The World Crisis in Dumb Show. The genius for using sound without syllables, which was so effective in his last film, can adapt itself to any locality, any necessity for expression. One imagines the little comedian in his usual picture make-up pleading soundlessly at Geneva for custard pies instead of poison gas. Or at Harbin he sits on a keg of powder and kicks his big, flat shoes against it while he shows a few Generals how to win. The Chinese “sound effects” in this scene should be good. Riding a Soviet tractor in the Russian fields, wearing a loin cloth and carrying his flexible cane in India, taking off his battered derby to an American bank that never failed, he can remain as silent, wistful and funny as ever in his old character.
—New York Times, 15 April 1932
As the New York Times news writer suggests in this excerpt, Charlie Chaplin was (1) often conflated with his film persona, the Little Tramp, and (2) viewed as seemingly “at home” in diverse locations and situations across the world’s landscape. Chaplin took advantage of the juxtaposition of these two phenomena twice1 during his long forty-year residence in the United States, in 1921 and in 1931–32. Each of these trips followed the completion of a film that marked significant risk on Chaplin’s part, as well as a period of some personal scandal publicized in the press.
When Chaplin left for London in September 1921, he had recently completed his first feature comedy, The Kid. The film was important for several reasons. First, as Charles Maland points out, it followed close on the heels of two relative failures, Sunnyside (1919) and A Day’s Pleasure (1919) (55). Second, articles began to crop up in the press at this time, such as “Is the Charlie Chaplin Vogue Passing?” (Farmer 249) in which the author asserts that Chaplin’s appeal was the result of repetition and that he objected to “styling Charles Chaplin a great artist when he’s nothing of the sort” (249). Also, not only was the film six reels long, but it took the risk of juxtaposing scenes of comedy with those of pathos in a bold new way.2 In addition, Chaplin was just recovering from his first divorce scandal; his divorce from actress Mildred Harris became final in August of that year. Despite Maland’s suggestions that the press treated Chaplin with gentleness (44) in their handling of the divorce, The Des Moines Sunday Register devoted two full pages of their Sunday magazine to Mildred Harris’s court testimony during the proceedings.3 Copyrighted by the International Features Service, the article would have appeared in newspapers throughout America’s heartland, thereby presenting Chaplin as a “real” person who contradicted his film persona.
His 1931-32 trip was propelled by much the same set of conditions. City Lights, the film he released just before his departure, despite its synchronized sound track, was essentially a silent film. By 1931, sound technology had been in place in the film business for more than five years.4 Proof of the risk involved here for Chaplin is evidenced by the fact that he was compelled to secure venues for showing the film himself in both Hollywood and New York. He contributed significantly to the completion of H. L. Gumbiner’s Los Angeles Theatre on Broadway in Los Angeles in order to show his film there. And in New York, he rented the George M. Cohan Theatre against the advice of his associates.5 In his personal life, Chaplin had recently undergone two scandals—the long and tortuous divorce suit of his second wife, Lita Grey, and his debt of back taxes to the Internal Revenue Service. One closely followed the other in 1927. Whatever revelations the press had provided during the Chaplin-Harris divorce, the Chaplin-Grey divorce made them pale in comparison. Most scholars agree that the public was divided on the issue along the lines of education level and economic status—at least in the United States.6 After the publication of Lita Grey’s divorce complaint in a small brochure-sized document sold on street corners like any scandal sheet, the public began to choose sides.7 For Chaplin were his colleagues in the arts and academia (including many members of the press); against him were the women’s clubs and self-righteous moralizing middle America. In Europe, there was no split, for most refused to judge Chaplin’s art on the basis of this particular human frailty. In an essay entitled “Hands Off Love,” printed in transition in September 1927, a group of thirty-one European artists and intellectuals, including Louis Aragon, André Breton, Marcel Duhamel, Max Ernst, Man Ray, and others transmitted their own comments on Chaplin’s situation to the public:
A Dog’s Life. That is at the very moment the life of a man whose genius won’t win him his case; of one on whom everyone’s back will be turned, who will be ruined with impunity, from whom all of his means of expression will be taken, who is being demoralized in the most outrageous fashion, for the benefit of a miserable, spiteful little bourgeoisie, and for the sake of the grandest public hypocrisy possible to imagine. A dog’s life. Genius is nothing to the law when matrimony is at stake, the blessed state of matrimony. And anyway as we know, genius is never anything to the law, never. (10)
