Customer Reviews

Charlie Chaplin: Intimate Close-Ups (The Scarecrow Filmmakers Series)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is everything I expected it to be and more.

Too many books on famous faces are filled with stories of their sexual exploits. Too many of these books lose their credibility due to bad writing, unrealistic situations, and a tell-all attitude which cheapens the information presented. This book is not like that. It is classily put together like an old movie that never showed sex but smartly implied it. Hale does not blatantly throw her longtime love affair with Chaplin in the reader's face; she forces one to read between the lines and to still realize that there were barriers like marriage that she did not cross.

Along with stories about Chaplin, Hale reminisces on her life before and during stardom. She tells of winning a beauty contest that took her to Hollywood and meeting Chaplin on the street one day. She tells about filming The Gold Rush and her passionate love for Chaplin ever after.

More than anything else, though, this book gives its reader total insight into Chaplin as a man. He was tempestuously moody and difficult, yet insanely insightful. This all comes from a woman who knew him well for much of his life. So many books dismiss his personality to dissect his genius as a film maker but only glance at his behavior outside of that. This book looks into what Chaplin was like socially by a woman who was not only close to him, but is representative of the many women in the comic's life.

Miss Hale comes off as an annoying know-it-all bragging about Chaplin having an attraction to her during The Gold Rush in the Unknown Chaplin series. However, reading this book gives a whole new perspective on her. It helps one to understand that she was not bragging about Chaplin's affections; she was simply reveling in a tiny glimpse of hope that he might feel even a fraction of the love she felt for him. This is an honest, emotional account.

I am a big Chaplin fan, so I try and read whatever I can get my hands on. Georgia Hale was Charlie's leading lady for The Gold Rush, and unbeknownst to me, one of his major loves off-screen. Their relationship was on-and-off again for several years, but he kept coming back to her. I enjoyed reading about Georgia's childhood and her search to meet the man (she claims) who completely saved her life. Her accounts with him are surprising, endearing, memorable. I only wish she would spend more time talking about herself as an individual, instead of Charlie's companion. This accounts for gaps in time and information since it is apparent that she feels the times not spent with Charlie are not worth mentioning. She also ends the book on a rather uneventful and abrupt note which is dissatisfying. You learn more about Georgia's post-Chaplin life (but not much) in the introduction by the author. However, it is a touching recollection of her times with this amazing man, hence my 3 stars.

This is a very beautiful memoir about Charlie Chaplin. Hale fell in love with Chaplin's tramp character, "Charlie." In her memory, it happened as a young girl when she first saw him at the movies, but one can suggest that it really happened when she co-starred with him in the "Gold Rush" in 1926. They had a close off-and-on romantic relationship for the next 17 years.
Hale wrote this in the 1960's, when she was in her 60's and had not talked to Chaplin for over two decades. Still, the pain and pleasure of her relationship with him seems quite fresh.
Unfortunately, she seems to be seeing the relationship through the prism of her Christian Science ideology. It is hard to say if she really loved "Charlie" the artist, but hated "Mr. Chaplin" the Hollywood businessman, as she insists. This might be a later interpretation that she imposed upon the relationship to suppress the very real contradictions that the relationship must have held for her. We should remember that she was in constant competition with hundreds of beautiful women for his affection and companionship. She desperately wanted to be special for him. The only thing that seems to have made her special was her love for Charlie the tramp character. One can say that Chaplin loved her for her love of Charlie.
She does give a fascinating dream account towards the end of the book in which she marries Chaplin and moves to a small village in Greece with him. Obviously, there, she would not have faced the terrible competition for his affection that she faced in Hollywood.
Heather Kiernan has done a wonderful job of editing this work into a narrative whole from what was apparently very choppy and incomplete manuscripts.

I'm a huge fan of Charlie Chaplin's and I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. Georgia Hale was a "hidden" love of his and this book gave me a lot of new info on him. If you like Charlie Chaplin and want to learn about another part of his life, this is the book to read.

From the title of the book, one would expect intimate (i.e., sexual) tid-bits to be explored in this book. Forget it, Georgia Hale was almost without doubt Chaplin's mistress for several years but this prudish, virginal woman inexplicably chose to present herself as a chaste, untouched maiden, all the while living in Charlie's Summit Drive estate in Hollywood. Georgia Hale was Charlie's co-star in his immortal 1925 film "The Gold Rush;" she was discovered by Chaplin and she owned her entire career to him. She also fell madly in love with him but claims that she held off sleeping with him because of his (miserably unhappy) second marriage to Lita Grey. Her morality supposedly prevented her from taking the plunge with the Little Tramp. Yeah, right.

Georgia writes poorly, wanders all over the place in her style and tells the reader very little about Charlie besides the fact he was moody, brilliant, beautiful, sexy, maddening and immature. Oh yes, let's toss in genius to the mix, but we already knew all of that. Hale was in a unique position of revealing much about Charlie during a pivotal period in his life; she was undeniably close to him and he trusted her and treated her better than he treated many of his other paramours. But she muddies the water with an insipid and irritating style and the absolute crusher is the final chapter. It's an idiotic dream sequence which goes on forever and is both banal and bizarre.

The most interesting story in the entire book is when she briefly reunites with Charlie at the Beverly Hills Hotel in 1972. Oona leaves the room and Chaplin asks her, "Have you ever married?" Even after 40 years, Georgia is still hopelessly besotted with Charlie and breathlessly intones, "After you, Charlie, no man could compare." Naturally Chaplin adores this line and showers her with kisses. One senses this was Georgia Hale's greatest moment since Charlie threw her over in the early 30's.

In short, a poorly written book, a tome of missed opportunities. Oh, what could have been!