The artist starred in a farce that could have been written by himself, but it was real
It could be a scene from a B-series horror movie, but it happened at dawn on March 1, 1978, in the Corsier-sur-Vevey (Switzerland) cemetery. After hours of searching in the dark under the rain (which fell horizontally due to the strong gusts of wind), the two men found their goal: a white tombstone that stood out among the more than 400 anonymous ones with the following inscription, “Charles Chaplin 1889-1977”.
The two men then spent a couple of hours digging up the still-fresh earth (Chaplin had been buried on December 27, 1977, two days after his death), loaded the coffin into their van, and fled without even bothering to refill. the hole: the desecrators left the mound of dirt next to the hole for the police to discover the next morning. This invasion of body snatchers would end up becoming a thriller first and a sitcom later.
For ten weeks, the Swiss police and Interpol barely found clues beyond a couple of anonymous calls in which various pranksters claimed to have the coffin in their possession. Some of those imposter calls went further and threatened the lives of Charlie Chaplin's children. One of his offspring (he had no less than eleven), Eugene, remembers that no one laughed in that house because a few months before, an Italian politician Aldo Moro had been kidnapped and murdered. “The atmosphere was horrible, everyone was very nervous; the terrorists who killed Moro had also killed his driver so our driver was sweating like crazy. It was a horrendous event, especially in a country like Switzerland, where things are always very calm."
The most neutral nation in Europe saw its peaceful existence shaken by a crime so macabre that, during those ten weeks without news, the world wanted to find a perverse, mystical, or political meaning in the event. Because that fake news thing is not an invention of the 21st century.
There was talk that the robbery had been perpetrated by anti-Semites, contrary to the fact that Chaplin (who, according to certain rumors of the time, was Jewish) lay in an Anglican cemetery. Others claimed the perpetrators were Nazis, enraged by the parody of Adolf Hitler that Chaplin immortalized in The Great Dictator and became almost as famous as the German dictator himself. The theory also circulated that admirers of the artist had exhumed the body to bury him in England, his country of origin.
But reality, for once, was not stranger than fiction and the resolution of the crime ended up being much more vulgar, mundane, and, delusional than any fascinating conspiracy theory. The guys who pulled off the coffin robbery turned out to be two petty thieves, so inexperienced and desperate that they first demanded a ransom and then haggled over the price.
The thieves sounded nervous and loud every time they called the Chaplin residence (a castle in the Laussane region, near the cemetery) and proposed to the butler, an undaunted gentleman named Giuliano Canese, a different price for the coffin.
First, they asked for 600,000 Swiss francs (just over half a million euros). Chaplin's widow, Oona (with whom he had eight children, was the daughter of American playwright Eugene O'Neill), refused to budge, declaring that her husband "would have found this whole situation ridiculous." So the kidnappers tried a currency exchange, perhaps it wasn't the currency that was the problem, and they asked for 600,000 US dollars (485,000 euros).
The answer was still no. And how about $500,000? Nothing. The Chaplin matriarch continued to delay them until they lowered her price to $100,000 (80,000 euros) and then she accepted, but only to set them up and have the police arrest them: she had never had the slightest intention of giving them a dollar. The authorities agreed to transfer a briefcase with $100,000, as they had demanded, delivered personally by the family butler. A Swiss policeman posed as the butler and drove the Rolls Royce to the delivery location with such bad luck that the village postman, seeing an unknown man driving the Chaplins' car, followed him. The police mistakenly stopped the postman and the mission was aborted.
But the thieves did not give up and specified, with astonishing precision, that they would call the Chaplin residence once again to renegotiate the ransom on May 17 at 9:30 in the morning. The police carried out a surveillance operation on more than 200 telephone booths in Laussane and were thus able to arrest Roman Wardos, a 24-year-old Pole, and later his accomplice Gantscho Ganev, a 38-year-old Bulgarian.
These two mechanics confessed that, embarrassed by their precarious economic situation, they had been toying with the idea of committing a crime that would solve their problems without using violence. And when one day they were reading the newspaper, they came across the news that someone had stolen a corpse in Italy and had demanded a ransom in exchange for returning it. And from there they got the idea: they would steal Chaplin's body. Where anyone else would see a chilling event, Wardos and Ganev saw an opportunity to make a fortune.
Wardos, the mastermind (that's one way of calling it) of the operation, was sentenced to four and a half years of hard labor and Ganev, the muscle, to 18 months. They both sent an apology note to Oona Chaplin, who forgave them without giving the matter any more thought. And when the wife of one of them (“the nicest”, as Eugene Chaplin recalls) also wrote a letter apologizing for her, the widow replied: “Look, I have already forgiven you”.
Hollywood stars, art geniuses and cultural icons (and Charlie Chaplin was all three at once) never stop generating stories about his life, even after he's dead. However, Chaplin is the only one who literally starred in a show after he died. A farce that could very well have been written by himself: the absurd danger, the comedy that is born of bitterness, the poverty that leads its victims to commit miserable nonsense, and, above all, the rewriting of cultural values: that Such a topical phrase of "rest in peace" was transformed, in this case, into a grotesque comedy.
So much so that four years ago the Frenchman Xavier Beauvois directed The Price of Fame, a comedy that recounted the event with the tools that Chaplin himself would have used: physical humor during the desecration, vagabond protagonists with a tendency to get into trouble and hilarious misunderstandings. when the kidnappers realized that dozens of anonymous people were calling the Chaplin family for ransom. As always happened to Charlot's mythical alter ego, “the tramp”, the unfortunate were not worth even the crime. Eugene Chaplin appeared in the film playing the owner of a circus: "We made this comedy so that the world would know how crazy that story was."
But don't get up from your seats just yet, because the final decision remains: where the hell was the body? The thieves only remembered that they had buried him "in a cornfield." The rain had caused the plants to grow profusely and, after several days of searching, the police found him in a wheat field a kilometer from the Chaplin mansion.
A landscape so beautiful that the widow herself exclaimed that, in a way, it was a shame to get it out of there. However, they removed it. Instead of leaving him for all eternity giving "yellow to the genista" as Serrat sang in the Mediterranean, they chose to bury him in his original tombstone and cover it with concrete, like a cursed coffin, instead of with earth.
The farmer, for his part, was furious at the sacrilege perpetrated on his land, but later he would end up installing a commemorative plaque: “Charles Chaplin rested here. Briefly".
