Richard Carnahan
2008-12-19 16:28:59 UTC
BOOK REVIEW
'Chaplin: A Life'
A psychiatrist puts Charlie Chaplin on the couch.
By Richard Schickel
December 19, 2008
In 1883 a young woman calling herself Lily Harley -- real name Hannah
Hill -- abruptly left her lover and her small-time career as an
English music hall performer to sail for South Africa and to marry a
man she thought was the aristocratic heir to a prospering estate. In
fact, this man, called Sydney Hawkes, was a penniless Cockney con man,
and it is likely that he prostituted Lily. She returned to London and
the theater -- with an illegitimate child and a case of syphilis,
which, typically, did not announce itself for several years. She also
returned to her rejected lover, whose name was Charles Chaplin.
No, not the Charlie Chaplin, but his father, then a rising performer
in the halls. In the not-too-distant future, he would die of acute
alcoholism and, by 1898, the pretty, charming Hannah was admitted to a
hospital and diagnosed as syphilitic. The written record of this
medical judgment has survived to this day, and the record of Hannah's
growing madness marks all of her son's many autobiographical musings
over the years. He, however, never publicly discussed the source of
his mother's condition; in his telling (and in many biographies) it
remains a tragic mystery. And a shaming one.
In a day when we can imagine a star like Chaplin discussing this
shaping fact of his life on "Oprah," this residue of silence and
gentility may strike some of us as strange -- and a few of us as, in
some sense, admirable. In any case, it is important information, first
revealed by the psychiatrist Stephen Weissman in a 1986 academic
article, and it is now a crucial element in his new biography,
"Chaplin: A Life." In his persuasive view, it conditioned Charlie's
private behavior -- he showered as often as a dozen times a day, and
it was his habit to paint his penis with iodine before indulging in
sex, which he did almost as often as he bathed -- and, more important,
it conditioned his art.
Weissman is scarcely the first to observe that the world through which
Chaplin's Little Tramp almost always moved was a version of the down-
and-out London world he inhabited as a de facto orphan. Nor is the
author alone in noting that Chaplin often cast himself as the rescuer
of the innocent, the downtrodden and the disenfranchised (see, most
obviously, "The Kid" and "City Lights"). Weissman is particularly
strong when he traces the autobiographical elements -- in "Limelight,"
Chaplin plays a version of himself and his father, while Claire Bloom
is a version of his mother. The film was made when he was 68, an age
when many of us have come to peace with whatever residual miseries our
childhoods have burdened us.
This book is not a full-scale biography -- David Robinson's long,
masterful and beautifully written "Chaplin: His Life and Art" remains
the standard work on the subject. Weissman, being a psychiatrist,
naturally concentrates on Chaplin the child and the young man. He
essentially ends his account after Chaplin's first, star-making year
at Mack Sennett's raucous studio, where the not-entirely-happy Chaplin
distinguished himself by the delicacy of his playing -- in opposition
to the muscular frenzy of Sennett's collection of cruder clowns.
There's nothing wrong with this strategy, though it eliminates
detailed, critically acute considerations of Chaplin's kinetic genius
(a weighty word I'm using advisedly), which was the source of his
uniqueness and a matter that lies beyond the more quotidian realms of
psychological explanation. I also wish Weissman had at least mentioned
Chaplin's somewhat mysterious relationship with his mother after he
achieved his unprecedented -- and unduplicated -- international
stardom. He was generous with her, eventually bringing her to Los
Angeles and setting her up in a little house where she was
conscientiously nursed. But Chaplin rarely visited her and only rarely
mentioned her to friends and colleagues. All his significant
references to her were symbolic and aesthetic. She provided the
(disguised) soul of the many waifs and gamins in his pictures, but
even after Hannah's death in 1928, she remained an almost
fictionalized figure -- beloved and sentimentalized -- in his account
of his early life, proffered first in passing, then in greater detail
in his autobiography.
Chaplin referred to his early years as Dickensian, and he was not
being melodramatic. He might not have survived it without the
protective ministrations of his half-brother Sydney -- child of
Hannah's South African venture -- who became his life-long best friend
and even better manager. But something happened to Chaplin as his fame
and wealth grew. It is somewhat beyond the purview of Weissman's
lively, attentive and sympathetic book, yet I can't forebear
mentioning it. To be sure, both Chaplin's priapic sexuality and his
Stalinist politics led him eventually to scandal, exile and the
contempt of the lunatic right. Still, I've never been able to escape
the thought that his deepest desire (even in the midst of all that
hubbub) was for the settled comforts of a prosperous bourgeois
gentleman and family man of the old-fashioned, 19th century variety.
Such amiable figures are also, lest we forget, Dickensian.
Amiable is not a word easily applied to Chaplin. But in his Swiss
exile, he completed fathering his huge, yes, Victorian family of eight
children; puttered about with new, not-so-hot, film projects and
refurbishments of his older ones; and wrote his autobiography, which
was wonderful about his childhood, much less so about after he became
famous. Increasingly, his exile seemed a self-imposed and withholding
one. Still, he liked looking at his old films, regarding them
appreciatively, but also it seems to me, almost as the work of someone
else.
When his daughter, Geraldine, showed a gift for and interest in an
acting career, he was dubious. He advised her, she once told me, to
take up a career in nursing -- something steady and useful to the
world. Happily, she refused that idea. Yet that was Charlie in his
final incarnation, no longer the sometimes cruel, but eventually
immortal, anarchist of his youth, but the settled, even occasionally
playful, squire of old age, enjoying his happy -- indeed, revered --
ending.
Schickel wrote and directed the film biography "Charlie: The Life and
Art of Charles Chaplin" and edited "The Essential Chaplin," an
anthology of critical writing about him.
