Charlie Chaplin vs. America: A Talk with Author Scott Eyman

0:01 Today on the Film and Whiskey Podcast, we're revisiting one of our favorite directors of the season as we chat with author Scott Eyman about his new book on the life and films of Charlie Chaplin. That's all ahead on the Film and Whiskey Podcast. Well, hey there, everybody. Welcome into the Film and Whiskey Podcast. I'm Bob Book. I'm Brad G, and we're coming at you with another special bonus episode.

0:43 Bonus episode Brad. Last week I went to my mailbox and I opened it up. And you know, one of the benefits of doing a whiskey related podcast is that sometimes your mailbox is full of booze. And I had a package. Very true. I had a package in the mailbox and it was not booze. I said what is I can't drink this? What is this thing? And it was a book, Brad. It's a book that we specifically requested too because it is a super fascinating new book by the author Scott Eyman. The book is called Charlie Chaplin Versus America When Art, Sex and Politics Collided. We had just done a series on Charlie Chaplin and we kind of hinted at some of his personal life and how it bled into his work and how we look at his work in in response to that. And lo and behold, Simon and Schuster is putting out this new major work about the Life and Times of Charlie Chaplin and Brad.

1:37 Spoiler alert, we're going to talk about that book today. We sure are, and we are joined by author of said book, Scott Ayman. And I will say this, he has written so much and been so influential as a film historian that. His bio takes up two paragraphs. So how about I take the first one, You take the second one, Bob. Does that sound good? It sounds great, man. Let's tag team it. Yeah, so Scott, as I said, he is a film historian and author of best selling biographies on the golden age of Hollywood, including, and this is Scott. We'll we'll have to talk about this later. Well, after the interview, my favorite actor of all time, Cary Grant. He's written biographies on John Wayne, Cecil B DeMille, John Ford, Louis B Mayer, Henry Fonda and Jimmy Stewart.

2:20 Yeah, Scott's also worked as a book editor and art critic for the Palm Beach Post. He's a reviewer for the Wall Street Journal, Film Comments, The New York Observer. He's had articles published in the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune. You know, basically all the major players at this point. Brad. I've never heard of him, Bob. You might have even caught him on TVA couple weeks ago. I just watched him introduce 4 films on Charlie Chaplin on Turner Classic Movies. Scott, it is great to have you here. Oh, thanks for inviting me guys. It's. It's good to be on a show with such an enticing title. Yeah, we try. We get right to the point. We we often find that that our guests enjoy the Whiskey Ave. just as much as the film.

3:00 If you have a lot of writers on that, that they'll definitely opt for the whiskey. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. All right, Scott, let's dive right in talking about this book. First of all, thank you for writing this. It's a, it's a phenomenal piece of writing. And you know, it's as suspenseful as it is informative, I have to say. Thanks. Thanks. It was a. It's a. It was a tough narrative to keep straight because there's four or five things going on at the same time a lot of the time. So it's about a fairly compressed period in his life. And there were times when I thought, OK, I'm losing the thread here. You know, you have to go back and make sure it has clarity because clarity is crucial with a story like this. Well, I think that's a great segue into my first question.

3:41 So this really hyper focuses on one period of Chaplin's life and that is his exile from America post war. And I'm wondering, as a biographer, how do you decide or like, you know, especially with this period in Chaplin's life, how did you identify that this was kind of the lens through which to look at the rest of his life and career? Well, in one sense it was it it it felt inevitable To me. It was the culmination of of decades of his political beliefs. His sexual behavior, his aesthetic contract with his audience and hit with his own self-image. Chaplin was not a man to trim his sails. No matter what he was told by smart people he was going to go ahead with what he thought was the right thing to do from hell or high water.

