 24th of February, 2020, after five days of deliberation, a jury came back with a guilty verdict for famed Hollywood director Harvey Weinstein. He was found guilty of being criminally inappropriate with female actresses looking to get work. Now it's no secret that Hollywood is known for the casting couch. In fact, there is a statue on Hollywood Boulevard commemorating this casting couch. But did you ever wonder where the casting couch came from? It seems that this is the tale as old as time or more specifically a tale as old as motion pictures. And there's one iconic actor who is allegedly the person who started this disgusting trade. This iconic actor had a very scandalous life and also scandalous death. But before we go any further, you know what to do. Please hit that subscribe button and give us a like as always. A very, very special thank you to all of our patrons and our producers here on Esoteric Atlanta. Without you guys, we absolutely would not be able to do what we do. You guys are the original sponsors and I cannot thank you enough for helping us keep this channel going. If you would like to join our Patreon or our producer community, there is a link down in the description box below. Welcome to Esoteric Atlanta and today my favorite day on Mystery Monday. We are gonna be talking about the life and the death of Charlie Chaplin. Charles Spencer Chaplin Jr. was born on April 16th, 1889 to a devastatingly poor family in South London. Now, not only was his family afflicted by poverty, but his parents did not have very good reputations. With that being said, we have to remember that this was the Victorian age where a class etiquette, manners and your social standing with society was of the utmost importance. His mother, Hannah and his father, Charles Sr. were both music hall entertainers. Now, music halls were specifically very, very popular in England at this time. They were basically variety shows. Think about like pub shows were leading into like burlesque shows in the early 1900s. This is what they did for a living. And on top of that, both Hannah and Charles Sr. did not have a very loving marriage. In fact, Hannah was quite promiscuous and had a few children that were not Charles Sr.'s kids. It is also said that Charles Sr.'s mother, so Charlie Chapman's paternal grandmother was of gypsy blood, specifically Romani. And I know I've lived in England and also we have small factions of people like this here in the United States. These are nomadic people and they're typically don't have the best reputations. Now, for me, I find gypsy life to be very fascinating. And I'm not saying that it is, that every person who is a gypsy is a bad scandalous person, but they do have this kind of Ruffian reputation. So it does seem that this lifestyle that Charlie was born into was very much generational. Charlie's father, Charles Sr. was in and out of the family. Apparently he himself was quite abusive to his children and his wife and was also a raging alcoholic. So for most of Charlie's early childhood, his mother was a single working woman trying to make a living for her children in a very seductive and scandalous entertainment lifestyle. Needless to say, Charlie and his siblings would often be at the entertainment halls where his mother was performing. So if we look at the trauma of Charlie's childhood, we can see that not only was it traumatic for him to be poor, but also the fact that he had very dysregulated parents and also was probably exposed to a lot of inappropriate things at a very young age in these music halls. By the age of seven, Charlie's mother, Hannah, was so desperate that she ended up sending Charlie to a workhouse, Lambeth workhouse to be specific. Now, this very much reminds me of my favorite story, my favorite book of all time, also my favorite movie of all time, which is the 1968 adaptation of the book, Oliver Twist. Again, this is the Victorian age. We have a lot of children running around without parents. Some of them are in workhouses. We've covered this about a year ago with the Newsy Strike of 1899, which I will put that down in the description box below if you would like more information on children in these workhouses. Now, Charlie was a rare breed because he did have parents. He knew who his parents were, but they were so poor that he literally had to go to work to support himself. Because he worked at the workhouse, he did not live with his family, but rather at the Central London District School for Poppers. Now, sadly by 1898, Hannah herself would be admitted into Cain Hill Asylum. She was diagnosed with psychosis that was probably made worse by syphilis. Now, the definition of psychosis goes as follows. Psychosis is a condition of the mind that results in difficulties determining what is real and what is not real. Symptoms may include delusions and hallucinations. Now, this to me is very, very scary. I myself have dealt with a stalker who is suffering from probably one of the worst cases of psychosis that I have ever experienced in my whole entire life. This person that has stalked me and threatened me has a telegram channel where she's basically building a cult based off of her own hallucinations. And so when I stumbled upon this information about