Short History Of... - Charlie Chaplin

Episode Date: August 20, 2023

The first truly global celebrity, Charlie Chaplin was once the most famous man in the world. The king of the silent movie, over the course of 82 films his wistful slapstick saw him light up the silver screen like no one else. But how did he leave behind the extreme poverty of his London childhood? What’s the truth about his complicated love life? And how did personal and political conflict threaten to derail one of the most celebrated careers in entertainment history? This is a Short History of Charlie Chaplin. Written by Dan Smith. With thanks to Lucy Moore, historian and author of Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties. For ad-free listening, exclusive content and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Now available for Apple and Android users. Click the Noiser+ banner on Apple or go to noiser.com/subscriptions to get started with a 7-day free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It is winter 1898 at the Empire Theatre in Portsmouth on the south coast of England. The 800-seater is packed tonight, with punters each having paid a few pennies to be entertained by an array of musical acts. At the side of the stage stands a slight young boy, not yet ten. He has porcelain skin black hair and huge puppy dog eyes nervously he peeps out of the audience in their plush blue velvet seats on the stage is a coquettish young woman trilling a bawdy song throwing her arms out as she sings the boy though is captivated more by the attention the rowdy crowd is lavishing on the performer than on the act itself. The audience heaves with laughter at every double entendre, each performed with a nudge and a wink. Amid their whooping and cheering, some join in the chorus,

and a few even get up to dance. But the boy knows not every act enjoys such a reception. Just moments earlier, a magician stomped past him after being booed off the stage. Now the song builds to its crescendo. The boy, dressed in the same white linen blouse and knickerbocker pants as the seven other members of his troupe, takes a deep breath to settle his nerves. He's up next. Their act, called The Eight Lancashire Lads, comprises a clog dance using the same heavy wood-soled shoes more commonly seen on miners down the pit. He's been training with the boys for six weeks,

and tonight is his debut performance on stage. The butterflies in his belly are taking flight he stares around at the theater's rococo interior augmented with ivory and gold leaf his nose fills with the distinctive odors of the music hall a heady mixture of citrus beer tobacco smoke and stale sweat all too, the woman hits the final high note that finishes her song and confidently strides offstage with a flick of her bustled dress. The crowd roars its appreciation. Then comes the cue from the stage manager. Faltering just for a moment, the boy feels a hand in the small of his back, Faltering just for a moment, the boy feels a hand in the small of his back shoving him on stage. The lights almost blind him as he takes up his position.

Dotted around are murmurings and a few drunken heckles. But then the orchestra starts up and drowns out everything else. The dance starts and the boy's weeks of training kick in, his feet moving in unison with the others. But he can feel that his movements are stiff. He can't relax. Are the crowd hollering their approval or their displeasure? He barely hears the music, performing the steps without thinking, and then, just as soon as it started, it's all over. without thinking, and then, just as soon as it started, it's all over. The lads march offstage, to what now sounds like mostly enthusiastic applause.

But as he heads through the wings, the boy knows that he could have done better. Stage fright, he realizes, is something he's going to have to work hard to overcome. But he will overcome it. The moments of fleeting admiration from the audience will become a drug that he cannot live without. He can't know it yet, but within a few short years, he will be the most beloved entertainer in the world. Though the men and women in the velvet seats have forgotten him almost as soon as he left the stage,

one day his name will be known across the globe. Charlie Chaplin, the world's greatest movie star. The first truly global celebrity, Charlie Chaplin was, for a while, the most famous human in the world. His particular talents and genius chimed perfectly with the emergence of the new mass media of cinema. Overall, he made 82 films. From New York to New Delhi, Hollywood to Hong Kong, the world knew and loved the little guy who lit up the silver screen like no one else. The world knew and loved the little guy who lit up the silver screen like no one else. But just how did Chaplin rise from the mean streets of South London to become the king of Tinseltown?

How much of what we see on the screen reflects the real Chaplin? And why did personal and political problems threaten to derail one of the most celebrated careers in entertainment history? problems threatened to derail one of the most celebrated careers in entertainment history. I'm John Hopkins and this is A Short History of Charlie Chaplin. It's a little after eight o'clock on the evening of the 16th of April 1889 in London, England. A woman, Hannah, holds her feeble newborn in her arms. In the years to come, he'll be unsure of exactly where he was born, but the best guess is a down-at-heel lodging house near London's Elephant and Castle neighbourhood. Though she's not 100% sure he's the father, Hannah names her son after her husband, Charles Chaplin. A musical singer like herself, Charles performs in a top hat and morning suit, blasting out songs with his powerful baritone.

