Charlie Chaplin’s Mother Dies Not Knowing of Son’s Fame.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18615, 17 November 1928, Page 19 (Supplement)

Charlie Chaplin’s Mother Dies Not Knowing of Son’s Fame.

The Love of the Master Ironist

WRITTEN FOR THE “STAR" BY

MOLL IE HERRICK)

HOLLYWOOD, Calif., Sept. 30. Few associations in the story of the theatre—or rather the story of life, for Charlie Chaplin’s history goes beyond the confines of the world of makebelief—are as poignant as that which existed between the master ironist and his mother. She was inextricably linked with his glamorous and tragic life, along all its winding ways. From the gutters of Lambeth to the luxury of Beverly

Hills the figure of Lily Hawtrey Chap lin loomed against the backdrop of his paradoxical existence. The extraordinary devotion which bound them was touchingly evident at the mother’s funeral. A silver haired man with brooding ejres sat, as if carved in stone, in the middle chair of an empty row while a minister read the burial service. Chc\>s Spencer Chaplin, the earth's king ot clowns, was taking his farewell of the woman who had given him life. Behind him. ranged in a semi-circle, were a group of men. Studio employees of many years’ standing, and loyal friends. They made no attempt to hold back the frank tears that welled into their eyes and rolled down their cheeks. Far in the background stood a slender dark woman, Lita Grey Chaplin. Whv she came there nobody knows. That she was there, at that final parting between mother and son, is an interesting angle—and a not understandable one- in the life story of a man who has been called “the enigma." As a young woman, Charlie Chaplin’s mother suffered a mental and nervous collapse when her husband, a musichall entertainer, died, leaving her penniless with two small boys to support. Because of this collapse she died without knowing that the youngest of these boys, Charles Spencer Chaplin, had become the master clown of hisTo her he was Charlie of the music halls, who did his turn inimitably jvith weary feet and a stomach that cried out for food. The silver screen had the perspective of the stage, to her, in

these late years. But the length of the show troubled her. “They arc making my boy work too hard,” she would say; “he can never keep this up ” She was back in the days of the Elephant and Castle, where her Charlie worked for eighteen shillings a week, oppressed always by the fear that he would break down under the strain of making the public roar at his antics. She lived, these last nine years of

her stay in America, in an exquisite home in the San Fernando Valley. The little clown who had jigged in the sawdust of many a London pub to earn tuppence that he might buy her a bag of peanuts or a sweetmeat had grown up. Had grown grey in the service of life—a slave of laughter. The mother did not see the gathering lines about his eves. To her he was the skinny gamin of the fogs who ducked under the stalls of the London markets with his brother, Syd, to forage for spotted tomatoes and dis-

carded bits of fruit in the bare days of his childhood. He was the Charlie whose damp tatters she dried and desperately tried to hold together. They had a secret understanding. Halves, in everything. When Charlie got his first real job the salary was four pounds a week. He took two of them; the other two were sent to his mother. She had sat, when he was a tot, depending because of her physical condition on what he could forage for her, with her face pressed to the grimy panes of such shelter as they could manage, watching for his return. Stark roof-trees these, furnished by the poverty-hunted people they knew in those days. And that picture of the cobwcbbed crookedness of Lambeth was etched ineffacably upon her memory.

There are chapters in Charlie Chaplin's life that have not been written. Some will never be written during his lifetime. A biography was done and Chaplin bought it, to keep it from publication. A man wants some things for his own, even though that man may belong to the world. Charlie Chaplin found, in his mother, the one woman love that did not fail. Two marriages had been disastrous. Perhaps eyes that have seen so much of human misery cannot take in the picture of happiness. Or a nature that has l>attled deep troubled waters cannoti stay,, resistless, on the smooth sands he had fought to do so valiantly Neither Mildred Harris nor Lita Gray could plumb the dark hinterland of his soul. Only the mother who had shared that darkness with him until she could no longer see the sun.

Somewhere abroad, Charlie’s halfbrother Syd is making a picture. There have been bitter quarrels between the men, for they are diametrically opposite so far as temperament goes. The bond .of brotherhood has been strained often, but never completely snapped. Charles Chaplin cannot forget the half-brothei who came home from a cruise as steward on an Australian and South African run, and took him in charge. Had the unkempt hair which had grown down to Charlie’s shoulders cleaned and clipped. Bought him clothes and got him work. From that first regular job Charlie Chaplin has gone right on up the ladder. He has never failed when standing before a throng of people waiting to be entertained. At twelve, with a cane and a bandanna, he imitated Bransby Williams as the grandfather in “The Old Curiosity Shop,” crooning over Little Nell. Sheer pathos. But sheer pathos explains all of Chaplin’s comedy. His laughter is always laid along the shadow-line of tears. He has a great yellow stucco mansion in the Beverly Hills. Notables the world over have been honoured to sit at his table. The power of fame and millions is his. But the pictures he makes—and spends endless time and money in the making—are in the forefront of his consciousness always. The men who have participated in their making are his best friends. The one woman who never failed him has passed. She was the dominant figure of his childhood. She and that grisly London of the poor—fog-soaked and sodden in its hopeless squalor. Sometimes Chaplin sits for hours studying etchings and prints of those grimy crooked ways. To him and his mother they were informed with a strange beauty. They held hands and talked over the old days. Days she understood and remembered. This is a hitherto unpublished chapter in the story of the king of clowns. A chapter to be handled reverently, for the spangles of this jesters motley all too often have been the bright prismatic glint of tears. (Copyright by tho “Stax” North. American Kewapaper Alliance. All rights reserved.)