16

Monsieur Verdoux

Chaplin’s whole life was marked by dramatic contrasts. The decade which followed the release of The Great Dictator was to see both the most bitter period of his public and professional career and the achievement in his personal life of a domestic happiness that had hitherto eluded him.

Chaplin thrilled the audience at the première of The Great Dictator by introducing Paulette as ‘my wife’. This long-delayed admission of a marriage made news across the world, yet it was oddly timed since both partners were by then aware that the marriage had already run its course. For two years they had been drifting apart, apparently without great acrimony. They had even arrived separately in New York for the première – Chaplin from California with Tim Durant, Paulette from Mexico, where she had been visiting a new friend, the Mexican painter Diego Rivera. Charles Junior suggested, realistically, that Chaplin calculated that a clarification in Paulette’s status would disarm the club women of America, whose moral disapprobation could harm the box office success of the new picture. He also believed Chaplin may have hoped that this public announcement might help to patch up the marriage.¹

It did not. After the première, Paulette returned to Hollywood to perform her last duties as hostess at the Summit Drive house, entertaining H. G. Wells, who was on a lecture tour, for two weeks. Chaplin stayed on in New York for four months until February 1941. In December he heard from Alf Reeves that Paulette had left Summit Drive and moved into a beach house lent to her by her agent, Myron Selznick.

Paulette was to obtain a divorce in Mexico in 1942, on grounds of incompatibility and separation for more than a year. Chaplin seems to have had grudging admiration for her shrewdness over the settlement she won from him. It was rumoured to be in the region of one million dollars, but was probably one third of that. Paulette also got the Panacea. The divorce proceedings (heard in absentia before Judge Javier Rosas Seballas in the Civil Court at Juarez) appeared to corroborate that a marriage had taken place in Canton in 1936.

Paulette’s career as a Paramount contract star flourished for most of the next decade: her craving for independence was undoubtedly one of the main causes of the split with Chaplin. She met Burgess Meredith while co-starring with Fred Astaire in Second Chorus (1940) and married him in 1944. That marriage ended with another Mexican divorce in June 1949, and in 1958 she married Erich Maria Remarque. Relations between Chaplin and Paulette remained quite cordial after the split, and Chaplin’s sons continued to see her from time to time. They felt particularly keenly the loss of Paulette’s vivid and cheering presence in the household. ‘It’s just one of those sad things, son,’ Chaplin would tell Charles Junior. ‘That’s life for you.’

Quite apart from the separation, the year 1941 began badly. The very mixed critical and public reception of The Great Dictator revealed, to Chaplin’s growing distress, the extent of pro-Nazi feeling in the United States. In January he was delighted to accompany a Hollywood delegation to the inauguration of President Roosevelt, whom he had first met as Secretary of the Navy during the First World War and whom he had since come to regard as the greatest President in American history. Roosevelt received him coolly, and his only comment on The Great Dictator was to complain at the diplomatic difficulties it had caused with the pro-Axis countries of Latin America. As part of the celebrations, Chaplin was to broadcast the final speech from The Great Dictator to a radio audience of sixty million. In the middle of it, perhaps from nerves, his throat went dry and his voice broke; it was two minutes before anyone could find some water in a folded sheet of paper so that he could continue. He carried off the mishap triumphantly, however, and the studio audience filled the hiatus with applause; but it was the kind of nightmare of embarrassment that always haunted him.

On his return to Hollywood in February 1941, Chaplin, having put behind him the Kustoff action over Modern Times, was faced with two insubstantial but irritating plagiarism suits relating to The Great Dictator.

He also remained a favourite target of the federal tax authorities. This time their claim for a large supplementary payment was thrown out of court, while Chaplin was upheld in his contention that he had overpaid by $24,938. The court victory did not lessen the irritation or prevent unfavourable publicity: in 1947, the vituperative Westbrook Pegler, in his syndicated column ‘Fair Enough’ (sic), would interpret the judgement as showing Chaplin ‘caught in the act of cheating the Government of an enormous debt for taxes’. It was hardly surprising that Chaplin willingly returned to New York on 26 March 1941, to appear as a character witness for Joseph M. Schenck, who was being sued for income tax evasion. This time Chaplin remained in New York for a month. His son Charles believed that he stayed on because he was considering a story about immigrants in New York, which would have been filmed there, with Paulette as his leading lady. Charles Junior considered that this idea was the nucleus of A King in New York, though nothing seems to have been reported at the time either on this story, or on another idea about the love of a drunken has-been star for a little chorus girl who doesn’t even know he exists – perhaps a prototype for Limelight. Another intriguing series of notes from around this period sketch a story about a great dancer whose career has collapsed – openly based on Nijinsky and equally looking forward to Limelight.

Perhaps remembering the attacks upon his expatriation during the First World War, he informally proposed to the British authorities that he might return to England to make a film to help boost wartime morale. The offer caused alarm rather than delight. Chaplin’s old friend and sincere admirer, Sidney Bernstein, working for the Ministry of Information as a war job, could only be honest about what he knew of Chaplin’s methods. He reported to the Minister:

Chaplin is an eccentric and works in conditions which would be impossible in any commercial studio in peacetime and would certainly be impossible in this country in wartime. That is why he works in his own studio in America.

He takes at least a year and a half to make a film and surrounds himself in the studio with relations and friends and appears to be unable to work with strangers. On many occasions he keeps his studio organization idle for weeks, waiting for the idea that will satisfy him or because he is not in the mood to work. We have not in this country sufficient spare studio facilities to make a Chaplin film or even a film directed by Chaplin … and the problems that would arise if he came … without realizing all this would be serious …

The Minister would be very embarrassed by the many questions that would be asked if Chaplin did come to England and spent a year or more making a movie.²

Chaplin returned to California on 30 April, but for the next six weeks stayed away from the studio. He was lonely, dispirited, and given to expressing dissatisfaction with his achievements. He enjoyed the companionship of his sons more than at any other time in his life. They were often taken along as chaperons when he dined with actresses who were often nearer their age than their father’s. One companion at this time was twenty-two-year-old Carole Landis, who had just attained stardom but was to commit suicide in 1948 at the age of twenty-nine. Another was the Viennese-born actress Hedy Lamarr, who had recently co-starred with Clark Gable in two films. Although they could never have been regarded as ‘dating’, Chaplin and Garbo had a high mutual regard: she laughed with abandon at his jokes and impersonations; he regularly proposed films that they might do together – wonderful fantasies with which she played along happily if sceptically.

Chaplin seems during this period to have become unusually gregarious, largely as a result of his passion for tennis. His old Sunday ritual of quiet English teas was now supplanted by weekly tennis parties which grew larger and larger, as friends brought friends, and became a rendezvous for the Hollywood elite. The most welcome guests were the great professional players of the time: Don Budge, Fred Perry, Bill Tilden, Pauline Betz and Helen Wills. Most of the domestic staff had Sunday free, but the entertainment always included tea and coffee, chicken sandwiches and the indispensable crumpets.

Among the guests in the early summer of 1941 was Joan Barry. At this time she was twenty-two. As Joan Berry she had arrived in Hollywood from Brooklyn in 1940, badly screenstruck but with no prospects. She was working as a waitress when she had her first break, and was picked out by J. Paul Getty, the oil millionaire, as pretty enough to form part of the female entourage to accompany him to Mexico for the inauguration of President Avila Camacho. In Mexico she caught the attention of the veteran film executive, A. C. Blumenthal, who had been a companion during Chaplin’s romantic fling with Louise Brooks in 1925. Blumenthal gave her a letter of introduction to Tim Durant, who invited her and another girl to dine with himself and Chaplin. Chaplin thought her cheerful and pleasant, but attached no importance to the encounter. Next Sunday, Durant brought her to the weekly tennis party. Chaplin then invited them to dinner at Romanoffs. Thereafter, Joan Barry pursued him with a persistence which, although her eagerness made him uneasy, eventually won through. She was by no means unattractive, and Chaplin found himself involved in an affair with her.

His misgivings about Joan were dissipated when he discovered, as he thought, that she had acting talent. He had found a possible film subject in Paul Vincent Carroll’s play Shadow and Substance, which had been brought to his attention by Sinclair Lewis and Sir Cedric Hardwicke, who had played the leading role of Canon Skerritt in the New York production. Chaplin bought the screen rights for $20,000. One evening, Joan Barry read the part of Brigid with such effect that he made screen tests, and on 23 June 1941 gave her a contract, on which her name appeared as ‘Joanne Barry’. This was for six months at $75 a week, with an option for a six-month renewal at the same rate, or one year’s renewal at $75 for the first six months and $100 per week for the remainder.³ Chaplin, whose memory was rarely at fault in matters of money, wrote in his autobiography, quite incorrectly, that he ‘put her under contract at a salary of $250 a week’.

Chaplin was undoubtedly sincere in believing that he could make Joan Barry into an actress. He had certainly neither the need nor the temperament to waste money wooing girls with contracts, even if there had been any cause to woo Barry, who was undoubtedly infatuated with him. He said, and no doubt meant it, that she had ‘all the qualities of a new Maude Adams’ and told his sons, ‘She has a quality, an ethereal something that’s truly marvellous … a talent as great as any I’ve seen in my whole life …’⁴ Chaplin sent Barry to Max Reinhardt’s drama school, paid for elaborate dental work for her, and showed off her talents in Shakespearean snippets at parties.

