Michael J Chaplin tells a story about an ancient sect that only counted a man’s age from the day his father died. It has resonated with him ever since he heard about it. On this score, he is 46 years old – his father, Charlie Chaplin, died on Christmas Day in 1977.
On a more conventional score, Michael is 77 and about to publish his first novel. A Fallen God is a retelling of the medieval romance Tristan and Isolde set in the 13th century. Apart from his family (he’s been married twice and has seven children), he says it’s the first thing he has done in his life that he’s truly proud of.
He likes to see the day his father died as a rebirth. It’s not that Michael disliked his dad. He loved him and couldn’t have admired him more. After all, Chaplin Sr is not only one of the greatest actors ever, but the first ever global celebrity, recognisable by his silhouette alone. The moustache, bowler hat, walking stick and splayed feet of his creation The Little Tramp remains iconic. There were so many remarkable scenes in his films – Charlie caught in the cogs of capitalism in Modern Times; the blind flower girl seeing him for the first time at the end of City Lights; prospectors struggling up the snowbound Chilkoot pass in the The Gold Rush; the Jewish barber, pleading for kindness while impersonating fascist leader Adenoid Hynkel in The Great Dictator.
And that’s just the start of it. Charlie was a one-man film industry – writer, director, producer, editor and even composer of the movies made at his own studio. In 1919, he co-founded the distribution company United Artists, giving him complete control over his films. There were the controversies, too. While he was feted as a cinematic visionary, he was demonised by FBI director J Edgar Hoover for his alleged communist sympathies and proclivity for teenage girls, and feared by some he worked with for his control freakery.
“He cast a huge shadow over me,” says Michael, the second of eight children from Chaplin’s fourth and final marriage, to Oona O’Neill (Charlie had 11 children in total). He was dwarfed by his father’s personality, intimidated by his power and sometimes simply scared of him. For much of his life, he says, he has been trying to find a purpose. “In my early years, I just drifted from one thing to another, I wasn’t doing anything solid.” Was he aware of his father’s genius as a little boy? He nods. “Yes, but in a negative way. It was rammed down my throat. My teachers would always say: ‘You’ll never be like your father.’”
He tried his hand at acting and pop music, briefly became infamous as a pot-smoking hippy in swinging 60s London, and spent many years running a goat farm in a remote part of south-west France. He says it was only after his father died that he realised what he really wanted to do with his life: write. “Once he died, I thought: ‘Yes, now I should write the novel. I should go ahead and do something.’” It was a new start? “Yes, absolutely.”
But progress wasn’t quick. Michael is one of life’s great procrastinators and it’s taken him the best part of a half-century to produce something worthwhile. “I tried to write novels when I was younger. I thought I’d have plenty to say, then when I sat down with the pen and paper I found I had nothing to say.” He laughs. “It was very upsetting.” One day a friend took him aside and told him that the problem with his writing was that it was superficial, that it never dealt with deeper truths. “He said: ‘Michael, your problem is you’re afraid to put yourself down on the page.’ He was right. I had to be braver. Put yourself, your weakness in the characters. It has to come from within you.”
* * *
Bravery is a recurring theme in Michael’s life – and in his novel. His father, he says, was astonishingly brave. Charlie’s parents, both music hall performers, separated before he was five. He barely knew his alcoholic father, while his beloved mother lived with mental illness throughout her adult life. Charlie and his brother Sydney spent their early years in and out of Lambeth Workhouse in London. And yet from this desperate start, he reached unimaginable heights – creatively and financially. He died one of the wealthiest men in the film industry, leaving an estimated $100m to his family (roughly $500m, adjusted for inflation). Michael could not have been more different: ambition to him was a filthy word.
A Fallen God is a beautifully told epic fairytale for all ages. While adults may wrestle with themes of church and state, action and inaction, and the transformative power of love, it could be read to kids as a bedtime story. The obvious hero is Tristan – a swashbuckling man of action, irresistible to Isolde. It’s possible to see Charlie in the character, but Michael insists that was not his intention. By contrast, Isolde’s husband, King Mark, is passive to the point of paralysis until he finally learns the importance of fighting for love.
“Obviously, I’m Mark,” he says. In what way? “I’ve been through the things he’s been through. I haven’t been a very dynamic person. I wasn’t doing anything with my life. I was quite happy but it was a problem for my wife, it was a problem for my wife’s father, and it became a problem for the children. I had no ambition at all.”
It wasn’t always this way. In the 60s, Michael seemed very much like a man of action. He spent his first few years in Beverly Hills, California, where his father was a victim of McCarthyism. Charlie sided with the left, refused to cross picket lines in the 1945-46 Hollywood strikes, and supported the Progressive party candidate Henry Wallace in the 1948 presidential election.
