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46
They had watched, with amusement or alarm, as Chaplin the great film star sent flowers daily to the little film extra, invited her to dine with him, and waited for hours in his car outside the studio where she was engaged. Yet in spite of this ardent courtship, his marriage came as a shock to his friends.
The marriage was bound to end in disaster. Chaplin was too subtle and complex a person to be able to live in harmony with a child who had no single taste in common with him, no point of character that met his, and an undeveloped mind that could not reach his own. There was the shining golden hair, the wonderful eyes, the youth that had englamoured him, but nothing more. And for her there was the impossibility of understanding and appreciating a personality beyond her experience. They had a child, which died; and in two years, Mrs. Chaplin gave up her hopeless struggle, and sued for divorce, which was granted her.
Chaplin, as always, refused to give any information to an eager press, and endured in silence the calumnies and scurrilities that were published. Miss Harris tried vainly to explain why she found it impossible to live with Chaplin, and earned pity in some quarters, and condemnation as a little gold digger in others. Whatever may have been her reason for entering into the marriage, her statements to her lawyers and the press reveal the alarming incompatibility between her husband and herself.
She told how Chaplin would leave her alone for hours on end, while he went down to the beach and stared moodily at the sea, never moving; how he would seem sometimes not to be aware of her at all, not answering when she spoke. Or he would turn to music for hours at a stretch, utterly absorbed, while she sat by. ignored and unwanted. He was always charming and kind when she was ill, but never concerned about her reactions to the times he absented himself for days on end, without warning, without explanation; or the effect upon her nerves of his silence and his withdrawal into his own melancholy.
All this is evidence of an unbridgeable chasm, with suffering on both sides. Mildred Harris married Cinderella's Prince, only to have him transformed into a moody creative genius beyond her ken, while Chaplin married a dream, and found nothing when he woke. He was too absorbed in his work, too caught up with the processes of his creative impulse, to be even aware that his wife was in fact a real person requiring rather more attention than he gave her, and young enough to be eager for amusement.
There is an ironic revelation of the gulf between them in an incident that took place when Chaplin accompanied Sam Goldwyn to a Los Angeles hospital to see a friend, some time after the divorce.