Only a year later, already making $1,250 a week, he is a different man. Footage of his first day of work at Essanay, Chicago, January 1915, survives. In front of his new cast, crew, and bosses, in a shabby but honest suit of welterweight dark wool, he performs a ninety-second clog dance, hands on hips in mock concentration, gathering speed and flinging off flop sweat as if terrified he isn’t dazzling enough. Then he jumps in place like a drunk in a barroom dodging the bullets of savage cowboys, executing each recoil with such expertise you can almost see splinters and the shock of sawdust from six-guns firing into the floor. And then, miming rescue, he radiates bounteous joy by loping like a fawn in the woods. He finishes by tossing daisies (where did he find daisies in the Chicago winter?) to the assemblage; in just three seconds, he shifts his shoulders, goes en pointe, performs a curtsy, and falls flat on his behind.

The last moment is almost but not quite a blur: he springs back into position with the shy grin of an undersized youth at his first day of work, and then, eyes flicking darkly to each and every person, awaits their terrible judgment; he gives a start of realization, his finger goes across his throat for the cameraman, and the rest of the entr’acte is unrecorded.

A year after that, twenty-six months after his first film, he is earning over ten thousand dollars a week, making him the highest-paid man in America (the president of United States Steel, upon learning this, was said to have gone to the foundry, reviewed his empire of cooling girders, and mused that the continent was built on more things than he yet understood).

The interviews with Photoplay and Motion Picture Weekly and Footlights began to contain moral instruction. He wished to be known no longer just as a comedian but also as an expert tennis player, composer, pugilist, a clever dancer, golfer, motorist (though never at excessive speeds), and, most of all, “a stickler for poetry.” He visited the chiropodist, spent hours reading fan mail, and was in bed nightly by ten p.m. “after a cool shower,” a code clear to anyone: he was a man who lived the cleanest of lives. Shockingly, there was not a single lie in it (he never claimed, for instance, to answer his fan mail).