8 h 5 m, 25 jul 2020 ano - TELEGRAPH ‘Perverted, degenerate and indecent acts’: Charlie Chaplin and the original A-list divorce scandal

Descrição:

‘Perverted, degenerate and indecent acts’: Charlie Chaplin and the original A-list divorce scandal

The allegations produced in the Depp-Heard case are barely a patch on the divorce that shook Hollywood to its core in 1927

By Martin Chilton

The High Court battle between Amber Heard and Johnny Depp has produced allegations of terrifying domestic violence, drug binges and even lurid tales of defecation in a bed. And yet, if you go back almost a century, you’ll find that it isn’t the first time a Hollywood marriage has been dragged publicly through the mud.

Charlie Chaplin – a man, coincidentally, on whose persona Depp riffed in his 1993 film Benny & Joon – was sued for divorce in the Superior Court of Los Angeles in 1927. His second wife, Lita Grey, accused him of pulling a gun on her and trying to force her into having an abortion. The split eventually opened the window on Chaplin’s behaviour towards a number of underage girls.

Charles Spencer Chaplin was born in London on 16 April 1889, and moved to America in 1913. The former vaudeville performer soon became a rising star of the Keystone Films company. Off-screen, he just as quickly gained a reputation as a voracious womaniser. After five years in the US, 16-year-old Mildred Harris became his first wife. Chaplin targeted the child actress, courting her with flowers and gifts, and married her only because of a false pregnancy scare and the fear of a scandal.

When she did give birth a year later, it ended in tragedy. Norman Chaplin was born with malformed intestines and died after 72 hours. Chaplin walked out on his young wife two days after their son’s death. They divorced in November 1920, with Mildred citing that Chaplin was “short-tempered, impatient and treated me like a cretin”. They reached an out-of-court settlement, and Chaplin’s first wife was awarded $200,000 and a share of the multi-millionaire actor’s property.

The relationship was just a dress rehearsal for the way Chaplin groomed, married and abused his second wife Lillita Louise MacMurray, whom Chaplin first set eyes on when she was just six. He later spotted the same 12-year-old amid a crowd of extras on the set of The Kid in 1920. His behaviour was that of a paedophile from the start. He called Lillita his “age-of-innocence girl” and asked a set decorator to paint her in the style of Joshua Reynolds’s famous 18th-century portrait The Age of Innocence.

Chaplin helped her land small roles – including one in 1921’s The Idle Class – and persuaded the teenager to change her name to Lita Grey, after a silver-grey kitten he had given her. “He’d try to create people. He enjoyed being the first person in a girl’s life,” Grey told the LA Times in 1989. In 1924, he cast her as the lead female in The Gold Rush. Chaplin was determined to seduce her and finally did so in the steam room of his Beverley Hills mansion. He was 35; she was 15.

At the time, Chaplin talked about of his love for “young girls”, declaring that there was “something so virginal in their slimness – in their slender arms and legs”. When asked by Vanity Fair in 1926 to describe his ideal woman, he replied: “I am not exactly in love with her, but she is entirely in love with me.” There is even a credible theory that the story of Chaplin and Lillita influenced Vladimir Nabokov when he was writing the novel Lolita, about a middle-aged professor’s affair with his child step-daughter. Publisher George Weidenfeld said that Nabokov met Chaplin socially and was a great admirer of his silent films.

Grey was infatuated with Chaplin and easy prey to his manipulation. When Grey collapsed on the set of The Gold Rush, the truth came out: the girl was pregnant. In her memoir, My Life with Chaplin, Grey recalled that a family member took a shotgun and marched to Chaplin’s mansion to confront him. Her uncle Edwin McMurray, a lawyer, followed up with a warning that if Chaplin did not marry the girl, the family would bring charges of statutory rape.

At five o’clock in the morning on November 24 1924, in the Mexican village of Empalme, Chaplin married Grey in a small ceremony he hoped would be far from the public eye. A couple of resourceful reporters managed to find out about the secret wedding and claimed that Chaplin quipped, “Well, boys, this is better than the penitentiary but it won’t last.”

The goodwill didn’t even last a day. On the train back from Mexico, after having failed at gunpoint to make her get an abortion, Grey claimed that Chaplin called her a “whore”, before pushing her on to the platform of the observation carriage and suggesting that she jump to her death. “The whole thing was ridiculous from the start,” Grey said in 1960. She recalled Chaplin telling her that he would make her “so damn sick of me that you won’t want to live with me”.

Adicionado na linha do tempo:

Data:

Imagens: