CHAPLIN—THE GENIUS.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18053, 13 January 1927, Page 7

CHAPLIN—THE GENIUS.

SIDELIGHTS ON AN INEXPUCABLE CHARACTER Tf Charlie Chaplin carries out his present intention, we shall see the most grotesque fairy story ever pictured on celluloid (writes Don Ryan in “Picture Play Magazine.”) For that present intention is to film the true life story of Charles Spencer Chaplin. Of course he may be diverted from this, but the chances are about even that he will do it.

It was only' by accident that I learned that Charlie is hankering for this unusual effort—the first autobiography in celluloid. If asked about it, he would deny it. For he is highly secretive, arrogant, sensitive, and egotistical. In other words, he is a genius. And it will be months, maybe a vear, before he tackles the story. He has a million dollars and a hearty contempt for money, so there is no hurry about this next picture of his. But I can tell the reader something of what it will reveal —if Chaplin ever makes it.

Thirty-odd years ago. a dirty, undersized urchin was playing with his kind in a shabby, gray street at Kensington Cross, in London. He slept around the corner in Chester Street. This was the child Charlie Chaplin. In a barber shop where the Cockneys came to be shaved, the little fellow got a job as a lather boy. Thus he eajned his first pennies. And so he grew *up to follow in the steps of his ancestors, knockabout performers in the third-rate musical halls of the Upper Bohemian quarter of London. The New World—ah, how many fortunes have been made, how many lowly people have been exalted, in the New World! Chaplin, the London music hall performer, got his chance in the movies. A slim chance it was—slapstick comedian with Alack Sennett, who was trying to make comedies on a shoestring, as they say. But these comedies came to fill a want in the hearts of the American public that nothing else would quite satisfy. And Chaplin was the reason.

“For most of us,” writes Gilbert Seldes, “the grotesque effigy dangling from an electric sign or propped against the side of the ticket booth must remain our first memory of Charlie Chaplin. The play feet, the moustache, the derby hat, the rattan walking stick, composed at once the image which ten years later was to become the universal symbol of laughter. “.‘I am here to-day,’ was his legend, and like everything else associated with his name, it is faintly ironic and exactly right. The man who, of all men of our time, seems most assured of immortality, chose that particularly transient announcement of his presence, ‘I am here to-day,’ with its emotional overtone of ‘gone tomorrow.’ and there is always something in Charlie that slips away.” The epitaph by Seldes seems to capture most of the essence Ghaplinesque.

For sheer mechanics of pantomime, Charlie is unequalled. It is my conviction that, like many a genius of the past, he is a victim or rather a beneficiary of the inferiority complex. Physically he is small. Once he was poor and despised. Now he is rich and famous. But he can never completely offset the complex born of his sordid early surroundings and his frail physique. ,

Chaplin is a radical in politics. Yet at heart he is an aristocrat of the intellect. lie sees himself, in fact, as a sort of modern Lorenzo the magnificent. He surrounds himself with thinkers.. The diminutive’ comedian has had more publicity in connection with his reported love affairs than any other male star. lie has been pictured as a triumphant conqueror of feminine hearts. Of the long list of actresses who have been reported at one time or other as cherising a reciprocal affection for Chaplin, most have been talented women: Claire Windsor, Edna Purviance, Pola Negri—all women of vivid personalities and attainments. On the other hand, the two marriages of the comedian have been with young women, almost schoolgirls in years and experience. His unhappy marriage with Atildred Harris came to an abrupt end. And now he is married to Lita Grey, and is the father of a son. The Chaplin-Grey romance is one that could happen nowhere except in Hollywood—where the unusual is regular. Five years ago, a dark-haired child with starry eves and the cream velvet skin of a budding rose was playing in the sequestered streets of that: village. Aged twelve, Lollita Louisa M’Alurray gave evidences of being about to blossom into that early pulchritude typical of the Spanish beauty. Although her father’s name was M’Alurray, behind her an intricate web connected this modern child, by blood and marriage, with those early times when the dons ruled in California.

While Lollita, aged twelve, was playing in the sequestered Hollywood streets one day, nearly five years ago, a small, bird-like person came strolling by. “ Whose little girl are you?” he asked, pleasantly enough. “ T live with my mother, rnv grandmother and Grandfather Curry, sir,” replied the girl. “ Please take me to them,” said Charles Spencer Chaplin, for it was he. Rich, celebrated, acclaimed a genius, received with pride by titled members of the tribe of London, where he used to play before Kensington Cross, received with equal delight by all and sundry of the fairer and weaker sex whom he deigned to favour —this was the Charlie Chaplin who stood before Grandfather Curry, holding the hand of little Lollita and offering a year’s contract for her to work in “ The Kid.” They did not like to let the child go, but Chaplin was insistent, and he was Chaplin. Lita Grey she was rechristened for sefleem purposes—the distinguished name of her relatives by marriage. The child actress worked for a year in the picture that made Jackie Coogan famous. Then she went back to school with the hope of returning to the screen after completing as much education as ■was deemed necessary. In the spring of 1924, she was about to leave town on a trip with her fam-

ily. She went around to say good-bye to Air Chaplin. She had just turned sixteen—the early promise of precocious beauty was bursting ripe. Her former employer regarded her with even more interest than he had displayed previously. “ I need you for my leading lady in the Alaskan picture J am going to make,” said Charles Spencer Chaplin, decisively. Lita worked in the picture as leading lad)% but she never had the satisfaction of seeing herself on the screen. The scenes in which she appeared were remade with another in the principal role. If Charlie Chaplin has an inferiority complex, it must surely be satisfied by now. The cockney urchin, nursing in his slender body the latent genius to make the world weep as it laughs—this cockney urchin, grown to the fullest stature of celebrity, can take as his bride—and favour in the taking—the daughter of the aristocracy of Kentucky and old Spain. But it is not likely that Chaplin has given much thought to this phase of his achievement. lie is thirty-six now, and his wife is seventeen. lie is primarily a genius—not a husband. Ilis mind is already awhirl with new schemes. He would become an impresario, a theatre owner, master of a new school of the theatre in the land

which he has chosen as his field of endeavour. Such a step is logical for Charlie, because, as Gilbert Seldes points out, he is above and beyond the actor.