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Birth of the Tramp. When he arrived in Los Angeles at 24, Chaplin was a thoroughly experienced veteran of the theater. On his first day at the studio, Mack Sennett took him aside to explain that "the essence of our comedy is a chase." Chaplin knew better, but for months as he worked under and fought with Sennett's directors, his funniest and most inventive efforts kept winding up on the cutting-room floor.
The birth of the Tramp changed that.
One day Sennett, looking at a hotel-lobby set, remarked that "we need some gags here," then turned to Chaplin. "Put on a comedy makeup. Anything will do." On the way to the wardrobe, Chaplin improvised the tight jacket, baggy pants and big shoes, added a small mustache for age. "I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the makeup made me feel the person he was. By the time I walked onto the stage he was fully born." Within two years Chaplin was making $10,000 a week.
Anecdotes & Omissions. His book is wonderfully revealing of the sources of his art, which developed the Tramp from the foot-in-the-cuspidor antics of the early two-reelers to the intense tragicomic ironies of those two flawed masterpieces, Monsieur Verdoux and Limelight. But it is uneven and uncommunicative about his many loves and his vociferous left-wing politics, supplying instead great heaps of anecdotes about his encounters with famous people from Einstein and Gandhi to Pablo Casals, Chou Enlai, and Khrushchev.
With such stuff included, Chaplin's frequent omissions are puzzling. He never mentions the name of his second wife, Lita Grey,* mother of his two eldest sons. So much is omitted, in fact, that little is left from which to deduce Chaplin's mature feelings and beliefs—beyond his lifelong insistence that he has never been a Communist, and the apparent mellowing of his resentment against the U.S. as he grows old and turns inward to bask in the profound joy of his life with his fourth wife, Oona O'Neill, and their eight children.
*First: Mildred Harris (1918-20). Third: Paulette Goddard (1936-42).