Charlie Chaplin and His Times

By Kenneth S. Lynn. New York: Simon and Schuster

As a subject for a critical biography, Charlie Chaplin is simultaneously irresistible and forbidding. He is irresistible because he is one of the first and most enduring movie stars, because he quickly gained creative and financial control of his movies, because he invented such a fascinating series of comic films, because he experienced such a stormy personal life, and because his 40-year filmmaking career in the United States was such a rollercoaster ride of boom and bust. Yet he is equally forbidding as a subject: he left almost no correspondence; he frequently sought to imbue or hide his past with mythic stories; he was such a complex, mercurial, elusive figure; and, finally, it’s simply ticklish to link a collaborative art like the movies to a single creator’s life.

Thanks in part to his access to Chaplin’s personal archives, David Robinson yielded to the temptation and, in 1985, published his insightful and informative Chaplin: His Life and Art. The biography offered a generous tribute to Chaplin’s artistry and contained much new information about Chaplin’s working methods and the production history of some of his films. Subsequent scholars writing on Chaplin have all been in Robinson’s debt.

Now Kenneth S. Lynn, a Professor Emeritus of Johns Hopkins University, has also submitted to the lure. Lynn admits that over a half-decade ago he worried about committing himself to Chaplin, wondering if he dared “to devote a book-length study… to a master of wordless communication, with all its attendant ambiguities?”. Yet he overcame the doubt, and in Charlie Chaplin and His Times he offers the results of his substantial labors.

Trained in an American Studies tradition at Harvard, Lynn is perhaps best known for earlier books on Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Ernest Hemingway. His extensive scholarly work in American literature and culture from the end of the Civil War through World War Two has provided a useful background for one interested in approaching the enigmatic Chaplin.

Lynn’s life of Chaplin has a number of strengths. First, it’s not hagiography: sometimes Chaplin’s films have been so seductive and Chaplin as a person so charming that biographers and critics have ignored his warts. Lynn doesn’t. Second, it’s clear the book was researched with great energy: the notes indicate that Lynn draws on the extensive secondary literature about Chaplin; on relevant works of American political and cultural history; on memoirs and autobiographies in which subjects recall their interactions with and impressions of Chaplin; and on interviews with people as diverse as Lita Gray and Sydney Chaplin, Oona O’Neill Chaplin’s high school friends, and Attorney General James McGranery’s widow and son.

Third, Lynn’s research and writing at times extends beyond Chaplin’s life and work to encompass related contexts that seek to ground and illuminate the subject. He discusses, for example, working- class conditions and politics in England between 1909 and 1913; tramps in American culture in the two decades before Chaplin created his memorable persona; and vignettes of many people, like Max Linder, Max Eastman, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Adolph Hitler, whose lives directly or indirectly intertwined with Chaplin’s. Finally, Lynn is an engaging prose stylist, making the book enjoyable to read.

In assessing Lynn’s portrait of Chaplin, let me emphasize two strands: Chaplin’s childhood and Chaplin’s politics. In his recent scholarship, like the Hemingway biography, Lynn has been drawn to biographical analysis that emphasizes the influence of childhood experience on an artist’s later life and work. That continues here, for Lynn argues that Chaplin was ineluctably shaped by his unstable early childhood; he lacked a strong father figure after Charles Sr. early abandoned the family, and he only intermittently possessed a mother figure at all, given Hannah Chaplin’s frequent hospitalizations.

Lynn documents Hannah’s medical and psychological difficulties well, but he also speculates–based in this case on no firm evidence–that Hannah resorted to prostitution at times to help support her sons. Chaplin’s helplessness at being unable to help his mother placed him under “appalling”
psychological pressures in his childhood, Lynn contends, and in a compelling formulation he writes,

That his zestful spirit and drive to success were not broken by his ordeal is a tribute to his mental hardihood. But if he emerged unbroken from the treacherous world of his childhood, he was not unscarred. The least attractive characteristics of Chaplin the man–his self-pity, his anger, his cruelty, his mania for taking total control of the lives of young women who caught his eye–must have been gathering strength within him all the while.

Lynn draws on this strand to help explain Chaplin’s many, usually unsuccessful, relationships with women throughout his Hollywood years, as well as to help us understand the depictions of women in many of his films.

Besides this emphasis on Chaplin’s early relationship with his mother, Lynn also focuses on Chaplin’s politics. I believe I’m fair in saying that, simply stated, Lynn finds Chaplin’s politics naive and objectionable, and much of this strand of the book is intent on exploring Chaplin’s relationship to Communists and Communism. For example, Lynn reprints significant passages of a 1952 Immigration and Naturalization Service interview with Paul Crouch, who had been a Communist Party organizer in the Carolinas in the 1930s. Crouch told INS officials that CP official V.J. Jerome told him during the depression that Chaplin was a “member at large directly responsible to the Central Committee”.

To his credit, Lynn raises some questions about Crouch’s veracity, yet he seems intent on criticizing Chaplin’s politics from the mid-1930s on, which makes his Chaplin appear more like a willing emigre or martyr in 1952 than a victim of McCarthyism, as he’s more often (and, I think, more accurately) portrayed in recent scholarship. (Relying on Chaplin’s friend and sometimes business manager Harry Crocker, Lynn even speculates that Chaplin may have been planning all along to leave the United States when he set sail for the London Limelight premiere in 1952.)

In approaching Chaplin’s political views, I would prefer to emphasize Chaplin’s strong anti-Fascism, a position which sometimes led him to cooperation with Communists and socialists, as it did many in the political left during the 1930s and World War II. I’d also stress Chaplin’s consistant and dogged protection of his own private property–not least the rights to his films, which are still in the hands of the Chaplin estate.

My differences with Lynn over Chaplin’s political views may stem in part from the fact that he came to intellectual maturity during the early 1950s, which I suspect has shaped his understanding of Chaplin’s politics, whereas my understanding has surely been shaped by the climate of a different era, the late 1960s and early 1970s–an era much more sympathetic to Chaplin’s plight than the early 1950s.

Yet I believe the evidence suggests that despite his flirtation with some people who had ties with Communism, Chaplin’s politics were those of a passionate but not very sophisticated anti-Fascist, one who was enthused about and relatively engaged in politics from about 1940 to 1948 but who then retreated around 1950, when he realized how much his activities were damaging his career. When Lynn tries to make much more of Chaplin’s Communist ties than that, his argument rests on shaky grounds