For the essential part of Waldo Lydecker, Preminger was determined to hire Clifton Webb, who had never made a movie but was then playing in Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit at the Biltmore Theater in Los Angeles. Zanuck was dubious. His casting director, Rufus LeMaire, claimed that he had seen a test that M-G-M had made of Webb. “He doesn’t walk, he flies,” LeMaire sneered. Preminger asked to see the test, and LeMaire promised to produce it, but apparently no such test existed. Webb had been under contract to M-G-M for eighteen months without ever going before a camera. Preminger got Zanuck’s approval to test Webb himself, but Webb refused to be tested. “My dear boy,” he said, according to Preminger, “if your Mr. Zanuck wants to see if I can act let him come to the theater. I don’t know your Miss Tierney. . . .” Zanuck was indignant. “I don’t want to see him on the stage playing Noel Coward. I want to see him on film playing the part of Waldo Lydecker.” Preminger worked out an odd solution. On his own authority, he took a film crew to the Biltmore and filmed Webb delivering a monologue from Blithe Spirit. Then he showed the film to Zanuck, who was still indignant, and Zanuck said, “You’re a son of a bitch, but you’re right. He’s very good.”
By this time, Rouben Mamoulian had been signed up to direct Laura, and Mamoulian had lots of ideas of his own about sets and costumes and how the actors should act. He also asked Preminger, the producer, not to come near the set. “He said I made him nervous,” Preminger recalled. Preminger acquiesced but insisted that the rushes be sent to Zanuck. Zanuck hated them. In the crowded executive dining room at Fox, Zanuck suddenly said to Preminger, “What do you think? Shall I take Mamoulian off the picture?” Preminger’s answer was unequivocal: “Yes.” So Zanuck finally gave him control of Laura, and he made the picture as he pleased, and nobody liked that either. The standard procedure, according to Preminger, was for a rough cut of a finished film to be shown in Zanuck’s projection room, with Zanuck and the director in the front row and “a dozen of Zanuck’s yes-men” arrayed behind them. “They didn’t pay much attention to the picture,” Preminger recalled. “They had developed the art of reading the back of Zanuck’s neck to perfection. They were able to anticipate whether he liked the film or not and adjusted their reaction accordingly.” On this occasion, Zanuck didn’t even ask their opinions but just said gruffly to Preminger, “Well, we missed the boat on this one. Be at my office tomorrow at eleven.”
As usual, Zanuck had a theory on how the picture should be fixed. He walked up and down his office, chewing his cigar, waving his polo mallet, dictating to a secretary his plan for a new ending. The first half of the film was narrated by Lydecker, the second half by the detective. Zanuck wanted a conclusion narrated by Laura herself. Preminger’s reaction was to scowl, as only Preminger could scowl. “If you don’t like it, I’ll get another director,” Zanuck snapped. Preminger professed his willingness to obey orders, if only “to save what I could.”
So Zanuck’s new ending was reluctantly filmed, and then the whole movie was brought back to Zanuck’s projection room. This time, in addition to the yes-men, there was a newcomer sitting in the back of the room, Walter Winchell, accompanied by what Preminger described only as “a young lady.” Winchell was an old friend of Zanuck’s and also a very powerful Hearst columnist and radio newscaster (“Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. North and South America . . . let’s go to press”). Winchell and the girl ignored the back of Zanuck’s neck. They enjoyed the movie. They laughed at the right spots. “Zanuck seemed amazed,” Preminger recalled. “He turned around several times and looked at them. When the screening was over, Winchell walked up to Zanuck and said in his staccato manner: ‘Big time! Big time! Congratulations, Darryl. Except for the ending. I didn’t get it. Didn’t get it.’ ”
Once again, Zanuck demonstrated his ability to change course. “Would you like to put your old ending back?” he asked Preminger. “Yes,” said Preminger. And so it was done. And it was about then that Clifton Webb, whose ill-suppressed hysteria was essential to the malevolent fascination of Laura, suffered a nervous breakdown. He checked himself into a sanitarium in New England. “He came out of it rested and restored,” Miss Tierney said, “but the main effect of his analysis was to encourage him to be rude to his mother.”
