The Oona O’Neill, Lady Chaplin Centennial

Born 100 years ago today, Oona O’Neill, Lady Chaplin (1925-1991).

Those well-versed in Chaplinia will note the startling fact that this timeline means that Oona was still an infant in swaddling clothes when The Gold Rush came out. Oona was to be the last in Charlie Chaplin’s prolific and checkered romantic career, which had included wives Mildred Harris,Lita Grey, and Paulette Goddard, supposed fiancee May Collins, and an estimated 2,000 lovers including Edna Purviance,Pola Negri, Louise Brooks, Georgia Hale, Florence Deshon, the elusive May Reeves, and the disastrous Joan Barry.

Oona was the teenaged daughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill. Despite the fact that he had divorced her mother when she was three years old, O’Neill strongly disapproved of the fact that Oona had decided to become an actress. Chaplin had interviewed her for a part in a possible project. That idea was quickly dropped when they began dating, and then married. She was 18, he was 54. O’Neill approved of that even less, and disowned her.

Oona was raised in New Jersey by her mother, British pulp writer Agnes Boulton. The O’Neills had married at a time when Eugene was a struggling playwright. He left Agnes for the much-married actress Carlotta Monterey a decade later, by which time he had become one of the hottest literary figures in the country. Oona attended the fashionable Brearley School, where she became best friends with Gloria Vanderbilt and Carol Marcus (who later married William Saroyan and Walter Matthau). Oona was breathtakingly beautiful. Slightly wild in her youth (but only slightly and only briefly) she was a habitue of the Stork Club, where she was named Number One Debutante, resulting in much publicity, leading to her acting ambitions, which ceased upon her marriage. During this time she dated New Yorker cartoonist Peter Arno, and the young J.D. Salinger. Truman Capote was also among her circle of acquaintances.

The Chaplins lived in Beverly Hills for the first nine years of their marriage, a period when Charlie made the films Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and Limelight (1952). It was an unhappy, embattled time for the comedian, but she stuck with him. She bore him four children during the Hollywood years: Geraldine (b. 1944), Michael (b. 1946), Josephine (b.1949) and Victoria (b. 1951). While the family was in Europe promoting Limelight, the U.S. government revoked Chaplin’s re-entry permit for political reasons, imposing a kind of exile. The remainder of their lives would be spent in Switzerland. There, four additional children were added to the family: Eugene (b. 1953), Jane (b. 1957), Annette (b. 1959), and Christopher (b. 1962). Oona had her hands full raising this large family on their big Swiss estate. By all reports, she was a loving, stable mother. Chaplin himself finally settled down during these years, and ceased his tomcatting ways (though, it must be observed that he was pretty advanced in age by this time, and the family’s seclusion assured that he encountered little temptation or opportunity to stray).

During this period of his life, Chaplin made two more movies, A King in New York (1956) and A Countess from Hong Kong (1966). He composed and recorded original scores to many of his earlier movies. He made his triumphant return to Hollywood to accept his special Oscar in 1972. Officially a British citizen, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1975, making Oona formally Lady Chaplin. After Chaplin’s death in 1977, his corpse was briefly stolen and held for ransom — a nightmare that was oddly similar to the bungling in one of Charlie’s own comedies, mixing slapstick elements with the darkness of his later satires.

In 1981, Oona briefly returned to acting, appearing in the film Broken English, directed by Michie Gleason, who had been an assistant director on Days of Heaven (1978). I’m dying to see it! It has never been properly released. Her remaining decade was spent in semi-seclusion, even as daughter Geraldine, nearly a dead ringer for her, blossomed into her own stardom. Lady Chaplin lived long enough to see her namesake, Geraldine’s daughter Oona Castilla Chaplin (also gorgeous, also a movie star), born in 1986.

For more on the life and art of Charlie Chaplin please check out: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube — now also available on audiobook.