Charlie's mother, A, it gave me more of an insight into even more trauma that Charlie was exposed to. And B, it made me realize once again how dangerous this mental disorder can be. Once Hannah was admitted to the asylum, the mental health institution of the day, Charlie Senior, Charlie Chapman's father did take temporary custody of the children. At this point, life got just rougher for old Charlie Chapman because his father was a raging alcoholic and did have anger disorders and did beat the shit out of his kids. But for Charlie, that horror would only last for about three years before Charles Senior himself would die of alcohol poisoning. At this point, Charlie and his siblings were truly on their own. It is stated that some of his siblings did find refuge in joining the military, but for Charlie at the age of 14, he found himself basically being a street kid. Again, this just brings me back to the case we covered last year about the child strike, the Newsy's strike of 1899, which was made up of a bunch of children in New York City who were warehouse workers, workhouse workers, Newsy's, who basically had to support themselves. And in many cases, they slept on the streets. So once again, that video will be down below in the description box if you wanna check that out after this episode is over. The way Charlie's life is described at this point seems pretty animalistic. He literally had to scavenge and search for food. Again, many nights sleeping on the streets when he could not afford lodging at this time. This is also a little bit after, I believe, the Jack the Ripper murders, which happened in around the same area where Charlie was living. And if you know anything about the Jack the Ripper murders to see people sleeping on the street at this time was not uncommon, especially in these poorer neighborhoods. There were many kind of like pseudo hotels where people could pay by the night. I mean, I guess we still have those hotels today, the hourly rates, you know what I'm saying? But in this case, a lot of people would not be able to make the money to be able to spend the night in shelter. And so therefore would be forced to sleep on the street. Out of what I believe to be pure desperation, Charlie Chaplin did the one thing he knew how to do. And that was perform. He was, I mean, genetically, he came from two parents who were supposedly pretty good performers and he knew this industry in side and out. And so desperate times call for desperate measures. He went seeking work in music halls where he knew people, right? Sometimes it's not what you know, but it's who you know. And I think this is definitely the true for a Charlie story. His first gig was with the eight Lankenshire lads, a clogging dance troupe that toured music halls from 1899 to 1900. Now this cracks me up because if you know anything about the South, we love our clogging down here in the South. No, I was not allowed to clog as a child. I had to take ballet instead. But there were a lot, there's a lot of cloggers down here. In fact, in the 1996 opening Olympic ceremonies here in Atlanta, they had a whole clogging troupe. So that is something obviously we get that from our English ancestors, our Irish, you need to get Riverdance, our Irish ancestors. But clogging, if you're not familiar with what clogging is, it's quite entertaining to say the least. But nonetheless, these were young boys who were working their asses off dancing in dance halls. I am sure, I don't have any proof, but I am sure there was obviously a lot of inappropriate stuff going on. I am sure that they were overworked. There were no labor laws at this time. But nonetheless, this at least afforded Charlie at a young age, a roof over his head and bread in his belly. Around this time, Charlie decided that he wanted to hang his clogging shoes up and move more in to sketch comedy. Now, one thing about his mother is that before she was notoriously famous in the music halls, she had actually dabbled a little bit in professional acting. And because of this, she had connections to talent agents in the West End of London. Now, for those who are not familiar with London, the West End is the theater district. Not necessarily the music hall district, but the proper theater district. This is where I actually interned in college at a theater in the West End. So I'm very familiar with the way the theater circuits work there as far as our modern times go. This would be like Broadway for New York City. So again, it's not what you know, it's who you know. And so Charlie took a gamble with his mother's connections in the West End to get himself a talent agent. And it worked. Charlie ended up working for, consistently working for these different performances, these different companies in the West End for a couple of years. By 1907, at the tender age of 18, Charlie Chaplin already had established a very successful career as an actor. He was at this point considered to be a very skilled comment. And by 1910, Charlie Chaplin's life would be forever changed. At this point, he got casted in a sketch called Jimmy the Fearless. And because of this performance, Chaplin got offered the opportunity to go on tour in North America with Vaudeville. Now, Vaudeville fascinates me. I