Charlie Chaplin vs. America
When Art, Sex, and Politics Collided
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Publisher Description
The “shocking” (The Wall Street Journal), must-read story of Charlie Chaplin’s years of exile from the United States during the postwar Red Scare, and how it ruined his film career, from bestselling biographer Scott Eyman.
Bestselling Hollywood biographer and film historian Scott Eyman tells the story of Charlie Chaplin’s fall from grace. In the aftermath of World War II, Chaplin was criticized for being politically liberal and internationalist in outlook. He had never become a US citizen, something that would be held against him as xenophobia set in when the postwar Red Scare took hold.
Politics aside, Chaplin had another problem: his sexual interest in young women. He had been married three times and had had numerous affairs. In the 1940s, he was the subject of a paternity suit, which he lost, despite blood tests that proved he was not the father. His sexuality became a convenient way for those who opposed his politics to condemn him. Refused permission to return to the US after a trip abroad, he settled in Switzerland and made his last two films in London.
In Charlie Chaplin vs. America, Scott Eyman explores the life and times of the movie genius who brought us such masterpieces as City Lights and Modern Times. “One of the finest surveys of the man and the artist ever written” (Leonard Maltin) this book is “a sobering account of cancel culture in action.” (The Economist).
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The clash between art and politics rages throughout this illuminating biography of Charlie Chaplin. Targeted by the Truman administration for his leftist political leanings, the British-born comedian visited London in 1952 to premiere his autobiographical film Limelight, only to find out that the State Department had revoked his visa, blocking him from returning to the U.S. Film historian Scott Eyman explores Chaplin’s life before and after his banishment, revealing some fascinating truths about Hollywood, like how German propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels fostered pro-Nazi sentiments in Los Angeles prior to America entering World War II. Eyman also examines how Chaplin’s detractors focused on rumors about the comedian—particularly regarding his May-December marriage to 18-year-old Oona O’Neill—to camouflage the political nature of his persecution. This eye-opening read provides us with a new take on both Chaplin himself and how Cold War politics shaped midcentury Hollywood.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Biographer Eyman (20th Century Fox) presents a riveting account of the events that led the U.S. government in 1952 to banish Charlie Chaplin, a Brit by birth who had lived in America for decades after first arriving as a teenager. According to Eyman, Chaplin earned detractors in his adopted country as his films became more overtly political, with some complaining that his 1940 anti-Nazi satire The Great Dictator was intended to undermine American neutrality in WWII. After Chaplin gave a series of speeches in 1942 advocating for the opening of a second European front to support Russia, the FBI "sailed into the Chaplin business full-time," investigating him for alleged communist sympathies and amassing a 1,900-page file on him. The Bureau leaked dubious information about Chaplin's sex life to his critics in the press, most notably gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, who used the occasion of an "ugly, trumped-up paternity suit" to drive public opinion against the filmmaker. He fell into such disfavor that when he was denied reentry to the U.S. after leaving for the London premier of his film Limelight, he didn't bother fighting the decision. Eyman gives the history a sense of urgency by highlighting the danger that government interference poses to artistic speech, and his account of how "Chaplin's forced exile destroyed him as an artist" is affecting. Readers will be rapt.
