whyexistence:

“Although not a pessimist or a misanthrope, there are days when contact with any human being makes me physically ill. I am oppressed at such times and in such periods by what was known among the Romantics as world-weariness. I feel a total stranger to life.

Solitude is the only relief. The dream-world is then the great reality; the real world an illusion. I go to my library and live with the great abstract thinkers—Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Walter Pater.” 

— Charlie Chaplin, Charlie Chaplin: Interviews

From “The Hamlet-Like Nature of Charlie Chaplin”, New York Times, December 12, 1920.

Charlie with his friend, writer & political activist Max Eastman, at the Chaplin Studios, 1919.

“He had to be understood as an untrained waif, a dream-endowed gamin, a delicate-minded guttersnipe—a leaf of paper with sacred writings on it, blown through the streets of a London slum.”

—Max Eastman, Great Companions (1959)

Filming The Kid.

Raymond Lee played the bully who picks on Jackie Coogan in this scene (Lee also appeared in A Day’s Pleasure (along with Jackie) & The Pilgrim (the child who applauds Charlie’s sermon).

Many years later, Lee recalled Charlie guiding the two boys through the scene:

“Boys this is a very simple scene. Very simple. Two boys fighting. All boys fight. Must be a million boys fighting all over the world this very minute. It’s born in you—like tonsils. But boys, you aren’t fighting. You’re dancing with each other.

…There is hunger in this scene. A boyish hunger makes Raymond steal Jackie’s toy. And Jackie fights for his hunger… It’s not an ordinary fight. It’s been going on for thousands of years but it still isn’t an ordinary fight. I’ve been so hungry I could eat a shoe!”

(“I Was A Chaplin Kid” by Raymond Lee, 1966. Reprinted in The Legend of Charlie Chaplin by Peter Haining)

Cover of Italian magazine Epoca, 1954.

Charlie always preferred cats over dogs, at least as pets. According to his son, Charlie, Jr., his father was sure that their fur was “a carrier of germs” and he found their drooling “distasteful”. But his father felt differently toward cats.

“‘A cat’, he once told me as a child, ‘is proud and independent. You don’t find that in a dog. If a cat is hungry it’ll drink the milk you give it. But it won’t for a minute think it owes you anything in return. It never sells its liberty. And just look at its grace and beauty!”

(My Father, Charlie Chaplin, Charles Chaplin, Jr.)

Josephine and her daddy, c. 1952

“Charlie looked at Josephine…’That one looks just like Mabel Normand,’ ‘Remember her?’

‘Sweet Mabel,’ Chaplin said, and he gave a little laugh.”

—Lillian Ross, Moments With Chaplin (although short—only 60 pages—this book is one of my favorites on Chaplin).

Charlie & Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova at the Chaplin Studios.

“The sublime is rare in any vocation or art. And Pavlova was one of those rare artists who had it. She never failed to affect me profoundly …. As she danced, every move was the center of gravity. The moment she made her entrance no matter how gay or winsome she was, I wanted to weep, for she personified the tragedy of perfection.”

—Charles Chaplin, My Autobiography (1964)

Work (1915)

“Most of the fun in Work, one of my very latest releases, comes through the efforts of a painter’s assistant to push a two-wheeled barrow loaded with materials. This idea came to me from a scene I witnessed, one that was not funny for the assistant, but very laughable for the bystanders. The man was trying to get up a hill, and the weight of the barrow kept pulling him up in the air, and letting him down again, until finally he was carried up in a half circle over his barrow wheel and the contents were spilled. I enlarged the idea, and the audiences shout with amusement.”

—From “How I Made My Success” by Charlie Chaplin, The Theater (September, 1915).

Charlie in St. Moritz, Switzerland during his world tour, c. 1931-32. His companion, May Reeves, is on the right. In A Comedian Sees The World, Chaplin’s memoir of his world tour, he said: “I’ve never been intrigued by Switzerland. Personally I dislike all mountainous country. I feel hemmed in and isolated from from the rest of the world. The ominous presence of mountains towering above me gives me a feeling of futility.” Ironically, Chaplin made his final home in Switzerland in 1953. One can assume by that time he was happy to be isolated from the rest of the world.