaplin and the Marx Brothers’.28 The
tramp kicking a policeman on the backside was not a political
act, or at least an insufficient one. Yet, despite such scepticism, it
must be acknowledged the Frankfurt School was not a uniform
set of principles. While Horkheimer and Adorno cast a pessimis-
tic eye on the movie industry, Frankfurt theorists such as Walter
Benjamin could view film’s potential much more positively. In his
seminal essay on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Pro-
duction’, Benjamin noted that ‘so long as the movie-makers’ cap-
ital sets the fashion, as a rule no other revolutionary merit can be
accredited to today’s film than the promotion of a revolutionary
criticism of traditional concepts of art’. So far, so Frankfurt. Yet
there was an important caveat. For one, Benjamin placed greater
emphasis than his contemporaries on the fact that ‘today’s films
can also promote revolutionary criticism of social conditions,
even of the distribution of property’. Certainly, this was the case
with Chaplin, whose audience, Benjamin believed, experienced
a ‘progressive reaction . . . characterized by the direct, intimate
fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation
of the expert’. This idea that film, unlike books, could cultivate
an expert’s mentality among the masses was an important one.
For Benjamin, ‘it is inherent in the technique of the film as well
as that of sports that everybody who witnesses its accomplish-
ments is somewhat of an expert’. Unlike literature, therefore –
where ‘for centuries a small number of writers were confronted
by many thousands of readers’ – film was a medium that the
 Introduction: A very political life 13

audience could not just passively and obediently consume, but

that they could understand, critique and potentially help shape
the future of themselves. Indeed, writing in the 1930s Benjamin
was able to conclude that ‘transitions that in literature took cen-
turies have come about in a decade’. Contemporary film may
indeed have been Donald Duck taking his beating at the time,
but there was no historical inevitability about this. Processing the
images of film would allow audiences to comprehend the chang-
ing nature of the industrial process, and the ills of capitalism. At
the forefront of this alternative agenda, red flag literally in hand,
appeared the Chaplin of Modern Times.29 The stakes on which
Chaplin made his comedies were therefore high, and increasingly
elevated by those both for and against him. This would indeed
go on to become a very political life.

Notes
1 ‘The Future of Charlie Chaplin’s Contribution’, Collier’s Weekly
[undated 1934/5], Churchill Archives Centre [CAC], Cambridge,
UK, Winston Churchill Papers [CHAR] 8/521.
2 Sinclair to Chaplin, 2 May 1941, Lilly Library, Bloomington, Indi-
ana, USA [LLBI], Upton Sinclair Papers [UPS]. My italics.
3 David Robinson, Chaplin: The Mirror of Opinion (London, 1983).
4 Buster Keaton, My Wonderful World of Slapstick (New York, 1960), 126.
5 Freud to Schiller, undated, within Margaret Herrick Library, Los
Angeles [MHL], Harry Crocker Papers [HRC] f.12.
6 Kenney to Brooke-Wilkinson, 16 June 1939, National Archives,
Kew, London, UK [TNA], Foreign and Commonwealth Office Papers
[FCO] 395/663.
7 For example, Eric L. Flom, Chaplin in the Sound Era: An Analysis
of the Seven Talkies (London, 1997) and Colin Chambers, Here We
Stand, Politics, Performers and Performance – Paul Robeson, Char-
lie Chaplin and Isadora Duncan (London, 2006) utilise no archival
material.
8 Charles J. Maland, Chaplin and American Culture: The Evolution of
a Star Image (London, 1989).
9 Walter Kerr, The Silent Clowns (London, 1975), passim and Kyp
Harness, The Art of Charlie Chaplin: A Film-By-Film Analysis
(London, 2007), passim.
10 See, e.g., David Denby’s blunt review of Urwand in The New Yorker,
23 September 2013.
11 Steven J. Ross, Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shap-
ing of Class in America (Princeton, 1998) and idem, Hollywood Left
14 Introduction: A very political life

and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics (Oxford,

2011), ch.1.
12 Owen Hatherley, The Chaplin Revue: Slapstick, Fordism and the
Communist Avant-Garde (London, 2016); Libby Murphy, The Art
of Survival: France and the Great War Picaresque (New Haven, CT,
2016), ch.8.
13 Indeed, emphasising Chaplin’s Britishness somewhat extends Hather-
ley’s analytical axes of Berlin–Moscow and America to further embed
a new geographic framework.
14 Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood:
Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960 (Berkeley, 1983).
15 Ben Urwand, The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler (Cam-
bridge, MA, 2013).
16 John Street, ‘Celebrity Politicians: Popular Culture and Political Rep-
resentation’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations,
6 (2004), 435–52.
17 Kenneth S. Lynn, Charlie Chaplin and His Times (London, 1998),
175–6.
18 David Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art (London, 1992), 456, 458.
19 Peter Ackroyd, Charlie Chaplin (London, 2014).
20 A speech clipped by supportive voices in the press, e.g., Hoover
Institute, Stanford University, California, USA [HOOV], Elizabeth
Churchill Brown Papers [ECB] Box 18 Folder 13.
21 Burns to Hoover, 28 August 1922, Federal Bureau of Investigation,
Washington, D.C., USA [FBI], FBI Chaplin Online file 7.
22 Harry Crocker’s unpublished memoir, ‘Charlie Chaplin: Man and Mime’,
MHL/HRC, X–12.
23 Assuming gross receipts of $2.5m, $6m and $5m respectively, with
cost of entry at 20c, 25c and 50c. As mentioned, this is likely an
understatement given discounted 5c or 10c entry fees towards the
end of such runs or at matinee showings.
24 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment
(London, 2010), 123.
25 Ibid., 137.
26 Ibid., 138.
27 Ibid., 139.
28 Ibid., 137.
29 All Benjamin quotes readily available online via www.marxists.org/
reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm (accessed 7 Nov-
ember 2016).
1 Chaplin’s England

In the mid-1930s a globally known figure began to pen an

account for the American magazine, Collier’s Weekly. This
author was a regular contributor to the serial, writing on issues
including press freedom and the future of publicity. Yet on this
occasion our narrator turned his hand to the undeniably trau-
matic events of 9 May 1901:

In a room in St Thomas’s Hospital, London, a man lay dying.

He had had a good life – a full life. He had been a favourite
of the music halls. He had tasted the triumphs of legitimate
stage. He had won a measure of fame as a singer. His home
life had been happy. And now Death had come for him.
While he was yet in the prime of manhood, with success still
sweet in his mouth, the curtain was falling – and forever. The
other windows of the hospital were dark. In this one alone a
light burned. And below it, outside in the darkness, shivering
with cold and numbed with fear, a child stood sobbing . . .
The dying man and the child outside the window both bore
the same name – Charles Chaplin.1

Despite the dramatic, almost cinematic tone here, the author

of this retrospective was not Charlie Chaplin himself. Nor was
it Alistair Cooke, Thomas Burke, Upton Sinclair or any of the
other prominent literary and cultural commentators who often
reflected on the ‘meaning’ of Chaplin. Instead, this piece of jour-
nalism was written by Winston Churchill (see Figure 1.1) – at the
time of publication marooned in the political wilderness before
16 Chaplin’s England

Figure 1.1 Numerous global politicians speculated on Chaplin’s back-

ground, including, here, Winston Churchill.
Courtesy of the Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, UK

his stridently anti-Nazi oratory, and the actions of Hitler himself,

brought this maverick hurtling back into favour in the eyes of his
fellow countrymen.
Although they were politically dissimilar as we will see, Chaplin
and Churchill always got on rather well. Winston visited Charlie
on the set of what would become the 1931 film City Lights, while
 Chaplin’s England 17

Charlie stayed at Chartwell when back in Britain promoting the

same product. Highlighting this connection from the outset is not
merely to begin with some interesting trivia. Instead the Chaplin–
Churchill friendship suggests three important issues that will run
throughout this book. The first is Chaplin’s political malleability.
Although broadly of the left, Chaplin was terribly interested in
political ideas generally, and rather impressed by aristocratic figures
of the right. The Astors – Lady Nancy and Viscount Waldorf (both
Conservative MPs) – got on famously with Charlie, and were indic-
ative of a series of relationships where Charlie provided the frisson
of fame and glamour, and such well-to-do couples the political
table talk. Certainly, politicians of whatever tribe were keen to
glad hand this modern icon. For example, presaging the modern
obsession with the ‘selfie’, Waldorf recorded in his 1926 diary
that during a trip to Hollywood he was ‘photoed with [Charlie]
of course’.2 Perhaps this was no big deal. But what was more
intriguing – for a man of the left – was that during his 1931 promo-
tional tour of the UK Charlie missed several engagements, includ-
ing visiting the children then studying at his old school because,
as the left-leaning Daily Herald newspaper sardonically noted,
he was ‘detained at the Astors’.3 In February or March 1931 you
were far more likely to find Chaplin at the Prime Ministerial resi-
dence of Chequers, or dining at the House of Commons, than in
a leftist discussion group, or dolling out the produce to real-life
Little Tramps in a soup kitchen. Throughout the book, as we will
see, Charlie’s politics could be slippery. His deeds did not always
match his words.
The second issue that the Churchill article suggests was the
regularity in which politics intersected with Charlie’s life, particu-
larly from those wishing to project a particular ‘meaning’ onto
his childhood. This occurred for good and ill. When, in 1933,
Chaplin was reported as saying he would make his next picture
without his famous moustache for fear of invoking comparisons
with Hitler (a stance that would clearly be reversed by The Great
Dictator in 1940), the Nazi press in Berlin responded that ‘the
creator and leader of the new Germany stands much too high to
even hear the barking of a dog from London’s ghetto’.4 Chaplin’s
origins were both mythologised by the man himself and by those
desiring to talk him up or down. But his entire life – involving as
18 Chaplin’s England

it did such extraordinary highs and lows – was innately political,

experiencing capitalism at both ends of the income scale from
being reliant on the charity of Victorian Londoners to becoming
one of the wealthiest men in America. As such, it is impossible to
do Chaplin’s life justice by reference to the film studio or the antics
in his bedroom alone. The man lived a very political experience.
The third theme, by no means a point limited to Churchill’s
slightly overly dramatic prose, was just how ambiguous and
shrouded in mystery Chaplin’s life actually was. The later sex
scandals, flirtations with communism and manic personality we
will get to, but public understanding of his origins – given how
important they were to the man who would become the world’s
most famous filmmaker – was perhaps the haziest of a rather hazy
lot. We may not expect a cheque-chasing piece of journalism from
a cash-strapped Winston Churchill to be strictly accurate in all
the dotting of the i’s and crossing of the t’s, but the fact that his
excerpt described Chaplin’s father’s ‘home life’ as ‘happy’, and
that Churchill would go on to state that ‘his death brought a safe,
comfortable world crashing about Charlie’ was certainly stretch-
ing credulity, as this chapter will set out.
Yet, if misleading, Churchill’s intentions were at least benign
enough – something that could not always be said for those who
speculated on Chaplin’s past. Nazi references to Chaplin’s ‘ghetto’
background were just the tip of the iceberg. Guesses as to Charlie’s
allegedly ‘real’ name competed with one another to be the most
stereotypically Jewish, while speculation on the location of his
birth was an equally enjoyable parlour game for many in the press.
One 1935 article claimed that Charlie was the son of a Chaim
Kaplan, a tailor from Whitechapel in London’s East End – then
known for its significant Jewish population.5 On the back of such
tall tales both the FBI and British Special Branch would later inves-
tigate allegations that he had been born Israel Thornstein, with
either a German or Franco-Jewish background. Another press
account (from which both intelligence agencies seemed to have
gathered much of their interest in Chaplin) accurately asserted
that ‘accounts of his birth are as vague as those concerned with the
nativity of divinities’, yet went on to report the second-hand gossip
that ‘Charlie’s father was a French pantomimic clown, his mother
an English Jewess’.6 In Canada The Toronto Standard even carried
 Chaplin’s England 19

a completely fabricated quote from Charlie that upon returning to

London at the height of his fame, ‘I set out immediately to find the
house in which I was born, and when I reached the ghetto I saw
the frightful loneliness and need of my brother Jews’.7 This was
wrong on many levels. With The Great Dictator in pre-production
in the late 1930s this would reach something of a crescendo when
pro-Nazi elements in the American press published a list of ‘Big
Money Jewish Names’ that labelled Chaplin as a Jew originally
named Tonstein.8 The story did not go away.
All this was simply made up. His father Charles Senior’s roots
lay in Protestant Suffolk, England and, although stories of a mater-
nal gypsy connection lingered, Charlie’s mother Hannah could
trace her family tree through South London. Yet, interestingly, the
notion of a more ‘exotic’ heritage was a lie occasionally peddled by
Charlie himself in early interviews. There are a variety of possible
explanations of this – Charlie may have done so either to embellish
or deflect from the very real and tragic nature of his childhood.
His half-brother Sydney also had a Jewish father, and there was
no doubt an element of solidarity with someone he cared deeply
about. Charlie may just have been bored at the relentless grind
of publicity. But it was also a legend able to gain some currency
because, as one Special Branch letter put it, ‘although his claim to
have been born in London on 16th April 1889 has been accepted
by the Passport Office since at least 1920 . . . we cannot find par-
ticulars of his birth at [record keeping facility] Somerset House’.9
Whoever Special Branch’s ‘source[,] which is usually considered
fairly reliable’, actually was, it subsequently transpired that there
was not a shred of evidence to back up his claim that Chaplin had
been born in Fontainebleau or Melun in France either.10 Perhaps
this informant had just read the papers and passed on the gossip
to the authorities.
For all its mystery, this was far from an unusual state of affairs,
however. When his son entered the world Charles Senior had been
on stage in Hull in the north of England and thus missed Charlie’s
birth. As David Robinson notes, it was easy for ‘music hall artists,
constantly moving from one town to another’ to ‘put off and even-
tually forget’ formalities such as registering births.11 In May 1889
an edition of the music periodical The Magnet recorded that ‘on
the 15th ultimo, the wife of Mr. Charles Chaplin, [was delivered]
20 Chaplin’s England

of a beautiful boy’. This may (or may not) have been a day out, but
it certainly stands as at least as powerful an argument for Chaplin’s
British birth as anything waged against this.12 Charlie himself later
placed his birth as taking place at eight o’clock on 16 April 1889
East Lane, Walworth, South London.13 In a neat coincidence, his
future nemesis Adolf Hitler entered the world in Brannau-am-Inn,
Austria only four days later.

The descent
Before we get to the difficulties of Chaplin’s childhood, a further
contextual point needs to be added. As his son entered the world
in 1889, the twenty-six-year-old Charles Senior was undoubtedly
a professional success. Kenneth Lynn records that, after the start
of his career in 1887, his ‘pleasing baritone voice and sophisti-
cated manner soon brought him top billings . . . He became sought
after as well by music publishers, who realized that having his
name and photograph on their sheet strengthened sales.’14 Hav-
ing progressed artistically from mimic to storytelling singer (often
about staple topics such as mothers-in-law or nagging wives),
between 1890 and 1896 several of Charles Snr’s recordings were
released to commercial success. Like his son, this would provide
a platform to work in America, and in August 1890 Charles Snr
appeared at Union Theatre, New York for several weeks. At least
initially, his father’s career was something of a triumph.
Certainly the music hall in which mother, father and Charlie
himself would make their names held a special place in Victorian
life. In the 1880s there were about 500 music halls in London, and
by the 1890s it was estimated that the biggest 35 were catering to
a combined audience of more than 45,000 people an evening. This
was not welcomed by all it must be said. As Gareth Stedman Jones
notes, while middle-class religious communities tried to foster a
similar devotion among the worker class, late Victorian England’s
‘dominant cultural institutions were not the school, the evening
class, the library, the friendly society, the church or the chapel, but
the pub, the sporting paper, the race course and the music hall’.15
The fare provided by the latter sought to highlight ‘the peculiari-
ties of the working-class situation in London’, which could often
be precarious. Few music hall performers could therefore progress
 Chaplin’s England 21

without at least one of ‘fatalism, political scepticism, the evasion

of tragedy or anger, or a stance of comic stoicism’ within their
armoury.16 A certain world-weariness, no doubt partially imbued
by the free-flowing alcohol around such premises (despite, again,
middle-class disproval), was a natural product of anyone raised in
such an environment.17 So it would be with Charlie.
The younger Charlie’s geographic hinterland would be South
London, and much of this would indeed appear, as in Churchill’s
account, rather Dickensian. But it did not start this way. Due to
his father’s artistic success Charlie Chaplin began his life in a rela-
tively well-to-do environment. As Charlie recorded in My Auto-
biography, in his early years ‘our circumstances were moderately
comfortable; we lived in three tastefully furnished rooms’.18 The
Chaplins could even afford a housemaid at this stage, and the rem-
iniscences of the early 1890s in his autobiography are relatively
misty-eyed and nostalgic. As he recorded: ‘London was sedate on
those days. The tempo was sedate; even the horse drawn tram-cars
along Westminster Bridge Road went at a sedate pace and turned
sedately on a revolving table at the terminal near the bridge.’19
Charlie remembered everything from the ‘rubicund flower-girls at
the corner of Westminster Bridge, making gay boutonniere’ from
fern and tinsel to the ‘galaxy of colour’ afforded by a nearby fruit
shop offering ‘pyramids of oranges, apples, pears and bananas . . .
in contrast to the solemn grey Houses of Parliament directly across
the river’.20 With his father’s theatrical career bringing in forty
pounds a week – far higher than the then average British weekly
salary of just over one pound – the Chaplins were doing well. His
father may have been distant, but he certainly was not poor.
Yet, as Charlie later noted, problems could be seen from the out-
set: ‘The trouble was that [father] drank too much, which Mother
said was the cause of their separation.’21 For all its (temporary)
financial security their marriage was clearly volatile and occasion-
ally violent. On one occasion when Charles Snr became physically
violent towards Hannah she fled to Brighton with some friends. To
his frantic telegram of ‘What are you up to? Answer at once!’ she
managed the gay reply of ‘Balls, parties and picnics, darling!’ The
madcap violence of the Little Tramp may have been mostly com-
edic, but at times young Charlie must have seemed like the boxing
referee in City Lights – marooned between two pugilists, and not
22 Chaplin’s England

a clue of what to do. Charles Snr’s lengthy absences at least saved

him from this fate most of the time.
In the absence of this alcoholic father the young Charlie’s attach-
ment to his mother grew ever stronger. Aside from Hannah’s obvi-
ous love for her children – which included Charlie’s half-brothers
Sydney (four years older than he) and George (the younger sibling
snatched from Hannah aged just six months by his father Leo in
a particularly Dickensian episode) – she and young Charlie also
shared a love of the music hall. Like her estranged husband, Han-
nah enjoyed sporadic success in this area, and when the Chaplins
separated in 1890 her wage of twenty-five pounds a week was
sufficient to convince Hannah not to seek any alimony from Char-
lie’s father. As her career began to experience peaks and troughs,
up until 1893 Hannah kept the wolf from the door through a
combination of Charles Snr’s patchy payments of support for his
son (about 10 shillings a week when they did arrive), her own
theatrical career and performing odd jobs such as sewing. Up to
this point the Chaplins got by. Through 1894 and 1895, however,
two varieties of ill-health rocked the foundations of Hannah and
young Charlie’s world, and gave the future film star his first taste
of what ‘the state’ as a political concept could look like.
The first dose of ill health was actually comparatively minor, if
debilitating for a performer: laryngitis. Hannah’s voice – ‘never
strong’ by her son’s account – was virtually useless should she be
hit with any cold or more debilitating malady. As Charlie noted,
‘The slightest cold brought on laryngitis which lasted for weeks;
but she was obliged to keep working, so that her voice grew pro-
gressively worse . . . In the middle of singing it would crack or
suddenly disappear into a whisper.’ Contemporary crowds were
not kind: ‘The audience would laugh and start booing. The worry
of it impaired her health and made her a nervous wreck.’22 For
mother this meant lost bookings, but for son it helped launch a
career. When playing the Canteen at Aldershot – ‘at the time a
grubby, mean theatre catering mostly to soldiers’ – Hannah lost
her voice and fled the stage.23 After a brief discussion with the floor
manager, young Charlie was led by hand on to the boards where
he performed the then well-known song Jack Jones (ironically,
given his later life, about a working-class man who loses touch
with his roots upon gaining great fortune). A shower of coins was
 Chaplin’s England 23

thrown onto the stage in appreciation at his performance. At the

time Charlie was only five years old. His first appearance on the
stage had occurred the same night as his mother’s career took a
nose-dive.
Hannah’s misfortune saw a significant slide in the Chaplins’
circumstances. From their initial three rooms, they moved into a
house with two rooms, and then into a single-room garret: ‘our
belongings dwindling and the neighbourhoods growing progres-
sively drabber’.24 Poignantly, the last item Hannah sold as she
sought to make what money she could was her old trunk of theat-
rical costumes – she long clung to a return to the stage that would
never come. Even with this slide down the social spectrum, how-
ever, Hannah retained several middle-class airs – one was a belief
in the church, and another was to ensure that her children spoke
with a middle-class diction (which Charlie maintained all his life).
Sitting by the window, she continued to indulge in amateur dra-
matics by mimicking people who passed by their garret, much to
her young son’s amusement.
For a while they made do, and blind luck intervened at one point
when Sydney returned home with a purse he had found on the
bus containing seven golden sovereigns (£7). But it could not last.
Hannah’s needlework dried up and she and her family were forced
to ‘live on parochial charity, soup tickets and relief parcels’.25 Syd-
ney’s newspaper selling around his few hours at school was not
enough to sustain them. At several points in the late 1890s, Han-
nah, lacking any alternative, took herself and her two children to
the last resort of Victorian London: the workhouse.

Chaplin’s Dickensian period

From the comfort of 1930s Chartwell, Winston Churchill wrote
of Chaplin that ‘poverty is not a life sentence. It is a challenge. To
some it is more – it is an opportunity. It was so to this child of the
theatre.’26 This is a profoundly Conservative reading of Charlie’s
childhood – talent had elevated Chaplin out of poverty and thus,
ipso facto, the system worked. Churchill’s verdict was certainly
not a prospect the seven-year-old Charlie could have envisaged
with any degree of certainty as he considered the gates of a work-
house for the first time (for the accompanying Sydney this was
24 Chaplin’s England

actually a second trip, with a previous three-day spell in 1895

during a period of ill health for Hannah). Perhaps most jarringly,
Churchill even claimed to identify with Chaplin’s difficult child-
hood:

Genius is essentially a hardy plant. It thrives in the east wind.

It withers in a hot house. That is, I believe, true in every walk
of life. The reason why the historic English families have pro-
duced so many men of distinction is that, on the whole, they
have borne great responsibilities rather than enjoyed great
wealth . . . I am glad I had to earn my living from the time
that I was a young man. Had I been born heir to millions I
should probably have had a less interesting life.27

There were elements of being a self-made man to Churchill’s

career it is true. But it is fair to point out that Churchill’s back-
ground of being born in Blenheim Palace, going to the prestigious
Harrow School and having a father who served as Chancellor
of the Exchequer was not entirely replicated by Chaplin’s own
youth. And yet in later life Chaplin would himself take some-
thing of the Churchill line. Commenting on the seemingly instant
celebrity status of two 1960s icons, the then seventy-something
Charlie spoke of

Marilyn Monroe, you see, that whole story is fairy tale. My

God, The Beatles – a fairy tale – little boys from Liverpool,
came along – well whatever they had. They do something and
suddenly they’re shot up and the whole thing has an unreality
to it. I’m telling you, people in my day, people like [the actor
Herbert] Tree, had to put in servitude – years and years – until
eventually they became prominent.28

These years of servitude have something of the David Cop-

perfield about them, and the Dickens comparison has often been
made. In his recent book on Chaplin, Peter Ackroyd – former
biographer of the Victorian novelist – has argued that with their
similar affinity for the minor theatres of nineteenth-century Lon-
don, their ‘military manner in relationship to their families’, their
‘driven, relentless, overwhelming’ personalities and, crucially,
 Chaplin’s England 25

their lower-middle-class ambition, ‘it might even be suggested that

Chaplin was Dickens’ true successor’.29 There is much in that.
In 1935 Churchill noted that ‘the alchemy of genius transmuted
bitterness and suffering into the gold of great literature and gave
us the novels of Charles Dickens. Between [Chaplin and Dickens]
there is, I think, an essential similarity. Both knew hardness in
childhood . . . [B]oth quarried in the same rich mine of common
life.’30 Twenty years later, from across the political spectrum, the
former Labour Lord Chancellor William Jowitt began his oration
to the February 1955 Dickens dinner by welcoming Charlie as its
guest of honour. He noted that

a great artist . . . must possess, as Dickens did, enormous

vitality. He must suffer, as Dickens suffered, from an extreme
sensitiveness . . . We ordinary people are apt to think our
own age is good and be complacent about the misfortunes
of others just because we have not got the imagination or the
sensitiveness to know what those misfortunes mean. Where
could I find someone who resembled Dickens in these char-
acteristics . . . who cares about the fortunes of others? As I
cast about in my mind to find such one, I thought of Charles
Chaplin.31

There is something of a sting in the tale to all this mutual appre-

ciation, however. As the actress Louise Brooks noted of one such
analysis of Charlie, ‘this was [Alistair] Cooke’s most glaring omis-
sion when he compared Chaplin with Dickens – their mutual pas-
sion for little girls’.32 In many ways, as we will see, it was sex that
undermined Chaplin, not just the politics of this book.
In the 1890s, however, you would have gotten long odds on
Chaplin reaching any such pedestal from which to fall. The pov-
erty of Chaplin’s youth was real, sustained and eventually over-
come by the force of his own talent. As discussed, as Hannah’s
illness took hold and Charles Snr’s maintenance payments proved
erratic, the Chaplins began a steady decline through the London
property ladder.
In Charles Booth’s landmark, multi-volume sociological study
Life and Labour of the People in London he produced a map
detailing the conditions he had observed in each of London’s
26 Chaplin’s England

streets during Chaplin’s youth. Booth was a social reformer who

had originally set out to ascertain the precise levels of poverty in
the late-Victorian East End (which he later extended to all of the
capital). Whereas previous estimates had put the level of abject
poverty at one family in four, Booth’s work placed the figure at
an even higher 35 per cent. Producing a colour-coded map to sup-
port his findings, Booth’s work provides a useful measure through
which we can gain a handle on some of the Chaplins’ dwellings.
The first property Charlie can remember was West Square, near
the present site of the Imperial War Museum in Lambeth, where
they lived up to about 1892. According to Booth, this address
was mostly for the comfortable working class (‘22s to 30s per
week for regular work’) and even included elements of the ‘lower
middle class. Shopkeepers and small employers, clerks and sub-
ordinate professional men.’ This latter group of lower-middle
Britain, Booth noted, was ‘a hardworking sober, energetic class’.
Charlie’s later dwellings, including Methley Street, mostly con-
formed to the ‘respectable’ working class who were not well off,
but kept the wolf from the door. Farmers Road just off Kennington
Park – where many working-class Londoners were ‘the victims of
competition and on them falls with particular severity the recur-
rent depressions of trade’ – was an exception. These were gener-
ally ‘labourers, poorer artisans and street sellers’. Certainly Booth
provides a great service to the historian trying to understand the
period, but what strikes one from a twenty-first-century perspec-
tive is the rampant moralisation in his descriptions. The worse
off in Booth’s classifications could be ‘loafers, criminals and semi-
criminals’, adding ‘their life is the life of savages’. Those higher
up the ladder were ‘paid for [their] responsibility and are men of
good character and much intelligence’. This was a much-divided
age indeed.33

Hanwell and the workhouse

The most obvious instance of this societal division came on
30 May 1896, when Charlie and Sydney were admitted to New-
ington Workhouse. Initially Charlie thought that it would be
‘adventurous and a change from living in one stuff room. But
on that doleful day I didn’t realise what was happening until we
 Chaplin’s England 27

actually entered the workhouse gate.’ The ‘poignant sadness’ of

the separation of mother into the women’s ward and her sons
into the children’s equivalent remained with Charlie all his life.34
Like all residents, his clothes were steamed and replaced with the
workhouse uniform upon entry while his hair was shorn in case
of lice. Such actions were of course largely medical and intended
to disinfect the new arrival, but there was a symbolic importance,
too: to cleanse the child of the sins of Victorian London, and to
mould a new, ‘better’ individual from scratch.
We deal below with the moralism that informed the workhouse,
but it is worth outlining what these institutions conjured up to
many. In January 1866 Lambeth’s Princes Road Workhouse had
been the subject of a piece of populist investigative journalism
from a man named James Greenwood. This was not the exact
institution that Charlie would enter, but it does give something of a
geographically similar flavour. Greenwood had voluntarily entered
the workhouse in disguise to write about its conditions, and his
articles appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette from 12 January. He
told an enthralled readership (his articles were eventually repub-
lished as a stand-alone pamphlet due to popular demand) that ‘no
language with which I am acquainted is capable of conveying an
adequate conception of the spectacle I . . . encountered’. Entering
a makeshift shed thirty feet square in diameter, ‘my appalled vision
took in thirty of them – thirty men and boys stretched upon shal-
low pallets with but only six inches of comfortable hay between
them and the stony floor’. Attempting to bed down for the night,
Greenwood noticed that ‘in the middle of the bed I had selected
was a stain of blood bigger than a man’s hand! I did not know
what to do now. To lie on such a horrid thing seemed impos-
sible; yet to carry back the bed and exchange it for another might
betray a degree of fastidiousness repugnant to the feelings of my
fellow lodgers.’ For Greenwood, ‘from the moral point of view . . .
the wakeful ones were . . . dreadful. Towzled, dirty, villainous,
they squatted up in their beds, and smoked foul pipes, and sang
snatches of horrible songs, and bandied jokes so obscene as to be
absolutely appalling.’ At points, he reserved some sympathy for his
fellow shed dwellers, but Greenwood ended his description of the
night’s events with two riders. First, he wrote that he had ‘avoided
the detail of horrors infinitely more revolting than anything that
28 Chaplin’s England

appears in this pamphlet’. It is likely that this meant sodomy. And,

more pointedly, he concluded that ‘the moral of all this I leave to
the world’.35
Partly in response to the shock that the Greenwood articles had
engendered, the state deemed further action necessary. Yet this
was not necessarily along the lines one may expect. For those who
could, the state encouraged outdoor paupers to fall back on sup-
port from relatives, and in the case that they still needed to claim
outdoor relief, the relevant tests to gain access to such funds were
made more stringent. This ‘crusade against outrelief’ went hand
in hand with the desire to reduce total welfare spending. Yet this
could be something of a false economy. In making outdoor relief
more difficult to acquire, many paupers were forced into indoor
relief – the workhouse. And, thus, between 1870 and 1910 the
proportion of the English population in receipt of some form
(indoor or outdoor) of pauper relief fell by almost half. In one
sense this was an arguable success. At the same time, however,
by 1910 30 per cent of all paupers were relieved in workhouses
compared to only 15 per cent forty years earlier.36 The workhouse
had become even more residualised by consequence – only the
absolutely desperate would contemplate entry through its gates.
We tend to view the late Victorian period rather optimistically.
Yet the general gains in real income seen across the board in
England from 1870 thus require further clarification. Certainly the
1890s workhouse that Charlie encountered was therefore some-
thing of a cross-class coalition. On the one hand, it contained the
poorest of the poor who were in a sense prisoners. Added to this
mix was the ‘Chaplinite’ Londoner forced into such a world by the
cumulative effect of the global ‘Long Depression’ that marked
the latter quarter of the nineteenth century on the one hand, and
the tightening up of outdoor relief on the other. Chaplin was ulti-
mately institutionalised by both a laissez-faire global economy that
could not sustain levels of income for ‘casual’ professions from
labouring to the music hall, and a state that pulled up the draw-
bridge for those afflicted by such maelstroms.37
If Charlie had encountered any dramatic visions along the James
Greenwood model while in the workhouse, he did not directly
refer to them in later years. After three weeks during which Char-
lie remembered ‘little of incident’ the Chaplin brothers were
 Chaplin’s England 29

transferred to the Hanwell School for Orphans and Destitute Chil-

dren in Ealing, West London on 18 June 1896. For all the drudgery
of the workhouse in some ways this was arguably a worse fate for
the young Charlie. At the workhouse ‘I always felt that mother
was near . . . but at Hanwell we seemed miles apart’.38 Sydney
was also put into the older classes while Charlie remained with
the infants. In despair, Charlie recalled looking out of the oblong
windows, mournfully taking in the sunset while singing the hymn
‘Abide with Me’. In part, Chaplin’s retrospective descriptions of
this period seem slightly cinematic, but there can be little doubt
that it was a traumatic time in his life.
During his trip to London in 1931 when he returned as all-con-
quering hero, Chaplin paid a visit to Hanwell. Greeted by a friendly
school headmaster, he was shown a record that stated ‘Sydney
Chaplin handed back to mother March 10, 1896. Charles, ditto.’39
Whatever the confusion about dates (possibly due to poor record-
keeping, or Chaplin’s own faulty memory), the forty-something
Chaplin was ‘anxious to see the interior of the school’. Walking
through the school yard, he noted that ‘contrary to some ideas
about objects or locations appearing smaller after one grows up,
it looks just as big as it ever did’. He saw ‘the tailor’s shop, the
school steps; the punishment room; the blacking hole where we
would shine our boots on a frosty morning; the dormitories and
the depressing slate wash sinks’. Walking up the aforementioned
school steps, he ‘felt myself going up them with the same sensa-
tion of oppression and confinement that I had then’.40 In 1931,
after observing an altogether more humane Hanwell, Charlie could
make his excuses and leave. In 1896 there was no such luxury.
Briefly, however, it had all seemed to be mercifully over when, in
August 1896, Hannah applied for a discharge and her boys were
returned to her. Meeting their mother at the gate of the work-
house, they all took a leisurely stroll through Kennington Park,
bought half a pound of black cherries and later enjoyed a two-
penny teacake. It was all a temporary ruse to allow them to spend
some time together, however: ‘In the afternoon we made our way
back to the workhouse. As mother said with levity: “We’ll be back
in time for tea.”’41 A poignant moment, emblematic of the type of
pathos that Chaplin would later inject into his movies. Meanwhile,
it was back to Hanwell for the young boys.
30 Chaplin’s England

This was hardly all Hannah’s doing, however. Where, for one,
was Charlie’s father during this slide? There were occasional
glimpses of potential light in this regard. Some respite seemed pos-
sible when, in the summer of 1896, Charles Snr was compelled
by the local board of Guardians to pay 15s a week towards the
support of Charlie and Sydney, although by this stage liquor had
taken hold and this was irregular at best. In September 1897, the
Lambeth Board of Guardians offered £1 for information leading
to Charles Snr’s arrest for non-payment of child support, although
his brother Spencer would eventually cover the £44.8s then due.42
In 1898 Charlie would briefly (albeit through the means of court
order) live with his father, but, if his recollections are true, he can
rarely have experienced him not either drunk or hungover. Cer-
tainly their last meeting was far from Churchill’s Hollywoodesque
hokum with which we began this chapter. Instead, in April 1901
Charlie happened to be walking past the Three Stags pub on Ken-
nington Road. Peeking inside, his saw his father who beckoned
him over. Charlie ‘was surprised at such a welcome, for he was
never demonstrative’. But this was not a pleasant sight: ‘He was
very ill; his eyes were sunken, and his body had swollen to an enor-
mous size. He rested one hand, Napoleon like, in his waistcoat
as if to ease his difficult breathing.’ Undoubtedly drunk, Charlie
did, however, receive the first and only kiss his father would ever
give him on this occasion. It would prove the last time they saw
each other; three weeks later he was dead from dropsy – a prod-
uct of years of drinking. Far from the tranquil scene painted by
Churchill, however, Charles Snr had to be plied with booze before
he drunkenly consented to go to St Thomas’s Hospital. There his
healthy declined further. Even in this moment of sorrow the Rev-
erend who came to comfort the dying man did not sugar-coat mat-
ters: ‘Well Charlie, when I look at you, I can only think of the old
proverb: “Whatsoever a man soweth; that he shall also reap.”’43
Back in 1896 Hanwell became worse when, at the age of eleven,
Sydney elected to join the Royal Navy in the form of the Exmouth
training ship that November. This left Charlie alone and scared in
a school he would, all told, spend eighteen months in. With his
combined stays at Newington (1896: twenty days) and Lambeth
(1898: eight days, three days and one-day stints) workhouses total-
ling just over a month, Hanwell would form the state institution
 Chaplin’s England 31

where the young Charlie would personally spend the most amount
of time. There he recalled he was ‘well looked after’ but ‘it was a
forlorn existence’. Feeling the local villagers’ eyes staring at him
as he trudged with the other boys into the school, Charlie heard
them refer to his friends as inmates of the ‘booby hatch’ – the
workhouse. He must have felt like the bottom of the pile. In actual
fact, this was not quite true: Hanwell tended to take the children
of the ‘striving poor’ rather than Charles Booth’s ‘savages’. But
self-perception mattered.
Punishment was very much the order of the day at Hanwell, and
it was administered by an intimidating figure, a former naval offi-
cer Captain Hindrum. Every Friday afternoon 300 boys marched
into the school’s imposing gymnasium, where they stood in line
forming the sides of a square. At the fourth end, behind a large
desk, stood Hindrum, addressing those waiting for trial and pun-
ishment. This was imposing stuff: ‘In front of the desk was an easel
with wrist-straps dangling, and from the frame a birch hung omi-
nously.’44 For ‘minor offences’ a boy would be laid across the desk,
and then ‘slowly and dramatically’ Hindrum would lift a ‘cane as
thick as a man’s thumb and about four feet long’ before bringing
it down with a terrifying swish on the boy’s backside. ‘Invari-
ably,’ Chaplin shuddered, ‘a boy would fall out of rank in a faint.’
The punishment varied between three and six strokes – naturally
judged relatively arbitrarily by Hindrum himself. The victim then
had to be carried to one side and laid on a gym mattress, ‘where
he was left to writhe and wriggle for at least ten minutes before
the pain subsided’. And this was the minor punishment. For maxi-
mum offenders, there was the birch, where, after that ordeal, boys
would have to be carried away to the infirmary for treatment.45
In late 1896 the list of affected boys included Master Charles
Chaplin. On Thursdays, ever the theatrical, Hindrum would
sound a bugle before reading through a megaphone the list of
boys who would report for punishment the next day. Charlie was
astonished to hear his name – ‘yet for some unaccountable reason
I was thrilled – perhaps because I was the centre of the drama’.46
Charged with setting fire to the school lavatory, Charlie was not
guilty of this offence. Yet, as he recalled, ‘boys would advise you
not to deny a charge, even if innocent, because, if proved guilty,
you would get the maximum [of six lashes]’.47 Here again the
32 Chaplin’s England

young Charlie encountered the notion of a repressive, unfeeling

state. He took his three lashes – ‘the pain was so excruciating that
it took away my breath’ – but felt ‘valiantly triumphant’.48 In his
later films, albeit in a more jovial sense, he would get to kick the
backsides of a good few authority figures himself by small way of
revenge.
Hanwell was the institution through which Chaplin most
directly felt the oppressive reach of government. It also imbued
a sense of class consciousness within the young boy – all were
against the ‘system’ as represented by Hindrum, and therefore
against a particular vision of England. Later, he would tell the
author Thomas Burke, who had also been sent to Hanwell,
that, unlike Britain, ‘in America the questions are “What do
you know?” and “What can you do?” not “Where do you come
from?” [and] “Are you public school?”’ Hanwell undoubtedly
had a long reach in Charlie’s life – cinematically and politically.49
Equally, however, this development could never only be reduced
to economics. Chaplin in many ways forms an exemplar of the
nineteenth-century world of the historian Patrick Joyce – where
class conflict did not just mean monetary or social division, but
also imbued an anti-aristocratic populism and scepticism towards
the state, and could attune minds to injustice and oppression from
whatever source.50 Money mattered, but such protest was never
just about economic envy.
Even after the horrors of Hanwell, Charlie was not done with
the workhouse either. As such, two factors lend the workhouse
real significance in his political development. The first was its high
death rate – and, thus, for a man who would not fight in the First
World War, it was his most dramatic exposure to human casualty
and trauma. To give some context, Lambeth’s Renfrew Road Work-
house in which Chaplin spent a combined twelve days in the sum-
mer and autumn of 1898 (after his time at Hanwell) was intended
to cater for in the region of 820 people. Held within the London
Metropolitan Archives, its surviving register records thirty-two
deaths in 1898, fifty in 1899 and seventy-three in 1900.51 In early
1900 the death rate in the Borough of Lambeth for the previous
year was recorded at 29 people per 1,000.52 Depending what year
a person was admitted, the death rate in the workhouse could
be up to two or three times worse than the local average, and
 Chaplin’s England 33

certainly more geographically concentrated. The workhouse was

the bottom rung of an already dangerous ladder.
Perhaps more significantly, if Charlie’s own exposure to the
workhouse was mercifully relatively brief (if still shocking), his
mother’s was far more significant and sustained. It was this expe-
rience of the workhouse, albeit second-hand, that combined with
Hanwell influenced his early life more than any other. To truly
understand this, it is worth turning to the experts – and there can
be few more qualified exponents of the link between child and
mother, and indeed childhood trauma and later life, than Sigmund
Freud. Intriguingly, in 1931 Freud chose to dwell on the early
life of Chaplin. Commenting on the Tramp, Freud noted that ‘he
always portrays one and the same figure; only the weakly poor,
helpless, clumsy youngster for whom, however, things turn out
well in the end’. ‘Now,’ the Viennese doctor continued, ‘do you
think that for this role he has to forget about his own ego? On
the contrary, he always plays himself as he was in his early dismal
youth. He cannot get away from those impressions and to this day
he obtains for himself the compensation for the frustrations and
humiliations of that past period of his life.’ For Freud, Chaplin was
‘an exceptionally and transparent case’, and, this study contends,
his mother’s spell in the workhouse provided the most visceral
early trauma.53
Hannah’s own spell in the workhouse from July 1898 had
exacerbated her physical frailty and she had severe dermati-
tis. But after her physical slide from accomplished songstress
to workhouse waif, matters became worse when she began to
exhibit signs of madness. After a short spell in the infirmary to
treat her physical ailments (which included bruising, likely the
consequence of fights with fellow workhouse residents) she was
admitted to Cane Hill Asylum in September 1898. This began
a series of trips in and out of the asylum for Hannah. She was
in Cane Hill until November 1898 for her first stay, from May
1903 to January 1904 for her second, and from March 1905 to
September 1912 for the final time. Prior to Hannah’s commit-
tal, Charlie admitted to spending much time at his new neigh-
bours’, an Irish family called the McCarthys who often looked
out for him – ‘anything to stay away from our awful garret’.
Returning home after a lunch with them, a little girl told him
34 Chaplin’s England

that ‘your mother’s gone insane . . . She’s been knocking at all

our doors giving away pieces of coal, saying they were birthday
presents for the children.’54 A doctor was summoned who made
a perfunctory summary: ‘insane: send her to the infirmary’. For
all the heartbreak, logistically this was easier said than done.
Charlie was forced to support his malnourished mother in the
one-mile walk to the infirmary, while ‘mother staggered like a
drunken woman from weakness’. Lying to the infirmary doctors
that an aunt would take him in, Charlie spent the walk to his
now empty home contemplating the ‘heart-breaking look as they
led her away’. Hannah was transferred to Cane Hill the next day
and her young son spent the next few days as a hermit – refusing
to speak or see anyone out of shame and sorrow: ‘Like a fugitive
I kept out of everyone’s way.’55 In order to stop his landlady see-
ing him and reporting him to the parish authorities, this included
sleeping rough on occasion. Only Sydney’s surprising return from
travel overseas a week or so later helped brighten his mood.
Charlie would forever be dogged by the feeling that one day he
may experience the same degree of diminished mental capacity
that had befallen his mother. Indeed, to speculate somewhat, it is
possible that Charlie hinted at a potentially Jewish background
in order to throw reporters off the scent of what he considered a
more shameful and very real family history. Mary Ann, Hannah’s
mother, had herself been committed to Banstead Asylum for the
last two years of her life. After the effect that years of drinking had
wrought (mostly due to gin consumption), the doctors recorded
her as ‘incoherent’ and as thinking the medical staff were trying
to poison her.56 She was dead by her mid-fifties. Hannah’s father
Charles Hill (described by Charlie, possibly erroneously, as ‘an
Irish cobbler’ from Cork) did not suffer such problems, but he,
too, required the refuge of the workhouse, with two (1904) and
six (1912) month spells in Renfrew Road following an earlier spell
in 1899. Alcoholism, poverty and madness constituted the col-
lective genetic material Chaplin most feared to be buried within
himself. As Limelight collaborator Jerry Epstein recalled, even in
old age ‘Charlie had a persistent fear he would go insane’.57 Visits
to Cane Hill, some twenty miles away from the garret in Pownall
Terrace, only exacerbated this feeling. When Charlie and Sydney
went there for the first time, they encountered a frail, blue-lipped
 Chaplin’s England 35

Hannah who ‘sat listening and nodding, looking vague and pre-
occupied’.58 This would be the case for many years.
As his wealth increased, Charlie made sure that his mother’s
institutional surroundings became more salubrious. In 1921 he
arranged for her to move to California to be closer to himself
and Syd (although she was officially denied permanent residence
on the grounds of her mental instability). She died in Glendale in
August 1928 at the age of sixty-one, with Charlie at her bedside.
Intriguingly, obituaries to her would often cite some variation of
her having been ‘the victim of a mental illness induced by horror of
air raids on London during the Great War’.59 This may well have
been another false impression given off by Charlie, if perhaps an
understandable one given attitudes of the time towards mental
health issues.

Boer War
Hannah was undoubtedly Charlie’s overriding concern in the
years that her instability took hold, but he was not myopic to
the changing world around him. Talking to Harry Cocker, co-star
of 1928’s The Circus, Chaplin reminisced about his youth that
‘being poor, the children in my neighbourhood were forced to
make up most of our games. I liked to play soldier best.’ Crocker
was surprised: ‘That’s odd, because now you’re a decided paci-
fist.’ But, as Chaplin told him,

at the time of the Boer War we naturally played at being Boers

and British soldiers. When we played the surrender of Kronjen
(the children must have invented the name, as I can find no
mention of a prominent Boer leader by that name. Perhaps it
is a corruption of Oom Paul Kruger). I never wanted to play
the part of a British general, upright and stiffly military, who
received the surrender: I asked for the role of . . . the defeated
Boer leader, because his harrowed face and bent figure gave
more ample scope for characterization.60

It was difficult to avoid such news. As Chaplin recalled in

the 1960s, ‘1899 was an epoch of whiskers: bewhiskered kings,
statesmen, soldiers and sailors, Krugers, Salisburys, Kitcheners,
36 Chaplin’s England

Kaisers and cricketers – incredible years of pomp and absurdity,

of extreme wealth and poverty, of inane political bigotry of both
cartoon and press.’61
The Boer War – formally the Second Boer War after a previous
conflict (1880–1) – began in October 1899. While a war of imperial
plunder – gold having been discovered near the city of Pretoria – the Brit-
ish were able to claim a fig-leaf of ‘legitimate’ concern for the plight
of the so-called uitlanders (white, non-Boer immigrant labour) who
had come, mostly from Britain, to capitalise on the new gold rush.
With uitlanders outnumbering the longer-settled Dutch ancestral
Boers by the mid-1890s, the British pressed the Transvaal govern-
ment under Paul Kruger for concessions to safeguard their economic
and political standing. When no such agreement was reached, those
pressing for war, such as the colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain,
were able to lever Kruger into attacking British garrisons in the
region, thus precipitating a conflict. With approaching half a mil-
lion imperial troops put into the field by the British in the course
of the war and less than a fifth of that number of defending Boers,
the conflict looked, on paper, to be an easy one. Utilising mobility
and guerrilla warfare against the British, however, the Boers proved
effective warriors. Several British garrisons experienced sustained
sieges during the three years of battle.
For its part, the South London Chronicle carried regular articles
on the local regiments of Chaplin’s youthful abodes – particularly
the 3rd Middlesex Artillery – and their heroism was described in
detail. Concerts were given – including one at the Horns Tavern
and Assembly Rooms opposite Kennington Park where ‘staircase
and lobby [were] draped with royal standards, union jacks, gar-
lands of artificial flowers . . . the effect being exceedingly pleas-
ing’.62 Even for the most politically disinterested, there would have
been few ways to avoid encountering the glorification of empire in
1900. The stakes were high and emotions ran deep.
As the war ebbed and flowed the ‘pomp and absurdity’ that
Charlie would later refer to only intensified. The relief of one Brit-
ish garrison, Mafeking, was met on 26 May 1900 with scenes of
unrestrained jubilation in Charlie’s hinterland:

South London put all other occupations on one side, and

started at once to compete with the rest of the Empire in
 Chaplin’s England 37

testifying its joy and delight. To put it comprehensively, the

place at once went mad. In ten minutes ten thousand peo-
ple lined London-Road and the fronts of the Alfred’s Head,
Elephant and Rockingham, and cheered themselves hoarse.
Everyone had apparently a flag up his sleeve, for thousands
were in evidence immediately. Every ’bus and ’tram that
passed had a yelling crowd on top, whose demonstration was
responded to by those on the pavement and on the road.63

At one theatre, the appropriately named Mr Bull (there was

no mention whether his first name was John) stopped the perfor-
mance of a play to joyfully announce, ‘Mafeking is relieved!’ His
Elephant Theatre stage was then ‘full of performers hand shaking
and laughing while the band played the national anthem and Rule
Britannia’. According to the South London Press, ‘every house and
every club’ soon had bunting over it. Chaplin himself recalled the
swing from ‘dolorous news about the Boers surrounding Lady-
smith’ to ‘England [going] mad with hysterical joy at the relief of
Mafeking . . . Then we won. All this I heard from everyone but
Mother. She never mentioned the war. She had her own battle to
fight.’64
To the eleven-year-old Charlie, patriotism would always be the
last refuge of a scoundrel. The dichotomy between the drab real-
ity in which he lived and the grandiose ‘Rule Britannia’ national-
ism then sweeping the nation was stark. If Britain truly was so
‘Great’ then how had it condemned generations of his family to
the workhouse, madness or both? The relief of Mafeking was one
vision of the British Empire, the mental asylums of South London
another. The spectre of poverty during the Boer War – when up
to four in ten men attempting to enlist to fight were deemed unfit
for military service – launched a high-profile debate in British poli-
tics surrounding the efficacy and righteousness of the Poor Laws.
Eventually, after a split between so-called ‘Minority’ and ‘Major-
ity’ report factions (advocating increased state intervention versus
increased charitable endeavour), the big state argument won out
in British public life. If the most important institution of the state –
the army – could not be relied on in times of war, there would
need to be greater state intervention elsewhere in times of peace.
If such paradoxes were not always resolved by Charlie’s own later
38 Chaplin’s England

political philosophy, English statesmen had scarcely an easier time

of it.

The state Charlie was in

Because of Charlie’s constant movement as a child much of his
location we must pin down by his formal registration in institu-
tions of the state: schools or the workhouse. Identifying his pre-
cise location is often a challenge. His spell at Hanwell aside, he
ranged across the hinterland of South London around Kenning-
ton Road. As such, late Victorian and Edwardian Camberwell,
Clapham, Lambeth, Newington, Norwood, Tooting, Vauxhall
and Walworth were all familiar to the future screen icon.
My Autobiography includes several vignettes concerning these
places. In the week after his mother’s transfer to the Cane Hill
Asylum, for instance, the nine-year-old Charlie would wander
the streets of South London. Passing by a mews at the back of
Kennington Road, he encountered a collective of ‘derelict-looking
men who worked hard in a darkened shed and spoke softly in
undertones, sawing and chopping wood all day, making it into
halfpenny bundles’. Young Charlie was fascinated by the sight,
and would hang about the shed’s open door, watching them. Even-
tually he joined in, seeing the lumber brought in from contractors
during the week, chopped by the men, and sold over the weekend:
‘but the selling of it did not interest me; it was more the clubby
working together in the shed’. Bonding with the older men –
particularly since they provided funds to buy ‘a pennyworth of
cheese rinds and a pennyworth of bread’ to make Welsh rarebit –
Chaplin received an indirect connection to a future world when
the men treated them all to a trip to see Fred Karno’s comedy Early
Birds. For the theatrical vehicle that would eventually lead him
to the Little Tramp, it is no small irony that Charlie first encoun-
tered Karno through the benevolence of actual transients. Indeed,
when Winston Churchill wrote ‘how characteristically American
are these homeless wanderers’, he cannot have known of Charlie’s
early experiences.65
Likewise, when living in the unwelcome surroundings of his
father and temporary step-mother Louise’s abode on Kennington
Road, Charlie would often walk around the streets simply to avoid
 Chaplin’s England 39

having to deal with either an empty house, or Louise herself. Find-

ing no food in the larder one day, Charlie walked to Lambeth Walk
and then the Cut, ‘looking hungrily into cook-shop windows at
the tantalizing streaming roast joints of beef and pork, and the
golden-brown potatoes soaked in gravy’. There he watched ‘for
hours . . . the quacks selling their wares. The distraction soothed
me and for a while I forgot my hunger and plight.’66 After night
fell he returned home, only to be met by a drunken Louise who
promptly threw him out. Remembering that his father drank at
the Queen’s Head pub on Prince’s Road about half a mile away,
Charlie promptly tracked him down, whimpering, ‘She won’t let
me in and I think she’s been drinking.’ His father, no doubt hon-
estly, replied, ‘I’m not sober myself’ as the two staggered home.
The evening ended with Charlie safely in bed, but not before his
father had thrown a heavy clothes brush at Louise’s head, knock-
ing her unconscious. This was Charlie’s South London: insecure
housing at best, institutionalisation at worst.
It is therefore worth providing a brief outline of the political
landscape of such areas because as well as imbuing a negative
impression of broad notions of ‘the state’ and ‘government’, his
childhood was presided over by local politicians who were, to say
the very least, not to Charlie’s later way of thinking. For example,
elected as Liberal Unionist member for Lambeth North in 1895,
Henry Morton Stanley had previously been a prominent explorer
of central Africa on behalf of the British Empire. On one such
expedition he encountered the missionary David Livingstone, and
uttered the famous greeting, ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ Stanley
argued that might was right and believed that ‘the savage only
respects force, power, boldness, and decision’.67 Stanley’s own
actions apart, his association with the even crueller regime in
the Belgian Congo did not mark him out as representative of the
young Charlie, nor the man he would become. On such issues of
race, in later life Chaplin stated that ‘speaking of Negroes, I never
laugh at their humour. They have suffered too much ever to be
funny to me.’68 Very few black characters would appear in his
films. Indeed, in December 1925 his friend Upton Sinclair would
write to Charlie telling him he had ‘a find for you. A man turned
up to repair our roof, with a negro helper who is the living image
of you . . . If you were to bring him on screen with you, dressed
40 Chaplin’s England

in the same costume, it would raise a howl.’69 This offer, like so

many others that Sinclair would make Charlie, was batted away.
Charlie’s generally positive line towards the black experience was
expressed in the fourth-wall-breaking final speech of 1940’s The
Great Dictator: ‘I should like to help everyone if possible: Jew,
Gentile, black man, white.’ In expressing equivalence between the
races, this certainly marked him out from Henry Stanley.
Stanley’s successor as MP was the Conservative Frederick
Horner – a man who had less blood on his hands than Stanley but
was hardly a model of propriety either. Horner had been elected
during the Khaki election of 1900 – when the Conservatives won a
strong parliamentary majority on the back of the type of Boer War
jingoism that Chaplin himself had seen after the relief of Mafeking.
Although his political career was modest, he soon came to public
attention. In 1902, Horner was accused of falsely obtaining cash
and credit from a series of European hotels using cheques from
his publishing business that usually bounced. In 1905, a series of
new accusations came to light, detailing five more dishonoured
cheques cashed across Monaco, France and Switzerland – totalling
in excess of £500 pounds (more than £50,000 in modern money).
After losing the seat in 1906, Horner was later imprisoned for
forging a telegram sent to the Daily Mail that libelled the then
Chancellor David Lloyd George. Not every late Victorian or early
Edwardian British politician was such a rum character. Sir Freder-
ick Cook as member for nearby Kennington and Sir Ernest Tritton
in Norwood were less overtly controversial Conservative MPs in
Chaplin’s hinterland, but once again there were few models for
positive governmental action at the national level for the young
boy to latch on to.
All told, in Chaplin’s youth the reach of government was rather
limited, and deliberately so. As Michael Ball and David Sunder-
land note, the welfare system under which Victorian Britain
was governed – the New Poor Law of 1834 – ‘set out the rather
unpleasant consequences of relying on state benevolence to ensure
personal survival, and most other aspects of welfare had to be
found somehow by individual family endeavour or not at all’.70
The new legislation discouraged the provision of so-called ‘out-
door relief’ in favour of ‘indoor relief’ – targeting help, in other
words, for those willing to enter the workhouse. As noted, this
 Chaplin’s England 41

policy emphasis only increased as the century progressed. The

workhouse was intended to be a harsh, fear-inducing place where
only the truly desperate would enter. In the 1890s this, of course,
included the Chaplins – with Charlie therefore marked out by
the state as undeserving, feckless and beyond the pale from an
early age.
More broadly, throughout the nineteenth century the ‘mass of
voluntary organisations, friendly societies and non-profit institu-
tions grew substantially’. On the one hand, there was undoubtedly
a large degree of philanthropy that occurred during this period –
in the 1880s The Times even boasted that the £5 million annual
income of the various charities around London was ‘twice that of
the Swiss confederation’. Yet this system, so far as it worked at
all, was reliant on the rich continuing to pay a largesse for which
they were under no compulsion. And equally, to be effective, those
administering such voluntary donations had to be sympathetic
to those in most need of the funds. This clearly was not always
the case. To many within bodies such as the Charity Organisa-
tion Society – formed to disperse the various voluntary donations
across England – the poor were essentially undeserving and were
confined to their fate by bad morals, not mere bad luck. For a fam-
ily such as the Chaplins – alcoholic absentee father and mentally
unstable mother – this did not bode well. By the late 1890s Charles
Booth recorded about 1.3 million Londoners living in primary
(‘struggling . . . to make both ends meet’) or secondary (‘in chronic
want’) poverty, with only 122,000 of these receiving any form of
welfare relief.
There were exceptions that proved the general anti-state rule,
however. The spectre of a mass cholera outbreak in 1849 man-
dated the creation of the Metropolitan Board of Works (MBW)
in London six years later. Although initially set up to tackle the
growing problem of the capital’s sewers, the MBW later assumed
a more overarching role concerning wider infrastructure matters,
such as building regulations and street improvements. Indeed, part
of Chaplin’s later political oddity was that for all he feared the big
state he often admired the type of public works schemes enacted
by ‘big government’ – particularly the New Deal in 1930s America.
When journeying back to London in 1954 he recalled that ‘natu-
rally I was shocked when I saw [the new] Waterloo Bridge – that
42 Chaplin’s England

beautiful, slick, modern, very fine utility’.71 Charlie could often be

impressed by the power of the state, even when he would simulta-
neously fear its reach.
Much of this may have emerged from his early experiences in
London. Joseph Bazalgette’s role as chief engineer at the MBW saw
a tripartite project of embankments spring up alongside the River
Thames at Westminster, Chelsea and Vauxhall Bridge Road. These
huge undertakings of new infrastructure, built in the 1860s and
1870s, were a significant reference point for Chaplin – not least
because his first date with his first love Hetty Kelly would end on
the embankment, with Charlie so ecstatic with the way that it had
gone that he donated £3 to the tramps lining the riverside. Indeed,
it was originally intended that City Lights would commence on
the Thames embankment, with the Tramp awaking and the story
segueing into the business with the statue that eventually would
begin that work. Back in the real world, as Londoners generally
clamoured for greater democracy and transparency, however, the
MBW that had produced these embankments gave way in 1889
to the London County Council (LCC). The early LCC was domi-
nated by the so-called ‘Progressive’ block of would-be Labour and
left-leaning Liberal politicians. The Progressive era was built on
a modest reform platform including the taxation of ground rents,
a municipal death duty and trying to increase London’s share of
Treasury (that is, national government) support. As work took
Charlie out of the capital his experience of this more active exam-
ple of local government was, however, limited. The day-to-day
nuts and bolts of municipal rates would be less his experience of
the MBW and LCC than the imposing architectural achievements
that they left behind.
What Chaplin almost certainly did not take from this time –
and he certainly did not mention doing so – was any innate affin-
ity with socialism or the various left-wing parties inhabiting the
late-Victorian/early Edwardian British political spectrum. For one,
as Stedham Jones notes, the Social Democratic Federation (or its
successor from 1911, the British Socialist Party) never possessed
more than 3,000 London members in a population of approxi-
mately 6.5 million (1901). Moreover, any ‘strength it did possess
was mainly concentrated in the new outlying working-class areas
like West Hammersmith and Poplar [in East London]’. Equally,
 Chaplin’s England 43

‘areas where trade union or labour candidates could win elections –

Deptford, Battersea and Woolwich – were similarly situated on the
outskirts’. Conversely, ‘the inner working-class area, the old home
of radical working-class activity, remained largely unresponsive to
socialist influence’.72 At this stage it is very likely that such apathy
included the young Charlie Chaplin.

Charlie finds his career, and his country

In any case, politics could wait for now because his performing
career was about to take off. Charlie’s initial theatrical break
came through the troupe of William Jackson, the Eight Lan-
cashire Lads. Jackson was known to Chaplin’s father, and Charles
Snr had convinced Hannah that it would be good for their son to
make a career on the stage. The economics of the matter were cer-
tainly beneficial: Charlie would be given free board and lodging,
while his mother would receive half a crown (2s 6d, or one-eighth
of a pound) a week. The Jacksons were staunchly Catholic, lead-
ing to everyone initially attending mass save Charlie. Even so, ‘I
was lonely, so occasionally I went with them. Had it not been for
deference to Mother’s religious scruples, I could easily have been
won over to Catholicism, for I liked the mysticism of it.’73 After
six weeks training Charlie began dancing with the troupe, enjoy-
ing such activities but all the while hoping to be able to explore
more comedic avenues. One night, playing a cat, Charlie let his
instincts roam. Only supposed to act as an arch for the main char-
acter, a clown, to tumble over his back, Charlie instead decided to
embellish his role, including going up to the rear end of a dog also
included in the scene and beginning to sniff. In however crude a
form, a comedian was born.
The mobile nature of Chaplin’s new profession meant that he
saw rather more of his homeland than the average citizen. When
touring with the Eight Lancashire Lads, he spent more than two
months in Manchester in late 1898 and early 1899. The year
1899 saw visits to Cardiff and Swansea in Wales, and 1900 to the
North-East of England (Newcastle and South Shields), Scotland
(Glasgow and Edinburgh), the industrial West Midlands (Birming-
ham), Yorkshire (Sheffield, Leeds and Bradford) and Ireland (Bel-
fast and Dublin). Since numerous cities – Belfast and Edinburgh
44 Chaplin’s England

included – experienced higher costs of living and lower wages in

several professions than London, seeing life outside the capital was
an important development.74 Certainly Charlie played to gran-
diose settings, such as the London Hippodrome, but the spectre
and geography was varied. In April 1901, his run with Jackson’s
troupe finally ended.
Before relaunching his theatrical career, and wishing to be close
to his mother, Charlie then undertook various odd-jobs to make
ends meet. As he later recalled, ‘I had been newsvendor, printer,
toy-maker, glass-blower, doctor’s boy etc, but during these profes-
sional digressions, like Sydney, I never lost sight of my ultimate
aim to become an actor.’75 It was something akin to entrepre-
neurialism that sustained young Charlie through his mother’s ill
health and his father’s waywardness: ‘There was a strong element
of the merchant in me.’ ‘Continuously preoccupied with busi-
ness schemes’, the young Charlie decided that ‘all I needed was
capital’.76 A conversation with his mother later, he left school
and embarked on his professional career. Charlie may or may
not have been a shirker during the Great War – and we will get
to that controversy in the next chapter – but one could hardly
describe his career, all told, as shirking. If we take his scoring the
music for the 1975 re-issue of A Woman of Paris as the end of his
career and take his debut at Aldershot in 1894 as the start, we are
talking about a career that lasted more than eight decades (and
at least seventy-five years, even if we date his debut as occurring
with the Eight Lancashire Lads). Just as the Tramp was usually
on the lookout for gainful employment, so, too, was this the case
with his young creator.
Returning to the stage, he also once again saw British life out-
side the capital. When playing Billy in Sherlock Holmes for H.A.
Saintsbury between 1903 and 1906, he had week-long stretches
everywhere from Perth in the East of Scotland to the South Wales
coal-mining area of Tonypandy. These experiences were undeni-
ably formative – not least in confirming to the young Charlie that
the harshness of his own upbringing was not unique to him. If the
sociologist Karl Mannheim is right and people are defined for the
rest of their lives by the person they were at the age of seventeen,
then Charlie spent most of that supposedly crucial summer (1906)
in England’s industrial north, not South London.
 Chaplin’s England 45

London was obviously crucial in a number of ways for Char-

lie, but his concept of Britain was perhaps wider than is always
acknowledged. For instance, Charlie had a particularly long
memory for an encounter in Ebbw Vale, Wales. Only there for
three nights, Charlie was ‘thankful it was not longer, for Ebbw
Vale was a dank, ugly town in those days, with row upon row of
hideous, uniform houses, each house consisting of four rooms lit
by oil-lamps.’77 Put up in a local hostel, Charlie became curious
that he was never allowed to enter the kitchen. Then, one evening,
the landlady’s husband who had been to see Charlie perform told
him, ‘I’ve got something that might fit your kind of business.’ He
continued: ‘Ever seen a human frog?’ The man led Charlie into the
locked kitchen where he rested a lamp on top of a dresser and said,
‘Hey Gilbert, come on out of there!’ Charlie recalled that ‘a half a
man with no legs, an oversized, blond, flat-shaped head, a sicken-
ing white face, a sunken nose, a large mouth and powerful muscu-
lar shoulders and arms, crawled from underneath the dresser . . .
the grisly creature could have either been twenty or forty.’ After
the landlord encouraged him to jump, Gilbert launched himself
upwards by the power of his arms, almost to the height of the
young Charlie’s head. ‘How do you think he’d fit in with a circus?
The human frog!’ exclaimed the man. Young Charlie was ‘so hor-
rified I could hardly answer’. Although he made sure his bedroom
door was locked overnight, Charlie would later, ‘with an effort to
be casual, shake [Gilbert’s] large calloused hand’ before he left.78

Karno and Kelly

Saintsbury established Charlie as a professional actor, but he did
not make him a star. As such, even in a book concerning Chap-
lin’s politics it would be remiss to leave out two decisive personal
connections: Fred Karno and Hetty Kelly. After all, Fred Karno
helped shape the career that gave Chaplin the political platform
of this volume while Hetty Kelly proved vital, albeit unknowingly,
in influencing Charlie’s relationships with women.
Fred Karno was born in Exeter in 1866 before his parents settled
in the East Midlands city of Nottingham where he spent his youth.
Like Charlie himself, the young Karno scratched a living in vari-
ous odd jobs, including being a barber’s boy, a costermonger, a
46 Chaplin’s England

bricklayer and a chemist’s shop boy. Discovering he had an ability

as a gymnast, he formed the Three Karnos troupe with two acro-
bats, Bob Sewell and Ted Tysall, which met with moderate suc-
cess. Karno had a natural flair for business, however – and from
1894 began to put on his own shows that included the high-flying
exploits of his background but soon moved in a more comedic
direction. A brash self-promoter, he used stunts such as faking
police chases to draw attention to his various touring acts. Quite
apart from Hetty Kelly, there are many links between Chaplin and
Karno. Billy Reeves, the brother of Charlie’s future studio manager
Alf, invented the character of the inebriate that Charlie later took
over to stunning reviews. From 1906 Charlie’s brother Sydney
had worked for Karno on a contract of £3 a week and soon set
about trying to convince his boss to bring his younger brother on
board. Karno was initially sceptical, feeling Charlie was ‘much too
shy to do any good in the theatre, particularly in the knockabout
comedies that were my speciality’.79
After a successful trial in February 1908 Charlie overcame such
reticence, however. With Charlie on a contract that was 10s a
week better than Sydney’s, the Chaplins were now doing rather
well. They jointly rented a flat at Glenshaw Mansions, Brixton
Road, which put them according to Charles Booth solidly in the
‘lower middle class’ of ‘hardworking, sober, [and] energetic’ indi-
viduals. If the legacy of Charles Snr and Hannah must have acted
as something of a corrective for any cocksureness, this did not
always translate to personal attitudes on tour. Sydney was always
a welcome companion, but Karno recalled that Charlie was at this
time ‘not very likeable. I’ve known him go whole weeks without
saying anything to anyone in the company.’80 One exception to
this could, however, soon be seen: for Charlie had fallen in love.
By all accounts Hetty Kelly was a pretty fifteen-year-old under-
standably overwhelmed with the degree of sudden affection the
then nineteen-year-old Charlie showed her in the summer of 1908.
This relationship – such as it was – seems to have knocked Char-
lie for six, and was something he arguably did not get over for
decades. As David Robinson notes, ‘for anyone else it would have
been an adolescent infatuation, a temporary heartbreak forgotten
in a week. But Chaplin was not like anyone else, and something
in his sensibilities or rooted in the deprivations of his childhood
 Chaplin’s England 47

caused this encounter to leave a deep and ineradicable impression

upon him.’81 All told, Charlie’s courting of Hetty lasted a week and
a half and saw the two alone for no more than twenty minutes at
a time.
The two had first met at the Streatham Empire, where Hetty was
performing in a song and dance troupe that was the opening act
before Karno’s Mumming Birds headlined the bill. Standing in the
wings watching the show, Charlie noticed ‘two large brown eyes
sparkling mischievously, belonging to a slim gazelle with a shapely
oval face, a bewitching mouth, and beautiful teeth’. The effect of
Hetty Kelly Charlie found ‘electric’, and the two soon arranged a
date for the Sunday. Meeting Hetty at Kennington Gate, Charlie
recalled that ‘her presence so overwhelmed me that I could hardly
talk’. Taking a taxi into the West End, the date itself would prove
a disaster. Dining at the Trocadero, Hetty said she was not hungry
and so ordered a sandwich to keep Charlie company. Since ‘we
were occupying a whole table in a very posh restaurant’, Charlie
remembered, ‘I felt it incumbent to order an elaborate meal which
I really did not want’. Nerves getting the better of him, Charlie
thought ‘we were both happy to leave the restaurant and relax’.82
After he had walked her home to Camberwell Road, the two
agreed to meet at seven the following morning where Charlie could
walk her to the nearest tube station to get her to rehearsals. This
continued on the Tuesday and the Wednesday – the two walking
hand in hand to the station, enjoying each other’s company. Yet on
the Thursday Hetty became cold towards Charlie. She refused to
take his hand, followed by Charlie reproaching her for not being
in love with him. ‘You expect too much,’ she replied. ‘After all, I
am only fifteen and you are four years older than I am.’ Recalling
this in his autobiography, Chaplin follows it with the very pointed
remark: ‘I would not assimilate the sense of her remark.’83 Indeed,
a four-year age gap was about as good as it was going to get for
Charlie’s love life from this point forward. He would get older, the
women would remain youthfully Hettyesque.
When Hetty declared that she did not know if she loved him,
Chaplin began interrogating the young girl. He asked her: ‘Would
you marry me?’ ‘I’m too young,’ she replied. This was actually
technically inaccurate – as minors (under twenty-one years old)
both Charlie and Hetty would have required parental consent, but
48 Chaplin’s England

the minimum age possible for marriage at this time was the four-
teen years for boys and twelve years for girls that it had been for
centuries. It would, however, have been unusual (the average age
for one’s first marriage in late Edwardian England was in the mid-
twenties), and certainly pre-marital sex would have been illegal –
since the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 sixteen years
had been the legal age of sexual consent, with heavier punish-
ments for sex with those under the age of thirteen. Nevertheless,
Charlie continued: ‘Well, if you were compelled to marry, would
it be me or someone else?’ ‘I don’t know . . . I like you . . . but . . .’
‘But, you don’t love me.’ Reaching the entrance to the Under-
ground, Chaplin remarked that he had ‘let this thing go too far’
and that the two should never see each other again. Undaunted, the
next morning Chaplin did pop around to see the Kellys, eventually
persuading Hetty’s mother to let him see her daughter. ‘Well,’ he
remarked, attempting to be humorous, ‘I’ve come to say goodbye
again.’ Hetty appeared ‘anxious to be rid of me’, and with a simple
‘goodbye’ she slowly closed the door on Chaplin. The sixth chapter
of Chaplin’s autobiography ends rather poignantly: ‘Although I
had met her but five times . . . that brief encounter affected me for
a long time.’84 Indeed so.
Still, at least Charlie’s career was taking off. In 1909, the Karno
Company had been engaged for a month in Paris where Charlie
played at the Folies Bergère. Other than artistic merit, this was
a trip where Chaplin let himself go. Getting drunk on absinthe,
Charlie spent several nights – together with other members of the
Karno troupe – in Parisian brothels. Attempting to procure a high-
class prostitute at one of his shows, he had an interpreter who
worked at the theatre ‘write down a few phrases d’amour’ on the
back of a postcard. Armed with several gems – including ‘Je vous
ai aimée la première fois que je vous ai vue’ – this proved unsuc-
cessful since it turned out that the proposed ‘vingt francs’ transac-
tion fee was indeed only ‘pour le moment’ and not the ‘toute la
nuit’ marathon session Charlie had planned. Sensing poor value,
he backed out. The man was careful with his money.
More foreign travel was to soon follow. In September 1910, the
Karno Company was engaged for a North American tour – thus
forming the first time that Charlie would set foot in the land he
would reside in for more than forty years. An improved contract
 Chaplin’s England 49

of £6 a week for 1911/12 (£8 for 1912/13 and £10 for 1913/14)
suggested this career was going places. Initially that place was
Quebec, followed by a train to New York where the Karno Com-
pany played a three-month engagement. Following this, a twenty-
week tour saw Charlie travel across America, from Chicago to
Los Angeles, via such less glamorous locations as Butte, Montana
and Tacoma, Washington. After twenty-one months in the States
Charlie briefly returned home in June 1912. Discovering that Syd-
ney had become engaged and had left Glenshaw Mansions behind,
Charlie found England increasingly dull by comparison with the
land of the free. He had seen the world, and now wanted more of
it. When the Karno Company was re-engaged for another Ameri-
can tour he leapt at the chance to go. On 9 October 1912, he went
to Southampton to set sail for America, this time for good.

