“You promise not to go?”
“I promise.”
Chaplin acknowledged no such promise. He said he regarded Warner’s warnings only as “a challenge,” and off he went.
In retrospect, there seems to be a certain element of fantasy and paranoia in all these recollections. The U.S. and Russia had been fighting on the same side for nearly six months by now, and the various organs of public enlightenment continually hymned the glories of the new alliance. The Red Army Chorus performed in New York, department stores sold babushkas, and even hardhearted old Louis B. Mayer produced the saccharine Song of Russia. It was in fact U.S. military policy to open a second front as soon as possible, not later than 1943. Dwight Eisenhower had drawn up the plans, and though the British were hesitant, General Marshall and President Roosevelt had endorsed them. So why should anyone object to a movie star urging a second front?
Chaplin insisted that dark forces were at work. Until the very eve of Pearl Harbor, he said, “the Nazis had made inroads into American institutions and organizations; whether these organizations were aware of it or not, they were being used as tools of the Nazis.” Even after the U.S. went to war, he believed, the dark forces exercised dark powers. “As a result of my second front speeches my social life in New York gradually receded,” he said. “No more was I invited to spend weekends in opulent country houses.” Much the same sort of thing apparently happened in Hollywood. “The little tennis house and green lawn where once my father had held a gracious court were practically deserted on Sunday afternoons,” his son Charles Chaplin, Jr., recalled. “I think my father must have been the loneliest man in Hollywood those days.”
It is quite possible that politics played only a small part in the increasingly widespread dislike of Chaplin, that people were tired of his boundless egotism, his posturing and pretentiousness. Everyone seemed to know that the little tramp would never be seen again, and that Chaplin, having created him, was somehow responsible for killing him, and that the megalomaniac tyrant who danced with the globe in The Great Dictator was Hynkel/Hitler but was also Chaplin himself. Chaplin’s three film statements from the late 1930’s to the late 1940’s were remarkably prophetic, remarkably right: Modern Times, The Great Dictator, and Monsieur Verdoux. Yet there is an old and very understandable tradition of beating the messenger who brings the bad news. That is not pure superstition; perhaps he deserved to be beaten.
Chaplin went to New York to make his second speech in October of 1942. On checking in at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, he found several messages saying that Joan Barry had called. “My flesh began to creep,” he said later. Miss Barry had been staying at the Waldorf herself but had recently moved to Getty’s hotel, the Pierre, and she wanted to see Chaplin. He did not answer her messages. A few nights later, he accidentally encountered her at the Stork Club, and she again asked if she could come to see him. In a misjudgment that seems almost suicidal, Chaplin agreed. He made sure, however, that his friend Tim Durant stayed with them. Miss Barry told Chaplin her latest financial troubles, and he gave her three hundred dollars. Nothing more happened, Chaplin insisted, and that was their only encounter in New York.
With the three hundred dollars that Chaplin had given Miss Barry to alleviate her financial troubles, she followed him back to Hollywood. That was when his butler told him that she was telephoning, and Chaplin said he wouldn’t talk to her. Miss Barry bought a gun, drove to Chaplin’s house at 1 A.M., broke a window, and clambered into his study. She found Chaplin in his second-floor bedroom and kept him covered with the gun while she harangued him for an hour and a half about her problems. Then she put the gun on a bedside table. Then they had sex. Then she picked up the gun, and they spent the night in separate bedrooms. Then he agreed to give her some more money, and she went away.
A week later, she reappeared at Chaplin’s house, and this time he called the police, “something I should have done before.” Chaplin had dreaded what the newspapers would make of this saga, but he found that the Beverly Hills police were, as anyone could have told him, “most cooperative.” They booked Miss Barry on a charge of vagrancy but said that the charge would not be pressed if Chaplin paid her fare back to New York, and if she went. An emissary from the Chaplin studio paid her one hundred dollars to leave, but she didn’t leave. She went out to Chaplin’s house again and created what the police called “a disturbance.” Chaplin again telephoned for help, and the police reappeared. During these alarums and excursions, Miss Barry took an overdose of barbiturates. The police pumped out her stomach. They kept her in jail for thirty days on the vagrancy charge.
