The Real Charlie Chaplin

December 1916.

The Society for Psychical Research

whose publications include "Phantasms of The Living"

and "Human Personality and Its Survival Of Bodily Death"

are reporting an extraordinary phenomenon.

Mr. Charles Chaplin, motion picture comedian,

has been cited in hundreds of places,

simultaneously.

From the Atlantic to the Pacific,

from the Canadian boundary to the Gulf,

people wait at stations to see Mr. Chaplin.

In the same hour,

crowds are gathering at hotels across the country.

(dramatic music)

"Have you got the Chaplin-oia?" asks one newspaper.

Others report the Chaplin Fever,

the Chaplin Craze,

Charlie-mania.

"Chaplin-it is," runs one headline,

"Has spread across America."

Bootlegs, counterfeits, and imitators flood the market.

Lookalike contests spring up across the globe.

It's rumored that Chaplin himself entered such a contest

and came 20th.

People demand to know,

"Who is the Real Charlie Chaplin?"

(dramatic music)

When we think of Charlie Chaplin,

we picture this man.

This is the moment he first steps on to the screen.

And he looks at us.

He reappears soon after in other films.

Here he is again.

And here.

And he keeps looking at us.

But this is not Charlie Chaplin.

This man has no name.

He has no fixed address.

No family.

No set point in space or time.

You can't pin him down.

The only constants are the hat, the cane,

the boots and the mustache.

Sometimes just the mustache.

So who is he?

He's been called the little man.

The little fellow.

The Tramp.

He's a character played by Charlie Chaplin.

"The Tramp" will make Chaplin more famous

than any king, queen, or emperor.

More famous than any philosopher, artist,

or religious figure.

Famous in a way that no one has been before.

Chaplin makes "The Tramp" and "The Tramp" makes Chaplin.

You can't see one without looking at the other.

(reel clicking)

They tell each other's stories.

So where do we start?

Here's how Chaplin starts.

1889 begins with a total eclipse of the sun.

This year, the Eiffel tower opens to the public.

Adolph Hitler is born.

In Kyoto, Nintendo is founded.

They make playing cards.

Electric streetlights are being installed in London

where Jack the Ripper remains at large.

The pizza margarita is invented.

They're still working on the aero plane.

This is how movies look in 1889.

89.

These are recordings of the human voice.

Of birdsong.

Of music.

(bell tolling)

Film grows up alongside Chaplin.

(gentle music)

It captures the London streets he roams as a kid.

The children he plays with.

This is the voice of Effie Wisdom.

(gentle music)

Captured on tape when she was 92 years old.

It takes 12 days for the Karno Company

to cross the Atlantic.

(engine rumbling)

12 days in a rat -infested cattle boat.

At first sight of land,

one young man leans over the railing

and screams out.

(gentle music)

They embark on a grueling tour of the continent.

Playing three shows a day.

Fred Karno's brand of knockabout comedy

is intensely physical.

He teaches his comics how to trip.

How to tumble, slide and fall.

How to take a punch.

How to fall down a flight of stairs.

(audience cheering)

They're the best in the business.

(audience applauding)

And wherever they go, one performer stands out.

But his tour mates can't work him out.

Offstage, he's quiet, moody and reclusive.

He's usually shabby in appearance.

Then, without warning, he'll dress to kill.

He teaches himself the cello, ancient Greek, yoga.

But above all he vows that he will not return poor.

(bell clanging)

In California, a fortune teller tells him

he will soon enter a new field

in which he will earn a tremendous fortune.

They say that fortunes are there to be made in America.

The oil boom has created millionaires overnight.

Henry Ford has devised the modern assembly line.

And Nickelodeon's opening in cities across the country,

showing motion picture comedies around the clock.

But Chaplin isn't impressed by the movies.

He thinks they're a passing fad.

Mr. Chaplin got into motion pictures purely,

in my mind, by accident.

This is the voice of Mack Sennett,

pioneer of movie comedy,

founder of Keystone Studios,

specialists in custard pie warfare and high-speed chases,

the Mack Sennett Bathing Girls, the Keystone Kops.

I have a comedian working for me at the time.

His name was Ford Sterling.

He was a chief of the Keystone Kops.

One day Sterling quits.

I said, "Oh, shucks".

Suddenly Sennett needs a new lead.

Right away, I thought of a comedian

that I'd seen in an English act called,

"A Night in the London Music Hall."

I couldn't remember the name at the time,

but I wired to New York to associates to find this man.

And I said, his name is Champion, Chaprin, or Chambers,

or something like that.

So they traced him in

and they found him in a small town in Pennsylvania.

Sennett offers him $150 a week,

three times the money he's getting now.

He decides he'll stick it out for a year.

And if Ford Sterling had continued with me,

the chances are that Chaplin would have returned to England

and we'd have probably missed the greatest comedian

we've ever seen.

This is Chaplin telling the story

in a 1966 interview for "Life Magazine."