Picture Play Magazine (Mar-Aug 1926)

88 XKJi'.'; ^•:-»;..(Ba,.J.,.», • %--'Sr-.^.>;;. No other figure is so well known throughout the entire world. I' F Charlie Chaplin carries out his present intention, we shall see the most grotesque fairy story ever pictured on celluloid. For that present intention is to film the true life story of Charles Spencer Chaplin. Of course he may be diverted from this, but the chances are about even that he will do it. It was only by accident that I learned that Charlie is hankering for this unusual effort — the first autobiography in celluloid. If asked about it, he would deny it. For he is highly secretive, arrogant, sensitive, and egotistic. In other words, he is a genius. And it will be months, maybe a year, before he tackles the story. He has a million dollars and a hearty contempt for money, so there is no hurry about this next picture of his. But I can tell the reader something of what it will reveal — if Chaplin ever makes it. Thirty-odd years ago, a dirty, undersized urchin was playing with his kind in a shabby, gray street at Kensington Cross, in London. He slept around the corner in Chester Street. This was the child Charlie Chaplin. In a barber shop where the cockneys came to be shaved, the little fellow got a job as lather boy. Thus he earned his first pennies. And so he grew up to follow in the steps of his ancestors, knockabout performers in the third-rate music halls of the upper bohemian quarter of London. The New World — ah, how many fortunes have been made, how many lowly people have been exalted, in the New World ! Chaplin, the London music-hall performer, got his chance in the movies. A slim chance it was — slapstick comedian with Mack Sennett, who was trying to make comedies on a shoestring, as they say. Chaplin — the Genius A few side lights on this lovable, mysterious, inexplicable character, who stands alone in the world of the screen, as he does in the world of realities. By Don Ryan etches by K. R. Chamberlain But these comedies came to fill a want in the hearts of the American public that nothing else would quite satisfy. And Chaplin was the reason. most of us," writes Gilbert Seldes, "the grotesque effigy dangling from an electric sign or propped against the side of the ticket booth must remain our first memory of Charlie Chaplin. The splay feet, the mustache, the derby hat, the rattan walking stick, composed at once the image which ten years later was to become the universal symbol of laughter. " 'I am Iicrc to-day,' was his legend, and .ii-slr* hke everything else associated with his name, it is faintly ironic and exactly right. The man who, of all men of our time, seems most assured of immortality, chose that particularly transient announcement of his presence, 'I am here to-day,' with its emotional overtone of 'gone to-morrow,' and there is always something in Charlie that slips away." This epitaph by Seldes seems to capture most of the essence Chaplinesque. My own first impressions go even a little further back. The first time I remember to have become conscious of Chaplin as an entity was in 1914. My dancing partner and I had just been closed out in our act — in Cincinnati, Ohio. Numb with despondency, we dragged ourselves into a nickelodeon, as the movies were designated in those days. We saw the Keystone comedy, "Dough and Dynamite." And the pathetically ludicrous adventures of the little comedian, then unnamed— he was just one of a swarm of them — caused us to forget for that day our own pathetically comic case. I remember as a transcendent piece of pantomime, which impressed us, as dancers, because of its absolute clarity and precision, the little fellow with the mustache — as we knew him — juggling doughnuts, tossing them, ringing them on his fingers, flipping them into an oven. ' Recently I sat in the elaborate Hollywood Egyptian Theater, where were assembled the kings and queens of the cinema realm to do honor to "The Gold Rush." Chaplin, elegantly removed in a box. Tom Mix in a white dinner suit, a la Mark Twain. Society women in Paris gowns. A seething mob of excited tourists besieging the entrance, while a suave Babbitt announced tc the world by radio, "Mr. and Mrs. Geblah now entering the Egyptian court!" AndT saw on the screen the same delightful clown of the five-cent show performing the Oceana Roll with two rolls impaled on dinner forks — a burlesque of his own legs and feet in dance — a piece of pantomime, as clean-cut, as unique, as charming as ever. I remember seeing Chaplin on the screen at another time, under circumstances even more in contrast, in a milieu even stranger, more hectic than that of Hollywood. Over the hills, to the northwest, was Jerry speaking to us with the deep gutturals of Big Berthas. In the badly damaged village where we were billeted, the incessant rain muddied the Grand Rue, running in a yellow stream along the gutters, bearing the refuse of stables