The affair began in earnest after the signing of the contract, and lasted for most of the year. Joan’s contract was renewed for a second six-month period, and she received the Christmas bonus of $1000 awarded to all studio staff. Tim Durant later told an FBI agent:

He’s not a wolf or really a cad – he’s just a guy who goes overboard and the wrong kind of girl gets involved and you can’t blame her. She just can’t handle it and that’s what happened in this particular case …

It isn’t a question of involving a young girl and trying to take advantage of her. He was very keen about Joan. He was interested in her. I think if Joan had used any sense – and Christ knows I talked to her by the hour trying to get her to calm down and use her head – she had a wonderful opportunity. All she had to do was to keep quiet and not involve Charlie or disturb him, and there would have been no danger or no trouble about it. She would have done this picture, which is just as good as The Song of Bernadette – I mean it’s that kind of picture; great spiritual quality, but when he got involved and saw she couldn’t handle it, he wanted to break off, he tried to break off and she wouldn’t let him, and instead of doing something about it, getting on a train and going somewhere, doing something for her, he kept, on occasion, seeing her, which she forced on him to a great extent. I think he was – know he was very, genuinely fond of her in his way.⁵

Long after Chaplin’s death, his widow, Oona, whom he had met and married in the course of the Joan Barry troubles, found a batch of letters which Joan had written to Chaplin, and found them touching: ‘she seemed very sweet and genuinely affectionate,’ she said. Joan recalled that ‘the first time I was ever intimate with Charles he told me that he couldn’t have children’:⁶ nevertheless by May 1942 she was pregnant. ‘I really wanted to go ahead and have the baby, and here were Chaplin and Durant trying to high-pressure me into the operation.’⁷ She resisted, and Chaplin seems to have relented, saying that she could go to Santa Barbara and have the baby, which he would thereafter support. In anticipation of this arrangement, on 22 May, Reeves swiftly drew up a letter of agreement to terminate her contract, getting Joan to state:

Dear Mr Reeves,

Understanding Mr Chaplin’s plans for production of his new picture are very indefinite, I hereby request you terminate my contract which has approximately one more month to run.

My associations with you and the studio have been very pleasant, but I feel that inasmuch as there will be no activity here for some time, I perhaps could do better on my own somewhere else.⁸

Immediately after signing this, however, Joan was persuaded by Durant to go ahead with the abortion. Later, when the FBI began to interest themselves in the affair, Joan Barry was interviewed at length by agents of the Bureau. Her statement is long and hopelessly confused about the chronology of events, but it appears that she became pregnant again, though this time she submitted quite meekly to a second abortion by the same gynaecologist, Dr Tweedie. Joan alleged that in the various altercations over the abortions, Tim Durant physically abused her, leaving her with a badly bruised face.⁹

Durant and other friends had become alarmed at signs of Barry’s mental instability before Chaplin himself noticed it. By the spring of 1942 and the time of the first pregnancy, the signs could not be ignored. She began to drive up to the house, very drunk, in the small hours, and on one occasion crashed her Cadillac in the drive. On at least one occasion she began smashing windows when Chaplin refused to open up to her. Abhorring drunkenness, Chaplin was particularly anxious that, as an employee of the studios, her escapades should not become public. He discovered that she had not been attending the Reinhardt classes for weeks.

Finally, eager to be rid of her, Chaplin paid off $500 of Barry’s debts (he later said it was $5000, but the studio accounts were clear on the point), and provided one-way tickets for her and her mother to go to New York, which they did on 5 October 1942.

In June 1941 Chaplin returned to work at the studio for the first time since the completion of The Great Dictator. Much of the rest of that year was taken up in preparing a sound reissue of The Gold Rush. Chaplin wrote a new musical accompaniment, which was recorded under the direction of Max Terr. The titles were replaced by a commentary, spoken by Chaplin himself, and referring to the hero throughout as ‘The Little Fellow’. Chaplin brought in an editor, Harold McGhean, and trimmed the film slightly, excising, besides the sub-titles, fifty-seven feet (thirty-eight seconds at the normal sound speed of twenty-four frames per second) from the original length. The major change was the lingering fade-out kiss between Chaplin and Georgia Hale, modified to a more chaste ending in which they simply walk off hand in hand.

Throughout 1942, and even after the departure of Joan Barry, Chaplin continued to work on the script of Shadow and Substance. In his hands Paul Vincent Carroll’s play could have been a fascinating film subject. Written in 1934, the play was originally produced at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in January 1937. It is the story of Brigid, a simple Irish girl working in the household of the Reverend Canon Thomas Skerritt, and given to seeing visions of her namesake, the holy St Brigid. The Canon’s two assistant priests represent the poles of rational and superstitious faith. A riot in the local town over the same conflict of belief results in Brigid’s death and leads the Canon to question his own faith and sinful pride.

Chaplin’s adaptation, completed late in 1942, is excellent, though he is much less interested in issues of Catholicism than in the human and humanist content of the play. Clearly, sympathetic chords were touched in him by lines like ‘Every year scores of decent Christians in America sprinkle Negroes with petrol and burn them because they love God and his justice.’ The film script retains the main dramatic line, while reducing the dialogue by at least one third, and reorganizing a number of the minor characters.

It concludes with a song, which seems to be Chaplin’s own addition to the text:

Ecce homo

Ecce homo

His crown

Just a barren wreath of thorns

There in the darkness

He wore

Just a barren wreath of thorns

But in the starlight

I saw

A rose

So red

Blooming on his crown of thorns.

Glory

Glory

A rose

So red a rose

Blooming on his crown of thorns.

On the back of this final page of the script, Chaplin has added some manuscript notes, including reflections on humour. It is not clear if they are ideas for additional dialogue or simply personal aides-mémoires: Tensions are vital to life. One should never completely relax unless one wants to feel the poetry of slowly dying.

Nonsense is not the proper word for humour. Fun is more appropriate …

Wisdom is the seed of humour.

Humour is the gauge that indicates excess in statement, action, attitude or manner.¹⁰

On 7 December 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and America entered the war on the Allied side. This caused domestic disruption for Chaplin, since the Japanese servants were immediately interned. The house was restaffed with English, whom Chaplin found tiresomely slow after more than twenty years of the swift, efficient, intuitive attentions of the Japanese. Spiritually the war affected Chaplin deeply, and both his sons were soon to be drafted for service. He was particularly chagrined by the widespread anti-Soviet feeling among many Americans who observed with satisfaction the mounting Russian casualties on the Eastern Front, reckoning that in time the conflict would result in the mutual destruction of both Nazis and Communists. Chaplin was eager to make his own contribution to the war effort.

His opportunity came in May 1942. He received a telephone call from the American Committee for Russian War Relief, asking if he could stand in for Ambassador Davies, who was ill, at a mass meeting the following day in San Francisco. He agreed, but as the time for his performance approached he was overtaken by the old feeling of stage-fright at the prospect of facing an audience. He was not reassured by learning that he was expected to hold the platform for an hour. A couple of glasses of champagne helped, however, along with his irritation at the timidity of the preceding speakers, who were evidently concerned not to seem too enthusiastic about the Soviet ally. When it came to his turn, Chaplin startled his audience of between 8000 and 10,000 people by addressing them as ‘Comrades!’ and then going on to explain, ‘I assume there are many Russians here tonight, and the way your countrymen are fighting and dying at this very moment, it is an honour and a privilege to call you comrades.’ The enthusiasm of the audience spurred him on to an excited Shakespearean paraphrase:

I am not a Communist. I am a human being, and I think I know the reactions of human beings. The Communists are no different from anyone else; whether they lose an arm or a leg, they suffer as all of us do, and die as all of us die. And the Communist mother is the same as any other mother. When she receives the tragic news that her sons will not return, she weeps as other mothers weep. I do not have to be a Communist to know that. And at this moment Russian mothers are doing a lot of weeping and their sons a lot of dying … ¹¹

The excitement of both speaker and audience intensified, and as a finale Chaplin called upon the enthusiastic multitude to send 10,000 telegrams to the President, demanding the opening of a second front in Europe: ‘Stalin wants it, Roosevelt has called for it – so let’s all call for it – let’s open a second front now!’ Chaplin’s fears that he might have gone too far – even without considering the dubious military implications of a second front at that juncture – were not dispelled by John Garfield’s wondering remark at a dinner party after the event: ‘You have a lot of courage!’ Dan James and his wife Lilith were present that night, and Lilith recalled that after the speech, ‘everyone was scared of him, so they handed him over to us. It was a tremendous speech. It was a very bold political stand to take at that time.’

The experience seems to have given Chaplin a new taste for public speaking. Even he was not clear to what extent he was inspired by idealism or by the rediscovery of the heady if fearsome stimulus of applause. (In Limelight, when Terry challenges Calvero’s assertion that he hates the theatre, he replies: ‘I hate the sight of blood, but I still have it in my veins.’) Two months after the San Francisco speech he was asked to address a mass meeting in Madison Square by radio-telephone. The rally had been organized by the Council of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and was attended by 60,000 trades unionists and others. Chaplin spent the whole of the previous day (21 July) preparing his speech, which lasted fourteen minutes and was heard with rapt attention. Again he called for a second front.

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. You, official Washington, and you, official London, let us make this our aim – victory in the spring!

‘As usual,’ commented Charles Junior, ‘his enthusiasm ran away with him.’ Despite (or perhaps, Chaplin felt, because of) Jack Warner’s advice that he should refuse, he accepted a further invitation to speak at a rally in Carnegie Hall organized by the Artists’ Front to Win the War, even at that time regarded as a dangerously leftist organization. However, the platform was shared with such politically respectable celebrities as Orson Welles, Pearl Buck and Rockwell Kent. Chaplin arrived in New York on 15 October 1942, the day before the rally, accompanied by Tim Durant and Edward Chaney, his new English valet. In New York he was met by Charles Junior, who noted his father’s habitual pre-performance nerves and nausea. There was also an amiable reunion with Paulette, whose divorce had become effective on 4 June.

Chaplin’s platform appearance was the usual success. Returning to the Waldorf-Astoria he discovered that Joan Barry had been telephoning repeatedly. She called again, and later arrived at the hotel. She explained that she had now moved into the Pierre Hotel, owned by J. Paul Getty. In his autobiography, Chaplin recalled the meeting as lasting no more than half an hour, and emphasized that ‘I told Tim not to leave me alone with her’. When Durant was interviewed by agents of the FBI in the course of their subsequent investigation of the Chaplin–Barry affair, he told them, ‘I sat in the living room with them. He said he was going to take Miss Berry to the Pierre. I went in my room and went to bed. I did not hear them leave Mr Chaplin’s apartment, but I do know that the following morning Miss Berry wasn’t there.’¹² Joan would later claim that she and Chaplin had had sexual relations.

