The Religious Affiliation of

Charlie Chaplin
influential director and actor

Charlie Chaplin was born to actor/musician parents. For most of his life he didn't really practice any
religion aside from theater and film. Bowman records that Chaplin received his name "at the font", so
he was apparently baptized into the Church of England as an infant. During some years while Chaplin
was a child his mother brought him to weekly Anglican church services. As an adult, Chaplin's
background was clearly Christian, but he was not actively religious in a traditional sense.

Chaplin only saw his father twice until the age of seven. The man left him and his mother about a year
after Charlie was born. During Chaplin's earliest years his mother was a singer and performer. Then
her voice gave out, her stage career ended, and she began actively attending Church of England
(Anglican) services. At the age of seven Chaplin's mother deemed insane, sent to Cane Hill lunatic
asylum, and the court sent Charlie and his brother to live with his father, who had by then stopped all
payments of child support. From: Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography, Simon and Schuster: New York,
NY (1964), page 22:

When the fates deal in human destiny, they heed neither pity nor justice. Thus they dealt with Mother.
She never regained her voice... our circumstances turned from bad to worse. Although Mother was
careful and had saved a little money, that very soon vanished... from three comfortable rooms we
moved to two, then into one, our belongings dwindling and the neighborhoods into which we moved
growing progressively drabber.

She turned to religion, in the hope, I suppose, that it would restore her voice. She regularly attended
Christ Church in the Westminster Bridge Road, and every Sunday I was made to sit through Bach's
organ music and to listen with aching impatience to the Reverend F. B. Meyer's fervent and dramatic
voice echoing down the nave like shuffling feet. His orations must have been appealing, for
occasionally I would catch Mother quietly wiping away a tear, which slightly embarrassed me.

Well do I remember Holy Communion on one hot summer's day, and the cool silver containing
delicious grape juice that passed along the congregation--and Mother's gentle restraining hand when I
drank too much of it. And how relieved I was when the Reverend closed the Bible, for it meant that
the sermons would soon end and they would start prayers and the final hymn.

Since Mother had joined the church she seldom saw her theatrical friends. That world had evaporated,
had become only a memory. They interim of one year seemed a lifetime of travail. Now we existed in
cheerless twilight; jobs ere hard to find and Mother, untutored in everything but the stage, was further
handicapped... Occasionally she obtained work nursing, but such employment was rare and of short
duration... she was expert with her needle and able to earn a few shillings dressmaking or members of
the church. it was barely enough to support the three of us [Charlie, his brother Sydney, and their
mother]. Because of Father's drinking, his theatrical engagements became irregular, as did his payments
of ten shillings a week.

Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography, pages 24-26:

I remember an evening in our one room in the basement at Oakley Street. I lay in bed recovering from
a fever. Sydney had gone out to night school and Mother and I were alone. It was late afternoon, and
she sat with her back to the window reading, acing and explaining in her inimitable way the New
Testament and Christ's love and pity for the poor and for little children. Perhaps her emotion was due
to my illness, but she gave the most luminous and appealing interpretation of Christ that I have ever
heard or seen. She spoke of His tolerant understanding; of the woman who had sinned and who was to
be stoned by the mob, and of His words to them: "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast
a stone at her."
The read until dusk, stopping only to light the lamp, then told of the faith that Jesus inspired in the
sick, that they had only to touch the hem of His garment to be healed.

She told of the hate and jealousy of the High Priests and Pharisees, and described Jesus and His arrest
and His calm dignity before Pontius Pilate, who, washing his hands, said, (this she acted out
histrionically): "I find no fault with this man." She told how they stripped and scourged Him and,
placing a crown of thorns on His head, mocked and spat at Him, saying: "Hail, King of the Jews."

As she continued tears welled up in her eyes. She told of Simon helping to carry Christ's cross and the
appealing look of gratitude Jesus gave him; she told of Barabbas, the repentant, dying with Him on a
cross and asking forgiveness, and of Jesus saying: "Today shalt thou be with me in Paradise." And
from the cross looking down at His mother, saying: "Woman, behold thy son." And in His last agony
crying out: "My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" And we both wept.

"Don't you see," said Mother, "how human He was; like all of us. He too suffered doubt."

Mother had so carried me away that I wanted to die that very night and meet Jesus. But Mother was
not so enthusiastic. "Jesus wants you to live first and fulfill your destiny here," she said. In that dark
room in the basement at Oakley Street, Mother illuminated to me the kindliest light this world has ever
known, which has endowed literature and the theatre with their greatest and richest themes: love, pity
and humanity.

...As we sank further into poverty I would, in my childish ignorance, reproach her [his mother] for not
going back to the stage. She would smile and say that that life was false and artificial, and that in such a
world one could so easily forget God. Yet whenever she talked of the theatre she would forget herself
and again get carried away with enthusiasm...

Winter was approaching and Sydney ran out of clothes, so Mother made him a coat from her old
velvet jacket. It had red and black striped sleeves, pleated in the shoulders, which Mother did her best
to get rid of, but with little success. Sydney wept when he was made to wear it... The boys called him
"Joseph and his coat of many colors."

[page 26]...One day... Sydney came bursting into the darkened room... exclaiming, "I've found a
purse!"... Mother opened it and saw seven golden sovereigns. Our joy was hysterical. The purse
contained no address, thank God, so Mother's religious scruples were little exercised. Although a pale
case of thought was given to the owner's misfortune, it was, however, quickly dispelled by Mother's
belief that God had sent it as a blessing from Heaven.

Charlie Chaplin lived with his father only a short time before his mother was released from the lunatic
asylum and then picked up Charlie and his brother, to live with her once again. Charlie Chaplin, My
Autobiography, page 40:
Mother's health was excellent and the thought that she had been ill never entered our heads.

How we lived through this period I have not the remotest idea. Nonetheless, I remember no undue
hardships or insoluble problems. Father's payments of ten shillings a week were almost regular, and, of
course, Mother took up her needlework again and renewed her contact with the church.

Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography, pages 44-45:

Father knew Mrs. Jackson, who ran the [theatre] troupe, and convinced Mother that it would be a
good start for me to make a career on the stage and at the same time help her economically: I would
get board and lodging and Mother would get half a crown a week. She was dubious at first until she
met Mr. Jackson and his family, then she accepted.. Mr. Jackson... was a devout Roman Catholic, and
after his first wife died had consulted his children about marrying again. His second wife was a little
older than himself, and he would piously tell us how he came to marry her. He had advertised for a
wife in one of the newspapers and had received over three hundred letters. After praying for guidance
he had opened only one, and that was from Mrs. Jackson. She too had been a schoolteacher and, as if
in answer to his prayer, was also a Catholic...

Every Sunday, everyone attended Catholic church but me. Being the only Protestant, I was lonely, so
occasionally I went with them. Had it not been for deference to Mother's religious scruples, I could
easily have been won over to Catholicism, for I liked the mysticism of it and the little homemade altars
with plaster Virgin Marys adorned with flowers and lighted candles which the boys put up in a corner
of the bedroom, and to which they would genuflect every time they passed.

Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography, pages 57-60:

Before Father died, Mother moved from Pownall Terrace and rented a room at the house of Mrs.
Taylor, a friend of Mother's, a church member and devoted Christian. She was a short, square-framed
woman in her middle fifties, with a square jaw and a sallow, wrinkled face. While watching her in
church I discovered she had false teeth. They would drop from her upper gums onto her tongue while
she sang--the effect was hypnotic.

She had an emphatic manner and abundant energy. She had taken Mother under her Christian wing
and had rented her a front room, at a very reasonable rate, on the second floor of her large house...
Her husband, a facsimile of Dickens' Mr. Pickwick, was a precision-ruler maker... Mrs. Taylor's one
desire was to convert her husband, who, according to her Christian scruples, was a sinner. Her
daughter... would have been attractive but for her hauteur and objectionable manner. Like her father,
she never attended church. But Mrs. Taylor never gave up hope of converting them both. The
daughter was the apple of her mother's eye--but not of my mother's eye.

One afternoon... I heard an altercation below between Mother and Miss Taylor [Mrs. Taylor's
daughter]. Mrs. Taylor was out. I do not know how it started, but they were both shouting loudly at
each other... Mother was leaning over the banister: "Who do you think you are? Lady Sh--?"

"Oh!" shouted the daughter. "That's nice language coming from a Christian!"

"Don't worry," said Mother quickly. "It's in the Bible, my dear: Deuteronomy, twenty-eighth chapter,
thirty-seventh verse, only there's another word for it. However, sh-- will suit you."

After that, we moved back to Pownall Terrace.

...One day [Charlie's mother] came home from the hospital indignant over what the Reverend John
McNeil, Evangelist, had said when he paid Father a visit: "Well, Charlie, when I look at you, I can only
think of the old proverb: "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."

"Nice words to console a dying man," said Mother. A few days later Father was dead.

[page 60] ...Mother was amazed when I came home in the evening with more than five shillings for an
afternoon's work. One day she bumped into me as I came out of a pub, and that put an end to my
flower-selling; that her boy was peddling flowers in barrooms offended her Christian scruples. "Drink
killed your father, and money from such a source will only bring us bad luck," she said. However, she
kept the proceeds, though she never allowed me to sell flowers again.

Chaplin returned to England after working for many years in the U.S. From: Charlie Chaplin, My
Autobiography, page 268:
The taxi turned a corner, and at last, Kennington Road! There it was. Incredible! Nothing had changed.
There was Christ Church [the Anglican church Chaplin attended with his mother while growing up] at
the corner of Westminster Bridge Road. There was the Tankard at the corner of Brook Street.
Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography, page 346:
There is a strong sense of frankness and sincerity about the English clergy that is a reflection of
England at its best. It is men like Dr. Hewlett Johnson and Canon Collins and many other prelates that
give vitality to the English Church.
Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography, pages 458-459:
Will Durrant, author and philosopher, was also in Hollywood lecturing at U.C.L.A. He was an old
friend and occasionally dined at our house. They were amusing evenings. Will, an enthusiast who
needed no stimulant to intoxicate himself but life itself, once asked me: "What is your conception of
beauty?" I said I thought it was an omnipresence of death and loveliness, a smiling sadness that we
discern in nature and all things, a mystic communion that the poet feels--an expression of it can be a
dustbin with a shaft of sunlight across it, or it can be a rose in the gutter. El Greco saw it in our
Saviour on the Cross.

...[Another] night I listened to Clare Luce's oracular preachments. [Luce was a playwright who became
a U.S. Congresswoman and ambassador.] Of course the subject turned to religion (she had recently
joined the Catholic Church), and in the melee of discussion I said, "One is not required to wear the
imprint of Christianity on one's forehead; it is manifest in both saint and sinner alike; the spirit of the
Holy Ghost is in everything." That night we parted with a slight feeling of estrangement.

Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography, pages 286-289:

When I returned to Hollywood [from England], I dropped by to see Mother... "Well, what do you
think of your son and all this nonsense?" I said whimsically.

"It's wonderful, but wouldn't you rather by yourself than live in this theatrical world of unreality?"

"You should talk," I laughed. "You're responsible for this unreality."

She paused. "If only you had put your talent in the service of the Lord--think of the thousands of souls
you could have saved."

I smiled. "I might have saved souls but not money."

[page 289]...How strange that her [Chaplin's mother] life should end here, in the environs of
Hollywood, with all its absurd values... Then a flood of memories surged in upon me of her lifelong
struggle, her suffering, her courage and her tragic, wasted life . . . and I wept.

It was an hour before I could recover and leave the room... I was asked if I wanted Mother cremated.
Such a thought horrified me! No, I preferred her buried in the green earth, where she still lies, in
Hollywood Cemetary.

I do not know if I have given a portrait worthy of Mother. But I do know that she carried her burden
cheerfully. Kindness and sympathy were her outstanding virtues. Although religious, she loved sinners
and always identified herself with them. Not an atom of vulgarity was in her nature... And in spite of
the squalor in which we were forced to live [when Chaplin was young], she had kept Sydney and me
off the streets and made us feel we were not the ordinary product of poverty, but unique and
distinguished.

Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography, page 19:

Grandma was half gypsy [Roma]. This fact was the skeleton in our family cupboard. Nevertheless,
Grandma bragged that her family always paid ground rent. Her maiden name was Smith. I remember
her as a bright little old lady who always greeted me effusively with baby talk. She died before I was six.
She was separated from Grandpa, for what reason neither grandparent would tell. But according to
Aunt Kate there was a domestic triangle in which Grandpa surprised Grandma with a lover.

To gauge the morals of our family by commonplace standards would be as erroneous as putting a
thermometer in boiling water. With such genetic attributes, two pretty cobbler's daughters quickly left
home and gravitated to the stage.

From: Charles Chaplin, Jr., with N. and M. Rau, My Father, Charlie Chaplin, Random House: New York,
NY (1960), pages 7-8:
My father [Charlie Chaplin] was born April 16, 1889, at 3 Parnell Terrace, Kennington Road, London...
Both my father's parents were British subjects. My grandfather was a mixture of French and Irish--the
Chaplin name is of French origin. My grandmother [Charlie Chaplin's father] had Gypsy blood--
French or Spanish--inherited from her mother. My father has always been inordinately proud of that
wild Romany blood.

Both my grandparents [Charlie Chaplin's parents] were rather well known in the London music halls of
the day. My grandfather was a ballad singer with a baritone voice that was pleasing enough to win him
bookings in New York. My father's mother, Hannah Chaplin, who went on the stage at an early age
under the name of Lily Harley, sang and played the piano, was for a while a member of a Gilbert and
Sullivan troupe that toured England, and acted out arts in the little skits where were so popular on the
music-hall programs...

The children of theatrical people usually lead a life subject to constant change. My father's was made
even more insecure by Grandfather Chaplin's addiction to alcohol, which kept him from providing
adequately for his family. He died in his thirties of an illness which had been brought on by his
drinking.

Almost from the first my father had a bleak childhood. He was often cold and hungry... He and Uncle
Sydney were placed in an orphanage by their mother because it was impossible to provide for them at
home any longer. He had been failed by his father and now his mother was failing him too, or so it
must have seemed to a small boy of five.

There was never enough to eat at the orphanage, never enough to wear... To add to his loneliness,
Dad's mother seldom visited him during those two years of his stay in the orphanage. But when he was
seven she came to take him home again.

Although apparently never active in the Anglican, Episcopal or any other denomination, Chaplin
apparently did receive a traditional Anglican baptism as an infant. From: W. Dodgson Bowman, Charlie
Chaplin: His Life and Art, The John Day Company: New York, NY (1931), page 11:
Charles Spencer Chaplin--to give him the names he received at the font--was born in Kennington,
London, on April 16, 1889. There has been much debate as to Chaplin's origin. Some writers assert
that he has gipsy [sic] blood in his veins. The writer of a book on Travels in Spain was greatly struck by
the number of men he met in that country who seemed to be counterparts of Charlie, and wondered if
his mimic gifts were inherited from dons or grandees.

These are but idle speculations. The surnames Chaplin and Caplin are occupative and are from the
middle English and Old French Capeline, meaning a mailed hood. The original owners of these names
were probably makers of this kind of defensive armor and descendants of French settlers in England.

What we know definitely is that Charlie's parents were English. His father also bore the name of
Charles Chaplin, and in the eighties of the last century was a great favorite of the public that took its
pleasures in the London music halls. He was also well known on the legitimate stage. His versatility
was remarkable. He is said to have played every kind of character known to the English stage...
Charlie's mother, Mrs. Hannah Chaplin, also had considerable talent as a musician, and took leading
parts in the stock companies that performed Gilbert and Sullivan operas and other popular musical
plays.

Charles Chaplin, Jr. -- in many places in his book My Father, Charlie Chaplin -- describes how his father
regularly celebrated Christmas and Easter with his family, but always in a mostly secular way.

From: Lita Grey Chaplin with Morton Cooper, My Life with Chaplin: An Intimate Memoir, Bernard Geis
Associates: Brattleboro, Vermont (1966), pages 160-161:

Although Charlie [Chaplin] had no use for most religious festivals, he could get quite sentimental about
the Christmas season. At Christmas in 1924--with our baby due in about four and a half months--he
made preparations, through [his servant] Kono, for a tree, dinner in the afternoon, and a gift for Mama
and one for me. When I asked Charlie if my grandparents might come for dinner, he looked at my
sharply, as if I'd asked the impossible, but answered, "Very well, if they'd like to--and as long as it's
understood there's to be no religious folderol and none of those insufferable carols."

...When we sat down at the table, Charlie began paying extravagant court to Grandma, who was
overwhelmed. He carved the turkey himself, with precision and skill, and then, when everyone was
served and just before we began to eat, he befuddled me thoroughly by inquiring, "Would someone
like to say grace? I think it would be fitting." Grandpa obliged.

Charlie Chaplin divorced his second wife (Lita Grey). Chaplin, who was not Catholic, had not allowed
his two children by Lita to be baptized into the Catholic Church, but after the divorce Lita Grey had
them baptized. Charles Chaplin, Jr., My Father, Charlie Chaplin, pages 38-39:
...at the time of the divorce everything seemed equably settled and properly adjusted. Our father's
reputation had only been dented, after all, and he went back to work on The Circus with renewed
energy...

We were now living as quietly at our great-grandmother's home in Beverly Hills as before we had lived
in our father's house. On January 24, 1928, five months after the divorce, Mother, who had been
baptized a Catholic herself, had both Syd and me christened at the Church of the Good Shepherd in
Beverly Hills. Father hadn't wanted this while we lived with him. He believed that children should be
free to pick their own religion when they were old enough. But now all that life was gone, and we were
starting from the beginning again. Everything was as if life on the hill had never been.

Charlie Chaplin's third wife was Paulette Goddard. Goddard's parents were both from Utah, and many
published sources state that Paulette's mother was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-
day Saints. Actually, Paulette's mother was an Episcopalian native of Utah, and her father was Jewish.
Charles Chaplin, Jr., My Father, Charlie Chaplin, page 54:
...a compensation came into our lives that was pleasurably to affect all our boyhood. Paulette Goddard!
She was number five or so in the list of leading ladies my father's wizardry had raised to prominence
throughout the years. Edna Purviance, Georgia Hale, Merna Kennedy, Virginia Cherrill, they had all
glowed for a spell under his tutelage. Paulette was the only one of them who remained as well known
after she left my father.
Charles Chaplin, Jr., My Father, Charlie Chaplin, pages 179-180:
I don't know how many ideas my father mulled over in his long search for a [film] story for Paulette
[Goddard, his wife], but I do recall some interesting details about one of them. It came to him by way
of a curious little item which someone clipped from a newspaper and mailed him. The item concerned
an edict by Adolph Hitler banning Chaplin films from Germany because Dad looked so much like
him.

