Since becoming New to Las Vegas, I have been amazed at the ability of places in Nevada to pop up in big stories focused elsewhere, often as a precursor. Remember the Watergate scandal triggered in 1972 when henchmen working for President Richard M. Nixon broke into Democratic Party offices in Washington, D.C.? By some accounts, it, had its origins in a bribe Nixon had taken from reclusive tycoon Howard Hughes, then living in a Las Vegas hotel.
There’s still a video on the Internet of Donald J. Trump partying in Las Vegas in 2013 with Russians and some hangers-on. One of them later wrote an infamous email promising Russian government dirt on Hillary Clinton. The matter became a focus of that Special Counsel Robert Mueller investigation begun four years later into purported Trump-Russian ties in the 2016 presidential election, which Trump won.
A New York City judge today is formally pronouncing a sentence on Trump after a jury last year convicted him on 34 felony counts of covering up a $130,000 hush money payoff made there in 2016 to stop porn actress Stormy Daniels from chatting up a one-night stand she said she had had with The Donald in 2016. The venue of the liaison? Why, Nevada, of course, specifically the Edgewood Tahoe Golf Course in Stateline, Nev., near Reno. In a 2018 interview with Anderson Cooper on “60 Minutes,” Daniels said she was subsequently threatened in a Las Vegas parking lot by an unknown man to “forget the story.”
It is with this backdrop that I write about a book to be published next month concerning a controversial Hollywood episode during World War II in the life of the legendary actor and director Charlie Chaplin (1887-1977) that has an interesting Nevada angle. The work is When Charlie Met Joan: The Tragedy of the Chaplin Trials and the Failings of American Law (University of Michigan Press).
The author is Diane Kiesel, a retired New York State trial judge and sometimes CNN commentator. Full disclosure here: Kiesel and I have been friends since we attended college together more than a half-century ago.
The focus of the meticulously detailed and footnoted 408-page book concerns a series of sensational trials involving Chaplin and Joan Barry, a 31-year-younger aspiring actress who lived with him for a time without benefit of marriage. When she declared she was pregnant by Chaplin (after several previous abortions), the Federal Government, probably suspicious of the leftist politics and sexual promiscuity of the British-born Chaplin, indicted him for violating the Mann Act, an ancient law criminalizing the transportation of women for immoral purposes.
Chaplin was acquitted. But he then twice stood trial in a civil paternity suit brought for the benefit of the child. Blood tests ruled him out as her father, but then were not admissible as evidence in California. Chapin was ordered to pay support for two decades toward a daughter he had not sired.
Kiesel’s account makes for entertaining and respectfully salacious reading–there is a lot of fooling around in the book–with astute assessments of the political, legal and culture milieus of the era. But since this is a Nevada blog, I am going a little outside the book’s focus and reporting to highlight a sideshow issue that coincidentally helped jump-start the Nevada economy toward the level of activity–and perhaps infamy–it enjoys today.
Quickie divorce.
Before Barry, Chaplin’s previous relationship was with Paulette Goddard. She became a prominent actress, due to her own talents and her connection with Chaplin. Here is her back story. In 1926, at age 16 and a beauty pageant winner, she made a splash on Broadway as a Ziegfeld Follies showgirl. The following year–still 16–she married Edgar James, the much-older owner of a North Carolina lumber company. But the marriage didn’t work out.
In 1930 Goddard, who had separated from James, moved to Reno–then the biggest city in Nevada–to get a divorce. However, at the time Nevada law required the party seeking a divorce to, among other things, be a resident for at least three months. That was far shorter than other states but still an obstacle, and too long for the ambitious Goddard, who had a chance to take part in a movie in Hollywood. She left Nevada three weeks short of the three months.
But then came 1931–one of the most consequential years in Nevada history.
Dealing with the Great Depression, the Nevada Legislature enacted a number of measures in a desperate effort to draw tourists to the remote, largely desert state. The big one: Gambling was legalized. So was quickie marriage; it became possible to show up and get hitched on no notice.
And divorce was made a lot easier. The residency requirement, once six months, was dropped in half from three months to six weeks, and the grounds for divorce greatly expanded. Reno enhanced its already formidable reputation as a splitsville capital, especially for celebrities who reveled in the publicity. (In 1930 Las Vegas was still little more than a whistle stop on the railroad, with a population of just 5,100, although that would change.)
