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FRED KARNO ON CHAPLIN ^33
meant ; he was seeing men and women touching the depths of poverty.
And soon he knew stark tragedy. His mother's mind became clouded. His father's death only served to hasten matters. The authorities were constrained at last to intervene.
The scene in The Kid in which Jackie Coogan was torn from hi3 foster-father, Charlie, by an official, happened to Charlie, but he was the child and his own mother was the other participant in the reallife scene. To the day of her death in the luxury home in Hollywood which her devoted son provided later, Hannah Harley never knew that her boy was the most famous actor in the world.
Charlie, then, was taken away and thrust into a workhouse orphanage at Hanwell. There he spent perhaps the bitterest and most friendless years of his whole life. Yet this district now boasts the only street in London named after a film star, Chaplin Circus.
School-leaving found him attempting the only means of livelihood he knew. He secured the part of Billy the pageboy in the play, Sherlock Holmes, starring William Gillette and Irene Vanbrugh. That was at the Duke of York's Theatre in 1905, and Charlie was fifteen.
After a few music-hall engagements he joined his brother Sydney in Fred Karno's comedy company. They rehearsed in a hall adjoining the Montpelier public house just off Walworth Road in South London, a hail which later became an electric theatre. Chaplin's talent for pantomime developed amazingly under the tutelage of the robustly comic Karno, who had assembled a school of slapstick comedians among whom the Chaplin brothers, Stan Laurel, Harry Weldon and Will Hay were destined to become widely known. A great deal of fanciful nonsense has been written about Charlie's instantaneous success as a Karno comedian. Here are the facts as Karno told them to me :
" The Chaplin brothers got £3 apiece in those days. Charlie was never my star comic. When he left me he was earning about £15 a week. He always seemed crushed in those days. When I offered him the lead in my sketch Jimmy the Fearless at the Alhambra, Bradford, he was frightened to do it, so I gave it to Stan Laurel instead. He went on tour in America for me two or three times.
"All the film people were after my boys because we used dumb show a lot, which is what silent pictures demanded. He was deaf to them for two years. At last they got him. He was playing in Oil City, Pennsylvania, and they offered him £30 a week. Alf Reeves,