Chaplin stayed on in New York for ten days after the rally, though he sensed that since his Second Front speeches he was no longer welcome at the homes of some of his former hosts. Speaking invitations continued to arrive, and to be accepted; conscientious as he was, Chaplin began to spend more and more time preparing each successive speech. He devoted most of the previous week dictating an address for a ‘Salute to Our Russian Ally’ meeting held at Orchestra Hall, Chicago, on 25 November. From Chicago he went on to New York to speak at an ‘Arts for Russia’ dinner at the Hotel Pennsylvania on 3 December. This brief, but in the long run highly significant, phase of Chaplin’s activities was rounded off early in 1943. In February he prepared a speech to be recorded at the office of the Soviet consul for subsequent broadcast in Russia. On Sunday, 7 March he made a speech which was transmitted to Britain from the Los Angeles studio of CBS. It was presented as a Transatlantic Call to Lambeth, and painted a vivid picture of the London that Chaplin remembered from his boyhood. He concluded: ‘I remember the Lambeth streets, the New Cut and the Lambeth Walk, Vauxhall Road. They were hard streets, and one couldn’t say they were paved with gold. Nevertheless, the people who lived there are made of pretty good metal.’

From the moment of Chaplin’s speech of 3 December 1942, arranged by Russian War Relief, Inc., J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI were back on his trail. The day after the meeting, a report was filed by an unidentified agent, who had posed as a sympathizer. He sent back a detailed transcript of Chaplin’s speech, which included such enthusiastic and, in the Bureau’s eyes, incriminating phrases as ‘I am not a Communist, but I am pretty pro-Communist.’ From this point onwards, as long as Chaplin remained in America, evidence of ‘Red sympathies’ was to be diligently piled up against him. The Second Front speeches were duly noted. In April 1943, Chaplin was seen at a showing of the Soviet classic, Baltic Deputy. In August 1943, he was Master of Ceremonies at a reception for the distinguished Soviet director, Mikhail Kalatozov. He attended a Shostakovich concert. In May 1946, he attended a film show and party on a Soviet ship in Long Beach harbour, and jokingly called American customs men ‘Gestapo’. On leaving, he was photographed with John Garfield, ‘alias Jules Garfinkle’ and Lewis Milestone, ‘Russian born film director’.

The endless rumours of contributions to the Party culminated in Hedda Hopper’s inventive sneers about ‘Charlie Chaplin, who contributed $25,000 to the Communist cause and $100 to the Red Cross’. The Bureau ‘monitored’ his bank account and found a lot of money but no sign of contributions to Communist causes. Everything was grist to the Bureau’s slow-grinding mill. In August 1947, we find Hoover himself requesting by urgent teletype a copy of an article in praise of Chaplin that had appeared in Pravda. It hardly seemed to matter to the Director that the item – an appreciative notice of the first Chaplin films to appear in the Soviet Union – had been published in 1923. A week later, a memorandum proposed that the Pravda piece might make a choice item for the gossip columnist Louella Parsons. In the end it was sent to Hedda Hopper, who used it. It is significant that the FBI was not only using the gossip of these viperish ladies as evidence, but was also feeding information to them. There is at least an acknowledgement that the procedure might be irregular: a note on the memorandum instructs that it is ‘To be destroyed after action is taken and not sent to files.’ Fortunately for posterity, someone slipped up.

In general, the FBI files reveal much more about the methods of the FBI than about the life of Chaplin. What is alarming is not any investigative skill or deviousness in the methods of the Bureau, but rather the degree of sloppiness and stupidity that many of the reports reveal. An inordinate amount of time seems to have been devoted to processing hearsay, rumours, poison-pen letters and cranky unsolicited correspondence, along with the public smears by Hedda Hopper, Ed Sullivan and other syndicated gossip columnists.

The Bureau’s biographical data on Chaplin, which served, periodically rehashed, for more than thirty years, was derived from Gerith von Ulm’s 1940 book, Charlie Chaplin, King of Tragedy, a record only intermittently trustworthy. Throughout the files the Bureau perpetuated such inaccuracies as that Chaplin had married Mildred Harris in London (von Ulm had this right, at least) and that he was Jewish. In this connection, they happily gleaned a piece of colourful misinformation from Who’s Who in American Jewry, wherein it was claimed that Chaplin was the son of a family called Thonstein, who had emigrated from Eastern Europe and settled in London in 1850. After this, they generally headed reports on Chaplin ‘alias Charlie Chaplin; alias Israel Thonstein’, which gave a nicely sinister touch to things.

Nothing, however trivial, was disregarded. It was enough for some leftish organization to express its admiration for Chaplin, or to say that it might invite him to attend a function, for an addition to the files. A soldier charged with a security offence snapped, ‘Sure I’m a Communist … so is Charlie Chaplin.’ It was reported by the Army to the FBI, and stayed on Chaplin’s record to the end; no detail, however meaningless or insubstantial, was ever erased once it was on file. It was recorded as a sign of undesirable radical views that he was signatory to a letter from 800 labour, religious and social leaders who urged Roosevelt to prevent racial outbreaks and lauded his stand against discrimination. At the time of Chaplin’s departure from the United States in 1952, all this was summarized in a 115-page report with the sub-headings ‘Information pertaining to Questions of Communist Party Membership of Charles Chaplin’, ‘Individual Associates of Chaplin who are Reported to be Communist Party Members’ (they included Hanns and Gerhardt Eisler, Lion Feuchtwanger and Theodore Dreiser), and ‘Affiliation of Charles Chaplin with Groups Declared to be Communist Subversive Groups or Reputedly Controlled or Influenced by the Communist Party’.

Troubles were piling up. On 2 November, Joan Barry returned to Hollywood and checked into the Beverly Hills Hotel. During the next weeks she spent time with a number of men, including J. Paul Getty in Tulsa, and the screenwriter and producer Sam Marx. She seemed to flaunt her escorts in an effort to arouse Chaplin’s jealousy when they met at smart Hollywood nightspots. She pestered him with phone calls and at least once called at the Summit Drive house, when, she claimed, he abused her verbally and physically.

On the night of 23 December, Barry used a ladder to break into Chaplin’s house, where she produced a gun.

The reason I bought those guns was because I was going to kill myself. I finally resolved to see Charles, thinking that when I got up there I would kill myself right in front of him … He asked me why I was going to kill myself and I told him that I had been in love with him and we weren’t getting any place. He said, ‘Don’t be foolish, I haven’t gone out with any other girls, but I have to have other “interests”.’¹³

Chaplin apparently calmed her and told her that she should stay the night. He assured his valet Edward Chaney, who had apparently heard what was going on, that he could manage the situation. In the midst of things his two sons arrived at the house. Unwilling to involve them, he asked them to go to their rooms and only told them the following morning what had occurred. Barry was later to assert that intimacy took place on this occasion, and that ‘Charles made some remark to the effect that having an affair with a gun nearby was a “new twist”.’¹⁴ Chaplin’s version was that he locked the door between his room and the bathroom which lay between the rooms they separately occupied. She left the following morning after Chaplin gave her some money.

A week or so later she was back, and this time Chaplin was obliged to call the police. She was given a ninety-day suspended sentence and ordered to leave town. An employee of the Chaplin studios handed her a railroad ticket and $100. In May 1943, six months pregnant, she was back again. Chaplin believed that Hedda Hopper had advised her to get publicity by getting herself imprisoned, which a second court appearance achieved for her. She was sentenced to thirty days for vagrancy, spending most of the time in hospital on account of her condition.

At the very moment that this sad, disturbed young woman was tormenting him and storing up still worse trouble for the future, Chaplin met Oona O’Neill. Oona was the daughter of Eugene O’Neill by his second wife Agnes Boulton, but was only a child when her parents divorced. She was gifted with beauty, charm and acute intelligence, and, despite her natural shyness, had made a name in New York as a young socialite and girl-about-town – to the disgust of her father, who soon severed all contact with her. In the spring of 1942, not quite seventeen, she had been nominated Debutante Number One of the year. Her dates included Orson Welles and J. D. Salinger. Having taken her Vassar entrance examinations, she decided instead upon an acting career, and arrived in Hollywood, where her mother and stepfather were already living. There she made a screen test for a role in The Girl from Leningrad, which was to be produced by Eugene Frenke, the husband of Anna Sten, the Russian actress brought to Hollywood by Samuel Goldwyn. The test still survives: her beauty is both radiant and fragile, her personality at once diffident and eager. Even in this antiquated fragment of film, her presence remains vivid.

Her agent, Minna Wallace (who happened to have been involved in fixing up doctors for Joan Barry), knew that Chaplin was looking for someone to play Brigid in Shadow and Substance. She mentioned Oona O’Neill to Chaplin, who was not optimistic about the prospect of the daughter of America’s most celebrated tragic dramatist. Minna Wallace, however, arranged a dinner party at which she and Oona were joined by Tim Durant (whose father had been a friend of O’Neill’s) and Chaplin. Chaplin was instantly enchanted by Oona’s looks, appeal, gentleness and smile, but he was still nervous that the role of Brigid was beyond an actress of her years and small experience.

According to Rollie Totheroh, shortly after the meeting Oona turned up at the studio in her red sports car. With the mixture of timidity and determination that was so bewildering and appealing in her, she refused to be put off by all the efforts of Totheroh and Alf Reeves, who were understandably nervous, after recent experiences with Joan Barry, at the arrival of a youngster who looked even less than her seventeen and a half years. Meanwhile, Minna Wallace alarmed Chaplin with reports that Fox were interested in her client and Chaplin promptly offered Oona a contract.

Charles Junior and his brother were at once won over by Oona when they met her at the house, but quickly realized that they had an insuperable rival:

Whenever Oona was with our father a rapt expression would come into her eyes. She would sit quietly, hanging on his every word. Most women are charmed by Dad, but in Oona’s case it was different. She worshipped him, drinking in every word he spoke, whether it was about his latest script, the weather or some bit of philosophy. She seldom spoke, but every now and then she would come up with one of those penetrating remarks that impressed even our father with her insight.¹⁵

Throughout their lives the Chaplins would deny that Oona sought and found in Chaplin the father-figure she had been deprived of in O’Neill, but there can be no doubt that the maturity and solidity he offered her fulfilled some special need. The love affair which was to bring Chaplin lasting happiness and compensate for all the troubles now impending progressed swiftly. Oona began to visit the house frequently, often accompanied by her mother Agnes Boulton (Aggie).

