The Forgotten Charlie Chaplin Scandal That Changed Paternity Laws In America Forever

What do you know about Charlie Chaplin? You’ve probably seen him clowning around on the screen, raising laughs as his classic Tramp character. But while no one can deny Chaplin was a hugely talented performer, he wasn’t exactly an angel when the cameras stopped rolling. One of his scandals was so thorny, in fact, that it actually ended up changing the law.

Wife number one

You may have an inkling that Chaplin preferred younger women, but the details are still pretty shocking. He was almost in his thirties, you see, when he married his first wife, 17-year-old Mildred Harris. And he may not have even wed her in the first place if she wasn’t convinced she was pregnant.

The first divorce

Needless to say, the marriage was over pretty quickly. After just a couple of years, Harris filed for divorce, and all the sordid details of the relationship were dragged through the press. She claimed that Chaplin had been cruel to her, having “humiliated [her] before the servants.” And while she ultimately won a large sum of money from her ex-husband, it wasn’t enough to save her.

Harris’ death

Being estranged from her famous husband didn’t help Harris at all. Her acting career went on a downward spiral without the Chaplin link to help secure roles, and she reportedly went bankrupt. There was no redemption arc for her, either. Sadly, she would eventually pass away from pneumonia at the age of just 42.

Wife number two

Chaplin’s second wife was also a teenager. He’d first encountered the 16-year-old Lita Grey while filming The Gold Rush. And, yes, the marriage both began and ended very badly. Chaplin wed her purely because he had gotten her pregnant. Grey’s mother had claimed she would tell the police about Chaplin’s misbehavior if he didn’t make an honest woman of her girl.

The second divorce

And all sorts of scandalous details came out during the subsequent divorce. In court documents, Grey claimed that Chaplin had made “revolting, degrading and offensive” demands of her — things that were “repulsive to her moral decency.” In the wake of the furor, there were even claims that Chaplin’s films should be outlawed.

Wife number three

Chaplin ultimately emerged with his career intact, and his next marriage was at least to a woman of age. He wed the 26-year-old Paulette Goddard in 1936, and the couple starred together in arguably Chaplin’s two most famous movies: Modern Times and The Great Dictator. Their divorce appeared fairly amicable, too. Well, this time proceedings passed without any huge scandal being splashed on the front pages.

Friends?

And Goddard didn’t meet Harris’ sad fate. If anything, she actually became more successful after the divorce. Perhaps surprisingly, she also remained on fair terms with Chaplin. It’s thought the last time they encountered each other was at the 1972 Oscars, where Chaplin cried on seeing his former wife.

The one who stuck

Chaplin’s fourth and final wife was Oona O’Neill — yet another woman who was a lot younger than him. In fact, this time around, the age gap was huge: she was 18 when they wed, while he was 54. Yet, remarkably, this marriage was the one that lasted. The Chaplins welcomed eight children into the world, and they stayed together right up until Chaplin’s death in 1977.

Enter Joan Barry

There’s no doubt about it: Chaplin was a womanizer. And it was very nearly his downfall in Hollywood. Though plenty of scandals and even crimes could be swept under the rug if you were rich and famous enough, Chaplin came under major fire after a woman named Joan Barry entered his life.

The affair

Chaplin began seeing Barry in 1941 — and while he was still married to Paulette Goddard. Barry, who also went by Berry, was in her 20s at the time. She was a wannabe actress, a complete unknown, but Chaplin decided he would try and make her a star. He even had a script for her: a movie version of the play Shadow and Substance.

The secret services get involved

Back then, the FBI was tracking Chaplin as a suspected Communist. Since he was a British national, the U.K. security service MI5 also kept tabs on him. And thanks to these investigations, files survive to this day with details of the women Chaplin was seeing and what exactly he was up to. Naturally, they include information about Barry.

Barry’s file

The FBI intel on Barry paints a picture of someone who may well have had an undiagnosed mental illness. File number 1442 reads, “It is to be noted that she [Barry] is a girl who becomes very emotional upon occasion.” According to the FBI, anyway, she was prone to erratic behavior.

