Charlie Chaplin

by Peter Ackroyd

  The naked girl in the bed was Oona O’Neill, daughter of the American playwright Eugene O’Neill. Chaplin had met her in 1942. She was then seventeen and had been suggested to him as a possible candidate for the part of Bridget in Shadow and Substance; this was the role he had originally envisaged for Joan Barry. Oona O’Neill had always enjoyed a privileged life. After attending a number of private schools she soon became a New York “face” and celebrity; the gossip columnists named her as “the toast of café society” and in the spring of 1942 she was named as Debutante of the Year. At this point she decided that she would turn down a place at Vassar and become a screen actress.

  This was the opportunity for O’Neill’s film agent, Minna Wallis, to contact Chaplin. He visited the agent’s house, and was at once struck by the beauty and self-possession of the young actress. The sequence of events is not entirely clear. It has been reported that, a few days after this meeting, Oona O’Neill turned up outside the gates of the Chaplin studio where Alf Reeves and Rollie Totheroh were not particularly happy about the appearance of another girl in Chaplin’s life.

  Minna Wallis, however, had made another call to Chaplin with the news that the Fox studio had become interested in her pretty client; he was at once roused to action and immediately put her under contract. He decided that he should give her acting lessons himself which, of course, meant that they spent much time together at Summit Drive. Soon enough Oona O’Neill had moved into the house. After the events of the recent past, he might have been more hesitant and uncertain than before. The difference in age between them was some thirty-six years. Yet his instant attraction to her was more powerful than any considerations of common sense.

  Chaplin’s sons seem to have been immediately reconciled to the presence of this new girl in their lives. Charles recalled that “she worshipped him, drinking in every word he spoke, whether it was about his latest script, the weather or some bit of philosophy.”

  Joan Barry made a further attempt to confront Chaplin. He refused to see her and, as she waited in her car, Chaplin whispered to Tim Durant that “I’m afraid she will shoot me.” He then plucked up courage and came to the door shouting “You dirty little blackmailer. Get the hell out of here. I mean it this time … if you don’t get off, you’ll be put in jail.” His butler later commented that “she looked like a little girl of sixteen … I don’t like to see people talk like that to anybody, no matter how bad they are.” The police were called and Barry was sentenced to thirty days’ detention for violating the terms of her probation. She was placed on suicide watch and, while in the prison hospital, it was confirmed that she was five months pregnant.

  In the middle of May Chaplin decided to announce his engagement to Oona O’Neill. She had just turned eighteen, and so the union was at last legitimate. Oona herself wrote to her mother that “if I don’t marry Charles … I’ll never marry anyone. This is going to be the love of my life.”

  Joan Barry was still under the illusion that Chaplin truly loved her, however, and after her eventual discharge from prison she telephoned him once more. It was the beginning of June. He agreed to talk to her again. Chaplin tried to cajole her into saying nothing further. “You’ve got to protect me, Joan,” she reported him as saying to her, “I’ve got to have peace. Joan, if you bring this into court you know what it will be. The newspapers will be after you, your picture will be taken.” He told her that “even if he was proven to be the father, that he would blacken my name so that won’t be the issue involved at all.”

  The affair would not be so quickly over. A gossip column, at the beginning of June, intimated that “Joan’s mother is saying it would be nice—with baby on the way—if Joan and Chaplin would wed.” On the following day the mother herself, Gertrude Barry, filed a suit on behalf of the unborn child naming Chaplin as the father; she asked for $2,500 a month for the support of the baby, and $10,000 for prenatal costs. Chaplin denied paternity, and refused to make a quick settlement. The law now made its slow way. In the course of their investigations the district attorneys became aware of the possible charge that Chaplin had financed two illegal abortions. The FBI now became involved in the case, with a memo to its director, J. Edgar Hoover, on “Information Concerning Charles Chaplin.” If Chaplin had paid for Barry’s train tickets to New York, and they had been intimate there, he could face a charge under the Mann Act for transporting a “sex victim” across state lines.

