Chaplin is remembered—due in part to a clandestinely orchestrated, politically motivated smear campaign by the FBI in the 1940s and Nabokov's novel Lolita—as a lecher with a penchant for adolescent girls. Three of his four wives were teenagers: Mildred Harris, Lita Grey, and Oona O'Neill (the playwright's daughter). But many, many more non-adolescent women were important to him over the years (Edna Purviance, Clare Sheridan, Sari Maritsa, Peggy Hopkins Joyce, Pola Negri, Louise Brooks, Marion Davies, Georgia Hale, and Paulette Goddard, to name but a few).
By his own admission (or gross exaggeration), Chaplin claimed to have slept with 2,000 women in his life. Tactfully alluding to his reputation as a ladies man in My Autobiography, he wrote “to gauge the morals of our family by ordinary standards would be like plunging a thermometer into boiling water.” (That remark also referred to his mother's and brother's promiscuous behavior.)
Without putting Chaplin on the couch, it is impossible to know precisely why he had such a weakness for nubile women. Attempting to explain his attraction to young girls, his friend Sam Goldwyn and his son Charlie Jr. each wrote of Chaplin's “horror” of old age. Much more significantly—and poignantly—Chaplin himself recalled his shock and dismay as an adolescent at the complete loss of all emotional contact with his prematurely aged mother when she descended suddenly into madness. That graphic emotional experience of witnessing her youth, beauty, and sanity permanently disappear overnight in 1903 (at age 38) was followed by Hannah Chaplin's physical death in 1928. But for 14-year-old Charlie, his beautiful young showgirl mother—whose glamorous stage name had once been Lillie Harley—“died” back in 1903.
Briefly stated: As a loss-sensitive artist with a tendency to dwell in the past, Chaplin drew his creative strength from his powerful need to recapture that poignant attachment to his formerly beautiful and vivacious young mother Those idealized images of Lillie (not Hannah) served as templates for all of the screen heroines that his boyishly infatuated little tramp character quixotically rescued from predicament after predicament in his greatest comedies (including The Kid, The Gold Rush, City Lights, and Modern Times).
From an artistic point of view, Chaplin's need to relive and rewrite his past paid off. However, Charlie's arrested emotional development was more problematic in his private life. On numerous occasions, as an ostensibly “mature” man in his thirties, Chaplin frequently
Steve Weissman, M.D., is a Washington D.C. based psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and psycho-biographer. He has authored Chaplin A Life, His Brother's Keeper: A Psychobiography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Frederick Douglass: Portrait of a Black Militant (Psychoanalytic Study of the Child).
described himself as still feeling and acting like that lost boy of 14: a self-observation independently confirmed by many of his friends and confidantes (including Thomas Burke). When the mood struck him, Chaplin occasionally autographed studio stills of himself “from that little waif, Charlie Chaplin.”
Lita Grey—his second teenage wife—recalled Charlie's pleading with her never to grow old during the torrid-romantic, “Napoleon-Josephine” courtship phase of their relationship that preceded their shotgun wedding. Fifteen-year-old Lita was in the dark about what this meant. Why Napoleon? Why Josephine? And what was this handsome 35-year-old man's morbid dread of aging about?
Oona O'Neill was the only one of Charlie's three teenage wives he actually liked and respected despite the 36-year difference in their ages. She was intelligent, cultured, sophisticated, well educated and—unlike Harris or Grey—immediately abandoned her show business aspirations when their affair began and never perceived him as a meal ticket.
Chaplin's first two teenage wives had been fleeting fantasy objects of his sexually infatuated romantic imagination and also were, perhaps, throwbacks to his own mother's highly romanticized and nostalgic self-dramatizations of herself as an aspiring 16-year-old actress.
Commenting on his attraction to teenagers, Chaplin later confided to a friend (Harry Crocker): “I have always been in love with young girls, not in an amorous way—just as beautiful objects to look at. I like them young because they personify youth and beauty. There is something virginal in their slimness—in their slender arms and legs. And they are so feminine at that age—so wholly, girlishly young. They haven't developed the ‘come on’ stuff or discovered the power of their looks over men.”
Unfortunately for Chaplin and for his first two equally disillusioned teenage lovers, the abrupt transition from virgin to slut occurred within days of his successful seduction of them or theirs of him (depending on one's point of view). As his oldest son Charlie Chaplin Jr. observed: “[my father's] troubles sprang from incurable romanticism…[he was] utterly blind to the fact that he was dealing with flesh and blood… [and] would form a deep attachment for his created image much as Pygmalion fell in love with his statue. When the idyll he had created for himself would explode into stark reality he would be shocked, angry, and hurt as at some betrayal.”