Historian Lucy Moore is author of the book Anything Goes, a biography of the Roaring Twenties. Anything Goes, a biography of the Roaring Twenties. His father was a bit more successful. He was famous for playing a sort of stock character called a swell, a kind of man who thinks he's a bit of a dude, he's a gentleman, and he's always getting into trouble. And this is something that Charlie Chaplin played on later in his life. One of his first successful characters was a fellow called the inebriated swell, who really was directly based

on chaplin's father who was an alcoholic as probably was charlie chaplin's mother baby charlie has an older brother sydney and for a few months the family muddles along but money is always tight and in 1890 charles and hannah Struggling to fend for the three of them, Hannah moves from place to place around Kennington in South London. Paid gigs are few and far between, and her drinking is getting worse. It's possible she turns to sex work to make ends meet. Chaplin's inner-city childhood is not for the faint-hearted. It's an area dominated by factories,

tanneries, ale houses, and dwellings often little more than overcrowded slums. And for most, there's no way out. But amid the permanent stench of vinegar, smoke, beer, and animal dung, briefly, it looks like the Chaplin's fortunes are changing. Hannah embarks on a relationship with another musical artist, Leo Dryden, and before long, she gives birth to a third son. It's good news for the toddler, Charlie, who is whisked away to a smart new home half a mile up the road. Now there's food on the table,

and on Sundays he is dressed in a smart blue velvet suit, finally getting a glimpse of how the other half live. But the idyll doesn't last. Fearing he's chosen the wrong woman, Dryden leaves with his child in 1893, and the chaplains are thrust back into their old hand-to-mouth existence. Hannah scrabbles for work as a singer and dancer. Charlie trails after her, watching her from the wings, those large eyes peering from beneath a mop of dark curly hair, absorbing it all. According to Chaplin's later accounts, he is only just five when he makes his stage debut. Hannah has just walked out to perform at a typically raucous venue.

She opens her mouth to sing, but her voice fails her. The impatient crowd booes her off, and knowing he has a slot to fill, the theatre manager shoves Charlie on in her place. He brings the house down with singing and impersonations, getting the biggest laugh of all

when he pauses his routine to pick up the coins thrown onto the stage. Though it's a glimpse of the different world that Chaplin could one day inhabit, for now his fate is tied to that of his mother. The next year she's admitted to hospital for stress-related migraines, but then finds herself institutionalized for several months. In the meantime, her children are shunted from the local workhouse to a school for the

poor, then briefly into the care of a distant relative. When they're reunited in the spring of 1896, their transient lifestyle continues. The little Hannah earns as a seamstress is lost when her sewing machine is repossessed. Soup kitchens and parish charities keep their heads just above water, but Sidney and Charlie take to stealing what they cannot beg for. A bit of fruit here, a heel of bread there. Charlie's childhood malnutrition will, in years to come, be there for all to see in his delicate and stunted frame on the silver screen. The next few years are itinerant and chaotic. Hannah is in and out of asylums, and though the

boys receive a little formal education at a school for orphans and destitute children, times could barely be tougher. But it's around now that Charlie discovers he can make a few coppers as a dancer to an organ grinder. Just maybe he can entertain his way out of this hell for him and his family. It was just a very sad and deprived life. There are stories Charlie Chaplin told later of him sleeping on a park bench as a kid. It's a really tough, tough life.

And he's trying to look out for his mother, who's not only failing to work and usually drinking too much, but she also has some mental health problems, which possibly are to do with syphilis and possibly are to do with inherited characteristics, but either way, things are really, really tough for Chaplin throughout his childhood. The entertainment that's in his genes starts to play an increasingly central role. Maybe thanks to his father's connections, Charlie's big break with the Lancashire lads doesn't come a moment too soon. Between his own performances, he watches the other entertainers

at work, the comedians and clowns, magicians and mesmerists, acrobats and strongmen. In 1901, Charlie Chaplin Sr. dies from alcohol-related illness, and though 12-year-old Charlie briefly lives again with his mother, soon she's ill once more, and he's back to being a street urchin. Hungry and ragged, he takes whatever work he can, whether that's working as a chandler's errand boy, a surgeon's receptionist, an assistant to a barber or a glassblower, a newsboy or a dance instructor. Then, out of the blue, he catches a break. A theatrical agent puts him up for a role in a celebrated adaptation of Sherlock Holmes.

Paid the princely sum of £2.10 a week, around £200 today, he tours with the production from 1903 until 1906. Probably his first success on stage is when he plays Sherlock Holmes' page boy in a West End production. It has four runs, chaplains singled out in all the reviews.