  Chaplin now took refuge at the house of some friends in western Los Angeles, where Oona O’Neill often stayed with him. Her closest friend, Carol Matthau, recalled that “Oona felt something she had always wanted to feel, but had never felt before now—safe. Not only was he older and a great man, he protected her and she knew he would for the rest of their lives.” Yet Carol Matthau also conceded that in exchange her friend “was to allow parts of herself to grow dormant … Part of her always had to be a little girl. Charlie’s little girl. She always had to be The One.” Before meeting Chaplin, Oona O’Neill had been spirited and rebellious; it was not clear that she would be able to retain those qualities for very long.

  They married on 16 June 1943, six weeks after Joan Barry had declared that she was bearing his baby. They left Hollywood very early in the morning and arrived at Santa Barbara just as the courthouse was about to open. This was to be his fourth marriage, if we include one with Paulette Goddard, even though the earlier unions had ended so disastrously. When Chaplin went to sign his name in the register, his hand shook so violently that he could hardly hold the pen.

  Oona and Chaplin remained in Santa Barbara for the following six weeks where it seems that, miraculously, they were not followed by the press. They had leased a house, where they remained during the day, and in the evening took quiet walks into the countryside; they were careful, according to Chaplin, “not to be seen or recognised.” In a period that should have been characterised by marital bliss, Chaplin fell into a depression; he feared that the American public would now turn against him, and that his film career would be over.

  Yet after this interval they soon settled down to life at Summit Drive, where Oona Chaplin fulfilled all of her new husband’s expectations; she began typing the script of a projected film and generally ensured that his life proceeded calmly. A mutual friend, Florence Wagner, noted that “her dressing-table mirror is lined with snapshots of him and apparently, at last, there is happiness in that house.” In a letter to a friend, written in the summer of this year, Oona Chaplin wrote that “I am so happy now—Charlie’s a wonderful man.” That happiness, however, was not to endure without severe trial for both of them.

  Chaplin and Oona O’Neill on their wedding day, 1943.

  18

  Proceed with the Butchery

  On hearing the news of Chaplin’s marriage to Oona O’Neill, Joan Barry went into a dangerous state of hysteria. A photograph of the time shows her distraught to the point of madness. She now sought revenge. It seems that, in advance of the imminent trial for immorality, Chaplin was trying to find witnesses who would declare that they had also been intimate with Barry, thus casting doubt upon his supposed fatherhood of the expected child; his enormous financial resources must surely have helped in that search. At the beginning of October 1943, Joan Barry gave birth to a baby girl.

  In February of the following year, Chaplin was charged with violating the Mann Act by transporting Joan Barry across state lines for immoral purposes and for conspiring with the Los Angeles police to have her imprisoned on charges of vagrancy; Chaplin was indicted on all counts by the federal grand jury. If he were found guilty as charged, he might face a prison sentence of twenty years. Yet he had deep faith in his own abilities to persevere and to overcome all impediments. That confidence came directly from his troubled childhood.

  The trial opened on 21 March. Hundreds of people lined the hallways of the courthouse to catch a glimpse of Chaplin on his arrival, and press photographers were allowed into the area where his fingerprints were taken. It was all good theatre and,
on one level at least, he might possibly have enjoyed it. On another occasion in court, he joked with the reporters by putting a handkerchief over his head. Yet of course his freedom was in jeopardy. His lawyer, Jerry Giesler, asked the jury whether it was likely that his client would pay Barry to travel 3,000 miles to New York when she “would have given her body to him at any time or place”; he added that “there was no more evidence of Mann Act violation than there is evidence of murder.”

  Barry herself gave evidence and repeated her claim of intimacy in New York; she was followed on to the stand by various travel agents, hotel employees and railroad staff. John Paul Getty also gave evidence to the effect that Barry had visited him in Tulsa after she had left New York, thus raising once more the subject of her behaviour with other men.

  The last witness was Chaplin who denied Barry’s claims. In a subsequent memoir Giesler recalled that Chaplin “was the best witness I’ve ever seen in a law court. He was effective, even when he wasn’t being cross-examined, but was merely sitting there, lonely and forlorn, at a far end of the counsel table. He is so small that only the toes of his shoes touched the floor.” As Virginia Cherrill had once said, he was always acting; he was always “on.”

