Lillita
(Lita) McMurray first met Chaplin on April 15, 1914 - her sixth
birthday. After Lita's mother spotted Chaplin sitting in the rear of
a restaurant, she asked the owner, “Do you think it would disturb
Mr. Chaplin if my daughter were introduced to him?” The owner
replied, “[...] I'm sure it'll be all right. He's very flattered
when the children want to meet him, but he's shy of grownups” And
it was all right. Upon meeting Lita Chaplin opined, “Hasn't
she lovely dark eyes and hair?”
By the
time Lita was twelve, the “incredibly shy” Chaplin had become one
of the most famous men on the planet and arguably the most famous man
in the United States which is why when twenty-nine-year-old Chaplin
married six-teen-year-old Mildred Harris he only “drew gasps and
condemnations only from a small section of the public.”
Lita met
Chaplin again six years later after Chuck Riesner, Chaplin's
assistant director, offered Lita a small but controversial part in The Kid. When
Lita visited Chaplin's studio to the sign the contract, she was
offered the opportunity to meet Chaplin. In anticipation of meeting
him, the previous day Lita stood “in front of her full-length
mirror, melodramatically posing and admiring [her] developing
breasts.” Chaplin, in his mid-thirties, opined to twelve-year-old
Lita, “You're an extremely pretty child, my dear and I'm glad Mr.
Riesner found you.”
After
Chaplin had a company artist paint a likeness of Lita similar to the
girl in Sir Joshua Reynolds' 'Age of Innocence', Lita began to
“catch” Chaplin looking at her with a “rapt expression”. She
wrote “It was an expression I couldn't define, but it made me feel
strange.” After Chaplin showed Lita the painting he confessed,
“I've been peeking at you, my dear, when you haven't been looking.
I've been more and more drawn to those fascinating eyes of yours.
They're so very young […] And only twelve years old! Amazing!
Using
a seduction technique that Royal encouraged in The Pimp
Game, one that Robert Beck
shared in Iceberg Slim, The Lost Interviews
and one that the Milner's discovered in Black Players, The
Secret World of Black Pimps,
Lita wrote that Chaplin “had a reputation for hibernating after a
picture” and that after The Kid
was completed she “[...] saw Chaplin rarely or not at all.” She
shared “I discovered myself missing him, missing the fuss he made
over me […] I had developed a twelve-year-old's crush on him and I
could hardly wait to see him again.”
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| Chaplin and Lita |
On
the first day back at the studio after the New York premier of The
Kid, Chaplin invited Lita,
unchaperoned, to a birthday party for Mae Collins at his home;
however, Lita's mother overheard the conversation, rejected the
invitation and “steered” Lita home. Subsequently, Chaplin gave
Lita and her mother the “cold shoulder” and at the end of the
year, Lita's option on her contract was not picked up.
Lita
shared that as she was nearing her fifteenth birthday, sex was
“uppermost” in her mind “a great portion of the time”. Thus,
Lita was enthralled by the stories that her good friend Merna Kennedy
shared. Merna who was approximately five months younger than Lita had
“brick-red hair, fair skin and blue eyes” Lita pleaded with Merna
“Gee, I'm hardly fifteen!” Merna replied, “If you're big
enough, you're old enough.” Merna shared with Lita that she had
lost her virginity at the age of thirteen and had subsequently had
sex with “five boys and one man”.
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| Merna and Chaplin |
By
fifteen, Lita, although still a virgin, had become self-assured
enough to pursue a role in Chaplin's The Gold Rush.
After Lita got the part, she had “wishful daydreams” of Chaplin
making love to her. She was certain that it would never happen since
her mother was “zealously against” it. However, she was “[...]
consumed by the fantasy of being held and kissed and protected by
Charlie.”
Lita
recalled the moment that it became “incontestably clear” that
Charlie was sexually attracted to her as well. It was “at lunch in
the dining car on the way to Truckee [to shoot scenes for The
Gold Rush].” She wrote
“Charlie was lunching with two studio workers at his table, and
Mama and I were lunching at the table directly across the narrow
aisle. He glanced up and saw me, and from the way he looked at me I
suddenly got the feeling that he was seeing me for the first time –
and that he very much approved of what he saw. All the guardedness,
all his reserve was stripped away, and his distinctly intimate gaze
sent erotic waves across the aisle that a shiver tore through me.”
While
in Truckee Lita was told by Henry Bergman, “Charlie wonders why you
haven't dropped by to say hello.” Fifteen-year-old Lita, with her
mother bedridden with the flu, almost immediately sauntered to
thirty-five-year-old Chaplin's room. Here is a summary of what took
place after some bantering:
Chaplin's
hands circled Lita's waist and pulled the nymphet closer to him. Then
he “roughly” pushed her onto the bed before he kissed her mouth
and neck and caressed her body. Lita asked Chaplin, who was in a pair
of red silk pajamas, to, “Please...stop...”, but he covered her
“mouth with a deep-drawn kiss.” and clutched her breast “with
almost brutal force.” Lita pleaded with Chaplin to stop, which he
did, but forwarned Lita, “I'm going to make love to you. When the
time and the place is right, we're going to make love.”