The American government chose this inconvenient moment (20 January, to be precise) to sue Chaplin for back taxes, seizing and sealing all of his assets, including the studio (Maland 97). By 1931, though, despite the predictions listed in the essay cited above, public rancor had largely been shelved, but the specter of its ability to arise at any moment must have added to the tense atmosphere that surrounded the production of City Lights. As I have tried to show, both junctures (the release of The Kid in 1921 and the release of City Lights in 1931) were tentative ones in Chaplin’s career and might make or break him professionally. As such, these junctures demanded strong and innovative promotional texts. At each of these points, the travel narrative comes to the rescue, for following each tour, Chaplin released a “promotional” travel book: My Trip Abroad (1922) and “A Comedian Sees the World” (1933–34) respectively.
Historical Context
The world Chaplin decided to tour in early February 1931 was in crisis, both economic and political. In Germany, Hitler had been agitating the populace against the tenets of the Treaty of Versailles since the late 1920s. The British ambassador in Berlin, Sir Horace Rumbold (who was to accompany Chaplin to the theater in Berlin in March 1931), in a memo to his financial adviser in March 1929, warned that if war reparations were set at the rumored two million marks, “‘there may be a pretty good row over here leading perhaps to the holding of fresh elections’” (qtd. in Gilbert 757). Nazis and other political groups in Germany became less and less willing to bear the brunt of World War I guilt on their shoulders. Also, the country itself became less and less able to pay. In fact, the gold standard was causing major problems to the economies of countries across the world. As Carroll Quigley suggests, “it was estimated that the world’s stock of gold money needed to increase by 3.1 percent per year in the 1920s to support the world’s economic development with stable prices on the gold standard. The production of new gold after 1920 was below this rate” (340). This, combined with the League of Nations’ recommendation that all countries get on the gold standard, caused a “gold rush” and subsequent gold shortage. The fact that gold was no longer being distributed evenly among countries—as occurred before World War I—suggested as well that the economic system of that prewar period was no longer adequate. In fact, the United States’ practice of extending credit indiscriminately at this time caused the Federal Reserve to curtail this practice, with the result that more credit was extended to stock market speculators than before, even though the Reserve’s measure was supposed to alleviate this problem. The resulting stock market crash on 24 October 1929 in New York sent shock waves around the world. Possibly one of the worst years for Europe and especially for countries like Austria and Britain was 1931.
What is so intensely interesting about “A Comedian Sees the World” is that Chaplin, when the historical context is investigated, was on the heartbeat of many of the major events and people of 1931. When Chaplin expressed to Ramsay MacDonald his approval of the effects of the dole on his beloved Cockneys during a visit to Chequers in February (pt I: 86-87), he was speaking to the first Labour Parliament prime minister of a parliament that Carroll Quigley argues sealed the fate of the American stock market crash in 1929 because British citizens immediately sent their money to America after its election. On 26 February, at dinner at Churchill’s Chartwell in which several young members of Parliament were present, Chaplin remarked that “Lenins and Ghandis do not make revolutions” (pt II: 15) when Gandhi himself was just days away (4 March) from being released from prison by the viceroy, Lord Irwin, after promising to cease his campaign of civil disobedience. Nor could Chaplin have predicted that the financial crisis of 1931,8 when it reached London by late summer, forced a repeal of this same public assistance that he had touted to MacDonald and demanded the installment of a National government for the first time, composed of four Conservative, three Labour, and two Liberal ministers. As Quigley relates,
the pound sterling was very vulnerable. There were five principal reasons: 1) the pound was overvalued; 2) costs of production in Britain were much more rigid than prices; 3) gold reserves were precariously small; 4) the burden of public debt was too great in a deflationary atmosphere; 5) there were greater liabilities than assets in short-term international holdings in London (about £407 million to £153 million). (345)
France and the United States lent £130 million to Britain in July and August to fight the depreciation of the pound by circulating more dollars and francs. Still the gold continued to leave the country, totaling £200 million in two months. By 18 September, when Chaplin was back in London, New York City and Paris, France refused further credits to the British Treasury (Quigley 345-46). The crisis also forced Britain off the gold standard on 21 September, just a month before the election Chaplin witnessed in the company of Conservative Lady Astor. The Conservatives won the majority in the election, but decided to keep the National government with Ramsay MacDonald at the helm to allow for greater stability.