After the emotional triumph of The Great Dictator, which also grossed more money than any film that its creator had ever made, Charlie Chaplin floated from one possibility to another. At a dinner with Igor Stravinsky, the composer suggested that they try a collaboration, and Chaplin began improvising. The film would be set in a nightclub. The floor show would be the crucifixion of Christ. Most of the customers ignore it. A group of businessmen at one table go on talking excitedly about a big deal. At another table, a woman says, “I can’t understand why people come here. It’s depressing.” “It’s good entertainment,” says her husband. “The place was bankrupt until they put on this show. Now they are out of the red.” A drunk starts to shout: “Look, they’re crucifying him! And nobody cares!” Stravinsky, who was then undergoing some kind of religious crisis—this was the period in which he wrote his great Mass—looked appalled. “That’s sacrilegious!” he declared. “Is it?” Chaplin protested. “I never intended it to be.”
At a lunch with Sir Cedric Hardwicke and Sinclair Lewis, he heard the two of them extol Paul Vincent Carroll’s Shadow and Substance, in which Hardwicke had recently starred. Lewis said the character of Bridget was a modern Joan of Arc. Chaplin was interested, partly because he was also interested in a would-be actress named Joan Barry. She told him that she had seen the play on Broadway, and she asked to read some of Bridget’s scenes from the script that Hardwicke had sent to Chaplin. Chaplin was surprised and impressed by her “excellent reading.” He put her under contract at $250 per week and sent her to Max Reinhardt’s acting school. He also bought the film rights to Shadow and Substance for $25,000 and set to work writing a screenplay. He soon began to have doubts about Miss Barry, however, about both her talent and her stability.
Then Orson Welles came to Chaplin’s house one day with a new idea. He wanted to make a series of documentaries, and he was fascinated by the case of a French murderer named Henri Désiré Landru, a respectable Parisian père de famille who rented a villa near Rambouillet in 1914 and began advertising for women interested in matrimony. Landru was a bald and black-bearded man of nearly fifty, but throughout the five desperate years of World War I, he recorded in his account books that he had made love, of one sort or another, to 283 lonely and prosperous matrons. He was guillotined in 1922, protesting his innocence to the end, for having murdered ten of them. Welles, who had not yet encountered Rita Hayworth, wondered whether Chaplin would be interested in this misogynistic tale. Chaplin was very much interested—his first break from comedy—and asked to see the script. There wasn’t any script yet, Welles said smoothly, just the record of Landru’s trial. “I thought you might like to help with the writing,” Welles said. Chaplin was annoyed at such a demeaning offer and immediately rejected it, but a few days later he began to think that the story of Landru would make “a wonderful comedy.” He telephoned Welles and bought all rights to the idea for five thousand dollars. “Now I put aside Shadow and Substance and began writing Monsieur Verdoux,” Chaplin said. “I had been working three months on it when Joan Barry blew into Beverly Hills. My butler informed me that she had telephoned. I said that under no circumstances would I see her.”
For most of his life up to that point, Chaplin had had the worst of luck with women. He wasn’t really interested in them. He regarded them as toys, to be taken to bed and then put aside whenever he had serious work to do. “I must find a woman who understands that creative art absorbs every bit of a man,” he once said. “When I am working, I withdraw absolutely from those I love. I have no energy, no love to give them.” He also wanted those he loved to be very young, which usually meant that they had suspicious mothers. Late in 1917, at a party in Sam Goldwyn’s house on the beach, Chaplin met someone he recalled as “a very silly young
girl” named Mildred Harris. She was eighteen and he was twenty-nine. In about a year, she thought she was pregnant, and so they got married. The pregnancy was a false alarm, but then the new Mrs. Chaplin really got pregnant and gave birth to a malformed son, who died in three days. “We were irreconcilably mismated,” Chaplin said later, recalling that when he proposed divorce to his young wife, who could rarely be found at home, she said, “All I want is enough money to look after my mother.”
