His hair was mussed. This was the best day of work he had done in months. Three of the four nymphs asked if he was free for dinner. While his crew packed up, he lay down on the floor of the backseat of his automobile, drifting in and out of a daze, one hand on his chest, the thumb and forefinger of the other pinching his nose. He did not know if he was happy.

A touring car picked the nymphs up. The car went down the road from the canyons toward Sunset without anyone from the Chaplin Studios waving goodbye. The four women inside laughed with one another and passed back and forth a flask of gin. They lit cigarettes. Their feet were killing them. Who had a date that night, who most needed a bath, who needed to stop at the blind pig for more gin, did anyone have a hairpin? When the car vanished around the curve, it was gone.

That was the end of the day. Helen never appeared in another moving picture. Nor Olive. Willie Mae was in the background of a handful of one-reelers. Olive Ann played a dancer once or twice and later appeared in photographs taken for artistic purposes and sent from a San Francisco post-office box to hobbyists and enthusiasts across the country. Who can tell if she was happy?

The lovely land of oaks and meadows where they danced with Chaplin would be bulldozed for bungalow housing, but its silver-and-black deep-focus stand-in could be seen, though not lived in, any hour of the night or day forever. And in that way it was like a memory, but not the way memory had worked since the dawn of time. The odd thing about memory now was that it no longer needed a rememberer.

Later, when the footage was developed and assembled, Chaplin edited the scene together. It was exactly two minutes. He still needed to shoot another six minutes to fulfill his contract. He had failed.

46

In the spring of 1919, with flowers beginning to grow for the first time in five years without threat of being torched to the ground, Elsie Janis, the Sweetheart of the Doughboys, came to France again. When there had still been a Western Front, she was the first girl entertainer allowed up among the razor wire, and her wholesome show—singing, dancing, impersonations, acrobatic kicks, humor, good-natured ribbing—was the standard by which all morale-boosters were judged.

Her 1919 tour ended in Mandres, once a village, now a way station for troops who knew not where their next destination was. As with any stagnant pond, Mandres had grown into a threat of a town, with crepuscular entertainments that no commanding officer much wanted to investigate.

No man wanted the Belle of Ohio to see such squalor, and the moral swamp was drained. The saloon became a tearoom. The brothels became barracks, hotels, and cafés. There was a good deal of white paint.