He insisted he was not a communist (“I do not want to create any revolution, all I want to do is create a few more films,” he said) but the FBI was determined to destroy him. It fed classified information and rumours (often about relationships with much younger women) to the Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper and, before long, Charlie was regarded as a traitor in the United States. By 1952, his film Limelight, which featured Michael in the opening shot, was being picketed.
Charlie had never applied for citizenship and, while he was sailing to London with the family to promote Limelight, the US government revoked his re-entry permit. The family moved to Switzerland, where Michael spent the rest of his childhood living in a neoclassical mansion on the banks of Lake Geneva.
Did Michael know why they were suddenly living on a different continent? “No. I was six years old when we were on the ship coming to Europe and he received a telegram saying he couldn’t go back to America. I heard it without understanding.” Michael would ask his mother when they would return home – but she would never reply. His father was in a terrible state. “He thought he could lose all his money, which was in America,” he says. “My mother took a plane back to sign all the money into Mexico.” It must have been terrifying for him, I say. “I think so. But he’s a fighter.” Does he still think of his father in the present tense? “Yes,” he says. “He’s in there somewhere.”
* * *
Michael is with his wife, the painter Patricia Betaudier Chaplin, in Málaga when we Zoom. He spends part of the year there, part in Switzerland. He looks like a rough-hewn version of his father, with a touch of Willie Nelson thrown in for good measure. A fedora is perched on his head, his leather jacket is gnarled and his white ponytail slides down his back. He’s clearly never lost his inner – or outer – hippy.
I ask what Charlie was like as a father. “Intimidating,” he says. He was tough, unyielding and often remote with his sons. Less so with his daughters. Michael believes Charlie’s lack of a male role model as a child resulted in him struggling with his sons. “He never really mentioned his father. I don’t think he’d ever really seen or known him, but he’d talk about his mother endlessly. He adored her.
“He always said: ‘I’m a loner, I have no friends.’” Was that true? “Not really. He had a big family and loads of friends that came to the house: Graeme Greene, Truman Capote, Noël Coward, loads of writers.” Michael pauses. Actually, he says, most of them were really friends of his mother’s. Oona, Charlie’s fourth wife, was the daughter of the playwright Eugene O’Neill. She loved writers. She married Chaplin when she was 18 and he was 54. “I had a very close relationship with my mother,” Michael says. “She gave me an appetite for reading. She introduced me to books like L’Etranger by Camus.” Did she write herself? “She wrote wonderful letters – funny, colourful and gossipy. She asked them to be destroyed after her death.” Why? “She kept herself in the shadows. It was where she was comfortable.” It was hard not to be in the shadows around his father. Michael talks of his first experience on a film set with him, when Charlie was making Limelight. “I remember this huge studio, and hearing my father’s voice through a loudspeaker. I couldn’t see him. He was saying: ‘No! Go over there!’ I was quite intimidated.”
When Michael was 10, Charlie cast him in A King in New York. The film, a satire of the McCarthy witch-hunt, was Charlie’s final leading role. Michael played a precocious teenager well versed in Marx – a sharp contrast to Michael who had never read a political text in his life. Did he enjoy working with his father? “I loved it. It had a biblical side to it. In ancient days, the sons went to work with their father in the field or wherever, and it felt like that.”
The film gave him a taste for acting. But Charlie, who had no formal education, was determined that his sons in particular do well academically. “He said: ‘Your only defence in this world is to be educated.’” Did Michael listen? “No. I couldn’t listen to him ... I couldn’t listen in school. I couldn’t hear the teacher even if I was interested. I don’t know why.” He was tested for dyslexia. “There was a French teacher I liked, and she said: ‘Don’t let them tell you that you’ve got dyslexia – you’re just lazy.’” Did that make him feel better or worse? “Better. I didn’t want to have a condition.”
His father’s patience with him wore thin. Charlie could be so funny and playful, but his son rarely saw that side. “When he wanted to, he could entertain us. He was great at mime. He had a lot of weapons to amuse us with.” Did his father teach him his skills? “No, he did with his daughters. He, Geraldine and Victoria would do duets on the piano. He related to them. I never felt that he didn’t love us, but he could get very angry and frustrated.”
Did the anger express itself in physical violence? “No. He gave me a few spankings but that was normal in the 50s.” As Michael got older, their relationship became more troubled. At 16, he ran away to be with his girlfriend. “I said I was going camping with friends and I went straight to London to see her. I didn’t come back for two years.” How did his parents react? “My father wouldn’t speak to me.”