First sights of America

In 1931 Charlie branded the British ‘the World’s Greatest hypo-
crites’. Chaplin remarked that ‘they say I have a duty to England,
I wonder just what that duty is. No one wanted me or cared for
me in England seventeen years ago. I had to go to America for my
chance and I got it there. Only then did England show the slight-
est bit of interest in me.’85 This idea that America could prove a
salvation to immigrants from Britain was of course hardly Chap-
lin’s alone. From 1876 to 1900, almost two million adult males
left Britain for North America all told, with the vast majority (five
in six) settling in the US itself. In 1890, about 5 per cent of the US
population had been born in Britain, and the theatre – as proven
by Charlie’s own father – had long been a boom export.86 In any
event, for mostly better, sometimes worse, America was about to
show a lot of interest in Charlie. But, while the Karno company
was doing decent business in the States, Chaplin was hardly a
household name at this point. He needed a wider platform.
The troupe began its tour by playing the smaller theatres around
the Midwest and North Eastern United States, before they were
scheduled to depart for the Pacific Coast. After five months ‘work-
ing the sticks’ six days a week, Charlie was ‘discouraged’ and
determined to enjoy a week’s lay-off, mostly by living the high
life on a vacation to New York. Returning to Philadelphia where
50 Chaplin’s England

the troupe was based, he passed by the theatre where Alf Reeves
showed him a telegram he had just received. ‘Is there a man named
Chaffin in your company or something like that STOP If so will
he communicate with Kessel and Bauman 24 Longacre Building
Broadway.’87 Kessel was one of the owners of the Keystone Film
Company, and had seen Charlie perform his inebriate character at
the American Music Hall on 42nd Street. Keystone was looking
for a replacement for their main star Ford Sterling who was leav-
ing to form his own production company with Universal. After
some negotiation, an agreement was signed. Charlie the movie star
was born, and set off to Los Angeles to meet his future boss Mack
Sennett (who ran the Californian end of Keystone) and co-star/
director Mabel Normand.
By this stage he had certainly come a long way, not least geo-
graphically. Yet so much of Charlie’s life would be determined
by what he had experienced in these formative years. Later he
would comment, ‘I am not in politics because I am not particularly
impressed with systems of politics, but I do think I am a humani-
tarian, as everyone who follows the artistic profession believes
himself to be.’ He retained a lifelong antipathy for ‘the idea of
an individual or a system kicking around a lot of small helpless
people’.88 This was doubtless a product of some all too memorable
experiences in his youth, and a Patrick Joyce-esque populism was
buried within him. Marrying his art, these early impressions and
a significant dose of politics would mark the rest of his life. His
pathological fear of losing money and returning to his childlike
poverty would manifest in a number of ways – stinginess when
it came to picking up a tab, refusal to pay an appropriate level
of taxation until threatened with jail and, perhaps, the refusal to
donate meaningful sums of money to his preferred political causes.
The spectre of his youth haunted him all his life.
Yet perhaps we may end this summary of these early days on
two things that he had not experienced, or at least fully imbibed.
As several historians have contended, the English theatrical stage
in the Victorian and Edwardian eras could be a place for radical
political engagement. As Marc Brodie has noted, ‘theatre perfor-
mances could act as one of a range of influences on how the poor-
est of the London working class saw the political conflicts of the
day’. He continues, outlining that while such lessons ‘gained could
 Chaplin’s England 51

be quite different from the “reality” of politics, [they could] pro-

vide a much more rational explanation for the political responses
of the poor than the purely “mob mentality” usually ascribed to
them’.89 This was a legacy that Chaplin certainly took from his
early years, but that had not fully emerged from its ideological
chrysalis. As yet, he had not worked out how to transmute his still
developing political views – anti-establishment, anti-patriotism
and a desire to curb poverty – into an artistic form; but there was
that latent experience within him.
Second, more directly, by the time he left the UK, Charlie had
never actually voted in a national election. He was off on tour
during the election of the new interventionist Liberal government
in 1906. Even as his career took off, he still did not fulfil the prop-
erty qualifications to vote at the next election in January 1910.
And when a snap election was again called in December 1910 he
was off touring the States. As someone who would never take
American citizenship, he cannot have voted in any later American
federal election either. When Charlie later spoke in such grandiose
terms about fighting for democracy, therefore, he was speaking
something that was, for him, an abstract notion. Not only would
he not join any political party, he would never take part in that
most basic affirmation of the social contract between citizen and
their elected representatives: an election. His difficult upbringing
had given him good reason to distrust a political elite he would
never have the option of having to sully his own ideological purity
by voting for. The next sixty years would see this play out in
several ways.

Notes
1 ‘The Future of Charlie Chaplin’s Contribution’, Collier’s Weekly
[undated 1934/5], Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge, UK [CAC],
Winston Churchill Papers [CHAR] 8/521.
2 Astor diary, 26 July 1926, University of Reading, UK [UOR], Nancy
and Waldorf Astor Papers [AST], MS 1,066/1/36.
3 Daily Herald, 26 February 1931, clipped in Municipal Archives,
Montreux, Switzerland [MAM], Charlie Chaplin Clipping [CCP]
Book 31.
4 Reported in New York Mirror, 28 September 1933.
5 Clipping from Chaplin Office, Paris, France [COP], CCP file 50.
6 Footlights, November 1929.
52 Chaplin’s England

7 Toronto Standard, 22 May 1931.

8 Late 1930s typescript, Hoover Institute, Stanford University, Califor-
nia [HOOV], News Research Service [NRS] 791.
9 See Clapham letter, 19 February 1953, National Archives, Kew, Lon-
don [TNA]. Security Service Papers [KV]/23/700.
10 See Clapham letter, 30 April 1953, TNA/KV/23/700.
11 David Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art (London, 1992), 10.
12 Kenneth S. Lynn, Charlie Chaplin and His Times (London, 1998), 39.
13 Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography (London, 2003), 13.
14 Lynn, His Times, 37.
15 Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Working-Class Culture and Working-Class
Politics in London, 1870–1900; Notes on the Remaking of a Work-
ing Class’, Journal of Social History, 7/4 (Summer, 1974), 460–508,
477, 479.
16 Ibid., 498.
17 On such ‘principal motifs’ such as ‘booze, romantic adventure, mar-
riage and mothers-in-law’ see Peter Bailey, ‘Conspiracies of Meaning:
Music-Hall and the Knowingness of Popular Culture’, Past and Pres-
ent, 144 (1994), 138–70.
18 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 13.
19 Ibid., 14; although in the 1920s, flush with the freedoms of America,
he would complain of England being ‘so set and solid and arranged’.
See the Burke interview within London Metropolitan Archives
[LMA]/Greater London Council [GLC]/DG/AE/ROL/34/5(i).
20 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 14.
21 Ibid., 15.
22 Ibid., 17.
23 Ibid., 17.
24 Ibid., 19.
25 Ibid., 23.
26 Churchill, ‘Chaplin’s Contribution’, CAC/CHAR/8/521.
27 Ibid.
28 Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Pictures Library, Los
Angeles, California, USA [MHL], Charlie Chaplin Interview Tran-
script [CCI]/33.f-302.
29 Peter Ackroyd, Charlie Chaplin (London, 2014), 124.
30 Churchill, ‘Chaplin’s Contribution’, CAC/CHAR/8/521.
31 Jowitt speech to Dickens dinner, 7 February 1955, Parliamentary
Archives, House of Lords, London, UK [HOL], William Jowitt
Papers, JOW/2/40.
32 Brooks letter, 14 November 1977, within MHL/Louise Brooks
Papers, Collection 874.
33 All via Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London,
Volume 1 (London, 1902), 33–62.
34 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 26.
35 All via James Greenwood, A Night in the Workhouse (London, 1866),
passim.
 Chaplin’s England 53

36 Mary McKinnon, ‘Poverty and Policy: The English Poor Law, 1860–
1910’, Journal of Economic History, 46/2 (1986), 500–2.
37 The cumulative effect of the nineteenth-century reform acts was also
to exclude many recipients of poor relief from the franchise, too.
38 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 27.
39 Charlie Chaplin (Lisa Stein Haven ed.), A Comedian Sees the World
(Missouri, 2014), 47.
40 Chaplin, A Comedian Sees the World, 47–8.
41 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 28.
42 ‘Correspondence concerning Charlie Chaplin’, within LMA/GLC/
DG/AE/ROL/34/5(i).
43 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 58–9.
44 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 29–30.
45 Harsh treatment was not atypical. One former workhouse boy, H.A.
Webb, would write to The Times on 20 September 1964 recalling
that ‘I was given six lashes just for feeding the hungry sparrows who
hopped in the hallway while we dined!’
46 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 31.
47 Ibid., 30.
48 Ibid., 31.
49 ‘The Tragic Comedian’ by Thomas Burke, Pearson’s Magazine, vol.
53, via LMA/GLC/DG/AE/ROL/34/5(ii).
50 See, e.g., Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and
the Question of Class 1848–1914 (Cambridge, 1990).
51 Register of deaths, 1890–1915, LMA/Microfilm related to Lambeth
Workhouses [X113]/018.
52 South London Chronicle, 17 February 1900.
53 Freud to Schiller, undated, within MHL/Harry Crocker Papers [HRC]
f.12.
54 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 68.
55 Ibid., 70–1.
56 Robinson, Life and Art, 16.
57 Jerry Epstein, Remembering Charlie: The Story of a Friendship (Lon-
don, 1988), 13.
58 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 74.
59 Reading Eagle, 29 August 1928.
60 Harry Crocker’s unpublished memoir, ‘Charlie Chaplin: Man and Mime’,
MHL/HRC, 1–23.
61 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 54.
62 South London Chronicle, 6 January 1900 via Minet Library, Lam-
beth Archives [MLA]/South London Press [FPP3].
63 South London Chronicle, 26 May 1900 via MLA/FPP3.
64 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 54.
65 Churchill, ‘Chaplin’s Contribution’, CAC/CHAR/8/521.
66 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 37.
67 Henry M. Stanley, Through the Dark Continent (Dover, 1988), 31.
54 Chaplin’s England

68 Cited in Theodore Huff, Charlie Chaplin: A Biography (London,

1952), 261.
69 Sinclair to Chaplin, 29 December 1925, LLBI/UPS Box 6.
70 Michael Ball and David Sunderland, An Economic History of London,
1800–1914 (London, 2001), 365.
71 BBC Radio Interview, 8 December 1954.
72 Stedman Jones, ‘Working-Class Culture’, 481.
73 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 44.
74 Ian Gazeley and Andrew Newell, ‘Poverty in Edwardian Britain’,
Economic History Review, 64/1 (2011), 52–71, 62.
75 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 76.
76 Ibid., 57.
77 Ibid., 84.
78 Ibid., 84–5.
79 Robinson, Life and Art, 76.
80 Ibid., 77.
81 Ibid., 80.
82 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 104–5.
83 Ibid., 106.
84 Ibid., 107.
85 Springfield News, 11 May 1931 via COP/CCP.
86 Statistics via Alan G. Green, Mary Mackinnon and Chris Minns,
‘Dominion or Republic? Migrants to North America from the United
Kingdom, 1870–1910’, Economic History Review, 55/4 (2002),
666–96.
87 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 138.
88 Christian Delage, Chaplin: Facing History (Paris, 2005), 28.
89 Marc Brodie, ‘Free Trade and Cheap Theatre: Sources of Politics for
the Nineteenth-Century London Poor’, Social History, 28 (2003),
346–60, 346.
2 To shoulder arms? Charlie
and the First World War

In the summer of 1933 the English writer Alistair Cooke sat on

the deck of a yacht that was gently sailing some twenty miles
south-west of Los Angeles Harbour. Cooke was on a two-year fel-
lowship to Yale and had networked his way through J.L. Garvin –
editor of the British Observer newspaper – on to a boat owned by
Charlie Chaplin. Later to be known on both sides of the Atlantic
for Masterpiece Theatre on PBS, and BBC Radio 4’s Letter from
America, at the time he encountered Chaplin Cooke was just a
young journalist trying to make his way in the world. The scene
was tranquil enough – Paulette Goddard, Chaplin’s then romantic
and cinematic partner, Cooke remembered as ‘enchanting’. The
other two guests, Chaplin’s chef and the boat’s skipper, were both
unobtrusive enough. All in all, the fare was good. Eggs, bacon
and pancakes were soon served, and Chaplin beckoned Cooke
over to the food by tossing a napkin over his forearm, cocking
his head expectantly, and placing ‘his right hand . . . in a kindly
step-this-way freeze’.1 As surviving home-movie footage of Char-
lie clowning around showed, he was often ‘on’ even when not
formally at the studios. Certainly, on that morning off Catalina
Island, all seemed convivial enough.
Perhaps triggered by the presence of a fellow Englishman, Char-
lie suddenly became very serious, however. Cooke recalled this was
often the way – ‘he was always reciting [his political sermons] in
snatches, at the unlikeliest of times, and in the end they led to his
banishment from the United States’.2 We will deal with that later.
In 1933, still hoping for a job out of Charlie, the young Cooke lis-
tened intently as he consumed his breakfast. The two discussed the
56 Charlie and the First World War

old music hall stars Marie Lloyd and Vesta Tilley before Cooke,
without thinking, remarked that his father had kept a copy of a
record called ‘Oh, the Moon Shines Bright on Charlie Chaplin’.
Charlie looked shocked: ‘That,’ he muttered slowly, ‘scared the
hell out of me.’3
It was the First World War – and others’ reactions to his actions
during it – that would ultimately politicise Chaplin. To understand
his sensitivity in recalling the subject, we only have to look at the
lyrics of this wartime sensation:

Oh, the moon shines bright on Charlie Chaplin

He’s going barmy to join the army
But his old baggy trousers they’ll need mending
Before they send him to the Dardanelles

Charlie Chaplin meek and mild

Stole a sausage from a child
But when the child began to cry
Charlie socked him in the eye
Charlie Chaplin had no sense
He bought a flute for 18 pence
But the only tune that he could play
Was ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay

Oh, the moon shines bright on Charlie Chaplin

His shoes are cracking, for want of blacking
And his baggy khaki trousers still need mending
Before they send him to the Dardanelles

Charlie Chaplin went to France

To teach the ladies how to dance
First you heel, and then you toe
Lift your skirts and up you go
Charlie Chaplin Chuck-Chuck-Chuck
Went to bed with three white ducks
One died and Charlie cried
Charlie Chaplin Chuck-Chuck-Chuck

Oh, the moon shines bright on Charlie Chaplin

His shoes are cracking, for want of blacking
And his old fusty coat will need a mending
Before they send him to the Dardanelles.
 Charlie and the First World War 57

As Cooke’s cringing reaction to his own faux pas shows, Chap-

lin’s fear was very real. A coward, much more a feminised coward,
was not the best review to have for any filmmaker between 1914
and 1918. Shirking war service, being ‘meek and mild’ and indul-
ging in comedic japes while heroic British and American boys died
overseas could look none-too-good to those who wished him ill,
and even for those who had only previously understood him as
a cinematic comedian. As Cooke well knew, this was all part of
‘the insensate jingoism of wartime Britain’ that had been stoked
by ‘the holy indignation of comfortable editorial writers against
any famous Englishman abroad who had not dashed home to join
Our Boys Out There in Flanders Field’.4 Brave service or cowardly
shirking during the First World War became, for many of this
generation, the ultimate test of one’s courage, manliness, and loy-
alty to the crown. Chaplin had not fought, had not joined either
American or British armies and to some degree paid the public
relations price. He was not of course the only person of fighting
age to be uncomfortable with the conflict, or indeed to decide not
to serve. In April 1916, about 200,000 British people gathered in
Trafalgar Square, London to protest against the introduction of
conscription, and more than two million British men of fighting
age did not perform active service at any point during the conflict
(for various reasons ranging from physical disability to consci-
entious objection to being employed in a protected occupation).
Chaplin was therefore hardly unique in not donning uniform. But
his monumental fame set him apart. And to trace the gripe many
on the political right had with Chaplin, we must therefore go back
to the origins of that fame: the early days of Hollywood.

Hollywood and the evolution of film

For a world for whom Hollywood now means big stars, big trail-
ers and big business it is difficult to recapture the atmosphere
of the early cinematic world in which Charlie dipped his toes.
The most obvious difference was that, in the first decade of the
twentieth century, there was no Hollywood, at least not in the
modern interpretation of the global capital of film-making. In
1910, 36 per cent of the films shown in London, for example,
were French-made compared to only 25 per cent coming out of
58 Charlie and the First World War

America.5 The world of early film was plural, anarchic and inter-
national, not capitalist, plutocratic and always Americanised.
This had particular ramifications in the country Chaplin had
now moved to. As Steven J. Ross has observed, ‘during the first
three decades of the twentieth century, when the movie industry
was still in its formative stages, movies and movie theatres were
battlegrounds for the control of the consciousness and class loyal-
ties of millions of Americans’.6 By 1910, about twenty-six million
Americans – close to three in every ten – were attending the movies
on a weekly basis. Most of these were working class – indeed, as
late as 1924 the Motion Picture Theater Owner’s Association pro-
claimed that ‘80 percent of the movie patrons were either working
class or [only] moderately well off’.7 The early world of mov-
ies was not designed for the chattering intelligentsia, but for the
working man on his way home from a hard day’s toil and seeking
twenty minutes of amusement. Indeed, early cinemas were often
located in parts of town that the affluent found less than safe, and
thus the film industry was a rather ghettoised affair. That was part
of its charm.
After an economic Depression that had straddled the mid-1890s,
the new Progressive era of policy making in Washington, D.C.,
therefore, had to try to dovetail with a new medium that was
reaching millions of the economically dispossessed. Things were
changing, and cinema was depicting this, and thus it needed to
be watched carefully. Throughout the late nineteenth century col-
lective bargaining and industrial militancy shortened the usual
American working week from a seventy-two-hour, six-day week
often seen before the Civil War to a sixty-hour week by 1890 and a
fifty-one-hour week by 1920. Real wages for non-farm employees
rose more than a third from 1890 to 1920. All this was no doubt
positive, but it was another form of upheaval being experienced
by a country that had gone through so much in the latter half of
the nineteenth century. Combined with significant levels of urban-
isation and immigration, America was being irreparably altered.
Many American elites were not happy about these changes, much
less about their being publicised or potentially praised through
the new cinema.
And yet this is precisely what was happening. From the 1905
emergence of the nickelodeon – the early cinema where patrons
 Charlie and the First World War 59

were charged a ‘nickel’ (five cents) for entry – until America entered
the First World War in April 1917, Ross estimates that there were at
least 274 films released that demonstrated so-called ‘labor–capital’
themes. Far from brushing change under the carpet, these movies
highlighted the struggle, explicit or implicit, between workers and
their bosses.8 To be sure, in a climate where up to 5,000 films were
released a year this was numerically not the be-all and end-all –
most films therefore ‘conformed’ – but the themes exhibited in
such labour–capital plots remained worrisome to many. For one,
there was the simple notion that ‘if leftist works or personnel could
please audiences and make money for producers, then companies
were willing to chance their oppositional politics’.9 What would
happen, in short, if these roots took hold and a liberal or radical
message proved significantly profitable? A working-class audience
watching profoundly leftist cinema was therefore no small concern.
In determining the political perspective of the aforementioned
274 early labour–capital films, Ross utilises five distinct catego-
ries (the percentage of those that fit each description is included
in brackets): liberal (46 per cent), conservative (34 per cent),
anti-authoritarian (9 per cent), populist (7 per cent) and radi-
cal (4 per cent).10 Discounting the conservative category – ‘those
that presented worker . . . activity in the worst possible light’ – for
obvious reasons, it is worth considering these other labels when we
consider Chaplin’s future work.11 First, Ross himself includes Chap-
lin as a sometimes ‘radical’ filmmaker – someone willing to ‘advance
positive depictions of socialists, their struggles and their goals’.12
He also rightly notes that the cinematic adaption of a later friend
of Chaplin’s, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1914), highlighted the
radical theme of ‘the devastation that industrial capitalism inflicts
upon workers through the exploration of the American meatpack-
ing industry.13 Thinking forward to Modern Times it is difficult to
deny this strand to Chaplin’s career, although it was arguably more
clear in his real-life intellectual leanings. Here we should acknowl-
edge that in many ways Chaplin was breaking free from his music
hall roots where, as Peter Bailey has noted, ‘the conflict lines of class
were elided the site of its most direct struggles, the workplace’.14
Such ‘radicalism’ aside, however, Chaplin could also embody
Ross’s description of the ‘liberal’ filmmaker – someone who ‘called
for co-operation between employers and employees, and advanced
60 Charlie and the First World War

reform (not radicalism) as the best method of solving the industrial

ills that beset the nation’.15 Chaplin’s 1920s views on Henry Ford,
for example, would match this label. In fact, a running theme of
this work is that while Chaplin was not a communist, he most
certainly was a liberal. As such, and with the earlier referenced
comparisons in mind, Chaplin almost precisely mirrors George
Orwell’s 1940 description of Charles Dickens:

a man . . . who fights in the open and is not frightened, . . .

a man who is GENEROUSLY ANGRY – in other words, a
nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated
with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which
are now contending for our souls.16

Charlie would face antipathy for such a stance on both sides of

the Atlantic, and his ‘liberalism’ rather neatly straddles the differing
American and British interpretations of the term. Just as he supported
the liberal domestic interventionism of Henry A. Wallace in the 1948
US Presidential election, so too did he share the nineteenth-century
British liberal fears regarding the encroachment of the ‘big state’.
Sympathetic small businessmen or entrepreneurs – from the prospec-
tor in The Gold Rush to the barber in The Great Dictator – appear
with some regularity in Chaplin’s work. Charlie’s view was that it
was possible to fix the world’s problems by co-operation between
public and private spheres within a democratic system, but that the
balance should not tip too far in favour of either.
Ross’s third category of so-called ‘populist’ films – the ‘Yellow
Press of the screen’ that adopted a ‘gut-level class hatred’ – was, how-
ever, rarely Chaplin’s style. The Idle Class (the one Chaplin film title
to include the word ‘class’) would be gentle enough in its mocking of
the 1920s elites – the pomposity of golf rather than the purposeless-
ness of greed was more its target. A Woman of Paris would capture
something of the ‘populist’ spirit whereby ‘capitalists committed
crimes and unspeakable acts that drove honest working people to
suicide but went unpunished’, but again pulled some punches.17 Even
by Modern Times, politicised jokes such as the Tramp unwittingly
acquiring a Red Flag that results in a beating down from the police,
could be seen to be as much about clever execution as they are trying
to hammer home the ‘class division’ point. Perhaps.
 Charlie and the First World War 61

Lastly, however, Ross’s description of the anti-authoritarian

filmmaker – those who ‘did not directly challenge capitalism,
[but] mocked the authority of those who often gave workers the
hardest time: foremen, judges, police and employers’ – fit the
early Chaplin like a glove. Charlie was, notes Ross, ‘the great-
est anti-authoritarian comic of his age’.18 Yet mocking those in
charge did not of course denote a precise platform for what should
replace them. In a sense, that is where Chaplin’s political state-
ments again augment his cinematic work. His writings and his
speeches expressed sentiments it was difficult (due to the censors)
or inadvisable (he still wanted to make money) to put on screen. In
the 1930s and 1940s the line between his cinematic and personal
output certainly began to blur, but we need to consider both to
truly understand the man. Hence, in essence, the rationale for this
book.
Ross’s demarcations of genre matter not least because such
anarchic, politically challenging cinema soon received some push
back. For example, in 1915 the Mutual Film Company (which
Charlie would begin working for the following year) had chal-
lenged the right of the state of Ohio to operate a motion-picture
censorship board. This board was charged with reviewing all films
to be released in the state, and had the power of arrest for any-
one producing movies it judged of ill repute. The Supreme Court
eventually ruled in the state’s favour by nine to zero – judging that
First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech did not apply to
the film industry, and operating a censorship board was therefore
entirely within the legal confines of state or national government.
There were such things that were off-limits, therefore, a process
that would play out over the next couple of decades through the
imposition of various codes to guide producers in what they could
and could not show. In such light, creative independence would
come to matter more and more.
The overall point then was that as Charlie arrived in Holly-
wood, and as he began to change audience perceptions of what
they expected from film, he was stirring a cauldron that contained
a more controversial brew than he realised. Even had the First
World War not happened, and even had he managed to keep his
sexual exploits out of the papers, he would still have been a politi-
cal filmmaker, because film itself was fast becoming a battleground
62 Charlie and the First World War

for the soul of America. America’s pastime had become the mov-
ies, and thus making any type of cinema that did not reinforce the
economic status quo was inherently challenging. Being English
born and raised, the fact that he had no grounding in that status
quo made a confrontation all the more likely.

Charlie changes film

However he brokered his appeal to the American people, Charlie
(or rather his agent, brother Sydney) proved a consummate nego-
tiator with his employers. Beginning at Keystone at the tail end of
1913, Charlie would jump to Essanay (November 1914), Mutual
(February 1916) and First National (June 1917) film production
companies during the First World War – all of which increased
his salary exponentially but, just as crucially, his level of artis-
tic control. As his friend Ivor Montagu later noted of Charlie,
‘money [was] pleasant – certainly for one whose formative years
were so hard-pressed – but the essential [thing] was the grow-
ing independence it secured in the creative field’.19 Early on, the
boundaries for creativity were rather limited. Mack Sennett’s
production company was known for its high-paced and cartoon-
ish Keystone Cops, and while Charlie’s early output had the odd
flicker of pathos that would mark his later work, these were films
pumped out at a rate that precluded much seriousness. Indeed,
when Charles Kessel had asked him what he thought of Keystone
in his initial interview, Chaplin ‘did not tell him that I thought
they were a crude melange of rough and tumble’.20 After initially
struggling to impress Sennett, in the forty-four-week stretch that
Charlie appeared for Keystone he managed to act in thirty-six
features – mostly single-reel skits.
During the first half of 1914 Charlie was very much second
fiddle to Mabel Normand – reflected in titles such as Mabel’s
Strange Predicament, Mabel at the Wheel and Her Friend the
Bandit. Although Charlie found the ‘dark-eyed . . . pretty’ Mabel
attractive, personally the two never got on and Charlie found her
direction ‘incompetent’.21 Still, as the year went on it is clear that
Chaplin was becoming a star in his own right – November saw
titles such as His Musical Career, His Trysting Place and the last
film he would make for Keystone the next month, His Prehistoric
 Charlie and the First World War 63

Past. In fact, perhaps ironically, it was capitalism that saved Chap-

lin’s career from being ended before it had begun. After one too
many quarrels on set with Mabel, Sennett had been determined
to fire Chaplin, but had received ‘a telegram from the New York
office telling him to hurry up with more Chaplin pictures as there
was a terrific demand for them’.22
From this point on, the relationship with Sennett was always per-
sonally close, but it remained artistically limiting. Sennett’s view
was to begin a film with ‘no scenario. We get an idea, then follow
the natural sequence of events.’23 In many ways this infuriating
method would remain with Charlie his entire life, but the point
was that he wanted to portray ‘ideas’ of his own. With his move
to the Essanay company therefore (which occurred after Sennett
pushed his contractual brinkmanship on for too long), Charlie
very much became James L. Neibaur’s description of an ‘artist
in transition’.24 Scenes that previously would have been played
with an ‘aggressive’ air – such as a woman bending over – were
‘presented as an accident . . . [helping Charlie become] less of an
aggressive knockabout clown and more of a substantial screen
character’.25 This emerged because at Essanay Chaplin was now
assured he would no longer have to work for other directors. From
April 1914 Charlie had begun to direct some of his pictures at Key-
stone, but several films were still either co-directed or co-written
with Mack Sennett or Mabel Normand. With complete creative
control came control over casting, and in February 1915 he would
cast a young secretary, Edna Purviance, in A Night Out – the
first of thirty-three films that Edna would experience under Char-
lie’s directorship. For eight years Edna would serve as Charlie’s
muse – helping launch her own career no doubt, although also
serving to soften the image of the Tramp away from a mere car-
toonish scamp to a living, breathing human with real feelings and
emotions.
Two Essanay films typify this. First, April 1915’s The Tramp is
often held up, not least for its title, as the moment that Charlie’s
character became the lonely little man he would go on to be so
famous for portraying. The film is fairly knockabout stuff, but
it concludes with a trope later often repeated (most famously in
The Circus) – the Tramp bowing out of a love triangle in the
knowledge that his sweetheart and his love rival are better suited.
64 Charlie and the First World War

Likewise, four months later The Bank saw Charlie’s janitor char-
acter attempt to woo Edna’s pretty bank secretary, but only to see
she has her heart set for another. That film saw Charlie recycle bits
from Keystone (the plot is essentially borrowed from The New
Janitor in which he had appeared the previous year) and Karno
(a dream sequence in which he wins Edna over through saving
her in a bank robbery). But the ending of both would launch a
trend within Chaplin’s films of the Tramp striving for a better
life, but not quite gaining it. In such fare, as Libby Murphy notes,
‘Charlot[’s] . . . position is not one of outright revolt or rebellion.
Instead it is one of dogged refusal – refusal to accept defeat or give
in to dismay.’26
Feeling that Essanay were both underpaying and overworking
him, Charlie again asked Sydney to look around for alternatives
and eventually settled on the Mutual Film Company. At Mutual,
Charlie would deliver twelve two-reelers, all of which he would
produce, direct and star in. These included several important
works and interesting elements of storytelling. For example, in
Easy Street (January 1917) the Tramp answers a job advert for
a local policeman and proves a spectacular success. With a local
thug terrorising the poor people of Easy Street and the existing
police too afraid to deal with him, Charlie goes on to use uncon-
ventional methods to bring him down. After gassing the bully in a
conveniently placed gas lamp and arresting him, the Tramp later
encounters the same, even more enraged adversary upon his escape
from the police station. For all the slapstick violence, this was a
remarkably brutal picture. At one point a junkie is shown injecting
himself with a drug that causes him to attack a defenceless woman.
By inadvertently sitting on the self-same needle the Tramp – rather
foreshadowing a darker version of Popeye – becomes supercharged
and able to defeat the various miscreants of the town. A title card
reads ‘Love backed by force, forgiveness sweet. Brings hope and
peace to Easy Street’ before an epilogue scene shows the Tramp as
now a pillar of the community, having brought safety and stability
to a once chaotic neighbourhood. In many senses, it is an oddly
conservative parable about law and order prevailing.
Perhaps the most famous of the Mutuals would, however, prove
to be June 1917’s The Immigrant. The film concerns Charlie and
Edna on a boat arriving into Ellis Island, and the welcome – or
 Charlie and the First World War 65

lack thereof – they receive in America. In 1949, The Daily Worker

reflected on the meaning of The Immigrant, as did so many of
Charlie’s films. The film had ‘appeared during the year of Amer-
ica’s entry into the first imperialist war’ and in it ‘Chaplin dared
to show men and women going hungry in a land of plenty at
a time when the bugles were blowing’. The maltreatment of
second-class immigrants being ‘herded like cattle’ was, for those
communist-leaning Americans, a profound cinematic moment.27
This article would be later dutifully clipped by some Washington
functionary and added to the case the House Un-American Activi-
ties Committee was building against Chaplin in the 1940s.
The Immigrant has been compared to Franz Kafka’s novel
Amerika (written between 1911 and 1914, published 1927) that
deals with the travails of a German immigrant to the United States.
As Parker Tyler argued, in this posthumously published work Kafka
took ‘his epic hero to the shores of this country and subject[ed]
him, in deliberately Dickensian manner, to the hazards of a young
modern civilization, ending, as customarily, on an ambiguous
note, but this time of hope rather than of despair’.28 Going further,
Tyler argued that Kafka’s character ‘Karl and Charlie the Tramp
are heroes of the identical international myth: the great adventure
of the young foreigner coming head-on to the United States to start
a new life and hoping to rise to a level beyond any available to
him in his native land’. Of course, ‘in the real-life dimension, this
was literally Chaplin’s career’.29 Like Thomas Paine, William Cob-
bett and, in later years, Christopher Hitchens, Chaplin brought a
contrarian English radicalism to America.
In the work of both Chaplin and Kafka there would be a punc-
turing of the image of the American dream. In Kafka’s Amerika
the Statue of Liberty is portrayed holding a sword rather than a
torch: less ‘give me . . . your huddled masses’ and more ‘might is
right’. In Chaplin’s The Immigrant no such reinvention is prof-
fered, but the very use of the Statue of Liberty in his film was con-
troversial. The Statue made clear that Charlie’s film did not take
place in the ‘never-never’ world of Chaplinesque fiction – some-
where non-specific between Lambeth and Los Angeles – but was
clearly in the modern-day, real-life America that had just entered
a world war to fight for ‘liberty’ and ‘democracy’ and had just
passed a 1917 Immigration Act that precluded the immigration
66 Charlie and the First World War

of anyone from the so-called ‘Asiatic Barred Zone’. Although it

ends on the happy sight of Charlie and Edna getting married, the
poverty depicted throughout the film was also shocking for many
middle-class audiences in the American heartland. An extension
of themes explored in Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle, the two
artists doubtless expressed their mutual appreciation in their first
meeting the following year.
Moving on again to the First National Company, Charlie would
go on to flesh out the Tramp character further, but this period was
also marked by some of his more slapdash works. Having formed
United Artists in February 1919, Charlie was eager to work out his
contract as soon as possible. As such, the audience was occasion-
ally treated to uneven comedies such as May 1919’s Sunnyside that
barely seemed to be coherent films at all. In that particular work,
disjointed scenes are met with the type of title cards that suggest
that even Chaplin could not be bothered to create a coherent plot
beyond walking his audience through the usual tropes: ‘And now,
“the romance”.’
Other than Shoulder Arms, which we consider below, there was
the odd chink of light, however. For one, 1921’s The Kid has been
remarked upon by many historians as intensely autobiographi-
cal, and certainly very poignant. Detailing the horrors associated
with the potential separation of (de facto) parent and son by the
state, the film lends the Tramp a paternal and altruistic streak
that would have been out of place in the early Keystone days. In
the film, the Tramp unwittingly becomes the guardian of a baby
boy left by his impoverished mother in a rich man’s car. The car
is stolen by thieves who, discovering the baby, leave him on the
street where he is picked up by Charlie. After being initially reluc-
tant to look after John, the Tramp develops a deep bond over
several years with the child, reinforced by their scheme involving
the child throwing a stone through neighbourhood glass windows
and Charlie conveniently walking by offering to affix glass panes
to some suddenly needy tenants. When the authorities learn that
Charlie is not the father of John, however, two men are sent to take
him to an orphanage. The scenes that follow – a weeping child, a
desperate Tramp determined to stop John being taken from him –
mix melodrama and slapstick comedy to a degree Chaplin was fast
becoming a past master at.
 Charlie and the First World War 67

The Idle Class of 1922 would also contain some of Chaplin’s

most inventive comedic asides. A scene where the wealthy husband
(played by Chaplin) who unwittingly leaves his bedroom without
any trousers – masked by a series of beautifully timed choreogra-
phy from his servants – and then has to make his way back again
is superbly executed. A later scene, shot from behind, where the
husband seems to be shaking in fits of tears at his wife having
moved out of the marital bedroom (on account of his drunken-
ness) only for Chaplin to reveal he is mixing a cocktail is also a
brilliant moment. But for the only one of Chaplin’s film titles to
include the word ‘class’ in it, it was not bitingly political. The
Idle Class includes a portrayal of the wealthy characters as mostly
drunk and/or decadent, and takes much from the absurdities of
golf, but the chief romantic plot – which rests on a proto-City
Lights mistaken belief that the Tramp is a rich man – would not
quite deliver. It is a film as much about pure idleness as it is class.
Interestingly, it does, however, assert a conventional married life
as the Tramp’s dream – a flash of sometime artistic conservatism
from Charlie at this stage.
Such correctives matter because of how the Tramp was
viewed by his contemporaries. For one, Buster Keaton recalled
an essential difference between his own silent persona and that
of the Little Tramp. He was ‘always puzzled when people spoke
of the similarities in the characters Charlie and I played in the
movies’. For Keaton, his creation was a member of the virtu-
ous working class: ‘My little fellow was a workingman and
honest.’ But ‘Charlie’s tramp was a bum with a bum’s philoso-
phy. Loveable as he was he would steal if he got the chance.’30
Fundamentally, if either creation wanted to buy a suit he saw
in a shop window, Keaton’s character would ‘start to figure out
how he could earn extra money to pay for it’ whereas Char-
lie’s would either ‘steal the money . . . [or] forget all about the
suit’.31 The Tramp was, in other words, a pauper condemned to
perpetual poverty. This may have been true in the early silents,
but through the 1920s in The Kid or, later, The Gold Rush
his efforts would increasingly be rewarded in an America that
seemed to be growing more at ease with itself. The 1920s, and
Chaplin’s growing attempts to be taken more seriously, we will
address in the next chapter.
68 Charlie and the First World War

Fame
Artistic evolution aside, Charlie’s level of fame during the First
World War was truly astonishing. Advertising his films for show-
ing in Britain from June 1914, Keystone proclaimed that ‘there
has never been so instantaneous a hit as that of Chas. Chaplin . . .
Most first rank-exhibitors have booked every film in which he
appears, and after the first releases there is certain to be a big
rush for copies.’ This certainly proved to be the case and in this
regard Britain was merely mirroring America. From Los Angeles
Charlie wrote in August that year to his brother that

I have made good. All the theatres feature my name in big

letters i.e. “Chas. Chaplin hear [sic] today”. I tell you in this
country I am a big box office attraction. All the managers tell
me that I have 50 letters a week from men and women from
all parts of the world. It is wonderfull [sic] how popular I am
in such a short time and next year I hope to make a bunch
of dough.32

He certainly delivered in that regard.

As he later recalled, by 1915 ‘my popularity kept increasing with
each succeeding comedy’. Sydney promptly all but gave up his own
acting career to manage Charlie’s affairs, and there was much to
manage. Although Charlie knew of his popularity in Los Angeles
‘by the long lines at the box-office, I did not realize to what mag-
nitude it had grown elsewhere’. In New York ‘toys and statuettes
of my character were being sold in all the department stores and
drugstores’. The Chaplins were also inundated with ‘all manner
of business propositions involving books, clothes, candles, toys,
cigarettes and toothpaste’.33 Rob Wagner, more of whom later, was
taken on at this point to help deal with the sheer volumes of fan
mail coming into Chaplin’s office.
By way of continuing illustration (and a less positive one), The
Times of London ran a series of articles entitled ‘Notes of a Neu-
tral’ that commented on the general climate of the war then engulf-
ing Europe. In August 1915, this anonymous columnist reflected
on ‘the chief popular indoor amusement in England . . . the cin-
ematograph theatre’. Out of curiosity, its correspondent went to
 Charlie and the First World War 69

one such attraction where they saw ‘not one film shown to give
any idea of the work of the British Army or the British Navy’.
Instead, ‘the whole audience looked forward to the antics of one
Charlie Chaplin’. He was, noted a bemused writer, ‘the idol of
millions of your people’.34
A few days later, having read this article, an anonymous letter from
the pen-name of ‘Action’ arrived to the same newspaper demanding
that ‘someone take the nation in hand’.35 All hands should have been
to the pumps of winning the war, not relaxing at the cinema – and
this would be a recurring theme. In December 1915 a letter was
published in The Times from a wounded soldier stating that

sometimes a feeling of intense depression would settle on

one, and of black despair of England ever facing facts or even
words . . . We were, indeed depressed at the strikes, at the
failure of recruiting in spite, or perhaps because of, the con-
temptible methods employed, at the demand for war bonuses
and unprecedented waste of them . . . and, at the general rot-
tenness of taste and feeling in a country which can amuse
itself with “Charlie Chaplin” in days like these.36

By mid-1915, certainly, the Tramp was increasingly used as

a metaphor to make political points. In July 1915, the Evening
Times would portray a man with a globe for a face smiling at
Charlie while Kaiser Wilhelm II – portrayed with a rat-like face –
looked on rather upset. The caption read that ‘the Crown Prince
protests to the world he is being superseded by Charlie Chaplin as
the universal laughter-maker’.37 Two months later Punch would
run a cartoon of the British wartime Minister of Munitions (and
soon to be Prime Minister) David Lloyd George in a derby hat and
cane with a man labelled ‘Trade Union Congress’ at his feet. The
caption read: ‘The Charlie Chaplin of Politics: The Little Cham-
pion (Lloydie George) after bringing certain people (at Bristol)
down with a run and giving them a nasty jar, toddles off with a
spasmodic raising of the hat to seek other adventures.’38 Evidently,
the image of Charlie could now serve as a catch-all for propaganda
against the enemy, or as a descriptive means to portray domestic
unrest between government and trade unions. This would con-
tinue virtually throughout his lifetime, not always for the better.
70 Charlie and the First World War

A shirker?
For all his later controversial statements, Chaplin’s biggest early
political move was actually a form of inaction. Charlie did not
fight in the war while millions of his countrymen (and adopted
country of America) did. This matter haunted him for decades
and, as Jerry Epstein recalled, ‘hurt him deeply’.39 As one-time
Chaplin actor Adolphe Menjou put it during the anti-communist
HUAC hearings of the 1940s, ‘the only gun Mr Chaplin had ever
heard go off was a pop-gun in his studio’.40 By not fighting in the
war, Charlie’s reputation would be tarnished for decades, includ-
ing among those actors – such as Menjou – who had served in the
conflict. Yet on the issue of his lack of uniformed service during
the Great War Chaplin had no formal case to answer. The British
Embassy – the only country, after all, Chaplin was ever a citizen
of – issued a statement in 1917 noting that

we would not consider Chaplin a slacker unless we received

instructions to put the compulsory service law into effect in
the United States and unless after that he refused to join the
colo[u]rs. Chaplin could volunteer any day he wanted to, but
he is of as much use to Great Britain now making big money
and subscribing to war loans as he would be in the trenches,
especially when the need for individual men is not extremely
pressing. There are various ways for one to do one’s bit.41

Informally, however, Chaplin was a man of fighting age (that

is, from eighteen to forty-one) who was seemingly having a ‘good
war’ while others of his generation fought and died for his lib-
erty to do so. As the Republican-supporting Menjou illustrated,
his lack of military service would long be a sore point with the
American right.
Part of this emerged from the fact the acting profession per se
had stepped up to the plate during the war. By December 1914,
800 actors had signed up for the British Army, a trend exacerbated
by the fact that theatres, even more than football grounds, were
often major recruiting centres. After conscription was introduced
from 1916 pressures became even greater. As Adrian Gregory notes,
one magistrate at a North London court ‘even threatened to invoke
 Charlie and the First World War 71

the Vagrancy Act, not used against actors since 1824, to punish
an Irish actor who had failed to report to the military authorities’.
This magistrate was only sorry for ‘the passing of the sterner Puri-
tan days when those who fooled about the country with parties of
players would be placed in stocks as vagabonds’.42 By the time that
the dust had settled on the conflict, Hollywood icons present and
future, such as Menjou, Buster Keaton and Humphrey Bogart, had
been seen to do their patriotic duty for the American war effort, too.
Chaplin’s reticence to physically take part at the front was hardly
unique. Keaton, who would briefly serve ‘as a thirty-dollar-a-month
private’ in the American Army – far less than the $250 weekly salary
he was then on for his films – also expressed reservations about fight-
ing. Keaton later noted that ‘it was not always possible to take that
war seriously’. He could not understand why ‘we, the French and
the English were fighting the Germans and the Austrians’. Keaton
believed ‘people from everywhere in the world were about the
same. Not as individuals, of course, but taken as a group.’ He also
‘resented the uniform which made me look and feel ridiculous . . .
The size eight shoes handed me were far too big for my size six
and one-half feet.’43 Spending seven months in France, he slept
every night but one in the ground or on the floor of mills, barns
and stables. With such buildings often having a strong draught,
Keaton developed a cold that impaired his hearing, later leaving
him deaf in one ear.
The most famous example of the informal pressure exerted on
Chaplin at the time, however, came from the very British Lord
Northcliffe, formerly Alfred Harmsworth, the proprietor of the
Daily Mail. To his allies such as Max Pemberton, whom we will
curiously encounter defending Chaplin shortly, Northcliffe was ‘a
very remarkable personality and a very great patriot – who ren-
dered imperishable services to his country and who never by his
countrymen [must be] forgotten’.44 This was one view. As Winston
Churchill commented, however, armed with the ‘solemn prestige of
The Times on the one hand and the ubiquity of the Daily Mail on
the other’ Northcliffe was capable of holding politicians to virtual
ransom as and where he felt the urge.45 By 1915 his latest bug-
bear had become the prosecution of the First World War where ‘in
his view, unless Britain demonstrated her determination to France
and Russia by instituting compulsion, one or both might make a
72 Charlie and the First World War

separate peace with Germany’.46 In a pattern ably laid out by the

historian J. Lee Thompson, through 1915 and early 1916 North-
cliffe therefore ratcheted up his campaign for universal conscription.
Judging the 1915 creation of a National Register that listed
all men between the ages of 15 and 65 (presumably therefore
including himself) who were not members of the armed forces as
insufficient since it lacked any element of compulsion to get these
‘slackers’ to join the army, Northcliffe turned his papers into an
all-out demand for conscription. On 16 August 1915, the Daily
Mail published a manifesto in support of national service that
included a pro-conscription form for the reader to fill out and post
to the government. By October 1915 the so-called Derby scheme
was launched that required all men aged 41 and under to make a
public declaration as to whether they were enlisting at once, or to
‘attest’ to join a list of reserve soldiers who would be called up as
and when necessary (and to wear an armband testifying to their
declaration in the meantime). Aiming at attracting half a million
new recruits to the British Army, it fell short at about 340,000 by
the time the scheme ended in December. Part of the shortfall was
undoubtedly married men, who were placed at the back of the
queue to be called-up, and so-called ‘volunteerism’ was not going
to cut it. By January 1916, partly due to the pressure of North-
cliffe, a bill for universal conscription (including married men) was
therefore brought before parliament – to take effect from April.47
Before we deal with the ramifications for Chaplin it is important
to contextualise the Northcliffe affair. Most British newspapers did
not take the same stance as this populist maverick. The use North-
cliffe made of his tabloidesque Weekly Dispatch to claim that ‘if
Charlie joined up, as is his duty, at least thirty other British cinema
performers of military age would have no [similar] excuse’ was
not a tactic replicated by all.48 For one, the conservative-leaning
Spectator magazine did not mention Chaplin’s lack of active ser-
vice during the war, nor did Northcliffe’s own more establishment
and ‘newspaper of record’ The Times. Local British newspapers
were rarely explicitly critical of Chaplin’s lack of service. For sure,
the dichotomy of horrific (and/or heroic) stories of local regi-
ments appearing alongside an advert for Charlie’s latest film did
not likely help his reputation, although it is difficult to read into
 Charlie and the First World War 73

people’s views. Was Charlie a slacker or Charlie the man who, for
a moment, could help them forget about the horrors of war?
We may deal with the facts first. Charlie’s 1916 Mutual contract
explicitly specified that as a British subject ‘he shall not leave the
United States and run the risk of compulsion in Britain within the
life of the contract without the permission of the corporation’.49
It is difficult to ascertain who demanded this clause – the studio
not wanting to lose their cash cow, or the cash cow who wanted
a plausible excuse not to serve at the front. Certainly, from the
moment the ink was dry on this contract Charlie was using it as his
formal ‘line’ to explain why he was not in a uniform. Denying in
March 1916 that he was ‘hiding behind my player’s coat’, Charlie
did, however, note that ‘my professional demands do not permit
my presence in the Mother Country’.50
This type of activity was certainly ammunition for the
anti-Chaplin Northcliffes, but not all publications toed this line.
In April 1916, one month after the implementation of conscrip-
tion for all British men of fighting age, The Economist weighed in
to support Chaplin on the issue. This august publication objected
to the ‘policy of commandeering the residue of a population which
has already been far more depleted of men than that of Russia’.
And this was best illustrated ‘by a popular case, the case of Mr
Charlie Chaplin’. According to The Economist, ‘that gentleman
is said to be earning £2,500 a week in the United States, yet some
Fleet Street luminaries cry out for his recall, to be drilled’. The
economics of the Northcliffe case simply did not add up:

If Mr Chaplin, after supplying himself with the necessaries,

and perhaps some of the conveniences of life, is remitting
£1,000 a week home for investment in the War Loan, he is not
only assisting the American exchanges, but he is also paying
for some 200 new recruits.

As they noted, ‘the alternative is to force him into one soldier.

[And so] we would ask every public man who has a moment
of leisure to reflect upon the case of “Charlie Chaplin,” and to
reconsider the policy of draining our industries and commerce
dry just when their activity and efficiency are most needed.’51
Quite aside from Chaplin’s own travails, it is worth noting that he
74 Charlie and the First World War

was being used here as a means of defending free enterprise and

productive capitalism. And possibly also as a tool of resistance
against Northcliffe’s domination of the British press.
Nevertheless, on 5 June 1917 Charlie Chaplin finally appeared
to bow to pressure and formally registered for the American mili-
tary draft in Los Angeles. Of ‘slender’ and ‘medium’ build, this
self-declared ‘alien’ reported for duty while listing one financial
dependent, his mother. On 22 June Northcliffe’s Weekly Dispatch
claimed that ‘nobody would want [Chaplin] to join up if the army
doctors pronounced him unfit, but until he has undergone medi-
cal examination he is under the suspicion of regarding himself
as specially privileged to escape the common responsibilities of
human citizenship’.52 Here we encounter something of a grey area.
In short, Chaplin very possibly was unfit to fight. A history of
asthma, chronic nervousness and a malnourished childhood may
well have stood him in poor stead to serve the allied effort in the
trenches. He also would probably not have made a great soldier.
As Harry Crocker stated, ‘Charlie was a pacifist. He not only real-
ized the fatality of war, but the futility of his attempting anything
which smacked of action.’53 Indeed, years later, when comment-
ing on the prospect of a war between Russia and America in the
1950s, Charlie stated, ‘I know what I’d do if my son was in that. I
guess I’d do everything to stop it. I don’t want him to go there to
fight for democracy or for anything. I mean when you think of the
horror of some of their deaths, [or] they come back basket cases.’54
But he does seem to have evaded the draft through simple skul-
duggery. Charlie Chaplin was widely thought to be at least 165 cen-
timetres tall, or 5 feet 5 inches (sometimes he even claimed 5 feet 6
inches). Mysteriously, when it came to his physical examination by
the American Army, he had dropped an inch. At an alleged 5 feet 4
inches and 129 pounds, Chaplin was deemed to be too small to don
an American military uniform by the doctor at his army physical.
Alf Reeves, Chaplin’s manager, later released the statement that ‘no
one could expect Charlie to join up, as he only weighs 8st, and no
army doctor would accept him’.55 With the British minimum height
requirements at 5 feet 4 inches from October 1914 (lowered to 5
feet 2 inches from July 1915) even this fiction did not preclude his
service in the British Army, but London did not pursue the matter.
In December 1917 Chaplin released a statement saying that he was
 Charlie and the First World War 75

ready and willing to answer my country’s call to serve in any

branch of military service at whatever post national author-
ity may consider I might do most good, but I am waiting for
word from the British Embassy at Washington. Meanwhile, I
have invested a quarter of a million dollars (£50,000) in the
war activities of America and England, contributing to both
loans. I registered for the draft here, and have not asked for
exemption. Had I been drawn I would have gone to the front
like any patriotic citizen.56

A flurry of later reports in April 1918 suggested that he had

renounced his British citizenship and would join the American
Army, but neither proved to be true.57
Charlie’s defence at not serving was twofold – he was enter-
taining the troops (and their loved ones) through his on-screen
performances, and these performances were generating a revenue
stream that greatly aided the Allied war effort. In March 1916,
he remarked in an open letter to the British people that ‘if, in
my modest sort of way, in occasional bits of cheery nonsense as
“Charlie Chaplin” of the films, I can instil a moment of brief relief
from the brunt of the fray, this is my contribution to the men at
the front’. Although Chaplin’s aversion to jingoism has already
been noted, in an age of global conflict he was careful to but-
tress such excuses with statements such as the fact that ‘the days
of Wellington and Nelson were not lived in vain, for the spirit
that underlies present England is no less strong in courage and in
absolute fearlessness’.58
Contrary to Blackadder Goes Forth, the troops do seem to
have enjoyed Charlie’s work.59 In November 1916 a gathering
of 400 wounded soldiers from across the Allied nations was held
in the ballroom of the Savoy Hotel, London. Before an after-
noon of tea, food and smoking, there was held ‘an exhibition of
cinematograph films, with Charlie Chaplin as the pièce de resis-
tance’.60 Moreover, the Imperial War Museum in London retains
images of a tank named ‘Charlie Chaplin’ (lost on 9 April 1917
during the First Battle of the Scarpe), of several soldiers dressed
in Little Tramp costumes when off duty, and of a Charlie Chap-
lin scarecrow built in tribute by Tommies to guard a road (see
Figure 2.1).61 American sources also defended Chaplin’s comedic
76 Charlie and the First World War

Figure 2.1 Charlie remained immensely popular with soldiers at the

front. Here men of the British Army Service Corps, Mechanical Trans-
port, have placed a model labelled ‘Our Charlie’ to guard the road
against German advance.
Courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London, UK

value for the front line, too. In August 1917, the Portland Oak
Journal noted that

there is one argument . . . which will strike one as absurdly

illogical. It suggests that Charlie might amuse the troops in
billets if his condition did not warrant him going into the
trenches, [but] in billets Charlie would be able to amuse a
select few of his comrades at any one time. At the present time
he is, on the film, affording entertainment to millions, not
least among them being the boys in khaki and blue.62

For all the Northcliffes, Charlie clearly had his defenders in the
press all told. While The Economist laid bare the financial case for
 Charlie and the First World War 77

Charlie continuing to make movies as British soldiers lost their lives,

the author Max Pemberton put forward the comedic case, too. As
noted, Pemberton was a friend and golfing partner of Northcliffe –
not innately liable to defend Charlie, therefore. Yet in a September
1915 Sunday Pictorial article he posed the question as to whether ‘the
Charlie Chaplin Craze’ was a ‘sign of national indifference?’ ‘Ought
we who remain at home to enjoy ourselves,’ he asked, ‘while our
soldiers are sacrificing their lives?’ Pemberton’s view was emphati-
cally yes: ‘Wars are not won by brooding, nor victories achieved by
gloom.’ Indeed, for the many to whom ‘the dawn beings anew the
terrible question of yesterday: “Is my son still among the living?”’
they were quite entitled to ‘turn gladly to those who will break the
spell of the doubt even for a little while’. Since many ‘owe precious
hours to Charlie Chaplin . . . who would rob them of his gifts?’63
Comedic utility aside, Chaplin’s activities on the Liberty Bonds
tours were undeniably significant, too. From April 1917 to Sep-
tember 1918 four separate wartime bond drives (known as Liberty
Bonds) were launched by the US government. All told, these raised
in the region of $17 billion for the American war effort, and inves-
tors garnered returns ranging from 3.5 per cent to 4.5 per cent. Yet
the first drive did not prove universally popular, and the tax incen-
tives had to be tweaked to encourage full take-up. In April 1918,
Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and other film stars
were therefore persuaded by Treasury Secretary William McAdoo
to tour the country ‘hawking bonds to movie mad citizens’.64 In a
single afternoon, on the back of crowds of up to 100,000 people,
these stars were able to persuade ordinary Americans to part with
up to $17 million worth of funds for the war effort. This tour was
important above and beyond what it did for the prospect of vic-
tory over the Central Powers (see Figure 2.1). As Steven J. Ross
notes, ‘The war bond tour gave Chaplin his first insight into the
political uses of stardom. He discovered that people were more
interested in hearing what he . . . had to say than any congress-
men, senator or even President.’65 At the time, this was the usual
patriotic stuff about ‘the Germans’ being ‘at your door’ and ‘we
will stop them, if you buy Liberty Bonds’, but being given such a
platform – and, for a silent comedian, a voice – must have been
intoxicating. People listened and, in 1918, agreed with Charlie
wholeheartedly. But this in turn worried many in the corridors of
78 Charlie and the First World War

power: ‘If stars could sell war bonds with such effectiveness, why
not political ideas that challenged official policy?’66
Such efforts aside, Charlie dealt with the war in two ways on-screen
(excluding the later portrayal at the beginning of The Great Dictator
in 1940). The first was a naked piece of propaganda for the Liberty
Loan entitled The Bond, released in September 1918. The Bond
walks the viewer through the three successive ‘bonds’ of friendship
(Charlie and Albert Austin), love, and marriage (Charlie and Edna),
before turning to ‘the most important: THE LIBERTY BOND’.
In the latter skit, the Kaiser (played by Charlie’s brother Sydney)
attempts to manhandle Edna’s Statue of Liberty before an American
soldier appears to save the day. The point is then hammered home
when the Tramp (portraying ‘The People’) gives a bag of money to
Uncle Sam in return for a Liberty Bond and a hearty handshake, and
Uncle Sam then hands the money to a man representing ‘Industry’
who in turn then provides a gun to both an army soldier and naval
warrior. The screen dissolves to black before we again see the Kaiser,
who is promptly knocked to the floor by the Tramp holding a ham-
mer saying, ‘Liberty Bonds’. An arrestingly shot production with a
totally black background and stark lighting, The Bond would be
produced by Charlie for free to help aid the war effort.
More significantly, in October 1918 he released the comedy
Shoulder Arms – predominantly set in the trenches of France. Hav-
ing made A Dog’s Life Charlie was ‘worried about getting an idea
for my second picture [for First National]. Then the thought came
to me: why not a comedy about the war?’ Friends warned Charlie
off the project, with Cecil B. De Mille telling him, ‘It’s dangerous
at this time to make fun of the war.’ Still, ‘dangerous or not, the
idea excited’ Charlie. Initially planned as a five-reeler taking in the
Tramp’s home life before the war, his service during it and a celebra-
tory banquet at the end, Charlie eventually ‘thought it better to keep
Charlot a nondescript with no background and to discover him
already in the army’. Initially dissatisfied with the film, it was only
when Doug Fairbanks saw the film and laughed hysterically that
Charlie was persuaded to go ahead with its release. ‘Sweet Douglas,’
recalled Charlie in the 1960s, ‘he was my greatest audience.’67
For all its clowning, Shoulder Arms remains an intensely patri-
otic film. There are some nice slapstick gags: Charlie applying
a gasmask to eat some Limburger cheese, the Tramp finding it
 Charlie and the First World War 79

difficult to learn the straight-legged march of the American Army

with his natural inclination to bow his feet and the remark, when
asked how he single-handedly captured thirteen German soldiers,
that he ‘surrounded them’. But beneath the comedy, the Tramp is
essentially a patriotic soldier who serves bravely for a noble cause
(French liberty being portrayed through Edna’s role as a makeshift
Marianne). Trench life is not idealised – the Tramp is shown sleep-
ing in a trench full of water and as scared to go over the top – but
the overall effect is of a brave man doing his bit. Even the end,
when Charlie captures the Kaiser only for it to be revealed that
the film has been a dream all along, reinforces the righteousness
of American participation in the conflict. Shoulder Arms suggests
that it should be the dream of all Americans to do this, and that
getting the pretty girl and the acclaim from previously sceptical
soldiers as a result of serving in the war is a potential outcome of
this war. That this was so at odds with the real life of Charlie’s own
war experience was rarely referenced in the reviews, with The New
York Times simply noting that ‘the fool’s funny’.68

Mildred
As British and American soldiers were engaged in the final push to
defeat the Kaiser’s Army, Charlie was getting married to his first
wife, Mildred Harris. Chapter 4 of this study will give much atten-
tion to his second ‘child bride’ Lita Grey, but Chaplin’s first union
bore much of the same hallmarks. Here we bump up against two
conflicting accounts from the respective parties in the marriage –
although neither appear terribly flattering to Chaplin. First, for all
the talk of youthful beauty and innocence, it is possible that Chaplin
liked his wives to be so young simply to avoid any form of intellec-
tual competition. To his friend Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie remarked
that ‘Mildred was no intellectual heavyweight’. This, however, did
not matter: ‘I had no desire to marry an encyclopaedia – I could
get all my stimulus from a library.’69 In Charlie’s account the affair
began after his chauffeur Kono had remarked to Charlie’s valet Tom
Harrington that Mildred was ‘the most beautiful girl he had ever
seen’. Charlie later recalled that ‘this absurd remark appealed to my
vanity – and that was the beginning’.70 Egged on by the comments
of his employees, ‘the only possible interest [Mildred] had for me
80 Charlie and the First World War

was sex; and to make a romantic approach to it, which I felt would
be expected of me, was too much of an effort’.71 In the belief that
he had gotten Mildred pregnant, Chaplin dispatched Harrington to
buy a ring and to book a wedding venue for that Friday. ‘Perhaps,’
recalled a Charlie hardly overflowing with the love of a new hus-
band, ‘it would all work out all right.’72 He barely seems to have
paid attention during the matrimonials, even having to be reminded
to kiss his new bride at the end of the ceremony.
Chaplin later described meeting Mildred for the first time in late
1917, and placed their marriage as taking place when she was ‘almost
nineteen’.73 It is possible that these were tricks of memory, but delib-
erate sleight of hand seems equally likely. According to Mildred’s
account, the two first met when she was a much younger fourteen
years of age in April 1915. D.W. Griffith, for whom Mildred had
previously acted, introduced the two by telling Charlie that ‘there is
a little girl who is dying to meet you’. Given Charlie’s youthful taste
in his women, such encounters often seem to have begun with such
uncomfortable phrasing. During this first encounter Mildred was
delighted to meet her hero and hear him compliment her golden
curls, but ‘I could not help noticing that he treated me as if I were
a little child.’ After this, she made every effort to style her hair like
Lillian and later Dorothy Gish, and adopt a more adult disposition.
Frequenting cocktail parties at the Hotel Alexandria, glamorously
dressed and on the lookout for Charlie, Mildred received a disap-
pointment when ‘I saw him – but he was not alone. He had with him
a beautiful woman whom I knew well by sight . . . Edna Purviance.’
This hit her hard: ‘I was, after all, but a child and the heart of a
14 year old girl is a strange and tremulous thing.’
A few months later, still aged fourteen, she attended a party thrown
by the actress Blanche Sweet. In a rather similar line to that he later
used on the also young Lita Grey, Charlie saw her and remarked, ‘My,
but you have grown up.’ The two danced together and Charlie did not
leave her side all evening. Asking if he could see her home, Mildred
said that she would have to ask Blanche who ‘smiled roguishly when
I asked her if she minded if “Mr Chaplin” took me home, and readily
gave her permission, at the same time admonishing Charlie to take me
“straight home”.’ Charlie ignored this, driving Mildred to the beach
at Santa Monica where he talked her through the beauty of the ocean
and the moonlight bouncing off it. The twenty-six-year-old Chaplin
 Charlie and the First World War 81

soon gained the trust of Mildred’s mother (oddly over a mutual love
of curry), and the romance was set.74
To give some sense of the unusual nature of the Chaplin–Har-
ris romance, the following table (Table 2.1) lists the fourteen

Table 2.1 Most successful films released 1918–31, and the age of mar-
riage of their star

Film Main star Age at Age of Age

first spouse at gap
marriage first marriage

1918 Mickey Mabel 34 42 –8

Normand
1919 The Miracle Man Lon 22 16 6
Chaney
1920 Way Down East Lilian N/A N/A N/A
Gish
1921 The Four Rudolph 24 26 –2
Horsemen of the Valentino
Apocalypse
1922 Robin Hood Douglas 24 19 5
Fairbanks
1923 The Ten Theodore 44 27 17
Commandments Roberts
1924 The Sea Hawk Milton 28 28 0
Sills
1925 The Big Parade John 21 20 1
Gilbert
1926 Aloma of the Gilda 14 20 –6
South Seas Gray
1927 The Jazz Singer Al Jolson 21 18 3
1928 The Road to Helen 24 28 –4
Ruin Foster
1929 The Broadway Charles 22 16 6
Melody King
1930 All Quiet on the Lew 22 24 –2
Western Front Ayres
1931 City Lights Charlie 29 16 13
Chaplin
Calculated from Variety, 21 June 1932
82 Charlie and the First World War

films that were most successful at the box office from 1918 to
1931, their main star and the age at which they (and their spouse)
embarked on their first marriage. It is a crude measure, but does
provide something of an insight. Other than Theodore Roberts
(who at least married a clear adult), Charlie’s first, second and
fourth marriages (not to say various exploits in between) would all
involve an age gap out of kilter with his contemporaries.
When Charlie and Mildred married on 23 October 1918 she
was sixteen years old (hardly ‘almost nineteen’ as in Charlie’s
story) and, although it proved to be a false alarm, believed that she
was pregnant. Even if we accept Chaplin’s claim that they first met
in the ‘latter part of 1917’ as accurate, his view that ‘the only pos-
sible interest she had for me was sex’ was still referring to a then
fifteen-year-old: ‘a very silly young girl’, in Charlie’s own words.75
This was seedy stuff, and would not be an isolated incident. The
Chaplin–Harris marriage eventually produced a child, Norman
Spencer, who was poorly from birth and died after only three days
in July 1919. The next month the couple separated.
During a divorce case that, by Chaplin’s later standards, was
settled amicably enough, Charlie got wind that Louis B. Mayer
had signed up Mildred to star in future productions. Charlie was
furious and said that if he ever met Mayer he would punch him
on the nose. One day he happened across Mayer in the lobby of
the Hotel Alexandria: ‘Are you Louis B. Mayer? he demanded.
‘I don’t know you, but I am certain that you are! Take off your
glasses.’ ‘What for?’ spluttered the M.G.M. mogul. ‘Take them
off,’ bellowed Charlie. When Mayer obliged, Charlie swung at
him. Later he recalled that he did not know ‘to this day whether or
not I carried out my intention of hitting him on the nose’. Mayer
started swinging back, at which point Charlie slipped and fell to
the ground. A nearby Los Angeles Times reporter saw the incident
and asked, ‘What’s this all about Mr Chaplin?’ ‘Nothing,’ cried a
sheepish Charlie, who promptly fled the scene.76
Such indignities aside, Charlie had had a good war and immedi-
ate aftermath. He had survived. He was rich to a point that would
have been unfathomable five years earlier. And he now had full
creative control over his art. Yet the war had marked him out as
a divisive figure, and someone who could no longer be viewed
as just a comedian. Even at the height of his fame, Charlie now
 Charlie and the First World War 83

had to watch his back. The Little Tramp was now, for some, a
big coward. Indeed, during Charlie’s 1921 visit to London Harry
Crocker recalled that some letters received during this trip con-
tained a white feather – the symbol of cowardice, of not doing
‘one’s bit’ during the conflict. Others included ‘an ironic German
cross for his war effort’. Even if one British soldier would send
Charlie four of the medals he had won on the battlefield because
‘you have never been properly recognized’, the recipient of this
generosity would now be a marked man.77 Once sexual contro-
versy was matched with its political equivalent his enemies would
be ready to pounce.

