Pantomimic Scandal

British law intervened last week to prevent the King-Emperor from reading an account of the affairs of his best known subject. Of the subject Mme. Sarah Bernhardt once said: "He is the greatest of all pantomimics." Yet Parliament recently passed a law (TIME, Dec. 20) forbidding the publication of sensational divorce details. Therefore though George V., R. I., may have read the London papers never so carefully last week, he read only half a dozen sentences about the cause celebre precipitated last week by an 18-year-old girl who was studying to be a typist before she married Charles Spencer Chaplin, born at London in 1889, still a Briton.

Typical British Account. "The famous cinema comedian, Charles Chaplin, became the defendant in an action for divorce begun yesterday at Los Angeles, the centre of his motion picture activities in the States. Counsel for Mrs. Chaplin secured an injunction restraining him from disposing of his funds or property in California which are said to have a value of -L-3,000.000.

"The allegations filed by Mrs. Chaplin covered 42 pages of legal foolscap, and were at once printed and hawked about the city of Los Angeles at a shilling a copy."

To these meagre details the Daily Mail added a sarcastic comment that it would not risk printing a picture of Comedian Chaplin, lest this constitute a legal breach.

Suppression. British editors were obliged to throw into their wastebaskets thousands of words cabled from the U. S. Allegations kept out of the British press:

MRS. CHAPLIN'S

That she was "a virtuous and innocent girl about two months past the age of 16 years" when he "seduced her under promise of marriage."

That "upon discovery by the defendant of the condition of the plaintiff, the defendant delayed the marriage for a long time in an effort to induce the plaintiff to prevent the birth of said child by submitting herself to a criminal operation, and so conducted himself that the plaintiff's physical condition became publicly and generally known at the time of their marriage."

That Mr. Chaplin said to men friends in speaking of his marriage: "Well, boys, this is better than going to the penitentiary, but it won't last long."

That he boasted of his affairs with "five movie actresses," threatened Mrs. Chaplin with a revolver, and "always detested" their two children.

MR. CHAPLIN'S

That, two years ago, "Lita was a big, well-developed girl and I never thought she was only 16 years old. ... I thought she loved me. I certainly loved her. I wanted six children--if I could have any-- and she said she did, too. ... I had dreams of children. I wanted them, longed for them, hoped for them, but because of my experiences with my first wife, Mildred Harris, I thought I was incapable of fatherhood.

"Lita's mother often suggested to me that I marry Lita and I said I would love to if only we could have children. Mrs. Grey deliberately and continuously put Lita in my path.

"Mother and daughter would come to my house and the mother would go and leave Lita and me alone. She even insisted that Lita and I occupy the same berth on our trip to Mexico" [after which they were married].

"On the very day when she informed me, 'You've got to marry me or we'll go to the district attorney,' she added, 'You're not the only one making a sacrifice. I am giving up the man I love to marry you because you are responsible for my present condition.' ... A man named Hilton it was. ... It wasn't lasting, however, because she later became violently in love with a boy named Ernie Tumbler. . . . Now and then she would taunt me, 'I don't get a kick out of being married to you.' . . . And then--I suppose it was in an effort to justify her conduct with Tumbler--she started telling her friends I was a degenerate."

That Mrs. Chaplin and her mother, Mrs. Grey, have been demanding $1,000,000, with the threat: "We'll ruin you if you don't settle."

Significance. The Chaplin case was momentous in British newspaperdom as the first divorce action to test thoroughly the new suppressive law. Was it well that Britons could not read the details of the case, or, in the words of Viscount Burnham, proprietor of the Daily Telegraph, is the law "an instrument of propaganda designed to persuade the world that Britons are moral by obscuring their immoralities?"

The New York World expressed its transatlantic opinion in this question in a tart editorial:

"In this country we have a bad misconception about divorce suits. We assume that because the law is invoked every detail then becomes public property. This is wrong. . . . We invoke the law when we perform a marriage, but we do not give the public the right to know what the bridegroom said when he proposed, or all the details of what took place after the wedding."

Meanwhile copies of the World and other publications which printed the Chaplin story in extenso were being smuggled into England by shrewd transatlantic stewards, who hawked them to those able and willing to pay.