“I don’t know,” Chaplin said immediately.

“Isn’t that the one where she fed him from a milk bottle?”

“No,” he declared, hands on his hips, but now unsure.

“Maybe that was Poor Little Peppina.”

How many films had she had dogs in? “I don’t think so. No. No.”

Lee shrugged. Very few people knew as much about the movies as he did. He didn’t want to show off, but: “She did,” he said. He had to get to his Four Minute Man audition. “Anyway, enjoy your magazine,” he said. He saluted the smaller man with his own rolled-up copy, winked (it was becoming a habit), and walked across the lobby, vanishing through the revolving doors.

Chaplin wanted the oaf to return, to insult him more, to enrage him thoroughly, to the point where they would come to blows. Instead, finding a chair in the corner of the lobby, he licked his finger and began to page through the magazine.

Beth Fairbanks had announced her intention to sue for divorce. She told the press that her husband had been seeing another woman, whom she would not identify.

And there it would have rested quietly had not Owen Moore, Mary’s husband, decided to defend her honor. “The other woman is now ill,” he told the press, “and under great nervous strain. So I feel it obligatory upon myself to make a statement to save her from humiliation.”

Since no one had identified Mary Pickford as the other woman, his comments were far from helpful. They were reported without the dotted lines being connected, since newspaper reporters were still not quite sure what one was allowed to say about movie stars. Besides, this was Doug and Mary, and so each paper waited for someone else to make the first clarifying move.

Chaplin, trapped on a train going across the South, had sent inquisitive cables to Doug. Doug was Catholic. Mary was Catholic. The public might destroy them for their happiness. If Doug wanted to phone him, he was available, and here was the hotel he was staying at. If Doug wanted to send a telegram, Chaplin had left word that it was to be delivered to him at any hour. As he went from Atlanta to New Orleans, he grew more fond of the clandestine lovers.

But by the time he reached Memphis, he realized that his friend was not going to talk to him. The trip to San Francisco was a melancholy one: Chaplin sat by the window of the train, every passing mile imagining Doug crying in Mary’s arms.

There was more. It was small but substantial enough for Chaplin: his own secret romance. No one could know about it, it was entirely unlikely and unsuitable, but over the last weeks he had quietly arranged for her to meet him in San Francisco. He imagined Mary Pickford finding out, and he shuddered.