Something clicked in my father's mind when he read it. In the Little Tramp getup, with the silly
mustache, he plainly did resemble Hitler. And when he looked further he saw other points of similarity
between himself and the German dictator. They had been born in the same year, in the same month,
just four days apart, and both had known extreme poverty in their childhood. But their destinies were
poles apart. One was to make millions weep, while the other was to set the whole world laughing. Dad
could never think of Hitler without a shudder, half of horror, half of fascination.

"Just think," he would say uneasily, "he's the madman, I'm the comic. But it could have been the other
way around." And he couldn't resist concluding with the quote, "There but for the grace of God go I."

Charles Chaplin, Jr., My Father, Charlie Chaplin, page 192:

Up at Pebble Beach he [Charlie Chaplin] had isolated himself from newspapers and radio, and when he
came back and saw what was happening in the world he was shocked. Hitler, his double, was spreading
monstrous tentacles beyond the bounds of Germany, and within Germany there were terrible
persecutions of the Jews. Suddenly Dad saw a purpose for his comedy beyond the mere art of making
people laugh. It could also, through the medium of satire, waken people to the horror of dictatorship.
It became his mission to hold up the mirror of ridicule to his alter ego, the mad Hitler, and show him
for what he was--an evil buffoon. Dad put aside the script he had worked on so laboriously for the
past six months and once more flung himself into the Hitler idea, which he was then calling The
Dictator [and later was titled The Great Dictator, starring Chaplin and Paulette Goddard].
Charles Chaplin, Jr., My Father, Charlie Chaplin, page 202:
That December of 1938, Dad finished the script of The Great Dictator. All the characters were clearly
defined in it now. The female lead, that of the winsome Jewish girl, had been written around Paulette.
Dad was to play both Hitler and the little Jewish barber.
Charles Chaplin, Jr., My Father, Charlie Chaplin, pages 239-240:
Dad felt a special concern about The Great Dictator, for it was different in kind from any of his other
pictures. Always with them he had hoped for two things, to make people laugh and to make money.
But with The Great Dictator, there was something else involved: it had become imperative to him to get
across his outcry against the hell of war and the evils of oppression. For the first time I heard my
father speak seriously of prayer in connection with a picture.

"I'm praying, son, that this picture will have a good message and maybe help mankind a bit," he said to
my suddenly one day. But he wouldn't have been my father if he hadn't added in a humorous aside,
"I'm also praying it will be a big hit, because I've spent a lot of money on it."

Dad was vague about who it was to whom he addressed his prayer. I never heard him speak of God as
a personal power or conjecture about what comes after death. He never even mentioned death as far as
I can recall. He wasn't one to adopt an organized religion, and he didn't care for ritualistic services,
though he openly and ardently admired the architecture of churches and synagogues. He never forced
his own beliefs on Syd and me, though occasionally he would speak of them to us.

"I'm not an atheist," I can remember him saying on more than one occasion. "I'm definitely an
agnostic. Some scientists say that if the world were to stop revolving we'd all disintegrate. But the
world keeps on going. Something must be holding us all in place--some Supreme Force. But what it is
I couldn't tell you."

Dad's opinion of this Supreme Force varied with his moods. Sometimes, reading the headlines of the
bloody battles raging in Europe, he would shake his head and say, "It must be Something very vicious
that permits people to kill one another in this way."

Sometimes in the solitude of seashore or mountain he would speak of the Supreme Force almost
tenderly, as of Something sublimely beautiful, mirroring itself so eloquently in rushing waves or
snowdrifts, solemn rocks and ancient trees.

It was to this Something that he addressed his prayers for the success of The Great Dictator.

Famed sculptor and writer Clare Sheridan was rumored to been one of Chaplin's many lovers, before
her conversion to Catholicism. Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography, pages 289-291:
When Clare Sheridan, the sculptress, who created a sensation with her book From Mayfair to Moscow,
came to Hollywood, Sam Goldwyn gave a dinner for her and I was invited. Clare, tall and good-
looking, was the niece of Winston Churchill... Dicky [Clare's son] died at the age of nineteen, a sad and
terrible blow from which she never recovered. She became a Catholic and lived for a while in a
convent, turning to religion, I suppose as a solace.

I once saw on a tombstone in the South of France a photograph of a smiling young girl of fourteen,
and engraved below, one word: "Pourquoi?" [Why?] In such bewilderment of grief it is futile to seek an
answer. It only leads to false moralizing and torment--yet it does not mean that there is no answer. I
cannot believe that our existence is meaningless or accidental, as some scientists would tell us. Life and
death are to resolute, too implacable, to be accidental.
The ways of life and death--genius cut down in its prime, world upheavals, holocausts and
catastrophes--may seem futile and meaningless. But the fact that these things have happened are
demonstrable of a resolute, fixed purpose beyond the comprehension of our three-dimensional minds.

There are philosophers who postulate that all is matter in some form of action, and that in all existence
nothing can be added or taken away. If matter is action, it must be governed by the law of cause and
effect. If I accept this, then every action is preordained. If so, is not the scratching of my nose
predestined as much as a shooting star? The cat walks round the house, the leaf falls from the tree, the
child stumbles. Are not these actions traceable back into infinity? Are not they predestined and
continuous into eternity? We know the immediate cause of the fallen leaf, the child stumbling, but we
cannot trace its beginning or its end.

I am not religious in the dogmatic sense. My views are similar to those of Macaulay, who wrote to the
effect that the same religious arguments were debated in the sixteenth century with the same
philosophical astuteness as they are today; and in spite of accumulated knowledge and scientific
progress, no philosopher, past or present, has contributed any further illuminating facts on the matter.