Hereafter, the world was no longer unified by one economic system for all; it tended to be organized into the sterling bloc about Britain and the gold bloc about the United States, France, Belgium, The Netherlands, and Switzerland (Gilbert 347). However, recovery from the Depression did not result from the abandonment of gold in Britain because of the deflationary policy it instituted. Neither prices nor employment rose until 1933 and from then on, improvement was slow (Gilbert 348).
When Chaplin visited Berlin from 9-16 March 1931, Hitler sent (on the 15th) this directive to all Nazi Party officials: “‘The natural hostility of the peasant against the Jews, and his hostility against the Freemason as a servant of the Jew, must be worked up to a frenzy’”(qtd. in Gilbert 793). Did Chaplin witness the violence of the Brown Shirts against the Jews, which had been going on with greater violence and frequency since 1930? Did he realize that unemployment in Germany had reached five million? Just days after Chaplin’s departure from Berlin to Vienna, German Chancellor Brüning announced his intention to form a Customs Union with Austria, a proposal that was rejected by The League of Nations and The Court of Arbitration at The Hague. This decision caused a financial crash of similar proportions to Black Thursday in the United States because with the announcement of a possible anschluss, France removed all of its deposits from Austria’s Creditanstalten. On 11 May, the Creditanstalten notified the Austrian government that it could no longer meet its obligations. As Martin Gilbert relates, “first Austria, and then, in rapid succession, Germany and Hungary, were plunged into a banking crisis that left millions of small investors penniless” (795). Coincidentally, Chaplin had visited a few members of the Reichstag, Reichsminister Dr. Joseph Wirth among them (Gersch 91-92), just a few short weeks before Chancellor Brüning was forced to close it (on 31 March) for seven months after a vote of no-confidence narrowly missed passage.
Gandhi was attending the Round Table conference, which opened at St. James Palace on 8 September when he met with Chaplin on 22 September 22. When the conference ended inconclusively on 1 December, “he intimated that the Indian national movement and the British government had come to a parting of the ways, and that nonviolent civil disobedience might soon be revived” (Gilbert 799). Interestingly, it was Gandhi’s people who suggested and arranged the meeting9 with Chaplin, even though Gandhi had never even seen a Chaplin film. What did he expect to gain from such a meeting? Did Chaplin gain or suffer further British consternation from it? Back in India by 28 December, Gandhi was arrested once again on 4 January 1932 for further civil disobedience.
Although Chaplin never mentions it in “A Comedian Sees the World,” Japan was beginning to cause problems already in 1931 through its constant aggressiveness toward China. On 18 September, just a few months before Chaplin’s arrival with his brother in Kobe and following the assassination of Captain Nakamura, the Japanese troops in Manchuria were mobilized and took Mukden (Gilbert 806). During Chaplin’s visit, Japan’s liberal Prime Minister Inukai was assassinated (he had hoped to forge a policy of friendly relations with China) and Chaplin was soon to find out that his life was also in danger there during his stay. Still, he managed to meet the new premier, Satai, just before he departed on 2 June.
