Icon no 3: Charles Chaplin

(Actor, film maker: 16/4/1889-25/12/1977)

Chaplin in The Kid, with child actor Jackie Coogan

Warning: this post contains references to trauma and abuse

It was from 1915 onwards, that Charles Chaplin “became the most famous man in the world”¹. He has been described as a “filmmaker, whose artistry transcends the cinema and spans world-historical dimensions”². Author Bernard Shaw wrote: “Chaplin is more than a genius. He is an institution, the idol of millions of all races and creeds, the champion of the pathetic and oppressed… the little man with the funny moustache is something of a saviour”¹.

Chaplin made 82 films including ‘The Kid’ (1921), ‘The Circus’ (1928), ‘City Lights’ (1931), ‘Modern Times’(1936) and ‘The Great Dictator’ (1940). As a director, he helped to push cinema past the rapid cutting of ‘Keystone Cops’ chases to longer scenes and more narrative driven films. Chaplin also more than successfully combined comedy and tragedy in a way that many predicted would fail.

Chaplin as The Tramp

Chaplin’s genius was almost all seen in the character, created, when he was 24, of The Tramp. It was in and through this character that his fame rose meteorically and was sustained².

I will be looking at the life of Chaplin through the lens of narcissism, which can be defined by three strategies that we might take up in order to manage relationships and how we generally feel (see the theory post). These strategies are: performing or being admired, shaming or putting others down, and being dismissing of emotional vulnerability. I have said that taking up these strategies, in narcissism, performs the function of distancing ourselves from feelings of being, ourselves, shamed or emotionally vulnerable. Humiliation or emotional vulnerability, in the smallest dose, has become experienced as dangerous. The map of narcissism³ (below) contains both the specific kinds of avoided traumatic experience together with strategies or roles of safety.

The map of narcissism³*

Strategies: Performance, persona and idealisation

On first viewing of a Chaplin film such as ‘City Lights’, we might find something like the opposite of narcissism; a humble homeless character who is there to be made fun of. But let’s look at the man behind The Trampknown as ‘Little Charlie’ – the man called Charles Chaplin. Was his drive specifically to be idealised? Were there strategies of dismissing emotional vulnerability or of shaming others that became a problem? If so, were these strategies specifically a way of managing trauma? What would we find in his biographies?

City Lights (1931)

At the age of nine, Charles was clog-dancing in the music halls of London as part of a troupe, after practicing next to street musicians for cash. He got his first acting job at 14 and by 21, he was sailing with the Fred Karno troupe to the US for a three-year tour.

By 1915, directing in his own studio, Chaplin was shooting each scene around 20 times –an unheard-of investment¹. At Keystone pictures he had quickly been described by other actors as impossible to work with due to his perfectionism. Later, philosopher Theodor Adorno would say of Chaplin, that,

“Any time spent with him is an uninterrupted performance. One scarcely dares speak to him, not from awe of his fame… but rather from fear of disturbing the spell of the performance”¹.

Chaplin poured most of his energy into performance and finding ideas that might earn him admiration and fame:

 “I have discovered that ideas come through an intense desire for them; continually desiring, the mind becomes a watch-tower on the look-out…”⁴ (Chaplin)

There was a huge drive to succeed. And few were given a glimpse beneath this performing façade. After Chaplin left Keystone Pictures, manager Mack Sennett recalled, “as for Charles Spencer Chaplin, I am not at all sure that we know him”¹

Behind the façade

Sometimes, the façade fell. In 1921 Chaplin, a now world-famous actor, returned from America to London and the poverty-stricken streets of his childhood. He was accompanied by a new friend he had made on the trip: author Thomas Burke. Burke later made some thoughtful observations about Chaplin that hint at this ‘split’ between a charismatic persona and a quite different man behind it:

“He is first and last an actor. He lives only in a role, and without it he is lost. As he cannot find the inner Chaplin, there is nothing for him, at grievous moments, to retire into”¹.