Notes
1 Alistair Cooke, Six Men (London, 2008), 31.
2 Ibid., 34.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Michael Ball and David Sunderland, An Economic History of London,
1800–1914 (London, 2001), 162.
6 Steven J. Ross, Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shap-
ing of Class in America (Princeton, 1998), 3.
7 Ibid., 32.
8 Ibid., 57.
9 Ibid., 69.
10 Ibid., 57.
11 That is not to say that Chaplin’s work could not be conservative in
other ways. See later comments on Easy Street and A Dog’s Life.
The dream sequence of Modern Times could also be included in this
bracket.
12 Ross, Working-Class Hollywood, 69.
13 Ibid., 70.
14 Peter Bailey, ‘Conspiracies of Meaning: Music-Hall and the Know-
ingness of Popular Culture’, Past and Present, 144 (1994), 141.
15 Ross, Working-Class Hollywood, 73.
16 Orwell’s work is readily available for free online, including via the
Project Gutenberg site: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.
html#part10 (accessed 7 November 2016).
17 Ross, Working-Class Hollywood, 77.
18 Ibid., 81.
19 Marxism Today, March 1978, 96.
20 Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography (London, 2003), 138.
21 Ibid., 138, 149.
22 Ibid., 153.
84 Charlie and the First World War

23 Ibid., 154.
24 James L. Neibaur, ‘Chaplin at Essanay: Artist in Transition’, Film
Quarterly, 54/1 (2000), 23–5.
25 Ibid., 23.
26 Libby Murphy, The Art of Survival: France and the Great War
Picaresque (New Haven, CT, 2016), 213–14.
27 Daily Worker, 15 May 1949.
28 Parker Tyler, ‘Kafka’s and Chaplin’s “Amerika”’, The Sewanee
Review, 58/2 (1950), 299–311, 299.
29 Ibid., 301.
30 Buster Keaton, My Wonderful World of Slapstick (New York, 1960),
126.
31 Ibid.
32 All quotes in this paragraph via David Robinson, Chaplin: His Life
and Art (London, 1992), 131–2.
33 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 172.
34 The Times, 28 August 1915.
35 The Times, 31 August 1915.
36 The Times, 6 December 1915.
37 Evening Times, 8 July 1915.
38 Punch, 25 September 1915.
39 Jerry Epstein, Remembering Charlie: The Story of a Friendship (London,
1988), 17.
40 Aberdeen Journal, 22 October 1947.
41 Washington Post report via COP/CCP/5.1.
42 Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War (Cambridge, 2008), 72–3.
43 Keaton, Wonderful World, 98.
44 Max Pemberton, Lord Northcliffe: A Memoir, (London, 1922), vii.
45 Cited in J. Lee Thompson, Politicians, the Press and Propaganda:
Lord Northcliffe and the Great War (Kent, OH, 1999), 66.
46 Ibid., 67.
47 All via Ibid., chs 4 and 5.
48 Cited in Suzanne W. Collins, Calling All Stars: Emerging Politi-
cal Authority and Cultural Policy in the Propaganda Campaign of
World War I (PhD thesis, New York University, 2008), 303–4.
49 As per the Cornishman, 30 March 1916.
50 Liverpool Echo, 29 March 1916.
51 The Economist, 29 April 1916.
52 Collins, Calling All Stars, 303–4.
53 Harry Crocker’s unpublished memoir, ‘Charlie Chaplin: Man and
Mime’, MHL/HRC, VII–11.
54 Chaplin Interview Transcript, MHL/Charlie Chaplin Interview [CCI]
33.f–302.
55 Reported in Aberdeen Evening Express, 17 April 1918.
56 New York Sun, 7 December 1917.
57 For example, Sheffield Evening Telegraph, 16 April 1918.
 Charlie and the First World War 85

58 Printed (among others) in Liverpool Echo, 29 March 1916.

59 Also true of the French Army. For a persuasive account, see Murphy,
The Art of Survival, ch.8.
60 The Times, 22 November 1916.
61 See, e.g., Q3237, Q5524 and Q8904 within the Ministry of Infor-
mation First World War Official Collection, Imperial War Museum,
London.
62 Portland Oak Journal, 5 August 1917.
63 Sunday Pictorial, 5 September 1915.
64 Steven J. Ross, Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped
American Politics (Oxford, 2011), 20.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid., 22.
67 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 218–19.
68 The New York Times, 21 October 1918.
69 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 229.
70 Ibid., 227.
71 Ibid.
72 Ibid., 228.
73 Ibid.
74 All via Ottawa Citizen, 14 March 1936.
75 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 226.
76 Crocker, ‘Man and Mime’, MHL/HRC, VII–32.
77 Crocker, ‘Man and Mime’, MHL/HRC, VIII–4.
3 Moscow or Manchester?
Chaplin’s views on
capitalism before the
Depression took hold

Whatever else had befallen him, by the end of the First World War
Charlie Chaplin had proved an astonishingly successful capitalist.
Here was a man from a humble background, possessive of a com-
edic skill that people wished to pay money to witness, who had
combined both these elements to accrue a virtually unprecedented
level of wealth. The bluntest measure we have of this rise is his
weekly salary. From £10 (~$50) a week working for Fred Karno,
Chaplin’s film contracts successively brought him $150 each week
from December 1913 at Keystone, $1,250 from November 1914
at Essanay, $10,000 from February 1916 at Mutual and more
than $20,000 in his June 1917 ‘Million Dollar a Year’ contract
at First National. Just counting the returns from his movie-studio
contracts, his wage had increased 137-fold in under four years in
the United States. This was the American Dream personified. An
immigrant, ironically partly through The Immigrant, made good.
This level of wealth was the subject of much discussion – as it
would be again in the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash. When
Chaplin visited London to promote The Kid in 1921, the British
press welcomed back their now rich prodigal son. The Star noted
that

Charlie Chaplin’s wealth is strange in our eyes because he

had nothing solid with which to secure it. No silver mines,
no merchandise, no cunning wares, not even a tin box full
of wild-cat mine stock. He has done it all with a pair of bad
boots, a pair of very awkward feet, a pair of very baggy trou-
sers, a toy moustache, a toy cane, and a shocking bad hat.
 Views on capitalism 87

This seems a very inadequate stock in trade to produce a sal-

ary of a million dollars a year, but it is a great fact.1

That publication did not blame the filmmaker, however: ‘It may
reveal an unfortunate kink in human nature, but it does not reveal
an injustice to anybody that Charlie should not be rich, while
we are all, alas! Poor.’ Instead, they mused on the extraordinary
expansion of film that had made it possible:

We already hear the cold voice of the ‘highbrows’ inquiring

why it is that Charlie’s old boots should give him a salary of
1,000,000 dollars while doctors and saints have to live on £300
a year and less . . . If he were acting his comedies on a theatrical
stage he would not receive 1,000,000 dollars a year or anything
like it, simply because no theatres would hold enough people in
a year to pay him so much for seeing him.

Chaplin was a pioneer – someone who had taken a new medium,

and created a product that millions of Americans were prepared
to buy into. So it is worth stressing what is, perhaps, an obvious
point: Chaplin did not hate capitalism, far from it. Indeed, as we
will see, although he surrounded himself with several left-wing
thinkers, he was able to distinguish between productive and preda-
tory forms of free market activity. He was also someone people
were as likely to ascribe to a victory of Adam Smith as they were
Karl Marx.
Many linked the Little Tramp to capitalism at this stage. For
example, in March 1921 an English Conservative Member of
Parliament, W.H. Sugden, set out to define what capitalism
was in a speech to local constituents. He told his audience that
‘by capitalism he meant commodity production, profit-making
and everything that furnished income’. And as to what personi-
fied this phenomenon: ‘Charlie Chaplin and Sir Harry Lauder
were both examples of Capitalism.’2 At this stage he may well
have said ‘exemplars’. This chapter, therefore, sets out the twin
tracks on which Chaplin’s politics would be based: a belief
that capitalism could be harnessed to positive ends, and how
to nudge it in the right direction when it was not. We begin
with the latter.
88 Views on capitalism

Max Eastman, Rob Wagner and Chaplin’s

early political development
Chaplin’s generally capitalistic stance aside, it is undeniable that
he was interested in the advance of the political left across the
globe. Picking up any newspaper over the previous years would
have furnished this fascination: the overthrow of the Russian Tsar
in March 1917, the Communist takeover of power eight months
later and a subsequent civil war between those seeking to preserve
the old order and the revolutionaries desiring to protect their take-
over would all be followed attentively by the screen comedian.
This burgeoning interest was, however, helped by three left-wing
intellectuals who had regular access to Chaplin in the period of
his greatest fame: Max Eastman, Rob Wagner and Upton Sinclair.
Sinclair we will deal with in the chapter on the 1930s, but it was
the First World War that, one way or another, drew the other two
into Chaplin’s circle.
Chaplin’s early political thoughts are worth teasing out partly
because of the consistently pro-communist views that opponents
would later attempt to pin on him. Much of this can be laid at the
door of communist newspaper The Daily Worker. In 1944, that
publication described him as ‘a long friend of the Soviet Union
since 1917’. During his visa problems in 1952 it noted that ‘a year
or so after 1917 Chaplin joined the ranks of artists and profes-
sionals who upheld the world-shaking Russian revolution’.3 Later
right-wing opponents leapt onto these idle boasts, noting that ‘the
Daily Worker, official organ of the Communist Party, has reviewed
the life and activities of Chaplin in the most glowing terms’.4 This,
they argued, was proof of Charlie’s long-term disloyalty of Amer-
ica. Yet as Rob Wagner and Max Eastman both found, it was
harder to get Charlie to raise the red flag than his loose tongue
occasionally made it appear.
In 1915 Rob Wagner began working with Chaplin, ostensibly
aiding the comedian in dealing with the volume of correspondence
his new-found fame had burdened him with. Wagner had worked
for Keystone previously and was something of a polymath – spend-
ing his days variously organising for the Socialist Party, writing
bits of freelance journalism, working for major film executives in a
variety of ways, including script writing, and teaching high-school
 Views on capitalism 89

wrestling. The two were no doubt connected by the fact that, in

part, Wagner’s conversion to the socialist cause had been expedited
by a trip to London in 1901 – a location that had similarly done so
much to influence Charlie’s own life. The connection was crucial.
For Joyce Milton, ‘Wagner became [Chaplin’s] political mentor.’
However, while ‘Wagner talked like a radical . . . he usually took
care to keep his politics and his income producing activities sepa-
rate. Charlie, however, lacked this self-protective instinct.’5
Wagner not only helped Chaplin articulate his preconceived
opinions in a more concise manner, but also helped shape his
thought in new directions. Recalling their early days, Chaplin
wrote, ‘I bought books on sociology and I began to realize that
there were many unseen forces at work in our social system. It was
not that I was for socialism. What I was against, as Rob Wagner
pointed out, was the abuses of capitalism.’ Chaplin continued:
‘Socialism casts grey aura over everything, I would argue, and
that if we did not work for profit there would be no incentive.
Rob would counter my ignorance with the fact that “The Post
Offices system throughout the world was not run for profit but
for service.”’6 Advocating such a view then, as now, did not neces-
sarily mean out-and-out communism. For one, nationalisation of
the means of distribution was, by 1918, the official British Labour
Party position – a party that was ‘establishment’ enough to see its
first Prime Minister in office by January 1924. Yet by the early
1920s Chaplin was taking Wagner’s line even further: ‘It was one
of the greatest mistakes the Government could make to restore
the railroads to private ownership. The postal department is run
by the government and I see no reason why the railroads should
not be [too].’7
More difficult to explain – certainly to those out to label Wagner
or Chaplin as communists – was the fact that, on 4 March 1919,
Wagner and Chaplin would attend a lecture entitled ‘Hands Off
Russia’ given by Max Eastman in Los Angeles. With both the Brit-
ish and Americans having intervened in the civil war on the side
of the anti-Bolshevik ‘White’ army in Russia, such a stance was
controversial if not without its supporters. In any case, after the
lecture Chaplin would show Eastman around his studios on La
Brea, and the two then went for a swim, and began horsing about
for the studio cameras. According to one early Chaplin biographer
90 Views on capitalism

Theodore Huff, ‘Max Eastman appears to have been the first polit-
ical intellectual to influence [Chaplin].’ Certainly, Eastman was, in
his own words, ‘the only Socialist agitator who opposed the world
war and supported the Russian revolution and yet managed to stay
out of jail’.8 In what some would have taken as a tell-tale sign of
his then political compass, Chaplin admired Eastman’s ‘restraint’.
As editor of The Masses (forced to close after it was alleged to
have broken the terms of the new wartime Espionage Act) and
then its successor The Liberator, Eastman was Chaplin’s link into
the burgeoning intellectual climate of Greenwich Village, including
thinkers such as Waldo Frank and the Jamaican-American poet
Claude McKay.
As Huff noted, ‘Having seen poverty in his own childhood,
Chaplin was naturally interested in any plans for social better-
ment . . . he was drawn to any doctrine which seemed to promise
or vaguely connote freedom.’9 In the early 1920s, studio hand
Jim Tully recalled that ‘the radicals came for his attention and
pity. He was worried constantly for the poor in Russia, when that
unhappy country was mentioned. John Reed’s name came in the
conversation, and then Max Eastman’s.’10 Chaplin later described
himself as ‘intellectually a fellow-traveller’ of such types. Since his
vaudeville days he had begun to read political tracts, but ‘being a
slow reader, I browse. Once I am familiar with the thesis and the
style of an author, I invariably lose interest.’11 Plato, Locke and
Kant were all read ‘piecemeal’ by Chaplin, but he much preferred
the form of intellectual conversation with which Eastman was able
to furnish him.
Very occasionally, Chaplin would attempt to pay his politics for-
ward to others in the movie industry. One early witness to Chap-
lin’s political conversion was his great rival Buster Keaton. As the
two great silent comedians sat drinking a beer in Keaton’s kitchen,
neither could know that vague comments Chaplin would make
between the two in 1920 would set the course for such a lengthy
period of overtly leftist political engagement from the Englishman.
By his own admission, Keaton had ‘gone his whole life almost
unaware of politics, and I only wish my old friend had done the
same’.12 Chaplin’s financial partner at United Artists D.W. Griffith
was another who sensed where the wind was blowing, telling Max
Eastman after hearing the leftist firebrand speak that ‘I take my
 Views on capitalism 91

hat off to you. You are a braver man than I am.’13 Charlie did not
demur from such utterances, however. As Keaton and Chaplin
chatted away, Chaplin began ‘going on at a great rate about some-
thing called communism which he had just heard about’. In light
of the Russian revolution of 1917 and the Palmer Raids in the US
of November 1919 and January 1920 (resulting in the deporta-
tion of more than 500 foreign citizens deemed ‘radicals’), ‘just
heard about’ must have been dramatic licence on Keaton’s part.
Nevertheless, on that occasion Charlie said that ‘communism was
going to change everything, abolish poverty. The well would help
the sick, the rich would help the poor.’ Becoming more agitated,
Chaplin banged the table and exclaimed that ‘what I want is that
every child should have enough to eat, shoes on his feet, and a roof
over his head!’ Reasonably enough, Keaton replied, ‘But Charlie,
do you know anyone who doesn’t want that?’ Keaton may indeed
have had a point. But with the ranks of the American unemployed
swelling from an average of about 950,000 in 1919 to 1.7 million
in 1920 to more than 5 million by 1921, the urgency that Chaplin
was expressing was hardly unwarranted.14
By 1921 Charlie’s various statements and friendships had
cemented the idea of him as a political figure. When he returned
to Europe to coincide with the release of The Kid that February he
was bombarded with questions of this type in an impromptu press
conference that took place in Cherbourg, France. A ping-pong
game of political debate ensued: ‘Will you visit Ireland?’ ‘I don’t
expect to do so.’ ‘What do you think of the Irish question?’ ‘It
requires too much thought.’ ‘Are you a Bolshevik?’ ‘I am an artist,
not a politician.’ ‘What do you think of Lenin?’ ‘I think him a very
remarkable man . . . because he is expressing a new idea.’ ‘Do you
believe in Bolshevism?’ ‘I am not a politician.’15 Given his praise
for Lenin, the Bolshevik question was perhaps understandable –
but it spoke to a general misunderstanding of the complexity of
Chaplin’s world view.
As Chaplin had previously struggled to get across to Rob Wag-
ner, much of his political advocacy, as such, was more about an
enlightened capitalism than the dead hand of the controlling state.
Throughout his career Chaplin’s world view feared public-sector
encroachment on individual liberty as much as the vicissitudes of
the free market, and in the early 1920s it was no different. In 1921
92 Views on capitalism

Chaplin told Thomas Burke that while ‘many people have called
me a socialist my radical views have been much misunderstood.
I am not a Socialist, nor am I looking for a new order of things.’
The hero in this vision was a man he would later mock merci-
lessly in Modern Times: Henry Ford. In 1914 Ford had made the
announcement that he would voluntarily shorten the working day
for those in his factories from nine to eight hours, and, even more
dramatically, would introduce a new wage scale that more than
doubled the minimum daily wage for his workers from $2.34 to
$5. In 1919 this became $6 and then by 1929 $7. This astonishing
move was precisely the type of productive rather than predatory
capitalism the early Chaplin so admired. ‘For a long time,’ Chaplin
pronounced, ‘capital has held sway and declared that the present
order is the only one. But Henry Ford’s methods rather disprove
that, don’t they?’ Ford’s new wage scale had ‘made profitable shar-
ing absolutely practicable’ and he was justly ‘getting all the busi-
ness of the country because he is fair’.
The only question was how to increase minimum wages across
the board: ‘Henry Ford has proved the practical result of paying
the workers well and keeping them happy.’16 Eventually the motor
industry indeed caught up with Ford’s generosity in this regard.
Although Chaplin would most seriously settle on theories of
under-consumption a few years later, Ford also proved something
of a vanguard here, too. Ford’s justification for the new wage scale
was after all to increase ‘the buying power of our own people, and
they increased the buying power of other people, and so on and
on’. ‘It is this thought of enlarging buying power by paying high
wages and selling at low prices that is behind the prosperity of this
country,’ Ford concluded.17
And yet, given what we know about the car manufacturer’s
anti-Semitism, Chaplin’s praise of Ford still rings oddly. In January
1919 Ford had taken over the running of the Dearborn Indepen-
dent that he soon turned into a newspaper whipping up notions of
a Jewish conspiracy on a weekly basis. In 1920 a compendium of
these articles would be published under the title The International
Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, and Ford would go on to be
the only American to be mentioned (positively) in Hitler’s Mein
Kampf. But his views were not just aired to right-wing crackpots.
Due to Ford imposing its sale on Ford car dealerships, by 1925
 Views on capitalism 93

about 900,000 copies of the Dearborn Independent were in print.

These did not include Ford’s own writings from cover to cover,
but the newspaper knew its job, often ran stories based on Ford’s
half-conceived anti-Semitic verbal rants and generally toed its
proprietor’s line until it was forced to close at the end of 1927
(under the weight of legal action against its controversial content).
Dearborn Independent rants included several against Chaplin.
On 12 November 1921, for instance, the paper ran a story on
‘The Gentle Art of Changing Jewish Names’. It asserted that ‘the
Jewish habit of changing names is responsible for the immense
camouflage that has concealed the true character of [recent] Rus-
sian events’. ‘The list of [Bolshevik] controllers of Russia,’ Ford
asserted, was replete with Jewish communists who had concealed
their racial or religious identities. The Dearborn Independent went
on to note that ‘the same may be said with reference to Kaplan, a
very common name. Charlie Chaplin’s name was, in all probabil-
ity, Caplan, or Kaplan. At any rate, this is what the Jews believe
about their great “star” [whereas] Non-Jews have read of Charlie
as a “poor English boy.”’ The name issue was part of a wider tap-
estry for those opposed to Chaplin’s later political views to suggest
he had something to hide. The fact that Charlie was neither a Jew
nor a communist barely seemed to matter.

Charlie the anarchist

If – and it is an ‘if’ – Chaplin could be linked to any one radi-
cal ideology during the 1920s, some posit the case for anarchism
over and above communism. On several occasions he told the
loyal Harry Crocker that, if he was ‘to become any form of politi-
cal entity, he would be an anarchist’. By this he did not mean
‘the form of anarchism now usually associated with the term – a
war on human society as it is constituted at present, hatred of
the bourgeois and propertied classes as such, and a systematic
effort to establish, especially by means of explosive, a state of
terrorism’. It was more a rejection of the state per se, rather than
individual rulers or classes within it – a late Victorian populism
taken into the Jazz Age. For Crocker, ‘Charlie’s dislike of rules led
him to express himself in favour of that form of anarchy which
means a negation of government . . . He objected to all authority.
94 Views on capitalism

If men must have government, any form of it was equally good

and equally bad.’ The 1920s was not the ideal time to set forward
such views, however: ‘It was his misfortune that the majority of
those to whom he stated his views either thought he was joking or
saw in him a bomb thrower.’18
Certainly from the early shorts the Tramp had often been an
anarchic figure. His propensity to get one over on authority figures
from policemen to employers, his regular lack of a fixed place of
abode and even the violence and thieving he occasionally used to
get what he wanted – these were evidence of a political philosophy
projected onto the big screen. As Christian Delage notes, ‘Charlie,
the Little Tramp, often found himself on the wrong side of the
Police, the Law, Big Business, the Church – all those who hold
power in an organized society.’19 Yet it was not all one way. The
‘dream’ of the Tramp is often shown to be a stable home life in the
country – with Paulette in the kitchen while Charlie beckons a cow
over to provide the milk in Modern Times, or in the saccharine
ending with Edna and Scraps’ puppies in A Dog’s Life. The latter is
indeed perhaps overly neat, but remains a rather moving contrast
to the standard trope of the Tramp leaving down an open road,
alone. The Tramp is anarchic because the state has failed him, not
because he does not want what the rest of society does.
Certainly as the political establishment really went for Charlie
from the mid-1930s onwards there was a more sharply defined
anarchist streak to Chaplin’s work and pronouncements. Keystone
Chaplin was certainly an anarchist, and so too would be the world
view of Monsieur Verdoux. But the lengthy stretch in the middle
is rather more ambiguous.
Such ambiguity would be typified by a mini-speech he would
give when staying with the Astors in 1931. He began by declar-
ing that ‘the world is suffering from too much government and
the expense of it’. Certainly this view would accord more with
anarchism than it would the communist regime in Moscow. That
being said, it rather also suggested Charlie’s belief in the Marxist
principle of the state eventually withering away once its usefulness
had expired. Yet in the next sentence Chaplin made a complete
U-turn. While many anti-waste Conservatives at the dinner table
probably nodded along the principle of the world ‘suffering too
much government’, Chaplin suddenly remarked that he would
 Views on capitalism 95

‘have government ownership of the banks and revise many of the

laws and those of the Stock Exchange. I would create a govern-
ment bureau of economics, which would control prices, interests
and profits.’ In contemporary British terms this was almost exactly
the position forwarded by the Labour Party at the 1931 General
Election. As such, he was generally closer to that movement than
the anarchist tendency.

Charlie the mogul

As some recognised, however, this encouragement of individual
freedom was symptomatic of a barely submerged megaloma-
nia. For someone who hated the notion of empire, Charlie had
become de facto Viceroy of his own cinematic fiefdom. Sick of
being reliant on others’ time, in 1917 Charlie decided to build his
own studio. Buying Hollywood Orange Grove – which took up
around a block on La Brea Avenue and nearly the same amount
on Sunset Boulevard – he constructed a complex that still stands
to this today (amusingly it is presently occupied by the Muppets).
At the time, La Brea and Sunset were ‘mere dirtroads’ yet would
come to form two of Hollywood’s main arteries. Indeed, one of
the few truly poor business decisions Chaplin would make was
to not sell this land at the top of the market. Having bought it
in 1917 for $34,000, in the late 1920s Charlie received an offer
to buy the plot for $750,000 that he refused – thereby missing
out on a large profit at a time his ongoing divorce case meant he
sorely needed the money.
Yet these new buildings held a symbolic significance for Charlie.
As Harry Crocker noted, ‘The office buildings which lie along La
Brea were in fulfilment of Charlie’s plans, a bit of old England.’20
As the romantic novelist Elinor Glyn wrote to a friend, ‘He is an
absolute autocrat in his own Studio, and that of course is why
his Pictures are always such things of art and magnetize the
public – they do not show the muddle which five or six separate
wills produce.’21 Having had so little control over his life as a
young man Charlie was determined that no vision but his should
permeate his pictures. As the ideas for feature-length business for
the Tramp began to dry up by the 1930s this would subtly change,
but at the height of his career in the roaring twenties the studios
96 Views on capitalism

at La Brea served as his cinematic White House in which he alone

was the boss.
Charlie was not the first South London boy to have achieved
astonishing fame and wealth through the arts. As Alan Fischler
has shown, Arthur Sullivan – of Gilbert and Sullivan fame – had
experienced a similarly meteoric rise half a century or so earlier.
Born in 1842 in Lambeth, music soon became to this composer ‘a
means not to money, but rather to social glory. Once he emerged
as Britain’s leading composer, he earned an ample income; but,
instead of buying himself houses with it, he made liberal donations
to the coffers of the Monte Carlo casinos.’ In doing so, rather like
Chaplin, ‘his companions on these Continental junkets mattered
more to him than did the cost’.22 Being seen with ‘the right sort’ of
people was the real acme of power. For Charlie, if this could only
be achieved through bossing about his underlings at the studio,
then so be it.
As with Sullivan, there must have been an element of adopt-
ing the ostentatious trappings of wealth to try to communicate
to it. In a sense, Charlie became such an interesting historical
figure because he was always something of a nouveau riche fish
out of water. An Englishman in Los Angeles. A movie maker
among politicians. And a former pauper mixing with the global
intellectual and economic elite. But this led to a series of faux
pas that, although minor matters of form, likely embarrassed a
man who was, to his core, always making up for the impover-
ishment of his childhood. During his 1921 trip to England he
would meet only the ‘most proper of intellectuals’. Through
Lady Astor, this number included an introduction to George
Bernard Shaw. Once she had introduced the two, Lady Astor
noted, ‘You two probably have a lot to say to each other, so I’ll
run along.’ Crocker recalled what played out next: ‘The Beard
looked down; the comedian looked up. There was an electric
silence which Chaplin feared to break, and Shaw failed to break.
A butler announced that dinner was served and, relieved, both
abandoned their posts on the grate. Without the exchange of
two words.’23 Charlie would get over such hesitancy in later
years (Shaw would become a friend), but its early impact was
crippling: he had ideas about how the world should change, and
was still taking in new ones, but his nerves were holding him
 Views on capitalism 97

back. In the early 1920s he was always feeling his way from the
silver screen into the intellectual sphere.
He could also be bizarrely petty about totally trivial matters. In
1920 Punch magazine printed an article about Charlie that sug-
gested that he did not like the works of Shakespeare. Charlie fired
off a terse letter to that publication’s editor, Owen Seaman, stating
that ‘were that the case, I fully realize that the loss would be mine,
but as it happens, the statement is lacking in accuracy, and just in
this instance I should prefer not to be misquoted’. Informing the
editor that ‘what I told Mr Faulkner was that personally I prefer
Shakespeare for private reading and never derive so much genuine
pleasure from his works when I see them in a stage rendering’, he
demanded a retraction. ‘I trust that you will give this statement
of mine the publicity necessary to remove an entirely wrong and
to me very unpleasant impression.’ In the end, Seaman conceded
the point, but it did not seem the be all and end all.24 One won-
ders if Charlie had been more assiduous in correcting the politi-
cal half-truths printed about him in the 1920s, he may well have
benefited from it down the line.
To secure his ego some more, Charlie also erected a new house in
Beverly Hills. This again had a touch of his homeland. Elinor Glyn
reported, ‘Charlie Chaplin’s house is most beautiful but like Eng-
land too – and they have the proper staffs of European servants –
and everything is beautifully done, but this costs, in this country,
simply a colossal sum of money.’25 Allied to this slice of the old
world were very much signs of the new – a cinema screen was
concealed in the roof, to be let down as demanded, while Charlie’s
love for tennis was indulged with a new court.26 His book shelves
contained numerous prominent British and Irish authors, includ-
ing Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, J.M. Barrie and Thomas Burke.
These trappings helped foster an atmosphere where ambitious
young types flattered and did not challenge Chaplin. As Jim Tully
later wrote,

Hollywood is the most crowded carnival in America. Too

often the stale wine of an over-stimulated nation, there are
far too many inside the tent who should never have joined in
the first place. They come from everywhere, those with too
much to give, and those with not enough – the big and the
98 Views on capitalism

small – the brave and the always defeated. In over twenty

years I have heard the word ‘genius’ applied to more hams
than Armour could supply the most patriotic of nations at
wartime.27

This could have been applied to Chaplin more than any other.
Like many a mogul, he had become powerful to the point where
few would question his actions until it was too late. Unlike the
democratic politicians with whom he would have dealings, there
was no brake or check to Chaplin’s power.
The most obvious and long-standing facet of Chaplin’s mogul
status was the foundation of United Artists, however. Initially this
started as an artistic quarrel. After A Dog’s Life and Shoulder
Arms Charlie felt that First National were not backing the type of
art he wanted to make to a significant enough degree. The extra
funds he required were not ‘much . . . an additional ten or fifteen
thousand dollars a picture’. Given his ‘Million Dollar a Year’
contract he may have had a point. Still, meeting First National
executives in Los Angeles he noted that ‘exhibitors were rugged
merchants in those days and to them films were merchandise cost-
ing so much a yard’. Charlie thought his requests reasonable, but
later noted that he ‘might as well have been a lone factory worker
asking General Motors for a raise’. After a brief silence at the
boardroom table, one First National executive merely muttered,
‘Well, Charlie, you’ve signed a contract and we expect you to live
up to it.’ After angrily replying that ‘you’re not dealing with sau-
sages, you know, but individual enthusiasm’, Charlie ‘could not
understand their attitude, as I was considered the biggest drawing
card in the country’.28
Perhaps he had a point, perhaps not. Either way, what happened
next certainly illustrated Charlie’s mettle for change. His brother
Sydney had heard rumours that all the big motion-picture produ-
cing companies were looking to merge. The next day Sydney met
with Doug Fairbanks and Mary Pickford whose Paramount con-
tracts were expiring and the studio had as yet done nothing about
it. All agreed that such prevarication probably had something to
do with the impending merger and so ‘we all agreed to hire a
detective’. This detective, ‘a very clever girl, smart and attractive
looking’, wormed her way into the attentions of ‘an executive of
 Views on capitalism 99

an important producing company’. For three nights, staving off his

affections, she gained a complete story of what the big companies
were planning: ‘a forty-million dollar merger of all the producing
companies and . . . sewing up every exhibitor in the United States
with a five-year contract.’ This would mean a de facto monopoly
over the entire industry, limiting what artists such as Charlie could
both be paid and likely the types of films they could make.
To resist this, the plan was simply that Douglas, Mary, Char-
lie, D.W. Griffith and W.S. Hart should make an announcement
that they would form their own company, sell their productions
on the open market rather than through a block-booking system
and remain independent. This was a bluff – ‘our objective was
only to stop exhibitors from signing a five-year contract with this
proposed merger’.29 Upon making this announcement, however,
the next day the heads of several production companies offered
to resign their posts and become President of United Artists. The
front-page coverage the story received was further evidence that
perhaps the idea could be a success. The bluff became a reality – on
5 February 1919 United Artists (UA) was incorporated with 20
per cent stakes for Pickford, Chaplin, Fairbanks and Griffith. The
balance was held by William McAdoo, who had returned to legal
private practice by this stage, but who had previously served as
the US Secretary of the Treasury at the time of the Liberty Loans
that Chaplin had helped sell.
Charlie’s own contribution to the UA pot was actually rela-
tively modest at first. Working out his First National contract
until 1923, it was only The Gold Rush in 1925 that saw him
deliver the first bone fide hit to the company. In the interim, Pick-
ford (Pollyanna, Little Lord Fauntleroy and Tess of the Storm
Country) and Fairbanks (The Three Musketeers, Robin Hood
and The Thief of Bagdad) did much of the heavy lifting at the
box office. Still, under the leadership of Joseph M. Schenck from
1925 the company was put on firm footing, negotiated the reten-
tion of its founding members and signed new stars such as Gloria
Swanson. By the mid-1930s it was reporting profits of more than
$1 million a year and had expanded well beyond its position as
challenger company to the big studios. Charlie eventually cashed
out his share in the 1950s for $1.1 million, in part to pay for back
taxes owed to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
100 Views on capitalism

Within the very ethos of UA were signs of Chaplin’s own world

view, however. In short, he was sick of carrying what he considered
to be ‘lesser’ filmmakers and having the studios shift mediocre
products on the back of his own superior art. As such, Tino Balio
notes, at United Artists ‘each picture was to be sold and promoted
individually. Block booking was out. In no way could one United
Artists release be used to influence the sale of another UA product.
Merit alone would determine a picture’s success.’30 Chaplin may
have had some socialistic inclinations, but business was business.
In many ways he embraced the ‘dog eat dog’ atmosphere of capi-
talism in deed as much as he protested against it in prose.

Chaplin and his money

Partially through UA, Chaplin had become an astonishingly
wealthy man who clearly also had many ideas about the state of
modern politics. However, there were two problems that Chap-
lin’s early political interlopers soon found. The first was to get
him to commit his ideas to paper. In the mid-1920s Jim Tully
recalled that ‘a London editor asked him for an article on social
conditions in America’. Chaplin knew ‘little of the subject’ but
was intrigued enough to agree. ‘He labored valiantly for some
time,’ Tully remembers, ‘but could not get his thoughts in order.
A few lines of misspelled words were the result. He lost interest.’
Tully would often wind his boss up: ‘How’s the article coming
along, Charlie?’ This did not go down well. ‘His eyes narrowed
at my barbed condescension. He did not reply.’31 As we will see,
particularly with reference to German war debt, this issue was
to a large degree solved over the next ten years: Chaplin became
more committed to setting his thoughts to the page, and, due to
his increasingly slow rate of cinematic production, he had more
time to do so.
But, second, if a fool and his money are easily parted, Chaplin
was no fool. Max Eastman liked Charlie as a man and a com-
edian, but he also wanted his financial investment. When seeking
to raise money for his journal The Liberator Eastman encountered
an enthusiastic Chaplin. Charlie initially claimed he wanted to
help: ‘He said it with some warmth and then gave us $25.’ Going
by Charlie’s then salary, this equated to about 12 minutes’ pay.
 Views on capitalism 101

This taught Eastman that although ‘Charlie likes radical ideas; he

likes talk about transforming the world, but [he] doesn’t like to
pay for the talk, much less the transformation’. As Harry Crocker
recalled, ‘Although Chaplin later gave Eastman $1,000 [to help
with his publication], Eastman learned in 1919 what others were
to learn years later.’32 When interrogated by the FBI in 1948,
Chaplin called any suggestions he had donated to the Communist
Party an ‘unmitigated lie’ but did concede that he had donated to
the Progressive Party campaign then being undertaken by former
Vice-President Henry Wallace. Getting Chaplin to bankroll the
hard left in any meaningful way, however, was a bridge too far.
This must have been particularly galling for his political friends
and would-be allies because not only did Chaplin’s films bring him
astonishing wealth, he also managed to avoid the calamities of the
Wall Street Crash. As we will address in more detail later, Chaplin
was a huge fan of C.H. Douglas’s system of Social Credit. To Chap-
lin, this work stated that ‘basically all profit came out of wages.
Therefore unemployment meant a loss of profit and a diminishing
of capital.’33 As a result, he later recalled that ‘when American
unemployment hit 1.4 million in 1928’ Chaplin promptly sold all
his stocks and bonds, preferring to keep his capital fluid. The day
before Wall Street plummeted Chaplin dined with the composer
Irving Berlin. Berlin’s portfolio then compromised several million
dollars’ worth of investments that had made him a total of more
than $1 million. Chaplin advised him to get out while the going
was good, touting the Douglas argument at him. Berlin was furi-
ous: ‘Why, you’re selling America short!’ A couple of days later,
his investments in ruins, Berlin came round to Chaplin’s studio
‘stunned and apologetic, and wanted to know where I had got
my information’.34 Even when confronted with what must have
seen like the utter vindication of his political world view, however,
Chaplin was unwilling to part with any of his preserved gains to
finance a party able to propagate them more widely.
These gains were also so large because, as Buster Keaton
bemoaned, ‘Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd from the start
were smarter businessmen than I. They became millionaires early
in the game by producing their own pictures and retaining con-
trol of their film properties. They still own these properties. This
means they are in a position to earn fresh fortunes for themselves
102 Views on capitalism

any time they feel like leasing or selling the TV rights to their old
silent movies.’35 The UA example we have already outlined. But
sometimes Chaplin wanted the industry to go even further. Indeed,
when shooting the breeze with Harry Crocker, Charlie outlined a
new scheme to bring movies to the masses – the big studios should
be forced to sell their products to exhibitors at no more than 10
per cent above the cost their films took to make. Crocker kept his
counsel, but ‘Chaplin leaned forward and poked me between the
shoulders to prod forth an answer.’ Refusing to look his boss in
the eye Crocker agreed with Charlie but added, ‘and you are just
the man to inaugurate the experiment. For years you have suc-
ceeded in upping the price on exhibitors for your films as a matter
of prestige to them. You should therefore be the first to come to
their aid in this matter.’ Charlie recoiled: ‘I should say not. This
scheme is not for me. I’m not a business man: I am an artist!’36
Given his almost limitless wealth Charlie’s retention of money
verged on the pathological. When funds for his film projects were
beginning to wane the English eccentric Ivor Montagu wrote to
his friend asking for a helping hand. When he received no answer
he angrily chased Charlie with a message of ‘Wotthehell! When
we wire you we need money you ought to take it that we do need
it, and for some purpose you may be sure more important than
you would be spending it on.’37 In the case of the rather chaotic
Montagu it may have seemed like throwing good money after bad,
but it was indicative of a wider trend.
For a man so wedded to the idea of helping ‘the people’ through
various social programmes, the greatest irony (or hypocrisy)
was that Chaplin always remained incredibly reluctant to pay
the taxes that would help fund them. As Sam Goldwyn noted of
Charlie, ‘His prejudge is against anything that interferes with his
own personal freedom. The censor, the income tax, any supposed
obstruction – these are hateful to him in the degree to which they
infringe upon that coveted sense of power.’38 As Charlie himself
scribbled some years later, ‘You can only tax and extract so much
from people and no more. If it goes beyond a certain amount,
you are going into Socialism or Communism and the present sys-
tem of society will collapse and change in spite of ourselves.’39
To forestall later accusations about his political loyalty, Charlie
claimed in 1942 that he had contributed more than $10 million
 Views on capitalism 103

in American income tax since his arrival in the country – ‘every

cent of it glad’.40
In fact, the connection between Charlie and tax went back many
years. In the Britain he was beginning to prosper in, the then Lib-
eral Government’s famous ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909 had man-
dated the principle of a graduated income tax where, the more
one earned, the higher the marginal tax rate would be. On just
over £500 a year by the time he emigrated to the States, Chaplin
was nowhere near being pulled into the new higher rates of tax for
incomes over £3,000 and £5,000, respectively, however. Indeed,
it would be America where, because of his soon to be astronomi-
cal earnings, Chaplin would feel the effects of recent changes to
fiscal policy.
The Sixteenth Amendment to the US Constitution in 1913 gave
Congress the ‘power to lay and collect taxes incomes, from what-
ever source derived, without apportionment among the several
States’. Ironically, given later events, the poster boy for this shift
in policy would be one Charlie Chaplin. In March 1916, Manhat-
tan became host to a new branch of the IRS and to promote this
undertaking Chaplin was persuaded to take part in a few publicity
photographs as an official explained to him how to fill out the
form. Given that he failed to provide a 1917 declaration to the
authorities he probably should have paid some attention during
these proceedings. In years to come things would only get much
worse.
Chaplin’s later claim to be ‘glad’ to pay ‘every cent’ of tax was
clearly a lie. While he was in the midst of the second divorce woes
that the next chapter outlines, in January 1927 the US government
announced that it was placing a lien on his assets due to underpay-
ment of income tax going back to 1918. The amount Chaplin had
supposedly avoided was $1.35 million (equivalent to about $18
million in 2015), no small sum. Particularly egregious seemed to
be his returns for 1924. Chaplin had various reasons to have filed
a low return for that year – most obviously, the commercial failure
of his first drama A Woman of Paris. But while other huge stars of
1920s Hollywood such as Douglas Fairbanks ($132,190), Gloria
Swanson ($87,075) and Mary Pickford ($34,075) had been seen to
make a ‘fair’ contribution to the IRS, Chaplin’s payment for that
year was the puny $345.81. That sum would not allow one to buy
104 Views on capitalism

a Chevrolet Roadster at the time, let alone form an adequate con-

tribution from one of the richest individuals in America. Newspa-
pers covered this payment as ‘the biggest surprise in screenland’.41
The Chaplins were adept tax avoiders. Joyce Milton’s analysis
of this murky topic covers it in expert detail, but, in essence, while
Charlie was using United Artists as a vehicle to minimise his own
income tax contributions his brother Sydney was concurrently
involved in a whole series of ‘businesses’ almost certainly designed
purely for tax avoidance. From 1918 to 1920, for example, Sydney
Chaplin purchased more than 400 former military planes from the
American government. At a time when air travel was in its infancy,
this was a laughable investment. As Milton notes, ‘There was sim-
ply no way that any commercial air service at the time could have
used forty planes, much less four hundred. Either Syd was a very
great optimist or the purchase was part of a scheme to reduce his
tax liability [by claiming relief for buying from the government].’42
In early 1927 the combination of the tax affair and his crum-
bling personal life brought Chaplin to physical and emotional
exhaustion. The gates of Chaplin’s studios were padlocked shut
and an audit was carried out to assess the value of on-site mate-
rial should the government need to seize it. The IRS was willing to
forgo a criminal prosecution of Chaplin that could lead to prison,
but only should he sign a consent decree acknowledging his crimi-
nal activity and financial liability. Since this could mean deporta-
tion for the non-American Chaplin, he refused. By April 1927,
reluctantly, he, however, consented to the payment of just over $1
million in back taxes. Much of Charlie’s then $16 million wealth
was not liquid and thus there was some difficulty in actually rais-
ing this sum, but eventually the payment was made. It would not
be the last time that Charlie would fall foul of the IRS – even, as
Chapter 9 will note, when he was in 1950s Swiss exile.

Taking him seriously

As this study notes at various points, many politicians, journalists
and authors took Chaplin entirely seriously. This book’s message
that Charlie’s comedy was only a means to an end was well under-
stood at the time. But this was a view hammered home by the
increasingly serious nature of Chaplin’s films. 1923’s A Woman
 Views on capitalism 105

of Paris was Chaplin’s first and only attempt at a purely dramatic

film. Posters for the film came with a message from Chaplin ‘to
the public’ that ‘in order to avoid any misunderstanding, I hereby
announce that I do not appear [in the film]’. Other than the small-
est of cameos as an unrecognisable railway porter, this was indeed
the case. The self-proclaimed ‘first serious drama written and
directed by myself’ proved a critical smash but box-office bomb.
Getting on for a century after its release, A Woman of Paris holds
up as a nuanced portrayal of romance in the 1920s where the main
cad (played by Adolphe Menjou) is charming and charismatic and
the sympathetic heroine Marie St-Clair (Edna Purviance, in a role
that Charlie hoped would launch her dramatic career) is not above
making terrible decisions. Roaring twenties Paris is a place of sex
and debauchery; cigarettes and alcohol are everywhere, and the
effect is mesmerising. For Elinor Glyn, invited to the Fairbanks’
‘charming house in Beverly Hills’ to watch it, the film ‘brought
real life to you across the footlights’. Chaplin’s characters were
‘presented as such people would be – no one gesticulates or goes
through a pantomime’. Correctly, she assumed that ‘the public in
general will not like the picture’ but felt it was one that ‘all think-
ing minds must appreciate’.43
After the poor response to A Woman of Paris, Chaplin needed
a hit and began work on The Gold Rush. The idea came to Char-
lie while spending a weekend with Mary Pickford and Douglas
Fairbanks. Glancing through stereoscopic views of Alaska and
the Klondike, Charlie’s imagination was stimulated: ‘Immediately
ideas and comedy business began to develop, and, although I had
no story, the image of one began to grow.’44 Reading up on the
Donner Party of 1846–7 – where prospectors who had taken a
wrong turn into the Sierra Nevada mountains were forced into
cannibalism to survive – Charlie began to conceive of one of his
most famous scenes where the Tramp cooks his own shoe, the
shoelaces functioning as make-do spaghetti. For six months, he
toiled over the various pieces of comedy business, eventually envel-
oping them in a love story surrounding the Tramp’s pursuit of
Georgia Hale – who substituted for the heavily pregnant Lita.
The plot (which differs somewhat between the 1925 silent ver-
sion and a later 1942 re-release with commentary from Chaplin)
is simple enough, though takes in many twists and turns along
106 Views on capitalism

the way. The basic elements are that a Lone Prospector (Chaplin’s
Tramp) and his reluctant new friend Big Jim have travelled north
to take part in the Klondike Gold Rush that took place in the late
1890s – they know there is gold buried nearby, but the location has
been masked by the snow. The search for gold was indeed arduous
but alluring. During this period thousands of prospectors really
had headed north hoping to find gold in this previously empty
area of North-West Canada. For example, from a population of
500 in 1896 the settlement of Dawson City expanded to a total
of nearly 30,000 just two years later. As depicted in The Gold
Rush, the wealthier prospectors spent their money drinking in the
saloons while the poor shivered in hastily constructed, isolated
wooden huts.
The film narrows in on the issue of hunger on several occasions.
At one point Jim becomes so delirious through lack of food that
he imagines Charlie’s Prospector as a giant chicken and attempts
to shoot him. Snapping out of it, the two eventually kill a bear –
no doubt tasting better than the Tramp’s shoe that they had been
forced to eat earlier. The search for sustenance apart, The Gold
Rush also deals with loneliness. Certainly this had always been
present in Chaplin’s work, but the frozen Canadian backdrop pro-
vided an additional layer of poignancy. After being separated from
Big Jim, the Prospector arrives at one of the hastily constructed
Dawson City-type settlements, and enters a dance hall. In this
building we then encounter Georgia who, irritated at the atten-
tions of Jack, a big and aggressive ladies’ man, decides to dance
with the ‘most deplorable looking tramp in the dance hall’. This, of
course, is Charlie, who is instantly taken and does not understand
the game she is playing. Later, he offers Georgia and her friends an
invitation to his New Year’s Eve dinner, which she breezily accepts
with little intention of actually attending. The shots of the lonely
tramp, sitting at his lovingly prepared table and dreaming of how
the night should have panned out with laughter and merriment
aplenty (including the famous ‘roll dance’), are deeply poignant.
When he then wanders the snowy streets, standing outside the
dance hall as Auld Lang Syne plays, there had perhaps been no
finer shot in Chaplin’s work to this point.
Seeing the effort that the Prospector had put in, and increas-
ingly aware of her own loneliness, Georgia has a change of heart
 Views on capitalism 107

and attempts to make contact with him. But just as the two see
each other he is dragged off by Big Jim to go searching for their
lost cabin, and the lost gold that lies nearby. He has enough time
to shout that he will return as a millionaire, before they depart.
Finding the cabin, they bunk down for the night but, unbeknownst
to the pair, the cabin is then blown to the edge of a cliff – coin-
cidentally right by the gold deposit. After much high-jinks as the
cabin threatens to crash over the edge, the pair just about make it
to safety. Finding the gold, the newly rich pair return to America
on a boat where, again unknown to Jim and Charlie, Georgia is
also on board. Time passes and the Prospector is asked to don
his ragged old clothes for a ‘rags to riches’ photograph that will
appear in a newspaper piece hailing their incredible story. After
hearing that there is a stowaway on board and mistaking this for
Charlie, Georgia attempts to hide him to save him from exposure.
The misunderstanding cleared up, the pair then re-unite – hand
in hand in the 1942 version, and with a kiss in the 1925 silent.
Perhaps due to this happy ending the film was an astonishing suc-
cess. On a budget of c. $923,000 it would gross more than six and
a half million dollars worldwide. After Mary and Doug had been
pushing for so long for Charlie to make a bankable hit for United
Artists, he had well and truly obliged.
His last work of the 1920s, 1928’s The Circus, seemed to mark
something of a return to ‘pure’ comedy for Chaplin. Since its
making coincided with the unhappy divorce from Lita Grey that
we cover in the next chapter, it is not even mentioned in Chap-
lin’s autobiography. To modern tastes, it remains Chaplin’s most
amusing film, however – the comedy that truly stands up to a
twenty-first-century audience in both its inventiveness and execu-
tion. The film is more a meditation on Charlie’s work than it is his
politics. The Tramp unwittingly becomes funny when he is trying
not to be so, but is unable to make his audience laugh when he is
attempting to perform prepared ‘bits’. Chased by the police when
falsely accused of stealing a wallet, Charlie stumbles into a circus
ring and becomes a smash hit completely by accident. Various high-
wire and perilous comedic acts involving monkeys render the film
perhaps Chaplin’s best slapstick performance. More seriously, The
Circus invoked several Chaplinesque themes, including the Tramp
bowing out of a love triangle involving himself, Harry Crocker
108 Views on capitalism

and Merna Kennedy in the belief he was the least suitable part-
ner for the girl, and almost ends on a beautiful shot of the lonely
Tramp, sitting on a box with the circus having left town, and
exhaling deeply in sorrow. Unlike City Lights, however, Chaplin
would follow this by slightly cheating the audience, having the
Tramp stand up and walk away twirling his cane as if happy to be
back on the open-road. It was something of a missed opportunity.
As film had ‘grown up’ so, in a sense, had Chaplin. Although
his political views in the early 1920s were mostly relatively ortho-
dox (albeit interspersed with the odd pro-communist remark), his
art had clearly evolved. Making feature-length cinema without
any elements of pathos would have meant plotting an hour of
purely anarchic comedy, and this held little interest for Charlie
who always wanted to be taken seriously. Had he confined this
desire to be taken seriously to the silver screen his life would have
been much easier. But this would not prove to be the case. Then
again, as we will note in the next chapter, his problems were as
much in the bedroom as they were in the salon, or the film studio.

Notes
1 The Star, 10 September 1921, MHL/HRC/1/9.
2 Northern Daily Mail, 15 March 1921.
3 ‘Fact Sheet Containing Pertinent Material Pertaining to the Commu-
nist Affiliations and Activities of Charlie Chaplin’, Hoover Institute,
Stanford University, California [HOOV], George Sokolsky Papers
[SOK] Box 241 File 3.
4 Clipping of 1949 Senator Cain Speech, HOOV/Elizabeth Churchill
Brown [ECB] Box 18 Folder 13.
5 Joyce Milton, Tramp: The Life of Charlie Chaplin (London, 1996), 127.
6 Scribbled note, undated 1950s, Cineteca di Bologna [CIN]/Charlie
Chaplin Archive [CCA].
7 Undated newspaper clipping ‘The Serious Opinions of Charlie Chap-
lin’, 1921, MAM/CCP Book 12.
8 Theodore Huff, Charlie Chaplin: A Biography (London, 1952), 260.
9 Ibid.
10 ‘The King of Laughter’ manuscript, Charles E. Young Research
Library, UCLA, Los Angeles, California [UCLA]/Jim Tully Papers
[JTL] Box 82 file 250, f.1.
11 Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography (London, 2003), 244.
12 Buster Keaton, My Wonderful World of Slapstick (New York, 1960),
270.
 Views on capitalism 109

13 Joyce Milton, Tramp: The Life of Charlie Chaplin (London, 1996),

154.
14 Stanley Lebergott, The Measurement and Behaviour of Unemploy-
ment (Washington, D.C., 1957), 215.
15 Charles Chaplin, My Trip Abroad (London, 1922), 37.
16 Undated newspaper clipping ‘The Serious Opinions of Charlie Chap-
lin’, 1921, MAM/CCP, Book 12.
17 Quoted in Saturday Evening Post, 3 January 2014.
18 Harry Crocker’s unpublished memoir, ‘Charlie Chaplin: Man and
Mime’, MHL/HRC, VII–17.
19 Christian Delage, Chaplin: Facing History (Paris, 2005), 14.
20 Crocker, ‘Man and Mime’, MHL/HRC, VII–2.
21 Glyn to ‘X’, No. 19, University of Reading [UOR], Elinor Glyn
Papers [EGN] MS 4,059, Box 24.
22 All via Alan Fischler, ‘Dialectics of Social Class in the Gilbert and Sul-
livan Collaboration’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 48/4,
The Nineteenth Century (Autumn, 2008), 829–37.
23 Crocker, ‘Man and Mime’, MHL/HRC, VIII–5.
24 Chaplin to Owen Seaman, 27 April 1920, Cambridge University
Library [CUL]/Add. 8,990/118.
25 Glyn to ‘X’, No. 3. UOR/EGN MS 4,059, Box 25.
26 ‘King of Laughter’, UCLA/JTL, 15a.
27 Tullygram, UCLA/JTL Box 84, f6.
28 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 220.
29 Ibid., 221.
30 Tino Balio, United Artists, Volume 1, 1919–1950: The Company
Built by the Stars (Wisconsin, 1976), 28.
31 ‘King of Laughter’, UCLA/JTL, 75.
32 Crocker, ‘Man and Mime’, MHL/HRC, VII–21.
33 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 324.
34 Ibid.
35 Keaton, Wonderful World, 127.
36 Crocker, ‘Man and Mime’, MHL/HRC, X–12.
37 Montagu to Chaplin, 4 October 1933, British Film Institute, London
[BFI], Ivor Montagu Papers [IVM] Item 320.
38 Huff, Charlie Chaplin, 262.
39 Scribbled notes, dated 1932, within CIN/CCA.
40 New York Sun, 16 October 1942 via COP/CCP 64.
41 Milton, Tramp, 253.
42 Ibid., 269.
43 Glyn to X, No. 18, UOR/EGN MS 4,059 Box 24.
44 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 299.
4 Sex, morality and a tramp
in 1920s America

In May 1924, The New York News asked Charlie for his chief
interest in life. For all the political machinations of this book and
the sublime films he crafted, the answer he provided was almost
certainly the most accurate he could give. ‘[It is] Women. Because
they are the most interesting, fascinating, and charming subject
in the world.’1 Indeed, the interplay between sex, celebrity and
politics – for all the more modern escapades of a Kennedy or a
Schwarzenegger – has rarely been as pronounced at any point in
modern history as it was for Charlie Chaplin. If the studio was
his workplace and the political salon his mental gymnasium, the
bedroom was his pastime. And that pastime was highly contro-
versial in a 1920s America still wrestling with its own conceptions
of morality, and modernity itself. On the one hand, the age of
the more sexually liberated flapper often found with a glass of
alcohol in her hand suggested a society moving in the direction
of the flamboyant Chaplin. As Adolphe Menjou recalled, ‘When
Hollywood discovered that sex was no longer a taboo topic, even
in women’s magazines, the producers took off the wraps and
gave the subject an all-out whirl. Sex, libido, bath-tub gin, Freud
speak-easies and joy riding were the new trends in the pictures as
they were in America itself.’2
On the other hand, politically America was conservative with
a small ‘c’. The Republican Party won all three Presidential elec-
tions during the 1920s, held a majority in the Senate through-
out the decade and were largely uncomfortable with the drift of
urban America. Whatever the jazz or decadent nightclubs of some
sections of its major cities, America remained a fundamentally
 Sex, morality and a tramp in 1920s America 111

conservative nation, typified by imposition of prohibition between

1919 and 1933. Chaplin’s salons with their young women, freely
drinking, smoking and adopting a looser than loose attitude to
that most traditional of institutions – marriage – rubbed many
up the wrong way. As the right-leaning journal The Argonaut
noted in the late 1940s: ‘Everything one learns about [Chaplin]
proves to be a bad egg – a rotten egg in fact . . . Is it not time to
deport Charlie Chaplin as an undesirable alien? We said so at
the time when he was demonstrating that he had the morality of
a billy-goat; and we say so again.’3 For Charlie, sex and politics
would be forever intertwined.
It is important to understand how this took hold. This chap-
ter therefore considers his 1920s in three regards: his proclivity
towards young women (or, in some cases, ‘girls’), his disastrous
marriage to Lita Grey and the wider moral climate in which these
were conducted. As we will note, Chaplin’s activities with the
opposite sex would soon attract the attention of a powerful enemy,
J. Edgar Hoover of the new Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
In short, Chaplin would not have been so politically exposed had
he not been so sexually exposed, and this was a trend ingrained
during the roaring twenties.

Chaplin’s women
Chaplin’s early encounters with women veered somewhere between
the chaste love affairs of the Tramp and rather more seedy escapades.
As we saw in Chapter 1, utmost in the first group was the young
Hetty Kelly, whom he met when in his Mumming Birds days under
Fred Karno. When they first locked eyes at the Streatham Theatre
in 1908, Chaplin was nineteen years old and Hetty fifteen. There is
no doubt this encounter scarred Charlie for life. Although Richard
Attenborough’s 1992 film Chaplin laid it on a bit thick in casting
the same actress, Moira Kelly, as both Hetty Kelly and Chaplin’s last
wife Oona O’Neill, most women for Charlie would be measured
against the youthful beauty he had loved and lost. In many ways, he
remained trapped in that nineteen-year-old self, struggling to cap-
ture a romance that was largely the product of his own imagination.
This process seems to have started almost immediately. Con-
tained in an unpublished account of his long-time aide Harry
112 Sex, morality and a tramp in 1920s America

Crocker (who also played the Tramp’s love rival in The Circus
of 1928), Chaplin gave the following description of an encounter
that took place during his early music hall career and shortly after
his ‘split’ from Hetty:

While I was playing the Folies – I was nineteen at the time,’

he recalled, ‘I had a most violent crush on a girl only ten or
twelve. I have always been in love with young girls, not in
an amorous way – just as beautiful objects to look at. I like
them young because they personify youth and beauty. There
is something virginal in their slimness – in their slender arms
and legs. And they are so feminine at that age, so wholly, girl-
ishly young. They haven’t developed the “come on” stuff or
discovered the power of their looks over men. I suppose you
might say that I had a crush on the little Parisienne. It was
funny; not in a sex way – I just loved to caress and fondle
her – not passionately – just to have her in my arms.4

Such language was not unusual for the man, and Chaplin’s
relationship with young women has been remarked upon by
many – not least the female participants. One such example was
the movie-star Louise Brooks who, one evening in 1925, could
be found in Chaplin’s suite at the Ambassador Hotel, New York.
By this stage Charlie was married to Lita but, as we will see, this
was hardly a massive encumbrance to him. In any event, Peggy
Fears, A.C. Blumenthal, Jack Pickford and Winnie Sheehan joined
Brooks in experiencing Chaplin monopolise an evening doing
various imitations. After a while the crowd thinned and Chaplin
suddenly ‘became the hunted man, seeking [Blumenthal’s] advice
about what to do about the detectives he felt sure that [press
baron William Randolph] Hearst had on his tail because of his
love affairs with [Hearst’s mistress] Marion Davies’. Blumenthal
and Fears then left, leaving Brooks alone with Charlie. At this
point, Brooks recalled, ‘Charlie would go into his seduction scene
with me. He had his sexes mixed up. Instead of playing the lazy,
watchful tom cat (like [Buster] Keaton), he rolled and slithered
and rubbed like the lady cat. This was a technique suitable only
for innocent little girls.’ Talking through his various conquests,
Brooks noted that ‘men’s choice of women is always determined by
 Sex, morality and a tramp in 1920s America 113

the success of their particular love play’. In terms of Charlie’s other

dalliances of the time, ‘[Pola] Negri wanted publicity, [Marion]
Davies wanted fun, Peggy Joyce . . . [was] whoring for stardom’.
At this point, Brooks was at a just about legal eighteen years old,
but Charlie’s other affairs suggested this was scarcely a concern to
an entertainer then in his mid-thirties.
For at least some balance it must be added that not every affair
Chaplin had in the 1920s pushed statutory boundaries. Pola Negri
and Marion Davies were twenty-something actresses where the
only danger for Charlie was overlapping with other powerful men
(Rudolf Valentino in the case of Negri, and Hearst for Davies).
Edna Purviance, Georgia Hale and, later, Paulette Goddard com-
bined being Chaplin’s leading lady while being actual adults when
sleeping with their director. With the partial exception of God-
dard, even such legally sound liaisons were always emotionally
one-sided, however. Georgia Hale, the Tramp’s love interest in The
Gold Rush (1925), later reflected on

the callousness and coldness to those for whom he proclaimed

deep affection. Mr Chaplin’s so-called love was as whimsical,
imaginary and unreal as was the Hollywood affection his flat-
tering friends showered on him . . . There was no manliness in
him . . . no unselfishness, no support, no carrying through . . .
But he expected all from a woman. He criticized, but could
not or would not see himself.5

Part of this distance, one suspects, must have come from

the traumatic experiences of his childhood. Having his mother
wrenched away from Charlie at such a young age must have had
an emotionally scarring effect on the young man that led him
to keep all future relationships at something of a safe distance.
Hetty’s rejection also obviously stayed with him. Yet what-
ever the cause, he was clearly a nightmare to be romantically
involved with. His background may help explain such behav-
iour, but it does not excuse it. When the FBI later asked him
all manner of questions regarding his prolific sexual exploits,
Chaplin simply replied, ‘What kind of reply is a healthy man
who has lived in this country for over thirty-five years supposed
to make?’
114 Sex, morality and a tramp in 1920s America

We will go on to discuss his marriage to Lita Grey shortly, but

the general pattern of Chaplin’s four marriages was that while the
comedian would get older, the wives would remain more or less
the same age. Before turning to Lita it is important to note that
this trend was readily understood and acknowledged as odd at the
time. According to census data, the average age of a first marriage
for American women was 21.2 years in 1920 (24.6 for men).6 Com-
pared to this, three of Chaplin’s four wives were eighteen years old
or under at the time of marriage – and this received much press
comment. Taking Lita as indicative, the Montreal Gazette point-
edly noted that ‘Chaplin’s child bride’ had completed the requisite
education required of a California girl in 1924.7 Likewise, in March
1926 The Evening Independent ran the headline declaring ‘Screen
Comedian’s School-Girl Wife Mother of Seven Pound Boy’.8 And
when the marriage was about to end, the Pittsburgh Press wrote of
the impending divorce from ‘his girl wife’.9 The very fact that these
descriptive terms were used suggests that Chaplin’s relationships
were not as normalised as he liked to suggest. In and of itself, that
remains as much a comment on contemporary mores – Chaplin was
rarely challenged on such tastes beyond the inference previously
noted – as it does his own predilections. In the wake of the famous
Arbuckle case (outlined below), however, any suggestions of sexual
impropriety did not sit too well with the American public.

Lita
When casting for a flirtatious angel to appear in a dream sequence
in The Kid (1921), Chaplin came across the young Lillita Louise
MacMurray – later known professionally, at Charlie’s instance, as
Lita Grey. Unbeknownst to Charlie he had actually met her before.
On her eighth birthday in 1916 a kindly restaurant manager led
Lita over to see him when the two happened to be lunching at
the same tea room on Hollywood Boulevard. Charlie dutifully
performed a magic trick for Lita, who ran back to her mother say-
ing she found the Englishman ‘spooky’.10 Lita’s early life was not
without more serious trauma – her father had left when she was
just two years old, and her mother’s second husband had died in
the bizarre circumstances of having accidentally burned down the
hospital ward he was staying on (via an errant cigarette).11
 Sex, morality and a tramp in 1920s America 115

Settling in a new home on De Longpre Avenue, the MacMurrays

were neighbours of Chuck Riesner, Charlie’s assistant director. Lita
enjoyed playing with Chuck’s new baby, and it was quite the cin-
ematic neighbourhood all in all. Merna Kennedy, later the Tramp’s
love interest in The Circus, also often came round to see Lita. One
day in the spring of 1920 Lita and Merna were sat doing their
homework on the front porch. Chuck Riesner and Charlie walked
by the house, and Chuck introduced Lita to the screen icon. After
Chuck told Lita he thought she’d ‘photograph well’, Charlie then
asked, ‘Would you like to be in a movie?’ Once her mother had
extracted guarantees over her education, Lita was told to report
to the studio at 10 the next morning.12
After a $50-a-week contract was signed to employ both Lita
and her mother (‘a small wage’ according to Lita) Alf Reeves led
Chaplin’s newest actress over to Rollie Totheroh, his lead camera-
man. There, Lita recalls:

My hair was arranged and makeup applied in such a way that

I appeared in my screen test to look several years older than I
actually was, which is what Charlie had wanted. I was tall for
my age, and the makeup and wardrobe enabled me to look
old enough to play the role of the flirting angel who tempts
the Tramp in the film’s dream sequence. It was a role that
Charlie had created just for me.13

At the time Lita was just twelve years old.