Immorality

But it was in October 1942 that things began to get murky. Chaplin asked Barry to travel from LA to New York, which in itself was naturally no crime. However, the FBI declared that during her visit to the Big Apple, the actress “attended various parties with Chaplin, and it is alleged that he made her available to other individuals for immoral purposes.”

The Mann Act

Taking Barry to these parties meant Chaplin may have broken the Mann Act, which prohibited people from crossing state lines to indulge in “prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.” Even if everything had been consensual, Chaplin was still in hot water. And then events took another turn: Barry showed up at Chaplin’s house with a gun.

Different stories

In December 1942, Barry appeared at Chaplin’s house with the intention of shooting herself in front of him. He had stopped taking her phone calls, and she had been left devastated. But stories vary as to what happened between the pair after Barry got to the house. Barry claimed she had sex with Chaplin that night; Chaplin said otherwise.

Tailing Chaplin

Then, on the first day of January 1942, Beverly Hills police discovered Barry outside the home of another man she knew. She was behaving erratically and told the police that she had nowhere to go. Barry was subsequently arrested, slapped with a charge of vagrancy, and told to leave Los Angeles. But she was back before too long — and back tailing Chaplin.

The revelation

Barry turned up at Chaplin’s house again and was arrested, but it turns out she had a get-out-of-jail-free card. Basically, she was pregnant. And she had a bombshell to drop. Barry went to Hedda Hopper — the most notorious gossip columnist in Hollywood — and told her that Chaplin was the father of the baby.

The suit

Then, in early June 1943, Barry filed a paternity suit against Chaplin. And it was dynamite stuff. Hopper wrote in her column, “What is to become of that child and its mother, Joan Barry?… Those are the questions Hollywood is asking today. Those are the questions Hollywood has a right to ask — and not only hope for an answer but to demand one.”

Taking blood

At the time, though, there were far fewer ways of proving the identity of a child’s father than there are now. The most surefire method back then? A blood test. As soon as the baby was born, doctors could examine her blood type along with those of Barry and Chaplin and see if they matched. She eventually arrived in October 1943, and Barry named her Carol Ann.

The truth comes out?

It was all to do with how blood types are inherited. Carol Ann was discovered to have type B blood, while her mother had type A. This meant the little girl’s dad must have AB or B blood. But after Chaplin’s blood was tested in February 1944, it was revealed to be type O. That meant the movie star couldn’t be the father.

Inadmissible evidence

This didn’t actually help Chaplin much. Blood tests weren’t admissible as evidence in California, so while the proof was out there, Chaplin’s attorneys couldn’t use it. Barry also denied the blood tests were accurate and carried on with her suit. And during the whole affair, salacious gossip spread about the case.

The rumors

After the results of the test were made public, a newspaper suggested that Chaplin had used some sort of unknown chemical to alter his blood type. It sounded very silly, but some people believed it. And while apparently Lita Grey was one of the naysayers, she still thought Chaplin had paid someone off to fake the test.

The case continues

Even Barry’s lawyer put forward the chemical ruse theory, but then he changed his mind and stepped down from his position. Chaplin’s attorney also tried to get the whole case dismissed, but that didn’t fly with the ruling Superior Court judge. The sorry saga would be seen through to the end — despite all the evidence just sitting there.

The Mann Act revisited

Oh, and then there was also the Mann Act accusation for Chaplin to deal with. In February 1944, Chaplin pleaded not guilty to the charges against him, although it was down to a jury of his peers to decide whether that was the truth or not. Both Barry and Chaplin testified in that case, and ultimately it was found that the star had not broken the law. It was one legal victory for him, at least.

A Cockney cad

But the paternity trial went far more poorly for Chaplin. Barry’s lawyer Joseph Scott went absolutely all in on the actor during proceedings, calling him a “pestiferous, lecherous hound,” a “little runt of a Svengali” and a “cheap Cockney cad.” At one point, he claimed he was sad Chaplin wasn’t there as he would have liked to hit him himself. Despite all this, the jury ended up in a deadlock.

