When Charlie Chaplin Was Deported From The U.S. For Decades

In late November 1952, Oona O’Neill Chaplin, then a 27-year-old mother of four, flew from Europe to Los Angeles to visit the house she and her husband had lived until recently called. home. It was not a pleasant trip. Oona was in the city to end their lives in America and to get her family’s fortune back, the money her famous husband—Charlie Chaplin—Buried in the backyard.

According to a neighbor who recounted a conversation he had with Oona more than a decade later, she took the cash recovered, went to the bank to change the piles of money into thousand-dollar bills, then sewed them. into a mink coat as directed by her husband. . Ten days after she arrived, she killed her right now very Valuable mink on her arm, said goodbye in tears to return to her homeland, and boarded the plane back to Europe.

“While the authenticity of this particular story, like so many Chaplins stories, can be questioned, there is no doubt that Oona was a key figure in saving her husband’s fortune and that If she hadn’t completed the mission, much of Chaplin’s fortune could have been lost,” wrote Jane Scovell in her biography. Oona: Living in the dark.