4:34 His whole life pointed him towards towards that point of view he had the catastrophic childhood. Which basically taught him, if it could be boiled down to one thing, it was that you can't depend on anybody but yourself. And he was lucky in that he had a brother that he adored and who adored him in return. And Sidney, his brother, who was two years older, was always there for Charlie, and Charlie was as as much there for Sidney as was humanly possible as well. So they each had each other in a very close bond. But still, Sidney was also a comedian. Of of some skill and in some success. So it had to be difficult for him on on some level to have a A a brother who was Hale, was a genius and is a extraordinary primary artist of the 20th century.

5:25 But you never know it. From his letters he was just 100% on Charlie's team. But Charlie, with very few exceptions, didn't trust society at large. Didn't trust the things people said. You can only trust the things people did. And in his experience, people acted basically out of self-interest. If you couldn't do them any good, they tended to ignore you, not necessarily step on your face with their boot heel, but they weren't going to expend a huge amount of effort on your behalf. So he early on learned that you had to depend on nobody but yourself. So as a result, he allowed very few people in. He had very few intimate friends. He had one close friend, close male friend, Douglas Fairbanks, Senior Douglas Fairbanks died young. It was in his 50s in 1939 and after that he never really had another close male friend.

6:20 He had employees that were there for decades. He was very loyal to and they were very loyal to him. But intimate friendships? Not really, no, no. He he was very much self-directed and self oriented. Until he met his last wife when O'Neill Chaplin. He gave himself over to another human being completely, probably for the first time in his life. And I I think that's what's like so fascinating for me about this book is that, you know, before you even get to the table of contents, you have a a a quote from him. And I'll read just a tiny bit of it, where he says my ego edits my life more than any moral code. And I would never do anything to shame it, for I have to live with myself.

7:05 And I think that as I've been reading your book, the psychological profile of Chaplin is just fascinating, you know, And as you said, you were pulling all the different threads of these narratives swirling about his life, the ability to stay connected to his psychological profile. And you know, as you said, how at the end of his life he's with Uno O'Neill and. And it seems to be the first person he's ever opened himself up to. I I mean that just that makes for compelling reading, Scott. Well thanks. Thanks. The the the relationship with Una is really I think indicates his character in a way that nothing else does because the reason that the relationship was they were married.

7:47 She was 18 when they married. He was 53, I believe 53 or 54. And nobody was suspicious about it at all. No, no, no, no. Nobody. Nobody raised an eyebrow. Nobody was upset. No, not. But the reason they had they were married for the rest of his life. They were basically idyllically happy. They had eight children together. The reason it worked was because each of them gave the other what they've been looking for their entire life. O'Neill was the daughter of Eugene O'Neill, who was a bastard. Great writer, but a bastard. And he had basically taken a dislike to the child, all of his children. He had two sons and a daughter. And he was really never a part of any of their lives to speak of. And he regarded them as mistakes or with disdain that seems completely out of proportion to who they actually were. Both of his sons committed suicide. Una was saved by her marriage to Chaplain. What Una gave Chaplain was complete acceptance, and for who he was and what he was.

8:50 She didn't try to change him. She didn't try to mold him. She didn't try to make him into something he wasn't. He was a man in middle, the middle years. By that time she understood that he was a workaholic and compulsive, and if he didn't get his his work, in his writing, in his filmmaking, in whatever happened to be doing at that moment, he didn't feel he'd earned his dinner because that was the way he was raised. He raised himself, and in return he gave her complete acceptance as well, which she'd never been able to get from her father. So it was a perfect perfect. Match in terms of their emotion, each of their emotional needs. Well, if I can, if I can, go from a complete acceptance with his, his, his last wife to complete rejection.

9:34 I mean the the way the book is centered on this crucial moment in Chaplin's life when he goes to take his film basically on tour in Europe and then is denied entry into the United States and essentially never returns except for when he collects his honorary Oscar in the 1970s. It seems that the tipping point though comes in the early 1940s and I believe it's 1942 you say in the book Chaplains basically starts advocating for a second front in World War 2, essentially to support Russia, and the FBI takes that as I guess the the nail in the coffin to start investigating him and they write a 2000, almost 2000 page dossier on him.

