He assured the National Board of Review that his dramatics would no longer be vulgar: “I shall steer clear of the Elizabethan style and strive toward the more subtle and the fine. Not all films must end with a climactic pie fight.” At a Hippodrome Theatre benefit for the wounded of Belgium, he eschewed comedy, conducting instead a piece of music he had composed, “The Peace Patrol,” which he introduced as a celebration of the dove. The reception was so frosty—the audience had expected a knuckle-dusting march of revenge—he reluctantly churned the air with a baton-as-cane, turned out his toes, and did “the walk” until, as he later said, “they no longer wanted to kill me.”

The dreary performance, a sodden winter rain, caused questions to spring up like dandelions. Did he not support the Allies, including his own native country of England? Did he mean to enlist? And why wasn’t he funny that evening?

He was driven to explain himself in Photoplay. “I was born in a hotel in Fontainebleau, where my parents were performing. My father was Spanish, and I never knew him before he passed on. But my mother was a saint, it must be said. Wherever we lived around Lambeth, no matter how poor we were, even if she had to break us from the workhouse to do it, she used to sit me down in Kennington Park and have me watch the people. ‘What are they thinking? What are they like? How do they act?’ We never had money, so we had to make our own entertainment, and she was the best mimic I have known. Her death …” And here he left the table, choking back tears reported as “dragged forth by a gravity previously unsuspected in the buoyant man who makes a million others laugh.” Who is to say an ocean of laughs did not seep from a secret source, a font of tears?

Fifty million eyes welled up. Every ditchdigger knew a happy drunk whose life was misery, every soldier in France had death branded on his own still-beating heart, every critic remembered his Versio Vulgata, Medice, cura te ipsum, and who was the Little Tramp’s master but the physic of laughter who could never heal himself?

As of November 12, 1916, there were fifty-seven films, each one a cry from a broken heart. And here was the irony: for everyone on earth, everyone excluding him, every film was tonic for the soul beset by life’s frustrations writ small, by its disasters gone epic, and, of course, by the distant thunder, the lightning over the hill, of the European War.

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