Early in 1943, Miss Barry found that she was pregnant and accused Chaplin of being the father. “Isn’t it a fact,” Jerry Giesler later asked her in court, “that on June first, 1943, in the yard of Mr. Chaplin’s home, when you were alone with him, you accused him of being the father of your unborn child, and didn’t you tell him that unless he gave your mother $65,000 and placed $75,000 in trust for the baby, you’d make trouble for him—that the press was on your side, and when they got through with him they would blast him out of the country?” Miss Barry denied making any such threat, but she did file a paternity suit against Chaplin. He denied everything.
Chaplin by now was once again involved with an adolescent girl, and a beauty, Oona O’Neill, the daughter of Eugene O’Neill. She was just seventeen, a debutante with vague theatrical ambitions, out in Hollywood to inspect the scene. Orson Welles, the eternal magician, took her to a nightclub on their first date and read her palm and said, “Within a very short time you will meet and marry Charles Chaplin.” Hal Wallis’s sister Minna, a Hollywood agent who thought that Miss O’Neill might get the part of Bridget in Chaplin’s version of Shadow and Substance, invited them both to dinner at her house. Chaplin found Miss O’Neill “of a luminous beauty, with a sequestered charm and a gentleness that was most appealing.” They were married that June.
In October, Miss Barry gave birth to a girl she named Carol Ann. Chaplin’s lawyer had worked out a deal to pay her $25,000 if she and the baby would submit to blood tests to see whether Chaplin was the father. If they all had the same blood type, that would not prove that he was the father, of course, but a difference would prove that he wasn’t. In the midst of these negotiations, Chaplin got a call from Justice Frank Murphy of the Supreme Court, who warned him that some politicians he had met at a dinner party in Washington had spoken of planning “to get Chaplin.” More paranoia? In January of 1944, a federal grand jury indicted Chaplin for violating the Mann Act, an antiprostitution law of 1910, which made it a federal crime to transport a woman across a state line for immoral purposes. Every once in a while, not often, the federal authorities invoked this antique statute to harass someone they didn’t like. The first black heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, who married three different white women, was convicted under the Mann Act in 1913, fled the country to avoid imprisonment, but finally served a year in jail for his sins. And now, on February 10, 1944, the federal authorities claimed that Chaplin had violated the Mann Act by paying Joan Barry’s railroad fare to New York and then meeting her there.
Five days after Chaplin’s indictment, the blood tests on Miss Barry’s baby showed that Chaplin couldn’t possibly be the father. Miss Barry was type A, her baby was type B, and Chaplin was type O. Chaplin felt exonerated, but the federal indictment did not say that he had fathered Miss Barry’s baby; it said that he had transported her across a state line for immoral purposes. Chaplin’s friends persuaded him to call in the famous Jerry Giesler, and Giesler fought the case on what he considered the perfectly sensible ground that a man “who could have enjoyed Miss Barry’s favors in Los Angeles for as little as twenty-five cents carfare, would [not] pay her fare to New York . . . for immoral purposes.”
Chaplin suffered a lot of criticism in the press, which regarded him as vain and arrogant, but he knew how to play his new role. “Chaplin was the best witness I’ve ever seen in a law court,” Giesler said later. “He
was effective even when he wasn’t being examined . . . but was merely sitting there, lonely and forlorn, at a far end of the counsel table. He is so small that only the tops of his shoes touched the floor. He looked helpless, friendly and wistful, as he sat there with the whole weight of the United States Government against him.” The federal indictment was ridiculous, and Giesler won a fairly quick acquittal. “I believe in the American people,” Chaplin said, just like Errol Flynn, just like every acquitted criminal. “I have abiding faith in them. In their sense of fair play and justice.”
