Charlie Chaplin: Banned from America

Mr. and Mrs. Chaplin on board the Queen Elizabeth, September 22, 1952, with their children (from left) Geraldine (age 8), Josephine (3), Michael (6), and Victoria (16 months).

(Bettmann/Corbis)

He had weathered divorces, paternity suits, even the blacklist. After nearly 40 years in Hollywood, the comedian Charlie Chaplin—whose “Little Tramp” character had made him one of film’s first international stars—seemed invulnerable. But on September 19, 1952, while he dined on the ocean liner Queen Elizabeth as it left New York harbor, several decades’ worth of rumor and allegation finally caught up with him. Fifty-five years ago today, proclaiming that he “has been publicly charged with being a member of the Communist Party [and] with grave moral charges,” the U.S. Attorney General, James McGranery, revoked Charlie Chaplin’s permit to reenter the United States after his trip to England.

His exile was 30 years in the making, a product of changing national attitudes and Chaplin’s role as one of the pioneers of a powerful new medium whose messages could be understood by citizens of any country, speakers of any language. Despite years of investigation, no proof ever materialized that Chaplin belonged to the Communist party. His impoverished youth in London had left him with a lingering suspicion of authority and unrestricted capitalism, however. He moved from the vaudeville stages of Britain to Los Angeles in late 1913; by 1920 he had starred in, directed, or written more than 60 silent shorts and full-length features and cofounded the United Artists studio. He never applied for American citizenship, perhaps because, as some of his friends suspected, he was holding out for knighthood (and not in vain—Queen Elizabeth knighted him in 1975, two years before his death).

He first came to the Bureau of Investigation’s attention in the waning months of the post–World War I Red Scare. In August 1922 an informant told agents that Chaplin had thrown a reception for the labor leader William Z. Foster, who would go on to become general secretary of the Communist Party of the United States of America in the 1930s. One might wonder why, three years after the Bolshevik Revolution, government investigators were bothering to catalogue the guests at Hollywood parties. But Washington had already begun to worry about the growing clout of Southern California’s new industry—and the politics of its most prominent members. Bureau reports would soon recognize movies as “one of the greatest, if not the very greatest, influence upon the minds and culture” of the world. And Chaplin was Hollywood’s most famous star. “There are men and women in far corners of the world who never have heard of Jesus Christ; yet they know and love Charlie Chaplin,” a trade magazine observed in 1944. “. . . His thoughts reach a far greater audience than do the newspapers, the magazines or the radio—and in picture words that all can understand.”

The very first page of Chaplin’s 2,063-page FBI file notes that at the reception for Foster, “the great importance of moving pictures with their educational and propagandist appeal for the causes of the labor movement and the revolution was discussed, and several instances cited where radical ideas have been or are going to be embodied into moving pictures.” (One screenwriter was said to have asked the heiress and socialist Kate Crane Gartz for “a rather large sum of money in return for which he could put some radical Communist propaganda into scenarios in a manner that would do the greatest possible good to the cause.”)

By January 1923 the FBI had made two more additions to Chaplin’s file. The first provided background on another visitor of his, a labor organizer referred to as “Plotkin”; the second alleged that he had donated $1,000 to the Communist Party of the United States of America. After that, he seems to have slipped from the federal government’s attention; the next document is dated nearly two decades later. Yet he did not keep a low profile, politically or professionally, in the intervening years. The period was perhaps the most triumphant of his career: He wrote, directed, and starred in seven films, including three of his best known, 1925’s The Gold Rush, 1936’s Modern Times, and 1940’s The Great Dictator. Each dealt with a favorite theme, the common man menaced by the wealthy and powerful and finding his comeuppance where he can.

In May 1942 he gave a speech at the American Committee for Russian War Relief in San Francisco, in which he addressed the audience as “Comrades—and I mean comrades!” The line got a big laugh, and he used it again in two more speeches to pro-Soviet groups in the next few months. In December, at a dinner at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York sponsored by Russian War Relief, he explained to 700 guests that Stalin’s purges had been “a wonderful thing”: “In those purges the Communists did away with their Quislings and Lavals, and if other nations had done the same there would not be the original Quislings and Lavals today. The only people who object to Communism and who use it as a bugaboo are the Nazi agents in this country. . . . I am not a Communist but I am proud to say that I feel pretty pro-Communist.”

