The procession was headed by Prince Vasily Vasilievich Meshchersky, a slender, bearded man who witnessed the commotion around him with his head tilted slightly backward, and his fingertips placed perfectly against the seams of his trousers. With him, his wife, their attendants, a few counts, a countess; Chaplin nodded with each ornate introduction. They were in Hollywood for an indefinite period, Chaplin was told. They had heard that all royalty in—the word the translator used was “transition”— should visit the Chaplin Studios.

“They love your movies,” the translator said. She wore her black hair in a chignon that almost touched the collar of a black silk dress that fastened on the front with large braid buttons. She was a narrow woman, far more beautiful than anyone had ever told her, and her frequent glances at the floor made him want to pull her into bed by her hair.

“Pardon?” He hadn’t heard the last three things she’d said.

“His Excellency the Prince asks about the ending of Praztoi Ulitza,” she said. “Of Easy Street.”

He remembered now that he had been up all night, editing his terrible new film. “Yes?”

“He is pleased that you defeated the villain at the end.”

Chaplin tried to remember that far back. In Easy Street, he had defeated the monstrous Eric Campbell by sticking his head in an extinguished gas lamp, a gag he was proud of, but then he remembered there was another villain. “The anarchist?”

“The Bolshevik.”

“Well,” he said, “it was an anarchist, but I can see how …”

The prince spoke again, making sweeping motions with his elegant hands, hands whose most strenuous act in the old country had been to knock over the king of his Fabergé chess set. The translator, in a rush, said, “His Excellency the Prince enjoys that you cleverly saved Miss Edna from the Bolshevik menace which now threatens the world. It was a sophisticated outcome.”

Chaplin grinned at him, and the prince put up two fists, swinging them and nodding in appreciation of the scene. He then frowned, and gestured that the translation should continue.

“But he wonders why, in the criminal’s lair, there were postcards of the Tsar and Tsarina.”

It had been a two-week shooting schedule. He had simply declared that Russian thugs should have Russian things on their walls. That someone would pay attention hadn’t yet occurred to him, not in late 1916.

“Bolsheviks may protest otherwise, but everyone secretly loved the Tsar and Tsarina,” he said, and waited for it to be translated. When it was, and there was gracious laughter all around, Chaplin turned Prince Meshchersky loose on the desk register, telling him please to sign his full family name, if only because that would buy Chaplin time before they asked him to do the walk.