He was to learn better. Chaplin thought that Miss Barry’s paternity suit against him had been nullified by the blood tests, certified by three doctors, declaring that he could not be the father of the baby. But the judge ruled that the “ends of justice” would best be served by a “full and fair trial of the issue.” Chaplin, perhaps overconfident that a medical decree of his innocence must lead to an acquittal, had abandoned the artful Giesler and entrusted his case to a more ordinary lawyer. Miss Barry entrusted hers to an old-fashioned orator named Joseph Scott. Ignoring the scientific evidence of Chaplin’s innocence, Scott proceeded to attack the star as a “master mechanic in the art of seduction,” and a “cheap Cockney cad,” and a “little runt of a Svengali,” and a “gray-headed old buzzard,” and a “reptile [who] just looked upon her as so much carrion.”
The trial ended with a hung jury, seven to five for acquittal; the second trial, in April of 1944, ended with an eleven-to-one verdict for Miss Barry. Chaplin, who could not have been the father, was ordered to pay $75 per week to support Carol Ann until the age of twenty-one, a tidy sum amounting to $82,000, and he did pay it. He then took Oona, pregnant, to live in Nyack, up the Hudson from New York, while he wrote the screenplay of Monsieur Verdoux, about a man who murdered love-hungry women. Miss Barry was eventually committed to a state mental hospital.
One of the cornerstones of the Hollywood studios’ monopoly was the standard contract by which they controlled actors, directors, and any other people they considered valuable. The standard contract lasted for seven years, renewable every six months at the wish of the studio, usually with an increase in pay if the studio decided to renew. The studios justified these contracts on the ground that they invested time and money in developing an actor’s career, and during the Depression, both the actor and the studio benefited from the security of a long-term contract. It was theoretically possible to free-lance (Charles Boyer, Cary Grant, and a few others insisted on signing for just one picture at a time), but the studios naturally favored their contract players, and few people dared to take the risks of the jungle.
They were frightened people, many of these famous stars, emerging from origins of poverty and conflict, driven onward not by talent or vocation so much as by the simple hunger for what Hollywood could give them: riches, success, fame. (Lana Turner was surprised to realize, on making a count, that she had acquired 698 pairs of shoes.) And among the few who triumphed, and thus acquired a surrounding phalanx of managers, agents, publicists, paid companions, there remained always an element of panic. “They didn’t know what they had,” as the screenwriter Daniel Fuchs put it in his novel West of the Rockies, “what it was in them that accounted for their good fortune. They didn’t know how to present it, manipulate it, embellish it, portion it out—since they didn’t know what it was or whether in fact they had anything at all.”
The standard contract gave the studio not only the right to decide on each renewal but also the right to make all the professional decisions in the actor’s life. The studio told him which film he would make next, and who else would be in it, and who would produce and direct it. If the studio had no immediate work for the actor, it could “loan” him out to another studio for any film that the other studio wanted to make, and the loan-out fee went entirely to the studio, which paid the actor his regular salary out of its profits on the loan. If the actor heard of an interesting movie at some other studio and wanted to be loaned out to take a part in it, that, of course, was a decision to be made by the studio that owned him. It might agree, or it might think him too valuable to loan, or it might, for various reasons, want to punish him by refusing. The studio that owned him could also command him to take part in publicity tours, or just about anything else that it wanted him to do. In fact, some studio contracts forbade an actor to leave Los Angeles for any reason without the studio’s permission.
In addition to all this, the standard contract contained what was known as the “morals clause.” When M-G-M signed up the nineteen-year-old Ava Gardner in 1941, for example, its contract made her promise that she agreed “to conduct herself with due regard to public conventions and morals,” and that she would not “do or commit any act or thing that will degrade her in society, or bring her into public hatred, contempt, scorn or ridicule, that will tend to shock, insult, or offend the community or ridicule public morals or decency, or prejudice the producer or the motion picture industry in general.” Miss Gardner signed, perhaps with fingers crossed, and so did everybody else.