I neither believe nor disbelieve anything. That which can be imagined is as much an approximation to
the truth as that which can be proved by mathematics. One cannot always approach truth through
reason; it confines us to a geometric cast of thought that calls for logic and credibility. We see the dead
in our dreams and accept them as living, knowing at the same time they were dead. And although this
dream mind is without reason, has it not its own credibility? There are things beyond reason. How can
we comprehend a thousand-billionth part of a second? Yet it must exist, according to our system of
mathematics.

As I grow older I am becoming more preoccupied with faith. We live by it more than we think and
achieve by it more than we realize. I believe that faith is a precursor of all our ideas. Without faith,
there never could have evolved hypothesis, theory, science or mathematics. I believe that faith is an
extension of the mind. It is the key that negates the impossible. To deny faith is to refute oneself and
the spirit that generates all our creative forces.

My faith is in the unknown, in all that we do not understand by reason; I believe that what is beyond
our comprehension is a simple fact in other dimensions, and that in the realm of the unknown there is
an infinite power for good.

Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography, pages 395-397:

I remember [Vladimir] Horowitz, the pianist... Just before the war [World War II] I dined at his house
with his wife, the daughter of Toscanini. Rachmaninoff and Barbirolli were there... It was an intimate
dinner, just five of us.

It seems that each time art is discussed I have a different explanation of it. Why not? That evening I
said that art was an additional emotion applied to skillful technique. Someone brought the topic round
to religion and I confessed I was not a believer. Rachmaninoff quickly interposed: "But how can you
have art without religion?"

I was stumped for a moment. "I don't think we are talking about the same thing," I said. "My concept
of religion is a belief in a dogma--that art is a feeling more than a belief."

"So is religion," he answered. After that I shut up.

While dining at my house, Igor Stravinsky suggested we should do a film together. I invented a story. It
should be surrealistic, I said--a decadent night club with tables around the dance floor, at each table,
greed, at another, hypocrisy, at another, ruthlessness. The floor show is the passion play, and while the
crucifixion of the Saviour is going on, groups at each table watch it indifferently, some ordering meals,
others talking business, others showing little interest. The mob, the High Priests and the Pharisees are
shaking their fists up at the Cross, shouting: "If Thou be the Son of God come down and save
Thyself." At a nearby table a group of businessmen are talking excitedly about a big deal. One draws
nervously on his cigarette, looking up at the Saviour and blowing his smoke absent-mindedly in His
direction.

At another table a businessman and his wife sit studying the menu. She looks up, then nervously
moves her chair back from the floor. "I can't understand why people come here," she says
uncomfortably. "It's depressing."

"It's good entertainment," says the businessman. "The place was bankrupt until they put on this show.
Now they are out of the red."

"I think its sacrilegious," says his wife.

"It does a lot of good," says the man. "People who have never been inside a church come here and get
the story of Christianity."

And the show progresses, a drunk, being under the influence of alcohol, is on a different plane; he is
seated alone and begins to weep and shout loudly: "Look, they're crucifying Him! And nobody cares!"
He staggers to his feet and stretches his arms appealingly toward the Cross. The wife of a minister
sitting nearby complains to the headwaiter, and the drunk is escorted out of the place still weeping and
remonstrating, "Look, nobody cares! A fine lot of Christians you are!"

"You see," I told Stravinsky, "they throw him out because he is upsetting the show." I explained that
putting a passion play on the dance floor of a night club was to show how cynical and conventional the
world has become in professing Christianity.

The maestro's face became very grave. "But that's sacrilegious!" he said.

I was rather astonished and a little embarrassed. "Is it?" I said. "I never intended it to be. I thought it
was a criticism of the world's attitude toward Christianity--perhaps, having made up the story as I went
along, I haven't made that very clear." And so the subject was dropped. But several weeks later,
Stravinsky wrote, wanting to know if I still considered the idea of our doing a film together. However,
my enthusiasm had cooled off and I became interested in making a film of my own.

In 1943, seventeen years after their bitter divorce, Charlie Chaplin spoke again with his second wife.
From: Lita Grey Chaplin, My Life with Chaplin, pages 313-314:
I told him [Charlie Chaplin] everything that had happened to me [after the divorce], the collapse, the
constant melancholia and depressions. I told him how hard I had tried to find myself all these years, in
and out of show business, searching for approval, for identity. I spoke as simply as possible, trying not
to white, trying not to sound absurd.

...then, never taking his eyes off the road, he spoke as I'd never heard him speak before.

"Does it help to know that we all look for these things, for love, for identity, for true evaluation? It
doesn't come easily. Some of us never find it."

"Identity? You've always had that."

He shook his head. "I've been looking for it all my life. If I ever do find it, it will be because of Oona."
[Chaplin's fourth wife, who stayed with him until he died in 1977]

"Why were you always such a mystery to me, Charlie?" I asked. "Why couldn't we every really reach
each other?"
"Because I didn't understand myself," he said. "All I knew was that I was always afraid of people, afraid
to be hurt. I couldn't ever quite believe that anyone could love me. I was sensitive about being a small
man with an oversized head and such small hands and feet. I never understood women. When they got
too close I conquered them, but I couldn't love them for long because I was convinced they couldn't
love me. Fantastic, isn't it? But there's the secret story of the self-assured Charlie Chaplin."

He paused, as though reviewing our brief years together, so long before. "Lita, if it's any possible
consolation, I'll tell you that even when I was at my most abominable, I knew I was disappointing you
terribly, and I was wretched with it. I excused myself by saying my work was my whole life and I had
to guard it with my life, but of course that's poppycock. I was simply determined to hold back from
giving of myself. That was my pattern with you, and Mildred, and Paulette. If there were a God I'd
pray to Him to not let me repeat this dreary pattern with Oona. I protected myself by hurting you, by
driving you to leave me. Does it help to say I'm sorry? I doubt it?"