think, I don't know if I lived there during this time, but I just, I'm so curious with a lot of the Vaudeville stories. We think about Gypsy Rose. We think about all these notorious actors and just scandalous sensations that came out of Vaudeville. Vaudeville was very much in a lot of ways like the music halls, but maybe kind of a step up in its caliber. The word Vaudeville actually comes from the French word. That means the voices of the city. And if we think about that, at this time in France, as we have covered with Madahari, which I'll link that in the description box below as well in case you missed that, Paris, France was becoming kind of the city for artistic expression and bohemian movements. I mean, the Moulin Rouge, all these kinds of things, these burlesque shows were starting. And Vaudeville became this kind of traveling troop of variety shows. Now, the interesting thing about Vaudeville is that it seems like it was nonstop. Like, you know, I'm a huge theater fan. Like I freaking love theater. I wish that we could just live in musicals. I think that would make life way more interesting. But here's the thing. If you're gonna go to see a show on Broadway or anywhere else in the West end, it's gonna start probably around eight o'clock. It's gonna be about a four hour ordeal. There's gonna be an intermission in between. And then you're gonna go home. There's like four acts, that's it. You know, and so with Vaudeville though, they were like 20 acts. And so it seems that it was like this nonstop kind of variety show at the town center when they were touring. And so people could buy a ticket, like pay a nickel for a ticket and just kind of come and go and watch these actors do their sets. Now we have to also remember as we are coming up on the eve of motion pictures, we're not quite there yet. So Vaudeville and all of these theater productions were, they were like the movie theater of our time. Well, it was during Chaplin's second tour with Vaudeville in North America that he got offered a position with the New York Picture Company. I kind of think we should go back to calling movies pictures because I don't know, it just has more of a flair to it. When you say I'm going to the pictures instead of I'm going to the movies. In September, 1913, he signed a contract with this particular picture company. In this contract, he was given $150 a week. This works out to about $5,000 a week in two days money. So for a man in his early twenties who came from extreme poverty, he was starting to live the good life. In December, 1913, just a few months later after signing his contract, he was officially moved out to Los Angeles where he was about to make his way into Hollywood. Interestingly enough, Los Angeles, Hollywood would be the place where this English-born actor would spend most of his life. He began officially acting for Keystone Studios on the 5th of January, 1914. Now, because this episode is primarily about the missing body of Charlie Chaplin after his death, I'm not going to go into a full biography of all of his work and film. If I were to do that, you would be sitting here for about 10 hours. So I'm just going to hit on some of the highlights of his career and talk more about the scandals that he was putting himself in off camera as well. Charlie Chaplin is probably best known for his character, The Tramp. And this was from a motion picture called Mabel's Strange Predicament. And by 1915, Charlie Chaplin was a pop culture phenomenon. We're talking the likes of any A-list celebrity you can think of, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, all those people, Charlie Chaplin was one of them. On July 6th, 1925, Chaplin became the first movie star to be on the cover of Time Magazine. Now, I did not expect to find everything out about Charlie Chaplin's personal life in this deep dive. Again, my whole focus of this deep dive was to talk about his eventual missing body. But the stuff that I found about him as a human being literally made me sick to my stomach. Now, I do know that his behavior was probably because of his childhood and the way he grew up. Hurt people do tend to continue to hurt other people. Most adults who abuse children were probably abused themselves. It does not give the person a license to do that though. There are plenty of people out there who went through abuse, myself included, who have not gone on to abuse other people. There is help out there to heal so that these patterns don't continue. However, with Charlie Chaplin, his behavior in Hollywood is probably one of the worst behaved human beings I have ever read about or known about. In fact, Marlon Brando is quoted as saying, Charlie Chaplin was one of the most sadistic men that he had ever met. You see, Charlie Chaplin had this propensity to want to be with very young girls. Now, these were not pre-pubescent girls, like children. These were more teenagers. So girls that have just come out are going through puberty like 14, 15, 16. And even in this time, this was considered to be a crime. But old Charlie Chaplin, he did work his way around the law as a skirt his way around the law as a lot of people do. He was married about four times and each woman was underage. The most famous of his underage