I’d often asked her about certain moments in her mother’s life only to find I already knew more about those moments than she did.

After learning how much I knew about her mother, she had come to believe I had a spiritual connection with her mother. “Why do you think she started drinking?” Jane asked one day. Jane was open, frank, and immensely helpful in my quest to capture the real Oona, the mother she remembers fondly, and with a wrench of regret. Her story did not need to be fabricated to make it interesting. But as I read about her, Oona had emerged as her own woman, a fascinating person in her own right. Yes, she was friends with Gloria Vanderbilt and Truman Capote. Salinger and Orson Welles before meeting Charlie. Jane appreciated my drive to represent Oona as the real person she was, not a fictional caricature. “Typing…” I could not believe my good fortune when the reply appeared, with exclamation points galore:

The first time I sent Jane an Instagram message, which was immediately after she inexplicably gave me a ‘follow back’, I watched in wonder as those three dots appeared beside her name. I’m one of those people who still thinks the 80s were a couple of years ago, so I was amazed to realize Charlie Chaplin’s children by Oona were all still alive, and the younger ones weren’t much older than me.

While researching for my biographical novel about Oona O’Neill Chaplin, I reached out to anyone I could find who might speak to me about her (try to imagine my shock when biographer Jane Scovell responded to my message by calling me on the phone!) But I wanted to speak to someone who knew her, too. And so Oona raised her own family in a sort of self-imposed exile. But her homeland had inexplicably turned on the man she loved. Oona loved and missed the US, especially her old Manhattan stomping grounds, and she missed the family she left behind (even her father, who disowned her after her marriage to Chaplin). Since her father had chosen to leave the United States rather than submit to further HUAC investigations, Jane was one of the four Chaplin children born away from their mother’s homeland.

Only Oona by Tamatha Cain