TREADING
WATER IN OUR MEDIA OCEAN it is difficult, if not impossible, to
imagine the frenzy that surrounded Charlie Chaplin in his early years,
when movies were all there was, and Chaplin had become, in critic
Gilbert Seldes's words, "the universal symbol for laughter." In 1921,
when he finally came home to London, crowds camped out for two nights
to watch him drive from Waterloo station to the Ritz, and when he
cruised by, they greeted him with more enthusiasm than their heroes
marching home from war.
It
wasn't Chaplin they cheered, of course; it was the Tramp. From his
first pictures for producer Mack Sennett, who didn't credit actors, in a
Los Angeles where the Times didn't take movie ads, the Tramp
was an instant sensation. As Seldes remembers, he leapt to fame as a
splay-foot cardboard cutout hung outside the theaters, beckoning young
and old, first in America, but soon around the world.
Chaplin look-alike contest: J.W. Sandison Collection, Whatcom Museum of History and Art
Once
Charlie found the Tramp, he only played the Tramp. Why not? Who'd have
let him play anything else? This "many sided fellow," as Chaplin put
it, "a tramp, a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always
hopeful of romance and adventure," freed him to explore his complicated
talent, and bound him to his audience. The Tramp touched his
followers in a way only movie stars could when movies were new.
Splashed huge on the screen, he was bigger than they were but they
knew him like a brother. Their modest emotions, projected on the
silver Tramp, expanded into passions deeper, subtler, and seemingly
more important. Chaplin rubbed together greed and generosity, lust and
love, triumph and disappointment, igniting a hotter, brighter
laughter than they'd known before. They loved the Tramp with a
superhuman love.
Sennett
admitted he didn't see much potential in Chaplin when he hired him.
As he wrote, "Charlie revealed most of the trade skills of the
music-hall people. He could fall, trip, stumble, summersault, slap,
and make faces. These were stock in trade items we could use. I did
not see then, and I do not know anyone who claims to have seen then,
the subtleties and the pathos of the small, hard-pressed man in a
dilemma which a few years later were known as the genius marks of
Chaplin's art." In his first film, Making a Living, Chaplin played his music-hall persona, the burlesque dude, in the role of con man and aspiring reporter.
Shoving
the newsboy isn't funny. Chaplin's Tramp is a bum who believes he's an
aristocrat; Chaplin's dude is a bum conning others into believing it.
There's a hint of Tramp charm when he adjusts his clothing, but Chaplin
comes across as vain, mean-spirited, stiff and mannered. We root against
him.
Chaplin
wasn't happy, nor were Sennett or director Henry "Pathé" Lehrman.
Lehrman, Sennett's top man, earned his nickname pretending to come from
France. Sennett hated a picture that "drooled along" and liked Lehrman
because he pushed pace and pushed his bang-bang gags to the edge and
occasionally beyond. His actors, who paid the price for Lehrman's
enthusiasm, called him "Mr. Suicide." In Making a Living the director also played Chaplin's straight-man competitor.
Lehrman
hated Chaplin's meandering rhythms. He hectored him about movie timing.
Chaplin fought back. Sennett backed Lehrman, and suspended Chaplin for a
week "to force him to follow instructions." Chaplin said he was close
to quitting. His drunk act was a vaudeville staple; pictures were canned
comedy. He'd had enough of them.
Then,
on January 6, 1914, three weeks after Chaplin first walked in front of
Lehrman's camera, the Tramp waddled onto the hotel set for Mabel's Strange Predicament.
What
wrought this miraculous transformation? How did Chaplin find such ease
before the camera, such patience riding his instincts? Did he need any
help? Chaplin claimed his costume was all he needed. "The moment I was
dressed," he wrote, 50 years later, "the clothes and the make-up made me
feel the person he was."
While
Chaplin's stage persona was a well-known type, the Tramp was not so
easily labeled. He wasn't faking wealthy, exactly, but he wasn't just
dressed poor, either. "Everything a contradiction," Chaplin said, "the
pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small and the shoes large." He may
have been rich at some time, or he may not. He was outside class, and
outside the standard ethnic types that dominated vaudeville. He was
American, the way anyone could be American, wherever they came from. We
could all be the Tramp, yet he was uniquely himself. The Tramp dressed
not to fit a type but to fill out a personal fantasy: formal on top,
comfortable down below, self-conscious and oblivious at the same time.
