Chaplin

High on the List of America's Pet Hates is a man who, over a thirty-year period, gave this nation -- and every other nation in the world -- a gift valuable beyond price and beyond estimation, the most desirable and most difficult to receive: the imperishable gift of joy.

There was a time when Charlie Chaplin's name was a synonym for happiness. Now, and inevitably, it is a symbol of hatred and a monument -- as if we needed one -- to humanity's eternal and passionate ingratitude. Chaplin spent the fruitful years of his life preaching a sermon to the heart. Good and evil were not part of the sermon, its point being that good and evil do not exist, that only joy exists. Now, in transcendent irony, we are told that Chaplin is an evil man. It is being said, by aging female journalists, by pettifogging senators, by hacks, and other self-appointed spokesmen of the American people, that he is a bad sort -- or, as the onetime Attorney General of the United States, James P. McGranery, put it, "an unsavory character." In 1952 Chaplin embarked upon a vacation cruise with his wife. Two days later, instructions were issued to the Immigration authorities to hold the actor for a hearing to determine whether or not he would be allowed to re-enter the country. Chaplin, said McGranery, speaking for the nation, "has been publicly charged with being a member of the Communist Party, with grave moral charges and with making statements that would indicate a leering, sneering attitude toward a country whose hospitality has enriched him."

There were a few dissenting voices, a few citizens who felt that it was America that had been enriched, but the majority appeared to be delighted at Chaplin's exile. The columnists, as though to stem the tide of sympathy, pointed out that the Attorney General had been kind in his judgments. They reminded us, in great but vague detail, of Chaplin's sins. He was a Commie. He was a tax dodger. He was a ravisher of young girls. He was an atheist. Worst of all, he was ungrateful. After forty years in this country, had he had the common decency to take out American citizenship papers? No! Clearly, it was a case of good riddance to bad rubbish.

Since 1952, Chaplin has lived abroad. With only the slightest trace of rancor, he has stated that he does not intend to return to the United States. While his attitude toward us might be one of profound bitterness, of outrage and disgust, he has said nothing to indicate that this is so. Instead, with the exception of a controversial film called A King in New York, he has maintained a dignified silence. In a gesture reminiscent of another, greater Charlie -- the little fellow Chaplin created and who danced his way into the affections of all who saw him -- Chaplin simply shrugged off the tragedy, turned his back, and disappeared.

But for this, the press might have reversed its approach. Like other nations, we are given to great kindness once we have administered punishment and exacted contrition. But to forgive forgiveness! The Big Mama columnists asked only for an expression of sorrow and a perhaps halfhearted promise of better behavior. Receiving the shrug instead, they tucked in their ample bosoms and bared their fangs. An anti-Chaplin campaign was begun, calculated by its emphases and omissions to present a single image of Chaplin, so hateful an image that some European critics concluded that it was a classic admission of guilty conscience.

Of course, people believed what they read. Even so, it was possible to think of Chaplin as a wretched little alien and still enjoy Charlie on the screen. For a while. Then the campaign began to have its success. Not content to destroy the man, the columnists proceeded to attack the man's work. Learned students of the cinema, such as Hedda Hopper, began to have second thoughts about the "so-called Chaplin masterpieces." Were they really so great? Were they really as funny as they were cracked up to be?

Despite the encouraging success of the recently reissued Modern Times and The Gold Rush, a number of small but alarming fissures have begun to appear in the estimation of Chaplin's professional achievements. Only a few months ago, a logorrheac Hollywood TV personality was asked why he persisted in slamming Chaplin. "I'll tell you," said the personality. "I've got nothing against the guy personally. What he does is his own business. I'm just sick of hearing all this stuff about what a great comic he was. You seen one of his pictures recently? They're pathetic. Stupid. What's funny about a little schmo who looks like Hitler and acts like a queer? I'll tell you a great comic. Joey Frisco. There's a great comic ..."