He's kind of got real stage presence and charisma, even at this early stage. After three successful years with the show, his brother Sidney persuades him to join a comedy troupe called Walpink's Workmen. Chaplin appears in a skit about two workers wreaking a trail of destruction, knocking over pots of wallpaper paste, and causing havoc with ladders and the like. It's hardly the best show in town, but Chaplin minds it for all he can, copying the physical slapstick movements of other cast members and making them his own. Before the year is out, he is coaxed to join Fred Carno's troupe, the most celebrated comedy group of the age. Carno rehearses his

team relentlessly, pre-planning every move so that their organized routine is as slick as possible. planning every move so that their organized routine is as slick as possible. The audiences love what appears to be boisterous pandemonium, complete with custard pies, trips, falls, and tweaked noses. Kano instills in Chaplin a valuable lesson. Keep it wistful. If you smack someone hard in the face, look sad about it. If you knock a man down, kiss him on the head. He debuts with Carnot at London's New Cross Empire in 1903 in a piece

called The Football Match, shamelessly building his part. He trips over a dumbbell, hooks his walking cane on a punch bag, and loses a button so his trousers fall down. The audience rock in their seats. Soon he is Carnot's biggest draw, elevating the art of comedy as the act leaves England. If proof of his proficiency is needed, it comes after a show in Paris in 1909. A member of the audience seeks out Chaplin to tell him, you are instinctively a musician and dancer. It's only later that he discovers his newest fan is the composer Claude Debussy.

Charlie Chaplin is on his way to international fame. It's September 1910 on the Atlantic Ocean off the Canadian coast. The breeze is bracing and waves crash against the hull of the SS Cairn Rona. There is a thunderous blast on the ship's horn. Seagulls squawk as they soar and dive among the clouds. Down on deck, an offshoot of the Kano troop animatedly chat among themselves. There are jokes aplenty, and suddenly a woman breaks into song. Beside her, a man grabs a life ring from the railings, sticks his head through it, and pulls a silly face. They work hard to keep their spirits high after many days at sea.

The Can Rona is hardly the last word in luxury, more like a glorified cattle boat, one of them suggests. They have come from London, destined for Quebec, hand-picked by Carnot's U.S. agent, Alfred Reeves, for a tour of North America. Each of them has their own big dream. The man with his head through the life ring is about five and a half feet tall and thin. His face is expressive, eyebrows arching high, his smile conveying an appealing innocence. For now, this man, whose name is Stan Laurel, is just another part of Kano's team.

But it won't be long until all of that changes. Suddenly, the man next to Stan, the man he understudies for, leaps from his deck chair, sending it clattering to the ground. He races to the edge of the deck and points to the distant horizon. His companions stop what they're doing and squint through the sea mist. Soon enough, they see what he can see. Land. They let out a collective cheer, but the 21-year-old at the railings lifts his hands to shush his colleagues. He stands before them as if about to make a speech. He stands before them as if about to make a speech. America, he declares dramatically.

I am coming to conquer you. Every man, woman and child shall have my name on their lips. Charles Spencer Chaplin. With that, he takes a deep bow. His audience begins to boo, affectionately keeping Charlie in his place as he makes his way back to his deck chair. But they all know that whatever hopes they have for their own futures, there's no doubt he has that sprinkling of magic that means he just might make it. Life in America is all about performance, but when he isn't on stage, Chaplin can be withdrawn,

sullen, and, on bad days, impatient and rude. But he is mischievous and eccentric too, like the time he helps Stan Laurel grill an illicit chop in his hotel room by playing his beloved violin loudly to disguise the sound of sizzling. hotel room by playing his beloved violin loudly to disguise the sound of sizzling in April 1913 he's in Philadelphia when a telegram arrives it comes from the Keystone comedy company America's most successful comedy movie producers Keystone are about to lose their leading man and they want Chaplin to replace him. They'll pay him $150 a month for the first three months, and then $175 a month for the next nine. Thousands of dollars today. It's an astonishing offer, and they don't have to ask him twice.

A few months later, in Kansas City, he comes off stage for the last time. Buying a farewell round of drinks for the company, he makes a jokey speech full of bonhomie, but the others can see him shaking as he talks. A moment later, he takes himself off to a quiet corner and begins to weep. The era of chaplain on stage is over, but his greatest days are just ahead. but his greatest days are just ahead.