As a youngster Oona had been subject to sore throats. Around this time she became quite ill with an upper respiratory infection and a hacking cough. Convinced that Oona required immediate and special care, Charlie informed Aggie that he was going to bring her daughter to his home, put her to bed, and call the doctor – a rather daring move in light of the Joan Barry situation. Busy with her own schedule, Aggie was quite content to have someone else take over. Charlie brought Oona to Summit Drive and announced to his servants that the young lady had tuberculosis. Extremely sick at first, Oona recovered and after regaining her health stayed on in the Paulette Goddard bedroom … the fact that Oona was living with Chaplin was not a well-kept secret. Indeed, Hollywood was abuzz with stories ranging from the ridiculous to the nasty.¹⁶

Chaplin recalled that – despite his nervousness about the difference in their ages – they decided they would marry after completing the filming of Shadow and Substance. This decision must have been rapid, since studio records show that Shadow and Substance was definitively shelved on 29 December 1942, no more than two months after the first meeting at Minna Wallace’s house.

Already by November 1942 Chaplin was working on a new idea, which was eventually to become Monsieur Verdoux, and no doubt it was the much richer possibilities it offered which made him decide to scrap a year’s work on the Shadow and Substance script. The idea had taken seed early in 1941, when Orson Welles visited the house and suggested he would like to direct a documentary reconstruction of the career of Henri Désiré Landru, the celebrated French wife-murderer, with Chaplin playing the principal role. Welles had as yet done no work on a script, and a few days afterwards Chaplin telephoned him to say that his suggestions had given him the idea for a comedy. Although the film would have only the remotest connection with the real-life Landru, Chaplin suggested that Welles might accept a payment of $5000, since his proposition had originally stimulated the idea. The offer was not in any way altruistic: by this time Chaplin had had too much experience of plagiarism claims and wanted to forestall any possible trouble. The letter of agreement, dated 24 July 1941 and signed by Alf Reeves and Welles, survives in the Chaplin archive.¹⁷ It provided for a credit to be accorded to Welles, ‘either before or after the credits given to the author or authors and the director of said photoplay’: the proposed form for this was amended from ‘Suggested by Orson Welles’ to ‘Based on an idea by Orson Welles’. The agreement also gave Chaplin rights in Welles’s original title, The Lady Killer. In later years, Chaplin was inclined to resent Welles’s pride in being the author of the germinal idea for Verdoux.

Chaplin worked almost continuously on the script from November 1942 until the start of production in April 1946. The production was referred to as Landru until March 1943, when it became known as ‘Production No 7: Bluebeard’. The title then became simply Verdoux; Monsieur Verdoux seems to have been finally adopted in June 1946.

The early part of 1943 passed pleasantly, without trouble. Oona seems to have moved in permanently around May, and before that she and her mother spent a lot of time at the house, as did young Charles and Sydney, who were now approaching draft age. In the weeks after Christmas, Chaplin screened City Lights, The Circus, The Idle Class and Shoulder Arms at the studio for the O’Neills and other friends. There was a portent of trouble in May when Joan Barry telephoned the house and informed the butler, for no apparent reason, that she was pregnant. On 4 June she gave the same information to the press, this time adding that Chaplin was the father of her unborn child. Thus began a two-year nightmare which was to be described by one Los Angeles attorney, Eugene L. Trope, as ‘a landmark in the miscarriage of justice’.

On the day of Joan Barry’s announcement to the press, her mother, Gertrude Berry, as guardian of the unborn child, filed a paternity suit against Chaplin, asking for $10,000 for pre-natal care, $2500 a month for support of the unborn child, and $5000 court costs. Chaplin’s lawyers countered with a brief statement in his name:

Miss Barry states her unborn child was conceived in December last. The first claim made upon me by Miss Barry was in May and was accompanied by a demand of $150,000. I am not responsible for Miss Barry’s condition.

Chaplin stated that these May demands specified $75,000 for the child and $75,000 for Gertrude Berry, with nothing for Joan herself, and were made under threat of exposure to the press. Chaplin refused to pay, even though Tim Durant, who was acting as middleman, was convinced that it was a bona fide once-and-for-all settlement. According to Charles Junior, Chaplin’s refusal was not in consideration of money – he was aware that to fight the case would be much more costly, win or lose – but out of a sense of justice: ‘He was indignant because he was innocent. It was all part of the strain of stubborn integrity which runs through him and which is such an admirable and exasperating characteristic.’¹⁸

Californian law on divorce and paternity at that time consistently gave the benefit of doubt to the woman, and the mere allegation that a man was father was sufficient grounds for forcing him to support both woman and child until settlement of the suit. The opposing lawyers finally agreed and filed with the Superior Court payments to be made pending the outcome of the case. Chaplin agreed to pay $2500 cash and $100 a week for Barry’s support, as well as $500 thirty days before the birth, $1000 at the birth and $500 a month for the succeeding four months. For her part, Barry agreed to permit blood tests on the infant to help determine the child’s paternity, when it reached the age of four months. As reported by the New York Times, the Barry lawyers agreed that ‘If at least two of the doctors say “no”, the suit would be dropped; if they said “maybe” (a positive “yes” is impossible from blood tests) the girl will be free to press her claims.’

The affair provided a field day for the press. As soon as the story broke, Chaplin, to escape reporters or process servers, hid out in the home of Eugene Frenke and Anna Sten on Layton Drive, Los Angeles. Oona visited him there and also stayed occasionally. It remained a long-standing joke with the Frenkes that the lovers were so preoccupied that they forgot to repay the Frenkes’ food ration coupons which they used up during the stay. They had already decided to marry on 1 June when Oona, having then passed her eighteenth birthday, would no longer need the parental consent which she rightly anticipated would not have been forthcoming from her father, though her mother was wholehearted in approving the match. Durant and the lawyers felt it would be advisable for Oona to return East until the Barry storm blew over, but she doggedly insisted that at this time more than at any other her place was at Chaplin’s side.

Harry Crocker was entrusted with arrangements for the marriage, and in return was permitted to photograph the ceremony and give the news as an exclusive to his colleague on the Hearst press, Louella Parsons. Always inclined to take a directly contrary view to her arch rival Hedda Hopper, Miss Parsons had remained as friendly towards Chaplin as Miss Hopper was vituperative – though the peak of Hopper’s vilification was yet to come. On Tuesday, 15 June, Chaplin and Oona, accompanied by Crocker and Catherine Hunter, Chaplin’s secretary, drove to Santa Barbara. Soon after eight the following morning they registered at the court house to receive a licence, and then made as rapid a getaway as possible to avoid the press, who had already been alerted by the court clerk. They were quietly married by a seventy-eight-year-old Justice of the Peace, Clinton Pancoast Moore. When they got outside they discovered that Mr Moore had taken down Chaplin’s name as ‘Chapman’. It was a mistake few people had made in the thirty years since Keystone had telegraphed the Karno Company in quest of a new star: Mr Moore obligingly corrected it.

Chaplin and Oona stayed on in Santa Barbara for almost six weeks, and miraculously the press failed to hunt them out. Chaplin’s mood veered from depression to bliss. Unrecognized, they went for country walks in the evenings, and Oona read aloud to relieve Chaplin’s darker moods. They returned to Beverly Hills on 26 July, and Chaplin immediately resumed work on the script, now called Bluebeard. There was other work to be done at the studio as well. Brigadier-General Osborn, Director of the Special Services Division of the Army, had requested that Chaplin might make prints of Shoulder Arms available to the Armed Forces Institute Film Services. Chaplin was delighted that his twenty-five-year-old picture was still reckoned to have a value for morale, and Totheroh set about revising and restoring a perfect new negative, using the plentiful negative out-takes that had been stored, often under protest, for so many years. In January, Chaplin saw the new print, as well as The Gold Rush, in the company of Oona and a party of friends, and decided that it would be a good idea to do the same for all his old films, in each case assembling new negatives to obtain a good protection print for special use if required at any time. On completion, the new negatives were to be deposited with Pathé’s Hollywood laboratory. Totheroh spent most of the next year or so preparing these definitive negatives and library prints of the First National films. They were to prove invaluable years later when Chaplin decided to reissue a number of his early films with music. Chaplin’s almost obsessive habit of retaking every shot until he was completely satisfied meant that Totheroh could reconstruct near-identical versions of practically every moment of the films. Inevitably there are slight but constant variations between the original versions of the films and the new 1940s negatives, which provide constant fascination and frustration to students and critics.

On the night of 2 October 1943, Joan Barry gave birth to a baby girl, whom she named Carol Ann. For the FBI, the chance to impugn Chaplin’s morals temporarily eclipsed investigations into his supposed subversive politics. After Joan Barry had made her first public charges that Chaplin was the father of her unborn child on 4 June 1943, the Bureau initiated investigations on 17 August, when Hoover put Special Agent Hood on the case to collect evidence to support charges under the Mann Act and the US code on the Violation of Civil Liberties. Three days later, Hoover issued a teletype requesting that the investigation be expedited, and during the next four months the Bureau were tireless. They interviewed scores of witnesses, including Chaplin’s entire staff, his sons, and even Oona, who had never met Joan Barry. The secret evidence they collected fills more than 400 pages. One of their most helpful informants was Hedda Hopper. They bugged telephones and hotel rooms (with devices they called ‘microphone technicals’). They put stops on border posts to prevent Chaplin leaving the country if he had been so inclined.

The Bureau’s investigations reveal much more about Joan Barry than emerged in the trials, showing her as perhaps the most pitiable figure in the affair, trapped between the lines of the war which Hoover and the FBI were waging against Chaplin. The files reveal that her true name was Mary Louise Gribble. She had adopted the name of her stepfather, Mr Berry, and was variously known as Joan Berry, Joan Barry, Mary Louise Barry, Joan Barratt, Mary L. Barratt, Joanne Berry, Jo Anne Berry, Bettie Booker, Joan Spencer, Mrs Mark Warner, Catherine McLaren and Mary L. Spencer. This indecision over her names perhaps reflects the mental confusion which had became increasingly acute towards the end of her association with Chaplin. The most singular revelation of the FBI files is the admission that ‘never did either BERRY or her attorney request this investigation or express a desire for the Government to take action against CHAPLIN’.¹⁹ It is also revealed that the prosecution did not always have an easy time in presenting Mrs Berry in the required role of a concerned and loving mother: Gertrude Berry was reported to have a drink problem and to quarrel frequently with her daughter; and on one occasion she disappeared from their home.

