She was eighteen. He was fifty-four, exactly six months younger than her father.
This was the marriage that America could not stop talking about during the summer of 1943.
Oona O’Neill was the daughter of the famous playwright Eugene O’Neill, who had won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1936.
She had been named the “Number One Debutante of 1942” at New York’s famous Stork Club.
She moved in the same social circles as Gloria Vanderbilt and had even been romantically involved with a young writer, J. D. Salinger, who was reportedly deeply in love with her.
Then she met Charlie Chaplin.
He had considered her for a role in a film that was canceled in December 1942. But what was not canceled was their relationship.
On June 16, 1943, a Catholic priest in Carpinteria, California, refused to marry them because of Chaplin’s three previous divorces.
A local justice of the peace performed the ceremony instead, just five minutes later, with two witnesses present.
Eugene O’Neill never forgave his daughter.
He cut off all contact with her, and when he died in 1953, his will left her nothing.
Oona gave up her personal dreams—she had once turned down Vassar College to pursue Hollywood—and built a marriage that lasted thirty-four years and produced eight children.
Then came 1952.
Amid the fear and political tensions of the McCarthy era, the United States revoked Chaplin’s re-entry permit while he was traveling to London.
Oona returned to America alone, to their four young children, closed their Beverly Hills home, and handled all the family affairs herself.
In 1954, she gave up her American citizenship to stand fully by his side.
They settled at Manoir de Ban, overlooking Lake Geneva in Switzerland, where they lived for the next twenty-four years.
In 1972, America finally honored Chaplin with an honorary Academy Award, and he returned to American soil for the first time in two decades.
Oona was by his side, as always.
Charlie Chaplin died on Christmas Day, December 25, 1977.
Oona was only fifty-two years old and faced a question she had never had to ask herself before:
Who was she without him?
She had kept diaries and letters throughout her life.
In her will, she ordered that all of them be destroyed.
Oona died of pancreatic cancer on September 27, 1991, at the age of 66.
She was buried beside Charlie, in the same Swiss village.
In 1986, her daughter, Geraldine Chaplin, named her own daughter Oona, carrying the name forward into the next generation.
A woman who chose love at the age of eighteen and never looked back, even when that choice cost her her father, a country, and, ultimately, a part of herself.
