‘When Charlie Met Joan: The Tragedy of the Chaplin Trials and the Failings of American Law’
By Diane Kiesel
University of Michigan Press, 408 Pages

Joan Barry wanted to be a movie star.  She was photogenic and did not mind what she had to do to get the attention of Hollywood producers. She seemed the perfect fit for Charlie Chaplin, who preferred very young women with little or no acting experience and were willing to submit to his cinematic and sexual projections.

Chaplin and Barry coupled as he groomed her for the screen, taking his time to develop a script while she took acting lessons and became one of his studio denizens. Prone to heavy drinking and making scenes, an impatient Barry exasperated Chaplin. She broke her contract with him and sought the attentions of an MGM producer, Sam Marx, but was just as unpredictable there, and did not show up for her screen test.

Joan’s motivations, other than wanting to be a star and also Chaplin’s wife, are not clear to biographer Diane Kiesel, and may not have been clear to Joan herself, who swung from one man to another, depending on who could give her money to satisfy her expensive tastes in clothing and fine hotels.

Among Barry’s male sexual partners was J. Paul Getty, his lawyer, and other men she traded in more swiftly than the owners of professional baseball teams swapped players. Yet Ms. Kiesel never loses patience with Barry, who in another biographer’s purview might have been treated much more cynically. In Ms. Kiesel’s view, Barry had to deal with men who were as manipulative as she was. Often Barry was not calculating but confused; later, she was institutionalized.

For a long time, Barry seems to have been sincerely convinced that Chaplin had fathered her child. She had already had two abortions, thanks to him, and when she decided to keep her daughter, she expected him to support the child even if he was not willing to marry Barry. Chaplin refused.

So they went to trial — first, though, under the Mann Act, which prohibited the transportation of young females for the purposes of prostitution or “other immoral purposes.” That Chaplin should have been so charged was a travesty of justice, as Ms. Kiesel demonstrates. The sex was consensual and there really was no case for accusing Chaplin of having seduced Barry, given her affairs with other men. Chaplin was acquitted.

A blood test conclusively showed that Chaplin had not fathered Barry’s child, yet a zealous lawyer brought a paternity suit to court anyway because under California law blood tests were not deemed dispositive, and this time Barry won. Chaplin lost on appeal, and had to support the child at $100 a month until she reached adulthood.

Ms. Kiesel, a former judge on the New York State supreme court, provides riveting accounts of the trials, the personalities and procedures of the lawyers for the prosecution and defense, and at the same time perfects a Plutarchian biography of the parallel lives of Chaplin and Barry.

Although Chaplin was ill served by the American justice system, he behaved badly and sometimes stupidly, as Ms. Kiesel shows, by not showing up in court and making at least one jury suppose he really did not care what happened to Barry or even to his reputation. He then became a target of the INS as, in effect, an undesirable alien. He was not permitted to return to this country after he went abroad to publicize his film “Limelight” (1952). Not until 20 years later did he appear in the United States to accept an honorary award from the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Ms. Kiesel shows that Barry was on her own for much of her life, without much help from her mother. After Barry was institutionalized, her daughter was kept away from her. Barry died in obscurity — not even her family could say where. But Ms. Kiesel tracked down what happened to Barry, and was able to provide some resolution to the story of Barry’s life for her daughter.  

Not many biographers are able to do such a service for the lives of their subjects, and in this case, provide the justice to Joan Barry’s story that Chaplin, the courts, and her own family were not able to supply.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Ronald Colman: Hollywood’s Gentleman Hero.”