On 10 February 1944, Chaplin was indicted by a federal grand jury. The first charge was that he had violated the Mann Act, a piece of legislation dating from 1910 and designed to combat commercial prostitution. The Act made it illegal to transport a woman across state lines for immoral purposes, and it was now alleged that on 5 October 1942 Chaplin ‘feloniously transported and caused to be transported Joan Barry from Los Angeles to the city of New York … with the intent and purpose of engaging in illicit sex relations’. A second similar count alleged that he had ‘caused her to be transported from New York City to Los Angeles for similar purposes’. Three further charges joined Chaplin with six other people, including the police judge who was involved in Barry’s first arrest on vagrancy charges, on a rather obscure offence of conspiring to violate Miss Barry’s civil liberties.

The Mann Act charge was itself pretty far-fetched and depended on proving that Chaplin had engaged in sexual relations with Miss Barry on the occasion of his visit to New York for his Second Front speech, and that moreover this had been his intention in paying her fare to New York a couple of weeks earlier. At the trial which began on 25 February, Chaplin’s counsel, Jerry Giesler, a ‘personality’ lawyer famous for his many show-business clients, pinpointed the absurdity of the Government’s position. He asked the jury in his summing up if it was likely that Chaplin would transport Barry 3000 miles for the purpose of a single alleged intimacy when she ‘would have given her body to him at any time or place’. There was, added Giesler, ‘no more evidence of Mann Act violation than there is evidence of murder’. The Government, however, pressed its case doggedly with a procession of witnesses. Barry went on the stand first to assert that intimacy had taken place during the New York visit, and that this meeting had been discussed before her departure from Hollywood for New York. The prosecuting attorney also called the travel agent who had supplied one-way tickets to New York for Barry and her mother; three railroad men who testified that the tickets had been used; the credit manager of the Waldorf-Astoria who confirmed that Chaplin was registered there – as everyone agreed he was – at the time under discussion; the night elevator operator from the hotel; and Chaplin’s valet, Edward Chaney. Giesler, for the defence, cross-examined Barry about her visits to Tulsa. J. Paul Getty was called to testify for the defence that he knew Barry and had frequented her company in 1941 and in Tulsa in November 1942.

The last witness, on 30 March, was Chaplin himself, who denied any immoral intent in providing railroad tickets for Joan Barry and her mother, and denied any intimacy with her at any period after May 1942. Giesler’s memoirs recall Chaplin as ‘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.’²⁰

Examining the first two charges, the jury of seven women and five men were out almost three hours and took four ballots to arrive at a unanimous vote of ‘Not Guilty’. Hoover, in alarm at this defeat, realized that unless the trial were stopped, Chaplin would emerge as a martyr. His blackmailing skills served him well: his files revealed that the trial judge himself had once had an ‘afternoon date’ with the sociable Joan Barry, and in appreciation he had presented her with a copy of his book Banks Under Roosevelt, affectionately inscribed and autographed. Clearly not overly excited by the subject, Joan had left the book behind in a lodging house. An FBI raid was mounted; the book was retrieved, and the obliging judge stopped the trial before the remaining charges could be considered.

After the trial, Judge O’Connor and the prosecution attorney, Charles Carr, gallantly congratulated Chaplin, who shook hands with each member of the jury and thanked them in turn. He was too moved to speak when one of them, Edythe Lewis, told him. ‘It’s all right, Charlie. It’s still a free country.’ At Summit Drive, Oona fainted when she heard the news on the radio. Privately the FBI exchanged letters of commiseration and compliments with the attorneys, looked forward to greater success in future attempts to expose Chaplin, and contemplated bringing charges of perjury against some of the witnesses.

The result was an immense relief, but Chaplin had suffered much from the days sitting in court, hearing the attorneys sieving through the unsavoury evidence of Barry’s love life. During preliminary hearings he had also been furious at the indignity of being fingerprinted while, quite irregularly, the press were permitted to photograph him. Needless to say, this incident was stored up for subsequent use – in A King in New York.

Between the indictment and the trial, Joan Barry’s baby had been submitted for blood tests conducted by three physicians, one representing Barry, one representing Chaplin, and one a neutral observer, Dr Newton Evans. The results were released by the attorneys for both parties on 15 February 1944, and showed conclusively that Chaplin could not be the father of the child. Research had established that parents of blood type 0 (Chaplin) and A (Joan Barry) could not produce a child of blood type B, as the baby proved to be. As a result of the tests, Chaplin’s lawyer Loyd Wright optimistically filed for a dismissal of the paternity suit. The motion was overruled by Superior Court Judge Stanley Mosk, who enigmatically declared that ‘the ends of justice will best be served by a full and fair trial of the issues’. Referring to the previous judge’s approval of the blood test, when Mrs Berry’s original suit had been filed, Judge Mosk said that it did not appear to him that the court then intended ‘more than mere approval of the blood test for the parties and the infant without expressing ultimate determination of the law suit’.

Mrs Berry had of course been party to the agreement to drop the suit if the tests proved negative. This was neatly side-stepped by taking the guardianship of Carol Ann away from her grandmother and assigning it to the court. It was now therefore the Court of Los Angeles that was suing Chaplin on Carol Ann’s behalf and the new trial was set for December 1944. Convinced though he was that the results of the blood test must wholly vindicate him, the months of waiting were still an anxious period for Chaplin.

Life with Oona, who was now pregnant with her first child, provided joyful distraction. In May they spent a ten-day holiday in Palm Springs, and passed most of June on the East Coast. On 1 August their first child, Geraldine, was born. Shortly afterwards they advertised for a nanny and among the applicants was Edith McKenzie, a Scot who had worked for many years in the United States. When Oona asked her on the phone how old she was, Miss McKenzie said evasively, ‘Why don’t you wait and see me for yourself?’ (She was just past forty.) Oona saw her and at once took to this slim, forthright, capable woman. Renamed ‘Kay-Kay’ a few months later by the infant Geraldine, she was to remain for over forty years an indispensable member of the household, and every Chaplin child’s closest friend and confidante.

Kay-Kay liked to recall how Chaplin watched and held his first daughter with the wonder of a young, first-time father, when he was in fact already the parent of two serving soldiers. Less than three weeks after Geraldine was born there was a reminder of his first unhappy marriage: Mildred Harris died at the age of forty-three in the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. Chaplin sent a spray of orchids, roses and gladioli to the funeral.

Lion Feuchtwanger, who was among Chaplin’s current friends, prophesied after the Mann Act trial, ‘You are the one artist of the theatre who will go down in American history as having aroused the political antagonism of a whole nation.’²¹ On this score Chaplin was for the moment reassured when General Eisenhower personally requested the preparation of a dubbed French version of The Great Dictator for release in newly liberated France, under the auspices of the Office of War Information. Chaplin happily gave his consent, and the required prints and tracks were shipped on 21 November.

The Carol Ann Barry paternity trial opened on 13 December 1944 before Judge Henry Willis. Chaplin was so confident that the scientific evidence must win the day that he did not this time engage the skilful Giesler (in the previous trial some friends had advised him that to hire such a heavyweight criminal pleader might in itself imply guilt) but a capable, unsensational attorney, Charles A. (Pat) Millikan. Neither Chaplin nor Millikan had reckoned on being faced by Joseph Scott as attorney for the prosecution. Scott was a craggy-faced old lawyer of the all-stops-out histrionic school. His ardent belief in God, country and the Republican Party added the strength of personal feeling to his pursuit of the defendant. Scott put Joan Barry on the stand, before a jury of seven women and five men, to describe the events of the night she broke into Chaplin’s house, brandishing a pistol. She explained that she had told Chaplin on that occasion, ‘I am almost out of my mind. I have waited and waited. You haven’t called me. I don’t know what to do.’ She insisted that the child was conceived on that occasion, and that she had had relations with no other man since she met Chaplin. Before she left in the morning of 24 December 1942, she said that Chaplin had promised to pay her a regular $25 per week. It was at that point that she had handed over the gun to him. Scott examined Chaplin, who insisted that there had been no intimacy between him and the girl since early in 1942, and that when Barry had told him that she was pregnant and he was responsible, he had replied that it was ‘impossible’. Scott’s final stroke was to have the jury gaze for three-quarters of a minute at Chaplin and Carol Ann, held in her mother’s arms at a distance of eight feet from Chaplin, urging them to recognize facial resemblances. The child was fourteen months old.

Millikan’s defence was in principle much stronger, relying simply upon two main witnesses. Dr Newton Evans, the independent physician who had conducted the blood tests, demonstrated the laboratory methods used to arrive at the definite conclusion that Chaplin could not be the father of Carol Ann. A Tulsa lawyer, O. C. Lassiter, described a conversation he had had with Barry on 28 January 1943, when he was Assistant County Counsel and was dismissing an unspecified charge against her. She had told him that she had ‘gone overboard’ for an oil man – presumably Getty – whom she had accompanied from California to Florida in November 1942; that she had come to Tulsa to be with him, and had spent two nights with him at the Mayo Hotel in Tulsa, when he had suggested marrying her if he could get rid of his wife. He had now left, however, and she could not find him. In court, Barry denied that such a conversation had taken place.

Logic may not have been on Scott’s side but he preferred to appeal to emotion. Throughout the trial he persistently abused Chaplin in terms which shocked even experienced reporters, and which had their effect in wounding and agitating Chaplin. Some instances of his invective were ‘grey-headed old buzzard’, ‘little runt of a Svengali’ and ‘lecherous hound’; Chaplin lied, he said, ‘like a cheap cockney cad’; ‘The reptile looked upon her [Barry] as so much carrion. Finally he took her up to the house and read her a script about Bluebeard’ (a reference which must relate to one of the later meetings of Chaplin and Barry). Scott evidently impressed part of the jury and, more important, he threw Chaplin off balance. At one point Chaplin was stung into crying out to the judge, ‘Your Honour, I’ve committed no crime. I’m only human. But this man is trying to make a monster out of me.’ Scott succeeded in manoeuvring Chaplin into a state in which the audience saw him as a man angry and cornered. In his final argument he exhorted the jury:

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.

