Wow. I never thought I would stump you guys with my Guess The Vintage Image of the Day post. Though both Vivian Vance and Ruby Keeler were good guesses, the starlet in question was actually Lita Grey, seen at right with her sometime husband, Charlie Chaplin.

Chaplin met Grey (born Lillita MacMurray) when she was seven years old. Five years later, he cast her as a flirtatious angel in The Kid, and four years after that, Miss Grey found herself impregnated by the biggest star in the world. She was 16, he was 35, and from shotgun marriage to embittered legal fight over seperation, the whole ordeal was the biggest scandal of Chaplin's very public career.


Lita's mother and several other releatives moved in with the "happy couple", and, at least according to Kenneth Anger, kept a careful log of Chaplin's every activity as kindling for the eventual big-money divorce. Lita cranked out two kids in just under two years, before the whole thing imploded. Her divorce complaint made all kinds of suggestions of Chaplin's perversity and impropriety; it's actually been credited by some for introducing the word "fellatio" into common parlance.

Charlie, for his part, claimed to be an innocent mark caught up in the cunning mother-daughter act. He released a statement that read in part, "I married Lita Grey because I loved her and. like many other foolish men, I loved her more when she wronged me. [But] her mother deliberately and continuously put her in my path. She encouraged our relations." When the Grey camp threatened to leak the names of "five prominent motion-picture actresses" that Chaplin had relationships with over the course of his two year marriage, Chaplin (likely trying to protect Marion Davies, with who he had an affair later documented in Peter Bogdanovich's The Cat's Meow) agreed to a large cash settlement.

Post-Chaplin, Grey had little movie stardom to speak of. She toured as an RKO radio player through the 40s, but never transcended her reputation as Chaplin's child bride. Eventually she threw up her hands and gave in to it: she published two scandalous "memoirs" about her ex-husband before her death in 1995.