So now even Charlie -- as distinct from Chaplin -- is under attack. It would be comforting to think the Little Fellow isn't in danger, that nothing so magnificent could possibly perish, but other magnificent things have perished, and at the hands of men. Why not Charlie too? Film doesn't last forever, and memory fades. And though we speak of a wonder that held the world enchanted for three generations, the wonder has demonstrably begun to dim. The young in America today do not know Chaplin at all, except as the monster the press has built, and that is sad. Unless they live in the few great cities of the nation, they do not know Charlie, either. And that is tragic. For the artist and his art, separable as they may and must be, are of vital importance to the cultural and moral development of America. If we allow ourselves to forget what we had, then we shall never understand what we lost, and that will make us poor indeed.

"I have a notion that he suffers from a nostalgia of the slums." So wrote Somerset Maugham of his friend Charles Spencer Chaplin, touching upon one of the great secrets of Chaplin's art. From the beginning it has been a celebration and a mockery of the earth's poor. Celebration because while we breathe, even in the dankest air of the lowest slum, we live, and life is sacred; mockery because, in Chaplin's words, "The poor deserve to be mocked! What fools they are!" What holy fools, he should have added, for that must be the final description of his masterpiece, Charlie.

But Maugham was also stating a literal truth. Chaplin's formative years were spent in the East End of London, where he was taken when barely a year old from his birthplace, Fontainebleau. Kennington was then, and is now, a gray, dismal, squalid crowd of ancient buildings, infested by the poor, the sick, the lame and the ignorant. Chaplin's father was a music-hall entertainer of slender talents. His income was small and most of it went for liquor. He died before the new century, and Chaplin remembers standing all night long outside St. Thomas' hospital, where his father lay, waiting for the light from the unshuttered window to go out. When it finally did go out, Chaplin's mother, Hannah, was faced with the nearly impossible task of supporting herself and her two sons.

The elder son, Sydney, Charles' half-brother (and for whom Charles' best-known son is named), achieved a certain fame of his own and accompanied Charles to America, eventually becoming his general manager and business manager. In the course of an interview. Sydney once made a number of disparaging remarks about their early life, putting some of the blame upon his mother. Charles, who was present, went into a cold rage and banished Sydney from the room. Later, he explained: "They can say what they want about my mother -- she was greater than I will ever be. She was a great actress. I've never seen anyone like her -- she was good to me when I was a kid -- she gave me all she had -- and asked nothing back-- and by Heaven, I've got no mother complex either. She was just a good fellow."

Under the stage name of Lily Harley, Hannah Chaplin performed in Gilbert and Sullivan stock companies, but her earnings were low and the strain finally broke her. She tried sewing, but even this light work fatigued her. When Charles was six years old, Hannah suffered a series of mental collapses. She was taken to an institution and her sons were left to fend for themselves. Alone in the city, Charles plunged directly to the hard core of survival, wandering the cold streets in search of scraps, struggling constantly to stay alive so that he might enjoy the occasional visits he was permitted with his mother. From time to time she would be released and they would live together in a workhouse, but these relatively happy periods never lasted long. For nine more years Hannah alternated between the workhouse and the hospital, her condition growing steadily worse. Yet, as Chaplin recalls, "she never lost her sense of humor." And he thanks this quality of his mother's for his own extraordinary ability to stay afloat during those hard times.

"She had the most marvelous gift of mimicry; I learned everything from her. We would sit in our drab little room and the people would pass below and mother would mimic them, giving an elaborate history of each as he or she would pass ..."

With such an inheritance, it is perhaps natural that Chaplin became interested in the theatre almost as soon as he could talk. At the age of seven, he haunted the London stages, watching the crowds, worshiping the performers with whom he felt a deep kinship. He claims now that his talent for pantomime was fully developed before he was ten, and that he never for a moment doubted that he would devote his life to entertainment. He entertained people from the time of his earliest memory and somehow he knew that he had a very special talent -- although of course he didn't know precisely what it was.

