One afternoon, William McAdoo visited Zukor at the Famous Players– Lasky lot near the top of Vine Street, where Hollywood started to rise into the wild foothills. McAdoo had been visiting Los Angeles with some frequency since the Liberty Loan Drive in part to drum up support for the Fourth and Fifth Liberty Loan tours (scheduled for November and January), but also because of the United States government’s production of Pershing’s Crusaders and its sequels.

Zukor had spent the previous day determining, via his web of informants, that McAdoo had never been to a studio before. So he arranged a tour. It was as devious as any of Zukor’s arrangements. By the time McAdoo was led to Zukor’s office, he had passed through sixteenth-century Venice and a seraglio in which harem girls sprawled and read Photoplay while the focus pullers attempted to keep them in frame. He had also seen a barroom brawl in which Hobart Kintey was thrown through a window (it was spun sugar, McAdoo learned), threaded his way through a crowd wearing togas, run into the dizzying Billie Burke (who had kissed him on the cheek), and thoroughly lost his balance.

Zukor’s office was a sixty-by-forty-foot room with twenty-foot beamed ceilings, and walls painted with gold flake. There were late-Baroque paintings, copies of Titian, on each wall, and at both ends was a fireplace that a man could stand up in. His desk was as far from the entry door as possible, which meant that McAdoo was in the awkward position of saying hello first upon arrival, then having to walk approximately fifty-five feet across a single Lavar Kerman rug that had taken an entire Anatolian village sixteen years to weave, before he could shake Zukor’s hand.

McAdoo sat down in a chair before Zukor’s desk—his next mistake, because Zukor had designed the furniture so that no guest could sit back and still see his host over the rise of his Brobdingnagian desk.

America, via the Committee for Public Information, had produced three films, which Zukor had arranged to have distributed, gratis, as a show of patriotism. This led McAdoo to his uncomfortable slant before Zukor. McAdoo took out a piece of paper, which he smoothed out on his knee. He could barely see it at first, with his eyes still pinging from the dazzle of radium lights, and he twitched his nose, recently treated to the ozone smell of bolting electricity. He adjusted his glasses.

“Let’s see here. Under Four Flags: $63,946.48. Pershing’s Crusaders: $181,741.69. And then there’s America’s Answer. That one has grossed, as of a week ago, $185,144.30.” He looked up and raised his eyebrows.

Zukor nodded. “Yes?”

“So where is it?”

“Where is what?”

“The $430,832.47.”

Every smile cost Zukor’s face five dollars, it was said. He produced the sympathetic look one would give the good-hearted simpleton whose father was the town drunk. “The exhibitors keep most of that.”