Charlie bought his first accordion (perhaps the same one he is playing here) during his romance with Georgia Hale a few years before. According to her, they were shopping for a gift for her sister's wedding when Charlie spotted the instrument and couldn't resist buying it. After they returned to her house, he strolled around trying to play it while she got dressed for the evening. By the time she was ready, he was playing the instrument "like a trouper." (Georgia Hale, Charlie Chaplin: Intimate Close-ups)
I often wonder, what happened to that boat? There was talk that she got it as part of the divorce, but he's mentioned using it after 1943, and then the boat seems to disappear. I remember, upon looking up Panacea, Chaplin Boat, seeing a news article around `1949 or 1950 that HE sold it, not she. But I've never been able to trace it after that.
ReplyDeleteI believe this is the article you mentioned:
Deletehttp://news.google.com/newspapers?id=v1YmAAAAIBAJ&sjid=DwAGAAAAIBAJ&dq=chaplin%20boat%20panacea&pg=3122%2C7763514
The Jane Scovell book about Oona also mentions the Panacea and Charlie and Oona taking trips on it to Catalina. As far as I know, the only evidence that Paulette got the boat was something she supposedly said to Charlie Jr. I also read somewhere once that the boat was legally owned by Paulette (even during her years with Charlie). It was a gift for her, so perhaps he put it in her name. The only other conclusion I can draw is that Charlie bought another boat and named it Panacea. I also found another strange article from 1952 about two Swedish men who salvaged a yacht that was formerly owned by Charlie which sank somewhere off the coast of Sweden in 1950. Which yacht was this?
Correct - though I thought the article I saw was earlier, before he left the US. How can a boat just disappear? Doesn't there have to be records, like a car? Maybe I am just thinking about it too much.
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