Charlie Chaplin's tragic real-life story

No one in history has made people laugh as much as Charlie Chaplin. The Little Tramp was silent cinema's first mega star, a character so recognizable that The Guardian has called him "the most famous man who ever lived." Even today, there are people living in random, out-of-the-way places from Albania to Eritrea to inner Mongolia who would still be able to tell you Chaplin's name just from glancing at a picture of him. That was the power of Chaplin's timeless comedy: He could make you continue to associate things like toothbrush mustaches with laughter even after Adolf Hitler had ruined them for everyone.

Yet Chaplin's real life was as far from a laugh a minute as you can possibly get. While his films have been criticized in our cynical modern world for a tendency toward saccharin sweetness and blatant tear jerking, the guy dreaming up all this schmaltz was far from smiling on the inside. From his early years trapped in biting poverty in London to his later mauling by the American political establishment and his own inability to say no to his darkest temptations, Charlie Chaplin was a clown who wasn't just crying behind the facepaint, but screaming his way through an absurdly bleak existence.

"Be careful what you wish for" goes the adage, and it's probably never been as apt as it was for young Charlie Chaplin. Always fascinated by his mother's vaudeville career, Charlie was mimicking her routines by the age of 5. It's not hard to imagine the boy wishing he could join her onstage. If that's the case, his wish came true in the worst way possible.

It happened during one of Hannah's performances, while Charlie watched from the wings. According to Biography, Hannah was halfway through a song when she suddenly lost her voice. The manager panicked and shoved Charlie out. In what feels like the opening for a feel-good movie, young Charlie knocked everyone's socks off. In a kinder world, this moment would be the beginning of Charlie's career. Instead, it was the beginning of his mother's descent into madness.

It quickly became clear that Hannah's voice issue was just the first outward sign of the demons consuming her. As she kept trying to raise her kids in poverty, she drifted further from reality. Eventually, she was institutionalized. This being Victorian London, the "social safety net" was something tramps caught fish with. Charlie and Sydney got chucked into the workhouse, which was exactly as Dickensian as it sounds. Charles Sr. did briefly agree to take the boys in, but it didn't last. Charlie would wind up spending so much of his childhood in the workhouse that he only ever received six months' schooling.

Stanley Kubrick's name is a byword for artistic perfectionism to the point of insanity. Before Kubrick became the poster boy for tyrannical directors, though, there was Charlie Chaplin. After Senett signed Chaplin, the young comic's star exploded. According to the British Film Institute, Chaplin made 34 films in 1914 alone. By the second film, he'd created the Tramp character. By the 12th, he was directing. By 1915, he'd signed to Essanay Studios and been given his own production unit. By 1916, he was with Mutual Films, where he had complete creative freedom and the largest salary in Hollywood.

So, yeah, things were kinda going great for Chaplin, and they would continue to for the next few years. But this was also the period where Chaplin the crazy-on-set autocrat emerged. It would be the world's first real glimpse of the tortured, driven man behind the genius.

PBS has the details. Chaplin on set was a Chaplin obsessed. Known as the most demanding man in Hollywood, Chaplin would reshoot each scene hundreds of times. Rather than directing, he'd act out everyone's role for them, then say "do that." (Many years later, on 1967's A Countess From Hong Kong, Tippi Hedren claimed this drove Marlon Brando crazy.) He would fire actors halfway through and start the film afresh, with all the bazillions of takes this implied. It was an insane system, but it worked. It also set the stage for the even darker Chaplin who would soon emerge.

Despite the darkness of his private life, this period of Chaplin's career was conversely when his artistic light shone its brightest. In 1919, Chaplin set up United Artists with D.W. Griffith and Mary Pickford (via The Guardian), where he went on to make films that still define silent cinema, like The Gold Rush. But it was when the Great Depression hit that Chaplin reached his peak. For weary audiences, the Tramp was the tonic they needed. City Lights and Modern Times really did fulfill that old cliche of bringing joy to millions, even as other silent stars like Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton faded away.

By the outbreak of World War II, Chaplin wasn't just famous. He was an icon. A man who considered himself untouchable, which may explain what happened next. As the war got underway, Chaplin began making public speeches extolling the Soviet Union. According to Slate, in 1942 he praised Stalin's purges and said "the only people who object to Communism … are Nazi agents."

Years later, Orson Welles, who worked with Chaplin on Monsieur Verdoux, would call him "deeply dumb in many ways." He could have been talking about Chaplin's Communist speeches. With the establishment already against him over his private life and perceived "anti-Americanness" — including J. Edgar Hoover and gossip columnist Hedda Hopper — Chaplin had handed his enemies the stick to beat him with, then turned around and dropped his pants, too. The results would be anything but amusing.

Let's pause here and take stock. It's 1947. Chaplin's reputation has been ruined by scandal and an unfortunate pro-Communist streak. Europe is shattered by war, America is devouring itself in a Red Scare, and all audiences want is for the Little Tramp to make them laugh again. Instead, Chaplin chooses to make Monsieur Verdoux, an Orson Welles-scripted black comedy in which Chaplin plays a serial killer (pictured above) preying on rich old ladies. You can probably already guess the public reaction.

Monsieur Verdoux bombed hard. It nearly ruined United Artists. As Slate describes, the press junket for the film turned into a kangaroo court in which Chaplin was metaphorically lynched. The tabloids had announced in advance that they would make him squirm for his Communist leanings and, boy, did they ever. Chaplin almost had to abandon one press conference when all reporters did was accuse him of not being sufficiently supportive of capitalism. It didn't help that Monsieur Verdoux could clearly be read as a black satire on capitalism's worst excesses.

At the exact same time Monsieur Verdoux was ruining his career, Chaplin was put on notice by HUAC that he could soon be indicted. While he never was, the Little Tramp still became a favorite punching bag of senators like William Langer, who divided his time between demanding Chaplin be deported and trying to get Nazi war criminals off the hook. In the backward world of McCarthy America, it was Langer who emerged victorious.

The last decades of Charlie Chaplin's life consisted of crazy ups and downs. On the one hand, he only made two more films – A King in New York and A Countess from Hong Kong. (King was banned in the USA for being "anti-American.") On the other, he settled in Switzerland with his wife, Oona, and raised a remarkably happy family, according to his son. That's surprising because Oona was another of Chaplin's young conquests. Married when she was 18 and he 54, they nonetheless stayed together until Chaplin died in 1977.

It would be nice to end Chaplin's story like that, with some semblance of peace after a hard life. But fate had one last, gruesome curveball to throw. Months after his funeral, two graverobbers dug up Charlie's body and made off with it. They held the Tramp's remains for 11 weeks, demanding a ransom payment of $600,000 (via Smithsonian).

But Oona was apparently made of steel because she refused to play ball, hanging up on the criminals rather than hear their demands. Panicked, the ghouls got sloppy, and Swiss police tracked them down. After a tortured life and a bizarre postscript, Chaplin was finally laid to rest, for good this time. He may have had a hard time, and he may have done some unpleasant things, but the Tramp is generally remembered for his laughter and his artistry, rather than his difficult life. He probably wouldn't have wanted it any other way.