May 3, 2010 • 17 mins
Charlie Chaplin is perhaps best known for his portrayal of 'The Tramp,' a character with raggedy clothes and a heart of gold. But who was the real Charlie Chaplin? Learn more about one of the most influential actors of silent film in this podcast.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Downy. And something you
may not know is that Sarah and I are actually
friends in real life. And we had a class together
(00:23):
in college with one of our very favorite professors, Dr
Hubert mc alexander. And that's where I was introduced to
the poet Heart Crane. And Crane had a fascination with
a certain cinema star so much that he wrote a
poem about him and once had the chance to meet
him where they partied till dawn. And if you're wondering
who this man was, he is a listener favorite. We've
(00:46):
gotten so many requests for Charlie Chaplin. Charlie Chaplin was
known to us for his Little Tramp character, which PBS
is American Masters described as a well meaning man in
a raggedy suit with hane always found himself wobbling into
awkward situations and miraculously wobbling away. He was also known
(01:07):
for being a perfectionist to the point of complete control freak,
and possibly the greatest actor ever. So let's get to
know our man Charlie Chaplin was born at Charles Spencer
Chaplin in London on April six, eighteen eighty nine, and
his mother, Hannah, was an actress who was also mentally
ill um She had some bizarre stories about her her
(01:30):
life pre Chaplain. She had one about eloping with this
lord and living on a South African plantation, which is
how she got Charles's half brother, Sydney. But whatever, you know,
it's maybe true, maybe not, but either way she ended
up marrying one Charles Chaplin, who was a singer, shortly
after Sydney was born, which was a bit of a
(01:51):
scandal to his family and our Charlie Chaplin didn't think
this Chaplain was his father for the rest of his life,
and indeed Hannah did have a weakness for affairs with men,
so who knows. But they separated when he was young,
and although the couple had been successful for a time,
both on the stage, they ended up very poor. They
(02:11):
weren't even sleeping in beds. His mom turned to evangelical
religion and wasn't very good with money, and his father
was alcoholic and estranged, and that at giving them money.
So the boys, little Sydney and Charles end up in
a workhouse, and Chaplin later said it wasn't so bad.
He just daydreamed about being in parliament. But from there
(02:33):
he moves on to an orphanage where they really try
to crush his spirit. So they ended up in more workhouses,
and then living with their father, the drunk, and then
living with their mother in bad circumstances, basically his dirty
little ragmuffins. So you have to picture him here. You know,
he's once part of the middle class with a very
(02:54):
successful father, and then he's poor and ashamed of his
poverty with a semi famous hollic father who didn't really
support them and died when he was young. And then
we also have a mother who loved him but couldn't
take care of him and spent a lot of her
time in mental hospitals. So this is where Charlie Chaplin
came from. And uh, kind of like some of our
(03:15):
vaudeville stars we mentioned earlier, these the sad kind of
childhood eventually drives the kids to the stage, and young
Charlie was a clog dancer with the Eight Lancashire Lads,
which is a great way to enter show business. I
think he also learned a lot about pantomime, but his
break came through his brother's sid He played a role
(03:36):
in Jim, a romance of Cockaine, and then in a
touring play Sherlock Holmes. He played a cockney boy in both.
But by the time he was seventeen, he had hit
that uh kind of rough period for a child star.
You know, too old to play kids parts, too young
to play adults, and we know how that usually turns out.
But he manages to pull through, and he ends up
(03:57):
in a production called Casey's Were to Circus, and that's
where he accidentally discovered how to be funny. He came
out on stage very serious and had this serious rendition
planned of the role he wanted to play, but everything
went wrong. His hat fell down over his face and
he dropped things, and he realized that you laugh because
(04:19):
it's unexpected. Those little nervous shocks make you laugh. And
soon enough he's on the vaudeville stage and he makes
his way to the United States where he becomes a star,
and famous words from the head of his touring company,
Fred Carnot, where keep it wistful, gentleman, Keep it wistful.
And that's something that when he he does forget that,
(04:40):
his career kind of goes astray, right, but that later
becomes such a part of the Tramp character, making it
funny but but sweet. And he gained this reputation for
being eccentric, but that didn't keep him from being signed
with Max Sennett and Keystone Studios, which is where he
would start making film. And he never thought that he'd
stay in film. He thought it was a bit of
(05:01):
a fad that would go out of style. But he
starts acting and his first film experience isn't what he expected.
