A lifetime penchant for women in their late teens or earliest 20s and an affair with a troubled young actress in the early 1940s equaled considerable FBI interest in the doings and undoings of seriocomic film legend Charles Chaplin, according to FBI files now released.
The Little Tramp's sex life led to three trials in the 1940s based on his relationship with Joan Barry. But the FBI was also interested in whether the subtle social messages of his silent classics and few talking films - plus his speeches on behalf of Russian war relief during World War II - equaled dangerous political activities by the British-born film legend. \nChaplin's reputation for preferring very young women, even late teenagers, was an open secret in Hollywood; but it was his attempt to rid himself of Joan Barry which got him under the sunlamp of the law. He had signed Barry to a film contract in 1941 and also entered into an intimate relationship with her - but Barry's mental trouble finally got the better of Chaplin, and he tried to leave the relationship.
Barry, however, wouldn't let go so easily: as Chaplin himself would recall in his autobiography, she vandalized his home and made herself such a nuisance, even appearing with a gun, that "Overnight, my life became a nightmare." FBI file entries from the time even suggested Barry had two abortions during her affair with Chaplin, suggestions which were never proven.
But Chaplin was hit with federal charges of violating the Mann Act - a law against transporting a woman across state lines for "immoral" purposes which was written to stop prostitution, but often abused. (Two decades later, rock legend Chuck Berry would be sent to prison under a Mann Act prosecution which some say sprang from racism - the woman in question was said to be Berry's personal assistant.)
Chaplin was acquitted. Interestingly, the FBI files reveal the bureau tried in the end to stop the case in its tracks - fearing Chaplin might become a martyr as a result of a trial. Meanwhile, Barry also filed a paternity suit against Chaplin, who was 54 at the time. Blood tests concluded Chaplin was not the father, but it didn't stop rumors that the Little Tramp had manipulated the tests, as even the FBI concluded was impossible at the time.
Chaplin was acquitted again - but despite the blood test a second trial was held and Chaplin was ordered to pay child support of $75 a week until the child came of age. Somewhere during the entire case, Chaplin met 18-year-old actress Oona O'Neill, the daughter of playwright Eugene O'Neill. They fell in love, married, had eight children, and remained married until Chaplin's death in 1977.
Chaplin's political troubles - his sympathy for the Soviet Union during World War II had brought him under both political and public pressure - led him to leave the United States in 1954.
He returned for a 1972 Academy Awards ceremony to receive a special Oscar, and wept openly when accepting it; but he returned to Switzerland to live out his life. Perhaps his best film was The Great Dictator, which used Chaplin's facility for comic paradoxes to illustrate through satire the horror of Hitler - well before the rest of the world picked up on the likely full scope of Nazism's destruction.
