Charles Chaplain as a young man

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Charlie Chaplin & Stan Laurel

Norman B. Schwartz

In September 1910, one of England’s most popular Music Hall acts, Fred Karno Company of Clowns, set off by ship to begin a scheduled tour of North America that would last twenty-one months. On board, there were two teenage knockabout comics, nineteen-year-old Charles Chaplin and his understudy, Arthur Stanley Jefferson, who had taken the stage name of Stan Laurel. Karno, their boss, was said to have initiated the original custard pie in the face gag and other forms of violent pantomime he called slapstick.

Many years later, Laurel recalled how, on sighting the Canadian shore, his shipmate rushed to the railings, looked out and shouted: America! I am coming to conquer you! Every man, woman, and child shall have my name on their lips! Charles Spencer Chaplin! He was wrong about the geography, but not about his ambition.

When the Karno tour was over, Laurel and Chaplin returned to England, but at his first opportunity (1912) Chaplin made his way back to the States– the first of the two to sign an American contract. In 1914, Chaplin joined Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios, famous for the Keystone Cops and Bathing Beauties series, photographed in sunny California. Chaplin quickly fell in with the dozens of other actors under contract who were Sennett’s employees. In one year, he appeared in thirty-five films.

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Given the frenetic atmosphere of Sennett’s fast-paced movies, Chaplin instinctively understood that he must find a way to stand out: he had to create an easily identifiable character that audiences would instantly recognize from film to film. Chaplin described his invention as a contradiction: the pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small and the shoes large…a small moustache. People began noticing his Little Tramp persona and started asking for more.

By November of that year, Sennett cast Chaplin in a supporting role in the first feature-length comedy film ever made, Tillie’s Punctured Romance, so great a box-office success that when Chaplin’s contract came up for renewal, he asked for a raise to $1,000 a week. When Sennett refused, Chaplin moved on to the Essanay Studios in windy Chicago, which had offered him $1,250 and much more artistic freedom. He began writing and directing as well as acting, slowing down the pace of his films, making his little tramp less manic, less violent, more pathetic, and even romantic. When the Essanay contract ended in 1915, Mutual Film Corporation eagerly offered him $10,000 a week, which Chaplin did not hesitate to accept. By 1918, only thirty-one years old, he was one of the highest-paid actors in the world.

Chaplin had spent his childhood in and out of Victorian workhouses, sometimes busking on the streets to earn enough to eat. Perhaps because of that traumatic experience, he never lost the sense that what he would one day earn would all be taken from him, just as he had seen his mother taken away to an insane asylum when he was fourteen. He was lucky too to have always had his elder half-brother Sydney Chaplin by his side. Sydney, who was to devote his life to caring for his brother’s business affairs, once announced: Charlie [must] be allowed all the time he needs and all the money for producing [films] the way he wants….. It is quality, not quantity, we are after.

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Stan Laurel’s father, Arthur Jefferson, a Lancastrian, was an actor / theatre manager who provided his family with a secure middle-class existence. Like so many Musical Hall veterans, Laurel had a much more easygoing personality; he was happy to find work, any work. While Charlie scrambled to the top, he earned a decent living kicking around in English Vaudeville and then American silent films, at one time even doing a Chaplin act on stage, dressed as the Tramp.

In June 1917, Chaplin signed yet another contract to complete eight films for First National. A year later, a famous director and two stars – D. W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks – formed United Artists, the first company of filmmakers in America to have total control over the funding and distribution of their films. They asked Chaplin to be their partner, promising Chaplin he would own all his negatives and benefit substantially whenever his films were shown anywhere in the world.

Still owing First National a few pictures, Chaplin began experimenting. He made his first long-form film, The Kid, in 1921, dramatizing in comic fashion the poverty and parental separation he had known as a child. Once free of his First National commitment, he made his first pictures for United Artists, the unsuccessful A Woman of Paris (1923), and then two great hits, The Gold Rush (1925) and The Circus (1928).

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In October of that year, at the first Academy Awards ceremony held at the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, Chaplin’s peers awarded him a special trophy, not yet called an Oscar, for versatility and genius in acting, writing, directing. Not only had Chaplin become enormously rich, but he was also being acknowledged by the world’s intellectual and artistic community as the great artist he had become.

