When Charlie Chaplin Was Expelled From the U.S.—for Decades
In late November of 1952, Oona O’Neill Chaplin, then a 27-year-old mother of four, flew from Europe to Los Angeles for a week-long visit to the house she and her husband had until recently called home. It wasn’t a pleasure trip. Oona was in town to wrap up their life in America and to recover her family’s fortune, the money her famous husband—Charlie Chaplin—had buried in the backyard.
According to a neighbor who recounted a conversation he had with Oona over a decade later, she took the recovered cash, went to a bank to convert the pile into thousand-dollar bills, and then sewed them into her mink coat, following her husband’s instructions. Ten days after her arrival, she slung her now very valuable mink over her arm, said a teary goodbye to her home country, and boarded a plane back to Europe.
“While the veracity of this particular story, like so many tales about the Chaplins, could be questioned, there is no doubt that Oona was a key figure in saving her husband’s assets and that had she not been up to the task, the bulk of the Chaplin fortune might have been lost,” Jane Scovell writes in the biography Oona: Living in Shadows.