Chaplin
wrote that the Tramp came to him whole: "I began to know him, and by
the time I walked on stage he was fully born." Sennett remembered
otherwise: "It was a long time before he abandoned cruelty, venality,
treachery, larceny, and lechery as the main characteristics of the
tramp." Looking at the Tramp's early films, we have to agree with
Sennett. And yet, before the Tramp was pathetic or lovable, he was
wildly popular. His gentle nature let his audience enjoy his vices
without hating itself. He was lecherous but not threatening, venal but
not vicious, treacherous but somehow loyal.
The
contradictions that let the audience enjoy Chaplin's genius were bought
with screen time. The Tramp didn't exactly drool along, but he chewed
his mustache and swung his cane and second-guessed himself, and that
broke Sennett's First Rule of Funny: it stopped the story. How did the
Tramp, a secondary character at that, appear in the first frame of Mabel's Strange Predicament
and then take 30 seconds to sit down? Chaplin claimed he invented the
Tramp alone, but someone had to let him eat up film. Lehrman wouldn't
stand for it. Who freed up Chaplin to be the Tramp? Was it Sennett, who
had just suspended him for such shenanigans?
Was
Sennett even there? He was producing, not directing, and had three
pictures going at the same time. Fifty years later Sennett claimed that
Chester Conklin, who was there, said that when the actors were
laughing at Charlie, "we didn't notice that the Old Man had come down
from the tower and was standing in the rear. All of a sudden we heard
him. 'Chaplin, you do exactly what you're doing now in your next
picture. Remember to do it in that get-up. Otherwise, England is
beckoning.'" The words Sennett puts in Conklin's mouth say exactly what
he'd like us all, himself included, to believe.
Chaplin
remembered a different scenario. In his version, all three pictures
were being cranked on the same stage. Chaplin ambled out in his street
clothes, and he wrote, Sennett was "looking into a hotel lobby, biting
the end of a cigar. 'We need some gags here,' he said, then turned to
me. 'Put on a comedy make-up. Anything will do.'" Chaplin returned as
the Tramp. "The secret of Mack Sennett's success was his enthusiasm. He
was a great audience and laughed genuinely at what he thought funny. He
stood and giggled until his body began to shake." Then Chaplin explained
his character in detail, for 10 minutes or more, "keeping Sennett in
continuous chuckles. 'All right,' he said, 'get on the set and see what
you can do there.'"
Chaplin's
story honors Sennett, perhaps, but it also confirms Chaplin's version
of creating the Tramp whole, as a single stroke of genius. But Chaplin's
version ignores the fact that the character he plays in the picture is
essential to the story, not simply an add-on in the first scene. He
couldn't have just ambled into the story, because there was no story
without him.
Mabel Normand and Mack Sennett
These
two eyewitness accounts, sharpened by novelistic detail (the voice from
behind, the chomped cigar) can't both be true. Sennett's account is
hearsay, so perhaps Chaplin deserves precedence, but if Chaplin's
account were true, wouldn't Sennett have told it himself? Sennett says
he wasn't there until the Tramp showed up. Wouldn't he want to take
credit for ordering Chaplin into the scene? What if they both have it
wrong? How did the volcanic, dictatorial Mack Sennett let pesky,
supercilious (and by all reports, foul-smelling) Chaplin, coming off a
week's suspension for bloody-mindedness, violate his First Rule of
Funny?
Chaplin
hinted at Sennett's doubts when he wrote, "It was a long scene that ran
seventy-five feet. Later Mr. Sennett and Mr. Lehrman debated whether to
let it run its full length, as the average comedy scene rarely ran over
ten." But Lehrman had nothing to do with Mabel's Strange Predicament.
If someone fought Sennett over Chaplin's screen time, it wasn't Mr.
Suicide, and if Sennett was fighting, it wasn't because he wanted more
time for Chaplin, but less.