Given his previous marriage to Mildred Harris, neither Lita nor
her mother can exactly have viewed Charlie as perfect husband
material. Indeed, by the time that Lita began working for Char-
lie he was often away from the studio dealing with his divorce.
On set, there was also a continual reminder of what becoming
romantically involved with the man actually meant: Edna Pur-
viance, who was playing the mother of the titular Kid in this
endeavour. At the time, Lita recalled, Edna was ‘getting bloated
through excessive drinking’. Several times the shooting had to
be called off on The Kid because ‘Edna was so drunk – literally
staggering – that he could not use her in the scene’.14 This had
no doubt been exacerbated through Edna’s on–off relationship
with Charlie.
116 Sex, morality and a tramp in 1920s America

After her success in The Kid, Charlie cast Lita in another minor
role in his comedic romp The Idle Class. He then invited her to
a birthday party he was throwing for the actress May Collins
(another of his later conquests), and told the then thirteen-year-old
that he had ‘been watching you when you haven’t been looking.
You have very pretty eyes, my dear.’15 When Lita’s mother refused
her permission to go without her as chaperone, Chaplin became
furious. Unbeknownst to Lita’s mother, she and Merna snuck
back to Chaplin’s studio where Charlie was ‘astonished and full
of enthusiasm’ at seeing Lita once more. Lita ‘noticed that his
eyes were going up and down my body’, but was pleased when
he announced he was searching for his leading lady for his new
picture – The Gold Rush.16 Describing the screen test that followed,
Jim Tully was not impressed: ‘Though she had less acting ability
than any other girl who applied, Chaplin exclaimed, “Marvellous!
Marvellous! Seated next to him, and not wishing to endanger my
insecure position by being too honest, I went [back] into my office.”’
Still, Charlie caught up with him: “What do you think of her Jim?”
“Evading, I asked in return, “What do you think of her Charlie?”
“Marvellous! Marvellous!” was the answer. Eventually Lita was
ushered in: “Would you like to be a leading lady?” Charlie teased.
“Very much,” she exclaimed. Tully recalls that “there was more
than admiration in his troubled gaze. He covered it with a wan
smile . . . The comedian’s eyes went up and down her lithe young
body.” “You’re engaged,” he said, laughing.17
Charlie told his new star that her then legal name
Lillita-MacMurray Parker was too ‘long [and] awkward . . . for
such a pretty girl’. Lita Grey it would be from now on, and a sal-
ary of $75 a week was soon awarded to suit her new star status.
To forestall any awkward questions, the studio publicity machine
soon began giving her age as nineteen. It should be added that
Charlie’s policy of hiring inexperienced and young actresses was
not merely the product of his sexual proclivities. On set the man
was a tyrant. As Virginia Cherrill found when working on City
Lights almost a decade later, ‘He acted out every part . . . every
glance, every movement, just as he wanted it played.’18 Hiring
inexperienced actresses meant that they had fewer lessons to
‘un-learn’, and thus Charlie’s brand of obsessive micro-managing
could be instilled at a quicker rate. Even so, it still took a record
 Sex, morality and a tramp in 1920s America 117

342 takes to record the scene where the Tramp and the blind girl
first meet in City Lights – covered in the next chapter.
Back in the early 1920s the relationship between Lita and Char-
lie soon crossed the lines of director and actress. Inviting Lita over
to his house, he told her ‘it might be fun’ to try his steam bath.
Closing the door of the bathroom behind him, Lita was left alone
in a room where ‘the steam was gushing out of a vent at a very
fast rate. It was only a few minutes until I could not see my hand
before my face.’ Suddenly, the door opened and Lita ‘could feel
Charlie’s hand gently going up and down my body’. Sensing Lita’s
hesitation, Charlie told her, ‘Don’t be ashamed – this is an ideal
way to make love. We can’t see each other.’ After the deed was
done, she told Charlie it had been ‘a wonderful experience’. Still,
she asked, ‘Do the servants know what we’ve been doing in the
steam room?’ ‘Perhaps,’ replied Charlie, ‘but it doesn’t matter.
They’re close mouthed. That’s the way the Japanese are.’19 Kono,
Charlie’s Japanese chauffeur, then drove Lita home, one presumes
keeping to that stereotype.
This arrangement continued for weeks, with Charlie never
using any form of contraception: ‘Charlie believed that there was
no danger of my becoming pregnant.’20 After the chaperone the
two had been using to keep Lita’s mother off the scent found out
that she was being used for such an underhand purpose, Charlie
and Lita had to find other ways to be together. Here Chaplin was
utterly brazen – inviting Lita and her mother over to stay the night
after one of his parties. Once Lita’s mother had fallen asleep, her
daughter tiptoed across the room, headed through Charlie’s con-
necting bathroom and into the master bedroom where her lover
was still awake. After a while the creaking springs of the bed
awoke Lita’s mother, who stormed into the room demanding to
know, ‘How long has this been going on?’ Charlie was surprised
but attempted to talk his way out of it. ‘Please, Lillian. Don’t cry.
I love Lita. We’ve been together several times when you didn’t
know about it . . . If Lita gets pregnant, we’ll get married.’21 The
timing was precipitous – two weeks later a doctor confirmed that
Lita was with child.
With Lita’s mother insisting that ‘he has to marry you, that’s all
there is to it’ Chaplin obliged (thereby making good on the pre-
cedent he had previously set with Mildred Harris). To get around
118 Sex, morality and a tramp in 1920s America

Californian statutory age limits, on 25 November 1924 Charlie

married Lita in Empalme, Sonora State, Mexico: soon after Lita
began to start ‘to show’. Taking the Southern Pacific Railroad to
this small coastal town two hundred and fifty miles inside Mexico,
the trip must have seemed like what it was – fleeing the scene of
a crime. Charles Spencer Chaplin Jnr would be born on 5 May
1925, putting the date of his likely conception in August 1924: or
when Lita was aged sixteen years and four months. This was defi-
nitely illegal – the age of sexual consent in California then stood
at eighteen years old (although twenty-five states and the District
of Columbia maintained sixteen years as the limit). On this matter,
according to Lita at least, Charlie showed some gallows humour
on the train home from Empalme. Within earshot of his new bride,
he told some of his hangers-on, ‘Well, boys, this is better than the
penitentiary: but it won’t last long.’22
Interestingly, Lita later claimed that the two had become
engaged in May 1924, and that ‘thereafter’ Charlie had ‘seduced
[her] under promise of marriage’.23 If they had indeed become
engaged in May then Chaplin did not, publicly at least, appear
to be relishing the prospect. The very next month Charlie had
told the Atlantic Journal that, when it came to marriage, ‘I think
it’s terrible. It is about as fascinating and inspiring as a prune
factory . . . I think marriage is the quickest and surest death to
individuality known to humanity. Life becomes as humdrum and
uninspiring as an old shoe.’24 Again, as with his previous attitude
to marrying Mildred Harris in 1918, this was hardly spoken like
a man truly in love.
When news of the Mexican wedding got out the Hollywood
rumour mill soon cranked into motion. In February 1925 Valeria
Belletti, Sam Goldwyn’s personal secretary at MGM, wrote that

the gossip in Hollywood just now centers around Charlie.

You of course know about his marrying that 16 year old
child. Well, he was compelled to. You see he wronged her,
and she threatened to advise the police, and since she was
under age it was either marry or go to jail. So he married her
in order to save his reputation and career. When he came back
to Hollywood, he brought his wife to his home, and he has
never got into it. He’s been going around with Marion Davies
 Sex, morality and a tramp in 1920s America 119

and I think Mr Hearst will soon cause some trouble. At least

so it is rumoured.25

That trouble would include much of his later political woes –

and losing the good graces of the Hearst press would prove to be
a risky move as the media generally turned against him. But he
had more immediate concerns: what to do about a child bride he
had evidently lost any infatuation for. This was manifest fairly
early, and Lita later recalled Charlie’s extreme reluctance to buy
her wedding ring, leaving her embarrassed to be ‘bare-handed’ at
parties. By early 1925 the solution Chaplin probably would have
preferred – an abortion – was beyond the realms of possibility. But,
as we will see, his alleged desire to procure one was just one of
many controversial aspects of the Grey–Chaplin wedding.
In May 1925, Lita gave birth to the newlyweds’ first son,
Charles Jnr. Charlie promptly disappeared from the scene to
go to New York to promote the release of The Gold Rush. Yet
this was not all he got up to. Louise Brooks would go on to be
annoyed that Charlie did not discuss their aforementioned liai-
son – A.C. Blumenthal, Peggy Fears, the Ambassador Hotel and
all – in My Autobiography.26 It was hardly surprising. Charlie
spent two months in New York barely going out, fearful that the
Hearst press was out to expose his various sexual exploits by
way of revenge. And to get around this he simply brought them
into A.C. Blumenthal’s apartment. While Blumenthal played the
piano, Peggy sang and Louise danced. Charlie had other ideas.
Retreating to the bathroom he produced a bottle of iodine.
According to Brooks, ‘He had studied the matter and was firmly
convinced that iodine was a reliable VD [venereal diseases] pre-
ventative.’ Normally, he would only apply a dab, but this evening
he ‘was inspired to paint the sum of his private parts with iodine
and come running with a bright red erection’.27 Louise and Peggy
squealed; Blumenthal’s reaction is not recorded.

Divorce trial
Unbelievably, his relationship with Lita did not last. Even after
a second son, Sydney, was born in March 1926 it was clear
that Charlie was looking for an early exit from his marriage. In
120 Sex, morality and a tramp in 1920s America

November 1926 he told Lita and Lillian to take a trip anywhere

far away from him: ‘Go away some place for a while; I can’t think
or work when you are here. You are ruining my career.’28 Eventu-
ally, they settled on Honolulu. Upon their return from Hawaii,
bowing to the inevitable, in January 1927 Lita served Charlie
with divorce papers.
The complaint filed by Lita at the Los Angeles County Superior
Court was explosive stuff. As Chaplin biographer Jeffrey Vance
notes, it was ‘designed not only to sway a judge but to so sully
Charlie Chaplin’s greatest asset, his reputation with his audi-
ence’.29 The content was so outrageous that the popular press soon
dumped stories about the Teapot Dome scandal and the threat
of war with Mexico to put Charlie on the front page. Given the
content of this incendiary document, such political machinations
could understandably wait.
To begin with, the many accusations of adultery contained
within the petition were at the vanilla end of proceedings. Indeed,
the notion of the Hollywood leading man as philanderer and cad
was relatively ingrained. Upon his first divorce in 1919, for exam-
ple, Al Jolson had cheerfully remarked that ‘outside of my liking
for wine, women and racehorses, I’m a regular husband’. That
said, once journalists got wind of the contents of Lita’s petition,
there was much speculation over who the ‘prominent moving pic-
ture actress’ who had allegedly exercised ‘a very great portion of
[Charlie’s] time’ in the first month of their marriage really was.
This woman Lita later revealed to be Marion Davies. Indeed, it
was the threat of revealing Marion’s identity publicly that Lita
suggested forced Charlie to concede a settlement of $825,000
($100,000 was ringfenced in a trust fund for each of their sons).
‘W.R. [Hearst] would go crazy!’ Marion is alleged to have said
when Lita suggested she may leak the news of their affair, and cer-
tainly Hearst would have been out for Charlie’s career in a matter
of minutes had their affair been more widely known.30 But all that
was not what buried Chaplin in the eyes of many.
Discussing the case in later life, Lita stated that ‘most of the
content [of the divorce petition] is correct. However the way it is
presented, the words used, the descriptions of sex, was all drawn
up by my attorneys.’31 Given the earlier tale of the steam bath that
she did not retract there was probably enough factually accurate
 Sex, morality and a tramp in 1920s America 121

material to have kept the press interested. Yet if unpicking the

truths and untruths from the petition is not easy, we can certainly
summarise its contents – not least because it was reported as ‘the
truth’ at the time. In short, Chaplin was portrayed as a sexual
deviant. ‘At times too numerous’ for Lita to mention, Charlie had
‘urged and demanded’ she ‘perform and commit such acts and
things for [the] gratification . . . of [his] abnormal, unnatural, per-
verted, and degenerate sexual desires’. Such acts were ‘too revolt-
ing, indecent and immoral to set forth in detail’.32 They, however,
certainly included the demand that Lita ‘commit the act of sex
perversion defined by Section 288a of the Penal Code of California’ –
oral sex. At the time performing this act with someone under the
age of eighteen was punishable by a year’s imprisonment.
According to the petition, Charlie would brag to Lita about
the previous actresses who had performed these (and other) acts.
Although not named in the petition, Lita later suggested that
these were Edna Purviance, Pola Negri, Claire Windsor, Peggy
Hopkins Joyce and her own friend Merna Kennedy. Charlie’s
attempts to encourage Lita into a threesome with ‘a girl of their
acquaintance . . . [who] might be willing to commit acts of sexual
perversion’ may or may not have included one of these five. Cer-
tainly three of these – Purviance (the star), Joyce (whose pursuit
of a wealthy husband had formed part of the inspiration for the
plot) and Negri (his lover during filming) – had been around the
director during the making of A Woman of Paris just before his
courtship with Lita began. In any event, Lita later revised the
number of actresses involved with Charlie as up to seven.33
Sex aside, the divorce petition also portrayed Chaplin as men-
tally deranged. Much of this was clearly trying to manipulate the
court. While Lita was ‘a virtuous and inexperienced girl’ who
nonetheless had a ‘sense and duty of maternal protection and
preservation’, Charlie was a nightmarish prima donna.34 On one
occasion Chaplin allegedly suggested Lita take her own life, and
on another ‘he picked up a loaded revolver and menacingly threat-
ened to kill her’.35 When Lita tried to tell Charlie that they ‘should
make the best’ of their marriage, he told her, ‘I might suddenly go
crazy anytime, and kill you.’ After seeing Charlie wave a gun one
too many times, Lita is said to have left the marital home, never
to return. Later in life Charlie would make similar claims against
122 Sex, morality and a tramp in 1920s America

Joan Barry, as Chapter 8 will show. Before his fourth wife Oona
his relationships were certainly rarely stable.
Threatening a woman, adultery and general sexual adventur-
ism were not the only offences Lita tried to hang around his neck,
however. As the legalistic language of Lita’s petition put it,
as a result of [Charlie’s] seduction, plaintiff became pregnant
with child at the time of said marriage; [and] upon the discovery
of defendant of said delicate condition of plaintiff, defendant
delayed the consummation of said promise of marriage for so
long a time in an effort to induce plaintiff to prevent the birth of
said child by submitting herself to a criminal operation.36

In short, Charlie wanted rid of their baby. Yet with Lita viewing
abortion to be a ‘great social, legal and moral wrong’, this was not
an option she would countenance. Charlie allegedly then tried the
same prior to the birth of their second child, telling Lita that ‘other
women had done that much for him without any hesitation’, and
named ‘one moving picture actress, whom, he stated, had such an
operation performed twice for him’ (this was likely Edna Purvi-
ance). This was a smart legal play from Lita’s team. Not only could
Charlie not disprove this allegation (it may well have been true in
any case), it would alienate religiously minded, small ‘c’ conservative
public opinion from Charlie while simultaneously angering those
liberals seeing a man of influence and wealth trying to pressurise a
poor young girl into a dangerous operation. In the late 1920s some
15,000 American women died each year from abortions. Much of
these occurred at the type of hazardous, back-street clinic Charlie
would likely have paid (if only to keep the story out of the papers)
to have Lita avoid, but it was hardly a good look almost fifty years
prior to Roe vs Wade. In his autobiography Charlie would deal
with the Lita years in a sentence: ‘For two years we were married
and tried to make a go of it but it was hopeless and ended in a great
deal of bitterness.’37 At the least that latter claim was certainly true.

Censorship and the movies

This debauched lifestyle mattered so much because it went against
the grain of much of Charlie’s industry, or rather the direction that
several influential groups were trying to take it. This was starkly
 Sex, morality and a tramp in 1920s America 123

illustrated on 5 June 1922 when The New York Times carried

the dramatic headline: ‘Ultimatum by Hays to Purify Movies’.38
This referred to Will H. Hays who had served as President of the
Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA)
since March that year, having left his previous position as Post-
master General under President Warren Harding. Hays was a
right-wing politician turned film censor – not exactly the ideal
candidate for Charlie – and his ties to the White House ran deep.
As Chairman of the Republican National Committee between
1918 and 1921 Hays had links to the Teapot Dome scandal then
plaguing the administration. This had involved the selling of fed-
eral naval oil reserves to private bidders at suspiciously low cost,
and would engulf members of the Republican leadership through-
out the 1920s. But even if Hays faced accusations that his own
hands were far from clean, he was quite prepared to cast simi-
lar aspersions on the motion-picture industry. The new MPPDA
that Hays led sought to ‘guarantee clean films to the public’. The
New York Times reported that ‘this ultimatum is the last word to
a few Directors whose last few pictures have been questionable,
and that the failure to comply would mean dismissal from the
industry’.39 Self-regulation of the movie industry was now in. A
Republican broom would sweep clean.
The situation had reached this point due to three factors. First,
undeniably, there was a political motivation. As discussed in Chap-
ter 2, the potential if not always the realities of leftist sympathy
within the movie industry meant that there was an incentive for
some to de-politicise the business. And de-politicisation was often
code for keeping things exactly as they were. In the wake of a
global conflict where more than 100,000 Americans had been
killed and a revolution in Russia that seemed to offer a nightmar-
ish glimpse of alternatives to democracy, the world, it was thought,
had been through enough. It was not for the movies to stoke the
fires of radicalism any more than had already been the case. Race,
labour–capital questions or gender: these were not issues that
officialdom wanted filmmakers to visit without the most extreme
caution.
Second, there was clear pressure from religious groups, par-
ticularly Catholics, to censor the movies. In this regard, Hays was
actually something of a brake on the advance of censorship. With
124 Sex, morality and a tramp in 1920s America

statutory censorship boards already in place in Florida, Kansas,

Maryland, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia by the
time the MPPDA began its work, the religious lobby had had sig-
nificant success across the country in narrowing the content that
millions of Americans could see. Indeed, one of Hays’s first key
victories was to wage a $300,000 campaign to ensure that a ref-
erendum on delivering a new statutory censorship board in the
significantly Catholic state of Massachusetts did not pass.40 The
industry-led MPPDA was strict, but state-run boards appealing to
fervently religious populations could be even worse. Accommo-
dation between the MPPDA and religious groups was therefore
necessary if the body was to survive at all, and this led Hays’s
organisation in the direction of taking a morally tough stance. By
1929, as we will see, it would be two religious men – the Catholic
layman Martin Quigley and the Jesuit Daniel Lord – who would
draft much of what became the ‘Hays Code’ to censor cinema con-
tent. Religious lobbying had contributed to the implementation of
America’s experiment with prohibition from 1920 and significant
restrictions on non-Western European immigration from 1924. In
a sense the movies were just another platform for such small ‘c’
conservative battles.
Third, religious groups aside, the view that Hollywood may
need some greater moral policing was not without some credence.
Chaplin’s own less than innocent sexual exploits apart, accusa-
tions of murder and rape against a similarly big name – Roscoe
‘Fatty’ Arbuckle – had rocked Hollywood throughout 1921. Lurid
accusations regarding Arbuckle having used a piece of ice – later
upgraded to a Coca-Cola or a champagne bottle – to rape an aspir-
ing actress, Virginia Rappe, resulted in three trials for manslaugh-
ter over late 1921 and early 1922. Arbuckle was unanimously
acquitted at the third trial after the jury had deliberated for just
six minutes (five of those being used to pen a formal apology to
Arbuckle for his ordeal). The press, particularly William Randolph
Hearst’s brand of populist ‘yellow’ journalism, had a field day
throughout the arrest and trials, however. Arbuckle’s weight was
used to suggest a lecherous cad who would overpower innocent
young maidens. The presence of alcohol and the suggestions of an
impending orgy did not help matters. Buster Keaton stuck up for
Fatty, as did Chaplin. When Keaton went to meet Arbuckle at the
 Sex, morality and a tramp in 1920s America 125

old Santa Fe Railroad Station in Los Angeles to express his soli-

darity during the trials, a crowd – or ‘hate-frenzied mob of 1500
men and women’ as Keaton later described them – gathered to hurl
abuse such as ‘Big, fat slob’, ‘Degenerate bastard’ and ‘Murderer’
at a man later found to be innocent of all charges.41 His career
was, however, ruined. For some in ‘respectable America’, Arbuck-
le’s unseemly antics – even if he was innocent of the actual murder
charge – demanded a response. The major innovation of Hays’s
MPPDA was to make that response one of industry self-regulation
rather than federal censorship.
Even so, if FBI files are to be believed, Chaplin did not take set-
ting up of the MPPDA particularly well. He was not the only one.
As Adolphe Menjou noted, ‘On Hollywood Boulevard the opinion
was that people won’t stand for any serious censorship.’ In this
regard, they were, however, out of touch: ‘In the rest of the country
civic groups and parent–teacher associations were holding more
and bigger indignation meetings, while editors were still fulminat-
ing against Hollywood.’42 Here Chaplin was either deliberately
myopic, or simply thought it would all blow over. When the radi-
cal Marxist labour organiser William Z. Foster visited Los Angeles
in August 1922, Chaplin threw a welcoming party for him and
what the FBI dubbed fellow ‘Parlor Bolsheviki’. At this gathering
Chaplin stated that neither he nor any of the stars associated with
him would have any use for Will Hays. Laughing, he claimed that
‘we are against any kind of censorship, and particularly against
Presbyterian censorship’. Leading his guests through the Chaplin
studios, he showed them a pennant with the words ‘Welcome Will
Hays’, which he had affixed to the door of the men’s bathroom.43
Initially, such animus was at least publicly restrained. When the
MPPDA had been set up, they had been eager to secure the mem-
bership of the big cinematic names, including Pathe and the Hearst
and Thomas Ince companies, to bolster their reach. But high on
that list had also been Charles Chaplin Productions and United
Artists.44 By March 1927 United Artists had joined the MPPDA.45
Through his UA affiliation Charlie had to deal with the new list
of so-called ‘Don’ts and Be Carefuls’ produced by the MPPDA.
Signatories to this document were resolved that the contents of this
list ‘shall not appear in pictures produced by members of this Asso-
ciation’, and, to be fair, 1920s Chaplin rarely troubled the censors
126 Sex, morality and a tramp in 1920s America

here. With the main concerns of the ‘Don’t’ list mostly alighting
on blasphemy, racial mixing (‘miscegenation’, ‘white slavery’) and
sexual conduct (‘suggestive nudity-in fact or in silhouette; and any
lecherous or licentious notice thereof’), Charlie was not a threat
to the ‘list’ in this regard. The Pilgrim of 1923 – where Charlie
has to improvise a sermon about David and Goliath – would pos-
sibly have bordered on the prohibited ‘ridicule of the clergy’. Oth-
ers would have seen The Immigrant as causing ‘wilful offense to
any nation’ – that is, the self-aggrandising wing of America. But,
for the most part, Chaplin’s actual cinematic content would have
passed the conditions laid out in 1927. In any event, the Studio
Relations Committee that monitored such content performed a
purely advisory function in the 1920s.
But there were harbingers for later troubles here. Where Charlie
was already beginning to worry moral America was in the portion
of the list that demanded ‘special care be exercised in the manner
in which the following subjects are treated’ – the so-called ‘be
carefuls’. Here the need for ‘good taste’ was stressed in twenty-five
areas from smuggling to surgical operations. While 1920s Chap-
lin had not yet begun to push the boundaries on some of these,
the request to temper ‘the use of the flag’, ‘international relations
(avoiding picturizing in an unfavourable light another country’s
religion, history, institutions, prominent people and citizenry)’ and
‘techniques of murder’ would all largely cover his content in the
1930s and 1940s. Scenes depicting ‘sympathy for criminals’ and
‘theft [and] robbery’ had arguably – albeit in a light-hearted set-
ting – formed part of his output since the early days. The studios
had defined, if not yet fully enshrined, what was ‘normal’ and
‘acceptable’ film-making, and Charlie was moving towards the
edge of this window of acceptability.
In 1929 these ‘don’ts and be carefuls’ were re-drafted and
extended through the combined efforts of the MPPDA, the Cath-
olic layman Martin Quigley and the Jesuit Priest Daniel Lord.
Lord’s view was that ‘we can make pictures with our approval and
break them with our disproval’. Why, he asked, were ‘marvellous’,
wholesome pictures like Paramount’s 1929 Disraeli box-office fail-
ures but Hell’s Angels – which had ‘no place in a civilized world’ –
or the ‘filthy production’ Party Girl such successes? It was because
the Church had not thrown its moral weight behind the ‘good’ and
 Sex, morality and a tramp in 1920s America 127

thus the ‘bad’ was free to roam unchallenged. There was a need
to imbue the movies with a more ecclesiastical, church-friendly
tone – one that, in short, was not merely ambivalent to good and
evil but firmly threw itself behind the former.
After an initial draft from Quigley, Lord set to work turn-
ing the ‘Don’ts and be carefuls’ into what became known as
the Hays Code from 1930. This combined document began by
noting that ‘mankind has always recognized the importance of
entertainment and its value in rebuilding the bodies and souls of
human beings . . . But it has always recognized that entertain-
ment can be of a character HARMFUL to the human race.’ This
had a particular dimension that was relatively benign in the days
before the crash on Wall Street led to a worldwide Depression,
but became ever more important as time passed. ‘Correct enter-
tainment’, noted the Hays Code, ‘raises the whole standard of
a nation. Wrong entertainment lowers the whole living condi-
tions and moral ideas of a race.’ Motion pictures ‘reproduce the
morality of the men who use the pictures as a medium for the
expression of their ideas and ideals’. Thus, Charlie’s protesta-
tions that he was just a comedian was a defence that was begin-
ning to wear ever thinner with official movie opinion formers.
In the 1930s this would play out in a myriad of ways.

‘Respectable’ Hollywood
If Chaplin represented avant-garde, vaguely subversive Hollywood
in the 1920s – foreign, leftist and debauched – this needs further
contextualising. Part of this was again about notions of a global
Jewish conspiracy – a concept that served its adherents so well
because even when politicians or businessmen denied they were
part of it, this was merely evidence of the so-called ‘cover-up’. On
22 January 1921 Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent claimed
that film and cinema was at the forefront of this plot. With ‘gen-
tile playwrights and actors . . . steadily diminishing in number for
want of a market, at times the employment of Jewish actors has
been so obtrusive as to endanger the success of the play’. It went
on to note that ‘some of the more prominent Jewish actors, many
of them prime favorites, are Al Jolson, Charlie Chaplin . . . Ed
Wynne, or to mention his real name, Israel Leopold’. Here, ‘the
128 Sex, morality and a tramp in 1920s America

cover-name conceals from the theater going public the fact that
the actors and actresses who purvey entertainment are, in large
and growing proportion, Jewish’.46
Against this secretive cabal of subversives, however, there was a
body of cinematic opinion that was much more politically palat-
able. Foremost among this was Louis B. Mayer, born Lazar Burt
Mayer to Jewish parents in the Ukraine (thereby ironically form-
ing another Jewish name concealer for the Fords). According to
the actor Ralph Bellamy, Mayer was a ‘Jewish Hitler, a fascist’
with ‘no feeling for any minority, including his own’.47 Although
a movie mogul, as Ross persuasively shows, ‘through his involve-
ment in party politics and his careful mentoring of conservative
stars, Mayer laid the groundwork that made it possible for actors
such as George Murphy, Ronald Reagan, and Arnold Schwar-
zenegger to become successful politicians’.48 That these were all
of the political right was as much about the California Mayer
made his mark in, as it was his own innate beliefs. With registered
Republicans outnumbering Democrats by 3:1 in California, the
so-called Grand Old Party (GOP) was the establishment party in a
state that had a Republican Governor in Sacramento from 1917 to
1939. With an immigrant background and (unlike Chaplin actu-
ally) being Jewish, there was little more obvious sign for Mayer of
having ‘made it’ in America than hobnobbing with and influenc-
ing the conservative, apple-pie eating and Protestant-worshipping
political establishment.
After the official inauguration of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
(MGM) in April 1924, Mayer joined the Republican Party and
campaigned for the re-election of President Coolidge. Coolidge had
famously declared that ‘the chief business of the American people
is business’ and as capital flowed into the movie industry (more
than $1 billion of capital by 1921) the alliance between Holly-
wood and the Republican establishment became ever more secure.
Whereas Al Jolson had organised Broadway players to campaign
for the Republicans in 1920 and 1924, it would be the election of
Herbert Hoover as President in 1928 that would finally cement the
pact between entertainment and the GOP, however. While Mayer
had joined the Coolidge bandwagon rather late, he ensured that by
1927 he was firmly behind the presumptive next Republican nomi-
nee in Hoover. Appointed treasurer of the Republican National
 Sex, morality and a tramp in 1920s America 129

Committee for California, Mayer went around the major studios

soliciting donations from Cecil B. De Mille ($10,000) and United
Artists president Joseph Schenck ($7,000) for Hoover’s cause – the
latter, albeit by degrees of separation, thereby seeing revenues from
Chaplin films fund the Republican Party. At the 1928 Republi-
can National Convention in Kansas City Mayer even promised
to ‘deliver the motion picture industry to the Republican Party’.
Although the existence of Charlie Chaplin always rendered this an
impossible task, Mayer was able to convince the even more impor-
tant press magnate William Randolph Hearst to leave behind his
last vestiges of Democratic sympathy and support Hoover’s nomi-
nation for the Republican ticket. On 12 March 1929, the first
guests Hoover would host after moving into the White House
would be the Mayers.49 With Republicans in the Governor’s Man-
sion in Sacremento, occupying the White House and in control of
both Houses of Congress in Washington, this was undeniably a
smart political play.
By 1932 the extent to which Mayer had captured Hollywood
for the Republicans would have been obvious to a child of ten.
Indeed, one such ten-year-old was actor Jackie Cooper (later to
achieve a second dose of fame as Perry White in Christopher
Reeve’s Superman films) who told a Republican sympathetic
meeting of women’s groups that he would vote for Hoover if he
was old enough. During the 1932 campaign Lionel Barrymore,
Buster Keaton, Jimmy Durrante, Conrad Nagel and Mae Murray
all took part in a grand rally in support of Hoover at the Shrine
Auditorium in Los Angeles six days before the election. That these
activities were portrayed as patriotic and as decent Americans sup-
porting their President would not be a luxury extended to Charlie
Chaplin in later years. Now the American public had not liked
what had gone on in Charlie’s hotel rooms, they were about to get
even more of a dose of what went on in his mind. In the 1920s he
had begun to enter the political fray, but in the 1930s he would
hurl himself headlong into it.

Notes
1 The New York News, 30 May 1924.
2 Adolphe Menjou, It Took Nine Tailors (New York, 1948), 129.
130 Sex, morality and a tramp in 1920s America

3 The Argonaut clipping, 2 January 1948 within National Archives,

Washington, D.C. [NADC]/HUAC/RG 233.
4 Harry Crocker’s unpublished memoir, ‘Charlie Chaplin: Man and
Mime’, MHL/HRC, IV–16.
5 Georgia Hale, Charlie Chaplin: Intimate Close-Ups (New Jersey,
1995), 149–50.
6 Via US Bureau of the Census.
7 Montreal Gazette, 6 December 1924.
8 The Evening Independent, 30 March 1926. My italics.
9 Pittsburgh Press, 22 August 1927.
10 Lita Grey (Jeffrey Vance ed), Wife of the Life of the Party, (London,
1998), 5.
11 Ibid., 3, 8.
12 Ibid., 10–11.
13 Ibid., 13.
14 Ibid., 15.
15 Ibid., 27.
16 Ibid., 30.
17 Tully, ‘King of Laughter’, UCLA/JTL, 83.
18 Miranda Seymour, Chaplin’s Girl: The Life and Loves of Virginia
Cherrill (London, 2009), 76.
19 Grey, Wife, 42.
20 Ibid., 45.
21 Ibid., 50.
22 Divorce petition, Los Angeles County Superior Court (LACSC), Lita
Grey–Charlie Chaplin Divorce Papers (LGLP) 2.
23 Divorce Petition, LACSC/LGLP, 3.
24 Atlantic Journal, 1 June 1924.
25 Valeria Belletti to Irma, 27 February 1925, MHL/Valeria Belletti
Papers [VLB] 1–f.2.
26 Louise Brooks, ‘Charlie Chaplin Remembered’, Film Culture, 40
(Spring, 1966), 5–6.
27 Peter Ackroyd, Charlie Chaplin (London, 2014) 152–3.
28 Divorce Petition, LACSC/LGLP, 11.
29 Grey, Wife, 126.
30 Ibid., 104.
31 Ibid., 128.
32 Divorce Petition, LACSC/LGLP, 7.
33 Reading Eagle, 20 December 1992.
34 Divorce Petition, LACSC/LGLP, 3.
35 Divorce Petition, LACSC/LGLP, 20.
36 Divorce Petition, LACSC/LGLP, 3.
37 Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography (London, 2003), 300.
38 The New York Times, 5 June 1922.
39 The New York Times, 5 June 1922.
40 Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics
and the Movies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 32–3.
 Sex, morality and a tramp in 1920s America 131

41 Buster Keaton, My Wonderful World of Slapstick (New York, 1960),

160.
42 Menjou, Nine Tailors, 130.
43 15 August 1922 report, Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI], Char-
lie Chaplin file [CCF] part 7.
44 MPPDA Committee Minutes, 6 January 1922, Flinders Institute
for Research in the Humanities, Flinders University, South Austra-
lia [FIRTH], Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America
[MPPDA] File no. 57.
45 Although Chaplin himself did not put his personal production com-
pany through their auspices.
46 Dearborn Independent, 22 January 1921.
47 Steven J. Ross, Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped
American Politics (Oxford, 2011), 53.
48 Ibid.
49 All via Ross, Hollywood Left and Right, ch.2.
5 Between Churchill and
Gandhi: A comedian sees
the world

If socially conservative America was beginning to baulk both at

Chaplin’s politics and his womanising, the man himself was about
to re-assert some profoundly transnational connections. Centred
on Chaplin’s world tour to promote City Lights in the early 1930s,
this chapter stresses the international thinking that informed his
work. He was of course British rather than American – but it
was more than that. Charlie’s world view developed in the 1930s
by drawing on thinkers from John Maynard Keynes to Mahatma
Gandhi. He read widely, paid attention to the news and put much
thought into how the world ‘should be’ as much as how it was.
He was an autodidact whose sheer wealth meant that his politi-
cal views were almost always about what was better ‘for other
people’. And, as a result, in later years some judged the political
philosophy he portrayed on the screen as jejune in the extreme.
This was unfair. In artistic terms Chaplin’s views were always
more developed than, for example, his nineteenth-century pre-
decessor Charles Dickens. When George Orwell wrote his 1940
essay on Dickens, he noted ‘the utter lack of any constructive sug-
gestion anywhere in [Dickens’s] work. He attacks the law, parlia-
mentary government, the educational system and so forth, without
ever clearly suggesting what he would put in their places.’1 In this
regard Chaplin had a more developed weltanschauung than the
nineteenth-century writer. More importantly, criticising the coher-
ence of Chaplin’s politics also somewhat overstates the specificity
of the political world in which he interacted. Rather than the mod-
ern fascination with specific retail policy offers – cut this or that
tax by a set amount, fund spending on this budget line by reducing
 Between Churchill and Gandhi 133

it on another – interwar politicians in both America and Britain

tended to set out their various principles in broad brush strokes. If
Chaplin could be vague in his desire to help the poor, so too could
elected officials. Thus, politicians talked of solving unemployment,
poor housing, low welfare and so forth but did not often set out
concrete programmes to reach these end goals, or how they would
be paid for. By way of ballpark indication, in 1929 the British
Labour Party manifesto would constitute 2,500 words of rather
vague aims.2 Chaplin spoke more politics than that during, say, his
1942 speech on a second front. Certainly in the intervening years
politics has since changed dramatically. Indeed, in 2015 Labour
would set forth a set of specific pledges totalling more than 16,000
words. But we should not judge Charlie by the modus operandi
of the twenty-first century. The fact that Chaplin did not sit down
and write Das Kapital in the 1930s should not preclude an accep-
tance of him as a coherent political actor.
This chapter therefore considers the international influences on
Chaplin’s thought in the crucial years after the Wall Street Crash,
issues that we continue in the next chapter on Modern Times. Tak-
ing in Sergei Eisenstein, Ivor Montagu, Winston Churchill, Gandhi
and the deputies of the pre-Nazi dominated German Reichstag, his
travels when working on and then promoting City Lights would
prove vital in shaping his politics. In a sense, it professionalised
them, moving Chaplin from the type of man who could merely
blether about communism over a cold beer with Buster Keaton
to someone prepared to take on contemporary politicians more
seriously. Whether this was a good thing for Chaplin’s life is of
course debateable, but it certainly changed it. To paraphrase the
title of one of his later books, this was truly a time when a com-
edian saw a good deal of the world, and would bring much of it
home to America.

Eisenstein in Hollywood
Before Chaplin saw the world, however, the world flocked
to Chaplin. A theme of this work is that for a self-proclaimed
non-communist (and certainly a very successful capitalist) Charlie
Chaplin kept the company of a significant number of Bolshevik
sympathisers. One of these was the Englishman Ivor Montagu,
134 Between Churchill and Gandhi

a public school and Cambridge-educated son of a Peer who had

been in sporadic contact with Charlie throughout the late 1920s.
Like Rob Wagner before him, Montagu was one of several poly-
maths whose leftist politics was only part of their appeal to Char-
lie. A jovial man, after working for the Labour Party at the 1918
General Election Montagu later recalled that ‘I put my top-hat
away in the Underground cloakroom nearest to my public school
when I went out canvassing’.3 Like Charlie he never let leftist
sympathy drift into a purely monastic existence. For example, as
President of the International Table Tennis Federation, Montagu
helped popularise the sport across the globe. He was adept with a
much larger tennis racquet, too, always more Chaplin’s game. As
a film critic for the liberal-leaning Observer and New Statesman
in London he had a natural affinity for the work of Chaplin, and
attempted to ingratiate both himself and, more crucially, others
of a leftist standpoint into Charlie’s inner circle. Montagu had
even directed three short comedic films himself – these were low
budget, but had utilised a script written by Chaplin’s acquaintance
H.G. Wells.4 After failing to make a breakthrough as a director
in Britain, Montagu’s eyes began to turn to Hollywood and the
opportunities potentially out there.
Just as Chaplin would consider much of his economic phi-
losophy on the beaches of the French Riviera in late 1931, Mon-
tagu’s association with communism took a decisive turn in the
equally salubrious location of the Swiss Alps. There, in La Sar-
raz, a late 1920s conference organised by the French philosopher
and cultural theorist Raymond Aron saw various avant garde
European filmmakers gather to, in Montagu’s words, ‘praise one
another and admire one another’.5 One such attendee was the
‘slim, strong, handsome, fair-haired and golden-skinned’ Sergei
Eisenstein, then still riding high on the success of the Russian
revolution depicting Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October
(1928).6 Montagu declared Eisenstein and his collaborators
(including Grigory Alexandrov) ‘the supreme experimenters’
who were convinced, ‘not incorrectly, that the great cinema of
those days, the cinema of industry and prosperity, was too com-
placent’. This artistic licence is what drew Montagu in: ‘We
were not “Reds” – the term was little used then – but we adored
experiment.’7
 Between Churchill and Gandhi 135

Ingratiating himself with a smattering of Russian gained through

two previous trips to the Soviet Union, Montagu invited Eisenstein
to give a lecture at the Film Society in London. This was not the first
connection Chaplin would have to Eisenstein – in 1926 Douglas
Fairbanks and Mary Pickford had seen Potemkin in Moscow. So
impressed was he with the film and keen to get its director to Hol-
lywood Fairbanks had then asked the Russian, ‘How long does it
take you to pack your bags?’8 Since the Soviet regime was grate-
ful for the propagandistic potential of Eisenstein’s recent output, he
and Alexandrov were permitted to leave the Soviet Union to cross
a Europe where ‘notabilities in literature, the arts, academic circles,
[and wider] society’ were all eager to meet them. Like Montagu they
were eager to get to Hollywood, however – particularly to learn from
the new sound cinema that would so plague Chaplin. With a £500
loan from his uncle to sustain himself for a year, Montagu promptly
proposed to join them.
Ivor Montagu’s initial connection with Chaplin is difficult to
ascertain. Certainly as far back as September 1925 he had been
in touch with Soviet officials who had offered Charlie – presum-
ably in the erroneous belief that Montagu was something of an
insider – the opportunity to make a film there, or simply visit the
country as a tourist.9 But the initial tone of their correspondence
seems to be Chaplin trying to fob off a Montagu looking for any
angle into the famous filmmaker. Doubtless he received many such
attempts. In November 1925 Montagu had written to Charlie, but
Alf Reeves had simply issued a perfunctory reply on his behalf say-
ing the ‘letter has been placed on his desk to await his return’.10
After H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw had agreed to pen let-
ters of introduction to both the Fairbanks and Chaplin, Montagu
appears to have led his Soviet friends to Hollywood in 1930 with
the vague hope of parlaying them into something, but having no
idea where it would lead. He was, in fact, something of a chancer.
Chaplin eventually agreed ‘to do something’ for Montagu, but
largely ‘to show his deep respect for Mr. Shaw and Mr. Wells’.11 Alf
Reeves attempted to intercede to get a more proactive response from
Charlie, partly due to Montagu’s wife coming from the same South
London hinterland as himself, but Montagu rebuffed the offer.
Eventually, after what must have seemed like an interminable wait,
Chaplin’s chauffeur Kono rang Montagu asking him round for tea
136 Between Churchill and Gandhi

at his Beverly Hills house. A set of tennis later (Montagu won six
games to three), a friendship was sealed.
This friendship did not necessarily mean business – formally at
least Eisenstein had an initial agreement with Paramount for six
months. This, however, merely provided expenses ($500 for Eisen-
stein a week, $100 for Montagu and others) while they searched for
a film to make. This time seems to have been mostly spent attending
the parties held by studio big-wigs, no doubt in the hope that one
would produce a big cheque for them to finance some cinematic
venture. At one such gathering the group encountered Upton Sin-
clair, whose wife told Montagu that ‘whatever happens now to the
Russian revolution, it has been a wonderful help to Upton and me
in our propaganda’. Montagu saw Sinclair as something of a sell-out
by this stage, however: ‘The Red David who had challenged Goliath
with The Jungle and The Brass Check had become pink by now.’12
In any event, it was Chaplin’s house that had now become their
collective ‘second home’. At another party Montagu encountered
Jim Tully, the now ex-Chaplin employee, who inveighed against his
former boss, ‘sneering at him for intellectual pretension’. Tully spat
that ‘he has a library full of the books of the day, but he has never
read any of them from start to finish’. Defending his would-be spon-
sor, Montagu noted that ‘there is probably not another star of his
eminence in the Hollywood of that day, or any magnate, who had
a serious library at all or had even looked at any of those books’.
Generally, Montagu believed, ‘Chaplin had looked into them all and
had ideas about them he could present with point.’13
If Montagu was not a communist (and his later CV listed com-
munist membership from 1931) he was certainly facilitating their
bidding.14 The Soviet film agency Amkino kept pestering Montagu
and Eisenstein to find out why Charlie would not sell any of his
films to the USSR, ‘and try to do something about it’. Ironically
for a director accused of trying to export communism to the West,
this was because he felt that the Soviet regime was short changing
him: ‘Charlie explained that it was not because he was in any way
anti-Soviet, but business was business and the money they were
offering was less than he would get for a film from one middling-size
town in the United States.’ Montagu tried to explain ‘all about the
five-year-plan, the need of the Soviet Union to import machinery,
the shortage of valuta. He would not budge.’ It was, Charlie noted,
 Between Churchill and Gandhi 137

‘the principle of the thing. Pictures are worth something. They give
Henry Ford valuta for tractors and my pictures must be worth at
least as much as several tractors.’15 Montagu tried to broker a com-
plicated deal whereby Charlie would receive furniture looted from
the Tsar’s palace in lieu of payment for distribution rights, but it
came to nothing.
The more Eisenstein was seen around Hollywood, the more suspi-
cious those on the American right became at his motives. Montagu
eventually put the failure of Eisenstein to land a major Hollywood
project as down to a mixture of ‘mistrust of intellectuals (espe-
cially “foreigners”), tribal rival[ries], our own tactical mistakes,
and political fears’.16 As mentioned, Montagu himself personally
denied being a communist. This was untrue. The British secret ser-
vice was monitoring Montagu’s mail constantly, he was described
as ‘the communist cashier’ in the press in 1932 and, most cru-
cially, by 1940 he had received the code name ‘Intelligentsia’ from
Moscow.17 Amusingly, the British became ever more suspicious of
Montagu because of his advocacy of table tennis – which they con-
sidered a hobby so eccentric it had to be cover for something more
nefarious. More worryingly, with Montagu’s brother Ewen heavily
involved in the planning for Operation Mincemeat (the diversion
for what became the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943), Ivor was
considered something of a threat to national security by the 1940s.
Despite (or perhaps because of) this, Charlie proved a loyal friend
until death – a loyalty that was reciprocated. For his part Eisenstein
eventually shuffled off to Mexico to link up with Upton Sinclair on
a new film project, which we cover in the next chapter.

The talkies
Leaving Montagu and Eisenstein behind, Charlie took off to pro-
mote 1931’s City Lights. In many ways Chaplin’s 1931–2 world
tour was initially intended to be as much about personal and
artistic introspection as it was political development. The politi-
cal writings would indeed emerge as this chapter will note, but
there was a more immediate problem: Al Jolson’s landmark per-
formance in The Jazz Singer. Previously Chaplin had been the
cinematic innovator. He had taken the one-note slapstick comedy
he had encountered when first arriving in the States, and imbued
138 Between Churchill and Gandhi

it with a pathos that far exceeded those of his great contemporaries.

He was, however pompously he expressed it, an ‘artist’. Except now
the rules of the cinematic game had changed. On 6 October 1927
Warner Brothers released The Jazz Singer to critical and commer-
cial success. The major story here was not only the use of spoken
dialogue in the film, but the fact that it had proven so successful.
With a near four-million-dollar return on a $400,000 investment,
the business case for moving to sound was clear.18 The big question
was where that left the Tramp, and was he now behind the times?
In the mid-1930s Winston Churchill speculated on this dilemma.
On the one hand, he believed that ‘had it not been for the coming of
the Talkies, we would already have seen this great star in a serious
role’. Chaplin remained, as Churchill knew, an anachronism in the
post Jazz Singer age: ‘He is the one figure of the old silent screen to
whom the triumph of the spoken word has meant neither speech
nor extinction.’ And for all the huge US receipts The Jazz Singer
had taken in there was a commercial argument for ploughing on as
long as possible in the silent format: the international market. As the
great imperialist Churchill knew, ‘there are many countries which
lack the resources to make their own talkies. There are millions of
people whose mother tongue will never be heard in any cinema and
who understand thoroughly no other speech.’ Churchill’s case then
segued in slightly odd directions here:
The English-speaking nations have a great opportunity – and
a great responsibility. The primitive mind thinks more easily
in pictures than in words . . . The films which are shown amid
the stillness of the African tropic night or under the skies of
Asia may determine, in the long run, the fate of Empires and
of civilisations. They will promote, or destroy, the prestige by
which the white man maintains his precarious supremacy.19
Churchill’s words here may not chime with post-1945 norms,
but at least they were consistent with his general world view. What
is less clear is how he imagined that Chaplin would fit in to this
agenda. Pointing to the need for studios to make the ‘right type
of silent films’ to both hit ‘an immensely profitable market’ and
provide ‘a great service to civilisation’, he hoped ‘we shall not have
to wait another four years for the next Chaplin picture’. If Winston
was hoping for Charlie to make a silent version of, say, The Lives
 Between Churchill and Gandhi 139

of a Bengal Lancer, he would be waiting a long time. But the point

was that so too would any cinema-goers who wanted to hear the
Tramp talk. From 1927 until 1940’s Great Dictator, the Tramp –
or a variant of him – appeared on screen without speaking a word
of English (the gibberish song in Modern Times not withstanding).
For thirteen years Chaplin rode out the talking storm, helped in
large part by the fact that his immense wealth meant that he did
not need to make many pictures, and his independence through
United Artists meant that there were no executives to face down
in any boardroom. By 1936 the New York Evening Journal found
it ‘curious to see the lips of the actors move and to hear no sound’
in Modern Times, the last time that Charlie would chance such a
tactic. But he had ploughed on regardless.

City Lights
As with much of his cinematic work, 1931’s City Lights was
the means and not the end. At least for our purposes it got him
into the rooms to talk to various famous politicians and think-
ers. But its sheer genius demands outlining even in a work on
Chaplin’s politics. In one sense, there was a major exception
with this film – Charlie did not end up sleeping with his co-star.
From Edna Purviance (1914–23) to Georgia Hale (1925) to
Merna Kennedy (1928) to Paulette Goddard (1936–40) Charlie
had always adopted co-stars as sources of potential affairs. This
was not the case with Virginia Cherrill. Initially attracted by her
‘shapely form in a blue bathing suit’, Chaplin found that unlike
other applicants he had tried, ‘to my surprise she had the fac-
ulty of looking blind’ – a key plot point for what would become
his most moving film. Virginia’s inexperience at acting was not
necessarily a problem for Charlie – ‘those with less experience
are more apt to adapt themselves’ – but her attitude to filming
was. As she later noted, ‘I don’t think Charlie really liked me
very much . . . we had almost no social contact of any kind.’ For
Virginia filming ‘was boring in that there was so much waiting.
One waited . . . sometimes for months, literally – three or four
months – and Charlie would not come to the studio.’ As a result,
Virginia sat knitting or reading in her room while Charlie figured
out how to resolve the film’s plot.
140 Between Churchill and Gandhi

Chaplin started pre-production on City Lights in early 1928,

albeit soon halted after the death of his mother on 28 August that
year. The film did not receive its premiere until February 1931.
This was some delay, even for Charlie. As Ivor Montagu wrote to
him just before its release: ‘[I am] beginning to get anxious about
City Lights. Why isn’t it ready? What is happening to it? I begin
to have visions of you swallowing the negative inch by inch as
you do your spaghetti [in one memorable skit in the film].’20 This
was not just a product of the poor relationship between Charlie
and Virginia, however – many changes occurred in the overall
structure of the story that delayed matters. When filming com-
menced in December 1928 it had originally been planned that the
film should be set in London, but this was subsequently revised to
a generic city, presumably in America. Similarly, although he had
always planned the story to be about the theme of blindness and
had an unusually strong sense of how it may end, he had originally
conceived it as something of a follow-up to The Circus where
he would play a clown that had gone blind and was attempting
to conceal this fact from his young daughter. Even when he had
settled on the importance of the blind girl, he toyed with various
endings, including having the Tramp introduce her to the million-
aire and for him to bow out of a love triangle once more. The plot
and the cast were both a pain, Cherrill aside. The role of the mil-
lionaire had to be re-cast after four days when the Australian artist
Henry Clive refused to jump into a river during the millionaire’s
aborted suicide attempt that sees the Tramp come to the rescue.
There could be no revisiting of this plot element. It would be the
association with the millionaire that enabled Charlie to assume the
affectations of wealth so crucial to the arc of the picture.
In the end, City Lights began with a couple of scenes of com-
edic business before its central story is introduced: the mutual love
between the Tramp and Cherrill’s flower-selling girl. Although a
comedy, the film derives its poignancy from the sheer lengths that
Charlie will go to to earn the money not only to pay for the girl’s
rent, but ultimately to procure an operation to restore her sight.
Against the backdrop of Chaplinesque slapstick, City Lights is ulti-
mately an exceptional love story in which its heroine has no idea
of the Tramp’s poverty, and throughout begs the viewer to consider
what will happen when her sight is restored, and she sees her pauper
 Between Churchill and Gandhi 141

of a benefactor. This required careful craftsmanship. What Chaplin

could not figure out for a long time was how, in the scene depicting
their first meeting, the girl should be shown to be unaware of the
Tramp’s lowly social status and, equally crucially, to show that the
Tramp knew this and would thus decide to affect the habits of a rich
man to win her over. As Charlie later wrote, ‘Logically it was always
difficult to get a beautiful girl interested in a tramp. This has always
been a problem in my films.’21 In the end, the simplest indicator of
1930s wealth, a car door slamming (and the two characters’ reac-
tions to it), was used to communicate these crucial plot signals that
drive the whole film. It is an incredibly efficient gem of a scene. But it
took time – contributing to Virginia’s general frustration and partly
accounting for her being temporarily fired before Charlie realised he
had shot too much film and was forced to bring her back.
The second story arc concerns the Tramp’s friendship with the
millionaire, now played by Harry Myers. Having saved him from
committing suicide (presumably because his wife has left him),
the millionaire is grateful and gregarious towards the tramp when
drunk. The two go out on the town, host an opulent party at the
millionaire’s house and drive around the city together without a
care in the world. When under the influence of liquor the million-
aire hands over his money willingly whenever his new friend asks,
but crucially he does not recall doing this, or indeed the Tramp
at all, when sober. Because of the millionaire’s erratic ways, the
Tramp is forced to take on a series of jobs (from street sweeper to
amateur boxer) that not only pave the way for much hilarity, but
illustrate the lengths he will go to to help his beloved. In this sense
although City Lights aims no direct pot shots at particular leaders
or policies, the fact that the only two people to treat the Tramp in
a humane manner are a drunkard and someone who cannot see
him lend the film an overarching class emphasis.
Whatever the politics, the film remains a classic from begin-
ning to end. Indeed, even the economy of the scene depicting the
protagonists’ first meeting and the pacing of the story thereafter
do not compare to the film’s justly famous climax. After taking
on various demeaning jobs to try to help his sweetheart, the
Tramp eventually manages to get the funds from his millionaire
friend to give to the blind girl that will pay for her rent and help
restore her sight. After being wrongly imprisoned for stealing
142 Between Churchill and Gandhi

this money, the Tramp wanders the streets aimlessly: alone once
more. Passing by a prosperous flower shop now run by Virginia,
her sight restored and middle-class manners affected, he is ini-
tially met with derision and then pity. Recognising his sweet-
heart, the Tramp is clearly moved at her beauty and how well she
is now doing, but tries to scuttle off before she works out who he
is and presumably has her dreams shattered. Cherrill, however,
manages to grab him by the hand with the intention of giving
some change to this poor wretch. But, as she does so, she rec-
ognises his touch. Slowly it dawns on her that this Tramp – not
the handsome Prince Charming she had previously been shown
to be imagining – had been her hero all along. She takes in her
benefactor with a mixture of despair and gratitude. Through
tears the Tramp asks, ‘You can see now?’ ‘Yes,’ she replies, ‘I can
see now.’ She draws his hand to her heart and sighs. On Charlie’s
face, a mixture of delight at seeing her again, but utter fear at
what comes next, we fade out.
For every ounce of criticism that may be lodged at Chaplin the
man, it is difficult to deny the genius of his work after scenes like
this. As Charlie later noted, ‘The reason it hasn’t the usual fade-out
is because it would have been laying it on too thick for me to walk
away in this picture.’22 Many praised the efficacy and restraint of
the work. After inviting him to the film’s London premiere, Charlie
recorded that Albert Einstein was blubbing like a baby as the film
reached its moving crescendo. More broadly, in The Listener the
writer Francis Birrell was effusive in his praise for this mesmerising
picture. Given the financial crash over a year and a half before the
film’s release, City Lights is surprisingly a-political on the surface.
Its class message is implied but not hammered home. Partly this
was because the Depression had not yet reached its peak. And yet,
despite this, Birrell read much into it:

Take another tiny moment, when Chaplin is being led off to

gaol – by a misunderstanding of course. Just as he is going
through the squalid doorway he kicks away his cigarette stump
with the heel of his boot. The whole of human expression, the
whole of the sense of powerlessness of man in the grip of the
machine is in this perfectly timed gesture. It defies analysis, but
it is utterly significant and beyond criticism.23
 Between Churchill and Gandhi 143

Even when kicking away a cigarette people could imbue Chap-

lin’s work with deep meaning. Again, after a flower pot is knocked
by a cat on to Chaplin’s head, Birrell noted that

Chaplin fades, and the scene is empty save for the sinister
wagging of the cat’s tail on the sill up in one corner. There
is, I suppose, about two inches of tail exposed in the right
hand top corner of the screen, yet there is something terrible
about its slow, self satisfied wagging, its complete indiffer-
ence to its own selfishness, to the ruin it has caused, the havoc
it has worked on human dignity, to the happy dream it has
destroyed. This tail seems to signify the whole farce of selfish-
ness and unconscious cruelty in the world.

Again, perhaps so, perhaps not. Soon enough critics were going
to have more overtly political films from Charlie to chew over. As
the lights dimmed on Europe’s cities, to be illuminated again by
fascists carrying torches, Charlie could not contend himself with
cats and flowerpots. Politics, he sensed, was moving in a far more
immediately sinister direction.

Back to Britain
As the painstaking ordeal of City Lights finally moved close to
fruition, and with the stinging publicity of both his divorce from
Lita Grey and the tax-evasion case still hanging around, a world
tour seemed an utterly agreeable idea. If in trouble: run – an option
not open to Charlie in his youth. And so on 13 February 1931 he
set sail from New York to arrive in Plymouth, England six days
later. The itinerary of his world tour is painstakingly reproduced
in Lisa Stein Haven’s excellently produced and annotated version
of Chaplin’s A Comedian Sees the World, and his travelogue pub-
lished in Women’s Home Companion across late 1933 to early
1934. To give something of the political flavour of this trip the
following engagements are listed within it for 1931:

February 1931
23/ . . . Lunch at Quaglino’s with Randolph Churchill and Lord
Birkenhead
144 Between Churchill and Gandhi

24/ Lunch at House of Commons with Philip Sassoon and Lloyd

George
25/ Luncheon at Lady Astor’s Cliveden; meets Bernard Shaw
26/ Dinner overnight at Churchill’s Chartwell

March 1931
1/ Visits Thomas Burke
3/ Luncheon at House of Commons with Lady Astor, Lloyd
George, and Kirkwood; first economic speech;
13/ Meets ministers of the Reichstag, Dr Joseph Wirth among
them [in Berlin]
15/ Tea with Einstein
16/ Visits Vienna; visits workmen’s apartments
21/ Attends tea with British consul [in Venice]
23/ Arrives back in Paris . . . lunch with Countess Noailles and
Aristide Briand
27/ Receives Legion d’Honneur back in Paris from Aristide
Briand

June 1931
Stays with H.G. Wells in Grasse

August 1931
14/ Dines with Winston Churchill in Biarritz

September 1931
7/ Meets Prince of Wales for the first time at a benefit for
the war wounded
19–21/ Weekend with Churchill at Chartwell
22/ Meets Gandhi at home of C.L. Catial in Beckton-road,
Canning Town

October 1931
9/ Meeting with Ramsay MacDonald outside the House of
Commons
23/ Attends Conservative election meeting at Plumstead in disguise
27/ Attends election night party at Selfridge’s
 Between Churchill and Gandhi 145

November 1931
14–16/ Spends weekend with Viscount and Viscountess Astor at
the Eliot Terrace, Plymouth
14/ Attends whist drive and dance of the East End Conserva-
tive Association
20/ Visits the House of Commons with Lady Astor

We deal with the international elements of this schedule later in

the chapter, but the British dimension is worth reflecting on. While
Britain remained a beacon of democracy in a Europe that saw
most countries fall to totalitarian regimes of left and right in the
years up to 1940, its politics were not without dramatic incident –
particularly during Chaplin’s visit back to his homeland in 1931.
Throughout the 1920s unemployment in Britain had remained
stubbornly more than 10 per cent of the labour force. Through that
decade policy makers of both left and right had wrestled with how
to tackle the ‘intractable million’ of the unemployed, with post-war
fiscal retrenchment being largely the policy prescription enacted by
Conservative-dominated administrations to try to restore the nation
to financial rectitude. This had been mirrored by the return of sev-
eral industries – including the mines and the railways – to private
ownership after being taken under state control during the war. As
such, in the late 1920s Charlie made a rather accurate prediction:

The next election, mark my words, will see the Labo[u]r Party
more strongly in power than heretofore. Why? Because the
government has made a tremendous mistake in its treatment
of the unions, in refusing to negotiate, in letting affairs drift
into an impasse, in letting the strike be called.24

Here Charlie referred to the General Strike of May 1926, which

had seen in the region of 1.7 million British workers from trans-
port workers and railwaymen to steelworkers and dockers down
tools for nine days in solidarity with the demands of their min-
ing colleagues to avoid wage reductions. Together with a gen-
eral impression that the Conservative government led by Stanley
Baldwin had been inert to the poverty faced outside the greater
south-east of England, this indeed led to a Labour victory in the
General Election of 1929.
146 Between Churchill and Gandhi

But when Chaplin arrived back in his homeland in February

1931 he most certainly did not walk into a socialist paradise. A
few months after Ramsay MacDonald had become Labour Prime
Minister his government, like so many, had to deal with the effects
of the Wall Street Crash and the subsequent desire of American
banks to repatriate capital they had previously lent to Europe.
Allied to this was the problem of parliamentary maths – Labour
was certainly ‘more strongly in power than heretofore’, but this
still meant a minority government reliant on the votes of other
parties to pass any legislation. Britain had therefore to deal with
a fast-moving crisis with a government that had to negotiate hard
for every inch of policy space. It is in this light that Chaplin’s vari-
ous meetings during his British trip are potentially so fascinating.
Certainly, Charlie always enjoyed dinners with aristocratic
Tories. Their conversation, manner and even accent impressed
him. But it was the politicians of the left who bear most attention.
By the time of his meeting with Ramsay MacDonald in October
1931, the Labour government had already fallen from power after
several of its ministers refused to countenance further spending
cuts to help balance the budget and a National Government (led
by MacDonald but heavily populated by Conservatives) had taken
its place. Yet Charlie’s meetings earlier in the year with Oswald
Mosley, David Kirkwood and David Lloyd George were more
telling than his more ‘official’ dealings with the Prime Minister.
We will deal with the Mosley conversation in our chapter on fas-
cism (which Mosley would later adopt), but suffice it to say that
speaking to a figure advocating dramatic government intervention
to curb unemployment was both formative, and hardly unique.
Lloyd George, the former Prime Minister turned vocal proponent
of Keynesian deficit spending, was very much of a similar mind set
to Mosley and in his 1929 Liberal Party manifesto had set forward
dramatic schemes to bring forward future infrastructure invest-
ment under the slogan We Can Conquer Unemployment. David
Kirkwood, a member of the Independent Labour Party (which
sat well to the left of the more mainstream parliamentary force),
would have had much in common with Charlie’s American politi-
cal allies like Henry Wallace and Upton Sinclair, too.
There was no little irony that these conversations about the
plight of the masses took place during tea at parliament or on
 Between Churchill and Gandhi 147

the French Riviera. Such a dichotomy brings to mind Charlie’s

conversation with Harry Crocker regarding his leftist friend Max
Eastman. Asking where Max was, Crocker replied, ‘in Southern
France writing on the the technique of revolution’. ‘He certainly
sets himself some lovely subjects,’ laughed Charlie in reply.25 As
we will see, when others started to mock Charlie for similar diver-
gence between his political content and the locations from which
it was delivered, this fired his radicalism. But, for now, it should
simply be stressed that this British sojourn mattered. The ‘respect-
able’ soft-left, pro-orthodox economics of MacDonald were fail-
ing before Charlie’s eyes. Meanwhile, charismatic and seemingly
eminently plausible politicians like Lloyd George and Mosley were
offering solutions regarding greater intervention that Charlie was
beginning to believe would ultimately be necessary to avert eco-
nomic meltdown. When Charlie arrived in February 1931 British
unemployment stood at 21.3 per cent of adult workers; by the
time he headed off in December it had barely budged (20.7 per
cent).26 The politics of MacDonald and Baldwin – best articulated
by Baldwin’s 1929 election slogan of ‘safety first’ – did not seem
to be working. New solutions were needed. Yet if Britain was ail-
ing, Charlie would encounter even worse examples of democratic
mismanagement on this world tour.