“The honor of American womanhood”

Barry’s legal people asked for a retrial, and they got one. This time, the jury was stacked with women, which ought to have played in their favor. And it did. Only one juror refused to believe that Chaplin should accept paternity of the child. That woman told Newsweek, “I came into this court determined to see that the honor of American womanhood was upheld. But after what I heard here, I couldn’t vote for that girl.”

The payout

“That girl,” or Barry, had emerged triumphant, and a judge ruled in April 1945 that Chaplin had to pay young Carol Ann $75 a week. This would then rise to $100 as she got older until she turned 21. In those days, that was a huge amount of money. He also had to let Carol Ann use the name “Chaplin” if she ever wanted to. And this was all despite the blood evidence.

Bad reputation

Chaplin’s lawyers did ask for a new trial, but it was declined. And it was really too late to fix his reputation, anyway. By this point, the media had absolutely savaged the fallen actor. Time declared that this new scandal “fitted into a familiar pattern” of Chaplin’s “affairs with a succession of pretty young protégés.”

An appeal?

Chaplin tried his best to fight back, though, and in 1946 he and his legal team launched an appeal against the ruling. The paperwork explained why, saying, “After the birth of the child, blood tests were made by physicians…They unanimously reported their conclusion from the tests that the defendant was not the father of the child. Counsel who at that time represented plaintiff did not, as provided in the stipulation, file a dismissal of the action upon the receipt of said report.” But this didn’t prove to be sufficient grounds for reopening the case.

The aftermath

And while Chaplin had once been one of the biggest movie stars in the world, now he was practically ruined. In 1947, Senator William Langer called to have him deported, declaring that Chaplin had been involved in “the debauching of American girls 16 and 17 years of age.”

The Red Scare

Hedda Hopper also wanted Chaplin to leave America — though she seemed more concerned about the possibility of him being a communist. In April 1947, she reportedly wrote to J. Edgar Hoover: “I’d like to run every one of those rats out of the country and start with Charlie Chaplin. In no other country in the world would he be allowed to do what he’s done… You give me the material, and I’ll blast.”

Out of the limelight

Finally, in September 1952, Chaplin’s adopted country threw him out. Chaplin was en route to Britain to attend a premiere of the film Limelight when the U.S. attorney general took away his reentry permit. But the star apparently didn’t care. He was done with America and reportedly told the press, “I would not go back there even if Jesus Christ was the president.”

Exile

In fact, Chaplin never lived in the U.S. again. Instead, he moved to Switzerland and stayed there with his family until his last days. And maybe that was the best move. He was so unpopular in the States that his 1957 film A King in New York didn’t even screen in U.S. theaters for another 15 years.

A standing ovation

Things eventually changed, though. In 1972, Chaplin was invited back to America to accept an honorary Oscar. And in the auditorium, he received a standing ovation that reportedly lasted 12 minutes in all. Chaplin took to the stage and said, “This is an emotional moment for me, and words seem so futile, so feeble. I can only say thank you for the honor of inviting me here.”

Chaplin’s death

Chaplin may have appreciated that outpouring of affection before his death. He passed away in 1977, with Oona and many of their children by his side. And as well as leaving behind a great many beloved movies, Chaplin had made his mark in another, more unusual way. Yes, his much-publicized paternity case actually helped change American law.

A new act

In 1953 — less than ten years after the ruling in Chaplin’s case — California created the Uniform Act on Blood Tests to Determine Paternity. Basically, if blood tests proved the supposed father of a child wasn’t actually the biological one, “the question of paternity, parentage or identity of a child” would be “resolved accordingly.”

Future technology

That act, however, is pretty much moot following the advent of DNA testing. These days, paternity can be determined with nothing more invasive than a mouth swab. And things could have been very different for Chaplin if that technology had existed at the time of his court case.

Sad fate

As for Joan Barry? No one is completely sure what happened to her. We do know that she was committed to a psychiatric hospital in 1953, having had a son five years prior. And while Carol Ann is — as far as anyone knows — alive and well, she seems to have no interest in speaking to the media.

Reassessment

Chaplin’s reputation is still in question today, mind you, but that’s more because of his relationships with young girls rather than his paternity suit. Yet the Tramp's womanizing ways did more than just alter the public's perception of his legacy — in fact, they may very well have left Chaplin with blood on his hands.