chaplin
 
Photo Essays
1. Exile’s Return
2. Chaplin’s Parents
3. Hannah Chaplin’s Femmes Fatales
4. Playing Dress-Up  In The Land of Make Believe
5. Teenage Girls and Fear of Aging
6. Chaplin’s Three Teenage Wives
7. Mildred Harris
8. Lita Grey
9. Oona O’Neill
10. Chaplin’s Father
11. A Royal Lion
12. Vesta Tilley as Bertie
13. Ella Shields as Bertie
14. Making A Living
15. The Lion Comique’s Son: Dressed Like A Bum
16. Monsieur Verdoux as a Lion Comique
17. Calvero as a Lion Comique
18. The Lion Comique’s Son in the Limelight
19. Charlie as a Child
20. The Kid’s Lucky Break
21. Syd Chaplin
22. A Family Album of Theatrical Drunks
23. Chaplin’s Family Romance
24. Edna Purviance
25. Purviance’s Influence on Chaplin’s Character
26. Essanay
27. Chaplinitis
28. Chaplin’s Predecessors
29. Eye Contact: Audience-Performer Intimacy
30. Chaplin the Auteur
31. Chaplin’s Two Autobiographies
32. Going It Alone
33. The Circus
34. Autobiographical Starvation Scenes From The Gold Rush
35. Autobiographical Madness Scenes in Modern Times
36. Two British Music Hall Traditions and Topical Comedy
37. The Great Dictator
38. Fatal Attraction: Joan Barry
39. Monsieur Verdoux: Guillotine or Hatchet Job?
40. Limelight
 
Chaplin: A Life In Film
Home  |  Author  |  Photo Essays  |  Links  |  Blog  |  Events  |  Reviews  |  Contact
 The Circus
 



Chaplin's oldest daughter, Geraldine Chaplin, who grew up admiring and respecting her age-disparate parents' successful thirty-four year marriage saw his attraction to young girls differently than her half-brother and Sam Goldwyn: "He loved young girls, the younger the better. He really did. He only saw pureness and innocence and youth and beauty... he was a romantic."

The actress Louise Brooks--an ex-lover from the 1920s - on the other hand, thought of him as a sexually insecure man with a "Lolita obsession": a view echoed by his longtime camera man, Rollie Totheroh. Like Totheroh, Brooks remembered Charlie as "afraid of girls and... deeply convinced that he could seduce a girl only with his position as a director and starmaker."

Apart from Eugene O'Neill, who disinherited his teenage daughter after she married Chaplin, the most hostile characterization of Chaplin's fourth marriage came from Oona's jilted ex-boyfriend (J.D.Salinger). He wrote: "I can see them at home in the evenings. Chaplin squatting grey and nude, atop his chiffonier, swinging his thyroid around his bamboo cane, like a dead rat. Oona in an aquamarine gown, applauding madly from the bathroom. Agnes [her mother] in a Jantzen bathing suit, passing between them with cocktails. I'm facetious, but I'm sorry. Sorry for anyone with a profile as young and lovely as Oona's."(Quoted from Salinger v. Random House, U.S.Court of Appeals 2nd Circuit, No,86-7957, January 29, 1987).
From the point of view of comparative emotional development, there is no reason to assume that 29-year-old Chaplin was the same man in 1918 when he married Mildred Harris as he was at 53 when he married Oona O'Neill in 1942.

Summing up her experience with Chaplin after twenty years of successful marriage in 1962, the former teenage bride said: "People seem to think of Charlie as my father, but age counts for nothing in this house. To me he seems younger every day. There certainly is no father fixation about my feeling for him. He has made me mature and I keep him young. When you're happy you don't go in for self-analysis."

"I never consciously think of Charlie's age for 364 days of the year. Only his birthday is the annual shock to me. But I can feel the way some people stare at me with puzzlement and then at him wondering how we have kept it up; whether it is just a façade."

"Well, my security and stability with Charlie stem not from his wealth, but from the very difference in years between us. Other young women who have married mature men will understand what I mean... Charlie has given me one great gift that I had not known before. My childhood was not a very happy one and what he has brought to me is the gift of laughter. And that is beyond price." Chaplin's wistful view was "if only I had known Oona or a girl like her long ago, I would never have had any problems with women. All my life I have been waiting for her without even realizing it until I met her." His playful (Cockney) nicknames for her were the old woman, the missus and the old girl. And for her part, on Tuesday evenings--their cook's night off - Charlie's missus personally prepared some of his favorite South London childhood dishes: tripe with onions, steak and kidney pie and stews with dumplings. "It's a fraud for me to be so old when I feel so young," Chaplin told a reporter.


CHARLIE AND OONA (1972) AT THE ACADEMY AWARDS
Herald Examiner Collection, Los Angeles Public Library
 
 
 
www.ChaplinALife.com
© 2008 All Essay Rights Reserved.

All images from Chaplin films made from 1918 onwards, Copyright © Roy
Export Company Establishment._Charles Chaplin and the Little Tramp are trademarks and/or
service marks of Bubbles Inc. S.A. and/or Roy Export Company
Establishment, used with permission.

 
 
the book
Check Out Recommended Books
Photo Essays with Picture and Video
Buy Recommended Chaplin Films
Visit Our News and Blog Page