Short Notices

MY LIFE WITH CHAPLIN by Lita Grey Chaplin. 325 pages. Bernard Geis. $5.95.

Lillita McMurray, as she was known back in the '20s, was Charlie Chaplin's second wife. At twelve, she had played as an extra in Chaplin's The Kid. By the time she was 16, Charlie had changed her name to Lita Grey, cast her as the leading lady in The Gold Rush, and was making love to her on the beach, in the back seat of his Locomobile, and in the. steam room of his Beverly Hills mansion.

When Lita got pregnant, Charlie got furious. She writes that at first he tried to force her to get. an abortion, then changed his mind and married her before a Mexican justice of the peace. It seemed as if Charlie would never forgive Lita this propriety, but he relented when she began reading Fanny Hill and betraying an interest in amorous acrobatics. When Charlie Jr. was born, Charlie Sr. tucked her away for a month, she says. He also bribed a doctor to falsify the birth certificate so that it appeared little Charlie had arrived seven months after the wedding ceremony instead of six.

Lita bore Charlie another son, Sydney, and divorced him after two years of marriage--but why go on? It is most curious that Lita, now 58 and living in retirement in Hollywood, can recall after 40 years the precise details of every sexual encounter she had with Chaplin despite an ensuing procession of other husbands (two) and other lovers (untabulated), and periodic bouts with the bottle that sent her reeling to sanitariums. She remembers Charlie better than Charlie remembers her. In his autobiography, he did not even mention her by name and dismissed their marriage in three sentences.

THE NINETY AND NINE by William Brinkley. 393 pages. Doub/ecfay. $5.95.

Battleships are majestic, destroyers are dashing, submarines are sinister --but LSTs (landing ship, tank) are slow, clumsy, ugly, and somehow faintly comic. Lieut. Jake Adler, who commands LST 1826 as it bobs between Naples and Anzio during World War II, is an easygoing skipper who runs an exceedingly loose and happy ship. All the 99 officers and men aboard could have stepped right out of an old MGM movie. In fact, after a while, the reader begins to wish that a Mr. Roberts would appear to toss the captain's palm tree overboard, or that Skipper Adler would start rolling a couple of ball bearings in his hands.

But Bill Brinkley (Don't Go Near the Water) did not make the seafaring life so idyllic for nothing. Things do begin to happen to 1826 and its buoyant crew. German prisoners try to escape, and 1826 almost gets blown to smithereens by a mine. Young Seaman Peter Carlyle is hauled up before a general court martial for carrying Navy supplies to his Italian sweetheart. Lieut. (j.g.) Matthew Barclay falls head over keel with an Army nurse who plays the piano. Finally, there is a chilling climax that shows that Brinkley has not been writing a situation comedy at all but a situation tragedy. Even so, the reader's interest is likely to reach deep six well before the 1826 does.

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