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Chaplin at the Windsor!
With news that the Windsor Hotel is set to close at the end of April, I wrote a history of the building for my Winnipeg Places blog. A part of Windsor Hotel lore is that Charlie Chaplin once stayed there back in its day as the LaClaire Hotel.
Chaplin's name also appears in a number of other stories about Winnipeg's history. It seems he played at many of the city's older theatres, may have signed his movie contract here, and Groucho Marx is said to have first set eyes on the comedian on a stage here.
How much of this is fact and how much of it is urban legend? Here's a deep-dive into Charlie Chaplin's Winnipeg connections.
DID CHAPLIN COME TO WINNIPEG?
Yes, Charlie Chaplin came to Winnipeg at least four times as part of Fred Karno's
travelling vaudeville show of British actors that toured North
America. According to the website fredkarnocompany.com, Chaplin was with the troupe from October 1910 to December 1913.
Chaplin's first trip to Canada in 1910, at the age of 21, involves an anecdote about Winnipeg, (see above). It was published as part of a wire story about the actor and was picked up in the August 2, 1913 edition of the Winnipeg Tribune.
The Dominion / Empress Theatre (Rob McInnis Postcard Collection)
The Karno company always played the Empress / Dominion Theatre which was located at 175 Portage Avenue East and operated by the American-based Sullivan-Considine theatre circuit. This contradicts the histories of many old theatres in the city, such as the Playhouse and Walker, that claim Charlie Chaplin played there.
Actors did not "freelance" when they got to town. They arrived under contract as part of a larger touring show and only played theatres owned by, or otherwise associated with, that specific circuit. They would not have been allowed to jump off and go do shows for Pantages (Playhouse), Walker or any other competing vaudeville circuits when passing through.
Reading various biographical articles about Chaplin, there's no evidence that he came to Canada prior to 1910 with any other travelling shows and any newspaper mentions of him playing live in Winnipeg were always as part of the Karno company in Sullivan-Considine's Empress / Dominion Theatre.
Some theatres histories even claim that Chaplin performed there live after 1913 which is not true as he was already in the movie business churning out dozens of shorts per year starting in March 1914 and by the end of the decade was making million-dollar feature films.
Thousands of ads do appear in local papers starting in 1914 proclaiming "Charlie Chaplin at the X theatre tonight" but that was a film showing, not a live show.
April 1, 1911, Winnipeg Tribune
The first newspaper mention of "the Karnos" coming to Winnipeg was for
a rare two-week stint in January 1910. Locals were treated to the final
week's run of "A Night in an English Movie Hall" and then the troupe changed
over to a new play called "A Night in the Slums of London".
If Chaplin joined the troupe in October 1910 he would not have been part of this show and there is no mention of him in any of the newspaper coverage.
April 1911: The next time the Karnos came to Winnipeg was in April 1911 with "A Night in an English Music Hall". This time around, Chaplin would have been in the cast but was still fairly unknown and didn't get separate billing in ads for the show.
A brief Free Press review noted that the play was good, if not a bit vulgar in places, and that "The chief amusement is furnished by the diverting antics of a small boy and the old roué." That old man was most likely Chaplin.
September 8, 1911, Winnipeg Tribune
September 1911: The Karno company was back at the Empress for the week of September 4, 1911 with "A Night in a London Club". This appears to have been a smaller show than the "English Music Hall" with just a cast of ten. Sullivan and Considine had to pack in more "filler" acts than usual around the headliner.
The show received a lot less attention in the papers than other Karno visits and none of the small newspaper write-ups or ads for the show mention Chaplin by name.
The Free Press wrote in its September 5th edition that "Hundreds were turned away from each performance" on opening day. (Sometimes reporting in the theatre section of the papers has to be taken with a
grain of salt as they were more "advertorials" promoting the shows as they were news stories.)
March 2, 1912, Winnipeg Tribune
March 1912: The Karno company's "A Night in an English Music Hall" with Chaplin was back at Winnipeg's Empress Theatre in March 1912.
The ability of the show to run for years on tour likely had to do with its setup as a play within a play. The cast, ranging from fourteen to twenty five members depending on the run, were divided into a handful of actors playing audience members sitting on stage getting up to antics whilst watching the rest of the cast perform music hall-style skits in front of them.
The "audience" antics and the music hall numbers could be changed up to keep the show fresh and promote the talents of new members as they joined the troupe.