When Keystone pick him up, they're going to pay him $150 a week in 1913. Within a year, he's being paid nearly 10 times that. He absolutely arrives in Hollywood as Hollywood is taking off and he's really part of those first exciting years where pretty much everything he touches turns to gold. A few days after Kansas, Chaplin walks onto the Keystone filming lot at Edendale in California's San Fernando Valley. Amid the expanses of cacti,

sagebrush, and eucalyptus, he spots the operation's headquarters, a rickety old bungalow, and next to it a ramshackle barn that serves as dressing rooms. There are three or four films all being shot at the same time, each coming in at a finished length of 10 to 25 minutes. The noise is oppressive. Directors and their assistants bark orders, cameras whirr noisily, and musicians hammer out live soundtracks to drive the action along. Columns of cars are parked up, ready to be used in the chases that have made Keystone's movies famous. As far as Chaplin can tell, each movie is being made up as it goes along, evolving from the kernel of an idea rather than from a honed script. Overwhelmed, he returns to his hotel in town and doesn't come back for a couple of days. When he does try again, he initially just wanders around. No one seems quite sure what to do with

him. Eventually, he's brought onto a movie called Making a Living, playing a streetwise confidence trickster with a cravat, top hat, monocle, and drooping moustache. And when he gives his character a funny walk, he realizes that Keystone is not so different from Karno. They're short movies. Most of them were improvised, so they didn't really have much of a script. It's complete slapstick. It's all about ladders falling on top of people and people stepping into pots of paint and cars crashing into horse-drawn carriages and, you know, custard pies and banana skins and all of that kind of thing, which Charlie's style of comedy is brilliant for.

What's interesting also, what we can really see now when we look back on it, is that it looks really jerky and sped up. And you think when you see it that it's to do with the quality of the film. In fact, that was an effect they deliberately tried to produce to enhance the kind of comedic qualities of it. One of his next movies, Kid Otto Races at Venice, introduces the world to what will become his most famous creation, The Little Tramp.

There's the oversized suit, too small bowler hat and bristly moustache, but the cane and duck waddle with outturned feet soon follow. The mournful-looking, accident-prone underdog instantly steals the hearts of audiences. Chaplin, meanwhile, is struggling to get used to the trappings of stardom. In 1914, Charlie starts making really quite big money. He's making over a thousand dollars a week and he goes to New York. He's 25 and he's kind of hit the big time. He checks himself into a fabulous hotel and he spends the whole night turning the hot tap on and off,

on and off, on and off. And he recounts this episode in his memoirs and he says, you know, how could anyone ever get used to luxury? And I think for Chaplin, really, it's a sense of how could anyone ever get used to comfort, to not being hungry, to not being desperate for love and affection, but also for the basic necessities of life. That's something that he never, ever loses. Despite his humble origins, he does possess a diva-ish quality. At work, he grumbles about

everything. Co-stars' performances, the directors, the storylines, the sets. One day, he sits his director, leading lady Mabel Normand, down on a curbside, to tell her that he doesn't think she is competent to tell him what to do. Anyone else would have had their contract ripped up on the spot for such disrespect, but Chaplin is already too big a star. He is allowed to start directing himself, beginning with 20 Minutes of Love. His next, Caught in a Cabaret, catches the eye of the critic for the New York Dramatic Mirror. It is unwise, the writer says, to call this the funniest picture that has ever been produced, but it comes mighty close to it.

By the end of 1914, Chaplin has made 36 movies. When his contract runs out in early 1915, he moves to the S&A Film Manufacturing Company. There, he receives a mind-boggling $1,250 per week, not to mention the $10,000 signing on fee. He finds his new leading lady in a 19-year-old novice actress called Edna Perviance. Over the next eight years, they will share the screen 34 times. They enjoy one of their greatest triumphs in 1915 with The Tramp, the film that cements the legend of Chaplin's most famous creation. Now he's not merely the biggest star in Hollywood, he's the most famous man on the planet.

Of a global population still some way under two billion, it is estimated that 300 million people have watched his movies. Branded merchandise sells by the truckload, popular songs are written for him. There is a craze for competitions to find the best chaplain impersonator. The winner of one of these, held in Luna Park, Cleveland, is a 12-year-old boy by the name of Bob Hope. And another glittering career is set into motion. Over in Russia, in between plotting the overthrow of the Romanovs and establishing global communism, Lenin cites Chaplin as the only man in the world he wants to meet. On a transcontinental trip in 1916, Chaplin is amazed to see huge crowds at every railroad station he passes through.

