October 14, 1927
Glendale
Pajamarino! Everybody loves pajamarino! Everybody, except, perhaps, Mr. Charles Chaplin.
Pajamarino, that time-honored tradition of frat boys garbing themselves in…pajamas! And thereafter lighting everything they can get their hands on on fire. And there’s something in there about football, and probably a booze-fueled orgy of rape and vandalism, but definitely football.
Which is all fine and good, yet again, Mr. Chaplin would disagree, in that he showed up for work this morning ready to get to work on his new picture The Circus. But two crucial props were missing…the circus wagons. He and his crew of fifty were held up—at Chaplin’s expense—as deputy sheriffs set about searching for the missing things.
They were located, finally, down on Moore Field at UCLA, apparently absconded with by the aforementioned Greeks of Occidental, who’d thrown them into the giant tower of chopped-up orphanages and dug-up caskets and whatnot ready for that night’s postgame bonfire.
So Chaplin’s people pulled the wagons off and back to Glendale, the rest of the kindling was sent that night aflame to hell, the pajama-clad ran amok, and all was right with the world.
We’ve come for your circus wagons.
Hollywood divorces may be ugly today, but the dissolution of the legal bonds between Charlie Chaplin and his child bride, Lita Grey, may have been nastier than K-Fed and Britney, Alec and Kim, and Loni and Burt put together.
In her nearly 50-page formal complaint against Chaplin, Grey leveled the following accusations: he’d forced her to have sex with him before they were married; he’d told her to get an abortion when he discovered she was pregnant; on their way back to Los Angeles after their wedding, he told her, “This marriage won’t last long. I’ll make you so — sick of me that you won’t want to live with me”; accused her of forcing him into marriage; had an affair with a prominent motion picture actress; told her she was stupid; encouraged her to commit suicide; only took her out 3-4 times during the first two months of their marriage “for the sake of appearances”; left her alone on Christmas while he went out and got drunk; threatened her life twice with a loaded revolver; and since their separation, had only given her $27 for milk for the babies.
In other baby news: local actress Lita Grey Chaplin today dropped her renewed bid for temporary alimony for herself and her two toddlers in an attempt to force her husband, one Charles Chaplin, into court. (Mr. Chaplin had impregnated Lita Grey when she was 16, he 35, resulting in a marriage and sensationally scandalous divorce which, when finalized in August of 1927, cost Chaplin $825,000 [$9,648,650 USD 2007].)