Did Charlie Chaplin Once Lose His Own Lookalike Contest?

Charlie Chaplin’s immense popularity in the mid-teens was coined “Chaplinitis” in the press. Film critic David Robinson described the phenomenon in his definitive Chaplin: His Life and Art:

“Costume balls were in great vogue in 1917 but magazine writers constantly complained that they were spoiled because most of the girls came as Annette Kellerman, the swimming star, and nine out of ten men came as Charlie Chaplin. In February 1917 Charlie Chaplin costume was used as a disguise by a hold-up man in Cincinnati. About the same time the Boston Society for Psychical Research was investigating ‘certain phenomena connected with the simultaneous paging of Mr Charles Chaplin, motion picture comedian, in more than 800 large hotels of the United States’. This surprising psychopathological phenomenon was supposed to have been observed on 12 November 1916 across the country from the Atlantic to the Pacific coasts, and from the Canadian boundary to the Gulf. Professor Bamfylde More Carew, a member of the society and author of the paper on the phenomenon, pointed out that Chaplin with his ‘singular brand of humor’ had become an American obsession, and that among young and active minds of the country, Chaplin was a subject of constantly recurrent thought. …
There was more concrete evidence of Chaplin’s unique appeal in Photo-play News on 3 March 1917: several cinema managements reported that after two weeks’ run of Chaplin comedies it had been necessary to tighten up the bolts in the theatre seats, since the audience had laughed so hard that the vibration had loosened them.” (Robinson, 2001, p. 223-224. Original work published 1985)

The Chaplin Craze also brought on a surge of Charlie Chaplin merchandise, sheet music, songs – as well as imitators, counterfeit “Charlie Chaplin” films, and lookalike competitions.

According to press clippings from 1918 in the Chaplin Archives, when Mary Pickford was in London at an Anglo Saxon Club dinner, she told a story to Lord Desborough who repeated it to the press that Charles Chaplin entered a Chaplin walk contest at a fair in the US and came in 20th.

This anecdote told by Lord Desborough, whoever he may have been, was quite widely reported in the British press at the time. One journalist accurately noted in an article that this story “will have an enduring life”. Various versions of this so-called “perfect story” were spread in the 1920s and 30s, and are still being spread today over a century later.

There are no earlier references to Chaplin entering such a competition in any other of the press clipping scrapbooks in the Chaplin Archives, so this was presumably the original source of the story.

Decades later, Charles Chaplin Jr wrote in his book, My Father, Charlie Chaplin that his father entered a competition and came in third, not 20th. He wrote that people around the world “went to his pictures. They flocked to see him when he traveled. They held countless Charlie Chaplin contests. Dad told me about one of these that had taken place before I was born. It was at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, and there were thirty or forty people on the stage doing their best to imitate Dad. Dad was one of them. He’d gone up incognito to see how he would fare. He came in third. Dad always thought this one of the funniest jokes imaginable — whether on him or the judges or both, I don’t know.” (Chaplin, 1960, p. 202-203)

It should be noted that Grauman’s Chinese Theatre opened in 1927, after Charlie Chaplin Jr’s birth in 1925, and nearly one decade after the earliest mention of Chaplin entering a lookalike contest in the press clippings in our archives. Further, Charlie Chaplin Jr’s account was written decades after the purported lookalike competition was supposed to have taken place.

In 1966, six years after Charlie Chaplin Jr’s book was published, Chaplin himself debunked the story in an interview with Richard Meryman. When asked about another rumor that he had made a mistake when creating his famous costume and makeup by cutting a big moustache “too small”, Chaplin explained, “That’s not true. Like the legend, I entered a competition – every week they had a competition of who was the best Charlie Chaplin – and they had it on Main Street – prizes like $25 and the legend is that I went in and came in third. … In the first place,” he continued, “I’m working hard all day. I certainly don’t want to do that.”

It seems, therefore, that the “perfect story” was too good to be true.

Article by Arnold Lozano