At 18, he started a relationship with the actor Patricia Johns (now Patrice Chaplin), who was seven years his senior. They tried to get married in Barcelona, but because Michael was so young he needed his parents’ permission. They refused to grant it. Didn’t it strike him as hypocritical that his father, whose first two wives were both 16, wouldn’t let him marry a woman of 25? “I didn’t make the connection,” he says.
Charlie met his second wife, Lita Grey, when she was 15 and he was 35. When she became pregnant, her mother threatened to report him to the police. He could have been charged with statutory rape in California. A discreet marriage was hastily arranged in Mexico. When they divorced three years later, Grey accused him of statutory rape, seduction of a minor, soliciting abortions and “perverted sexual desires”, details of which were leaked to the press. The judge awarded Grey the world’s then-largest divorce settlement of more than $800,000 (approximately $14m today) – $625,000 for her, and $100,000 to be placed in a trust for each of their children.
Does Michael think his father was a paedophile? “They were young brides, but he was not breaking the law. The rock singer Jerry Lee Lewis married a girl of 13 and he got into trouble. My father didn’t get into trouble because she was a bit older, I suppose. I don’t want to defend my father, but I don’t think he was ever someone to use women purely sexually. He fell in love with a lot of young ladies, but he wasn’t forcing them to have sex.”
Back in London, Michael won a place at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, but he didn’t finish the course. His fellow students had “all read Shakespeare. They were keen, ambitious. And I was smoking marijuana and having a good time. I had no talent for acting.”
Was he disappointed? “No, I was in full swinging 60s mode. I was reading Burroughs and was into the counterculture.” After the story of his failure to marry Johns in Barcelona became front-page news, the pair got married in England, which also made headlines. When it was discovered that he and Johns, who by now had a baby son, were claiming benefits, they were all over the newspapers again. It’s strange that was considered news, I say – you’re hardly the first people to have claimed benefits. “Yes, but not the son of a millionaire.” How did his father feel about it? “We never spoke about it. I’m sure he was absolutely furious.” On 5 April 1965, the front page of the Daily Telegraph ran with the headline: “My son should work, says Oona Chaplin” beneath a photograph of a bearded Michael.
A couple of days later, Michael was back in the news again after signing a record deal. Was he a good pop singer? He looks sheepish, and tells me he released a single called I Am What I Am. “To be honest with you, I hadn’t written the song. I needed some money at the time, and I let these people tell me what to do and they released the record. It didn’t go anywhere in the charts, and didn’t deserve to.”
His most memorable newspaper appearance came in 1966, after he published a memoir at 19 with the fabulous title I Couldn’t Smoke the Grass on My Father’s Lawn. Even better, he then went to court to try to stop his own book being published – and failed. It had been written by two ghost writers and was rammed with potentially libellous material. How did the family feel about it? “My father was very angry because I wasn’t too kind to him and some of his friends … Again we didn’t talk for a long time after it.” What had he said about Charlie? “It stereotyped him a bit.” How? “Discontented, never happy.”
Was that image unfair? “Yes, absolutely. You can say it on the surface. But you see where he came from and how he had to fight to get where he was. And he had deep relationships with HG Wells, Bernard Shaw, Winston Churchill. He and Einstein would go out in Hollywood and have fun.”
Around this time, Charlie was making a film with Marlon Brando called A Countess from Hong Kong. Brando later called Charlie “fearsomely cruel”, “an egotistical tyrant” and “the most sadistic man I’d ever met”. It was inevitable that they’d fall out, Michael says. “I thought: ‘How can they work together? They’re just complete opposites.’” While Brando liked to do his own thing, Charlie insisted on choreographing every move.
Michael was banned from the set because Charlie still wasn’t talking to him. “He thought I wasn’t doing anything; wasting away. And he was right.” Despite this, he says, he ended up working on the film without his father’s knowledge after the producer, an old family friend, gave him a job. “I was sorting out photographs of young actresses and running errands.” Did he get a credit? He laughs. “It wasn’t a job that merited a credit, but I got to meet Brando. He invited me to supper one night in his house.” He does a mumbling Brando impersonation. “He said to me: ‘I’ve seen you and your father,’ and he pointed his finger at me.” What did he mean by that? “Brando could read people, and he saw I was keeping a protective distance when dealing with my father, because he was quite explosive. He could relate to it. I suppose he liked me because he was also having problems dealing with him.”