  On 4 April, to screams and tumult in the courtroom, Chaplin was acquitted of all charges. One of the jurors told him with a smile that “It’s all right, Charlie. It’s still a free country.” When Oona Chaplin heard the news over the radio, she fainted. Yet the damage had been done to Chaplin’s reputation and Giesler himself said that “the trial of Charlie Chaplin carried with it the heaviest weight of public loathing for a client I’ve ever had anything to do with.”

  Yet Chaplin still awaited the ordeal of a paternity case at the end of the year. There was in fact not much to be added to the testimony of the previous trial, except evidence in Chaplin’s favour. As a result of blood tests three doctors agreed that Chaplin could not possibly be the father of Joan Barry’s baby. At this point Barry’s lawyer, Joseph Scott, decided upon an ad hominem attack in order to sway the jury. He denounced Chaplin as a “grey-haired old buzzard,” “a little runt of a Svengali,” a “debaucher” and “lecherous hound” who “lies like a cheap cockney cad.” Chaplin, now incensed, turned to the judge. “Your honour,” he said, “I’ve committed no crime. I’m only human. But this man is trying to make a monster out of me.” Scott had not finished his attack. He told the jury that “there has been no one to stop Chaplin in his lecherous conduct all these years—except you. Wives and mothers all over the country are watching to see you stop him dead in his tracks. You’ll sleep well the night you give this baby a name—the night you show him the law means him as well as the bums on Skid Row.” The attack affected Chaplin very deeply, eliciting once again the humiliation and shame he had experienced as a child.

  This unwarranted appeal to the emotions of the jurors did not altogether work, however, since the case ended in deadlock. A further trial was ordered for the spring of the following year, but Chaplin declined to appear as a witness. On this occasion, despite the evidence of the doctors that he was not the father of the child, he was deemed to be responsible by a majority of ten. His reputation in the United States fell into a decline from which it never recovered until his final years.

  The judge awarded the infant girl, Carol Ann, the sum of $75 a week; she could also be given the name of Chaplin. Joan Barry never really profited from the verdict in her favour. She married again but, after separating from this husband, she drifted through her life until in 1953 she was found wandering in a confused state; she was holding a pair of baby’s sandals and a child’s ring, whispering “This is magic.” She was admitted to a mental hospital and, after her release, disappeared from all records. The little daughter was brought up by relatives and continued to receive Chaplin’s payments.

  Between the two trials for paternity, Chaplin was intent on finishing the script for a film that had provisionally been entitled The Lady Killer. Orson Welles had suggested to him three years before that the career of a notorious killer of eleven women, Henri Désiré Landru, might prove to make an interesting film. Chaplin was intrigued by the idea, no doubt provoked by his own difficult relations with females at the time. Welles later claimed that he had himself written a script for the projected film, and it is certainly possible that Chaplin lifted ideas and themes from him.

  Chaplin had always been fascinated by the violent and the macabre; his own favourite reading at home was the magazine True Detective, well known for its lurid sensationalism. The case of Landru had all of the appropriate elements, since he had dismembered the bodies of his victims before burning them. Chaplin was now determined to turn this criminal career into comedy, and even farce, in a film that was entitled Monsieur Verdoux.

  He had worked intermittently on the script for the last two years, during bouts of what might be called legal and social persecution; much of the bitterness and anger he felt was now redirected into Verdoux’s cynicism towards the conventional pieties of modern society. Some of Chaplin’s early notes for the film testify to his state of mind; he wrote, for example, that “when all the world turns against a man he becomes holy … where there are no facts, sentiments prevail … a reputation is the concern of cooks and butlers.” In one of the last scenes of the film Monsieur Verdoux is savagely attacked in the courtroom in the same manner as Joseph Scott had once excoriated Chaplin himself. A strain of deep misogyny can also be detected throughout the film, in which the women are largely characterised as harsh, loud or foolish. Yet Verdoux is animated not so much by hatred of women as by love of his own self.