wives is his second wife. His second wife was a woman by the name of Lita Gray. He technically met Lita when she was eight years old and they got married. Some sources say 15, other sources say 16, but nonetheless, Charlie himself was 35. It is said that Lita got pregnant at either 15 or 16. And because this would have landed Charlie in jail, they ran off to Mexico to get married so that Charlie would not be charged. Now something very interesting I found in my research that really blew me away and I don't know how I didn't know this, but it is rumored that Vladimir Novikov's novel, 1955 novel, Lolita is based on Lita Gray and Charlie Chaplin. Now this is something I've never read Lolita, but I have seen the 1997 movie adaptation with Jeffrey Irons playing the lead adult male and it is one of the most unsettling, disgusting stories. It's very uncomfortable. Lolita is about a 12-year-old girl that basically gets groomed by a man in his 30s and she ends up living this horrific life as basically his captive for a few years before she eventually escapes and she ends up getting trafficked into another man's web of pedophilia and pornography. And anyway, at the end of the book, they both die, both the older man and the woman adult spoiler alert. It's an old story though, but the fact that this was based on this relationship really disturbs me. Now Lita Gray ended up having quite a few children by Charlie Chaplin and by 1926, they were in a very, very, very bitter divorce. So again, this is the 1920s. Nowadays I feel like women do have a huge voice in the court system. In most court systems, especially in the state of Georgia that I live in, it is a mom and those best states. So usually women do kind of have the upper hand, especially dealing with children and custody issues. So the fact that Lita Gray was able to kind of dominate this divorce proceeding in the 1920s is quite a miraculous and B just speaks of overwhelming evidence of what a horrific person Charlie Chaplin truly was. In the courts, it came out that Charlie Chaplin had perverted sexual desires. There were also claims that he tried to get women to kill themselves. He tried to force them to have abortions and held some women at gunpoint for fun. There are also some deaths, some murders around Charlie Chaplin's fringe of people that is suspected. He had something to do with that, but there's no proof and it's been such a long time since this took place that I don't know if any proof is ever going to be found based on this, but it's just interesting to note that he was kind of gangster, like people in Hollywood knew he was not a good guy. Now, Lita Gray ended up having a settlement of $600,000 in her divorce. And at this point, this was the highest settlement that any person had ever had in a divorce in the court systems of America. This is about $10 million in two days time. And part of me feels like Chaplin just gave her this money as kind of hush money because her speaking out encouraged other people to speak out and it was starting to affect him in his career. Now, again, it wasn't just his wives that he was abusive to and that he groomed, but a lot of his female co-stars claimed that Chaplin would force them to sleep with him in order to get the roles in these movies. And this, my friends, as I referenced in the beginning, is where the phrase the casting couch comes from. Now, to make matters worse for Chaplin, in the 1930s, Chaplin started to become very sympathetic towards communism. In fact, in this, we see a person who thinks very black and white. And if you've been on this channel for a long time, I've mentioned that black and white thinking is an indication that there is an actual mental disorder, a lot of narcissists, a lot of psychopaths see things in black and white. And so basically what Chaplin was kind of famous for saying is that if you don't support communism, then you must, in fact, be a Nazi. Like, he could see no in between. And the interesting thing for me is in my own personal views of fascism and communism is they're not that different. They're really not that different. They're kind of like the same thing with a different name. You know, it's all about dictatorship, censorship, all that kind of stuff. There is no freedom. And in both system, there is no freedom for you to be you. We also know around this time we are entering into, we're coming from as a globe, as a planet, we're moving from World War I into World War II. Now, another episode I will tag down in the description box below is the Rosenbergs case, the couple who was actually executed as being spies for the Russians, Americans, they were basically committed treason and they were executed. And in that episode, I do kind of go into the soap opera, the drama that was happening between Russia and the United States. And during World War II, the Russians in the United States, kind of when the United States entered the war, kind of like had each other's backs a little bit. So, because they were going against the Nazis, but then that quickly turned around. And of course we have the Cold War. It's very, very, very confusing to kind of see these politics play out in this chess game. So the fact that Charlie Chaplin is getting involved in this