Fans wave flags and call his name. When the Chaplin train, as it is soon known, reaches New York, the police commissioner asks him to disembark at 125th Street rather than as planned at Grand Union. His officers can't control the crowds gathering there. At the age of 26, Chaplin signs a new movie deal, this time with the Lone Star Film Corporation. Long gone are the days of the workhouse. Now he's earning $670,000 a year, almost $20 million today. It seems like he can do no wrong. million today. It seems like he can do no wrong. Almost every major figure in films through the 20th century cites Chaplin as being a huge influence on their work. And even though all the films he made seem to feature the same central character, variations on the tramp, and they're often a similar story of trying to achieve something and failing and then picking

himself up at the end and going off into the sunset with his cane and his bowler hat. I think Chaplin really communicates that feeling that that's how the tramp feels. He's never quite in the place he wants to be. He never quite gets the things he dreams of, even though he's being told all the time that everybody else is getting those things and that quality, that sense of yearning and melancholy and not quite achieving your dreams is something that I think really spoke to audiences in the 1920s. While Chaplin's professional life seems on a permanent ascendancy, his personal life is less successful. In his movies, Chaplin is constantly chasing beautiful young women and is routinely undeterred when they refuse his advances.

Though it's played for laughs, his characters are frequently aggressive. In one movie, he even hits a reluctant woman in the face with a brick. In one movie, he even hits a reluctant woman in the face with a brick. Though there's no evidence that he's quite so violent in real life, there's much to suggest he's very far from an ideal partner. In years to come, he boasts that he's clocked up some 2,000 lovers. He's definitely not an ideal husband. Politically, he sees himself as a kind of anarchist who needs to be free and unfettered.

That's obviously fantastic for his working life. It gives him creative freedom and the ability to go anywhere creatively. But on a personal level, it means he's very unsatisfactory as a husband and father. Co-star Edna Pervience is among the 2,000, although the relationship, which for a while seems destined for marriage, fizzles by 1916, long before their screen chemistry fades. She comes to realize, as do many others, that his one true love is his work. His new deal with Lone Star calls for him to produce a film a month for a year.

And though creatively fulfilled, on set he becomes a tyrant. Bellowing orders and demanding dozens of retakes until his perfectionism is satisfied, he considers his fellow actors little more than foils to his own genius. He's a complete control freak, really, in modern terms. He acts out every single scene and shows his actors exactly how they have to perform it. He even goes to the lengths of writing the scores for his own films, even though he's not musically trained, because he just has this idea of how it ought to be, and that's how it has to be. And this is hugely rewarding for him. He creates these incredible masterpieces, because that's what he sees in his head and that's what

he's able to communicate on film. But no one complains while he continues to fill the theaters. He racks up stellar hits like Easy Street and The Immigrant, in which Chaplin uses social satire to chronicle the lives of the poor and exiled. In the summer of 1917, he signs his first million-dollar deal for eight films with the First National Film Corporation. Not long afterwards, he's at a party thrown by one of Hollywood's most powerful producers, Samuel Goldwyn. There, Chaplin's head is turned by a dainty, blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl. Her name is Mildred Harris, and she's just 16,

13 years his junior. Nonetheless, the relationship develops, and a few months later, Mildred announces she is pregnant. Appalled at the prospect of a scandal, Chaplin quietly marries her, and though it emerges that she wasn't pregnant after all, soon she is. With little trust between them, it's a horrible marriage. When they're not quarreling, Chaplin ignores her. It's not long before she is hospitalized for three weeks, diagnosed with a nervous breakdown. Still, Chaplin always has his work. He strikes up a friendship with perhaps the only man in Hollywood whose fame remotely approaches his own, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., the heartthrob of countless swashbuckling epics. Along with the director W.D. Griffith and Mary Pickford, the industry's first million-dollar actress, they establish the United Artists Production Company, in February 1919. Five months later, Mildred

delivers a son, Norman, but he survives just three days. Bereft, Chaplin spirals into a depression as his marriage collapses. Within a fortnight, he is at work on what will become one of his masterpieces, and his first full-length feature, The Kid. A twelve-year-old girl, Lolita McMurray, is cast as a street urchin, and Chaplin becomes infatuated with her. Maybe it's a distraction, albeit an unsettling one, from the divorce proceedings Mildred now instigates on the grounds of desertion and cruelty. The unhappy couple settle in November, with Mildred receiving property and $100,000. Fortunately for Chaplin, the divorce does not harm his popularity.

When The Kid opens in February 1921, audiences devour its mix of sentimental melodrama, pantomime, and farce. All the old magic is still there, but the movie seems to be saying something more about wider society and its attitudes to the weak and vulnerable. According to some critics, Chaplin is becoming a sort of Dickens for the silver screen. In the 1920s were a time when everybody was told they were living through a kind of boom era of fabulous parties. And it's that same thing as The Great Gatsby, where everybody's thinking there's an amazing party going on and everybody else is at it, but they're outside, not invited. Chaplin Mania is at its peak. In August, he's in New York for the premiere of Fairbank's latest,

The Three Musketeers, at the Lyric Theatre on Broadway. When the crowd spots him, they descend like lions on a zebra. He feels a sudden breeze as a woman produces a pair of scissors and cuts a piece from the seat of his trousers. Others grab at his shirt and tie. Buttons are torn off and fought over as souvenirs. Amid the frenzy, his feet are trampled and face scratched. The following month, it's time to return to London to promote the kid. Perhaps things will be calmer there. It's spring, 1921.