The German question

For all the economic difficulties faced by Britain, it was Germany,
Chaplin correctly diagnosed, that was the major problem facing
the Western world. In 1921 he had visited the country during his
tour to promote The Kid. Passing into the country on his train to
Berlin, Chaplin noted, ‘Germany is beautiful. Germany belies the
war. Men, women, and children are all at work. They are facing
their problem and rebuilding.’27 Although, with the notable excep-
tion of one-time conquest Pola Negri, there were ‘a few pretty
girls, but not many’ in the German capital, he generally enjoyed
his time in the land of Britain and America’s recent enemy. Ask-
ing to be taken ‘through the German slums’ he was even rebuked
by being told that ‘they have long such disappeared’.28 Certainly
the night-time was more rough around the edges – ‘the streets are
dark and gloomy, and it is then that one gets the effect of war and
148 Between Churchill and Gandhi

defeat’ – but Charlie’s general impression was of ‘a great people,

perverted for and by a few’.29
When promoting City Lights a decade later he encountered a
different country. On the plus side, he caught up again with Albert
Einstein, and his films (and therefore Charlie himself) were far
more known in Germany than they had been in 1921. Hearing
shouts of ‘Gold Rush Charlie’ and ‘Circus Charlie’ it was clear that
his silent films had penetrated far beyond the English-speaking
world. Yet storm clouds loomed on the horizon. Visiting the Ger-
man Reichstag to take tea with several parliamentary deputies, he
was given a rather gloomier vision of the new Berlin. He recalled
that ‘every member seemed pessimistic of the future’ and heard it
repeated that ‘it was impossible to go on for another year’. When
Charlie enquired what this meant, he was told simply ‘bank-
ruptcy’. The future did not look bright: ‘We shall have trouble,’
the deputies told him. ‘We have young men graduating in qualified
professions and passing their examinations, only to leave college
and stand in the bread line with the rest of the unemployed.’ Char-
lie summarised that this would lead to ‘anarchy and Bolshevism.
Their plight seemed pretty awful and their future dark.’30 Less
than two years before Hitler became Chancellor of Germany this
seemed a reasonable assessment.
All this required a solution. As we will see, part of this involved
a sustained interest in the politics of Social Credit and the theories
of C.H. Douglas. But an equally large part saw Chaplin sit down
and actually sketch out a plan to solve the ‘German question’ for
himself. Writing to contacts at the Daily Mail in London, he had
them send him financial data from the newly formed Bank of Inter-
national Settlements (which then, as now, monitored transnational
flows of capital) and John Maynard Keynes’s 1919 volume on The
Economic Consequences of the Peace.31 Keynes’s work had argued
as to the folly of punishing the Germans too harshly at the Treaty of
Versailles, and would prove particularly formative for Charlie. Thus,
whereas Jim Tully had mocked Charlie in the 1920s for not putting
pen to paper on his vague political musings, with the exotic back-
drops of Bali, Japan and Singapore in 1932, he finally set to work.
By 17 June 1932 the Los Angeles Times had him noting that ‘on
my travels I talked my idea over with renowned economists and
none was able to find a flaw’. He continued, ‘I think it can be made
 Between Churchill and Gandhi 149

practical. I am now preparing a paper on the subject which I will

release in a few days.’32 In the early drafts of this paper that survive
in Bologna, Chaplin wrote that ‘the most stupid and blind theory
existing today is the belief that we must protect the high value of
our currency, even at the sacrifice of our commodities, for what
we know is that it is the inexorable law of cause and affect that if
money is dear, commodities are cheap and vice versa. So where is
your standard of values?’33 The previous September Charlie’s home-
land of Britain had – after avoiding the measure for some time –
devalued its currency against the US dollar by almost a quarter in
coming off the gold standard. But Charlie proposed to go further.
By 27 June 1932 it became clear that his willingness to sacrifice
the value of ‘our’ (presumably America’s) currency meant printing
new money. This transnational form of quantitative easing was the
inventive twist to an ‘economics manifesto’ that Chaplin published
that day to widespread media coverage across the United States.
Chaplin proposed a new global issue of $35 billion worth of cur-
rency, with the new currency to have the same value as gold. This
money would be paid to the Allied powers, in lieu of the sum then
comprising Germany’s total war debt, which would be cancelled.
Germany would cover the administrative cost of launching the
scheme, and it would simultaneously provide ‘added capital to
the world’.34 Chaplin’s scheme would not only redress Germany’s
problems, but America should consider that ‘Europe’s recovery is
our recovery – Europe’s prosperity is our prosperity’.35 With the
world being ‘without money’, it was time, in Charlie’s mind, to
create some. The timing here was not precipitous: at the Lausanne
Conference underway as Chaplin published his manifesto, Ger-
man reparations under the Treaty of Versailles were subsequently
cancelled altogether. Technically, when Congress rejected the Lau-
sanne Plan in December 1932 Germany was, however, still liable
for its debt to America, but Hitler would be in no mood to pay this
when he came to power barely a month later. If Charlie’s famous
speech at the end of The Great Dictator was sometimes derided
as being a little flowery, it is worth considering that he had issued
a very practical (or at least specific) scheme to try to arrest the rise
of Nazism in the first place. As to resolving the German question
he was, at least initially, a Keynesian – certainly in terms of The
Economic Consequences of the Peace.
150 Between Churchill and Gandhi

Chaplin and Empire

If Charlie took his economics ‘manifesto’ from elements of C.H.
Douglas and J.M. Keynes, he also looked outside the West to
inform his world view, too. Back in September 1931 two global
icons had met in a humble little house in London’s East End. Sit-
ting on a sofa in a modest room, no more than twelve-feet square,
sat Charlie Chaplin. A taxi pulled up outside the house, met
with ‘hooraying and cheering’ as the figure he was about to meet
entered ‘that crowded little slum street’.36 The man was Mohan-
das Gandhi, known by his honorific title of Mahatma (the vener-
able) who was greeted by a throng of East Enders desperate to
see him. Although Charlie agreed with his new acquaintance on
several points, two issues place this meeting as a little odd.
First, Charlie had just come from his stay at Chartwell with the
Churchills (see Figure 5.1), not the biggest fans of Gandhi to say

Figure 5.1 Chaplin’s stay at Chartwell in September 1931 saw much polit-
ical discussion, not least about India. Here Charlie is pictured with, among
others, Winston Churchill, his wife Clementine and his son Randolph.
Courtesy of the Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge, UK
 Between Churchill and Gandhi 151

the very least. The previous October Winston Churchill had joined
a lobbying organisation called the Indian Empire Society that
argued that ‘too rapid advance towards self-government [for India]
would be fraught with the utmost danger’. Later he would join a
parliamentary off-shoot of this body, the India Defence League,
which would strenuously oppose the devolution of power to the
Government of India in 1935. To go from Churchill to Gandhi in
1931 was to travel from one end of the political spectrum to the
other, and this irony had been discussed at the Churchills’ dining
table. Brendan Bracken, a Conservative follower of Churchill’s,
told Charlie that ‘we’ve catered to this man long enough. Hunger
strikes or no[t], they should put him in jail.’ Charlie replied that
‘if you imprison one Gandhi, another will arise. He is a symbol of
what the Indian people want, and until they get what they want
they will produce another Gandhi after another.’ Churchill smiled,
and noted diplomatically that ‘you would make a good Labour
Member [of Parliament]’.37
Second, Chaplin actually thought Gandhi’s visit to London ‘a
mistake’. This was less for reasons of policy than presentation.
While Chaplin had ‘always respected Gandhi for his political
astuteness and his iron will’, he felt the trip had tarnished the
Mahatma. ‘In the cold dank climate of England, wearing his tradi-
tional loin-cloth . . . [Gandhi] seemed incongruous.’ For Chaplin,
‘his legendary significance evaporated in the London scene . . .
One’s impressiveness is greater at a distance.’38 In a sense this was
rather like Chaplin’s desire to keep the Tramp from talking – as
soon as he talked the mystique of what he may sound like was
lost. ‘Gandhi’ the concept, Charlie felt, was more impressive than
Gandhi the man. Better, in other words, to stay on that pedestal.
In any event, after the obligatory photographs the two got to
talking. For Charlie ‘now came that uneasy, terrifying moment
when I should say something astutely intelligent about a subject I
knew little about’. Knowing he could not wait for ‘the Mahatma to
tell me how much he enjoyed my last film . . . I doubted if he had
ever seen a film’, Charlie began to interject. ‘Naturally I am in sym-
pathy with India’s aspirations and struggle for freedom,’ he ven-
tured, ‘nonetheless, I am somewhat confused by your abhorrence of
machinery.’39 For a man set to release Modern Times six years later
this anti-Luddite view was perhaps surprising. ‘After all,’ continued
152 Between Churchill and Gandhi

Charlie, ‘if machinery is used in the altruistic sense, it should help

to release man from the bondage of slavery, and give him shorter
hours of labour and time to improve his mind and enjoy life.’40
Gandhi considered the notion, and then gave Charlie a ‘lucid object
lesson in tactical manoeuvring in India’s fight for freedom, inspired,
paradoxically, by a realistic, virile-minded visionary’. Machinery,
Gandhi argued, had made India dependent on England, ‘and the
only way we can rid ourselves of that dependence is to boycott all
goods made by machinery. That is why we have made the patriotic
duty of every Indian to spin his own cotton.’41 This was doubt-
less something of a political education for Charlie – only mildly
undermined by then watching the Mahatma at prayer: ‘His astute
legal mind, and his profound sense of political reality . . . seemed to
vanish in a sing-song chant.’42 Yet even in September 1931 Charlie
evidently was not fully reconciled to his Modern Times view of the
world, telling reporters, ‘I was not able to follow [Gandhi] in all
that he told me, but I was none the less anxious to impress upon
him my view that machinery was a heritage of mankind, and we
could not wholly depart from its usefulness.’43

Homeward bound
Gandhi provided one insight into contemporary Asia, but within
a year Charlie would have a far more sustained one. As his world
tour wound its way through Ceylon, Singapore, Java and Bali,
Charlie encountered ‘the realization of all of my exotic dreams’ in
the sights and rickshaws of Kandy, and the ‘fantastically beautiful
scenery’ the further he ventured into south-east Asia.44 Most sig-
nificantly, in May 1932 Charlie visited Japan and received a rap-
turous reception. In Kobe harbour Charlie’s boat was greeted by
aeroplanes circling overhead, dropping leaflets of welcome, with
thousands of Japanese cheering on the docks: ‘It was as excited and
emotional as any crowd I have ever seen anywhere.’ With the gov-
ernment putting on a special train to transport Charlie to Tokyo,
at every new station the train pulled up in the crowds became ever
larger. By the time the Chaplin party arrived in the Japanese capital,
an estimated 40,000 people had gathered to greet the English star.45
Although Charlie found the Japanese ‘generous and hospitable’, he
was almost witness to a rather darker side. On 15 May Charlie
 Between Churchill and Gandhi 153

attended a sumo wrestling match with Takeru Inukai, known as

Ken. His father, Prime Minister Tsuyoshi Inukai, had been experi-
encing a long running battle with the Japanese military for control
over foreign and defence policy. Many within the Japanese Army
wanted a full-scale invasion of mainland China (after the previous
conquest of Manchuria), and Inukai was seen as an impediment
to this. As Charlie and Ken watched the sumo, six naval cadets
broke into the Prime Minister’s palace and shot Inukai Snr dead.
Had Ken not been with Charlie he would have been assassinated,
too, but the military coup held even more significance for the cre-
ator of the Tramp. The ring-leader of the plot, Seishi Koga, later
confessed that the plan had been to kill Charlie because, ironically,
‘Chaplin is a popular figure in the United States and the darling of
the capitalist class.’ He believed that ‘killing him would cause a war
with America, and thus we could kill two birds with one stone’.
Eventually they reasoned that the death of Chaplin was unlikely to
draw a declaration of war from President Hoover – a reasonable
call. Chaplin later wryly commented, ‘I can imagine the assassins
having carried out their plan, then discovering that I was not an
American, but an Englishman – “Oh, so sorry!”’46
Eventually, Charlie made it back to American soil safe enough.
Landing in Seattle and making his way down the coast on land, he
passed ‘through the rich farmlands of Washington, the dense pine
forests of Oregon, and on into the vineyards and orchards of Cali-
fornia’. In doing so ‘he found it impossible to believe ten million
people wanting when so much real wealth is evident’. He felt glad
to be ‘home in Hollywood’ and contended that ‘in America lies the
hope of the whole world’. Given the upheaval he had witnessed
from the triumph of small ‘c’ conservatism in Britain to the violence
of militarist Japan, the radical in Chaplin likely meant such words
utterly sincerely. At this time at least, he felt that ‘whatever takes
place in the transition of this epoch-making time, America will be
equal to it’.47 In some turbulent times that remained to be seen.

Notes
1 Orwell’s work is readily available for free online, including via the
Project Gutenberg site: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.
html#part10 (accessed 7 November 2016).
154 Between Churchill and Gandhi

2 It is fair to add that the Liberal Party and its leader David Lloyd
George – who Chaplin would meet on this tour – had set out rather
more costed schemes.
3 Richard Weekes biographical essay of Montagu, within Communist
Party of Great Britain Paper Archives [CP], People’s History Museum,
Manchester [PHM], IND/MONT/1/1.
4 Ivor Montagu, With Eisenstein in Hollywood (Berlin, 1967), 18–20.
5 Ibid., 14.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid., 15.
8 Ibid., 28.
9 See correspondence in BFI/IVM item 324.
10 Reeves to Montagu, 19 November 1925, BFI/IVM item 324.
11 Montagu, Eisenstein, 66.
12 Ibid., 87.
13 Ibid., 92–3.
14 See Montagu’s CV within PHM/CP/IND/MONT/1/1.
15 Montagu, Eisenstein, 96–7.
16 Ibid., 141.
17 See, e.g., TNA/KV/2/598 and TNA/HW/15/43.
18 See Richard Carr and Bradley W. Hart, The Global 1920s: Politics,
Economics and Society (London, 2016), ch.4.
19 ‘The Future of Charlie Chaplin’s Contribution’, Collier’s Weekly
[undated 1934/5], Churchill Archives Centre [CAC], Cambridge, UK,
Winston Churchill Papers [CHAR] 8/521.
20 Montagu to Chaplin, 26 January 1931, BFI/IVM Item 320.
21 Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography (London, 2003), 208.
22 Paul Duncan (ed.), The Charlie Chaplin Archives (London, 2015), 338.
23 The Listener, 11 March 1931.
24 Harry Crocker’s unpublished memoir, ‘Charlie Chaplin: Man and
Mime’, MHL/HRC, XIII–12.
25 Crocker, ‘Man and Mime’, MHL/HRC, VII–22.
26 James Denman and Paul MacDonald, ‘Unemployment Statistics from
1881 to the Present Day’, Labour Market Trends (January 1996), 5–18.
27 Charles Chaplin, My Trip Abroad (London, 1922), 114.
28 Ibid., 118.
29 Ibid., 116, 114.
30 Ibid., 57.
31 Chaplin to Daily Mail, 26 February 1932, via CIN/CCA.
32 Los Angeles Times, 17 June 1932 via COP/CCP/39.
33 ‘An Idea for War Reparations’, June 1932, CIN/CCA.
34 Washington Herald, 27 June 1932 via COP/CCP/39.
35 Los Angeles Examiner, 27 June 1932 via COP/CCP/39.
36 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 335.
37 Ibid., 334.
38 Ibid., 335.
 Between Churchill and Gandhi 155

39 Ibid., 336.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid., 337.
43 Nottingham Evening Post, 23 September 1931.
44 Charlie Chaplin (Lisa Stein Haven ed.), A Comedian Sees the World
(Missouri, 2014), 126–7.
45 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 366.
46 Ibid., 369–70.
47 Chaplin, A Comedian Sees the World, 144.
6 Modern Times and
the Great Depression

Let us jump forward a moment. As our ninth chapter will note,

Charlie’s final years would be spent closer to Lausanne, Switzer-
land than Los Angeles, California. From this Swiss exile of the
1950s, with the scenic Alps in view, Chaplin had ample time to
reflect on the maelstrom that had gripped the world two decades
earlier. In one of the many jottings he wiled his days away produc-
ing, he argued that the Great Depression had been a classic exam-
ple of the cyclical nature of capitalism. Chaplin was certain that

the majority of us want to do right. But the law of supply and

demand which derives profits from scarcity, must eventually
end in disaster of some kind. I have never quite been able to
divest myself of this thought. I have never read Karl Marx, nor
have I studied socialism. But it is clearly recognized that the
abuses of capitalism accelerated the depression of the 1930s.1

The impact of the Wall Street Crash would be writ large over two
of his later films, the semi-silent Modern Times of 1936, and his first
film explicitly not to feature the Little Tramp, Monsieur Verdoux
released some eleven years later. These films were of a profoundly
left-wing persuasion, no question. The communist Daily Worker
even (wishfully) reported in 1936 that Chaplin had submitted the
script of Modern Times for prior approval from the Moscow Cin-
ema Board.2 But Chaplin’s response to the Depression went beyond
these high-profile examples. This chapter considers Chaplin’s eco-
nomic thought between 1929 and the outbreak of the Second World
War. If sex helped blacken his name in the public eye and his flirta-
tions with communism rendered him beyond the pale as the political
 Modern Times and the Great Depression 157

general climate changed, it was his 1930s critiques of capitalism that

provided something of a gateway to this nightmarish pincer move-
ment. As we will note, this was a period of artistic triumph, but also
concrete engagement with ideas to arrest the decline then gripping
many areas of America, and beyond. He had seen the problems of
the world, and now it was time to solve them.

The Depression and Charlie

When the stock market collapsed in New York in late October
1929 Chaplin was still attempting to get City Lights over the
finishing line. He had liquidated his investments in 1928 so was
financially protected, but artistically he was still struggling with
the impact of the crash and what, as a creative individual of a
leftist leaning, he should do about it. With filming wrapped up in
October 1930, little of the Depression’s impact could be included
in a film whose class rifts are clear, but that take place in a world
whose titular ‘city’ was utterly generic. Initially, he was therefore
accused of ducking the major political questions, both on- and
off-screen. Indeed, in August 1931 the New York Telegraph even
referred to the fact that ‘Charlie Chaplin can well afford to sun
himself on the sands of Juan-les-Pins [in the South of France]
with $7,000,000 to guard him from a poverty stricken old age’.
It continued: ‘All this talk of depression is being greeted with a
vague and wondering stare by film players as they trot down to
their favourite bank to indulge in a little coupon clipping of their
favourite and most productive bonds.’ With Harold Lloyd having
amassed a $12 million fortune during the 1920s, this was not just
aimed at Chaplin.3 A few months later the Boston Globe reported
that ‘pockets bulging with goodily returns financial from his
Europe expedition, Charlie Chaplin is headed homeward’.4 It was
not only his diagnosis of the Depression, but the initial fear that
he had been seen to do nothing about it that would drive much of
his 1930s radicalism.
Action of some kind was clearly needed. Through seeing Europe
Charlie had in a sense seen America’s possible future – and it did
not look too rosy. As Eric L. Flom notes, as Charlie returned to
California he had come to believe that America, ‘contrary to his
early feelings during the vaudeville days, [had become] a place of
uncertainty. No longer did the country seem to hold the promise it
158 Modern Times and the Great Depression

once did.’5 This was an impression reinforced in everything from

newspaper headlines to the dole queues. Indeed, the annual esti-
mates of unemployment in the United States record an astonishing
rise in the early 1930s. From 1930 to 1933 unemployment as a
percentage of the civilian workforce was recorded as 8.9 per cent,
15.9 per cent, 23.6 per cent and finally 24.9 per cent, respectively.
By 1933, almost thirteen million Americans were officially recorded
as out of work – an astonishing increase of about eleven and a half
million on the number seen in 1929. Yet to imply that Chaplin was
totally oblivious to this was rather unfair on the part of papers
such as the New York Telegraph, for the spectre of unemployment
haunted Chaplin’s work almost from its beginnings. The Tramp,
after all, had been employed in every capacity from impromptu
circus performer to boxer to gold prospector to glazer, all to stave
off the impoverishment that American capitalism could bring.
This would continue in the 1930s as evidenced by a document
prepared by Donald Gledhill, the executive secretary of the Acad-
emy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) in Los Ange-
les. Gledhill would type up a list of the 221 most popular films
released that decade. This 1939 list, which was circulated to mem-
bers of the House Un-American Activities Committee (albeit with
the jovial note, ‘don’t take it too seriously’), included reference
to three of Chaplin’s works. Both City Lights and Modern Times
were deemed ‘socially significant’ by the author, touching as they
did on issues such as poverty and the Depression (and ‘The Dic-
tator’ was listed as a ‘Propaganda Film talked about but not yet
made’).6 Chaplin may have liked lounging on French beaches, but
his 1930s were about more than that. If Chaplin indeed wanted
to change things in America he had three options: make politically
challenging cinema, endorse President Roosevelt’s New Deal, and
explore politically even more interventionist alternatives to those
pursued by the White House. As this chapter sets out, starting with
the last, he stepped up to the plate on all three.

Social Credit
As for radical ideas, Charlie Chaplin was an enthusiastic convert
to the movement known as Social Credit – propagated by the Eng-
lish engineer Major Clifford Hugh (C.H.) Douglas. The origins of
 Modern Times and the Great Depression 159

this philosophy were primarily located in the Great War, although

Douglas acknowledged his own debt to previous theories of
under-consumption propagated by thinkers such as J.A. Hobson.
When Major Douglas was put in charge of organising the work of
the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Britain during the First World
War he began to conceive that there was a fundamental flaw with
the capitalist system. Since the work of the nineteenth-century
theorist David Ricardo, perceived economic wisdom had it that
all costs associated with producing a particular good would be
distributed simultaneously as purchasing power. But in his war-
time work Douglas began to conclude that this was not true – that
the cost of producing goods was greater than the various salaries,
wages and dividends paid out to the workers and management
who produced them. Coming from a practical engineering back-
ground, Douglas set out to do something about this imbalance,
and his theories promptly gained widespread international atten-
tion. For his part, Chaplin was certainly reading Douglas as early
as his European tour of 1921.7
The precise rationale for Social Credit was expressed through
Douglas’s so-called ‘A + B theorem’. By way of brief explanation,
Douglas believed that the cost of producing any given good is
made up of two groups of costs. ‘A’ costs denote all those pay-
ments made to individuals – wages and salaries to employees,
potential dividends to investors and/or managers. Added to this,
the ‘B’ costs equate to everything else – raw materials, machin-
ery, bank charges and other external costs associated with making
a product. With the growth of industrialised economies and the
increased use of machinery in the mode of production, ‘B’ was
growing as a proportion of production costs. And since ‘A’ would
always be less than ‘A+B’ this meant that capitalism had a funda-
mental (and growing) flaw: costs were not being distributed suf-
ficiently to ensure that purchasing power was maintained among
the masses. The solution was simple: replace the lost money with a
direct transference payment from government to worker. In other
words, the state should top up wages, salaries and dividends with
a sum necessary to allow people to purchase the relevant good they
had helped produce. This ‘National Dividend’ proposal formed
the most high-profile aspect of the Social Credit movement. Tax
credits form something of a modern political equivalent.
160 Modern Times and the Great Depression

Chaplin bought into this policy offering wholesale. When on

his world tour in 1931, he stopped by Albert Einstein’s house in
Berlin. Describing the economic crisis then engulfing the Western
world, Chaplin told the great professor that ‘the business world
has acquiesced and welcomed the fundamental industrial change
from man power to machine power, which has cheapened the
cost of all our commodities. But it stands resolute against any
fundamental change in the capitalistic system that might cheapen
money and facilitate the means of buying those cheap goods.’8
Einstein scoffed: ‘You’re not a comedian. You’re an economist.
However, how could you cure all this?’ Chaplin response was to
‘reduce the hours of labor, print more money, and control prices’.
At this point he was ‘fascinated with the possibilities of the Doug-
las Credit Scheme’.9
Even as Roosevelt’s New Deal began to arrest American unem-
ployment, Chaplin maintained a ‘keen interest in the Social Credit
theory’. In a conversation with the American war veteran and
playwright Laurence Stallings, Chaplin expressed such enthusiasm
that an associate of Stallings, Gorham Munson, reached out to
the film director on the back of such praise. Writing to Chaplin
in June 1934, Munson pointed to the ‘acquisition of very influ-
ential supporters’ for the Social Credit movement. ‘Among them
Senator Bronson Cutting of New Mexico, Dr Paul de Kruif, and
the Reverend Charles E. Coughlin who spent four hours in con-
ference with Major Douglas last April.’10 This was an odd set of
supporters to say the least. A relatively bipartisan Republican in
Cutting and microbiologist in de Kruif certainly lent the movement
a degree of credibility, but Reverend Coughlin was more of a wild
card – if, given one in four Americans listened to his broadcasts,
a popular one.11 Initially a fervently pro-New Dealer, Coughlin
turned against Roosevelt from 1934 and gradually began to deride
the ‘cash famine’ in the United States being exacerbated by usuri-
ous elements (a similar path taken to Rep. Martin Dies, whom we
will encounter later). As the decade progressed Coughlin increas-
ingly linked responsibility for many contemporary ills – including
communism – to American and global Jewry. In some ways
Coughlin’s anti-capitalism had similarities to Chaplin’s own, but
his views on Bolshevism and sympathy towards the anti-Semitic
regime in Germany certainly did not. By May 1939 C.H. Douglas
 Modern Times and the Great Depression 161

himself was writing of the horrors of the ‘Jewish Financial System’

and urged Hitler to ‘destroy the power of the international finan-
cier – a power which only increases and which, if not destroyed,
will destroy civilisation in Europe’.12 Here again Chaplin could not
follow – but he remained interested in the theory of Social Credit
well into the 1940s. Chaplin was not a people person, but rather
an ideas man. Whoever could solve unemployment and raise the
conditions of the working class – he was at least willing to give
them a hearing.

Upton Sinclair and taking a political stand

So Chaplin wanted to change capitalism, but to do so (short of
standing for office himself, which he occasionally joked about) he
would have to find a concrete vehicle to support. Despite being a
communist in the eyes of many, Charlie never joined the Commu-
nist Party – or at least, as the House Un-American Activities Com-
mittee later acknowledged, there was ‘no evidence’ for his having
done so.13 Indeed, his most direct political endorsement came not
for a Communist but for a Democrat: the 1934 Democratic Can-
didate for Governor of California, Upton Sinclair (see Figure 6.1).
This point is an important one – Chaplin was in essence a liberal
Democrat, someone certainly on the far left of the mainstream
political spectrum, but still fundamentally within it. In more con-
temporary times he would have been a Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie
Sanders fan, not a communist.
Upton Sinclair and Chaplin had been in contact for several
years, and shared friends such as Max Eastman. In August 1918
Sinclair wrote to Chaplin to thank him for their first meeting:
‘When I came to meet you, it was with no intention of butting in
on your affairs, except as a Socialist always butts in everywhere –
to make the other fellow into a Socialist!’14 In 1920 and 1922
Sinclair ran unsuccessfully for the House of Representatives and
then for the Senate on the Socialist Party ticket. Throughout the
1920s Sinclair ramped up his political engagement and, by 1923,
was openly courting Charlie for money to help do so. On the back
of fighting ‘big business interests’ through supporting a Maritime
Strike in San Pedro (and the rights of protestors to organise with-
out the fear of imprisonment), Sinclair wrote to Charlie to ask for
162 Modern Times and the Great Depression

Figure 6.1 Chaplin was both a friend and a fan of Upton Sinclair’s. Here
he is at his studio lot with Sinclair and, among others, the white suprem-
acist former Governor of Mississippi, James Vardaman. Even beyond
Chaplin, the political connections of this era could be unexpected.
Courtesy of Lilly Library, Bloomington, Indiana, USA

$500 to help fund a new branch of the American Civil Liberties

Union (ACLU) in Monrovia, California where he had moved.15
Getting actual cash out of Charlie was never easy. As Chaplin
threw himself into his divorce case and The Circus, the latter half
of the 1920s did not, as Harry Crocker recalled, see much poli-
tics discussed at the studio. But one such conversationalist who
could get a rise out of Charlie was a ‘professional looking man . . .
dressed in rough tweeds’ who appeared ‘far too mild looking for a
socialist’.16 Upton Sinclair’s appearance aside, he regaled Charlie
with his views on ‘France . . . drifting into bankruptcy and a state
of anarchy worse than Russia. If things break, all of Europe will
be in a mix-up which will be worse than the last war.’17
Through the Ivor Montagu and Sergei Eisenstein machina-
tions outlined in the previous chapter, Upton and Charlie almost
became business partners. With his options to make a picture in
Hollywood running out, Montagu ‘knew Eisenstein had a han-
kering for Mexico’.18 Upton Sinclair had obviously heard enough
 Modern Times and the Great Depression 163

in his cocktail-party conversations with the Soviet filmmakers to

back them financially, and formed a legal corporation entitled The
Mexican Film Trust that signed Eisenstein, Grigori Alexandrov
and Eduard Tisse to a contract in November 1930. The proposed
Eisenstein film was to be an episodic montage of Mexican culture
and politics from pre-European Conquest Mexico to the Mexican
Revolution that had begun in 1910. Filming was supposed to be
wrapped up in April 1931, but by the time that more than 170,000
feet of film was in the can the Mexican Film Trust – and Sinclair
personally – were growing weary at the costs involved. Informal
enquiries to Chaplin about stumping up some of the additional
cost came to nothing. Eventually, footage Eisenstein had shot was
released by Sinclair as three shorts, Thunder Over Mexico, Eisen-
stein in Mexico and Death Day. As he did so, Charlie simply wired
to Upton: ‘Sorry I could not join you in Mexico – success to the
picture.’19
By 1933, Charlie’s politics had been radicalised through the
reading, writing and table talk that had taken place on his City
Lights world tour, and Upton Sinclair was about to launch his own
campaign for public office. Sinclair’s campaign was something of
a glorious failure: an exercise in shifting the Overton window of
the Democratic Party to the left and, arguably, paving the way for
Roosevelt to accelerate the interventionism of the New Deal. It is
easy to see how Charlie was drawn to Upton – for Chaplin was
certainly a fervent New Dealer in these early years. In October
1933, he even took to the nationally syndicated airwaves to deliver
a nine-minute speech endorsing Roosevelt’s new National Recov-
ery Administration (NRA). The NRA was a landmark part of the
National Industrial Recovery Act passed that summer, and was
an exemplar of 1930s corporatist planning. Get industry, workers
and the government around the negotiating table and jobs could be
protected while paying decent wages. On the latter point, so-called
‘blanket codes’ attempted to ensure a maximum working week (at
most forty-five hours), a minimum hourly wage (at least 20 cents,
depending on the industry) and the complete abolition of child
labour. By increasing productivity in the factories and purchasing
power among ordinary workers, unemployment could be averted,
or so the ambition remained. And so Chaplin took to the radio to
endorse the new policy. Referring to the virtual army of ‘eleven
164 Modern Times and the Great Depression

million unemployed’ (it was likely even higher), Chaplin claimed

it was incumbent on the ‘ninety million people in America, myself
included, who have the means – who have the purchasing power
to buy now and can help put those unemployed back to work’.20
Directly naming the nation’s saviour, he noted that ‘the people
cried for action. Now President Roosevelt has given us that action.
The Government has given us a program, and now it is our turn for
action.’ There was clearly a strong degree of respect there. Indeed,
by 1940 Liberty Magazine noted that ‘Charlie Chaplin owns no
orthodox political allegiances. He is still a British citizen, although
his personal political hero is Franklin Delano Roosevelt.’21
This was not a view held by all of Charlie’s associates. For Waldo
Frank, whom Chaplin encountered in Greenwich Village via Max
Eastman, the NRA was ‘the beginning of American Fascism’. This
would not take the form of jackboots and uniforms, but rather
‘may be so gradual in the United States that most voters will not be
aware of its existence’. Instead, America would be conquered by
‘judicious, black-frocked gentlemen; graduates of the best univer-
sities; disciples of [Columbia University President] Nicholas Mur-
ray Butler and of [journalist and public opinion theorist] Walter
Lippmann’.22 It is interesting, given his general antipathy to the
overreaching intrusive state, to see Chaplin endorse a programme
that others had criticised along these lines, but it identifies unem-
ployment as the central concern in his world view once more. The
early 1930s was not a time for kind words, but for action. In this
regard Charlie rather agreed with another fascist sympathiser, the
future British King Edward VIII: ‘something must be done’ about
those out of work.
Upton Sinclair was one man putting noble intent into concrete
action. Switching his affiliation from Socialist to Democrat in Sep-
tember 1933, Sinclair published a best-selling pamphlet entitled
I, Governor of California, And How I Ended Poverty two weeks
later. This True Story of the Future laid out the framework for
Sinclair’s campaign to ‘End Poverty in California’ – whose acro-
nym EPIC and its actual message became known nationwide. In
later life, Sinclair claimed he had no intention of winning the elec-
tion, but was merely running for the governorship to educate the
people in the socialist cause. By this stage Chaplin needed little
such education. In December 1933 Sinclair wrote to Rob Wagner
 Modern Times and the Great Depression 165

asking him to ‘help me to persuade [Charlie Chaplin] to take a

public stand’ in formally backing him.23 Wagner wrote back that
he felt Chaplin was ‘essentially an entertainer. If politics get hot
and he is publicly lined up, he’ll lose half his audience. As it is
now, his Red stuff leaks out, helps the cause and doesn’t [cramp]
his profession.’24 Eventually, Chaplin himself got in touch: ‘After
thinking over your request to use my name endorsing your politi-
cal program, I realize it would be a mistake for me to identify
myself in politics. As in the past, my principle is to maintain a
non-partisan attitude.’25
This must have been a blow. Certainly, Sinclair’s under-
consumptionist analysis of the Depression (‘one of abundance, not
of scarcity’) and the need to give ‘workers access to the means of
production’ were two of several points within the twelve-point
EPIC programme with which Chaplin wholeheartedly agreed.26 Sin-
clair’s more detailed prescriptions regarding a new state income tax,
increased inheritance levies and other taxes on wealth to make up
the state’s deficit doubtless could have found favour with Charlie,
too (particularly since he may well have found some scheme to avoid
paying them). As it was, without Charlie’s support, the right-leaning
movie moguls soon hit Sinclair hard: producing movie reels depict-
ing transients flocking to California on freight trains with the inten-
tion of remaining (and presumably living off welfare payments)
in the event that the EPIC plan was ever implemented. After win-
ning a stunning victory in the Democratic Primary (gaining almost
150,000 votes more than his nearest challenger, George Creel), Sin-
clair would go on to comfortably lose the gubernatorial contest
itself to the Republican incumbent Charles Merriam.
Small victory though it may have been, Sinclair’s campaign did
succeed in bringing Chaplin out of his political foxhole. Despite
his earlier protestations, in early 1934 Chaplin agreed to have his
name appear on several leaflets supportive of Sinclair and, that
June, he gave a speech endorsing Sinclair’s candidature. Could
he have done more? Certainly – but by then Charlie’s sights were
set on getting Modern Times, his own political oeuvre, out to the
masses. When he got around to seeing it, Sinclair himself argued
that ‘the part about the factory was very interesting and charming,
but the rest just repeats Charlie’s old material’.27 Few would take
such a balanced view on this controversial product.
166 Modern Times and the Great Depression

The making of Modern Times

When it came to Modern Times Charlie had initially intended to
make a fully fledged talkie. After producing a rather so-so script,
however, he eventually plumped for a mixture whereby the Tramp
himself would not speak (save a song delivered in gibberish near
the end), but other characters would be heard through the use of
machinery such as the radio and a proto-television screen. This in
itself was one of the more minor metaphorical points that Chaplin
would make about machinery. Modern Times’ themes of mecha-
nisation and the de-humanisation of labour were most famously
highlighted when the Little Tramp fell into the factory’s great
machine (we never learn what it is making; for Chaplin it barely
mattered) and, in profile shot, we see him flow effortlessly through
its cogs. Humankind, in short, had become part of the machine.
As Gandhi had told him in 1931, machines that were supposed to
be serving humankind had turned out to enslave them.
Such views had long been known to Chaplin’s confidants. One
day Charlie was chatting to Harry Crocker over tea at Santa Bar-
bara. During this discussion, he decried the virtues of ‘Efficiency! It
is a terrible thing. In Detroit I went through a huge automobile fac-
tory [where] each man is told that he is a partner in the company.’
Here Charlie was describing his visit to the Ford Motor Company
in 1923. Doubting the validity of this arrangement, Chaplin pre-
saged the nut-tightening wreck of the Tramp of Modern Times
when he talked of the American worker being ‘assigned individual
tasks . . . For eight hours the man does one job, the same move-
ment, the same effect.’ Crocker indulged Charlie as

he visualized each member of the sales force living under his

individual Damoclean sword. [Charlie] was outspoken in his
criticism of such a system. At this period of his life, he was
not inherently serious on the problem, but even his semi-light
hearted comments were construed as socialistic. Compe-
tition was the shibboleth of big business. Big Business was
America’s sacred cow, and he who ventured criticism of the
ordered, machine conduct of Big Business was, to the indus-
trial tycoons, a radical.28

Well before its release, the press had wind that Modern Times
was going to be more overtly political than City Lights. Its initial
 Modern Times and the Great Depression 167

title, which the British left-wing politician John Strachey (more

of whom later) thought ‘of often’, was the almost political tract
worthy Mass Production. ‘I’m quite sure it will be the biggest
thing you’ve done,’ noted Strachey.29 But it was more than the
title. When asked about the Depression in 1934, Alf Reeves told
Screen Book Magazine that although ‘Charlie’s basic purpose is
to entertain[,] of course he is intensely interested in such prob-
lems. And it’s impossible, isn’t it, to completely pass over them
even in a picture that is intended as entertainment only.’30 Reeves
was not merely stalling or being deliberately evasive here. Char-
lie’s erratic working method meant that the construction of what
became Modern Times’ plot took time, and thus it was difficult
to predict how the film would actually turn out. As Charlie later
told Max Eastman, the film ‘started from an abstract idea . . . an
impulse to say something about the way life is being standardized
and channelized, and men turned into machines and the way I feel
about it’. He confirmed that he ‘knew that was what I wanted to
do before I thought of any of the details’.31 As ever, those could
be worked out on set.
In February 1935, Charlie’s leftist credentials were given a shot
in the arm when Boris Shumyatsky, de facto head of the Soviet
film industry in the 1930s (until he was executed by the regime
as a traitor in 1938), spoke out on the class content inherent in
Chaplin’s work. The San Francisco Daily professed itself sceptical
at such a notion:

‘Well, now, who’d a thunk it,’ as the old Yankee farmer said.
Here for years we’ve gone on believing that Charlie Chap-
lin was a great comedian and a great clown, but if you are
to believe a gentleman by the name of Shumyatsky, all those
years Chaplin has been working to show how ‘honestly and
truthfully the American [working] class is carrying on a strug-
gle against capitalism.’32

Eighty years later, by way of curiosity, then Venezuelan President

Hugo Chavez professed himself in agreement with the Russian’s
assessment, however. Showing the film to thousands of its workers
in 2006, the Venezuelan Labor Ministry believed Modern Times
laid the groundwork for ‘socialism for the twenty-first century’.
As Jhonny Picone, the Labor Ministry official sent out to answer
168 Modern Times and the Great Depression

a curious Western press, put it: ‘With Charlie Chaplin it is easier

to catch the attention of workers who are often too tired or don’t
trust government in the first place.’33
This was demonstrably true in the 1930s – and Modern Times’
role as a gateway drug to more radical political views was wor-
rying many. Certainly, many a political figure took Chaplin seri-
ously. Before seeing Modern Times, Winston Churchill was of this
mind: ‘All [Charlie’s] greatest pictures are tragedies, in spite of the
richness of their comedy.’ He believed they showed ‘man in the
grip of Fate – a longely [sic], pathetic figure who is perpetually
at odds with circumstance, a rebel for whom there is no place in
the modern world’.34 Churchill did not make the connection that
this was partly, even predominantly, engendered by free-market
capitalism – but Charlie was rarely shy in doing so. This had been
no more overtly the case than it would be in Modern Times, at
least to this point.
The film itself begins with the dramatic description that it is a
‘Story of Industry, of individual enterprise – humanity crusading in
the pursuit of happiness’. Chaplin then juxtaposes shots of sheep
being herded (including one black sheep, presumably Charlie) with
workers trudging out of a factory. For Chaplin scholar Chuck
Maland, this opening metaphor remained confusing: is it that capi-
talism treats its workers as livestock, or that the worker meekly
accepts their fate without questioning it?35 Either way, working
in such a factory we find the Tramp who is subject to all man-
ner of indignities including constant supervision from an overly
attentive boss (who looks suspiciously like Henry Ford), and being
subjected to a force-feeding machine. The latter piece of appara-
tus was called a ‘Billowes feeding machine’ in the film, a nod to
inventors such as Charles Bedaux who were seeking to introduce
increased efficiency into the workplace and quantify the perfor-
mance of each worker.36 By the 1930s – for Chaplin at least – even
a worker’s lunchtime was no longer sacrosanct.
In any event, running amok in this Bedaux-esque factory Charlie
is eventually committed to a hospital before unwittingly becoming
the leader of a workers’ demonstration and being thrown in jail by
some heavy-handed policemen. The story then pivots into a love
story between the Tramp and Paulette Goddard’s gamin (Chaplin
would marry the real-life Paulette in 1936, only to divorce her in
1942) where the two try to resist the forces of capitalism as best
 Modern Times and the Great Depression 169

they can: looting goods from a department store (and distribut-

ing some to hungry, unemployed workers), living in a deserted
Hooverville old shack, and finally singing in a café to earn a liv-
ing. Such distinctions are important, notes Eric Flom, because
they situate Modern Times as a film that shows that ‘everyone is
impacted by the hardships of the Depression, even the employed’
and that ‘some crime is driven not by want, but by need’.37 The
film eventually ends with a trademark shot: the Tramp and the
gamin, hand in hand, walking down a deserted road towards an
uncertain tomorrow.
On that famous ending, the aforementioned Soviet official Shu-
myatsky had met with Chaplin during the filming, and even claimed
to have influenced a creative change of heart regarding its content.
According to the Russian, he had ‘prompted Charlie Chaplin to make
drastic changes in his latest film’. Previously, ‘the fatalistic endings
of all Chaplin’s films, the individual’s withdrawal to a position of
resigned hopelessness, was in this film even more sharply pronounced
than in all the others’. Yet after Shumyatsky’s apparent intervention,

when, after the privations and sufferings of the world, the heroes
finally meet, they promise each other never again to part from
one another. They decide to work and fight together against
the “machine of time,” a euphemism for capitalist society –
and walk off, hand in hand, into the “blue distance.”38

As a result, the Soviet regime resolved to buy the picture for

showing in the motherland (the first to be shown since 1923’s A
Woman of Paris): ‘the [Soviet] trust’s officials boast that they have
persuaded Chaplin to alter the end of his film. It will finish on
a note of communistic optimism instead of being pessimistically
American, as intended.’39
Here Alf Reeves was sent out to immediately dampen down
such talk. ‘The Russian story reads deep, terrible social meanings
to sequences that Mr Chaplin considers funny.’ In a nod to Chap-
lin’s capitalism, he assured viewers that ‘this picture is intended as
entertainment, and perhaps it might be said too, that Mr Chaplin’s
purpose in this picture is to make money’. Reeves acknowledged
that they were ‘concluding the picture on a somewhat more opti-
mistic note than was first designed’, but this was down to Char-
lie having ‘his own way and . . . his own ideas – always’.40 The
170 Modern Times and the Great Depression

film’s ending is often compared to Charlie’s early work – and the

much-repeated template of the Tramp walking away from shot
down a road, once again alone. In Modern Times, it is true, he
walks away with a beautiful woman. Yet perhaps the better com-
parison is with The Gold Rush. In 1925 the Tramp becomes rich
through his prospecting, and eventually gets the girl (who herself
wants to better her lot as a ‘dance hall girl’). By hook or by crook
he gets by, and the ending is unambiguously happy. Yet in the 1936
film Charlie and Paulette attempt various means to circumvent the
capitalist system, but all end in failure. They may leave together,
and Charlie may tell her to ‘smile’, but they have lost. As Paulette
says, ‘What’s the use in trying?’
Upon its release in February 1936, Modern Times struggled
domestically – taking about $1.4 million at the box office against
a $1.5 million budget. Three years after lounging on Chaplin’s
boat in the Pacific, Alistair Cooke was called upon to review the
film for the British publication The Listener. In a mixed review
Cooke enjoyed bits of business including when Charlie sprinkles
‘his food with dope which he thinks is salt’, but noted ‘with firm-
ness and regret that Modern Times is never once on the plane of
social satire’. Deriding those who found the Tramp an anachro-
nism in a now sound age, he said that ‘for the first time in Chap-
lin’s history, we have a film that looks and sounds as if it came
from only one place – from Hollywood . . . since he has yielded
these two integrities – the looks and the sound – he has yielded
much of his strangeness’.41 As to what it all meant politically,
the Chicago Illinois Times provided a balanced reaction. First,
it noted the irony that the American public ‘get excited when a
broadcasting company permits an admitted communist to sound
off over a nation-wide hookup, but we take our children to see
the uproarious Charlie give capitalism a $2m razz’. And this, they
scoffed, was ‘a razz that makes [American Communist Leader]
Comrade Browder’s mournful numbers sound like a piece on a
penny whistle’. Still, ‘we don’t think Charlie is a communist. Not
with his bank account.’ Instead, the paper praised Chaplin’s con-
sideration of the problems inherent in 1930s America: ‘Appar-
ently he has been reading the news and has concluded that no
country is stable where too much misery abides.’ He may even
have been at home in the Roosevelt administration: ‘Instead of
 Modern Times and the Great Depression 171

denouncing agitators. Charlie gives a look at the thing that makes

agitators. In other words, Charlie is a [Roosevelt backing] brain-
truster teaching sociology with a slapstick. So far it hasn’t got him
into much trouble.’42 That, of course, would change.
All in all, Modern Times would again prove something of a
staging post on his artistic development. As we saw in the 1910s
and 1920s, Chaplin was a willing and very able practitioner, not
an opponent, of capitalism. Modern Times would see him take
pot shots at aspects of the industrial production process – and
certainly provide more opposition than he had previously mus-
tered to Henry Ford. But the film ultimately remains ‘Chaplin-
esque’, and not merely because it includes the Tramp and a pretty
girl. To borrow Steven J. Ross’s descriptions, while it contains
flashes of a ‘radical’ filmmaker advancing the cause of socialism,
and certainly was ‘liberal’ in its implicit call for a more humane
capitalism, ultimately it rests on Chaplin’s perhaps widest trope of
‘anti-authoritarianism’. In Modern Times the main fall-guys and
targets of mockery are factory foremen and policemen, not the
owners of the means of production. Only in Monsieur Verdoux,
made in the wake of the HUAC attacks on Chaplin and the Second
World War, would Chaplin really go for the artistic jugular.

The Napoleonic diversion

For all the controversy over the films he did make during the
1930s, another project remains of key interest despite not com-
ing to fruition. More broadly, Charlie’s willingness to help the
Montagu–Eisenstein party in 1930–1 should not be taken as the
limit of his outreach to various collaborators. Charlie was an
autocrat in the studio, but he long struggled for the ideas to actu-
ally get him back in said studio in the first place. To rectify this, he
knew that his own creative juices were often more likely to flow
through conversations with politicians as they were with fellow
actors or directors.
As Alistair Cooke knew, ‘those who have seen him re-create
scenes in the life of Napoleon have no fears for his popular recep-
tion as a dramatic actor’.43 Charlie was obsessed with the Corsican
dictator, telling Harry Crocker rather eccentrically, ‘Do you know
Napoleon and I have a lot of characteristics in common? He was
172 Modern Times and the Great Depression

nervous. He could not bear to unbutton things, he ripped them off,

he left his clothes where they fell. He loved hot baths.’44 Chaplin
read Emil Ludwig’s famous 1915 study of Napoleon and began to
envisage various scenarios in which he could play him.
A great historical curiosity is that his collaborator in this
instance could well have been Winston Churchill. During
Churchill’s visit to Los Angeles in September 1929 Charlie not
only showed him around the set of City Lights, but the two sat
up one night drinking and smoking. Winston’s son Randolph
recorded in his diary that ‘Papa and Charlie sat up till about 3.
Papa wants him to act the young Napoleon and has promised to
write the Scenario.’45 This would likely have been some form of
comedic farce, as Charlie later noted:

Take the case of Napoleon: I would not portray him as the

mighty general, but as an undersized gloomy, silent, almost
morose individual, who is always in trouble with members of
his family. Heavens! There is humor throughout all his life! His
efforts to marry off his brothers and sisters and step-children,
and keep on good terms with his mother and his wife, and
fight a few wars in the meantime, provide a wealth of material
for a play. I would not burlesque him, you understand, but I’d
re-enact all the messes he got into and all his efforts to extricate
himself and keep peace in the family.46

In mid-1933 he tried to purchase a Napoleon scenario from

an unnamed source through Ivor Montagu.47 This may well have
been Jean Weber’s La Vie Secrète de Napoleon 1er, which he even-
tually did purchase in 1935. In any event, with Churchill evidently
not stepping up to the plate (ironically, he was then seeking to pre-
serve Britain’s own empire, particularly in India), Charlie needed a
collaborator to help him bring the idea to fruition.
In February 1935 one guest at Charlie’s house in Beverly Hills
would be John Strachey. If there was a politician who most mir-
rored Charlie’s interwar politics, then Strachey would not be far
off. A British Labour Party MP first elected in 1929, he resigned
the party whip a year later to join Oswald Mosley’s New Party.
After losing his seat at the 1931 General Election, Strachey would
not follow Mosley into fascism from 1932 and instead furthered
 Modern Times and the Great Depression 173

his own intellectual credentials, publishing a series of works

including The Coming Struggle for Power (which forwarded the
standard Marxist critique that fascism was merely a vehicle to
stave off a successful communist revolution) and drifted towards
the Communist Party through the early 1930s. By the time he
stayed with Charlie, Strachey viewed Roosevelt’s New Deal as
‘politically clever’ and constituting ‘relief’ that had bought off ‘rev-
olution’. Letters in Strachey’s privately held papers to global com-
munists, including the American Earl Browder, Swedish-Indian
Rajani Palme Dutt and Charlie’s own friend the Englishman Ivor
Montagu indicate that his Popular Front-esque sympathies were
not unlike Charlie’s own.48
During his stay with Charlie and Paulette, Strachey discussed
the Napoleon project and agreed to return to England to write it.
Strachey noted that his ‘only object in writing it – aside from my
own amusement – was to have something in front of us to knock
about, if and when you come over here in the autumn’.49 With
the delays in production for Modern Times this visit did not pan
out, but the script was still useful: Strachey ‘always found it much
easier to have some sort of manuscript in front of one, even if one
scraps every word of it in the end, rather than start with a blank
sheet of paper’. While the ‘whole idea’ Strachey felt to be Chaplin’s
‘from start to finish’, it had ‘so fired me . . . that it simply wouldn’t
stay still in my head’. Producing a script in short order (no doubt,
in part, because Strachey was always scrabbling around for money
in the mid-1930s), he sent over his thoughts to Los Angeles. Leav-
ing the comedic ‘business’ to Charlie, Strachey concentrated on
trying to flesh out his ideas for Napoleon the man: ‘What do you
think of Lodi still hearing Bounapart’s [sic] voice in the garden?
Has that idea of dividing the time and place of the visual and aural
impression been done on the talkies yet?’ Having read the script,
Charlie judged ‘it is wonderful – will write in detail later’.50
By early 1936 the script had been finalised and was registered
for copyright on 9 April. In the surviving Chaplin–Strachey draft
can be seen something of both men’s philosophy. At one point the
script has Napoleon, in a long-winded peroration, declare:

There is something wrong with the whole political situation

of Europe. Governments and Constitutions are old fashioned,
174 Modern Times and the Great Depression

obsolete . . . mechanical science is running away with us . . .

steamboats, railroads and barges . . . all these things spell
revolution and we must prepare for the future . . . The man
of the future will be a scientist . . . Future governments will
realise that the religious and moral principles are problems
for the individual, but the economic problems of the indi-
vidual are the affairs of the State . . . Countries will combine
forces for the protection of the trades.51

In this prose we see much of the type of political rant that would
mark Charlie’s output from The Great Dictator of 1940 to 1957’s
A King in New York. Through Napoleon, the Chaplinesque mani-
festo of breaking down national borders and adapting to the pace
of technological change come through clearly in a film that is,
ostensibly, set in the nineteenth century.
Strachey and Chaplin were undeniably politically sympathetic
to each other – albeit with Charlie the more fervently pro-New
Deal. Personally they were both gregarious, and doubtless got
along. And yet Chaplin’s association with the man indicated
much of the troubles to come. During his American tour Strachey
not only met Charlie and Paulette but gave a series of speeches
where ‘he advocated the overthrow of the capitalistic system’.
After finishing one such address to a 600-strong audience in
Glencoe, Illinois, Strachey left the stage to be greeted by Col.
Daniel W. MacCormack, the US Commissioner of Immigration
and Naturalization, who arrested Strachey on the grounds that
he had entered the country ‘by means of false statements’. Upon
his arrival in New York in December 1934, Strachey is reported
to have answered in the negative ‘questions intended to bring out
whether visitors or immigrants advocate or believe in overthrow-
ing the United States government by force or violence or whether
they are members of organizations which have such aims or
beliefs’.52 Strachey had stopped short of advocating such violent
revolution and he was not a member of the British Communist
Party (both sides felt it more useful for him to appear ‘neutral’
from outside). However, he did declare Soviet Russia to be ‘the
hope of civilisation, and I believe the sternest measures were
justified to safeguard it’. A move towards communism would be,
he noted, a step ‘forward’.
 Modern Times and the Great Depression 175

The anti-communist press soon denounced Strachey’s views as

those ‘pleading for . . . FREEDOM FOR HIMSELF AND HIS
FELLOW FOREIGN RATS TO UPSET OUR FORM OF GOV-
ERNMENT’. They noted that ‘HIS MASK IS LITERATURE. HIS
FACE IS THE FACE OF STALIN’.53 Released on bail, Strachey
subsequently continued to tour the US denouncing ‘W.R. Hearst,
Father Coughlin’ and others as ‘decidedly and dangerously Fas-
cistic’. Reversing the anti-communist charge against him, he
argued that ‘fascism has the mask of radicalism but the face of
William Randolph Hearst’.54 On 30 March 1935, US Immigra-
tion indicated they were willing to drop all charges against him,
provided that he left the country. In later years, Martin Dies’s
HUAC Committee would continue to list him as one of the ‘lead-
ing radicals admitted to the United States’.55 Yet before boarding
the Berengaria, Strachey turned to address reporters. He was
‘profoundly grateful for the wide sympathy and support I have
been given by the people of America’. It remained his fervent
‘hope . . . that the whole case has done something to clarify the
issue of free speech in America as applied to alien visitors’.56 Sit-
ting in the Californian sun, Charlie Chaplin may well have been
nodding vigorously.

Notes
1 Undated note, 1950s, CIN/CCA.
2 A fact included within the ‘Fact Sheet Containing Pertinent Material
Pertaining to the Communist Affiliations and Activities of Charlie
Chaplin’, HOOV/SOK/240/3.
3 All via New York Telegraph, 30 August 1931 via MHL/CCS/24.f.231.
4 Boston Globe, 25 March 1932 via MHL/CCS/24.f.231.
5 Eric L. Flom, Chaplin in the Sound Era: An Analysis of the Seven
Talkies (London, 1997) 83.
6 Gledhill note: ‘Sing Me a Song of Social Significance, All Other Tunes
Are Taboo’, circulated 17 August 1939, NADC/HUAC/RG 233/Box
1,105.
7 Charles Chaplin, My Trip Abroad (London, 1922), 147.
8 Charlie Chaplin (Lisa Stein Haven ed.), A Comedian Sees the World
(Missouri, 2014), 61.
9 Clipping within COP/CCP/39.
10 Munson to Chaplin, 15 June 1934, Wesleyan University, Middletown
[WES], Gorham Munson Papers [GMN] Box 1 Folder 37.
176 Modern Times and the Great Depression

11 For Coughlin listening figures see Gallup Poll, 18–23 December

1938, USAIPO1938-0141.
12 The Social Crediter, 6 May 1939.
13 See 24 January 1965 information sheet on Charles Chaplin within
NADC/HUAC/RG 233/Box 42.
14 Sinclair to Chaplin, 18 August 1918, LLBI/UPS Box 2.
15 Sinclair to Chaplin, 29 May 1923 LLBI/UPS Box 5.
16 Harry Crocker’s unpublished memoir, ‘Charlie Chaplin: Man and
Mime’, MHL/HRC, VII–22.
17 Ibid.
18 Ivor Montagu, With Eisenstein in Hollywood (Berlin, 1967), 128.
19 Chaplin to Sinclair, 24 May 1933, LLBI/UPS Box 22.
20 Boston Globe, 24 October 1933.
21 ‘The New Mystery of Charlie Chaplin’, Liberty, 2 June 1940, MHL/
HRC/CCS/1/9.
22 Waldo Frank, ‘Will Fascism Come to America?’ Modern Monthly, 8
(1934), 465–6.
23 Sinclair to Wagner, 5 December 1933, UCLA/Rob Wagner Papers
[RBW] Box 17.
24 Wagner to Sinclair, 8 December 1933, UCLA/RBW, Box 17.
25 Undated telegram – Chaplin to Sinclair – within UCLA/RBW, Box 17.
26 Upton Sinclair, I, Governor, And How I Ended Poverty (Los Angeles,
1934), 10.
27 Sinclair to Wagner, 17 March 1936, UCLA/RBW, Box 17.
28 Crocker, ‘Man and Mime’, MHL/HRC, X–12.
29 Strachey to Chaplin, 14 July [1935], PRIV/STCH.
30 Screen Book Magazine, undated 1934, via MHL/CCS.
31 Max Eastman, Great Companions: Critical Memoirs of Some
Famous Friends (Toronto, 1959), 224.
32 San Francisco Daily, 10 February 1935.
33 Eugene Register-Guard, 9 July 2006.
34 ‘The Future of Charlie Chaplin’s Contribution’, Collier’s Weekly
[undated 1934/5], Churchill Archives Centre [CAC], Cambridge,
UK, Winston Churchill Papers [CHAR] 8/521.
35 Charles J. Maland, Chaplin and American Culture: The Evolution of
a Star Image (London, 1989), 151.
36 Michael R. Weatherburn, Scientific Management at Work: The Bedaux
System, Management Consulting, and Worker Efficiency in British
Industry, 1914–48 (PhD thesis, Imperial College London, 2014), 78.
37 Flom, Talkies, 100.
38 Motion Picture Herald, 7 December 1935 via COP/CCP/44.
39 Daily Telegraph, 3 December 1935.
40 Motion Picture Herald, 7 December 1935 via COP/CCP/44.
41 The Listener, 19 February 1936.
42 Chicago Illinois Times, 15 March 1936 via COP/CCP/55.
43 The Atlantic Monthly, August 1939.
 Modern Times and the Great Depression 177

44 Crocker, ‘Man and Mime’, MHL/HRC, XI-23.

45 Diary entry, 21 September 1929, CAC/Randolph Churchill Papers
[RDCH] 11/24.
46 Clipping within COP/CCP/52.
47 Montagu to Chaplin, 4 October 1933, BFI/IVM Item 320.
48 See, e.g., Strachey to Browder, 18 May 1936, Strachey to Palme Dutt,
10 October 1931, and the August 1940 correspondence with Mon-
tagu, all via PRIV/STCH.
49 Strachey to Chaplin, 14 July [presumably 1935], via PRIV/STCH.
50 Chaplin to Strachey, 19 July 1935, PRIV/STCH.
51 David Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art (London, 1992), 477–8.
52 New York Herald Tribune, 13 March 1935.
53 The Chicago Herald, 13 March 1935.
54 Philadelphia Public Ledger, 28 March 1935.
55 HUAC Hearings, 75th Congress on H. Res 242, 1,938/vol. 1, 700.
56 The New York Times, 30 March 1935.
7 The Tramp and the dictators

By the end of the 1930s Chaplin’s homeland of Great Britain stood

on the brink of war with Nazi Germany. By then the Wehrmacht
had already been on the march across Central and Eastern Europe,
radically overturning the Versailles order as it did so. Appease-
ment of the dictators by the Western European democracies was
only seeming to delay the inevitable. With Prime Minister Neville
Chamberlain having acquiesced to Hitler’s demands to annex the
German-speaking Sudetenland through the Munich Agreement
the previous October, the German Army had moved to occupy and
partition the remainder of the Czechoslovakian state in March 1939.
In response, Chamberlain promptly guaranteed the independence of
Hitler’s next military target – Poland – meaning a conflict between
Britain and the Nazi state was now likely just a matter of time.
Sitting in Los Angeles, the fifty-year-old Charlie Chaplin was too
old to be asked to fight for his country in any impending war, but
that did not mean that he was divorced from the march of Euro-
pean diplomacy – far from it. In April 1939, an extraordinary mes-
sage was cabled from the British Foreign Office in London to their
consulate in Los Angeles. It read, ‘We wonder whether it might be
possible for you to approach the Company making the film, and
prevail upon them to treat the subject in such a way that it could
be exhibited in this country without giving offence to Germany.’1
The ‘Company’, of course, was Chaplin’s United Artists, and the
film was soon to take the name of The Great Dictator.
We will outline how this request panned out shortly (making
The Great Dictator ‘without giving offence to Germany’ was
certainly a tough ask). But first it is worth recapitulating the
 The Tramp and the dictators 179

relationship between the world’s biggest film star and perhaps

the twentieth-century’s most infamous figure, Adolf Hitler – the
subject, through the thinly veiled moniker of ‘Adenoid Hynkel’,
of Chaplin’s 1940 satire. Like anyone even vaguely aware of the
political climate of the thirties, Charlie had his own views on the
German regime. A scribbled note now held in Chaplin’s archive in
Bologna, written late in the Second World War, saw Charlie give
his take on the rise of Nazism:

From the beginning of Hitler’s regime, national dementia set

in. Its pathological signs were classic. It started with exhi-
bitionism, mass herding of military, goose steppers, pack-
ing into city squares by the hundreds of thousands, just to
impress themselves and their Fuehrer. Jew-baiting and book
burning followed which led to mass torturing and murdering
of innocent people. And now that madness is being subdued,
strait-jacketed and enhanced forever.2

This negative account was hardly unexpected and conforms

to the broad themes of The Great Dictator. Yet, as this chapter
makes clear, before the advent of Hitler’s Nazi state Chaplin was
not without a kind word to say for those on the road to fascism.
Even more surprisingly, if a man named Konrad Bercovici is to be
believed, this even extended to Hitler himself. Charlie’s bravery in
making his anti-Hitler film cannot be questioned. But we should
first consider the slightly crooked path he took to get to this point.
For many in the Anglophone world it was easier to see fascism’s
evils in 1940 than it was ten years earlier, and this even applied to
Charlie himself.

Charlie and two fascists

An interesting example of Charlie’s early views on fascism con-
cerns Sir Oswald Mosley, later to lead the British Union of Fas-
cists from October 1932, and drifting in that direction when he
encountered Chaplin at a 1931 lunch on the French Riviera. The
two had several mutual acquaintances – from the very political
David Lloyd George to more artistic types such as the photogra-
pher Cecil Beaton.3 Furthermore, the poet Blanche Oelrichs knew
180 The Tramp and the dictators

Mosley’s wife Cimmie and had encouraged Charlie to drop her

a line whenever they were in the same location.4 But Chaplin’s
descriptions of Mosley during this period went beyond the per-
functory acknowledgement reserved for a friend of a friend. In
unpublished drafts of what became A Comedian Sees the World,
Chaplin called Mosley ‘one of the most promising young men
in English politics in spite of his momentary defeat. He is one of
the few dynamic forces to be considered in the future of English
politics.’5
In 1931, this would have been a reasonable call – Mosley had
resigned from MacDonald’s Labour government over its refusal to
bring forward capital spending to curb unemployment, and was
viewed by many as a future Prime Minister. But by the time of
publication it was no longer 1931, and Mosley’s political alignment
had decisively changed. The 1933 published version of A Com-
edian Sees the World eventually removed the second sentence in the
above recollection of their meeting, but still remained an upbeat
description given Mosley had by this time openly adopted the fas-
cist ideal. A few months earlier, for example, in his book The Com-
ing Struggle for Power, Charlie’s potential co-scriptwriter John
Strachey had denounced Mosley as ‘stand[ing] for fascism naked
and unashamed’.6 For all this, Chaplin no doubt admired Mosley’s
political adventurism and on aspects of government intervention to
create jobs the two had much common ground at the time.
Indeed, Chaplin’s later re-writing of the meeting says much
about their points of political overlap, and some possible retro-
spective sleight of hand. From the perspective of the 1960s, Char-
lie recalled the lunchtime encounter with Mosley rather differently
to the positive noises he had made in the early 1930s:

One guest stands out, a tall, lean man, dark-haired with

cropped moustache, pleasant and engaging, to whom I found
myself addressing my conversation at lunch. I was discussing
Major Douglas’s book, Economic Democracy, and said how
aptly his credit theory might solve the present world crisis – to
quote Consuelo Balsan about that afternoon: ‘I found Chap-
lin interesting to talk to and noted his strong socialist tenden-
cies.’ I must have said something that particularly appealed
to the tall gentleman, for his face lit up and his eyes opened
 The Tramp and the dictators 181

so wide that I could see the whites of them. He seemed to be

endorsing everything I said until I reached the climax of my
thesis, which must have veered in a direction contrary to his
own, for he looked disappointed. I had been talking to Sir
Oswald Mosley, little realizing that this man was to be the
future head of the blackshirts of England – but those eyes
with the whites showing over the pupils and the broad grin-
ning mouth stand out in my memory vividly as an expression
most peculiar – if not a little frightening.7

The notion of Chaplin the committed anti-fascist clearly has

much behind it. He would risk his career to make a film critiqu-
ing the Nazi dictatorship, and loathed the treatment of the Jews
in the Third Reich to the point where he would refuse to answer
questions about his own ancestry to show some semblance of soli-
darity with these unfortunate souls. But there was something in
Hitler the individual that drove Charlie’s antipathy, too. With the
more socially gregarious Mosley or Mussolini, Chaplin perhaps
detected a spark of humanity that at least made the men – if not
every aspect of their movements – explicable to him. And in the
early 1930s the horrors of the Second World War remained years
away. To someone curious about alternatives to Anglo-American
capitalism, making pleasant conversation with such figures made
logical sense.
This cross-political praise cut both ways. As noted, in American
political terms Chaplin was essentially a slightly eccentric left-wing
Democrat along the Upton Sinclair or Henry A. Wallace model
(both of whom he supported in their runs for high political office).
There were elements in which this could be said about early fas-
cism, too. In his review of Wallace’s 1934 book New Frontiers
Benito Mussolini found it ‘a declaration of faith and an indict-
ment of economic liberalism’. Asking where America was headed,
Mussolini concluded that ‘this leaves no doubt that it is on the
road to corporatism, the economic system of the current century’.8
The corporate state in Italy appeared to many to have successfully
walked a middle road between laissez-faire capitalism and out-and-
out Marxism. It had harnessed the private sector in the national
interest, and enacted the type of big public works schemes the
Roosevelt administration would later ape. Given that democracy
182 The Tramp and the dictators

was always something of an abstract to Charlie – he could not vote

in America, and was rich to the point where whoever was in the
White House would have little impact on him economically – it is
entirely feasible that he would have been sympathetic to aspects
of Italian fascism.
In fact, Chaplin almost met Benito Mussolini, and the pair prob-
ably would have had much to talk about. This was true cinemati-
cally and politically. For one, as Thomas Doherty notes, Mussolini
‘inspected foreign films as censor-in-chief [of Italy] and meddled
with the scripts and casting-decisions of Italian-made feature
films’.9 This ran in the family – in the 1930s Mussolini’s young
son Vittorio served as the screen columnist for his father’s news-
paper Il Popolo d’Italia, and later travelled to Hollywood to seek
to co-produce an Italo-American film. But even Vittorio may have
failed to match his father’s enthusiasm for the movies. In April
1929 Il Duce had told the American press of his love for

[c]omedies – American comedies. I care for no other films.

The attempt to create serious movies in America leaves me
unmoved. They are nearly all sickly in their sentimental-
ity, puritanical and filled with such unbelievable bunkum as
to make any European burst with amazement to find such
[trash] still existing. But your comedies! Need I mention
Carlino Charles Chaplin? That is where the American film
approaches a great art and has a value. The American com-
edies are among the best thing from America and I never miss
them.10

This was several years before Chaplin would lampoon Mus-

solini as Benzino Napoloni in The Great Dictator (albeit through
the softer form afforded by Jack Oakie than he himself gave to
Hitler). But for all the speculation as to whether Hitler ever actu-
ally saw that film (it seems unlikely), smart money for having done
so would have gone on the Italian dictator. A meeting between
Chaplin and Il Duce was even scheduled for early March 1932 in
Mussolini’s office, but was cancelled at the last minute by the Ital-
ians. Although it could not take place a press release was issued for
the event that made the American papers, including Hearst’s Los
Angeles Examiner: ‘Premier Mussolini received Charlie Chaplin
 The Tramp and the dictators 183

this afternoon in his study in the Palazzo Chigi, and the two con-
versed informally for 15 minutes.’11
Again, this may well have been a meeting of mutually apprecia-
tive minds. Chaplin’s published account in A Comedian Sees the
World was certainly very favourable to the home of fascism: ‘on
crossing the border into Italy I was impressed with its atmosphere.
Discipline and order were omnipresent. Hope and desire seemed
in the air. In the midst of these medieval surroundings, a new life
has crept in.’12 In 1928 Chaplin had even named Mussolini as one
of the great personalities of the year, not merely for his general
importance but ‘because he took a nation and put it to work’.13 In
this sense Charlie was arguably similar to the historian Wolfgang
Schivelbusch’s verdict regarding FDR: ‘In contrast to Hitler, with
whom he always felt a world of social, ideological, and political
difference, Roosevelt had nothing but “sympathy and confidence”
in Mussolini up until the mid-1930s.’14 In any case, always the
businessman, before the fascists banned his work (from Modern
Times) Italy formed a significant market for Charlie. Democracy
was not all that important when there was lira to be made.

Before The Great Dictator

As mentioned, Hitler was a rather different case. Born in the same
week, adopting the same toothbrush moustache for their ‘charac-
ter’, and subsequently achieving global fame, Chaplin and Hitler’s
world views would be radically different. We will deal with The
Great Dictator and Adenoid Hynkel in a moment, but it is impor-
tant to note that much of Chaplin’s early understanding of Hit-
ler seems to have come from his friend, the newspaper publisher
Cornelius Vanderbilt. During a journalistic visit to see the ‘New
Germany’ Vanderbilt had managed to get into a concentration
camp ‘on some pretext’, and returned home to publish ‘stories of
brutality [that] were so fantastic that few people believed them’.
Sending Charlie postcards depicting Hitler making a speech, it is
likely that Vanderbilt provided something of the inspiration for
The Great Dictator.15 Upon seeing these, Charlie ‘could not take
Hitler seriously . . . The salute with the hand thrown back over
the shoulder, the palm upwards, made me want to put a tray of
dirty dishes on it.’ He thought, ‘This is a nut,’ although when
184 The Tramp and the dictators

Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein were forced to leave Germany

Charlie began to view that ‘nut’ in a more ‘sinister’ light.16
Not everyone felt this way. When in 1934 Vanderbilt released
the anti-Nazi documentary film Hitler’s Reign of Terror, The
New York Times was scathing: ‘Hitler’s methods are scourged by
Messrs. Vanderbilt and Hill, but their words would be infinitely
more effective if they were endowed with a slight degree of subtlety
and a sense of humor.’17 As Thomas Doherty recently notes, when
it came to showing the totalitarian regimes on film, in the early to
mid-1930s reviewers still ‘felt duty bound to pan a work whose
good intentions were no compensation for its dreadful artistry’.18
Equally, film reviewers were not above praising documentaries that
were apologies for fascist regimes. Barely a year prior to panning
Hitler’s Reign of Terror, The New York Times’ Mordaunt Hall
described the 1933 pro-fascist documentary Mussolini Speaks as
one where ‘even those in the audience who are not Italians cannot
resist a surge of patriotic feeling’. Hall further noted that ‘as each
point of the Fascist program is taken up in the dictator’s flaming
oratory, the camera moves out over the country to illustrate what
has been done in that particular direction and how Mussolini has
kept his promises to his people’.19
Part of this feeling came from the general perception that per-
haps Germany and even the victorious Italy had been rather hard
done by through the Treaty of Versailles. Such a view marked Brit-
ish and American elites, who in later years began to feel that per-
haps they had listened too much to the French desire for vengeance
in the post-war treaties. Richard Law, briefly a British Cabinet
Minister under Churchill, recalled that

in 1933, when Hitler came to power, we did not know that he

was Hitler. We thought he was Charlie Chaplin; we thought
he was a pathetic little man with a toothbrush moustache
who went about in a rather curious chauffer’s uniform. We
rather pitied him, and felt that in some way he was speaking
for the underdog.20

As we will shortly note with reference to Konrad Bercovici, it is by

no means impossible that Chaplin himself shared something of these
sympathies. The fact that his previous visits to Germany in 1921 and
1931 coincided with periods of economic downturn for that nation
 The Tramp and the dictators 185

(sandwiching the more prosperous, ‘golden years’ of Weimar) was

likely significant. On his 1921 world tour, as noted in Chapter 5,
although Charlie enjoyed himself he also encountered ‘many cripples
with embittered, sullen looks on their faces’ – the physical and emo-
tional scars of the war.21 Likewise, ten years later he had met with
various Reichstag deputies bemoaning a Germany on the verge of
total bankruptcy. Expectations of Germany were not high for Charlie.
His views on Hitler the ‘performer’ also shifted when it came
to researching the film. After watching reels of Hitler’s speeches,
Chaplin conceded that he

was impressed when I saw some of his gestures – I didn’t

understand what he was talking about – I’d say what he
talked about was bloody rot – but he made certain gestures
which were very effective. I didn’t see any sort of orator do
that. Churchill was sort of in the grand manner – in the grand
tradition – English style, you see – [whereas Hitler said] “I
will take Europe!” and it came over.22

His Hynkel character would go on to deliver speeches in a ludi-

crously over-the-top manner in the film, and certainly his words
would be stage managed in their English translation, but the cheers
of his audience – and Hynkel’s ability to stop them with a wave
of his hand – could be read as genuine enough. At one stage, he is
even able to seduce his secretary merely by cartoonishly snorting.
That at least was always more Chaplin’s domain than Hitler’s.
Yet, for Charlie, the anti-Semitism that was at the foundation
of Hitler’s regime was all too personal. Both Charlie’s half-brother
Sydney and then partner Paulette Goddard had Jewish fathers, and
he simply never understood the irrationality of baiting Jews simply
because they were Jews. As he later told American investigators
looking into his communist sympathies: ‘All this racial business –
I am not a Jew – nevertheless the mere picking on a minority
people incenses me more than the ideology, more than the work
movement, or anything else – just because they were crazy – they
were mad men.’23 In part thanks to Nazi prejudice, Charlie was
also himself again accused of being a Jew. During a trip to Berlin
in January 1934 the genuinely Jewish Ivor Montagu happened
across a book whose ‘contents are almost unbelievable and not
the least fantastic thing about it is that numbers of people in it are,
186 The Tramp and the dictators

like yourself, not Jews at all’. This book was Johann von Leers’ notori-
ous Juden sehen dich an (The Jews are Looking at You), in which Char-
lie was described as a ‘nerve killing fidgeting Jew’. Although Montagu
was ‘sad to say there are some real crooks in it, it’s surely not unhon-
orable to be included amongst so many noble and maligned’.24 Albert
Einstein and Emil Ludwig were at least two Jews within the book
Charlie would have considered in the latter, more honourable light.
But if the Nazi regime’s anti-Semitism clearly both angered and mys-
tified him, Charlie took a reasonable amount of time to convert such
antipathy into meaningful action – particularly given, unlike Italy,
there was no economic concern since the new regime in Germany
had banned his films from the outset. Even after the Nuremburg Laws
of September 1935 formally excluded Jews from being citizens of the
Reich, Charlie rebuffed those trying to convince him into helping Ger-
many’s Jews. One such body was the Society for the Protection of
Science and Learning (SPSL), which throughout the 1930s sought to
place German-Jewish academics at British universities and other insti-
tutions to get them out of the clutches of the Nazis. In October 1935
SPSL General Secretary Walter Adams wrote to Chaplin’s acquain-
tance H.G. Wells letting him know that they wished to help ‘displaced
scholars, whether German or other national’ but would require initial
contributions of £100,000 to do so. They went on to say that

if you were able to interest Mr Charles Chaplin in the work

of the council, we shall be extremely grateful. If Mr Chaplin
were interested, members of my Council would be pleased to
explain their plans in greater detail to him on the occasion of
his coming visit to this country.25

Wells ‘was not at all hopeful Mr Chaplin would give a sum like
£100,000 but said he would do his best’, and the SPSL pinned their
hopes on getting some face-to-face time with him after a proposed
London premiere of Modern Times in December 1935.26
The biologist Julian Huxley was soon brought into this lobbying
effort. Chaplin knew both Julian and his author brother Aldous
(who Charlie liked very much as

the cynical young man of the twenties’). Huxley wrote to tell

Adams that ‘[the] last time he was here I tried to get in touch
with him to ask him to a meal, but my letter was simply not
 The Tramp and the dictators 187

acknowledged! Apparently he has gangs of secretaries, who sit

on almost everything. If you can find means of getting over
this, I should be glad to do what I can.27

This seems certainly plausible – in his 1948 interrogation by the

American Immigration and Naturalization Service Chaplin noted
that ‘we get tons of mail . . . we get a million things here for all
sorts of donations . . . a lot of these things are all carried down to
the studio and they more or less apportion some of these things
out you know’.28 It is certainly true that with a powerful man the
underlings often hold much sway. Still, when H.G. Wells was able
to reach the man personally, he noted that he ‘regrets Mr Charles
Chaplin is not disposed to assist in the project discussed’.29 Adams
replied that ‘the news is of course disappointing but we are by now
completely used to this sort of thing’.30
Indeed, the journalist Hedda Hopper – admittedly no sympathetic
source, as we will see – suggested that Chaplin’s reluctance to help
the Jews lasted even longer. She recorded that a meeting took place
at Twentieth Century Fox where ‘a little man from Palestine [was]
trying to win sympathy and raise funds . . . to arm one hundred
thousand Jews in Palestine before we got into World War II’. Hopper
provided her own donation, but when Chaplin was called upon ‘he
got up in a white heat of hate and said, “I am not a Jew; I am not a
citizen of America; I am a citizen of the world, I will give nothing to
this cause. I deplore the whole thing.”’31 In light of the film he would
later make, this perhaps appears somewhat surprising. Yet against
this we must, however, balance one crucial piece of evidence. In July
1939 Charlie would be hailed as a ‘Twentieth Century Moses’ after
he signed over the foreign revenues from his pictures to aid Jews
in Milan who had fled Germany and Austria and were awaiting
the chance to emigrate to safer territories. Many American newspa-
pers reported that ‘according to Jewish quarters in Vienna, a part of
this fund[, which ran into several millions of dollars,] recently was
placed at the disposal of the Jewish community in Milan’. And ‘for
each of 1,000 Jews who left Germany under this arrangement last
week, the Milan Jews posted a $50 bond with the Italian government
so that the Jews would not become public charges in Italy’.32 The
material effect of this is difficult to ascertain – The Great Dictator
would not be released (and therefore make any money) until after
the Italian entry into the war had brought a clampdown on such
188 The Tramp and the dictators

emigration – but the gesture mattered. In July 1940, it was further

reported that Chaplin was among those luminaries who collectively
deposited $6 million in a Milan bank to aid Jews fleeing Austria after
the Anschluss. Unpicking the financial flows of the time remains dif-
ficult, but we can at least hypothesise that the presence of such funds
played a role in slowing the pace of Fascist Italy’s conversion towards
the Nazi dogma on the Jews. If any money from Charlie provided
the time and space for one Jew – Austrian, German or otherwise –
to escape the spectre of the gas chamber, then he was clearly on the
right side of history in some catastrophic times. His conversion to
this position, however, took time.

The Bercovici case

The Great Dictator would form Chaplin’s quintessential state-
ment of anti-fascism. While, however, we know when he
announced the film (October 1938), there remains a question
mark against when Charlie actually came up with the idea for
it. Years after the event a Romanian-born author named Kon-
rad Bercovici claimed to have distributed to Charlie (via Zeppo
Marx) a script outlining, in essence, the plot of The Great Dicta-
tor in March 1938. There was nothing necessarily unusual with
that scenario – we have seen that Chaplin had frequently toyed
with different co-writers from Alistair Cooke to John Strachey
as he made the difficult transition to sound. Orson Welles would
even help Charlie with the scenario for the later Monsieur Ver-
doux. Yet in this instance The Great Dictator became the subject
of an infamous legal case. In the early 1940s, having received no
credit on the film (or, crucially, royalties) Bercovici would sue
Chaplin for $6,400,000 in lost earnings. This case would eventu-
ally be settled by Chaplin in 1947 (albeit for the more modest
sum of $90,000), partly no doubt due to Charlie having so many
other legal and political troubles at the time.
The actual case was pretty flimsy as Chaplin’s legal team laid
bare – all Bercovici had was ‘a [verbal] contract made in secret with
no one present, no witnesses, no writing’.33 Yet during the civil suit
that was set to judge on the matter there were extraordinary accu-
sations about Chaplin’s politics, and ones that seem to fly in the
face of everything we understand about the man. After Bercovici
 The Tramp and the dictators 189

had finished his proposed script for Charlie, he claimed that he

and Chaplin encountered each other at the house of a mutual
acquaintance in April 1938. Charlie wandered in as Bercovici was
discussing the Nazis and, surprisingly, ‘his words right off the bat
[on Hitler] . . . were: “Well, there must be something to the man.
Look at what he has done for Germany.”’ Bercovici objected to
this strenuously: ‘I had been in Germany and I knew what was
going on there.’ But Charlie continued: ‘You can’t make fun of
Hitler, make fun of a man who has done so much as he has, [or]
such as Mussolini who has made something out of Italy.’ ‘In Italy,’
Charlie is alleged to have said, ‘The trains run on time, and look at
what the Versailles Treaty had done for Germany. Hitler is bringing
order out of chaos.’34 This startled Bercovici: ‘I knew [Charlie] to
be somewhat of a liberal and took it for granted that he detested
the Nazis. Before he had seemed to agree with me, but this time
he disappointed me.’ Having planned to thrust a copy of his script
directly into Charlie’s hands, Bercovici thought better of it.
Bercovici left the party having harangued Charlie: ‘You sympa-
thize with dictators because you have become soft and bloated.’
Given that Charlie’s economic manifesto of 1932 had been inspired
in part by such accusations of lethargy in the face of global crisis,
this was a smart play. Others at the gathering allegedly backed up
Charlie’s anti-fascist credentials, but Bercovici was not to be brow-
beaten and retained ‘very little’ respect for the comedian’s opinions.
Later that evening Bercovici went around to Charlie’s house where
his host ‘suddenly seemed very anxious to talk about the dicta-
tor situation in Europe; there were things that he did not know
about; what was really happening in Germany.’ As time passed and
the atmosphere mellowed, Bercovici outlined the general scenario
behind his proposed script and how ‘Hitler and all the other dicta-
tors could be killed with ridicule’. At the time Charlie was ‘mildly
opposed’ to such a concept, but ‘could see there was something
in it’. As Bercovici went on Charlie asked more questions about
Germany and Italy, ‘who Hitler was, his background’. Bercovici
duly obliged with such information and claimed, in so doing, that
he was the first individual ‘to acquaint Chaplin with the relation-
ship between Hitler, Goering and Goebbels’ – later lampooned to
great effect in the film. He also suggested that the idea for Charlie
escaping a concentration camp in the film was his alone.35
190 The Tramp and the dictators

Bercovici’s case was certainly full of half-truths and contestable

statements. For instance, he claimed that ‘Charlie impersonating
Hitler is original with me.’ That can hardly have been true. During
the later trial Charlie’s lawyer handed over to the jury a scrapbook
of clippings from 1936 related to Chaplin – ‘He keeps a scrapbook
of press notices, as all important people do.’ This book was full of

scores of editorials and reporters’ notes of stories in every

newspaper in the United States and every paper in Australia,
Canada, and England comparing Hitler and Chaplin . . . why
the thing was as open as day. Did[, therefore,] Chaplin need
Bercovici to implant the idea . . .? Nonsense.36

There was much in that view. Alexander Korda, for one, had
proposed the idea at least a year before Bercovici.
But Charlie’s alleged praise for Hitler and particularly Mussolini
has arguably been glided over too quickly. Certainly it is odd to hear
Charlie say, ‘You have got to admire Hitler’s efficiency, if nothing else,
and Mussolini has done some good things for Italy, and I am not at
this time trying to discredit him.’37 In Joyce Milton’s highly critical
(although equally readable) biography of Charlie, she describes this
as the action of someone ‘ever the contrarian’.38 Given that other
sources, his son Michael not least, frequently point out that Charlie
simply liked to argue for the sake of it there may be something in the
notion that Chaplin was simply winding Bercovici up. But it is as
likely that these simply represented Chaplin’s views at the time. Ber-
covici later softened his description of the April 1938 conversation:

I don’t think Chaplin [defended] Hitler and Mussolini. I think

Chaplin said, more or less, the picture is not as black as I had
painted it; that they were not just gangsters . . . I would not say
he defended Nazism or Fascism, but I would say he was not
opposed to it in the sense I was opposed to it.39

As extraordinary as that may appear in light of the film he released

two and a half years later, that description broadly seems to hold
up. While it is easy to dismiss Bercovici’s evidence, or indeed ignore
it as many accounts of Chaplin’s life do, it does at least deserve
due consideration. Simply because it does not fit the narrative of
brave Charlie standing up against the dictators, that does not mean
it is fiction. Indeed, given his early statements on fascism, it seems
 The Tramp and the dictators 191

entirely plausible. Contemporary difficulties or not, Chaplin did

after all settle the case with Bercovici, indicating that there may
have been something there.
It is undeniable that Chaplin would come to hate the dictators –
and aspects of them were always inexplicable to him. For instance,
when the Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann was put on trial in Jeru-
salem in 1962, displaying what Hannah Arendt famously called ‘the
banality of evil’, Charlie was livid. As his son Michael recalled in typi-
cal 1960s idioms, this was ‘a regular topic while his trial was going
on and my father was choked with rage and would be just lost for
words about what he’d like to do to that cat’.40 But this was after the
Holocaust had taken place. In the late 1930s fascism had seemingly
conquered domestic unemployment, restored downtrodden nations’
place on the diplomatic scene and projected an albeit pompous sense
of hope for the future. The fact that Charlie may have imbibed some
of that does not in any meaningful sense detract from his later work.

Putting America first

The odd pro-fascist utterance may even have done Charlie some good
before the Second World War. Aside from machinations involving
the communist baiting House Un-American Activities Committee
(covered in the next chapter), Chaplin’s output was so controversial
in late 1930s America because he would come, in essence, to advo-
cate a position explicitly contrary to existing statute: war with Nazi
Germany. In 1935, Congress had passed the first of four Neutrality
Acts, the first of which forbade America trading with any belligerent
involved in a war. In 1936, this was extended to all forms of loan
and credit. Finally, in 1939, with Britain and France now at war with
Nazi Germany, ‘cash and carry’ sales were finally allowed – in effect
meaning that the United States would only permit the sale of arms
to belligerents if the other party to the transaction paid up-front, in
cash, and managed the transportation of the goods themselves. Yet
even this change of emphasis came with caveats. Until the passage of
the Lend-Lease Act in March 1941 (passed partly because the British
were running out of gold with which to pay under ‘cash and carry’),
America kept its dealings at the very least to a degree of plausible
deniability when it came to the war erupting in Europe.
Gallup Polls suggest that the American people strongly sup-
ported such an isolationist stance. In September 1938 a survey of
192 The Tramp and the dictators

more than 3,000 Americans revealed that two-thirds did not think
President Roosevelt should criticise Hitler’s ‘war-like’ actions dur-
ing the Sudetenland crisis.41 By September 1939, with Britain and
France now at war with Germany, only 6 per cent of Americans
thought that Roosevelt should lead America in joining them.42 By
October 1939 this figure had even fallen to 5 per cent.43 When
Charlie Chaplin began work on The Great Dictator he was craft-
ing a film that would likely fly in the face of received opinion – an
undeniably brave move. Modern Times had been controversial,
but this new film seemed to be pushing boundaries much further.
As a result of this isolationism Hollywood was generally careful
about its output. There were several reasons for this. First, as Ben
Urwand has recently shown, Nazi officials such as Georg Gyssling
buzzed around Los Angeles in the 1930s discussing with the major
studios what would and would not be acceptable for release in the
Third Reich: ‘He told the studios to make changes to their pictures
about Germany, and he threatened to expel them from the German
market . . . if they did not co-operate’.44 By the end of the decade,
as diplomatic pressures exerted a further such influence, Gyssling
barely had to express his displeasure: studios knew what would not
pass German censors, and acted accordingly. But it was more than
that, for the American MPPDA itself urged strict neutrality during
the conflict, and not out of fervently pro-Nazi feeling. In an open
letter to Hollywood film producers on 15 September 1939, two
weeks after the German invasion of Poland, Will Hays expressed
his belief that ‘no propaganda on the screen shall be the contribut-
ing cause of making this industry assume the dreadful responsi-
bility of sending the youth of America to war’.45 This was sent a
year prior to President Roosevelt’s famous pledge to the American
people that ‘your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign
wars’. It also predated the formation of the anti-interventionist
America First Committee – whose approximately 800,000 mem-
bers included Hollywood figures such as Walt Disney and Lilian
Gish – by roughly the same timescale. The movies broadly fell into
this generally pacifistic spirit. Hays worried that ‘there is no law’
covering the issue of ‘federal neutrality’, and noted, ‘We do very
well, indeed, to keep our responsibilities constantly in mind now.’
The films were about ‘entertainment’ and ‘“hate” pictures have no
place on America’s amusement screen’.46 Such self-regulation by
 The Tramp and the dictators 193

the MPPDA was convincing enough to forestall an amendment to

the Neutrality Act that would have established a formal censorship
board to police ‘all Hollywood films with a war theme or setting’.47
While this was not Chaplin’s view about film’s role in the com-
ing struggle, it is important to set out the ambiguities of the time.
For one, the varying opinions as to what actually constituted cin-
ematic propaganda were given interesting light by a survey sent to
ten staff members of the self-regulating censorship body the Pro-
duction Code Administration (PCA) in June 1938. This was unde-
niably a small sample, but this collective’s views on what actually
was ‘propaganda’ and whether particular texts were ‘self-serving’
are worth repeating. A small sample is given below in Table 7.1.

Table 7.1 Instances of ‘propaganda’ as defined by the Production Code

Administration, June 1938

Total Propaganda? Self-serving? Uncertain

replies
Yes No Yes No

Texts
United States 9 3 6 1 5 3
Declaration of
Independence
Communist 7 5 2 3 3 1
Manifesto
Das Kapital 6 4 2 1 3 2
Mein Kampf 7 6 1 4 2 1
Franklin D. 6 6 0 2 3 1
Roosevelt’s On
Our Way
Upton Sinclair’s 8 8 — 2 5 1
The Jungle
Films
Birth of a Nation 9 3 6 1 4 4
Potemkin 7 2 5 0 3 4
Survey appendix of ‘A Study of the Effect of the Production Code and its
Administration and Content of American Motion Pictures, and Certain Other
Basic Industry Policies and Their Current Application’, 22 June 1938, FIRTH/
MPPDA No. 1,192
194 The Tramp and the dictators

There are some interesting conclusions here. First, the notion

that Mein Kampf was a less obvious form of propaganda than that
propagated by Upton Sinclair or the sitting President is certainly
odd. Yet, conversely, communistic texts by Marx were viewed as
less overt forms of propaganda than those by Hitler.
Such confusing findings may arise from the fact that many of
the respondents had difficulty precisely defining what propaganda
actually was. While one respondent to the PCA survey noted that
‘propaganda in common usage is a very confusing term which
should probably be abolished altogether’, others took more dog-
matic lines. Another commented that ‘anything today for or against
Communism or Fascism or religion or even Prohibition, any of
which subjects would tend to arouse the hatred and feelings of one
group of American citizens against another, constitutes the type of
propaganda that should be kept off the motion picture screens’.
Even within the cinematic world, therefore, there were extremely
divergent views as to what good cinema ‘should’ do during this
difficult time.48 Chaplin, to his credit, ploughed on regardless.

Censoring The Great Dictator

Making The Great Dictator amidst such debates was an unques-
tionably brave step. As his old friend and sailing partner Alistair
Cooke knew,

The Great Dictator will be more than an artistic risk. It is

a daring business venture, for his change of theme almost
certainly blights him of any prospect of showing the film in
Poland and Portugal, in most of South America, in the Soviet,
and in Japan – to say nothing of Italy and Germany.49

Certainly the commercial implications were stark. For example,

when Harry Warner, then President of Warner Brothers, wrote to
Roosevelt’s advisor Harry Hopkins in March 1939 to note that ‘in
South America, the American motion picture reigns supreme’ he
was telling the blunt truth.50 With Argentina (90 per cent of films
shown being American made) and Brazil (85 per cent equivalent)
combining militaristic dictatorships with a public who liked a good
glut of Hollywood, there were key markets at risk in making a film
where an ally of such regimes, Hitler, was being ridiculed mercilessly.
 The Tramp and the dictators 195

Although the diplomacy was rather different, this was also

potentially true of the United States. When Bercovici had alleg-
edly brought up the prospect of making The Great Dictator in
early 1938 Charlie told him that ‘he could not do it, that there
would be trouble with the State Department, that we were at peace
now with Germany and Italy, that these two men – Hitler and
Mussolini – were heads of governments – we dare not satirize
them’.51 If this is true, Chaplin’s stance had certainly changed by
September 1938 when he engaged the writer Dan James, fresh out
of Yale, to bounce ideas off with regard to the film’s plot. After
the October announcement that the film was going ahead, full
production (the ordering of sets, costumes and so forth) would
commence in July 1939.
The intervening period between these two dates would come to
matter enormously. By December 1938 the German Propaganda
Ministry was receiving reports that an ‘impudent satire’ of the dic-
tators was being prepared by Chaplin. According to German inter-
nal memoranda, ‘the joke of this film is that Chaplin, the “little big
Jew,” is mistaken (!) for the Fuhrer (!) by the guards and thereby
ends up in the position of Adolf Hitler(!)’.52 In a rare break from
his détente with most of Hollywood, Hitler himself issued some-
thing of a direct response to Chaplin and other perceived anti-Nazi
films such as the Three Stooges’ You Nazty Spy! Subsequently,
this 30 January 1939 speech by Hitler to the Reichstag would
become known for promising ‘the annihilation of the Jewish race
in Europe’ in the event of a world war, but it also contained a
much less high-profile attack on the American film industry. He
thundered that ‘the announcement of American film companies
of their intention to produce anti-Nazi – i.e. anti-German – films,
will lead to our German producers creating anti-Semitic films in
the future’.53 In late 1938 and early 1939 Charlie was supposedly
wavering about whether to make the picture, and more pressure
was about to follow.
By this stage news of the planned film had reached Charlie’s
homeland of Britain. On 27 February 1939, a Conservative MP
Edward Keeling wrote a letter to Rab Butler, Under Secretary of
State at the Foreign Office and then a rising pro-appeasement
star within the British government. Keeling had been contacted
previously by one of his constituents, and told of ‘a film now in
196 The Tramp and the dictators

preparation in Hollywood which is to be called “The Dictator”

and in which Charles Chaplin is to portray Herr Hitler satirically’.
According to this unnamed source,

It is obviously most undesirable that such a film should be exhib-

ited in this country and I venture to think that the Government
should make it known immediately to the persons financially
interested in its production and distribution that its exhibition
in Great Britain will be forbidden, the necessary instructions
being issued at the same time to Lord Tyrrell’s Board.

In essence, this was a request to kill off what became The Great
Dictator lest it prove offensive to the Nazis.54 Butler promised
Keeling he would look into the matter and get back to him.
What followed was a paper trail studied in ambiguity. On the one
hand, the official line was very much as Rab Butler later told Keel-
ing: ‘Film censorship in this country is under the control of the Film
Industry and, as we have repeatedly pointed out in the House of
Commons, is in no way subject to government control.’55 This gen-
eral rule of thumb applied even into the Second World War. When
Soviet Ambassador to London Maisky complained to the British
about the content of King Vidor’s comedy espionage film Comrade X,
Harold Nicolson at the Ministry of Information deemed it to be
‘vulgar and it is most vulgar to the Soviet system’. Yet he still ‘warned
Maisky that we really did not have powers to do anything about it’
and that the head of his department (Alfred Duff Cooper) ‘does not
feel that we should be justified in taking steps which are beyond our
powers to prevent the showing of a film produced in America and
for which we are in no possible way responsible’.56 Had the govern-
ment stood back from all involvement in what films could or could
not be released, this would at least have been a consistent position.
In reality, however, it is clear that Chaplin was leant on by British
sources to tone down his portrayal of Hitler. In early March 1939,
the Foreign Office began to make enquiries about the nature of
the film through its Washington Embassy, a request subsequently
relayed to the British Consulate in Los Angeles.57 This was a tumul-
tuous time. Two weeks after this letter Hitler marched his troops
into what remained of Czechoslovakia and by the end of the month
Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had issued his guarantee of
Polish independence. The film’s importance and sensitivity had
 The Tramp and the dictators 197

therefore only grown. Indeed, when Jack L. Warner (of Warner

Brothers fame) met with President Roosevelt around this time, he
found a President hoping that Chaplin’s picture would still come to
fruition.58 Warner assured the Commander in Chief that this was
indeed so. On 21 March Chaplin issued a statement stating that
‘owing to erroneous reports in the press that I have abandoned my
production concerning dictatorship, I wish to state that I have never
wavered from my original determination to make this picture’. He
was not worried about ‘intimidation, censorship or anything else’.59
That was fortunate because the British were not about to give
up. On 28 April 1939 the Foreign Office in London wrote to their
Los Angeles Consulate to note that

while we have no wish to suggest that you should wish being

charged with interference, we wonder whether it might be
possible for you to approach [the Chaplin Company] . . . and
prevail upon them to treat the subject in a way that it could be
exhibited in this country without offending Germany.60

After having some presumably tense conversations with Chap-

lin on the matter, Los Angeles reported back two weeks later. The
Consulate contended that he was ‘entering into the production of
“The Dictator” with fanatical enthusiasm’. His ‘racial and social
sympathies’ were with the ‘classes and groups who have suffered
most in the dictatorship countries’, and he was prepared to put
a million dollars into the film to make sure this was hammered
home on-screen. In something of a massive understatement, they
reported that Chaplin’s ‘political outlook is not of a quality which
is likely to influence him in favour of propitiating the personalities
whom he burlesquing. Indeed, the directness of his attack would
seem to be, to him, the picture’s only motive and reason.’61
By June 1939 the Foreign Office had recognised the difficulty
of their convincing Chaplin to change his film but still, again in
the mannered language of diplomats, began to work on British
censors to try to get them to refuse to pass the film. A 16 June
letter sent from Rowland Kenney at the Foreign Office to Joseph
Brooke-Wilkinson at the British Board of Film Censors certainly
suggests as much. Relaying the news from Los Angeles that Chap-
lin was determined to make the film come what may, Kenney told
Brooke-Wilkinson that ‘Mr Chaplin recognises that the Hays
198 The Tramp and the dictators

Office may refuse to pass the film for exhibition in the United
States of America, and that it may be banned almost everywhere
else’. Presumably just to be helpful, he ‘thought it as well to draw
your attention to these reports in order that you may be prepared –
if you have not already heard of them – to give the film the most
careful scrutiny should it be presented to you for a license in this
country’.62 This was a classic British fudge. By the letter of the
law, Kenney had not overstepped statutory bounds here. But by
urging ‘the most careful scrutiny’ for a product likely to be ‘banned
almost everywhere’ he was giving the censors a firm nudge as to
which side of the fence to come down on. Unbeknownst to Ken-
ney, however, Brooke-Wilkinson was already sympathetic to this
position – and he had independently already sent a telegram on
Chaplin to his counterpart Joseph Breen, the anti-Semitic head of
the Production Code Administration in America. Back in March
1939 Brooke-Wilkinson had contacted Breen to point out ‘the
delicate situation that might arise in [Britain] if personal attacks
were made on any living statesman’, and asking what contact
could be made with Chaplin.63 As Chaplin continued to work up
his anti-Hitler scenario, therefore, British officialdom already was
on the same page as to its likely response.
Events overtook matters, however. With the British declaring
war on Hitler on 3 September 1939 such concerns were soon
swept aside, and a product lampooning Nazi Germany was now
useful rather than undesirable. But the early concerns among the
British establishment should not be forgotten. Charlie had forged
ahead with the expense of making a film with the very real pros-
pect that it would be banned from his key markets. The Great
Dictator would form a powerful legacy for many different reasons.

Content and release

Charlie later told a friend that he had ‘put everything into this
picture. It may be my monument.’64 As ever, he shot and shot
until he felt the scenes were right. It is said that he shot a million
feet of film for a film that ended up using less than 7,000.65 Even
by Charlie’s standards this was picky – but this film clearly mat-
tered more to him than any other up to that point. While even the
very political Modern Times had embedded itself within a world
 The Tramp and the dictators 199

recognisible to the early Tramp, The Great Dictator was all too
‘real’.
On 31 August 1939 screen tests for the film were started
with Charlie seeking Jewish actors who could speak Yiddish for
extras and to play incidental characters in the ghetto. Shooting
began on 9 September, six days after the British and French had
declared war on Hitler. Early shooting including scenes in the
ghetto building the romance between the barber and Hannah,
and occurred during a heat wave in Los Angeles that saw tem-
peratures reach 114 degrees Fahrenheit. By December he had
filmed preliminary scenes for the final speech with Garbitsch and
Herring, but had not yet fully nailed down the content of the per-
oration itself. The final address would only be fully fleshed out in
the week commencing 23 June 1940 – after, in other words, the
French had surrendered to the advancing German Army and the
war looked more or less won by Hitler. It was even braver than
it looked (see Figure 7.1).
After editing and scoring the picture through the autumn, even-
tually the film received its New York premiere in October 1940. It

Figure 7.1 The Great Dictator was Chaplin’s greatest artistic risk to date
and would stand as his most profound achievement.
Courtesy of Bridgeman Images
200 The Tramp and the dictators

stayed fifteen weeks there, playing two big theatres – the Astor and
the Capitol – and proved Charlie’s biggest gross to date. One invi-
tee to the premiere who could not attend was President Roosevelt
himself. An intriguing telegram has survived in his official archive
in upstate New York, however. On 22 October Edwin M. Wat-
son, Roosevelt’s secretary, cabled to Chaplin that ‘before Novem-
ber 5’ – the Presidential election in which FDR would secure an
unprecedented third term – the President was ‘now faced with
the necessity of preparing five major political addresses’ and thus
could not make it to Chaplin’s premiere. Yet, evidently, Roosevelt
had been moved by the film, for Watson continued noting that ‘he
asks that I explain the circumstances to you and say he had hoped
so very much to see you this week and to attend the screening in
the White House of your new picture’. FDR was ‘sorry you must
return to the West Coast so soon’ and asked ‘is there are any
chance you will be east again and can be here when the picture is
screened’.66 This was not just perfunctory acknowledgement of a
big cinematic name. Unable to get Roosevelt, Charlie was success-
ful in convincing Harry Hopkins, FDR’s Chief Advisor, to attend
a preview for the film. Hopkins judged the film ‘a great picture’
and ‘a very worthwhile thing to do’. But he believed ‘it hasn’t a
chance. It will lose money.’67 In this regard, as mentioned, he was
proved comprehensively wrong.
The timing was also appropriate for Chaplin’s homeland. Its
British release (London Premiere: 16 December 1940; nation-
wide release March 1941) coincided with the Blitz – seventy-one
German bombing raids on the British capital over 1940–1 that
damaged in the region of one million homes and killed more than
40,000 civilians – and was thus a much-needed morale boost for
Chaplin’s countrymen. Just before its London Premiere the Duch-
ess of Marlborough, Churchill’s Secretary Jock Colville, Brendan
Bracken and several other luminaries gathered at Chartwell to
watch The Great Dictator with Winston Churchill. Colville’s
account records the group sitting down to watch the film that
had ‘not yet been released in this country and which everyone
has been eagerly awaiting’. He continued: ‘The film at which we
all laughed a great deal, being over, Winston dictated to me a
short telegram to Roosevelt, asking whether Lloyd George would
be acceptable as Ambassador, and went to bed early.’68 There
 The Tramp and the dictators 201

remained a war to win, and whose outcome still remained in the

balance.
As Winston Churchill saw, the film itself makes great use of the
physical similarities between Charlie Chaplin and Adolf Hitler.
Charlie plays two characters – a Jewish barber (notably, unlike
Chaplin, a veteran of the Great War) and Adenoid Hynkel, leader
of the Double Cross movement and Dictator of Tomania. As ever
with Charlie’s political films, it begins with a caption: ‘This is a
story of a period between two World Wars – an interim in which
Insanity cut loose. Liberty took a nose dive, and Humanity was
kicked around somewhat.’ We move from some business on the
Western Front in the Great War to a post-war world where news-
paper headlines make clear that economic Depression had given
way to mass rioting before bringing the ‘Hynkel Party’ to power.
The film contains several notes of broad comedy such as (the Her-
mann Goering mocking) Marshall Herring attempting to ‘tighten
his belt’ as per a Hynkel speech from Charlie, but being unable to
do so due to his expansive stomach. It was not his funniest work,
but the slapstick does on occasion neatly cut through.
Yet it is the politics that really shines throughout the film, and
not just in the direct sense of portraying the Nazi regime in a nega-
tive light. Chaplin used his global fame to make some very specific
points. First, his work suggested that the Western democracies
were being fed a pack of lies about Hitler’s intentions, and to some
degree willingly swallowing them. In one speech, for example,
Hynkel goes on an anti-Semitic tirade so vicious that even the
microphones physically recoil in terror. The well-mannered Ger-
man translator simply notes that ‘his excellency has just referred
to the Jewish people.’ Second, for all the pomp of the Nazi state,
the film suggests that Hitler was fundamentally driven by domestic
public opinion – that to some degree the tail was wagging the dog.
When dissent breaks out across Tomania in protest at working
conditions, Propaganda Minister Garbitsch/Goebbels pushes his
leader to invade the neighbouring country of Osterlich as a distrac-
tion. This concept of a flucht nach vorn – a flight to the front – has
subsequently been applied to German aggression before both the
two world wars by major historians. Fritz Fischer’s thesis regarding
Germany’s grasp at world power before 1914 is probably the most
well known, but Tim Mason and other scholars have pointed to
202 The Tramp and the dictators

working-class unrest as driving much of Hitler’s aggressive actions

from the invasion of the very real Austria in March 1938 onwards.
In some sense, Chaplin got in there before such academics.
Third, there is also the issue as to how different nations and
leaders are treated. Chaplin would be guilty by omission for
some – indeed for a film about dictators it is odd that there is no
reference, even obliquely, to a Stalinesque parody figure. If Dan
James is to be believed, he and Bob Meltzer talked Charlie out of
including a reference to Stalin in the climactic speech that ends the
film. And, thus, if the next chapter will discuss Rep. Martin Dies’s
tunnel vision for anti-communism, so too would Chaplin be fixed
on the Nazis. Yet, equally, the democracies do not appear in the
1940 film – save by implication through the English translation of
Hynkel’s speeches, and a journalist from ‘the international press’
who appears briefly. The film’s ending (where Chaplin famously
implored soldiers not to give themselves ‘for brutes’, but ‘for lib-
erty’) we will get to, but for a film that presented the realities of the
dictatorships – concentration camps, anti-Semitic pogroms and a
police state – its main body was absent of any even comedic refer-
ences to real-world America, Britain and France.
Such geopolitical analysis can be extended further. With Chap-
lin’s sometime previous warmth towards Mussolini in mind, Jack
Oakie’s character of Benzino Napaloni remains very interesting.
Put bluntly, is he even a villain at all? He attempts to thwart Hyn-
kel’s invasion of Osterlich, is one of the few non-Jewish people
to mock the Tomanian dictator and, it is implied, has a far big-
ger army that could stop Tomania in its tracks. Napaloni’s only
major error, like the real-life Neville Chamberlain, was to believe
that the ‘scrap of paper’ signed by Hynkel had any actual value.
Whereas Hynkel’s armband displays a double cross, the symbol of
duplicitousness, Napaloni’s contains two dice – he is a gambler, a
chancer, but not of the same order of evil as Hynkel.
Generally, the film follows two story arcs. In one, Hynkel the
Dictator is shown to be an absurd blunderer guided by the ridic-
ulous Marshall Herring and the Machiavellian Garbitsch. His
stormtroopers invade the ghetto to beat innocent Jews, although
they withdraw when the Tomanian government needs a loan from
a Jewish financier. They soon, however, go back in to terrorise
the Jews and, subsequently, to invade the neighbouring nation of
 The Tramp and the dictators 203

Osterlich into which many have fled. In the second arc, Charlie
plays a Jewish barber who looks exactly the same as der Phooey,
Adenoid Hynkel. Initially shown on the front of the Great War
and saving a German officer, Commander Schultz, the barber suf-
fers amnesia after an aeroplane crash and is initially unaware of
Hynkel’s rise to power. Reacquainting himself with the ghetto, he
meets Paulette Goddard’s Hannah. As Hannah’s father had been
killed in the war and her mother had died the previous year, she is
watched over by friendly neighbours Mr and Mrs Jaeckel. Han-
nah and the barber soon fall in love, but the moments of romance
are mostly tempered by the political backdrop. The Jaeckels and
Hannah eventually flee into Osterlich under the mistaken belief
that ‘that’s still a free country’. They have good reason to do so.
Stormtroopers are shown marching through the Tomanian ghetto,
shouting, ‘The Aryan-The Ary-Ary-Ary-Ary-Aryan, and Hynkel
marches high!’ They steal food, throw tomatoes and paint shops
with the word ‘Jew’. In a make-believe country where shop names
are all written in Esperanto, Charlie made the point of having
them daub ‘Jew’ rather than ‘jude’, again to shake his audience
with the reality of such actions.
After some business involving Napaloni and Hynkel, Charlie’s
Jewish barber is thrown into a concentration camp from which he
subsequently escapes – and with Commander Schultz (through-
out the film presented as something of a ‘good German’) flees to
the Osterlich border. Unbeknownst to them, and after Hynkel is
mistakenly arrested by stormtroopers believing him to be the flee-
ing barber, Osterlich is about to fall to the Tomanian Army. It is
Schultz and the barber, who the army command believe to be der
Phooey Hynkel (due to their physical resemblance), who lead this
invasion. Called to address the world in the aftermath of Hynkel’s
diplomatic success, Schultz whispers to the barber that he ‘must
speak – it’s our only hope’. ‘Hope?’ mournfully asks the barber.
And so begins the film’s famous final peroration.
The final speech stands apart from the rest of the film. It is not
delivered in the grandiose pomposity of Hynkel or the mumbling
nervousness of the barber. Instead, we have Charlie Chaplin the
man holding court, speaking in a passionate yet frenzied man-
ner. Certainly the speech is a denunciation of those who have
‘goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed’ and urges soldiers:
204 The Tramp and the dictators

‘Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men – machine men

with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines!
You are not cattle! You are men!’ But it is not just a piece of
anti-totalitarian rhetoric. When Chaplin tells the people that they
have the power to create machines and the power to create happi-
ness, he follows it up with:

Then, in the name of democracy let us use that power! Let us

all unite! Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will
give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future and
old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have
risen to power, but they lie! They do not fulfill their promise;
they never will. Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the
people! Now, let us fight to fulfill that promise!

Ridding the world of Hynkels or Hitlers was not enough. Peo-

ple in the democracies needed something positive to fight for –
‘a chance to work . . . a future . . . a security’. Throughout the
time Charlie was crafting this speech in late 1940 many Western
democrats were waking up to the fact that they had not yet con-
vinced their populations that they could deliver this ‘new world’.
On 11 October 1940, a few days before the New York premiere of
The Great Dictator, Julian Huxley received a letter from Harold
Nicolson then at the British Ministry of Information. Both had
met Charlie previously and, as noted, Huxley had (unsuccessfully)
urged Chaplin to help German Jewish academics in the mid-1930s.
Huxley and Nicolson regularly corresponded on so-called ‘War
Aims’ during this period, with the aim of shifting public opinion,
and that of Prime Minister Churchill, into creating a more positive
programme for reconstruction after any victory. On this occasion
Nicolson told Huxley,

I think that a definite governmental plan going into some detail

of national . . . reconstruction would have an enormous effect.
Little good will be gained if that plan merely speaks in amiable
generalities about freedom and democracy unless it includes
concrete details . . . We must take rather dramatic action here
and now.69

Through the Beveridge Report of 1942 and its emphasis on prob-

lems such as unemployment and ill health Britain would eventually
 The Tramp and the dictators 205

find some meaningful meat to put on these bones. One upshot of

this would be the new National Health Service (NHS), introduced
in 1948, which Charlie would later praise. But Charlie was part
of this pre-Beveridge mindset, too – defeating The Great Dictator
would have less meaning if it restored the world to that of Modern
Times. Democracy needed to justify its existence once more.
A bad record for supporting the dispossessed was not the only
contemporary democratic ill that Chaplin identified either. When
his speech stated, ‘let us fight to free the world, to do away with
national barriers, to do away with greed, with hate and intoler-
ance’, this was hardly just an anti-fascist point. American policy
towards African Americans, the innately unequal nature of the
British and French Empires and the hyper-capitalism that had
gripped the democratic world from Santiago to Sydney were all
under the microscope, too. As the film critic Roger Ebert com-
mented in 2007, ‘The Great Dictator ended with a long speech
denouncing dictatorships, and extolling democracy and individual
freedoms. This sounded to the left like bedrock American values,
but to some on the right, it sounded pinko.’70
The left indeed swung behind the picture. In May 1941 Upton
Sinclair wrote to tell Charlie of ‘the great pleasure I got from see-
ing the Dictator . . . It seems to me the best thing you have ever
done, and has as much fun as any other picture of yours, but
underneath it is the undercurrent tragedy we all know about.’71
Later, on the parliamentary benches of Charlie’s homeland, the
Labour MP (and later briefly Cabinet Minister) Richard Stokes
remarked that he ‘thought that most of [The Great Dictator] was
awful nonsense, but the [final] peroration was one of the finest
things that has ever been written’. He told the chamber that ‘if we
are to avoid a repetition of the awful conflicts which most of us
have experienced twice in a lifetime we have to pay attention to
what is said in that great speech’.72
Film critics were more mixed. In The New York Times Bosley
Crowther noted that the film illustrated ‘the courage and faith
and surpassing love for mankind which are in the heart of Charlie
Chaplin’. He did, however, argue that ‘the speech with which it
ends – the appeal for reason and kindness – is completely out of
step with what has gone before’.73 The New York Post was simi-
lar: ‘Laughter and tears, long held to be closely akin, don’t mingle
quite so well on this political plane. The final speech demonstrates
206 The Tramp and the dictators

that it has even put Mr Chaplin momentarily off balance.’74 Fur-

ther afield, the Sydney Morning Herald told its Australian audi-
ence that the Great Dictator ‘proves that he is unique as a satirist
and as social critic’. As for the final speech: ‘The intensity is almost
embarrassingly sincere: but it emphasises Chaplin’s burning hatred
of Nazism.’75 In Britain the picture sold out immediately, with
some critics urging the government to acquire copies of the film
and distribute them wherever possible on the continent to provide
hope for those occupied by the Nazi jackboot.
After the frantic worry over what The Great Dictator would
mean for the diplomatic picture in the summer of 1939, it is per-
haps apt that we end this chapter on the note of this volte face
undertaken by the British. Indeed, the month after its London
premiere (which he did not attend) Charlie had visited New York
and briefly met with the British Consulate General stationed there.
There ‘Mr Chaplin expressed a conviction that if he could make
his next feature film in England, he would like to do so, as he felt
that such a policy on his art would be beneficial to our interests’.76
The initial London official charged with responding to the infor-
mation from New York remarked that ‘on the face of it [it was] a
very good idea’.77 As it moved further up the chain, however, the
idea was nixed. This was not on political grounds, but because
‘Chaplin is an eccentric and works under conditions which would
be impossible in any commercial studio in peace time, and would
certainly be impossible in this country in wartime’.78 Still, if he
could not work commercially in his homeland for the time being,
he was at least in its good graces and the very idea of Chaplin mak-
ing a film was no longer beset with worry. The Great Dictator had
cemented his reputation to his countrymen. The question was: for
how long would this still be true of America?

Notes
1 Foreign Office to Los Angeles Consulate, 28 April 1939, TNA/
FO/395/663.
2 Undated note written by Chaplin, c. 1945, CIN/CCA.
3 See, e.g., Lunts to Beaton, 3 April 1948, St John’s College, Cam-
bridge/Cecil Beaton Papers, uncatalogued.
4 Oelrichs (writing under her pseudonym Michael Strange) to Chaplin,
undated 1929, University of Birmingham Special Collections [UBSC]/
Oswald and Cynthia Mosley Papers [OMN]/2/12/15.
 The Tramp and the dictators 207

5 ‘A Comedian Sees the World’ Unpublished Typescript, CIN/CCA.

6 John Strachey, The Coming Struggle for Power (London, 1932), 284.
7 Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography (London, 2003), 351.
8 Cited in Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Three New Deals: Reflections on
Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933–
1939 (New York, 2006), 24.
9 Thomas Doherty, Hollywood and Hitler 1933–1939, (New York,
2013), 125.
10 Pittsburgh Sun Telegraph, 4 April 1929, COP/CCP/29.
11 Los Angeles Examiner, 6 March 1932, COP/CCP/39.
12 Charlie Chaplin (Lisa Stein Haven ed.), A Comedian Sees the World
(Missouri, 2014), 124.
13 Harry Crocker’s unpublished memoir, ‘Charlie Chaplin: Man and
Mime’, MHL/HRC, XIII–8.
14 Schivelbusch, Three New Deals, 30–1.
15 Tantalisingly, the correspondence between the Chaplins and Vander-
bilts is limited to an 18 January 1968 letter from Oona to Vanderbilt
acknowledging receipt of a cake: Cornelius Vanderbilt IV Papers,
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN.
16 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 316.
17 The New York Times, 1 May 1934.
18 Doherty, Hollywood and Hitler, 77.
19 The New York Times, 13 March 1933.
20 House of Lords Debates, 12 December 1956, vol. 200, col. 1,095.
21 Charles Chaplin, My Trip Abroad (London, 1922), 119.
22 Chaplin Interview Transcript, MHL/CCI, 33.f-302.
23 Chaplin Interview with the Immigration and Naturalization Service,
17 April 1948, within FBI/CCF File 8.
24 Montagu to Chaplin, 20 January 1934, BFI/IWM Item 320.
25 Adams to Wells, 29 October 1935, Bodleian Library, Oxford [BOD]/
Society for the Protection of Science and Learning [SPSL]/58/3.
26 Huxley to Adams, 27 November 1935, BOD/SPSL/58/3.
27 Huxley to Adams, 28 November 1935, BOD/SPSL/58/3.
28 Chaplin Interview with the Immigration and Naturalization Service,
17 April 1948, within FBI/CCF Files 7 and 8.
29 Wells’s secretary to Adams, 23 December 1935, BOD/SPSL/58/3.
30 Adams to Wells, 24 December 1935, BOD/SPSL/58/3.
31 Cited in The American Legion Magazine, 53/6, December 1952, 50.
32 Reported widely, including Chicago Sunday Tribune, 30 July 1939.
33 Bercovici Trial Testimony, April 1947, Cornell University, Rare
Books and Manuscripts Archives, Ithaca, New York [CURMA],
Konrad Bercovici vs. Charles S. Chaplin Case [KBC], Part 1.
34 Bercovici Trial Testimony, April 1947, CURMA/KBC, Part 1.
35 Bercovici Pre-Trial Deposition, 5 March and 15 April 1942, CURMA/
KBC.
36 Bercovici Trial Testimony, April 1947, CURMA/KBC, Part 1.
37 Bercovici Trial Testimony, April 1947, CURMA/KBC, Part 1.
208 The Tramp and the dictators

38 Joyce Milton, Tramp: The Life of Charlie Chaplin (London, 1996), 368.
39 Bercovici Trial Testimony, April 1947, CURMA/KBC, Part 2.
40 Michael Chaplin, I Couldn’t Smoke the Grass on My Father’s Lawn
(London, 1966), 83.
41 Gallup Poll, 25–28 September 1938, USAIPO1938-0133.
42 Gallup Poll, 13–18 September 1939, USAIPO1939-0169.
43 Gallup Poll, 26 October 1939, USAIPO1939-0175.
44 Ben Urwand, The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler
(Cambridge, MA, 2013), 178.
45 Will Hays open letter to Hollywood industry leaders, 15 September
1939, FIRTH/MPPDA, No. 3,015.
46 Ibid.
47 Memorandum on ‘Propaganda’ and ‘Hate Pictures’, 22 April 1940,
FIRTH/MPPDA, No. 1,210.
48 All via survey appendix of ‘A Study of the Effect of the Production
Code and its Administration and Content of American Motion Pic-
tures, and Certain Other Basic Industry Policies and Their Current
Application’, 22 June 1938, FIRTH/MPPDA No. 1,192.
49 The Atlantic Monthly, August 1939.
50 Warner to Hopkins, 6 March 1939, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presiden-
tial Library [FDRPL], Official Files [OF] 73.
51 Bercovici Pre-Trial Deposition, 5 March and 15 April 1942, CURMA/
KBC.
52 Urwand, Collaboration, 203.
53 Urwand, Collaboration, 204.
54 Keeling to Butler, 22 February 1939, National Archives, Kew, Lon-
don, UK [TNA], Foreign and Commonwealth Office Papers [FCO]
395/663.
55 Butler to Keeling, 20 June 1939, TNA/FCO/395/663.
56 Nicolson to Butler, 26 April 1941, Trinity College, Cambridge [TCC]/
Richard Austen Butler Papers [RAB]/F79/160.
57 Foreign Office newswire, 1 March 1939, TNA/FCO/395/663.
58 Urwand, Collaboration, 206.
59 Reprinted in Chaplin’s later (unpaginated) book My Life in Pictures
(London, 1974) .
60 Foreign Office News Department to Los Angeles Consulate, 28 April
1939, TNA/FCO/395/663.
61 Los Angeles Consulate to Foreign Office, 17 May 1939, TNA/
FCO/395/663.
62 Kenney to Brooke-Wilkinson, 16 June 1939, TNA/FCO/395/663.
63 Recounted in Brooke-Wilkinson to Kenney, 21 June 1939, TNA/
FCO/395/663.
64 Liberty, 2 June 1940.
65 Tully, ‘King of Laughter’, UCLA/JTL, 69.
66 Watson to Chaplin, 22 October 1940, FDRPL/OF/73.
67 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 393.
 The Tramp and the dictators 209

68 Martin Gilbert, The Churchill Documents, Never Surrender, May

1940–December 1940, Volume 15 (London, 2011), 1,236 [14 Dec
1940].
69 Nicolson to Huxley, 11 October 1940, University of Houston [HOU],
Julian Huxley Papers [JHX] Series 3 Box 14.
70 Ebert’s review of The Great Dictator via www.rogerebert.com/
reviews/great-movie-the-great-dictator-1940 (accessed 7 November
2016).
71 Sinclair to Chaplin, 2 May 1941, LLBI/UPS Box 47.
72 House of Commons Debates, 18 May 1943, vol. 389, col. 1,060.
73 The New York Times, 21 October 1940.
74 New York Post, October 1940 via BFI/IVM Item 324.
75 Sydney Morning Herald, 23 December 1940.
76 Ford to Cleugh, 28 April 1941, TNA/Central Office of Information
[INF]/1/583.
77 Cypher, 17 May 1941, TNA/INF/1/583.
78 Bernstein to Beddington, 30 May 1941, TNA/INF/1/583.
8 Comrades and controversy

In March 1972 the White House received an invitation for the

then President Nixon to attend ‘A Salute to Charlie Chaplin’ soon
to be held in New York. Nixon’s Deputy Director of Communi-
cations Ken Clawson was charged with responding, and his ver-
dict said much about the shadow that Chaplin’s earlier politics
had cast by this point. For Clawson, it was ‘inappropriate . . . to
even consider the possibility of having Charlie Chaplin come and
meet with the President’. Referring to Chaplin’s decision never to
become a US citizen, he went on to note that ‘there was consider-
able discussion during the 1930s and 1940s about Chaplin’s loy-
alty to our form of government, much less the government itself’.
Besides, Clawson concluded, ‘I don’t think anyone in the country
will be able to separate this gigantic artistic talent from Chaplin’s
decidedly un-American utterances and stances.’1 Three months
out from the Watergate burglary there was something of an irony
here. But the persona non grata status afforded to Chaplin by
the Nixon White House was, although fading by the early 1970s,
merely reflective of what Chaplin’s views over several decades had
wrought. Although Clawson did not directly refer to it, this was
largely caused by the widespread belief that Chaplin had been, to
say the least, soft on communism.
This had a large degree of truth. Yet from Charlie’s point of
view kind words towards the Soviet Union were the product
of wartime. If it was reasonable for Roosevelt and Churchill
to meet with Stalin (and later help carve up the map of Europe
with him), why was it unreasonable to praise the brave efforts
of Soviet soldiers resisting Nazi invasion? And anyway, was he
not just a mere filmmaker? As this chapter will note, providing
 Comrades and controversy 211

answers to either of these questions was not sufficient for many

in the American political establishment.

The House Un-American Activities Committee

Although the FBI had been tracking Chaplin’s activities since
1922, it was only in the mid-1930s that the suspicion many had
in Washington regarding Charlie’s motives was publicly for-
malised. The first incarnation of this was the Special Committee
on Un-American Activities chaired by two Democratic congress-
men, John McCormack and Samuel Dickstein. As with Nixon’s
White House denouncing Chaplin’s motives a few decades later,
hypocrisy marked this committee from the outset. The remit of
this committee was to search for subversive activities carried out
by forces primarily sympathetic to either Russian communism or
German Nazism – reasonable enough. Yet while Rep. Dickstein
sought to root out America’s enemies it subsequently transpired
he was receiving $1,250 a month to pass on information to Soviet
intelligence. Although the McCormack–Dickstein committee had
comparatively little impact (beyond ascertaining, without much
evidence, that a widespread fascist plot had tried to overthrow
Roosevelt in 1933), its successor would create a good deal more
controversy.
In May 1938 a more infamous and far-reaching Congressional
body would be set up: the House Un-American Activities Commit-
tee (often referred to as HUAC), chaired by Rep. Martin Dies of
Texas. Dies was a southern Democrat who had gradually become
ever angrier and more disenchanted with the interventionist path
taken by the Roosevelt administration in Washington. His papers
survive in Liberty, Texas and are an under-utilised treasure trove of
material related to 1930s and 1940s American anti-communism.
Through this material we can certainly see how figures such as
Dies became suspicious of Charlie. For Dies Rooseveltian schemes
such as the National Recovery Administration that Charlie had
viewed with much sympathy – and indeed endorsed on the radio
in 1933 – were the thin end of a rather malign wedge. In a 1939
speech Dies told a huge Madison Square Garden audience that big
government threatened to curtail American liberty:
We are now witnessing the first stage of this campaign,
namely, the attacks upon our economic system, the attempt to
212 Comrades and controversy

convince people that the government ought to support them,

and the proposals to regiment our economic life under clev-
erly devised schemes of planned economy.2

For Dies, Roosevelt was at best a meddling fool, and at worst

someone looking to take America down the road of a totalitarian
state of the left. Ironically, in fearing the big state Dies was not so
far removed from some of Charlie’s own views.
In an unsympathetic contemporary biography, the academic
William Gellerman attempted to eviscerate Dies’s reputation.
Much of this concerned the work of HUAC, but Gellerman was
also eager to point out the contradictions in Dies’s early congres-
sional career. Quoting one anonymous ‘young woman’, Gellerman
suggests that ‘in the course of his career, Martin Dies seems to have
expressed almost every point of view at least once’.3 In September
1931, for example, he called for ‘an extended programme of public
works’ and ‘conferences with industrialists to secure shorter work-
ing hours to offset the displacement of men by machines’. This was
essentially political Chaplinism, even if Dies’s desire to ‘prohibit
all immigration to the United States for five years’ would hardly
have chimed with an Englishman who had made The Immigrant.4
Although he vehemently opposed the so-called ‘Sit Down Strikes’
of 1937 – where workers in Flint, Michigan physically occupied a
General Motors factory to secure collective unionisation – as ‘rep-
rehensible . . . lawlessness’ Dies maintained many left-of-centre
views. These included making estate taxes as high as they were in
England, blaming financial crises on bankers manipulating the
credit system and providing a one-year moratorium on mortgage
foreclosures.5 He was a contradictory man.
Dislike for the President aside, Dies’s view was that there was a
far more dangerous hidden hand guiding Roosevelt and America
per se in the wrong direction. In June 1932 he gave a speech listing
fourteen means by which communists fostered class consciousness
in America. Several of these criteria could have described Charlie
Chaplin in the 1930s and 1940s, including the promotion of ‘dis-
content and disregard for authority among the children’ and the
‘promotion among the intelligentsia of discontent with the exist-
ing order in the United States’. Dies argued that any opposition
to ‘the restriction of immigration’, and perceived ‘ridicule of the
 Comrades and controversy 213

politics of the United States toward the present regime in Rus-

sia’ would see one placed in this bracket, too.6 These were fairly
open-ended definitions, but that in a sense was the point. For,
as Dies noted, ‘not all the adherents of Marxism in America are
card-holding members of the Communist Party. Some of them are
distributed among scores of numerically inconsequential organisa-
tions, but the great majority of Marxists do not belong, as such,
to any organisation. They masquerade under the name of liberals,
and they deny, with technical accuracy, that they are Communists,
but the truth is that they worship at the shrine of Marx and derive
their political and economic conceptions from his writings.’7 This
quote said it all. Even if someone denied that they were a com-
munist, and indeed Dies’s committee could produce no evidence
that they were a communist, it was still perfectly possible to claim
‘they worship at the shrine of Marx’.
The rhetorical space for anti-communism was again in part cre-
ated by wider questions of morality and decency. In June 1933
Dies’s fellow Texan Democrat John Patman brought forward
H.R.6097 with the express aim of creating a new Federal Motion
Picture Commission (as well as banning so-called ‘block book-
ing’).8 The bill noted that ‘no picture shall be produced which will
lower the moral standards of those who see it’ and that ‘the history,
institutions, prominent people and citizenry of other nations shall
be represented fairly’. On both charges Charlie’s 1930s and 1940s
output could be said to be under the microscope. But in essence
the role of H.R.6097 was to put the existing Hays Code onto the
statute book and have a new Federal Commission police it. This
was mostly accomplished, de facto, by the eventual creation of
an industry-backed Production Code Administration (albeit not
enjoying Patman’s desired statutory underpinning).
The Patman Bill was interesting not just for the broad Texan
Democrat anti-Hollywood measures it implied, but for the scores
of letters that Dies received asking him to back the bill (which he
was happy to do). For one, the Beaumont Motion Picture Council
wrote to him decrying the ‘large proportion of films which portray
a small but lawless segment of American life’ that was educating
‘many of the younger generation in methods of committing crime
and is a detriment to moral and social progress at home and a
menace to America’s good name and interests abroad’.9 Similarly,
214 Comrades and controversy

the American Legion Auxiliary in Beaumont also felt ‘the best way
to insure the most desirable type of motion picture for the children
of all ages is to demand federal supervision’, a position with which
more than one local parent–teacher association agreed.10 Certainly
Dies’s committee was led by a charismatic figurehead, but that fig-
urehead was always to some degree responding to his constituents.
The voices demanding censorship were clearly louder than those
more or less with the status quo, but a significant proportion of
Dies’s constituents were undoubtedly suspicious of the motives
of liberal Hollywood. And as with Chaplin’s own experience, it
was easier to pin communism on Hollywood generally if people
already felt Tinseltown to be immoral.
The perceived link between communism and the movies can be
seen in the various reports produced by Dies’s HUAC committee.
First, there was the direct worry about Soviet-produced activities –
and here Chaplin’s previous associations with Sergei Eisenstein
hardly helped. As the committee reported, ‘the establishment in
Hollywood in 1932 of a special American Proletkino [Soviet film
studio] may be regarded as a first attempt to start in the United
States of America the production of films to propagate Communist
ideas through movies’.11 In a sense this problem could be managed
by pressurising theatres not to take on such films. The larger, more
invidious problem was the American (or at least in Chaplin’s case,
Anglophone) fellow travellers who, in Dies’s views, ‘worshipped
at the shrine of Marx’ even if they could deny membership of the
American Communist Party. As the committee noted in 1938,

it has been the aim of leading film producers in America to

produce pictures for amusement and not for propaganda, as
is the chief purpose of Russian cinema and Communist cin-
ema, although subtle efforts have been made at times to inject
subversive propaganda into important films, and in Holly-
wood there are numerous players and other artists strongly
sympathetic to communism.12

Doubtless this number, to Dies and the American right, included

Charlie.
The spectre of HUAC cast a shadow wider than the movie indus-
try and longer than Chaplin’s own American residence. From the
formation of the Dies committee in May 1938 to it being formally
 Comrades and controversy 215

recognised as a Standing Committee of the House in 1945, its

activities were only wound down as late as 1975. One of its most
famous scalps would indeed be the famous ‘Hollywood Ten’ of
communist sympathetic screenwriters and producers, with which
we will deal later in this chapter. But its remit was always much
wider – and the accusations of communism against state depart-
ment official Alger Hiss in 1948, initially brought forward by
HUAC and then continued into a subsequent perjury trial, rocked
the American psyche. If the communists could be everywhere from
the movie screen to the corridors to power, how was America to
emerge victorious from the titanic struggles that awaited it?
The evidence brought before the committee varied in quality
massively. Much like the FBI reports on Chaplin, which rested
so much on news clippings and stories publicly reported but
not necessarily verified, so too did HUAC encourage a variety
of non-mainstream voices. But these remain interesting in and
of themselves. For instance, on 19 November 1938 John Met-
calfe, HUAC’s chief investigator in Los Angeles, testified before
the Committee. Handing Chairman Dies a copy of a pamphlet he
had picked up from the American Nationalist Party on his travels,
Dies read the following into the record. True patriots, the pam-
phlet noted, ‘in every way, and wherever possible, [should] show
an exclusive preference for gentile merchants, gentile professional
men, and gentile working people . . . Your dime at the movies
may endorse and support further Jewish attacks upon our Chris-
tian morality’.13 The very type of ‘hidden hand’ agenda that some
read into communism – Dies not least – dovetailed nicely with
traditional notions of a Jewish conspiracy. With Chaplin allegedly
denying his ‘true’ Jewish heritage and about to ridicule Adolf Hit-
ler on screen, he was naturally drawn into this orbit.
In this vein, on 29 December 1938 General George Moseley spoke
of his hope that America’s Jews must ‘disassociate themselves entirely
from all communistic activities’. He proposed that they could

stop communism in the United States in just 30 days . . . By

using what power? The power that they now have so com-
pletely over the radio, the power that they have over the
public press; the control they have over the “movies”; and,
finally, the power they have now at home and internationally,
in the money markets of the world.14
216 Comrades and controversy

Six months later – his plea ‘unanswered’ – Moseley told the

HUAC committee that a Jewish conspiracy was about to over-
throw the American government and replace it with a Communist
dictatorship. Even for HUAC some of his testimony was beyond
the pale and subsequently deleted from the record. But the idea
that the Jews were using Hollywood to ferment a communist plot
was by no means a fringe view.
As such, the atmosphere in these committees was undeni-
ably hostile. Witnesses would often begin on the defensive, and
pre-emptively seek to exonerate those whom the committee had
accused of communism by implication. Charlie himself would be
called by the committee in the late 1940s but was in no hurry to
attend – and one can see why. As Gellerman shows,

while permitting witnesses to make unsubstantiated charges

against persons or organizations, Dies insisted that those against
whom charges were made must, if they were to appear before
the committee, not only make denials under oath but produce
books and records, “real evidence” to disprove such charges.15

Another irony was that Chaplin and Dies were both criticised for
the same thing: neglecting the other side of the dictatorial coin. While
Chaplin’s Great Dictator took pot shots at fascist Italy and Nazi
Germany, Soviet Russia was nowhere to be seen. But Dies’s commit-
tee was also supposed to go after both communist and fascist forms
of subversion, and yet seemed to lean heavily towards the former.
Rep. Marcantonio of New York chided the committee for not having
investigated the Silver Shirts, the Ku Klux Klan and other spokes-
men of the ‘native Nazi’ section of America.16 During its first five
years the committee was said to have compiled an index of more
than 1,000,000 subversive organisations and individuals – yet the
list of individuals connected to Nazi activities that the committee
handed to the Roosevelt White House contained just barely 17,000
names.17 The majority of the committee’s activities were therefore
clearly aimed at Moscow rather than Berlin – indeed in Dies’s 1940
book, The Trojan Horse in America, more than 300 pages outlined
the threat of communism compared to the less than 50 on fascism.18
Through 1940 Dies remained fixated on ‘pre-mature anti-fascism’ –
that is to say, the idea that to have been overtly anti-fascist before
America was forced into the Second World War was to invite sus-
picion of communist sympathy. In this light Chaplin’s The Great
 Comrades and controversy 217

Dictator joined the Warner Brothers’ Confessions of a Nazi Spy as

somehow malevolent.19 This was proven ipso facto misguided – in
December 1941, after all, it would be Hitler and not Stalin who
would declare war on America.
Praise for Dies’s work, however, poured in from ‘respectable
Hollywood’. In late May 1940 Sam Goldwyn of MGM fame wrote
to Dies to offer his ‘congratulations for your splendid radio broadcast
on Saturday. You have voiced the thoughts of millions of Americans
who love this country dearly and who object strenuously to every
type of “Fifth Column” activity’.20 This was symptomatic of a grow-
ing divide between liberal and conservative Hollywood concerning
the activities of Dies. In August 1938 HUAC investigator Edward
F. Sullivan suggested that ‘evidence tends to show that all phases of
radical and communist activities are rampant amongst the studios of
Hollywood and, although well known, is a matter which the movie
moguls desire to keep from the public’.21 He continued that he

might say in passing that a very large number of motion pic-

ture stars are strongly opposed to all this subversive activity
but, as one very prominent star told me, if he spoke loud
about the situation, he would soon be ditched by the studios
and a campaign of vilification would be started against him.22

There was some irony in the right complaining about ill-treatment

here. For one, on the liberal side of the movie industry stood the
Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, formed in April 1936, that con-
tained some 5,000 mostly left-leaning actors and motion-picture
employees, including Edward G. Robinson and Melvyn Douglas.
In investigator Sullivan’s terms, this organisation was itself subject
to a large degree of vilification. In the late 1930s Sullivan’s HUAC
colleague John Metcalfe brought another poster into the hearings
that stated that ‘the Jewish Hollywood Anti-Nazi League controls
communism in the motion picture industry – stars, writers, and
artists are compelled to pay for communistic activities’. Before
reading out the poster, Dies icily commented to his audience that
‘we find that many of those who are talking the loudest about
racial and religious hatred are silent on the subject when it comes
to class hatred’.23 Jews and their allies not being able to take criti-
cism of communism was the real problem to Dies, in short.
There was some sympathy from President Roosevelt and his admin-
istration towards those tarred with the Dies brush. In 1938, witness
218 Comrades and controversy

J.B. Matthews, former chairman of the American League for Peace

and Democracy, contended that communist organs were using celeb-
rities as decoys for their propaganda. Among these, he claimed, was
the ten-year-old Shirley Temple. Many in the administration had some
fun with this – Secretary Harold Ickes for one guffawed that the com-
mittee had found ‘dangerous communists in Hollywood, led by little
Shirley Temple’.24 By September 1941 Roosevelt himself was praising
a cartoon in The Washington Evening Star that portrayed Charlie
Chaplin holding a subpoena to testify before HUAC. In this amusing
sketch, Charlie was depicted asking what he could teach these ‘past
masters’ about comedy. Roosevelt also expressed amusement at a tele-
gram he had received from an anonymous source in Connecticut that
stated: ‘Have just been reading book called Holy Bible. Has large cir-
culation in this country. Written entirely by foreign born, mostly Jews.
First part full of dangerous war mongering propaganda. Second con-
demns isolationists with fake story about Samaritan. Dangerous.’25
Charlie later gave his own explanation as to why he thought
that HUAC had been after him. ‘My prodigious sin,’ he argued in
1964, ‘was, and still is, being a non-conformist. Although I am not
a Communist I refused to fall in line by hating them.’ He found
the description of the ‘Committee on Un-American Activities – a
dishonest phrase to begin with, elastic enough to wrap around the
throat and strangle the voice of any American citizen whose hon-
est opinion is a minority one’. Lastly, while he conceded he had
‘never attempted to become an American citizen’ he also pointed
to the many Americans making a good living in Britain without
becoming British subjects: ‘The English have never bothered about
it.’ All in all, Charlie ‘would say that in an atmosphere of pow-
erful cliques and invisible governments I engendered a nation’s
antagonism and unfortunately lost the affection of the American
public’.26 With HUAC in full swing it was risky to be seen to be
lionising the Soviet regime. That being said, during the Second
World War Charlie certainly came perilously close to this.