Finally, as Chaplin arrived back in Los Angeles on 16 June, an international conference on reparations opened in Lausanne, Switzerland. On 9 July, the conference approved everything the Germans asked for; “The only reparations that were retained were a final and nominal demand for 3000 marks” (Gilbert 815). While Lloyd George and Philip Sassoon may have yawned and looked at their watches during some of Chaplin’s economic diatribes during the tour, it’s uncanny how many of his suggestions were adopted.10 Getting off the gold standard, as Chaplin advised,11 did turn out to be the best thing for Britain. Ending war reparations for Germany was also sound advice, although by mid-1932, this measure failed to calm the already riled and vengeful German populace as agitated by Hitler and others.
Chaplin’s Published Travel Narratives
Chaplin’s two travel narratives are essentially promotional vehicles—a fact that should not be surprising if one considers his affinity for the business side of film, surmised from an anecdote included in his autobiography about early business inclinations: “There was a strong element of the merchant in me. I was continuously preoccupied with business schemes. I would look at empty shops, speculating as to what profitable businesses I could make of them, ranging from fish and chips to grocery shops” (60). Neither is it surprising, then, that Chaplin was in Europe on each tour to promote his newest film—The Kid (1921) and City Lights (1931), respectively. My Trip Abroad reveals the fact that Chaplin carried his films into Germany for the first time on this trip and that he also attended the first of many premieres of his work. The Charles Chaplin Film Corporation correspondence during this time demonstrates that the second tour’s venues were chosen with the intention of staging premieres of City Lights in the chosen city, which then would be enhanced by a personal appearance of Chaplin himself.12 Letters to Chaplin and Arthur Kelly, his representative at the United Artists’ New York office, from Boris Evelinoff, Chaplin’s European United Artists representative, written and sent the same day (12 December 1935), promise that “ce ne sera pas difficile de reconstruire la grande popularité et l’enthousiasme autour de génie de notre grand Patron ‘Charlie,’”13—the same publicity as Chaplin had during the 1931-32 tour on what Evelinoff calls “un voyage de propagande en faveur de Charlie.” Chaplin managed to get in a little rest and relaxation on the beaches of the French Riviera and the slopes of St. Moritz, but it is clear that these occasions are beside the point. Both the 1921 and 1931-32 tours were clearly arranged for promotional reasons.
However, My Trip Abroad seems, at first glance, to be a book recounting Chaplin’s exploits on his first trip home to England in 1921 since his great cinematic success.14 The book was so unimportant to him late in life that, although it is clear that he borrowed from it nearly verbatim for relevant passages in My Autobiography in 1964 when Chaplin was in his seventies, he fails to mention the book or the writing of it at all in that text. Chaplin scholars largely dismiss the work as well. Wes D. Gehring, in Charlie Chaplin: A Bio-Bibliography, offers a typical review of the work:
Discarding his “literary” aspirations, in My Trip Abroad Chaplin merely records the significant events of his 1921 trip to Europe. The result is a seemingly endless repetition of the important books he read or took along, the important people he met, and the generally unprecedented public response he received. (23)
However, print reviews of the book at its release in 1922 were overwhelmingly complimentary and favorable.15 Chaplin’s most respected biographer, David Robinson (Chaplin: His Life and Art) provides some information surrounding My Trip Abroad’s genesis:
Chaplin’s record of the trip was mostly written in the course of the train journey back to California, and was taken down at his dictation by a young newspaperman, Monta Bell [. . .]. The account originally appeared as a series of articles in Photoplay before publication in book form as My Trip Abroad (My Wonderful Visit, for the English edition). (290-91)16
The book then came to be serialized additionally in Movie Weekly, Screenland, and twenty-nine newspapers around the country (mostly second-string papers, such as the Chicago News and the New York Evening World), as well as being translated into twelve languages other than English within ten years of its initial publication.
