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much now was he his own master that early in 1918 he began to build his own studio on La Brea Avenue, where all his subsequent films have been made to date.
At the age of twenty-eight Chaplin was on top of the world, with enough money behind him to scare away the bogey of poverty for ever, with freedom to shape his career according to his own creative impulse, with a loyal and utterly devoted partner in Edna Purviance, and a degree of universal fame and popularity that no one in the history of mankind had ever before achieved.
t@^ Marriage and Divorce
Chaplin's popularity was due in some measure to the time at which his first films appeared. The 1914-18 World War was spreading its ugly tentacles over Europe, and reaching out desperately towards America. Soldiers and civilians alike suffered from warfare on a vaster scale than any known before, waged with more lethal weapons, and already engendering far-reaching consequences. Soldiers and civilians alike were enduring the domestic and economic upheaval that comes with war, the personal and social suffering, the monotony and the agony, the frustration and the sorrow.
Charlie was a godsend. His comedy sent a light to pierce the gloom; his absurd and fantastic misfortunes released the mind from greater misfortunes; his pathos was an outlet for grief. He was able to convulse his audiences with healthy, happy laughter. He was a tonic and a katharsis at a time when both were desperately needed.
More than this, the endearing little tramp was Everyman, and when Shoulder Arms was released at the end of the war, there was not a soldier who did not recognize the truth of this revelation of the boredom and monotony of war, even while he rocked in his seat with the hilarious comedy it contained; there was not a woman present who did not see, in the lonely little soldier to whom no one wrote nor ever sent a parcel, the heart of the desolation she had endured for so long.
The war itself influenced Chaplin's reputation in another and subtler way. It was impossible for him to have achieved such fame so rapidly without acquiring detractors among his envious competitors; and an insidious campaign began in the press suggesting that Chaplin was skulking in Hollywood, enjoying himself, when he should be at the front. When, in 1917, America entered the war, thousands of angry letters were received, from England and the United States, all indignant because he had not joined up, some even threatening him. And at the same time he was wildly denounced in the press. War