March 5, 1912, Winnipeg Tribune
By this time, Chaplin had become a well-known member of the cast. A line under the preview ads for this Winnipeg run read "25 comedians and Charles Chaplin as the inebriated swell."
The Tribune ran the above photo showing what is said to be the overflow crowd waiting to get into the Monday matinee performance. The C & S Empress Theatre can be seen in the background.
Source: August 2, 1913, Winnipeg Tribune
August 1913: The Karnos were back in Winnipeg in August 1913 with a new show called "A Night in London". It featured a cast of fourteen and there was no mistake who the star of the troupe was this time around.
A number of preview stories, no doubt provided by Karno's publicity
team, were sent to local newspapers in advance of the show's arrival.
One published in the Tribune noted that the cast included: "Charles
Chaplin who is the celebrated inebriate with Karno's London
comedians.... He is a small, dapper little fellow with quite a serious
face and an earnest desire to study everything he sees."
A Winnipeg Tribune reviewer said of the
opening night performance: "(it is) just as funny - as screamingly funny - as
the previous Karno acts and Chaplin assuredly improves each year."
November 23, 1912, Winnipeg Tribune
November 1913: A sign of how gruelling life on the road for a vaudeville actor
could be is that the Karnos were back in Winnipeg for the week of November 25, 1912 with another
play at the Empress entitled "The Wow Wows".
This time around, Chaplin wasn't a drunk and the role contained some spoken lines. He is a camper who annoys fellow campers around him. They get their own back by inviting him to join a secret society called "The Wow Wows" and make him do ridiculous things.
November 23, 1912, Winnipeg Tribune
A Tribune reviewer wrote that on opening night there was "a feeling of suppressed excitement" and that "... basing their expectations on past experiences, the huge audience anticipated something exceptionally good." He concluded that Chaplin delivered "...with his remarkable ability as a comedian, it is impossible for him not to be funny and he gets roars of laughter out of every line, out of every look, and out of every gesture"
A Free Press reviewer noted that "...Charles
Chaplin is as good as ever. It is impossible to describe
the scene more than to say it is a scream from start to finish."
This was the last time Chaplin came to Winnipeg.
GROUCHO AND CHAPLIN IN WINNIPEG
Another bit of Winnipeg / Chaplin lore is that Groucho Marx first saw Chaplin perform in Winnipeg. This did happen, most likely during the August 1913 run of "A Night in London".
Marx explains in his autobiography Groucho and Me (Marx, 1959) that "We were on our way from Duluth to Calgary and had a three-hour layover in Winnipeg."
His brothers found a pool room in which to kill time while Groucho decided to
walk up Main Street, (the layover was likely at Union Station on Main
Street at Broadway). He wrote:
"A half-block away from a frowzy-looking theatre I heard roars of laughter. I decided I had better go in and see who could possibly be that funny. On the stage were eight or ten assorted characters in an act called “A Night at the Club.” One of these actors wore a very small moustache and very large shoes, and while a big, buxom soprano was singing one of Schubert’s lieder, he was alternately spitting a fountain of dry cracker crumbs in the air and beaning her with overripe oranges. By the end of the act the stage was a shambles.
Leaving the theatre, I went back to the
depot to meet my brothers. I told them I had just seen a great comic. I
described him . . . a slight man with a tiny moustache, a cane, a derby
and a large pair of shoes. I then penguin-walked around the depot,
imitating him as best I could. By the time I finished raving about his
antics my brothers could hardly wait to see him."
To read a longer transcript from this section of the book check out this blog post.
December 20, 1912, Vancouver Sun
The brothers caught up with Chaplin in December 1913 when their
Pantages circuit show and the Karnos circuit show overlapped in Vancouver and they went to see him backstage. (Newspaper research indicates that this would have been at the Orpheum Theatre in the last week of December.)
Marx writes that Chaplin told them that he had been offered $500 a week to
go to Hollywood and make pictures but said that he did not think he would take it. Marx replied, “Why not?... Don’t you like money?”
CHAPLIN AND THE LA CLAIRE / WINDSOR HOTEL
Chaplin at the Windsor!
There is, indeed a direct connection between Charlie Chaplin and the Windsor Hotel, or the LaClaire Hotel as it was known in those days. His tramp character can be seen peeking from the top balcony and its south wall sports a mural showing a still from the 1918 film "A Dog's Life".
