Charlie Chaplin and His Times.<i> By Kenneth S. Lynn</i> .<i> Simon & Schuster: 604 pp., $35</i>

The life of Charlie Chaplin is an irresistible rags-to-riches story. Born in London in 1889, Chaplin was the only child of a young couple who hoped to make careers for themselves in the flourishing English music halls. His father was modestly successful; his mother was not. The marriage broke up; his father died an alcoholic; his mother, like her own mother, retreated into madness. Chaplin and his stepbrother spent periods in public institutions for destitute children. At 10, Chaplin made his escape from slum poverty to become a professional entertainer. By 20, he was on his way to stardom in the music halls. By 25, he was in Hollywood. At 30, he was rich and famous, a world celebrity.

Later his fortunes were to take a no less dramatic turn. During the Cold War, his politics and his morals came under attack. His popularity in America, his chosen country, declined dramatically. In 1952, when he had just embarked for a visit to England, his reentry permit to America was revoked by the Justice Department. Chaplin did not attempt to return, choosing to spend the rest of his life in exile. He died in Switzerland on Christmas Day, 1977.

Not surprisingly, most of Chaplin’s biographers have tended to be political liberals, attracted by his screen character (the Tramp seen as a symbol of the underprivileged classes) and by his life, first as child victim of an oppressive society and later as a target of political paranoia. The climate nowadays, however, seems to favor more right-wing perspectives. Recently, there was Joyce Milton’s “Tramp: The Life of Charlie Chaplin,” and now Kenneth S. Lynn’s “Charlie Chaplin and His Times.” Both books are big, each devoting more than 500 pages to his life, though Lynn’s sets out to be more serious than Milton’s garrulous and headline-grabbing account.

Lynn, whose previous biographies have covered the lives of Mark Twain and William Dean Howells, is an indefatigable reader, as more than 800 end-notes in this volume testify. He has discovered at least three documented mistresses, who eluded me when I researched a biography of Chaplin (admittedly more concerned with the studio than with the bedroom) a decade ago. His book has the charm of frequent Sternean digressions--on tramps, the making of early Hollywood, English music halls, London poverty, sexual identity in the early 20th century and Adolf Hitler.

“I have always been fascinated by the detective work of connecting the lives of artists to their art,” Lynn writes in his introduction. Sometimes, though, he shows an odd schizophrenia in making this connection. His introduction claims that one of his goals is “to pay homage to a pantomimic achievement consisting of more than 70 pictures . . . one of the glories of American culture.” Yet the greater part of his biography shows such mistrust and distaste for Chaplin’s character, morals and politics that one wonders why he embarked on the project in the first place.

Lynn sets out to counter the liberal versions of the Chaplin biography on a number of specific points. He seeks to show that Chaplin’s account of his early privations is exaggerated and self-pitying. (Even if Chaplin spent most of his eighth and ninth years in a children’s home, Lynn is at pains to point out that the place was at least in “a lovely stretch of countryside.”) Dealing with the grown-up Chaplin’s romantic liaisons, Lynn portrays him as an “off-screen Svengali, who was capable of treating [women] with a sickening contempt.” As to Chaplin’s politics, Lynn generally finds himself in sympathy with the charges of dangerous communist leanings brought by the FBI and the right-wing press in the late ‘40s. Chaplin was the “multimillionaire tyrant who spouted the peace messages of the Communist line,” while the “eagerness with which he sought out Communist friends and hired Communist associates led people to wonder whether he was under Communist discipline.”

Perhaps Lynn’s most startling thesis is that Chaplin secretly anticipated and welcomed the revoking of his reentry permit and the resulting life of exile, since it earned him the status of a Cold War martyr. It is a highly extravagant (and quite unsubstantiated) assumption that Chaplin could possibly have coveted this doubtful accolade so much as to pay for it with the unplanned, painful and costly severance from the home and studio that had been his empire for more than 30 years.

Lynn is driven by a profound disbelief in anything said or written by Chaplin himself. The autobiography is dismissed as a self-serving “compound of fact and fiction.” I am chided for “blind faith” since in my own Chaplin biography, I admiringly remarked on the coincidence between Chaplin’s memories of his childhood and a mass of corroborative documentation unearthed only after he had written his book.

