Re-Enter Charlie Chaplin, Smiling and Waving

By Stefan Kanfer

HIS entrances and his exits are what linger in the eye's mind. Half a century later, when the plots have disintegrated like old nitrate-film stock, the comings and goings remain indestructible.

Entrance: The Tramp. His mustache, bowler and jacket are all from the Salvation Army of Lilliput. The pants and shoes are Gulliver's discards. The step is shy, tentative, then jaunty. He is going for a walk in the jungle of the city. Titters, Howls and Boffos hang from every bough.

Exit: The girl has fallen for someone else. The Tramp sets off, his back to the camera, his bamboo cane a parenthesis of melancholy. Abruptly, the little shoulders twitch, the leg shakes off tragedy like a cramp. The head snaps to attention. Step, skip, step--the Tramp is restored, off once more on the unimproved road to Better Times.

Charlie Chaplin's off-screen life has been equally crammed with entrances and exits. None has had greater significance than those he will make next week in Los Angeles. There, the white-haired and rather fleshy 82-year-old will cross the stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to accept a special Academy Award for "the incalculable effect he has had in making motion pictures the art form of this century." As the old comedian concludes his valedictory and ambles to the wings, an epoch will fade out. The ambivalent skirmish between Chaplin and the United States can be ended at last.

It began with the first entrance in 1910, when an unknown music-hall comedian found his English routines bombing on the vaudeville circuit. His sentiments were aggravated by failure, yet buoyed by the new ethos. "The American is an optimist with hustling dreams," Chaplin concluded. "Hit the jackpot! Get out from under! Sell out! Get into another racket! Why should I stick to show business? I was not dedicated to art. I began to regain confidence. Whatever happened, I was determined to stay in America."

qed

No other racket was necessary. Chaplin was to enter the pantheon by the stage door. One morning he tried on Fatty Arbuckle's trousers and Chester Conklin's jacket. The rest is legend. From that moment he essayed only one role--but what a role! The low comic became a visual poet; he gave slapstick soul. Comedy derives from the Greek komos--a dance. And indeed, as the Tramp capered about with his unique sleight of foot, he created a choreography of the human condition. Under Chaplin's direction, objects spoke out as never before: bread rolls became ballet slippers, a boot was transformed into a feast, a torn newspaper had a new career as a lace tablecloth. There have been more ambitious silent comedies than Chaplin's--Buster Keaton's The General combined yocks with the verisimilitude of Mathew Brady photographs; Harold Lloyd's and Ben Turpin's movies could wring as many laughs from an audience. But no one ever touched Chaplin's mute grace; no one ever approached the lyricism of his Eternal Immigrant lost in a country that would never be his. No one ever implied a comic past that reached back through civilization to Pan himself.

Let a man rise high in show business--even so stratospheric a celebrity as Chaplin--and there comes an evening of the long knives. For Chaplin it came early and never seemed to lighten. After a series of affairs with leading, supporting, featured, walk-on and crowd-scene actresses, Chaplin took up with the adolescent Lita Grey. A relative of Lita's had news for her paramour: in California, dallying with a minor was statutory rape. Charlie and Lita were married in November 1924. She was his second teen-age bride. Three years later the Chaplins were divorced after loud litigation. The American public booed his on-screen image; annihilation beckoned. Chaplin tried a master tactic. "I married Lita Grey because I loved her," he announced in the sentimental idiom of the silent film. "Like other foolish men, I loved her more when she wronged me, and I'm afraid I still love her." The statement rescued Chaplin's career--until next time.

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L'affaire Chaplin was one of the great silver screen scandals. It helped bolster the movies' infamous Morals Clause. This bit of fine print allowed a studio to fire an employee who caused embarrassment by his private behavior. Hollywood, an arena never deficient in irony, intended the clause to be used in case of sexual indiscretions. Its eventual use was political. In the '40s and '50s, film company lawyers employed it to separate "subversives" from the payroll. One suspect they could not touch was the independently wealthy Chaplin. It was not for want of trying.

Long before the subversive scare, the brilliant assembly-line satire Modern Times (1936) had galled industrialists. When the dehumanized Charlie went crazy--when he stepped from the factory trying to tighten the foreman's nose, fire hydrants, the buttons on women's dresses--big-business executives took the gestures personally. When the Tramp waved a danger signal at a truck driver and was arrested by the police for inciting crowds with a Red flag--well, that was ridiculing authority, wasn't it? Explained Chaplin: "I was only poking fun at the general confusion from which we are all suffering." The businessmen knew better; the Tramp was tramping on the Gross National Product.

Several years later a group of Senators, headed by Isolationist Burton K. Wheeler, weighed The Great Dictator and found it wanton. The mustachioed Adenoid Hynkel, they concluded accurately, was none other than the Chancellor of Germany. The film was one of a number of movies, including Sergeant York and I Married a Nazi, that were under investigation. They were warmongering propaganda, theorized the Senate subcommittee; it was all engineered by the New Deal. With timing characteristic of the Old Right, the subcommittee chose to attack Chaplin in the fall of 1941. Three months later Charlie was again rescued, this time by history.

qed

The resentments were deferred, not dismissed. In the palmy days of Hollywood, a story made the rounds. Actor: "How should I play this scene, Mr. Chaplin?" Reply: "Behind me and to the left." It was more than a critique of the star's egomania; it was also a comment on his politics. From the start, Chaplin was a fan of sentimental collectivism, of revolution seen through a scrim. He needed no Bolshevik primer on poverty. Charlie had risen from the darkest of London slums. His father was a drunk; his mother sewed blouses for 1 1/2 pence per. He and his half brother Sydney had gone the rounds of London's forbidding schools for the destitute. Chaplin's great creation is a waif in the tradition of Pip and Oliver and David Copperfield. Like Dickens, Chaplin never forgot the wink of the pavement and the leer of the gutter. Also like Dickens, he was enchanted with radical politics --at a proper distance. In fact, despite his sponsorship of Soviet-American friendship meetings and loud avowal of Stalinist causes, Chaplin was the kind of political naif who would only fellow-travel in first class.