Getting a job in the theatre was even more difficult then than it is now. After short stints as newsboy, toymaker and lather boy in a barber shop, Charles went looking for engagements. Hannah thought he was too young for the hard professional life, but at last she relented and through her remaining contacts, arranged for him to join the Eight Lancashire Lads, a troupe of child clog dancers. By the time he was eight. Charles was a veteran showman. He stayed with the troupe for two more years, and after playing in a large number of variety shows, landed a small part in William Gillette's famous dramatization of Sherlock Holmes. He toured with the company for four years, then appeared, as one of the wolves, in the first performance of Barrie's Peter Pan. Meanwhile, Sydney was doing well, also in the theatre. Which is to say, both were making enough -- barely enough -- to survive without having to resort to theft or charity.

In 1906, when he was seventeen, Charles was appearing in most of the music halls as a regular performer. He had a solo act, with songs, and was considered one of England's outstanding young talents -- but hardly in the same league with his brother. Sydney was tiring of the fight and so was delighted to accept an offer from Fred Karno, king of the music halls. At a grand three pounds per week. Sydney felt that he had achieved the nearest thing to security in the entertainment business. He was happy with the Karno company and, once solidly entrenched, asked the impresario to hire Charles.

Karno had doubts. The younger Chaplin did not appear, at first glance, to have much potential as a comic. But when he went through one of his routines, shedding the sickly, serious seventeen-year-old exterior like a snake's winter skin, and exploding into a combination tumbler, acrobat, singer, dancer, mimic and jokester. Karno hired him at once, without misgiving. This was to prove the first important development in Chaplin's professional career.

He was an instantaneous success in the troupe, largely because of the freedom Karno allowed him in the sketches. Most of these would seem unbearably quaint today, but Chaplin admits that they helped form much of his future style. It was with Karno that he learned the immense theatrical value of seemingly insignificant detail. Picking a daisy is a commonplace and unremarkable action, by itself; inserted into the right context it can become an action of the most overpowering significance. (In a City Lights sequence, Charlie, stoned to the keel, is being dragged home by a friend who is only one degree less pixilated; en route, Charles notices a daisy, picks it and holds it to his nose; the screen fairly bursts with joy.) He learned timing, also, and all of the magic graces which he later brought to perfection.

After a few years, Karno sent Charles to America for an extended tour, and the second and most decisive development of his career occurred. America had fallen in love with the movies. There were film dramas, but the cry was for film comedy, and the producers could not turn out enough humorous pictures to meet the demand. A horse-faced, impish talent named Mack Sennett was the unchallenged emperor of this new field. He produced one- and two-reel comedies at the rate of three per week, but somehow he managed to instill in each zaniness and quality. His stable of comics -- Ford Sterling, Roscoe Fatty Arbuckle, Buster Keaton, Chester Conklin, Mable Normand, et al., together with the immortal Keystone Cops -- had become an American habit, and would-be competitors found the door solidly shut against them.

No one knows what Sennett's secret was, including Sennett. His only philosophy toward comedy was that it ought to be fun to watch. In line with this approach, it struck him that watching the same actors over and over again was not much fun, so he conducted an unending search for fresh talent -- in all departments. He saw Chaplin's act at the Pantages Theatre in Los Angeles, thought it was pretty good, but not good enough to do anything about. Several months later, Mack's Number One comic, Ford Sterling, began to complain. Not realizing that it was the Sennett touch and not the work of any single performer that made the films successful, Sterling demanded a huge raise. Sennett demurred, on the grounds that if he gave it to Sterling, then everybody else would expect the same thing. Sterling grumbled some threats and Sennett started to look for a replacement. Scraping his brain for ideas, he suddenly remembered the little cockney he'd seen with the Karno group at the Pantages. Recalling little except a certain enthusiasm he'd felt at the time, he told his publicity men to find "a guy called Chapman or Chipton or something like that" and promptly forgot about it. In a few weeks, he was told that Charles Chaplin was working for a pittance in Oil City, Pennsylvania.

Without bothering to take another look, Sennett instructed his men to offer Chaplin a year's contract at $75 per week. Chaplin was then making $50, and the increase looked appealing. However, he was basically an entertainer, and although he had been amused and interested by the early film experiments of Max Lindner, he couldn't bring himself to regard the flickering business seriously. Besides, with Karno he had security.

