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with that of Paillette Goddard, while Chaplin was reputed to be interested in the young daughter of Eugene O'Neill.
In 1942, therefore, a divorce took place in Mexico, and Paulette Goddard was granted a divorce settlement of £250,000, largely in jewellery, for which she had an exorbitant passion. She successfully pursued an independent career in films, the only one of his wives to do so.
The repercussions of this divorce were only just dwindling when once more Chaplin found himself in the public eye, and suffering the incurable glare of maximum publicity.
In 1943, he married the eighteen year old daughter of the playwright Eugene O'Neill, much against her father's wishes. There were some who attributed the failure of O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh to his concern over his daughter. In the same year, Chaplin was involved in the unsavoury Joan Barry paternity case, in which a young actress sued him as the father of her then unborn child.
The case was taken before the Superior Court of California; and the Hearst press, always among Chaplin's deadliest enemies, began a campaign of abuse that clearly had a political, not a moral, basis. The campaign seemed to have received its impetus from hostility occasioned by speeches Chaplin had made in 1942 in support of the Second Front.
The case dragged on into 1944, by which time Chaplin had been indicted by a Federal Grand Jury in Los Angeles for violation of the Mann Act, on counts of having endeavoured to transport Miss Barry to New York, in order to engage in illicit sexual relations with her; and of conspiring to deprive her of her civil rights.
The case had now taken an ugly turn; for the maximum sentence for these offences were twenty-three years' imprisonment and a fine of nearly seven thousand pounds. Chaplin was acquitted of these more serious charges, but the paternity suit, with a re-trial following disagreement on the first jury, dragged on into 1945, when it was finally decided that Chaplin was the father of the child, now two years old. In the following year, his appeal against the decision was dismissed by the District Court of Appeal in California.
In the witness box, Chaplin suffered at the hands of Miss Barry's counsel, who called him, among other flamboyancies, "a master mechanic in the art of seduction" and accused him of "lying like a cheap Cockney cad" ! Chaplin's refusal to apply for American citizenship has long been a grudge against him; and counsel certainly pandered to that grudge.
By the time Monsieur Verdoux was released in 1947, Chaplin's own attitude, the recent dramas of his private life, and world events