POCKET CARTOON hy USBBAT LANCASTER
"Come right over, Mia Vandallure! I want to have you meet a very, very im portant British talent-scour who's over here looking for hii ideal Florence
Nightingale "
'CRUEL SEA'
AUTHOR'S DEPTH CHARGE
By EPHRAIM HARDCASTLE
TICHOLAS MONSAR-
NBA wuthor of the fabulously successful "Cruel Sea," runner-up to the post- war best seller "Kon-Tiki," plunges into ona of the biggest controversies of
the moment: Are we being too forgiving and gentle. manly about the Germans?
THE CHINA MAIL, SATURDAY, OCTOBER 4, 1952.
The Chaplin Story, 2: Fred Karno's New Comic
FIRST LOVE-THEN OFF This is
TO HOLLYWOOD
F
By COLIN FRAME
In
|RED KARNO, mas- ball match between his com- ter of music hall pany and a team from the town comedy, has often they were visiting and he was fond of telling how young been said to have Chaplin nearly got his famous discovered Charlie Chaplin. company drummed out of town.
This is hardly true. As
he lat weak moment a Chaplin
referee the game-it we have seen. Chaplin was
Was against Burton-on-Trent- already well equipped for and the good citizens of Burton the music-hall stage by saw for the first time that 1908 when the two firat met. splayed-foot swaying walk which
to convulse people And even then he was not w
Hollywood
to Hongkong. a "discovery." He was prac- Chaplin, with deadpon faco, tically foisted on an unwill- tripped over imaginary obstacles, ing Karno by elder brother fell headlong at the slightest op. portunity and turned what was Sydney Chaplin who made
meant to be a serious game into the introductions and asked a complete farce with his im- that Charlie should be given promptu fuoling as referee." In job.
Karno, as he later said, was not impressed. He looked at the smell, pule youth with his serious face and unkempt black hair, his frail feminine hands and delicate bulld and decided he was far too fragile for the knockabout life produced by the Karno Fun Fac- tory in Camberwell.
War Songs
But out of a liking for Sydney, who was already a member of the company, he took the lad on
Seven years later British youth marched to war singing that self-deprecating but defiant song "We are Fred Kario's army What blooming use are we."
And they also sang about tho boy he had hired:
The moon shines bright on
Charlie Chaplin Hts boots are cracking In a foreword to U-boat For want of blacking 977, a German submarine And his litle baggy trousers
they want mending
བ
In the
Police Escort
from
The crowd, however, was not amused. Word grow that it was an unfair attempt to put the local team off their game and Karne used to claim-but after all he was a showman' and a
is: per touch of exaggeration misable in the story that Charlle had to have police protec- tion when he left the Beld..
Scene from one of Charlie Chapila's most successful
full-length comedies, "City Lights"
What is more. that night to London a.rich man in 1021 he the show
Chaplin, died in the violent Influenza for the first and probably last epidemic of 1910. time in his life, got the bird.
feit
as if the bottom had His naine a music-hall fallen out
A
of my
world." he comedian was truly made in a anid later of this boy-and-girl Karno show called "Mumming romance. "I look for my Hetty, Birds
but she has gone with the years. For this Karno had a stage And the Ind who walled for her within a stage.
On one, more in Kennington dressed in the normal music hall was played; on pink with his best suit and van the other the whole show was he has gone also,** guyed by a small boy throwing vegetables from one box and a
reception and young
met with 成功 ley asked after Hetty. But she had
Temperamental
made several mistakes about
herole
son by striking a mock pose and making a speech..
This ended: "Hail America, IĮ have come to conquer."
True or not, It was typical of the now-up. now-down Chaplin who can 10/20 and dramatise any situation when in the mood. And it is certainly true that he came, was seen and conquered.
It was, in any case,, a dramatle moment in the lives of both orator and audience and people
can easily imagine with” what philosophic calm Stanley Jeffer- son took his friend's outburst- for he, too, achieved film famo as Stan Laurel.