If Scott’s abuse was to be taken seriously, it was a name the child would hardly thank them for giving her. Chaplin, along with everyone who knew him, was stunned by the vilification. Even taking into account the publicity surrounding his unfortunate divorces, Chaplin had led a life of exceptional discretion by Hollywood standards, and his time with Paulette demonstrated his essential yearning for domesticity. The affair with Joan Barry herself had started out with real mutual affection. The sticky label of ‘libertine’ hardly seemed deserved.

The jury may have been impressed by Scott’s oratory, but they were less convinced by Joan Barry’s evidence. After four hours and forty minutes of deliberation the jury could not reach a verdict: the vote was seven to five in favour of acquittal. Judge Clarence L. Kincaid offered to arbitrate. Scott for the prosecution was prepared to accept the offer, but Chaplin (who had missed the final days of the trial because of a foot injury which hospitalized him) was set on complete exoneration, and refused.

The retrial lasted from 4 April to 17 April 1944, and was heard before Judge Kincaid. It was adjourned on 14 April because of the death of President Roosevelt. This time the jury consisted of eleven women and one man. Joseph Scott stepped up his emotional assault upon the jury. In the words of a writer in Southern California Law Review, the jury ‘let sentimental consideration turn logic out of doors, and failed dismally in its task of weighing the evidence’. They brought in a verdict of ‘Guilty’ by an eleven to one vote. The stand-out juror was a housewife called Mary James, who said of her vote: ‘I am not upholding Mr Chaplin at all … Only I don’t think he was the father of the child.’

The evidence of the blood tests was totally disregarded. At that time, only ten states, which did not include California, allowed blood tests to be introduced in evidence in paternity suits. The legal notoriety of the Chaplin case may have encouraged subsequent wider recognition of the test. In 1953, California itself introduced legislation to prevent pursuance of paternity cases where blood tests had conclusively proved that the defendant could not be father of the child.

Judge Kincaid ruled as a result of the verdict that Chaplin should make payments of $75 a week to Carol Ann – who was now legally entitled to adopt the name of Chaplin – with increases to $100 as her needs grew, until she reached the age of twenty-one. Apart from that the Berry/Barry family finally disappeared from Chaplin’s life, though the damage they had done and the embarrassment and smears that he had suffered as a result of the trial were permanent. A year or so later Joan Barry married and had two more children before separating from her husband. In 1953 she was found in a dazed state in Torrance, California, whither she had apparently trekked from Mexico. She was committed to Patton State Hospital for care. In 1991, during the production of Richard Attenborough’s Chaplin, strenuous efforts were made to trace her in order to secure clearance for representing her in the film. The children by her marriage were found and contacted, but said they had no idea what had become of their mother, though they supposed that she was dead.

Chaplin’s motion for a new trial, filed through his lawyers, Wright and Millikan, was denied on 6 June 1945, after four weeks’ consideration. Though a further trial might have gratified his sense of justice, Chaplin was repelled and exhausted by the affair, and realized that nothing could now repair the damage to the reputation that had meant so much to him throughout his professional life. His consolation was his new family and, as always, work. He took enormous pleasure in showing Oona his old films, many of which she had never had the opportunity to see. Apart from all her other qualities, Oona was the best audience he had ever had. However often she saw his films she would giggle at Charlie’s antics with as little inhibition as any child, and Chaplin would join in, though ordinarily he watched himself on screen with an objective, critical detachment.

Despite the irritations and interruptions of the Barry affair, work had continued on the script of Monsieur Verdoux, and preparations for production began in 1945. Practically none of Chaplin’s early drafts and working notes for the film have survived, so it is not possible to trace its evolution as we are able to do for his other films. Only three manuscript pages in Chaplin’s hand, headed ‘Notes for Verdoux’, somehow escaped the fate of the rest of the papers. The use of the name indicates that the notes belong to a late stage of the writing. The name ‘Verdoux’ seems not to have been adopted until the latter part of 1945: the main character was originally called ‘Varnay’, a name which still crops up, through secretarial slips, in the finished script. It is not clear whether the aphoristic notes are suggestions for dialogue, or whether they represent reflections on the philosophical content of the film. In either event it does not seem farfetched to see in the tone of irony and disillusion Chaplin’s personal reaction to his recent months in the pillory:

When all the world turns against a man he becomes holy. Where there are no facts, sentiments prevail.

Virtues are less acquired than vices.

It is more important to understand crime than to condemn it. Good is in everything – even in evil.

The most profound eloquence is silence, a deep wordless understanding. Evil has its attendant good.

In the last analysis there is no reason for anything. Violence is patience’s last resort.

Soul is the possible, and the world is the actual. This concept is the deep inner feeling in man.

The soul is the becoming.

The world is the become.

Life is the state of becoming.

The soul is the still to be accomplished.

The world is the accomplished,

And life is the accomplishing.

The most compleat concept of meaning is beauty.

Living becomes a habit which at times I wish I could break.

A reputation is the concern of cooks and butlers.

The surviving versions of the script are almost exactly in the form of the finished film, except for an opening scene which was never shot, and some emendations to the dialogue required by the censorship of the Breen Office. The only resemblance to the original story of Landru is Verdoux’s profession, which is that of murdering rich widows and investing their fortunes. The front for his operations is an apparently inoperative furniture store. When he is not otherwise occupied by his demanding business, Verdoux returns to his country cottage, cherished child and invalid wife. He meets a beautiful young woman, down on her luck and working as a prostitute, whom he takes home, intending to use her as a guinea pig for a new poison. Instead he is inspired to persuade her that life is worth living after all. When he meets her again years later, their roles in life have changed: she has become the mistress of an armaments manufacturer, whose business is flourishing on the eve of a new world war; Verdoux’s careful investments have been wiped out since the stock market crash. At this point, Verdoux’s past catches up on him and he is arrested and put on trial. During his trial and execution he shows mild surprise rather than remorse, since, as he explains, his mode of life has only carried to logical extremes the philosophies on which contemporary capitalist society is built:

Judge: (to Verdoux) Have you anything to say before sentence is passed upon you?

Verdoux: (rises) Yes, Monsieur … I have … However remiss the prosecutor has been in paying me any compliment, he at least admits that I have brains. (turning to prosecutor) Thank you. Monsieur … I have … And for thirty years I used them honestly, but after that nobody wanted them. So I was forced to go into business for myself. But I can assure you it was no life of ease. I worked very hard for what I got, and for the little I received I gave very much … As for being a mass murderer, does not the world encourage it? Is it not building weapons of destruction for the sole purpose of mass killing? Has it not blown unsuspecting women and children to pieces, and done it very scientifically? As a mass killer, I am an amateur by comparison … To be shocked by the nature of my crime is nothing but a pretence … a sham! You wallow in murder … you legalize it … you adorn it with gold braid! You celebrate it and parade it! Killing is the enterprise by which your System prospers … upon which your industry thrives. However, I have no desire to lose my temper, because very shortly I shall lose my head … Nevertheless, upon leaving this spark of earthly existence, I have this to say … I shall see you all very soon.

(This is from the original script: the Breen Office required some cuts to make the speech more acceptable to the mood of post-war America.)

Later, awaiting execution, Verdoux tells a reporter who protests that other people don’t conduct their business in Verdoux’s way:

Oh, don’t they? That’s the history of many a big business. One murder makes a villain … millions a hero. Numbers sanctify, my good friend.

In an interview shortly before the release of the picture, Chaplin stated:

The picture has moral value, I believe. Von Clausewitz said that war is the logical extension of diplomacy; M. Verdoux feels that murder is the logical extension of business. He should express the feeling of the times we live in – out of catastrophe come people like him. He typifies the psychological disease and depression. He is frustrated, bitter, and at the end, pessimistic. But he is never morbid; and the picture is by no means morbid in treatment … Under the proper circumstances, murder can be comic.²²

Under the proper circumstances, relations with the Breen Office could be comic too, though irritating. Chaplin devoted a dozen pages of his autobiography to his dealings with the Office over Verdoux, and the correspondence and a marked copy of the script remain in the Chaplin archive. Initially disapproving the script in its entirety, they said they were passing over

those elements which seem to be anti-social in their concept and significance … the story in which Verdoux indicts the ‘System’ and impugns the present-day social structure.

(It is interesting that they failed to acknowledge that the film was supposed to take place in France, between the wars.) The whole nature of Verdoux’s modus vivendi, they found, had about it ‘a distasteful flavour of illicit sex, which in our judgement is not good’. Specific passages to which they raised objection included a scene which suggested that Verdoux had actually slept with one of the ‘wives’ he had murdered; all dialogue which made it evident that the girl he picked up in the street was a prostitute, and later suggestions that she had become prosperous and was the mistress of a munitions manufacturer. They wanted to be sure that there was no ‘showing of, or suggestion of, toilets in the bathroom’, objected to a double entendre about ‘scraping her bottom’; and required the removal of the word ‘voluptuous’ and the phrase ‘indecent moon’ which Chaplin had treasured since he savoured it a quarter of a century before in the company of H. G. Wells.

On 11 March 1946, Chaplin accepted Joseph Breen’s invitation to go to his office and discuss the script. Breen himself was amiable and even constructive. Chaplin realized, however, from the attitude of one of his assistants, a ‘tall, dour young man’ who greeted him with the words, ‘What have you against the Catholic Church?’, that a good deal of their anxiety centred upon Verdoux’s exchanges with the priest at the end of the film:

Verdoux: What can I do for you, my good man?

Priest: (benevolently) Nothing, my son. I want to help you … if I can. I’ve come to ask you to make your peace with God.

Verdoux: (affectionately) Dear father … I am at peace with God … my conflict, at this moment, is with Man.

Priest: Have you no remorse for your sins?

Verdoux: Who knows what sin is … born, as it was, from heaven … from God’s fallen angel? Who knows what ultimate destiny it serves? (with politeness) After all, what would you be doing without sin? (footsteps are heard along the corridor).

Priest: They are coming … let me pray for you.

