Here's the Robinson review, a letter to the editor and Robinson's reply:
Sunday, March 16, 1997
Subverting Chaplin
Charlie Chaplin and His Times. By Kenneth S. Lynn . Simon & Schuster:
604 pp., $35
By DAVID ROBINSON
The life of Charlie Chaplin is an irresistible rags-to-riches
story. Born in London in 1889, Chaplin was the only child of a young
couple who hoped to make careers for themselves in the flourishing
English music halls. His father was modestly successful; his mother
was not. The marriage broke up; his father died an alcoholic; his
mother, like her own mother, retreated into madness. Chaplin and his
stepbrother spent periods in public institutions for destitute
children. At 10, Chaplin made his escape from slum poverty to become a
professional entertainer. By 20, he was on his way to stardom in the
music halls. By 25, he was in Hollywood. At 30, he was rich and
famous, a world celebrity.
Later his fortunes were to take a no less dramatic turn. During
the Cold War, his politics and his morals came under attack. His
popularity in America, his chosen country, declined dramatically. In
1952, when he had just embarked for a visit to England, his reentry
permit to America was revoked by the Justice Department. Chaplin did
not attempt to return, choosing to spend the rest of his life in
exile. He died in Switzerland on Christmas Day, 1977.
Not surprisingly, most of Chaplin's biographers have tended to be
political liberals, attracted by his screen character (the Tramp seen
as a symbol of the underprivileged classes) and by his life, first as
child victim of an oppressive society and later as a target of
political paranoia. The climate nowadays, however, seems to favor more
right-wing perspectives. Recently, there was Joyce Milton's "Tramp:
The Life of Charlie Chaplin," and now Kenneth S. Lynn's "Charlie
Chaplin and His Times." Both books are big, each devoting more than
500 pages to his life, though Lynn's sets out to be more serious than
Milton's garrulous and headline-grabbing account.
Lynn, whose previous biographies have covered the lives of Mark
Twain and William Dean Howells, is an indefatigable reader, as more
than 800 end-notes in this volume testify. He has discovered at least
three documented mistresses, who eluded me when I researched a
biography of Chaplin (admittedly more concerned with the studio than
with the bedroom) a decade ago. His book has the charm of frequent
Sternean digressions--on tramps, the making of early Hollywood,
English music halls, London poverty, sexual identity in the early 20th
century and Adolf Hitler.
"I have always been fascinated by the detective work of
connecting the lives of artists to their art," Lynn writes in his
introduction. Sometimes, though, he shows an odd schizophrenia in
making this connection. His introduction claims that one of his goals
is "to pay homage to a pantomimic achievement consisting of more than
70 pictures . . . one of the glories of American culture." Yet the
greater part of his biography shows such mistrust and distaste for
Chaplin's character, morals and politics that one wonders why he
embarked on the project in the first place.
Lynn sets out to counter the liberal versions of the Chaplin
biography on a number of specific points. He seeks to show that
Chaplin's account of his early privations is exaggerated and
self-pitying. (Even if Chaplin spent most of his eighth and ninth
years in a children's home, Lynn is at pains to point out that the
place was at least in "a lovely stretch of countryside.") Dealing with
the grown-up Chaplin's romantic liaisons, Lynn portrays him as an
"off-screen Svengali, who was capable of treating [women] with a
sickening contempt." As to Chaplin's politics, Lynn generally finds
himself in sympathy with the charges of dangerous communist leanings
brought by the FBI and the right-wing press in the late '40s. Chaplin
was the "multimillionaire tyrant who spouted the peace messages of the
Communist line," while the "eagerness with which he sought out
Communist friends and hired Communist associates led people to wonder
whether he was under Communist discipline."
Perhaps Lynn's most startling thesis is that Chaplin secretly
anticipated and welcomed the revoking of his reentry permit and the
resulting life of exile, since it earned him the status of a Cold War
martyr. It is a highly extravagant (and quite unsubstantiated)
assumption that Chaplin could possibly have coveted this doubtful
accolade so much as to pay for it with the unplanned, painful and
costly severance from the home and studio that had been his empire for
more than 30 years.
Lynn is driven by a profound disbelief in anything said or
written by Chaplin himself. The autobiography is dismissed as a
self-serving "compound of fact and fiction." I am chided for "blind
faith" since in my own Chaplin biography, I admiringly remarked on the
coincidence between Chaplin's memories of his childhood and a mass of
corroborative documentation unearthed only after he had written his
book.