He thought movies would be like a stage blow. You
would act it out in front of a camera, you know,
film the whole thing and then start to finish. That
would be it. But of course that's not how it works.
You film things out of order, some of it's done
very quickly, and he was really disconcerted by the whole thing.
(05:23):
So in this film, he basically just fell off a ladder.
No one thought he was very good, and he wanted
to quit, but of course he doesn't. And he thinks
of the character the Tramp. And remember that Chaplin had
a lot of experience with a shift in class, you know,
going from respectable middle class to living in the workhouse,
(05:45):
and he tries to to keep some dignity in his
portrayal of being poor. So the Tramp from years in
Mabel's Strange Predicament, which is actually a pretty risque film,
and his early work is Super two said you wouldn't
he it's not the tramp that you would think of
it entirely unlikable character in those early ones. But to
(06:07):
give you an idea of what his workpace was like,
in nineteen fourteen alone, he made thirty five short films,
so it was pretty crazy. And again he wasn't used
to how this whole system worked, which is part of
the reason that made him so hard to work with.
He was very resistant to direction, incredibly picky about how
(06:27):
shots were set up, and he wanted constant reshoots, which
was really expensive and just not the way that things
were done. But he does work on developing his comedy,
bringing more empathy to it, and in nineteen fifteen he
leaves Keystone for a higher salary with a company called
sen A, and he leaves them for way more money
at the mutual company Film Corporation. His annual salary is
(06:51):
six hundred and seventy thousand dollars. But we want to
talk a little bit more about what he was like
to work with. As we mentioned for he was very demanding,
obsessed with every tiny detail and every actor's performance. He
wanted to walk through every scene and criticize what you
were doing. He took hundreds of takes and fired actors
(07:12):
right in the middle of things. But of course it
paid off because his films were great. He also did
a lot of improvisation on a bare bones script, which
is pretty cool, and according to Time, he was the
first and to date the last person to control every
aspect of the filmmaking process, founding his own studio united
Artists with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and d W Griffith
(07:34):
in producing, casting, directing, writing, scoring, and editing the movies
he started. So that's that's Those are some big shoes
to the One Man Band. He was described as very
intense and self absorbed by most of the people who
knew him. That he was also very sweet and his
comedy was smart. Again. According to PBS's American Masters, for Chaplin,
(07:57):
the best way to locate the humor or pathos of
a stuation was to create an environment and walk around
it until something natural happened. And that's a really good
way of summing up a lot of his films, and
we should talk about some of his most famous pictures.
Chaplain's first feature film was The Kid from nineteen one,
where most of us know that plot. A woman abandons
(08:20):
her baby plans to kill herself, but she ends up
becoming an opera star and always looking for her son
and the Tramp has been raising the baby all along, surprise,
and it's a huge hit and really kicks off his
film career. Another biggie is The gold Rush n and
this was the film that he said he wanted to
be remembered for. It's often considered his masterpiece. He made
(08:44):
it with United Artists, and the plot is that he's
the Tramp again, this time during the gold rush in Alaska.
He falls in love and there's a famous scene where
he eats his own boot for Thanksgiving dinner, which he
carves and shares with the Big Jim Carrot Her. You
can see this clip on TCM dot com if you
search for it. I was thinking hot ham Water might
(09:05):
be better, but nobody asks. This is actually the film
that I watched for a third grade class project, I'm
Charlie Chaplin, which I also made a clay sculpture that
my dad still has. And you discovered that the movie
Chaplin was perhaps not properly good for like an eight
year old kid, but the gold rushes. And his next
big film was City Lights in nineteen thirty and in
(09:28):
this one, the tramp helps cure a blind girl of
her blindness and he's in love, but once she sees
who he is, she isn't. And this is called by
some the most romantic seen in film history. And this
one was a compromise between the silent movies and the talkies.
He held out for a long time in the silent
(09:49):
film and did well. It was a good bet. And
in this one he didn't talk, but there was music
and sound effects, so it was kind of easing into
the idea. Yeah, he finally spoke in The Great Dictator
from nineteen forty and he played two roles, a tramp
like Jewish barber and a Hitler figure named Adnoid Hinkel.
