‘When I’m trying to be funny I’m all wrong’: Chaplin in The Red Letter

Abstract

This article looks at the way Charlie Chaplin’s star image is constructed through articles written by Fred Goodwins for The Red Letter magazine. From its content, it seems likely that this magazine was primarily aimed at women in general, and the housewife in particular. As such, it would have been a presence in many family homes. Although not a specialist film magazine, Goodwins contributed around 35 of these articles about Chaplin, and they build into a fascinating account of Chaplin’s working methods around 1916, the period where he was completing his last films for Essanay and beginning his contract with Mutual. They also offer a glimpse into the making of a star. Chaplin was, by 1916, arguably the most famous man on the planet. These articles reveal to us how this star image was maintained; how Chaplin attempted (with a fair degree of success) to deflect the criticism of his failure to join up at the outbreak of the war for instance, and the repeated emphasis on both his extraordinary talent and his being ‘one of the boys’. Indeed, he was being hailed as a genius, and Goodwins himself uses this description on a number of occasions. This archive has been lost to us for almost a century, but the rediscovery of Goodwins’ articles increases our knowledge of the construction of Chaplin’s star persona as well as providing a description of some of the people involved and the filmmaking process taking place at this time