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Review by Edward Morris
Don't worry if Charlie Chaplin is just a name and a flickering image to you. Kenneth S. Lynn gives you all the background and context you'll need to appreciate the great comedian's impact on film, politics, and other manifestations of popular culture. Lynn even provides scene-by-scene descriptions of Chaplin's best-known movies to probe both his art and his mind. A former professor at Johns Hopkins University, with books on Mark Twain and William Dean Howells to his credit, Lynn brings an academic's zeal for details to this combined biography, career appraisal, and cultural history.
On a par with Chaplin's own absorbing story are Lynn's vivid re-creations of the turn-of-the-century English music hall scene, the growth of the Hollywood movie industry, and the insidious spread of film censorship.
Born in London in 1889 to down-at-the-heels theatrical parents, Chaplin learned music and acting at a very young age on stages throughout England. After two trips to the U.S. with performing troupes, Chaplin took his first American film-acting job in 1913. By 1915, he was a major and trend-setting star. His celebrity would continue to ascend (albeit shakily) for the next four decades. Chaplin, however, never sought American citizenship. So after a particularly lurid morals case was lodged against him, he exiled himself to Switzerland in 1952. (In spite of widespread belief to the contrary, Lynn maintains that Chaplin was not driven away by government attacks on his left-wing politics.) The actor died at his home in Vevey, Switzerland on Christmas Day, 1977.
Lynn's portrait of Chaplin depicts a man who was forever tormented and shaped by memories of his mentally unstable mother. Chaplin was also so rank-conscious, the author contends, that he fabricated much of his own history, read constantly for self-improvement (while insisting that his mistresses do likewise) and courted intellectuals. As a movie-maker, Chaplin tended to be conservative in accepting new techniques and technology, particularly sound. He was an authoritarian producer, husband, and father and a relentless pursuer of affairs with very young women. Of Chaplin's legion of sexual conquests, only Paulette Goddard seems to have matched him in strength and ambition.
Although Lynn writes at length about the genius and flaws evident in Chaplin's movies, he is clearly more interested in the actor's psychology -- and he interprets virtually everything Chaplin did as man and artist as reactions to his mother. Lynn is equally heavy-handed in his treatment of Chaplin's radical politics, which he scorns as naive and insincere. Seen from years distant, many of Chaplin's pro-Communist utterances do seem naive -- but then so does the Republican euphoria of1994. Real politics are pounded and shaped by the conditions of each new day, and Chaplin was no more or less a victim of that reality than anyone else. And the fact that he knowingly risked public condemnation and worse by speaking out for his beliefs suggests substantial sincerity.
Eventually, Chaplin and America reached a polite reconciliation. In failing health, he returned to the States in 1972 to accept the honorary Academy Award his admirers had tirelessly lobbied for. For a brief moment, he was again the toast of the smart set. But by the time Queen Elizabeth conferred a knighthood on him in 1975, Chaplin was so feeble he had to be wheeled to the ceremony.
Because Lynn so loves minutiae, the book sparkles with "stardust" scenes. There's 12-year-old Leslie T. (Bob) Hope, winning a Chaplin lookalike contest in Cleveland and using the proceeds to buy his mother a stove; Chaplin at a party imitating what Lillian Gish would look like in a state of orgasm "if she ever went to bed with anybody"; an enraged Chaplin driving well-meaning Truman Capote from his home because the young writer had dared criticize the old master's autobiography; and, most bizarre of all, two inept graverobbers holding Chaplin's body for ransom. Despite his fretting over social class, nothing about the Little Tramp was ever common.
Edward Morris is a journalist living in Nashville.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.