21 last week, and ask your lawyer if it’s not so.’ And he hung up.” “He called back later and said, ‘I think you’d better come down and we’ll talk about it.’ So Marion said, ‘Now you’ve got him.’ And I went back, and I got double the amount, so I had the large sum of $150 a week from then on, till the rest of the film.” City Lights turned out to be an instant hit, of course; Cherrill, who’d survived the two-year Chaplin maelstrom, was briefly world famous. She was able to parlay that success into a handful of mediocre films barely remembered today before her career fizzled. In between, she had an affair with hypochondriac Oscar Levant, but when she next married, it was to no less than Cary Grant. “Cary,” she said, “Was my favorite actor. He was not my favorite husband.” TOP TO BOTTOM: Virginia The personification of charm and all things suave onscreen was something of Child Villiers socializes a creep in private. Neurotic and deeply jealous, his insecurities made him lash with Polish airmen; her last husband, Florian out at his bride when drunk, and Cherrill recalled being beaten several times Martini; Cherrill (center) during the seven months they were together. Just three weeks into the marriage, visiting her beloved he throttled her so severely that a week later, her throat was still bruised and squadron; Cherrill at home in Santa Barbara she was barely able to speak. She filed for divorce and put an ocean between in 1977. herself and Grant. Europe’s great and near great welcomed her with open arms as a Hollywood sensation, and she was soon running around with aristocrats like the Prince of Wales and notoriously promiscuous Edwina Mountbatten on an endless round of Ascot balls and French yachting parties. One of Cherrill’s admirers, the owner of Romania’s largest steelworks, gifted her with a red and white Bentley; when she complained that its colors were vulgar, he replaced it with a dark green, pigskin-upholstered model. Another admirer was one of England’s richest men, George Child Villiers, ninth Earl of Jersey. But he was married, so she accepted an invitation from the Maharaja of Jaipur and sailed to India, where the oversexed monarch showered her with so many jeweled rings, her knuckles disappeared. Back in England, the newly divorced Earl of Jersey, George Child Villiers (“Grandy” to his blue blood friends) again pursued her and made her his countess, putting at her disposal five magnificent homes, 9,400 acres of land, and a trove of heirloom jewels. The effete earl was something of a cold fish; his idea of a good time was tying a rotting herring to the exhaust pipe of guests’ cars; a really good time, two herrings. Cherrill married into a glittering, if staid, world of suffocating protocol, where a task as mundane as serving a boiled egg to his lordship involved 12 servants. “Sex,” she claimed, “was never part of it. I could do just as I wished so long as I was discreet.” Visits to the maharaja continued. Cherrill’s stultifying lifestyle got a jolt with the onset of World War II. With Lord Jersey permanently away at army camps, Cherrill began entertaining wounded servicemen and adopted a squad of exiled Polish pilots. In 1942, when she was 35, she fell in love with one of them, 28-year-old Florian Kazimierz Martini. She gave the boot to dizzying wealth, transatlantic society, the earl, and the maharaja, and returned to California for a happily anonymous life with Martini, who got a job at Lockheed while they raised avocados. At the end of her life, in a house on a quiet Santa Barbara street surrounded by roses and a lifetime’s worth of mementos, the woman Chaplin made immortal, who married one of classic Hollywood’s handsomest stars, trysted with a maharaja, and held court over London’s tony Mayfair set remained—at least at heart—a farm girl. ■ 132
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