Living in the shadows 1998 biography

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Her father, Nobel Prize-winning playwright Eugene O'Neill, was an alcoholic and distant man who abandoned Oona when she was a child and later disinherited her. And Chaplin found in Oona a steady, evenhanded companion who idolized him, and a caretaker for his dotage. Nevertheless, her dependent position and habitual self-effacement inevitably make Oona, however finely realized, a limited subject for a biography.

Hardly a story of marital victimization, this tells instead of how Oona made a choice, lived her life afterward, and in Chaplin probably found exactly what she wanted: ``father, lover, provider and protector.'' Only upon his death did her drinking grow debilitating. Drawing on extensive research, arts journalist Scovell (who has been co-author to Elizabeth Taylor and Kitty Dukakis) moves quickly from the proverbial family tree to chart the messier human trail left by mother Agnes Boulton O'Neill's flightiness and father Eugene's nearly lifelong absence and rejection of their daughter.

It was Oona's mutually supportive union with Chaplin, Scovell contends, that saved her from the inner demons that led to the suicides of her drug-addicted brother, Shane, and her half-brother, Yale classicist Eugene O'Neill Jr. Oona and Chaplin moved to Switzerland in 1953 after Hollywood blacklisted the comic for leftist leanings; they had eight children, who gave Oona mixed, yet, on the whole, favorable reviews as a mother.

Her older half brother, Eugene O'Neill Jr., was a brilliant Ivy League scholar; her brother, Shane, was addicted to drugs. As for whether Oona ever wanted more for herself, Scovells as clear as her research allows. Drawing on extensive research, arts journalist Scovell (who has been co-author to Elizabeth Taylor and Kitty Dukakis) moves quickly from the proverbial family tree to chart the messier human trail left by mother Agnes Boulton O'Neill's flightiness and father Eugene's nearly lifelong absence and rejection of their daughter.

She speculates that the mutual protection offered by the marriage somewhat diminished and compromised the couple's awareness of the world; Gold Rush co-star Georgia Hale even questions their unions perfection. At age 17, Oona, a Manhattan debutante spurned by the neglectful, alcoholic, famous father who had abandoned her when she was two, went to Hollywood to become an actress.

Scovell paints a scathing picture of O'Neill pere as an aloof, mean-spirited parent who dumped Oona's eccentric, alcoholic mother, Agnes Boulton, in 1927 to marry actress Carlotta Monterey. In compelling detail, it relates how as a girl she turned her back on Manhattan's cafe society and went to Hollywood to become an actress. At fifty-four, Charlie Chaplin was thirty-six years her senior, had been married three times, and had had a steady stream of mistresses.

According to Scovell, who has collaborated on autobiographies with Elizabeth Taylor, Kitty Dukakis and Maureen Stapleton, Oona found in Chaplin a father surrogate, but also a genuine love match. There, the eighteen-year-old starlet met and fell in love with the world's adored King of Comedy. To the surprise of the world, they wed. As Scovell makes clear in this touching, bittersweet biography, Oona's tragedy was that she went directly from the specter of her awful father to Chaplin: "She never stood on her own."
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Devotion to genius characterizes the life of Eugene ONeills daughter and Charlie Chaplin's wife in this respectful overview.

Instead, a year later, in 1943, she married Chaplin, then 54 and thrice-divorced, an English-born Casanova with a reputation for seducing young women.