Charlie Chaplin
Warning: this post contains references to trauma and abuse
In Victorian London, a six-year-old Charlie Chaplin had a chance meeting with his father, Charles Chaplin Senior:
“I had seen him only twice in my life, on the stage, and once when passing a house in the Kennington Road, as he was coming down the front garden path with a lady. I had paused and watched him, knowing instinctively that he was my father. He beckoned me to him and asked my name. Sensing the drama of the situation, I had feigned innocence and said: ‘Charlie Chaplin’. Then he glanced knowingly at the lady, felt in his pocket and gave me a half crown, and without further ado I ran straight home and told Mother that I had met my father.”1
In part A, I looked at some examples of Chaplin’s huge drive to perform and be idealised. However, alongside a reliance on achieving admiration, were a reliance on judgment or condemnation and a reliance on sex in ways that exploited others. The map of narcissism predicts that these strategies for managing relationships and emotions, would be developed in response to both emotional trauma and a nurturing of these kinds of strategies by adults during childhood. Here, I will look at Chaplin’s childhood. For Chaplin, were there early traumatic experiences of humiliation and vulnerability from which he needed to escape? First, I will look at the role of nurturing in his early life – of performance, charisma and emotional distance as methods for such escape.
Strategies: lessons in performance, admiration and distance
Hannah Chapman (stage name, Lily Harley)
Charlie described his singer mother Hannah as having a “compelling charm” and both Charlie and his older brother Sydney thought she was “divine”1. Hannah Chapman (born Hills) would often enchant the boys with her singing. At 18, a younger Hannah had eloped to South Africa with a middle-aged man, and she would tell stories of luxury, glamour and servants. Hannah had returned to London and had married her actor husband Charles Chaplin Senior. Both father and mother performed in the booming Vaudeville theatre scene of Victorian London.
Charles Chaplin Senior was known for playing the “man about town, whose debonair attitude was matched by his elegant dress of top hat, cravat and morning suit.”2 Although this was more than just a stage persona, in private, he also had a violent temper. He split from the boys’ mother in 1890, just a year after Charlie was born. By this time Hannah was a star in her own right. However, she began to suffer repeated episodes of laryngitis, which undermined her singing and caused her to become a “nervous wreck” in-front of the London audiences who were not slow to heckle. As a single parent family in Kennington, South London, they received no help from the boys’ father.
Hannah had always encouraged Charlie to perform in front of her friends. She did this with little Charlie and not his older brother. Perhaps she knew that Charlie alone was the son of a performer2. Charlie later said that his mother “imbued me with the feeling that I had some sort of talent”.1 She would be heard referring to Charlie as “the King”2. And he in turn was seen to idealise his mother as “the most splendid woman I ever knew”1.
When Charlie was five years old, and Hannah was booed off stage, struggling with laryngitis. the theatre manager agreed to let Charlie perform in her place. At this point little Charlie’s need to perform was not just for admiration or fun. He was keenly aware that his mother’s performances put food on the table and a roof over their heads. As Charlie performed some songs, the biggest laughs were in response to the boy pausing to pick up the coins that had been thrown. This was Charlie Chaplin’s first time on stage. And apparently his mother’s last. The latter fact would have devastating consequences of poverty, mental ill health and separation.
By the time Charlie was taken in by his father, aged seven, almost his only experience of this father was seeing him on stage – from a distance, as audience, as admirer. He later remembered,
“At meals I watched every move he made…And for years I copied him… He would tell…about the acts … and have us all enthralled.”1
A strategy, in the face of vulnerability, of being entertaining, idealised and invulnerable, learned first from his mother, was being built upon by his father.
Charlie recalled, in the face of his later shame and destitution, “creeping off by myself at the poorhouse and pretending I was a very rich and grand person…I was of a dreamy imaginative disposition. I was always pretending I was somebody else.”2 Chaplin would later tell his first son,
“even then [in the orphanage] I thought of myself as the greatest actor in the world. I had to feel the exuberance that comes from utter confidence in yourself.”1
Biographer Ackroyd concludes that this “invulnerability inevitably later became part of his screen persona”2.
By the time he finally spoke on camera in ‘The Great Dictator’, Chaplin had a perfect upper class actor’s elocution. But this must have required a lot of work. As a teenager, he once appeared in court as a witness, but the whole court struggled to understand anything of his cockney accent2.
Charlie as the page boy in Sherlock Holmes
Trauma: judgment and humiliation
The area of Kennington in South London where Chaplin grew up was, at the turn of the 19th and 20thcenturies, a slum. The air was filled with smells of poor sanitation, vinegar, glue manufacturing, slaughterhouses and smoke.
After a period of severe poverty following the break-up with Charles Senior, Hannah began a relationship with a singer who was materially well off. Suddenly, Charlie, aged two or three, had a period of living in non-poverty. There was a house maid. A new half-brother was born. But this relationship too broke down, and the partner, Leo Dryden, left with his own son, saying that Hannah was not fit to be a mother. Whilst Chaplin’s own biography is perhaps kind about his mother, it may be that something was affecting Hannah’s parenting or relationships long before she was admitted to an asylum. On the other hand, these three fathers might have rejected Hannah in response to ways she had been forced to cope with poverty. At the age of four, poverty again was where Charlie found himself 2.
One of the favourite songs Hannah would sing to her boys, fondly written down in Chaplin’s autobiography, paints a picture of a woman prone to judgment:
“I’m a lady judge
And a good judge too
To teach the lawyers
A thing or two”
Hannah tried hard to make sure the boys “spoke well and felt distinguished”. She would sometimes threaten the boys - that they might “end up in the gutter like your father”. But Charlie had to wear his mother’s stockings to school – provoking a nickname of “Francis Drake”1. In the space of three months, they lived in six separate rooms or basements. Biographer Ackroyd suggests that Hannah may have resorted to sex-working and there are hints of the brothers resorting to theft2. Eventually they were forced to move to the place of humiliation: Southwark workhouse. According to its register, this was “owing to the absence of their father and the destitution and illness of their mother”2.
