Despite the fact he found Los Angeles “an ugly city, hot and oppressive,” Charlie Chaplin lived and worked here from late December, 1913, when he joined Mack Sennett’s Keystone Co., to Sept. 6, 1952, when he left for England, later to be barredfrom returning to the United States by the federal government.
In four decades here, he became perhaps the planet’s most celebrated person of his the and made films that will endure–just as he suspected that Northern California would endure long after “Hollywood has disappeared into the prehistoric tar pits of Wilshire Boulevard.”
The years since his 1952 exile have taken their toll on Chaplin’s Los Angeles, but history and developers have yet to wipe him from the scene–totally. The Charles Chaplin Studios still stand at LaBrea Avenue and DeLongpre Avenue, now home of A & M Records. The Georgian-style mansion in which he lived from 1920 remains on Summit Drive in Beverly Hills, its current owner the financially troubled Adnan Khashoggi.
Still standing too is the Circle Theater, on El Centro Avenue, in Hollywood, a converted drugstore where a group of young actors, including Chaplin’s son Sydney Chaplin, were directed anonymously by the star who sought artistic haven from troubled times. These days, the Circle Theater continues in operation.
But most indestructible among these physical remembrances are the personal memories many have of Chaplin and his days here.
NORMAN LLOYD, actor, producer and featured player in “Limelight.”
Lloyd became a friend and business partner of Chaplin’s after first meeting him on the tennis courts of Summit Drive. “He was a kind of 19th-Century genius,” says Lloyd, who was a regular on “St. Elsewhere” and appears in the upcoming “The Dead Poets Society.” “He was romantic, poetic–from another era, really.”
Acting as producer, director, writer, choreographer and composer, few details escaped Chaplin’s attention during the making of “Limelight.” ” ‘Rightly to be great . . . is to find quarrel in a straw,’ ” Lloyd says, paraphrasing Hamlet. “That was Charlie. There was nothing too minute, everything was important.”
Every experience was important, as well. With all his success, he couldn’t wipe away his childhood workhouse days. Lloyd recalls an episode at the house when 10-year-old Michael Chaplin was dragging a sweater along the ground. “Charlie said, ‘Get that up off the ground! People had to work for that!’ He always said, ‘I don’t believe I deserve dinner unless I do a day’s work.’ ”
SYDNEY CHAPLIN, retired actor, owner of “Chaplin’s” restaurant in Rancho Mirage.
Sydney was born in the house at 1085 Summit Drive, as was his older brother, Charlie Jr. His parents divorced before Sydney was a year old and the boys were relegated to weekend visits to the house. Sydney remembers tennis games, swims in the pools and stepmother Paulette Goddard pulling them out of school for trips to Catalina on the Chaplin yacht, Panacea. “She was great with us,” he says. His father was less available.
“Sometimes he was fun to be around,” Sydney says, “but mainly he was preoccupied with his work. When I grew up we had more in common.”
Sydney joined the Circle Theater at age 21, and Charles directed him in a number of productions. “It wasn’t bad working with my father,” he says, “but he was tough on me always. He wanted me to be better than the other people in the show.”
Sydney went on to play leads in “Lime light” (1952) and “A Countess From Hong Kong” (1967). Onstage, he won a Tony starring opposite Barbra Streisand in “Funny Girl.” Brother Charlie Jr. had less luck with his theatrical interest and died at 42, an alcoholic. Sydney isn’t a believer in inherited talent.
“Just because your family is in a business, that helps put you in it,” he says. “If your father was a coal miner, you’d probably be one too.”
GLORIA DeHAVEN, actress.
At age 9, Gloria DeHaven accidentally launched her acting career with a visit to the set of “Modern Times,” where her father, Carter DeHaven, was assistant director. Chaplin needed two little girls to play Paulette Goddard’s sisters. Gloria and her schoolmate were picked on the spot. “Mr. Chaplin said, ‘They’re perfect.’ All we would have to do was wear tattered clothes, eat bananas and run away from a truant officer,” DeHaven says, laughing at the memory. They were sent to Western Costume for tattering, came back to the set and “had a marvelous time.”
Afterward, they were all invited to his house. She was stunned to discover that, out of costume and on the tennis court, the funny little tramp was an “awesomely attractive man. He had a wonderful physique, tanned and very attractive. Then he came in and played the piano, told stories. There wasn’t anything that he couldn’t do. I was totally dazzled by him.”
