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One result of this unfortunate marriage was that he was forced to re-make the greater part of the scenes already taken. The two women had not realized soon enough that nothing was ever allowed to come before Chaplin's work. He was determined to keep the predatory hands of wife and mother-in-law away from it, determined that Lita Grey should not use him to make a film career. His decision increased the friction of his domestic life, but gave him freedom in his work, where Georgia Hale replaced Mrs. Chaplin as leading lady.
The Gold Rush, when it was released, was an enormous success, both artistically and financially, and remains one of Chaplin's best loved films.
When The Gold Rush was completed, Chaplin himself was for the first time satisfied with a film he had made, and told Goldwyn that this was the film he wished to be remembered by. The critics and the public united to acclaim "Chaplin's hour of sovereign triumph in the picture reels", as one leading authority in America flamboyantly wrote.
In the spring of 1925 — the year that saw the release of The Gold Rush — Chaplin's son Charles junior was born. This event did nothing to bring husband and wife together; and by the time a second son, Sydney, arrived in 1926, it was clear that nothing could serve to put the marriage upon a happier footing.
Night after night Chaplin roamed round the suburbs of Hollywood, prey to abysmal gloom, and the loneliness that could only be lifted from time to time by few and chosen friends. He was unwilling to spend any time at all in a home where there was neither peace nor rest, a home filled with Lita's gay young crowd, picked up here and there at random, eternally crooning, dancing, jazzing, and chattering against the blaring of phonographs and incessant jangling of the piano. Chaplin had out-grown, had indeed never had, any interest in high school high jinks.
The conflict and unhappiness of his private life at this time is reflected in The Circus, the film he made next. In spite of its comedy — and the film contains some of Chaplin's funniest gags — the atmosphere of the film is one of exhaustion and melancholy. The lead in the film was given to Merna Kennedy, a childhood friend of Lita Grey, who afterwards denied that she had secured the part for her friend.
Suddenly, and for what seemed a trivial cause, the whole of the pent-up irritation and hatred accumulated since the beginning of the marriage came to a head, soon after the birth of the second son. Chaplin came home one day from the studio, exhausted and on edge after an arduous day's work, to find the house filled, as usual, with a