How Charlie Chaplin Became an FBI Target
Chaplin’s wild soirées around Venice Beach and his affinity for very young women garnered the interest of J. Edgar Hoover and his federal agents.
When Charlie Chaplin left the United States for the last time in 1952, the famed actor-director, who spent a large swath of time filming in Los Angeles — hanging at a Beverly Hills pool with Rudolph Valentino, living in a Venice Beach hotel — famously declared of the country that made him a megastar and had just exiled him: "I wouldn’t go back there even if Jesus Christ was the president.”
