The Icon as Shield in Battle of the Sexes

Charles Chaplin's relation to the opposite sex -- on and off the screen -- was one of the most complex, and ultimately one of the most haunting, troubling, and destructive, issues of his career. Due to the prevalence of Charlie today, few who aren't versed in film lore recall Chaplin's tempestuous social life, but in the 1920s, a pot always seemed ready to boil. Yet, in a true testimony to the power of the icon, Charlie's innocence forever silenced and calmed the controversies surrounding his creator: as mentioned elsewhere, when Charlie was finally dropped, a firestorm of chaos erupted around Chaplin as never before. Yet had the icon always symbolized quite the opposite of its creator's social urges?

Actually, the Charlie of 1914 was fairly free, vulgar, and womanizing no matter how critics today look at him. Although Charlie invited the audience to share in his flirtations from the start (see his physical methods as discussed elsewhere), they were harder to share at first, being far more overt. "Scenes of [Charlie's] slinging his leg onto a girl's lap or pulling her knees to him with his cane seem bold even today," states historian Dan Kamin (1984: 8), were among the sequences. "The effect in 1914 was shocking and, in the eyes of many [reviewers], obscene." In fact, twenty years later, Chaplin would object to such scenes in Marx Brothers films, when public morals were more lax (1984: 100). Yet Chaplin had played Harpo-like roles such as that in Caught in the Rain (1914), in which he amorally wooed another man's wife, continually knocking a gouty man out of the way in his lust to get to her. Ironically, acceptance of this icon as representative of the "real" Charlie didn't keep much secret: it did him no favors and in fact exaggerated however much of a womanizer he may have been.

Yet this version of Charlie didn't last long. Kamin points out how "it is interesting to note that as Chaplin's sex life became the subject of tabloid headlines, his screen character became less aggressive in making advances toward the women in the films" (1984: 9). In fact, the change took place earlier -- in the Essanay period, only a year after Chaplin began making films and before his romantic life became legion in various headlines. I have already discussed Charlie's character development, but suffice it to say that Charlie changed fairly quickly to a more sympathetic character. Soon the Tramp became a character whom Parker Tyler could call "one whose only solid connectin with reality is love, his irrepressible desire to express his admiration and tenderness for the opposite sex" (Tyler 1948: 84). This was Charlie the Hollywood legend, and while people may have been "asked [by society] to believe what they [didn't] see" -- that is, to speculate on Chaplin's offscreen personality -- they had precious little grist to observe. Since Hollywood promoted Charlie, not Chaplin, what few secrets leaked out tended to be viewed through the stained-glass windows of Charlie's fictional self.

What of the real Chaplin's social life? As explained by David Robinson (the authoritative text from which most of my biographical information derives), unlike the brash early Charlie, Chaplin felt his first definitive love affair -- in 1908, when he was nineteen years old -- to be an enriching, bewitching moment of bliss so great that he tended to use it as the benchmark for future affairs. "I was walking in Paradise," he said of his very brief time with Henrietta ("Hetty") Kelly, "with inner blissful excitement," but the pair had to part when Hetty's mother forbade the fifteen-year-old to have an affair at her age. Chaplin suspected the affair was more important to him than to Hetty: "to me," he said later, "it was the beginning of a spiritual development, a reaching out for beauty" (Robinson 1985: 81).

Chaplin would reach out for beauty again and again as the years rolled by. Perhaps it was the lingering fascination with Hetty, but for whatever reason, the actor tended to go for very young girls -- essentially too young to be defined as women. Chaplin met sixteen-year-old Mildred Harris at a party given by Samuel Goldwyn in 1918. Although the two claimed to have a platonic friendship when asked by the press, Mildred's suspected pregnancy a short time later led to the first of many sudden, brief marriages. Not only was the pregnancy a false alarm, but "Chaplin was convinced that the marriage debilitated his creative ability," a suspicion that seemed borne out when his latest film, Sunnyside (released 1919) had a rough gestation period contemporaneously. Making matters more difficult still, Chaplin was getting used to a new system: as of 1918, he was an independent filmmaker at this point, with much looser contracts to fill for new distributor First National. The uncertainty of the schedule, while it might have made his life easier, instead seemed to make things more difficult.