Hard as it may be to believe today, those comments barely made a ripple in 1942. As the historian Richard Gid Powers wrote in his 1998 book Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism, once Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, the White House discouraged criticism of the Soviets. Merely pointing out flaws in Soviet-American relations, Arthur Krock of The New York Times remembered, “was to bring down the charge of sympathy with ‘fascism.’” Powers adds: “If it was now almost un-American to attack the Soviet Union, it also seemed almost unpatriotic to attack the Soviet Union’s American comrades.”

Although the December speech did inspire investigators to reopen Chaplin’s file, the issue that planted him firmly within the FBI’s crosshairs that same year was much more ageless: sex. Chaplin was one of Hollywood’s first conquering Lotharios, and he was drawn to very young women. In June 1943, he married his third wife, Oona O’Neill, daughter of the playwright Eugene O’Neill; she was 18, he was 54. (His first and second wives had both been 16 when he married them.) He had also enjoyed flings with a rash of actresses over the years, including Pola Negri, Louise Brooks, and Hedy Lamarr. In 1941 he had begun a brief romance—how brief would become a matter of some dispute—with a mentally unbalanced 22-year-old aspiring starlet named Joan Barry. He later remembered admiring her “upper regional domes immensely expansive,” but he claimed to have broken off the affair a few months later, after Barry began appearing at his house drunk in the middle of the night and breaking the windows when he refused to answer the door.

Barry told a different story. In her version, the relationship lasted well into 1942, by which point Chaplin had pressured her into two abortions. In May 1943 she returned from a five-month stint in New York to announce she was pregnant again. Chaplin denied that the baby could be his, so Barry filed a paternity suit. As the story rampaged through the gossip columns, the FBI got wind of a visit Barry had paid to Chaplin in New York in October 1942. If Chaplin had bankrolled a trip she took from Los Angeles so that they could continue their affair in New York, he had violated the Mann Act, a 1910 anti-prostitution law that prohibited transporting a woman across state lines for sexual purposes. Chaplin was arrested, fingerprinted, and booked. After a two-week trial, a jury acquitted him in April 1944.

Two months earlier, a blood test had proven that Chaplin was not the father of Barry’s baby. At the time, however, blood-test results were not admissible in California courts. After two trials each ended in a hung jury, a judge ordered Chaplin to pay Barry child support until the child, a girl named Carol Ann, turned 21.

The FBI, with its sights now trained on Chaplin, continued to document his political and personal behavior well after the paternity suit ended. For many of his critics in and outside the government, sexual freedom and political insurgency were not necessarily distinct offenses. In their minds, traditional families acted as the cradle of patriotism, the first defense against radical ideology. Any behavior that strayed from conventional morality—including extramarital sex—could be a threat.

Of course, Chaplin also refused to temper his left-leaning activity once the Cold War set in. He opposed the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947. In 1948 he donated to Henry Wallace’s Progressive campaign for President, and the following year he endorsed the meetings of two international Communist-front organizations. And the political climate in America had shifted dramatically. Just as ideas that had been popular in the Progressive Era suddenly seemed suspect after the Russian Revolution, so speeches that might not have raised an eyebrow when the USSR was our anti-Nazi ally rang alarm bells after Czechoslovakia fell.

Chaplin’s biggest public-relations misstep may have been the film he released in 1947: Monsieur Verdoux, a parable about a poor Frenchman (played by Chaplin, who also co-wrote and directed the movie) who marries and kills rich widows for their inheritances so he can support his crippled wife and young son. In the movie’s climactic courtroom speech, Chaplin asks, “As for being a mass killer, does not the world encourage it? Is it not building weapons of destruction for the sole purpose of mass killing? Has it not blown unsuspecting women and little children to pieces? And done it very scientifically? As a mass killer, I am an amateur by comparison.” American moviegoers spurned what seemed like a justification for murder and an indictment of the United States. The audience at the New York premiere actually hissed.