Robinson states that “some Chaplin biographers have suggested that the text was ‘ghosted’ by [Monta] Bell, but the style is too distinctive and the analysis of Chaplin’s reactions and sensations far too personal for that” (305). My research in the Charlie Chaplin Archive, however, suggested that My Trip Abroad was more likely a collaborative effort. Although the contract for it lists as its second point that the “author is sole author and proprietor of said work,” the author being listed as Charles Chaplin, Louis Monta Bell17 is listed as due to receive 1.5 percent of Chaplin’s 10 percent of the profits in the fifth point of the contract “for services rendered by him in connection with the writing of such work.”18 Correspondence between P. C. Eastment of McClure Newspaper Syndicate dated 19 October 1921 suggests the details of the financial deal regarding the serialization of My Trip Abroad (which was to predate the publication by Harpers & Bros.). It should be noted that Chaplin’s press agent at the time was involved:
In accordance with our conversation with you and your representative Mr. Carlyle Robinson, it is agreed that you will furnish material for a story of your trip abroad, to be written over your signature to us. [. . .] This story is to consist of approximately 50,000 to 60,000 words and is to be prepared by a thoroughly trained newspaper man and submitted to you and your representative for revision and approval before [being] published in the newspapers.
A later letter, also from Eastment, dated16 February 1922, reveals some information on the way Bell may have become involved. Eastment writes: “I have no doubt that you are finding Mr. Bell both very delightful and very useful to you and I feel pleased for your mutual sakes that our little business deal brought you together.” Bell himself, writing to Chaplin in November 1921, reveals this about his writing project: “I have sent 3 batches of copy back for you to read, through Robinson. I still have about thirty thousand words to write and expect to be finished with it in about a week.” According to Chaplin Studios correspondence, Bell then submitted the final chapter in early December 1921. More important, though, is an unpublished typescript found late in my research. It was a typescript dated 24 May 1960 and titled “Monta Bell”—a typescript found among Chaplin’s draft and manuscript material for My Autobiography. Chaplin’s first line of this typescript serves as his admission in print of Bell’s role. It reads “Monta Bell, the newspaper man who ghost wrote my book My Trip Abroad.” This evidence clearly shows that Chaplin did not write the book alone. It was essentially a solicited and paid-for promotional product. Not surprisingly, there are no drafts of any kind for this work in the archives.
For “A Comedian Sees the World,” on the other hand, there are several. Its published form comprises five parts, which appeared starting with the September 1933 issue of Woman’s Home Companion19 (Crowell Publishing, Springfield, Ohio) and ended with the January 1934 issue. The managing editor for this series was Willa Roberts.20 While Timothy Lyons and Charles Maland (128) are among the scholars who state that the series appeared in book form, my close examination of the “book” listed on World-cat, a database of library collections around the world, showed that a volume listed as part of the Museum of Modern Art’s collection was nothing but a manual compilation of the five Woman’s Home Companion installments bound into one volume. In fact, the series was never published in book form, despite Chaplin’s original desire that this should happen.21 Due to this fact, it never reached the world outside the United States and, therefore, had neither the financial nor promotional impact of My Trip Abroad. It differs from My Trip Abroad in several other important ways. First, from the primary documents in the Charlie Chaplin Archive, it can be ascertained that this series was largely Chaplin’s own and as such it is perhaps the first instance of his own writing to appear in print, except for the “economic policy,” which he released to the papers on 27 June 1933—a document that also resulted from the 1931-32 trip.
Chaplin is unique in the film business for utilizing the travel narrative as a promotional tool. His close companions, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, also tried their hands at writing; Fairbanks wrote two men’s self-help books, Laugh and Live (1917) and Making Life Worthwhile (1918), and Pickford made her debut with Rendezvous with Life (1935). The travel narrative, however, proves to be the perfect exploitation tool for the Little Tramp character, whether Chaplin realized it or not. Because toys, postcards, and other Little Tramp items often showed the persona in the guise of a typical tourist, accompanied by “luggage” of one type or another, golf clubs, or collections of postcards and viewing typical tourist sites, Chaplin’s audience would easily have accepted the travel narrative as a likely venue for him. Either Chaplin himself or possibly his press agent at the time, Carlyle Robinson (who dabbled in producing travel films after his departure from Chaplin’s employ), made that connection and then masterfully exploited it.
