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His success was rammed down my throat’: Charlie Chaplin’s son Michael on fame, failure and finding peace

He was the son of the most famous man in the world, a runaway hippy, a failed pop singer and then a goat farmer. Now, Michael J Chaplin is publishing the novel it took him decades to write

While he was feted as a cinematic visionary, he was demonised by FBI director J Edgar Hoover for his alleged communist sympathies and proclivity for teenage girls, and feared by some he worked with for his control freakery. He tried his hand at acting and pop music, briefly became infamous as a pot-smoking hippy in swinging 60s London, and spent many years running a goat farm in a remote part of south-west France. It fed classified information and rumours (often about relationships with much younger women) to the Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper and, before long, Charlie was regarded as a traitor in the United States.

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