10:17 I'm wondering what was it about that specific stance that tipped the FBI into investigating him when there had been rumors for years? What was it about that public stance that that became the tipping point? They had. They'd opened a file on him in 1922. Because he'd been attending some socialist meetings in Los Angeles, he had neglected to welcome Will Hayes to Los Angeles when Will Hayes was named the Tsar. The movies. In order to forestall censorship because of a series of scandals that have broken out into Hollywood, so the industry felt they had to do something to defuse it. So they brought in Will Hayes, who had been in the cabinet of Warren G Harding, which is of course tantamount to being a criminal as to run a kind of loosely defined oversee production of films. Censorship, in essence.

11:14 Chaplin had greeted this with a a great deal of sardonic humor, which got the attention of what became the FBI and they and they they opened a file on him, but nothing really came of it. Things heated up in in the late 1930s there were some people that felt Modern Times was politically on the edge. I think it was, but people really started paying attention in in the late 1930s when he began production on The Great Dictator. The film comes out in October of 1940, at a time when both the public and the Congress are isolationist by a considerable amount.

11:54 There was no interest on the part of the American public or of the American government outside of the White House. Franklin Roosevelt to get involved in either the problems of Europe or the problems of Jews of Europe. Chaplin felt otherwise. He felt that immigrants needed to be welcomed. And he felt that Hitler had to be confronted directly, in spite of the fact that the Motion Picture Association didn't want the film made. The British Foreign Office didn't want the film made because at the time Neville Chamberlain was the Prime Minister and he was trying to basically buy Hitler off and avoid World War 2. So Chaplain went ahead and did what he always did, which is what he thought was the best thing to do. He financed the film personally, which he had been doing since 1918.

12:41 All those films were self financed. That way nobody could tell him what to do and nobody could edit his films with him and nobody could release his films in any way they wanted except him. So he financed the film himself and it was a considerable critical and commercial success in spite of everybody saying it was going to be a disaster. But by making the film, in spite of all the objections and all the resistance, Chaplin had branded himself as a premature anti fascist. And there's nothing worse. In American politics than being a premature anti fascist and and and at that point the FBI started sniffing around. They started sniffing around obviously. So about 18 months later, after Pearl Harbor, when the Russia, Russia was now our ally in the fight against Hitler and Chaplin began making speeches advocating the opening of a second front to aid our Russian allies in fighting fascism, certainly within conservative movement. In Congress and in the public at large, it was regarded as a non starter because they simply didn't regard Russia as, as ever being able to be our ally.

13:52 They could only be our enemy in waiting, and Chaplin argued that they may very well be our enemy in waiting, but at this moment in time, at this moment in history, they're our ally and we have to make sure they don't lose that, or really any, he began making a series of speeches. Advocating the opening of the 2nd and the FBI began taking dictation. They began going to these speeches and noting what was said and noting who else was at the meetings. Sometimes they were left wingers, sometimes they weren't, but they basically began surveilling. And all this is, as I said, 1940, two 1943. While all this is going on, he also gets embroiled in a paternity suit.

14:40 In a with a woman that he's been having an affair with. After the release of The Great Dictator, he got involved with a young woman named Joan Berry. She was 22 or 23. She had been the mistress of J Paul Getty in Oklahoma before this. She thought it would be fun to be in the movies. Got a letter of introduction. Came to Los Angeles to meet people in the movie industry. Got introduced to Chaplin. One thing led to another. They were together for about a year. They broke up. She came back. Some months later to LA and said she was pregnant and he did the math and he realized that he couldn't be the father. She insisted he was the father. Then she went to Hedda Hopper, and at that point the wheels of injustice began to grind because Hedda Hopper had had a how to put this delicate hard on about Charlie Chaplin? Well, and just real quick, Hedda Hopper being probably the most famous gossip columnist in in Hollywood. Right.

