Ben Joravsky and his coauthor [Nadia Oehlsen] resorted to fakelore in making the case for preservation of Uptown’s Plymouth Hotel (“Heartbreak Hotel,” January 24).
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George Spoor (the S of Essanay) and his partner Max Aronson (the A), also known as Broncho Billy Anderson, would be greatly surprised to know that their studio, founded in 1905, was ever Chaplin’s property. Perhaps to Spoor it seemed so because Broncho Billy, without consultation, gave Chaplin a salary of $1,250 a week and a $10,000 bonus to join Essanay in 1915. Gloria Swanson told me in a 1970s interview about her Chicago days that Essanay permitted Chaplin to use the back lot for his “experiments,” as she scornfully termed his slapstick routines.
Gloria Swanson, about 17 years old in 1915, lived with her parents at 820 W. Grace Street in Lakeview until she went with her mother to California, where she later married Wallace Beery, another onetime Essanay performer.
The case for preserving the hotel belonged to the preservationists we profiled, but you’re right that Chaplin didn’t own Essanay Studio, and I’m sorry for the error. As to whether Chaplin, Swanson, and Beery stayed at the Plymouth, I got that information from preservationists who’d researched the building in their efforts to create city and federal landmark districts. I also read it in a June 9, 1931, article in the Uptown News, which says, “When Uptown hotel first began operating in 1913 as Plymouth hotel, Gloria Swanson, George Roberts, Wallace Beery, Charlie Chaplin and many other famous film stars of today were guests.” I should have checked further.
