The West Coast correspondent for Lord Beaverbrook's London Daily Express was one of the busiest men in Los Angeles last week. Covering the Mann Act trial of Charles Spencer Chaplin for both British and Australian newspapers, he had to file two separate stories every day. For Britons, to whom British Subject Chaplin is still the lovable, great little cockney comedian, he was carefully sympathetic. But for Australians he could be tougher and more realistic.
Australians have begun to acquire the U.S. view of a Chaplin minus mustache and baggy pants, the off-screen Chaplin who is a dapper, grey multimillionaire of 54, widely envied in Hollywood for his unassailable arrogance and for his affairs with a succession of pretty young "protegées."
Auburn-haired Joan Berry, 24, who wandered from her native Detroit to New York to Hollywood in pursuit of a theatrical career, became a Chaplin protegee in the summer of 1941. She fitted into a familiar pattern. Chaplin signed her to a $75-a-week contract, began training her for a part in a projected picture. Two weeks after the contract was signed she became his mistress. Throughout the summer and autumn, Miss Berry testified last week, she visited the ardent actor five or six times a week. By midwinter her visits were down to "maybe three times a week." By late summer of 1942 Chaplin had decided that she was unsuited for his movie. Her contract ended.
Then followed the episode in dispute last week. According to Miss Berry, Chaplin asked her to go to New York "to be near him" while he went to make a speech, urging a Second Front, at a pro-Soviet rally in Carnegie Hall. She was with him just once during a 23-day stay, but that once, she said, involved a three-hour visit to his Waldorf-Astoria bedroom. Back in Beverly Hills, she broke into his mansion one night with a pistol, "intending to kill myself," held the gun for an hour until he talked her into bed again. Admitted by both sides: Chaplin paid her train fare both ways but did not travel with her, did not pay her hotel bills. Asserted by the defense: she went at her own request; Chaplin had no "intent" to transport her for immoral purposes and did not consummate any such purpose in New York.
Chaplin's lawyer, slick Jerry Giesler (attorney for Errol Flynn, Alexander Pantages) had a battery of witnesses waiting to testify that Joan Berry was no one-man girl. Judge J. F. T. O'Connor, onetime (1933-38) U.S. Comptroller of the Currency, shooed away this legal red herring as often as it appeared. The prosecutor, Charles H. Carr, argued: "Even if you put a common prostitute on the stand, it would be immaterial as to how many men she might have had affairs with in the past." The only issue was the technical one of Chaplin's "intent" in paying Joan Berry's fare from Los Angeles to New York and return. If the jury should find that he intended to bed with her, conviction on two charges (two trips) of violating the Mann Act might bring him a maximum sentence of $10,000 fine and ten years in prison, presumably to be followed by deportation as an undesirable alien.