Distinctly Montana Magazine

W W W. D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA NA . C O M 113 was eventually cornered in a blind alley without harm, fortunately." He recorded the event, evi- dently with relish, as "gunplay in the street." But the town was far from without culture. It had a wealth of theaters — 14 of them by 1917 — including the Broadway eater, which contained the highest number of seats west of Chicago, and Maguire's Grand Opera House, which under- went a frantic series of name changes in the early 20th century, becoming first the Orpheum, next the Majestic, and then the Empress before it would burn down in 1912. e miners, cowboys, entrepreneurs, and working girls who paid their admission to see Charlie and the others perform on one of those evenings in 1911 would have seen a performance that would, later, be recognizable to fans of Chaplin's Little Tramp. ey would have enjoyed, well in advance of the nation at large, the same improbably graceful pratfalls, the same mixture of pathos and hilarity, that would make Charlie Chaplin the world's biggest movie star less than a decade later. e show, called "A Night at an English Music Hall," adapted from a play called e Mumming Birds, would in fact be adapted, by Charlie himself, as a short film called A Night in the Show. ough the film was silent, the shows at the Majestic would not have been, ringing instead with the sound of laughter and the clinking of glass on glass. But it was another of Butte's attractions on which Chaplin would remark in his autobiography. e Karno Company, many of whom were young men in alternating states of adventure-hungry and homesick, were fascinated by Butte's legendary red-light district. Chaplin would remember later that "it consisted of a long street and several side streets containing a hundred cribs, where young girls were installed… for one dollar." e boys in the Karno Company had frequented red-light districts across the country, but Chaplin remarked that "Butte boasted of having the prettiest women of any red-light district in the West, and it was true." In fact, the women employed in Butte's brothels were a cut above in that they were better dressed as well. "If one saw a pretty girl smartly dressed, one could rest assured she was from the red-light quarter, doing her shopping." Later, Chaplin would offer W. Somerset Maugham advice regarding a character in Maugham's play Rain, about a lady of the evening in the South Pacific. e character, originally, had been made up "rather grotesquely, as I remember, with spring-side boots. I told him that no harlot in Butte, Montana, could make money if she dressed like that." e soiled doves of Butte, Montana were memorable enough in Charlie's estimation that he would bring them up to friends and acquain- tances for years to come. According to A.J. Marriott's book Chaplin Stage by Stage, Chaplin's first stay in Butte lasted six days, from the Saturday, April 15th through Friday the 21st of April. In between theatrical performances and wooing the city's girls, Chaplin and his mates, including his then roommate Stanley Laurel, of Laurel and Hardy fame, saw the sights. His autobiography doesn't re- cord what all they took in, but some photographs from the Chaplin archives tell us more. Two in particular are of inter- est. ey show Charlie and his friends, nattily dressed to the nines, standing on the Continental Divide. ree of them, including Chaplin, are seated on a large rock. He appears to be making a comical face, or maybe just squinting into the light. e photograph is labeled, appropriately enough, "In Butte City, Montana." And then, underneath, as if it were necessary to differentiate from all the other Buttes in the world, it reads "U.S.A." e Fred Karno Company's vaudeville tour of the Americas would last until November of 1913, by which time Chaplin was thoroughly in love with America. Over the course of the company's ramblings, Chaplin would visit Butte a total of The Grand Theater is now the Maguire Opera House.

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