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Let a man rise high in show business—even so stratospheric a celebrity as Chaplin—and there comes an evening of the long knives. For Chaplin it came early and never seemed to lighten. After a series of affairs with leading, supporting, featured, walk-on and crowd-scene actresses, Chaplin took up with the adolescent Lita Grey. A relative of Lita's had news for her paramour: in California, dallying with a minor was statutory rape. Charlie and Lita were married in November 1924. She was his second teen-age bride. Three years later the Chaplins were divorced after loud litigation. The American public booed his on-screen image; annihilation beckoned. Chaplin tried a master tactic. "I married Lita Grey because I loved her," he announced in the sentimental idiom of the silent film. "Like other foolish men, I loved her more when she wronged me, and I'm afraid I still love her." The statement rescued Chaplin's career—until next time.
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L'affaire Chaplin was one of the great silver screen scandals. It helped bolster the movies' infamous Morals Clause. This bit of fine print allowed a studio to fire an employee who caused embarrassment by his private behavior. Hollywood, an arena never deficient in irony, intended the clause to be used in case of sexual indiscretions. Its eventual use was political. In the '40s and '50s, film company lawyers employed it to separate "subversives" from the payroll. One suspect they could not touch was the independently wealthy Chaplin. It was not for want of trying.
Long before the subversive scare, the brilliant assembly-line satire Modern Times (1936) had galled industrialists. When the dehumanized Charlie went crazy—when he stepped from the factory trying to tighten the foreman's nose, fire hydrants, the buttons on women's dresses—big-business executives took the gestures personally. When the Tramp waved a danger signal at a truck driver and was arrested by the police for inciting crowds with a Red flag—well, that was ridiculing authority, wasn't it? Explained Chaplin: "I was only poking fun at the general confusion from which we are all suffering." The businessmen knew better; the Tramp was tramping on the Gross National Product.
Several years later a group of Senators, headed by Isolationist Burton K. Wheeler, weighed The Great Dictator and found it wanton. The mustachioed Adenoid Hynkel, they concluded accurately, was none other than the Chancellor of Germany. The film was one of a number of movies, including Sergeant York and I Married a Nazi, that were under investigation. They were warmongering propaganda, theorized the Senate subcommittee; it was all engineered by the New Deal. With timing characteristic of the Old Right, the subcommittee chose to attack Chaplin in the fall of 1941. Three months later Charlie was again rescued, this time by history.
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