Lynn’s mistrust tends to drive him to alternative sources that are themselves often dubious. He resurrects “Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story,” written in 1915 by Rose Wilder Lane, a young journalist who interviewed Chaplin for a series of newspaper articles that she was persuaded to extend, inventively, into a book. Chaplin succeeded in suppressing the book on the grounds that it was “purely a work of fiction, holding him to public ridicule and contempt,” but for Lynn, its fictions must have come from Chaplin and are proof of his propensity for lying.

In describing Chaplin’s portentous meeting with the Polish-born movie star Pola Negri, during his visit to Berlin in 1921, Lynn predictably prefers Negri’s version to Chaplin’s and colorfully paraphrases her description of how they met in a club following the premiere of her film “Madame Du Barry.” Unfortunately, that premiere had taken place two years before Chaplin’s visit to Berlin.

Even when Lynn’s sources are more reliable, his use of them often appears injudicious. His principal authority for his contention that Chaplin exaggerated the poverty of his childhood is a series of maps defining social conditions in different London neighborhoods, which appeared in a pioneering sociological study, Charles Booth’s “Life and Labour of the Poor in London,” published between 1889 and 1903. Lynn triumphantly discovers that the streets where Charlie, his mother and half brother lived are not included in the dark blue areas of “the very poor” but merely in the lighter shades attributed to “the poor” and even “working-class comfort.”

Without factoring in either the massive generalizations of such diagrams or the different living standards of homeowners and their lodgers, Lynn concludes that the Chaplin family was not so much to be pitied after all. From this, he leaps to the startling conclusion that “flighty Hannah” must have accepted money from men. “For how else,” he asks, “could she have kept herself and her two boys above the social level of Booth’s ‘very poor’?” In no time, this assumption leads him on to explain her frequent changes of address as occurring because “the lovers who enabled Hannah to rent decent lodgings quickly became disillusioned with her erratic behavior” and to speculate that there was a “succession of men who temporarily took up with her.”

Lynn is as free with other reputations on even slighter evidence. He characterizes the eminently respectable and happily married actor-manager H. A. Saintsbury, who engaged the 14-year-old Charlie for the role of the pageboy “Sherlock Holmes,” as “quite possibly homosexual.” Later he admits that if “their relationship was sexual, there is no evidence to support it.” So why mention it? Equally provocative, Lynn suggests that the eccentric Anglo-Jewish aristocrat Ivor Montagu--who was undeniably starry-eyed about the Russian Revolution and was a fan of both Chaplin and Sergei Eisenstein, whom he introduced to each other--”may well have been subject to ‘guidance’ by the NKVD.”

With Chaplin’s politics, Lynn gets really into his stride and the heart of his matter. He resurrects and renews most of the charges leveled against Chaplin by the far right in the late 1940s and adds a few new ones. He devotes three pages to the evidence of a former activist from the Communist Party, Paul Crouch, who happened to be naming names in the very week that the rescinding of Chaplin’s reentry permit made headlines. The news stories made Chaplin a handy name to throw into the ring: “Oh, yes,” Crouch said, Chaplin was “a member at large directly responsible to the central committee.” Lynn at least admits that the man could have been lying and that his own recent inquiries addressed to Moscow “came up dry.”

Lynn also makes much of an incident involving the head of the Soviet Film Industry, Boris Shumyatsky, a Stalinist megalomaniac who was responsible for wrecking the career of Sergei Eisenstein. Returning from an official visit to America in 1936 to face criticism that would very soon end his career, Shumyatsky published some panicky, show-off articles in the Soviet press about the impression he had made upon the capitalist West. In one of these, he boasted that he had persuaded Chaplin to change the ending of “Modern Times.”

In fact, Chaplin did change the ending--a preview at the studio quickly convinced him of the error of the original mawkish finale in which Paulette Goddard becomes a nun--but the circumstances and the nature of the revision do not at all fit Shumyatsky’s specious account. Moreover, neither the FBI nor the Chaplin studio reports record any meeting between Chaplin and Shumyatsky (which Lynn would no doubt conclude was proof of its clandestine nature).

