Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [38]
In 1920, Chaplin had spotted a young extra named Lillita MacMurray while directing The Kid. Struck by the twelve-yearold’s precocious allure, he asked her to play the provocative angel-temptress in the film’s dream sequence. Four years later (having not seen her in the interim) he cast her as the Tramp’s love interest in The Gold Rush, but by the time filming had started several months later Lita Grey (the stage-name Chaplin had chosen for her) was pregnant. Her role was filled by another actress and, because she was still only sixteen and refused to have an abortion, she and Chaplin were secretly married in Mexico.
Although she and Chaplin had two sons in the next two years, the marriage was miserable from the start. In December 1926 Grey left Chaplin and filed for divorce, accusing him of neglect and cruelty and demanding $1.25 million in alimony. Hollywood may have turned a blind eye to Chaplin’s taste for young girls, but the nation was aghast at the revelations of the Little Tramp’s “immorality” and “degeneracy.” The exposure of his marriage to a minor and his negligent and abusive treatment of her nearly destroyed him. Grey’s suit included claims that Chaplin had tried to force her to abort both of her babies, demanded oral sex (considered utterly reprehensible at the time) and asked other women to join them in bed, and she threatened to name five prominent women with whom Chaplin was said to have been involved during their marriage. Across the country appalled wives and mothers formed groups petitioning for Chaplin’s films to be banned and raising money to help feed his abandoned children.
The divorce, which awarded Grey over $600,000 (the largest settlement made up to that time) and each of her sons trusts of $100,000, and cost Chaplin almost a million dollars in legal fees, was finalized in August 1927. But somehow Chaplin’s appeal was undimmed. Out of a series of scandals that shook Hollywood to its foundations during the 1920s, he was the only survivor.
One evening in the mid-1920s Chaplin, Elinor Glyn and Marion Davies saw a murder being committed outside the door of Glyn’s suite at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. When Glyn enquired what had happened, the following day, the hotel denied all knowledge of a crime; only the much-scrubbed bloodstain on the carpet remained as evidence of what Glyn and her friends had witnessed. This was Hollywood’s initial approach to the scandals that threatened to destroy it: if the evidence could be concealed, then no one would be the wiser. The real problems started when the scandals happened so regularly that the truth could no longer be suppressed.
In September 1920, Mary Pickford’s appealing but wayward brother Jack and his exquisite starlet wife, Olive Thomas, returned to the Ritz in Paris after an evening slumming at a seedy Montmartre bar, Le Café du Rat Mort. As the Pickfords went through the lobby witnesses observed that they looked “unsteady, but not drunk.” That night Olive took mercury tablets and died after five days of excruciating suffering. Despite the verdict of accidental death it is unclear whether she took the pills by accident, thinking they were sleeping pills, or whether she intended to kill herself perhaps because of her husband’s infidelities and the syphilis he had given her, or because of her own addiction to morphine or cocaine.
A year later, the comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was charged with the murder of a young actress named Virginia Rappe. Arbuckle was a brilliant physical comedian who was the first actor to be contracted for a million dollars a year. Banners advertising his movies read, “He’s worth his weight in laughs”; reviewers hailed his success as proof “that everybody loves a fat comedian.” But Arbuckle resented being called Fatty and hated the fact that his stardom was linked to his size. In 1917 he complained to Photoplay that “if Joe Schenck [his producer] didn’t harbor the hallucination that fat is my fortune, I’d be a contender for Doug Fairbanks