Mabel Normand on the set, 1919
Only
one person on the Keystone lot could shout down Mack Sennett, and her
name was on the title of the picture, the little lady with the big plume
who walks out on Chaplin. Mabel Normand was Sennett's meal ticket and
his perpetual fiancée. Sennett's Keystone didn't credit actors, because
they might want more money, but Sennett hung Normand's name on her
pictures, because Mabel on a picture brought in crowds. She started as a
Gibson girl in her early teens, pushing Coke. She met Sennett when he
was a failed opera singer making comedies at Biograph for tomb-faced
D.W. Griffith. Sennett took her to Los Angeles, and made her immensely
popular. She made him a fortune.
Normand
was an inventor of the movie star, the first woman allowed to be both
sexy and funny. She was a high diver, a bareback rider, a race car
driver, and a flapper a decade before flappers. Photoplay called her "a
kiss that explodes in a laugh, cherry bonbons in a clown's cap, sharing a
cream puff with your best girl, a slap from a perfumed hand, the sugar
in the Keystone grapefruit." By the time the man who would become the
Tramp walked onto her set, Normand had worked on sets for four years,
and made over a hundred pictures. She was 22.
Shouldn't
we credit the director, the one who decided to shoot 75 feet, for the
success of the Tramp? Keystone didn't have writers in those days, but
did the director of Mabel's Strange Predicament unleash the
Tramp? Doesn't Sergio Leone deserve some credit for Clint Eastwood's Man
With No Name? Doesn't the director dictate tempo and decide who gets
the camera's attention? Isn't the director's job to seek out the hidden
talents of his actors and make sure they end up on screen? Doesn't a
good director jump on a happy accident like the Tramp and ride it with a
prayer of gratitude?
What
Sennett and Chaplin both neglect to mention in their memoirs is that
Mabel Normand was among the very first stars to direct their own films,
and Normand directed Mabel's Strange Predicament. Perhaps in the
intervening decades they forgot. It was certainly in their interest to
forget. Why diminish their own roles in creating the miracle of the
Tramp? Normand remembered it differently; she recalled Sennett's fury
after seeing Chaplin's performance, screaming that Lehrman "had hooked
himself up with a dead one." Normand said she begged him to give Charlie
another chance.
Sennett acknowledges her effect on Chaplin:
After
Mabel saw what Charlie could do in his new costume and tramp character,
she changed her mind about 'that Englisher.' She not only wanted to
work with him but wanted to help him. Charlie knew nothing about screen
acting. He did not know how to behave in front of a camera, or why he
was directed to move left to right in order to match a scene shot the
day before. He was baffled by instructions to react to someone off
camera — someone who would be inserted in the next day's shooting. Mabel
patiently explained these and other simple techniques to Charlie, who
had rebelled when Pathé Lehrman gave him orders.
I
submit that Normand did a good deal more. As director and star (and the
second most powerful person on the Keystone lot) she shaped Mabel's Strange Predicament.
She saw Chaplin's potential and worked to bring it out. Chaplin said he
was surrounded by rough and tumble types, admited he was anxious and
found Normand reassuring. He called it a "unique atmosphere of beauty
and the beast." Isn't it reasonable to believe that Normand, his
director and acting partner, loosened up Charlie? That she gave him
confidence in his own rhythms, and when she saw what she had, she knew
he was the key to making her picture work, and let him run on at
unprecedented length? He was a secondary character, but she built the
picture around him. Normand the star stepped back and let the Tramp take
over. Here she plays with Chaplin in the key scene of the picture, the
predicament scene, when she's locked out of her room wearing only her
pajamas, and the Tramp happens along. Notice how she plays to his tempo,
and gives him the scene:
Normand
was known for a subtle comic style that isn't on display here. She
vamps along, buying time for Chaplin to wring his contradictions, from
surprising to calming her, to seeing they're alone, to eyeballing her,
to coming on to her, to chasing her tail. Sennett characters didn't have
time for such transitions, just as they didn't take 30 seconds to sit
down in a hotel lobby. I submit that Normand the director won Charlie's
confidence and drew this out of him, and that Mabel Normand the star
sacrificed her scene for the good of the picture.