Up and up
One July day in 1913 Adam Kessel, a friend of Mack Sennett,
was walking down Broadway when he heard roars of laughter
coming ⚫ from Hammerstein's Misle Hall. It was a time since
had heard such enthusiasm so he walked 'Inside;
There was
falling out was Chaplin, fall!
of his box with excllement, as the drunk in "Mumming Birds" which had been renamed Night in an English Music Hall" for its American tour.
Kessel was No went }
room and round to the offered Chaplin £15 a week to enter Alms. Chaplin refused. He had already told
Karno, "Don't worry guv'nor-I can't see myself standing in front of a
camera."
But the offers went up and up until Kamo could no longer compete. Chaplin signed with Sennett for £30 a week!
-It was dazzling money for A Londoner who had known ex- treme poverty and to whom money meant a great deal. Out of his tiny weekly wage in the past he had always lived carefully and put the bulk of it in the
bank.
his bedroom in the small hours, talking restlessly to himself, do claiming or playing a one-string fiddle which was his latest hobby.
But at other times he would burst into the dressing rooms an imp of mischief and would hold even the most hardened troupers
And he kald many years spellbound, with some place of later that he doubted if he newly-invented foolery *f · earned more than £200 in his deeply tragic acting,
last two years in England.
Here, in the land of new Charlie but at least I always re- opportunity, he could earn that cognised he had a touch of in a couple of months.
The No. 1 Clown there were no hard feelings. So he parted from Karne and the drunk--at £3 a week.
It was about this time that he can hardly be taken seriously. pressing effect his moods had on The English showman had be fell deeply in love for the first
For by the time he returned he the rest of the cast. Instead, he camo useti to transfers time.
was 32 and
Hollywood. met and married. sent him to America, Mildred Harris, whe was his Arsen a circus round Europe in books.
Ambitious Karno, who had He had other stars on his Also in the cast of "Mumming wife.
And ho had never Birds' was a young man called
Many
have women
loved his carly
days, had captured dreamed how great his protege with his original was to be. He sull had Syd- of the ney Chaplin and, it was he,
not Charlie, he thought intis pensable.
drunk perpetually falling out of the other.
Charlle was promoted to play
Karno used to
It is a pretty story, this sug- gelus," Fred gestion that Chaplin intended say, one day to meet his Hetty again of firing him because of the de- More than once he thought and make her his wife, but It
forerunner
commander's story of his Before we send wartime adventures, Mon-To the Dardanelles," sarrat sweeps aside the It is true to say that it was Karno who developed platitudes normally found in Fred
Chaplin and gave him his big a foreword, and says:
chance. And, that meeting be- tween the puny-looking boy and "There have been far too the man who had put a new Kelly who had a sister on the Charles Spencer Chaplin, and he America many postwar books, films, brand of comedy on the European stage. Her name was Hetty and makes no secret of the fact that humour,
a highlight and plays arguing that the map was.
she was Baparently extremely Germans, though misguided Chaplin story.
beautiful with golden hair and he has found women among the modern Crazy Gang. Charles Spencer Chaplin, at and misled, were in the
large grey eyes." She
was seven- most fascinating of his studies. nineteen, bred in the stage teen.
"Hail America' But there is something heart- main honest, manly types tradition, reared in poverty and
tugging about that first romance who fought the good fight taught by the daily life of a
In Kennington between the boy But in turn many of his best like any Christian soldier; ILondon street stood unknowing
who was to have the world at his men had been captured by She and Chaplin used to meet feet and the golden-haired girl Hollywood and In particular by do not want to run the risk on the brink of fabulous fame
and fortune.
regularly in Kennington Park whose life was to end so soon. en enterprising producer called of seeming to belong to
His first job with Kamo was and there they talked of the Chaplin was developing a Mack Sennett. this gang....
in a sketch called "The Football future and what it might hold. temperament about this time. He Chaplin was sent to America Match" which some still re- It is said that when Chaplin would astonish the Karno crowd, as a replacement for comedians member. Charlie had to follow entered Bimland it was with the always tolerant of temperament who had-turned to flims where Harry Weldon about and pretend idea of making enough money to in an
began.
