While in Minneapolis I read Scott Eyman's latest, “Charlie Chaplin vs. America,” and recommend it. It's biography, but centered around the effort, led by a few figures in U.S. politics and journalism (Hedda Hopper, J. Edgar Hoover and Truman's AG James McGranery), to kick Chaplin out of the country and keep him out. How did they do this? By conflating his sexual peccadilloes with left-wing politics, even though, with the latter, there was no evidence, zero, that Chaplin was or had ever been a member of the communist party. As for the former, he lost a paternity suit in 1943 even though a blood test proved he wasn't the father—but blood tests weren't conclusive “proof” in those years. That would come later.

I'll have more. I do like this bit, this European sense of the wonder of early America:

When he spoke of America in these years [of exile], he tended to speak of the country he had found in his youth, not the clenched fist the country became after World War II—“The days when I was touring America with Fred Karno's vaudeville troupe. Then I was having experiences that made the marvelous country come alive for me. ”I was just a kid out from England, with all sorts of fancies about the West and the frontier. So when we hit towns such as Denver, Tacoma, Minneapolis—places with rich American names—I felt I was right in the middle of a new and wonderful thing."

Fun reading that in Minneapolis.