15:41 There's nobody like, remotely in that league now. But I mean, she was syndicated through the Los Angeles Times Syndicate to hundreds and hundreds of newspapers. Everybody, daily column, everybody read her. She was also she was a former actress, a character actress. But she was saved by the Los Angeles Times, who had her start writing a column, and it turned out. She was a good columnist and she knew everybody in Hollywood and she had an edge. And she was also extremely conservative. I call her the Madame Defarge of the Red Scare. So she disliked chaplain on political grounds and she disliked chaplain on sexual grounds because Hetta Hopper's back story was very specific.

16:24 She's been married to a man in De Wolf Hopper who is a well known vaudeville star in Rouet with the five or six wives. And he was much older than her. And they married, and he dumped her, leaving her with a child and no visible means of support. But because of her own background as well as her political beliefs, Chaplin checked all the boxes, and she went after him with a vengeance. And she enlisted other columnist who had similar political affiliations to go after him with a vengeance. So before you knew it, you had. The Chicago Tribune syndicate filling their daily pages with anti chaplain columns and articles.

17:09 The Los Angeles Times syndicate. The Hearst papers. Three major newspaper chains. At a time when newspapers were the way people got all their information and people began to think what about this chaplain guy? He never became a citizen and here he is saying we should be in bed with Russia. And here he is with all these young girls and so forth and so on. And then at that point Chaplain married O'Neill, who was 18 and he was 53 or 54, and that seemed to confirm everything that was being brooded about in the newspapers, all these, these domino and the dominoes began to fall, and the public at large, who had always basically gone wherever Charlie Chaplin LED.

17:56 But finally, the combination of his political beliefs, his lack of citizenship and the paternity suit began to turn the public against him. And it didn't really change. Even when he took a blood test and the blood test proved that he was not the father of the child, he lost the case. He lost the paternity case. His appeals were denied. So he had to start paying child support for a child that wasn't his. And you can imagine how that made him feel. Well and it it all culminates in, you know you you go into great detail in the book, especially about Hopper petitioning Richard Nixon who was on the, you know, coming up in the political scene about to run for vice president. And it culminates in chaplain getting barred from entry into the US and he really is on an island. And you There's a really interesting tidbit that the only three people in Hollywood where he was king for decades that came to his defense were Samuel Goldwyn, Cary Grant and William Wyler, and they publicly decried what was happening to him. Did he have a personal relationship with any of those three?

19:06 And to what extent was that relationship? He and Goldwyn went back to the 20s. They were friends, not intimate friends. I mean, they didn't hang around socially particularly. Goldman was a strange character, and Chaplin was a strange character too. But they, I mean they they liked each other because they were both independent, fiercely independent. Cary Grant. No, he had no social relationship with Cary Grant. Tyler, I just found this out last week. A friend of mine is friends with Catherine Wyler, William Wyler's daughter. And he put her on the phone with me because she read about the book and she wanted to talk to me and I'd never met her. And she told me that she. It was the last survivor of the Chaplin Wyler tennis tournaments because Wyler lived on Summit Drive a couple doors up from Chaplin and Chaplin had a tennis court and Wyler had a tennis court and they would get together for these week weekend tennis tournaments where you know, Chaplin was a very serious tennis player and evidently Wyler and his was too.

20:04 So they would really go at it. Their wives were not so serious and the kids thought the whole competition thing was ridiculous, so they would throw things at the. The wives when they tried to play tennis, because neither Wyler's wife or Chaplin's wife could play tennis at all, no, But he said, she said they they were Wyler and Chaplin played for blood. So he and Wyler had a social relationship, but that was where it ended. They. Just happened to be neighbors, basically. But no. Cary Grant? No. But Cary Grant had a kind of libertarian streak about behavior, and he also stood up for Ingrid Bergman a few years later when she had her affair with Roberta Rossellini and got pregnant. And he said it was nobody's business. You know, what people do in their private life is nobody's business.

