Chaplin: A Life [Hardcover]

Stephen Weissman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 24, 2008

Born in London in 1889, Charlie Chaplin grew up in dire poverty. Both his parents were in show business, but severe alcoholism cut short his father's flourishing career, and his beloved mother first lost her voice, then lost her mind to syphilis. Charlie at age seven was committed to the Hanwell School for Orphans and Destitute Children. How then did this poor, lonely child become such an extraordinary comedian, known and celebrated worldwide? Chaplin cut his teeth in British music halls, but it was America that made him. At age twenty-five, he was touring here with a vaudeville troupe when his talents caught the eye of entertainment entrepreneur Mack Sennett, who spirited him off to California and signed him to a film contract. Chaplin became Sennett's star comedian, and by twenty-eight the actor had become a millionaire and the world's greatest celebrity. Weissman traces Chaplin's life and the sources of his genius in fascinating detail, demonstrating how his tragic childhood shaped his personality and his art. Infamous for his politics and his scandalous sex life, Chaplin was a much more complex and contradictory character than has hitherto been known. Weissman brilliantly illuminates both the screen legend and the turbulent era through which he lived and worked.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Weissman, professor at the Washington School of Psychiatry, examines Charlie Chaplin's life and work from a psychoanalytical perspective. Believing in using a life to read a film and a film to read a life, Weissman focuses on Chaplin's childhood and early career, giving scant attention to his later adult life. Most telling is the relationship with his mother. Her madness, brought on by starvation and syphilis, Weissman believes, manifests itself in Chaplin's films with a recurring theme: the rescue of a downtrodden female. For example, City Lights is a childhood rescue fantasy of saving his parents, while Limelight is filled with references to his alcoholic father. Weissman uncovers the source for the shabby gentility of the Little Tramp, as well as the development of that extraordinary character. En route, he paints an engaging if narrowly focused portrait of how a cinema artist is created and how he practices his craft. (Jan.)
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From Booklist

Psychiatrist Weissman offers a fascinating, analytic portrait of a most complex man, who from 1915 to the mid-1930s was the most famous person in the world. Chaplin’s near-Dickensian childhood was one of squalid poverty in London. Both parents were in show business, and alcoholism and syphilis blighted their lives. At seven, Charlie was committed to the Hanwell School for Orphans and Destitute Children. According to Weissman, Chaplin recreated his painful childhood over and over in his movies, especially through the adventures of Chaplin’s archetypal film persona, the Little Tramp, the comical and lovable Everyman who never gives up. Weissman finds many parallels between Chaplin’s upbringing and what he presented on the big screen; indeed, he maintains that the films are deeply personal statements reflecting the formative influence of early poverty on his artistic development. Besides being a captivating psychological study of a seminal figure in motion-picture history, the book is an engaging survey of early Hollywood filmmaking. --June Sawyers

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 315 pages
• Publisher: Arcade Publishing; First edition. edition (November 24, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1559708921
• ISBN-13: 978-1559708920
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #341,338 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars He was large; he contained multitudes., November 13, 2008

By 

Robert Morris (Dallas, Texas) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Chaplin: A Life (Hardcover)

For most people who are interested in knowing more about the life and career of Charles Chaplin (16 April 1889 - 25 December 1977), this most recently published of several biographies and two autobiographies provides as much information and analysis as they probably require. I had seen several of Chaplin's greatest films (The Kid, The Gold Rush, City Lights, Modern Times, and Limelight) as well as the film about him starring Robert Downey Jr. One of his daughter's, Geraldine Chaplin, wrote the introduction to Stephen Weissman's biography and correctly describes it as "always provocative and at times heart-wrenching, 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."

More specifically, Weissman thoroughly examines

1. Chaplin's generally miserable childhood
2. His initial appearances on stage in London and throughout the British Isles
3. His breakthrough performance in the West End production of Sherlock Holmes
4. His association with the Fred Karno troupes ("Fred's Fun Factory")
5. His first and second American tours with Karno group (between 1910 and 1913)
6. His association with Mack Sennett and the Keystone Film Company
7. His one-year association with Essanay Films

Note: Although Chaplin co-founded United Artists with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and D. W. Griffith in 1919, Weissman includes no discussion of that partnership.