In the same year Chaplin received his special award, Laurel, now a permanent resident in America, signed a contract with the Hal Roach studio as a writer and director of short comedies, not as an actor. He was happy to stay behind the camera until one of the studio contract players, Oliver Hardy, was hospitalized, and Roach asked him to act in his place. Leo McCarey, Roach’s best director, who would go on to direct many of the best Marx Brothers films and An Affair to Remember, had an inspiration: he teamed the two Roach employees in several short films.

When sound pictures came in at the end of the 1920s, audiences were further delighted to hear their voices – Hardy’s rich Southern cadences and Laurel’s English accent and baby voice. A three-reeler they made in 1931 won them an Academy Award for Best Short Subject. Yet despite Laurel’s great talent – some thought equal to Chaplin’s as an actor-writer-director – he never once attempted to go out on his own to form his own company. Even after he sued Roach for a salary increase, Laurel eventually dropped the case and agreed to return to work, more than happy to be employed at a slightly increased guaranteed weekly salary, however disproportionate to the profits his creativity was bringing his producer, than to be a freelancer. He would do so for the rest of his working life.

The advent of sound did not change Chaplin’s belief in the power of the silent film. He said: I was a pantomimist and in that medium I was unique and, without false modesty, a master. In 1931, still under the banner of United Artists, he made City Lights, a silent film with music he composed himself. It grossed over $3 million at the box office, equal to over $60 million today. His next film, another satire, this time on the dehumanizing aspects of industrial capitalism, Modern Times, was released in 1936 with sound effects and music. The Tramp did not speak; he sang one gibberish song.

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In 1939, six days after England entered the war, Chaplin began production on what would be his most ambitious project to date, The Great Dictator. Chaplin took comic advantage of the obvious parallels between himself and the German chancellor. Both men had been born a few days apart in poverty. The dictator wore the same moustache as the Tramp. Chaplin played two parts – “A Jewish Barber” and the dictator of Tomainia, “Adenoid Hynkel.” Famously, he ended his film with an impassioned five-minute monologue delivered directly to the camera, in which Chaplin in Hynkel’s uniform spoke for the first time in his own richly melodious voice, never heard before on film. He railed against war and fascism:

Let us fight to free the world – to do away with national barriers – to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers! in the name of democracy, let us all unite!

It was Chaplin’s unorthodox combination of his sexual life and politics that was to be his undoing in the United States. J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), who had long kept a dossier on the actor, accused Chaplin of being a pedophile and a communist. Chaplin was notorious for his affairs with other actors and his marriages with young girls. (He married three of his wives when they were teenagers.) His acrimonious divorce from his second wife, actress Lita Grey, whom he met when she was fifteen, led to a then-record settlement. Another aspiring actress, Joan Barry, who he had signed on a $75-a-week contract when she was twenty-one and Chaplin fifty-two, claimed she was pregnant with his child. Although Chaplin was acquitted, Hoover next named him in alleged violation of the Mann Act, which prohibits the transportation of women across state boundaries for sexual purposes. In April 1944, acquitted once again and fully understanding that bad publicity would seriously affect his public image, Chaplin surprised his public one more time by announcing he had married his latest discovery, Oona O’Neill, the eighteen-year-old daughter of the playwright Eugene.

Another thorn in Hoover’s side was that although Chaplin had made millions in the years before income tax, he had never once applied for citizenship. During World War Two, Chaplin openly championed the Soviet Union and supported causes that supported Russian and American friendship. After the war, he protested the blacklisting of actors and directors by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

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For his next film, Monsieur Verdoux (1947), the story of a Bluebeard who married women for their money and then killed them, he abandoned his Tramp costume, never to wear it onscreen again. As the suave lady-killer, he spoke for the entire film, suggesting that killing a few women was no worse than killing many in war. It’s all business, the Verdoux character says.

This anti-capitalist satire was the first Chaplin release that was both a critical and box-office failure. A member of the House Un-American Activities Committee, John Rankin of Mississippi, condemned it in Congress, saying Chaplin’s life in Hollywood was detrimental to the moral fabric of America. […] his loathsome pictures can be kept from before the eyes of the American youth. He should be deported and gotten rid of at once.

