Chaplin Returns

Charles Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks on Wall St., April 8, 1918

The Paramount and Seattle Theater Group will screen Charles Chaplin’s entire Mutual Film Corporation catalog in chronological order over four successive Monday nights, beginning on September 10. The twelve two-reel films released between February 1916 and October 1917 are without question, the finest collection of short-program comedies ever produced. Chaplin’s Mutual work also established a comedy vernacular still used in film today.

In recent correspondence with noted Hollywood author and silent era child star Diana Serra Cary, whose screen name was Baby Peggy, we discussed Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and Diana’s childhood friend Jackie Coogan.

DJ- There is a wonderful photo in Kevin Brownlow's book Hollywood: The Pioneers I have wondered about for years. Jackie Coogan, who must have been five-years-old at the time, is playing some sort of game with Douglas Fairbanks, who appears to be visiting the set of The Kid (1921). Chaplin and another man are standing in the background. All of them seem to be having a great time. Did Jackie ever mention this photo to you?

DSC- I have the Brownlow book and know the photo well. Actually, based on my own similar studio experiences, what all photographers wanted, especially from child stars, was to look "normal", "like you're playing". so my guess is it is not any particular structured "game" of any kind. Both Chaplin and Fairbanks had a very "childlike" streak under their adult images, and both men were addicted to practical
jokes.

A year or so later Jackie spent considerable time with Fairbanks and Mary Pickford and actually remembered them as "other children", the only ones he ever had a chance to play with! Mary was barely five feet tall and he regarded her as a playmate. He and Mary got fairly seriously bruised and scratched up one time when she insisted on borrowing her gardener's son's go-cart and she had no idea how to steer it. They ran off the highway and down into the scrub brush on the hillside below. They couldn't go before a camera for several days until their famous faces healed. Mary was also a working child so when she grew up she actually wanted to find ways to play!!!

In my Coogan biography you may also recall the time she and Douglas and Jackie had a pillow fight and Pickfair's housekeeper scolded her employers soundly in front of Jackie for ripping a pillow case and scattering feathers all over everything! They really were in many ways as immature as eight-year-old kids. After they founded United Artists Studio Mary became irate with Chaplin because he wouldn't attend business meetings and ignored his role as "studio head". She dismissed him verbally as merely a "Ham-handed comedian!" Their friendship ended and was never restored.

Jackie's favorite pastime was baseball which he played between scenes with the members of his crew. I never pursued any sport except riding horseback. I couldn't hit the side of a barn with a ball, and I doubt if Jackie ever knew or engaged in any formal or typical "Children’s' games." Mah Jong, poker and croquet were the main games around at the time and it was the arrival of the British that popularized tennis and Badminton in the later 1920s and thirties.

Judging from my own experience with photographers, he probably just told them to "fool around" with Jackie and "engage him in play", so Fairbanks was probably pointing at and making fun of his shoes or telling him a joke or anything to stir up some physical action, and make him laugh in order to make it seem completely candid and not just a stiff, posed picture. Real life action "candids" did not come in as a "standard" outside of Hollywood until around the time of LIFE magazine in the mid-1930s, being considered undignified for politicians and other public figures. Moving picture stars were exceptions to this rule - - they were supposed to be seen moving!

DJ- I have read from various sources about two predominant reasons Pickford and Chaplin did not get along. One was the result of advice Chaplin gave his friend to "have his fling" (with Pickford) and move on, without realizing how serious their relationship was. The other was Pickford’s simple jealousy of the abiding friendship Chaplin shared with Fairbanks, and the sense she had to compete for her husband’s time and attention. Fairbanks and Pickford had a fascinating relationship. Within the context of American culture, they were seen as virtual royalty.

As part of Seattle Theater Group’s Harold Lloyd series earlier this year, a sound film, Movie Crazy (1932) was added to the program. On the evening of that show the audience was asked to offer suggestions for future sound films which might be similarly included. A perfect choice I later suggested was The Taming of the Shrew (1929), for the upcoming Fairbanks series in 2008. Have you seen it? It bombed in 1929, but it’s wonderful! This was the only time Fairbanks and Pickford starred together, and it was also their first sound film. Pickford’s audience would not accept her in sophisticated adult roles, the likely reason for this box office failure, but as Shakespeare’s Kate, she is a force to be reckoned with and a delight to behold! The film, in my opinion, also offers some insight into the state of their personal relationship at the time, which lent itself to the performance.

DSC- I should add a leading game of the 1920's which was VERY popular in Hollywood where the weather was favorable in every season of the year. GOLF! Coogan Senior tried to make a Pro of Jackie, who bragged about his superior skill for the rest of his life. My father - - a former cowboy who never wanted to shed that hard-earned, top-hand image - took up golf in Hollywood as both respectable in the eyes of the "established society" he had spurned as a youth, but also acceptable to his own more rugged male image.

DJ- This sounds like something you might delve into as part of your current project (I can't wait!) I recall numerous Hal Roach films (Laurel and Hardy, Our Gang, etc.) which used golf as a background and I’ve often wondered where they were filmed? Was Jackie an enthusiastic golfer, or was it something his father insisted he do?

DSC- Yes, I will cover this sort of thing because it is the "society" I am describing. Jackie was an enthusiastic player who prided himself on being that 1920s rarity - - a YOUNG golfer in a world of older, richer establishment duffs. And he loved being special for something besides THE CHILD STAR, whose many perks he took as his hard-earned privileges, which of course they were. But his parents also encouraged people to think of him as a "real American boy" BIG on all kinds of sports, for fear the parents of his small fans might think he was a Little Lord Fauntleroy, a Code Word, the only acceptable term then for Gay that could be used in "mixed company".!

To my amazement I found researching the facts of his life a journey of shocking discoveries, even though I knew him and his family in childhood quite well. I was stunned by the horrific college tragedy in which he was involved in San Jose in the fall of 1933. Kevin Brownlow, who did several in-depth documentary-like interviews with the older Jackie in the 1970s said, "In many hours of confiding candid details of his entire life, Jackie never once dropped the faintest hint about the TWO most traumatic public events in his youth - - his parents' notorious "sex scandal" and the murder of his closest college friend." The career that began as Chaplin's bubbly, innocent little "Kid" ended up becoming King Lear! Brownlow also remarked "This book is a constant surprise."

Newly published in paperback by The Scarecrow Press Inc., Diana Serra Cary’s biography, Jackie Coogan: The World’s Boy King, is available at Cinema Books on Roosevelt Way.

Seattle Theater Group and The Paramount present, Silent Movie Mondays: The Chaplin Triple Play, September 10, 17, 24 and October 1. Musical accompaniment for the series will be performed on the Paramount’s Publix 1, 4/20 Wurlitzer by the best damn theater organist on the planet, Dennis James.