As Chaplin's train chugs into Platform 14 at Waterloo Station, It's spring, 1921. As Chaplin's train chugs into platform 14 at Waterloo station, he realizes there is no chance of slipping quietly to his hotel. Approaching the station exit with his entourage, he first sees the ocean of handkerchiefs and hats, cloth caps, straw boaters, bowlers, bonnets, thousands of them, waving in the air. There are cries of recognition and appreciation, hundreds of people calling out his name. Beyond that, he hears a low music drifting across the city. They are even ringing the church bells for him.

But this is no time to breathe it all in. Harassed-looking police officers are struggling to hold back the reporters and cameramen bearing down, and it's hard to see which path he might take away from the throng. Pushing through, he fears he might be submerged when he feels hands upon his own slender arms. His feet leave the ground, and he is unceremoniously bundled into a waiting limousine, three policemen on each running board. They speed him to the Ritz in Piccadilly, where another vast crowd awaits. Preparing to run the gauntlet again, he smooths his dishevelled hair and brushes imaginary dust from his grey overcoat.

Stepping from the car, he smiles and blows kisses. The crowd roars back its love. The hotel has had to close its doors to keep the public out, but now he is swept in and taken to his room. Still, he hears the chanting of his name. He grabs the roses from a vase and marches to the window. Waving and blowing kisses, he starts to throw stems into the crowd. A police officer rushes over and begs him from below the open window to stop, for fear he'll start a stampede. He retreats from the window and takes a moment to wash and change his clothes, and after a little while, the crowd disperse.

When he's sure he's safe, he takes himself out to a service entrance at the back of the hotel, where a cab waits for him. As the engine roars into life, Chaplin directs the driver across Westminster Bridge and down into Kennington. Outside the Canterbury Music Hall on Westminster Bridge Road, he spots a blind beggar he used to know. And there is the barber's where he worked as a lather boy. Here, the public baths, where he'd once gone swimming for throppens he could hardly afford. Over there, the stone trough outside a pub where he washed himself in harder times. where he washed himself in harder times. He asks the driver to stop, and he goes for a walk,

a familiar odour of fish and chips wafting in the air. He stops at The Horns, a pub where, as a child, he used to bump into the stars of the music hall and orders a ginger beer. The drink is delivered by a woman he last saw as a servant girl in her teens, and he realizes just how unkind the years have been to those he left behind. He drinks quickly, conscious of the murmurs around the pub, the increasingly shameless stares.

Getting up, he continues his walk, but soon he's conscious of a crowd gathering behind him. Though they keep at a respectful distance, he asks a policeman for assistance. And though the officer assures him that these people mean him no harm, Chaplin is uneasy. Soon, he's safely confined in another cab, speeding back to the luxury of the Ritz. speeding back to the luxury of the Ritz. Back in America, Chaplin builds himself an estate over several acres of the Hollywood Hills. His home has no fewer than 40 rooms, plus a cinema and a bowler hat-shaped swimming pool.

But he's well aware he must keep the wheel turning if he is to maintain his preeminent position. Figures like Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd are only too ready to usurp him. Fortunately, his Midas touch seems as strong as ever. In February 1924, he opens production on The Gold Rush, a movie inspired by the Klondike gold rush of the previous century. a movie inspired by the Klondike gold rush of the previous century. He casts as his leading lady one Lita Gray, who is in fact Lilita McMurray, who had so entranced him on the set of The Kid.

She is still not yet 16, so she brings her mother with her when filming begins in the Sierra Nevada. Chaplin, though, will not be discouraged by something as trifling as her age. Not content with his catalogue of other affairs, he now adds the teenage Lita to his list of conquests. When she tells him she is pregnant, he panics. He could get a 30-year prison sentence for having relations with a minor. So instead, he makes plans to marry her. Under the guise of a scouting expedition for filming locations, the couple tie the knot in Mexico in 1924, when Lita is 16. Marrying outside of the U.S. means the ceremony doesn't attract the coverage it would have drawn

in California, and it also gets the authorities off Chaplin's back. No one wants to prosecute a man for sleeping with his wife. But Chaplin feels trapped and behaves abominably. When they're still on the train home, he calls her terrible names and even suggests that they would be better off if she jumped onto the line. The next year, he completes edits on The Gold Rush, which costs nearly one million dollars, but makes back six times as much. It becomes known as the most expensive, biggest grossing, and quite possibly best-loved movie of the silent era. Privately, though, Chaplin is deeply unhappy.

