Just a Peter Pan

A famed Hollywood comedian sat uneasily in the witness stand last week and considered the far-from-comic aspects of ingratitude. Charles Spencer Chaplin, 55, his platinum hair damp against his perspiring forehead, saw himself as an ill-used man. Three years ago, he had impulsively befriended an auburn-haired, freckle-nosed girl from Detroit named Joan Berry. There was a misty quality in the girl's shy brown eyes that made him think she might have picture possibilities. As it turned out, she didn't.

But she became the great Chaplin's protegee. Night after night, sometimes as often as five or six times a week during that summer and fall of 1941, he worked with her. He did "everything in the world to build her up spiritually as well as professionally. I believed in that girl. I lectured her. She was inarticulate. . . ."

Last week in court Miss Berry, 24, had obviously become articulate. She had accused Charlie Chaplin of having fathered her 14-month-old illegitimate daughter, Carol Ann, during a night in December 1942. A fascinated seven-woman, five-man jury--and hundreds of thousands of tabloid readers throughout the U.S.--got the kind of profane love story that the Hays office has not allowed Hollywood to film for years.

"A Little Love." Joan Berry's memory of Dec. 23, 1942--the night on which she claims that little Carol Ann was conceived--amounted to total recall. That night, she said, having heard no word from Chaplin for two weeks, Joan went to his home and stormed his bedroom, brandishing a gun. She said: "I'm almost out of my mind. You never called me."

What, the court wanted to know, was Chaplin doing all this time? Miss Berry shyly fingered her smooth calves: "He was playing with my legs--here. He said: 'You know where to get the pajamas.' I did and I got them. He made a little love to me . . ." And then they went to bed.

Next morning, Miss Berry was asleep in the "Paulette Goddard Room," named for Chaplin's third wife. When Chaplin came in, she said, he promised to pay her a regular $25 a week and she gave up the gun. On the stand, it suddenly occurred to Miss Berry that "telling a story like this" was "very embarrassing." The Court urged her to go right on. Well, she and Chaplin had both undressed.

"He walked back and forth in front of the mirror, flexing his muscles and said: 'You know, Joan, I look something like Peter Pan,* don't you think?'" After awhile, "we . . . lay there together talking over my career and my bills. . . ."

Chaplin's version of the same night: "She invaded my bedroom. She had a gun. She circled around me. I asked her what was up and she said she was going to kill herself in my home to create a scandal. She insisted on staying and I told her she could sleep in the guest room. I gave her some night clothes and didn't see her again until the next morning." How long had it been since Chaplin and Miss Berry had ceased being lovers? Chaplin: "Oh, some time in February 1942."

"I'm Human." At one point, Actor Chaplin lost his famed control. He pounded the witness stand, shook the white locks from his face, turned from Miss Berry's lawyer and shouted to the judge: "I've committed no crime, Your Honor. I'm human. I can't help it. But this man is trying to make me look like a monster."

Charles Chaplin had his reasons to feel abused. His lawyer says that three physicians, by blood analysis, have determined that he cannot possibly be the father of Miss Berry's baby. Further, Chaplin's lawyer hinted, Miss Berry is no one-man girl. Grown literate as well as articulate, the Chaplin protegee once wrote from Tulsa, where she was spending a week in a hotel at the expense of a wealthy oilman: "Why am I here? Having to go through with a cheap intrigue for a few stinking dollars. Why do we have to grow up into little gold-digging bitches?"

And though Chaplin's behavior toward a onetime mistress who cherished him had been consistently less than chivalrous, there was abundant evidence that he had given their romance a tone of intellectual uplift. He and Miss Berry apparently spent many an improving hour discussing topics of social significance. One evening "we talked about this & that and about the Second Front." When she suggested that she could not live on the $25 a week he gave her, he replied dialectically, "Oh, Joan, you are always coming up with those fascist ideas."

And she once wrote, in words that read like faithful echoes: "How right you are, Charles. We should destroy soulless, unimaginative, money-mad hypocrites who boast of breeding and are more ill-mannered than the lowest serf. . . ."

*Stage directions for J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan (or The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up): "The window is blown open . . . and Peter Pan flies into the room. Insofar as he is dressed at all, it is in autumn leaves and cobwebs." Says Peter Pan: "I'm youth, I'm joy, I'm a little bird that has broken out of the egg. . . . I don't want to go to school and learn solemn things. No one is going to catch me, lady, and make me a man. I want always to be a little boy and to have fun."

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