'Chaplin: A Life'
A psychiatrist puts Charlie Chaplin on the couch.
By Richard Schickel
December 19, 2008
In 1883 a young woman calling herself Lily Harley -- real name Hannah
Hill -- abruptly left her lover and her small-time career as an
English music hall performer to sail for South Africa and to marry a
man she thought was the aristocratic heir to a prospering estate. In
fact, this man, called Sydney Hawkes, was a penniless Cockney con man,
and it is likely that he prostituted Lily. She returned to London and
the theater -- with an illegitimate child and a case of syphilis,
which, typically, did not announce itself for several years. She also
returned to her rejected lover, whose name was Charles Chaplin.
No, not the Charlie Chaplin, but his father, then a rising performer
in the halls. In the not-too-distant future, he would die of acute
alcoholism and, by 1898, the pretty, charming Hannah was admitted to a
hospital and diagnosed as syphilitic. The written record of this
medical judgment has survived to this day, and the record of Hannah's
growing madness marks all of her son's many autobiographical musings
over the years. He, however, never publicly discussed the source of
his mother's condition; in his telling (and in many biographies) it
remains a tragic mystery. And a shaming one.
In a day when we can imagine a star like Chaplin discussing this
shaping fact of his life on "Oprah," this residue of silence and
gentility may strike some of us as strange -- and a few of us as, in
some sense, admirable. In any case, it is important information, first
revealed by the psychiatrist Stephen Weissman in a 1986 academic
article, and it is now a crucial element in his new biography,
"Chaplin: A Life." In his persuasive view, it conditioned Charlie's
private behavior -- he showered as often as a dozen times a day, and
it was his habit to paint his penis with iodine before indulging in
sex, which he did almost as often as he bathed -- and, more important,
it conditioned his art.
Weissman is scarcely the first to observe that the world through which
Chaplin's Little Tramp almost always moved was a version of the down-
and-out London world he inhabited as a de facto orphan. Nor is the
author alone in noting that Chaplin often cast himself as the rescuer
of the innocent, the downtrodden and the disenfranchised (see, most
obviously, "The Kid" and "City Lights"). Weissman is particularly
strong when he traces the autobiographical elements -- in "Limelight,"
Chaplin plays a version of himself and his father, while Claire Bloom
is a version of his mother. The film was made when he was 68, an age
when many of us have come to peace with whatever residual miseries our
childhoods have burdened us.
This book is not a full-scale biography -- David Robinson's long,
masterful and beautifully written "Chaplin: His Life and Art" remains
the standard work on the subject. Weissman, being a psychiatrist,
naturally concentrates on Chaplin the child and the young man. He
essentially ends his account after Chaplin's first, star-making year
at Mack Sennett's raucous studio, where the not-entirely-happy Chaplin
distinguished himself by the delicacy of his playing -- in opposition
to the muscular frenzy of Sennett's collection of cruder clowns.
There's nothing wrong with this strategy, though it eliminates
detailed, critically acute considerations of Chaplin's kinetic genius
(a weighty word I'm using advisedly), which was the source of his
uniqueness and a matter that lies beyond the more quotidian realms of
psychological explanation. I also wish Weissman had at least mentioned
Chaplin's somewhat mysterious relationship with his mother after he
achieved his unprecedented -- and unduplicated -- international
stardom. He was generous with her, eventually bringing her to Los
Angeles and setting her up in a little house where she was
conscientiously nursed. But Chaplin rarely visited her and only rarely
mentioned her to friends and colleagues. All his significant
references to her were symbolic and aesthetic. She provided the
(disguised) soul of the many waifs and gamins in his pictures, but
even after Hannah's death in 1928, she remained an almost
fictionalized figure -- beloved and sentimentalized -- in his account
of his early life, proffered first in passing, then in greater detail
in his autobiography.
Chaplin referred to his early years as Dickensian, and he was not
being melodramatic. He might not have survived it without the
protective ministrations of his half-brother Sydney -- child of
Hannah's South African venture -- who became his life-long best friend
and even better manager. But something happened to Chaplin as his fame
and wealth grew. It is somewhat beyond the purview of Weissman's
lively, attentive and sympathetic book, yet I can't forebear
mentioning it. To be sure, both Chaplin's priapic sexuality and his
Stalinist politics led him eventually to scandal, exile and the
contempt of the lunatic right. Still, I've never been able to escape
the thought that his deepest desire (even in the midst of all that
hubbub) was for the settled comforts of a prosperous bourgeois
gentleman and family man of the old-fashioned, 19th century variety.
Such amiable figures are also, lest we forget, Dickensian.
Amiable is not a word easily applied to Chaplin. But in his Swiss
exile, he completed fathering his huge, yes, Victorian family of eight
children; puttered about with new, not-so-hot, film projects and
refurbishments of his older ones; and wrote his autobiography, which
was wonderful about his childhood, much less so about after he became
famous. Increasingly, his exile seemed a self-imposed and withholding
one. Still, he liked looking at his old films, regarding them
appreciatively, but also it seems to me, almost as the work of someone
else.
When his daughter, Geraldine, showed a gift for and interest in an
acting career, he was dubious. He advised her, she once told me, to
take up a career in nursing -- something steady and useful to the
world. Happily, she refused that idea. Yet that was Charlie in his
final incarnation, no longer the sometimes cruel, but eventually
immortal, anarchist of his youth, but the settled, even occasionally
playful, squire of old age, enjoying his happy -- indeed, revered --
ending.
Schickel wrote and directed the film biography "Charlie: The Life and
Art of Charles Chaplin" and edited "The Essential Chaplin," an
anthology of critical writing about him.