Archival Materials
“A Comedian Sees the World” exists in several partial drafts in the Charlie Chaplin Archive. There is a manuscript draft that, when transcribed, is only thirteen pages long and makes up only a small portion of Part I, up only to the point at which he recounts the dinner at Lady Astor’s. Several pages of this manuscript are written over and over with nearly the same wording, much the way Chaplin is known to have worked in the medium of film. As Anna Fiaccarini and Cecilia Cenciarelli write in “Chaplin as Author,” “writing is for Chaplin an exercise, a job, feverish craftsmanship: its pleasure lies in the search for perfection, through its rigour and discipline” (22). Even with this very small amount of the whole in manuscript form, though, I can begin to see Chaplin’s initial foci for the series, including rhetorical strategies he would use throughout the work.
Next, a typescript draft that appears to have some integrity (it has numbered pages to page 76 and follows the sequence of the published series fairly closely) exists, also in the archives. This document would appear to be the studio secretary’s (Catherine Hunter’s) attempt to translate an often difficult-to-read manuscript into typed form. However, more importantly, this draft has evidence of Chaplin’s handwritten deletions and annotations, some written right on the page and others on the back of the preceding page. In most cases, he is clear about where such additions should be located in the text, even numbering changes in some places in order to help with clarity.
This draft deals only with the content of what would be Part I, Part II, and about half of Part III. It ends with Chaplin’s first few days spent on the French Riviera, which is essentially June 1931, and it is missing pages 47-53. In addition to this typescript, there is another one—also 76 pages—that appears to be a draft later than the one just described. It contains the changes Chaplin demands in his handwriting on the first typescript. Handwritten comments on this draft are in someone’s hand other than Chaplin’s (perhaps Hunter herself) and are confined to questions of spelling, punctuation, and getting names, dates, and places correct. In addition to this material, I found one typescript page that was on letter-sized paper, unlike the other typescript drafts, which are on 8½ inches by 14 inches, an indication to me that at least one other typescript draft existed at one time. This seems to be the only surviving page from this manuscript (page 63). It was also filed in with the “economic policy” papers.
Interestingly, even though he would be abroad for another entire year, only half of the series dealt with this period (June 1931-June 1932). In addition, the existence of a typescript draft for only this half of the series is consistent with correspondence between Syd Chaplin and Alf Reeves, the Chaplin Studios manager, who noted in a letter dated 30 March 1933 that Miss Roberts, the managing editor of Woman’s Home Companion and the individual who courted Chaplin’s work for her publication, “whilst she was laudatory in her comments on the first half of the story, [. . .] does not appear quite so pleased with the second half remitted later, and has asked Charlie to make some changes, which, however, he does not feel inclined to do.” However, in the archives, I was able to locate several pages and partial pages of typescripts that ended up being included at points in the final version of the second half. One of these was a three-page typescript entitled “BALI,” which contained what would be the first few paragraphs of Part V of the series. This typescript had a handwritten page that contains the only evidence I found of an outline, or a brainstorm, for the work. Because it’s so unique and may provide some concrete evidence of Chaplin’s composition process, I include a transcription of it here in its entirety:
Bali
Different from other Tropic mixtures
Captain talks of other islands as wilder—Bali more romantic—Isle of rats—Isle of white people—very few cannibals left—my first reaction—North Bali—South Bali—while progressing more Natives—my brother nudges me—our quest—the meals of the Hotel the food—Hirshfeld the artist ??—The House ?? furnished—music that night—I meet Hirshfeld Landsend—what they drew— they describe their ways—the present & the beauty—tea at the ??—the native girls’ covering—
I found other “pieces” of the second half as well. A two-page typescript filed in with the “economic policy” typescripts, entitled “Depression #1,” appears in the final version as an addition to the scene in Einstein’s apartment in Berlin in Part III. Another three-quarter-page typescript entitled “Japan #27” appears in the last few paragraphs of Part V and is Chaplin’s description of the Japanese tea ceremony for that section. In addition, a single untitled, short typed paragraph on one sheet of paper becomes the final paragraph for the series in its published version. And finally, there is a typescript several pages in length, entitled “Notes for the Final Chapter,” none of which was included in the final version. This proposed final chapter for the series was an overview of the effects of the economic Depression on Europe and Asia and Chaplin’s own suggestions for solving the problems he saw and described.
