Oona O’Neill Chaplin (1925-1991) was the reluctant lightning rod placed between two influential, innovative, and troubled twentieth century artists.  Besides coming from ne’er-do-well theatrical families, both Eugene O’Neill and Charles Chaplin lead lives of extreme highs and lows that consumed this resourceful woman.  In terms of cultural context alone, the life of this daughter of a great playwright and wife of beloved movie star is one worth examining.  Unfortunately, the sensational details of Lady Chaplin’s life – an absentee and verbally abusive father, marriage to a controlling man 33 years her senior, the eight children they had together when Chaplin was between the ages of 54 and 72, the alcoholism that destroyed the O’Neill family (including Oona during the last years of her life) – overwhelms Ms. Scovell’s 1998 biography.
Lady Chaplin, a very public person who eventually succeeded in leading a very private life, destroyed many of her papers.  While this might provide an obstacle to her biographer, the essential facts of Oona O’Neill Chaplin’s life are compelling, complicated, and detailed enough to cover in book form.  Too bad Ms. Scovell chose to write Oona as the fairy tale of a lost child-bride with a beast of a father, doomed brother, woman warrior mother (Agnes Boulton O’Neill deserves a biography of her own), evil stepmother, and charismatic rescuer.
Her approach distorts her subject and wrongly assumes every reader can fill in the missing information.  This is most glaring in the sections relating to Charlie Chaplin’s later films.  Ms. Scovell’s dismissal of Limelight is not only intrusive to the narrative but way off.  However sentimental the 1952 tragicomedy is, it is considered an important and historic film because several generations of the Chaplin family appear in it (his two half-brothers, children from two marriages, and Oona in a long shot standing in for Claire Bloom), and it was the only time Chaplin and Buster Keaton worked together.  Also, her observation that “directing does not seem to be an old man’s art” is ridiculous: at the time of Oona’s publication in 1998, Clint Eastwood, Robert Altman, and Mike Hodges were all mature, active, acclaimed, and creatively rejuvenated filmmakers.
There are other gaps.  Apparently the longest time Oona spent away from her husband was during the ten days in 1952 when she closed up their Los Angeles home after the comedian was denied a re-entry visa for so-called politically deviant behavior and never applying for American citizenship.  (He returned to the United States with Oona for the first and final time in 1972 when he received an honorary Academy Award and was honored by The Film Society of Lincoln Center.)  A few chapters later, Oona returns home to New Jersey to care for her dying mother for an undisclosed amount of time in 1967; the unfolding circumstances of this visit seemed to have taken her away from the Chaplin’s Switzerland estate for longer than ten days.  Also in 1967, Chaplin’s last film A Countess from Hong Kong was released.  While Ms. Scovell mentions that the film’s London premiere took place at the same movie theatre where Dr. Zhivago was playing, her statement would have been complete if she gently reminded readers that the Chaplins’ oldest child Geraldine co-starred in the David Lean epic.
There is one instance where the author solidly combine research and insight.  Throughout the 1960’s Oona contributed to Louis Sheaffer’s two-volume Pulitzer-Prize winning biography of her father.  Ms. Scovell nicely follows this resulting long-distance collaboration through Oona and Sheaffer’s single in-person meeting.  However, this too seems truncated.  While Oona’s feelings about her husband are demonstrated as supportive and loving, it would have made for an interesting comparison a even the slightest hint was offered knowing what her motives were for cooperating with Sheaffer.  Another unanswered question was how she regarded her father’s posthumous fame, which was in large part due to four individuals left unmentioned: stage director José Quintero, actor Jason Robards, Jr., and biographers Arthur and Barbara Gelb.
While Oona is not a biography of Eugene O’Neill – or Charlie Chaplin – it is enitrely possible that she may be better represented in the biographies and works of the men in her life.  You’ll definitely get to know her better through two out-of-print books: her late best friend Carol Saroyan Matthaw’s memoir Among the Porcipines and her son Aram Saroyan’s Trio.