Chaplin biography offers a timely new angle

Charlie Chaplin may be making a comeback.

For most of you, that probably sounds peculiar. He’s one of the eternal icons of cinema, so he can never really go away. But Chaplin has been in a critical trough for the past 50 years or so, with most American film historians even parroting the critical lunacy that his silent movie colleague Buster Keaton was the greater artist.

But now the world is changing in ways that are making Chaplin, who died in 1977, necessary again.

There’s an excellent new book out from biographer Scott Eyman titled, “Charlie Chaplin vs. America: When Art, Sex and Politics Collided.” Though it covers the full span of Chaplin’s 88 years, it concentrates mainly on a 10-year period of his life, from the early 1940s through 1952, the year that Chaplin — after almost 40 years of living in the United States — was told that he would not be readmitted into the country.

“It’s a pandemic book,” Eyman told me, speaking from his home in West Palm Beach, Fla. “I started working on it in February of 2020, panicked because I thought I couldn’t just sit here for three or four years. The libraries were closing, but I realized the Chaplin archive is digitized.”

Eyman never thought he’d ever write about Chaplin (“I have four rows of books about Chaplin. I thought, what could

I write about him that hasn’t been covered?”), but it turns out that this 10-year period has gotten scant attention in previous biographies, despite its being pivotal to Chaplin’s life and illustrative of certain negative tendencies in American politics and media.

Chaplin’s hellish decade began in the early 1940s, when a former girlfriend of Chaplin’s initiated a paternity suit against him. He lost the case and was forced to pay child support, despite a blood test proving that he wasn’t the father. Then for the next decade a goon squad of rightwing columnists, such as Hedda Hopper, Walter Winchell and Westwood Pegler, regularly peddled the lie that Chaplin was a communist.

Reading the book, it’s hard not to see some of the malign tendencies that remain a presence in American life: The willingness of people to cancel celebrities based on unproven accusations, and the influence of right-wing media on a gullible public.

“The world affecting Charlie Chaplin increasingly became the world around us as we came close to publication,” Eyman observed.

Eyman originally intended his book to simply cover 15 or so years in Chaplin’s life, but soon he realized he needed to expand it to reach further back into the actor’s life. He figured, “from the standpoint of the 21st century, not everybody knows Chaplin’s story. And if you don’t understand Chaplin’s childhood, you don’t understand Chaplin.”

Chaplin’s upbringing was worse than Dickensian. He was homeless for a time, and this experience gave him a lifelong concern for those in poverty, as well as a lifelong terror of going broke. Thus, in his comedy, he was “not Red Skelton, and he’s not Danny Kaye. He’s actually dealing with the real world,” Eyman said. “So when the Depression hits, he suddenly gets serious about the common man.”

Perhaps Chaplin’s star receded in the 1960s and ’70s

because people thought that they didn’t need him anymore, that the things that concerned him were now settled issues. Who still worried about humanity being superseded by machines (“Modern Times”) in 1980? Who worried that fascism (“The Great Dictator”) could come back?

Well, those issues seem personal today in ways we didn’t imagine just 10 years ago. As Eyman put it, “The world he was coping with in the ’40s and ’50s became much more a corollary to the world we’re in.”

Aside from its original point of emphasis, there’s another reason why “Charlie Chaplin vs. America” is a major addition to the Chaplin canon. Since I was a teenager, I’ve read everything about Chaplin, but this is the first Chaplin book I’ve ever read that gave me the sense of what it would feel like to be in a room with him. At one point, Eyman breaks off the narrative and writes that it’s time to talk about what made Chaplin “tick.”

Better than any other biographer that has gone before, Eyman gets underneath Chaplin and explains that complex personality.

CHARLIE CHAPLIN VS. AMERICA: WHEN ART, POLITICS AND SEX COLLIDED

By Scott Eyman (Simon & Schuster; 416 pages; $29.99)

Hulton Archive/Getty Images Charlie Chaplin was a target of a questionable paternity suit and the Red Scare starting in the 1940s.

Greg Lovett/Simon and Schuster Scott Eyman is the author of “Charlie Chaplin vs. America.”