And to give a little context, this is when a
(10:12):
lot of people thought that maybe we should try to
work with Hitler, and according to Roger Ebert, it prophesied
the persecution of the Jews and the scenes of stormtroopers
terrorizing the ghetto or thought at the time to go
too far. What a sad joke that seems today. And
in one scene, the Hankel character tries to rip up
a bunch of spaghetti, saying that's how he'll destroy his enemies,
(10:33):
but he can't actually do it. It is a very
cruel satire and very spot on. He's a wholly unlikable character,
and the film starts off with this quote. This is
the story of the period between two world wars and interim,
during which insanity cut loose, liberty took a nose dive,
and humanity was kicked around somewhat. And Chaplin was very political,
(10:54):
as we'll learn a little bit later in the podcast.
In nineteen forty seven he changed characters dramatically and Monsieur
verdou he didn't play the tramp and instead he played
a serial killer, actually one who marries women and kills
them for their insurance money to support his own family,
so basically a total blue beard. The concept was actually
(11:16):
orson Wells's idea and based on a real French serial
killer on real and Drew, but the film did not
go over well. And around this time Chaplain was embroiled
in a paternity suit and considered a communist, and there
was all this controversy and people didn't like him playing
somebody who wasn't the Tramp. No. My favorite contemporary review
(11:37):
just started with Chaplin generates little sympathy. It's very dry
and cracked me up. It is a very dark film.
One line from Al river Do in the film says,
wars conflict. It's all business. One murder makes a villain,
millions a hero, numbers sanctify my good fellow. So it
was anti war and it's also known as being an
(11:57):
anti capitalist film, which seven not a good time for
the ihole. And as far as his personal life goes,
it was a bit messy, to say the least. In
nineteen eighteen he married a sixteen year old Mildred Harris.
That didn't last, and in nineteen twenty four he married
another teenager, Lida Gray, with whom he had a very
(12:18):
bitter divorce. It's possible that their story inspired Lolita. According
to the biographer who wrote Tramp, The Life of Charlie Chaplin,
Joyce Milton, and I got some very good details from
her book. He has another marriage to Paulett Goddard, and
she describes him as being difficult but charming and that
genius can be rather difficult to live with. And he
(12:40):
has several affairs, including one with Poland Negri, who Katie's
interested in. I really like her, and she wrote about
it in Memoirs of a Star. And you might remember
a mention from our William Hurst podcast about him being
on the yacht with Marian Davies when there was that
mysterious murder, and that per hops he was having an
(13:00):
affair with Davy maybe, but he also had a fraternity
suit with Joan Barry and this is so strange. But
the child was proven not to actually be his, you know,
according to blood evidence, but blood evidence wasn't admissible in court,
so the court makes him pay, and then a second
trial happens where the exact same thing goes down. You know,
(13:23):
they find it's not his child, but he still has
to pay. So paying for someone else's babyest to hurt
a little bit. But the American public did not approve
of this whole thing, or his womanizing in general. And
that's not all they didn't approve of. He had some
very lefty politics and he was investigated by the House
an American Activities Committee for being a supposed Communist sympathizer
(13:46):
for some things he said during World War Two. He
thought we should help the Soviet Union on a second front,
and people didn't like that. He hadn't seen service during
World War two, or at least gone on some sort
of entertainment tour. A lot of the stars at the
time did, and j Edgar Hoover kept a two thousand
page dossier on him and had his name down as
(14:10):
Israel Fonstein, a Jew, which brings us to a question
that's been asked many times whether he was Jewish or not.
During his own time, he wouldn't say yes or no,
because he said that would be playing into anti Semite hands.