He is constantly fearful of contracting venereal disease, and with good reason. He suffers from insomnia and is increasingly paranoid too, even fitting a listening device in his wife's bedroom. By the spring of 1926, the couple have two sons, but it's a turbulent year for Chaplin. His current film, Circus, circus is a disaster not least when a fire rips through the film set then news reaches him that he's being investigated by the internal revenue for suspected tax evasion and fraud incidentally he is by now having an affair with another leading lady myrna kennedy who happens to be his wife's best friend.

Lita files for divorce in January 1927. In a statement running to several dozen pages, she accuses him of various misdemeanors, including pulling a gun on her, trying to persuade her into an abortion, and having unnatural sexual preferences. abortion and having unnatural sexual preferences. The complaint of Lita, as it is known, is soon being sold for 25 cents on the street corners of L.A. Chaplin endures a nervous breakdown, but Lita secures the biggest divorce settlement in U.S. history. Crucially, the movie business is changing too. 1927 sees the release of The Jazz Singer, which wows audiences as the first movie to have synchronized sound.

But Chaplin is wary, telling an interviewer that they are ruining the great beauty of silence. His response is to defiantly stick to the silent genre with his next film, City Lights. It may be out of step with technology, but it proves to be a massive commercial and critical hit and becomes Chaplin's own favorite. With an unprecedented global profile, Chaplin now counts among his friends, royalty, presidents and prime ministers. There are also intellectual heavyweights like economist John Maynard Keynes, George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells and J.M. Barrie, Mahatma Gandhi and Albert Einstein. His natural bend is towards the political left. His natural bend is towards the political left.

Hollywood in the 1910s and 1920s was populated with people like Chaplin, like Mary Pickford. They'd come from very, very poor backgrounds indeed. They're often kind of outsiders, marginal. They're often quite left-leaning. And this comes through after the Second World War when the McCarthy era comes in. People with politics like that were excluded or the government sought to have them excluded from Hollywood. So Chaplin definitely saw himself as a left-leaning person, as a communist sympathizing person, but this is something that was quite typical of Hollywood in that period. But this is something that was quite typical of Hollywood in that period.

Now, well into his forties, in 1934, he begins work on Modern Times. It's the last outing for his tramp character, in a story he hopes will act as a critique of a way of life in which humans have been turned into machines. It also provides him with his next wife, a minor actress called Paulette Goddard, who initially claims to be 17, but is actually 22. They claim to have married in Honolulu in 1936, but no legal documentation is ever produced. Regardless, the relationship soon runs its course, seemingly hitting the buffers after Paulette narrowly misses out on the role of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind.

In 1938, with Europe on the brink of war, Chaplin makes his most overtly political film, The Great Dictator, a satire on tyranny. Ironically, it is suggested that Hitler had styled his mustache on chaplains, perhaps wishing to tap into that image of the everyman hero fighting the system. His first full dialogue movie. It costs two million dollars and opens in October 1940, but fails to sparkle. It seems curiously old-fashioned, the Nazis represented as a version of the calamitous Keystone Cops, and Chaplin's closing monologue managing to be both over-earnest and trite. More impactful, however, are the political speeches Chaplin starts to give

in public, sometimes to audiences of thousands. With the Second World War now underway, he comes out in support of Russia and calls for a second front to aid them. He denies being a communist himself, he is, after all, on a seven-figure salary. But his willingness to stand in support of Stalin and the Kremlin is widely noted by the American establishment. For now, his political life remains much less complicated than his love life. In 1941, he starts a romance with 22-year-old starlet Joan Barry, 30 years his junior. But by late 1942, he has grown tired of the relationship and calls it off. Two nights before Christmas, Barry arrives at his mansion, waving a pistol around and threatening to kill herself.

Chaplin drops her at a police station, but she is back the next night, and again the police are called. Fast forward to May 1943, and Barry still cannot let go. Now claiming to be pregnant, she arrives one evening at the mansion out of the blue, only to discover a 17-year-old aspiring actress in Chaplin's bed. This, it turns out, is Una O'Neill, daughter of the celebrated playwright Eugene. The distraught Barry now starts leaking details of Chaplin's alleged cruelties to the press, while her family attempt to sue him for upkeep of the unborn child. He marries O'Neil in June 1943, and Barry gives birth to the child she maintains is his a few months later.