Having given the matter a little thought, Chaplin refused Sennett's offer -- by way of demanding triple the amount. To his surprise, the demand was met and in this manner Charles Chaplin backed into the medium he was to lift to the highest degree of art.

It wasn't art then. The Keystone comedians were all masters of slapstick, but that was about the extent of their talent. They leaped and ran and rolled about the screen like wild wind-up toys, falling down, getting up, falling down again, and relying always upon utter chaos for their effect. Sometimes it worked, sometimes -- no one can say why -- it didn't.

The trouble was, none of it was even remotely Chaplin's style. When the British comedian strode shyly into the studio to report for work, Sennett, like Karno before him, was positive he'd made a mistake. How would this pale, sensitive young man ever fit in with the wild loonies and their pies-in-the-face? Daunted, the great producer sighed, dispatched his latest acquisition and made a successful effort to put the blunder out of his mind.

This reaction was a fortunate thing, for us all. Had Sennett been impressed, he would have prepared a series of his own devising for Chaplin, and Charlie might never have been. As it was, the new actor was free to experiment. His first picture, Making a Living, was in every way a disaster. Typically Keystone Coppian, it ran its chaotic mile with Chaplin appearing as a dude in a Chinese mustache: there was nothing funny nor individual from first to last foot of film, and no hint whatever of the Little Fellow.

Sennett was not surprised, but Chaplin admits that the experience was personally crushing to him. He had managed to convince himself that motion pictures could provide a fine showcase for his talents, but now it appeared that he would vanish into the great panicking crowd of funnymen. He brooded about the matter at length, taking many midnight walks through the poorer sections of Los Angeles. Gradually, faintly, an idea formed. He knew that it would sound bad, even if he were able to verbalize it, so he decided to develop it thoroughly on his own and then give it, whole, to Sennett.

The idea took shape the following week. From the London beggars who had haunted his youth, he would make a composite figure. In this figure would be all the elements which had frightened and amused him: the ragtag clothes, the dirt, the air of absolute and irrevocable failure, the pathetic dignity. He took Mack Swain's walrus mustache first and began cutting it down. By accident -- the only accident in Charlie's creation -- he went too far and ended with nothing more than a square patch. But it looked right. To this he added Fatty Arbuckle's bowler hat and gigantic trousers, and Ford Sterling's oversize shoes. The bamboo cane was an afterthought. Together, amazingly, the stray odds and ends made a perfectly homogeneous ensemble. It took only a bit of white make-up (descended from death-conscious clowns in the times of the great plagues) to convince Chaplin that he had found the perfect answer.

Charlie was born.

He came of cast-off clothes and desperation, but he was an embodiment: his spirit may be traced back to all the other great embodiments of joy: through Joseph Grimaldi, Dan Leno, Jean-Gaspard Duburau, whose sweet foolery similarly charmed and convulsed audiences; back further through Don Quixote, Punch, Pierrot, and finally, Pan himself. Pan danced through life, reminding man of the joy of his mortality. So did Charlie. So do all the really great clowns. Life is strong in them and they celebrate it.

Only a creation of the highest art can express joy in the whole of life, which is not cruel and is not mean and is not kind, but is all of these things. Charlie the tramp eloquently expressed this. It is what separated him -- and separates him -- from such other grand and wonderful clowns as Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon, Harold Lloyd, W. C. Fields, Laurel and Hardy, Raimu, and Cantinflas.

"He does not cut a dashing figure as he blunders through a drab and commonplace existence," wrote Chaplin of Charlie. "Heroism with him, except on great occasions, never soars to greater heights than his interviews with his landlord. His fortunes always drag a little behind his expectations, and fulfillment lies always out of reach. And as he shambles along with dwindling hopes he is smitten more than ever with a sense of his own unfitness and inadequacy. When [the common man] sees on the stage or screen the romantic hero who sweeps through life like a whirlwind, he feels a sense of inferiority and is depressed. Then he sees me shuffling along in my baffled and aimless manner, and a spark of hope rekindles. Here is a man like himself, only more pathetic and miserable, with ludicrously impossible clothes -- in every sense a misfit and a failure. The figure on the screen has a protective air of mock dignity -- takes the most outrageous liberties with people -- and wears adversity as though it were a bouquet ..."