When the Hollywood Ten were exorcised from the film industry, Chaplin offered his voice to the choir of protest. Two years later, one of the ten, Alvah Bessie, called on Chaplin begging for a writing assignment. How about a movie on Don Quixote, Bessie spitballed, with you as Sancho Panza and Walter Huston as Don? "They'd crucify me," Chaplin told him crisply and offered a farewell handshake. When Bessie morosely withdrew, he found a folded hundred-dollar bill in his palm.

That was about the extent of Chaplin's Red menace. It was enough. By 1952 the sexual scandals had proliferated; he had been fingerprinted and tried for violation of the Mann Act (innocent) and in a paternity suit (guilty). More, the cold war had frozen the country's sense of humor. Congressman John Rankin of Mississippi fulminated against some socially conscious paintings. "I am sure," he said, "that some of them got into the home of Charles Chaplin, the perverted subject of Great Britain who has become notorious for his forcible seduction of white girls." Rankin was correct in one respect, and it was the one that irritated more enlightened legislators: Chaplin had resided in America for more than three decades, but he had never forsaken his British citizenship. Inevitably Chaplin was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee. It was his chance to play David with the Philistines. Instead, he sent a brief wire: i AM NOT A COMMUNIST; NEITHER HAVE I EVER JOINED ANY POLITICAL

PARTY OR ORGANIZATION IN MY LIFE. I AM WHAT YOU CALL A

"PEACE-MONGER." I HOPE THIS WILL NOT OFFEND YOU.

The Government's response was a classic in xenophobia.

In 1952, Chaplin and his fourth wife Oona were in mid-Atlantic when they heard the news. Attorney General James P. McGranery had instructed immigration authorities to detain Chaplin on his return. "If assertions about Mr. Chaplin are true," said McGranery, "he is, in my judgment, an unsavory character . . . charged with making statements that indicate a leering, sneering attitude toward a country whose hospitality has enriched him."

When Falstaff, Shakespeare's greatest comic invention, is barred by Prince Hal, he protests: "Banish plump Jack, and you banish all the world." Banish Charlie Chaplin and you banish at least a part of the world--perhaps the best part. It came as no surprise when Chaplin, perennially adored in Europe, made this exit permanent. The enmity continued without the target. On the West Coast, his new film Limelight was boycotted by theaters, and RKO's Howard Hughes urged others to cancel bookings of the movie. The Saturday Evening Post called Charlie a "Pink Pierrot." Throughout the U.S. the Tramp became a pariah. Still he had his champions who refused to stop smiling merely because Washington was in an inquisitory phase. "Turn the laugh on them, Charlie," beseeched I.F. Stone. "This capital needs nothing so badly as one final well-flung custard pie."

Charlie flung the pie--badly. He called it A King in New York, a satire on a witch-hunting nation whose investigations cause a small boy (played by Charlie's son Michael) to rage: "There's no freedom here!" King Shahdov of Estrovia (Chaplin) quits the U.S. to "sit it out in Europe" until hysteria passes. It was Chaplin's first and only labor of hate, a film entirely without humor. Given this King, Americans winced when the Chaplin autobiography was announced. Would this be the final severance between Chaplin and the country he loved and resented? Instead, the book was a benign evasion. The bitterness was cloaked, the moral aphorisms indistinguishable from the titles in an old Biograph two-reeler. ("Sage or fool, we must all struggle with life.") It remained for the other side to signal its nonbelligerency.

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The signal has been too long in coming. Only now is Hollywood willing to reassess Chaplin's "disloyalty," to recognize that the British citizen paid millions in American taxes, helped found United Artists--one of the few old studios still functioning--and provided the aesthetic foundation for every film comedian since 1920. Conversely, only now is Chaplin willing to admit "great affection for the U.S. The unpleasant things have faded."

The negative of the picture seems obvious. Hollywood scarcely exists any more. To refurbish its image, the town has taken to celebrating its past, to awarding Gary Grant the Oscar he never won, to pretending giants still walk on Vine Street. But a more spacious interpretation is needed. This last great award to the last great clown extends beyond the pavilion. True, a few scraps of dirty snow still remain from the cold war. But the King was right. Although there was more to the cold war than hysteria, the hysteria at least has passed. America of the '70s has become a better region for the artist, a place where the old Tramp might feel free to caper and to rest. This Academy Award is more than workmen's compensation, greater than a statuette-shaped apology. It is a gesture Chaplinesque in implication.

A squint of the eyes and it might even look like an entire nation shaking off its bygone disappointments and its tragic errors, kicking out its legs and setting off once more on that long and hopeful road.

. Stefan Kanfer

-It is Chaplin's second Academy citation. In 1929 he was honored for the "versatility and genius" of The Circus.

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