  Chaplin began filming Monsieur Verdoux on 21 May 1946, and finished twelve weeks later; this in itself was a record of brevity. There had been occasions in the past when he had spent the same amount of time in shooting a single scene. He had a clear conception of the story, however, and of his own role as the dapper if somewhat precious mass murderer. He spent six weeks growing a real moustache for the part; a false one would of course have conjured up memories of Charlie. When at the premiere of the film in New York some children came after him calling out “Charlie! Charlie!” he told them that “This is the new Charlie.” Yet the Little Tramp’s individualism, and his indifference to the moral conventions of the world, are shared by Verdoux himself to a murderous degree. This is where we may find the identity of Chaplin himself.

  He also hired a strong supporting cast, principal among them the American comedienne Martha Raye whose raucous laugh and wild behaviour manage to upstage Chaplin’s own performance. She admitted that on her first day she was “sick with fear” at the thought of working with him; yet she cheered up and he patiently taught her how to smoke, and to walk, for the part. “I learned so much from Charlie,” she said. “We became friendly but if he said, jump … I jumped.” He told her not to wear earrings because they diverted attention from her uniquely comic facial expressions; he also designed her clothes and her hair. Raye also noticed that he would break from one scene and start another, according to his mood of the moment.

  He had hired an assistant director, Robert Florey, who was in practice assigned the role of director without receiving the title. Florey recalled the process of filming in an essay written some years later. He noted that Chaplin was resolutely old-fashioned in his film techniques. Chaplin liked the camera to be immobile, with himself preferably at the centre of the composition. He was not interested in close-up shots of the other performers because “people come to see me.” Any attempt at another camera angle or change of focus was dismissed by him as “Hollywood chi-chi”; he was continually angry at the cameraman for what he called his “technical tricks.” He also seemed quite happy to retain certain inconsistencies and aberrations pointed out to him by the “continuity” team, on the principle that the audience’s attention would be entirely drawn to him. He asked a colleague his opinion of four different takes of the same scene. The colleague commended the first and fourth. What was wrong with the third?

 
“Well, you can see the electrician.” The camera had momentarily strayed to show an electrician holding a light.

  “What are you watching him for? You’re supposed to be watching me.”

  Florey jotted down at the time his stream of remarks against an unfortunate colleague on the set. “No, no, no, shut up you silly bastard, for Christ’s sake, we cut to Annabella, you don’t understand anything about motion pictures. I know what I am doing, yeah, that’s what I cut to, I have been in this business for twenty—for thirty years. You don’t think I am gaga? Oh shut up … Christ.” Florey observed that “with Chaplin things just broke up or faded away, like a storm in late summer.” He concluded, like many observers, that Chaplin had “two distinct personalities.” One was the comic genius and social charmer, while the other was “the tyrannical, wounding, authoritarian, mean, despotic man imbued with himself.”

  The actor who played the part of the prefect of police in search of Verdoux, Bernard Nedell, recalled that “the cast loved him” and that he had “that curious mixture of a hot temper and very great patience.” He recalled one occasion when Chaplin, physically exhausted and almost sick from overwork, went endlessly through one scene with an actress until she had achieved the effect he desired.

  The premiere of Monsieur Verdoux was held at the Broadway Theatre, New York, in the spring of 1947. It was the first time he had encountered his public since the trials and tribulations of the previous three years, and it was reported that scattered hissing and booing broke out at the close of the film. Chaplin had never before endured such an experience. It was not a good omen.

  In the final scenes, before going to his death on the guillotine, Verdoux effectively impugns the capitalist and military system for committing crimes much greater than his own. He remarks that “wars, conflict, it’s all business. One murder makes a villain; millions a hero. Numbers sanctify.” It is possible that Chaplin believed that the audience would sympathise with a mass murderer, or at least accept the man’s analysis of the hypocrisy of society, but he misjudged the effect of the narrative. Verdoux made an unlikely hero. A producer sent a telegram to the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper with the words that he had witnessed an historic event. “I have seen the last film of Chaplin.”