Walt Disney's theatrical career began as a teenager impersonating comedy filmmaking genius Charlie Chaplin in theater contests in Kansas City, Missouri.
While the first appearance of Charlie Chaplin's The Little Tramp character was in February 1914, Chaplin kept evolving and refining the character so that the little fellow became less rough and aggressive and thus more sympathetic and more popular. Chaplin was 24 years old when he created the character and the reason for the mustache was to make him appear older without limiting his ability to make facial expressions.
Today, it has been forgotten by modern generations just how intensely an audience adored these films. In March 1917, Photoplay magazine reported that continuous laughter during a two weeks' run of Chaplin comedies loosened the bolts on theater seats. It was determined that nine out of 10 men attending costume balls that year went dressed as Chaplin. Children bounced in their theater seats in glee at the acrobatic antics.
By 1915, the press was declaring that Charlie Chaplin's character was so popular that the world had “Chaplin-itis”. Vaudeville houses often showed motion pictures as well at this time and, to increase attendance, sponsored amateur Charlie Chaplin look-alike contests to save the cost on hiring live entertainers to perform and to increase revenue by bringing in friends and relatives to cheer on the hopeful impersonators.
The contests were not simply to “look” like Chaplin's character, since a few appropriate items like a derby, thin cane and smudged-on mustache could accomplish that effect. Impersonators were encouraged to mimic the distinctive walk, swing of the cane and wiggle of the upper lip. A young Bob Hope won first prize in such a contest in Cleveland, Ohio.
In 1915, Chaplin himself entered a contest held at a theater in San Francisco and failed to even make the finals. He later told a reporter for the Chicago Herald newspaper about it on July 15, 1915, and joked, “I am tempted to give lessons in the Chaplin walk out of pity, as well as in the desire to see the thing done correctly.”
That incident probably sparked the urban legend from around 1918 that supposedly his friend, actress Mary Pickford, told people that Chaplin had entered a look-alike contest and had come in 20th. While this story was repeated in some newspaper columns during this time period as fact, there has never been any confirmation that the story, or even Pickford telling it was true. Different versions have the competition taking place in France, Monaco, and Switzerland.
In Women's Home Companion magazine for July 1934, writer Alva Johnston, after an interview with Walt Disney, stated:
“He perfected himself in the art of springing a cane into the air with his feet and catching it nonchalantly. Sneaking out of the bedroom window, he would attend amateur nights where he won several small cash prizes and became known as the second best Chaplin (impersonator) in Kansas City.
“He still believes that he was jobbed, as the winner of the first prizes broke the rules by departing from pantomime and singing songs. When Charlie Chaplins became too common in Kansas City, Disney took a partner and appeared on amateur nights in a singing and patter act.”
In Ladies' Home Journal magazine for March 1941, in an article titled Mr. & Mrs. Disney, Walt stated that when he was around 13 years old, he started entering Chaplin contests.
“I'd get in line with half a dozen guys,” he said. “I'd ad-lib and play with my cane and gloves. Sometimes, I'd win $3, sometimes $2.50, sometimes just get carfare. I made the wig out of old hemp used to stuff pipes. It stunk of creosote. Later, I got wise to crepe hair.”
Because his father Elias did not pay Walt for his work delivering newspapers in the morning and late afternoon, Walt found other ways of supplementing his income.
He ordered extra papers to sell without his father's knowledge, and worked at the candy shop across the street from his school doing things like sweeping and unloading boxes during recess and at lunch hour. A local druggist paid him for delivering prescriptions at $0.10 per delivery. Winning some money in a Chaplin look-alike contest seemed easier and quicker and more fun.
Walt developed a friendship with a boy his own age named Walt Pfeiffer, who he later brought out to California to work in the story department at the Disney Studios. Pfeiffer's father was a fun-loving and entertainment loving patriarch much different from Walt's own dad.
The elder Pfeiffer helped the boys attend Sunday matinees at a local Kansas City vaudeville theater to see the variety of acts. It was there that Walt saw Chaplin's films and his first Chaplin look-alike contest.
Walt immediately told his friend that he would be able to do that and would do so the following weekend. While his parents were out visiting friends, Walt rummaged through his father's closet and found an old suit that had baggy pants and a shiny black jacket that was much too large for him. His father's black workshoes were several sizes too large, and Walt felt they would be perfect to use for a funny walk.
For a tie, Walt improvised a black shoelace and he found that he could use the soot from the back of the kitchen stove to create a mustache. From the backyard, he found an elm branch that had a curve to it and he cut it off and with a knife trimmed it into a cane.
