Charlie Chaplin was on top of the world—and his game (a biographer writes that he once claimed to have slept with 2,000 women during his lifetime). But then it all almost came crashing down: a divorce and sex scandal threatened to air Chaplin’s very dirty laundry to his adoring public. Chaplin escaped by the skin of his silent movie-star teeth…but given the facts about his marriage to Lita MacMurray and his proclivity for statutory rape, he didn’t exactly come out looking like an angel.
By the mid 1920s, it was clear that something was not entirely right about Chaplin’s attitude toward women. In a 1926 interview with Vanity Fair, he gave the magazine his picture of the ideal woman: “I am not exactly in love with her, but she is entirely in love with me.” He had already been through several high-profile romances: the first with Edna Purviance, who became his costar she was 19 and he was 25, the next with Mildred Harris, who he married in 1918 when she was sixteen and pregnant with his child (he was 29 at the time). They divorced in 1920.
Soon after his marriage, though, Chaplin met Lita MacMurray. She was 12 years old when Chaplin cast her as “an angel dangling from wires in a scene set in celluloid heaven.” Chaplin’s behavior toward Lita was abhorrent at best: he was openly obsessed with her and told friends that he would marry her if she became pregnant. He spent his days making over her image into a starlet known as Lita Grey and his nights in bed with his child girlfriend. To cover up her age, he told the press she was 19 years old.
When 16-year-old Lita collapsed on set of The Gold Rush, Chaplin learned she was pregnant. He responded by insisting she have an abortion, then removing her from her role when she refused. Her pregnancy had cost her a role in what would be one of Chaplin’s most famous movies, but she wasn’t about to go down without a fight. Her family threatened to turn Chaplin in for statutory rape and he married her under duress and in secret in 1924, telling friends that “marriage was a better option than prison.”
Little Charlie was born in May 1925 and his father bribed the obstetrician to change the date on his birth certificate to reflect a later date to prevent an even bigger scandal. Then he settled back in to life as one of the biggest stars in the world—until everything blew up in his face. In 1927, Lita filed for divorce and went to court with a series of explosive allegations, including that he had cheated on her, falsified her son’s birth date and forced her to perform oral sex on him. Her 42-page complaint was published “as a warning to maidens as to what may be expected from union with a rich and much older man” and was used as fodder for disgruntled fans who were convinced he wanted to avoid child support and payment of his taxes rather than pay his scorned wife.
Chaplin ended up paying nearly $1 million in legal fees, and Lita walked away with $825,000—an astronomical sum for the 1920s. But though Chaplin managed to maintain his fame, he wasn’t done getting in legal trouble. In the 1940s, yet another paternity/divorce lawsuit ended up changing California’s paternity laws to allow blood tests. He married that wife, Oona O’Neill, just a month after she turned 18. He was 54 years old.
