"Chaplin: A Life"

In 1883 a young woman calling herself Lily Harley -- real name Hannah Hill -- abruptly left her lover and her small-time career as an English music hall performer to sail for South Africa and to marry a man she thought was the aristocratic heir to a prospering estate. In fact, this man, called Sydney Hawkes, was a penniless Cockney con man, and it is likely that he prostituted Lily. She returned to London and the theater -- with an illegitimate child and a case of syphilis, which, typically, did not announce itself for several years. She also returned to her rejected lover, whose name was Charles Chaplin.

No, not the Charlie Chaplin, but his father, then a rising performer in the halls. In the not-too-distant future, he would die of acute alcoholism and, by 1898, the pretty, charming Hannah was admitted to a hospital and diagnosed as syphilitic. The written record of this medical judgment has survived to this day, and the record of Hannah's growing madness marks all of her son's many autobiographical musings over the years. He, however, never publicly discussed the source of his mother's condition; in his telling (and in many biographies) it remains a tragic mystery. And a shaming one.

In a day when we can imagine a star like Chaplin discussing this shaping fact of his life on "Oprah," this residue of silence and gentility may strike some of us as strange -- and a few of us as, in some sense, admirable. In any case, it is important information, first revealed by the psychiatrist Stephen Weissman in a 1986 academic article, and it is now a crucial element in his new biography, "Chaplin: A Life."