20:49 But by 1952, which is when, September 1952, when Chaplain got kicked out of the country, the blacklist is in full sway. And most of the people that had been persecuted by the blacklist were either in New York, in Mexico or hiding out, you know, are working under pseudonyms. They were out of the industry, effectively out of the industry. So everybody that was within the industry was not going to stand up and say this is wrong, this is ridiculous. He's not a communist. They didn't want to be guilty of guilt by association, you know, with someone who's obviously unpopular with the general public and extremely unpopular with the probably 60% of the American public. Yeah.

21:35 And as you look at his career then you know the hindsight is gives you certain benefits. Is there any, like certain poignants to some of his earlier works, knowing the exile and kind of pain that came along with that, that was ahead for him? Well, the the tramp is always an outsider. The tramp is always an outsider. And it's not that it's interesting because I was watching Modern Times recently and you guys remember the opening. You know, the factory starts, it's people are streaming into the factory to go to work and the production line starts up and everybody's working frantically to keep up with the production line.

22:16 And then we cut to the president of the company who's sitting at his desk working a Jigsaw Plaza because he has nothing else to do. And it's very funny because I think that's a very apartment way of characterizing reality, because it's not that people are evil or, you know, wearing iron boots to keep put on the throats of the working man. It's much less complicated than that. People are just interested in their own lives, and they're not. They're only interested in other people up to a point. And after that point, they don't really care. And that's that's basically reality. That's basic reality, and Chaplain's position as an outsider is rigorously maintained in his films. Rigorously maintained.

23:05 He's always at the end of the film. Whatever happens during the film, at the end of the film, he's usually, he's almost always isolated and heading down the road or or alone on some psychologically, emotionally, physically and the ending of City Lights, you know, where he stares at the girl and she recognizes him what's going to happen next and he ends it on the close up, you know, because there's no way to go beyond that recognition scene. It's a it's one of the great endings in movies. The the The Tramp is that not just a character he played, it's his alter ego. It's his way of expressing his feelings about an outsider, an eternal outsider in a society that isn't really interested in outsiders except in a kind of romantic guy in a Horace Western way.

23:54 You know, we don't really trust outsiders. We trust people who are like us, people who have mortgages and families and and and we can see around the swimming pool. You know and aren't marrying a girl 30-40 years younger than that. Oh no, that happens all the time. Sure. That happens all the IT happened all the time in Hollywood. It happens all the time outside of Hollywood. You know, I'm. I live I live very near Palm Beach, where any night on Palm Beach you can see guys who are 70 and 80 years old with a cluster of 25 and 30 year old blondes clustered around them. Now why is this happening? Is it happening because they're so devastatingly charming and their their conversation is so sparkling.

24:39 They're. All pretty. They're all pretty much Cary Grant. Oh yeah, imagine they're Cary Grant. They may have an Ascot, but that's where they resemble, you know, No, they're clustered around them because they have money and chaplains. Saw it all the time in Hollywood and saw it all the time in London growing up. Because that is, that's a common transaction. Men and women. Yeah, it's not. It's not unheard of. He didn't vent it in his private life. He took advantage of it, but he didn't. Yeah, well, and. And he might have been one of the few to actually find happiness in that. And you know, as you said at the start, it seems like he and Uno O'Neill did find happiness. Yeah. Now, Scott, I'm curious.

25:22 As as somebody who knows more about Charlie Chaplin than I would have, I would wager Bob, you can correct me if I'm wrong. I'd wager you know more about Charlie Chaplin than 99% of the human. Population. I think it's probably a fair assumption. Probably. Probably a fair assessment. What what questions do you still have about his life? Like it? You know, A lot of times when we dig into something it, you know, we get answers, but the answers raise more questions than. You know we we had to start with. So is there anything that you're still curious about that you're like, man, I want to know more about this part of his life or this relationship or is there anything that stuck out to you as as I want to know more about his life. My favorite story in the book came from Groucho Marx, and Groucho saw that they were friends in vaudeville before they went to the movies, and they but they didn't socialize much because Vaudevillians were in constant motion. They always worked, occasionally working the same bill with somebody who actually knew generally you didn't. But one night in 1913, this is in September, I believe 1913, they were both in Salt Lake City. Chapman was leaving Salt Lake City because his show had closed and the Marx Brothers were just coming in and they had one night where they were both in Salt Lake City and the Marx Brothers wanted to go to a whorehouse because they were the Marx Brothers and Groucho invited Chaplin to go with him. That's a great line.