Adding injury to insult, the House Un-American Activities Committee subpoenaed Chaplin that September; he responded by sending each of its members an invitation to Monsieur Verdoux. He was never called on to testify. A bill that could have led to his deportation had been introduced on the Senate floor two years earlier, and after it failed, the sponsor, William Langer of North Dakota, asked in March 1947 how “a man like Charlie Chaplin, with his communistic leanings, with his unsavory record of law-breaking, of rape, or the debauching of American girls 16 and 17 years of age,” could be allowed to remain in the country.

Soon the Immigration and Naturalization Service was wondering the same thing. Chaplin, planning a trip to London to scout locations for his next film, applied for a reentry permit in July 1947, which prompted the INS to launch an investigation of his activity. First an INS commissioner interviewed him. He asked about Chaplin’s membership in Communist front groups (“I am not a member of anything,” Chaplin responded), his association with known Communists, and his donations to the party (“Never . . . I am sure”). He subsequently decided not to go to England after all.

By 1949, with very little evidence—most of it hearsay, some clipped from gossip columns, some literally overheard in hair salons—to show for the government’s years of inquiries, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover concluded that “there are no witnesses available who could offer testimony that Chaplin had been a member of the Communist Party in the past, is now a member, or that he has contributed funds to the Communist Party.” By that point, sobered by the reaction to Monsieur Verdoux as well as the trials of several high-profile spy suspects, Chaplin had finally quieted his political rhetoric.

Three years later, he decided to take his wife and children on a trip to Europe to attend the premiere of his latest film, Limelight. The INS issued him a reentry permit with little fanfare in July 1952, but he still nursed the fear that he might not be allowed back. He was right to worry. On September 9, the day the Chaplins left Hollywood for New York, Attorney General McGranery met with Hoover to discuss “steps which would prevent [Chaplin’s] re-entry . . . because of moral turpitude.” Before he could act further, however, McGranery needed time to review the FBI’s file.

Despite his misgivings, Chaplin and his family left New York on the Queen Elizabeth on September 19. That same day, McGranery made his decision. A devout Catholic, he was offended by Chaplin’s sexual conduct; as a lawyer, though, he knew that the claims of Communist party membership were not supported by reliable evidence. In the end, he canceled the reentry permit because, he announced, Chaplin “has been publicly charged with being a member of the Communist Party, with grave moral charges and with making statements that would indicate a leering, sneering attitude toward a country whose hospitality has enriched him.”

Aboard the ship, Chaplin received the cable: To set foot in the United States again, he would have to appear before an INS board of inquiry to answer questions about both his politics and his morality. Privately, INS commissioners admitted that “the INS does not have sufficient information to exclude Chaplin from the United States if he attempts to re-enter”; moreover, the bad publicity if the agency tried to ban him “might well rock INS and the Department of Justice to its foundations.”

Chaplin spared them the ordeal. “I would have liked to tell them that the sooner I was rid of that hate-beleaguered atmosphere the better,” he remembered 12 years later in his autobiography, “that I was fed up with America’s insults and moral pomposity, and that the whole subject was damned boring.” Instead, he waited until his American assets were secure, bought a villa in Corsier-sur-Vevey, Switzerland, and turned in his reentry permit to the American consulate in Geneva. “My prodigious sin was, and still is, being a nonconformist,” he later wrote. “Although I am not a Communist I refused to fall in line by hating them.”

He lived comfortably in Europe, making two more films (one about an exiled king) before retiring in 1967. He may have vowed never to come back to the United States, but when he was invited to receive an honorary Oscar, in 1972, he nervously returned to Hollywood. The Nixon administration made no move to block his reentry; the FBI had given up its investigation of the movie industry in 1956. On April 10 he accepted his award, “for the incalculable effect he has had in making motion pictures the art form of this century,” before a rapturous ovation in the packed Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Struck nearly dumb by the outpouring of applause, he stammered out a few quick words of thanks, then fell back on his earliest performer’s instincts. Handed a derby by Jack Lemmon, he placed it on his head and made it pop off, a favorite gag from his silents. The Little Tramp had come forth, one last time, in the city that had made him famous—the city he had helped to build.

—Christine Gibson is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.