Backing the Red Army

On 7 December 1941, 353 airplanes from Imperial Japan unleashed
a surprise attack on the US naval base of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
This resulted in the death of 2,403 Americans, with a further 1,178
 Comrades and controversy 219

wounded. After various declarations by the major powers, by 11

December America was at war with Germany, Italy and Japan.
The US was now an ally of the Communist Soviet Union against
the enemy that Charlie had so recently warned about on-screen –
Nazi Germany. Whatever anti-leftist sentiment HUAC had been
stirring up among the American public, for a time Charlie must
have felt utterly vindicated. His most high-profile foreign policy
analysis had been proven to be correct, and the world was now
swinging behind this view. If he had left the propensity to make
big political statements behind him at this point, all may have been
well. But he did not.
On 18 May 1942, Chaplin gave a speech in aid of Russian
War Relief in San Francisco. A last-minute addition to the bill
after Joseph E. Davies, the American Ambassador to Moscow,
had to pull out with laryngitis, Chaplin steadied his nerves with a
couple of glasses of champagne. Listening to the previous speak-
ers addressing the packed 10,000 crowd, Charlie had the general
impression that ‘our allies were strange bed fellows’. This, he felt,
would not do. Taking to the stage wearing a rather incongruous
black tie and dinner jacket, he began a speech with a single word:
‘Comrades!’ The audience erupted in laughter. When it subsided,
Charlie added ‘and I mean comrades’. More laughter followed,
but then, applause. Later he claimed that he had merely used this
address ‘to clarify the air . . . I am naturally liberal’, but it met with
some scepticism.27 Although billed to only speak for four minutes,
Charlie launched into a forty-minute tirade. Addressing the ‘many
Russians here tonight’, he told them that ‘the way your country-
men are fighting and dying at this very moment, it is an honour
and a privilege to call you comrades’. At the end of the speech, on
the back of a very positive reception, he went all the way in: ‘If I
know Americans they like to do their own fighting. Stalin wants
it, Roosevelt has called for it – so let’s all call for it – let’s open
a second front now!’28 At dinner after the speech, the actor John
Garfield – later hauled before HUAC – told Charlie that he ‘had a
lot of courage’. ‘This remark,’ Charlie recalled, ‘was disturbing.’29
Nonetheless, a few weeks later, on 22 July 1942, Chaplin gave
a second speech over the telephone to Madison Square Park, New
York. At this gathering of about 60,000 trade unionists and reli-
gious and civil society organisations, the audience heard speeches
220 Comrades and controversy

from Mayor La Guardia and Senator Mead backing American

troops launching a second front in Europe. Charlie joined them
in noting that ‘on the battlefields of Russia democracy will live or
die’. With ‘the Germans . . . 35 miles from Caucasus, if the Cauca-
sus is lost 95 per cent of the Russian oil is lost’. And then, Chaplin
warned, ‘the appeasers’ll come out of their holes. They will want to
make peace with a victorious Hitler.’ For Charlie ‘there is no safe
strategy in war’, and the time for American intervention was now.30
Upton Sinclair wrote to congratulate him on this speech, but this
was hardly a universal opinion.31
As the second front became delayed, Charlie stepped up the rheto-
ric even further. In October 1942 in a speech at Carnegie Hall, New
York Charlie praised Roosevelt for having released the communist
leader Earl Browder from prison. ‘I want to thank the President of
the United States. We the people, the artists, the bohemians and the
great middle class are with you.’ After ‘bouquets were thrown at
[labor leader] Harry Bridges’ Charlie then went even further: as a
result of the war ‘they say communism must spread out all over the
world. And I say, “so what?”’ The extent to which this annoyed ele-
ments of the American right can be seen in the papers of Elizabeth
Churchill Brown, a journalist later turned friend and political ally
of Joseph McCarthy. Within her archive at Stanford is attached a
pamphlet detailing Chaplin’s Carnegie Hall address, with the phrase
‘So what?’ pointedly ringed in pen. Alongside this document stands
a note criticising prominent publications for running the story:
‘Charles Chaplin flew all the way from Hollywood to put on this
bold display of scorn for our United States – why does Life Magazine
persist in enhancing the career of people like this?’ On another sheet
of paper, she urged American business to pull out of backing any
publications covering Charlie’s controversial words, ‘if Life contin-
ues to promote . . . “alien” Chaplin and food manufacturers still pay
money to Life for advertising, can’t retailers find other lines of mer-
chandise to promote’.32 The idea here was to make associating with
Charlie politically toxic, an odd position to be in for a comedian.
In December 1942, an FBI source attended a dinner held ‘in
honor of Chaplin’ at the Hotel Pennsylvania, New York City. The
informant recorded that it was full of

the typical fellow-traveller speeches: snide and would-be sub-

tle cracks at our “capitalist” system, without however, any
 Comrades and controversy 221

outright subversive statements . . . plus the usual bleeding heart

stuff about the valiant Soviet people and our own ill-housed,
ill-clad and ill-nourished.

When Chaplin gave his own speech, he was reported as saying,

Thank God this war is sweeping away all this hypocrisy and
nonsense about communism . . . The American people begin to
understand the Russian purges and what a wonderful thing they
were. Yes, in those purges the Communists did away with their
Quislings and Lavals and if other nations had done the same
there would not be the original Quislings and Lavals today.

This was strong stuff – even Martin Dies may have bristled at
some of it. As for the climate that an allied victory should produce,
Charlie declared,

I am not a Communist but I am proud to say that I feel pretty

pro-Communist. I don’t want any radical change – I want an
evolutionary change. I don’t want to go back to the days of
rugged individualism . . . I don’t want to go back to the days
of 1929 . . . No, we must do better than that.33

This would eventually lead him in the progressive direction of

Henry A. Wallace, then serving as Vice President under Roosevelt
and his (very) unsuccessful 1948 campaign for the highest office
in the land.
During the war, however, the Soviet–Chaplin bond of mutual
appreciation remained suspiciously strong for some. On 25
August 1943, the Council of American–Soviet Friendship invited
500 guests for a screening of Kalatozov’s film The Unconquer-
able, which told of the heroic efforts of the Red Army to defend
Leningrad against the Nazi hordes. Chaplin made a speech there
claiming that there was ‘a good deal good in communism; we
can use the good and segregate the bad’. Reassuring any watch-
ing FBI sources that ‘I am just a clown, a retired humourist’, he
then jokingly enquired whether Rep. Martin Dies was in atten-
dance. Ascertaining he was not, Chaplin then went on to note,
‘I’m glad I’m not a ballet dancer – If I were, I might be banished
from the country!’ By April 1944 Charlie and his new wife Oona
Chaplin were reported as learning Russian for a planned post-war
222 Comrades and controversy

visit.34 And later that summer the Soviet Voks Agency – formed
to promote cultural understanding between the Soviet Union and
other nations – paid back Chaplin’s previously kind words to the
Russian people by praising him as a ‘Militant Humanist’ who
‘Worships Love’. Solomon Mikhoels, Director of the Jewish Art
Theater in Moscow, pointed to Chaplin’s ‘courage in taking an
open anti-Fascist stand in his picture “The Great Dictator” and
condemned the “mud-slinging, wholesale libel and slander” of the
“Hearst-McCormick tabloid press”’.35 If nothing else can be said
for Chaplin, this was certainly not a man who sat on the political
fence as the Second World War raged.
A by-product of all this was that the combination of his admi-
ration for the Soviet war effort and the ire that this was increas-
ingly garnering from American conservatives drew Charlie closer to
American leftists as the conflict drew to a close. By 23 March 1945
The Los Angeles Times was reporting Charlie as on the guest list for
a dinner at Dalton Trumbo’s house that would pay tribute to Harry
Bridges, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union leader.36
Bridges was undeniably a divisive figure, and one who had been
divorced even from the controversial Chaplin previously. Having
split from supporting Roosevelt in the late 1930s, he had denounced
the President as a warmonger prior to the American entry into the
war. After the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union, however, Bridges
demanded that America’s employers increased productivity prior
to America joining the effort against Hitler. Deportation proceed-
ings against the Australian-born union leader began in 1939, and
dragged on until 1955 – ten years after he had been naturalised as
an American citizen. To attend a dinner held in honour of such a
man, as the allies stood on the verge of victory and the Cold War
seemed likely to become a lingering diplomatic issue into the period
of peace, was undeniably a bold move from Charlie.

Joan Barry and the Cockney cad

As ever, the unhelpful backdrop to these political machinations
were more tawdry revelations about Charlie’s sex life. The spe-
cific difficulty here – as we will see with his political views and
the Internal Security Act of 1950 (McCarran Act) – would stem
from some pretty ambiguous legislation. In 1910, Congress had
passed the White-Slave Traffic Act, known as the Mann Act after
 Comrades and controversy 223

its sponsor the Republican Congressman James Robert Mann

(of Illinois). This legislation prohibited the transportation across
state lines of ‘any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or
debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose’. The last of these
three descriptions was vague enough to capture almost any sexual
act – consensual or otherwise – and certainly bad news for some-
one like Charlie. Although motivated by the Progressive era desire
to tackle the existence of open red light districts in many American
cities (and women being transported between states to work in
them), there had been a distinctly racial dimension to this early
twentieth-century crackdown. To give one example, the African
American World Heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson
would be successfully prosecuted under the Mann Act ostensibly
for having sex with his Caucasian wife. In the era of ‘separate but
equal’ such activities (and those with the other white women John-
son would sleep with after his fights) were given a directly crimi-
nal outlet. Vague notions of ‘immorality’ within Mann became a
further recourse to crack down on miscegenation – illegal in the
majority of American states in any case.
Crucially, for the caucasian Charlie Chaplin, the Mann Act also
criminalised anyone ‘who shall knowingly procure or obtain . . .
any ticket or tickets, or any form of transportation or evidence of
the right thereto, to be used by any woman or girl in interstate or
foreign commerce’. It was here that the first legal problem with a
woman named Joan Barry would begin. Charlie was involved with
many volatile women, a product both of the youth he tended to
favour and the cruelty of treatment he could meet out. Yet Joan
Barry was exceptional even among Chaplin’s partners. She had
been born Mary Louise Gribble in 1920 to a former soldier father
who had committed suicide while his daughter was still in the
womb. Moving to Los Angeles and renaming herself, Barry took
to shoplifting when she failed to make it as an actress. She began
or attempted affairs with several wealthy men, including the oil
magnate J. Paul Getty. During the Getty affair, his associate A.C.
Blumenthal – who had witnessed Chaplin’s iodine-coloured penis
in a New York hotel room in 1925 – took to virtually pimping
Barry around Hollywood. After Spencer Tracy proved uninter-
ested, Joan was introduced to Charlie Chaplin.
As described by her later Attorney, the red-haired Joan was
‘an attractive girl of limited intelligence’ who had been on the
224 Comrades and controversy

Chaplin payroll ($75 a week) since the summer of 1941.37 Charlie

had been attracted by what he called her ‘upper regional domes
immensely expansive’, but discovered that her acting range and
her nasal voice limited how far he could use her professionally. An
affair began soon after and in the build-up to his Carnegie Hall
speech of October 1942 Charlie paid for train tickets for Joan
and her mother to come to watch. Later FBI files recorded that
‘Chaplin took Barry to dinner in New York several times follow-
ing his appearance in New York on October 16, 1942, at the Art-
ists Front to Win the War Rally. Thereafter, Barry returned to the
Waldorf Astoria apartment of Chaplin, where the alleged immoral
acts took place.’38 The deed done, Chaplin then gave Joan $300
to return to Los Angeles. For the remainder of 1942 the two had
‘numerous trysts’ – at least according to the FBI – although Char-
lie always asserted that their last encounter had been in the first
half of that year. Throughout this time Joan was clearly mentally
unstable (no doubt possibly exacerbated by Charlie’s general treat-
ment of women). On the night of 23 December 1942, she appeared
at Charlie’s house brandishing a gun, threatening to kill herself
because Charlie had forsaken her for another, Oona O’Neill.
In February 1944, the Federal Grand Jury in Los Angeles indicted
Chaplin under the terms of the Mann Act. This had largely been
instigated at the behest of the FBI and Hoover’s orders to ‘expe-
dite [the] investigation’ of Chaplin’s activities in this regard. In a
trial lasting two weeks, Charlie was acquitted under all charges.
He admitted supplying the tickets by which Joan had travelled
between New York and Los Angeles, but the prosecution could not
prove that there had been any immoral purpose behind the action.
‘I believe in American justice,’ exclaimed a jubilant Chaplin after
the verdict. ‘I have had a very fair trial.’39
Yet it would not be the last. In June 1943 Barry had also filed a
civil suit against Chaplin, claiming he was the father of her baby
Carol Ann, born four months later. For Charlie’s eighteen-year-old
new wife Oona it must have been a horrendous ordeal, albeit a
fate she would have to get used to. Indeed, if Georgia Hale is to
be believed this could have been an even more traumatic time for
the young Oona. In the late 1970s Georgia wrote to Ivor Montagu
telling him that ‘the night before [Charlie] married Oona [in June
1943] he came to my house and begged me to leave the country
with him. But I knew it wasn’t right – not with him in his situation.
 Comrades and controversy 225

So at three in the morning he left and how sad it all was.’40 True or
not, the second Barry trial to settle the paternity of her daughter
would rival Lita Grey’s 1927 divorce papers in terms of public
embarrassment and reputational damage for Charlie. In one sense,
this was not actually his fault and more the product of a flimsy
case. After all, Joan Barry’s Attorney Joseph Scott had a fairly big
problem: blood tests proved Chaplin was not the father of the
baby in question. Carol Ann had been born blood type B while
Joan was A and Charlie O. These tests were inadmissible under
Californian state law, but they were undeniably an inconvenience
to his case. And so unable to win on the science, Scott had to win
on the theatrics.
To do so Scott wound back the clock to the same kind of tactics
used by Lita’s legal team. He declared that ‘you [that is, the Jury]
have promised me you would not hold it against her because she has
fallen by the wayside and surrendered to this fellow’s embraces’.
After all, ‘Chaplin is a master mechanic at his trade, a master
mechanic at the art of seduction.’ If Peter Ackroyd’s estimate of
more than 2,000 sexual partners for Chaplin is true, there may be
something in this. According to Scott, ‘He has violated this girl
so many times he can’t even remember himself – he talks about
it as if he would about ham and eggs.’ Really twisting the knife,
Scott continued: ‘This fellow is just a little runt of a Svengali . . .
This fellow doesn’t lie like a gentleman – he lies like a cheap cock-
ney cad.’ Certainly Joan and Chaplin were ‘both equally guilty –
only Chaplin is a man old enough to be her father. At his age you’d
think he’d have something better to do.’41 Tugging at the heart-
strings of the seven women and five men on the jury, he declared
that ‘all Joan wanted was for this man to give the child a name’.
Imitating his client, he shouted, ‘Please [Scott banged the table],
please [he pounded again] for my baby.’42
This was a trial of mutual mud-slinging. Joan had apparently
begged Charlie to marry her at which point her intended beau
had replied: ‘How can you be so blatant and look me square in
the face, and say such a thing, knowing the kind of life you have
been living.’43 ‘That’, the judge murmured disapprovingly, ‘is a bit
far from the swimming pool’. Yet the Getty affair and at least two
others initially seemed to sway the jury’s mind. After four and a
half hours of deliberation on 4 January and then another day on
5 January 1945 the jury returned deadlocked – seven votes to five
226 Comrades and controversy

in Chaplin’s favour. Barry’s legal team insisted on a retrial that,

after similar theatrics from Barry’s team, cast its verdict on 17
April: this time nine votes to three against Charlie. This meant that
Charlie had to pay $75 a week in support of Carol Ann (ironically
the same ‘salary’ he had paid her mother). Whatever Charlie’s
involvement, the Barry case remains tragic. In 1953, Time Maga-
zine reported that Joan had been ‘admitted to Patton State Hospi-
tal . . . after she was found walking the streets barefoot, carrying
a pair of baby sandals and a child’s ring, and murmuring: “This
is magic.”’44 As per the court’s ruling, Charlie continued to pay
maintenance for Carol Ann until her twenty-first birthday in 1964.
The financial penalty of $75 a week was neither here nor there to
Chaplin.45 But the reputational damage the two trials created was
immense. As Chuck Maland points out, ‘Chaplin’s legal difficulties
in the Barry affair, however much they soured him on the Ameri-
can legal system, had little effect on his star image.’ On the other
hand, ‘the press coverage of those legal difficulties greatly effected
his declining star image’.46 This case brought Charlie the ire of two
gossip columnists in particular – Florabel Muir of the New York
Daily News, and Hedda Hopper of the Los Angeles Times who
both ended up testifying against Charlie and passing on informa-
tion to the FBI. While Muir seems to have been more motivated by
an antipathy to Chaplin’s supposed immorality, for Hedda Hopper
the politics were vital. Hopper, a Republican, hated both Chaplin’s
progressive politics prior to 1939 and his desire to get American
embroiled in the conflict about to break out in Europe. He also just
was not terribly interested in feeding gossip columnists morsels of
information for their columns, which made him eminently discard-
able without fear of losing a source. In early June 1943 Hopper pub-
lished an article ostensibly about the Barry–Chaplin case, but that
segued into various attacks on the man. Hopper wrote, ‘It’s been
implied by many people here and elsewhere that a genius should
have special privileges, [and] Chaplin’s had many.’ These included
‘making his home, fortune and reputation in America, without ever
making any attempt to become a citizen of our country’. When
given the opportunity to contribute to the ‘motion picture relief
fund home, he didn’t’. And, rolling out an old lie, while ‘Jews should
be proud of their heritage’, apparently Chaplin was not.47 As with
America, it was rather difficult for Charlie to feel proud of an entity
of which he was not a part.
 Comrades and controversy 227

All in all, by Chuck Maland’s summary, ‘the dominant press’

came out against Chaplin ‘strongly’. The Chicago Tribune gave
front-page headlines to the case, and the moments of peak cover-
age were almost uniformly negative. Meanwhile, Newsweek head-
lines such as ‘Chaplin as Villain’ and Time magazine’s assertion
that the Barry case ‘fitted into a familiar pattern’ of ‘unassail-
able arrogance and . . . affairs with a succession of pretty young
protégés’ did not help Charlie’s declining image. The left-wing
intelligentsia such as Rob Wagner’s Script and the out-and-out
communist-backing Daily Worker tried to re-frame Chaplin as a
political victim rather than immoral leach, but this was an uphill
battle by this point.48 Crucially, his next film, a daring artistic
experiment, would not serve to correct this.

Monsieur Verdoux
On 11 April 1947 Chaplin released Monsieur Verdoux – the first
film since 1923 where he played no version of the Tramp charac-
ter. Beginning with a shot of Verdoux’s grave, the title character
claimed in a voiceover that

for thirty years I was an honest bank clerk until the Depres-
sion of 1930 – in which year I found myself unemployed. It
was then I became occupied with liquidating members of the
opposite sex. This I did as strictly a business enterprise to sup-
port a home and family.

If the Great Dictator had hinted at the type of non-tramp film

Chaplin would make, Verdoux squarely smacked his audience
across the face with the notion. Murdering widows and other
financially independent women in order to steal their money
was not something the cartoonish, ultimately sympathetic tramp
would ever have countenanced, whatever petty crimes he occa-
sionally engaged in.
The theme of the film, eventually played out in Verdoux’s mem-
orable courtroom speech at the end, is the similarity between one
mass murderer’s individually amoral decisions and those that capi-
talism per se encourages. As Verdoux said when in the dock, ‘One
murder makes a villain, millions a hero. Numbers sanctify.’ In such
an abysmal world, why not become a killer? Earlier in the movie
Verdoux’s wife reads the newspaper headlines to him: ‘Depression
228 Comrades and controversy

worldwide, unemployment spreads to all nations.’ ‘Enough!’

replies the killer Verdoux. ‘It’s too depressing.’ Before being led
to his execution at the end of the film, Verdoux is interviewed by
a newspaper reporter eager to learn about his ‘tragic example of
a life of crime’. Verdoux simply replies that he did not ‘see how
anyone can be an example in these criminal times’. For some, this
was something of a cop-out from an actor-director whose own
personal sense of morality was skewed. The First World War, say,
did not justify getting a barely sixteen-year-old Lita Grey pregnant;
nor did the Depression justify associating with types who wanted
the red flag flying over the White House. But the 1947 film was
undeniably powerful even if it contained a central irony that Chap-
lin perhaps did not consider: Verdoux’s victims were all ultimately
undermined by not using that most capitalist of institution, keep-
ing their money in a bank.
On 12 April 1947 Charlie entered the Grand Ballroom of the
Gotham Hotel in New York – ostensibly to publicise the film. The
atmosphere of this press conference can be gleaned from Chaplin’s
introductory remarks, and indeed the first question he was asked.
After a brief smattering of welcoming applause, Charlie addressed
journalists in a tense voice: ‘Thank you, ladies and gentlemen of the
press. I am not going to waste your time. I shall say, “Proceed with
the butchery!”’ The first voice sprung up, ‘Could you answer a direct
question: are you a communist?’ Chaplin confirmed, ‘I am not a
communist.’ The journalist shot back: ‘A communist sympathiser?’
Charlie hedged: ‘A communist sympathiser . . . that has to be quali-
fied again.’ Charlie then proceeded to trot out his usual, and not in
itself unreasonable, defence – that during the war he had sympathised
with the Soviet Union because at the time they were America’s ally.
In such a hostile atmosphere, the film met with a threefold disaster:
organised protests outside theatres, poor reviews from many critics,
and limited financial success at best on the American market. The
first of these saw war veterans, particularly Catholic ex-servicemen,
express widespread discontent at Charlie’s recent activities. This
would not prove an isolated incident. In February 1953, American
Legion pickets would appear outside theatres showing Chaplin’s
nostalgic and utterly politically uncontroversial Limelight, too. In
an open letter to Chaplin, one Legion district leader stated that his
opposition was based on the fact that he had ‘given aid and comfort
to 11 organizations officially cited as Communist sympathizers’.
 Comrades and controversy 229

Placards were carried outside theatres, declaring that ‘your box

office dollar helps Charles Chaplin spread Red propaganda’. In
1953 a reluctant theatre manager interviewed by the press was able
to at least comment that ‘people like the picture’.49 With Monsieur
Verdoux back in 1947 it was not even clear that this was true.
As for the 1947 reviews, The New York Times found Verdoux
‘slow – tediously slow – in many stretches and thus monotonous.
The bursts of comic invention fit uncomfortably into the grim
fabric and the clarity of the philosophy does not begin to emerge
until the end.’50 London was a little kinder, but many agreed that
Charlie had gone too far with his latest piece of moralising. Still,
ever the entrepreneur, Charlie sought to use the controversy sur-
rounding the film to generate business. Adverts for the film called
it ‘the most controversial motion picture of our time’, a claim given
credence when its opening coincided with talk of Charlie being
hauled before HUAC. Speaking to reporters, Charlie called it ‘no
ironical coincidence that my comedy also opens in the National
Capital less than 24 hours after Rep. Thomas begins his probe into
asserted Communistic film activities’. After writing to the commit-
tee and declaring that he was not a communist, Charlie did not
have appear before it. But the suggestion that he may do so clearly
harmed him artistically and financially.
Charlie had gone into Verdoux expecting to make at least $12
million gross. In truth, this was always ambitious, and would have
more than doubled receipts seen from The Great Dictator. Given
the box-office kicking that Charlie had taken in his last major
artistic experiment – A Woman of Paris almost a quarter of a
century earlier – taking a great leap forward financially while not
playing the Little Tramp seemed a long-shot at best. After Joan
Barry, perhaps the antics of a loveable underdog would have been
given short shrift anyway. In the end, the film barely covered costs,
pulling in less than $2 million worldwide.
Verdoux cemented Chaplin’s political enemies against him.
But it also bought him the loyalty of some new friends. The
German-Jewish émigré novelist Lion Feuchtwanger (who had
settled in Los Angeles in 1941) was one kind voice. Writing to
Charlie, he told him that Verdoux would

cause hundreds of thousands to think, it will improve many

people and will make them more intelligent and better aware of
230 Comrades and controversy

what is going on. Your film is a great ethical lecture, and makes
the relationship between crime and the general economical situ-
ation clearer than a thousand essays. In your own way you have
put into practice the principle that many a philosopher and
writer adhered to: “By laughter may we improve the world.”51

After Chaplin replied that he was ‘happy to tell you that pic-
ture passed Hays office and New York censors without a cut’,
Feuchtwanger later told him that he was ‘convinced that Monsieur
Verdoux is not only the best picture of the year but of the whole
decade’.52
Another similar case was the Austrian composer Hanns Eisler –
who, like Feuchtwanger, had fled Nazi Germany on account of
his Jewish background. Eisler would be hauled twice to face ques-
tioning under the HUAC hearings in the 1940s and eventually
left America entirely in 1948. The two families were close. Oona
Chaplin wrote to Eisler’s wife Lou after the New York premiere
of Monsieur Verdoux to report that the film had

got a lot of bad – really bad – reviews – even the good ones
were not very good – this was a great blow to Charlie – and
to me – naturally. Also there has been a lot of trash about
Charlie’s not being a citizen and being a communist and not
helping ‘our boys’ in the war. He had a mass interview of
about seventy five reporters this afternoon – It was broadcast
all over the radio – And they really came to slaughter him.
And I must tell you that one of the questions they asked was
‘Are you a friend of Hanns Eisler?’ Charlie said that you were
close friends and then they asked if Hanns was a communist
and Charlie said he didn’t think so – that Hanns was a great
musician and not in politics. Then of course they said – ‘well
if he were a communist would you still be friends with him?’
And Charlie said ‘of course.’ Then they said ‘Well if he were
a spy would you be friends?’ So Charlie said they were being
absurd and that ended that.53

Unlike Chaplin, Eisler had indeed been a card-carrying com-

munist. Prior to the Nazi seizure of power in Germany Eisler had
taught at the Marxist Worker’s School in Berlin, and thereby seen
his musical compositions banned after Hitler became Chancellor in
 Comrades and controversy 231

1933. His brother Gerhart had been a liaison between the Comin-
tern and communist parties in China (1929–31) and America
(1933–6), and his sister Ruth a German communist turned HUAC
informant (including on her brothers). Even with an acknowledged
communist, however, the FBI still went to the trouble of record-
ing Hanns’s collection of books, which included Das Kapital, the
Marx–Engels Letters and several works by Lenin.54 According to
a 1947 FBI report, Eisler had associated with ‘many Communist
sympathisers, including Charles Chaplin, Bertolt Brecht, Clifford
Odets and others’.55 This sympathy allegedly extended to Chaplin
offering to throw a benefit party for Gerhart in 1946, and to lend
Hanns money should he need to flee the country (although Hanns
eventually found the funds elsewhere).56 This was intended more
to help out friends in need than to assert Chaplin’s conversion to
communism, and even the FBI spy reporting to Hoover noted

the only conversation that he recalled concerned the pro-

jected appearance of Chaplin before the House Committee
on un-American Activities. There was no political discussion
at all and [redacted] stated that he had no information con-
cerning any Communist connections on the part of Chaplin
other than his association with Hanns Eisler and what he has
read in the press.57

This would no doubt have included a January 1948 article in the

Republic-leaning journal The Argonaut, which was also clipped
by the HUAC committee keeping tabs on Chaplin. Pointing to
a telegram Chaplin had sent Pablo Picasso trying to get him to
speak out against Eisler’s deportation, The Argonaut noted Char-
lie’s ‘conception of human morality is low, and almost, if not quite,
everything else is low also’. They continued: ‘Whether [Charlie]
takes his orders from Moscow, as most of our Communists do, we
do not profess to know. But he is evidently a partisan of Moscow,
and sympathetically disposed towards all of the Politburo decrees.’
Like Eisler therefore, ‘Is it not time to deport Charlie Chaplin as an
undesirable alien?’58 The Eisler association clearly helped close the
noose around Chaplin. Anti-Chaplin Senators in D.C. later latched
on to Charlie’s comments that he was ‘proud’ to be Eisler’s friend,
with Harry Cain reading out ‘with the greatest feeling of revulsion’
Charlie’s telegram to Picasso.
232 Comrades and controversy

This was a situation cemented by those willing to testify against

him. During a meeting between the two in Malibu, Eisler told
a man named Jack Bungay (who was also acquainted with Ayn
Rand) about Chaplin’s promise to help Eisler ‘get him out of the
country’. Also present at one of these gatherings was Edward
Mosk, Attorney and active member of the Progressive Party under
whose banner Henry A. Wallace ran for President in 1948, with
Charlie’s support. As an aside, Bungay certainly pressed the right
buttons by mentioning Mosk, for the notion of a Hollywood cabal
behind Wallace was fairly ingrained. In December 1946 HUAC
Chief Counsel Ernie Adamson tried to subpoena Chaplin ‘to hear
more about reports that motion picture money is financing a third
party, tentatively named “The People’s Front” which has an eye
running Henry Wallace for President’.59 In any event, while Bun-
gay admitted ‘this information may be of little worth’ he had pre-
viously turned a list of attendees at similar leftist meetings over
to the journalist Hedda Hopper (with the understanding that she
would inform Hoover at the FBI). Equally crucially, Bungay went
to great efforts to note that although he had mixed with commu-
nists, ‘I have never been a sympathiser or a member of the Com-
munist party – merely a by-stander.’60 It may have been for the
Hoovers or McGranerys to frame Chaplin as a communist sym-
pathiser in a top-down sense, but this approach always required
bottom-up adherents.
In December 1947, Eric Johnston, President of the Motion Pic-
ture Association of America (the re-branded organisation formerly
led by Will Hays), issued what became known as the Waldorf
Statement after a meeting of forty-eight leading film executives,
including Louis B. Mayer, Sam Goldwyn and Paramount’s Barney
Balaban. After the so-called ‘Hollywood Ten’ of leftist screenwrit-
ers (perhaps most famously, after a 2015 film covering his life,
including Dalton Trumbo) and directors had refused to testify
before HUAC, the Waldorf Statement attempted to distance such
figures from the ‘respectable’ end of the movie industry. The Hol-
lywood Ten were immediately discharged from their work at the
signatories studios (without compensation) until ‘such time as [the
accused writer] is acquitted or purged himself of contempt and
declares under oath that he is not a Communist’. The Waldorf
Statement further committed each studio head to take ‘positive
 Comrades and controversy 233

action’ to tackle the ‘subversive and disloyal elements in Holly-

wood’, including not ‘knowingly employ[ing] a Communist or a
member of any party or group which advocates the overthrow of
the government of the United States’. This policy, they claimed,
would not ‘be swayed by hysteria or intimidation from any source’
and admitted that taking such steps involved ‘dangers and risks’.
But to preserve ‘a free screen’ change was needed. Finally, they
requested ‘Congress to enact legislation to assist American indus-
try to rid itself of subversive, disloyal elements’, not least to protect
the ‘30,000 loyal Americans employed in Hollywood’. Chaplin’s
vagaries – the type of loose political talk he had been able to throw
around in the 1920s and 1930s – would no longer do in this atmo-
sphere. The question was, could he adjust?

The pressure intensifies

By this stage Chaplin had two options: denounce his friends and
publicly renounce some of his apparent political views, or leave
America – at least until the heat died down. Some suggested
that he should go down the former route and apply for Ameri-
can citizenship to show his ‘loyalty’. Here communist leader Earl
Browder had allegedly advised him not to do so ‘since it would
raise the whole question of his being an alien, attacks on his per-
sonal life, and all sort of things that might lead to his deporta-
tion’.61 He was never much disposed to becoming an American
in any case. By April 1948 he was therefore clearly exploring the
latter option, and duly sat down for an interview with Inspec-
tor John Boyd of the Immigration and Naturalization Service to
determine his eligibility for a re-entry permit as a British subject
should he travel abroad. Since many of the statements made dur-
ing this interrogation were pertinent to the ongoing FBI inves-
tigation into his politics, edited highlights of this meeting were
passed over to the Bureau. Asked whether he had ever made any
donations to front organisations of the Communist Party, Chaplin
gave the reasonable explanation to Boyd, ‘I don’t know what con-
stitutes a front organization of the Communist Party.’62 Denying
membership and direct financial contribution to the Communist
Party, he did, however, make the odd tactical slip. Asked about his
pro-Russian speeches in the early 1940s, he remarked that ‘during
234 Comrades and controversy

the war, everybody was more or less a Communist sympathizer . . .

I have always felt grateful because they helped us to get ready
and prepare our own way of life.’ When asked whether he had
ever contributed to the Russia-American Society for Medical Aid
to Russia, he replied, ‘I might have done. I don’t know. When I
say that, I really shouldn’t say that. To my knowledge, I don’t
think so.’ Equally, ‘he may have’ made a donation to the National
Council of American–Soviet Friendship. The explanation here
was understandable, but not the type of thing likely to assuage his
enemies: ‘We get a million things here for all sort of donations.
We don’t carry a list of what is a Communist front or what isn’t a
Communist front.’ By 1947, however, the FBI, HUAC and others
had produced very clear lists along such lines.
During this interrogation, Chaplin was asked his impressions of
both communism per se, and recent actions by the Soviet regime.
After a Soviet-backed coup by the Communist Party of Czecho-
slovakia in February 1948, Chaplin stated he did not ‘know much
about the situation’. Yet, ‘from what I read in the papers, I still
maintain I don’t think Russia has done a damn thing. That is my
own personal belief.’ Arguing ‘no soldiers were there, [t]here was
no bloodshed’, he believed ‘the press is trying to create a war . . .
with Russia’. Among certain elements of the right, that may well
have been true. Yet Russian co-ordination behind the Czechoslo-
vak coup was clear: Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s then heir apparent,
had previously remarked that Soviet pressure had ensured ‘the
complete victory of the working class over the bourgeoisie in every
East European land – except Czechoslovakia, where the power
contest still remains undecided’.63 The premeditation of the Soviet
regime to ferment a takeover was therefore clear. In such a light,
Chaplin’s predilection to favour Stalin’s government, particularly
where he had no evidence either way, did not endear him to his
American hosts.
Quite apart from his controversial personal life, politically
Chaplin had been unable to move with the times. The Ameri-
can left had previously been divided between those progressives
who refused to denounce Stalin (including Chaplin), and the
anti-Stalinist left who very much did. During the war, as a result
of the purges, the Nazi–Soviet Pact and a growing belief that the
USSR was a militaristic power hell bent on expansionism, many
 Comrades and controversy 235

American liberals shifted their position from pro-Stalin progres-

sivism to opposition to his leadership. While Harry Truman’s
combination of New Deal liberalism and an anti-Soviet foreign
policy proved just about enough to win him the 1948 Presidential
election, the former Vice-President Henry Wallace maintained the
former more optimistic vision of what Stalin ‘could’ be, which
informed his Progressive Party campaign that year, and earned
Chaplin’s support in doing so.
All this made the job for those in Congress who wanted action
taken against this apparently ‘red’ foreigner much easier. Yet the
electoral cycle also played its part. One moderate voice on the
HUAC against the bombast of Chairman Martin Dies had been
Jerry Voorhis, a Congressman from California’s twelfth district
since 1937. As Gellerman noted, ‘There is a reasonable qual-
ity about Voorhis that has no place in a Dies report. Dies sees
things in terms of black and white, whereas Voorhis insists that
there are intermediate shades.’64 For Voorhis – who published his
own minority report opposing much of the tenor of the direc-
tion of HUAC – the Dies Committee was ‘in danger of becoming
an agency which abrogates to itself the right to censor people’s
ideas. That in itself is un-American.’65 Once it became clear that his
impact was ever diminishing, in 1943 Voorhis resigned from the
Committee. Three years later Voorhis would lose his seat in Con-
gress to an up-and-coming former naval officer then stationed in
Baltimore, Richard Milhous Nixon. Nixon’s campaign alleged that
Voorhis’s links to the labor federation of the Congress of Indus-
trial Organizations (CIO) meant that he was pro-communist. This
was a fudge at best – while it is true that the CIO Political Action
Committee (CIO-PAC) was seen by some as a communist front,
it had actually refused to back Voorhis. In fact, the National Citi-
zen’s Political Action Committee (NCPAC) that did back Voorhis
was not only open to those outside the trade union movement,
but included Ronald Reagan among its members. But blurring the
CIO-PAC and NCPAC in people’s minds certainly worked, and in
November 1946 Richard Nixon won the seat for the Republicans
by more than 15,000 votes (overturning a similar majority for
Voorhis from 1944).
As a freshman, Congressman Nixon would launch his career on
the back of the Alger Hiss case. After a Time magazine journalist
236 Comrades and controversy

had named more than half a dozen government officials including

Hiss as communist spies, Nixon pressured Hiss to admit he was
secretly working for the Soviet regime. This Hiss never conceded,
although he would eventually be sent to prison for perjuring him-
self in a civil suit when he tried to clear his name. But the Hiss case
showed that there was political capital and a national reputation
to be gained for those able to identify the communists hiding in
plain sight among America’s elites.
In May 1952 Richard Nixon wrote a letter to Hedda Hopper.
Six months away from being the Vice-Presidential candidate on
Dwight Eisenhower’s 1952 Republican ticket, Nixon told her, ‘I
agree with you that the way the Chaplin case has been handled
has been a disgrace for years. Unfortunately, we aren’t able to do
too much about it when the top decisions are made by the likes
of Acheson and McGranery. You can be sure, however, that I will
keep my eye on the case and possibly after January we will be able
to work with an administration which will apply the same rules
to Chaplin as they do to ordinary citizens.’66 Evidently, as we will
see, he should have had more faith in McGranery.
This was something of a bug-bear for Hopper, who had not
dropped her anger from the Joan Barry case. In April 1947, just
as Chaplin was trying to launch Monsieur Verdoux to a sceptical
public, Hopper had received an advance copy of The Story of the
FBI from J. Edgar Hoover himself. Thanking him for the book and
endorsing its red-baiting content, Hopper had replied,

I’d like to run every one of those rats out of the country and start
with Charlie Chaplin. In no other country in the world would
he be allowed to do what he’s done. And now that he’s finished
another picture, and Miss Pickford is back in NY helping him
sell it, what are we doing about that? It’s about time we stood up
to be counted. You give me the material and I’ll blast.67

This request for journalistic content went even further in August

1947 when, before a public event, Hopper wrote to Hoover ask-
ing him for

some facts to hurl back at the angry mob in the audience who
is going to ask me very embarrassing questions . . . Naturally I
won’t be able to accuse certain stars of being Communists, as
 Comrades and controversy 237

even those who are deny it, always have and always will . . . [But]
I feel that I can call upon your friendship for help. I know you’re
just as anxious to rid the country of our enemies as I am.68

Even if Hoover did not always have legal proof of the wrongdoing
of figures such as Chaplin, he was able to use sympathetic figures in
the press to blacken their reputation in the public’s mind. Other than
$500 allegedly donated in 1934, the only ‘evidence’ of a financial con-
tribution from Chaplin to the Communist Party was when ‘Hedda
Hopper, Hollywood columnist, wrote in her column of December 27
1943, as follows: “From things I have learned, Charlie Chaplin . . .
contributed $25,000 to the Communist cause and $100 to the Red
Cross.’69 Feeding journalists information to put into the public record
was a well-worn tactic by those wishing to discredit the left.
The third element necessary was to get politicians to use these
newspaper columns to frame speeches that would add an official
veneer to any accusations. By the late 1940s this was falling into
place. For one, on 13 May 1949 the single-term Senator from Wash-
ington, Harry Cain, spoke in a debate on ‘Communist Activities
among Aliens and National Groups’. After Senator Pat McCarran
had brought forward a bill on the subject of deporting ‘subversives’ –
more on this in our next chapter – Cain ‘presented the case of an
alien who has been guilty of activities which are designed to injure
the welfare and international position of the United States. He is,
of course, Charles Chaplin.’ For Cain, Chaplin’s ‘public utterances
provide a series of eulogies for the Stalinist dictatorship but . . . I
have never been able to find a single kind word for the United States.’
The latter half of this claim was nonsense. Conversing with the very
leftist Ivor Montagu, Charlie claimed, ‘I’d never exchange one foot
of my place here for all of England. I love it here. I love Califor-
nia, I love its climate and I admire the American people.’ Even the
communist-sympathetic Montagu conceded that ‘the United States
has opened its arms wide to you, loved you and enriched you. No
wonder you feel the way you do.’70 This was the general tenor of
several of Charlie’s public utterances. But claiming otherwise became
standard fare in elements of the anti-Chaplin press, and this provided
the political cover to go big for freshman politicians. Cain read Ed
Sullivan in The New York News who had regularly been out for
Chaplin: ‘Don’t tell us, Charlie, that you are reluctant to discuss
politics. During the war, instead of entertaining the troops or our
238 Comrades and controversy

wounded, you delivered nothing but political speeches for Russia,

demanding a second front.’71 Cain springboarded from these com-
ments to scornfully assert that he was ‘sure that the men who gave
their lives on the Normandy beaches . . . must be grateful to Charles
Chaplin that he made speeches on behalf of a second front’.72
By the early 1950s Charlie’s enemies were closing in on him.
Before we deal with his bitter departure, it may be worth indulging
in some alternative history, however. In October 1952 Edward
G. Robinson published an article ‘How the Reds Made a Sucker
Out of Me’ in American Legion Magazine.73 If we want an indi-
cation of the alternative path that Chaplin could have travelled
in the 1940s and 1950s then this serves a very useful purpose.
Like Chaplin, Robinson had been through the wringer of pub-
lic opinion. A pacifist and supporter of Socialist Party candidate
Eugene Debs in 1920, Robinson experienced his big cinematic
breakthrough in the Warner Brothers’ film, Little Caesar (1931).
As Hollywood steadily moved to the right, Robinson became
a fan of Roosevelt’s New Deal and was, according to Steven J.
Ross, ‘not a radical trying to replace capitalism with socialism’,
but rather a moderate ‘left-liberal’.74 Joining the Hollywood
Anti-Nazi League and later the Hollywood Democratic Commit-
tee, Robinson’s politics were not so dissimilar to Chaplin’s. He
certainly had a far more stereotypically ‘patriotic’ Second World
War, selling war bonds, donating $100,000 to the USO, appear-
ing at many US-government-sponsored rallies and becoming the
first movie star to entertain the troops after D-Day.75 Yet, as with
Charlie, Robinson’s other activities were viewed as innately sus-
picious. Being part of an open letter sent to Congress and the
President calling for the boycott of all German products until the
country ended its aggression towards the Jews and other countries,
Robinson joined other signatories such as Harry and Jack Warner,
Groucho Marx, Henry Fonda and James Cagney in falling under
varying degrees of suspicion. Calls for universal health care did not
endear Robinson to the right either, nor did his demanding equal-
ity for African Americans after the war. By the 1940s the FBI was
keeping regular tabs on Robinson, and in May 1945 sent a memo
to the White House naming Robinson as one of fifty movie stars
accused of being a communist. In October and December 1950
Robinson appeared before HUAC to deny communist sympathy,
but the accusation was enough to damage his career irreparably.
 Comrades and controversy 239

So, like Chaplin, what was to be done in such a bind? Extend

the hand or extend the middle finger? In the aforementioned pages
of the American Legion Magazine, Robinson repeated a statement
from a previous HUAC interrogation: ‘It is not easy for a man to
admit to having been a dupe, but I’ve had to admit it.’ The sum of
Robinson’s experiences told of ‘how an honest liberal was tricked
into keeping company with scoundrels with ulterior motives who
masqueraded as supporters of decent causes’. Joining the Hol-
lywood Anti-Nazi League had been ‘grist to the communist mill’,
donating to the Committee to Aid Agricultural Workers in the late
1930s – the product of being moved ‘by John Steinbeck’s book
Grapes of Wrath’ – was unwittingly to have given to a body where
‘the communists have control’. In retrospect, Robinson noted, ‘I
would still try to help any underprivileged group but I would be
careful about the company I did it in.’ Instead, the communists had
been ‘very successful in making “herd” thinkers out of a substan-
tial section of Americans who wanted to be liberals. Given an idea
that sounded sympathetic or tolerant, we were prone to accept it
blindly. I did and so did many others.’
Robinson’s charges against his former fellow travellers were
not completely without foundation. His view that communist-
sympathising Americans ‘may worry about the deportation of a com-
rade from the United States, but they are unmoved by the forcible
evacuation of tens of thousands in the [Soviet] satellite countries’ argu-
ably held some truth. The same people who ‘scream for civil liberties
in America’ could indeed rarely be heard ‘protest[ing] the absence of
all legality, due process, judicial freedom in Russia’. But despite such
charges, as Ross notes, neither this article nor his HUAC testimony
managed to restore him to public favour. Robinson declared in 1952,
‘I have one allegiance and one allegiance only; I am not a communist;
I have not been; I never will be. I am an American.’76 Chaplin would
take a rather different course. In the end, both would see that their
careers had been hit beyond the point of possible redemption.

Notes
1 Clawson to Parker, 24 March 1972, White House Central Files
[WHCF], Richard Nixon Presidential Library [RNPL].
2 Madison Square Garden Speech, 29 November 1939, Sam Houston
Research Centre, Liberty, Texas [SHRC]/Martin Dies Papers [DIES]
Box 157 File 30.
240 Comrades and controversy

3 William Gellerman, Martin Dies (New York, 1944), 33.

4 Ibid., 41.
5 Ibid., 40–1.
6 Ibid., 48.
7 Madison Square Garden Speech, 29 November 1939, SHRC/DIES,
Box 157 File 30.
8 Block booking was the system whereby studios could sell multiple
films to theatres, often unseen, in order to keep production and dis-
tribution costs down. Often hitting independent theatres hard, it was
eventually outlawed in 1948.
9 Beaumont Motion Picture Council to Dies [undated], and L.G.
Pounders to Dies, 20 March 1935, SHRC/DIES Box 4 File 25.
10 Mrs Harry Gordon to Dies, 11 March 1935, SHRC/DIES Box 4 File
25.
11 HUAC Hearings, 75th Congress on H. Res 242, 1938/vol. 1, 547.
12 Ibid., 1938/vol. 1, 540–1.
13 Ibid., 1938/vol. 3, 2,354.
14 Ibid., 1939/vol. 5, 3,581.
15 Gellerman, Martin Dies, 97.
16 Ibid., 177.
17 Ibid., 166.
18 Martin Dies, The Trojan Horse in America (Washington, D.C.,
1940).
19 Kevin Starr, Embattled Dreams: California in War and Peace, 1940–
1950 (Oxford, 2003), 286. In a September 1938 speech, Harry War-
ner criticised ‘certain bigots’ – presumably Dies – who ‘whisper that
Hollywood is run by -isms’. See Warner to Roosevelt, 27 September
1938, FDRPL/OF/73.
20 Cited in Goldwyn to Dies, 29 May 1940, SHRC/DIES Box 89 File 53.
21 Thomas Doherty, Hollywood and Hitler 1933–1939, (New York,
2013), 231.
22 Ibid.
23 HUAC Hearings, 75th Congress on H. Res 242, 1938/vol. 3, 2,367–8.
24 Milwaukee Journal, 24 December 1939.
25 Daytona Beach Morning Journal, 17 September 1941.
26 Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography (London, 2003), 458.
27 Chaplin Interview with the Immigration and Naturalization Service,
17 April 1948, within FBI/CCF File 8.
28 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 402–3; my emphasis.
29 Ibid., 404.
30 Ibid., 404–6.
31 Sinclair to Chaplin, 18 August 1942, LLBI/CCF Box 48.
32 Undated typescript within HOOV/ECB Box 18 Folder 13; emphasis
in original.
33 ‘Communist Activities: Charlie Chaplin’ Memorandum, 4 December
1942, FBI/CCF Part 7.
34 Washington Times Herald, 6 April 1944, FBI/CCF Part 6.
 Comrades and controversy 241

35 Memorandum for Mr Buckley, 18 May 1944, FBI/CCF Part 5.

36 Cited within McGranery’s typescript simply titled ‘Charles Spencer
Chaplin’, 14 July 1962, LOCDC/JMG Box 98 Folder 6.
37 Milwaukee Journal, 29 December 1944.
38 Charles Spencer Chaplin typescript, 14 July 1962, FBI/CCF Part 10.
39 Evening Independent, 5 April 1944.
40 Georgia Hale to Ivor Montagu, 6 January 1978, BFI/IVM Item 326.
41 All quotes above via Milwaukee Journal, 29 December 1944.
42 Pittsburgh Press, 30 December 1944.
43 Spokane Daily Chronicle, 21 December 1944.
44 Time Magazine, 17 August 1953.
45 Joseph Scott later considered the opportunity of using Chaplin’s visa
problems in 1952 to increase this fee. James O’Callaghan to James
McGranery, 17 October 1952, LOCDC/JMG Box 79 Folder 1.
46 Charles J. Maland, Chaplin and American Culture: The Evolution of
a Star Image (London, 1989), 207; my emphasis.
47 Los Angeles Times, 3 June 1943 and syndicated widely thereafter.
48 Maland, Star Image, 213–20.
49 Evening Star, 20 February 1953.
50 Within BFI/IVM Item 324.
51 Feuchtwanger to Chaplin, 11 March 1947, University of Southern
California [USC], Lion and Martha Feuchtwanger Papers [FEU] Box
C1-b, c. 16–19.
52 Feuchtwanger–Chaplin letters, 25 March and 27 December 1947,
USC/FEU, Box C1-b, c.16–19.
53 Oona Chaplin to Lou Eisler, undated 1947 letter, USC/Hanns and
Lou Eisler Papers [EIS] box 2.
54 L.B. Nichols Memorandum, 12 May 1947, FBI/Hanns Eisler file
[HEF] Part 8.
55 Ibid.
56 SAC to J. Edgar Hoover, 20 November 1946 and 26 September 1952,
FBI/HEF Parts 4 and 9.
57 SAC to J. Edgar Hoover, 26 September 1952, FBI/FEU Part 9.
58 The Argonaut, 2 January 1948 clipping within NADC/HUAC/2/23/1.
59 Washington Post, 7 December 1946, within FBI/CCF Part 7.
60 Bungay to McGranery, 23 September 1952, Library of Congress,
Washington, D.C. [LOCDC], Joseph McGranery Papers [JMG] Box
79 Folder 1.
61 Louis F. Bundenz memorandum, 21 June 1950, FBI/CCF File 9.
62 Chaplin Interview with the Immigration and Naturalization Service,
17 April 1948, within FBI/CCF File 8.
63 Robert C. Grogin, Natural Enemies: The United States and the Soviet
Union in the Cold War, 1917–1991, (Lexington, 2001), 134.
64 Cited in Gellerman, Martin Dies, 155.
65 Ibid., 163–4.
66 Nixon to Hopper, 29 May 1952, MHL/Hedda Hopper Papers [HEH]
f.2,522.
242 Comrades and controversy

67 Hopper to Hoover, 7 April 1947, MHL/HEH, f.1,713.

68 Hopper to Hoover, 7 August 1947, MHL/HEH, f.1,713.
69 Cited in Charlie Spencer Chaplin typescript, 14 July 1962, FBI/CCF
Part 10.
70 Georgia Hale, Charlie Chaplin: Intimate Close-Ups (New Jersey,
1995), 129–30.
71 The New York News, 12 April 1947.
72 Ibid.
73 All subsequent quotes from Robinson via this source, American
Legion Magazine, 53/4, October 1952, from 11.
74 Steven J. Ross, Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped
American Politics (Oxford, 2011), 99.
75 Ibid., 107.
76 Original italics.
9 A citizen of the world

In 1960 Charlie’s long-time enemy J. Edgar Hoover received a

letter from an anonymous source suggesting that the ‘TV Enter-
tainer Groucho Marks [sic] be investigated as a Communist’. The
evidence here was apparently clear-cut: a couple had been watch-
ing the television and a dutiful wife had recorded that ‘both my
husband and I understood him to pronounce “The United States”
as the “The United Snakes”’. To seal the deal this concerned citi-
zen noted that ‘in his book “Groucho and Me” he speaks quite
affectionately of Charlie Chaplin, who is a well known commu-
nist’.1 Sitting in Vevey, Chaplin would probably not have known
whether to laugh or cry. But the point was that Chaplin would no
longer be in America to face such hysteria. As this chapter lays
out, a man who spent so long shaping Hollywood would spend
only a few days of the last quarter century of his life in Tinsel-
town, or indeed the entirety of an America that had propelled him
to global stardom.
Despite, or indeed because of, his exile these final years were not
without political engagement and Charlie would go on to make his
views on the Cold War known both on- and off-screen. He would
become (rather understandably) bitter at an American establish-
ment that had cast him asunder, before, with the passage of time,
old wounds could begin to be treated if not healed. For the film-
maker Jean Renoir, writing in 1953, Charlie was ‘certainly the
victim of an unconsidered campaign and one day the American
people will discover that there may be smoke without fire’.2 This
was not quite true, but there would eventually be something of a
détente between the English director and his long-time homeland.
244 A citizen of the world

Indeed, although they began with such controversies, these final

years would see Chaplin eventually reach peace with much of the
world, and it with him.
Even Lita Grey, who had much to be bitter about, conceded
in an interview towards the end of her life that Charlie ‘was never
a Communist as they accused him of being. He just liked to talk
about the things that were good for every individual, all the people
of the world.’ If America did not want it, she declared, there were
others who would: ‘His talent was too big to be confined to one
nation or one culture. He called himself a citizen of the world – and
of humanity. And he was.’3 In a sense this had always been Chap-
lin’s theoretical position: internationalism trumped patriotism. Yet
it now had a very practical dimension. This chapter, therefore,
begins by outlining the circumstances in which his physical exile
from America, and his leap into ‘the world’, began.

The Tramp leaves America

As someone who never assumed American citizenship, Chaplin
was always on shaky ground when uttering his controversial
political opinions. As early as 1917 Section 3 of the US Immigra-
tion Act allowed ‘the following class of aliens [to] be excluded
from admission to the United States’. A long list of potential
exclusionary conditions followed, ranging from medical reasons
to various acts of criminality. But also on the list were those ‘who
teach disbelief in or opposition to organized government’ or who
were ‘affiliated with in any way’ organisations that did similar.
Few could genuinely have argued that Charlie Chaplin was advo-
cating the violent overthrow of the American government but
on the above – open-ended – definitions of illegal activity he had
more cause for concern. As with the Mann Act on so-called White
Slavery, there was enough room to go after Chaplin.
In 1950 Congress passed the McCarran Act, enacted over the
attempted veto of President Truman who felt it made ‘a mockery
of the Bill of Rights and of our claims to stand for freedom in
the world’.4 Harry Truman himself, by way of context, held the
reasonable position of being a fan of Charlie the comedian but
not Chaplin the man. Writing to his wife Bess in June 1950, he
told her ‘we had a very old Charlie Chaplin [film] which is just
 A citizen of the world 245

as funny and just as pathetic as it was in the early days. Wish

I knew nothing about him.’5 Thanks to the McCarran Bill that
Truman had attempted to block, people were about to rake over
Chaplin’s personal life and his politics once more, however. The
chief innovation of the new legislation was to require the regis-
tration of all communist and communist-sympathetic organisa-
tions in the United States with the Attorney General. Its tone was
harsh, as was the climate of the time. The Act stated that ‘those
individuals who knowingly and willfully participate in the world
Communist movement . . . in effect repudiate their allegiance to
the United States’. Clarifying and extending previous Immigra-
tion Acts, it backed the exclusion of those ‘aliens who write or
publish . . . or who knowingly circulate, distribute, print or dis-
play . . . any written or printed matter, advocating or teaching
opposition to all organized government’. Crucially, for Chaplin’s
purposes, McCarran stated that ‘no visa or other documentation
shall be issued to any alien who seeks to enter the United States
either as an immigrant or as a nonimmigrant if the consular offi-
cer knows or has reason to believe that such alien is inadmissible
to the United States under this Act’.6 The passage of McCarran
meant that Chaplin’s exile from the United States likely required
two components, therefore: the man himself to leave the country,
and for an Attorney General to state they had ‘reason to believe’
he had or may break the terms of Act.
This all involved a heavy degree of double-speak and misno-
mer. First, contrary to later myth, Chaplin would not be ‘kicked
out’ of America. He would leave voluntarily and then be denied a
re-entry visa until his eligibility under McCarran could be deter-
mined. Yet like Kafka’s Joseph K, it was unclear what crime he
was guilty of, and therefore what this ineligibility actually con-
stituted. For one, the Act itself included instances of potential
repentance. Had Chaplin admitted to being a member of a com-
munist front organisation it is possible that this would have satis-
fied the legal difficulties (his technical ‘crime’ under McCarran
arguably being not registering as a communist sympathiser, not
the alleged sympathies themselves). This would, of course, have
had the not inconsiderable by-product of ruining his career. But
President Truman perhaps put it best in his September 1950 letter
attempting to veto the bill. Under McCarran, a determination of a
246 A citizen of the world

‘communist-front organization’ could be ‘based solely upon “the

extent to which the positions taken or advanced by it from time to
time on matters of policy do not deviate from those” of the com-
munist movement’. As Truman noted, this led to the extraordi-
nary situation whereby ‘an organization which advocates low-cost
housing for sincere humanitarian reasons might be classified as a
communist-front organization because the communists regularly
exploit slum conditions as one of their fifth-column techniques’.7
This was no mere technical point. Included in a 1965 HUAC list
proving Chaplin’s involvement with ‘Communist Front’ organisa-
tions was the ‘un-American’ activity of being a ‘signer of a letter
to President Roosevelt “expressing appreciation of his position
against discrimination and attacks upon Negroes and others”.’8
Edward G. Robinson, as we saw at the end of the previous chap-
ter, was in this general bracket, too – although he took a distinctly
different course to Charlie.
In any event, when Charlie boarded the Queen Elizabeth in
New York on 17 September 1952 to sail to London to promote
Limelight, he was taking a considerable risk. Three months prior
he had made an application for a re-entry permit for his return,
but had received no reply. With Oona wishing the children to be
educated in Europe, Chaplin wrote to D.C. informing the immi-
gration authorities that ‘if they did not wish to give me a re-entry
permit I intended leaving in any case’.9 Eventually, they contacted
him, asking to come by his house and question him. The inquiries
included whether he had been born with ‘a very foreign name’ and
came ‘from Galicia’.10 More difficult to parry was the question
as to whether he had ever committed adultery. ‘Listen,’ Charlie
answered, ‘it you’re looking for a technicality to keep me out of
the country, tell me and I’ll arrange my affairs accordingly.’ Appar-
ently, this was a ‘question on every re-entry permit’, although
Chaplin’s request to look up the definition of ‘adultery’ in the dic-
tionary probably did not inspire the most confidence. Eventually,
he settled on the legalistic reply, ‘not to my knowledge’. Overall,
Chaplin recalled that he ‘should have had my lawyer present’ but
that he had ‘nothing to hide’.11
The day after setting sail a telegram was brought to Charlie’s
attention by Harry Crocker. He waited until Charlie had finished
his lunch with the musicians Adolphe Green and Artur Rubinstein
 A citizen of the world 247

before delivering the bad news. Charlie was to be banned from

re-entering the United States unless he go before ‘an Immigration
Board of Enquiry to answer charges of a political nature and of
moral turpitude’.12 Understandably, he was furious. Chaplin issued
a ‘pompous statement to the effect that I would return and answer
their charges’, but swiftly resolved to liquidate his American assets
as soon as possible. Arriving in London, Charlie found his old gar-
ret at 3 Pownall Terrace empty and ready to be demolished, while
the centre of town was all ‘American gimcracks, lunch counters,
hot-dog stands and milk-bars’. ‘Time,’ he later noted wistfully,
‘marches on.’13 Oona soon flew home to extract from America
what wealth she could from the Chaplin empire, and found that
the FBI had twice interrogated Chaplin’s butler Henry, ‘wanting
to know what kind of man I was, if he knew of any wild parties
with nude girls that had gone on in the house etc’. When the loyal
Henry defended his boss, ‘they began to bully him and asked what
nationality he was and how long he had been in the country, and
demanded to see his passport’.14
Beyond Henry the butler, Charlie’s former political allies swiftly
came under officialdom’s microscope. On 22 October 1952 Max
Eastman was interrogated by the Immigration and Naturaliza-
tion Service. The first questions, predictably enough, concerned
whether Charlie had ever been a member of the Communist Party
or any front organisations. Answering ‘no’, Eastman did, however,
volunteer the information that Charlie had given him $1,000 to
help with his magazine The Liberator – however ‘this act was
prompted more by personal sympathy’, and neither the publica-
tion ‘nor I had any affiliations with any Communist Party’. The
only political remark Chaplin had made during their last meeting
soon after the premiere of Monsieur Verdoux five years earlier
was that, after the treatment of his friend Hanns Eisler, ‘[Charlie]
thought the country was drifting towards fascism.’ Women – and
therefore the issue of ‘moral turpitude’ – was, however, a different
matter. If Charlie had been reticent in their conversations to go
beyond the odd outlandish political comment, Eastman reported
that Chaplin had ‘related to me intimately and apparently with
great candor, the inside story of some of his relations with girls’.
These tales had ‘left me with a distinct impression that while he
is romantic and impressionable and easily swayed by emotions, a
248 A citizen of the world

great deal of the scandal about him is due to efforts to participate

in his fame, or get hold of his money, on the part of girls or moth-
ers’. Gold diggers or not, it seems unlikely that these dalliances
helped Charlie’s case.15
Viewed from the office of Attorney General James McGranery
this heavy-handed approach was all perfectly logical. Within
McGranery’s papers at the Library of Congress, Washington
are contained several letters from prominent sources expressing
unfettered joy at Chaplin’s exclusion. Thomas M. Madden, Dis-
trict Judge in New Jersey, wrote to tell him that ‘if I ever had
a desire to hug a man it was when the news broke about your
actions regarding Charlie Chaplin’.16 Walter Annenberg, the pub-
lisher (of TV Guide) turned American Ambassador to London
(1969–74), wrote to ‘personally congratulate’ McGranery and
noted that ‘[Chaplin] has hardly earned the continued hospital-
ity of this country’.17 Many of the letters endorsing McGranery’s
position emerged from Chaplin’s adopted state of California.18 For
example, a J.K. McDonald, a Drive-In owner in Stockton, told
McGranery that ‘if and when you are masterfully able to keep him
out good and all, your name will be honored by those many loyal
American actors who have long doubted Chaplin’s loyalty’. Such
animosity he claimed on account of personal experience. In ‘about
1933’ Charlie and Paulette Goddard had patronised McDonald’s
previous Los Angeles establishment called None-Such Foods. Pass-
ing by the two in animated discussion at one of his restaurant
tables, ‘I heard Chaplin mention the name: “The United States.”
There was an intermission of perhaps a minute when I did not hear
the intervening remarks, but as I then moved closer behind them,
I heard him distinctly say this (coupled with his usual skeptical
smirk): . . .“They have never learned how to run this country”.’19
For McDonald, this was ‘further proof that Chaplin never did
have any respect for Citizenship in America’.20 All in all, McGra-
nery’s evidence base certainly varied in its quality.
Once Charlie was back in the UK, one kind letter came from his
old friend Winston Churchill – once again back in Downing Street
in his final spell as British Prime Minister. Having watched Lime-
light in his private cinema at Chartwell, he wrote to ‘congratulate
you cordially on this masterpiece which we all watched with min-
gled emotion and amusement’. Noting Charlie’s recent troubles,
 A citizen of the world 249

the Prime Minister stated he was ‘glad you have had such a cordial
welcome home in your hard pressed land’.21 For whatever reason –
arrogance, forgetfulness, or the simple passage of time – Charlie
never bothered to reply. Perhaps he was too embarrassed to tell
Churchill he soon planned to leave England. Believing the Swiss
climate to be more ‘suitable for the children’ than dreary English
rain, the Chaplins soon purchased the Manoir de Ban in the vil-
lage of Corsier, about sixteen miles from Lausanne. It was in the
beautiful scenery and low-tax environment of the Swiss Alps that
Charlie would live out his final days.
The latter factor was probably as important as the former. As
we saw in Chapter 3, Chaplin had always been a reluctant US tax-
payer at best. This no doubt emerged from his general antipathy to
the type of 1920s Republican who had got to spend much of his
contribution to Uncle Sam. With the halcyon days of Roosevelt’s
New Deal receding into memory, by January 1953 the White
House was again in Republican hands in the shape of President
Dwight D. Eisenhower. Exiling Chaplin may or may not have been
good politics, but it was hardly good economics for the United
States. In 1959, Charlie’s fortune was estimated to be in the region
of one hundred million dollars. The previous year his tax contribu-
tion to the Swiss authorities had been just $25,000 – it would have
been about half a million dollars in the US.22
Tax aside, Switzerland was clearly something of a relaxing
change from the turmoil of his final years in America. Writing to
the leftist screenwriter Clifford Odets in September 1953, Charlie
told him ‘what a luxury it is, after living 40 years in that God
forsaken country of yours – it’s like just being out of prison’.
Compared to America, ‘Europe is taking on a new look, both
politically and culturally . . . Living here gives one a perspective
on the body politics of the world and America stands out like a
large ugly boil.’ In Europe, Chaplin could still ‘rub elbows with
illustrious’ people but, most importantly, ‘politically one can
agree to disagree with all of them – so different from the master
minded Americans that want to castrate you for having an opin-
ion that differs from theirs’.23 He would later refer to America as
a ‘police state’, and in April 1953 he announced that he had given
up his residence status in the States.24 It seemed like there would
be no going back.
250 A citizen of the world

Charlie and the Cold War

If the world could not start getting along a little better, it seemed
like there may not be an America he could go back to. As friends
such as Upton Sinclair knew, the prospect of nuclear warfare
haunted Chaplin for decades.25 For Charlie, ‘the scientists are
more irresponsible even than the politicians. They have created
this Frankenstein and placed it in the hands of third rate men.’26
These third-rate men would initially be the Americans, and Chap-
lin never could ‘forgive mankind for [both] the Nazi atrocities and
for the atom bomb’.27 Making such moral equivalence between
the orchestrated planning of the Holocaust and the undoubted
horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki rather typified the type of
comment that often landed Chaplin in trouble. While Chap-
lin ‘did not assume to know the answers to the problems that
threaten peace’, he did ‘know that nations will never solve them
in an atmosphere of hate and suspicion, nor will the threat of
hydrogen bombs solve them’.28
This filtered through to his later cinematic work. In Monsieur
Verdoux (1947), the mass-murdering title character had used his
final courtroom peroration to compare his ‘amateur’ killings with
those achieved through the professionalisation of warfare seen in
recent years. Later, in A King in New York (1957), a recurring
theme would be the evil of using nuclear technology for making
and dropping bombs instead of generating energy for domestic
usage. On the latter film, the Daily Mail reported that ‘Chaplin
the matchless clown’ was ‘fighting a losing battle against Chaplin
the pompous pamphleteer’.29 But, as Charlie noted, ‘if we are to
survive this atomic age, we must have the bigness to criticize the
folly of our ways’.30 It was because of this that Chaplin declared
he was never a Communist, but rather a ‘peace monger’.
In practical terms this meant continuing to encourage détente
between West and East, even when unpopular. In 1956, during a
trip to London (see Figure 9.1), Charlie and Oona were invited to
a party hosted by the Soviet Embassy at Claridge’s Hotel. Seeing
Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev from a distance when guiding
the Chaplins inside, a furtive bell-hop cried, ‘Khrushchev! Charlie
Chaplin!’ At which point Khrushchev and Bulganin turned around,
faces lit up. Through an interpreter pleasantries were exchanged,
 A citizen of the world 251

