Charles "Chic" Sale

Charles Partlow "Chic" Sale (August 25, 1885 – November 7, 1936) was an American actor, author, and vaudevillian born in Huron, South Dakota and raised in Urbana, Illinois. He was the son of Frank and Lillie Belle (née Partlow) Sale and the brother of actress and writer Virginia Sale-Wren. Sale built his reputation on portrayals of older men and rural characters, a specialty that defined his work across vaudeville, Broadway, film, and print.

Sale's Broadway career spanned 1917 to 1930 and included appearances in the Ziegfeld Midnight Frolic of 1919, the revue Hello, Paris, the play Monte Cristo, and the 1926 revue Gay Paree, in which he starred. His work in the Ziegfeld productions and at the Shubert Winter Garden was noted during this period of his career.

By 1920, Sale had completed a tour in which he performed rural character parts, after which he was engaged by Christie Studios in Los Angeles. Charles Christie, the business head of the studio, contracted with Exceptional Pictures to produce a Sale film to be distributed through Robertson-Cole. That film, eventually titled His Nibs, was adapted from Irvin S. Cobb's The Smart Aleck and co-starred Colleen Moore. The picture functioned as a spoof of the backwater characterizations that defined Sale's stage persona. He continued working in Hollywood in comic roles until his death, with one notable departure from comedy coming in 1935, when he portrayed President Abraham Lincoln in the short film The Perfect Tribute, which dramatized Lincoln's disappointment at the initial public reaction to the Gettysburg Address.

In 1929, drawing on a carpenter from his hometown of Urbana whom he identified as "Lem Putt," Sale wrote The Specialist, a comedic piece about a privy builder. Because copyright infringement was common in vaudeville, he enlisted newspaper political cartoonist Roy James to adapt the material into a book, with James's illustrations expanding the work's appeal. The book achieved considerable success, and Sale spent months responding to fan mail generated by it. He subsequently wrote two additional books, The Champion Cornhusker Crashes the Movies and I'll Tell You Why.

The Specialist brought Sale a degree of notoriety that outlasted his other achievements. Comedians including Groucho Marx referenced the work in their routines, and Sale is mentioned by name in the Marx Brothers film Animal Crackers, in an exchange between the characters Ravelli and Captain Spaulding. For years following its publication, and continuing after Sale's death, the name "Chic Sale" was used colloquially as a euphemism for an outhouse, a development Sale found deeply unflattering. Late in his life, Sale observed that he had spent his early career playing an eighty-year-old man and his middle years playing young men's parts, and speculated that if he reached seventy he expected to rival Shirley Temple. He did not reach that age, dying of lobar pneumonia on November 7, 1936, at fifty-two.