Separation seemed to be the answer and might have been accomplished without a messy suit had Mildred not been piqued and stirred up by the press some months later. Just as The Kid was in full production Chaplin found himself all over the papers; although his repute was not stained deeply by the divorce (Mildred went directly into a romance with the then-current Prince of Wales, leaving the aftermath brief and non-noteworthy), he was hurt by a fistfight with Louis Mayer, whom he attacked for having publicized his marriage at a stressful time; then he went through a legal battle with Mildred during which the woman tried to sue for film materials on the unfinished Kid (which would then have been destroyed). In this case, Mildred was treated as a fanatic and an opportunist by the press; however true that image may have been, Chaplin was popularly seen as wrongly attacked by weird twists of human nature (Robinson 1985: 250-264). Fiction celebrates fiction. So why should fact -- in the hypothetical situation that Chaplin was at fault in the relationship's disintegration -- go ignored? De Certeau has it that back when myth stayed myth, one could observe and enjoy icons of fiction and then turn to "believe what [they didn't] see" (De Certeau 1984: 187). Because Chaplin shared some goals with the figure of Charlie, however, and because Charlie was such a breathtakingly real figure -- serious, funny, and tragicomic -- for the cinema in his day, Charlie overpowered the urge to believe what one didn't see.

In fact, Charlie's romances of the era had some minor repercussions in the real world. As Essanay Studio production was replaced first by improved budgets at Mutual Pictures and then in independent production for First National, Charlie developed a regular leading lady in Edna Purviance (seen here in The Immigrant), a longtime friend and acting partner of his creator. In the real world, Purviance had obviously felt some affection for Chaplin, and as the first to congratulate him -- with obvious calm -- she "made me feel embarrassed," as Chaplin later said. Purviance, as I have stated was the case for Chaplin at other times, seemed to try to lose her sadness through fulfilment in the fictitious, symbolic world of the film: her letter to Chaplin on his honeymoon spoke mainly of having seen the final print of his then-current film (Shoulder Arms) and referred to Charlie's experiences as "yours" -- Chaplin's (Robinson 1985: 247). Charlie's on-screen romances, meanwhile, became somewhat more symbolic and ambiguous for a time: in The Kid, for example, Chaplin dreams of heaven, but is tricked by a demon into wooing a betrothed angel whose bully boyfriend, even in Paradise, can 'shoot' the Tramp, waking him (1985: 261). At the end of the film, Chaplin joins the Kid's mother in privacy, but the nature of their ensuing relationship is left to us. In the first instance, perhaps the Tramp reflects the confusion Chaplin might have been going through; in the second, Chaplin's distraction left a possible happy ending unsure. Later, the relation of the Tramp's romances to Charlie's own would become quite different.

It was in 1923 that Chaplin became involved with the European stage actress Pola Negri. The engagement was briefly broken off over financial dealings, but the couple got back together, reporting all of what was going on to the press as if personally fascinated by the publicity (1985: 330): this was one time that fact made it to the press. But the Chaplin-Negri romance was killed by the interferences of Marina Varga, a Mexican fan who snuck onto Chaplin's estate (and his bedroom) to raise first an argument with Pola, then a media circus upon being rejected by the engaged actor in the midst of his heavily-covered Negri affair. The temperamental Pola shortly called off the engagement, criticizing Chaplin's "experiments" in love, his temper, and her own ambitions (1985: 329). Again, Chaplin didn't seem to suffer many repercussions, and I would claim that while it was partly because the romance did not lead to legal tangles, it might also have been that folk believed what they didn't see, but just didn't figure it to be important compared to their celebrated fiction (De Certeau 1984: 187).

On March 2, 1924, Chaplin signed Lillita McMurray (former Angel of Temptation in The Kid to appear in the upcoming Gold Rush, and her professional name of Lita Grey was created. Although he secretly saw her as fairly plain, Chaplin's publicity agent Jim Tully regaled the press with stories of her "beauty, talent, charm, innocence, and aristocratic lineage" which had supposedly come from Chaplin. Journalist Jack Junsmeyer said that Chaplin "wields a powerful professional sway over his new protegee -- that almost hypnotic influence which the more masterful directors exert upon sensitive players before the camera" (1985: 338). The influence had Lita pregnant by late September, and as the (ignorant) newspapers gossiped over whom Chaplin's latest flame might be (non-Hearst papers suspected Marion Davies, a lover of Hearst) a literal shotgun wedding took place in Mexico, and the very young Grey -- now a "child bride," as she was known -- was taken off the film and put into the household. She was replaced in the film by Georgia Hale (1985: 350).

