Oona O'Neill - Biography

Biography

Oona was born while her parents were living at Spithead (originally the home of 18th-century privateer Hezekiah Frith), in Bermuda. She was two years old when Eugene O'Neill left the family for actress Carlotta Monterey who became his third wife.

Oona spent her summers in the Boulton family's rambling Victorian house in Point Pleasant, New Jersey; the rest of the year she lived in Manhattan with her mother, where she attended the Brearley School. In 1942, seventeen-year-old Oona was named "Debutante of the Year." When asked by a reporter whether she considered herself "lace curtain" Irish or "shanty" Irish, she replied, "Shanty Irish!" Deciding to pursue an acting career instead of attending Vassar College, she got a part in a stock company stage production of Pal Joey and formed close friendships with Carol Grace Saroyan and Gloria Vanderbilt, later chronicled by Aram Saroyan in the book Trio: Portrait of an Intimate Friendship.

Oona dated cartoonist Peter Arno, director Orson Welles, and author J. D. Salinger. To Salinger's disappointment, however, their relationship ended when she met Charlie Chaplin, after having been suggested to him for a part in one of his films. Chaplin wrote in his autobiography that he was instantly smitten by Oona's "luminous beauty and sequestered charm."

Eugene O'Neill was outraged at the news of his daughter's affair with Chaplin and refused to give his consent so that she could marry him before her eighteenth birthday. After their marriage in June 1943, he cut Oona out of his life, refusing her attempts at a reconciliation. According to her biographer Jane Scovell, playwright Clifford Odets "saw something vindictive in O'Neill's behaviour and thought that O'Neill could not forgive Oona perhaps because he had abandoned her."

Her half-brother, Eugene O'Neill, Jr., was the son of O'Neill's first wife, Kathleen Jenkins; the younger O'Neill later suffered from alcoholism and committed suicide in 1950 at the age of 40. Oona's brother Shane became a heroin addict and moved into the family home in Bermuda, Spithead, with his new wife, where he supported himself by selling off the furnishings. He was disowned by his father before also committing suicide (by jumping out of a window) a number of years later. Oona ultimately inherited Spithead and the connected estate (subsequently known as the Chaplin Estate).

When Oona saw Jack Nicholson in the 1981 film Reds, where he portrayed her estranged father, she wrote him a letter saying "Thanks to you, I now can love my father".

While attending the London premiere of his film Limelight in September 1952, Chaplin was accused of "Communist sympathies" and denied re-entry into the United States. Because of the tax laws in England, the family (which by then included four children), chose to relocate to Switzerland. Oona returned to the United States by herself to close their California house and to surreptitiously collect all Chaplin's assets from safe deposit boxes, even as the FBI was questioning the members of their staff. She later admitted to sewing $1,000 bills into the lining of her mink coat, thereby saving the Chaplin fortune. Oona (British by virtue of her birth in Bermuda) renounced her American citizenship shortly after returning to Europe. She and Chaplin settled permanently with their family in Vevey, Switzerland, where they spent the majority of their thirty-four year marriage, visited by Hollywood friends.

Chaplin and Oona maintained a close relationship for 34 years and had eight children together. It was by all accounts a happy marriage despite the age difference.