In this, he agreed with Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin was unimpressed. How much did the audience really love her, and how much did they love the idea of loving the idea of her? Give any one of them four minutes alone with her, and he would have the answer and three minutes thirty seconds to spare.

McAdoo was approaching. He sorted through scraps of paper. “Hello, Charlie,” he said absently.

“Is something wrong?”

McAdoo looked at the clock on the Liberty Tower. “We are ninety-four, almost ninety-five percent of the way to our goal.”

“Good?”

McAdoo said, “Not really. We’re not going to make it.”

“I see the bond salesmen all over the crowd—there are booths up and down the street. Surely that’s fine.”

“No one is buying bonds. They’re watching Pickford.”

“They seem to be watching me, too. My movie.”

McAdoo gazed at him. “Pardon?”

“It’s, well, I’m embarrassed, but… I was worried that people wouldn’t go see it, but it seems that for some reason all the shows are selling out.”

McAdoo’s eyes performed a strange, jerky dance about the landscape, Chaplin’s face, and then behind him, the barricades. “How much has it made?”

“I’m not sure. More than anything I’ve done.”

“I hadn’t thought how all this would also help you, if you had something new to sell.” Then he was back at his calculations. Chaplin tried to dismiss that with a shrug.

In the meantime, Pickford was saying, “Forget I’m Mary Pickford. Put it out of your minds. I could be any American woman. We all have the common goal of protecting our allies and spreading freedom,” she cried. The phrases carried farther than had Hart’s, or Fairbanks’s, her voice seemed to be one with the winds blowing down the street, but McAdoo was right—no one was opening a wallet. In each city, when it had reached its quota, there had been celebration of going “Over the Top.” The headlines always cheered completion that way, as if raising money were exactly the same as sprinting out of a trench and onto the battlefield.

McAdoo couldn’t let the whole campaign end with such a thud. It frustrated him to know that there was a sizable amount of cash within the country’s reach, and yet that there was some final piece missing. He saw white-and-grayish blurs pass overhead, a flock of pigeons escaping the cooling streets for better, sunnier climes.

“I have an idea,” Chaplin said. “A piece of paper, please?”

It was a mean-spirited idea.

“Dear Mary,” he wrote, and then elaborated. It was simple. He handed it to McAdoo, who frowned while reading it.

“Are you sure?”

“How badly do you want to go over the top?”

McAdoo chewed on his lip. “It could work.”

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