He lay back and held the ring up to the sky, which he could see through the open doorway of the livery. Bordeaux had a unique species of tree, a blue palm, whose papery leaves rustled all night, with sometimes a crack and a crash as a frond broke and fell to the street. The night was warm, the moon hadn’t yet risen, and the animal smell that surrounded him somehow made him feel like part of the world. He would ride tomorrow on the Sonnenseit, named after a popular song that translated more or less exactly as “Sunnyside,” and what were the odds of that trip’s not having a happy ending?

It was so dim he could barely see the light catching the gems; in fact, he might have just imagined it. He ran the three opals in soaring arcs past the deep-blue velvet spread of stars, making his own announcement, through sheer force of will, that the war—what war? every war, everything that felt like a war—was finally over.

Boy slept on; Leland slowly drifted into a happy sleep; Nanette sneezed once, and then she, too, fell asleep.

50

Word from the Chaplin Studios was grim. His new comedy was said to be a disaster. Outside of a two-minute scene of dancing nymphs, the remainder was a bizarre construction of false starts and feints in strange directions. Chaplin had finally capped off shooting and was determined to hew a story line from whatever he had, which apparently ended with his death by suicide.

All this was true. And excellent news for Adolph Zukor, for whom the end of the war had been one week after another of good news. The Paramount Studios umbrella was casting more shade by the day. The European film industry was a shambles, so American films were hungered for over there. Burton Holmes had sold his catalogue to them, a purchase Zukor had made shrewdly, for he knew the audiences would consume the travelogues the way they did spinach. In other words, as long as there was dessert. And an Arbuckle comedy was dessert.

Further, his vision of horizontal integration was proceeding at a pace no one had predicted possible. Buying the number of theaters he had in mind cost more money than Zukor or anyone—or everyone—in Hollywood had. But “everyone” lacked basic understanding of how the world had changed since the days of the nickel dumps. Over tea at the Waldorf= Astoria with Otto Kahn, Zukor arranged a ten-million-dollar line of credit from Kuhn, Loeb, of an area no one had dared approach before: Wall Street. Zukor had known actual money was involved in Hollywood, but this was the first time actual money had allowed itself to be located and leveraged into a plan for the future.