Customer Reviews

Chaplin: A Life

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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.

"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

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.

This biography primarily focused on his early life, and even his parents' life before him. There are a lot of descriptions of life in lower-class Victorian England, including the culture and style of entertainment in the music halls. There are also descriptions of his family's descent into poverty and his time spent in an orphanage--and how he managed to get out of his situation.

There are details about his Tramp character and his films that many of us probably are unaware of because we live in a different time. The book describes how his character was partly based off some archetypal characters in Victorian England and his mannerisms were learned from [alcoholic] neighbors around town. Watching his films I was struck by some of them depict himself and others in poverty. The book also explains some of the contexts of the films. Watching them, obviously I knew that social rules were different (for example, in some of them a girl is mortified to be seen in her pajamas) but there were some things I didn't pick up on. When I saw how much butt-smacking there was going on in Chaplin's movies, I thought audiences just had an inane sense of humor, but the book describes how it was a rebellion against childhood corporal punishment and therefore was shocking and hilarious at the time. (Nowadays I laugh because it is funny to look back at what was considered funny.) A few different films are directly influenced by his family and events in his childhood.

The book also talks about the rudimentary film industry of the time and how he ends up becoming the most famous person in the world at the time, with his likeness everywhere, mobbed on the streets, even known and cheered on by tribes in Africa and people in other remote locations. Like so many other "firsts" in culture, there will never be another Charlie Chaplin because we just don't have that monoculture, or that innocence, anymore, to be effected so universally and strongly by one person.

His personal life is described here and there. There are a few details about events in the decades after, but basically it's as if the writer lost interest or abandoned the book after Chaplin becomes world famous. This is my biggest problem with the book because so much did happen to him after he was famous. Not only did he marry several times and have lots of children, and leave the U.S. after being vilified in the red scare, but he also stayed involved in new creative pursuits his entire life and I would have liked to know more about them. The exclusion of his later years seems to be a glaring omission.

The author doesn't spend enough time relaying the events of later Chaplin's life. The book starts off good but in later chapters, my senses are dulled by the abundance of Non-Chaplin details. I also was not impressed how the author attempts to psychoanalysis Chaplin's choices. An analysis that is obvious to anyone who took Psychology 101.

In her introduction to this biography, Geraldine Chaplin writes: "It is unlike anything that has ever been written about my father." And that is certainly an apt comment based on my experience. The author is a psychiatrist here in Washington and teaches as well at the Washington School of Psychiatry. He has studied Chaplin for a number of years and even led a seminar at the WSP contrasting two Chaplin autobiographies (the earlier one disputed by Chaplin) and what they disclose about Charlie. So we have in this book a psychoanalytical study of Chaplin's early life and the initial stages (primarily) of his film career. The author offers some fascinating theories about various aspects of where Chaplin got some of his ideas for his films, relating back to his childhood. So, much attention is paid to Chaplin's father and especially his mother as progenitors of events that Chaplin later revived in his films. The author also does an outstanding job in recounting Chaplin's youthful stage career in Britain and how he learned from his years performing in English vaudeville, an apprenticeship which paid constant dividends for the rest of his career. But this is not a biography such as that by David Robinson, a favorite of mine, in that the author jumps around a bit in time, and devotes very scant attention to Chaplin's work and life after 1930 or so. The final chapter, "What happened next?", loses effectiveness by trying to cram together the remainder of Chaplin's remarkable life (he died in 1977) into 14 pages. While there are 17 pages of notes referencing the Chaplin literature, and some interesting photographs, the most interesting aspects are based on the author's own research into the films at the Library of Congress. While one might well wonder if some of the author's theories are correct, there is no doubt that this book enriches our understanding of that unique genius, Charles Spencer Chaplin.