Chaplin was reportedly a client of celebrity astrologer Carroll Righter. From: Stefan Kanfer, Ball of Fire:
The Tumultuous Life and Comic Art of Lucille Ball, Alfred A. Knopf: New York (2003), page 202:
...the lectures of Carroll Righter. The man who called himself "the Gregarious Aquarius" had risen to
the status of Astrologer to the Stars. Among his clients were Cary Grant, Marlene Dietrich, Susan
Hayward, and Charlie Chaplin. Dahl was especially impressed; she attended many of "Righter's "zodiac
parties," given for his favorites. The fete he gave for her had a Leo theme, complete with lion. The big
cat was so drugged he fell into the swimming pool and had to be hauled out, but no one saw this as an
embarrassment. Righter was much too important to be mocked. It was common knowledge that he
had told Hayward the best time to sign a film contract was exactly 2:47 a.m. She set her alarm for 2:45
so that she could obey his instructions. Like the others, she agreed with the astrologer's self-appraisal:
"They need me here. Just like they need a doctor."
Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography, page 321:
Dr. Reynolds... asked Einstein if he believed in ghosts. Einstein confessed he had never seen one, and
added, "When twelve other persons have witnessed the same phenomenon at the same time, then I
might believe."

At that time psychic phenomena were rife and ectoplasm loomed over Hollywood like smog, especially
in the homes of the movie stars, where spiritualist meetings and demonstrations of levitation and
psychic phenomena took place. I did not attend these affairs, but Fanny Brice, the celebrated
comedienne, swore that at a spiritualist meeting she had seen a table rise and float about the room. I
asked the professor if he had ever witnessed such phenomena. He smiled blandly and shook his head.

Dozens of Atheist websites have latched onto Charlie Chaplin and have classified him as an atheist,
always doing so on the basis of a quote that appears in Manual of a Perfect Atheist, by Mexican writer
Rius. That book claims that Chaplin said: "By simple common sense I don't believe in God, in none."
It is possible that Chaplin said this; it is also possible that this is a misquote. Chaplin's biographies
make it clear that Chaplin was not an active adherent of any traditional religious group, but the
classification of Chaplin as an atheist runs counter to Chaplin's own repeated claims that he was not an
atheist, but was agnostic. Given what Chaplin himself wrote in his autobiography, published when he
was 75 years old, and what his family members wrote about him, it calling Chaplin an atheist seems
untenable.

From: Mail.Jewish Mailing List, Volume 26 Number 40, produced: 6 May 1997 (URL:
http://www.ottmall.com/mj_ht_arch/v26/mj_v26i40.html#CMD):

From: Harry Chaim Mehlman [mehlman@melb.alexia.net.au]

Date: Wed, 7 May 1997
Subject: Is Charlie Chaplin Jewish?

According to all his biographies (some of which trace his lineage back to the Huguenots - French
Protestants), Chaplin was not Jewish. His older half-brother Sydney probably had a Jewish father. No-
one is absolutely sure, since the man never married Chaplin's mother. (No doubt he did not believe in
intermarriage...) That seems to be the sum total of Chaplin's Jewish family connection. Charlie's father
was Charles Chaplin Sr.

Many people mistakenly thought Chaplin was Jewish, especially after "The Great Dictator" and his
other public defenses of the Jews. It is well known that Chaplin identified strongly with the Jewish
people. During World War II he stopped denying he was Jewish, since he felt that to do that was
"playing into the hands of anti-semites". Presumably he meant that denial implied shame.

Chaplin made his anti-Hitler movie The Great Dictator before Americans were fully aware of the extent
of what Hitler was doing in Europe. Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography, page 405:
A young New York scion asked me in a benign way why I was so anti-Nazi. I said because they were
anti-people. "Of course," he said, as though making a sudden discovery, "you're a Jew, aren't you?"

"One doesn't have to be a Jew to be anti-Nazi," I answered. "All one has to be is a normal decent
human being." And so the subject was dropped.

At one time an atheist website (http://www.gr8st8.com/main_pages/atheists.htm, viewed 1 October

2003) listed Chaplin as a "Jewish actor" and an atheist. All available published biographies,
autobiographies and academic sources indicate that Chaplin was not Jewish, nor did he identify himself
as an atheist.

While still a young comedian just starting out in London, Chaplin tried out some Jewish humor, but
soon gave up on it. Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography, pages 96-97:

At the time Jewish comedians were all the rage in London, so I thought I would hide my youth under
my whiskers... I had obtained a trial week without pay at the Forester's Music Hall, which was a small
theatre situated off the Mile End Road in the center of the Jewish quarter... my comedy was most anti-
Semitic, and my jokes were not only old ones but very poor, like my Jewish accent. Moreover, I was
not funny.

After the first couple of jokes the audience started throwing coins and orange peels and stamping their
feet and booing. At first I was not conscious of what was going on. Then the horror if it filtered into
my mind. I began to hurry and talk faster as the jeers, the razzberries [sic] and the throwing of coins
and orange peels increased. When I came off the stage, I did not wait to hear the verdict from the
management; I went straight to the dressing room... let the theatre and never returned...

Charles Chaplin, Jr., My Father, Charlie Chaplin, pages 71-72:

My father [Charlie Chaplin] usually slept in the far bed... I recall the pulp detective magazines that were
always stacked by his bed. My father might read Spengler and Schopenhauer and Kant for edification,
but for sheer relaxation he chose murder mysteries...

In the drawer of the night stand beside his bed, my father kept a thirty-eight caliber automatic, with its
bullets. He would sometimes show it to Syd and me, though we never saw him fire it.

"I practice with it," he would tell us. "I'm not a bad marksman." I could tell by the way he handled it
that it gave him as much a sense of security as the samurai sword downstairs gave me.

Charles Chaplin, Jr., My Father, Charlie Chaplin, page 196:

Among the fiction writers, Dad's favorites were Charles Dickens and Maupassant, perhaps because of
the peculiar combination of the humorous and the macabre in their works. He also liked Edgar Allan
Poe, Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain. The philosophers he read included Nietzsche, Emerson, Robert
Ingersoll (whom he got through when he was seventeen), Schopenhauer and Spengler. I remember
how one day when I was older my father took down a volume of Schopenhauer and handed it to me.

"You ought to read him, son," he said. "You don't need to take him too seriously, though--especially
what he says about women. He's bitter, a great pessimist, but he's amusing."
Dad was fascinated by Spengler's Decline of the West. He set great store by the writings of Aldous Huxley
and Will Durrant, both of whom were visitors at his home.

