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Photo Essays |
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MILDRED HARRIS
(Age 16) |
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LITA GREY
(Age 16) |
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OONA O’NEILL
(Age 17) |
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Oona was the only one of Charlie’s three teenage wives he actually liked and respected despite the thirty-six year difference in their ages. She was intelligent, cultured, sophisticated, well educated and—unlike Harris or Grey—immediately abandoned her show business aspirations when their affair began and never perceived him as a meal ticket. Chaplin’s first two teenage wives had been fleeting fantasy objects of his sexually infatuated romantic imagination and also were, perhaps, throwbacks to his own mother’s highly romanticized (and self-flattering) descriptions of herself as an aspiring 16-year-old actress.
Commenting on his attraction to teenagers, Chaplin later confided to a friend (Harry Crocker): “I have always been in love with young girls, not in an amorous way—just as beautiful objects to look at. I like them young because they personify youth and beauty. There is something virginal in their slimness—in their slender arms and legs. And they are so feminine at that age—so wholly, girlishly young. They haven’t developed the ‘come on’ stuff or discovered the power of their looks over men.”
Unfortunately for Chaplin and for his first two equally disillusioned teenage lovers, the abrupt transition from virgin to slut occurred within days of his successful seduction of them or theirs of him (depending on one’s point of view). As his oldest son Charlie Chaplin Jr. observed : “[my father’s] troubles sprang from incurable romanticism…[he was] utterly blind to the fact that he was dealing with flesh and blood…[and] would form a deep attachment for his created image much as Pygmalion fell in love with his statue. When the idyll he had created for himself would explode into stark reality he would be shocked, angry and hurt as at some betrayal.” |
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www.ChaplinALife.com
© 2008 All Essay Rights Reserved.
All images from Chaplin films made from 1918 onwards, Copyright © Roy
Export Company Establishment._Charles Chaplin and the Little Tramp are trademarks and/or
service marks of Bubbles Inc. S.A. and/or Roy Export Company
Establishment, used with permission. |
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