In the spring of 1978, two men dug up Charlie Chaplin's coffin from a Swiss village cemetery and held it for ransom. When it was recovered, he was reburied under reinforced concrete. This episode uses that bizarre postscript to examine a life of extreme contradictions, beginning in London in 1889, where a father's abandonment and alcoholism and a mother's psychosis and repeated institutionalization sent Chaplin to a workhouse at age seven.

The conversation traces how he studied his mother's window-side mimicry of passersby, first performed on stage at five, toured America with the Fred Karno troupe alongside Stan Laurel, and created the Tramp in 1914. It follows his rise to $670,000 a year with Mutual, the global craze the press called Chaplinitis, his co-founding of United Artists in 1919, the grief behind The Kid, his refusal to adopt sou ...