The moral behavior reference connected to a paternity suit that had been filed against Chaplin in the early 1940s, involving an actress named Joan Barry. The suit and the surrounding scandal had been extraordinarily damaging to his public standing in the United States. Blood tests at the time indicated that Chaplin was not the father of the child in question, but the jury in the civil paternity case had found against him anyway, and the reputational damage was lasting.
The combination of the paternity scandal, the political accusations, and what historian Charles J. Maland later concluded from declassified FBI files — that the government had no real legal grounds to deny him re-entry — effectively left Chaplin stranded. He announced from London that he had no intention of submitting to the proposed interrogation. He would not return to the United States to face an interview designed to humiliate him in the name of accusations the government could not prove. His wife Oona traveled back to California to liquidate their American assets and move their finances to Europe. In November 1952, she made that trip alone, clearing out the house and the studio they were leaving behind.
The Chaplins settled in Switzerland. On December 31, 1952, they purchased the Manoir de Ban, a neoclassical manor house built in 1840, set on fourteen hectares of grounds — parks, gardens, terraced lawns overlooking Lake Geneva, and a view of the Alps on clear days — in Corsier-sur-Vevey, Canton Vaud.
The village sits in the Lavaux wine-growing region, on the northern shore of the lake, between Lausanne and Montreux. Vevey itself is a small city of perhaps twenty thousand people, known locally for its annual folk market and for being the headquarters of Nestlé. It is not a place where the famous typically seek attention. The lake is wide and blue and the surrounding hills terraced with vineyards; Chaplin could walk into town for dinner without being mobbed. His son Michael later recalled that his father was always working, dictating to a secretary in the library, composing music, writing his autobiography, and entertaining friends at the manor.