CHAPLIN IN SWITZERLAND

Here's a lovely look at Charlie Chaplin and his wife Oona (nee O'Neil as in Eugene O'Neil's daughter who her dad disowned for marrying Chaplin one month after her eighteenth birthday) at their luscious home in Vevey, Switzerland in 1975. Chaplin is 86, two years away from his passing and a man clearly very much in love with and beholden to his lovely wife. (I believe they had eight children together by the way. And what of it?)  Chaplin's predilection for much younger--indeed not of legal age--women would, of course, be a total career-ender now and might likely have driven him from the country, Polanski-like, as opposed to his affiliation with the Communist party (which did the job successfully in 1952). But what would the Chaplin's life in Beverly Hills have looked like in the 1970s had they stayed? Chaplin's house on Summit Drive was called 'Breakaway House' due to its having been built from spare parts of movie sets. It most likely would have been a ruin by then (it was torn down in the 60s I believe) and the Chaplin's most likely would have wound up in Trousdale, around the corner from Groucho and Danny Thomas. How depressing would that have been?

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