By the time Chaplin returned to the patio, dinner had ended. Five tableaux under the twisted limbs of the giant oak had been illuminated with lipstick lights. He stared at the entertainment without feeling a single damned thing.

The oak, massive, towering, and dead, made the backdrop to actors in white powder posed as famous tableaux: Laocoön and his sons beset by serpents; Rodin’s The Thinker; the Winged Victory; the suicide of David in his bath; and last, to his displeasure, was a slight youth in foppish hat and palm-frond-sized saber, labeled “Donatello’s David.”

“Behold,” a voice declaiming like a carnival barker with the pretensions of a college professor. It belonged to the actor who had read “Thanatopsis,” with his bald head and crêpe beard. “All is vanity,” he said. “The pride of Icarus leads to the fall of Icarus. The temptations of Laocoön lead to the tortures of Laocoön. The grandeur that was Greece and the glory that was Rome, reduced to rubble, their marble burned by savage races. Such is as it shall ever be.”

There was nodding in the crowd, muffled acquiescence, as if no one had really considered this before.

“What about David? The one by Donatello?” Chaplin yelled this, for he was suddenly suspicious. Heads turned, first to locate the voice, and then back to the stage, where the orator was looking with confusion at the actors portraying statues. Chaplin mimed spinning a rock in a slingshot, and then mimed it colliding with his own noggin. “As I recall, he wins. What’s the vanity there?”

Unfortunately, the orator’s notes did not explain how this statue oozed vanity, but Mr. Goldwyn had been very precise: all had better be vanity.

Chaplin continued, “Ladies and gentlemen, since all is vanity, don’t bother asking Goldwyn for a raise.” Which put his finger on it nicely. A few young executives in the Goldwyn company exchanged frightened glances: Chaplin had figured it out. Goldwyn, who, it should be remembered, was somewhat insane, did hope the moral was going to save him when it was time to renegotiate. Chaplin’s uncovering it had been a kind of genius of wrong turns, from hating the statues, hating Frances, hating himself, hating all that Goldwyn stood for. It was like discovering the source of the Nile by way of Neptune.

Chaplin searched quickly for Mildred ( didn’t find her) and Dexter (clutching a drink with a weak smile) and Frances (not there), and he also caught sight of his blue-eyed government agent, who was staring at him with blank assessment, his wide face a carbon-copy form that had not yet been filled out.