In his classic study of silent film comedians, “Comedy’s Greatest Era” (1949),
James Agee suggested that the genius of silent comedy was its ability to go
beyond words, rather than merely to do without them. By finding “a figure of
speech, or rather of vision” for their ideas, he argued, the masters of
silent comedy “discovered beauties of comic motion which are hopelessly
beyond the reach of words” to create “a kind of poem”. “Words can hardly
suggest” the films’ explosive vitality. The silence of silent cinema,
therefore, was not, in Agee’s view, a technological limitation which the
filmmakers cleverly overcame: it was defining, intransigent, transcendent. A
thousand words, evidently, do not equal a picture.
Although Simon Louvish quotes Agee’s essay in Chaplin: The tramp’s odyssey, he
seems to have overlooked this key point. Much of his 400-page book consists
of descriptions of Chaplin’s films – an encyclopedic, heroic, but
fundamentally futile endeavour. The genius of Charlie Chaplin’s films is
inextricable from the poetry and grace of his visual metaphors, metaphors
that are beyond description. But that doesn’t stop Louvish from trying. Film
historians and Chaplin fanatics will find this book a treasure trove of
information; less devoted, or less dogged, readers may find themselves
overwhelmed by description and detail. Louvish is interested less in Chaplin
than in Chaplin’s creation, “Charlie”: “this character, larger than life and
perhaps more real than his creator, deserves a biography of his own”. Except
for the dubious proposition that “Charlie” is “more real” than Chaplin (as
if reality comes in degrees, or Chaplin’s reality is in question), this is
an astute way – some might argue the only way left – to approach one of
twentieth-century culture’s best-known figures, as “the story of a myth, and
how that myth became a part of the twentieth century’s self-perception”. It
is a good question.
In order to answer it, Louvish assumes that “the reader is by now reasonably
familiar with the blow-by-blow accounts of the embattled producer, husband,
and father, or can turn to other accounts for those oft-told details”, and
so he skips them. This assumption creates a false distinction between the
biography and the myth, when of course – as Louvish knows perfectly well –
they overlap. Given the degree to which “Charlie” and “Chaplin” became
indistinguishable in the cultural imagination, it would have made more sense
to recount their separate stories simultaneously, so as to reveal the points
of divergence. But Louvish prefers to offer “the mask before the man”,
rather than the man before the mask; to do so, he piles up social,
theatrical and film history, with a little biography and a great deal of
journalism. The result is an overstocked book, crowded with facts,
quotations and précis, all jostling for attention.
Louvish’s story opens at the end of Chaplin’s long career, with his
unsuccessful film, A King in New York (1957). Thanks to the combined
scandals of his “un-American” politics and his underage bedfellows, Chaplin
had been exiled five years earlier from the country whose most popular art
form he helped to define. Decamping to a villa in Switzerland, he lived out
the next twenty years with his devoted fourth wife, Oona, at his side,
returning to the US in 1972 for what Louvish terms “the great American
recantation”, when Hollywood offered him an honorary Oscar, and the
opportunity for some preening. He died five years later, at the age of
eighty-eight, widely considered cinema’s greatest genius.
As Louvish shows, although the international adoration the Tramp inspired was
gratifying at first, Chaplin came to resent the “mask” he had assumed:
“There are days when I am filled with disgust at the character that
circumstances forced me to create”, he said late in life: “That dreadful
suit of clothes”. This seems less a rejection of the suit itself, than of a
career defined by – or as – a suit of clothes, the lingering horror of a
costume that became both straitjacket and carapace. But as Agee pointed out,
Chaplin’s genius was precisely for finding “inflections”, for ranging across
human nature while remaining within this one, apparently fixed, identity.
Nonetheless, becoming a living legend is, by all accounts, not much fun. Like
Marilyn Monroe after him, Chaplin felt imprisoned by his own creation, as
his audiences refused to let him play anyone else. Unlike Monroe, however,
Chaplin had the wealth and the creative control to make the attempt. After
dozens of shorts and a handful of classic features starring the Tramp,
including The Gold Rush and City Lights, Chaplin set about killing him off,
first turning him into Hitler, in The Great Dictator, and then into Monsieur
Verdoux, the sociopathic serial killer who justifies murdering a string of
wives by means of the atomic bomb. Monsieur Verdoux was greeted with a
mixture of incomprehension and hostility; although it was nominated for best
screenplay of 1947, it lost to that beloved masterpiece, The Bachelor and
the Bobby-Soxer starring Cary Grant and Shirley Temple. Chaplin made only
one more film in Hollywood, the mawkish and self-pitying Limelight, before
the House UnAmerican Activities Committee drove him into exile.