For the rest of the week, Walt practiced, sometimes in front of a mirror, the famous Chaplin waddle, twirling the cane and the shy smile. He paid $0.15 at the novelty store for a black derby made out of stiff paper.
By the following Saturday, Walt was ready for a contest held at the Rialto Theater. The grand prize was $2, more money than he could earn at any of his odd jobs in an entire day. There were more than a dozen other contestants in all shapes and sizes. Even a few young girls had tucked their long hair underneath cheap derbies and blackened their upper lips with a small mustache.
Walt watched from the wings and saw that most of them merely waddled across the stage, made a few simple gestures like tipping a hat, and then took a bow.
Walt had a great memory for physical gags, so when he walked across the stage, he purposely dropped his hat but when he reached down to pick it up, his foot would “accidentally” kick it forward as he bent down to pick it up. He would repeat this old vaudeville (and also a circus clown) gag a couple of times chasing his fallen hat around the stage floor with laughter from the audience increasing each time, not only at the actual bit but at Walt's expressions.
He tried a few other gags as well, including mastering the balletic Chaplin bit of business of tossing a cigarette over his shoulder and kicking it with his foot. Walt didn't merely imitate the superficial aspects of the Chaplin character but captured the spirit of the character.
He also captured the top prize and that encouraged him to enter similar contests during that year. In 1936, a schoolmate of Walt's, LeRoy Greene, wrote to him remembering that in those days that Walt “could do [a Chaplin imitation] to perfection.”
Some of the competitions took place at night.
“I'd go down and sneak him out of the window, so his dad wouldn't know it,” recalled Walt Pfeiffer. “When we'd get through, we'd shove him back in the window and I'd go home.”
The two boys were scared of the strict Elias who insisted that Walt be in bed no later than 9 p.m. because he had to get up by 3 a.m. to do the paper route and disliked this type of frivolity for fear that Walt wouldn't have a secure future if he pursued these type of fancies like cartooning.
Decades later, Walt's younger sister Ruth admitted that her parents were somewhat more aware of Walt's extra-curricular activities than the boy realized.
“One time Roy got wind that Walt was going to be in an amateur night somewhere,” Ruth said. “So we all hurried down to the theater and sure enough he was acting like Charlie Chaplin. According to us, he was the best. But he didn't win the prize.”
Walt Disney eventually got to meet one of his idols: Charlie Chaplin.
Walt eventually teamed with the young Pfeiffer to put together a series of different comedy skits, including Hans and Mike, Pat and Mike (dialect comedy acts in the spirit of Weber and Fields, a comedy team beloved of the elder Mr. Pfeiffer), The Two Walts, The Boys From Benton School, and Chaplin and the Count.
In 1916, Chaplin released a comedy called The Count. The premise of the film was that while Chaplin's character was ironing the pants of a Count, he accidentally burns the trousers and is fired. However, he finds an invitation to a social event and decides to go in place of the Count who is unable to attend resulting in some comic eccentric dancing on a slippery floor until the real Count does show up.
So the two Walts, with Disney as Chaplin and Pfeiffer as his rich, pompous nemesis the Count, performed at local amateur competitions, at their school and other events. Once, they won $0.25 for fourth place doing the act, Pfeiffer later recalled.
“These performances reacted on me like the taste of blood on a lion,” Disney later claimed. “In other words, I liked acting! Liked the applause, liked the cash prizes that were being handed to us, liked the weird smells and weirder sights behind the scenes.”
At this point, Walt even briefly considered being an actor rather than an artist.
“I tried to decide. Was I going to be an actor or an artist?” recalled Walt in TIME magazine, December 27, 1954. Walt later claimed that a vaudeville scout had seen him perform and was interested in signing him as a “juvenile” to tour with a troupe but Walt was too scared to discuss the possibility with his parents.
Later when the Disney family moved to Chicago, 16-year-old Walt Disney asked his girlfriend Bea Conover while they were walking along the beach whether he should use the extra money he had saved from his work at the post office to buy a canoe or a movie camera.
He said he was greatly disappointed that she so eagerly replied that he should buy the canoe. Instead, Walt put a down payment on a movie camera. He set up a tripod in the alley behind his parents' home and dressed up as Chaplin and did some actions while his friend Russell Maas turned the crank. Maas was the boy who joined the Red Cross Ambulance Corps with Walt.
Walt had some plans to make some further films, but he was unable to make further payments on the camera and it was repossessed. That classic Walt as Chaplin bit of film is long lost to the ages.
