The marriage was troubled from the start. The two had few interests in common, and Chaplin spent as much time as he could away from home, working on The Gold Rush (in which Grey was to have played the female lead prior to becoming pregnant) and later The Circus. They divorced on August 22, 1927 due to his alleged numerous affairs with other women, and he was ordered to pay over US$600,000 ($8.8 million in 2019 dollars) and US$100,000 ($1.5 million in 2019 dollars) in trust for each child, in the largest divorce settlement at the time. Copies of her lengthy divorce complaint which made scandalous sexual claims against Chaplin were published and publicly sold, and the divorce became a sensational media event.

She later married Henry Aguirre and Arthur Day. According to the 1940 United States Census, Lita and Arthur lived at 38 East 50th Street in New York City, and that in 1935, she had lived in England. The census listed her occupation as “singer,” and Arthur’s as “manager personal.” She married her fourth husband, Patsy Pizzolongo (aka Pat Longo), on September 22, 1956, in Los Angeles, California. They were divorced in June 1966.

In the 1970s and 1980s, she worked as a clerk at Robinson’s Department Store in Beverly Hills. She wrote two autobiographical volumes covering her life with Chaplin. My Life with Chaplin (1966) was, by her own admission, largely a work of exaggeration and fabrication. She claimed to tell the story as it really was in her second memoir Wife of the Life of the Party (1998). Grey was portrayed by Deborah Moore in the 1992 film Chaplin, but Grey was depicted on screen for less than a minute in the final film.