Lynn's mistrust tends to drive him to alternative sources that
are themselves often dubious. He resurrects "Charlie Chaplin's Own
Story," written in 1915 by Rose Wilder Lane, a young journalist who
interviewed Chaplin for a series of newspaper articles that she was
persuaded to extend, inventively, into a book. Chaplin succeeded in
suppressing the book on the grounds that it was "purely a work of
fiction, holding him to public ridicule and contempt," but for Lynn,
its fictions must have come from Chaplin and are proof of his
propensity for lying.
In describing Chaplin's portentous meeting with the Polish-born
movie star Pola Negri, during his visit to Berlin in 1921, Lynn
predictably prefers Negri's version to Chaplin's and colorfully
paraphrases her description of how they met in a club following the
premiere of her film "Madame Du Barry." Unfortunately, that premiere
had taken place two years before Chaplin's visit to Berlin.
Even when Lynn's sources are more reliable, his use of them often
appears injudicious. His principal authority for his contention that
Chaplin exaggerated the poverty of his childhood is a series of maps
defining social conditions in different London neighborhoods, which
appeared in a pioneering sociological study, Charles Booth's "Life and
Labour of the Poor in London," published between 1889 and 1903. Lynn
triumphantly discovers that the streets where Charlie, his mother and
half brother lived are not included in the dark blue areas of "the
very poor" but merely in the lighter shades attributed to "the poor"
and even "working-class comfort."
Without factoring in either the massive generalizations of such
diagrams or the different living standards of homeowners and their
lodgers, Lynn concludes that the Chaplin family was not so much to be
pitied after all. From this, he leaps to the startling conclusion that
"flighty Hannah" must have accepted money from men. "For how else," he
asks, "could she have kept herself and her two boys above the social
level of Booth's 'very poor'?" In no time, this assumption leads him
on to explain her frequent changes of address as occurring because
"the lovers who enabled Hannah to rent decent lodgings quickly became
disillusioned with her erratic behavior" and to speculate that there
was a "succession of men who temporarily took up with her."
Lynn is as free with other reputations on even slighter evidence.
He characterizes the eminently respectable and happily married
actor-manager H. A. Saintsbury, who engaged the 14-year-old Charlie
for the role of the pageboy "Sherlock Holmes," as "quite possibly
homosexual." Later he admits that if "their relationship was sexual,
there is no evidence to support it." So why mention it? Equally
provocative, Lynn suggests that the eccentric Anglo-Jewish aristocrat
Ivor Montagu--who was undeniably starry-eyed about the Russian
Revolution and was a fan of both Chaplin and Sergei Eisenstein, whom
he introduced to each other--"may well have been subject to 'guidance'
by the NKVD."
With Chaplin's politics, Lynn gets really into his stride and the
heart of his matter. He resurrects and renews most of the charges
leveled against Chaplin by the far right in the late 1940s and adds a
few new ones. He devotes three pages to the evidence of a former
activist from the Communist Party, Paul Crouch, who happened to be
naming names in the very week that the rescinding of Chaplin's reentry
permit made headlines. The news stories made Chaplin a handy name to
throw into the ring: "Oh, yes," Crouch said, Chaplin was "a member at
large directly responsible to the central committee." Lynn at least
admits that the man could have been lying and that his own recent
inquiries addressed to Moscow "came up dry."
Lynn also makes much of an incident involving the head of the
Soviet Film Industry, Boris Shumyatsky, a Stalinist megalomaniac who
was responsible for wrecking the career of Sergei Eisenstein.
Returning from an official visit to America in 1936 to face criticism
that would very soon end his career, Shumyatsky published some
panicky, show-off articles in the Soviet press about the impression he
had made upon the capitalist West. In one of these, he boasted that he
had persuaded Chaplin to change the ending of "Modern Times."
In fact, Chaplin did change the ending--a preview at the studio
quickly convinced him of the error of the original mawkish finale in
which Paulette Goddard becomes a nun--but the circumstances and the
nature of the revision do not at all fit Shumyatsky's specious
account. Moreover, neither the FBI nor the Chaplin studio reports
record any meeting between Chaplin and Shumyatsky (which Lynn would no
doubt conclude was proof of its clandestine nature).