He wears adversity as though it were a bouquet ... Charlie's world was full of adversities, and tragedies, yet he survived them, triumphantly, and this is why everyone loved him. They warmed to the truth of Charlie's Law: the survival of the unfittest.

It is unfair to blame Mack Sennett for not immediately recognizing the magnificence of this. After all, the success of Keystone was rooted firmly in slapstick, and it is not always wise to tamper with success. Nonetheless, his fears notwithstanding, Sennett approved the costume and allowed Chaplin to wear it in his next picture, Kid Auto Races at Venice.

Amid all the flailing arms and rolling eyes, the little tramp figure appeared as a divine thunderbolt. With a wink he toppled Sterling from his throne as America's favorite clown and demolished the rest of the competition. Of course, Charlie was not fully realized in this early effort (released February 7, 1914), but Chaplin knew that it was only a matter of time. He was aware that there was significance in the character he had invented and that it might take him a lifetime to understand this significance.

His next thirty-five pictures for Keystone were instantaneous hits. Chaplin's name became famous before the year was through, and when it was time for contract renewal he requested a raise, on brother Syd's advice. Sennett refused, for the same reasons that had prompted him to refuse Sterling: it would set a dangerous precedent. Years later, Sennett admitted his mistake, but claimed that he had been right at the time. Of Chaplin he says, simply, "Oh, he's just the greatest artist that ever lived, that's all."

Within a few months, Chaplin was working for the Essanay Company in Chicago, at $1000 per week. Shortly thereafter, he signed a contract with Mutual for the unheard-of salary of $10,000 per week, plus bonuses. All this while he concentrated upon developing the character of the Little Fellow, adding the refinements that were to make Charlie the most magnificent comic character of the century. Chaplin understood that true art cannot be collaborative, and so he insisted upon writing (making up, more properly; there were no scripts in those days) and directing his films.

Such masterpieces as The Bank and The Floorwalker caused Chaplin's fame to spread, and before World War I had begun, he was acknowledged to be the most popular man in the world. In a recent attack, The Saturday Evening Post quotes Chaplin as having commented: "I am known in lamaseries where the name Jesus Christ has never been heard." The Post regards this as an incredible and somewhat sacrilegious boast. It is nothing of the kind. Thanks to the invention of motion pictures and to the universal language he spoke, Charles Chaplin might well lay claim to being the first man truly world famous in his time. Not even the greatest figures before him could be certain of immediate recognition in every civilized community on earth.

During the war, Chaplin put Charlie to work selling Liberty Bonds, and raised more money for this country than any other individual. He also raised a great deal of money for himself, and very soon was able to assume complete control of his career. With the forming of United Artists, which was his idea, and the construction of a private studio at La Brea and Sunset in Hollywood, he became the first independent star-producer.

His films continued to enjoy success. So high was the level of their artistry that they left no area of the audience uncaptured. The intellectuals began to see in Chaplin a new messiah, and the people -- all the people, all over the world -- accepted him as they accepted the sun. Masterpiece followed masterpiece. And though the level of quality was not invariable, it can be said that each film contained more invention, more originality, and more downright fun, than a year's production of other companies.

With the exception of Woman of Paris, a Chaplin-directed film in which neither Charlie nor Chaplin appeared, these pictures comprised a chronicle of the Little Fellow's adventures, and became part of the world's culture.

Chaplin was now rich and powerful. Though but a short time out of the Kennington slums, he found himself an object of veneration. Dispensing love, he received love in return; and his fame grew, like a vast silvery balloon.

That this must have its effect upon a man is, or should be, self-evident. Chaplin the man had always been withdrawn. The sudden overwhelming popularity caused him to withdraw further. People did not understand. They did not understand that Chaplin's way of repaying them for their love was to give them the best of him, through Charlie, and that having put into Charlie all that was wild and fine and sweet in him, there was little left over.

But people have a way of resenting great artists. A man may travel to the searing center of his soul and come out with a new vision, and the world will ask him why he hasn't changed his shirt.

