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Chaplin in 1964 with wife Oona O’Neill Chaplin and children Josephine, Victoria, Eugene, Jane, Annette and Christopher; the oldest, Geraldine and Michael, are absent. |
The silent suffering of a very talented chap
A new book about Hollywood legend Charlie Chaplin argues that a
traumatic childhood in London may have been the making a comic genius, writes Gerald Isaaman
Chaplin: A Life. By Stephen Weissman.
JR Books, £18.99
ARE we creatures of our environment? Certainly, some might insist, the arrival of new technologies has changed our culture, manipulated and malfunctioned us. That’s why scientists say violent killer computer games give children a lower level of empathy to others.
And one DNA expert is on record as revealing that a jury can be suspicious of her evidence in court when she says it can take weeks to produce results, whereas in TV crime programmes the DNA results are available within minutes. Jurors brought up on the box believe the fantasy of fiction and not the reality of forensic science.
These are thoughts worth pondering when you consider the innovative genius of someone like Charlie Chaplin, who is still making us laugh as the down-trodden baggy tramp of the silent screen whom life kicks to pieces, the sentimental lover forever pushed aside in a harsh society where dire poverty and degradation rule.
Where did all that come from? His own great artistic creativity, an innate ability to see humour in a wicked world, a rare understanding of the frailties of human existence and the cruelty of power?
According to the remarkable Stephen Weissman, an American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, who has explored every nuance of the Chaplin saga, the essence of the comedian’s own tragic childhood in south London provided the brave spark that still keeps us laughing at his antics today.
This is no ordinary showbiz biography filled with tales of Chaplin’s scandalous sex life or his indulgences once he became a millionaire, no dismissive rebuttal of how his left-wing politics ruined his Hollywood career.
Weissman has had his subject under analysis for 20 years, and Chaplin, the Cockney urchin knighted by the Queen, was a complex character but one whose personality was indelibly shaped by his past.
His father, a butcher’s son who became an admired actor, was an awful alcoholic; his adored, impulsive mother, who dreamed of becoming a music hall star, was forced into prostitution after being conned by a man she thought to be an aristocrat.
She lost her voice, and eventually her mind.
Being sent, at the age of seven, to a school for orphans and destitute children, where he was deloused and his head shaved, was the millstone that hung forever round Chaplin’s neck. Yet from that agonising and lonely existence he rose to be celebrated around the world, hardly anyone aware that the laughter he generated came directly from his own suffering.
Indeed, that experience – and his mother’s syphilis – resulted in Chaplin taking as many as 10 showers and baths a day in some strange self-cleaning ritual that baffled many of the beautiful women he took to bed.
Freud first revealed that Chaplin, a supreme mimic who understood the magic of the camera, probably always played himself in his films. The world of comic misfits he created came from the tragicomedy of his own life, their transformation being Chaplin’s unique skill.
His sheer humanity and idealism too is revealed in the Jewish barber mistaken for Hitler in The Great Dictator. His claim that greed poisoned men’s souls and engulfed the world with hate, still resonates around us. No wonder Chaplin was banned in Germany.
Now Weissman undoubtedly earns our admiration as he unravels the Chaplin story with meticulous care. His credibility is given even more kudos by support from Chaplin’s own daughter, Geraldine.
As she declares in her introduction: “This book, always provocative and at times heart-wrenching, is an enlightening read, an important addition to an understanding of my father’s genius and art, and a unique meditation on the mystery of creativity.”
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