But his political views were so controversial that after he
went to London from one of his premiers, he wasn't
(14:31):
allowed back into the United States. So he became a
little bitter about this incident, a little disenchanted with the US,
and he moved to Switzerland. But you know, it's not
a terribly unhappy ending. In Switzerland, he marries Una O'Neill,
who is the playwright Eugene O'Neill's daughter when he's in
his fifties and she's eighteen. He really does have a
(14:52):
thing for teenagers, but they're quite happy together. They live
in Switzerland and they have eight children. And he does
end up returning to the US for an honorary Oscar
and he gets a twelve minute ovation which is to
record the longest ovation at the Oscars, and he ended
up being knighted by the Queen in England. But he
(15:13):
died Christmas Day in nineteen seventy seven and his body
was stolen from his Swiss cemetery by thieves. It was
later returned and reburied, but still exhumation. In our podcast
Exhamation and Dreams. And to end where we started, we'll
give you a quote from Hart Crane's chaplain esque. We
(15:35):
will side step and to the final smirk, dally the
doom of that inevitable thumb that slowly chafes its puckered
index toward us facing the dull squint with what innocence
and what surprise? And that brings us to our listener
mail today. This is an email from James who was
(15:56):
on his way to Vienna when he wrote us. He
did mention that our podcast keeps him from losing his
mind at work and called us saints. But Sant Katie
I like that. Yeah, Thank Katie and St. Sarah. But
um he did write in your podcast on the Book
of Kells you incorrectly said that the Latin Vulgate Bible
is the basis for English translations today. Though it was
a key source for the King James version translated in
(16:18):
sixteen eleven, most of the King James version, as well
as all modern Bible translations, used the Greek in Hebrew
text as primary sources. The first English translation made by
John Wycliffe was a translation of the Vulgate into English
in two So a little more background information for those
monks scribbling away of the Book of Kills, and if
(16:41):
you like to email us any corrections or comments or suggestions,
It's history podcast at how stuff works dot com. You
can also follow us on Twitter at misst in history
or join our Facebook fan page. But we'd like to
end with an interesting side note about our buddy Chaplin.
His films might be good for your health. To completely
(17:01):
exaggerate the claims of one study in the study, breastfeeding
mothers watching Chaplin films laughed quite a bit, which upped
their melotona levels and decreased their babies allergic responses. So
Reno chaplain and if you're interested in learning a little
more about that, we have an article called does Breastfeeding
(17:23):
Make Better Babies? By our own Molly Edmunds of Stuff
Mom Never Told You, and you can search for it
on our homepage at www dot house stuff works dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how stuff works dot com and be sure to check
out the stuff you missed in History Glass Blog on
the how stuff works dot com home page
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Downy. And something you
may not know is that Sarah and I are actually
friends in real life. And we had a class together
(00:23):
in college with one of our very favorite professors, Dr
Hubert mc alexander. And that's where I was introduced to
the poet Heart Crane. And Crane had a fascination with
a certain cinema star so much that he wrote a
poem about him and once had the chance to meet
him where they partied till dawn. And if you're wondering
who this man was, he is a listener favorite. We've
(00:46):
gotten so many requests for Charlie Chaplin. Charlie Chaplin was
known to us for his Little Tramp character, which PBS
is American Masters described as a well meaning man in
a raggedy suit with hane always found himself wobbling into
awkward situations and miraculously wobbling away. He was also known
(01:07):
for being a perfectionist to the point of complete control freak,
and possibly the greatest actor ever. So let's get to
know our man Charlie Chaplin was born at Charles Spencer
Chaplin in London on April six, eighteen eighty nine, and
his mother, Hannah, was an actress who was also mentally
ill um She had some bizarre stories about her her
(01:30):
life pre Chaplain. She had one about eloping with this
lord and living on a South African plantation, which is
how she got Charles's half brother, Sydney. But whatever, you know,
it's maybe true, maybe not, but either way she ended
up marrying one Charles Chaplin, who was a singer, shortly
after Sydney was born, which was a bit of a
(01:51):
scandal to his family and our Charlie Chaplin didn't think
this Chaplain was his father for the rest of his life,
and indeed Hannah did have a weakness for affairs with men,
so who knows. But they separated when he was young,
and although the couple had been successful for a time,
both on the stage, they ended up very poor. They
(02:11):
weren't even sleeping in beds. His mom turned to evangelical
religion and wasn't very good with money, and his father
was alcoholic and estranged, and that at giving them money.
So the boys, little Sydney and Charles end up in
a workhouse, and Chaplin later said it wasn't so bad.