Because Louvish is interested only in the biography of the Tramp (or
“Charlie”, as he confusingly names him), he gives short shrift to Chaplin’s
life outside his sixty-year career. Relying heavily on David Robinson’s
authoritative 1985 biography for his outline of Chaplin’s more or less
Dickensian childhood, Louvish offers a few facts before diving into a
history of music hall. He skims through the emotional and economic
deprivations the young Chaplin survived, touches on his schooling, and in
fewer than thirty pages Chaplin has joined Fred Karno’s troupe. A brief
history of Karno follows (during which Chaplin disappears), and suddenly it
is 1914, and the twenty-five-year-old Chaplin is in Hollywood reminiscing
about Karno and his influence on the Keystone films. A few pages on W. C.
Fields, a bit on the vaudeville role of the Drunk, and we are ready for the
Tramp to be born. This is where Louvish should hit his stride. But too
often, rather than describing the Tramp, Chaplin’s ideas or his relation to
him, Louvish instead describes the Tramp’s films. Many chapters open with
italicized “plot synopses”, before progressing to full plot summaries, one
after the other. A twenty-four-minute short from 1916, The Vagabond, is
described for four pages. The summaries pile up like car crashes in a
Keystone picture. In between come pages-long reprints of articles in
parochial papers and early fanzines such as the New Jersey Evening News and
Motion Picture; instead of photographs, which are in short supply, the book
offers a great many cartoons, which might be of historical interest but are
never analysed. Louvish reprints at length doggerel verses in praise – or
censure – of Chaplin’s growing fame and wealth.
Louvish’s tone veers from the sententious (Limelight is “imbued with
post-Freudian anxieties about the loss of personality, meaning and the
fragility of not only the ego but the id”) to the sentimental (her death
“finally released [Chaplin’s mother] Hannah from her long suffering, and
from her wanderings in her own unknown realm”) to the jarringly colloquial
(“much butt-kicking ensues”; “‘I’ll do anything for a bit of aggro and a
fuck’, seems to be the . . . attitude” of the early Chaplin personas). Most
obtrusively, Louvish dots his narrative with the exclamations of an eager
fan: “Chaplin was not to play a barber until a deleted scene in Sunnyside of
1918 (to be reprised in The Great Dictator of 1940!)” and “The Chaplin craze
was well on its way!”. When we are told that “when Charlie signed with
Essanay for $1,250 a week, Ben Turpin was receiving only $50 a week!” it
would seem that the all-important distinction between Chaplin and his
creation “Charlie” has collapsed in all the excitement.
Buried under the miscellany are plenty of clever insights and occasionally
enlightening analysis. There are also some factual errors: it is surprising
to read that William Holden, not Joseph Cotten, was the “urbane and
soft-spoken” murderer in Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt. That The Circus
(1928) “emerges as Chaplin’s great meditation on the central contradiction
of show business – its economic and social harshness set against the gaiety
it is supposed to arouse” is a nice apprehension. And again: Chaplin
achieved a central significance in the twentieth century’s struggle of the
avant-garde against convention. Uniquely, he had achieved this by mastering
the century’s industrial art form, the cinema, working in a conventional
mode, in the realm of mass commerce. The only other American artist to
achieve this, equally paradoxically, is Walt Disney. But Disney capitulated
to the demands of convention, and embraced the State, while Chaplin remained
implacably free.
But this implacability, the ruthlessness and carelessness that balanced out
Chaplin’s capacity for sweetness and sentiment, are surely a product of the
man, not the mask. In trying to separate the two, Louvish loses sight of the
complex personality pulling the strings. Facing potentially awkward
questions, for example, about Chaplin’s personal life, Louvish is evasive:
“Yet again Chaplin was forced into marriage by his own recklessness and his
penchant for very young women”. But that recklessness was not merely sexual;
it also drove his comedy and his ambition. In marginalizing the
characteristics that enabled Chaplin’s myriad “inflections”, Louvish
condemns himself to repetitive accounts of the “mask before the man”. We
come to understand all too well why Chaplin was so frustrated by the
inflexibility of the mask he had assumed; we, too, are left chafing against
it.
One of the moments that Agee ranked as the greatest of Chaplin’s “inflections”
was the final shot of City Lights, an ending which, as Louvish shrewdly
points out, typifies “Chaplin’s refusal of anything that we today call
closure”. Agee was moved by this ending to uncharacteristic hyperbole,
declaring it “enough to shrivel the heart to see . . . the greatest piece of
acting and the highest moment in movies”. That moment was shared with
Virginia Cherrill, playing the blind girl, and she is the subject of Miranda
Seymour’s new biography, Chaplin’s Girl. It is a cynical title for such an
otherwise sentimental book; according to the index, Chaplin appears in
roughly twenty-five of its 340 pages. Given that Cherrill lived for almost a
century, during which she spent two years working with Chaplin, in a
desultory way, then apparently never spoke to him again, marketing this book
by her association with Chaplin is opportunistic and misleading.
