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Paulette Goddard: Charlie Chaplin
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Paulette Goddard began to acquire her own fame after her performance in The Women(1939). She next worked with Bob Hope in The Cat and the Canary(1939), which established Paulette as a genuine star in her own right. She won a ten year contract with Paramount Studios, and danced with Fred Astaire and co-starred with future husband Burgess Meredith in Second Chorus(1940), and with Bob Hope again in The Ghost Breakers(1940). She again co-starred with Chaplin in his most famous film, The Great Dictator(1940).
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Pauline Levy, better known as Paulette Goddard, met Charlie Chaplin soon after he returned from his World Tour in 1931-32. Paulette, a divorceé in her early 20's, would be the oldest of his wives and the only divorceé. Paulette was doing bit work in films when she met Charlie at a party given by a friend of Chaplin's.
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In the tradition of their previous star bios (of Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth), Epstein and Morella now focus on Paulette Goddard, perhaps more famous for her illustrious lovesCharles Chaplin, Burgess Meredith and Erich Maria Remarquethan for her film career. Despite leading a high life both in Hollywood and abroad, Goddard, according to the authors, was not a celluloid damsel typical of her era: she was independent, unconventional and intelligent. A childhood that was impoverished educationally, emotionally and financially toughened her. Forced to drop out of school at age 14 to support her mother and herself, she married a rich husband who provided her with the first of the many "settlements" she would receive throughout her life. She was ... enabled to be professionally and socially selective and to ignore the intrusive demands of press and public. Although the biographers obviously admire Goddard, they have produced a routine and essentially superficial portrait.
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Paulette and Charlie remained distant friends over the years, but rarely saw each other. She even married and ended up living in Switzerland, but never met Chaplin while living there. But like in all the other cases, each succeeding wife would meet the previous. She did meet Charlie and Oona by chance in Paris and they had a pleasant lunch together. The last time she would see Chaplin, apparently, was in New York in 1972. Charlie and Oona were in America for the last time, since 1952, for Chaplin to receive his special Oscar award.
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The biggest ``adventure'' in Goddard's life probably consisted of successively marrying Charlie Chaplin, Burgess Meredith, and Erich Maria Remarque. Along the way this basically mediocre actress starred in films such as Modern Times , The Women , and The Great Dictator. Morella and Epstein, the authors of popular, gossipy studies of Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth, have written a run-of-the-mill Hollywood biography. John Smothers, Monmouth Cty. Lib., Freehold, N.J.
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Goddard's career went into full gear when she met Charlie Chaplin, who was looking for an unknown actress to play "The Gamin" in his 1936 film Modern Times. Struck by the actress's breathtaking beauty and natural comic sense, Chaplin not only cast her in the film, but fell in love with her. It is still a matter of contention in some circles as to whether or not Chaplin and Goddard were ever legally married (Chaplin claimed they were; it was his third marriage and her second), but whatever the case, the two lived together throughout the 1930s. Goddard's expert performances in such films as The Young in Heart (1938) and The Cat and the Canary (1939) enabled her to ascend to stardom without Chaplin's sponsorship, but the role she truly craved was that of Scarlett O'Hara in the 1939 epic Gone With the Wind. Existing test footage indicates that she would have made an excellent Scarlett, but the tide of public opinion was against her; since no one knew the state of her marital status with Chaplin, she was deemed a "moral risk," one whose casting as Scarlett would not sit well in America's Bible-belt states.
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