He just daydreamed about being in parliament. But from there
(02:33):
he moves on to an orphanage where they really try
to crush his spirit. So they ended up in more workhouses,
and then living with their father, the drunk, and then
living with their mother in bad circumstances, basically his dirty
little ragmuffins. So you have to picture him here. You know,
he's once part of the middle class with a very
(02:54):
successful father, and then he's poor and ashamed of his
poverty with a semi famous hollic father who didn't really
support them and died when he was young. And then
we also have a mother who loved him but couldn't
take care of him and spent a lot of her
time in mental hospitals. So this is where Charlie Chaplin
came from. And uh, kind of like some of our
(03:15):
vaudeville stars we mentioned earlier, these the sad kind of
childhood eventually drives the kids to the stage, and young
Charlie was a clog dancer with the Eight Lancashire Lads,
which is a great way to enter show business. I
think he also learned a lot about pantomime, but his
break came through his brother's sid He played a role
(03:36):
in Jim, a romance of Cockaine, and then in a
touring play Sherlock Holmes. He played a cockney boy in both.
But by the time he was seventeen, he had hit
that uh kind of rough period for a child star.
You know, too old to play kids parts, too young
to play adults, and we know how that usually turns out.
But he manages to pull through, and he ends up
(03:57):
in a production called Casey's Were to Circus, and that's
where he accidentally discovered how to be funny. He came
out on stage very serious and had this serious rendition
planned of the role he wanted to play, but everything
went wrong. His hat fell down over his face and
he dropped things, and he realized that you laugh because
(04:19):
it's unexpected. Those little nervous shocks make you laugh. And
soon enough he's on the vaudeville stage and he makes
his way to the United States where he becomes a star,
and famous words from the head of his touring company,
Fred Carnot, where keep it wistful, gentleman, Keep it wistful.
And that's something that when he he does forget that,
(04:40):
his career kind of goes astray, right, but that later
becomes such a part of the Tramp character, making it
funny but but sweet. And he gained this reputation for
being eccentric, but that didn't keep him from being signed
with Max Sennett and Keystone Studios, which is where he
would start making film. And he never thought that he'd
stay in film. He thought it was a bit of
(05:01):
a fad that would go out of style. But he
starts acting and his first film experience isn't what he expected.
He thought movies would be like a stage blow. You
would act it out in front of a camera, you know,
film the whole thing and then start to finish. That
would be it. But of course that's not how it works.
You film things out of order, some of it's done
very quickly, and he was really disconcerted by the whole thing.
(05:23):
So in this film, he basically just fell off a ladder.
No one thought he was very good, and he wanted
to quit, but of course he doesn't. And he thinks
of the character the Tramp. And remember that Chaplin had
a lot of experience with a shift in class, you know,
going from respectable middle class to living in the workhouse,
(05:45):
and he tries to to keep some dignity in his
portrayal of being poor. So the Tramp from years in
Mabel's Strange Predicament, which is actually a pretty risque film,
and his early work is Super two said you wouldn't
he it's not the tramp that you would think of
it entirely unlikable character in those early ones. But to
(06:07):
give you an idea of what his workpace was like,
in nineteen fourteen alone, he made thirty five short films,
so it was pretty crazy. And again he wasn't used
to how this whole system worked, which is part of
the reason that made him so hard to work with.
He was very resistant to direction, incredibly picky about how
(06:27):
shots were set up, and he wanted constant reshoots, which
was really expensive and just not the way that things
were done. But he does work on developing his comedy,
bringing more empathy to it, and in nineteen fifteen he
leaves Keystone for a higher salary with a company called
sen A, and he leaves them for way more money
at the mutual company Film Corporation. His annual salary is
(06:51):
six hundred and seventy thousand dollars. But we want to
talk a little bit more about what he was like
to work with. As we mentioned for he was very demanding,
obsessed with every tiny detail and every actor's performance. He
wanted to walk through every scene and criticize what you
were doing. He took hundreds of takes and fired actors
(07:12):
right in the middle of things. But of course it
paid off because his films were great. He also did
a lot of improvisation on a bare bones script, which
is pretty cool, and according to Time, he was the
first and to date the last person to control every
aspect of the filmmaking process, founding his own studio united
Artists with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and d W Griffith
(07:34):
in producing, casting, directing, writing, scoring, and editing the movies
he started. So that's that's Those are some big shoes
to the One Man Band. He was described as very
intense and self absorbed by most of the people who
knew him. That he was also very sweet and his
comedy was smart. Again. According to PBS's American Masters, for Chaplin,
(07:57):
the best way to locate the humor or pathos of
a stuation was to create an environment and walk around
it until something natural happened. And that's a really good
way of summing up a lot of his films, and
we should talk about some of his most famous pictures.