In 1931, a few months after the new law took effect, Goddard returned to Reno. As detailed in local newspapers, she took up residency in a suite at the Riverside Hotel. The newly built facility on S. Virginia St., then one of the tallest in the state, marketed itself as a great place to wait out a troubled marriage and was conveniently next door to the Washoe County Courthouse, where divorces were easily granted.
Goddard’s presence drew notice. “I can hardly wait to be free,” she told the Nevada State Journal in a story published December 27, 1931. “And I am having a marvelous time meanwhile. I adore Reno.” A wire-service report called her “”the first platinum blond to seek separation in the divorce capital.”
Not two weeks later, on January 7, 1932, Goddard, a Nevada resident by then for a full six weeks, filed her divorce petition across the street, alleging a single ground of cruelty. The very next day, she testified at a hearing that her husband was “mentally cruel” and once threw her to the floor. With no testimony presented by the lawyer for her husband, her divorce was granted that day. Kiesel writes she received a settlement of $375,000, which is $8 million in 2025 dollars.
Three days later, the unencumbered Goddard left Reno by train for California. Within a few months, gossip columnists were reporting her relationship with Chaplin, who had been divorced from his second wife for five years and into his Beverly Hills house Goddard moved. She returned her hair color to its natural brunette at Chaplin’s suggestion and starred with him in two of his most famous movies, “Modern Times” and “The Great Dictator.” They supposedly got secretly married on a trip to China in 1936.
But they split in 1940, and Goddard, eschewing Nevada, obtained an uncontested Mexican divorce in 1942. Besides a long film and TV career, she went on to have two additional famous husbands: Burgess Meredith, the actor who played the Penguin on the Batman TV series of the 1960s, and Erich Marie Remarque, the celebrated German author of the World War I novel All Quiet on the Western Front. Goddard died in 1990 at age 79.
It was within a year of Goddard’s departure that Chaplin, 52, took up with the clearly troubled Joan Barry, 21, for about a year, which forms the basis of Kiesel’s book. For his part, Chaplin in the middle of all his troubles with Barry married yet again, at age 54, to Oona O’Neill, the 18-year-old daughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill, a marriage that endured until his death. She died in 1991 at age 66.
But there is yet another Nevada divorce angle in the book.
Barry’s baby born in 1943 was not that of Chaplin (the father was never conclusively proven, although it might have been the oil tycoon and future museum benefactor J. Paul Getty). But Barry, who was also employed by Chaplin at his studio, had been previously impregnated by Chaplin at least once. Joan Barry, who was born Mary Gribble but had used the name Joan Barry, had a helicopter mother, Gertrude Berry, that Joan wanted out of the way during the procedure. Joan used her $1,000 Christmas bonus as a Chaplin employee to send Gertrude to Reno for six weeks to get her own divorce from Joan’s stepfather, John Berry. Kiesel describes him as “a bunco artist” with “a rap sheet going back to 1909 that spanned half a dozen states” who “used multiple aliases to write bogus checks on nonexistent bank accounts, peddle stolen goods and swindle hoteliers.”
So there are a lot of colorful and vividly drawn characters in When Charlie Met Joan.
Keisel, a former journalist and prosecutor who spent much of her judicial career handling family law cases, did a lot of digging for the book. She got cooperation from the child at the center of the scandal, Carol Ann Berry, now 81 and living in the Pacific Northwest under her married name, and Stephen Seck, a son who Joan had with a Pittsburgh railroad brakeman she later married and divorced. Kiesel writes that the Charlie Chaplin Archive, which houses Chaplin’s papers, “refused several requests to cooperate with this book and barred this author from access to the closed Barry case files storied there.”
Barry lost touch with her kids. But by tracking a Social Security number, Kiesel managed to figure out Barry eventually lived alone with some kind of disability in a Brooklyn, N.Y., nursing home under the name Mary Baker. How she got there, Kiesel writes, “is anybody’s guess.” Barry died in 2007 at age 87. She was buried in a grave in a New Jersey cemetery that remained unmarked until Kiesel located it and told the two children. A bronze marker provided by Seck now graces the grave, the end of a tale with that Nevada angle.