Lita Grey (1908–1995)

I love the idea of getting a window into Charlie Chaplin’s personal life, even if it’s voyeuristic of me. The man was a genius with such an extraordinary sense of humanity in his films, that to understand more of him as a complete person, even one with flaws, is interesting to me.

Books like this one, written by his second wife Lita Grey in 1966, have to be accurate though. In this case, we obviously only have one side of the story, presented by a woman biased in all the usual kinds of ways for an autobiographer, and from her writing, clearly with a need of wanting to be more important than she was in Chaplin’s life and in the entertainment world. Just a couple of years before, Chaplin wrote his own autobiography and nearly completely omitted her, except to say that “Because we have two grown sons of whom I am very fond, I will not go into any details. For two years we were married and tried to make a go of it, but it was hopeless and ended in a great deal of bitterness.” Grey then worked with Morton Cooper, who by her own admission later amplified the salacious bits and distorted the truth in ways which are now very hard to disentangle. In reading statements of fact and verbatim dialog in the book four decades after it supposedly occurred, one has to constantly be questioning whether it’s true, and that’s problematic.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t believe the fundamental story of Chaplin’s statutory rape of this young woman, because those facts are indisputable. He took an odd interest her when she was 12, made her the “Flirting Angel” in the dream sequence of “The Kid”, and then later pursued her sexually when she was 15. He got her pregnant, and at 16 was forced by her family under threat of legal action to marry her. They had two sons but a very unhappy marriage, and divorced in bitterness a little less than three years later. It’s disturbing that Chaplin had also married his first wife, Mildred Harris, before her 17th birthday, which indicates a pattern.

Many of the interesting bits in the book I had to wonder about. Unfortunately, Grey was not specific as to which elements she and Cooper lied about while she was preparing her second memoir, which was published a few years after her death in the 1990’s. Chaplin to my knowledge never dignified the book with a comment, possibly because it was a quagmire which also included truths and partial truths he preferred to leave buried. It’s maddening that Grey blamed Cooper for the falsehoods, and it was eerily reminiscent of her blaming her lawyers for the statements they made about Chaplin’s “perversion” and “unnatural desires” in their divorce proceedings in 1927.

It’s not that she casts herself in an entirely angelic light, and she describes many things she did in her life that she was not proud of, including foolishly squandering a divorce settlement which until then was the largest in history (after lawyer’s fees and setting aside the trust fund for the kids, nearly $9M in today’s dollars). She became an alcoholic and was on the road trying to make a living as an entertainer (billing herself as Lita Grey Chaplin) while her two sons were raised remotely. She had breakdowns and received many rounds of electroconvulsive shock therapy while committed. She was married and divorced three more times in her life. None of these things are particularly interesting in the later chapters as Charlie Chaplin is no longer on the scene, but they do help flesh out a portrait of this woman, and what to me seems a pathetic life, despite her optimism at the end. Video interviews of her from the 1990’s show her in a positive light though, a survivor and somewhat philosophical.

Here are some other tidbits that stuck out:

- In the prologue, she makes the extraordinary allegation that while on the train back from their shotgun marriage in Mexico, he suggested that she jump off the train to kill herself and their unborn child, to spare themselves a life of misery. While it’s easy to believe he suggested an abortion and also tried to buy her off with $20,000 to avoid marriage, this one is hard to swallow.

- At age 12, Chaplin was entranced by her eyes and her resemblance to what he saw in Sir Joshua Reynolds painting ‘Age of Innocence’ (1788), so he had her sit for a portrait. This one is disturbing but very believable and almost certainly true, as there is a photo of her posing for it.

- After an attempt to have sex with her in his hotel room in Truckee while they were on location to film ‘The Gold Rush’, and later on a beach, Chaplin continued grooming her, taking her to the Santa Monica Swimming Club, and eventually succeeded in deflowering her in the steam room of his mansion. Details about specific dialogue aside, this account is believable. She also describes her mixed feelings of confusion and lust for Chaplin, and her naïve belief that if she didn’t have an orgasm, she couldn’t get pregnant, in ways that are entirely believable.

- In an aside, she tries to distinguish what she and Chaplin had as being fundamentally different, and more elevated, from what Errol Flynn had with Beverly Aadland. Flynn was 48 and Aadland was 15 when they met and became lovers before he died at 50. This doesn’t seem like an outright lie, but just wishful thinking more than truth.