8. Chaplain's creation and development of the "Little Tramp"
9. Various controversies involving Chaplin's lifestyle and political views
10. His recognition and awards in his later years

Note: In the "Afterword," Weissman provides an especially interesting discussion of contradictory opinions about the legitimacy of Charlie Chaplin's Own Story (a narrative as told to journalist Rose Wilder Lane) that appeared in a series of 29 installments in the San Francisco Bulletin from July 5 to August 4, 1915. Weissman believes that Lane transcribed Chaplin's comments as accurately as she could. Another Chaplin scholar, David Robinson, dismisses Own Story as "romantic and misleading nonsense." Weissman suggests that his reader take her or his choice. "Neither Robinson's theory nor mine is provable."

While reading this often riveting account of Chaplin's personal life and professional career, I was reminded of a passage in Walt Whitman's poem, "Song of Myself": "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes." That can certainly be said of Chaplin who overcame a truly miserable childhood, mastered the skills needed to achieve extraordinary success on stage, completed an especially difficult transition from performing in front of a live audience to performing for the lens of a camera, then became arguably the greatest film actor ever while mastering the skills needed to write and direct his own films.

Throughout his narrative, Weissman cites a number of different sources who offer a variety of perspectives on Chaplin's life and art. For example, here is what Alistair Cooke once observed when discussing Chaplin's identification with Dickens: "Charles Chaplin was Charles Dickens reborn...there is an eerie similarity between [the novel] Oliver Twist and the first 60 pages...of Chaplin's Autobiography. But as a reincarnation of everything spry and inquisitive and Cockney-shrewd and invincibly alive and cunning, Chaplin was the young Dickens in the flesh." Here is what Sigmund Freud once noted: "In the last few days, Chaplin has been in Vienna...He is undoubtedly a great artist; certainly he always portrays one and the same figure; only the weakly poor, helpless, clumsy youngster for whom, however, things turn out well in the end. Now do you think for this role he has to forget about his own ego? On the contrary, he always plays only himself as he was in his dismal youth."

Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out the Charlie Chaplin's Own story (as told to Rose Wilder Lane) and Chaplin's My Autobiography as well as David Robinson's Chaplin: His Life and Art and The Essential Chaplin edited by Richard Schickel.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Here's How Kirkus Reviewed This Book, November 13, 2008

By 

Carole E. Horn MD (DC, DC USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Chaplin: A Life (Hardcover)

"A fresh entry in the evergreen field of works devoted to Charlie Chaplin. If ever an artist's life lent itself to psychoanalysis, it's Chaplin's. . . . Weissman lends dimension to the classics . . . and demonstrates Chaplin's ability to transform family heartbreak into film comedies. . . . With lean, energetic prose, Weissman brings this colorful theatrical period to life. . . . He offers vivid sketches . . .and carefully follows the confluence of several artists that lead to the creation of the Chaplin's iconic Little Tramp. Throughout the book,the author caps exhaustive sourcing with an overlay of insightful observations about Chaplin's creative process. Find space on the crowded Chaplin shelf for this perceptive, literate take on the great screen clown."
-Kirkus Reviews
ALSO GO TO www.chaplinalife.com THIS WONDERFUL WEBSITE HAS FILM CLIPS & PHOTOS THAT ILLUSTRATE THE BOOK

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An "On The Couch" Bio That's On The Mark, March 10, 2009

By 

Brian Jay Jones (Damascus, MD USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Chaplin: A Life (Hardcover)

I'm normally wary of biographies that attempt to put their chosen subject "on the couch." I know it's tempting, when writing about artists, writers, or other creative people to try to view their work through the gauze of life experience, explaining their art in the context of childhood traumas, distant parents, or failed relationships. There are some no-brainers out there, certainly -- one could hardly write about Edgar Allan Poe or Vincent Van Gogh, to name only two, without looking into inner demons that ended up screaming at the public from the page or canvas.