Bowman, pages 100-101:

One of the best examples of this more matured style is "The Pilgrim." In this comedy, which was first
produced in 1922, Charlie introduces himself to the public as a convict who has just escaped from
prison, and is wearing prison garb. This he is anxious to exchange for something less revealing and
conspicuous. He steals the clothes of a clergyman who is enjoying a swim, and hastily dresses himself
in them. Then as he is hurrying along the road he encounters an elderly couple, who take him for a
clergyman and wish him to marry them.

This is very awkward, but worse troubles follow. The people of a neighboring town are expecting the
visit of an eminent minister who is to preach a special sermon in their church. When Charlie arrives
there, the inhabitants at once assume that he is the preacher they expect. He tries in vain to shuffle out
of the predicament. At last he finds himself in the pulpit facing a large congregation, waiting to hear a
sermon.

Charlie preaches. It must have been an extraordinary sermon, judging by its effect on the congregation.
Some look horrified, others surprised, while the young people present are obviously amused. In the
picture we see Charlie telling the Biblical story of the combat between David and Goliath. This is one
of the most marvelous pieces of pantomimic acting Charlie ever achieved. So expressive are his
movements and gestures that we can follow every incident of the narrative without the use of words.

This is the culminating triumph of the play, and a fine example of Chaplin's genius in pantomimic art.

Charles Chaplin, Jr., My Father, Charlie Chaplin, pages 337-340:

Other people put the question... "Is your father [Charlie Chaplin] really a Communist?"... I used to go
into long, heated explanations about why he wasn't. But if you meet enough people and try to answer
everyone, you spend the rest of you life explaining things. Now I have a different approach.

"Look, I think that's really a silly question," I tell them. "Why don't you look up the facts and figure it
out for yourself. But if you want a short, straightforward answer, I'll tell you myself right now--he's not
and he never was."

[page 338] How did my father ever come to be considered a Communist, or even a fellow traveler?
This is the second chief irony of his long career, just as getting labeled an immoral philanderer was the
first...

[page 339] He [Charlie Chaplin] always felt that the degradation of the very poor is the cruelest of all
suffering. I remember how horrified he was by the wretched poverty he saw in India... and how
admiringly he spoke of Mahatma Gandhi, who joined with the outcasts when he could have lived a
very comfortable life. Gandhi, he said, was not only one of the most brilliant men he'd ever met, but
one of the most godlike as well...

[page 340] Outside these convictions my father's "politics" are extremely catholic. He will go through
the various world systems, picking out the high points in each. On the one hand he used to praise
Hitler's early concern for the common man and his interest in public works. On the other he approved
of the way the Russians kept their artists from the front lines and generously subsidized them. It was
only after the war that he realized the Communists, while carefully nurturing the physical welfare of
their creative geniuses, were forcing them to direct their talents to propaganda purposes... From the
Far East he borrowed the peaceful mysticism of Buddhism to add to his potpourri, and his attachment
to England has always been warm and sentimental.

Charles Chaplin, Jr., My Father, Charlie Chaplin, pages 210-211:

It was time, he [Charlie Chaplin] could see, to have a stab at sex education with his sons. I remember
the day when he first broached the subject to us. The sun was setting and we were walking around
Dad's estate, all three of us looking at nature in general. Dad always seems to wax most expansive at
sunset... And so he chose that hour to talk of sex to Syd and me. First he spoke poetically of the
flowers and how they grow. From the flowers he passed on to the birds, and then the animal world.
And finally he was describing how it was with human beings, how we one and all without exception
had come into the world. He told us that in the female body the male cell meets the female and from
this mysterious union a new life is conceived.

"There's some Force that causes it," he said. "Who can tell what that Force is? But it's beautiful and
mysterious."

Dad never did get around to telling us just how the male cell gets an opportunity to meet the female
cell. He seemed relieved when we assured him we had learned all those details from Mr. Mourat.

Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography, page 208:

A well-known lady novelist, hearing I was writing my autobiography, said: "I hope you have the
courage to tell the truth." I thought she meant politically, but she was referring to my sex life. I
suppose a dissertation on one's libido is expected in an autobiography, although I do not know why.
To me it contributes little to the understanding or revealing of character. Unlike Freud, I do not
believe sex is the most important element in the complexity of behavior. Cold, hunger and the shame
of poverty are more likely to affect one's psychology.

Like everybody's else my sex life went in cycles... But it was not the all-absorbing interest in my life. I
had creative interests which were just as absorbing. However, in this book I do not intend to give a
blow-by-blow description of a sex bout: I find them inartistic, clinical and unpoetic.

Charles Chaplin, Jr., My Father, Charlie Chaplin, page 76:

He [Charlie Chaplin] seldom entertained [had guests over to his home] in the days before his marriage
to Paulette. And he always had tea and crumpets with marmalade served every Sunday afternoon at
four. Tea and crumpets, the symbol of solid English comfort and security, was a little ritual with my
father.

"It's four o'clock, boys," he would religiously inform us on the week ends we spent with him. "Time
for tea and crumpets as it's done in England just at this hour."

...Dad couldn't have found better servants to fulfill his almost impossible dream of how a good house
should be run than his small Japanese staff of three... I guess there never were any servants like those
Japanese servants of his; they seemed to have an almost intuitive rapport with him.

Actually, there is a rapport between my father and the whole Japanese race. They understand and love
his pantomime, which has so much in common with the tradition of their own Kabuki theater. My
father, or his part, fell in love with the Kabuki style of acting, with its stress on pantomime, from the
first time he saw a Japanese troupe performing in this country. He liked the Japanese on another score.
They were perfectionists at heart, and perfectionism down to the slightest detail is my father's passion.
If he ever showed any snobbery it was in this field. He wouldn't put up with an inefficient worker.
[More pages describing these Japanese servants in detail.]

Notes from Chaplin's first U.S. tour. Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography, pages 129-134:
We finished our first tour in Salt Lake City, the home of the Mormons, which made me think of Moses
leading the children of Israel. It is a gaping wide city that seems to waver in the heat of the sun like a
mirage, with wide streets that only a people who had traversed vast plains would conceive. Like the
Mormons, the city is aloof and austere--and so was the audience...