Burke was clearly struck by something. He added that if catching Chaplin off guard, he looked all-together different: “a drawn, weary mouth and those eyes of steel”. Chaplin was uninterested, Burke said, “in people either individually or as humanity”.

It seems that Chaplin was almost entirely interested in performance and fame. Little would stand in his way. But was this drive caused by the kind of emotional trauma suggested in narcissism theory? And if so, was fame and idealisation a form of escape, nurtured by the adults around him, from pain?

Chaplin as The Tramp

Strategies: contempt and condemnation

After looking for examples of Chaplin’s drive for admiration and idealisation, we turn to a second strategy on the map of narcissism – one of shaming; being judgmental or contemptuous. If taking up this strategy is in the service of avoiding something – it most effectively avoids the felt experience, in that moment, of being ourselves contemptible or humiliated. It should be the opposite experience.

Even in his teenage part as a page boy in Sherlock Holmes, Chaplin was recorded antagonising fellow actors in the company by lecturing them on their shortcomings¹.

Later, Chaplin’s method of directing was centred, according to some, around “bullying and humiliation”¹ His oldest son Charles Jr remembered, “The violence of his anger was always so out of proportion to the object that had stirred him that I couldn’t help being frightened at it”⁵ He thought that his father’s dark moods and flashes of anger represented a fundamental fear of failure, and presumably the vulnerability and shame that might come with that⁵. One composer was sacked specifically for saying, ”I think we can do better than that” ¹

Whilst Chaplin was having an affair with a friend of his wife, he returned home one night to find his wife had organised a house party. Furious, he spoke only to say, “you pack of whores and pimps would’ve all been at one another all over my furniture...Get this filth out of here!”¹ Again, what was it that Chaplin was using contempt of others to get away from? We are perhaps seeing judgment as an escape from feeling judged.

Narcissism, contempt and self-esteem

Was Chaplin contemptuous of others whilst full of confidence in himself? If we were to go back to London in the 1930s, we would see and hear about a Charles Chaplin who looked to be full of self-esteem. That is to say his view of himself would appear to be the opposite of contempt. But this cuts to the heart of a division in ideas about what narcissism really is. Reading about narcissism today, you will find descriptions of high self-regard or self esteem⁶ or the slightly ambiguous ‘grandiose self’⁷. But according to Ryle’s map³ and a number of other theories, narcissism’s appearance of self-esteem is only a mask – created as a solution to a problem. The judgment of others may be public, whilst the condemnation of self is kept much more private. After all, it would sabotage efforts to be admired.

So, can we find in the biographies examples of Chaplin being overly judgmental towards himself? I think the first clue is in his exhausting perfectionism. One scene in ‘Modern Times’ was famously shot 200 times before he could move on². This may have produced a more excellent film. But it does not indicate a generous and kind view, by himself, of his work.

Another episode might serve, in retrospect, as a kind of accidental personality test. Chaplin asked a sculptor called Clare Sherdian to make his bust. The two of them would soon have an affair and so presumably she sculpted something she thought was complimentary. Chaplin’s spontaneous response to the finished sculpture of himself was interesting. Looking at the bust he concluded that it looked like the face of a “criminal”. Compare this with Chaplin’s frantic and sustained efforts to be idealised. Based on all the admiration he received, did he not admire himself? It seems not. This hints perhaps at an underlying difficulty - covered up and avoided through façade, performance and charisma.

If Chaplin made use of putting others down in order to distance himself completely from feelings of shame and judgment, then we would expect him also to be highly sensitive to criticism and negative judgment when it did arrive. When Charlie discovered reading, he found an intense hunger to learn and, looking back, he could later see what specifically motivated this:

“I wanted to know, not for knowledge but as a defence against the world’s contempt for the ignorant” ¹ (Chaplin)

Chaplin in The Kid, with child actor Jackie Coogan

In his 70s, whilst writing his autobiography Chaplin asked American writer, Truman Capote to read parts of the manuscript. Capote naturally thought Chaplin was asking for feedback, but when some was offered, Chaplin became angry, saying “get the fuck out of here…I don’t need your opinion”. He never spoke to Capote again¹.

