The remarkable, story of Charlie Chaplin’s years of exile from the United States during the postwar Red Scare, and how it ruined his film career, from bestselling biographer Scott Eyman.

Film critic, Scott Ryman’s biography of Charlie Chaplin is a perceptive, insightful portrait of  Chaplin and of an America consumed by political turmoil, starts in 1952, as he was barred from re-entering America by opaque machinations bin the US state department. Once the most famous man in the world, Chaplin abroad the RMS Queen Elizabeth, bound for England now risked becoming “stateless, impoverished” in Ryman’s words “ Charlie Chaplin had been cancelled”.

Chaplin had never become a US citizen, something that would be held against him as xenophobia set in when the postwar Red Scare took hold. 

His repeated involvement with young women and girls was well publicised.  His first wife was 17 when they married, his second wide, Lita Grey began working with him aged 12. Mona O’Neill with whom he fell in love had eight children and lived out the rest of his life, was 18 when they met Chaplin was 54.

Eyman intruduces Chaplin’s friends Segei Eisenstein, Winston Churchill, the mobster Mickey Cohen, his foes J Edgar Hoover, the Nazi Party gossip columnist Hedda Hooper and his family, an absent , alcoholic father, a mentally ill mother, and a brother Sydney, who quit movies after being accused of biting off a young actor’s nipple in a violent sexual assault.

Chaplin was born into a world of extreme poverty in Victorian South London and sent to school for destitute children. Even after he became rich, the humiliation of being poor stuck with him. French writer Maurice Besst writes “ Poverty fitted Charlie like a glove”.

FB! Was angling to boot Chaplin out long before 1952. The ,most conservative minded capitalist e ever to be accused of communism”, owning shares in AT&T, Bank of America, Standard Oil and General Electric.

Charlie Chaplin vs America: When Art, Sex, and Politics Collided by Scott Eyman, Simon & Schuster £18.99/ $29.99, 432 pages.