With raven-black hair and piercing eyes, Paulette Goddard made audiences swoon. She captured the heart of the Little Tramp and set gossip columns buzzing. Charlie Chaplin cast Goddard as his ghetto gamine, a street urchin with a heart of gold; long before Julia Roberts became a box office breadwinner in Pretty Woman (1990), Paulette Goddard embodied the impishly good natured waif. Goddard was 17 when she joined Florenz Ziegfield's troupe of sexy chorus girls on Broadway; but didn't stay in the background for long. A year later, in 1929, Hollywood scouts brought her West where she played bit roles along with other future stars such as Betty Grable and Lucille Ball. All of a sudden, Goddard found herself thrust into the spotlight when Charlie Chaplin chose her to play his love interest in Modern Times (1936). Chaplin had been Hollywood's top star and prestigious filmmaker, writing, directing, producing and composing the music for his films for 20 years in 1936. When talkies revolutionized the industry, Chaplin resisted change, releasing City Lights as a silent film in 1931. No one else had the clout to write his own rules and still be so successful. Modern Times would be his final silent film, even though he used a sound track and some synched sound-Charlie even sings in nonsense-French at one point. This comedy, infused with a Socialist message, placed the little tramp in a factory tightening nuts on an unmerciful conveyor belt. While featuring some of Chaplin's most memorable sight gags, such as the tramp becoming entangled in the cogs of a massive machine, Modern Times had a serious underlying idea: the working man was pushed to inhuman pressure by the stresses of the modern age. Outside the walls of the factory, the little worker-tramp meets an orphaned girl dressed in rags and becomes her friend and protector. Charlie tries to support his new family but each time he finds employment, the sack isn't far away. One evening the two are locked in a department store after closing time and discover a new world feather beds and luxury items--everything they lack in their impoverished lives. In one of his great sequences, Charlie laces up roller skates and does a little dance-unknowingly on a precipice while his girlfriend watches in horror. Goddard provided the perfect onscreen accomplice to Chaplin's character; she was sexy and playful, embodying a mischievous innocence. Offscreen, things weren't so innocent. Chaplin was a well-known ladies man in Hollywood and during production he fell for this leading lady. They moved in together and might even have been secretly married, paying no heed to their blossoming reputation as one of Hollywood's most controversial couples. The notorious relationship did have consequences. Goddard was in the running for the sought-after role of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind, but was eliminated partly because producer David O. Selznick saw the freewheeling actress as a risky choice in the Bible Belt states. Her screen tests still exist today so film buffs can see how the waif-like performer would have played as a Southern belle. It would be four more years until Chaplin mounted another production, this time an anti-fascist comedy called The Great Dictator (1940). Even as Hitler engaged Europe in war, Chaplin lampooned the leader who shared a similar mustache. It wasn't just the Fuhrer who became the butt of Chaplin's jokes-Mussolini became the absurd Napaloni, played by obese Jack Oakie. Hitler's inner circle was transformed into Garbitsch and Herring, memorably introduced in Charlie's faux-German oration: "Garbitsch ferstunken (stinks of) Herring, und der Herring ferstunken Garbitsch." Once again, Paulette Goddard was called on to play the sweet street waif, this time a spirited soul in the Jewish Ghetto of Berlin. During The Great Dictator's production, Chaplin and Goddard's relationship came to an end. While Chaplin went into a seven-year seclusion working on his next film, Goddard made a go of Hollywood without her tramp. She held her ground against Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell and Joan Fontaine, Hollywood's top female talent, in The Women (1939). Goddard even played the lovable street soul again, opposite Ray Milland in Kitty (1945). In 1947 as Chaplin was releasing Limelight, which would his first box office failure, Goddard appeared in Cecil B. DeMille's grandiose Technicolor production of Unconquered. Playing Abigail Martha Hale, Goddard is accused of crimes against the British crown and sent to colonial American as an indentured servant to Gary Cooper. With lusty Puritan settlers and Indian massacres, Unconquered is great entertainment in the DeMillian tradition--and as far from the style of Charlie Chaplin as a film could possibly be. In the 1950s Paulette Goddard's star began to fade, though she still seemed able to claim similar types of roles, in films such as Vice Squad (1953) opposite Edward G. Robinson. The following year, Goddard left the Dream Factory bound for Switzerland with author Erich Maria Remarque, whom she married in 1958. Goddard and Remarque made their home in Ronco, not a far distance from Chaplin's own residence in Geneva. The tramp and gamine were far, far away from the bright lights and gossip columns of the Dream Factory, living a real life very much like that one night they were trapped in a department store in Modern Times. -written by Jeremy Geltzer LIST OF FILMS 28 Monday 8:00 PM   Modern Times (1936) The Little Tramp tries to build a home with a young slum girl. Charles Chaplin, Paulette, Goddard, Henry Bergman. D: Charles Chaplin. BW 87 m. 9:30 PM   Unconquered (1947) An English convict girl sent to the colonies gets mixed up in the war with the Indians. Gary Cooper, Paulette Goddard, Boris Karloff. D: Cecil B. de Mille. C 146 m. 12:00 AM   Vice Squad (1953) The head of an escort ring joins forces with a vice cop to solve a murder. Edward G. Robinson, Paulette Goddard, Lee Van Cleef.D: Arnold Laven. BW 87 m. 1:30 AM   The Great Dictator (1940) A Jewish barber takes the place of a war-hungry dictator. Charles Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Jack Oakie. D: Charles Chaplin. BW 129 m. 4:00 AM   Dramatic School (1938) A young actress struggles to make a hit on stage and in married life. Luise Rainer, Paulette Goddard, Lana Turner. D: Robert B. Sinclair, Jr. BW 81m.