Strategies: narcissism, celebrity and sex

Chaplin off set

Like drugs and alcohol, sex appears a lot in the lives of the iconically famous – even, apparently in the 1920s. Where is it on Ryle’s map of narcissism³? Looking at the locations on the map, we can see how sex can be experienced variously as admiration, humiliation, vulnerability or the locating of vulnerability in someone else. Sex can be a non-narcissistic experience of mutual vulnerability and admiration. But, like drugs or alcohol, it can also be used as a way to move powerfully from one place to another, on the map of narcissism.

In the life of Chaplin, sex played a huge and problematic role, causing a significant number of women harm and threatening to sabotage his own success. Whilst he tried to maintain the idealised, controlled and workaholic Chaplin, a reckless and sex-obsessed Chaplin increasingly emerged. He had numerous affairs, once boasting that he had slept with 2000 different women, and he would “use and discard his partners at will”¹. Chaplin went to great lengths to avoid scandal - once paying a bribe of $25000 to a doctor to falsify the date of birth of one of his children, conceived before the age of consent². Chaplin’s impulsive, sometimes exploitative, power-wielding sexual activities drew increasing attention of the American authorities.

In 1944 Chaplin was charged with trafficking Joan Barry, one of his lovers, “for immoral purposes”¹. In a subsequent paternity trial, Chaplin experienced an authoritive condemnation of his character from the prosecution. Ackroyd summarises that, “The attack affected Chaplin very deeply, eliciting once again the humiliation and shame he had experienced as a child”¹.

Sex can be a way to escape humiliation and vulnerability, but as a strategy, this can backfire. If we need only others to be vulnerable, if we have to disconnect completely with shame, and if our thirst for admiration and power is unquenchable then it can become exploitative. If there is no flexibility then extreme strategies, inflicting pain on others, will start to backfire on the person using them – leading back to those places they most feared: condemnation and vulnerability.

In 1945, Senator William Langer put forward a bill calling for the attorney general to investigate whether ‘alien’ Chaplin should be deported because of “his unsavoury record of law breaking, of rape, or the debauching of American girls 16 and 17 years of age”². In 1947 a congressman demanded Chaplin be deported on grounds that he was “detrimental to the moral fabric of America”¹. At a New Year’s Eve party, a guest spat in his face. If his strategies were there to achieve distance from judgment and humiliation, they were now working backwards. Chaplin went from experiencing Californian restaurants as places of mass admiration, to places where strangers felt free to label him out loud - as an outlaw.

In part B, I will turn to Chaplin’s childhood in Victorian London, to see if there are illustrations of traumatic humiliation and vulnerability together with experiences that nurtured the narcissistic strategies of escape I have looked at here. One of the paradoxes of narcissism illustrated here is the distance between the strategies that we (society) value and the strategies that, when left to develop, we have to condemn.

Disclaimer: All views expressed are my own unless otherwise stated, and do not necessarily reflect the views of any institution I have been employed by. The content here is for information and should not be interpreted as advice.

*Ryle did not apply this approach only to narcissism. If this mapping approach has been used in your own therapy, this does not mean that you have narcissistic difficulties.

References

1.     Ackroyd, P. (2014). Charlie Chaplin. Vintage books.

2.     Brody, R. Charlie Chaplin’s Scandalous Life and Boundless Artistry. In The New Yorker, September 18^th, 2015.

3.     Ryle, A. & Kerr, I.B. (2002). Introducing Cognitive Analytic Therapy. Wiley.

4.     Chaplin, C. (1964). My Autobiography. Penguin.

5.     Chaplin, C. (1960). My Father, Charlie Chaplin. New York

6.     Malkin, C. (2015) Rethinking Narcissism. Harper Wave

7.     Diamond, D., Yeomans, F.E., Stern, B.L. & Kernberg, O.F. (2022) Treating Pathological Narcissism with Transference Focussed Therapy. Guildford