How US authorities blocked Charlie Chaplin's knighthood

By JAMES MORRISON

LONDON - His tragicomic persona made him a star around the world, but it failed to win over the American right, who branded him a communist sympathiser and reviled him for his "immoral" sexual antics.

Newly released papers reveal the extraordinary lengths to which the United States establishment went to prevent Charlie Chaplin being knighted.

Born in London, Chaplin became a star of the silent screen in the US but never became an American citizen.

Throughout the 50s and 60s he is known to have been kept off the honours list by a series of allegations concerning his private life.

But Chaplin did not fall victim to the smears of a reactionary minority, as was long supposed. His knighthood was systematically blocked by American tax and immigration authorities, as the documents released by the Public Record Office reveal.

Chaplin was finally knighted in 1975, two years before he died. Even then, the process was not smooth. One letter reveals how the US tried to persuade the British Government to substitute Bob Hope, on the pretext that the American comedian, who was born in England, was a keen charity worker.

British diplomats initially sought to deny the award for fear of antagonising the US. The full substance of the case against Chaplin is detailed in a memorandum compiled in 1956 by an official in the Foreign Office research department.

The unnamed official refers to a raft of "public charges" linking the actor with communism, including his backing for Stalin's World War II campaigns and a telegram he sent in support of the 1949 Russian-backed World Peace Conference.

The official also lists several "grave moral charges", notably his two marriages to 16-year-olds, Mildred Harris and Lita Grey, and his later wedding to Paulette Goddard in China.

Of the latter union, he writes: "The suggestion seems to have been that Mr Chaplin and Miss Goddard, who first jointly attracted the attention of the gossip writers by journeying to the Far East together in 1933, were never really married."

Chaplin had also been declared the father of actress Joan Barry's child after a lengthy paternity suit.

Also raised in the memo are his financial affairs. Chaplin, who left the US after 42 years in 1952 for Switzerland, was being pursued by the US Internal Revenue Office for US$1 million ($2 million) in unpaid taxes.

The memo concludes: "While there is undeniably still much admiration for Mr Chaplin as an artist, even amongst those Americans who neither agree with his politics nor condone his morals, there has been remarkably little disposition, outside certain left-wing circles, to question the action of the Department of Justice in 1952 in virtually barring his re-entry into the United States."

The matter of Chaplin's suitability for a knighthood reared its head again in July 1971, when the Civil Service Department in London received a recommendation from "highly reputable, indeed distinguished sources".

Shortly afterwards, the Queen was sent a letter by Fergus Horsburgh, a Canadian, advocating knighthoods for both Chaplin and P.G. Wodehouse, whose name had been blackened during the war over allegations that he acted as a Nazi propagandist. He wrote: "No doubt these men have erred, but they are both old now. Why not forgive and forget?"

In a recommendation to the Foreign Office, P.S. Milner-Barry of the Civil Service Department wrote of the Chaplin application: "What would the Foreign Office say? In the past [1957] they were 'strongly opposed', but a good deal of water has flowed under the bridge since then. There may be a feeling that it is time to let bygones be bygones."

When Chaplin was knighted four years later, aged 88, he was so frail that he had to be wheeled to the Buckingham Palace ceremony. Wodehouse was knighted the same year, but died 45 days later. Hope, who failed to steal Chaplin's thunder in 1975, received an honorary knighthood in May 1998.

- INDEPENDENT