Oona: Living in the Shadows: A Biography of Oona O'Neill Chaplin

Scovell's moving, intelligent, perceptive biography of Oona O'Neill Chaplin, daughter of playwright Eugene O'Neill and wife of film legend Charlie Chaplin, is told with sympathy and feminist insight. At age 17, Oona, a Manhattan debutante spurned by the neglectful, alcoholic, famous father who had abandoned her when she was two, went to Hollywood to become an actress. Instead, a year later, in 1943, she married Chaplin, then 54 and thrice-divorced, an English-born Casanova with a reputation for seducing young women. According to Scovell, who has collaborated on autobiographies with Elizabeth Taylor, Kitty Dukakis and Maureen Stapleton, Oona found in Chaplin a father surrogate, but also a genuine love match. And Chaplin found in Oona a steady, evenhanded companion who idolized him, and a caretaker for his dotage. Scovell paints a scathing picture of O'Neill pere as an aloof, mean-spirited parent who dumped Oona's eccentric, alcoholic mother, Agnes Boulton, in 1927 to marry actress Carlotta Monterey. It was Oona's mutually supportive union with Chaplin, Scovell contends, that saved her from the inner demons that led to the suicides of her drug-addicted brother, Shane, and her half-brother, Yale classicist Eugene O'Neill Jr. Oona and Chaplin moved to Switzerland in 1953 after Hollywood blacklisted the comic for leftist leanings; they had eight children, who gave Oona mixed, yet, on the whole, favorable reviews as a mother. After Chaplin's death in 1977, Oona, overwhelmed by grief and despair, descended into alcoholic dissolution; she died of cancer in 1991. As Scovell makes clear in this touching, bittersweet biography, Oona's tragedy was that she went directly from the specter of her awful father to Chaplin: ""She never stood on her own."" (Dec.)