Charlie Chaplin (1951)

cc 88 Purviance appeared as the Statue of Liberty; in other scenes she led Charlie to the altar. Charlie performed in character, hanging his cane on the prop moon, and a little cupid's arrows bind him and Edna together. In the summer of 1918, as he was starting "Shoulder Arms," Chaplin met Mildred Harris at a party. She was then sixteen years old and had been acting since her tenth year at the Ince studio where her mother was wardrobe mistress. She had appeared in a few GriffithTriangle films, and was now with Universal. At Universal Lois Weber, one of Hollywood's few women directors, had written and directed such sensational "problem" pictures as "Hypocrites," featuring allegory in the nude, and "Where Are My Children," a birth-control drama with Tyrone Power, Sr. She had starred Mildred in a series of somewhat milder "woman-angle" films: "For Husbands Only," "The Price of a Good Time," "Borrowed Clothes," etc. Chaplin's infatuation with the young blue-eyed blonde began at their first meeting. It was natural that the girl's head should be turned by the attentions of the screen's richest and best-known actor who, at twenty-nine, was physically extremely attractive as well. According to her later statements, Chaplin was "wonderful" and "so fatherly" and "acted to me as though I had been a mere child." She was living with her mother at the time, in the Cadillac hotel in Venice (California). When the affair took on a serious cast Mildred's mother expressed objections to their marriage, which she wanted deferred until her daughter was a little older. Chaplin used to sit in his car for hours outside the Universal studio waiting for her appearance. One day Griffith, seeing them together, exclaimed, "Mildred, why don't you marry Charlie? He'd make a nice husband for you"; and turning to Chaplin, "Charlie, wouldn't she make a