When Chaplin decided to hold the world premiere of his next film, Limelight (1952), not in America but in London, the Attorney General revoked Chaplin’s re-entry permit. Chaplin replied, Whether I re-entered that unhappy country or not was of little consequence to me. I would like to have told them that the sooner I was rid of that hate-beleaguered atmosphere the better, that I was fed up with America’s insults and moral pomposity and I had given up my residence in the United States. Chaplin settled with his bride and family in Switzerland in January 1953 and severed all his business ties in the United States.

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During all these turbulent years in Chaplin’s life, Laurel moved from the Roach studio to 20th Century Fox and then to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Still under contract, still a studio employee, he and his partner “Babe,” as he always called Oliver, were to go on to make 106 films together, 27 of them full-length feature films. Their films made millions, but Laurel kept collecting his weekly salary checks, happy to be working and earning a living.

When Oliver Hardy died on 7 August 1957, Laurel was devastated. “What is there to say? He was like a brother to me.” The comedian announced he had no interest in making any more films. Married four times, he lived out his final years in a two-and-a-half room flat in the Oceana Apartments in Santa Monica, California.

Chaplin remained in Europe, living in luxury at his fourteen-hectare Manoir de Ban in the village of Vevey. In 1964 he published his 500-page autobiography, never once mentioning his understudy, the man with whom he had roomed for three years. Laurel was disappointed but not surprised.

He wrote: [Chaplin] never to my knowledge ever had any time for any of his close friends who worked with him in the early days…. He was a very eccentric character, composed of many moods, at times signs of insanity, which I think developed further when he gained fame and fortune.

The director Jon Conway said, I think jealousy came into it. Chaplin was jealous of Laurel and saw him as a rival. Also, he very much wanted to leave his old life in England behind. He wanted to reinvent himself in America. The same year his book was published in 1964, Chaplin returned to the United States for the first time in twenty years to receive an honorary award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He was given a twelve-minute standing ovation.

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Those who had speculated why Chaplin had never become an American citizen guessed it was because he hoped one day to be knighted in the land of his birth. He lived long enough to see, finally, his name on the 1975 New Year Honors list. Too weak to kneel before the Queen, he received his longed-for honor in his wheelchair. On the morning of Christmas day 1977, Chaplin died in his home in Switzerland, leaving over $100 million to his widow Oona.

As Chaplin was the proprietor of all his intellectual property, his heirs continue to collect royalties every time his films are shown anywhere in the world. While they were alive but retired, Laurel and Hardy’s shorts and feature films were revived on television, but as Laurel and Hardy did not own them as Chaplin owned his creations, neither man ever saw a penny of what these revivals earned or will earn in perpetuity. Laurel died in 1965, at age seventy-four. At his funeral service his contemporary Buster Keaton spoke: Chaplin wasn’t the funniest, I wasn’t the funniest; this man was the funniest. His young friend and occasional imitator Dick Van Dyke gave the eulogy and read The Clown’s Prayer, one of whose verses goes—

Never let me acquire success to the point that I discontinue calling on my Creator in the hour of need, acknowledging and thanking Him in the hour of plenty.

Charlie Chaplin may have never forgotten to call on his Creator in his hour of need, but he ignored his former shipmate in the hour of plenty. Had Laurel been granted one last gag, one last reaction as given every time Hardy uttered these immortal words – Well, here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into – Laurel might have sat up in his coffin and shrugged. He was not a man to take Chaplin or Death personally.

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Norman B. Schwartz is the author of the comic novels ‘ALL THINGS small‘, Paradise Now, Don Juan in Space, True (Cinema) Confessions, Hollywood: Below and Beyond, and the DIY guide, The Art Of The Schnoorr. He spent over forty years working on films in Hollywood and Rome. Norman was the first ADR sound editor / post-production dialogue director to be admitted to Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles.

Norman B. Schwartz’s essays will appear in sequence monthly in each issue of Ars Notoria Magazine. In October of 2025, a paperback edition of the complete collection of his essays titled: HOLLYOOD  Actors & Politicos/ a Shared Profession was published and is available for purchase from Centre House Press.