"The Gold Rush"

Events in a man's life often culminate queerly, as if manipulated for dramatic effect by an unseen director who, with megaphone to lips, soundlessly thunders : "Register! This is the headline scene. Strut! This is the big-act." Such a climax occurred one day last week in the career of an undersized gentleman who was perceived, at dawn, walking up and down the terrace of his villa at Beverly Hills, Calif. A medical man in his employ issued from the house and crossed the grass to the little fellow, making, as he came, expressive gestures. The other's face relaxed. He beamed, took the doctor's arm, crossed to the house with him at a skipping run. In an hour the world knew that a 6 3/4-pound boy had been born to Mrs. Lita G. Chaplain, wife of Charles S. Chaplin, famed cinema clown. The world already knew that, a few hours before, his latest picture, The Gold Rush, had been shown in a Hollywood cinema house.

All the notables for miles around had gathered in the Egyptian Theatre to see Charles S. Chaplin in The Gold Rush-- the picture 9,000 feet long which has taken him two years to make and of which he had remarked: "This is the picture I want to be remembered by, heedless of the fact that his press agent was listening.

On the screen, a shadow flickered--a shadow with feet like boxcars and a smile like the last soliloquy of Hamlet. He was a tenderfoot. The date was the year of Our Lord 1896--a period in which gentlemen were proud to spend several thousand dollars of lousy paper money to dig up a couple of ounces of mica "in the Klondike. ... A blizzard. A straggling company of ragged monte-banks passing through a wintry defile; Chilkoot Pass. Chaplin left behind in the dash for gold, blown to the door of a lonely cabin. Does the hearty Westerner within open his door, warm the tattered stranger with a glass of whiskey? No; he snarls through a crack in the window; Chilly Chaplin reels off in the storm. . . .

The violinists in the Egyptian Theatre played another tune. . . . This is a dance hall. A piano with sinus trouble clangs for the twiddling feet of Big Jim McKay, swashbuckling prospector who picks his teeth and his sweethearts with a Colt 44. The tiny mustachioed orphan of the storm beams innocently over the shoulder of McKay's own dearest. . . . Old stuff about an endearing note which Chaplin receives by mistake. . . . Out to make his pile so that he can wed the Klondike Kitty Kelly . . . . More prospectors*. . . . The big strike; the search for the girl; the scene on board the ocean liner in which the stunted erstwhile prospector, now in purple and fine sable, lounges on the first cabin, his heart aswoon for a vanished barmaid . . . while down in the steerage the girl tosses on her midnight pallet, wishing for her hobo-brummel. . . .The audience in the Egyptian Theatre made comments on the picture. . . .An epic in comedy . . . Gloria Hale, his new leading lady, a most adept young actress . . . Good support by a comedian named Mack Swain . . . . An epic in comedy, written, directed, acted by a man who understands that the cinema is a medium of high art only because it can be used, as can no other medium, to express the illimitable diversity of life.

Charles Spencer Chaplin was born in London in 1889; his mother, part Irish, part Spanish, was playing there in a stock company. His father was a small-time music hall favorite.

Newspaper men have killed his parents in various ways; it is said that the paternal Chaplin died of natural causes and his widow (known to the boards as Lily Harley) went into dressmaking, taught Charles and his brother Sydney to hem flounces; there is still another affecting scene in which Chaplin, a sallow waif in bloomers, is portrayed leading his starved mother to a poorhouse while London gamins revile him for his kindliness. It was owing to this incident, some doters, declare, that his eyes acquired that tragic, haunted cast.

At 13, however, he was taking juvenile parts. A British critic hailed him as a "baby wonder." A year later he was playing with William Gillette in Sherlock Holmes. He got a part in a vaudeville skit, A Night in an English Music Hall, toured the U.S. In 1914 the Keystone Film Corporation enlisted his services for $40 a week.

His first efforts to be funny in celluloid were dismal. Keystone directors feared that he was overpaid, offered to cancel the contract. Chaplin told Roscoe Arbuckle, the now deposed cinema clown, that he needed a pair of shoes. Arbuckle tossed him a pair of his own enormous brogues. "There you are, man," he said. "Perfect fit!" Chaplin put them on, cocked his battered derby over his ear, twisted the ends of his prim mustache. His face was very sad. He attempted a jaunty walk which became, inevitably, a heart-breaking waddle. He put his hand on the seat of his trousers, spun on his heel. Arbuckle told him that he was almost funny. Such was the research that led him to "create a figure that would be a living satire on every human vanity."

In three months, the U. S. raved; in six, England shrieked; in a year his hat, feet, waddle and harrassed, insouciant smirk were familiar to South Sea Islanders who pasted his picture on the walls of their bathhouses; to lamas in Tibet who chucked each other in the ribs at a mention of his name; to bushwackers, coolies, Cossacks, Slavs, Nordics. His salary became $1.000, $2,000 $3,000 a week. One film company after another outbid each other for him; he worked for Essanay, Mutual, First National, United Artists.

So violently did the vulgar clasp him to its unclean bosom that the cultured upper classes reacted to any mention of his name as they would to a bathroom joke--they saw the point, but would not be caught laughing at it. This son of moonlight and custard pie crust was a green pea off the knives of the intelligentsia until statements of his began to appear in the public press to the effect that "Solitude is my only relief. ... I live with abstract thinkers, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Walter Pater. . . . Human contact makes me ill. ... I resolve to retire to some Italian lake with my beloved Shelley, Keats, and violin. ... I am too tragic by nature. ... I don't give a damn about anybody. ..." Critics took him up. On the strength of his avowed penchant for philosophical thought, they decided that he was a genius. H. G. Wells was proud to meet him. George Bernard Shaw gave him a couple of hundred well-chosen words. Meanwhile, Genius Chaplin continued to put one foot in front of the other much as before. He sat down in eggs. He held babies in his lap. His salary became $1,000,000 a year.

The complicated misanthropy which enabled him, his interpreters declared, to love the public and spurn humanity, did not preclude certain trifling investigation of the tenderer emotions. One such investigation--attempted in 1918 with Mildred Harris--ended in a divorce. She charged that he starved her, got drunk, hit hard. To down the scurrile rumor that he had been seared by the red-hot lips of Actress Pola Negri, he last year married (in Mexico) his leading lady, Lita Grey, aged 16.

In these slight ruffles he retained both his composure and his reticence. Grave, deliberate, costly, he has gone on utilizing the genius with which few who deify him as a thinker, apotheosize him as a tragedian, credit him the genius for being funny.

*Chosen for their parts by Chaplin out of carloads of assorted tramps.