City of Nets (38 page)

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 audience?” 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.

“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.