The My Autobiography Version
Chaplin relates in his 1964 My Autobiography that:
After my arrival in London, [. . .] I wanted change, new experiences, new faces; I wanted to cash in on this business of being a celebrity. I had just one date, and that was with H. G. Wells. After that, I was freelancing, with the dubious hope of meeting other people.
“I have arranged a dinner for you at the Garrick Club,” said Eddie Knoblock.
“Actors, artists, and authors,” I said jokingly. “But where is this exclusive English set, these country homes and house parties that I’m not invited to?” I wanted that rarer sphere of ducal living. Not that I was a snob, but I was a tourist, sight-seeing. (271)
So begins a franker version of Chaplin’s 1921 tour. In fact, a comparison of his version of the two tours in this volume shows just how different they are from the versions contained in My Trip Abroad and “A Comedian Sees the World.” Chaplin explains shortly after the passage cited above that it was only his inauspicious meeting with Sir Philip Sassoon that provided his entrée into the circle of society he wished to experience, another fact never provided by the travel narrative version. Included in Chaplin’s autobiography but not in his travel narratives are elements of his behavior that his audience would have considered un-Little-Tramp-like, such as his frank opinions about celebrated individuals, which make him seem too much a sort of verbal commentator, and sexual exploits that make him seem successful with women—something the Little Tramp rarely was. Also, his receipt of the Légion d’Honneur medal, his frequent visits with the Prince of Wales, his material acquisitiveness, as well as his tireless efforts for charitable causes are all evidence of a level of affluence that would conflict with the Little Tramp’s apparent poverty. In addition, the Europe of the 1930s he experienced was not entirely a venue of high and lascivious living but instead is best represented by Chaplin’s final words on the subject: “I saw food rotting, goods piled high while people wandered hungrily about them, millions of unemployed and their services going to waste” (377). This great disparity between the two versions of these tours (from My Autobiography and from My Trip Abroad or “A Comedian Sees the World”) again supports an unstated promotional agenda for the travel narratives’ versions, one that seems to include a deliberate conflation of Chaplin’s public and filmic personae.
Aftershock
The social consciousness that Chaplin’s world tours helped him to develop demonstrably affected his later creative work. The rise of the machines and the fall of the worker as portrayed in Modern Times, the palpable and destructive nationalism of Hynkel’s minions in The Great Dictator, and the tacit desperation of the lowly bank clerk forced to kill the weak and trusting in order to feed his own family in Monsieur Verdoux are three obvious examples of this consciousness. Maland notes that by the end of his world tour, “Chaplin was beginning to speak out more often on political affairs, and reporters found them newsworthy” (141). By the mid-1930s, his political opinions “became an inextricable part of his star image” (Maland 133) and his next three films especially (listed above) were more didactic, perhaps due to this fact. David Robinson writes about the effect the tour had on the film Modern Times, for instance. He points to Chaplin’s “diatribe against complacent acceptance of the growth of the machine age” in a speech following a lunch at Lady Astor’s Cliveden early in the tour as “the genesis” of the film (424). More than just the social commentary present in Modern Times, though, influences of the tour can be seen in all of Chaplin’s remaining films. In The Great Dictator, the viewer sees the same “ridiculous figures that stand upon the edge of the roof [. . .] for all the world like balancing acrobats” (“A Comedian Sees the World” pt. II: 16) adorning the buildings lining the “Unter den Linden” of Adenoid Hynkel’s capital city. In the scene in which Napaloni meets with Hynkel in his palace for the first time, we see echoes of his experience with King Albert of the Belgians in which the towering King offers the diminutive Chaplin a tiny seat during an audience in Paris (“A Comedian Sees the World” pt. II: 108). Monsieur Verdoux cannot be separated from the effects of Chaplin’s 1931-32 world visit. He witnessed Verdouxs firsthand there; he visited the same cities in which Verdoux has “wives.” Even his anecdote about Hetty Kelly, which begins Part I of the series, finds its way almost verbatim into the film. The young woman Verdoux spares from the poisoned wine has now become rich and prosperous. She is Hetty, several years after Chaplin’s first failed relationship with her:
I was crossing Picadilly when the screech of an automobile made me turn in the direction of a black limousine, which had stopped abruptly. A small gloved hand waved from the window. There must be some mistake, I thought, when a voice unmistakably called, “Charlie?”
