The loan drive had begun on April 6, 1918, the anniversary of the United States’ entry into the war. The first rallies had been staged in New York, with special guests Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and cowboy idol William S. Hart. On Wall Street, Chaplin spoke through a megaphone to twenty thousand people while Fairbanks lifted him high into the air.

Then it was Philadelphia, then Washington; then they split up. Fairbanks and Pickford headed to the Midwest. Hart took the West and Southwest, and Chaplin went south, speaking in Charlotte, Columbia, Augusta, New Orleans, and Memphis, where his nerves began to fray.

He had finished work on his new film, A Dog’s Life, only the night before leaving for the loan tour. It could well have been a disaster, for he had taken certain risks in tone that he couldn’t defend now.

In a telegram from Memphis, Chaplin told McAdoo that he had never seen so many people in his life. He wasn’t sure he could speak again in public. “I like to go among people and get intimately acquainted with their loves, their hates, their politics. So, when, in a great bunch of human beings, I see on every face only one emotion, curiosity, I want to get away as fast as I can.” He dreamed at night of rabbits that ate people.

McAdoo shuttled to Memphis to see Chaplin. On the evening train out of the city, he listened to Chaplin’s complaints and tutted sympathetically, “Of course you can sit the rest of the tour out,” and then, changing the subject, smiled and slapped his knee and told Chaplin he had the most foolish thing to report: Motion Picture Magazine had sent Syd a wire saying Chaplin was now No. 14 on their list of immortals. Up from 36 or something. What a ridiculous thing! How silly people were to vote in such a contest! McAdoo laughed, and Chaplin, eyes unfocused as if seasick, laughed. And later asked McAdoo if it was possible he might speak in just one or two more cities.

The plan was to reunite the four stars in San Francisco on Thursday, April 18, 1918, twelve years after the Earthquake. Hence the forty-eight-point predictive headline in the Chronicle: GREAT THRONGS WILL CHEER LIBERTY PAGEANT, with the equally directive twenty-four-point subline: OUR SAN FRANCISCO TO BE SHAKEN BY PATRIOTISM.

San Franciscans laughed at the Chronicle the way they always would. This laugh was particularly rich: they would not be sold their emotions in advance, particularly by such an old shell game as patriotic fervor. It was as if the government and the de Youngs thought the City That Knew How was populated by chaw-dipping men, and children running wild in stained gunny sacks, and toothless women struck dumb by the glow of electric lights.