“Now, Zasu,” he said, “this is the saddest part you’ve ever played. Your fiancé has just died. In the war.”

“Yes, sir.”

“‘Yes, Charlie.’ Show me sad.”

Her face collapsed. Tears the size of porterhouse steaks popped into her eyes. You could see them from the fourth balcony.

“Except you’ve received a telegram—he’s alive!”

Unmitigated joy! She lit up like God’s chandelier, and, impulsively, she did a small jig.

“No dancing,” Chaplin said. “And that’s not the right kind of joy. More like this.” And his eyes beamed like those of a child who has just heard a disturbance in the chimney on Christmas.

She did a reasonable imitation of this, and he said, “He was your first love,” and her face went as bland as oatmeal. He said, “You never even kissed him,” and she seemed to shed five years off her face. He said, “Younger. More innocent. Gullible. Yes, no, no, not like that. Yes. Good. Now that ‘Papa, what is beer?’ look. Now just watch me.”

Zasu followed him, ready to flinch, as if he might punch her. He expressed sadness—it looked like his sweetheart had died. Then joy. Then—and this is when her skin began to show goosebumps—he was a girl who had never kissed her first love. He became more innocent, more gullible, and then Zasu realized he wasn’t just a girl, he had become her. He was Zasu Pitts, acting at all those things. For a frightening second, she thought the exercise hadn’t been to see her range so much as it had been to steal her soul.

But in a Chaplin story, all the characters were him. So a successful induction into his world, and onto nitrate, meant that Zasu should imitate him imitating her imitating him imitating the character and so on, approaching something like real life. It was like sitting in a barbershop chair between two mirrors and seeing infinite faces that were only one face. It was like firing an arrow that never quite reached its target.

Her head was spinning, of course.

“Zasu, are you aware of tableaux vivants?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now how old are you?”

“Seventeen?”

She looked twenty-five. But that was fine. “Good. Now, you’ll go to Wardrobe and take off your clothes.”

“Sir?”

“A nude statue is permissible, of course. It’s fine art. So we have the Little Fellow in a museum, admiring, say, an Eve of some sort. You can’t argue with such a thing. Then, in the next shot, we’ve replaced Eve with you, painted white.”

“Painted—painted—”

“Well, no, not actual paint, more like, it’s a cerise paste, sort of, anyway, pay no mind to that, the point is, it’s a statue. The censors can’t argue with that. But then you move! Can you imagine the reaction?”

Apparently, Zasu couldn’t imagine the reaction: she said nothing before Chaplin dismissed her.