Chaplin took another bite of toast, then carefully tore out the clipping and put it in his pocket, further proof of his success and also a souvenir of the pretty child. I hope Maria might work with me someday. He’d said no such thing, knowing it was an impossibility. But he was accustomed to reporters putting words in his mouth.

And it was a good sign that the photograph ran prominently on page 3. People were tired of bad news. His most popular moving picture for Essanay, The Tramp, had been released four months earlier and was still playing in motion-picture theaters and storefront nickelodeons alike, along with a few others that had appeared since then. The studio also had several films in the can lined up for release, but these would be his last with the studio. He was holding off on breaking that bit of news to Spoor and Anderson.

The train whistle blew as they barreled through another dusty town, half a dozen derelict buildings with horses in a paddock, dogs lolling in the street, a group of children who ran shouting and waving as the locomotive steamed by. A wooden structure with a sign above its door:

ALPINE THEATER

SHOWING THE CAPTIVE

Cecil DeMille’s five-reeler, released about a week after The Tramp, and a flop. Still, here it was, all these months later, in the middle of a desert. He drew his face closer to the window, to grin and wave at the running kids. Maybe one of them would recognize him.

Chapter 37

Chapter 37

LIONEL HATED SUNDAYS. The studio was closed, and while he got along well enough with the folks he worked with, no one had ever invited him to a picnic or Sunday supper. They thought he was strange—no girl, those bizarre scenarios and photoplays he wrote—and they were right. Beery had been warned off the young girls he toyed with at Essanay, but if Lionel’s colleagues knew more about his own predilections, he’d be fired in a heartbeat, or arrested.

So Sundays presented themselves as a wasteland. He woke sick and shaken by his indulgences of the night before, exacerbated by constant fear that someday he’d be caught. He knew his taste in stories—his own and others’—stemmed from his tormented desires, phantasmagoric fruit from a tree with twisted roots. He should never have left his room yesterday. He should never have left New York.