This last move set up a dichotomy between Charlie's screen romances and Chaplin's real-life ones: the implication, I find, is that Charlie was uncomfortable when his symbolic, iconic screen world became part of his real one, perhaps because he felt that the tender beauty he strove for on the screen need not be polluted by the real-life consequences of parallel romances in the real world. When we look at Chaplin's divorce from Lita a few years later (after the teenage bride had spent some time as a virtual ward as well as a mother of two children), we see the advantages in keeping Charlie separate. Right in the thick of the divorce proceedings, French admirer Robert Florey wrote a pen-portrait of Chaplin that symbolized what was going on: it painted Chaplin, desolated by his surroundings, as not the forceful director, but as "Charlie" (so called), the tramp, who even (as in 1918's A Dog's Life) identified with a homeless hound while trudging drearily along the city streets during the divorce proceedings. The implication was clearly that the Tramp could not have been a poor husband (quoted in 1985: 372). Other French Charlie-celebrators hailed the genius film artist in solidarity; when Grey threatened to smear several women whom Chaplin had allegedly had affairs with, the papers simply rebounded in celebration of "Charlie" when he paid the settlement she desired. "CHARLIE IS A REAL HERO," -- in other words, just like his film self! -- read one headline whose subtext praised Charlie for "sparing us" the grim details of life with Lita (1985: 378-79). In essence, the separation of Charlie from Chaplin's real existence allowed him to be an escape for his creator and a separate image-upholder for the benefit of public opinion. Charlie was close enough to Chaplin to satisfy the real as well as the fictional and iconic, even though in reality the shared space varied wildly between human and icon with time.

The icon and the person were at their farthest apart in the Lita Grey era, and distance was only underscored by The Circus (1928). Here, in the story of the Tramp's ill-fated romance with a circus owner's daughter, we have a product of grief: Charlie, trying to be a clown, is "funny when he doesn't intend to be and pathetic when he tries [for the ringmaster] to be comic" (Tyler 1948: 109). Charlie doesn't 'get the girl'; instead, she is wooed away by Rex, a dashing tightrope walker who appears partway through the film. The plot is essentially very bleak with its message of unattainable (or uncontrollable) success and a love bound to fail, but for critics, the humor in The Circus is seen as its main element, making it a "brisk, enjoyable, and exceptionally well-composed comedy" in spite of its quintessentially disillusioning plot (Robinson 1984: 72). The icon was used to express its creator's disappointment in life, perhaps, but while Chaplin's life was the tempestuous result of romance that succeeded too well, The Circus presented romance that could not succeed, a man ruined by power relationships rather than ruined through his abuse of them. Thus the pathetic image Florey saw: the icon -- through being identified with Chaplin -- perpetuated the concept that Chaplin could not be a scandalous figure. The Circus was overdue, according to devoted reviewer Alexander Woolcott,

"because it was interrupted in the making. I now only vaguely recall the circumstances, but I believe it was because thanks to the witless clumsiness of the machinery of our civilization, someone (a wife I think it was, or something like that) was actually permitted to have the law on Chaplin as though he were a mere person and not such a bearer of healing laughter as the world had never known" (quoted in Robinson 1985: 383).

Another article had it that "the 'unnamed actresses' whom Lita was to have named are as well left in the obscurity of the screen as to the publicity of the printed page . . . . a rising vote of thanks to Charlie [note wording] for sparing us the minute details of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness with the little woman." (Robinson p. 379) De Certeau might claim, in awe, that folk acknowledged fiction as fiction and believed what they didn't see, but preferred their fiction: it was clearer here than anywhere else. Despite The Circus' minimal relation to Chaplin's own circumstances, its alienated version of Charlie was tied to him: even Robinson blurs the line, referring to a fire that burned some of the sets one day. In reference to some photographs of Chaplin, in costume, surveying the wreckage in blank shock, ""These unposed shots are some of the most poignant images of the Tramp" (1985: 370). Regardless of whether one saw Chaplin as victimized by his wives, one must admit that the icon was certainly doing its job in protecting him.

As time passed, although the Tramp sometimes reflected his creator's disquietude more than in The Circus, there was still a difference between the two which the public, obsessed with the icon, could not comprehend. City Lights was one of the Tramp's most emotional performances; its story of the Tramp's love for a blind flower girl involved perhaps the purest and most romantic version of the former leg-grabber that had ever been shown (the story also involved social comment to some degree). Yet one of Chaplin's press agents, who aided him during a tour of Europe to promote the new film, joked that his job was "less often that of press agent than of sup-press agent," because Chaplin's "indiscretions" forced him into a "nannyish role" (1985: 421). When Modern Times was in production, Chaplin began his romance with its lead actress, Paulette Goddard; again, he seemed to imitate the Tramp's existence with his own, but this time he did kept controversy from entering the affair simply by marrying Goddard in secret during a Far Eastern trip (1985: 483). Chaplin made sure that the Tramp's innocent independence remained in the public eye; not necessarily as a cynical public relations ploy, but certainly as a use of the icon to his own advantage.