Despite
Chaplin's aggression and Lita's (dis)pleasure with Chaplin's hour of
“erotic scrutiny”, Lita decided that if she and Chaplin were
alone again, she would be “ […] ready for him. Eagerly ready.”
After
they arrived back in Los Angeles, Chaplin convinced Lita's mother to
allow Lita to be seen with him in public as her protégée
for publicity purposes. He assured her that they would not be
attending “premieres and dinner parties alone” but that his
fiancée, Thelma Morgan
Converse, would be the third wheel. Lita's mother agreed, but even
Lita knew that her mother “was making a big mistake”.
Consequently,
Chaplin was able to get Lita alone at the Santa Monica Swimming Club,
where he went to relax. He brushed Lita's ear and neck with his lips
before he lowered Lita's bathing suit straps and palmed her “tingling
breasts in his palms.” Lita “aggressively” threw her arms
around Chaplin and hugged him - “bringing him closer”. Chaplin
then “peeled” the bathing suit completely off of Lita and
muttered to himself, “Beautiful, incredibly beautiful...”
However, after Chaplin lowered himself and began “moving with
small, steady increases of force”, Lita pleaded, “No. Oh, I
can't, I can't!” But after Chaplin informed Lita that the pain
would have quickly ceased after her hymen broke, Lita asked,
“Why-didn't you keep on, then?” Charlie sympathetically replied,
“Because you were so fearful.”
After
dinner at Musso Frank's Restaurant, in the back seat of Chaplin's
large limousine, Chaplin's “soft hand dug into the bodice” of
Lita's dress, “[h]is other hand darted under” Lita's skirt and
“danced” up her thigh until it found her “underpants”.
Chaplin “found his way to the top of the elastic banded underpants,
and wordlessly he yanked them down”; however, the pain was still
too intense for Lita. Thus, once again Chaplin mercifully stopped.
But
three days later Charlie announced that he had a “blistering
headache”, dismissed everyone except Lita and (fully) took her
virginity in the steam room of Chaplin's Cove Way mansion. Lita wrote
“The pain blinded me far more than the encircling steam, but I
writhed wildly, as though in ecstasy […] I was fifteen, but I felt
younger than fifteen.”
Lita
wrote about Chaplin's ephebophilia. She shared “It's hardly a
secret that Charlie had a penchant for young girls. He approached
them as projects, and indeed, cared for them. He liked to cultivate
them, to gain their trust, to be their first-never their second or
third lover, and to create them as scrupulously as he created a
motion picture. To me he admitted his preference for the company of
inexperienced girls over experienced women. '[…] The most beautiful
form of human life is the very young girl just starting to bloom
[...]'”
Minutes
after Chaplin unsuccessfully attempted to have Lita perform fellatio,
Lita “heard the doorknob squeak in turning.” Lita's mother
“tottered weakly into the room” and found them in the nude “in
each other's arms”.
Lita
defended Chaplin by “insisting” she was the one who aggressively
pursued him. She resented “being treated like a put-upon little
angel who'd had no part in the seduction”.
However,
Lita's mother insisted that Chaplin marry her daughter or she
threatened to alert the authorities. In an effort to avoid going to
the penitentiary for statutory rape, “prematurely graying”
Chaplin fled to Mexico in 1924 with pregnant Lita for an impromptu
weeding that would be his second marriage to a sixteen-year-old.
Lita wrote that after the ceremony she overheard Chaplin say to a
lieutenant, “Well, this is better than the penitentiary, I guess,
but it won't last.” And on the train ride back to California,
Chaplin matter-of-factly yet almost compassionately told his new
bride, “This would be a good time for you to put an end to your
misery. Why don't you jump?”
Chaplin
was correct. It didn't last. Two years, two children, four affairs
with Ed Purviance, Peggy Hopkins, Marion Davies and Lita's young
friend Merna and two children later, Judge Walter Guerin awarded the
children a $100,000 trust fund and Lita $625,000 in the divorce
settlement.
(Mildred
Harris, Chaplin's first nymphet wife, did not write a book;
therefore, there are not many details about their marriage but it
appears to be similar to Lita's marriage. Chaplin and Harris were
married after Chaplin was under the impression that sixteen-year-old
Harris was pregnant. However, two years, one baby, who died three
days after birth, and two accusations of infidelity later, Harris was
awarded a $100,000 divorce settlement.)
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| Mildred Harris |
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