If you have not read Louis Menand’s massive, 857-page study of the arts in America from 1945 to 1965, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, you are missing, not an intellectual treat but an intellectual feast of the highest order. A more accurate title might be New York in the Fifties, because, first of all, if it didn’t happen in New York it didn’t happen, and, secondly, the “Fifties” really started in 1945 and didn’t really run out of gas until 1965, but I guess the publishers thought they’d better humor the folks in the hinterland to think they might merit a mention, along with giving the book a wider “frame” with the Cold War bit, as though there might be any frame wider than “New York”. But all this is a quibble. Read the damn book.
Yes, indeed. Read the damn book. But, at the same time, skip Louie’s meretricious missive in the current New Yorker, The War on Charlie Chaplin, in which he tries to drum up pity for the world’s funniest serial statutory rapist/crypto communist, Charlie Chaplin. To put it bluntly, Louis Menand lies his ass off for absolutely no reason, other than to publicize a book that some dude named Scott Eyman has written, Charlie Chaplin vs. America, reworking an already worn trope that all of Charlie’s troubles were due to tongue-clicking, obsessive-compulsive, sphincter-clenching blue noses like J. Edgar Hoover, who thought that anyone who actually enjoyed sex was a damn commie who wanted to overthrow America’s God given free enterprise system.
It’s “remarkable” how frequently Menand departs from the historical record in this short piece—whether he’s following Eyman or making it up on his own isn’t clear to me. For example, Menand tells us how Charlie started out in Hollywood:
The Tramp was born in the wardrobe department of Keystone Studios, in Los Angeles. The year was 1914, and Charlie Chaplin was a twenty-four-year-old contract player. Keystone was known for its slapstick comedies, and pantomime was more Chaplin’s comic genre. At first, nobody seemed sure what to do with him. Then one day the head of the studio, Mack Sennett, sensed that a scene they were shooting needed some funny business. Chaplin happened to be standing nearby. Sennett ordered him to put on comedy makeup—“anything will do.”
Well, no. I happen to be a bit of an expert on Charlie, having written reviews of all his films for the estimable Bright Lights Film Journal, researching his life in some detail in the course of their composition. If Louie had thought to consult Chaplin’s My Autobiography, or Joyce Milton’s excellent biography, Tramp, he would have discovered that Chaplin was an accomplished stage comedian, the featured performer of Fred Karno’s famous music hall troupe in Great Britain before he joined Sennett’s Keystone troupe. The notion that Chaplin wasn’t into slapstick is, well, laughable. Said Hal Roach, the guy who produced Laurel & Hardy’s classic films, “Fred Karno is not only a genius, he is the man who originated slapstick comedy.” And Menand’s claim that “At first, nobody seemed sure what to do with him”—the (very) standard shtick that great careers are routinely the result of accident—“Hey, you! Yeah, you! Do you want a job? Go put on something funny!” —is absurd.
In fact, Chaplin was a known quantity, an established star hired to replace Sennett’s departing top banana, Ford Sterling, chief of the once legendary Keystone Cops, a role Chaplin did not reprise. Chaplin’s first film for Sennett was Making a Living (1914, like all of Chaplin’s films for Sennett), in which he did not wear his famous tramp outfit. The development of the legendary tramp costume was a pretty straightforward combination of too big (pants and shoes) and too small (the vest and jacket), the derby and cane for class (and “business”), while the eyebrows and moustache made Chaplin’s already large face more expressive.1 Why Menand feels obliged to force the birth of the tramp into such a cliched mold is anyone’s guess.
The heart of Menand’s article concerns what he pictures as the right-wing reaction to Charlie’s famous film The Great Dictator, released in October 1940, a year after the German invasion of Poland, which was, of course, set in motion by the notorious “Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact”, signed in Moscow on August 23, 1939, in which Stalin and Hitler agreed to cooperate with one another and, not so incidentally, divide up Poland between them, just like in the good old days with Frederick and Catherine the Greats, though it isn’t true that Stalin had sex with a horse to celebrate.
More to the point, of course, is that the Pact knocked into a cocked hat the “Popular Front” against fascism that the Soviet Union had organized and supported since the rise of Hitler in 1933, a movement that Chaplin had passionately supported. Many communist party members, disgusted by Stalin’s brutal sellout of the Polish people, left the party. Chaplin, though not a party member, loyally followed the party line, and rewrote his picture, originally conceived in the spirit of the Popular Front, to take bizarre pacifist twist at the end, concluding the film with fierce, eight minute harangue delivered by Chaplin urging “workers” to throw down their weapons and defy their superiors—a decision that would perhaps make a shred of sense if Chaplin had (somehow) believed that the film would be shown to the entire German army, whose rank and file, which had been sweeping all but unopposed across face of Europe, would immediately abandon their rifles and tanks. The real goal, of course, was to further the interests of the Soviet Union and prevent any harm from coming to their great pal Adolf and to discourage U.S. support for Great Britain. The conclusion of Chaplin’s bitterly anti-Nazi film turns out to be, “objectively”, pro-Nazi!