Verdoux: (politely) As you wish. But I don’t think these gentlemen want to be kept waiting. (enter executioner and prison officials)

Priest: May the Lord have mercy on your soul.

Verdoux: Why not? After all … it belongs to him.

1946 – Script for Verdoux’s speech from the dock, marked up by the Breen Office.

The script opens with the description of the abandoned scene: a montage of shots showing American business booming; busy brokers on the stock exchange; a business man in his office, all ready for golf; a millionaire on a luxury yacht. A voice-over explains, ‘In the glorious days of ’28, everybody made money except those who worked for it’: Monsieur Verdoux is seen diligently working away as a clerk in a big Parisian bank. A parallel sequence follows, with the Stock Exchange in panic, the business man shooting himself, the ruined millionaire falling dead over the side of his yacht, and a broker swallowing a cyanide capsule and expiring with a grimace of distaste. In the bank, Verdoux receives a notice of dismissal along with his pay packet, and the camera moves in to a close-up of his hopeless, tragic face. Over dissolves of Depression scenes, the voice continues.

In the lean years that followed, many changes occurred in the lives of people … millionaires became paupers and commodores became stevedores. But Monsieur Verdoux, ex-bank teller of Paris, became something else, a man of many aliases who, in spite of the depression, did well for himself.

Verdoux is next seen busy and prosperous, an elegant boulevardier just about to go to work on his next victim.

As work progressed, Chaplin realized that he needed to place the Stock Market crash and Depression later in the film, to explain Verdoux’s ruin. A much simpler Stock Market scene was therefore introduced at a later point, and the elaborate beginning was abandoned. In its place Chaplin devised a faster, neater opening. Over a shot of a grave marked ‘Henri Verdoux, 1880–1937’ his voice is heard saying ‘Good evening. I was a bank clerk until the Depression of 1930’ and then goes on laconically to explain the nature of his business.

Few of Chaplin’s old collaborators now remained. There was the ever-faithful Totheroh, and half-brother Wheeler Dryden had been promoted to the post of associate director. The other associate director was Robert Florey, a friend and dedicated admirer for thirty years. Since he had written his first book about Chaplin in 1927, Florey had become a director of some distinction in his own right, and had just enjoyed one of his greatest successes with The Beast With Five Fingers. He was proud, even so, to accept a subordinate role on a film directed by his lifelong idol, and for Chaplin he was a valuable asset for the technical advice he was able to offer on the French settings. Henry Bergman, a kind of mascot since 1915, was now too ill to work, and died shortly after shooting began. Sydney was living in California again, and Chaplin wanted him to play the detective who arrests Verdoux but unwisely accepts his hospitality in the shape of a glass of poisoned wine. Sydney’s wife Gypsy opposed this, since she did not want to see Sydney worried sick by Charlie’s extravagance as, she said, he had been during The Great Dictator.

Perhaps a sense of nostalgia made Chaplin decide that the role of the matronly Madame Grosnay might suit Edna Purviance. Edna, who was now over fifty and long retired, was as much alarmed as flattered by the prospect. On 18 March 1946 she arrived at the Chaplin studios for the first time in more than twenty years, during which period neither Chaplin nor Totheroh had seen her. The reunion was emotional for all three, although Chaplin affected a breezy nonchalance as if they had been together the day before. Edna had grown stout and there was not much reminder of her old beauty, but she still had the same charm and humour. She read for the part – not badly, Chaplin conceded – and spent the next month at the studio, testing and rehearsing. Gradually it became evident that it would not work: the sophistication of a Continental grande dame was not in her line. When Edna returned home, both she and Chaplin were relieved. Her presence was too melancholy a reminder of the old times when everything still lay in the future. They were never to meet again, although in the last pages of his autobiography Chaplin quotes with affection two letters she wrote to him in Switzerland in her last years – knowing full well that she would never receive any answer, for Chaplin was a poor letter-writer. Edna died of cancer in 1958 at the age of sixty-two.

The part of Madame Grosnay eventually went to an English actress, Isobel Elsom, who was singing in the chorus of The Quaker Girl at the Adelphi at the time that Chaplin was touring with Karno. She had subsequently made a distinguished stage career and moved to the United States in the late 1930s. The cast mostly called for character actresses, among whom were the formidable Almira Sessions and the Australian-born Marjorie Bennett, who was to appear again with Chaplin in Limelight.

It was most probably at the suggestion of Robert Florey, who had directed her nine years before in Mountain Music, that Chaplin cast the comedienne Martha Raye in the role of the terrible Annabella, the most indestructible of Verdoux’s victims. The decision was taken after a screening at the studio of Raye’s most recent film, Four Jills and a Jeep. During her first days on the set, the ebullient Martha Raye was in awe of Chaplin, who had been a hero for her since her show-business childhood. Recognizing that this was inhibiting her work, she took the plunge and started to address him familiarly as ‘Chuck’. He took it in good part and in turn called her ‘Maggie’ (her real name was Margaret Reed). After that she grew even bolder and alarmed the unit by calling ‘Lunch!’ if she felt the morning’s work had gone on too long. Instead of the anticipated fury, Chaplin accepted this in good part also, perhaps because he justly acknowledged her skilful partnering.

His casting of the young prostitute was less successful. Marilyn Nash was good-looking, charming and intelligent, but all too clearly without experience or great natural acting talent. Chaplin’s own doubts about her were indicated by the number of times he rescreened the elaborate test he had shot of her, and the time he spent patiently rehearsing her. Problems with Miss Nash accounted for several lost days on the schedule. On the second day of shooting the scene in which Verdoux takes the girl to his furniture warehouse, Miss Nash left the studio abruptly. The daily studio record reported that she was ill and unfit to work, but it appears rather that she had eloped with a prominent screenwriter, Philip Yordan. That afternoon Chaplin tested two girls, Barbara Woodell and Randy Stuart, for the role. He settled on Randy Stuart. Marilyn Nash returned to work the following day, which was Saturday, but for the next four days of shooting Chaplin took the unusual measure of working with both girls in the part. No doubt he suspected that the elopement had been prompted by pregnancy, but he was mistaken: Marilyn Nash completed the film and Miss Stuart was paid off.

The manner of filming Monsieur Verdoux was unlike that for any previous Chaplin film. Apart from this incident, the work proceeded quickly and efficiently, with none of the pauses for reconsideration and reflection which had been so essential to Chaplin’s method. The reason was not any change in Chaplin’s temperament, nor even because he began with a wholly realized script. Rather it reflected the change in post-war Hollywood. The years 1945 and 1946 saw union troubles in the industry, and a prolonged strike had forced up studio wages by 25 per cent. Moreover, the unions were now imposing tough minimum requirements on staffing and, even more than during The Great Dictator, Chaplin found himself engaging technicians whom he did not require and whose function he did not even understand. For some years the soaring costs of running the studio had made it necessary to rent out studio space between films. The cost of the idle days that had been part of the studio routine in years gone by would now have been prohibitive.

There were more painful reminders of passing time. Since Christmas, Alf Reeves had been ailing and in the first week of April 1946, when production had just officially got under way, he died. Alf had been associated with Chaplin since 1910, at first as his boss with Karno’s companies; later as a shrewd, loyal and incorruptible employee who had discreetly guided the studio’s affairs and watched with patient, paternal concern over Chaplin’s private life. At the end of March, when it was already clear that Reeves, now nearing seventy, would never return to work, Chaplin interviewed a prospective replacement, John McFadden, who was appointed general manager on 8 April.

McFadden had been recommended to Chaplin by his lawyer, Loyd Wright, and arrived at the studio with new-broom efficiency. From the start he aroused the hostility of the unit, but particularly Rollie Totheroh, who was understandably angry when McFadden began to destroy the old footage he had stored (with whatever grumbles) for almost thirty years.

He told the cutter to get rid of a lot of stuff, to burn it up. ‘I’m making a new Chaplin. The old Chaplin is forgotten, see?’ He called in The Gold Rush after our second release, that was still out making money with the sound track. ‘Don’t show that stuff to the public any more. That’s the old Chaplin; forget that’ … But Charlie could be taken in by a lot of guys like that, you see.²³

Relations at the studio became so bad that Chaplin had to call the unit together and ask for their co-operation. As Totheroh watched Chaplin entrusting property affairs to the new man, and McFadden using studio facilities in ways the jealous Totheroh did not approve, he finally plucked up courage to take Chaplin aside:

I said, ‘You know what’s going on here? He’s just robbing you right and left and what he intends to do later … and you’re going to give him permission.’ It’s a wonder Charlie didn’t give him his stocks and his bonds to handle. And Charlie said ‘Honest?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘just keep an eye on him. I’ll get rid of him but we’re so far into things now I can’t very well change in the middle of the stream. He knows about expenses that have already gone out. Just wait.²⁴

One week after the last shot of Monsieur Verdoux, with cutting only just begun, McFadden left the studio.

There was no substance in Totheroh’s accusations but they reflected the general dislike of McFadden. Even so, he introduced something which had never been seen before in the Chaplin studio – a shooting schedule. The work was broken down in advance into sixty shooting days and it was to everyone’s credit – including McFadden for the practicability of his schedule – that the film fell only seventeen days behind. Another innovation was the series of meticulous floor plans for every sequence produced by the art director, John Beckman, showing precise camera positions and movements (see plates 116 and 117).

Shooting was completed in the first week of September 1946, and during the remainder of the year Chaplin was cutting the film and working on his musical score with Rudi Schrager. The music – the most notable theme is the perky little ‘boulevardier’ motif for Verdoux – was ready to record by mid-January 1947. Chaplin worked for six weeks with RCA Studios before he was satisfied with the recording and dubbing. He had become as perfectionist over sound as he was about his own performances, and perhaps more so than in his judgement of images: critics were quick to point out some rather obvious backdrops and some bad cutting matches in Verdoux. By the beginning of March the first finished prints of the film were ready and on 11 March 1947 the film was shown to the Breen Office examiners, who passed it without demur. During March, Chaplin arranged private showings of the film for friends and visitors, including Gabriel Pascal, and was greatly heartened by their enthusiasm. On 21 March, he and Oona, accompanied by Watson, the English butler, took a train for New York, nervous but optimistic about the world première there.