As I approached, the door of the car opened and there was Hetty beckoning me to get in. She had left the troupe and had been living on the Continent with her sister. Oh, yes, her sister had married an American multimillionaire. All this as we drove along.
“Now tell me something about yourself,” she said eyeing me kindly.
“There is very little to tell,” I answered. (pt. I: 8)
Limelight, a film set in London, surely came, not just from Chaplin’s own memories of childhood, but also from his return trips to Kennington in 1921 and 1931. In “A Comedian Sees the World,” Chaplin notes to Ramsay MacDonald that he is pleased to see none of “the old gray-haired ladies sleeping on the Thames embankment” (pt. I: 87). In Limelight, the viewer sees such a lady when Terry and Calvero walk the embankment after midnight in one scene; in another Calvero predicts a similar fate for himself. Also, Chaplin encountered “Calveros” everywhere in London. The media picked up one such moment when Chaplin meets his old nemesis from his days with the Karno Company in America, Arthur Dandoe, now working as a lowly sidewalk artist and slips him some money. His visit to a meeting of the Water Rats in November 1931, a sort of fraternity of old music hall performers, must have provided even more material for developing this character.
The tour’s influence continued even when Chaplin relocated in Europe and began to make films there. Certainly, King Shadov of A King in New York is a caricature of European royalty such as he met on the tour and his hotel suite similar to many he stayed in. The society dame, Mona Cromwell, could easily be Lady Deterding at the Hotel Crillon, Elsa Maxwell, or half a dozen others. The boys’ school may have been suggested by Chaplin’s visit to the Ballard Institute with Lady Astor in November 1931. And, as Robinson reports, A Countess from Hong Kong was at its genesis a script written for Paulette Goddard in the later 1930s, most likely from Chaplin’s long relationship with May Reeves over the course of the tour.
There was another important change taking place in Chaplin’s creative life as well. He was fast developing an interest in writing, one that would continue throughout his life. Robinson reveals Chaplin’s writing process fairly accurately, noting that “he would first write everything out in longhand, and then dictate it to his secretary. Afterwards he would work over the typescript, and successive secretaries were astonished at how he would labour over a word, trying different positions or variations” (453). While there is no evidence left that the process of getting the handwritten manuscript to the typescript page was through dictation, there can be no doubt that Chaplin’s writing process was every bit as arduous as his filmmaking one. Even so, because he devoted all of 1932 and 1933 through to 22 February to the task of writing “A Comedian Sees the World,” he became both familiar with and somewhat confident of the writing process. The overwhelming volume of written material Chaplin produced from this period onward must be proof of that. In essence, his epiphany, which marked the close of “A Comedian Sees the World”—“a desire for accomplishment—not in the old way but in something new; perhaps in another field of endeavor” (pt. V: 86)—resulted in Chaplin the writer.