Word: lita
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...LIFE WITH CHAPLIN by Lita Grey Chaplin. 325 pages. Bernard Geis...
Lillita McMurray, as she was known back in the '20s, was Charlie Chaplin's second wife. At twelve, she had played as an extra in Chaplin's The Kid. By the time she was 16, Charlie had changed her name to Lita Grey, cast her as the leading lady in The Gold Rush, and was making love to her on the beach, in the back seat of his Locomobile, and in the. steam room of his Beverly Hills mansion...
...When Lita got pregnant, Charlie got furious. She writes that at first he tried to force her to get. an abortion, then changed his mind and married her before a Mexican justice of the peace. It seemed as if Charlie would never forgive Lita this propriety, but he relented when she began reading Fanny Hill and betraying an interest in amorous acrobatics. When Charlie Jr. was born, Charlie Sr. tucked her away for a month, she says. He also bribed a doctor to falsify the birth certificate so that it appeared little Charlie had arrived seven months after the wedding...
With such stuff included, Chaplin's frequent omissions are puzzling. He never mentions the name of his second wife, Lita Grey,* mother of his two eldest sons. So much is omitted, in fact, that little is left from which to deduce Chaplin's mature feelings and beliefs-beyond his lifelong insistence that he has never been a Communist, and the apparent mellowing of his resentment against the U.S. as he grows old and turns inward to bask in the profound joy of his life with his fourth wife, Oona O'Neill, and their eight children...
DUPONT SHOW OF THE WEEK (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). "The Patient in Room 601," a documentary about 23-year-old Lita Levine and her fight for life after being severely burned in a 1958 plane crash...