is pretty kind of, I guess, normal for the time, but the fact that he was so sympathetic towards the communist and really supported communistic views was very concerning, rightly so, for a lot of Americans. But nonetheless, this is where we are. It's the 1930s, Charlie Chaplin is super successful, he's super famous, he's living a life well beyond the life he probably ever expected for himself, being a pauper from South London. He's been involved in all of these scandals regarding women, it's coming out how sadistic he is, and now he's starting to speak out in his support for communism. In 1947, Chaplin basically took his own career down, by starring in and doing a movie con mon sur verdo. This was considered to be a black comedy or a morbid comedy. It basically went against the ideals of capitalism, which is obviously the government structure of the United States, or it was at one point, we're slowly turning into a communist country as well. And even though capitalism does have its faults, like all political systems do, I for one do believe that it is the best system that gives people more freedom, where they are not under the government control. Well, a lot of Americans feel this way, capitalism and the American dream go hand in hand. And on top of this, as Chaplin is openly speaking out against capitalism, in favor of communism, he's also living in a country that is not his birth country. And on top of that, Chaplin never established citizenship as an American. He always maintained his British citizenship. So a lot of Americans were kind of seeing this rightfully so as a problem. Like here you are living in America, living the American dream, enjoying all the benefits of capitalism, but yet bitching about it. So at this movie premiere here in the United States, he got booed in a lot of the theaters that were showing this picture, this motion picture, they got boycotted. So this movie was the first movie of Chaplains to bomb at the box office because of his own actions. Now at this point, it does seem that this movie does have quite a cult following. However, I guess that's why he hates capitalism, right? Because that's the power of capitalism. You get to decide where you put your money. And if you've pissed off a bunch of American people who are literally giving you the country and the prosperity of the country that's making you wealthy, if you're pissing them off, they're not gonna go see your movie. So that should have been a pretty big lesson to Chaplin, but as most of you know, narcissist and psychopaths, which I do believe that in my opinion, Charlie Chaplin was a narcissist and was a psychopath. I think he came from a long line of narcissist and psychopaths, but these narcissists and psychopaths, it's never their fault, right? It's always somebody else's fault, whereas a normal human being would probably take that, reflect on it, learn the lesson. Obviously he's not gonna do that. At this point in 1947, the FBI, I don't know how good this is with them doing it, but they launched an investigation into Chaplin. There were threats of him being deposed, all sorts of stuff going on, again, very scandalous stuff, regarding his views towards communism. And something interesting I found in my research too is that in 2003, a document from the British Foreign Office was declassified. Now I come out of laugh because like what? This document was a list that George Orwell, the creator and writer of 1984 and Animal Farm, it's a list that he made of Hollywood people, influential people, I guess the influencers of their day that he felt like were communists. And Charlie Chaplin's name was right there on it. Now I don't know why George Orwell, I mean, don't get me wrong you guys, like 1984 Animal Farm, these are really important books. Also, Huxley's Brave New World, these are really important books that kids should be reading because it does speak of the dangers of totalitarian governments, tyrannical governments, whether that be fascism or communism. I think more kids should be studying this work. If more kids study this work, then maybe we wouldn't be in the predicament we are in today, but nonetheless, George Orwell was really focused on showing people what was gonna happen if they continue to allow governments to have too much control. But he was just an author. So the fact that the British Foreign Office had like a list that he just like wrote a list and like gave it to the government, like I think these people are communists and gave it to the government is kind of comical, but Charlie Chaplin was kind of a no-brainer because he basically said, he wasn't really hiding this. So anyway, the fact that it was declassified in 2003, I would be like, y'all, I think Chaplin himself declassified that, he was very open about his feelings. Now, Chaplin in the early 1950s, Chaplin and his fourth wife, Una, who was 17 when they got married, so at least she was a little bit older than his typical taste for women, went to the United Kingdom to start doing more motion picture work. And in 1952, September of 1952, they embarked a boat to come back to the United States. Upon getting to the New York port, he was denied entrance into the country. Now, Una herself is an American and so she had to