Then
Normand the director protected what she had in the can. In his first
picture, Lehrman cut away from Chaplin whenever he could, so he could
snip out what he saw as dead time, returning only for what he saw as
action. These were the 10-foot scenes Chaplin talked about. Normand
guards Chaplin's rhythms and lets him breathe. Given Sennett's obsession
with pace, it is likely he had words with her during dailies. When
they edited the picture, it is likely he wanted to chop up Chaplin as
Lehrman had done. If so, Normand the director fought him on that, and
made sure Chaplin's pregnant pauses stayed in the picture. Could Sennett
have denied his director, his fiancé, his biggest star?
Unless
you've made a movie, it's to hard to conceive how difficult it is to
read your own picture before an audience sees it. This was as true for Star Wars and Casablanca as it was for Howard the Duck and Ishtar.
In fact, as William Goldman put it, nobody knows. Alan Pakula said he
could write the good review and the bad review, but which is the
audience writing? Once an audience sees the picture, all comes clear.
Once audiences saw Mabel's Strange Predicament and loved their
Tramp, Normand's insights became obvious and her strength of conviction
just good sense. But that doesn't diminish the courage or vision it
required before the fact.
When
Chaplin became the Tramp on Normand's watch, he also learned to be a
movie actor. As Sennett put it, Normand, "the greatest motion-picture
comedienne of any day, was as deft in pantomime as Chaplin was... She
worked in slapstick, but her stage business and her gestures were
subtle, not broad." Normand, the first movie star actress who wasn't
stage trained, hadn't been taught the comic conventions of the theater,
or to project to the back of the house. She had a movie-bred patience
for living in the moment. She was a movie star because while she was
beautiful, she let you see inside, and people liked what they saw.
Movies are supremely intimate, and Normand was consummate at drawing
people in, and holding them. We can watch Chaplin learning Normand's
delicate skills.
Three
months after the Tramp showed up, Sennett was cranking the first
feature-length comedy ever made, and Normand and Chaplin were part of
it, though neither one was above the title. Sennett's old boss was
making his first magnum opus, The Clansman, later called The Birth of a Nation,
and so Sennett wanted to match him. Smart money said a movie audience
couldn't laugh for more than half an hour, and Sennett bought insurance
in the form of Marie Dressler, star of the Broadway hit Tillie's Nightmare.
She would bring in the middle-class audience that was only beginning
to warm to cloth-cap darling Normand. Sennett paid Dressler her stage
rate, $2500 a week, or 10 times what Normand earned.
Dressler
was a skilled comedienne in the pre-Normand pattern of the grotesque
who thought herself a beauty, and she transferred well to pictures.
Later, Chaplin preferred ingénues to comediennes, but in Tillie's Punctured Romance
he plays against two of the best. Watching Chaplin play with
stage-trained Dressler and with movie-star Normand, we can see how
Normand's subtler style toned down Chaplin, and brought him closer to
the mature Tramp. Here, in Tillie, Chaplin doesn't play the Tramp. He's a low-life con man, after Dressler for her money. Sennett directs.
Here are Chaplin and Normand in the
same picture. Normand is Chaplin's moll. They've stolen Dressler's money
and spent it on fancy clothes, and they're watching a movie about a
pair of low-lifes like themselves doing the same thing. Sennett cut up
their close shot into 10-foot bits, but even in bits we can see they
have a comfort with each other that allows for nuance and grounds the
scene. Would Chaplin have found his subtle style without Normand, with
Sennet pushing pace?
Sennett
wrote about what Normand taught Chaplin, but Chaplin is mute on the
subject. In his autobiography Mabel is pretty, Mabel is sweet, Mabel is
reassuring, but Mabel is not an experienced professional who helps
perfect his art. Why is Chaplin so dismissive? In part because she's a
woman but more, I think, because Chaplin needed to portray Normand as
incompetent to justify the shabby way he treated her.