Lillita McMurray was six years old when her mother took her to a Hollywood restaurant for a birthday party, spotted Chaplin, and insisted on making introductions. She was twelve when one of her mother’s friends introduced her to Chaplin again, and he was sufficiently impressed to cast her as the angel in The Kid. Four years later, Chaplin tested her as the dance hall girl in The Gold Rush, and with the hard-eyed innocence of an adolescent starlet, she asked Chaplin how he liked the test. “Not bad,” he said. (“Marvelous,” he had said to one of his aides.) “Goody, goody,” said Lillita McMurray. Chaplin signed her to a contract at seventy-five dollars per week. He also changed her name to Lita Grey.
By this time, of course, he was much involved with the girl, and therefore he had to deal with her mother too. One of the mother’s brothers, who happened to practice law, threatened to sue Chaplin if he did not marry his protégée, by then pregnant. Chaplin docilely took her and her mother to Mexico and got married. He was thirty-five and Lita sixteen. When they returned to Hollywood, they all moved into Chaplin’s new mansion in Beverly Hills. This was a forty-room Spanish stucco place on a six-acre plot just below Pickfair, the famous estate of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Chaplin’s partners in the founding of United Artists.
The new marriage was a disaster from the start. Chaplin’s mother-in-law not only ran the house but regularly filled it with her friends and relatives. Chaplin spent most of his time at his office. He saw his young wife often enough for her to have two sons, Charles, Jr., and Sydney, but at the end of two years the Chaplins officially separated. Lita and her relatives demanded a big settlement, and so, since Chaplin was notoriously stingy, they filed a fifty-two-page document accusing him of transgressions ranging from spying to temporary desertion to infidelity with “a certain prominent moving picture actress” to demands that the young Lita gratify Chaplin’s “degenerate sexual desires . . . too revolting, indecent and immoral to set forth in this complaint . . . the act of sex perversion defined by Section 288a of the Penal Code of California.” Those who consulted Section 288a of the code discovered that it forbade oral sex, even between married couples, and threatened punishment of fifteen years in prison. Mrs. Chaplin also demanded half of the star’s community property, which she estimated at $16 million (an estimate that apparently inspired the Internal Revenue Service to file a claim for $1,133,000 in back taxes). She also got a court order for temporary alimony of $3,000 a month. Chaplin responded by charging her with “unwomanly, unseemly” behavior and offering to let her have $25 a week. By the time all that was settled, Chaplin had to pay $625,000 for Lita, $200,000 for the children, and $950,000 for the lawyers.
Paulette Goddard, née Marion Levy, didn’t have a mother with her when Chaplin first met her aboard Joe Schenck’s yacht. She was already twenty-one, already a bit player in Hal Roach’s Laurel and Hardy pictures, already married and divorced. Chaplin, by now forty-three and somewhat scarred, was charmed. With good reason. Miss Goddard was not only beautiful but intelligent, good-natured, and funny. Also very ambitious. Chaplin bought up her contract from Roach and starred her in Modern Times (1936), which ended with the two of them walking into the sunset, and The Great Dictator, which ended with Chaplin preaching the humanitarian virtues at her (“Look up, Hannah! Look up!”). Perhaps she was too ambitious, certainly too ambitious to accept Chaplin’s total control of her career. He resented her applying to Selznick for the role of Scarlett O’Hara, and she resented his resentment. “It was inevitable that Paulette and I should separate,” Chaplin later said, rather grandly. They agreed on a separation even before he started The Great Dictator, and though there was some doubt whether they had ever really been married, on that ship in Singapore Harbor, Miss Goddard went to Mexico in 1942 and got a divorce that ended whatever marriage had existed. (It was stated in connection with this divorce that she had married Chaplin in Canton, China, in 1936.) Miss Goddard never disclosed how much money she received—estimates ran to one million dollars—but she enjoyed joking about it. “I even got the yacht,” she remarked.
