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The whole legend about Hearst trying to kill Chaplin, with Ince getting killed instead, is 100% bogus. It's a story that's too juicy to die, so it keeps popping up. But there's no truth to it whatsoever.
Chaplin and Hearst were friendly for about ten years, and Chaplin wrote in his autobiography how impressed he was by the mogul. But there's actually less to that relationship than meets the eye. Hearst went through a period in which he cultivated Hollywood people, and often invited them to San Simeon and to Marion's Santa Monica 'beach house.' But this seems to have been more for business than pleasure, calculated chiefly to support Marion's film career. Once she retired in 1937, the star-studded soirees came to an abrupt halt, never to resume. True, Hearst was having serious financial difficulties at that point, but even after the war, when his finances were steady again, the movie stars were never really invited back, with only an occasional exception here and there.
Chaplin seems to have been outside Hearst's social circle sooner than the other stars, though. His autobio doesn't give any details, and the big Hearst biography by David Nasaw isn't much help either. But by the mid-1930s, Hearst was on a big anti-communist kick, larding his newspapers with anti-communist and anti-socialist editorials and stories. Chaplin wasn't a communist, but he was certainly on the political left, and his friendship with Hearst probably withered in that climate. Whether it happened in one big argument, or during a gradual chill, no one seems to know.
Much of Chaplin's public-relations grief in the '40s and early '50s was fueled by Louella Parsons' and Westbrook Pegler's attacks against him in the Hearst papers. Nasaw's book shows that Hearst personally asked Pegler to tone down the rhetoric in one of those columns, but that was the exception, not the rule.
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