Chaplain's first feature film was The Kid from nineteen one,
where most of us know that plot. A woman abandons
(08:20):
her baby plans to kill herself, but she ends up
becoming an opera star and always looking for her son
and the Tramp has been raising the baby all along, surprise,
and it's a huge hit and really kicks off his
film career. Another biggie is The gold Rush n and
this was the film that he said he wanted to
be remembered for. It's often considered his masterpiece. He made
(08:44):
it with United Artists, and the plot is that he's
the Tramp again, this time during the gold rush in Alaska.
He falls in love and there's a famous scene where
he eats his own boot for Thanksgiving dinner, which he
carves and shares with the Big Jim Carrot Her. You
can see this clip on TCM dot com if you
search for it. I was thinking hot ham Water might
(09:05):
be better, but nobody asks. This is actually the film
that I watched for a third grade class project, I'm
Charlie Chaplin, which I also made a clay sculpture that
my dad still has. And you discovered that the movie
Chaplin was perhaps not properly good for like an eight
year old kid, but the gold rushes. And his next
big film was City Lights in nineteen thirty and in
(09:28):
this one, the tramp helps cure a blind girl of
her blindness and he's in love, but once she sees
who he is, she isn't. And this is called by
some the most romantic seen in film history. And this
one was a compromise between the silent movies and the talkies.
He held out for a long time in the silent
(09:49):
film and did well. It was a good bet. And
in this one he didn't talk, but there was music
and sound effects, so it was kind of easing into
the idea. Yeah, he finally spoke in The Great Dictator
from nineteen forty and he played two roles, a tramp
like Jewish barber and a Hitler figure named Adnoid Hinkel.
And to give a little context, this is when a
(10:12):
lot of people thought that maybe we should try to
work with Hitler, and according to Roger Ebert, it prophesied
the persecution of the Jews and the scenes of stormtroopers
terrorizing the ghetto or thought at the time to go
too far. What a sad joke that seems today. And
in one scene, the Hankel character tries to rip up
a bunch of spaghetti, saying that's how he'll destroy his enemies,
(10:33):
but he can't actually do it. It is a very
cruel satire and very spot on. He's a wholly unlikable character,
and the film starts off with this quote. This is
the story of the period between two world wars and interim,
during which insanity cut loose, liberty took a nose dive,
and humanity was kicked around somewhat. And Chaplin was very political,
(10:54):
as we'll learn a little bit later in the podcast.
In nineteen forty seven he changed characters dramatically and Monsieur
verdou he didn't play the tramp and instead he played
a serial killer, actually one who marries women and kills
them for their insurance money to support his own family,
so basically a total blue beard. The concept was actually
(11:16):
orson Wells's idea and based on a real French serial
killer on real and Drew, but the film did not
go over well. And around this time Chaplain was embroiled
in a paternity suit and considered a communist, and there
was all this controversy and people didn't like him playing
somebody who wasn't the Tramp. No. My favorite contemporary review
(11:37):
just started with Chaplin generates little sympathy. It's very dry
and cracked me up. It is a very dark film.
One line from Al river Do in the film says,
wars conflict. It's all business. One murder makes a villain,
millions a hero, numbers sanctify my good fellow. So it
was anti war and it's also known as being an
(11:57):
anti capitalist film, which seven not a good time for
the ihole. And as far as his personal life goes,
it was a bit messy, to say the least. In
nineteen eighteen he married a sixteen year old Mildred Harris.