Lynn makes extensive, but selective, use of the voluminous files
of the FBI without applying the skepticism necessary in approaching
this bizarre collection of documents, packed with fantasy, speculation
and hearsay. In almost 30 years of dogged and costly investigation,
the FBI failed to prove that Chaplin had ever contributed a penny to
the Communist Party or belonged to a Communist front organization.
This did not prevent the FBI, and now apparently Lynn, from having
dark suspicions about his sympathies, though without any proof that
Chaplin's friendships with known leftists implied any commitment to
their politics. His friends and guests always included a substantial
but by no means exclusive (as Lynn would have us believe) proportion
of the leftists and liberals, who were naturally attracted to him. No
doubt, they often proved livelier guests than political conservatives.
Chaplin's FBI file grew fatter in 1942, when he was persuaded to
address a number of rallies in support of the Russian allies, Russian
war relief and the opening of a second front in Europe to relieve the
Russians. Today, these speeches are often embarrassing in what Lynn
justifiably calls their "breathtaking naivete," but in 1942 they only
echoed the sentiments of the greater part of the nation.
Writing about Chaplin's liaison with Joan Barry and the
subsequent paternity suit brought against him, Lynn makes extensive
use of Barry's statements to the FBI, though without revealing the
extent to which the paternity case and an earlier one involving her
relations with Chaplin were inspired and directed by the FBI itself,
looking for ways to damage Chaplin. He characterizes Barry as
"monomaniacal" in pursuing Chaplin in the courts. In fact, the FBI
reports state that never did either Barry or her attorney "request
this investigation or express a desire for the government to take
action against Chaplin."
The more Lynn warms to his argument, the more one detects an
inescapable emotional bias, reflected in his partisan treatment of the
various characters whose testimonies figure in his story. He has
rarely a good word for anyone who is on Chaplin's side and never a bad
one for his opponents. He characterizes Chaplin's courtroom counsel as
shifty, while Barry's attorney, Joseph Scott, the man who famously
abused Chaplin as "a lecherous hound," "a little runt of a Svengali"
and "a gray-headed old buzzard," is admired for his likeness to an Old
Testament prophet. Though Chaplin's eminently respectable longtime
lawyer Nathan Burkan cannot easily be impugned, Lynn manages to confer
a touch of the disreputable by referring to him as Nate.
For film people, Lynn's most startling revisionism is his
assessment of Joseph Breen, who, as director of the Production Code
Administration in 1933, declared himself determined to expose the
"lousy Jews" who ran the studios and "seemed to think of nothing but
moneymaking and sexual indulgence. . . . They are probably the scum of
the scum of the scum." While Lynn admits that Breen's censorship of
political ideas was "inexcusable . . . thought-control," he concurs
with his disapproval of the "sneering anti-Americanism" of "Monsieur
Verdoux," exemplified in the final speech equating war and big
business (even though the film is actually set in France between the
two world wars). Lynn's astonishingly final judgment on Breen is that
"it must be acknowledged that it was not simply an accident that his
years in office were a golden time in the history of Hollywood
movie-making. There is merit, for instance, in the argument that the
constraints that the code imposed on sexual conduct were actually
beneficial, dramatically speaking. . . ."
Chaplin remains, finally, a puzzling creature, even for Kenneth
Lynn, equally hard either to love or to hate entirely. Few people ever
expressed more intense dislike of him than Marlon Brando did when he
and Chaplin had the mutually miserable experience of working together
on "A Countess From Hong Kong." Yet with time and on cooler
reflection, Brando concluded that "as a human being, he was a mixed
bag, just like all of us."
Maybe Lynn would acknowledge the same. For all the distaste he
expresses, from time to time he turns from Chaplin's character to his
work and, in describing a film or a gag, real pleasure breaks out,
unexpected but uncontainable. In the last two pages, he lets himself
go again, swept up in "cascading laughter" at a revival of "The
Circus" and--quoting an English newspaper's view--that when all is
said and done, Chaplin "lives on in the consciousness of everyone who
loves movies."
- - -
David Robinson Was for Many Years Resident Critic of the Financial
Times and Subsequently The Times of London, to Which he Still
Contributes Regularly. His Many Books Include "Buster Keaton,"
"Chaplin: the Mirror of Opinion," "Chaplin: His Life and Art" and
"Charlie Chaplin: Comic Genius."
