A Visit to the Past at Essanay

A rather nondescript street runs east and west on Chicago's north side. It's on Argyle Avenue, just a couple blocks north of Lawrence Avenue. I mention this because I was in Chicago over a July 4th weekend about ten years ago. My wife and I, along with our son - who lives in Chicago - and our daughter, who was in from NYC, spent about two hours at The Green Mill, Al Capone's storied speakeasy and now a jazz club on Broadway.

The following morning I remembered that Charlie Chaplin had a brief stay in Chicago, after he had signed with Essanay Pictures. By brief I mean a little over a month. Charlie had left Mack Sennett and Keystone for a supposedly better deal from George Spoor and G. M. Anderson. Hence the "S" and "A."  They promised him a lot, but it took some time for them to deliver. In the meantime,  Charlie moved to Chicago. Talk about timing. He arrived in December of 1914.

The Essanay Film Manufacturing Company had been in business for seven years before they signed Chaplin, for the unheard of amount of $1250 a week plus a signing bonus of $10,000. The bonus was late in coming. So Charlie went to work on his first film, appropriately titled "His New Job." It would be his only film completed in Chicago.

Winter in Chicago, during January of 1915, would prove more than he could stand. He packed up and headed west to Niles, California, where Essanay had another studio. Charlie didn't  care for the working environment at either place, but at least the temperatures didn't sink below freezing in Niles. In less than a year, Chaplin would leave Essanay and sign with Mutual Films, to begin one of his most productive and satisfying segments of his creative life.

Now comes the part under the heading of "Small World." Many years ago, when I was working at D'Arcy Advertising, we had to shoot some cat food commercials for Ralston-Purina. The product was a small tin of meat for cats called Purina 95. That meant it was 95% meat, although I never really wanted to know where the meat came from. For budgetary reasons, we decided to shoot  in Chicago instead of L.A. The winning bid was submitted by Wilding Studios. The shoot would take place - you guessed it. At the old Essanay Studios.  I even remember the director's name. Lutz Hopke. He spoke with a heavy German accent.

I wandered around the stage, looking for traces of Charlie - props, sets, announcements taped to a wall, pieces of his past. I could find no trace of him on the stage or in any of the offices and storage spaces. This was around  1972 or '73.  That's a long time after Charlie had left Chicago. Still, I was on hallowed ground, slightly desecrated by cat food.

I have read occasional articles that attempts were made, are being made, will be made, to establish some sort of tribute or memorial to Chaplin at the 1345 W. Argyle address. The building today, as of and an adjacent structure, is owned by the St. Augustine School, which caters to Hispanic students and is church affiliated. The main meeting hall is named the Charlie Chaplin Auditorium.

So here I was, almost one hundred years after a young Charlie Chaplin got off the train in Chicago for a brief stint, standing outside the gates of Essanay, beneath the Indianhead logo. If it hadn't been a holiday weekend, and I could have entered the building, I know I would have picked up a trace of The Little Tramp. A shadow, a gesture, a twitch of the mustache, a flip of the derby, a twirl of the cane. Because, as we all know, some things never die.