Walt's younger sister Ruth told Silver Screen magazine in its November 1932 issue that Walt's ambition at the time “was to be another Charlie Chaplin. Up and down the alley he'd swagger, with bagging trousers, derby hat, floppy shoes and a cane while one of his pals turned the crank on his new movie camera.”
Roy Disney recalled, in an unpublished interview with author Richard Hubler for a proposed biography of his brother, that “He was always very taken with Charlie Chaplin, so he was Charlie Chaplin.”
When I interviewed Disney Legend Ward Kimball in April 1996, he told me:
“Walt had a tremendous amount of respect for Chaplin. Walt, in private, was just as fine an actor as Chaplin. In fact, in my opinion, I think he was a better actor than Chaplin.
“When Walt was acting out a scene or showing how a character might react, he was really great. He'd have us laughing so hard. Not just because he was the boss but because he was genuinely funny. He was completely unselfconscious when he was showing us how to do something.
“But, of course, he'd never do it in public. If you asked him, he'd be very embarrassed. Both he and Chaplin understood the basic humor of any situation. Walt had that great sixth sense of timing of what might be funny and what might not.”
Other animators who worked at the early Disney studio agreed with Kimball's assessment of Walt's acting ability, including evoking the name of Chaplin. Animator Marc Davis, in an interview with Hubler, stated, “He would act out the parts better than you were able to do it. He had a wonderful Chaplinesque sense of timing and being able to perform something the way he saw it in pantomime.”
When Walt arrived in Hollywood in 1923, he purposely made sure that when he walked to the employment office looking for work that he lingered for a while on LaBrea Avenue where the Chaplin movie studio was located, in the hopes of catching a glimpse of his silent screen hero. In an interview, Walt admitted that if he had seen his idol, he would have been to awestruck to say anything to him.
Chaplin had built the studio in 1917 to resemble an old English village with a Tudor mansion façade and trimmed landscaping. It still stands today, although reduced in half from the original five acres.
When Chaplin left the U.S. in 1952, it was taken over by a variety of owners, including CBS, which filmed shows like The Adventures of Superman there and then later became the headquarters for A&M Records under Herb Alpert. Finally, the studio was purchased by Jim Henson Productions and, as a fitting tribute, installed a statue at the entrance of Kermit the Frog dressed as The Little Tramp.
Finally, Walt and Chaplin were formally introduced around 1930 when Mickey Mouse had became a success, but more of that story next week.
As Walt told writer Pete Martin in June 1956:
“Charlie was a great friend. He was an admirer and it was mutual admiration because way back in my life, I used to impersonate Charlie Chaplin. I won a lot of prizes in theaters. I did it when I was going to school. I did it in theaters on amateur night. I was movie struck. I was stage struck.
“One of the things I did was Chaplin. I had all his tricks down. I never missed a Chaplin picture. A neighbor boy – he's over at the studio with me now – together we had a little act. He was The Count. He was the straight man with me as Chaplin. Then we would go to these amateur things. We'd put on our little act.
“We always got a little more applause than someone else imitating Chaplin because we were younger and there was a team of us. We won a lot of prizes. We'd get a couple of bucks or something. But it was more the fun of doing it, you see? Chaplin was my idol. His comedy, the subtleties of it and things like that I always admired.”
Chaplin admired Walt and Mickey Mouse, as well. On October 15, 1933, there was a Writers' Club dinner in Hollywood where Walt was the guest of honor. Chaplin attended and sat at the same table as Walt. To amuse the animator, Chaplin got up and did a little pantomime including his famous Little Tramp walk.
Acclaimed American humorist Will Rogers, a friend of Walt's who also attended the event, wrote:
“We were all down to a might fine dinner they gave to Walter Disney. He is the sire and dam of that gift to the world, Mickey Mouse. Now, if there wasent (sic) two geniuses at one table, Disney and Charley (sic) Chaplin. One took a derby hat and a pair of big shoes and captured the laughs of the world, and the other one took a lead pencil and a mouse, and he has the whole world crawling in a rat hole, if necessary, just to see the antics of those rodents.
“But there was more than shoes and pencils and derby hats and drawing boards there. Both had a God given gift of human nature. Well, of course, they base it all on psychology of some kind and breed, but its something human inside these two ducks that even psychology hasent (sic) a name for.”
Next time: The Chaplin Connection Part Two: Mickey Mouse As Chaplin. I will be covering both the real and the false connections between Mickey Mouse and Chaplin, some of Chaplin appearances in Disney cartoons, how Chaplin helped Walt with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), and much more.