LITA GREY. Retired performer, Chaplin’s second wife and mother to Sydney and Charles Jr.
Lita Grey gave birth to both her sons in a hospital-equipped delivery room in the mansion on Summit Drive and says that she spent many nights waiting alone there for her husband to come home.
Chaplin, then 35, had cast the 16-year-old actress as his leading lady in “The Gold Rush” but had to replace her in the role when she became pregnant by him. The marriage, she says, was forced by her family. “He backed out at first.”
Their divorce played for nine months in court and made international headlines for far longer. It caused Chaplin to have a nervous breakdown and is said to have turned his hair prematurely gray–Lita is the only one of his four wives whom he does not mention by name in his 1964 autobiography.
“He was a very difficult man to be with,” Grey, now in her 80s and living in an apartment in West Hollywood, says. “He was a genius, but hard to reach, with a big ego and terribly insecure.”
Of his notorious attraction to young women, she believes: “He’d try to create people. He enjoyed being the first person in a girl’s life.”
She doesn’t believe that he ever warmed to fatherhood. “He was never one to cuddle and kiss his children. He was always very objective around them. He looked as if he was examining them. He saw everyone in a frame.
“Charlie Jr. sought his father’s love and approval all his life,” she says. “Sydney was well aware of his father’s faults, but he didn’t let them affect him. Charlie was different, he needed his father.”
After the divorce, she launched a lengthy career in vaudeville and nightclubs as Lita Grey Chaplin. “The name was a definite advantage,” Grey says. “But when they overpublicized it, when they said the ex-wife of Charlie Chaplin, I made them take that down.”
WILLIAM SCHALLERT, actor, former president of the Screen Actors’ Guild.
Schallert, perhaps best known as Patty Duke’s television dad, was directed by Chaplin in a number of Circle Theater productions. It was a heady experience for a young actor, particularly in a theater that Schallert remembers fondly as a “rickey tick operation,” with barely 100 seats and a small, in-the-round stage.
Chaplin’s involvement with the group began shyly, as if testing for acceptance, then became total. “After a preview performance,” Schallert says, “he’d say, ‘There are just a couple of things I want to suggest.’ Then he’d start at the top of the play and work his way through the entire first act. When it was about 5 or 6 in the morning, Oona (Chaplin’s wife) would finally say, ‘Come on Charlie, let them go home, they’ve got a performance to do tonight.’ Then they’d drive off in his little old black Ford.
“We’d end up redoing the play two and three times in two to three nights. By opening night, we’d be in a state. It was helter-skelter for inexperienced actors, but exciting. It was a remarkable process. It was like if you were a painter and working with Picasso. We had some rare treats,” Schallert says.
“There was something very endearing about the man. He’d work with us with unlimited enthusiasm and affection. Not openly affectionate. There was a little wall, there, in fact. He was always ‘Mr. Chaplin,’ but actions are always louder than words.”
JERRY EPSTEIN, producer, director and author of “Remembering Charlie: A Pictorial Biography,” published this month by Doubleday.
Epstein, founder of the Circle Theater, shared a friendship and professional relationship with Chaplin that lasted until the star’s death in 1977. Epstein, who produced Chaplin’s last film, “A Countess From Hong Kong,” feels that the Circle Theater, at the outset of the McCarthy era, “was good for (Chaplin) . . . to find people who adored him. We didn’t care about his politics. He was one of those isolated Hollywood figures, like Garbo, an untouchable, and here he was just looking for friendship.”
The young troupe learned perfectionism under Chaplin’s direction. “Charlie worked and worked until he got it right. He always told us that the audience should think that they’re looking through a keyhole. ‘I don’t want to see any acting!’ He was after absolute reality.”
Epstein recalls the long walks they would share on the streets of Los Angeles where Chaplin sought his own sense of reality. “He liked to see people, see how they lived. Everything ‘talked’ to him. His antennae were always out.”
The only thing he ever asked in payment for his work at the Circle was, “35 cents and a cup of black coffee.” And Chaplin was never gloomy about his pending personal problems. “He used to say he was like an old weed–you pull it out, but it just keeps coming back.”
Chaplin came back to Hollywood just once, in 1972, to accept a special Oscar. He chose not to visit any of his Los Angeles haunts during the visit.