That didn't last, and in nineteen twenty four he married
another teenager, Lida Gray, with whom he had a very
(12:18):
bitter divorce. It's possible that their story inspired Lolita. According
to the biographer who wrote Tramp, The Life of Charlie Chaplin,
Joyce Milton, and I got some very good details from
her book. He has another marriage to Paulett Goddard, and
she describes him as being difficult but charming and that
genius can be rather difficult to live with. And he
(12:40):
has several affairs, including one with Poland Negri, who Katie's
interested in. I really like her, and she wrote about
it in Memoirs of a Star. And you might remember
a mention from our William Hurst podcast about him being
on the yacht with Marian Davies when there was that
mysterious murder, and that per hops he was having an
(13:00):
affair with Davy maybe, but he also had a fraternity
suit with Joan Barry and this is so strange. But
the child was proven not to actually be his, you know,
according to blood evidence, but blood evidence wasn't admissible in court,
so the court makes him pay, and then a second
trial happens where the exact same thing goes down. You know,
(13:23):
they find it's not his child, but he still has
to pay. So paying for someone else's babyest to hurt
a little bit. But the American public did not approve
of this whole thing, or his womanizing in general. And
that's not all they didn't approve of. He had some
very lefty politics and he was investigated by the House
an American Activities Committee for being a supposed Communist sympathizer
(13:46):
for some things he said during World War Two. He
thought we should help the Soviet Union on a second front,
and people didn't like that. He hadn't seen service during
World War two, or at least gone on some sort
of entertainment tour. A lot of the stars at the
time did, and j Edgar Hoover kept a two thousand
page dossier on him and had his name down as
(14:10):
Israel Fonstein, a Jew, which brings us to a question
that's been asked many times whether he was Jewish or not.
During his own time, he wouldn't say yes or no,
because he said that would be playing into anti Semite hands.
But his political views were so controversial that after he
went to London from one of his premiers, he wasn't
(14:31):
allowed back into the United States. So he became a
little bitter about this incident, a little disenchanted with the US,
and he moved to Switzerland. But you know, it's not
a terribly unhappy ending. In Switzerland, he marries Una O'Neill,
who is the playwright Eugene O'Neill's daughter when he's in
his fifties and she's eighteen. He really does have a
(14:52):
thing for teenagers, but they're quite happy together. They live
in Switzerland and they have eight children. And he does
end up returning to the US for an honorary Oscar
and he gets a twelve minute ovation which is to
record the longest ovation at the Oscars, and he ended
up being knighted by the Queen in England. But he
(15:13):
died Christmas Day in nineteen seventy seven and his body
was stolen from his Swiss cemetery by thieves. It was
later returned and reburied, but still exhumation. In our podcast
Exhamation and Dreams. And to end where we started, we'll
give you a quote from Hart Crane's chaplain esque. We
(15:35):
will side step and to the final smirk, dally the
doom of that inevitable thumb that slowly chafes its puckered
index toward us facing the dull squint with what innocence
and what surprise? And that brings us to our listener
mail today. This is an email from James who was
(15:56):
on his way to Vienna when he wrote us. He
did mention that our podcast keeps him from losing his
mind at work and called us saints. But Sant Katie
I like that. Yeah, Thank Katie and St. Sarah. But
um he did write in your podcast on the Book
of Kells you incorrectly said that the Latin Vulgate Bible
is the basis for English translations today. Though it was
a key source for the King James version translated in
(16:18):
sixteen eleven, most of the King James version, as well
as all modern Bible translations, used the Greek in Hebrew
text as primary sources. The first English translation made by
John Wycliffe was a translation of the Vulgate into English
in two So a little more background information for those
monks scribbling away of the Book of Kills, and if
(16:41):
you like to email us any corrections or comments or suggestions,
It's history podcast at how stuff works dot com. You
can also follow us on Twitter at misst in history
or join our Facebook fan page. But we'd like to
end with an interesting side note about our buddy Chaplin.
His films might be good for your health. To completely
(17:01):
exaggerate the claims of one study in the study, breastfeeding
mothers watching Chaplin films laughed quite a bit, which upped
their melotona levels and decreased their babies allergic responses. So
Reno chaplain and if you're interested in learning a little
more about that, we have an article called does Breastfeeding
(17:23):
Make Better Babies? By our own Molly Edmunds of Stuff
Mom Never Told You, and you can search for it
on our homepage at www dot house stuff works dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how stuff works dot com and be sure to check
out the stuff you missed in History Glass Blog on
the how stuff works dot com home page
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