5 Controversies That Led to Charlie Chaplin's Exile

Charlie Chaplin had a fixation on much younger women. At 19, he fell for 15-year-old Hetty Kelly—he called her his first love—a dancer at the theater where he was working. Of the four women he married, three were teenagers when they wed him: Mildred Harris at 16, Lita Grey at 16 and Oona O’Neill at 18.

As Lita Grey detailed in her memoir, she met Chaplin when she was still a child; she appeared in his films The Kid and The Idle Class. She wasn’t yet 16 when Chaplin cast her as his leading lady in The Gold Rush. When she became pregnant by Chaplin at 16—Chaplin was 35—he arranged a discreet marriage in Mexico, rather than risk being charged with statutory rape. When Charles Chaplin Jr. was born, she wrote, the Hollywood luminary paid a doctor to falsify the birth certificate to lengthen the gap between the wedding date and the child's arrival.

Of Chaplin’s attraction to age-inappropriate women, Grey would later say in a 1989 Los Angeles Times interview: “He’d try to create people. He enjoyed being the first person in a girl’s life.”

Chaplin and Lita Grey’s marriage ended after only a few years. Grey’s explosive divorce complaint accused Chaplin of seduction of a minor, statutory rape, adultery and soliciting abortions, along with the charge that he had solicited “revolting, degrading and offensive” sex acts.

As Eyman notes in Charlie Chaplin vs. America, after Grey’s complaint leaked to the press, some called for Chaplin’s films to be banned. Chaplin suffered a nervous breakdown and was forced to stop production of his film The Circus. Apart from the damage to his image and reputation, the divorce settlement cost him $825,000, the largest in California history at that point.

In itself, the scandal was not enough to ruin Chaplin’s career, writes Eyman. “The issue was that it became a recurring pattern in his life.”

In the late 1930s, Chaplin embarked on the riskiest move of his career. He conceived of a film that would mock European fascism, centering on “Adenoid Hynkel,” Chaplin’s clowning imitation of Adolf Hitler.

With The Great Dictator, Eyman notes, Chaplin was swimming against the isolationist tide of the time. A majority of Americans regretted U.S. involvement in World War I and, as the Great Depression deepened and new conflict brewed in Europe during the 1930s, Congress passed three separate neutrality acts. A 1938 poll revealed that 54 percent of Americans felt “the persecution of the Jews in Europe has been partly their own fault.”

In 1940, Joseph P. Kennedy, the president’s ambassador to England, urged Hollywood to “stop making anti-Nazi pictures.” The British government announced it would ban The Great Dictator and, in 1941, a Senate committee investigating war propaganda subpoenaed Chaplin to testify about the picture. 

None of it deterred Chaplin. The Great Dictator, his first film with spoken dialogue, premiered in New York City on October 15, 1940, achieving both commercial and critical success. But to his critics, including powerful entertainment industry columnist Hedda Hopper and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, its overt politics—particularly a climactic scene in which Chaplin directly addresses the audience and decries fascism—marked Chaplin as dangerously progressive and un-American.

In 1941, at age 53, Chaplin met 22-year-old actress Joan Barry. The affair was short-lived, but the fallout, as recounted by his granddaughter Oona Chaplin in Hollywood Exiles, proved disastrous. 

In 1942, Barry began stalking Chaplin, once turning up to his Beverly Hills home with a gun. Then she claimed he was the father of her unborn child. Chaplin denied the claim. In addition to the subsequent paternity suit, Chaplin was charged with violating the Mann Act, which prohibited the transportation of women across state boundaries for sexual purposes.

In court, Eyman reports, Barry’s lawyer launched an attack on Chaplin’s moral character, calling him a “debaucher” and “lecherous hound,” adding “there has been no one to stop Chaplin in his lecherous conduct all these years.” Chaplin was acquitted of the Mann Act violation, avoiding significant prison time. But he was declared the father of Barry’s child, despite blood tests indicating he was not. The surrounding press coverage—along with memories of the Lita Grey scandal and news of Chaplin’s latest teen bride, Oona O’Neill—turned Chaplin into a “pariah,” writes Eyman. “It was a delayed reckoning.” 

The heightened social consciousness that led Charlie Chaplin to make The Great Dictator also turned him into a serious political target. At the height of the Red Scare, Chaplin outed himself as pro-communist, says film critic and historian Karina Longworth in the "You Must Remember This" podcast. 

Prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, when much of the country still favored isolationism, Chaplin called for the United States to commit ground forces in Europe to relieve Soviet forces. He protested the trials of communist party members and criticized the House Un-American Activities Committee. 

The pushback was severe. Questions arose about Chaplin’s failure to become an American citizen. Calls escalated for Chaplin’s deportation. 

In 1952, while traveling to London by sea for the world premiere of his film Limelight, Chaplin received news that his re-entry permit to the United States had been revoked. After 40 years in America, he was forced to abandon his life there, selling his California homes, his iconic production lot and his share of the movie studio he had co-founded. It's possible Chaplin would have gained re-entry if he applied for it, notes Eyman. The FBI had been investigating him since 1922, but the nearly-2,000-page file contained no hard proof of any actual communist ties. As Eyman puts it: “Chaplin was not a communist. He would never belong to any club, for one thing.”

With all he’d been through, Chaplin finally decided he’d had enough. He cut ties with America and lived out his remaining years in Switzerland, only returning in 1972 to receive an honorary Academy Award.