Lynn makes extensive, but selective, use of the voluminous files of the FBI without applying the skepticism necessary in approaching this bizarre collection of documents, packed with fantasy, speculation and hearsay. In almost 30 years of dogged and costly investigation, the FBI failed to prove that Chaplin had ever contributed a penny to the Communist Party or belonged to a Communist front organization. This did not prevent the FBI, and now apparently Lynn, from having dark suspicions about his sympathies, though without any proof that Chaplin’s friendships with known leftists implied any commitment to their politics. His friends and guests always included a substantial but by no means exclusive (as Lynn would have us believe) proportion of the leftists and liberals, who were naturally attracted to him. No doubt, they often proved livelier guests than political conservatives.

Chaplin’s FBI file grew fatter in 1942, when he was persuaded to address a number of rallies in support of the Russian allies, Russian war relief and the opening of a second front in Europe to relieve the Russians. Today, these speeches are often embarrassing in what Lynn justifiably calls their “breathtaking naivete,” but in 1942 they only echoed the sentiments of the greater part of the nation.

Writing about Chaplin’s liaison with Joan Barry and the subsequent paternity suit brought against him, Lynn makes extensive use of Barry’s statements to the FBI, though without revealing the extent to which the paternity case and an earlier one involving her relations with Chaplin were inspired and directed by the FBI itself, looking for ways to damage Chaplin. He characterizes Barry as “monomaniacal” in pursuing Chaplin in the courts. In fact, the FBI reports state that never did either Barry or her attorney “request this investigation or express a desire for the government to take action against Chaplin.”

The more Lynn warms to his argument, the more one detects an inescapable emotional bias, reflected in his partisan treatment of the various characters whose testimonies figure in his story. He has rarely a good word for anyone who is on Chaplin’s side and never a bad one for his opponents. He characterizes Chaplin’s courtroom counsel as shifty, while Barry’s attorney, Joseph Scott, the man who famously abused Chaplin as “a lecherous hound,” “a little runt of a Svengali” and “a gray-headed old buzzard,” is admired for his likeness to an Old Testament prophet. Though Chaplin’s eminently respectable longtime lawyer Nathan Burkan cannot easily be impugned, Lynn manages to confer a touch of the disreputable by referring to him as Nate.

For film people, Lynn’s most startling revisionism is his assessment of Joseph Breen, who, as director of the Production Code Administration in 1933, declared himself determined to expose the “lousy Jews” who ran the studios and “seemed to think of nothing but moneymaking and sexual indulgence. . . . They are probably the scum of the scum of the scum.” While Lynn admits that Breen’s censorship of political ideas was “inexcusable . . . thought-control,” he concurs with his disapproval of the “sneering anti-Americanism” of “Monsieur Verdoux,” exemplified in the final speech equating war and big business (even though the film is actually set in France between the two world wars). Lynn’s astonishingly final judgment on Breen is that “it must be acknowledged that it was not simply an accident that his years in office were a golden time in the history of Hollywood movie-making. There is merit, for instance, in the argument that the constraints that the code imposed on sexual conduct were actually beneficial, dramatically speaking. . . .”

Chaplin remains, finally, a puzzling creature, even for Kenneth Lynn, equally hard either to love or to hate entirely. Few people ever expressed more intense dislike of him than Marlon Brando did when he and Chaplin had the mutually miserable experience of working together on “A Countess From Hong Kong.” Yet with time and on cooler reflection, Brando concluded that “as a human being, he was a mixed bag, just like all of us.”

Maybe Lynn would acknowledge the same. For all the distaste he expresses, from time to time he turns from Chaplin’s character to his work and, in describing a film or a gag, real pleasure breaks out, unexpected but uncontainable. In the last two pages, he lets himself go again, swept up in “cascading laughter” at a revival of “The Circus” and--quoting an English newspaper’s view--that when all is said and done, Chaplin “lives on in the consciousness of everyone who loves movies.”