These memoirs by Charlie Chaplin’s eldest son must have appeared in-between the two volumes of Chaplin’s own massive autobiography, viewed by critics as unreliable; it seems that the old man had plenty to hide. If his son’s version of the same story cannot actually set the record straight, it can provide revealing sidelights on it, as well as a close-up view of Chaplin as a parent from someone on the receiving end. And it does seem that he made quite a good father, at least to the eldest two, Charlie Jr. and Sydney, both by his second wife Lita Grey.

He was clearly reacting against his own chaotic childhood in his enforcement of order and discipline at home, with a particular emphasis on good manners, and no bunking-off school by hanging around the studios, working as child actors.

Most of us know that Chaplin hit trouble in 1943 when he became the subject of a paternity suit. Although a test had cleared him, America chose that moment to put pressure on a medical panel to declare the test invalid, and show him as an immoral man, taking selfish advantage of young actresses. (They may have felt that he’d got away with too much underage stuff on account of his fame.) But after months of misery in court, he meets the refreshingly uncomplicated teenager Oona O’Neill, and against all predictions, they live happily ever after.

It is the period before this, the interwar years, that we have tended to view as the long hot summer, with the great man enjoying well-earned peace and plenty. But we learn that it was quite unlike this. Chaplin’s true heyday was actually quite brief, about three years, ending in 1918 when he was bounced into a faked shotgun marriage, leading on to an endless catalogue of horrors, on which his son’s commentary is quite revealing (especially when he learns that he himself was the cause of his father’s second shotgun marriage, and that he had been given a false birthday, which later had to be corrected.) Among other things, the arrival of talking pictures threw him badly, causing him to take a long sabbatical. Then it is easy to forget the impact of the Lindbergh kidnapping, when every millionaire with young children was suddenly made to feel insecure. And he had to stand the whole cost of making The Great Dictator, when there was a high chance that America would ban it for the sake of her neutrality. A long hot summer it was not.

On the whole, though, it is the smaller revelations that we find illuminating. Apparently Chaplin’s hair had started to go white in youth. We had been ready to believe the old story that it happened overnight when he read his wife’s accusations about him in the divorce court. Then we hear that he never liked alcohol, so the stories of him getting plastered at (teetotaller) Douglas Fairbanks’ parties were presumably invented. At private showings of his films in his own cinema, he would never watch the screen, only the audience’s faces, to gauge reaction. And after years of composing fine music at his beloved piano, he still had to dictate it to secretaries, because he couldn’t read a note.

Finally, we are still none the wiser about whether he and Paulette Goddard were ever properly married. I heard he pretended they were - to give her respectability when she was hoping to be auditioned for Scarlett O’Hara. Yet it seems he didn’t want her working for other studios, and her continued unemployment caused their break-up. At their supposed divorce in Mexico, it was revealed that they had married in Canton in 1936. But it all sounds a bit too Mexican to be trusted. Goddard (who never had children of her own) turned out to be a particularly good mother-figure for the boys, who bonded with her as children, and then soon wanted to bond with her in a rather more adult context… Whoops!