He's a Tramp

My latest reading venture was a departure from Mark Twain: I decided to read My Autobiography by Charlie Chaplin. I was mostly motivated to read this after Luke and I watched Modern Times, and I realized that I am in love with Charlie Chaplin.

His autobiography wasn’t quite what I expected. He was raised in poverty in London, with his crazy mother, absentee, drunkard father, and older brother (who also went on to star in films). He got in the vaudeville circuit, came to America, broke into movies, broke into socialism, made fun of Nazism, was called before the Committee of Un-American Activities, then left the country. He was a genius and an icon, revolutionized the silent film industry, et cetera et cetera.

There are some details that Chaplin seems to be deliberately vague about while he is writing. For instance, his second marriage (which produced two children, who he was “quite fond of”)—I don’t think Chaplin even mentioned his second wife’s name in his book.

There also is a lot of name dropping—Charlie met basically every famous or influential person who lived between 1920 and 1950, including: Fatty Arbuckle, Winston Churchill, President Wilson, President Hoover, President Roosevelt, Albert Einstein and his wife, William Randolph Hearst and his wife and mistress, George Bernard Shaw, Orson Welles, H.G. Wells, Picasso, and Gandhi. There are literally hundreds more, probably 50% of which names I didn’t recognize (probably B-listers of the ‘30s).

The most interesting point about the book is that Chaplin is almost obsessive in recounting how much money every single venture made him, starting from his youth and continuing through his film career. He wasn’t shy about dropping figures and sums—not in a braggy way, though. It seemed more meant to be informative. Maybe Chaplin was just so supremely interested in money, and he thought his readers would be, as well. (I think his personal fascination with wealth stems from his humble beginnings, but that’s just a theory.)

Anyway, another book come and gone. I enjoyed this one. Chaplin did a better-than-adequate job of writing his own autobiography; it was entertaining and enlightening.

(Final note: Chaplin was a fervent anti-fascist and he hated Hitler. He said that when he first saw pictures of the rising German dictator, he was annoyed that Hitler’s mustache was similar to his.)