“I was a tramp in that story,” he recalls, “and they wanted me to do all the usual slap-stick stunts. I had to beg them to let me play the part my way. ‘If you want somebody to pull all the old gags,’ I said to Sennett, ‘why do you hire me? You can get a man at twenty-five dollars to do that sort of stuff.’ So at last they gave in to my idea. This I had worked out very carefully. A tramp in a fine hotel--there’s a universal situation for you. Hardly a human being that hasn’t duplicated the feeling of being poor, alone, out of touch with the gay crowd about him, of trying to identify himself somehow with the fine, alien throng. So I did the little touches here of imitation--the pulling down of shabby cuffs, the straightening of my hat, all the gestures that gave a wider meaning to the characterization.” Chaplin’s own account of his start is eloquent of the creative imagination which has made him the supreme exponent of screen art. This first picture was a success. Even so, there were those in the Sennett studios who looked askance upon such advanced methods. “They didn’t really appreciate Charlie in those early days,” so Mabel Normand has often said to me. “I remember numerous times when people in the studio came up and asked me confidentially, ‘Say, do you think he’s so funny? In my mind he can’t touch Ford Sterling.’ They were just so used to slap-stick that imaginative comedy couldn’t penetrate.” When Chaplin went out to California to make his first pictures he found the pantomimist just quoted a star in the Sennett organization. After having been a model for Gibson and other noted illustrators, Mabel had worked with Mary Pickford and Blanche Sweet in the Biograph studios. She was still here when Sennett, meeting her on the street one day, said, “How about going to California at a hundred dollars a week? I’ve just got some backing for my company and I’m going to settle out there in a short time.” Mabel had been rendered incredulous by her salary at the Biograph. She was so sceptical of there being any such salary as a hundred dollars a week that Sennett’s backers, to whom he had referred her, thought she was hesitating because of the insufficiency of the recompense. They thereupon offered her twenty-five dollars more. Not long ago my friend Edgar Selwyn, the theatrical producer and playwright, said to me: “We hear so much about our successful stars as they are to-day. Yet most of us are a great deal more curious to hear the details of their earlier years.” With this in mind I am devoting a short space to the Sennett studio of a former time, for, although these days did not come under my direct observation, they have been described to me so often by Mabel Normand and Chaplin and Sennett himself that they seem almost like a portion of my own experience. Certainly, too, such flash-backs are necessary to a complete participation in the stories of my own immediate contacts with these two stars.