In the workhouse, Charlie was separated from his mother on the children’s ward (his brother was away). This was a huge fall from the world of the London theatre. The workhouse clothes, for Hannah, were hugely embarrassing. Charlie would later write, aged 75, that “It was then that I felt utterly dejected”1. Charlie was seven.
Transferred away further from his mother to Hanwell Boarding School (at the order of the Board of Guardians at his father’s expense), Charlie looked with “loathing” at the children diagnosed with ringworm who would be shaved and stained with yellow iodine. When Charlie found that he had “become one of them” he isolated himself so as to avoid the “contempt” of other children1. His mother did not visit for a year. But she was later released from the workhouse and took back her two boys only to live with them “from one back room to another” in squalor, until her mental health broke down and she was again detained in the asylum. Charlie felt betrayed by his mother and later remembered, “I did not cry, but a baffling despair came over me”1. He was now eight.
In the asylum, records of Hannah’s mental state describe a woman with a psychotic illness2. She was ‘talking to imaginary people’ and at times “very noisy…singing and shouting…violent and destructive”2. I wonder how much of this Charlie had managed at home without alerting authorities. At times, Charlie’s mother appeared to dismissively blame Charlie for her poor mental health (“if only you had given me a cup of tea…”1) Could all of this, at times, have felt like his own fault? Charlie recalled being reduced to crying in his mother’s lap. And then alone in a bare room. The experience would be, for a young boy, one of abject helplessness, despair and perhaps guilt.
The streets of Kennington
Finally, Charles Senior, along with his partner Louise, was forced to take custody of Charlie and Sidney. The step-mother would have Charlie scrubbing floors whilst she got drunk. Charlie called this the saddest time of his life. Sidney and Louise would have fights and he would threaten to tell Charles Senior how she treated the boys whilst he was away.
One night at 3am, patrolling police picked up two boys; Charlie and Sidney, sleeping next to a watchman’s fire.1 They had been kicked out of the house by Louise. A few days later the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children called at the house but this was not taken further.
Charlie returned to his mother, but when she was again hospitalised, Charlie lied to avoid the orphanage - saying that a relative would take him in. But with his brother away, he lived alone in sheds, or slept on park benches – doing some casual work for a local wood-cutter. When his brother eventually returned and was greeted by Charlie, Sidney did not at first recognise the “dirty tattered street urchin”2.
Chaplin’s childhood could be described simply as a story of poverty. But many people in London at that time shared poverty. How was Chaplin’s experience different? Firstly, he experienced living at two very different levels of Victorian society – one was poverty and destitution and the other glamourous and sometimes plentiful2. The distance between these experiences perhaps compounded the experiences of humiliation and vulnerability.
Secondly, the glamourous and plentiful experiences of Charlie’s childhood were bestowed on the family specifically by men on whom his mother depended.
Charles Chaplin Senior
These men appear through the lens of history as fickle, devoid of compassion and narcissistic. But young Charlie would have experienced them – distant as they were - as holding the power to avoid the dangers that he associated with vulnerability and emotional attachment. Becoming such a man, was the solution he was presented with. And becoming a performer, was the solution he was coached in. These two roles are both in the top half of the map of narcissism3. So, by the time Charles Chaplin Senior died of alcohol poisoning at the age of 38, narcissistic ways of being had been passed powerfully from one generation to the next.
The map of narcissism3*
The Tramp
Both Chaplin’s mother and father offered the specific intense experiences described by Narcissism theory – experiences focussed on encouraging performance, appearance and idealisation as a route of escape from unmanageable vulnerability. These moments of idealisation – of Charlie himself or of a parent – stood in stark contrast to intolerable experiences of humiliation and vulnerability.
Perhaps the cliched rags to riches story often told about celebrities contains some timeless truth. Poverty does not necessarily come with emotional trauma. But for some, like Chaplin, the ‘rags’ come along with devastating humiliation and vulnerability. This provokes the narcissism that provokes the need for the ‘riches’ that provide distance from feelings of vulnerability - at all cost. Sadly, in the final year of Chaplin’s life, despite having extracted his millions successfully from America to live in Europe, and despite finally having a stable marriage, he was apparently terrified of one thing: of being left alone.
Ackroyd charts how Chaplin’s ‘Tramp’ became more vulnerable and also childlike the more powerful Chaplin became – concluding that The Tramp was Chaplin’s “shadow self”2.
For me, the central thing about narcissism is that specific strategies; of idealisation, power, and the shaming of others, serve to distance us as far as possible from felt experiences of vulnerability and shame. Chaplin ultimately excelled as The Tramp. He never bettered The Tramp. Making fun of this dejected, helpless character with ill-fitting clothes was something he made into magic. Why was making fun of this particular character, for Chaplin, so freeing? Was it for him, an ultimate distancing from some particular vulnerability? When we go back to Charlie, the child, struggling to survive on the streets of Kennington - when we look for his most painful experiences of vulnerability and desperation, we find an eight-year-old, at 3am, by a watchman’s fire, on the streets. A ‘poorper’. A homeless boy. A tramp.
*Ryle did not apply this approach only to narcissism. If this mapping approach has been used in your own therapy, this does not mean that you have narcissistic difficulties.
References
1. Chaplin, C. (1964). My Autobiography. Penguin.
2. Ackroyd, P. (2014). Charlie Chaplin. Vintage books.
3. Ryle, A. & Kerr, I.B. (2002). Introducing Cognitive Analytic Therapy. Wiley.