Many of us will soon be gearing up for our
summer vacations and so, it seemed like a
good time to write about one of Chaplin's.
One of his most well publicized was his first
trip back to London in September 1921 after
Charlie Chaplin had left there in 1912 to go on tour with
the Karno London Comedians. Supposedly he
had envisioned himself trying his luck in
America in some capacity (pig farming, for
instance!), even before he got a lucrative
contract with Mack Sennett in 1913 while he
was performing in Philadelphia-one that proved
to lengthen his stay to some forty years.
But in 1921, as he seems to claim in My
Trip Abroad, a book recounting Chaplin's
experiences on this first homecoming trip,
"a steak-and-kidney pie, influenza, and a
cablegram" (1), taken together, all proved
to propel Charlie Chaplin towards a hurriedly arranged
trip across the Atlantic. While the steak-and-kidney
pie suggests a condition of homesickness,
the influenza one of physical exhaustion and
the cablegram one of some sort of urgency-all
conditions which suggest that a vacation was
sorely needed--the trip was actually arranged
for business reasons. Chaplin wished to attend
premieres of The Kid in Paris and
to transport his films to Germany for the
first time, because the First World War had
precluded any such previous attempt.
My Trip Abroad
provides a selective account of the trip as Chaplin
wished his public to know about it. It is a book
that is fairly easy to find in libraries around
the world and because of this fact I will not simply
recount its contents here. However, a more interesting
picture is presented by the newspaper reports of
the trip, most of which are difficult or impossible
to find and so, it is from a select few of these
that I will attempt to give you some indication
of both Chaplin's experiences and his extraordinary
reception during the tour. One such report depicts
Charlie Chaplin supposedly up to his old tricks. An article
from the London press dated September 13th and titled
"Chaplin, Disguised as a Woman, Puts One Over on
Fight Fans," gives you some idea of what I mean.
The reporter writes:
"Charlie Chaplin was chuckling today
over the one he put over on a fashionable
London audience at Covent Garden Opera
House last night.
It had been announced that Charlie as
well as the Duke of York and Georges
Carpentier and other notables were to
attend the Beckett-McCormick fight,
and the film star, fearing to be mobbed
by admirers, decided to go incognito.
The enterprising management offered
£100 to the first person to identify
the comedian, but Charlie sat through 12
rounds of the fight and escaped undetected.
It was learned today he had gone disguised
as a woman.”
Much of the reporting of the tour
involved the general surprise at Charlie’s
appearance—especially as it involved a
stark contrast with that of his Little
Tramp persona. This “real” Charlie appeared
to be (when not wearing women’s clothes!)
very richly dressed. One reporter, C.
F. Bertelli, covering the tour in Paris
on September 21st, devoted a whole article
to Charlie’s seemingly unrestrained clothes-buying
in that city and it’s interesting to note
the kinds of apparel which most attracted
him:
“A fitter from one of the most exclusive
London tailors arrived in Paris by
airplane this afternoon. It was disclosed
that Chaplin had ordered eighteen
morning suits, three of them edged with
velvet, with white stripes down
the trousers; five afternoon suits with
the latest wasp waist effect, and a
dinner coat patterned after André
de Fouquiére’s innovation in white
satin
striped with black.
Shopping in Rue de la Paix this morning,
Charlie bought six dozen silk
shirts of the latest ‘Grand Prix’ colors,
including mauve, sunshine yellow,
and brick brown.
He is scheduled to visit a bootmaker tomorrow
before his departure for
Berlin.”
Of course,
Charlie’s European visit was not all evening
outings and shopping sprees. Much of his
time in London is reported to have been
spent scouting out the old Kennington
neighborhood, often alone. We got only
a watered down version of this in My
Trip Abroad. It was only upon Charlie’s
return to Europe in 1931, that one of
his friends from the previous visit released
some interesting details about one of
these visits. The Daily Mail
for February 19, 1931, reported what they
called “A Human Story about Chaplin,”
as received from Frederick Lonsdale:
“It appears that two or three evenings
after his arrival [in 1921], Charlie was
invited to a big dinner party at which
he was to be the lion of the evening,
although he was the only one without a
title.
For years, so he told Lonsdale, he had
hoped for the day when he would meet
people of this type on the same social
footing, and he spent hours nervously
tying and retying his tie for the great
occasion. When it came, however, he
was immensely disappointed—so much so
that dinner was barely over before
he made an excuse and went back to his
hotel.
Here he
changed, and then went down by taxi-cab
to the house in Kennington where he
had lived as a boy with his brother
Syd. He knocked at the door and asked
if he could go up to his old room. He
knocked again, and found two small children
playing on the floor. At once he sat
on the floor and started to play with
them.
‘Have you done
the peep-hole tonight?’ he asked. But
they did not know what he meant. So
he quickly picked up the worn piece
of carpet in front of the fire- place,
prized up a piece of the plank and said,
‘Look! There you are! Now you can watch
the people in the sitting-room below.
It’s far more fun than going out if
you have no money in your pocket.’”
Of course, we all tend to believe
what we read in the newspapers, but
it’s just as likely that these “news
articles” are as fabricated as a publicity
text like My Trip Abroad. Isn’t
that kind of an expected part of vacationing
anyway—the telling of tall tales about
the people and places we’ve been and
seen?
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