Charlie Chaplin was once the biggest star in the world, beloved for his silent-film classics in which he played a sweet-natured, trouble-prone “Little Tramp.” But in his middle age, his political outspokenness—particularly his starkly liberal views—began to attract hostility from the US government and others who saw the British-born comedian as an disreputable outsider with no right to criticize his adopted homeland. 

Scott Eyman’s new book, Charlie Chaplin vs. America, delves into the conflict that ultimately turned public opinion against Chaplin, and drove him into exile from the United States. In this excerpt, Eyman explores how accusations leveled against him by a 23-year-old actress named Joan Berry, who sued him for child support, claiming her child, Carol Ann, was also his daughter, were leveraged against him by the media and the government. A blood test during the case had determined Chaplin could not have fathered the little girl, but a Los Angeles jury disregarded that evidence and found him responsible for her paternity nonetheless due to his romantic history with her mother. 

Eyman begins with an example of one particularly strident newspaper writer who used the case to rouse anger against Chaplin.

By all odds the most vitriolic columnist of his period or, for that matter, of any period, was Westbrook Pegler, a merchant of hate who subsisted on a diet of rage seasoned with contempt. For years his favorite target had been Eleanor Roosevelt, but after World War II she was out of the White House. Pegler decided to pile onto an easier target.

Pegler wrote that, “In Hollywood there is some doubt whether Chaplin is a Communist in the sense that he has ever joined the party. My guess would be that he is not because party members as rich as Chaplin are subject to demands for money and Chaplin is notoriously cheap, so stingy in fact that an unfortunate 23 year old girl whom he had seduced and who was pregnant was run out of town like a victim of the Gestapo, with only a few dollars and a one-way ticket out of Beverly Hills.”

Pegler was just warming up, but he got to the point: “And should he ever undertake to become a citizen for some reason of expediency, loyalty being out of the question, that record should be sufficient to thwart him on the protest of any citizen with a decent regard for the privilege of citizenship . . . I believe it is doubtful that [Chaplin] will be seen in a new movie in the United States, although, if we should deport him for cause after more than 30 years, he might be used by the Communists in some other land for missionary films to be shown in the Balkans and Latin America. . . . All matters considered, I do not understand why he has not been deported to his native England even though England might regard this as a deliberately unfriendly act. . . Through two wars involving his native country, Chaplin has hidden in Hollywood and, through this one, when hundreds of other movie actors too old for fighting, traveled overseas with camp shows, Chaplin still stayed in Hollywood. His most noteworthy public activity during that time was his merciless persecution of a girl less than half his age who was betrayed by her hopes of a career, and his subsequent appearance as defendant in a trial which revealed him as a vicious old man, still as nasty at 56 as he had been throughout his earlier years.”

Pegler would eventually strangle in his own bile when he indulged in anti-Semitism so rank that the only publishing outlet he had was the John Birch Society. By that time, Chaplin was no longer in America.

The FBI file on Chaplin encompasses just under two thousand pages and is notable for its lack of filter—everything is included, no matter how ridiculous. There is hearsay, rumor, bountiful examples of guilt by association. The file even contains poison-pen letters from vengeful citizens that close with admonitions such as “Send him back but freeze his properties and cash!!!” J. Edgar Hoover wrote back, dryly noting that “This Bureau has no jurisdiction over such Matters.”

Anything, no matter how trivial, was fodder. Frank Taylor, a recent escapee from the publishing business, had become an MGM producer. He and his wife founded the Westland School, a progressive elementary school following the theories of John Dewey, where Oona Chaplin enrolled her daughter Geraldine. Chaplin allowed the school to show City Lights as a fundraiser, which earned $2,000. The Daily Worker ran a story about the benefit, which ended up in the FBI file as yet another example of Chaplin’s misbegotten social sympathies. After Chaplin’s reentry permit was rescinded in 1952, the attorney general would cite the article about the benefit as proof of Chaplin’s un-American sympathies.

A 1947 dossier labeled “Confidential” gets down to cases: “CHAPLIN has been accused on a number of occasions of being a member of the Communist party. However, source whose reliability has been well established as an authentic informant stated that he has never been able to identify CHAPLIN as a member of the Communist Party in Hollywood. . . . CHAPLIN’S bank account was monitored . . . and there is no indication of contributions to the Communist Party.”

Chaplin’s memberships were listed as being the Loyal Order of Moose, the Tuna Club of Catalina Island, the Screen Actors Guild, the California Yacht Club, the Los Angeles Athletic Club, the Santa Monica Swimming Club, and the Lambs Club in New York. Chaplin never joined the Directors Guild after it was formed in 1936, probably because he thought it was irrelevant as far as he was concerned. He owned his own studio as well as 25 percent of United Artists, and answered only to himself. There was, of course, the possibility of using his leverage within the industry to benefit creatives on a lower level, but he evidently dismissed that possibility.

A memo of August 24, 1947, confirms that the Bureau was funneling negative material about Chaplin to specific Hollywood columnists (“In connection with the material prepared for HeddaHopper”). Chaplin’s attendance at a concert of music by Dmitri Shostakovich is ominously noted. Occasionally anti-Semitism rears up—the files often refer to Chaplin as “aka Israel Thonstein,” because of the incorrect entry in Who’s Who in American Jewry. Note is made that Chaplin “speaks with a Jewish accent” (he didn’t) and “uses his hands when talking” (he did).

The FBI didn’t have to funnel anything to Billy Wilkerson, the conservative publisher of The Hollywood Reporter. In December 1947, Wilkerson wrote another one of his scathing editorials: “The wonder to us is that Washington hasn’t long ago relieved Mr. Chaplin of his privilege of living in this country, working among us, banking millions of dollars while, at the same time, it becomes quite obvious that he is not satisfied with the conduct of our Government and continually criticizes its actions. Why should such an agitator be given the benefits he has received here? Why should the picture business be forever burdened with his actions? Why?”