Copyright Los Angeles Times
To the Editor:
Assigning the review of Kenneth S. Lynn's "Charlie Chaplin and
His Times" (Book Review, March 16) to David Robinson, a doctrinaire
leftist Brit who is himself the author of a biography of Chaplin, was
a truly boneheaded idea. The hatchet job the rivalrous Robinson
performs on Lynn's book was clearly impelled by a desperate wish to
protect the endangered reputation of his own. At no point does
Robinson acknowledge the engaging wit and aesthetic sensitivity with
which Lynn makes Chaplin's films live again in our minds or the
exciting connections he draws between certain themes in the films
(e.g. madness) and the hellishness of Chaplin's early life.
In regard to Chaplin the man, Robinson's book ignores the
penetrating assessment of the comedian by the sophisticated Frenchman
Robert Florey, who once worked at the Chaplin Studio. According to
Florey, Chaplin had "two distinct personalities." On one hand, there
was "the amicable Charlie . . . whom the whole world adores." And on
the other, there was "the tyrannical, wounding, authoritarian, mean,
despotic man imbued with himself." Lynn, by contrast, not only quotes
Florey but consistently faces up to the challenge of portraying
Chaplin's complexity. For his pains, he has earned nothing more from
Robinson than an accusation of "inescapable emotional bias."
Yet another of Lynn's achievements is his decisive demonstration
that while Chaplin's claim of having lived as a child in abject,
bottom-dog poverty has always appealed to the gullible, including
Robinson, it has no basis in fact. By poring over the maps of every
London street that a remarkable late Victorian, Charles Booth,
color-coded by social status and published as an adjunct of his
17-volume study of the "Life and Labour of the People in London," Lynn
has discovered that the young Chaplin lived in genteel poverty or
working-class comfort. In his review, Robinson makes a pathetic
attempt to discredit Booth but merely succeeds in revealing his
unfamiliarity with the gentleman's work by erroneously referring to it
as "Life and Labour of the Poor in London."
As an apologist for Chaplin's political conduct, Robinson has no
use for the idea that Chaplin was a fellow traveler whom Soviet
propagandists found useful. Consequently, it is anathema to him that
Lynn stresses the importance of Chaplin's social ties in the 1930s and
'40s to such figures as the German refugee composer Hanns Eisler.
Eisler worked for a time for the Comintern in Moscow and was then
assigned to Hollywood because the Kremlin believed in his aptitude for
cultural infiltration. After he was deported for perjury in 1948--a
procedure that Chaplin fought fiercely every step of the way--Eisler
boasted that he and Bertolt Brecht had "radicalized" Chaplin. The
success of their effort can be seen in "Monsieur Verdoux" (1947). Not
only does Verdoux the wife killer equate business with murder but, in
the courtroom scene, he defends himself by mounting a thinly veiled
assault on atomic America. Robinson's weak riposte to all this is that
"the film is actually set in France between the two World Wars."
R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., Editor in Chief, The American Spectator,
Arlington, Va.
* * *
David Robinson replies:
On the very eve of voting in the British election, it is
disconcerting to learn from R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. that I am a
doctrinaire leftist. This is as big a surprise to me as to the
unswervingly right-of-center newspapers for which I have worked for
the last 40 years. Maybe his information comes from the same sources
as lead him to no-less-uncompromising judgments on Charles Chaplin's
politics.
My review of Lynn's book was certainly unfavorable but not
written in the petty spirit of rivalry that Tyrrell infers. I agreed
unseen to review because I had met Lynn, liked him and admired his
earlier work and so anticipated a book by a colleague, which I would
admire no less. That it proved otherwise was, I admit, embarrassing,
though I certainly do not feel his book "endangers" the reputation of
my own, written many years ago. On the contrary, he pays me the
compliment of drawing extensively and legitimately on my work: Out of
his 60 end-note references to it, only one takes issue with its
position.
The problem is not with Lynn's politics or his dislike of Chaplin
but with his uncritical use of sources. One such case, Charles Booth's
great "Life and Labour of the People in London," which I would
certainly never discredit, is cited by Tyrrell. My point here is that,
however good Booth's research, it is at the very least unsafe to make
categorical and absolute assumptions about individual houses and
lodgings on the strength of colored areas on a map on a scale of a
mere 6 inches to one mile--particularly when dealing with the shifting
urban chaos of late Victorian south London. Chaplin's claim of
poverty, says Tyrrell, apparently on the basis of the Booth maps, "has
no basis in fact." I can only say that the civic documents that I
unearthed 15 years ago in the London archives, and which Lynn also
cites, never fail to corroborate particulars of his story.
* * *
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