That was at first.

A single figure had stood up in the back of the house, and walked down the center aisle. Her hands clutched at the throat of her wool cape, which was thrown over a simple uniform of blue with gold braid, a smart cap atop her gray hair. And as she came into the light, she seemed to glow under the spots, as if tiny beads of water, a mist, clung to her. Though she was silent at first, all eyes were upon her, for she radiated a kind of quiet authority. “Oh,” she said, whispering it. “Oh, Leland.”

“Mom!”

Pickford was onstage when she became aware that McAdoo had sidled up to her. He whispered in her ear, and waited for her reaction. She nodded. He whispered again, pointing toward the clock tower, the 95-percent subscription, how it had stalled there. She nodded. And then he handed her Chaplin’s note.

She read it. This took almost no time, for it was just a sentence long.

Dear Mary:

Why don’t you auction off a curl?

XOXO

Charlie

Her tongue went deep into her cheek, as if she was biting down on an insult. Chaplin watched her pace across the stage. He wished he had written, “Dear Mary: Why not just BE a whore?” He felt as pleased as a spring lamb rolling in zests of clover.

Of course, Chaplin had never actually gone toe-to-toe with Mary Pick-ford before. She regarded him in a way he did not understand: her eyes went fathomless on him. It was a look studio heads had learned meant their days were going to be painful.

“Say,” Mary said, to the world. She approached the edge of the stage, appearing now quite ragged. She had done nothing to her dress or her hair or her makeup, but the smallest clench of her shoulders, the subtle draw to her mouth, a wince as if from the impact of many unseen blows, had turned her into an orphan.

“San Francisco. My beloved San Francisco. We have not yet gone Over the Top. I cannot believe it, but Mr. McAdoo has seen the numbers, and he tells me that it is so.” She spoke as if this were their last moment together before they were to be taken to the coal mines.

Who among us will go just a little further and actually give—not just what we can—but more than we can?”

She paused. The crowd was chastened. She put her right hand into her hair and extended it, stretching out a fistful of the mane that had made her famous.

“Does anyone have scissors? I’ll give them back.”

What she proposed was not immediately obvious, but there were sudden screams from directly across the street, on the second floor, the Knightly Barber College, where a row of a dozen young men in white smocks now extended their shears and cried out for the right to cut Mary Pickford’s hair.