Charlie Chaplin was a young English comic actor who toured the United States with a British music-hall revue from 1910 to 1913.  His most popular role was that of a drunken old man--a part that required him to wear heavy makeup to disguise the fact that he was in his early twenties.

In September of 1913, Chaplin signed a one-year contract with a film company in Los Angeles called the Keystone Pictures Studio, whose founder, Mack Sennett, had been favorably impressed by one of Chaplin's vaudeville performances.  The contract promised Chaplin one hundred fifty dollars a week--far more than he had ever earned before.

Having grown up in poverty in London, Chaplin could hardly believe his good fortune; but he knew nothing about filmmaking, and he secretly doubted his ability to act in movies.  Films were silent in 1913, and he was accustomed to using dialog to achieve comic effects. 

Chaplin was so fearful that he might fail as a film actor that on the day that he was supposed to report for work at the Keystone Pictures Studio, he was afraid to enter the grounds.  After watching costumed "Keystone Cops" and other employees come pouring out of the gate to buy hot dogs and sandwiches at a store across the street, Chaplin returned to his hotel. 

He later wrote:
The problem of entering the studio and facing all those people became an insuperable one.  For two days I arrived outside the studio but had not the courage to go in.  The third day Mr. Sennett telephoned and wanted to know why I had not shown up.  I made some sort of excuse.  "Come down right away, we'll be waiting for you," he said.

Chaplin then worked up the courage to enter the Keystone premises, where Sennett seemed glad to see him.  Chaplin was immediately enthralled by the ethereal quality of light on the movie sets, where fluttering screens of windblown white linen diffused the sun, enhancing the way human faces looked on film.  Beautiful women, including starlet Mabel Normand and the extras known as the Sennett Bathing Beauties, wandered among the sets.  The male actors were a mixture of odd-looking comedians and rugged stuntmen like the Keystone Cops, many of whom were ex-prizefighters with battered faces.

"It was a strange and unique atmosphere of beauty and beast," Chaplin wrote.

He was fascinated to find that movies were made piecemeal.  "In one set," Chaplin wrote, "Mabel Normand was banging on a door shouting: 'Let me in!'  Then the camera stopped and that was it."

No one gave Chaplin any work to do for ten days, which made him nervous.  His nervousness increased when Sennett informed him that he would have to improvise his own parts.  Sennett said, "We have no scenario--we get an idea, then follow the natural sequence of events until it leads up to a chase, which is the essence of our comedy."

Chaplin did not like the Keystone brand of humor, which relied on actors fighting with pies or chasing each other.  He preferred humor based on personality--but that was easier to achieve with dialog on stage than with manic action on the silent screen. 

Chaplin's first attempt to act in a movie left him feeling frustrated.  He had a minor role and he quarreled with director Henry Lehrman.

On the day after Chaplin finished the film with Lehrman, Sennett was standing peering at the set for a new film.  There was no script yet for the story.  In his autobiography, Chaplin recalled that Sennett said, "We need some gags here."  Turning to Chaplin, he said, "Put on a comedy make-up.  Anything will do." 

On the way to the wardrobe room, Chaplin wondered what to wear.  Based on his experience in the theater, he decided to "make everything a contradiction."  At the wardrobe room he picked out a small hat, large shoes, baggy pants, and a tight coat.  Sennett had liked Chaplin's vaudeville role as an old drunkard, so Chaplin looked for props that would make him look older.  He added a cane and an abbreviated mustache that he figured was small enough to allow the camera to see his facial expressions. 

Once he was dressed in these clothes and makeup, a character suddenly came alive for him.  The character was a penniless tramp who tries to act like a wealthy gentleman.  Chaplin strutted out onto the film set, swinging his cane, with ideas racing through his mind.  For ten minutes, he described his character to Sennett:

"You know, this fellow is many-sided, a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always hopeful of romance and adventure.  He would have you believe he is a scientist, a musician, a duke, a polo player.  However, he is not above picking up cigarette butts or robbing a baby of its candy.  And, of course, if the occasion warrants it, he will kick a lady in the rear--but only in extreme anger!"

Sennett laughed, and then he said, "All right, get on the set and see what you can do there." 

The plot of the movie called for Chaplin to accidentally meet a glamorous lady played by Mabel Normand.  With little instruction as to what to do, Chaplin entered the set, an elegant hotel lobby, where his character, the Tramp, felt like an imposter among the wealthy guests.  He tripped over a lady's toe and apologetically tipped his hat to her.  He next tripped over a cuspidor and tipped his hat to it.  He then ran into the Mabel Normand character, got tied up in her dog's leash, and fell down.

The scene ran seven times longer than Sennett had planned, but the extras who were watching were roaring with laughter from start to finish, so Sennett decided to keep the whole routine. 

Chaplin played the Tramp in subsequent movies.  He wrote: "As the clothes had imbued me with the character, I then and there decided I would keep to this costume, whatever happened. . . .  With the clothes on I felt he was a reality, a living person.  In fact he ignited all sorts of crazy ideas that I would never have dreamt of, until I was dressed and made up as the Tramp."

Chaplin's Tramp quickly became so popular that department stores began selling toys and statuettes of the character.  In New York the Ziegfeld Follies girls donned mustaches, derby hats, big shoes, and baggy pants for a Chaplin number. 

As a result of his rising popularity, Chaplin was able to gain creative control of his films, at first by improvising his own scenes and later by directing whole movies for Keystone.  He deliberately slowed the pace of his comic movies, allowing his character to create surprising moments of irony and pathos that did not quite fit the simple Keystone formula of slapstick humor.  During the filming of [i]The New Janitor[/i], when the Tramp was threatened with being fired, Chaplin pleaded desperately, in pantomime, that he had a family and many mouths to feed.  As the scene ended, he looked up and noticed that an actress who had been watching was in tears.  He was pleased when she told him, "I know it's supposed to be funny, but you just make me weep." 

During the rest of his fifty-year career in cinema, Chaplin made many films centered on his Tramp character.  The character became an internationally beloved and universally recognized icon of comedy, and many of Chaplin's movies are still popular throughout the world. 

By Dorothy Patricia Brewster

SOURCES:
Chaplin, Charles. [i]My Autobiography.[/i] New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964.
Milton, Joyce. [i]Tramp. The Life of Charlie Chaplin.[/i] New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1996.