- She says that Chaplin referred to himself as a “stallion” and for good reason, as during their marriage he could make love six times in a night, with just five minutes rest in between. She also says his high sex drive led to numerous affairs, and doesn’t hold back in naming Pola Negri, Claire Windsor, Peggy Hopkins Joyce, Edna Purviance, and Marion Davies. She says that because “he was a human sex machine” (lol) she couldn’t tell if he’d had sex with someone else earlier in the day because of his incredible ability to perform. While all of this is probably exaggerated and played up for its full shock value, the central gist of it, that he had high drive and had affairs, is believable.

- She alleges later that at the time of the divorce, in a fit of anger he threatened to use his power and connections with William Randolph Hearst to have her killed. This is the culmination of years of cruelty, lack of respect, and the one-sidedness of their relationship, stemming from his feeling of having been trapped and being resentful about it (his own damn fault of course). Some of this seems exaggerated, some of it rings true.

- She describes reading “Fanny Hill” from his library, whose sex scenes Chaplin had underlined, and which inspired some passion between them, as did an interval after childbirth where she was sexually voracious. Then again, she says that they slept apart, and on the occasions when he summoned her to his bedroom, she felt “increasingly like the whore he’d called me” and “more often than not, during that period, he simply expended his passion in me and dismissed me.” Again, parts of this may be the truth, and parts may be an attempt on her part to both play up both the salacious aspects and Chaplin’s cruelty.

- Her accounts of celebrity behavior at Hearst’s palace at San Simeon, including comments she has Hearst making, seem too literally borrowed from ‘Citizen Kane’ to be true. Similarly, there is a scene with a drunken John Barrymore, who indeed was an alcoholic, but does he really speak all of the lines that come out of his mouth in this book, coming on to her and also clueing her in about Chaplin having an affair with Marion Davies? Her discussions with Davies, meetings with Garbo, and Negri? All impossible to know, but certainly questionable.

- Similarly her statements about Chaplin’s directing style, or her other comments on Hollywood figures, really don’t seem to have a whole lot of value, despite her own sense of importance, since her brief career and exposure to the industry essentially ended with her divorce.

- In her descriptions of their sex life she alludes to two things that were spun out of all control in the divorce papers against him: (1) his desire that she perform fellatio on him, which was astonishingly illegal in California at the time, and (2) his desire that the two of them have a ménage à trois with Andrea Gatesbry, a young poet who he heard was sexually adventurous. She turns both of these things down and he doesn’t force her, but then she didn’t stop her lawyers from alluding to and condemning his “perversions”, which scandalized America in 1927. I think it’s sad that his reputation was further tarnished from this innuendo (not that the underage sex shouldn’t have been condemned), and don’t believe her when she says it was not her intention.

- Likewise, she says she wanted none of his money, then later asked for only a pittance ($10,000) to support her kids, which seems patently false. She loved the good life, as evidenced by her living it up to an extreme after the divorce.

- Some of the aspects that Chaplin and his lawyers accused her of at the time of their divorce, including partying, drinking, and essentially being an unfit mother, which she bitterly denied, seem to have played out in her life that way, making one wonder about her statement that the only instance of this that occurred during their marriage was innocently bringing some young kids over to their home one night and then dancing the Charleston with them when Chaplin came home, outraged. It really seems like there is another side of the story that was untold here.

- Years later she states Chaplin was kind to her in getting her to seek help, telling her that he had “really loved only two women – you and the girl who’s my wife now [referring to Oona]. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to be a real husband.” This entire incident and specific quote are very, very hard to believe, based on Chaplin’s own autobiography, and Grey herself just pages later vacillating on whether she would attempt to damage Chaplin in hearings associated with the irrational fear of communism that gripped America in the 1950’s.

As I peruse all of these points (and apologize to anyone who has actually read this far for my verbosity), you can tell it’s a lot to process, and the recurring theme is when we’re getting this window into Chaplin Grey in the 1920’s, just how many layers of distortion are in between us and the truth, and whether what we’re seeing is an impressionist painting that while fuzzy contains the essence, or if it’s entirely too fictional to be taken seriously. In the earlier chapters I felt it was mostly believable, but my confidence eroded as time went on, and it suffered a bigger blow when I read about Grey’s own admission that parts were misleading. The more you think about both Chaplin and Grey, the less you might like either one of them – or the more you may appreciate that most people are complicated, and should neither be deified nor vilified. For my part, I liked finding this first edition hardback copy with a nice set of pictures in the center, and am glad I read her account, despite the serious misgivings.… (meer)