But bubbling beneath the surface of the great unwashed was a growing desire to focus on what they didn't see, as De Certeau has it: as the community got out of the Depression and the New Deal brought new educational opportunities among other things, an interest in the concrete real became more important. The erosion of the Tramp in such a condition, with the public becoming more interested in what lay beneath the Charlie fiction, led to Chaplin's social downfall, and that began with The Great Dictator -- Chaplin both concluded Charlie's real career with the film, and fused the character more with himself by putting an atypically opinionated speech in the character's mouth (see my essay on Chaplin against the Fascists or Charlie's speech itself for more on this). I have written elsewhere how the media's political aspects were skeptical about Dictator, but more importantly, without the icon as a symbol of an idealized Chaplin, the actor was fair game for a major come-uppance. Furthermore, during the war, an age of propaganda, I cite a vast upswing in De Certeau's factualization of the fictive: as we shall see, now that "the facts" about Chaplin began to be revealed, it didn't matter how real they were or how exaggerated they might have been. The 1940s "could only give in, and obey what [an exaggerated truth] signified" (De Certeau 1986: 186). There was no longer an icon with enough semblance to the real to shield Chaplin from the masses: instead, various exaggerations of the real took up the icon's space, to Chaplin's detriment (if Charlie was false, "the real Chaplin" was hardly real).

Chaplin had drifted away from Paulette Goddard, but their parting was fairly uneventful (1985: 517). The actor's subsequent affair with Joan Barry -- in line with tradition, another woman whom Chaplin felt could become a great actress under his tutelage -- was a different story entirely. Chaplin lavished her with paid drama courses, but soon found that she was remarkably unstable: friends of Chaplin noticed how she was a notorious drunk driver and the Tramp's creator himself found that she had been cutting the classes he'd paid for. He paid for her to travel home, but was not done with her: she used some of the money to travel to New York's Waldorf-Astoria, where she heckled Chaplin until he paid her further. Returning to Hollywood, she threatened to commit suicide on Chaplin's property; upon turning up pregnant some months later, she began a long, heavily-publicized lawsuit in which (biological evidence notwithstanding) she claimed that Chaplin was the father of her child. Although the details are unnecessary here in what I intend as a simple analysis of Chaplin's relations with the public, it will suffice to say that the FBI added additional charges -- including violations of long-outdated laws -- to Barry's, basically interested in "getting" Chaplin for his expressions of sympathy, if not on political principle, with Russia (see my essay on Chaplin and the left). Barry's cause, though biologically flawed, was supported by powerful and unscrupulous lawyer Joseph Scott, who could and did call Chaplin a "little runt of a Svengali," "lecherous hound," and "reptile" (1985: 527); by forcing Chaplin to angrily defend himself, Scott made him look desperate, turning the fictive into apparent fact. Consistent with De Certeau's pessimism, the blood tests were disregarded: with no icon to defend him, Chaplin found himself declared guilty. "There has been no one to stop Chaplin in his lecherous conduct all these years -- except you," Scott exclaimed to the jury: the years of tramp predominance were over. (Actually, The Gold Rush had been reissued in 1942 with added sound: perhaps as a premonition of romance-fueled disaster, Chaplin sanitized Charlie's image further by removing the film's final mouth-to-mouth kiss, which I've shown at left (Kamin 1984: 136). But the reissue was not a hit like a new Tramp adventure would have been, so its affect on Chaplin's image was disputable to the present author.)

Today more than ever -- the point of De Certeau's essay -- we are willing to believe sensationalized factoids which are frankly quite fictionalized: fiction is speaking as fact. In the 1920s, this was not so. It is a testimony to the power of the icon that even with the realization that Charlie was not wholly real, the 1920s public found him real enough to push aside the well-founded knowledge that Something Else was more so. Today, as De Certeau says, one can claim that "I know perfectly well [an urban legend] is so much hogwash," but one takes it in anyway. The lies of Joan Barry, the possible truths of other lovers would all be given equal credibility, and Charlie none -- so it would seem that Chaplin today would have no iconic shield at all. The great comedian's relations with the opposite sex might then mean a brisk end to a short career, or a very different kind of career for man and icon altogether.

-- David Gerstein

(For a look at the lecherous Charlie of the early Caught in the Rain, a detailed description of the groundbreaking film is seen here.)

Text (C) 1995 David A. Gerstein