The première took place at the Broadway Theatre, New York, on 11 April, the same day as the West Coast press preview at the Academy Theatre, Hollywood. A Chaplin première still attracted crowds and excitement. Mary Pickford accompanied the Chaplins and was grabbed by a radio interviewer: her companions always wondered how her statement would have continued if she had not been separated from the microphone just as she had begun, ‘Two thousand years ago Christ was born and tonight …’

The show was a gruelling experience. The bad publicity of the Barry trials and the growing wave of political denigration had clearly done their work, and from the start it was apparent that an element in the audience was there intent on demonstrating their hostility. From the start of the film there was scattered hissing, which stirred all Chaplin’s old terrors of the live audience. Even many of the well-disposed, however, were puzzled by the dark irony of the film. Eventually Chaplin could no longer bear to watch and waited in the lobby until the film ended, leaving Oona and Mary inside. The supper party afterwards for 150 guests was a further ordeal; this time Oona left early.

There was to be a far worse experience the following day. United Artists had arranged a press conference for Chaplin in the Grand Ballroom of the Gotham Hotel at 55th Street, just off 5th Avenue. The room was crowded and Chaplin started off the proceedings with an attempt at grim jocularity: ‘Proceed with the butchery … fire ahead at this old grey head.’ The first questions were already barbed: Had he not failed to give Orson Welles proper credit for his contribution to Monsieur Verdoux? Had The Great Dictator been shown in the Soviet Union, and was it true that he was part of a motion picture combine to transfer American films to the Soviet Union? (Chaplin said that it was definitely untrue.) Then, ‘There have been several stories in the past accusing you more or less of being a fellow traveller, a Communist sympathizer. Could you define your present political beliefs, sir?’²⁵ Chaplin replied,

Well, I think that is very difficult to do these days, to define anything politically. There are so many generalities, and life is becoming so technical that if you step off the curb – if you step off the curb with your left foot, they accuse you of being a Communist. But I have no political persuasion whatsoever. I’ve never belonged to any political party in my life, and I have never voted in my life! … Does that answer your question?

It did not. The questioner persisted: was he a Communist sympathizer? Again Chaplin attempted a serious answer to the question:

A Communist sympathizer? That has to be qualified again. I don’t know what you mean by a ‘Communist sympathizer’. I’d say this – that during the war, I sympathized very much with Russia because I believe that she was holding the front, and for that I have a memory and I feel that I owe her thanks. I think that she helped contribute a considerable amount of fighting and dying to bring victory to the Allies. In that sense I am sympathetic.

At this point the assault was taken over by one James W. Fay, the representative of the Catholic War Veterans’ paper and the Catholic War Veterans of New York County. (Some years later Fay was to become President of the League of Catholic Lawyers in New York, and National Commander of the Catholic War Veterans.) The dialogue appears like a caricature of the Cold War mind:

Fay: Last week you reported, not as a taxpayer … you were a well-paying guest. Don’t you realize, Mr Chaplin, that veterans while assuming all the obligations of a citizen at the same time pay their share of taxes as well?

Chaplin: I didn’t say they didn’t.

Fay: I know that, but you are giving that implication, sir.

Chaplin: I don’t see how. I think you have misinterpreted my remark. I never meant it that way.

Fay: Mr Chaplin, you also said you are not a nationalist of any country, is that correct?

Chaplin: True.

Fay: Therefore, you feel that you can pay your way on your taxes without assuming any of the moral responsibilities or obligations of the particular country you are living in?

Chaplin: When you say, when you do what you are told – when you are living in a country you assume all the responsibilities – wherever you’re residing.

Fay: I don’t believe you do, Mr Chaplin.

Chaplin: Well, that’s a – that’s a question where we both differ.

Fay: All right. Now, Mr Chaplin, the Daily Worker on October 25 1942 reported [that] you stated, in an address before the Artists’ Front to Win the War, a Communist front group: ‘I’m not a citizen, I don’t need citizenship papers, and I’ve never had patriotism in that sense for any country, but I’m a patriot to humanity as a whole. I’m a citizen of the world. If the Four Freedoms mean anything after this war, we don’t bother about whether we are citizens of one country or another.’ Mr Chaplin, the men who advanced in the face of enemy fire, and the poor fellows who were drafted like myself, and their families and buddies, resent that remark. And we want to know, now, if you were properly quoted.

Chaplin: I don’t know why you resent that. That is a personal opinion. I am – four-fifths of my family are Americans. I have four children, two of them were on those beachheads. They were with Patton’s Third Army. I am the one-fifth that isn’t a citizen. Nevertheless, I – I – I’ve done my share, and whatever I said, it is not by any means to be meant to be derogatory to your Catholic – uh–uh–uh–GIs.

Fay: It’s not the Catholic GIs, Mr Chaplin, it’s the GIs throughout the United States!

Chaplin: Well, whatever they are, if they take exception to the fact that I am not a citizen and that I pay my taxes and that seventy per cent of my revenue comes from uh – uh – uh – abroad, then I apologize for paying that hundred per cent on seventy per cent.

Fay: I think that is a very evasive answer, Mr Chaplin, because so do those veterans pay their taxes, too.

Chaplin: Yes?

Fay: Whether their revenue comes from elsewhere or not.

Chaplin: The problem is – what is it that you are objecting to?

Fay: I’m objecting to your particular stand that you have no patriotic feelings about this country or any other country.

Chaplin: I think you’re …

Fay: You’ve worked here, you’ve made your money here, you went around in the last war when you should have been serving Great Britain, you were here selling bonds, so it stated in the paper that I read, and I think that you as a citizen here – or rather a resident here – taking our money should have done more!

Chaplin: (after a pause) Well, that’s another question of opinion and, as I say, I think it is rather dictatorial on your part to say as how I should apply my patriotism. I have patriotism and I had patriotism in this war and I showed it and I did a good deal for the war effort but it was never advertised. Now, whether you say that you object to me for not having patriotism is a qualified thing. I’ve been that way ever since I have been a young child. I can’t help it. I’ve travelled all over the world, and my patriotism doesn’t rest with one class. It rests with the whole world – the pity of the whole world and the common people, and that includes even those that object to me – that sort of patriotism.

The questioners who followed Fay were equally determined to pursue Chaplin’s political opinions, rather than to talk about the film. Chaplin’s replies were forthright and uncompromising. He was asked about his wartime activities:

I spoke what was in my heart, what was in my mind and what I felt was right and manly of me to do. I appealed both to Great Britain and the United States – said that we should have a second front. Our boys were over there and so forth, and I wasn’t alone in that. It appears it’s come out now that General Marshall and President Franklin Roosevelt and other people were of the same opinion. And then I made several speeches along that line for the unification and for the unity of the Allied cause – which at that time was being disrupted. We know the technique of the Nazis. They started by condemning the Communists, and that was their technique in order to bring around the jingoism and the war that followed – and it was very obvious to see that they were trying to disunite us in this country. We were all fresh at that time, and so the Administration wanted unity – and I made several speeches on behalf of the Administration for that purpose, and I felt that I served that purpose better, doing that sort of thing, than trying to do a floor-show, because that is not quite my business. I’m not very good at that sort of thing. And I thought I would use my effort in another direction. I made several speeches to factory workers and also several records for French distribution and for foreign consumption.

Asked if he was a friend of German-born composer Hanns Eisler he replied that he was very proud of the fact. Pressed to say if he knew that Eisler was a Communist he said he only knew that ‘he is a fine artist and a great musician and a very sympathetic friend’. When eventually questioned about the film, Chaplin was asked if he himself shared Verdoux’s conviction that contemporary civilization was making mass murderers of us:

Yes … Well, all my life I have always loathed and abhorred violence. Now I think these weapons of destruction – I don’t think I’m alone in saying this, it’s a cliché by now – that the atomic bomb is the most horrible invention of mankind, and I think it is being proven so every moment. I think it is creating so much horror and fear that we are going to grow up a bunch of neurotics.

Would he permit his own children to see Monsieur Verdoux?

Why not? … Not all of it’s beyond them … I know there are a lot of pictures that I wouldn’t allow my children to see that are supposed to be very forthright, high moral purpose, that I wouldn’t send my children because it’s absolutely a false notion of life. Something that doesn’t exist. A lot of pictures are very dishonest. So-called boy meets girl …

Chaplin parried the attacks with skill and total honesty. He seemed taken aback, though clearly touched, suddenly to find he had at least one defender. James Agee of Time magazine stood up in the balcony. He was so angry that his words were barely coherent, but his sentiments were clear:

What are people who care a damn about freedom – who really care for it – think of a country and the people in it, who congratulate themselves upon this country as the finest on earth and as a ‘free country’, when so many of the people in this country pry into what a man’s citizenship is, try to tell him his business from hour to hour and from day to day and exert a public moral blackmail against him for not becoming an American citizen – for his political views and for not entertaining troops in the manner – in the way that they think he should. What is to be thought of a … country where those people are thought well of …

Agee followed up this indignant outburst by devoting three successive monthly columns in The Nation to Monsieur Verdoux. When, later, he arrived in Hollywood to be the writer on John Huston’s The African Queen, Agee became a personal friend of the Chaplins and a visitor at Summit Drive.

The transcript of the Verdoux press conference was preserved by George Wallach, who was present as a producer-director for radio and recorded the whole affair on a portable sound recorder. After the conference he asked Chaplin if he would like to hear the recording, and Chaplin invited him to his suite on the seventeenth floor of the hotel. He remembered that Chaplin sat cross-legged on a high-back upholstered chair.

As he listened to the questions and his answers, he relived each and every moment. He would turn to Oona, his wife, who was sitting on the bed, and say ‘How was that?’ or ‘Did you think that was all right?’ And she reacted to him rather than to the recording.

Chaplin’s back was quite straight and he held his clasped hands under his chin and rocked slightly back and forth – as if he were shadow-boxing with the words coming out of the speaker. He thanked me after the recording had run its course, and I headed back to the studio, where I put together a thirty-minute program that was broadcast that same evening.

Somehow, thinking back after almost a quarter-century to Chaplin sitting in that chair – listening to the recording – I see in him the personification of the universal underdog. The underdog who, somehow, does win in the end.²⁶