“You there, Dah-veed in the bath, how much are they paying you to sit in this bath all night? Not nearly as much as that Chaplin makes in the time he takes to twitch that mustache.” This caused some laughter, and Chaplin realized he had just taken on a character. He thought quickly, attacking that which he feared most: he dashed to the government agent, whispered “Pardon me,” and took his round spectacles off his face.

The man’s hands leapt too late to protect himself, his eyes sent into a squint that his neighbors found comic. Chaplin found the orator, said, “Pardon me” again, and tore off his beard. The actor, taking the temperature of the crowd, quickly turned his open mouth into a smile, as if he were in on the joke.

Chaplin huddled near the tree to slap on the beard, the spirit gum only half sticky, to adjust the glasses, and to work up a head of social outrage, and when he strode through the statues to the crowd, he was ready. “Comrades!” His back was stiff, he had planted a fist at the base of his spine, and his other hand extended, sweeping across the crowd as if they all belonged to him. He had become Leon Trotsky.

“You see, comrades, that we need not divide ourselves into financiers, actors with their own production companies, actors without production companies, extras, actors who need to wait in the bath for four dollars a night. Comrade, tell Trotsky the truth—is it four dollars?”

The young man, spellbound, nodded.

“Four dollars! When a buffoon like Chaplin makes one million twenty-five thousand. That is the thing that divides us. For there are perhaps, what, twelve immortals who are showered with money. And the rest? Showered with broken dreams and promises, chaos and homicide in the streets!”

Someone shouted “Yes,” and there was nervous laughter, for, though there wasn’t much homicide in the streets, now that it had been said aloud it could happen at any minute. “And in this issue I am starting not from the angle of any faction or party, but from a broader view. What are revolutionaries but actors? What are actors but revolutionaries? And, representing my fellow actors, I choose to address you, the Hollywood bourgeois moneymakers, as equals. Even though in Hollywood no one is equal.” The dialectic was perfect, the enunciation perfect, the accent perfect, the grammar startlingly true. Though no one here had heard Trotsky, they knew he would sound exactly like Chaplin. Who wanted to tear the system down.