HE WAS FAR FROM A SAINT. We want to forgive him because he was funny as hell, a process that grows less and less difficult as the misbehaviors of others in the public eye grow (or are revealed to be) more heinous. Charlie Chaplin’s biggest sin was that he liked women, liked them young, and liked them to satisfy a prodigious sexual appetite. Chaplin’s biggest crime was his outspoken political stance, which was misinterpreted vigorously enough to win him a fat FBI file and eventual banishment from the U.S.
Chaplin’s early years are sketched with sympathetic precision, covering the important points of his career and examining a fraught relationship with his show-biz parents: a father, famed for his music-hall turns, who was mostly absent and soon dead, and a soubrette mother who lost her mind. Although Eyman doesn’t indulge in too much psychological speculation, he sees this a stage-setting the relationships Chaplin eventually with the friends, co-workers, and, especially, women in his life.
He started as a boy performer in England, eventually landing a berth in the Fred Karno troupe, which toured knockabout sketches throughout the U.K. and, ultimately, across the U.S. In 1914, when Charlie was 24, he was invited to make films for Mack Sennett. In breathtakingly short order he created the character of the Tramp and placed him 36 one-reelers, all in the space of a year. Skyrocketing popularity led him to set his own terms for his subsequent 25 films, now two-reelers, that he wrote and directed for two different companies through the end of 1917.
In 1918 he created his own production company, First National, for nine films now considered absolute classics, including “The Kid,” “The Idle Class,” and “The Pilgrim.” He co-founded a distribution company, United Artists, with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and D. W. Griffith, and built his own studio where he could control all phases of production. All of which is old news to Chaplin-lovers, but Eyman had access to more information than informs the earlier books, and goes over the story so engagingly that you don’t mind reading about it again, any more than you mind re-watching those movies.
But here’s where the trouble starts to bubble up. His first two marriages were to teenagers even as he sailed through his 30s; by the time of his last (and lasting) marriage, he was 54 and Oona O’Neill was 18. Along the way he had some hardly secret flings with such stars as Marion Davies, Pola Negri, Hedy Lamarr, and Paulette Goddard (to whom he seemed, but wasn’t married).
He co-starred with Goddard in “Modern Times” in 1936, in which politics crept in more than had been usual with him. He’s making a comment on the de-personalization of industrialization, which was hardly inflammatory, and at one point he innocently picks up a red flag even as a protest group appears, unseen by him, to his rear and the soundtrack plays “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum” (the folksong, not the Rodgers & Hart tune of the same title).
Europe was simmering with rise of Hitler, and Chaplin countered with a completely political film: “The Great Dictator,” in which a Jewish barber (the Tramp’s farewell performance) is mistaken for the power-mad title character. It was released in 1940, before the extent of Hitler’s horrors were known, at which point (according to Chaplin) it would have been much more difficult to laugh at the man. The movie was a huge hit, but Hoover was on his own warpath.
This is when the book’s hitherto breezy narrative begins to turn ugly. The writing is still superb; it’s the story, the relentless of Chaplin’s persecution, that becomes maddening. If you know what happened to Paul Robeson, the Hollywood Ten, and those in the entertainment industry who lost families and careers in subsequent years, you’ll still be surprised by the workings of the besmirchment industry.
Hoover’s office fed misinformation directly to gossip columnists like Hedda Hopper, Walter Winchell, Westbrook Pegler, and the particularly odious Ed Sullivan. They gloried in doing Hoover’s bidding, and the credulous masses bought it, just as they now buy the lies chanted by Fox News.
Chaplin made it worse for himself in 1942, when he gave a speech to the American Committee for Russian War Relief in which he called for opening a second front (with Russia) in a European war that had now dragged in the United States. Even as the filmmaker was wrongly accused of belonging to the Communist Party, he was vilified for refusing to become a U.S. citizen. The fact was, as he often insisted, that he didn’t believe in political parties and patriotic partisanship.
He went on trial for a Mann Act violation, and was easily acquitted; he was tried again in a paternity suit in 1943 and lost, despite a blood test proving that he couldn’t have been the father. And all of this fanned those gossip-column flames. The culmination occurred as he crossed the Atlantic in 1952 to promote his latest picture, “Limelight,” and learned that he wouldn’t be allowed back in the U.S. His final years, in Switzerland, were spent in a very happy marriage, surrounded by adoring children, but with nothing like his prior outlet for creativity. And the political oppression would persist for years, until its principal protagonists had died off and Hollywood, a reliable amnesiac, forgot the sins and Academy Award-ed the sinner in 1972.
This ground has been covered before, first in Chaplin’s own “My Autobiography,” published in 1964, in which the narrative is laced with the exaggerations (and elisions) that make dinner-table tales so effective, and which is skillfully balanced by the authoritative biography “Chaplin: His Life and Art” by David Robinson, published in 1985. There are many other Chaplin-related books, but one to avoid it Joyce Milton’s 1996 hatchet job “Tramp: The Life of Charlie Chaplin,” and Kenneth Lynn’s “Charlie Chaplin and His Times” (1997) both of which read as if the authors had been cozying up to Hoover and his minions.
But Eyman’s book takes its rightful place alongside the best of them, explaining better than any of them why the comedian-filmmaker spent those last three decades of his life in exile, unfortunately muting a career that had taught the world in general and Hollywood in particular how to laugh.
Charlie Chaplin vs. America: When Art, Sex, and Politics Collided
By Scott Eyman
Simon & Schuster
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