26:49 They wanted to go to a whorehouse. Why? Because they were. That's incredible. So they invited Chaplin to go with him. So Chaplin had nothing else to do because his laundry had been done. So they go to the whorehouse and the Marx Brothers pick out girls, and they go in the back to do what you do. Chaplin was too shy to take a girl. Chaplin stayed in the lobby and played with the madam's dog all night until the Marx Brothers were through and came out, and then they all went back to the hotel. To me, that is so indicative of his crippling social shyness that never really left him and how much fame enabled him to come out of his shell. Because when you're famous and when you're rich, you don't have to introduce yourself to people.

27:39 People introduce themselves to you and people come up to you and women come up to you. And this guy who was so cripplingly shy that he couldn't, he could barely have a conversation with a girl, let alone a physical relationship with a girl he had. It has a choice, has its choice, and his world changes. Not because he's any different as a human being, but because his opportunities are suddenly opened up. Because he's got a whole different world, a whole different lifestyle. Because he becomes a star on a level that nobody had been before him. Literally. There had never been a movie star like Chaplin before Chaplin. He invents what we think of as modern stardom, where nobody knows who you are in January of one year and 18 months later you're a multi millionaire.

28:33 The money is rolling in so fast you can't count it and everybody knows who you are. That's the kind of start of the event. What I would ask him is if I'm right in imagining that becoming famous was simultaneously liberating for him on a emotional level and on a sexual level, and also terrifying for him, because how could you possibly live up to that when inside you feel like this scared little child from London? Yeah, yeah. I think that's an incredible question and I it it segues into what I wanted to finish with and Scott, I wanted to tell you that part of what? I love about this book is it does what all great biographies do.

29:14 It is it's an incredible look into one man's unique personal lived experience. But it really taps into something I think much more universal than that. And in the case of Chaplin, you know, it is this long history of the suppression of art and artists. And I wonder, you know, if if there is one main take away or one main lesson that you would like others to take away from the story of Chaplin. And his involvement with the government? What did you learn in writing this book, and what are you hoping to impart to the readers here? What I learned in writing this book is that everything that's happening in America today has happened before. the US government using its leverage to enforce, try to enforce behavior, not not legalities.

30:05 That's within government's purview but behavior it's regarded it regard it might regard as untoward or speech it regards as untoward. That is is the what makes the book an ugly word relevant I think in that it's 75 years have gone by 70 years have gone by since the events the book is about culminating in the events. The book is about 1952, but nothing's really changed because everything that happened that is happening now. And I have no doubt that unless we're swamped by it this time, it will happen again in 20 years or 40 years or 70 years. Because I see this kind of incipient Footsie dance with the under the table, with authoritarianism as like a staph infection in the American body pond. And no, no, no antibiotics seems to cure it. Not really because it's it's always, it's always ready to rear back as the bitch is always an eat, you know the the antibiotics don't work and it's simply lies in wait until the body politic is weakened sufficiently and then it comes roaring back.

31:19 And it came roaring back and obliterated Chaplain's career in America and it's doing the same thing today, you know. And I'm sure it's not going to go away anytime soon. I was going to say author and political commentator Scott Iman, everybody. I was going to say, Scott, we cannot thank you enough for being with us today. The author is Scott Iman. The book is Charlie Chaplin Versus America When Art, Sex and Politics Collided. Scott, thank you for your time today. Happy to do it. Call me anytime. We'll be back on Tuesday with another regularly scheduled episode. But until then, I'm Bob. Book. I'm Brad G. And we'll see you next time.