Book review: Chaplin's Girl: The Life and Loves of Virginia Cherrill

Published on Thursday 11 June 2009 15:03

By Miranda Seymour Simon & Schuster, 284pp, £15.99 Review by JULIET NICOLSON

AT 21, VIRGINIA CHERRILL HAD never landed a part in a film, had little gift for singing or dancing, and at a 1928 Hollywood boxing match failed to recognise her immediate neighbour owing to her shortsightedness.

However, Charlie Chaplin, the most famous man in the world, decided the sensationally beautiful young woman beside him, squinting at the athletes in the ring, must be his next leading lady. He leaned towards her and offered her the part of the blind flower-seller in City Lights. After 342 takes, she proved that his choice had been perfect.

She distinguished herself as Chaplin's only leading lady not to sleep with him, yet romance and laughter remained the two tenets of Virginia's life, although happiness initially evaded her. Three out of her four marriages brought three miscarriages. A Chicago lawyer (Irving Adler) provided an escape from a humble upbringing. A world- famous movie star (Cary Grant) helped launch her into the celebrity-conscious public eye.

A British lord (Jersey) and his Adam stately home at Osterley Park (a house so grand that 12 men were involved in the production of His Lordship's breakfast boiled egg) gave Virginia a cut-glass entre into British upper-class society.

But it took three divorces, an exotic affair with the Maharajah of Jaipur (complete with enough jewelled rings to render Virginia's elegant knuckles invisible) and several other flings with leading Hollywood heartthrobs before she found happiness. Finally Florian Martini, a Polish cowboy and movie-mad airman, persuaded her to retire from transatlantic society and marry him, grow avocados and reminisce.

Miranda Seymour fell almost unconditionally and unapologetically for the gorgeous, charismatic Virginia while watching her in her most famous film role (in fact the only one of any distinction in her short movie career). With fantastic biographer's luck, she discovered that the ageing actress had, before her death in 1996, dictated her life story from the propped pillows of her Californian bed into a family friend's tape machine.

Seymour's exceptional gift for delivering visually atmospheric scenes never fails her, whether she is describing the bleak Chicago of the Twenties, the hedonism of Hollywood at its glittery zenith, the unchallenged sexual laxity at the court of the Maharajah of Jaipur or the tedious schoolboy pranks of the British upper classes in the Thirties and their jokey habit of tying rotting kippers to the exhausts of their gleaming Bentleys.