Figure 9.1 After his exile from America, Charlie returned to his home-
land and re-visited the impoverished sights of his youth. Here he is, pic-
tured with fourth wife Oona, looking over 1950s London. Big Ben and
the Houses of Parliament can be seen in the background.
Courtesy of Bridgeman Images

and the Chaplins were offered some vodka: Charlie ‘thought the
pepper-box had spilled into it, but Oona loved it’. Khrushchev’s
visit had so far proved an astonishing success and Chaplin told
him ‘it had come like a ray of sunshine . . . [and] given hope for
peace to millions throughout the world’. The following evening,
dining at the Savoy, the Chaplins happened to meet the Churchills.
Winston, retired as Prime Minister the previous year, told Charlie
that he too had ‘always got along well with Khrushchev’.31
Just as Khrushchev could bring greater sympathy towards
the Soviet Union among some Western power brokers, Charlie’s
views on capitalism also became tempered. There was the odd
moment of social awkwardness here, as Harry Crocker witnessed
first-hand. In one public speech, Charlie noted ‘the great improve-
ment in England since his previous visit in the 1930s. [Yet] as
252 A citizen of the world

the Tories were now in power, there was a slight rustle in the
room when Charlie spoke of the obvious health of the children
and their dental care.’ Charlie claimed that ‘if socialized medicine
is responsible [for such improvements], there is something to be
said for it!’ Since ‘socialized medicine had been introduced by the
Labour Party’ in the form of Britain’s new National Health Ser-
vice (NHS), Crocker recalled that ‘it was a touchy subject’.32 As
Winston Churchill had previously remarked, however, in British
political terms Charlie was essentially a Labour man. Yet even
during the 1950s he was able to muster positive words for the
now Conservative-run Britain. In 1954, Charlie thought back to
his London trip of 1921 when he

saw the shops and they weren’t filled – a lack of goods and
so forth – and I saw the children, their little pasty faces, and
there was a certain sort of melancholy about the place. It
was after the war . . . But coming back I look at the children
now and they have rosy cheeks and they have confidence and
they are full of vitality and virility, and it is very heartening.
And I feel this in the gait and tempo of the town. I feel there
is a resurgence, something has happened to England. You’ve
suffered and tightened your belt . . . But there has been a
resurgence.33

This was perfectly logical (quite aside from Chaplin’s positive

social connections to previous British Conservatives, such as the
Astors). The era of Chaplin’s exile from America in 1952 until his
death in 1977 would almost precisely mirror the period of Brit-
ain’s ‘post-war consensus’. This would see a period where the two
major British parties would differ on the pace of travel towards
more interventionist government with greater social spending, but
broadly agree on the overall trajectory. As such, even with the
Conservatives in Downing Street, it was easy for Chaplin to drop
in frequent references to ‘my country’ and the ‘gratitude’ he felt
towards the British people for having not abandoned him. After
the turmoil of Washington politics, Westminster certainly seemed
more sedate.
Yet if his homeland’s politics were beginning to converge, global
diplomacy could be a more divisive affair. Having seen his removal
 A citizen of the world 253

from the States and his obvious bitterness towards the country in
the years that followed, the Soviet Union was keen to award the
man several plaudits. In a sense this helped fulfil the prophecy
the American right had previously been making – not only was
Chaplin soft on Russia, it was soft on him, too. In June 1954
Moscow broadcast a lengthy eulogy to Chaplin that decried the
‘dark forces in America who are preparing for a new war’ that
were waged against him. On the other hand, they claimed, ‘All the
champions of peace accepted the undesirable alien as their son.’34
A year earlier the Soviet-sponsored World Council of Peace had
awarded Charlie Chaplin its International Peace Prize. Accept-
ing the prize in a simple ceremony in the garden of his home at
Vevey, Chaplin released a statement proclaiming that ‘the desire
for peace is universal. To promulgate a demand for peace, whether
from east or west, I firmly believe is a step in the right direction.’35
As the French publication Défense de la Paix put it, ‘Chaplin’s
struggle has no other goal than the reconciliation with men and
the world.’36
It took time for this world view to incorporate America, how-
ever. When Jerry Epstein flew into Geneva to see the Chaplins on
20 June 1953 he found Charlie livid at the news that the Ameri-
cans had executed the Rosenbergs the previous day. Convicted of
passing atomic secrets to the Soviets, husband and wife Julius and
Ethel had been sentenced to the electric chair. Epstein recalled that
‘Charlie wept when he talked about it. Then he would explode:
“Those bastards: how could they murder these people?” Whether
the Rosenbergs were guilty or not did not enter into the argument.
It was the humanity of the thing.’37 As to his own exile, late at
night he ranted to Epstein that ‘he wasn’t going to be blackmailed
by fascist gang, or bend down on his knees to anyone when he’d
done nothing wrong’.38 Slowly but surely he began to craft an
artistic answer to his critics – the last time he would attempt to
make a political picture.
The result was 1957’s A King in New York, which saw Chaplin
take various pot shots at America. Certainly, this film incorpo-
rated many jokes that said more about Chaplin’s age than his
political leanings – in one scene Charlie’s King Shahdov is unable
to hold a conversation because of the noise of a nearby band and
reacts in a grumpy manner. The political content of the film was
254 A citizen of the world

even less subtle. For one early reviewer of the film, ‘nearly all
craftsmanship has been thrown away. It’s a raw pamphlet indicting
the American way of life . . . All the bile of Chaplin’s estrangement
from the States gushes out.’39
The plot sees King Shahdov of some non-specific land flee the
bloody coup that is taking place in his own country to seek refuge
in America – ‘one of the minor annoyances of modern life is a revo-
lution’. Along the way Shahdov acquaints himself with 1950s real-
ity television, rock and roll and sensationalist cinema (the coming
attractions Shahdov sees include one entitled ‘Man or Woman?’).
Yet it is Shahdov’s visit to a progressive school where the chil-
dren are encouraged to develop their individuality that really saw
Chaplin lay the politics on thick. There Shahdov encounters a
young boy named Rupert (played by his son Michael). Hearing
that Rupert is reading Karl Marx, Shahdov asks him, ‘Are you a
communist?’ ‘Do I have to be a communist to read Karl Marx?’
says the indignant boy. ‘That’s a valid answer,’ replies the King.
Rupert then goes on to launch something of a Chaplinesque mani-
festo, ‘I dislike all forms of government . . . leadership and govern-
ment is political power and political power is an official form of
antagonising the people.’ It was not all the ‘bile’ the critical press
asserted, but it could be something of a bore.
Later it transpires that Rupert’s parents are to be hauled before
the House Un-American Activities Committee as potential com-
munists. Shahdov himself faces the same accusation, although
forwards the line that ‘royal communist? The expression is a
reductio ad absurdum.’ The real-life Charlie said much the same
thing about his own wealth when it came to charges of being a
Bolshevik sympathiser. Eventually, Rupert is tricked into indicting
his own parents, with a HUAC interrogator commenting that ‘we
consider Rupert a hero and a real patriot’. As David Robinson
points out, whereas 1921’s The Kid had seen Charlie unite with
a young actor to deliver a tale of physical deprivation, A King in
New York meditates on personal morality, and the consequence of
individual decisions. On one level this is certainly true, but while
The Great Dictator and Monsieur Verdoux had just about been
able to get away (artistically) with their rampant moralising, the
views of 1957 Charlie bled too overtly on to the screen. A King in
New York just was not a good enough film.
 A citizen of the world 255

Later plaudits and a final reconciliation

with America
Other than making one truly terrible film, A Countess of Hong
Kong (1967), Charlie’s final years were full of plaudits, compos-
ing music to overlay some of his silent films and, ultimately, some-
thing of a reconciliation with America. A Countess of Hong Kong
is barely worth re-telling. It had lain in Charlie’s scrapbook of
ideas since the 1930s and had originally been intended for Pau-
lette Goddard. The film concerns a stateless Russian countess
being assisted by an American Ambassador to flee Hong Kong
and attempt to start a new life. A dreadful farce, it marked the
last film Charlie would make (and briefly appear in, as a seasick
steward). Two vignettes remain of some interest, however.
The first concerns Chaplin’s inability to get on with Marlon
Brando, his star. Brando had won his first Oscar in 1954’s The
Waterfront and was only five years away from his most iconic role
as Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather. He was, in short, a big
star who expected to be treated accordingly. Brando and Chaplin
thus clashed as to who should receive greater promotion on mate-
rial advertising the film. Chaplin recalled this argument in the late
1960s: ‘God, in the billing, I never knew there was so much impor-
tance attached to whose name comes first [in the] title or so forth.
I should think that a star that’s already established wouldn’t care
much about that.’40 Yet, this had not always been his position. As
far back as 1919, with the foundation of United Artists, his own
contract had put in writing that ‘the name of Charles Chaplin
shall receive “chief prominence” (and by “chief prominence” is
meant that his name shall be in larger letters than, at least twice
the size of, any other part of the subject matter in which his name
appears)’.41 Charlie Chaplin could be bigger than the film itself,
but evidently not Marlon Brando. In the end, however, Charlie did
eventually cave, and the contract specified that ‘Mr Brando would
receive first star billing above the title in the same size, color and
prominence as the title’.42
Sophia Loren was different. Chaplin clearly adored her, not least
because she was so stunning. In one scene Sophia asked Charlie if
she could be excused from wearing her character’s high heels from
a dancing scene and wear flats instead. A cameraman murmured
256 A citizen of the world

to his director his concerns about a potential break in continu-

ity: what would the audience think if Sophia’s footwear suddenly
changed between shots? Despite being such a perfectionist on set,
Chaplin told him, ‘Don’t worry. When Sophia’s on screen no one
looks at her feet.’ This was followed by a comedic sigh. ‘If only
I were sixty again.’43 Given that Oona would give birth to the
couple’s last child, Christopher, as late as 1962 (when Charlie was
seventy-three) evidently his libido had not yet waned.
Before his final film he worked for many years on what became
the oddly titled My Autobiography. Reviews for this work, when
it finally arrived in 1964, were mixed. In Britain, the left-leaning
New Statesman noted that his tone was ‘less Dickensian than
Chekhovian; reality is seen in a clear and tender light’.44 Bosley
Crowther in The New York Times was less positive, and noted
that the book ‘tells so little about him in certain areas that only
he could reveal . . . It is too bad that Mr Chaplin doesn’t tell us
more about his ideas and experiences as a film-maker and how
he happened to make certain films, especially “Modern Times,”
“The Great Dictator,” and the fatal “Monsieur Verdoux.’’’45 The
New Republic pointed to the style being ‘at its best . . . attractively
simple. Sometimes it is coy, and occasionally it is impressively liter-
ary, presumably to prove his intellectual status.’46 For The Times,
it was ‘fascinating if in certain respects disingenuous’.47
Some, like Charlie’s literary agent Max Reinhardt, urged him ‘to
consider the possibility of publishing the book in more than one
volume’. In March 1958, he noted that ‘the accounts you read us
from your early childhood and your life in Lambeth are absolutely
first-rate and there is obviously enough material there to constitute
the first volume, say up to your arrival in the United States’.48
Reinhardt enlisted the novelist Graham Greene, also a friend of
Charlie’s, to try to persuade his client to re-shape the book’s con-
tent, too. Greene had told Reinhardt that ‘when Chaplin’s feelings
are personally engaged he writes admirably, and the first hundred
and fifty or so pages containing his early life, his mother’s insanity
and his departure from England are excellent’. The problem came
‘when the story shifts from Chaplin himself or concerns rather
unimportant episodes of his life’. For example, ‘on pages 304 and
305 we are interested in Upton Sinclair but we could hardly be less
interested in the rather bad novelist Rupert Hughes’.49 Still, in the
 A citizen of the world 257

end, sales did well enough. In its first three months more than half
a million copies of My Autobiography had been sold.
As the years went by, the honours rolled in. Despite the relatively
mundane nature of all this, Hoover and the FBI continued to moni-
tor such awards, as subsequently revealed in FBI papers.50 In June
1962, Charlie received an honorary Doctor of Letters from the
University of Oxford. Hearing this news Chaplin’s old adversary
former Attorney General James McGranery caustically noted that
although ‘good old Charlie’ may be ‘more of a crowd pleaser than
Dean Rusk [also honoured by Oxford the same day] . . . all of this
should not add up to re-entry for the Little Tramp.’ Even in the
early 1960s ‘an official change of heart toward Charlie might look
like an official softening of our position against flagrantly immoral
conduct and pro-Communist sentiment’.51 Forgiveness took time.
Three years later Charlie was awarded the prestigious Eras-
mus Prize in Amsterdam. When explaining why Charlie had been
awarded this latter accolade, the press release for the event noted
that it was ‘because he has succeeded in wrapping sorrow, disap-
pointment and injustice so poetically in jokes and comical situa-
tions, that a message of warm human compassion has emerged
which has been understood by everyone’. He ‘remained the inter-
preter of the characteristically European hesitation between col-
lectivism and individualism, between the absolute and the rela-
tive, between the preaching of a message and the enjoyment of
laughter’. He was, in short, ‘a great European and world citizen’.52
Many English people wanted to honour one of their most
famous sons, too. In fact, the question of a knighthood for Charlie
Chaplin first arose as early as his promotional tour for City Lights
in 1931. Despite a Labour government then in office, and Chap-
lin spending several hours with the then Prime Minister Ramsay
MacDonald (both as Labour PM, and later upon the formation
of the National Government) in the course of his visit, no knight-
hood was as yet forthcoming for the left-leaning thinker. Given his
various political problems for the next thirty years it rather looked
like Charlie may miss the boat altogether.
In 1956 the British Foreign Office gave serious consideration to
the question again. This resulted in a flurry of paperwork indica-
tive both of attitudes to Chaplin and the wider atmosphere of the
Cold War (certainly pre-American hostility to the Anglo-French
258 A citizen of the world

incursion into the Suez Canal, later to topple Prime Minister

Eden). One civil servant, A.N. McCleary, noted that the Americans
had three specific grievances that would make a knighthood for
Chaplin difficult to countenance. The first was that ‘they regard
him as a Left-Winger and a fellow-traveller’. Although McCleary
noted that Chaplin had always denied being a communist, and

the messages [of support] which he has sent to some of these

organisations may have been in the nature of liberal gestures,
he has done it so consistently over the years that he would
probably have some difficulty in re-entering the U.S. on politi-
cal grounds alone.

Second, there was ‘the grounds of morals’. Since Chaplin ‘has

been married to two 16 year olds’ and ‘his marriage to Paulette
Goddard has been criticised on the grounds that they never went
through a proper marriage ceremony at all’, there was a poten-
tial question mark here, too. Lastly, there was the issue of ‘his
income tax obligation to the U.S.’ On the latter two, McCleary
respectively commented, ‘It is possible that he may be forgiven for
the wild oats he has sown in the past’ and any tax owed to the
Americans ‘does not concern us’. He doubted very much, however,
that the Queen ‘could overlook the moral charges since they are of
concern to the British public [too]’.53
The 1956 claim saw the Foreign Office generally take a balanced
view on Chaplin. Elsewhere in the extensive paper trail debating the
merits of a ‘Sir’ Charles Chaplin, it was noted that ‘the American
Legion and other right wing organisations have at times been almost
hysterical both [in] their opposition to the showing of his films and in
their agitation to have him declared an undesirable alien’. That said,
Chaplin’s refusal to show ‘much sense of gratitude for the material
prosperity which his forty-two years in America bestowed on him’
and his regular associations with the ‘Communist Orbit’ – including
accepting the ‘Communist sponsored World Peace Council [prize] in
June 1954, his dinner with Chou En-lai in Geneva in July 1954 and
meeting with Premier Bulganin in London in April 1956’ – had not
helped his cause.54 Then US Ambassador Sir Roger Makins inter-
vened to note that ‘there was considerable danger of a British award
causing unfavourable comment and even bringing disrepute in the
United States on our honours system’.55 With Chaplin only having
 A citizen of the world 259

left the US in 1952, the 1950s was not a period where the climate had
yet softened sufficiently. The matter was quietly dropped.
In the wake of the more liberal sentiment of the 1960s, how-
ever, a knighthood for Charlie was back on the agenda. If The
Beatles could get an MBE, why not a KBE for Chaplin. In 1969 the
question was again seriously revisited, and was ‘not without sup-
port’ among the honours committee, even if it did not yet gain full
approval. By August 1971 the British view was that ‘an honour
for Mr Chaplin would do no harm to our relations with the US
and could indeed do some good, in liberal circles’. Since ‘neither
his communist affiliation nor his colourful romantic past would
be seen in the same light now as in 1956’, the FCO felt a revisit-
ing of the matter was entirely possible. One official was, however,
keen to stress that ‘we must rely on Washington’s comments’,
and ‘if Washington thinks otherwise, I would not venture to dis-
agree’.56 With the general feeling that it was time to let ‘bygones be
bygones’ politically (and morally), the only major questions were
artistic.57 Certainly, the British Ambassador to Washington Lord
Cromer believed ‘a lot of water has flowed under the bridge’.58 Yet
he also questioned ‘whether such tardy recognition of Mr Chap-
lin’s talents displayed so very long ago would really be desirable
now’. ‘As good a claim’, Cromer argued, could be made for the
English-born Bob Hope – whose charity work and promotion of
‘friendship between the US and the UK’ presented a strong case.
In the event, both Hope (1998) and Chaplin (1975) would go on
to become Knights of the Realm.
On 2 December 1974 Chaplin accepted ‘the honor with great
pleasure’ and, after a bout of influenza delayed matters, eventu-
ally travelled to Buckingham Palace to receive it in person.59
The Queen apparently told him ‘that she had seen many of my
films and that they had helped her a great deal’.60 As Principal
Private Secretary to Prime Minister Harold Wilson, it had fallen
to Robert (now Lord) Armstrong to sign the letters conveying the
Prime Minister’s proposal to recommend Charlie for the honour.
In the same set of New Year’s honours another long-time British
exile, the author P.G. Wodehouse, received his own knighthood.
Today, Armstrong recalls that he was ‘glad to sign the letters to
Chaplin and Wodehouse . . . I was one of very many people, in
other countries as well as in the UK, who had greatly enjoyed and
admired their work.’ As to ‘the impediments that had until then
260 A citizen of the world

stood in the way of recognition by means of a public honour, the

time had come when they could and should be set aside, so that
they could receive the public recognition that their achievements
deserved’.61 This seems broadly indicative, and the British hon-
oured their countrymen with palpable relish. The Times called it
a ‘pleasure to hear of their knighthoods, which they both richly
deserve’.62
Britain was usually loyal to her own son, but America had
been a different matter. Yet even here, a couple of years earlier,
Charlie had managed to make a form of peace with the nation
that had so shunned him. Although billed as such, this was actu-
ally not the first time he had set foot back on American soil since
boarding the Queen Elizabeth in 1952. In the early 1960s Char-
lie had taken Oona and the children on a global tour through
Bali, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan. Flying back to Europe,
Charlie suddenly recoiled in horror when he saw where the plane
was touching down to refuel: Anchorage, Alaska. As Michael
Chaplin remembered, ‘No sooner had he set foot on the tarmac
than it struck him that Alaska had recently become America’s
forty-ninth state. He was standing on US territory!’ At this point,
almost like one of his films, ‘he did a quick about face and tried
to scuttle back into the aircraft and sweat out the two hours’ wait
inside the cabin’. There was no such luck – Charlie had to go
through customs and immigration to the airport lounge itself. In
the event, ‘the duty officers’ of Anchorage ‘could not have been
nicer’. All the same, Charlie was glad to be back in the air – ‘terri-
fied lest they take away his passport, money, socks and braces’.63
Charlie’s gripe was always with American officialdom and not
the American people. As he remarked in 1962, ‘Some of my best
friends are Americans. I like them . . . There are many admirable
things about America and about their system too. I have no ill
feeling.’64 This was not quite true and, certainly, there was the
odd flash of anger. For one, the assassination of President Ken-
nedy in November 1963 shocked him deeply – as it did so many.
Convinced both the killing of Kennedy and the subsequent murder
of Lee Harvey Oswald had been engineered by ‘haters’, he bitterly
stated, ‘Thank God I am not American.’65 This type of comment
provided fodder for those continuing to monitor his activities –
which still included HUAC and the FBI.
 A citizen of the world 261

In January 1972 J. Edgar Hoover received an anonymous

letter noting that ‘Chaplin is to return to the United States to
receive some kind of award from the American motion picture
industry’. Rather confusingly, given that the American right took
such pleasure at having hounded Charlie out of the country, this
writer noted that ‘this communist bastard turned his back on
this land of ours and took millions of dollars out of this country
when he went to live in Switzerland’. They concluded that ‘as
a red-blooded American, I want you to make every effort to
keep this son-of-a-bitch out of our country’.66 Hoover replied
that this correspondent’s ‘concern . . . is understandable’ and for-
warded the comments on to the Immigration and Naturalization
Service.67
Yet overall policy had already shifted. As Hoover’s angry
correspondent knew, the cinematic community was planning
to invite Chaplin back into the fold. The previous March the
American Ambassador to Switzerland (Davis) had ‘recom-
mended swift waiving of Chaplin’s ineligibility [to enter the
States] to avoid unfavourable publicity for U.S.’68 This was
eventually granted, and at the 44th Academy Awards in April
1972 Charlie received a twelve-minute round of applause prior
to his receiving an honorary award for ‘incalculable effect he
has had in making motion pictures the art form of this cen-
tury’. To some sceptics this ‘honorary Oscar’ merely ‘help[ed]
salve Hollywood’s conscience’.69 But the award presented to
the ‘white haired and frail looking Chaplin’ proved a sweet
moment indeed. ‘Oh, thank you so much,’ he gushed, ‘words
are so feeble and futile. Thank you for the honor of inviting
me here.’70 After all the glad handing and not keen to stay very
long in an America he no longer recognised, Charlie returned
to Switzerland as soon as practicable. Less than a month later,
with Charlie’s triumph fresh in his mind, J. Edgar Hoover died
of a heart attack. For a man whose life had been mired in con-
troversy and who attracted such powerful opponents, Charlie
had gone on to outlive most of his enemies and see the Cold War
thaw. On Christmas Day 1977, with the presents under the tree
and seven of his eight children by Oona around him, the now
elderly Tramp took his last breath. A great twentieth-century
life reached its conclusion.
262 A citizen of the world

Notes
1 Redacted to Hoover, 20 June 1960, FBI/Groucho Marx File [GMF]
Part 1.
2 Renoir to Vogel, 25 March 1953, UCLA/Jean Renoir Papers Box 12
Folder 3.
3 Reading Eagle, 20 December 1992.
4 Truman to House of Representatives, 22 September 1950, Harry
S. Truman Presidential Library, Independence, Missouri [HSTPL]/
Harry S. Truman Papers [TRU].
5 Harry to Bess Truman, 3 June 1950, HSTPL/TRU.
6 Statutes at Large, 81st Congress, 2nd Session, 23 September 1950,
987.
7 Truman to House of Representatives, 22 September 1950, HSTPL/
TRU.
8 Document prepared for HUAC on Chaplin’s Communist Affiliations,
25 January 1965, NADC/HUAC/RG 233 Box 42.
9 Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography (London, 2003), 449.
10 Ibid., 450.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid., 455.
13 Ibid., 457.
14 Ibid., 457–8.
15 Interrogation of Max Eastman, 22 October 1952, LLBI/Max East-
man Papers [MEP] Box 2.
16 Madden to McGranery, 22 September 1952, LOCDC/JMG/Box 79
Folder 1.
17 Annenberg to McGranery, 22 September 1952, LOCDC/JMG Box
79 Folder 1.
18 See also Steckler to McGranery, 22 September 1952, LOCDC/JMG
Box 79 Folder 1.
19 Underlining in original.
20 J.K. MacDonald to McGranery, 20 September 1952, LOC/JMG/Box
79 Folder 1.
21 Churchill to Chaplin, 29 November 1952, CIN/CCA.
22 HUAC clipping, 21 July 1959, NADC/HUAC/RG 233/2/23/1.
23 Chaplin to Odets, 2 September 1953, LLBI/Clifford Odets Papers
[COD] Box 4.
24 Clipped within HUAC, 29 November 1955, NADC/HUAC/RG 233/
Box 42.
25 See Sinclair to Chaplin, 20 October 1964, LLBI/UPS Box 63.
26 The New York Times, 6 June 1962.
27 Los Angeles Times, 20 September 1964.
28 Chaplin statement in Bulletin of the World Council of Peace, June
1954, TCC/Richard Laurence Milton Synge Papers [SYNG]/A.410.
29 Daily Mail, 11 September 1957.
30 1947 Press Conference note within CIN/CCA.
 A citizen of the world 263

31 Chaplin, My Autobiography, 467–9.

32 Harry Crocker’s unpublished memoir, ‘Charlie Chaplin: Man and
Mime’, MHL/HRC, XV–14.
33 BBC Radio Interview, 8 December 1954.
34 Evening Star, 22 June 1954, clipped by NADC/HUAC/RG 233/
Box 42.
35 Chaplin statement in Bulletin of the World Council of Peace, June
1954, TCC/SYNG/A.410.
36 Le discours de Chaplin in Défense de la Paix, July 1954, TCC/
SYNG/A.411.
37 Jerry Epstein, Remembering Charlie: The Story of a Friendship (London,
1988), 106.
38 Ibid., 109.
39 Washington Post, 13 August 1957.
40 Chaplin Interview Transcript, MHL/CCI, 33.f-302.
41 Charles Chaplin’s Contracts, Folder 29, MHL.
42 Marvin Meyer (Brando’s solicitor) to Keith Allinson, 3 September
1965, BFI/Jerome Epstein Papers [JLE] 3/2.
43 Unidentified clipping within UCLA/George Johnson Papers [GRJ]/
Box 56 Folder 5.
44 New Statesman, 2 October 1964.
45 New York Times Book Review, 4 October 1964.
46 New Republic, 3 October 1964.
47 The Times, 28 December 1978.
48 Reinhardt to Chaplin, 21 March 1958, British Library, St Pancras,
London [BL]/Max Reinhardt papers within Add MS.88987/2/15.
49 Reinhardt (quoting Greene) to Chaplin, 29 December 1960, BL/Add
MS.88987/2/15.
50 E.g., 12 July 1962 memorandum FBI/CCF Part 10.
51 McGranery comments in attachment to Byron to McGranery, 18 July
1962, LOCDC/JMG Box 98 Folder 6.
52 Erasmus Prize press release, 24 June 1965, BL/Add MS.88987/2/16.
53 A.N. McCleary note, 1 October 1956, TNA/FCO/57/291.
54 FCO Research Department note, 24 September 1956, TNA/FCO/
57/291.
55 See Morgan note, 11 August 1971, TNA/FCO/57/291.
56 R.A. Vining note, 12 August 1971, TNA/FCO/57/291.
57 As Lord Armstrong recalls to the present author (26 April 2016),
‘Opinions were divided, of course, but I think that most people
thought that [Prime Minister] Wilson’s decision [to recommend
Chaplin for a knighthood] was a reasonable one.’
58 Cromer to Stow, 16 September 1971, TNA/FCO/57/291.
59 Chaplin to J.R. Wright, 2 December 1974, CIN/CCA.
60 The Times, 5 March 1975.
61 Lord Armstrong to the present author, 26 April 2016.
62 The Times, 2 January 1975.
264 A citizen of the world

63 Michael Chaplin, I Couldn’t Smoke the Grass on My Father’s Lawn

(London, 1966), 72.
64 The New York Times, 6 June 1962 via NADC/HUAC/RG233/
Box 42.
65 Baltimore Sun, 13 April 1964 via NADC/HUAC/RG233/Box 42.
66 Name redacted to Hoover, 26 January 1972, FBI/CCF Part 10.
67 Hoover to redacted, 3 February 1972, FBI/CCF Part 10.
68 Swiss embassy to Hoover, 3 August 1971, FBI/CCF Part 10.
69 Montreal Gazette, 27 January 1972.
70 Lodi News-Sentinel, 12 April 1972.
Conclusion

Even in death everyone wanted a piece of Charlie. The obituar-

ies poured in, column inches were unfurled and people generally
sought to lay claim to his legacy. But our conclusion’s first sen-
tence was also true in a very direct and grisly sense. In March
1978, Charlie’s corpse was stolen from its burial site in Corsier,
Geneva, Switzerland, by two motor mechanics. They tried to
pressure Oona into paying a 600,000 Swiss franc ransom for its
return, which she robustly refused. Eventually, the coffin, still
in-tact, was found buried in a cornfield. Although more macabre
than even Monsieur Verdoux may have contemplated, this bizarre
episode remained oddly Chaplinesque in its sheer absurdity.
As the grave-robbers were presumably hatching their plot, they
may well have caught the numerous tributes extended to Charlie
across the globe. For one, Charlie’s old friend Ivor Montagu would
take to the pages of Marxism Today to urge the construction of a
statue in London in honour of the Tramp. As he noted, ‘the little
man really was a giant’, but he also reflected on the controversies
that had passed. For Montagu, Charlie had never ‘sold out’ to
the trappings of stardom: ‘VIPs buzzed round him like flies as
urgent to get into the picture as the tramp was in one of Chap-
lin’s earliest films, Kid Auto Races . . . Could they know that his
main interest in them was that of a zoologist studying animals in
a game reserve?’ Montagu found the final years of reconciliation,
‘the Special Oscar and the “Sir’’’ rather nauseating – a way for the
establishment to get ‘the public to forgive their past behaviour’
towards Charlie. There had been a standard interpretation reached
of Charlie: ‘He was all right once. Poor chap – starting to preach.’
266 Conclusion

Still, as Montagu knew, ‘he was no Communist – for all that he

had kind words to say to a Daily Worker seller he met in the street.
He had no politics. He had no party.’ Charlie’s son Sydney wrote
to Montagu to thank him ‘for sending me your most amusing con-
tribution to that most serious publication MARXISM TODAY’.1
Unsurprisingly, the mainstream press was less fawning. For
the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ‘his private life was controversial.
Criticized as egocentric, Chaplin had as many enemies as he had
friends.’2 Equally, according to the Spokane Daily Chronicle, the
‘bitter estrangement from the United States’ had been engendered
by ‘allegedly dangerous political affiliations’.3 These were both no
doubt accurate. All in all, most of the American press paid a good
deal more attention to Chaplin’s political problems than did that
of his homeland, however. The Times in London played down such
controversies and noted that ‘even his later contretemps with the
American authorities over his flirtations with Marxism and his
staunchly preserved British nationality . . . was essentially resolved
to the complete satisfaction of both sides’. In a slight barb, they
declared that Buster Keaton had been a ‘more subtle and imagina-
tive filmmaker than Chaplin could ever claim to be’, but also noted
that ‘his greatness as a clown and his crucial role in the history
and serious acceptance of the cinema as an art form are certain to
stand the tests of time’.4
It is his politics rather than his art that has concerned us, however,
and certainly Chaplin’s politics evolved over the gamut of that long
life. In the years before the First World War he had undoubtedly
taken on board something of a suspicion of ‘the establishment’.
The war itself then gained him his first major political enemies
from the British right but also lent him a greater appreciation of
the implicit contract and mutual interdependence between govern-
ment and the private sector. As he came to believe more and more
in his own cinematic abilities, the corollary was a fervent belief in
the power of technological innovation and, in short, commercial
entrepreneurialism. Henry Ford could erroneously attack him as a
Jew in disguise, but this did not preclude Chaplin admiring Ford’s
efforts. As a pioneer of a new genre of film splitting comedy and
pathos, and later the man who took on the big film companies
through United Artists, Charlie was a capitalist, no question. As
such, his politics took on board both leftist antipathy to ‘the man’
 Conclusion 267

and right-leaning bug-bears concerning statist bureaucracy. He

flouted the law through both ignoring prohibition and the statu-
tory age of sexual consent. He did not pay his taxes until the threat
of jail or deportation brought him scurrying to the negotiating
table with the IRS. Clearly, his films portrayed a sympathetic figure
from the dispossessed classes. He occasionally murmured about
the Russian revolution, and no doubt admired its adventurism. But
the idea that Chaplin was a communist in the 1920s was frankly
ludicrous. He was either a hypocrite, a businessman or both. He
wanted a Square Deal for the American worker, but not the red
flag flying over the White House.
What changed him from a Teddy Roosevelt to a Franklin Roose-
velt was the Depression and his particularly international per-
spective on it. Just as FDR drew on the best, pro-big-government
brains America had mustered in the Great War to populate his
1930s administrations, so too did Chaplin reconfigure his world
view. Crucially, the Wall Street Crash occurred just as Chaplin’s
art seemed severely under threat from the march of sound. A lurid
divorce case, accusations of tax evasion and now The Jazz Singer
had conspired to rather jolt Charlie’s confidence. If he had lost
his Midas touch, perhaps ‘the business of America’ should not be
‘business itself’. And if a new broom could sweep the Republi-
cans out of office in either Sacramento or Washington – preferably
both – what should come next?
Clearly, Charlie retained a life-long antipathy for an amorphous
‘establishment’ – the type of invisible forces that had condemned
him to the workhouse or separated him from his mother, Han-
nah. But what of a William McAdoo who had been so kind to
him on the Liberty Bonds tour, or an Upton Sinclair whose book
The Jungle had so moved him. What of the British consensus of
seemingly reasonable men – Keynes, Lloyd George, even Oswald
Mosley – who were arguing for greater state intervention? Should
the state step in and apply a jolt to an economy that looked like
collapsing, even if this meant bigger government in the short term?
The world was changing in ways he did not fully understand –
few did – but it was not time to stand on the sidelines. Most
of his programme was no more radical than, for example, the
British Labour Party and, in some senses, he fell victim to being
an Englishman abroad. He never quite ‘got’ America for all
268 Conclusion

the many years he lived there. His political compass and sense of
the Overton Window – the range of politically acceptable options
and how to shift them through reasonable discourse – was always
lost somewhere over the Mid-Atlantic.
Yet for all he was ‘just’ a movie star and occasionally was a little
politically naive, who can say that his solutions of the 1930s were
particularly wrong? Germany was undoubtedly the key problem
facing the global economy and, were extremism to triumph, the
diplomatic scene, too. Sketching out his June 1932 memorandum
on writing-off their war debt took courage from Charlie (par-
ticularly given his past reputation as a wartime ‘shirker’), and no
little brains to diagnose the urgency of the moment. Likewise, the
exploitation of low-paid workers was indeed a massive problem
across the globe – and thus the concept of C.H. Douglas’s Social
Credit Movement to re-capitalise the poor via state-sponsored
transfer payment was hardly a ludicrous notion. And in 1933 and
1934, albeit semi-reluctantly, he did get off the fence to back the
mainstream versions of limited intervention propagated by Upton
Sinclair and Franklin Roosevelt. Chaplin always hated Hitler,
but during the 1930s he likely preferred the capitalist-statism of
Mussolini to the dead hand of Stalin. Like Keynes, Chaplin came
to save capitalism not to bury it and, in this regard, he trod an
interesting artistic path. In 1940 George Orwell wrote of Dick-
ens’s Hard Times that ‘there is not a line in the book that can
properly be called Socialistic; indeed, its tendency if anything is
pro-capitalist, because its whole moral is that capitalists ought to
be kind, not that workers ought to be rebellious’.5 He could well
have written the same about much of Chaplin’s output, and indeed
his personal leanings.
Any political vices, such as they were, may never have caused
such controversy had it not been for the other areas of his life. It
is difficult to defend Chaplin’s private life: he was not someone
who just liked the odd drink or even had the ‘odd’ affair. He was
consistently an autocrat in the studio, a cad in his relationships
and a sometime sexual predator of teenage girls. To do all this, and
then elect to sleep with press baron William Randolph Hearst’s
mistress on the one hand and mock key figures such as film-censor
Will Hays on the other took a staggering degree of disregard for
any consequences. This may well have emanated from a childhood
 Conclusion 269

where predicting the next five minutes due to an absent father and
mentally unstable mother was difficult in the extreme. But it meant
that, in a sense, meeting with various communists such as William Z.
Foster and Ivor Montagu and making the odd pro-Bolshevik
comment was only the tip of an adventurous iceberg. Charlie
lacked both a sense of consequences and a sense of grounding. He
hoarded money and erected walls emotionally – as those who tried
to get close to him, such as Georgia Hale, found out to their cost.
But here comes the twist. Given the shifting diplomatic picture
in the late 1930s, for a brief moment, the window for such gam-
blers and loose cannons swung wide open. Years earlier, when
Charlie Chaplin invited Winston Churchill to the set of City
Lights, the two men were at something of a crossroads. Charlie
was wrestling with the issues vis-à-vis sound already discussed,
but Churchill had just been turfed out of power in Britain (he
had served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1924 to 1929)
and increasingly looked like a political irrelevance. In the years to
come he and Charlie would diverge over their views on Gandhi,
as the two would jovially discuss at Chartwell in 1931, and by
this point Churchill seemed to have made one controversial com-
ment too many to ever bring him back to mainstream prominence.
Ironically, however, it was Hitler who resurrected both Chaplin
and Churchill. And, in this regard, for all the self-regarding histo-
riographical interpretation of a 1930s Gathering Storm that Win-
ston would help entrench, it was Charlie who took the greater
risk in adopting an overtly anti-appeasement stance. For all the
problems that Charlie’s personal anarchism and devil-may-care
attitude may have brought, The Great Dictator was a massive
historical achievement. If 1940 saw much of the world governed
by maverick gamblers – Churchill, Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin –
then Chaplin can certainly be added to that list in cinematic terms.
When Prime Minister Churchill and guests sat down at Chart-
well to watch Chaplin’s satire on 14 December 1940 few may
have dwelt on the long odds of this event occurring just two years
earlier. While Churchill placed what few chips he had on Cham-
berlain’s policy of appeasing Hitler proving a failure, Chaplin had
risked financial disaster, being completely cut off from ‘respectable’
Hollywood, and drawing the further ire of Martin Dies’s HUAC or
the FBI, which already found his personal life and leftist politics
270 Conclusion

suspicious. In a sense the Nazis had made the fight – erroneously

calling Chaplin a Jew and thereby actually going after his brother
Sydney and partner Paulette Goddard. But he could have ducked
the Hitler issue and made, for example, the Napoleon film he had
scripted with John Strachey. But he did not. Ignoring the interven-
tions of the British government, the tenor of his own industry (or
certainly the major studios as defined by Hays’s MPPDA), much
of the American establishment (if not its President) and indeed
the potentially aggressive actions of the Nazi regime itself, he
ploughed ahead with the film regardless. In this regard, history
would utterly vindicate Chaplin.
Having met with both moral triumph and disaster, Charlie
henceforth resolved to treat these imposters the same. In mak-
ing The Great Dictator Charlie had been proven right and those
behind movements such as America First wrong. But they were not
about to let him forget this. Risking a career was all very well, but
where was the satire of Stalin? Temporary allies or not, why was
Chaplin praising the Soviet regime in later years? Why was this
Englishman who refused to take American citizenship pontificat-
ing on the ills of democracy at a time when America was facing
such a cataclysmic struggle? And to some degree – why indeed?
As the arc of what it meant to be ‘an American’ changed, Chap-
lin did not change with it. The pragmatic thing to have done would
have been to have adopted American citizenship, made a few
donations to the war effort and otherwise stayed out of politics
altogether. But Chaplin was no pragmatist. This was his gift and
his curse. When pragmatists were signing the Munich Agreement
or joining America First, he was urging the allies to fight a war that
looked like it may be unwinnable. When pragmatists had told him
to make sound cinema, he had produced two back-to-back classics
in City Lights and Modern Times. He had beaten monumentally
long odds to have risen from his humble circumstances to become
one of the most famous men in the world. What were Martin Dies
or James McGranery against all that?
The issue was that the power possessed by such types was
very concrete – while Chaplin’s political power was charismatic
and essentially ephemeral. He was assuming the risk of political
endeavour without holding the offices to back it up. The accusa-
tion that somehow Chaplin was playing at politics is therefore
 Conclusion 271

unfair. He was taking on board huge questions of importance to

millions – how to conquer unemployment, what to do about Hit-
ler, what the balance between citizen and state should be, among
others – but without the direct power to do much about them.
The odd leftist comment was hardly the end of the world. Indeed,
even J. Edgar Hoover had to sift through reports from agents that
did ‘not believe [Chaplin] to be communistically inclined . . . he
became interested in the Second Front movement and went over-
board in advocating it, all without knowing anything about com-
munism or having any desire to see it in America’.6
When it came to his eventual fall from grace and exile from the
United States, however, Charlie clearly made a rod for his own
back. Praising Stalin’s purges was a ludicrous position for someone
already accused of Bolshevik sympathies to take in wartime America.
Equally, Chaplin’s personal life may well have been his own business
had he stayed the right side of Californian law regarding the age of
consent. The American right may have been pompous, self-regarding
and indulging in a good degree of muck raking, but the point was
that with Charlie they did not have far to look. With Hoover and
McGranery both keeping tabs on Chaplin virtually to the day they
died (in McGranery’s case a good ten years after he left the job from
which he had pursued Charlie), this was not about to be dropped.
As interesting a question, however, and one, given the lack of
actual polling on the politics of Chaplin’s films, which involves
some supposition from the author, is whether Chaplin actually
managed to achieve anything politically. With the great exception
of playing a role – albeit limited – in helping shift American public
opinion on the prospect of entering the Second World War, Chap-
lin’s filmic output could only have a limited effect. After all, to bor-
row from our earlier reference to Edward VIII, the implicit lesson
from Chaplin’s pictures was that ‘something must be done’ about
the poverty he depicted. In a sense this was fine, but ‘what’ exactly
should be ‘done’? What was the actual take-home message for the
average American viewer? It was here that we must begin to leave
Charlie’s films behind and look again at the political realities in
which he dealt, and the concrete solutions – vague or not – that
he advocated. Charlie Chaplin was a man we may well describe as
theatrical, emotional or mercurial, but to these well-worn epitaphs
it is time to add a fourth, for he was equally political.
272 Conclusion

Notes
1 Marxism Today, March 1978 and Sydney Chaplin to Ivor Montagu,
20 March 1978 via BFI/IVM Item 323.
2 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 26 December 1977.
3 Spokane Daily Chronicle, 26 December 1977.
4 The Times, 28 December 1977.
5 Orwell’s work is readily available for free online, including via the
Project Gutenberg site: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.
html#part10 (accessed 7 November 2016).
6 Memorandum for the Director, 24 June 1943, FBI/CCF Part 1.
Select bibliography

Archival collections
NB: Archival collections are listed in full during their first usage
in a note in the main body of this work, and then where necessary
abbreviated using the following acronyms.

Australia
Flinders Institute for Research in the Humanities, Flinders University,
South Australia (FIRTH)
Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA)

France
Chaplin Office, Paris (COP)
Charlie Chaplin press clippings (CCP)

Italy
Cineteca di Bologna (CIN)
Charlie Chaplin Archive (CCA)

Switzerland
Municipal Archives, Montreux (MAM)
Charlie Chaplin press clippings (CCP)
274 Select bibliography

United Kingdom
As well as the privately held papers of John Strachey (PRIV/STCH) this
study utilises:
Bodleian Library, Oxford (BOD)
The Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (SPSL)
British Film Institute, London (BFI)
Jerome Epstein (JLE)
Ivor Montagu (IVM)
British Library, London (BLL)
Max Reinhardt (Add MS.88987)
Cambridge University Library (CUL)
Additional Manuscripts (Add.)
Churchill College, Cambridge (CAC)
Randolph Churchill (RDCH)
Winston Churchill (CHAR)
Imperial War Museum, London
Ministry of Information First World War Official Collection (Q)
London Metropolitan Archives (LMA)
Greater London Council (GLC)
Microfilm related to Lambeth Workhouses (X113)
Minet Library, Lambeth Archives (MLA)
South London Press (FPP3) and other local newspapers
National Archives, Kew, London (TNA)
Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO)
Central Office of Information (INF)
Security Service (KV)
Parliamentary Archives, House of Lords, London (HOL)
William Jowitt (JOW)
People’s History Museum, Manchester (PHM)
Communist Party of Great Britain (CP)
St John’s College, Cambridge (SJC)
Cecil Beaton (BEA)
Trinity College, Cambridge (TCC)
Richard Austen (‘Rab’) Butler (RAB)
Richard Laurence Milton Synge (SYNG)
University of Reading Archive (UOR)
Nancy and Waldorf Astor (AST)
Elinor Glyn (EGN)
University of Birmingham Special Collections (UBSC)
Oswald and Cynthia Mosley (OMN)
 Select bibliography 275

United States of America

Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles
(UCLA)
George Johnson (GRJ)
Jean Renoir (JRN)
Jim Tully (JTL)
Rob Wagner (RBW)
Cornell University, Rare Books and Manuscripts Archives, Ithaca, New
York (CURMA)
Konrad Bercovici vs. Charles S. Chaplin Case (KBC)
Federal Bureau of Investigation, Washington, D.C. (FBI)
Charlie Chaplin file (CCF)
Hanns Eisler file (HEF)
Groucho Marx file (GMF)
Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York (FDRPL)
Franklin D. Roosevelt Official Files (OF)
Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, Independence, Missouri (HSTPL)
Harry S. Truman (TRU)
Hoover Institute, Stanford University, California (HOOV)
Elizabeth Churchill Brown (ECB)
News Research Service (NRS)
George Sokolsky (SOK)
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LOCDC)
James McGranery (JMG)
Lilly Library, Bloomington, Indiana (LLBI)
Clifford Odets (COD)
Upton Sinclair (UPS)
Los Angeles County Superior Court (LACSC)
Lita Grey-Charlie Chaplin Legal Papers (LGLP)
Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Pictures Library, Los
Angeles, California (MHL)
Valeria Belletti (VLB)
Louise Brooks (LBP)
Charlie Chaplin Scrapbooks (CCS)
Charlie Chaplin Interview (CCI)
Harry Crocker (HRC)
Hedda Hopper (HEH)
National Archives, Washington, D.C. (NADC)
House Un-American Activities Committee material (HUAC)
Richard Nixon Presidential Library, Yorba Linda, California (RNPL)
White House Central Files (WHCF)
276 Select bibliography

Sam Houston Research Centre, Liberty, Texas (SHRC)

Martin Dies (DIES)
University of Houston, Texas (HOU)
Julian Huxley (JHX)
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California (USC)
Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger (FEU)
Hanns and Lou Eisler (EIS)
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee
Cornelius Vanderbilt IV
Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut (WES)
Gorham Munson (GMN)

Correspondence
Lord Robert Armstrong (Principal Private Secretary to Prime Ministers
Heath and Wilson) kindly provided thoughts on Chaplin’s 1975 Knight-
hood to the present author.

Published sources
The bible of Chaplin studies remains the biography written by David
Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art (London, 1992). That said, in
the decades since Robinson published his volume (originally in the
mid-1980s) Chaplin’s ‘Life’ and ‘Art’ have seen significant engagement
from historians. Two more recent works that anyone seeking to anal-
yse Chaplin must consult are Kenneth S. Lynn, Charlie Chaplin and
His Times (London, 1998) and Charles J. Maland, Chaplin and Ameri-
can Culture: The Evolution of a Star Image (London, 1989), both of
which consider the man outside the film studio. Elsewhere, Joyce Milton,
Tramp: The Life of Charlie Chaplin (London, 1996) remains a contro-
versial (and mostly negative) account, but a worthwhile read. For those
interested in the intersection of movies and politics generally, Steven J.
Ross, Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American
Politics (Oxford, 2011) is a modern classic.
For Charlie the man, the relevant chapter in Alistair Cooke’s Six Men
(London, 2008 edn) is crucial, although perhaps overly sycophantic. Max
Eastman, Great Companions: Critical Memoirs of Some Famous Friends
(Toronto, 1959) does not pull as many punches. The testimony of Lita
Grey (Jeffrey Vance ed.), Wife of the Life of the Party (London, 1998),
understandably does not cast Chaplin in the best light. Ivor Montagu,
With Eisenstein in Hollywood (Berlin, 1967) gives an interesting narra-
tive of Chaplin and the broader atmosphere of early 1930s Hollywood.
 Select bibliography 277

Meanwhile, Chaplin’s own writings display his political and artistic lean-
ings often enough. Perhaps regrettably, we must be fairly reliant on My
Autobiography (London, 2003) for the early years. It is a good read – but
one wonders about the veracity in some areas (partly due to difficulties of
memory). My Trip Abroad (London, 1922) sees Chaplin dabble in politi-
cal commentary but as something of a starry-eyed observer. By the original
1930s publication of A Comedian Sees the World (Missouri, 2014) (edited
by Lisa Stein Haven), we are dealing with a different, more serious operator.
Finally, this study rests heavily on original archival material, but some
interesting samples of the Chaplin collection have recently been published
in Paul Duncan (ed.), The Charlie Chaplin Archives (London, 2015). This
is an exceptionally well-presented, if pricey, volume.

Other cited published works

Peter Ackroyd, Charlie Chaplin (London, 2014).
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment
(London, 2010).
Peter Bailey, ‘Conspiracies of Meaning: Music-Hall and the Knowingness
of Popular Culture’, Past and Present, 144 (1994), 138–70.
Tino Balio, United Artists, Volume 1, 1919–1950: The Company Built by
the Stars (Wisconsin, 1976).
Michael Ball and David Sunderland, An Economic History of London,
1800–1914 (London, 2001).
Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics and
the Movies (Cambridge, 1996).
Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London, Volume 1
(London, 1902).
Marc Brodie, ‘Free Trade and Cheap Theatre: Sources of Politics for the
Nineteenth-Century London Poor’, Social History, 28 (2003),
346–60.
Louise Brooks, ‘Charlie Chaplin Remembered’, Film Culture, 40 (Spring,
1966), 5–6.
Richard Carr and Bradley W. Hart, The Global 1920s: Politics, Econom-
ics and Society (London, 2016).
Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics
in the Film Community, 1930–1960 (Berkeley, 1983).
Colin Chambers, Here We Stand: Politics, Performers and Performance –
Paul Robeson, Charlie Chaplin and Isadora Duncan (London, 2006).
Charlie Chaplin, My Life in Pictures (London, 1974).
Michael Chaplin, I Couldn’t Smoke the Grass on My Father’s Lawn
(London, 1966).
278 Select bibliography

Christian Delage, Chaplin: Facing History (Paris, 2005).

James Denman and Paul MacDonald, ‘Unemployment Statistics from
1881 to the Present Day’, Labour Market Trends (January 1996),
5–18.
Martin Dies, The Trojan Horse in America (Washington, D.C., 1940).
Thomas Doherty, Hollywood and Hitler 1933–1939 (New York, 2013).
Jerry Epstein, Remembering Charlie: The Story of a Friendship (London,
1988).
Alan Fischler, ‘Dialectics of Social Class in the Gilbert and Sullivan Col-
laboration’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 48/4, The Nine-
teenth Century (Autumn, 2008), 829–37.
Eric L. Flom, Chaplin in the Sound Era: An Analysis of the Seven Talkies
(London, 1997).
Waldo Frank, ‘Will Fascism Come to America?’ Modern Monthly, 8
(1934), 465–6.
Ian Gazeley and Andrew Newell, ‘Poverty in Edwardian Britain’, Eco-
nomic History Review, 64/1 (2011), 52–71
William Gellerman, Martin Dies, (New York, 1944).
Martin Gilbert, The Churchill Documents, Never Surrender, May 1940–
December 1940, Volume 15 (London, 2011).
Alan G. Green, Mary Mackinnon and Chris Minns, ‘Dominion or Repub-
lic? Migrants to North America from the United Kingdom, 1870–
1910’, Economic History Review, 55/4 (2002), 666–96.
James Greenwood, A Night in the Workhouse (London, 1866).
Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War (Cambridge, 2008).
Robert C. Grogin, Natural Enemies: The United States and the Soviet
Union in the Cold War, 1917–1991 (Lexington, 2001).
Georgia Hale, Charlie Chaplin: Intimate Close-Ups (New Jersey, 1995).
Kyp Harness, The Art of Charlie Chaplin: A Film-By-Film Analysis (London,
2007).
Owen Hatherley, The Chaplin Revue: Slapstick, Fordism and the Com-
munist Avant-Garde (London, 2016).
Theodore Huff, Charlie Chaplin: A Biography (London, 1952).
Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question
of Class 1848–1914 (Cambridge, 1990).
Buster Keaton, My Wonderful World of Slapstick (New York, 1960).
Walter Kerr, The Silent Clowns (London, 1975).
Stanley Lebergott, The Measurement and Behaviour of Unemployment
(Washington, D.C., 1957).
Mary McKinnon, ‘Poverty and Policy: The English Poor Law, 1860–1910’,
Journal of Economic History, 46/2 (1986), 500–2.
Adolphe Menjou, It Took Nine Tailors (New York, 1948).
 Select bibliography 279

Libby Murphy, The Art of Survival: France and the Great War Picaresque
(New Haven, CT, 2016).
James L. Neibaur, ‘Chaplin at Essanay: Artist in Transition’, Film Quar-
terly, 54/1 (2000), 23–5.
Max Pemberton, Lord Northcliffe: A Memoir (London, 1922).
David Robinson, Chaplin: The Mirror of Opinion (London, 1983).
Steven J. Ross, Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of
Class in America (Princeton, 1998).
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s
America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933–1939 (New
York, 2006).
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr, The Coming of the New Deal, (Boston,
1958).
Miranda Seymour, Chaplin’s Girl: The Life and Loves of Virginia Cherrill
(London, 2009).
Upton Sinclair, I, Governor, And How I Ended Poverty (Los Angeles,
1934).
Henry M. Stanley, Through the Dark Continent (Dover, 1988).
Kevin Starr, Embattled Dreams: California in War and Peace, 1940–1950
(Oxford, 2003).
Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Working-Class Culture and Working-Class
Politics in London, 1870–1900; Notes on the Remaking of a Work-
ing Class’, Journal of Social History, 7/4 (Summer, 1974),
460–508.
John Strachey, The Coming Struggle for Power (London, 1932).
John Street, ‘Celebrity Politicians: Popular Culture and Political Repre-
sentation’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 6
(2004), 435–52.
J. Lee Thompson, Politicians, the Press and Propaganda: Lord North-
cliffe and the Great War (Kent, OH, 1999).
Parker Tyler, ‘Kafka’s and Chaplin’s “Amerika”’, The Sewanee Review,
58/2 (1950), 299–311.
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bridge, MA, 2013).

Doctoral theses
Suzanne W. Collins, Calling All Stars: Emerging Political Authority and
Cultural Policy in the Propaganda Campaign of World War I (PhD
thesis, New York University, 2008).
Jack D. Meeks, From the Belly of the HUAC: The Red Probes of Holly-
wood, 1947–1952 (PhD thesis, University of Maryland, 2009).
280 Select bibliography

Jack Rundell, The Chaplin Craze: Charlie Chaplin and the Emergence of
Mass-Amusement Culture, (DPhil thesis, University of York, 2014).
Sarah C.J. Street, Financial and Political Aspects of State Intervention in
the British Film Industry, 1925–1939 (DPhil thesis, University of
Oxford, 1985).
Michael R. Weatherburn, Scientific Management at Work: The Bedaux
System, Management Consulting, and Worker Efficiency in British
Industry, 1914–48 (PhD thesis, Imperial College London, 2014).

Other important works

Although not directly cited in this volume, the following works also
deserve due acknowledgment. Kathryn Cramer Brownell’s Show-
biz Politics: Hollywood in American Political Life (Chapel Hill, NC,
2014) provides an excellent sweeping overview of the relationship
between celebrity and the politics of Washington DC. Likewise, Donald
Critchlow’s When Hollywood Was Right: How Movie Stars, Studio
Moguls and Big Business Remade American Politics, (Cambridge, 2013)
takes the story into the Reagan era and beyond. Nahuel Ribke’s A Genre
Approach to Celebrity Politics Global Patterns of Passage from Media to
Politics, (Basingstoke, 2015) takes the story worldwide, from Argentina
to Israel. Doubtless the election in 2016 of a celebrity as President of the
United States will invite further considerations in the years ahead.
Index

Abortion 119, 122 Brooke-Wilkinson, Joseph

Ackroyd, Peter 5, 24, 225 197–198
Adorno, Theodor 11–12 Browder, Earl 170, 173, 233
American Army, The 71, 74–75, Burke, Thomas 15, 32, 92, 97, 144
78–79, 89 Butler, Rab 195–196
American Legion, The 214, 228,
238, 239, 258 Cain, Harry 6, 231, 237
Anti-Semitism 8, 92, 185, 186 Capitalism 3, 13, 18, 59, 61,
Arbuckle, Roscoe ‘Fatty’ 114, 63, 74, 86–108, 156–161,
124 167–171, 181, 205, 238,
Astor, Nancy 10, 17, 94, 96, 251, 268
144, 145, 252 Chaplin, Charles Snr 9, 18–22,
Astor, Waldorf 10, 17, 94, 25, 30, 43, 46
145, 252 Chaplin, Hannah 18–23, 27, 29,
33–38, 41, 43, 44, 113, 140,
Baldwin, Stanley 145, 147 256, 267, 269
Barry, Joan 122, 222–227, Chaplin, Sydney 19, 22, 23, 26,
228, 236 29, 30, 34, 35, 44, 46, 49,
Bercovici, Konrad 179, 184, 62, 64, 68, 78, 98, 104, 119,
188–191, 195 185, 270
Bernard Shaw, George 96, 97, Cherrill, Virginia 116, 139,
135, 144 140, 142
Blumenthal, A.C., 112, 119, 223 China 153, 231
Boer War, The 35–37, 40 Christianity 20, 43, 122, 123–124,
Bolshevik Party (USSR) 89, 91, 194, 215, 228
93, 125, 133, 254, 269, 271 Churchill, Randolph 143, 150, 172
Booth, Charles 25–26, 31, 41, 46 Churchill, Winston 1, 2, 4, 8,
British Army, The 37, 56, 68–72, 10, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 23, 24,
74, 75–76, 79, 89 25, 30, 38, 71, 133, 138, 144,
British Foreign Office 2, 178, 150–151, 168, 172, 184, 185,
195–197, 257 200–1, 204, 210, 248, 251,
Brooks, Louise 112–113, 119 252, 269
282 Index
Circus, The 35, 63, 107, 112, Eisenstein, Sergei 133–137,
115, 140, 162 162–163, 171, 214, 276
City Lights 7, 10, 16, 21, 42, 67, Eisler, Hanns 230–232, 247
81, 108, 116, 117, 132, 133, ‘End Poverty in California
137, 139–143, 148, 157, 158, (E.P.I.C.)’ 7, 164, 165
163, 166, 172, 257, 269, 270 Epstein, Jerry 34, 70, 253
Clawson, Ken 210 Essanay 62–64, 86
Colville, Jock 200
Comedian Sees the World, A 143, Fairbanks, Douglas 77, 78, 81,
180, 183, 277 98, 99, 103, 105, 135
Communism 18, 89, 91, 93, Fascism 4, 8, 164, 172–175, 179,
102, 133–136, 156, 160, 174, 180, 182–183, 188, 190–194,
194, 202, 210–211, 213–217, 216, 247
220–221, 231, 234 Federal Bureau of Investigation,
Conservative Party (UK), The 6, The 3, 111
17, 40, 72, 87, 94, 144–145, Feuchtwanger, Lion 229–230
146, 151, 195, 252 First National Company 62, 66,
Cooke, Alistair 15, 25, 56–57, 78, 86, 98, 99
170, 171, 188, 194, 276 First World War, The 6, 32,
Coolidge, Calvin 7, 128 55–83
Coughlin, Charles 160, 175 Ford, Henry 5, 7, 60, 92, 93, 127,
Crocker, Harry 3, 9, 35, 74, 83, 128, 137, 166, 168, 171, 266
93, 95, 96, 101, 102, 107, Foster, William Z. 125, 269
112, 147, 162, 166, 171, 246, Freud, Sigmund 2, 33
251, 252
Gandhi, Mahatma 132, 133,
Daily Worker, The 7, 65, 88, 156, 150–152, 166, 269
227, 266 Germany 3, 9, 11, 17, 72, 147,
Davies, Marion 112, 113, 119, 148, 149, 160, 178, 183–206,
120 216, 219, 230, 268
Democratic Party (US), The 1, Gish, Lilian 80, 81, 192
128, 129, 161, 163, 165, 181, Glyn, Elinor 95, 97, 105
211, 213, 238 Goddard, Paulette 55, 113, 139,
Dickens, Charles 9, 21, 22, 168, 185, 203, 248, 255, 258,
24–25, 60, 65, 132, 256 270
Dies, Martin 3, 160, 175, 202, Goebbels, Joseph 189, 201
211–217, 221, 235, 269, 270 Goering, Hermann 189, 201
Doherty, Thomas 3, 182, 184 Gold Rush, The 11, 60, 67, 99,
Douglas, Clifford Hugh 7, 101, 105, 106, 113, 116, 119, 170
148, 150, 158–160, 180, 268 Goldwyn, Sam 102, 118, 217,
232
Eastman, Max 7, 88–90, 100–101, Great Dictator, The 2, 3, 4, 8,
147, 161, 164, 167, 247, 276 9, 11, 17, 19, 40, 60, 77, 139,
Eight Lancashire Lads, The 43–44 149, 174, 178, 179, 182, 183,
Einstein, Albert 142, 144, 148, 188, 192–206, 216, 222, 227,
160, 184, 186 229, 254, 256, 269, 270
 Index 283
Greenwood, James 27, 28 Internal Revenue Service 99, 103,
Grey, Lita 79, 80, 89, 105, 107, 104, 267
111, 112, 114–122, 119, 143,
225, 228, 244, 276 Japan 117, 148, 152, 153, 194,
Griffith, D.W. 80, 90, 99 218, 219, 260
Jolson, Al 81, 120, 127, 128, 137
Hale, Georgia 105–107, 113, 139,
224, 269 Karno, Fred 38, 45–49, 64, 86,
Hanwell 26, 29, 30–33, 38 111
Harding, Warren 123 Keaton, Buster 1, 7, 67, 71, 90,
Harris, Mildred 79–83, 115, 91, 101, 112, 124–125, 129,
117, 118 133, 266
Hays, Will H. 123, 124, 125, 192, Kelly, Hetty 42, 45–48, 111, 112,
197, 230, 232, 268, 270 113
‘Hays Code’, The 127, 213 Kennedy, Merna 108, 115, 116,
Hearst, William Randolph 112, 121, 139
113, 119, 120, 124, 125, 129, Keynes, John Maynard 7, 133,
175, 182, 222, 268 146, 148, 149, 150, 267, 268
Hiss, Alger 215, 235, 236 Keystone Film Company, The 50,
Hitler, Adolf 8, 16, 17, 20, 92, 62, 64, 66, 68, 86, 88, 94
128, 148, 149, 161, 198–206, Khrushchev, Nikita 250, 251
217, 220, 222, 231, 268, 269 Kid, The 11, 66, 67, 86, 91, 114,
‘Hollywood Ten’, The 215, 232 115, 116, 147, 254
Hoover, J. Edgar 4, 7, 111, 224, King in New York, A 174, 250,
231, 232, 236, 243, 257, 261, 253, 254
271 Knighthood, Discussion of
Hoover, Herbert 128–129, 153 257–259
Hopkins, Harry 194, 200
Hopper, Hedda 187, 226, 232, Labour Party (UK), The 6, 7,
236 25, 42, 89, 95, 133, 134, 146,
Horkheimer, Max 11–12 151, 172, 180, 205, 252, 257,
House Committee on 267
Un-American Activities Lenin, Vladimir 7, 91, 231
(HUAC) 10, 70, 171, 175, Liberty Bond, The 77–78, 267
211–218, 219, 229, 230–235, Limelight 34, 228, 246
238–239, 246, 254, 260, 269 Lloyd, Harold 101, 156
Huxley, Aldous 186 Lloyd George, David 40, 69, 144,
Huxley, Julian 186, 204 146, 147, 179, 200, 267
Lord, Daniel 124, 126, 127
Idle Class, The 60, 67, 116
Immigrant, The 64–65, 86, 126 MacDonald, Ramsay 6, 144, 146,
Immigration and naturalization 147, 180, 257
service 174, 187, 233 Mann Act 8, 222, 223–224, 244
Income Tax 102, 103, 104, 165, Maland, Charles 3, 168, 226,
258 227, 276
India 151, 152, 172, 173 Marx, Groucho 238
284 Index
Marx, Karl 87, 156, 194, 213, Nixon, Richard M. 210, 211,
231, 254 235, 236
Mayer, Louis B. 82, 128–129, 232 Normand, Mabel 50, 62, 63, 238
McAdoo, William 77, 99, 267 Northcliffe, Lord 71–74, 76
McCarran Act 8, 222, 237, 244, Nuclear warfare 250
245
McCarthy, Joseph 220 Oakie, Jack 182, 202
McGranery, James 232, 236, 248, Odets, Clifford 231, 249
257, 270, 271 Orwell, George 60, 132, 268
Menjou, Adolphe 70, 105, 110,
125 Patman, John 213
Mexico 118, 120, 137, 162, 163 Pemberton, Max 71, 76
Milton, Joyce 89, 104, 190 Pickford, Mary 77, 98, 99, 103,
Modern Times 2, 7, 13, 59, 60, 105, 135, 236
92, 94, 133, 139, 151, 152, Pilgrim, The 126
156–175, 183, 186, 192, 198, Production Code Administration
205, 256, 270 193, 194, 198, 213
Montagu, Ivor 62, 102, 133–137, Purviance, Edna 63, 80, 105, 113,
140, 162, 173, 185, 186, 224, 121, 122, 139
237, 265–266, 269, 276
Monsieur Verdoux 94, 156, 171, Quigley, Martin 124, 126, 127
227–230, 236, 247, 250, 254,
256, 265 Reeves, Alf 50, 74, 115, 135, 167,
Mosley, Cynthia 2, 180 169
Mosley, Oswald 2, 5, 8, 146, 147, Renoir, Jean 243
172, 179, 180, 181, 267 Republican Party (US), The 6,
Motion Picture Producers and 7, 11, 70, 110, 123, 128, 129,
Distributors of America 160, 165, 222, 226, 235, 236,
(MPPDA) 123–126, 192, 269
193, 270 Riesner, Chuck 115
Munich Agreement, The 198, 270 Robinson, David 1, 5, 9, 19, 46,
Murphy, Libby 3, 64 254, 276
Music hall 19, 20, 22, 28, 56, 60, Robinson, Edward G. 238–239,
112 246
Mussolini, Benito 7, 181–184, Roosevelt, Franklin D. 158, 160,
189, 190, 195, 202, 268, 269 163, 164, 170, 171, 173, 181,
Mutual Film Company, The 61, 183, 192, 193, 197, 200, 210,
62, 64, 72, 86 211, 212, 216, 217, 218, 219,
My Autobiography 21, 38, 119, 220, 221, 222, 238, 246, 249,
256, 257, 277 267, 268
Ross, Steven J. 3, 58, 59, 60, 61,
Negri, Pola 113, 121, 147 77, 128, 171, 238, 239
New Deal, The 7, 41, 158,
160, 163, 173, 174, 235, Schenck, Joseph 99, 129
238, 249 Shumyatsky, Boris 167, 169
Nicolson, Harold 196, 204 Scott, Joseph 225
 Index 285
Second World War, The 171, 179, United Artists 66, 90, 98, 99, 100,
181, 191, 196, 201, 218–222, 104, 107, 125, 129, 139, 178,
238, 271 255, 266
Sennett, Mack 50, 62, 63
Shoulder Arms 66, 78–79, 98 Versailles, Treaty of 148, 149,
Sinclair, Upton 1, 3, 7, 15, 39, 178, 184, 189
40, 59, 66, 88, 136, 137, 146, Voorhis, Jerry 235
161–165, 181, 193, 194, 205,
220, 250, 256, 267, 268 Wagner, Rob 7, 68, 88–89,
Social Credit movement 5, 101, 164–165, 227
148, 158–161, 268 Wallace, Henry A. 60, 101, 146,
Socialist Party (US), The 88, 161, 181, 221, 232, 235
238 Wall Street Crash, The 7, 86, 101,
Stalin, Joseph 8, 175, 202, 210, 133, 146, 156, 267
217, 220, 234, 235, 237, 268, War debt 100, 149, 268
269, 270, 271 Warner Brothers, The 11, 12, 138,
Strachey, John 5, 167, 172–175, 194, 197, 216
180, 188, 270 Wells, H.G. 97, 134, 135, 144,
186, 187
Temple, Shirley 218 Woman of Paris, A 44, 60, 103,
Truman, Harry S. 235, 244–246 105, 121, 169, 229
Trumbo, Dalton 222, 232 Workhouses 23, 26–35, 37, 38,
Tully, Jim 90, 97, 100, 116, 136, 148 40–41, 267