If an actor objected to the next film assignment, or anything else, his only recourse was to refuse the studio’s orders, whereupon the studio was entitled to suspend the actor without pay, indefinitely, or until he agreed to do as he was told. Furthermore, the period of suspension was added to the end of the contract, so that the actor owed the studio not just seven years of his life but seven submissive and obedient years. To any reasonable outsider, this standard contract seemed extremely unfair, and the only thing more remarkable than the contract itself was the labor unions’ docile acceptance of it. “As a union contract which gives the employer the right to fire a worker every six months . . . it is unique in trade union history,” wrote a sociologist named Hortense Powdermaker in Hollywood, The Dream Factory (1950). “Hollywood presents the picture of a 100 percent union community, paying the highest salaries in the country . . . but with the atmosphere of a company town.” The standard contract, she added, “smacks more of mediaeval power relationships between lord and serf than of employer and employee in the modern world of industry.”
The first rebel to challenge this system in court was Bette Davis. Having won the 1935 Academy Award for Dangerous, she didn’t like the scripts that Warner Bros. kept sending her. She also wanted her sixteen-hundred-dollar weekly salary doubled. Jack Warner balked, and when the news of the argument leaked out, a producer in London offered Miss Davis a contract to make two movies for him. She accepted and promptly departed for England. Jack Warner pursued her with a charge of breach of contract, and in the fall of 1936, the controversy came before the bewigged legal authorities of London. It was not a very distinguished trial. Jack Warner testified that his company had built Miss Davis “up almost from oblivion to what the company thinks is a very great height.” His lawyer, Sir Patrick Hastings, accused Miss Davis of being “a very naughty young lady.” But the main legal point was that a contract was a contract, and the London court could only conclude that Miss Davis had freely committed herself to Warner Bros. The decision left her with nothing but a thirty-thousand-dollar legal bill. Jack Warner, to his credit, paid most of it.
Still, holdouts and suspensions were more of a problem at Warners than anywhere else. They were relatively rare at M-G-M and almost unknown at Paramount. Perhaps Warners’ problem lay in Jack Warner’s fondness for typecasting, or perhaps simply in the feistiness of his repeatedly suspended stars—Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, Jimmy Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, John Garfield. (Warner had similar difficulties with one of his three-hundred-dollar-per-week hirelings, William Faulkner.)
The one star who fought him the hardest was Olivia de Havilland, whom Warner had first seen and admired as Hermia in Max Reinhardt’s Hollywood Bowl version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She was eighteen, and according to Warner, she was “a girl with big, soft brown eyes . . . and a fresh young beauty that would soon stir a lot of tired old muscles around the film town.” Despite all this, Warner had very little idea what to do
with her. Almost by chance, he cast her opposite the unknown Errol Flynn in Captain Blood (1935), and when that proved a great success, he cast them both in a variety of sequels.
It was after the friendly intervention of Warner’s wife, Ann (Miss de Havilland was nothing if not resourceful), that the actress got permission to play Melanie in Gone With the Wind. After that, Warner went right on putting her in second-rate films like Devotion, an ill-conceived biography of the Brontë sisters, and Princess O’Rourke, the title of which is description enough. There were various explanations for this Hollywood tradition of miscasting. One was that the studios had to produce a good deal of fodder to satisfy their theater chains; another was that they believed a star could carry an inferior film; another was that they sometimes assigned a star to a bad script as a form of discipline; and yet another was that they didn’t know the difference between good and bad, and didn’t much care.
Whatever the reasons, Warner’s assignments exasperated Miss de Havilland, and her exasperation was compounded by the fact that David Selznick was finding much better roles for her beautiful but somewhat less talented younger sister, Joan Fontaine. Rebecca had made Miss Fontaine a star, and Hitchcock’s Suspicion had won her an Academy Award in 1941. While Miss de Havilland was struggling to impersonate Charlotte Brontë in Devotion, her sister was starring opposite Orson Welles in the title role of Jane Eyre. Miss de Havilland began suffering from a series of headaches, temper tantrums, mysterious swellings in the legs. She refused Warner’s latest offering, The Animal Kingdom, and so she was suspended.
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