Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [37]
This intense vulnerability was the secret of Chaplin’s universal appeal. He encapsulated the nameless sense of longing felt by so many Americans during this period, from Zelda Fitzgerald to the compulsive womanizer President Harding. Even Sinclair Lewis’s fictional George Babbitt, the Midwestern estate agent whose name became a synonym for middle-class conformity and complacency, was not immune to these yearnings. Lewis describes his most unromantic of heroes tucked up in his sleeping-porch (the dernier cri of modern suburban house design) but “restless again, discontented about nothing and everything, ashamed of his discontentment” and dreaming of a “fairy girl” who waited for him in mysterious, magical groves. Only Charlie Chaplin could have understood this side of George Babbitt. As the critic Gilbert Seldes said, Chaplin corresponded to all “our secret desires.”
Charlie existed outside space and time, wrote Seldes, in a world that he had created and where he became an “eternal figure of lightness and of the wisdom which knows that the earth was made to dance on. It was a green earth, excited by its own abundance and fruitfulness, and he possessed it entirely . . . As it spins under his feet he dances silently and with infinite grace upon it.”
By the late 1910s and throughout the 1920s, critics like Seldes were competing to see who could praise Chaplin the most highly. Harper’s decided his vulgarity was an essential element of his art, in the tradition of Aristophanes, Cervantes and Swift; the New Republic praised the democratic breadth of his appeal. Chaplin was all things to all men: the social commentator Waldo Frank commended him for creating “a viable alternative to the materialism of American culture” while the literary critic Edmund Wilson marveled at his reactions, “as fresh, as authentically personal, as those of a poet.”
The Gold Rush, Chaplin’s masterpiece, was released in 1925. It grossed over $4 million dollars, earning United Artists $1 million and its star $2 million. The cartoonist and comic writer Robert Sherwood (who himself sported a Chaplinesque moustache) summarized what he called Chaplin’s “symbolical autobiography” for Vanity Fair: “It is the story of a stampede in the Klondike, with an enormous mob of eager prospectors storming the heights of Chinook Pass in a wild scramble for gold. With the procession, and yet utterly detached from it, is a lonely figure in a derby hat and a burlap Inverness cape, who carries a bamboo cane to aid him in his perilous climb up the icy slopes. He would like to mix with the others, but they will have none of him; they are too busy, too anxious to get down to business to bother with him. So he must go his way alone. He finds the gold, but the dance-hall girl of his heart jilts him—and he is compelled to return home with nothing but vast wealth to show for his efforts.”
Chaplin’s gold-mine was the movie industry and, like the Tramp, although he found immense wealth there true love was more elusive. Comedy was his only release, the only way he could stop being overwhelmed, as he put it, “by the apparent seriousness of life.” “Charlie Chaplin’s secret is that he has created for himself a mask in which all this gamut [from comedian to sensualist, from sentimentalist to ironist] lives,” wrote Waldo Frank in an early edition of the New Yorker the year The Gold Rush came out. “What a strange mask it is: a bit of a moustache, a bit of a cane, baggy trousers, flapping shoes. Yet it has satisfied the world, from China to Paris. It has failed him