1) The Aolian solution. Lying on his back and watching the clouds, barefoot, sometimes with a kite tied to his big toe. Among variations were picnics on set, joshing with the crew, card games, reading fan mail, picking lemons from the orchard and making his own lemonade. Now, December 1918, he wasn’t sure how this had ever worked.

2) The brute force of yoking his slaves to their oars: just executing routines from beginning to end, without the slightest inspiration except the knowledge that continuous motion was like striving toward adequacy. These times kept everyone on set, under the command that the cameras grind, day after day.

3) A Trojan horse. He would have Kono drive to Bullock’s with twenty dollars, with orders to purchase a basket of odd items in the hope they would inspire comedy.

4) Sometimes he felt better after seducing one of the girls who worked in hair and makeup.

5) He tried to put the sailing metaphor to literal use. Twice, he had chartered a boat and fled to Mexico with Rollie and a camera.

When he did not work, but instead avoided the studios (“rain,” read the studio logs; then “clouds”; then “chance of clouds,” by way of explanation), his crew forgave him. He was in a hard marriage. The financiers and fiefdoms of Hollywood were conspiring to drive him out of business. Someone in his company would betray him. Though all this was true, there was something else wrong, and he could not name it, and this made it still worse.

“You always think it’s the worst one yet,” said Syd on his last day in California. With the war over, Syd was going to the Continent with an armload of contracts to sign with Gaumont, Pathé, Kino, e/o, and Cinematia for distribution of Chaplin films internationally; the world was starved for motion pictures, and the foreign studios hadn’t yet rebuilt. He also had a hunch that, with all the newly unemployed aviators and their JN 4s, establishing a service whereby important mail was flown by airplane would be very profitable.

“I’ve lost my spark,” Chaplin said. They were standing in Syd’s house, in Syd’s bedroom, where he was packing his suitcase. “I don’t know how stories are shaped anymore.”

“I’m sure you do, Charlie. It’s, what, not ‘automatic,’ what’s the word I’m looking for? It’s a part of you.”

“Innate?”

“That’s it. Stand up—you’re on my trousers.”

Chaplin stood. “But that’s the thing. I no longer believe in the whole game. He finds a dime on the street, he eats a pie, he doesn’t eat a pie, boy meets girl, boy loses girl, I don’t care.”

Syd folded his arms. “You’ve been paying too much attention to The New Republic and Robert Benchley and all that lot.” He belted his suitcase shut and hoisted it off the bed.

“When are you coming back?” Chaplin asked miserably.

…