It gets harder, however, with figures that, for the most part, aren't quite as haunted or tormented. But that doesn't mean biographers haven't tried. Some Disney biographers, for example, have claimed that Walt Disney obviously had a contempt for women and deep-seated abandonment issues, since several of his early films featured evil mother-figures or mothers who are dead or otherwise unavailable. It doesn't matter that Disney's own life story doesn't really seem to bear that out; once you've got him on the couch, you can use his body of work to explain away anything. That was the sort of thing that nearly ruined David Michaelis's otherwise dynamite SCHULZ AND PEANUTS for me -- Michaelis tried, I thought, a bit too hard to use the Peanuts strip to explain Schulz's psyche. It was a valiant effort, but I just didn't buy it.

And that, ultimately, is my problem with On The Couch biographies: I don't like being told that every inch of an artist's output -- whether it's on film, on audiotape, on canvas, or on the printed page -- is a channeling of some remote glob of their psyche, or reflects a subconscious effort to work out some personal issue. I believe you can understand an artist's life by looking at his work; it's more difficult and dangerous, however, to try to use an artist's work to explain away an artist's life. Ideally, one must view the artist through the prism of both the life and the art together.

That's a roundabout way of saying that, going into it, I was skeptical of Dr. Stephen Weissman's CHAPLIN: A LIFE. It's true that Chaplin, with his mess of a private life and in-your-face politics, practically begs his biographers to put him on the sofa -- a challenge to which Chaplin biographer David Robinson all but explicitly refused to rise. But on the other hand, I did not want to be told that every Chaplin film was merely another psychological exercise in which Charlie either consciously or subconsciously tried to come to terms with some childhood trauma.

Well. In his first chapter, Weissman -- a for real psychiatrist, and not just playing one on TV -- immediately put such concerns to rest. Reading every Chaplin film or sketch as a therapy session, says Weissman,

". . . does little to advance our undertstanding of how the creative process operated . . . It assumes that the comic mind operates as a seething id-cauldron automatically transforming childhood fears into schoolboy gags which are periodically belched and farted up from the steamy depths of the unconscious."

Bingo. That's exactly what I wanted to hear -- and that's precisely why Weissman's book works so spectacularly well. Weissman doesn't explain away every moment on film in psychological terms; rather, he helps the reader understand why Chaplin makes particular comedic or artistic decisions, and where in his art Chaplin has borrowed or paid homage to his parents, mentors, rivals, and the London stage.

Weissman is particularly convincing in helping the reader understand some of the broader themes of Chaplin's work -- a particularly high point is his examination of City Lights as an opportunity for Chaplin to, at last, redeem both his mother and his father. But what's important is that Weissman isn't trying to tell us that Chaplin did all these things as an act of psychic cleansing; rather, he's helping us see where life experience has influenced some of the artistic decisions Chaplin made.

Further he doesn't get you in the weeds on psychobabble; Weissman's language is real, and readable -- no long ramblings on Freud or lectures on id suppression or whatever. His themes are larger than that, which is why you'll find them more thought provoking -- and even where you don't agree, he hasn't become so mind-numbingly technical that you think he's overreaching. Weissman's so agreeable, in fact, that it's like watching Chaplin's movies with a good friend who's got a particular insight into a film and doesn't mind at all if you disagree with him. Enjoy the film anyway, Weissman would probably say.

In a lively afterword, Weissman also does something no other Chaplin biographer has yet done: he's dared to accept an extended 1915 interview -- later published as Charlie Chaplin's Own Story before being squashed and disavowed by Chaplin -- as a reliable text. It's a primary source detective story, and Weissman will tell you convincingly why he believes biographers, and readers, can believe it . . . even when Chaplin himself tries to tell you otherwise.