This is what the world -- our American world -- began to ask Chaplin. Over a twenty-year period, working twenty hours a day, he was making the finest films anyone had ever seen, distilling his genius to its greatest perfection in such unforgettable scenes as the dance of the rolls and the eating of the shoe in The Gold Rush, the blind girl's first glimpse of the tramp in City Lights, the automatic feeder in Modern Times, the globe-map ballet in The Great Dictator. And the people laughed, but they did not forgive. For while Chaplin was dishing up these delights, he was living a life described by columnists as "unnormal."

To ask an artist to please everyone with his life as well as his art is both stupid and unfair. Even if all the charges leveled against Chaplin were true, America's attitude would be difficult to understand. As the charges are almost entirely false, the attitude is inexplicable.

What, in fact, were his sins?

They say he is -- or was -- a Communist. That is not so. It has never been so. Along with most of the intelligent people of his time, Chaplin was grieved at the inequality of the world and took an interest in all theories which proposed to end that inequality; but he never joined nor promoted in any way the Communist Party. While it is certainly true that, from one viewpoint, his films were a protest against the uneven distribution of wealth, it is also true that many intellectuals were protesting against the same shameful condition. Politically, Chaplin's pictures, which stress personal freedom, displeased the Soviet government far more than the American. Careful research reveals that his closest tie with Marxism was his friendship with the great Russian film director, Sergei Eisenstein, who said Chaplin was "able to see . . . the most tragic things through the eyes of a laughing child." Together they plotted nothing more sinister than a possible film collaboration, which never came off.

To the charge of ingratitude, it is difficult to reply. In 1916, very quietly and without publicity, Chaplin tried to enlist, and was turned down. President Wilson commented that his film Shoulder Arms accomplished more for national morale than all the overt propaganda put together (all the more remarkable in that the picture was not anti anything). In addition to his fund-raising campaigns during the first World War, Chaplin was among the first to promote the opening of a Second Front, in 1942. In all, he did as much for this country as any entertainer before or since. The actual charge, of course, obtains from Chaplin's refusal to become an American citizen. Americans, who customarily retain their citizenship when they go to live abroad, cannot bear the thought of someone's moving here without cutting all home ties. If a foreigner manages to get past Ellis Island and make good in the United States, he must become a citizen; if he does not, then he is an ungrateful wretch.

A moment's reflection on Chaplin's enormous popularity, from the beginning, makes it abundantly clear that he could have succeeded anywhere in the world. France would have been delighted to supply the beloved Charlot with a home, just as Spain would have welcomed Carlos and Italy opened its doors to Carlito. To the list, add England and Germany and any country you choose. That he preferred to produce his films here is a fact for which we should be grateful.

After all, like Ernest Hemingway, he might have gone elsewhere; and, also like Hemingway, who considers himself a Cuban ("I don't want people to think of me as a Yankee"), he might have renounced America at the first disapproving rumble.

As for his much-vaunted lecheries, they should be his business and his alone. Errol Flynn, before his death, admittedly devoted himself to "women, liquor and amusement," becoming involved in paternity and rape suits with monotonous regularity; yet, perhaps because he did not add to these the affront of genius, he was secretly admired and generally considered a lovable scalawag. Flynn, even when he was consorting with girls young enough to be his granddaughters, could do no wrong. Chaplin could do no right. He was criticized for divorcing his first wife, Mildred Harris, whom he married in September 1917, even though it was an impossible union. The young girl had been swept away by the famous artist, dreaming, naturally enough, of a life of endless parties and communal glamor. She was totally unable to cope with the introspective side of Chaplin, which manifested itself in prolonged states of depression, lonely walks, unheralded disappearances; certainly she could not understand that these were the incubation periods for the art that was to follow. Although Chaplin granted the girl a handsome settlement, the press took him to task. When, some years afterward, he became enchanted by Lita Grey, signed her for the lead in The Gold Rush, and married her, the gossip was that he was about to make a fool of himself. And so he did, if falling in love and falling out again is foolish, if reaching desperately for the unattainable is foolish, if making a mistake and trying, honorably, to rectify it is foolish. Chaplin the man was lonely. In those years of his greatest artistic energy, there was little for him to give personally; yet he needed to give and to receive. He might have had all the women he desired, but sex alone was not enough. Even though he knew it was impossible, he wanted -- as he confessed later in Monsieur Verdoux -- the happy married life of an ordinary person.

