Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [36]
Far more than New York or Chicago, Los Angeles was a modern Babylon, an explosive concentration of new wealth, ambition and the easy accessibility of anything one could dream of. “Money was abundant,” remembered Lillian Gish. “Luxury was everywhere. Shoeshine boys and cab drivers played the stock market . . . indigent young actors were getting used to traveling in limousines.”
But as the Photoplay columnist Adela Rogers said, “Low education and high income don’t mix.” Most Hollywood actors in the early 1920s came from poverty to find themselves lavished with popular adoration and, at relatively young ages, with more money than they had ever imagined. Few had stable family backgrounds or much education. It was hardly surprising that they spent their silly money like water, had affairs with everyone they could, drank heavily and took drugs.
This was one aspect of what Elinor Glyn described as the “Hollywood disease”—to which she confessed she also succumbed, although (in her sixties) perhaps not to the same extremes as some. It started almost on one’s arrival, Glyn wrote, producing “a sense of exaggerated self-importance and self-centeredness, which naturally alienates all old friends. Next comes a great desire for and belief in the importance of money above all else, a loss of the normal sense of humor and of proportion, and finally, in extreme cases, the abandonment of all previous standards of moral value.”
The one star more beloved than Mary Pickford was Charlie Chaplin, who had come to Hollywood in late 1913 from the English music-hall stage, after three years touring America in vaudeville shows. Like Pickford, his youth in and out of work-houses and paupers’ schools in south London had been marked by desperate poverty and deprivation. Chaplin never forgot the fear and isolation of his childhood, and even—or perhaps especially—his most comedic work was indelibly marked by his early experiences. As a friend said, he was “one of the loneliest souls that ever walked this earth.”
Chaplin described finding New York a frightening and unfriendly place when he arrived there in 1910 at the age of twenty-one. While others swaggered on the streets Charlie looked and felt “lone and isolated.” These feelings never left him. Three years later, with his first decent paycheck in his pocket, Chaplin booked himself into an expensive hotel for the first time. He said he wanted to weep when he saw his well-appointed room and sat by the bath turning the hot and cold taps off and on, thinking, “How bountiful and reassuring is luxury!” Years later he would say that the saddest thing he could “imagine is to get used to luxury.”
It was in his third film for Keystone, released in February 1914, that Chaplin introduced the Tramp. His defining character came into being almost by accident. “On the way to the wardrobe I thought I would dress in baggy pants, big shoes, a cane and a derby hat. I wanted everything to be a contradiction: the pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small and the shoes large. I was undecided whether to look old or young, but remembering [Mack] Sennett had expected me to be a much older man, I added a small moustache, which I reasoned, would add age without hiding my expression. 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. I began to know him, and by the time I walked on stage [set] he was fully born.”
“You know this fellow is many-sided, a tramp, a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always hopeful of romance and adventure,” said Chaplin elsewhere. “He would have you believe he is a scientist, a musician, a duke, a polo player. However, he is not above picking up cigarette butts or robbing a baby of its candy. And, of course, if the situation warrants it, he will kick a lady in the rear—but only in extreme anger.”
As the humble, noble, hopeful Tramp, in film after film, Chaplin had found a way of communicating