By now, the FBI are involved and charge Chaplin with having transported Barry across state lines for immoral purposes. He insists he originally brought her to California to work in his films, but the authorities claim this was never his real intention. He is also accused of conspiring with the LAPD to have her wrongfully imprisoned. His trial opens in February 1944 and causes a sensation. Facing up to 20 years in jail if he is found guilty, he takes the stand and puts on a dazzling performance, denying any wrongdoing.

It is enough to see him acquitted, but his reputation has taken a pounding. When a subsequent paternity trial finds him to be the father of Barry's child, despite blood test evidence to the contrary, his public image is changed forever. Chaplin has a complicated relationship often with his female co-stars. He's often in love with much younger women. Quite often they get pregnant and he has to marry them and then the marriage doesn't work out. He has a very checkered personal life until he meets Una O'Neill much later. The Women's Institute of America is up in arms about his personal life, even when he's a huge star in the 20s and they're kind of organizing boycotts of his films.

It's April 1947 in New York, and Chaplin has just witnessed the opening of his latest movie, Monsieur Verdoux. It's a change of direction, a dark comedy, where he plays a bigamist wife-killer. But for the first time, one of his films loses money. The public's love, secure for so long, seems to have finally waned. love, secure for so long, seems to have finally waned. Feeling compelled to react, he calls a press conference in the ballroom of his hotel. The room is packed with journalists. Amid heightening Cold War tensions, their questions focus on Chaplin's alleged communist sympathies, but he fails to win them over. Fellow director Orson Welles describes the press conference as a lynching. Worse still, Chaplin is now in the sights of U.S. Senator

Joe McCarthy, who has been spearheading a communist witch hunt across the U.S.'s political and cultural institutions. There is the real threat that Chaplin could be blacklisted and unable to work in Hollywood again. He is soon at work on the highly autobiographical Limelight. In 1952, he opts to premiere it in London, where he hopes for a warmer reception, free from the tentacles of the House Un-American Activities Committee, who are currently investigating him. On the 17th of September 1952, he sets sail with wife Una and their four children on the luxurious Queen Elizabeth liner. But just two days into the voyage,

he is informed his re-entry has been withdrawn. The Attorney General has publicly called him an unsavory character. Once the premiere is over, Chaplin sends Una back alone to get their financial affairs in order. Not long after, they buy a home on the shores of Switzerland's Lake Geneva, beginning a new life in exile. The America that once embraced him is no more. Part of the reason that he doesn't go back to America again is not just his communist leaning politics, but also the sense that he had a scandalous private life that wouldn't have been accepted in the more puritanical America of the 50s and 60s.

In 1957, Chaplin makes his final screen appearance in A King in New York, fittingly about a monarch in exile. The last film he directs comes a decade later, A Countess from Hong Kong, with Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren. By 1962, he and Una have completed their family. They have no fewer than eight children, meaning Chaplin is the father of a total of eleven surviving offspring. A decade later,

he returns to the States for the first time in twenty years. A decade later, he returns to the States for the first time in 20 years. As his plane prepares to touch down, he is filled with nerves. How will he be received? But as it turns out, time has healed old wounds. The crowds come out to cheer him when he gets a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and he is bestowed an honorary Oscar for his work in making motion pictures the art form of this century. But everyone can see he is fading.

He struggles periodically for lucidity, and his failing mobility sees him increasingly dependent on a wheelchair. There is still time for one final honour, however. In 1975, he travels to London where he is knighted by the Queen. Sir Charles Chaplin. Not bad for the kid from Kennington. He now retreats to Lake Geneva, He now retreats to Lake Geneva, where a stroke leaves him partially paralyzed. He passes away just before dawn on Christmas Day, 1977. His greatest fear has been that he will not be remembered.

He doesn't have to worry about that. In many ways, Chaplin defined what the early years of Hollywood were all about. He arrived there at a time when coyotes were still howling in the canyons of Beverly Hills. And he really was such an influential figure in those early decades. Every great Hollywood director or producer or actor will cite Chaplin as an influence on their work. director or producer or actor will cite Chaplin as an influence on their work. And even though he just had this one great figure, the little tramp, that kind of encapsulates everything that Hollywood's all about, really. It's that one individual figure who's trying to achieve something great. And whether he succeeds or whether he fails, that's what the movies are all about. And that's what Chaplin really communicated on screen.

Next time on Short History Of, we'll bring you a short history of Sutton Hoo. This quantity of gold, there was nothing like that previously known anywhere in England. And again, with the tendency of archaeologists, I think it must be said now as well as then, to light the bling, it was a massively exciting find. That's next time.