Famous narcissists - Charlie Chaplin
The diminutive comic genius Charlie Chaplin was a compulsive womaniser and regular patron of prostitutes. He was exploitative and sadistic, domineering, deceitful, self-absorbed, aggressive, bad mannered, and prone to tantrums. He could be beguiling but often treated his lovers, many of whom were underage, with contempt.
He had a life-long attraction to very young girls. Lovers who were little more than children were less likely to judge him as inadequate or challenge his position of power. He controlled all his women, made them over to his liking, and either consumed them with his demands or broke them with his cruelty.
His first wife Mildred Harris was perhaps thirteen but no older than sixteen when they first became involved. In either case, Chaplin would have been guilty of statutory rape, a law he continued to flout. He was having a sexual relationship with his second wife Lillita when she was just fifteen and he was thirty-five.
He refused to use contraception so inflicted unwanted pregnancies and abortions on various lovers. When Lillita became pregnant and her family pressured him to marry her, he was furious with her and called her a whore, as if he’d had nothing to do with it. When he got her pregnant a second time soon after the birth of their son, he again blamed her and his degrading and abusive treatment of her escalated. When he met his third wife Oona, she was seventeen and he was fifty-three. They had six children and stayed together until his death but he even wore down the devoted Oona who took to drink and eventually died from it.
So how did Chaplin come to be the destructive personality that he was? He grew up in the slums of South London. His alcoholic father deserted the family the year after Charlie was born, possibly because of his mother’s instability and promiscuity (Charlie always doubted that his official father was his biological father). Of the succession of men that Charlie’s music hall singer mother then took up with, none were father figures to her two sons. From the age of five, overwhelmed by fear and distress, Charlie had to comfort and care for a psychotic mother. Eventually, violent and incoherent, she was confined in a mental asylum and Charlie and his older brother were sent to a workhouse, poor law schools, and then had to support themselves while still little more than children. Charlie and his brother Sydney had virtually no childhood.
Charlie was never able to develop a healthy and normal self-image. In order to survive his chaotic, bleak and frightening childhood he created the grandiose, false self-image of the narcissist.
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