go back to California and close out all of his estates, all that kind of stuff. Una herself gave up her American, her American-born citizenship in favor of British citizenship, seeing that her husband, her creepy, old, pedophile husband was not gonna be allowed back into the American country. And this is where Charlie Chaplin lived out the rest of his life, was in Switzerland. Now, Charlie Chaplin upon his death would leave behind about 11 children. Four ex, four wives, three ex-wives, one widowed wife, and then again, 11 children. Can you, I mean, I know, I mean, I watched 19 Kids and Counting, I watched these families that have lots of kids. And I love having siblings, I think siblings are great, but could you imagine 11 children? Holy shit. So that means he's got a lot, a lot of descendants still out there in the world, the Chaplains of anyway. Charlie Chaplin did work up until the day he died. Around September of 1977, Chaplin started having some strokes. He was 88 at the time, so he was definitely pushing it. And on December 25th, 1977, Christmas Day, he basically died in his sleep from a mini stroke. There was a private funeral held on the 27th of December, where his body was laid to rest. At the time of his death, Chaplin left his widow, Una, about a hundred million dollars. But this is not the last we would hear of ol' Charlie Chaplin because on March 1 of 1978, just a few months after his passing, his body was dug up and stolen by grave robbers. I just wanna take a minute to talk about how much effort that took for them to literally dig up a coffin and pull it up themselves. When bodies are ungraved today, are pulled up today for police procedures or whatever, it takes heavy machinery to get that coffin back up and out of the ground. So for these two dudes to do that by themselves, this is pretty impressive. I'm not gonna lie, like that's pretty impressive that you stole Charlie Chaplin's body. Well, these two guys were refugees from Eastern Europe, which is interesting. I found this very, very interesting because they're refugees from Eastern Europe. They're obviously running from communism and they pulled up the body of the dead dude who was in support of communism. I don't know, karma's funny sometimes. The body was missing for about 11 weeks. Now, y'all, I know some of y'all watching out there have probably unfortunately lost a spouse. We've all lost someone close to us, a family member. But could you imagine, could you imagine getting a phone call from a police department to inform you that your dead husband's body is missing? So for better or for worse, however you feel about Chaplin and Oona, his wife, I have questions about her, but anyway, her moral code, but whatever. I just, in fairness, even after saying that I cannot imagine what that must be like, you're mourning the passing of your spouse. You're a good bit younger than your spouse too, so you're still kind of a spring chicken. Now you got all his money. But then you get a call that his body's missing. I just can't imagine the trauma that anyone would go through in that situation. But anyway, they ended up finding the grave robbers 11 weeks later because they were in the process of trying to get money, hold Charlie Chaplin's body for ransom so that Oona would give them some money. They were apprehended and Charlie Chaplin's body was interred again this time with a bunch of concrete on top of him so that no one would be able to dig up his body ever again, which I still have questions about. Now, five years ago, if I'd covered this story, I might've been like, yeah, they put concrete on it because it's a problem. Obviously people want to steal his body. He was a huge cultural icon. He was a very scandalous person. They put concrete on it just to make sure that it wasn't messed with. But now I'm wondering, like the tinfoil hat wearing person inside of me is like, did they really put his full body back or did they take his head? Did they take his hands? Because, you know, we've talked about that with Madahari and with Henry IV of France and Oliver Cromwell, these prolific people who after death get their bodies or body parts stolen, which we now know is for satanic rituals. I don't know. I mean, what do you guys think? It's just speculation at this time, but we can't even check because there's literal concrete on top of his body now. So anyway, you guys, that's the scandalous life of Charlie Chaplin and his body. Let me know your thoughts down in the comment section below. Please remember to join us over on Aquarius Rising Africa at 9 a.m. this morning so that we can, we're gonna be talking about this again, live with Shanti and Mornay. And if you guys are familiar with the channel Aquarius Rising Africa, they deal with a lot of whistleblowers who are coming from these fucked up families that do SRA. So Mornay and Shanti have a very unique perspective on a lot of these cases that we look at on their channel. So please make sure you join us if you can for that live so that you can interact with us and share your opinions as well. Other than that, I hope you all have a wonderful day. I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving for my Americans in the audience and I will speak to you all shortly.