The connection comes thanks to a ten-page letter that Charles wrote to his older half-brother and business manager Sydney Chaplin on LaClaire Hotel letterhead. He starts out by saying that "I have a lot of good news this time" and he goes on to explain that he had received an offer from Keystone Pictures Studio, run by Quebec-born Mack Sennett, to come to California to make films.
The full letter is part of the Charlie Chaplin archives and there is no doubt that he wrote it from Winnipeg's LaClaire Hotel as the address in on the letterhead.
Source: The Charlie Chaplin Archive
The letter itself is not dated and the Chaplin archives notes only that it is from 1913, which is when Chaplin came to Winnipeg in both August and November. Some sources say this letter is from the November "The Wow Wow's" visit, but that isn't the case for a couple of reasons.
During the November 1913 visit, a Tribune reporter wrote about hanging out with Chaplin and other members of the Karno show who "gathered in Charles Chaplin's suite at the Oxford at midnight last night". The Oxford Hotel is located on Notre Dame Avenue near Portage Avenue and today hosts the Solid Gold strip club on the main floor.
The timing of the August visit also makes more sense if Chaplin honestly wanted to let his brother (and sometimes business manager) know of the offer from Sennett. There's no way he could have written it the week of November 25th with the expectation that it would arrive in London by the time he had already departed vaudeville for a movie career.
Some have speculated that the letter means that Chaplin also signed a contract with Sennett while he was here or that he left Winnipeg to go directly to Hollywood. You will see below that neither of these are true.
A matter not directly related to Chaplin and Winnipeg is the fact that there appears to be a timeline discrepancy between some sources for the latter part of 1913.
In this excerpt from Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema (2003), Vance provides a more detailed account about Sennett's pursuit of Chaplin. Initial contact appears to have taken place in May 1913 and their contract was signed on September 25, 1913 to take effect on December 13, 1913. (Vance cites the signed contract, which is part of the Chaplin archives, for these dates.)
If this is the case, it supports the August run as the Winnipeg visit when Chaplin wrote the LaClaire letter to Sydney as the contract with Keystone had already been signed by the time he came in November.
If Marx's recollection that he met Chaplin in Vancouver in December is correct, it shows that Chaplin was not truthful when he told Marx that he might not sign with Sennett. Perhaps he didn't want to jinx things, or there was a confidentiality clause in the contract, or he was simply playing his cards close to his chest with fellow performers.
Strangely, Chaplin DID perform for Karno after December 13, 1913 when the contract was to take effect. Newspaper ads show that The Wow Wows with Chaplin in the cast played Spokane, Washington the week of December 16 and Vancouver the first week of January. This may have been due to a contractual obligation to Karno that Chaplin and Sennett decided to let play out.
After the show's run ended in Vancouver in early January, Chaplin likely returned home for a stint. This archival photo is said to show Sennett in the U.K. with Charles and Sydney Chaplin signing the contract. It is dated sometime in January 1914 so it was likely a staged photo op of the actual signing that took place back in September.
August 2, 1919, Winnipeg Tribune
Chaplin did not set foot again in Winnipeg after November 1913 but he continued to thrill audiences in local theatres for decades to come through antics on the big screen.
Other urban legends I explore:
Did Bob Hope really play his first game of golf in Winnipeg?
Who had the label longer - Standard or Budweiser?
Was the Arlington Bridge really built to span the Nile?
3 comments:
I love this post, and as a huge Chaplin fan (and new transplant to Winnipeg), I'm excited to know this local history. Thank you!
One thing worth pointing out is that Groucho's memory of seeing Chaplin might be wrong: Chaplin claimed that he didn't bring together the "Tramp" costume until 1914, whereas Groucho saw him in 1913. "Groucho and Me" was written in 1959, so it's possible that Groucho was conflating different memories.
Of course, it could also be that Chaplin's memory was wrong: his story with the 1914 date comes from 1933 (after a LOT had happened to him). Or maybe Chaplin, who wasn't averse to a bit of self-mythologizing, might have invented a "creation story" for the tramp character, when in fact the character had evolved during his time in vaudeville. The fact that The Tramp shows up in Chaplin's second film ever suggests that he might have had the character ready to go already, fully developed by that point.
Either way, thanks again for this fantastic post!
Any idea in what floor or room Chaplin stayed in the hotel?
Hotel is burnt down now.
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