Personal Life
The sixteen-year old Harris met actor Charlie Chaplin in mid-1918, dated, and came to believe she was pregnant by him - but the pregnancy was found to be a false alarm. They married on October 23, 1918, in Los Angeles, California when she subsequently became actually pregnant. The couple quarreled about her contract with Louis B. Mayer and her career. Chaplin felt she was not his intellectual equal, and, after their child died in July 1919 aged only three days, they separated in the autumn of 1919.
Chaplin moved to the Los Angeles Athletic Club. Harris tried to keep up appearances, believing a happy marriage was possible, but in 1920 she filed for divorce based on mental cruelty. Chaplin accused her of infidelity, and, though he would not name her lover publicly, Alla Nazimova was suspected. Harris denied rumors Chaplin had been physically violent, and divorce was granted in November 1920 with Harris receiving $100,000 in settlement and some community property.
In 1924, Harris married Everett Terrence McGovern. The union lasted until November 26, 1929, when Harris filed for divorce in Los Angeles, California, on grounds of desertion. The couple had one child, Everett Terrence McGovern, Jr., in 1925. In 1934, she married the former football player William P. Fleckenstein in Asheville, North Carolina.
Read more about this topic: Mildred Harris
Famous quotes related to personal life:
“Wherever the State touches the personal life of the infant, the child, the youth, or the aged, helpless, defective in mind, body or moral nature, there the State enters ‘woman’s peculiar sphere,’ her sphere of motherly succor and training, her sphere of sympathetic and self-sacrificing ministration to individual lives.”
—Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)