In fact, apart from what she evidently considered the ordeal of making City
Lights, Cherrill had no association with Chaplin; nor does Seymour offer any
evidence that she was ever known as “Chaplin’s girl”. They certainly had no
off-screen relationship as would seem to be implied by the title: according
to Seymour, they didn’t even like each other. Seymour finds this antipathy
“cryptic” and “mysterious” – perhaps because she admits neither Cherrill’s
frivolity nor Chaplin’s drive. (Louvish understandably dismisses Cherrill as
an “untried twenty-year-old society girl”, and doesn’t give her another
thought.) Cherrill never wanted to act; seeking a beautiful girl who could
look vacant and blind, Chaplin spotted her at a boxing match in Hollywood
(they were all the rage). Cherrill was short-sighted and didn’t wear
glasses; Chaplin saw a stunningly beautiful girl peering into the distance
and cast her virtually on the spot, without even a screen test. Cherrill
almost turned him down, but was convinced by friends that rejecting Chaplin
would be madness. Her lack of training, combined with Chaplin’s
perfectionism, meant that City Lights was a difficult production: Cherrill’s
first scene required 342 takes.
Seymour’s primary source is a series of taped conversations made by Cherrill
for an old friend of hers named Teresa, near the end of Cherrill’s long
life. Seymour never met Cherrill but discusses her with Teresa, listens to
the tapes, and comes to feel she knows her subject personally. The result is
an affectionate, readable, but ultimately forgettable account of a life that
appears shallow, in spite of Seymour’s attempts to imbue it with some
gravitas.
Cherrill’s beauty defined her life in every way. She married a wealthy man at
seventeen, left him and went to Hollywood, where she cavorted with the rich
and famous, including Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst, before
marrying husband number two: Cary Grant, for whom Seymour says she carried a
torch for years (the book might more accurately, if less catchily, have been
titled “Cary Grant’s Girl”). She left Grant after less than a year, alleging
abuse, and fled to England, where her beauty and charm rapidly gained her an
entrée to high society. She was pursued by playboys and maharajas, with one
of whom at least she had a long-term serious affair; after several liaisons,
one near-miss with a lawsuit as correspondent in a scandalous divorce, and a
brief stint touring in rep around England – in order, Seymour suggests, to
let the gossip die down – she married the Earl of Grandison in 1937. Her
mettle emerged during the Blitz, which she faced with fortitude and good
humour, and Seymour makes a case that she contributed a good deal to the war
effort, before running off with a Polish airman, husband number four.
Cherrill does emerge from this book as a likeable, well-meaning person – but
Seymour is also labouring hard on her behalf. She insists, for example, that
Cherrill’s loveless and adulterous marriage to Grandison was made to gratify
her mother, and not her own social or material ambitions. Certainly it is
true that Cherrill had the strength of character to leave her wealthy,
privileged life as Lady Grandison when she fell in love with Florian
Martini. She married him at forty and lived the rest of her long life in
modest circumstances in California, the wife of a civil engineer. But
despite calling Martini the love of Cherrill’s life, Seymour covers their
forty-year marriage in an epilogue of twenty-five pages. She is justified,
in narrative terms: what interest Cherrill’s life affords the reader today
derives from gossip: it comes from those she consorted with, the glamour and
glitter of the borrowed finery her beauty enabled.
Also disconcerting is Seymour’s nonchalant lack of familiarity with the
period. She casually admits that she “knew nothing” of Oscar Levant until
she began researching Cherrill, who was involved with Levant for several
years. A few pages later she says euphemistically that she needed to be
“reminded” who Beatrice Lillie was; she misspells Nathanael West and is soon
“astonished [that] the suavely elegant Cary Grant [could] ever have behaved
in such a thuggish manner” as to beat his wife, despite the fact that Dyan
Cannon later divorced him also alleging assault. Finally, Seymour emerges as
curiously uninformed about Chaplin himself, which leads her to another
groundless and specious charge. Complaining about Cherrill’s (admittedly)
dilettantish attitude to the making of City Lights, Chaplin later said, “I’d
know in a minute if she wasn’t there . . . when she’d be searching, or
looking up or just too much or just too soon. Or if she waited a second. I’d
know in a minute”. Despite Chaplin’s genius, and his well-known cinematic
intuition, Seymour, examining this “strange description”, “begin[s] to
wonder if Chaplin had not become obsessed by the young girl he had plucked,
untried from the audience at a sporting event. The level of watchfulness
that he describes seems not simply directorial – it’s manic”. It seems
evident from Seymour’s tale that Chaplin cared far more about his film than
he did about Cherrill, but the biographer of Chaplin’s Girl is unfamiliar
with Chaplin’s famous explanation of his working method as “sheer
perseverance to the point of madness”.
Simon Louvish
CHAPLIN
The tramp’s odyssey 412pp. Faber. £25.
978 0 571 23768 5
Miranda Seymour
CHAPLIN’S GIRL
The life and loves of Virginia Cherrill
369pp. Simon and Schuster. £15.99.
978 1 84737 125 6
Sarah Churchwell is Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Culture
at the University of East Anglia and the author of The Many Lives of Marilyn
Monroe, 2005.