Maybe Chaplin realized, for the first time, that he had lost someone valuable. He was now fifty-three, not a good age to be divorced for the third time. Perhaps that was why he seemed so vulnerable to the advances of an attractive redhead named Joan Barry. She was a friend, as they say, of J. Paul Getty, the oilman, who was just two years younger than Chaplin. She came from Mexico to Hollywood with some letters of introduction that led her to Tim Durant, a tennis-playing friend of Chaplin’s, and they all went out to dinner at Perrino’s. “Miss Barry was a big handsome woman of twenty-two,” Chaplin later recalled, in the peculiar prose of his memoirs, “well built, with upper regional domes immensely expansive and made alluring by an extremely low decolleté evening dress. . . .” That first encounter was “an innocuous evening,” Chaplin thought, but then Miss Barry telephoned and asked him to invite her to lunch. He agreed, taking her first to an auction in Santa Barbara. She told him that she had quarreled with Getty and was about to return to New York but would stay in Hollywood if Chaplin wanted her to remain. Chaplin “reared away in suspicion,” he later claimed, and told her “not to remain on my account.” She called a day or two later and said that she was still in Hollywood, and wondered whether she could see him that evening. She could. “The days that followed were not unpleasant,” Chaplin confessed, “but there was something queer and not quite normal about them. Without telephoning she would suddenly show up late at night at my house. . . .”
It was at about that time that Chaplin became interested in Shadow and Substance and bought it for Miss Barry to star in. He seems to have thought that she was really talented—and maybe she was—but her behavior became increasingly bizarre. “Barry began driving up in her Cadillac at all hours of the night, very drunk, and I would have to awaken my chauffeur to drive her home,” Chaplin recalled. “One time she smashed up her car in the driveway and had to leave it there. . . . Finally she got so obstreperous that when she called in the small hours I would neither answer the phone nor open the door to her. Then she began smashing in the windows. Overnight, my existence became a nightmare.”
Chaplin learned that she hadn’t been going to her classes at Max Reinhardt’s school, and when he confronted her with that discovery, she said she didn’t want to be a movie star after all. She said, according to Chaplin, that if he gave her five thousand dollars plus the train fare back to New York for herself and her mother, she would tear up the contract between them. Chaplin agreed, relieved, and off she went.
Chaplin was busy, these days, not only with his movie projects and his love life but also with politics. One of the big issues for speechmaking at this particular point in the war was the Soviets’ need for the Western allies to open a second front by invading France. The American Committee for Russian War Relief asked Chaplin to substitute for the ailing Ambassador Davies at a rally in San Francisco, and Chaplin began his emotional speech by saying, “Comrades! And I mean comrades!” There was great applause. Chaplin was quick to add: “I am not a Communist, I am a human being.” But he went on to urge that everyone in the audience of ten thousand send a telegram to Roosevelt to urge the opening of a second front. This now seems innocuous enough, but Chaplin claimed that he soon “began to wonder if I had said too much and had gone too far.” He reported that John Garfield told him after the rally, “You have a lot of courage.”
New invitations to speak kept arriving, and Chaplin kept accepting. (“How much was I stimulated by the actor in me and the reaction of a live audie
nce?” he wondered.) A few weeks after his San Francisco speech, he addressed a CIO-sponsored rally in Madison Square Garden over a telephone hookup. He sounded much the way he had at the end of The Great Dictator: “Let us aim for victory in the spring. You in the factories, you in the fields, you in uniforms, you citizens of the world, let us work and fight towards that end. . . . Remember the great achievements throughout history have been the conquest of what seemed the impossible.”
Then he got an invitation to speak at Carnegie Hall.
“Don’t go,” said Jack Warner, who had come to play tennis on Chaplin’s court.
“Why not?” Chaplin asked.
“Let me tip you off, don’t go,” Warner mysteriously repeated.
Warner himself later claimed that, as in the making of Mission to Moscow, he was acting on a secret request from the White House. In his memoirs, which are perhaps even less reliable than those of Chaplin, he reported that Press Secretary Steve Early called him up and said, “The President wants you to see Chaplin and beg him to stay away from that rally. It could be very damaging to us at this stage if Chaplin lends his name to this movement.”
Warner claimed that he told Chaplin that “some very big people in Washington told me to tell you about this,” adding his own military judgment that “we’re just not ready for a second front, and we don’t want to kill a million men now just because Stalin is screaming.” Warner further claimed that he had persuaded Chaplin.
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