Alright, so I FINALLY finished Charlie Chaplin's autobiography. I loved it. So very interesting. But as my husband has told me, pretty much no one else is interested in Charlie Chaplin....
How can this be? Apparently I am alone in my fascination with him, and in general people did seem pretty surprised that I was reading a book about him, and merely polite when I'd start to ramble about the things I had found out about him.
He's so interesting. Here's a man, who after being born in the poorest area of London goes on to become one of the most iconic men in cinema. Face it, you may have never even seen a film of his, yet you know who the Tramp is - big clownish shoes, baggy pants, tight jacket, bowler hat, can, and "Hitler-esque" mustache. They reference Charlie Chaplin everywhere - The Simpson's, news, anything having to do with black and white pictures, heck, even Pam from The Office dressed up as him for Halloween - though it didn't go well without the hat on.....
I find him so fascinating and his autobiography was wonderful. Now, it was long, and man did the guy name drop. Seriously. He met everyone - Gloria Swanson, Winston Churchill, HRH Prince of Wales (not the current one), the Einsteins (yes, the e=mc2 guy), Woodrow Wilson, Walt Whitman, H.G. Wells, Rudolph Valentino, Igor Stravinsky, Gertrude Stein, Upton Sinclair, George Bernard Shaw, Laurence Olivier, Louis Ferdinand (grandson of the Kaiser), Sir Thomas Lipton (yes the tea guy), Nikita Khrushchev (leader of Soviet Russia), Sir Henry Irving, Aldous Huxley, Edgar Hoover, Albert Hirschfeld, Howard Hughes (of "Aviator" fame), William Randolph Hearst, Jean Harlow, Samuel Goldwyn (MGM guy), Mrs. Gandhi, ....anyway, you get the idea. If they lived during Chaplin's life, and had any importance in any field, chances are he met them.
So, once you get past the name dropping, the book is great. I am just so intrigued by him. He worked his butt off doing whatever he could to make money, then once he had it, it was so foreign to him that he didn't really know what to do with it. And his fame took him by surprise. He couldn't believe that people knew him without his makeup on. When he started making silent films, his thought process was so basic - he took a simple set up like the Tramp (his iconic character) gets a new suit and then just ran with it, threw in some gags and called it good. No real structure, just him improvising and then meticulously editing and reshooting, and editing again, and again, and again til it was perfect. He would often shoot two hours worth of film, only to have twenty minutes of it actually become the finished film because he wanted things perfect.
Then once he became super famous and rich, America's darling and a great movie star, he was basically boycotted, harangued, and eventually kicked out of the U.S. for good, and for no real reason other than they were upset that he didn't hate communism enough, never got his citizenship for America and asked for second front during WWII (which incidentally the U.S. government asked him to say).
How do you go from poor nobody, to ultra famous actor, to vilified outcast? Anyway, as you can see, I thought his life probably more interesting than most.
On the off chance someone out there does want to read about him, I won't say much more, and let you discover how interesting he is in your own way. Or... you could ask me, and I'll talk your ear off... :)
Happy Reading!
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