I’m sure Menand knows all this history, but he pretends he doesn’t. Instead, he claims that Chaplin got in trouble for making a pro-war picture!
A sendup of Fascism would seem unobjectionable from a patriotic point of view, but the nineteen-thirties was a period of isolationism in the United States and appeasement in the United Kingdom. Many Americans, and not just Republicans, wanted the country to stay out of a European war, and the British did not want to antagonize Hitler. (Chaplin was still a British citizen.)2
Before production on “The Great Dictator” even began, Neville Chamberlain’s government announced that it would ban the picture in England. In September, 1941, after the movie had been released in the United States, Chaplin was subpoenaed by a congressional subcommittee investigating “pro-war propaganda.”
Here’s a “news flash”, Louie. The Great Dictator was released in October 1940, when the Soviet Union was fiercely opposing U.S. support of Britain of any sort. The Great Dictator, while anti-Hitler, was not “pro-war propaganda”. It was isolationist, anti-war propaganda.3 Hitler then invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, instantly reversing the “party line”, which Chaplin immediately pursued, while redoubling right-wing opposition to the war, who, of course, wanted Hitler to crush the USSR. Again, I’m sure Menand knows all this. He’s deliberately misleading his readers with a ludicrously “selective” presentation of facts in order to convince them that “innocent” Charlie was a hapless victim of a right-wing plot.
Chaplin’s left-wing proclivities did irritate a number of people, but it was his obsession with young women that really got him into trouble. Menand, in the long tradition of past Chaplin apologists, insists that poor Charlie was the hapless victim of a long succession of scheming dames. “Explains” Louie:
Chaplin was not a libertine in the sense of a man who sleeps around or who preys on women. He was a libertine in the sense that he believed that his private life was his business and needed to be answerable to no one’s moral code. In practice, Chaplin was a romantic. He fell in love with the women in his life and he was sometimes incapable of seeing when a woman was not the person he imagined her to be.
Which definitely explains why Chaplin ended up in bed with 16-year-old Mildred Harris, 15-year-old Lita Grey, and 17-year-old Oona O’Neil and was forced to marry all three of them. He also kissed Lita on the mouth in his famous 1920 film The Kid when she was all of 12 years old, something Louie doesn’t mention. The first two marriages ended quickly in bitter, ungracious divorces, while poor Oona wasted her life chained to a self-pitying “king” (for so Chaplin saw himself) in exile for more than 30 years. Referring to a supposedly one-time event in his past, Charlie once explained his fascination with not even barely legal young in the following manner: “I had a most violent crush on a girl only ten or twelve. I have always been in love with young girls, not in an amorous way. … It was funny: not in a sex way—I just loved to caress and fondle her—not passionately—just to have her in my arms.”4 Michael Jackson, move over!
It’s really amazing that, in this day and age of “#metoo”, the New Yorker is still making excuses for the most arrant sort of misogyny and exploitation, simply because the perpetrator is an “artist”, a superior being whose foibles should not be inspected by the many headed. It’s similarly ridiculous that Menand insists on painting Chaplin as a simple “New Deal liberal”, when, among other things, Chaplin, pursuing the Communist Party line, strenuously opposed FDR’s preparations for war and his support for Great Britain from September 1939 until June 1941, something that I guess Louie “forgot”. The endless efforts of the “Smart Set” at the New Yorker and elsewhere to “normalize” the left-wing nonsense, and worse, of the New York intelligentsia in the 1930s gets ever more repulsive with every passing day. If Professor Menand really wants to know what people like Chaplin were complicit with in the 1930s, and with which he is complicit with after writing such a review as this one, he should write reviews for the New Yorker of such books as Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands and Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History.
1. Like so many movie stars, Chaplin had an unnaturally large head. When he is seen wearing only a swimming suit, it looks almost freakish.
2. Charlie was not a British citizen; he was a British subject. The UK didn’t make the switch until the passage of the British Nationality Act of 1981.
3. Chaplin brags in his memoirs that he performed the anti-war speech/rant that concludes The Great Dictator before the annual convention of the Daughters of the American Revolution, an oft-caricatured group of strenuously right-wing babes who generally detested all immigrants, much less left-wing party animals like Charlie.
4. Quoted in Joyce Milton’s Tramp: The Life of Charlie Chaplin, p. 45. According to Milton, Chaplin was probably reminiscing about his infatuation with a 12-year-old ballerina, Maybelle Fournier, whom he met in his early twenties while working with Karno.
