No Papers

Charlie Chaplin was thrown out of the United States in 1952 for his politics. He was not. Attorney General James P. McGranery barred nobody; he revoked a re-entry permit the day after Chaplin sailed for the London premiere of Limelight, and required him to satisfy an immigration hearing on his morals and his political associations before he came back. The richest artist in the world, with the best lawyers in America, did not attend it. The word this book uses is excluded, not deported, and Chapter 19 sets the banishment reading beside the self-exile reading and says which it finds more persuasive and why. He did not set foot in the country again for twenty years.

No birth certificate for him has ever been produced. He is generally said to have been born in Walworth, in south London, in April 1889, and no piece of paper establishes it; in forty years of American residence he never took citizenship. An MI5 file opened in 2012 records the American government asking the British to establish whether Chaplin was really a Frenchman named Israel Thornstein; British intelligence could not substantiate it. He was never registered, so he owned things instead: a hundred and fifty dollars a week at Keystone from December 1913, then the right to direct, then his own studio off Sunset at La Brea by January 1918, then a quarter of United Artists. Property never amounted to standing. The marriages sit inside the production chapters, because that is where they happened. Mildred Harris was sixteen, in the year the studio was finished. Lillita MacMurray was sixteen and pregnant, married in Sonora because his lawyers knew what California law said. Oona O'Neill was eighteen, and stayed thirty-four years. On the paternity case, with its blood groups that excluded him, its statute that made the tests inadmissible, its acquittal and its support order anyway, the book says he was wronged. On the pattern it says the pattern is real. He was wronged, and he also walked.