By her own consent, Lita Grey was removed from The Gold Rush; she was far too busy being Mrs. Chaplin to bother with the rigors of a career, which she'd never really desired. The marriage lasted three years and ended in divorce. Lita's mother released a number of ugly stories to the newspapers, charging Chaplin with behaving like a genius ("monster" was her word), and he was pilloried anew by the press. By now it had become fashionable to attack Chaplin. As the facts did not supply much ammunition, new "facts" were invented. About the time Chaplin was preparing to give The Circus to the world, a story circulated to the effect that Hannah Chaplin had been "forgotten" by her famous son and was living in abject poverty. She was, in fact, living in Santa Monica, in a lovely house which Chaplin had purchased for her; and if he did not visit her often, it was because he could not stand to see the condition into which her mind had fallen. A nurse and doctor attended Hannah until the day she died, and when she spoke to them of her son, she called him "the King of them all."

Chaplin's marriage with Paulette Goddard looked promising, but the young actress was too much of an individualist to walk in Chaplin's shadow, and his ego was too raw to withstand her emerging personality. After eight years of effort, they were divorced. The almost simultaneous appearance in his life of Joan Barry and Oona O'Neill provided the gossip-mongers with their favorite weapons, and they used them with such vengeance that within a few months Chaplin's reputation was beyond repair. Joan Barry was the sort of waif or gamin that Chaplin loved to feature in his films. Unlike his characters, however, Miss Barry was not all sweet innocence. Her eyes had seen a great deal of the world and were quick to recognize a good thing when it came around. She signed a contract with Chaplin and also became his mistress. When he tired of her, he asked her to leave. In such situations, sympathy is usually equally divided; but Chaplin got all the blame. He was painted as a Svengali who had used up yet another Trilby and was now tossing her out into the cold. Miss Barry left, as she'd been asked to do, but she returned with demands, which Chaplin would not grant, and threats which he ignored. It may be that he was unwise in underestimating the power of a teenage girl. The gamin broke into his house, leveled a pistol at him, insisted that he make love to her, then announced to the world at large that she was going to have a baby.

Public opinion was entirely against Chaplin in the ensuing trial, which included not only the paternity suit but also a charge of violation of the Mann Act. The latter was laughed out of court thanks to the skills of defense lawyer Jerry Giesler, but the paternity charge stuck -- despite the statement of an accredited physician that the child could not possibly have been Chaplin's.

Now the creator of the Little Tramp was a bona fide villain. The experience might well have embittered him permanently but for his new-found friendship with Eugene O'Neill's lovely daughter, Oona. Though only eighteen years old, she was no stranger to the shapes of genius. Whether because of the relationship with her famous father, beside whom most artist-eccentrics might seem like Rotarians, or because of an inborn understanding, she knew how to deal with Chaplin's moods. And she loved him.

If the marriage itself was not enough to finish them both in America, its success was.

Chaplin made two more films here -- the brilliant Monsieur Verdoux and Limelight -- but they were not appreciated, and so he left us.

It is for these reasons, for his occasional weaknesses as a person and for his incredible strengths as an artist, that Charles Chaplin became one of the most despised men in America. Now, in Vevey, Switzerland, he lives quietly with his wife and seven children -- one of whom this remarkable man sired only recently, despite the fact that he is in his seventies. Because he is in his seventies, Chaplin will, before long, die. And then, because his legend has been all but destroyed, he will probably be forgotten, as most men are.

But what Chaplin created we must not allow to be forgotten: Charlie the fool. Charlie the clown. Charlie, the spirit of Man, walking with a goatlike skip of his oversize shoes and a hitch of his baggy pants -- bewildered, but unafraid -- into the unknown. Charlie, the best of us.