February 2, 1914

August 2, 2020

February 2, 1914

Sir Charles Spenser Chaplin in my library

The other day I officiated at the funeral of a dear friend. At the time of her passing she was 106, and had been, up until a few days before her death, about as healthy as anyone I knew. Selma shared a birthday with “Madame,” my mother Alice . . . except that Selma was precisely 10 years older than mom. Every February the 8th, she (Selma) would ask to be remembered to “that young lady” and send along her birthday wishes. Like Madame, Selma was a fine, fine artist; she worked largely in oils where Madame spent a lifetime as a gifted pointillist . . . pen and ink being her “weapon” of choice. Unlike Mom, Selma was never an actress, but like mom, was a gifted dancer.

In preparing for Selma’s service, I did quite a bit of research . . . most of it dealing with the year 1914. In the year of her birth, Woodrow Wilson was president, the only Roosevelt most Americans could identify was Theodore, and Babe Ruth had yet to hit his first home run. (For baseball aficionados, that year, the all-time record for home runs was one Roger Conner (1857-1931) who held the all-time record: 138 dingers. In February 1914, one could purchase a 3 bedroom home through the Sears catalog for $825.00; the vast majority of American veterans had served during the Civil War, a Ford Model T cost $440.00 (approximately $11,231 in current dollars) and the most popular movie star in the world (at least as of February 1st of that year) was a zaftig Jewish maiden named Theodosia Goodman, who who acted under the name “Theda Bara.” (Mom would parody Miss Bara about 45 years later in a sketch called “We Never Learned to Twalk (sic).”

On February 2, 1914, a mere 6 days before Selma’s birth, the world be forever changed. For on that day, a 25-year old Cockney vaudevillian named Charles Spenser Chaplin was first seen on screen in a 1-reel short ironically entitled “Making a Living.” Appearing sans baggy pants, tight threadbare coat, derby hat and over-sized shoes (which wouldn’t come about until his next picture, “Kid Auto Races in Venice”). Film reviewers immediately understood that the first genius of the screen had arrived. The anonymous reviewer for Motion Picture World wrote about the unnamed actor in Making a Living: “The clever player who takes the role of the nervy and very nifty sharper (Chaplin) in this picture is a comedian of the first water, who acts like one of Natures’s own naturals. . . . “

One week later - on the very day Thelma was born - came Chaplin’s second picture: a half-real short entitled “Kid Auto Races at Venice.” In this picture, Chaplin somehow managed to throw together the costume that would almost immediately make him the best-known, most beloved character on planet earth. In this split-reel film (the other half being an educational short called Olives and Their Oil), Charlie, a stranger from “Who Knows Where,” makes his first appearance as “The Tramp.” He laughs with the children at the auto race, mimics them, and flies into rages which soon pass. Already, reviewers sensed that this as yet unnamed actor was someone very, very special: the reviewer for The Cinema wrote “Kid Auto Races struck us as about the funniest film we have ever seen. When we subsequently saw Chaplin in more ambitious efforts, our opinion that the Keystone Company had made the capture of their career is strengthened. Chaplin is a born screen comedian; he does things we have never seen done on the screen before.”

“Kid Auto Races at Venice” (February 8, 1914)

By May 13, of that year, Chaplin had made an additional dozen pictures for Keystone. On May 4, 1914, Keystone released the first film written, directed by - and starring - Charles Chaplin: “Caught in the Rain.” Within 3 months, “The Little Fellow” - as Chaplin would forever after refer to him - had learned just about everything he would ever need to know about the art/business of cinema. He would never entrust any aspect of a Chaplin film to anyone else for the rest of his career. By the time Caught in the Rain hit the theaters, his initial director at Keystone, Henry "Pathé", Lehrman had left Mack Sennett, understanding full well that Chaplin already knew far, far more about the art of cinema than the Ukraine-born Lerhman (1881-1946) could ever hope to know. Within two more years, Chaplin (whom Sennett paid $150.00 per week in 1914), would be making $10,000 per week (plus a $150,000.00 signing bonus) for a contract to write, direct and star in films for Mutual. Within another year, he would be making more than $ 1 million a per as a founder and major stockholder of United Artists. (n.b. In 1919, upon hearing that Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and the revered director D.W. Griffith had gone into business for themselves forming a company they called “United Artists" in order to protect their work and control their careers, Richard Rowland, then head of Metro Studios, famously remarked that "the lunatics have taken over the asylum". That’s where this witty bon mot came from.)

After making “The Kid” (Chaplin’s full-length picture for U.A., he would take more and more time between pictures, turning out such immortal classics as “The Gold Rush,” “The Circus,” “City Lights,” “Modern Times,” “The Great Dictator” and “Limelight,” among others. Over the years, reviewers, while frequently castigating and finding fault with his politics (decidedly progressive) and personal life (he had a penchant for marrying younger women) never ceased to acknowledge his God-given brilliance as a filmmaker.

On occasion, I would chat with Selma about Chaplin, whom she considered a consummate genius. She fully understood that to be an artistic genius did not necessitate being either a saint or a paragon of virtue. Without question, Sir Charles Chaplin left an indelible legacy as a cinematic artist, world-class director, peerless composer, first-rate writer and clown. I hope that the next generation will come to understand that Chaplin was and is to cinema what the Beatles were, are and ever shall be to Rock ‘n Roll, and Dickens to literature: the best there ever has been. And unlike just about any other person in the history of the so-called “Seven Arts” (Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, Literature, Music, Performing and Film) Chaplin was the only whose brilliance was universally proclaimed on day one - February 2, 1914 - a mere 144 hours before my friend Selma’s birth.