[page 130] I felt sad as we drew near to the end of our second tour. There were three weeks more: San
Francisco, San Diego, then Salt Lake City and back to England... In Salt Lake City, the newspapers
were full of holdups and bank robberies. Customers in night clubs and cafes were being lined up
against the wall and robbed by masked bandits with stockings over their faces. There were three
robberies in one night and they were terrorizing the whole city. [On pages 130 to 131 Chaplin recounts
how in a saloon after his show in Salt Lake City he met the actual robbers who were responsible for
the crime spree in Salt Lake: They were fellow Englishmen, and they greeted Chaplin warmly and had a
drink with them. Chaplin kept the confidence of his fellow countrymen, although.]

...Then he spoke confidentially, bringing his face close to my ear. "See those two guys?" h whispered,
referring to his friends. "That's my outfit, two dumb clucks--no brains but plenty o' guts."

I put a finger to my lips cautiously, indicating that he might be overheard.

"We're O.K., brother, we're shipping out tonight." He continued, "Listen, we're limeys, ain't we--from
the old smoke? I seen you at the Islington Empire many a time, falling in and out of that box." He
grimaced. "That's a tough racket, brother."

I laughed.

As he grew more confidential, he wanted to make a lifelong friend of me and to know my address in
New York. "I'll drop you a line just for old times' sake," he said. Fortunately, I never heard from him
again.

[page 134]...As much as I liked New York, I also looked forward to the West, to greeting again those
acquaintances whom I now looked up as warm friends... MacAbee, the Scottish mine-owner of Salt
Lake City...

From: Lita Grey Chaplin, My Life with Chaplin, page 39:

Charlie Chaplin did go into hibernation right after The Kid, but not to concentrate on his next movie...
Mildred Harris [Chaplin's first wife] sued him for divorce.

...Mildred was charging him with mental cruelty, and her attorneys were not only demanding temporary
alimony for her and trying to prevent him from disposing of his assets, but they were seeking an order
as well for a division of community property. He had fled to Utah in the dead of night with the
negative of The Kid under his arm, aware if the picture were to remain in California, half of the profits
from its eventual distribution would legally be his wife's, under the community property law. By
fleeing, he could escape his own state's power to attach his assets--and the most significant asset at the
time was the negative of The Kid.

Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography, pages 241-242:

My lawyer was surprised--"there's something in the wind," he said--and there was. I had been having
disagreements with First National over The Kid... Lawsuits were threatened. Legally they had little
chance and they knew it. Therefore, they decided to operate through Mildred [Chaplin's first wife, who
he was divorcing at the time that The Kid was in post-production] and try to attach The Kid.

As I had not finished cutting the film, my instinct told me to cut it in another state. So I set out for Salt
Lake City with a staff of two and over 400,000 feet of film, which consisted of five hundred rolls. We
stayed at the Hotel Utah. In one of the bedrooms we laid out the film, using every piece of furniture--
ledges, commodes and drawers--to put the rolls of film in. It being against the law to have anything
dangerously inflammable in a hotel, we had to go about it secretly. Under these circumstances we
continued cutting the picture. We had over two thousand takes to sort out, and, although they were
numbered, one would occasionally get lost and we would be hours searching for it on the bed, under
the bed, in the bathroom, until we found it. With such heartbreaking handicaps and without the proper
facilities, by some miracle we finished the cutting.

And now I had the terrifying ordeal of previewing it before an audience. I had only seen it with a small
cutting machine, through which a picture no larger than a postcard was projected onto a towel. I was
thankful that I had seen the rushes at my studio on a normal-size screen, but now I had a depressing
feeling that fifteen months' work had been done in the dark.
Nobody had seen the picture except the studio staff. After running it a number of times on the cutting
machine, nothing looked as funny or as interesting as we had imagined. We could only reassure
ourselves by believing that our first enthusiasm had grown stale.

We decided t give it the acid test and arranged to show it at the local movie theatre without an
announcement. It was a large theatre and three-quarters filled. In desperation I sat and waited for the
film to come on. This particular audience seemed out of sympathy with anything I might present them.
I began to doubt my own judgment as to what an audience would like and react to in comedy. Perhaps
I had made a mistake. Perhaps the whole enterprise would misfire and the audience would look upon it
with bewilderment. Then the sickening thought came to me that a comedian can at times be so wrong
in his ideas about comedy.

Suddenly my stomach jumped up into my throat as a slide appeared on the screen: "Charlie Chaplin in
his latest picture, The Kid.' A scream of delight went up from the audience and scattered applause.
Paradoxically enough, this worried me: they might be expecting too much and be disappointed.

The first scenes were exposition, slow and solemn, and threw me into an agony of suspense. A mother
deserts her baby by leaving it in a limousine, the car is stolen and the thieves eventually leave the baby
near an ash can. Then I appeared--the tramp. There was a laughter that accumulated and increased.
They saw the joke! From then on I could do no wrong. I discovered the baby and adopted it. They
laughed at an improvised a hammock made out of an old sacking and yelled when I fed the child out
of a tea pot with a nipple on the spout, and screamed when I cut a hole through the seat of an old cane
chair, placing it over a chamber-pot--in fact they laughed hysterically throughout the picture.

Now that we had had a showing of the picture, we felt that the cutting was complete, and so we
packed up and left Salt Lake City for the East.

Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography, pages 245-246:

And now the gentlemen of First National came to me, metaphorically, with their hats in their hands.
Said one of the vice-presidents, Mr. Gordon, a large owner of theatres in the Eastern states: "You want
a million and a half dollars and we haven't even seen the picture." I confessed they had something
there, so a showing was arranged... Since the preview in Salt Lake City I had become a little more
confident, but before the showing was half through the confidence had collapsed: where the picture
had got screams at the preview, there were only one or two sniggers. When it was over and the lights
went up, there was a momentary silence. Then they began to stretch and blink and talk about other
matters... Eventually I snapped: "Well, what's the verdict, gentlemen?"...

He hesitated, then grinned. "Charlie, we're here to buy it, not to say how much we like it." [First
National bought distribution rights for $1.5 million, with a deal that gave Chaplin 50% of profits after
that initial investment of $1.5 million was recouped. After five years complete rights reverted back to
Chaplin. The Kid was a big hit nationwide.]