The Little Tramp: As Told to Himself

MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY by Charles Chaplin. 512 pages. Simon & Schuster. $6.95.

The actor was Hollywood's greatest contribution to folklore--the Tramp, symbol of the indomitable little guy preposterously pitted against the tyranny of circumstances and the system. The man was something quite different --notoriously vain, snobbish, difficult to know and to work with. He thumbed his nose at the ancient rule that a prominent man may get away with flamboyant politics or flamboyant sex, but never both. The combination turned a large part of the U.S. press and public noisily against Charles Spencer Chaplin, and in a sneering rage, he left the country.

The striking contrasts between these two public images have teased and tormented Chaplin's biographers and the students of his films. Now, at 75, Chaplin is publishing his long-awaited autobiography. Does he answer all the questions? By no means.

Cost of Admission. The book is one of the richest publishing coups of the century, simultaneously released worldwide in eight languages. Publishers had been angling for it for years, without response. In 1957 Max Reinhardt of Britain's Bodley Head press wangled an invitation to meet Chaplin through Novelist Graham Greene. After dinner at Chaplin's secluded mansion in the little Swiss village of Corsier, Chaplin shyly asked his guests if they would like to hear him read aloud some trial passages from a book he was starting to write. "It was a shattering, staggering experience," Reinhardt recalls, "this magnificent actor reading to us about his incredible youth."

The cost of admission turned out to be fabulous too. With the patience of a stone sphinx, Reinhardt returned again and again to Corsier, waited years for Chaplin to confirm that he was indeed to get the world rights, and when agreement was reached, it included a guaranteed minimum royalty reported to be upward of half a million dollars.

Destitute Childhood. What Chaplin has delivered is the expectably professional production, fine-honed and highly polished, with funny moments and some touching ones. Yet many readers will wish they had Reinhardt's opportunity to see the great pantomimist act out the high points, for without Chaplin's visual art, the story he tells is in some ways curiously flat, formal, and unrevealing.

Chaplin's book is most moving when he is describing his childhood. He was born in London in 1889, the second son of an English theatrical couple. His parents soon separated--his mother was forced off the stage by loss of her voice, and his father was often drunk and out of work. Chaplin remembers his mother bending over a sewing machine far into the night in their garret room, sewing the sweatshop blouses that earned her 1 1/2 pence each. He and his older brother Sydney were in and out of London's grim schools for destitute children. Although Charlie first appeared on the stage at the age of five, his life began to improve only at eight when his father got him a job as a dancer with the Eight Lancashire Lads, a troupe of children touring the English provincial circuits.

Birth of the Tramp. When he arrived in Los Angeles at 24, Chaplin was a thoroughly experienced veteran of the theater. On his first day at the studio, Mack Sennett took him aside to explain that "the essence of our comedy is a chase." Chaplin knew better, but for months as he worked under and fought with Sennett's directors, his funniest and most inventive efforts kept winding up on the cutting-room floor.

The birth of the Tramp changed that.

One day Sennett, looking at a hotel-lobby set, remarked that "we need some gags here," then turned to Chaplin. "Put on a comedy makeup. Anything will do." On the way to the wardrobe, Chaplin improvised the tight jacket, baggy pants and big shoes, added a small mustache for age. "I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the makeup made me feel the person he was. By the time I walked onto the stage he was fully born." Within two years Chaplin was making $10,000 a week.

Anecdotes & Omissions. His book is wonderfully revealing of the sources of his art, which developed the Tramp from the foot-in-the-cuspidor antics of the early two-reelers to the intense tragicomic ironies of those two flawed masterpieces, Monsieur Verdoux and Limelight. But it is uneven and uncommunicative about his many loves and his vociferous left-wing politics, supplying instead great heaps of anecdotes about his encounters with famous people from Einstein and Gandhi to Pablo Casals, Chou Enlai, and Khrushchev.

With such stuff included, Chaplin's frequent omissions are puzzling. He never mentions the name of his second wife, Lita Grey,* mother of his two eldest sons. So much is omitted, in fact, that little is left from which to deduce Chaplin's mature feelings and beliefs--beyond his lifelong insistence that he has never been a Communist, and the apparent mellowing of his resentment against the U.S. as he grows old and turns inward to bask in the profound joy of his life with his fourth wife, Oona O'Neill, and their eight children.

*First: Mildred Harris (1918-20). Third: Paulette Goddard (1936-42).

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