Mack’s specialty had always been comedies, and among his early stars was that noted screen comedian of another day, Ford Sterling. At the time when the Lasky Company started, Sterling was getting a salary phenomenal for that period. Yet, being a perfectly normal star, he kept wanting more, and it was in an hour when Sennett feared he would not be able to keep pace with these increasing demands that he cast about him for some one to take Sterling’s place.
In this period of vigilance he chanced to go to Pantages’ in Los Angeles. Among the acts of this performance, which represented the second circuit—that employing the less costly talent of the organisation—there lingered in his mind the work of one comedian.
Months afterwards when Sterling really seemed on the point of leaving, Sennett thought immediately of the little comedian in the second circuit. He did not know where he was. He could not even remember his name. But he wired to an Eastern representative, “Get in touch with fellow called Chapman or Chamberlain—something like that—playing second circuit.”
The representative had a hard time locating the person thus vaguely defined. At last, however, in a little Pennsylvania town the agent caught up with Charlie Chaplin. He was getting fifty dollars a week for his work in vaudeville, and when Sennett took him on at one hundred and twenty-five he seemed stunned by his good fortune.
And did he make good at once in motion-pictures? Mack has told me that he did not.
“It was days and days,” the latter relates, “before Charlie put over anything real. He tried all sorts of make-ups—one of them I remember was a fat man—and they were all about equally flat. The fact of it was that for some time I felt a little uneasy as to whether my find was a very fortunate one.”
It must be remembered at this point, however, that Chaplin encountered at the outset of his screen career an almost inflexible conception of humour. He himself has told me how he had to combat this prejudice in creating his very first picture.
“I was a tramp in that story,” he recalls, “and they wanted me to do all the usual slap-stick stunts. I had to beg them to let me play the part my way. ‘If you want somebody to pull all the old gags,’ I said to Sennett, ‘why do you hire me? You can get a man at twenty-five dollars to do that sort of stuff.’ So at last they gave in to my idea. This I had worked out very carefully. A tramp in a fine hotel—there’s a universal situation for you. Hardly a human being that hasn’t duplicated the feeling of being poor, alone, out of touch with the gay crowd about him, of trying to identify himself somehow with the fine, alien throng. So I did the little touches here of imitation—the pulling down of shabby cuffs, the straightening of my hat, all the gestures that gave a wider meaning to the characterization.”
Chaplin’s own account of his start is eloquent of the creative imagination which has made him the supreme exponent of screen art. This first picture was a success. Even so, there were those in the Sennett studios who looked askance upon such advanced methods.
“They didn’t really appreciate Charlie in those early days,” so Mabel Normand has often said to me. “I remember numerous times when people in the studio came up and asked me confidentially, ‘Say, do you think he’s so funny? In my mind he can’t touch Ford Sterling.’ They were just so used to slap-stick that imaginative comedy couldn’t penetrate.”