Wilkerson was about profits at least as much as he was about politics. “Our ticket buyers are being influenced against us in a cause that’s growing like a typhoon. That influence might well curtail everything that has made our industry one of the greats in the world. Any man or woman who, under the guise of freedom of speech, or the cloak of the Bill of Rights, or under the pseudo protection of being a liberal, causes things to be said, or who actually is involved with many of the conspiracies that have now infested this great land of ours, has no place among us, be he commie or what. He or she should be rushed out of our business.”

Wilkerson’s primary attack dog was Mike Connolly, the daily columnist for the Reporter. Connolly was the movie industry’s version of Roy Cohn—a gay man who adopted the identity of a rabid attack dog for protective coloration. When he wasn’t popping Benzedrine or downing multiple Manhattans at Musso & Frank’s, Connolly would typically refer to accused left-wingers as “vermin” or “scummie.”Connolly went so far as to publish new work addresses for people who had been driven out of the movie business, in the hopes of inciting picketing, bankruptcy, or both.

Two months after Wilkerson’s column about Chaplin, the Los Angeles office of the FBI requested Chaplin’s income tax records from 1940 to 1947, presumably looking for either donations to the Communist Party, or evidence of tax evasion.

That same month, an August 10 report indicated that the FBI was tapping Chaplin’s phone and reading his mail—the report notes dinner invitations to Chaplin from Salka Viertel and five phone calls from Lion Feuchtwanger to Chaplin between August and October of 1945.

This level of investigation continued into 1949. In April, Hoover asked for “the current status of this investigation.” After reading the results, Hoover rendered his verdict: “A review of this file at the Bureau reflects that no substantial information has been developed to date which would indicate that the subject has been engaged in espionage or other intelligence activities.” On October 7, the Los Angeles office wrote Hoover and told him that “no new information of value has been obtained.” They had a few more interviews to do, but if no significant information was derived, Los Angeles recommended that the Chaplin internal security case be closed.

Nevertheless, in 1948, two professional informants included Chaplin in their list of Communist sympathizers. Louis Budenz, a former managing editor of The Daily Worker who became a paid informant for Senator Joseph McCarthy, named about four hundred “concealed Communists,” including Chaplin, James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, and Vera Caspary—the author of Laura.

Budenz’s testimony helped refocus the FBI’s interest in Chaplin. Their new efforts centered on assisting the INS in establishing that he was a “subversive” in order to justify deportation. Budenz told an FBI agent in New York that in 1936 Chaplin was “the equivalent of a member of the party.” Budenz claimed that in the early 1940s the Party had discouraged Chaplin from applying for American citizenship because “it would raise the whole question of his being an alien, an attack on his personal life, and all sorts of things that might lead to his deportation.”

The other informant was Paul Crouch, a member of the party from 1925 to 1942, who told INS officials that Chaplin was “a member-at-large of the Communist party . . . temperamental but loyal” to the Party. In Crouch’s telling, to protect Chaplin officials had decided he should not be affiliated with any of the Party cells in Los Angeles. These two hearsay testimonies were the only evidence the FBI ever uncovered about Chaplin’s affiliations, and there is some indication that Hoover remained convinced that Chaplin was a Communist.

At one point in 1948, there was a report that somehow managed to link Chaplin to the sale of thirty-six armored tanks to the Zionist Haganah forces in Palestine. Chaplin’s name came up as someone who “had to be consulted on both the financial aspect and the general advisability of the proposed acquisition” of the tanks from a storage facility in Barstow, California.

These wild-goose chases went on for years, culminating in Senator William Langer introducing a resolution requesting the attorney general to determine whether Chaplin should be deported. This led Chaplin to take the highly unusual step of responding:

“I wish to state that this action is part of a political persecution. It has been going on for . . . years, ever since I made an anti-Nazi picture, The Great Dictator, in which I expressed liberal ideas. On account of this picture I was called to Washington for questioning as a ‘War monger’ by Senators Clark and Nye. This investigation fell through after Pearl Harbor. The persecution, however, increased, after I ‘dared’ to speak on behalf of Russia, urging the Allies to open a second front. For this I was bitterly attacked by reactionary columnists, using every device to discredit me with the public. I was called a ‘Communist,’ an ‘ingrate.’ I was accused of ‘making money in this country without becoming a citizen.’. . .

“I believe that in a democracy I have the right to state that I am an Internationalist—which ideas I expressed in The Great Dictator. But the pro-Nazi reactionary elements continued their attack. Trumped-up charges were the results of all this, inspired by vicious lies written by certain ‘sob’ sisters, using as their tool, Joan Berry, who was played up as an ‘innocent girl lured into immoral relations.’ This point was particularly stressed in the Mann Act trial.

“Although my lawyers tried to introduce the fact that long before I met Joan Berry, she had been the mistress of several men, and long before I met her (unknown to me) she had a police record for shoplifting in Los Angeles—these facts and many others, of which my lawyer has proof—were not allowed under the rules of evidence. Yet, on the word of the same woman, and on her accusations, my liberty was jeopardized. I was indicted and compelled to stand trial. Later she accused me of being the father of her child. But the fact remains, I was acquitted of the Mann Act charge, and medical science has proved I am NOT the father of Joan Berry’s child.

“However, the prosecution continues, the Berry case being used to attack my character, discredit me with the public and banish me from the country.”

Excerpted from Charlie Chaplin vs. America: When Art, Sex, and Politics Collided by Scott Eyman. Copyright © 2023 by Scott Eyman. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.