Courting
to dope him before the game enable him to come back and mood" artist, by his depth of they could earn blg money.
marry her.
Sometimes he would speak As a publicity stunt Karno Whatever the truth of that, the, lo no une tur days on end. Some there used to arrange a serious foot- fact is that when he did return times he could be heard pacing
"You will recall a remarkable discovery
when wo coll Germany-that Quered were actually no Nazis there at all, just millions of 'decent Ger- mans.'
You will also recall that General MacArthur found the same thing in Japan-that the Japanese were gum-chewing democrats to a man.
"Why the Western world should
swallow this par- ticular brand of eye-wash, no man can say. For Nazi Ger- many was not a nation of honest dupes and simple soldiers..
"Among the worst of these willing - servants of world- enslavement wore the men serving in German U-boats,"
SQUAD
KEYSTONE
COPA
21
With him went another of the Karno gang. Stanley Jefferson. And it is said that as their cattle boat passed the Statue of Liberty and entered New York, Chaplin astonished the sad-faeed Jeffer-
to
But in a few more years. he, was to lose Sydney, too --- as manager to his kid brolber whose name and fame extend- and from San Francisco to the ed from Tottenham to Tokyo South Sea Islands.
For through the medium. of the cinema, in a year or two, Chaplin became not along Lon- don's, not America's, Europa's, but the world's first clown.
NEXT SATURDAY - Marriage and a million dollar contract
not
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Drawn into the controversy la world-renowned sallor, Admiral of the Floot the Earl of Cork and Orrery. For he writes a preface to the foreword.
And În it he calls the author
An "Melent and brave officer," Of the way the submarino-ser- vice develops the best, "military virtues," he says:--
"Certainly no one can deny these qualities to the officers of the late German Navy. If some more undesirable trujts seem to hive bean developed plst, it may o due to certain methods of training...
AMERICAN WAY-OF-LIF
Marti Copyright, Ký arrangement wilk Dela 'Kerali.
GOOD NEWS FOR BAD MEN
New York.. for shooting Jennings Lang, reports the Federal Bureau of Sa result of his prison theatrical agent for Mrs Wan- Investigation.
Her Joan Bennett. experience film pro- ducer Walter Wanger has He Insists that ex-convicts DEEP SEA DIVER Otis Bar-
must run Jobs Anonymous. He
AMERICA COLUMN
from NEWELL ROGERS
'ton is trying to beat big or four years. Last year alone organised society named feels that men who have been descent to the occan
awn world record of a 4,500lt. UNO produced 40.000 docu- "Jobs Anonymous", to help in gaol will trust others who illa rock boltom oblative now pages, This year the cost of bottom, ments, some running up to 1,000
convicts.
have shared their experiences,
On the NO and its paper work will It trains them for a new law. They know their own kind know -0,280ft (one mile).
way down he hopes to tako reach a new high-about £135 abiding life while they are still all the problems.
pictures of fish with luminous million,
RESEARCHERS
in prison. And they can choose IN Harvard University, spots on their sides. their own trade or professiów 20-year-old Borden Stevenson,
in Chicago | if they do not already have one. son of the Democratic presiden- RESIDE, UNO'S (30. – alącèy Is are hard at work on a plan Members of the society out lal candidato, shares a room green glass and steel tower to replace the taltered magazines side prison, ex convicts and with William Donner Roosevelt, on New York's East River in doctors waiting rooms with cltitans, boo that the aged 20, a grandson of the lule atands a brand new four-storey a fan projector to show films. men Jobs which
leave President,
Hbrary and storage, buliding. Theyyare i conskfering this the cells,
It is filling up no fast with question. Would Rita Haywoell Mr Wanger thought up the CRIME in New York City is paper, that it will have to be or Clark Gable oxelte or plan while serving four moullia "up" 000°- percent over 1948, roplicati or expanded in three press patients too much?”
actin
they
de-
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