Michael’s marriage to Johns ended when he was 20. He met Betaudier Chaplin the following year, and they have been together ever since. In 1978 they retreated to south-west France to bring up their children (who include the actors Carmen and Dolores Chaplin) on a farm. Was he a good farmer? He shakes his head. “We only had six acres and 30 goats. The farmers’ union accepted me because they needed farmers. Occasionally, they came at 8am when we were all asleep in bed to see if we were doing anything.” He produced a bit of milk, but not enough to live on. But they had a “very nice subsidy”. The whole region was being abandoned. “There was no industry there, the schools were emptying and there was a lower population in the region than in the middle ages.”
So what attracted him? The landscape, he says. “I love that place. We were right in the heart of the Crusades against Cathars and you can feel a real melancholy there.” The Cathars were a 12th- and 13th-century sect that preached an austere form of Christianity and believed the world was created by an evil force. They were regarded as heretics by the Catholic church and were burned at the stake on huge pyres. The slaughter of the Cathars eventually became the backdrop for A Fallen God.
* * *
It was on the goat farm, where they spent 13 years, that Michael began to be undone by his lack of ambition. The way he talks about it, he almost stopped being a player in his own life, feeling that whatever he achieved, he knew he couldn’t compete with his father, or match his father’s hopes for him. “I was going nowhere, and everything was falling apart in the family we created. Our marriage was going through a hard time. My wife is much more dynamic and she doesn’t mince her words. I despaired about my life and what it had become. It was a hard moment, but it gave me something to write about. I’m very grateful …” It took him two decades to complete the book but his malaise provided the inspiration for King Mark in the novel. And, in turn, King Mark became a means of addressing that malaise. “I wanted it to be about how you can bring yourself out of a state of despair. If you can accept it on a mythical level, then it can lift you out”
I ask if he ever reconciled with his father. Not fully, he says. But there are positive memories from later years. He tells me of the time Charlie discovered that he had Roma blood, and how proud both of them were. One of the few things they shared was a love of Gypsy culture. Then there was a time he took his father to a cafe he’d discovered behind Victoria station in London that served jellied eels and mash. “He was really enjoying it.” But then Charlie soured the occasion. “I think he thought he was being too good to me so he looked at me and tapped me on the shoulder and said: ‘You know your sister Geraldine is a great actress.’” He laughs – this time wistfully. “Just to let me know!”
Perhaps his happiest memory is an occasion when he feels Charlie came closest to acceptance of, or even respect for, him. Charlie was in his 80s, and retreating further and further into himself. “We went to a very expensive restaurant in Paris when he could still talk just a little. I was talking about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance [Robert M Pirsig’s fictionalised autobiography] and explaining it to my mother, and he looked at me and said: ‘You’re a mystic.’ I felt very touched.” He looks on the verge of tears.
After his father’s death, Michael began to reassess their relationship. Perhaps Charlie had only wanted to toughen him up for the world – his greatest fear was that his children would experience the hardship he had as a child. Michael also became more critical of himself. “I definitely wasn’t a good son. I ran away from home. I embarrassed him …” He trails off.
Soon after his mother died in 1991, Michael and his brother Eugene and their families moved into their parents’ Swiss mansion. They lived there for 10 years before it was turned into a museum, Chaplin’s World, which finally opened in 2016. Was this a way of preserving their father’s legacy? “To be honest, a house that size just swallows money, and we were going bankrupt. But when we were there, so many people would come knocking at the door from all around the world, so we got the idea of a museum. And it’s a very good museum.”
Today, Michael feels at peace – with his father, and himself. He knows that many of his loved ones doubted that he would finish his book. “It became a kind of joke,” he says. “‘He’s writing his book.’ But I knew I wouldn’t allow myself to not finish it.” Is he working on another one? He smiles. “This took 20 years. I don’t think I have 20 years left for another, but who knows?”
He says his mother would be thrilled that he’s finally a published novelist. As for his father, he doesn’t like to presume to speak on Charlie’s behalf, so he tells me a story instead. “There was a coming together with my father, but it happened after his death. That’s why they say you count the years of your life from the moment of your father’s death. I started having powerful dreams where I confronted him and we talked together. It was when I went back to Switzerland and the family house. He’d stopped at that point being an obstacle and was opening the doors for me to live.”
He tells me of one particular dream about the Christmas card the Chaplins used to send out every year featuring a family photo. “For a long time, I was out of that Christmas card because I was abroad. When I came back, I was still not put back in that family photo. I wasn’t happy about not being in that picture, nor was my wife. Then I had a dream about meeting my father under this huge Lebanese pine tree in front of the house. He walked me into the living room, opened up the cupboard and he gave me that photograph, but now me and the whole family were in the card. Then I woke up.”
The dream gave him a sense of closure, he says. “I think he was telling me, wherever he is, that he’s not excluding me from his life.”
• A Fallen God by Michael J Chaplin is published on 28 January by the Book Guild. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com