Before Tillie began, only six weeks after the Tramp first walked on stage, just as Mabel's Strange Predicament
came out in the East and the Tramp first captured the public
imagination, Sennett put Chaplin in a picture where he didn't play the
Tramp. Lehrman had absconded to Universal with Ford Sterling, Sennett's
most popular male star, and Sennett decided that Chaplin would play a
Sterling role in his next picture. This had the double virtue of
plugging the hole left by Sterling's departure and putting Chaplin in
the kind of role Sennett could appreciate, because unfortunately for
Chaplin, Sterling played the consummate scenery-chewing villain, a
vaudeville Dutch with the volume jacked to 11. Chaplin despised his style but went along with the gag. Perhaps suspension did its job.
To fans
of the Tramp, a spectacularly bad idea. Oddly, when Chaplin recalls
this picture he omits the fact that he played Ford Sterling. Here is his
account. Chaplin was 24, and had acted in pictures for all of 10 weeks:
Now
I was anxious to write and direct my own comedies, so I talked to
Sennett about it. But he would not hear of it; instead he assigned me to
Mabel Normand who had just started directing her own pictures. This
nettled me, for, charming as Mabel was, I doubted her competence as a
director; so the first day there came the inevitable blow-up ... Mabel
wanted me to stand with a hose and water down the road so the villain's
car would skid over it. [In fact Chaplin was the villain; Mabel drove
the car.] I suggested standing on the hose so that the water can't come
out, and when I look down the nozzle I unconsciously step off the hose
and the water squirts in my face. But she shut me up quickly: 'We have
no time! We have no time! Do what you're told.'
'I'm
sorry, Miss Normand,'" Chaplin says he replied, "'I don't think you are
competent to tell me what to do,'" and he walked off the set.
Sweet
Mabel — at the time she was only twenty [she was 22], pretty and
charming, everybody's favorite, everybody loved her. Now she sat by the
camera bewildered; nobody had ever talked to her so directly before.
Chaplin
said that his solution to their impasse was to strike a deal with
Sennett: he offered to let Normand finish this picture in exchange for
the right to direct his own picture next. Chaplin, a notorious tightwad,
had saved up $1500, and to allay Sennett's very reasonable misgivings
he offered it all to Keystone if his picture was unreleasable. Sennett,
pressured by East Coast reports of Chaplin's instant popularity, took
the deal. The rest, as they say, is history.
As
Chaplin biographer David Robinson points out, the spritz-in-the-eye bit
that Chaplin proposed was the oldest joke in movies, dating back to the
Lumière brothers in 1896. Normand probably wanted something fresher. Not
only had she already directed Chaplin well in Mabel's Strange Predicament, a few weeks later they'd partner up to direct Caught In a Cabaret together.
The
deeper truth is that Chaplin was set on directing his own pictures, and
Sennett wouldn't let him. The God Griffith could have helmed Mabel at the Wheel,
but Chaplin knew he was popular back East, knew this was his chance to
leverage himself into directing. To justify his dirty dealing, he had to
paint Normand as incompetent. As he put it, "this was my work."
In 10
weeks Chaplin had gone from rank amateur to auteur. If he had anyone but
himself to thank, it was probably Mabel Normand. He was lucky she was
directing when he decided to take home his football. According to Mabel,
a couple of extras offered to beat him up, and she talked them out of
it. Had Mr. Suicide been talking to those extras, Chaplin might have had
more painful memories.
Do we
know what really happened? No. But absence of evidence is not evidence
of absence. To understand what happened, we have to play with the facts
until we find the story that fits them together most comfortably. Mabel
Normand is the missing piece that knits together the invention of
Chaplin's Tramp.
We owe
it to Normand to speculate. She didn't have her say decades later like
the others. She was mortally ill by the time sound came to the movies,
and she died soon thereafter. It's easy to forget her brilliance,
because most of her pictures are gone as well. Chaplin's remain.
We need
to honor Normand for larger reasons. We all need genius. It's essential
to know that Great Souls are out there, revealing the potential of the
species, and we want to believe that true genius creates itself, and
forces itself on the world. But we only know those geniuses who have
broken through, and when we look at their stories, we often find that a
random stroke of luck or a passionate believer made all the difference.
If ever there was a movie genius, it was Charlie Chaplin. But anyone who
works in movies will tell you that when it comes to pictures, nobody
does anything alone.
