CRIME: Mann & Woman

The West Coast correspondent for Lord Beaverbrook’s London Daily Express was one of the busiest men in Los Angeles last week. Covering the Mann Act trial of Charles Spencer Chaplin for both British and Australian newspapers, he had to file two separate stories every day. For Britons, to whom British Subject Chaplin is still the lovable, great little cockney comedian, he was carefully sympathetic. But for Australians he could be tougher and more realistic.

Australians have begun to acquire the U.S. view of a Chaplin minus mustache and baggy pants, the off-screen Chaplin who is a dapper, grey multimillionaire of 54, widely envied in Hollywood for his unassailable arrogance and for his affairs with a succession of pretty young “protegées.”

Auburn-haired Joan Berry, 24, who wandered from her native Detroit to New York to Hollywood in pursuit of a theatrical career, became a Chaplin protegee in the summer of 1941. She fitted into a familiar pattern. Chaplin signed her to a $75-a-week contract, began training her for a part in a projected picture. Two weeks after the contract was signed she became his mistress. Throughout the summer and autumn, Miss Berry testified last week, she visited the ardent actor five or six times a week. By midwinter her visits were down to “maybe three times a week.” By late summer of 1942 Chaplin had decided that she was unsuited for his movie. Her contract ended.

Then followed the episode in dispute last week. According to Miss Berry, Chaplin asked her to go to New York “to be near him” while he went to make a speech, urging a Second Front, at a pro-Soviet rally in Carnegie Hall. She was with him just once during a 23-day stay, but that once, she said, involved a three-hour visit to his Waldorf-Astoria bedroom. Back in Beverly Hills, she broke into his mansion one night with a pistol, “intending to kill myself,” held the gun for an hour until he talked her into bed again. Admitted by both sides: Chaplin paid her train fare both ways but did not travel with her, did not pay her hotel bills. Asserted by the defense: she went at her own request; Chaplin had no “intent” to transport her for immoral purposes and did not consummate any such purpose in New York.

Chaplin’s lawyer, slick Jerry Giesler (attorney for Errol Flynn, Alexander Pantages) had a battery of witnesses waiting to testify that Joan Berry was no one-man girl. Judge J. F. T. O’Connor, onetime (1933-38) U.S. Comptroller of the Currency, shooed away this legal red herring as often as it appeared. The prosecutor, Charles H. Carr, argued: “Even if you put a common prostitute on the stand, it would be immaterial as to how many men she might have had affairs with in the past.” The only issue was the technical one of Chaplin’s “intent” in paying Joan Berry’s fare from Los Angeles to New York and return. If the jury should find that he intended to bed with her, conviction on two charges (two trips) of violating the Mann Act might bring him a maximum sentence of $10,000 fine and ten years in prison, presumably to be followed by deportation as an undesirable alien.

White Slaves and Mistresses. The Mann (“White-Slave Traffic”) Act, introduced by the late, bearded Representative James R. Mann of Illinois, was passed by Congress in 1910. It was aimed at traffickers in commercial prostitution. But many a U.S. philanderer has discovered to his unhappy surprise that, amateur though he be, the law makes him a criminal. The Act applies to travel not only between states and into foreign countries but also within Federal territories. Legally, any would-be seducer—or seductee—who so much as pays the woman’s streetcar or taxi fare in Washington, D.C. is liable to five years in jail and $5,000 fine. The Act is a wide-open invitation to blackmail and feminine revenge.

Some examples of Mann Act miscarriages :

¶ U.S. v. Hart. One Hart and a woman lived together for three years, traveling considerably the while. When Hart decided to marry somebody else, he was promptly booked on Mann Act charges.

¶ U.S. v. Athanasaw. The girl who traveled from state to state with Athanasaw testified that he took “philosophically” her constant refusal to yield. But the court, finding Athanasaw’s intentions evil, judged him guilty just the same.

¶ U.S. v. Christian. A woman after three marriages intended to make Christian her fourth, but unfortunately crossed the Mississippi-Arkansas line with him before the ceremony. Christian got 18 months.

¶ U.S. v. Alpin. One Alpin lived scatheless with a girl in Salem, Ore. for four months, then took her on a trip to Las Vegas, Nev. Sentence: two and a half years.

Reviewing these cases in the American Mercury some years ago, Lawyer Anthony M. Turano observed of the Mann Act: “For the first time adultery is treated as a geographical offense; there is no crime unless the gentle passion combines with wanderlust.”